∞∞∞

  CATHARINE - Noctis Shipyards

  Deimos hung low over Pavonis Mons, its cratered surface glowing ember-red in the Martian twilight. Catharine stood at the mouth of the service tunnel, one hand steadying her jeweled tiara against the wind that howled up from the basin below. The tiara refused to catch the light. Fitting, for tonight she would challenge the very foundation of Mars' Stratocracy, including Pericles and the king.

  The wrist comm pulsed beneath her embroidered silk sleeve. Its surface rippled with alien heat, an impurity snaking along the metal like living circuitry. She pressed her arm close to her body before the others could see.

  Behind her, boot-stamps echoed through the tunnel. Her guards formed up. Twelve of them, visors coated in flickering ash, pikes held at uncertain angles. She turned, met the Master Guard's eyes.

  "Keep up with my strides," she said, her voice cutting through the wind. "Pikes upright, or I'll march you to the end of the plain."

  The pikes rose. Barely.

  Catharine turned back to the edge and looked down.

  The Noctis shipyards sprawled sixty meters below, spread across the basin floor like a gutted animal. Half-built battleships stood skeletal against the smoke, their frames stripped of plating. Gantry cranes hung frozen mid-swing, their cables severed and swaying. Technicians moved through the wreckage cutting fuel umbilicals, bleeding the last power from dying ships to keep them from Krrel or Pericles. Lift motors sparked and died. Track crawlers retreated toward the northern defensive lines, their treads churning ash.

  The rest had fled or dug in at strong-points along the rim.

  The scent of burning flesh rose on the thermal updraft. Casualties from the first assault lay heaped in the trenches. Bodies still smoldering, forgotten in the chaos. The basin floor was crosshatched with fresh fortifications: buttresses, firing positions, razor wire strung between the ships like webbing.

  On the southern approach, directly across the basin from her position, Raf's miners had mounted heavy shock turrets on the engineering scaffold. The barrels tracked her guards even now, waiting. Their pillboxes bristled with scavenged metal spikes.

  And there, a hundred meters distant on the far platform, twenty meters below her elevation, stood Rafael.

  Even at this distance she could see the tension in his shoulders as he directed a crew of engineers. A plasma torch flared blue-white, cutting through a destroyer's gantry support. Sparks cascaded like rain, and the entire structure groaned before collapsing into the basin with a sound like breaking bones.

  A few ragged cheers rose from the miners.

  Rafael didn't smile.

  Catharine felt a cough rising in her throat. Bile burned. She swallowed it, let her eyes linger on the shock turrets one moment longer, then turned to her guards.

  The Master Guard stepped forward, fist pressed to his chest in salute. "M'lady." His voice was careful. "They struggle."

  She glanced back at the formation. Weapons drooped. Eyes darted. Young soldiers trembling in armour that fit poorly, pikes wavering despite her order. Fear reeked off them like sweat.

  "Do not waver." She stepped close to the nearest soldier and slapped the flat of her glove against his helmet hard enough to ring the metal. "These are your best?" Her voice rose, sharp enough to carry. "They barely lift their weapons. My heavy gravity training will break their bones."

  The soldier stiffened. The pike rose higher.

  Around her, the formation tightened.

  Good. Fear was a tool like any other.

  Soon Pericles would march with a traitor's army. Krrel would search for a new queen and heir. And if the miners somehow won, Rafael would climb to the top of the slag pile and rule from the ruins.

  All of them needed to see weakness in themselves. She would undermine each—every battlement, every tunnel, every canal—corroding loyalty until only her vision remained.

  But first, Rafael.

  She blinked until her eyes stung, letting the wind wick away the moisture. He needed to see her vulnerable. Helpless. One last time.

  She raised her hand. The guards halted.

  Leaving them at the tunnel mouth, Catharine began her descent.

  ∞

  The switchback stairs clung to the western wall of the basin, each step dusted with red grit and ash. Her silk slippers whispered against the metal grating. Sixty meters down, the air grew thicker—fuel vapour, burnt insulation, the copper tang of spilled blood. By the time she reached the third landing, her hem had turned grey.

  The basin floor opened before her.

  What had once been an orderly grid of construction zones now resembled a battlefield. Craters pocked the ground where munitions had struck. Severed crane cables lay coiled like dead serpents. A half-built corvette listed to one side, its keel cracked, crew compartments exposed to the open air.

  She walked across the open ground alone.

  No guards. No retinue. Just Catharine in royal silks, crown glittering faintly as she crossed no-man's-land between the fortified positions. Short steps. Hesitant, as though the weight of the crown might topple her.

  Let them see the girl in the pretty gown.

  Fifty meters ahead, Rafael stood with his back to her. The engineering platform rose three meters off the basin floor, accessible by a single ladder. Plasma torches flared in the gantries above him. Steel trusses sheared and fell, crashing into the dust with sounds like artillery.

  The miners cheered.

  Rafael's shoulders stayed rigid.

  Twenty meters now. Close enough to see the soot streaking his coveralls, the tension in his jaw. Close enough that if he turned, he'd see her approaching.

  He didn't turn.

  Ten meters. Her throat tightened. The wrist comm throbbed beneath her sleeve, sending heat up her forearm like a second pulse.

  "Rafael." She made her voice thin, fragile. A girl calling to a friend.

  He turned his back deliberately and faced the hissing torches.

  Above them, another support beam gave way. Sparks pelted the ground like rain, and the gantry stairs collapsed in a shriek of tortured metal, crashing onto the rocks below in a cloud of red dust.

  "Pericles will never get inside that ship," Raf said. His laugh was hollow, strained. "Or is it you who's come to survey your inheritance?"

  Catharine stepped closer, one hand outstretched. Reconciliation. Plea. Whatever he needed to see.

  "Rafael, my father needs you." She let her voice crack. "The palace has fallen to the traitors."

  He looked at her then. His eyes moved from her outstretched hand to her face, lingering on the crown, the silk, the perfectly crafted vulnerability.

  "Who holds a gun to us now?" His glare cut past her to the service tunnel, then back. "Pericles? Krrel?" He paused. "Or is it you, Catharine?"

  She clenched her fists, nails biting into her palms. The points were sharp now—no longer ragged from childhood anxiety but filed to deliberate edges. Pain was the prerequisite for Mars' future, and she'd learned to wield it.

  "Rafael, you can't mean that." She softened her voice, uncurled one fist to show him the blood welling in her palm. "You used to love the palace. Remember?"

  Raf looked past her to the glowing ruin of the shipyards, then up to the sky. Betelgeuse burned red above the smoke.

  "You want the throne," he said quietly, "but you still need everyone to see you as the girl in the pretty gown." His voice was empty. "You can't have both, Catharine."

  "Rafael, you speak as if you're just pawns." She stepped closer. "You're not. I assure you."

  "Your mother was murdered for failing the king." He raised both arms, gesturing to the devastation around them. His face went pale. "Is that your plan?"

  An image flashed unbidden: La Chambre Rouge, sunlight through tall windows, herself and Rafael as children watching the stars. The memory twisted like a knife.

  "I can make life better for all the people on Mars."

  "Like you did for Trianon?" Veins stood out on his forearms when he said her dead sister's name.

  The air left her lungs.

  "I didn't even know her." The lie tasted like ash.

  "They say you poisoned Trianon." Raf picked up a steel bar from the scaffold and hurled it through the gantry. It clanged off the framework, ringing like a bell, before clattering to the basin floor.

  He'd loved her once. She'd been certain of it.

  "Poison my own sister when I was only a child?" She forced the words out. "Rafael, you know me."

  "Not..." His voice broke. His eyes glassed over. "What the servants say."

  The connection she needed. The care, the trust, was slipping through her fingers like Martian dust.

  "No, Rafael. Truly, you can't believe that." Her performance cracked. Grief surged up beneath the mask, uninvited and unstoppable. Real tears came, and for once she couldn't control them.

  Rafael turned his back.

  "Before she changed," he said to the flames, "Xylia told me the truth about you."

  Ice closed around her heart.

  Saints, he knows.

  The memory rose like bile: Xylia's small hand in hers. The laboratory's white lights. The drill descending. Her own voice, young and terrified, promising it would be all right. The queen standing over them both, making Catharine hold her sister’s while they took Xylia's mind apart.

  "I—I didn't—"

  "When they drilled into her skull," Raf said, each word sharp as broken glass, "you told her everything would be all right."

  "No, Raf, listen to me—"

  "She's coming for you." His voice echoed across the scaffold and basin floor, amplified by the metal around them. "For everyone."

  A fetid wind blew across the shipyards. Smoke and decay and warning.

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  She's still alive.

  "She's better?" Catharine shook her head, opened her hands in denial or plea.

  "Xylia hates you." He spat the words. "Blast, I can't believe you. You tried to kill her so you could become queen."

  Xylia's hair was always long and beautiful. Am I still so jealous?

  Beneath her sleeve, the wrist comm writhed. Metal shifted against her skin, sending tremors through her hand that she couldn't suppress. The alien presence coiled tighter.

  "I'd never do that." A vein throbbed in her temple. The words came out wrong—sour, defensive.

  "I'll tell you a secret, Lady Catharine." Raf held his breath, steadying himself on the rail. "It's more than just hate." His eyes lost focus for a moment, seeing something she couldn't. "Xylia is becoming something else."

  He gripped the steel rail with both hands and looked down at the fires burning across the basin floor, as though he might jump.

  "You're a ghost in the palace shadows," he said. "You used to hate the Stratocracy. Now you descend into the cesspit with the rest of the elitists."

  "If I left the shipyards to Pericles," his voice rose, dangerous, "what would you do?"

  Was it a threat? The thought pierced deep. An affront to everything she'd built, everything Mars needed to become.

  The wrist comm throbbed harder. Hotter. She didn't flinch.

  Fifty meters away across the basin, plasma torches flared in the upper gantries. Steel trusses sheared under the cutting beams and fell, crashing to the ground like broken ribs. The sound echoed off the basin walls.

  A few miners cheered.

  Rafael didn't smile. Not even for the engineers he'd trained, the men who would follow him into fire.

  Catharine pivoted. Her cloak unfurled, red silk against grey ash.

  She raised one hand, gestured to her lady-in-waiting who stood near the base of the stairs. The woman approached. Catharine leaned close, whispered instructions—orders that would set everything in motion.

  When she turned back, Rafael had already started down the eastern gangway toward his defensive positions. His chin was high, shoulders set. Defiant to the end.

  Had she finally broken his dream?

  She stayed where she was and watched him descend.

  Catharine pictured him cracking his knuckles the way he always did. That stupid nervous habit from childhood. He'd believed in her once. Believed in the stars, in a better Mars, in the girl who held his hand in La Chambre Rouge.

  Now she'd let him see her crush that dream.

  One day he would stand at her side. Or under her feet.

  I won't look back. This will be my Mars.

  She laced her cloak closed and began the walk back across the basin floor. For a heartbeat, standing alone in the open ground between fortifications, she felt the weight of it—the isolation, the impossibility of what she'd chosen.

  Then the wrist comm pulsed. Heat traced along her bone like a benediction.

  No. I am not alone.

  She drew the cold Martian wind into her lungs and relished its burn.

  The wars ahead bled with uncertainty. Rafael would struggle. Pericles would fall. Krrel would die. And through it all, she would endure.

  Catharine massaged her wrist as she climbed the switchback stairs. Power would come from this discreet alien alliance. She could feel it growing, spreading through her veins like roots seeking purchase in stone.

  At the tunnel mouth, her guards waited. She adjusted her crown, and the cutting torches far below caught the gems. For the first time tonight, the tiara glittered.

  Its clear stones seemed blue in the firelight.

  Somewhere beyond the smoke and stars, an undiscovered world drew closer to Mars.

  ∞∞∞

  RAF - Rebel Shipyards, Phoenicis Lacus

  The rebel shipyard lay hidden in a wound three kilometers deep—a vertical canyon carved into Mars's southern highlands, its walls rising like prison bars toward a jagged strip of twilight sky. Natural alcoves pocked the rock faces, each one sheltering a stolen Stratocracy fighter. From above, Krrel's satellites would see nothing but shadow and stone.

  Raf stood at the base of the western wall, boots crunching on rust-colored grit. Two hundred meters across the canyon floor, miners swarmed around a row of interceptors—fueling, arming, preparing for an escape that might never come. Two of them wrestled a missile toward a hardpoint, grunting under its weight despite Mars's forgiving gravity.

  Behind Raf, tucked beneath a stone overhang that jutted from the cliff face like a broken jaw, the Galvex-1 waited in permanent shadow. Its faceted hull caught no light. Just the way he needed it.

  The heavy fighter's ladder-stairs whirred to life, descending with mechanical precision until they locked at his feet. An invitation.

  Its equalization vents hissed softly as he looked up. Motors cycled, as the Galvex-1 steadily lifted its hatch. Clutching the hand grip, Raf looked back to the shipyards before he stepped inside. Framed in blue light, conduits along the narrow companionway ticked softly as heat expanded the metal. The air carried a scent he’d never noted before: phosphate and burnt oil and something faintly like abraded metal. Raf slid into the pilot’s seat and stared blankly at the Galvex-1 main controls station. Screens flickered. In the empty copilot’s seat, a phantom pressure existed within the harness. A presence. It wasn’t Catharine. The ship hummed. Blue and proud, Vega flickered in the corner of the viewport, but Raf only noticed the condensation on the glass.

  The incoming communication channel flashed amber in the old Morse code SOS pattern. A muted ping reverberated through the cabin.

  Raf remembered Noctis when ships stood, bristling, ready to launch. When Catharine was not an adversary. The way she laughed. Truly laughed. A little boy’s nostalgic dream that died, along with the queen. Finally, he punched the communication portal and a 180-degree holo of the Phobos weapons emplacement flickered into view before him. Blue static frayed the image. It glitched once then cleared.

  “Raf buddy—finally. Thought your comm was fried or you were dead.” Britt rushed his words.

  Interference warped Britt's face into a shattered mask. Raf’s fingers found and clenched the console’s grab handle. Britt never called unless something was wrong.

  The tiny moon left a long blue streak on the Galvex-1 orbital display, tearing across the sky.

  The Phobos AI aligned the image and trilled. “Standby.”

  Britt's face was long and gaunt. Low-gravity atrophy had hollowed his eyes and sunk his cheeks. His eyebrows were fat caterpillars, and Raf hated caterpillars. He hated the porous, pitted face of Phobos even more. It looked like the mine walls that had almost been his tomb.

  Stickney Crater. The second-worst place this side of Mars. An active neutron star bathed it in enough gamma radiation to give a man the jitters for a week. He’d never last a day there, let alone months in mag boots.

  The emplacement’s shielding was all that stood between Britt and a slow, irradiated death.

  Raf watched Britt wipe a green stain from the console onto his sleeve. Everything on Mars felt stained since they escaped from the mines.

  “This place smells like rot—can you run the filters, Chirp?”

  “Why did you call me anyway?” A muscle in Raf’s forearm twitched.

  “Big things happening up here, ya know?” Britt answered. “Why didn’t you answer right away?”

  “Girl trouble.” Raf lied, cracking his knuckles.

  “There’s a war going on, didn’t ya know?” Britt spun his chair as a visual of the grey crater filled the screen behind him. On its rim was an array of three meter diameter launch tubes that held Krrel’s missiles.

  The display pixelated. Raf leaned forward and adjusted the input gain. Britt's eyes evaded him.

  He’s stalling. Why? Raf clenched his fists.

  “Telemetry incoming,” the station AI trilled.

  “Confirm, Chirp.” Britt pressed the long-range readout. Behind him, the missile silo’s pivoted, sync’d with the moon’s orbit. They’d always been aimed toward Earth. Not anymore.

  “You said this was important.” Raf’s voice edged.

  Britt stared at a flashing light. “Telemetry incoming—text readout.”

  Saturn—Enceladus. The words landed like a physical blow. One of the moons. His fists whitened on the control stick.

  “Coordinates again, Chirp?”

  He released the stick, and leaned into the holo's glow. “Blast—get to the point.” His voice was raw. Tension locked in his shoulder blade.

  Raf clasped his hands together trying to remember a story he was once told. “Did I hear Saturn?”

  The holo went blank then reappeared. “Frequency switch.” The Phobos station AI blurted cheerfully.

  “Don’t worry pal, just a quick channel change to keep Krrel from hearing this.” Britt turned a dial, but the image still flickered with too much blue static.

  “Confirm decode, Commander?” The console AI asked.

  “Confirm. Give me the readout, Chirp.” Britt watched the garbled text.

  “Galvex-1, 237.6 West longitude.” The AI pitched through the distortion.

  “Isn’t that the same as before?” Britt smacked the console. Missiles on the rim vented fuel. Fully charged.

  “I’m tellin’ ya Chirp, Corin already found the Galvex-1.” Britt looked puzzled.

  “Negative, Commander. These coordinates are new.” Chirp’s voice grated, straining up an octave.

  The Galvex-1 hardpoints glowed, emanating a subsonic buzz. Latches and wires waited, ready. The holo went blank for thirty seconds, before reappearing again before Raf pounded his heel against the base of the console as if there were loose connections inside.

  “New coordinates on Mars, Chirp?” Britt sounded worried, while red console lights glowed on his face and reflected in his eyes.

  “No, Commander. Coordinates appear to be an incomplete Saturn waypoint.” The station AI trilled loudly.

  On the Galvex-1’s main nav screen, green and blue vectors self-plotted, converging on a yellow ringed planet. Raf’s hand left a sweat print on the console as a red target burned. ‘IRIS SCAN REQUIRED.’

  Britt's voice surged. He slapped the console. “I’m not deaf, Chirp.”

  “Just a minute Raf, I’ve got something else here. Something on the old Stratocracy Enigma.”

  Silence followed, then frantic keystrokes.

  “Saints.”

  Even in the fading holo, Raf could see every blood vessel in Britt's eyes.

  “What is it?” Muscles in Raf's neck cemented.

  “Looks like a lot of unusual activity. Not Mars, Earth, or even Saturn.“ Britt typed again, hitting the keyboard harder as if he was trying to break the letters. “I’ve got one, two, no five bogeys on the long range scans. Someone’s trying to hide outside our system.”

  Raf ground his teeth together when he saw the data spike.

  When the image returned Britt was a charcoal shadow in grey static.

  “Britt, come in.” Raf pulled himself closer.

  “Heavy gravity armour. Do you hear me? HEAVY GRAVITY.” Britt's voice cracked on the last words while a thick silver exoskeleton refracted on the holo.

  “I heard you.” Raf knew the mines. Brittle struts bearing a mountain above men. “Three Earth-G’s minimum. That’d crush a miner. Are they testing it on a soldier?”

  The image dissolved. Britt's face petrified.

  “How many? I’d bet less than a dozen.” Raf glanced at the navigation console. “You okay?”

  “Transports. Hundreds of them.” Britt's voice choked.

  “Impossible. Mars doesn’t have the commerce or that many ships.” Raf refused the information. He massaged his neck and thought about Xylia instead.

  “No. You don’t understand.” Britt pulled his face through the static.

  “Armour. Powered infantry. Six million units.” Britt's voice dropped to a whisper.

  He disabled the AI not speaking again until all noise vanished, even the fans.

  “Someone’s building an army for another star system.” Each word was separated by silence.

  “Six million?” The pulse in his neck veins counted each breath.

  An Army? The words exploded in his mind. An army for who? Off planet? Krrel saw only Earth as the enemy and Earth was fragmented. They’d only need half a million troops.

  Raf’s temples throbbed. He looked up at the twin points of Alpha Centauri and knew this went further. This threat was bigger than Mars, bigger than Earth. Mars was no longer a red gem—just a pebble on the Plains of Tharsis, insignificant against whatever was coming.

  “Changing channels. Someone’s tracking.” Britt's voice severed. The holo image shattered then vanished.

  “Britt, come in.” Raf tapped on the holo panel.

  Noise crackled on the Galvex-1 speakers.

  “Look Raf. I’ve interfaced with, kzzkt, Galvex-1, kzzkt, frequency, audio only.”

  “Be careful. This tracking signal—it’s not from Mars. It’s not even from our solar system.” Britt's voice trembled through the hiss.

  “Britt! Come in!” Raf shouted.

  “Sending a waypoint. For the Galvex-1.” His audio cut off again.

  “Britt? Britt!” Raf slapped the console, wrenching the audio gain.

  “Nothing there. Could be a trap.” Britt's voice chopped in and out, barely recognizable over the static.

  The audio signal pitched into a scream that hurt his ears, then cut to absolute quiet. In the void it left, a luminous, yellow glyph etched itself onto the primary display: a ringed planet, with a perfect, geometric snowflake where a moon should be. The pilot’s seat adjusted by itself. Smooth. Hydraulic. Then locked into place. Thrumming replaced the static. To his left, a navigation display woke as the fighter’s whole frame shuddered with pent-up power. It’s answering a command. Not mine. His pulse hammered against his ribs and he seized the control column, crushing the grip until the composite creaked, bracing for an unauthorized launch.

  His stomach churned. Saturn. Enceladus. The name triggered something—a half-remembered story Branik had told in the mines. Something about an ice moon and a scientist who'd vanished. Raf had thought it was just miner folklore.

  But the Galvex knew the coordinates.

  “Britt!” Raf shouted at the comm panel. A wave of vertigo swept over him, except he wasn’t falling.

  “Stickney, come in.” Lights dimmed on the communication console and the automated response signal faded.

  In his mind, a phantom image: Phobos, shattered. Spiralling down to Mars. Ten thousand craters. Then nothing. A silence as deep and absolute as the Plains of Tharsis before the wars.

  His eyes flicked to the right-side display where an unfamiliar star pulsed: tagged by a targeting icon.

  Text scrolled beneath it. Cold. Precise.

  BLUE WAVELENGTH SHIFT - 127,865.01 VELOCITY -APPROACHING-

  Raf ignored it. The universe was infinite, and expanding so why care about a ghost on a single fighter's sensors? Even a rogue star. He buried the memory of Phobos’s fall, the static of Britt's fear, the six million units. He buried it all.

  The stars would have to wait.

  ∞∞∞

  While Raf’s comm fell silent and Phobos drifted on its haunted orbit, Krrel’s armies gathered in the crater plains of Hellas Planitia, whispering of loyalty, power, and betrayal.

  And at Noctis, as smoke curled into a dying sky, Catharine stepped toward a throne no longer meant to wait.

  Soon, Mars would kneel—

  to fear, or to fire.