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Soon those fading hearts will join the ashes of New Thebes in their silence They will join thetownshipsrubble the Block War left streest of Hyperion, and the irradiated stormland of the Helios I fear that my subjects will return to their private concerns after this speech It is always the saain rules the feed
“Brothers and sisters” My voice nearly falters as I feel more than ever the absence of my husband’s hand on my shoulder My son will not be wai
ting on my shuttle to critique my speech “Brothers and sisters…there will dawn a day when these hostile hours, these days of hatred and violence, see is the road up out of hell So do not tire, do not despair, do not abandon your brethren, and do not forget that through this darkness we and we alone carry the light of freedom We must defend it with every cell in our bodies If not nohen? If not us, who?” I make my hand a fist and raise it in salute “Hail libertas”
In the back of the rooets hiht: “Hail Reaper” More join him “Hail Reaper!” More and more until half the room shouts my husband’s invocation But the rest stare in stony silence
At that hty-four thousand kilometers from my heart, in orbit one thousand kilometers above the ard continent of South Pacifica, a new battery of twin prototype railguns, named the Twins of South Pacifica for Earth’s favorite son and daughter, set their telescopic sights on a path of empty space ten days ahead of Mercury’s orbital path and fire at full power Projectiles skinned with stealth polymer race into the void at 320,000 kilo not death, but supplies, radiation medicine, e of hope
You have not been abandoned I will come for you
Until then, endure, my love Endure
LUNA IS A DREAM, a noise, a blaze of light, a soup, a swagger, a ar, a lament, a suburb of Hyperion, and a ht anted A dozen fleets waver through the gutter puddles of her rain-soaked streets, only to be shattered by the calf-high boots worn by the children of four planets and thirty saw bedlaeniuses, architects, idiots, swindlers, warlords, the lost, the found, the indifferent And indifferently she waits, throbs, beats, swarms, suffocates, promises, and robs
They call her the City of Light, but no one calls her home
“What does Luna mean to you, Centurion?” I ask from inside my private office aboard Pride One as we descend Holiday ti Naka the sunny shores of South Pacifica, where there was not a building taller than a grain silo for a hundred klicks I have nauard unit drawn froions Of the one thousand Martians, she is the lone Terran That not a single h of her reputation They call her Six, ot your back
“Quicksand,” she replies in regards to the moon
The reply mirrors the cold-rolled spirit of the woman Of all my husband’s instruments, it is Nakao Flexible, but unbreakable Brutal, but not cruel Over these last weeks, she has led the investigation into race When their shuttle went down during Ephraim ti Horn’s failed rescue attempt, it was as if the ht every instinct to tear apart the city to find theence would disturb the breadcrumbs Holiday was the scalpel I needed
“And you,her datapad back into its arm sheath
What does Luna s
“Renewal” I catch her smirk in theLike Daxo, she doesn’t suffer hollow sentiments “Maybe one day that’ll be true Myherself off a cliff and abandoning us was preferable to a single day more of ic For it was the one place even Nero au Augustus had to bow Of course, she , really”