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As ever, Holiday senses my mood “Ma’am, I know you’ll think you were only one hundred onna lie That’ll haunt you sure as a fold against a single coht in the ludus the surest path between two points ain’t always the shortest”
I turn on her “You think there’s a chance we’ll get Sevro back?”
She gives rim smile “It’s been done before”
“Victra found my son I lost her husband No amount of calculus will fix that arithmetic”
“Yet Victra did not sail on Luna She respected your orders” She gives a curt nod out the viewport where Mars’s ht of the Julii fleet roves around the pincushion city moon of Phobos and the battleer even than my own With her lost child, and Sevro in captivity, I feared she would run wild Instead, her trade armada readies for war
Light flares on the Julii-Sun Dockyard halo as we pass Hundreds of new ships teem with expedited industry as the workers and autoainst the doomsday clock And then we are past the dockyard, and the planet itself looms before us
On Mars, I was born and rode horses at Ishtar On Mars, ean cobbles before Karnus au Bellona, my mother jumped off a cliff, my father and best friend were killed by my twin On Mars, I met my husband
But only my son waits below
It seeainst our planet I watched the friction trails blooe How simple the world seemed then in the tunnel of youth Could I have really been only nineteen? Can it be wrong to feel nostalgic for a day of blood? Or was it the innocence I miss, before we truly knehat turned the world?
The htside of the planet comes into view Cimmeria is cloaked in darkness The Obsidian I allowed to seize the continent in hopes they would call it hoed it instead The central cities of Nike, Phoenicia, and Olympia are dark I believed in the Obsidians I believed in Sefi I was too optin and unleash her people
Now, the Obsidian ar disappeared nar It see Fá wanted was Sefi’s army and only half her stores of helium The rest they left abandoned in containers on the tarmacs as casually as if the containers were filled with surplus dining utensils
“What does Mars mean to you, Nakamura?” I ask
The Terran hesitates “Hope And you, e?”
“War” I turn on a heel for the hangar
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