Hannah was hesitant to accept this as fact. Although it seemed to Parker that she trusted him more with each passing moment, he also knew that she had a hard time feeling confident with the Alliance fleet obliterated. She kept saying it was impossible for them to mount any organized attacks against Trivium or Zephyria for a long time. Parker, on the other hand, felt the fleet was unnecessary for them to succeed. They would take the fight to the colonies with an enigmatic attack. Parker felt Hannah was competent to pull it off, too.
As he looked at the new leader of the Alliance, Hannah Rohen, he realized she was perfect for the position. Everyone respected the decisions she made and the ideology she advocated. She had a quiet air of confidence. She demanded attentiveness.
"I will confirm Chloe is dead," she said. "I trust the judgment of Sarah Cortez. While you were helping the wounded into the infirmary, I had her investigate your friend’s status. She, along with our technicians, analyzed the battle as best as possible. Obviously, her ship was within the blast radius. If they say she has perished, you’ll have to accept it." She paused for a moment, showing respect for his loss, and then she waved him to come with her. "We have much more pressing concerns at the moment."
"Such as?" he said, walking over to where she had indicated.
"We must plan our attacks on the civilian targets who are MSA sympathizers. The lessons from the Alliance will be heard for once."
Parker hesitated. A picture of Chloe and Eamonn surged into his mind. How would they want him to react? What would he do for them? Eamonn would want the MSA to pay for their treachery, while Chloe would want peace. He just wanted the crew back. Parker shrugged his shoulders; destroying the MSA would satisfy each of their wishes. Gwen and Seth would have nothing to rule, and the peace Chloe so dearly wanted would spread across the planet. "You will go ahead with the plan I recommended?"
"As you stated," she said, and then smiled, "it was my plan all along. It just needed to be attacked from a different angle."
"Okay," Parker said. "You can take credit for it in the history books. It is something that Sarah and I should have been doing this whole time. Our insistence on keeping the colonies safe and out of this war has led to their destruction."
"You can’t lead Aethpis into this fight," Sarah said. "I won’t have it."
"It is no longer your decision," Hannah replied.
"I gave you command of the Alliance with certain obligations. One was to uphold the Principles of Man. ‘One man cannot determine the fate of the people without the people’s acceptance of it.’ It is one of the first decrees."
"Your people’s fight is their clear acceptance. Don’t quote the Principles of Man to me."
"You will regret taking Aethpis into battle. We were a peaceful people, but not anymore."
"Perhaps that is why the war began," Hannah replied and then turned her back to Sarah.
Parker reached out to hold his wife, but she shot him a hardened stare. Then she turned and left the room.
PART III
Chapter 28
For the past month, Hannah Rohen had laid out a simple plan for terrorizing the citizens of the main colonies, but even with his approval of the plan, Parker found two difficulties in doing so. First, these people were innocent of any wrongdoing toward the Alliance. Hannah rationalized it by telling him they had collaborated with the enemy. Parker didn’t see it that way. He only saw fearful people, whose only crime was entanglement in the net of the MSA as it spread across Mars.
Secondly, his ability to hide within the colonial citizens or the Alliance was a problem. After Eamonn Dalton’s death, Parker’s wanted poster was the prime choice of the MSA to display to the people. The reward for his head flattered him, but he didn’t need it at this moment. For two years, he had been hiding from within the MSA, using a fake mining permit to sneak around behind Gwen’s back. He had kept out of the limelight.
That was impossible now. The MSA forces had made him the new poster boy in their propagandist efforts to dissuade the population from having any sympathy with the Alliance and to point the finger directly at him, as a symbol of the Alliance, as the reason Mars didn’t have peace or freedom. It was true, but only from an angle so far off center, it hurt his neck to think about it. Sure, the Alliance had restarted aggression across Mars; but the MSA’s continued efforts to extinguish the Alliance voices and to suppress Mars into conforming to the MSA’s own doctrine and ignoring the Principles of Man were why this renewed hostility existed. The people saw for the first time in two years the MSA’s faults and evil methods.
For the past month, it had been a hectic journey from Aethpis to Trivium and back again, a tale he didn’t ever want to retell to anyone, but he had to now. Sarah was standing on the other side of the table in her hollowed-out quarters in the new Alliance Command, situated several kilometers west of Castor. Her arms were crossed and her stare piercing, just as she had been when she interrogated him. He wasn’t going to leave the room and ignore her demands for answers. She wouldn’t allow it, and a part of him didn’t blame her. He had left her to fend for herself when the escape pod landed and the Alliance was reborn on Mars. The love of his former crew obligated him to continue their fight. She distanced herself from this renewed conflict. He couldn’t.
"I want to know what happened," she said. Her thin voice strained to talk, as if some mystic creature tortured it. "You can’t leave for a month and show up like nothing has happened. I was worried. What if you were caught, injured, or worse?"
She brought her hand up to her trembling chin. He moved to comfort her but stopped before he advanced. "I am back now and I am fine. I don’t want to talk about it. I killed a lot of innocent people."
"You aren’t a murderer," she said. "The people who haven’t risen up against the MSA are with the MSA."
"Hannah and you can justify it so callously. You took this crusade too far. All I want is—"
She cut him off. "What you want is irrelevant. Your crew is gone. It died with Chloe and Eamonn’s death. Remember them as heroes, not as what could have been. Your loyalty rests with your family and your family alone."
"You didn’t know the crew as I did," he said. "You weren’t a part of it."
"Tell me about it, then. Whenever I ask, you push me away."
"It hurts too much to talk," he said, and turned away from her. Eamonn and Chloe’s death tore at his heart more than she realized. She never understood the companionship the crew provided for him. It was as if he had lost a limb. They were members of the Protector’s crew and the people he counted on the most when the times were tough. They were gone, targets of the MSA.
He looked at the wall in silence for a long moment, seeing nothing, gripped by his own thoughts.
He felt a gentle touch wrapping around his waist. Sarah rubbed her hands from behind him and then pushed them out along to his chest. His tender muscles ached as she pressed her fingers along them. A welcome pain. A pain he tolerated and a pain he knew would make him feel better in the end. Not like the mind-twisting memories of his former crew. What had happened? It was so sudden.
"Hannah sent us out on a search and destroy mission," he said. "Quartz and I were assigned as the platoon commanders for this particular mission, except Hannah lent us a couple of her personal soldiers. She doesn’t trust us explicitly; rather, she doesn’t trust her sister in particular. There is more to the story between them than Quartz’s banishment from Castor and Pollux. It doesn’t matter for this. On our previous missions, we covered the perimeter of the main colonies, never getting too close. But as the time wore on, we found ourselves foraying deeper and deeper into the MSA perimeter. I swear I smelled them. We were so close. We engaged them when they spotted us crossing the hills to the north of Trivium, near the algae farm borders, and we lost six soldiers, including the two that Hannah had sent to watch us. If there had been a full complement of MSA troops patrolling the area, they would have slaughtered us.
"It was our lucky day. The MSA patrol wa
s destroyed after a well-timed flanking maneuver by Quartz and Dobson. Then we cut along the edge of the port and ransacked their supply sheds, leaving them with a flaming mess to clean up. When we returned to base camp, we discovered our supplies were useless. The MSA poisoned the food on purpose." He bit his lower lip hard.
"We are rats to them. It hardly seemed worth it. For the next week, my platoon was given time off. We waited at base camp, unable to communicate out or receive any transmissions of our own. But it didn’t stop me from snooping around, and I found out about our next mission from Hannah before she planned it. It was lucky for her that I did find out. The shock of the mission would have shot me through the roof. As it was, I was prepared for what was to come next."
Parker paused for a moment, removed his canteen from his belt, and took in a mouthful of water.
"What did she make you do?"
He swallowed. "Hannah wanted to make a grand statement against the MSA in the colony she knew they were the weakest. Her rationalization was sound. If the MSA lost total control in Aethpis, the Alliance could move in and establish ourselves within the people—a foothold. Our mission was covert. It happened so fast."
Parker raised his hand to cut off Sarah’s anticipated comforting words. He felt he didn’t deserve them. "We infiltrated Aethpis through the northern tunnels we established when the war began. We had to dig a few hundred meters, but with a molemechano it wasn’t much of a problem. After we were through, Quartz insisted we send the bulk of our force out along the base of the crater to avoid the nitpicky fights spread across the colony.
"I saw Aethpis for the first time in a long time. If you saw Aethpis as it is now, your tears would create the first river on Mars. The streets are a mess, and mortar shells have carved half the buildings out. Safety is no longer available in the colony. That is why our mission was so vital to crippling the MSA.
"We moved along the crater’s edge to the east side of the colony, where we came to the reservoir. Oddly, it sat untouched. Only meters away, the security center was leveled. You saw down into the sublevels. I was sick."
He raised his hand up to this mouth. The nausea returned, and he fought to suppress it. "I held together, and we managed to slip past the guards running around the reservoir into the main tank area."
Sarah’s face brooded as the pieces came together. "Please tell me you didn’t poison the water supply. Hundreds will die of thirst."
"You know how the northeastern edge of the tank sits above ground level and is supported by the meter-thick concrete barrier."
Her eyes shot open with alarm. She calmed herself and nodded patiently.
"We obliterated the wall with a ton of metalor explosives."
"You didn’t!"
"We did. After that, the real show started. The water from the reservoir surged from its tank and poured across the eastern quarter of the colony." He paused for a moment.
Sarah bristled. She was too upset, angry, or disappointed to reply. Parker didn’t know which.
Finally, she mustered up enough discernable thoughts to speak. "How does destroying the Aethpis reservoir help the fight against the MSA? Thousands of loyal members of the Alliance will die of thirst."
Parker raised his index finger into the air. "Remember, the building was untouched despite the continual bombardment from orbit. There is a reason the MSA hasn’t destroyed it yet," he replied. "Why leave the reservoir for the Aethpisian people? The MSA isn’t about playing it fair."
"The MSA forces aren’t Raiders. They understand the significance of the infrastructure, and they know the need to preserve it. Hannah Rohen doesn’t. Maybe I need to take my command back."
"Your command is over, Sarah. This is Hannah’s Alliance, and we have to respect that."
"You call the destruction of the reservoir beautiful, and you don’t even bat an eye at the consequences of your actions against the people of Aethpis. That reservoir was a testament to humankind on Mars."
Parker bit his lip and then spoke sharply. "I certainly questioned Hannah’s decision to destroy it. But she was right. You know why the reservoir wasn’t destroyed by the MSA forces? Because they were using the water. There is a pipeline running under the ground from Aethpis to Trivium, and Trivium to Zephyria. They haven’t been supplying Aethpis with water for weeks. It has gone to Zephyria, and no one knows why. The people aren’t consuming a quarter of what is pumping out of it. Not to mention that Zephyria has a larger reservoir than Aethpis had."
"Aethpisian people haven’t been dying of thirst."
"For the last three weeks, they have been. It stems back to the Jupiter runs my squad was destroying. The MSA forces weren’t getting their water quota, so they began to steal the water from Aethpis. You didn’t notice it in your reports because they were falsified by your water director."
"I have known Kelly Clark for over ten years…" Sarah said and then trailed off. Parker looked at his wife. When her mind churned, her forehead wrinkled slightly to the side, creating a woeful expression on her face. Each time she did it, he knew her mind was contemplating something serious. "You know there had been a public complaint about water supply in Green Sector before I left. I thought it was just a routine maintenance call that Kelly reported. I paid no attention to it. If I had…"
"Gwen Arwell handcuffed you, and your public inquiries would have been seen as a desperate attempt to disparage the MSA. The people stopped listening to your words months ago."
Sarah ran her hands through her hair. "I was a figurehead."
Parker placed his hand on her shoulder. "You are a fine leader with good intentions. The odds of your success approached zero with the MSA’s hold on Mars. The MSA forces had been setting up their coup for years. You had a matter of days and hours."
"What do we do now?"
"What we have been doing—taking this fight to Mars and showing the people that the MSA had misled them from the start. We have established claims that the Alliance was dead were false. Now, we must show them the MSA has been lying in other ways."
Chapter 29
Chloe sat in a seedy tavern in the seediest sector of Zephyria colony. A place built over by the new, great colony. A place many had forgotten existed. Chloe knew about it though. She had lived within its nightmarish walls for a year after Orcus was destroyed.
She had worked hard over the last month to conceal her identity from the local riffraff that frequented the place. She scraped her cup along the top of her table in a circular fashion. The tabletop was metal; iron plate molded around a crudely carved stone stump. The cup of Norse tea—or at least what they served as Norse tea—nestled between her hands, warming her fingers more than it was ever going to warm her stomach. The air was stale, and in the time she had spent here, there had been little indication of a maintained or working ventilation system, making the place stink. Sweat and stale human body odor dominated the room, but the saving charm of the place was the dim lighting and the fact that few questions were asked.
There had been little progress in getting to Seth. She felt his presence, and she wanted to see him. Her heart said otherwise, and she didn’t know why…
Completely…
Her love for Seth had become painful, like a slowly expanding balloon in her gut. She loved him still, and that was all her mind allowed her to explore.
In the month after she arrived, she had done despicable things to stay hidden—the same way she and Seth had found passage to Lunara. What scared her was how easily she had slipped back into her role. After the Orcus massacre, for a year, she did what she had to do so that she and Seth could survive. She did it to stay near Seth, and yet she couldn’t bring herself to get too close to him. She tiptoed a thin line with it every day. Her body, mind, and heart were exhausted.
"Celeste," the young and terrifyingly innocent voice of Lola Starbright called toward her. With her blouse dangling perilously from her breasts and her skirt cut high along her thigh, she hurried over to the table and sat down.
Celeste Solaria was the name Chloe had used to conduct business. Peruzzi, her caretaker, gave it to her. It made her feel sexy, and as well, the men enjoyed it, so she kept it as long as questions about her past were not raised. Celeste Solaria was what existed of her at this moment.
Like Lola, she was scantily clad. Suffocating, she pushed her breasts, which were contained within a sparkling bright red-and-black top, up to her chin. The short skirt, which matched Lola’s except that Chloe had added red and silver trim, meant that her legs were chilled.
She ran her boots along the floor. Frustrating her since she put them on, her boots ran the length of her calves and came to a stub at the end of a tall platform toe. Walking with a sultry stride wasn’t easy, but Lola had reminded her of how to do it.
She glanced up at Lola. Her face was young, sweet, and without the lines of wear that the war had drawn on everyone’s face. Perhaps the lines were there, though, just hidden beneath the youth, a testament to her innocence that also provided a shadow for the direness of her situation. She had been the same as Chloe had been seventeen years ago. A little older than Chloe had been when she met Peruzzi for the first time, but definitely not wiser. Lola stroked her jet-black hair nervously as she looked at Chloe. A trait that meant, as Chloe had learned quickly, that Peruzzi was tracking her, probably to inflict discipline upon her. Peruzzi’s discipline usually entailed a squeezing of a person’s pride, will, and dignity.
But without any marks, Chloe couldn’t call him on it. Lola denied it. She needed the work and the livelihood. She knew no different.
Chloe sipped her Norse tea and then trained her eyes on Lola. "Did you have a lot of customers last night?"
Lunara: The Original Trilogy Page 93