MARIA

  Maria IX, Head Chair of the High Council, sat in her office with a book resting in her lap and a cup of algae infused water cooling on her desk, untouched.

  The orbital silence beyond the glass wall behind her stretched vast and infinite—stars unmoved, uncaring.

  Below, Earth burned.

  And the newest reports on that slow burning war had yet to arrive.

  To kill the impatience gnawing at the edges of her polished composure, she read.

  The book was a relic of the old world. A printed edition from before the collapse. Heavy in the hand. Yellowed like bone.

  It was about power, war, governance. A treatise written by a man both revered and reviled.

  Maria did not understand all the subjects it covered—the ancient systems of feudal succession, maritime empires, the notion of divine kingship—but the intrigues…

  Ah, the intrigues she understood. And feared.

  There was one passage she reread more than once.

  A chapter about sowing disorder among allies before a final offensive. About the necessity of cruelty—calculated, clean, and finite. About how leaders must sometimes wear two faces: one for peace, and one for victory.

  Better to be feared than loved, the author had written.

  Maria had once been loved. Briefly. A mistake she had not repeated.

  She turned another page, careful not to crease it.

  Her hands, usually so still, now trembled just slightly. She wasn’t sure if it was the words. Or the waiting.

  The ship with the surface updates wasn’t due for another couple of hours. She looked through the window, one of the few on the station, and told herself she wasn’t nervous. Only thorough.

  Then came the knock. Two soft taps at the door. Deliberate. Almost reverent.

  Maria’s heart surged, irrationally. They can’t be here yet. The landing is scheduled for later.

  She glanced at the chronometer above the sealed hatch—still three hundred and fifty-three minutes to go.

  She placed a bookmark between the pages and shut the volume gently.

  The knock came again.

  “Enter.” Her voice was cold, practised.

  Seth walked in. He was one of the five Chairs beneath Maria and she couldn’t stand looking at him. She quickly averted her ayes towards the window, yet there she spotted the reflection of his bald head. It looked event more grotesque than the real Seth, so the turned to him instead and looked in his eyes below the non existing eyebrows. Maria remembered she had once wondered if Seth was born bald or simply peeled himself like fruit, layer after layer, until only the clean remained.

  He stepped into her office now without waiting to be asked further, and with him—someone new.

  The boy.

  Tall for his age, or perhaps for any age, given the Moon’s long history of bone thin children. He looked like something sculpted rather than grown. Shoulders straight, jaw square, muscles already coiled into adult sharpness. His black uniform clung to him like a second skin.

  Genetically corrected, of course. The last generation of splicers had finally achieved what ten centuries of orbital decline had undone. Maria could almost taste the pride in Seth’s voice when he said:

  “Michael the Thirteenth.”

  Maria did not rise. She only looked the boy over, her fingers tapping faintly on the closed book in her lap.

  “Michael,” she repeated. “That’s not your real name.”

  The boy—no, the young man—met her eyes.

  “No.”

  “What was it?”

  “Ezra.” His lips barely moved.

  A pause.

  “Pretty name,” Maria said. “But we don’t need an Ezra. We need a Michael.”

  The boy did not flinch. Did not ask why. They’d trained him well.

  “To replace the old one,” Maria said, almost to herself. “Michael the Twelfth. Big Mike like they call him.”

  She stood then. Walked slowly, precisely, as if through the vacuum between stars, until she stood before him. He looked up slightly to meet her gaze.

  Maria’s voice lowered.

  “You know why we need a Michael.”

  “Yes.”

  She stepped closer.

  “Just like in those legends,” she said. “Michael who slayed the dragon. Do you know who the dragon is?”

  Ezra—Michael XIII—held her stare.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ll kill whoever I have to.”

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  Silence bloomed between them.

  Maria smiled faintly.

  “Good.”

  Behind her, the Earth turned slowly in the glass.

  And somewhere far below, the dragon stirred.

  “How much do you know of history?”

  Maria turned away from the boy—Ezra no longer, now Michael XIII—and approached the far wall. It bloomed to life with a flick of her wrist, revealing a shimmering surface of data and dust, a shifting mosaic of light. A map. The world, or what remained of it.

  “I know a little,” Michael said. “The old world ended. The ancestors escaped. They settled here. On the Moon.”

  Maria smiled faintly, as if amused.

  “That’s what they taught you?”

  He nodded.

  “In the doctrinal histories. The sanctioned ones.”

  Maria dared to look in the browless face of Seth and said:

  “We need to revisit the way history is being taught to our future generations.”

  “Of course,” he said and bowed.

  Her fingers drifted across the panel, and the map zoomed out. The Earth, cratered and limping. A scarred jewel in black.

  “You know why we repeat the events of the old world?” she asked, still not looking at him.

  Michael hesitated. “Because… they worked?”

  “No.” She turned now, slowly. Her eyes narrowed with something between amusement and warning. “We do not repeat the past to reproduce its results. We do it to achieve our own goals. We simulate the structure. Not the outcome.”

  She returned to the wall. Tapped a point—an old border. The map shifted again.

  “We keep the surface population at a calculated minimum. Enough to dig, to harvest, to carry the resources we need them to carry. But not enough to resist. They are sustained by wars and kept docile by faith. And the two—” she touched two glowing nodes, war and religion, and dragged them into a spiral on the screen “—go hand in hand.”

  Michael watched silently.

  “This war,” Maria said, voice cold as the void, “is more important than any of the others. It’s not just a managed conflict. It is something what the old world never achieved.”

  Her gaze turned sharp.

  “A war to end all wars.”

  Michael shifted slightly.

  “Is that even possible?”

  “It wasn’t, once. Not for them.” She tapped the book still lying on her desk. The one she’d read earlier—philosophies, strategies, power examined like an autopsy. “They tried. But they never had our tools. And our circumstances.”

  The map flared again. A new overlay.

  “Look.”

  She brought up the world as it once was. The boy squinted. Names of old kingdoms flickered on the patches of the land showed in various colours. Faded like myths.

  “This is what was,” Maria said. “Now…”

  She flicked her hand, and the image melted into flame and ruin. Shockwaves, craters, glowing deserts. Radioactive zones rendered in red.

  “This is what they made it.”

  She zoomed in. A fractured landmass surrounded by broken seas. The new Earth.

  “The only truly habitable region lies here—” she drew a circle across the Middle Sea. “A strip of Earth stretched from the dwarven mountains, down to the Levant. Fertile enough to sustain. Contained enough to control.”

  She indicated northward. “The Northlands. Where the Nordling tribes dwell. Beyond that, nothing. Wasteland. No longer habitable. The Eastern Wall separates their territory from the Faithful lands. The Faithful, as you know, we chose to be our chosen tribe. They worship symbol of the moon and a god who resides there.”

  She dragged her finger eastward. “The steppes. Ruined. Vast continent known as Asia is mostly gone. On the far eastern edge—what remains of it—lies the Kingdom of Sajanos. Yellow-skinned, rare-blooded, isolated.”

  Her hand swept down across the curve of Africa. “North of the desert: Svart territory. Refuge for the Nordling elite after the Great War. Below the Sahara? Dying kingdoms. Remnants of the Black race.”

  She looked at him again.

  “Sajanos. The Svarts. They have survived longer than they should have. And now their lands are dry. Their mines empty. Sooner or later, they will turn on our people who are there to manage them.”

  Her smile returned.

  “And that’s why we’ll make sure they don’t. They will be… involved.”

  A final movement—southwest, where there should’ve been a continent.

  “There use to be two huge continents,” she said. “That myth has sunk beneath the waves. There was an empire always hungry for war and wealth, always hungry. In its place—our own isle. Lunareth. The jewel of the Council. The base on Earth. The centre of control.”

  Michael XIII stood silent. His breathing steady. His jaw clenched.

  Maria looked at him, and for a moment, her voice softened. Not with kindness—but with command tempered into confidence.

  “You were made for this. The old world faltered because it feared finality. But we do not. We control the map. We write the myths. We kill the dragons.”

  She turned fully to him now.

  “The ones that we created ourselves.”

  The room pulsed with a low chime.

  Maria walked to her desk, slowly, even though she was sure something wasn’t right. She pressed a panel on the desk, and the transmission filtered in—sound only. A voice filled the space, static, urgent, male.

  “This is Raph. Requesting clearance to start early. We are under attack. The launching pod is compromised. Hostiles are mixed. Never seen anything like it. Svarts, Nordlings, even some Faithful judging by the look.”

  Maria’s jaw tightened just slightly. She decided to ignore the last information. For now.

  “What’s your status?” she asked.

  “Defensive systems holding for now. Minimal damage. But we cannot guarantee another hour. Requesting immediate clearance.”

  She stepped to the window—not that there was much to see but a view of dark moonscape and far glints of metal. She didn’t look at it.

  “Clearance granted,” she said. “Bring the pod in. Avoid further contact. Do not risk resources.”

  “What about the station staff?”

  “Bring them with you,” Maria said, her tone hasn’t change. Still formal, no traces of emotions, though her heart has been pounding. “As many as you can.”

  “Understood.”

  The transmission cut with a final snap. Silence returned.

  Maria lingered a moment, then turned back to her desk. The book still where she left it.

  “We truly live in primitive times,” she murmured more to herself then to the men in the room with her. Neither of them said anything.

  She crossed back to the projection table and ran her hand across the glass. The map sparked up again. Static danced across it—patches where feeds were lost, satellites down, drones gone quiet.

  “We are losing more,” she said not to anyone. “We weren’t even able to see them coming. We are blind. And those satellites? They used to be our eyes, we could look into the eyes of those stupid people from up here. Control their every movement. And now?”

  She inhaled, composed. Her fists clenched.

  “Seth,” she said, turning toward his bald, gleaming head.

  “High Chair.” He bowed slightly, light from the ceiling reflecting off the skin above his almost invisible brows.

  “Any news from Gabriel?”

  “Yes,” he replied, quick and precise, like a page turning. “The pregnancy is progressing well. Both mother and child are healthy.”

  Maria nodded once, lips barely parting.

  “Have they found him already?”

  “That Yanick? No. Not yet.”

  Her fingers tapped twice on the armrest. A small, metallic sound.

  “Why does it take so long?”

  “He leads Luc’s army,” Seth said. “They’ve taken one of the fortresses by the Eastern Wall—one of the old strongholds meant to contain the Nordling tribes. From there, they’ve begun pushing into the outer territories of the Faithful.”

  Maria’s tone sharpened like the point of a scalpel.

  “This much I know. Tell me something I don’t.”

  Seth inclined his head.

  “Gabriel is letting them advance. Sacrificing the Faithful forces in calculated retreats. Their last transmission noted that if this pace continues, they will reach Astoris within a month.”

  Maria’s brows rose slightly, the only sign of surprise.

  “And they are sure he leads them?”

  “He is the Divine Wolf,” Seth said. “They say he wears a decorated gauntlet on the same hand he broke. It’s become an icon. Painted in mud and blood across captured towns.”

  Maria rose and walked to the window, though there was nothing to see except the barren dust and quiet machines beyond. She looked anyway.

  “Within a month…” she repeated. Her voice was a whisper wrapped in calculation.

  Maria counted how much time she had left. Amaia was already five months into her pregnancy. When Yanick reached Astoris with his rabble army, there would be barely three months left before labour. If the girl didn’t break early. Stress, shock, heightened emotions, long lost lovers reuniting under the banners of war—such things could tear the body open faster than time would allow.

  If she was to be there, she had to speed things up here as well. All without revealing her true intentions. She was aware not everyone here could have been trusted.