Josephine stalks the gangways of the Navy frigate, fists balled in the pockets of her frock coat, goggles pushed high on her head and respirator dangling at her throat against the eventuality of the hull's rupture to the aether. The coat is the brilliant red of the Revolution; the Flag of Blood, as the propagandists of the butcher Government would have it, pens scratching tirelessly in bloodless offices mortared with the tears of a million labourers' starving children.
Her own ship is not quite a match for this one, but a early lucky shot burst open the bridge. Decapitated, un-captained, the ship's command had visibly failed to grapple with the turmoil of the battlefield; a belated competent hand perceptibly took hold of the auxiliary command post, but too late, as the broadside cannonade threatened to vent the hull entire. The ship surrendered.
Its corridors stink of blood and terror.
The acting command crew are lined up beside the command post's strategy tables and speaking-tubes, under Revolutionary ray-rifles, for her to survey. A diadem of crisp, starched uniforms.
There is, within Josephine, a cold iron anvil, suddenly obstructing her lungs.
The neutral port at the Olympus Mons docking-mast is a seething cauldron of spies and smugglers. Of course Josephine's visits there are official Revolutionary business; of course they're for the freedom to slip into a soup of moral grey, invisible. And in a tiny room above a dismal Martian speakeasy, devoid of lighting except for a single spendthrift dribbling candle, she is only Jo; on her back in the effort-rucked tangle of scratchy sheets, with only Rose, and neither asks a single question.
Josephine looks over the line of officers, at the straight-backed clear-eyed jewel among them, and continues; assessing only with the Revolution's steely eyes. And over the ship's crew address system, she gives the speech; the infamous Revolutionary speech.
The ordinary hands are workers. The Revolution is the cause-forged family of every worker, and they are welcome.
(True, of course, and not; every one who takes the offer will be watched, possibly for ever, for sign of sabotage or espionage or propagandising.)
The officers are instruments and hands, both, of the brutality of a system of caste, the worth of a life and its outcome determined by hereditary stake in the ownership of capital. They are prisoners of war.
(Their possible recruitment will come later, after careful watch and assessment. The Revolution is desperate for officers experienced in the maintenance and supply of a long-running military campaign.)
"The Captain at the time of your surrender will turn over to the Revolution the ship's instrument of discipline."
The literal tool by which the officer class maintain the fiction of their ordained superiority, the figment of their right to command. The blood-flecked, screaming imposition of self-anointed authority. The flesh-rending Cat o'Tails.
The Captain will surrender it; and, as synecdoche, serve as conspicuous demonstration of the Revolution's opinion of the torturer's fiat.
Josephine knows. Before the Navy's Rose steps from the line of officers and to the lazarette containing the Cat; before she fumbles, unfamiliarly, with the latches retaining it. Before, chin high, she crosses the room and courteously extends it. Brave. Collected. Handsome in her Naval uniform. The hand that surrendered the ship, rather than spend every sailor's life aboard for the simple spite of refusing.
Jeering Revolutionary hands drag out the bench for her to brace across.
The Revolution is riven with contradictions, a hundred knives ready for any back perceived weak. Disagreements of style and purpose. Distaste for those stained with the proof of their capability for spy work's perfidies. Age-old contempts, clutched jealously to the chests of those who insist they're not part of the ills Revolution redresses, and should be left alone; such as that for womanhood.
If Josephine's hand falls light (if it falls any lighter than excessive, any lighter than total annihilation of any room for the most malicious to whisper) then she ends them both.
She uncoils the Cat, face set in cold steel. She is the Revolution.
("Your jacket," Jo says, the first time in the tiny room, half-dizzy on wine and anticipation, riding the edge of uncertain thrill, waiting to see whether Rose will smile an already too-intoxicating smile and shuck off the threadbare Martian labourer's garment—)
"Your jacket," says Josephine.
