Fred held up the coffee cup. The name TACHI hadn’t quite worn off the side, red and black letters half-erased by use. But not gone. Not yet. “I understand better now how Darius felt,” Fred said. “Having power, position, advantage. Especially when you think you know how wars work. It blinds you to other things. And by the time you see them, there’s a Macedonian cavalry with spears set coming right at you. But that wasn’t how Darius lost.”

“It’s not? Because the story you just told me sounded a lot like that’s how he lost.”

“No. He ran.”

Holden drank. From the crew quarters, the murmur of unfamiliar voices was a reminder that things were wrong. That the patterns of the past were broken, and might never be put right. “He was going to get killed if he didn’t, though. Alexander would have killed him.”

“Maybe. Or maybe Darius would have withstood the charge. Or maybe he would have fallen and his army would have crushed Alexander’s in rage and grief. The end of an emperor isn’t always the end of an empire. I look at Earth and what happened there. I look at Mars. At what happened on Tycho, and what I’m afraid happened on Medina. I’m seeing Alexander’s wedge bursting through the line at me. The same shock as Darius, the same dismay. The fear. But I’m not Darius. And I think Chrisjen Avasarala isn’t either.”

“So you don’t think we’re screwed?”

Fred smiled. “I don’t know what to think yet. I won’t until I know more about the enemy. But looking back through history, there are a lot more men who thought they were Alexander the Great than men who actually were.”

Chapter Thirty-seven: Alex

They burned across the emptiness, and the enemy came hard behind them. Four Martian military ships with target locks on Alex’s drive burned toward him as they all dropped toward the sun. The other two had stayed behind to continue the attack on the main force. More than half the attackers had peeled off to come for him. Alex hoped it was enough to let Captain Choudhary get a toehold. Nothing he could do about that from here, though, but watch and hope.

For the first few hours, it had all been hard burn and dodging. Once he’d opened up some distance between the Razorback and the attackers, the nature of the chase altered. It wasn’t about catching or being caught anymore. Alex had the lead, had seventy-two missiles left flying around him in a cloud, a path to Luna, and reinforcements burning out to join him. If nothing went wrong, he’d be safe in less than two days.

The enemy’s job now was to make something go wrong.

“You’ve got another couple PDC arcs coming in,” Bobbie said.