The God's Abode was close to Pangaea Castle. That proximity, which made the complex easy to administer in peacetime, made it catastrophic now.
From the moment the beam appeared to the moment it arrived, there was almost no time at all.
Finn had been holding the Four Elders in place, gravity pressing down through the floor and darkness coiling up from it, both abilities working together to keep four old men from reaching the door. He had no hands free, no attention to spare, and no warning beyond a shift in the air that arrived at the same time as the impact.
The eastern wall of the conference room ceased to exist.
The explosion tore through the surrounding structure with the indifference of force that had not been calibrated for a building. Half of Pangaea Castle came down in approximately four seconds. The sound was enormous and total, the kind that didn't register as noise so much as a sudden absence of everything else.
Dust and fractured stone spread outward across Mary Geoise's upper tier. The smoke column was visible from every point on the holy land within seconds.
Pangaea Castle had been hit before. After the Fisher Tiger raid, the reconstruction had taken years. The people of Mary Geoise who had lived through that rebuilding recognized the quality of the silence that followed an explosion like this one, the disbelieving pause before the alarms began.
The alarms began.
"Why is Pangaea Castle on fire?"
"That's where the conference room is. The World Conference is in session. The five elders are in there. A hundred kings are in there."
"What happened? What happened?"
The questions moved through Mary Geoise faster than anyone could answer them. But the Marine garrison didn't need answers. They needed orders, and Vice Admiral Kuzan and Momosa Gion had orders ready before the dust had finished settling.
The two of them had been sharing tea in a side building when the eastern face of Pangaea Castle detonated. Gion was on her feet with a hand on her Den Den Mushi before the teacup finished rocking.
"Something went wrong," she said, staring at the smoke. "This isn't our schedule."
Kuzan's expression was controlled, but his eyes were calculating fast. "The direction of that shot came from the God's Abode. If that was Uranus—"
"That was not Uranus." Gion's voice was flat. She had seen what Uranus was supposed to be capable of, and half a conference room, however dramatic, was not it. "Something else. It doesn't matter right now."
She raised the Den Den Mushi.
"All Marine forces in Mary Geoise, this is Vice Admiral Gion. Effective immediately, the holy land is under martial law. All vice admirals are to deploy their units and establish sector control. Port access is sealed, no ship enters or leaves for any reason. All non-Marine personnel are to be confined to their current locations. Anyone who resists this order is to be treated as a hostile combatant." A pause. "Anyone."
Kuzan was already on a second line. "G-1 and G-5, this is Vice Admiral Kuzan. Move to the Mary Geoise port now. Full complement. Headquarters garrison is to mobilize for immediate support."
Gion and Kuzan had not planned for this morning to look like this. But the difference between a Marine who had spent decades in the field and everyone else in Mary Geoise was that they had planned for mornings looking like something they hadn't planned for. The machinery was already in motion.
Across the holy land, the Marine vice admirals who had spent the past several days escorting royal delegations, standing guard at corridors, managing logistics and security details, snapped from ceremony to combat footing within minutes. Units moved. Sectors were divided and assigned. The port gates came down.
The Celestial Dragons' private guard force was already moving too.
The Five Elders had never quite repaired their faith in the official Mary Geoise Army after Dragon and Fisher Tiger had walked through it without breaking a sweat. The solution they had settled on was not rebuilding an army, which would have required working through Kong's command structure, but quietly expanding the personal guard force attached to the Celestial Dragon households. Guards answered to the families who employed them, not to the Commander-in-Chief. Technically, they were private security. Practically, they had been supplied with the finest weapons, the best armor, and consistent professional training for years. There were almost a hundred thousand of them.
At the same moment Pangaea Castle was hit, a message reached the guard commanders from the God's Abode: the Marine had turned traitor, the Revolutionary Army was involved, and every loyal sword on Mary Geoise was to suppress the rebellion at maximum force.
The Marine received orders to control Mary Geoise. The guards received orders to destroy the Marine. The two forces made contact at approximately the same time, in approximately a dozen locations across the holy land simultaneously.
Neither side was interested in a conversation.
Gunfire spread through the streets like weather. The holy land that had been finished rebuilding less than a year ago took damage almost immediately: shop fronts, colonnades, decorative stonework that had been laid with enormous care, all of it equally indifferent to the principles of the people shooting from behind it.
The Marine brought their cannons up from the ships at the port. The guard force pulled artillery out of the God's Abode. The street fighting that had started with rifles and close-quarters combat escalated into something that shook the ground and produced craters in roads that had been pristine the day before.
Mary Geoise had become a battlefield, again, less than a year after finishing its reconstruction from the last time.
At the World Government Headquarters building, the fight had taken a different shape.
The building had been locked from the inside within minutes of the explosion, security personnel forming a defensive line at the ground-floor entrance with the efficient speed of a force that had specifically planned for this kind of contingency. They held the doorways and the main corridor with practiced discipline, and the first CP operatives who attempted to breach them found the resistance unexpectedly serious.
Outside, directing the assault from behind a column that had already taken two direct hits, Spandine was having a different kind of morning than he had planned for.
A bullet passed close enough to his cheek to draw blood. He touched the mark, looked at his fingers, and did not flinch. His eyes were too bright for the situation he was describing them from, the concentrated focus of a man who had done the calculation and understood what losing today meant.
He reloaded and fired back.
"Don't stop," he called out, voice raised over the exchange. "The Director General's orders are to take this building at any cost. Every official inside is a target for the purge. If we're standing here tomorrow without having done it, none of us are standing anywhere." He leaned out briefly and fired twice. "Push them."
Spandine had, by most reasonable assessments, spent his career as a man who valued his personal safety at a level most soldiers would find excessive. That he was currently standing in the middle of active gunfire firing a revolver with a bleeding face was testament less to any change in his character and more to his clear-eyed understanding of how the accounting worked. He had been on Finn's side of this equation for years. Everyone in the World Government Headquarters building knew it. If the Marine and CP lost today, Spandine would not be offered a chance to explain his choices.
So he was not going to lose.
Who's Who and several CP-9 agents had gotten tangled up with the more capable members of the security force inside. The breach was stalled.
"Sir," a CP-0 operative pressed close, shielding him. "Contacts approaching from behind. Requesting defense formation."
Spandine risked a look. "Who is it? What flag?"
"Confirming now."
Two minutes passed that felt considerably longer.
"Marine, sir."
The tension in Spandine's shoulders released about five degrees. "Marine. Good, they're ours. Let them through."
The column that came around the corner did not look much like a formal Marine unit. They had the white coats and the rank insignia, but the way they moved, the total absence of hesitation in how they flowed into the space and began immediately reading the defensive positions, that was not port security or escort duty. That was something that had been doing violent work in difficult places for a long time and had gotten very comfortable with it.
Spandine recognized the vice admiral at the front before the man had crossed the threshold.
"Doberman!"
The vice admiral's scarred face split into something that, on a warmer person, might have been called a grin. "Spandine. You look terrible."
"I've been shot at. Come help."
Doberman had come up through G-7 during the years when the base's command track was built almost entirely by people loyal to Finn. He and Spandine had enough history through those years that neither of them wasted time on formalities when there was work to do.
Doberman turned to his unit, reading the defensive layout at the entrance in a glance.
"G-5," he said simply. "Let's go."
The G-5 Marines had been standing by at the port for this exact kind of morning, and they were not a force built for ceremonies.
They hit the entrance line at full momentum.
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