By May it was clear we had to leave Mars for our old home base in Turkey, where the soldiers of Father's former command had also declared for him. Mr. Golden's couriers had brought the nanomachines we call the new metal plague with them from Earth, and already the mining station's computers were failing to produce naught but display screens of scrolling numbers. The last two members of Father's command who had implants within their systems had likewise perished. We had to evacuate soon, or else we would be trapped on an alien planet while we waited for our atmospheric systems to fail.
We loaded the entire 1,628 members of the mining station onto the gigantic ore ferry that normally carried rock from Mars orbit to orbit about the Earth. By using the barge's shuttle, we filled up its empty hold, 150 passengers at a time. Despite the cramped quarters we had, our veteran pilot, Captain Mbasa, expertly pulled the vessel from its path around the Red Planet and went directly into the solar wind, wherein the barge's expanding wings and nose scope could collect radiated energy to power our nuclear generators and bring us home. In only fifteen days' time, Mbasa hit the retro-rockets to slow us down enough to flip us around the Earth and put us into orbit. In reverse of the process we had used on Mars, the shuttle craft carried 150 of us at a time to Van City, or so it did for almost ten round-trips.
We soon discovered the surface of the Earth was rife with the nanomachines. The shuttle carried millions of them onto the ore barge, and within two days they caused our oxygen system to fail. Those of us left in the hold had to put on the individual respiratory tanks the miners had used and hope that the ninety minutes of breathing the tanks allowed would give us enough time to reach solid ground. The shuttle craft exploded on its tenth return trip back to the barge, leaving Father, myself, our four servants, and one hundred and twenty-two others stranded 630 miles above ground.
We would have perished like live sardines packed inside a large can if brave Captain Mbasa had not hit the retro-rockets one last time and sent the barge into the Earth's atmosphere, where the ungainly ship was not designed to fly and naturally began falling like a stone. While the captain manually held the craft on a nearly steady course, the rest of us rushed to the escape pods and ejected into free fall in the upper stratosphere. When the parachutes on the eight pods opened, we softly landed in a scattered pattern across eastern Turkey, and the soldiers from Van City had to spend the next week gathering everyone who had escaped the ore barge. We were safe, though Father had been shaken by the experience after already having been weakened by our time in Mars's reduced gravity. Ours, however, was a better fate than that of courageous Captain Mbasa, who rode the ore barge until it exploded like a supernova in the cloudless sky and was strewn across the mountains of southwestern Asia. To my knowledge, ours was the last flight to escape the other planets. For a month afterward the two radios we had at Van City that still functioned received desperate messages from those left behind on the mining stations and scientific posts in the Asteroid Belt and on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter where the nanomachines had also reached; soon the messages ceased, and there was again only icy silence in the expanses of the solar system above us.
By early summer we had learned from travelers that what Mr. Golden had foretold had come to pass: Abdul Selin and his Army of the Heartland had reached Garden City, and in a single day had disposed of the pretender John Chrysalis. A letter from Mr. Golden informed us that as Selin's advance guard approached the city, Chrysalis had made numerous desperate appeals to the Senate. He had proposed restoring the ancient rights the senatorial class had enjoyed in republican times, provided the current senators supported him against Selin. Chrysalis had requested that representatives of all the city's religions go to meet Selin's troops on the march and tell them John Chrysalis was willing to share his rule with their commander. When the army reached the capital's suburbs, the Senate and the City Guardsmen, both of whom had served the pretender when Selin was far away on the Great Plains and Chrysalis's money was nearby, at once turned on their master. John Chrysalis's last day on Earth found him running through the hundreds of rooms within the palace, calling out to servants who had disappeared and peering out the high arched windows for Guardsmen who had taken off their uniforms and blended into the civilian population. The last soldier on watch intercepted the frantic man in a hallway and stabbed him to death, so that his body might be presented as a welcoming gift to Selin when that terrible little man at last entered the capital city proper.
The death of one rival did not appease the general of the Army of the Heartland. He did not pause a few days to hold a parade for himself. He went right to the business of establishing total rule. Selin at once dismissed the Senate and mixed the present City Guardsmen into the regular army and made new Guardsmen from the ranks of his own force. Many noble families—including those who had the surnames of Chrysalis, Whiteman, and Black—disappeared or went into exile. Father's wife and his two legitimate sons became prisoners in their homes. The other members of father's extended family were put to death. As Mr. Golden had predicted, Selin quickly seized the fleets stationed at San Diego and Tampico. From the latter of those two ports he sent troops to North Africa to take control of the solitary division stationed in Egypt. Thus his two remaining rivals were left isolated in distant parts of the world: Whiteman was walled inside Britain and Scandinavia, and Father was trapped in Turkey.
Mr. Golden's letter assured Father we still had support among the common folk in Garden City.
“Every day they call out your name to Selin and his thugs when they march through the streets,” he wrote. “The African turns a darker shade of black when he hears their taunts. He has murdered thousands for your sake; still he cannot stop the people from loving you.”
“Golden is betting on every spot on the dice,” commented Father as I read the letter to him. “He fears there may yet be a popular uprising on my behalf. I wonder what he is saying to Selin.”
As I read on, we learned that Selin had sent a large army across the Mediterranean in the direction of Istanbul.
“We will have to meet him there,” said Father. “He'll be most vulnerable while he's making the crossing. Once he gets into Asia, his larger army will overwhelm ours. We have to defeat him at the Bosporus…or we won't.”
My father was weak that summer day. None of us in his household dared to say aloud that knowing what Selin had done to his cousins, nephews, and nieces was the affliction that was bringing him low. We did not wish to distress him further. Father's pulse beat too fast when he awoke. He had to remain in his bed until it slowed and his head did not spin when he stood upright. When he finally got his feet under himself, he could not move quickly. All of us—including nonbelievers like myself—prayed to Sophia to aid him in the long struggle he had before him. In the evening, I, the skeptic, took his place in the cult's ritual processions while Father watched from his couch, as the exertion of the long, slow shuffles the deity requires would have undone him. He promised the officers who came to visit our house he would feel stronger soon. He assured everyone that when that time came we would start marching to the west to defend Istanbul.