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Guang Song was many things, but they were not—and they would stand by this forever—a traitor. Hell, Gale had only acquiesced to the trial under enormous amounts of pressure; they’d come to Guang’s cell to apologise They had always been honorable like that, down to the last blow.
Guang had considered their own refusal to request a military tribunal a testament to their character; the jury had considered it worth precisely nothing. So here they were. Jupiter, hulk, prison labor—ten years couldn’t come soon enough.
They held onto the fact like it was a gun. They weren’t a traitor—treason implied betrayal. Treason implied giving up, and Guang would never. Tharsis existed as a fail-safe, an auxiliary measure for the rapidly approaching day that Earth became uninhabitable. It took a sort of faith to realise that; bone-deep and certain, the kind of all-consuming force that animated the cephalophore saints in the old stories. Gale was decent at their core, and Guang respected them, but they weren’t capable of that kind of conviction in anything.
It didn’t matter. Guang wished the new, independent Tharsis all the best. Earth was warming all the time; they only had to wait.