“MINOTAUR-1 HAS CONTACT. Engaging enemy,” Apollonius says over the com.
On the sensor display inside my starShell, the curved edge of the Ash Lord’s darkzone blots out the corner of the blue-hued map. The mass of gold dots from Apollonius’s small fleet approaches the barrier. I listen to their com chatter as they detect hostile patrols and engage with full force. Two ripWings go down almost immediately; a third disappears into the darkzone. Apollonius’s squadron pursues. Soon their signatures disappear. Their massed assault will eat up the attention of the Ash Lord’s forces, and the bulk of the casualties. With the Nessus’s stealth hull, we’ll come in the back door and rip straight for the Ash Lord.
“Minotaur is inside the darkzone,” Char says. “Two minutes to breech.”
Inside the firing tube in the port side of the Nessus, my soft body is cocooned in the vestments of war. Thermal skin, pulseArmor, starShell—a twelve-foot-tall mechanized armored suit. I’m like one of those layered wooden toys they sell down by the wharf in Thessalonica, the ones that are painted with the faces of rosy-cheeked Reds and Violets. I bought one for Pax when he was young. It was our first and only trip to Mars as a family. He sat in Mustang’s lap, gasping each time he pulled apart the dolls to find yet another inside, looking to us hoping we saw the miracle as well. Seeing the joy in my wife’s face, I was witnessing another miracle. One, for a long time, I believed I would never see again. Love so potent, so whole and true, that it hurts, because even when you convince yourself that it will last forever, you know enough of the world to see how things break and fade, but somehow, some way, you believe this love will be the exception. That it alone will last.
An ache fills my chest. Not just at the memory, but in thinking Pax was ever so young and innocent. It seems like it was just yesterday, before we were pulled back to Luna. Where did the time go? I ask when I know the answer. I spent that time. And I spent it worlds away from those who needed my love.
I sense the claustrophobia now and the fear of the coming violence beyond the hull. The Nessus roars over the sea escorted by Colloway’s ripWings, my friends loaded in its spitTubes.
“Enemy contact. Six bandits inbound. They’ve seen us,” Colloway says. “Warlock Squadron engaging.” Colloway and his depleted Warlock Squadron race ahead of us to target the incoming patrols. They dance across the sensors, dots flashing in and out of existence.
“Bandits eliminated,” Colloway drones, his normal insouciance replaced by the hard-edged voice of a master at his craft. “Warlock-1 crossing into darkzone.”
I watch through the Nessus’s holoCams from my starShell as the ripWings cross the threshold into the darkzone ahead of the Nessus, disappearing from our sensors to be swallowed up by the looming black curtain.
“We’ll be deploying at their back door,” I say over my com to my starShell squadron. “Expect a firestorm, regardless. We can’t expect communications to work inside. You have full autonomy. Group up after initial threats are eliminated to reassess.”
“Copy that, Howler 1,” Alexandar says unnecessarily.
“How can you even breathe with your nose so far up Reaper’s ass?” Clown asks.
“I hold my breath,” Alexandar replies. “Far easier that way, my goodman.”
“No one can hold their breath that bloodydamn long,” Rhonna says from her gun turret.
“Ragnar could,” Sevro says.
“Well, Ragnar could lift a mountain with his gorydamn pinkie,” Clown replies. “And drink an ocean without needing to piss a drop, so powerful was his bladder.”
“What’s the quickest way to a Peerless Scarred’s heart?” Pebble asks. “Ragnar’s fist.”
Sevro cackles. “Unlike mortal men, Ragnar didn’t sleep. He merely waited.”
They make me miss my old friend more than I can say. Seems so unfair Ragnar died without knowing that Tinos would be saved, and Luna would fall. “Remember today what the Ash Lord did to our friend,” I tell my men. “Remember that he made Ragnar a slave. That he made him kill his own kind for sport. A debt is owed. Two Grimmuses have fallen. Two yet remain.”
“Atalantia au Grimmus. Magnus au Grimmus,” they recite as a promise, and I hope Atalantia is here with her father so we can end their family’s saga once and for all.
Tongueless drones the death rattle of the Obsidians. It fills my ears with righteous dread and I feel the bitter winter plains of Ragnar’s homeland roll inside me. I wish I had my old friend here today. What I’d give to see him lead this charge on his old master. To see the Golds quake as they did before no other man.
“Hyrg la Ragnar,” Sevro snarls.
“Hyrg la Ragnar,” the men bellow back.
The Nessus plunges into the darkzone. The external cameras go black. My com silent with static. I am no father. No husband. I summon my anger. My hatred. I am Helldiver of Lykos. The Reaper of Mars come to rip the life from the last great warlord of Gold.
Yellow lights flash outside my suit on the firing mechanism’s launch alert console; I stare at it hungrily. Desperate for it to turn green and release me. I perform preflight checks on my interior dampeners and pulseShield, power my gravBoots, charge up the particle cannon on my right shoulder and the railgun that makes a stump of my left arm. A whine from the particle cannon draws energy from my suit’s main reactor on the suit’s hunched back.
The light goes green.
The firing chamber’s hooks push me forward into the mouth of the railgun. I clench my teeth together and lower my head. Then the hooks propel my suit into the clashing current and I launch forward at three times the speed of sound, punching through the darkzone, my heart in my throat.
I tear into a scene of death.
No time to orientate myself. Proximity sensors scream with incoming ordnance. A particle beam smotes the sky in front of me, a pillar of light as thick as a forearm and as bright as a sunbeam. The impulse sensors in the formaGel that surrounds my body communicate with the suit and bank me hard. I pass the particle beam and feel the heat even through the layers of armor. My evasive maneuver throws me into the path of an anti-aircraft battery’s fusillade. Fist-sized shells detonate in clouds of superheated shrapnel. A shell detonates to my right, spinning me through the air, my pulseShield screaming from the kinetic energy transfer. I boost out of my spin, diving blindly toward the sea.
A bad start.
We’ve come out of the darkzone’s veil directly into the teeth of the enemy perimeter defenses. So much for the back door. Beneath, atop a cluster of atolls garlanded with anti-aircraft batteries, six automatic turrets swivel on gyroscopes, filling the air with metal. The guns slam munitions into the underside of the Nessus’s shields. She vaporizes an atoll with her main particle cannon. Colloway’s three ripWings are trapped in a frenzied dance with a squadron of enemy first-responder ripWings. Two of my starShells already smoke and limp away from the theater of fire, but ten others race with me down toward the atolls. No way to tell who is who in our uniform black. I race headlong toward the largest atoll, a towering pillar of rock crested with a particle cannon installation. Light crackles in its meter-wide barrel and then erupts upward at me. I weave right of the certain death and bring my smaller particle cannon online and draw a bead. I expand my left hand, building the energy in the battery. When I’m close enough I can see terrified parrots fleeing the island’s canopy of trees, I clench my fist and my cannon roars. Lightning crackles from my right shoulder and slices a molten gash through the base of the gun installation. I sweep my closed fist back and forth, guiding the cannon and lacerating the installation’s roof till I hit their power generator and the installation explodes. I bank up and see the Howlers destroying the rest of the gun installations.
When the last gun of the perimeter defense is silent, the starShells form up atop a rock formation on one of the atolls near the smoldering remains of a gun battery. Colloway’s ripWings fly a thousand meters higher, the Nessus floating above them. She tears apart the sky as she fires at the main islands in the distance. But they fire back.
It sounds like the planet itself is cracking in half.
One by one, the Howlers land on the rugged escarpment with me. The three-ton starShells, with their apelike elongated limbs and armored carapaces, make them appear in the bright daylight like a dark band of crustaceous golems. They stare at me through the triangular duroglass face shields. Smoke billows from the shoulder of Tongueless’s shell, but his flesh wasn’t hit. Thraxa steadies herself as she lands; the nuke launch tube is still strapped to her back. Sevro is the last to land. He hangs above us on the cliffside, holding on to an outcropping of rock.
Our coms are down from the darkzone’s interference, so I signal commands with a laser display on my armored chest. When I’m through, Sevro and I rocket upward from the island, gaining altitude to see the Ash Lord’s hidden world in its totality.
A placid emerald sea littered with volcanic islands stretches before us. Twenty kilometers in the distance, at the epicenter of the Ash Lord’s realm, lies a humped island with an impressive white spire atop its central rock formation. Reaching out from the island is a spine of towering jagged atolls and islets of shattered arms and legs that claw out at the sea. Pale sand, visible under the clear water, seeps around the bases of the islands like spilled marrow. Fire laces the islands from the Nessus’s gun batteries. Already the island’s main antenna is melting slag, but a shield generator has activated over the main island and its spire, leaving only a hundred-meter unshielded gap above the waterline.
Distant thunder rolls across the water.
Thirty kilometers away, past the island on the eastern expanse of the darkzone, a war rages. I magnify my vision. Apollonius’s ripWings twirl in a kaleidoscopic firefight with the Ash Lord’s over the sea. Streams of red railgun fire and electric-white particle beams streak up from submerged gun installations and anti-aircraft batteries hidden in the crests of the islands.
Concussions from bunkerbusters echo as Apollonius’s heavy, spider-shaped thunderWings make runs on the main islands. His ripWings have carved a hole in the defenders, and dropships filled with his legionnaires race through heavy fire across the no-man’s-land of water to make landfall. Despite heavy casualties, he makes progress.
Then I see something terrifying.
On the second-largest island, about four klicks from the Ash Lord’s spire, ripWings rise from a large airfield to join the fray. Three squadrons, thirty-six aircraft. Nearly two hundred more ships fill the airfield. Long metal buildings that look like barracks glint from the neighboring islands. Hoverboats are already speeding across the water, carrying pilots to their aircraft.
Seeing our presence to the west, an enemy squadron detaches from the wing from the airfield and slowly banks around to block Colloway’s ships from attacking the rows of waiting ripWings on the ground. I glance up at his squadron of three. Warlock’s going to have to earn his reputation today. Already long-range missiles streak between the craft.
Sevro and I lock eyes through our faceplates.
We have to eliminate the pilots before they reach their ships or we’re all dead. I drop like a stone, Sevro on my tail, and land amongst my men. I signal them to follow me. We plunge into the water as the ripWings engage out over the sea. Railgun rounds eat into the water, but shatter on impact above us. We dive to twenty meters and head toward the islands like a school of metal sharks. Two torpedoes fall into the water and detonate, bucking us sideways.
Then, from the deep, I see something moving through the water toward us, a blur of metal no larger than a fist. It slams into one of the Howlers’ shells and detonates, vaporizing half his body. More metal swims toward us from the deep. Minefield. I shoot upward out of the water, my Howlers hot behind, the mines screaming after them. A lance of fire streaks down from a belly turret on the Nessus and cuts the mines out of the air. Good shot, Rhonna! I could kiss her.
We surface just off the bow of one of the hoverboats. More than a dozen of them race toward the airfield. Two have already landed. I burst over to one and land on the deck just before the command cabin. Through a glass partition, I see the female Blue pilot and half a dozen Orange and Green crewmembers. I switch to the railgun implanted into the left arm of the suit and fire into the command cabin just as the pilot lifts her hands in fear. Superheated metal makes pulp of the men. Throughout the bay, my Howlers in starShells leapfrog back and forth between the fleet of hovercraft, massacring the command cabins. Thraxa wades into one against pulseRifle fire and slams a Gray twenty meters into the air with her powerHammer. She disappears inside. Light flashes from the interior. Sevro floats above another, firing down onto it. I burst forward through the shattered command cabin into the passenger hold of my own hovercraft, where two dozen uniformed Blues in flight gear stare at me in terror. Some are no older than Rhonna.
I pull the trigger and make meat of men.
Evaporated blood fills the air with a rusty mist as fragments of bodies twitch on the floor.
By the time I make it out of the hovercraft, their fleet is a ruin of smoldering, sinking wrecks. Sevro has marshaled the Howlers on the airfield island. I skip over the water and land next to him. “There’s no bloody back door!” he says of the main island, popping his top. “Place is a porcupine.”
“We’ll have air superiority soon. Those frigates are pummeling them.”
“Apple’s boys can fly,” he says with a laugh. “You see Colloway? He slagged half a bloody squadron on his own.” We peer up and see black specks swirling around each other in the clouds above. They look so peaceful. So too does the beach. It faces out to sea away from the main island. Water laps against the feet of my starShell. Crabs skitter along the sand. And out in the bay, hulking wrecks of the hovercraft smolder and sink to the deep.
“Who is missing?” I ask.
“Grana and Vandros,” he says quietly. Eight of our twelve remain. I try to pull up a battlemap, but static still distorts the sensors. It’s infuriating how little of the battlefield I can see. But this is what Niobe teaches our children, what Sevro and I learned long ago: rely on tech and you’ll soon be dead as your batteries are.
“Doesn’t look like he’s going to try a shuttle escape,” I say.
“Course not. For once he overestimated us. Prolly thinks we have a whole fleet waiting for him to try and escape. Gonna make us dig him out.”
“We should wait for Apple’s forces to push inland on their side of the island,” Sevro says. Tongueless and Thraxa land together after scouting the coastline. Pebble and Weed watch the interior of the island where the airfields lie beyond white rock hills and olive trees. Alexandar joins them with several Howlers.
“Can’t wait,” I say. “Chances are they got a signal out before we destroyed the array. We’ll be dealing with reinforcements from the mainland soon.”
“Then let’s move our asses,” Sevro says.
The air’s a deadly place to be, so we move as a pack across the rocky island toward the coastline facing the main island, low to the ground, skipping thirty meters at a time. I send Tongueless, Alexandar, and Milia inland to demolish the ripWings on their landing pads. Plumes of fire rise over the hillsides from the airstrips before they rejoin us. In the sky we’ve had a drastic setback. The Nessus has lost its gun battle to the particle cannons on the Ash Lord’s main island and has been forced to retreat to a lower elevation to seek shelter. And another of Apollonius’s frigates has fallen from the sky.
Under the shelter of a ridgeline, Howlers help each other check their starShells as Sevro and I climb the ridge to look at the main island. A kilometer of open water separates the landmasses. Turrets line the rocky coast.
To our far right, Apollonius’s force has pushed in and landed troop carriers on the main island. Hundreds of mechanized soldiers storm the beachhead on grasshopper legs, supported by heavily armored spider tanks and the remains of his air force.
Into the teeth of death, the last legion of Valii-Rath charges.
The first wave is mowed down by cluster munitions fired by drones and gun batteries on the high cliffs. The ripWings drop bunker busters and big guns fall silent. Ash Legions, caught unaware, now pour out of subterranean barracks. I see a flash of armor in the sky as Apollonius, flanked by bodyguards, exits a troop carrier midair and falls for the bunkers in the cliffs. His holobanner glows in the sky above him, three times his own size: the raging head of a purple Minotaur, inviting all to come dance and die. He lands amongst a squad of Grays and decimates them.
Clang.
I’m kicked in the chest. Falling from the rock formation, I collide with the sand below and stare up at the sky, dazed. “Sniper!” Sevro shouts.
Sevro lands next to me. “Reap, where are you hit? Reap?”
“Oh, goryhell, he’s going to die!” Clown says.
“Shut up, asshole!” Sevro shoves him away.
Pebble kneels over me. “Darrow, can you hear me? Darrow.”
“Ow,” I say. They help me sit up. The armor-penetrating round pierced the starShell but was stopped by the pulseArmor underneath. The arms and legs of the suit won’t respond. Pebble and Weed help me activate the ejection port. The mech splinters apart and I crawl out, still dazed from the shot. There’s a dent in my pulseArmor.
“Where’s Thraxa?” Sevro looks around.
“Here,” she says, rushing up.
“Still got that baby nuke?” he asks, his face enraged.
“Yes, sir.”
“Give it.”
She unholsters the nuke launcher from the back of her armor and hands it to him. Without even lowering his helmet, he jumps thirty meters upward to clear the ridgeline. He hovers a half second in the air and fires. The small missile shrieks out of the tube. He lets gravity claim him and falls back to the beach as we rush to shelter against the ridgeline. He saunters over without a smile. There’s a flash of blinding light. The earth shudders. A blast wave of sand and debris roars over our heads and huge waves crash against the island. In the distance, the black distortion surrounding the Ash Lord’s island flickers and disappears, revealing the horizon.
I climb back out to see the devastation the half-megaton missile has caused to the island’s coastline. Smoke and dust particles clog the sky. A horrible wound has been carved into the Ash Lord’s island. The mushroom cloud blossoms. And above it, deeper inland where the white fortress of the Ash Lord towers upon the high peaks, sunlight catches on iron men.
Finally, the Golds have come to war.
I unfurl my razor and look to my Howlers. “For the Republic.”