Golden Son

  Sevro nods to me, wiping puke from his mouth. Jupiter helps him stand. Strangely, Sevro lets him. I look for Mustang’s signature on my helmet’s datapad. She’s alive with the main element of my force, but we’ve been separated. I’m with a dozen Golds and forty Obsidians specially trained in hi-tech military equipment.

  “Exos off,” I bark at the Obsidians. “Omega, guard the perimeter.”

  We shed our clunky exo thermal armor to reveal the more agile starShells beneath. I order helmets up. Metal demon and animal faces replace those of friends.

  But there’s beauty in this moment. In the half seconds where Golds and Obsidians nod to one another to pass on comfort before going about their tasks, finding solace in the cocoon of duty, in companionship, like I did in the mines.

  I gather Sevro to me along with the Howlers. Ragnar, separated from his legion, stands in my shadow. We landed on the day-side of the planet. It looks like a meteor shower as the second wave of starShells pierces the atmosphere, leaving trails of black smoke across the fire-scarred blue sky. Hundreds of ground cannons still shoot at the swarm that spreads from horizon to horizon, but slowly those gunstreams thin as the guns are targeted from space or eliminated by squads like us on the ground. My squad is three hundred kilometers from where we need to be. How did that happen?

  I call Mustang over the coms. She’s fifty kilometers closer to the designated drop zone on some other mountain. Her force is nearer four hundred men.

  “Looks like we’re the idiots,” Sevro says.

  We go down the mountainside. We do not fly. Instead, we skip. In the Academy they taught us to think of it like skipping a rock over the surface of the water. We could fly in our gravBoots, but flying makes you a target to missiles and anti-air munitions, not to mention enemy hunting parties. So we jump fifty meters in the air, then use our gravBoots to jerk us back toward the ground.

  Missile fire comes from a nearby peak. Sevro and his squad deal with it, skipping over thousand-meter ravines, skimming up the side of a steep rock façade as Ragnar and I press forward. A dull thump echoes over the mountain range as they rid us of the missile turret. The Howlers link up with us at the end of the mountain range. We perch on the side of a cliff, where low clouds gather. To the left, about twenty kilometers off, rise the towers of distant whitewashed Thessalonica, perched on the craggy coastline of the clear Thermic Sea. Tactus’s home. I feel a pang of sadness.

  We press north. I watch the towers fade, till they’re nothing but glinting metal against the coast of that weirdly calm water. Explosions rumble in the distance. I feel the weight of a hand fall on my armored shoulder.

  “Just like after we took Olympus.” Sevro grins, looking down from a new mountain’s peak at the land that lies open before us.

  “Except everyone has gravBoots here.” I check our coordinates in my helmet’s HUD. The invasion continues above us. Enemy gunships, rarer now, flit across the sky. One targets us. It roars through a cloud and chews up the ground with chainguns. We take cover in a ravine. Snow kicks up around us. Then a missile slithers out and collapses a rock onto my legs in the explosion, pinning me down. Pebble and Clown stand over my body, shielding me.

  “Ragnar!” I shout. “Kill it!”

  I don’t see what he does, but the sound is tremendous as the gunship smokes and spins from the air, teetering toward the ground, and then disappears in a cloud of shrapnel.

  “Your legs?” Sevro asks frantically.

  They pull the rocks off me. Gears groan and electrical components whir.

  “Still work.”

  We descend the snowy mountain range into rugged Martian plains. A mass of heavy infantry like us moves to our left. Their transponders label them ours. But far off to the right, about thirty kilometers out, where the ground swells into subtropical highlands, a Bellona column skips forward—maybe three hundred in separate parties.

  “Cracked one of our com sigs,” a Green communications director in space relays over a new signal. “They’re hunting you, Icarus.” My secondary call sign.

  “Here’s when we learn who is winning the heavens,” I say. Sevro directs a tracking laser on the enemy squad, just as they set one on us. Theirs bobs on the ground in front of us like a frantic fly. We scatter, Sevro and I flying away together, and then a rain of fire descends on our enemy from two trajectories. At the same moment, Sevro IDs a drone deploying cluster missiles at us. He tags it, and a railgun from nearby Thessalonica fires a projectile that leaves a streak of blue fire across the horizon. The drone disappears in a blossom of red. This is the multi-madness of hi-tech war.

  We make our way to Mustang’s coordinates, sensors and eyes peeled for the death that hides in the mountains. It stalks the plains. It secrets itself in woods of towering godTrees and in the waters of the infant seas.

  A great lake stretches far to our left, while a dormant volcano so gradual in its incline that it seems little more than a snow-capped hill broods to our right. I soar higher along the spine of the mountain range we traverse to gain vantage over the surroundings. Periodic topographical data flickers onto my datapad as drones broadcast data, are shot from the sky, then replaced.

  It is quiet inside my suit. I cannot hear the wind that whistles around me at this great height. A stormcloud, one of Mars’s dramatic thunderheads, rolls in from the distant lake. When it hits the forest below the mountain, the rains come and the lightning slashes the sky. Atop the craggy peak, snow swirls, melting against my suit.

  I catch movement on a peak nearby. I hold off on discharging my weapon when I see it’s no Bellona, but a carved beast. I magnify my vision and see the griffin clinging to the edge of a huge nest set into a narrow stone defile atop the peak, watching in wonder as men fly across her valley below. What a world these Golds have built.

  My men rejoin me on the next peak over, pausing a moment to check the powercells in our starShells. They won’t last all day. Mustang’s group slams into the ground around us, causing snow to scatter as four hundred starShelled killers add their strength to ours. She bumps fists with me.

  “Icarus?” a voice crackles in my ear. “Icarus, do you read me?”

  “Roque, I read. What’s what?”

  “Icarus … urgent … on … read me?” His signal breaks up as lightning slashes overhead. Jamming devices from both sides already molest the airwaves. “Dar … ead … me … in Agea.”

  “Roque? Roque?” I know the plan for the battle above, but the tone of his voice worries me.

  “Coms are all scattered,” I tell Mustang.

  “Local frequencies are fine. It’s the jammers and storm.” Rain splatters over her faceplate.

  Sevro points up. “Gonna have to get your ass above it to hear.” Above, a ship is struck by lightning. Her systems fail and she plummets before reactivating, only to collide with a passing ripWing.

  “Oh, goryhell.” I give Ragnar and Jupiter orders to push forward of the mountain range and secure the northern valley for our main force of Gray legions. While we besiege other cities to divert Bellona attention, to me Agea is all that matters. A million men will go at her walls. The Stained opens his hand to me in salute and then jumps off the mountain peak with Jupiter and a hundred Obsidian warriors.

  Mustang and Sevro wait below as I rip up through the lightning-laced clouds with several of my bodyguards. Past the clouds, I float in relative peace, hailing Roque.

  “Icarus!” he shouts into the com. “She’s here. She’s not on Luna or with the main Societal fleet! We just found out. Kavax’s men found Praetorians on board the Warchild … she’s here! She came in secret without her fleet; we caught her.”

  “Roque. Slow down. What are you saying?”

  “Darrow, the Sovereign is on Mars. Her shuttle is trapped behind the shields on Agea. She is trapped.”

  “Roque. I already know. She’s why I want Agea.”

  39

  At the Wall

  He doesn’t ask how I knew. Later I’ll tell him that I let Aja e
scape from Europa so we could track her back to the Sovereign via my bomb’s radiation signature. She’s her personal killer. Of course she would return to her side. I’ve told no one but Mustang and Sevro. I couldn’t risk it spreading, especially with how Roque’s been acting.

  He hangs up the com without another word.

  The vanguard of my force, Ragnar’s men, have made landfall in the valley ahead. I see the fat ships descending, then disappearing into the ground where the Valles Marineris stretches kilometers beneath. We have our Blues in space lay fire down on Agea itself. The deluge heats the shield, causing it to pulse opaque. We’ll be coming at her at ground level along the bottom of the hundred-kilometer-wide canyon from the north and south, just through the two-hundred-meter gap her shields must maintain above soil to avoid creating seismic disturbances.

  I hop off the mountain peak at the head of my bodyguard. Sevro and Mustang accompany me as we jump to another peak, then skip through the lower foothills, taking fire as we go.

  The Sovereign is the key to this war, the key to fracturing this Society so the Sons of Ares can rise. With her captured, the Society itself will wonder in confusion if it even exists without Octavia atop its throne. Senators and governors will try to seize power. There will be a dozen local wars, fracturing manpower and cohesion.

  Beneath me, a world of bounty lounges along the bottom of the vast canyon—lakes and streams, waist-high grasses, trees blooming with flowers and Spartan pines growing at odd angles from the kilometers-high canyon walls despite the steep declivity. Above all this, the great floating mountain, Olympus, reigns. I glimpse the quiet castles and see deer running in the vale of Mars. But I see no children along the great rivers, no boys and girls in armor. Only memories and muddied earth. The students have already been collected. How strange that must have been—fighting for their lives with medieval weapons, only to be scooped up by dropships as invaders came from space.

  We meet with Jupiter and Ragnar on one of floating Olympus’s white spires. There are dead men in the halls, on the slopes.

  “They used it as a base,” Jupiter says cheerily. “Your Stained disagreed with their presumptuousness. I like the beast!” Our men secure the section of the Valles Marineris set aside for the Institute, far east of Agea in the upper arm of the grand canyon. I watch out the window as hundreds of friendly dropships descend on the staging ground, depositing more than three hundred thousand men in thirty minutes. A Gold runs out of each lowered ramp, always the first onto enemy soil.

  “No resistance,” I say quietly, my starShell helm popped. I look at Mustang uneasily.

  She wipes blonde hair from her eyes. “The longer we’re dug in, they harder we are to dislodge. Why are they waiting?”

  “Want to cluster us up like a bunch of grapes before stomping,” Sevro guesses. “Atomics?”

  “Silly children.” Jupiter goes through the pockets of one of the dead men. “That’s why we have Grays. Let them be stomped. They will lubricate our passage.”

  “No atomics,” Mustang says. “Sensors would have picked them up from a hundred clicks away.” She looks out over the land. “They’re waiting because they don’t have enough men to contest our passage through the valley. Or we’ve caught them flat-footed, which is doubtful. Or they deployed too many men to halt Lorn’s advance. Or they’ve created choke points in the valley. Or they marshal them around the Citadel. Or there’s a trap ahead.”

  Her mind is a machine.

  “There’s a trap,” she says after a moment. “But they are over-relying upon it to stall us while they reallocate men and materiel.” She snorts in contempt. “Static defenses without massive mobile support haven’t been relevant since the Maginot Line.”

  “But they know we don’t want to waste the city or the populace,” I say.

  “They know that.” Mustang adjusts her datapad, examining the map. “Which shrinks our flexibility in tactics.”

  “Total war is easier,” Jupiter grumbles. “Let’s use the Grays to lubricate our passage, then drop bombs at the walls under the shields. Entry gained.”

  “It takes a day to break a city, then fifty years to rebuild,” Mustang snaps. “You want to sign up to oversee the reconstruction?”

  “Do I look like a builder?” Jupiter asks.

  “The passage to Agea is eighty kilometers wide on average, seven-kilometer-high walls on either side, all farming and agriculture for the city. Bellona likely littered the place with mines. If they had time. We didn’t exactly tell them we were coming.” Did they have time?

  Mustang motions me to the side.

  I walk with her away from the rest of my command staff, who roll their eyes at one another. The airy palace halls should remind me of past victory, but all I feel is steep melancholy being here. So many memories. So many lost friends, I think when I see a Grays landing near Minerva castle where Pax and I once dueled.

  “It’s eighty kilometers to the walls from here,” she says. “We could make the dash as planned. Just because they didn’t contest our landing doesn’t mean there’s something nefarious afoot.” She sees the hesitation in my eyes. “We are here for my father just as much as we’re here for the Sovereign. We have to move with pace.”

  “You’re afraid Lorn is going to kill him if he breaks through the southern city walls first,” I guess. “Aren’t you.”

  “You know their history.”

  “I do.”

  “And do you trust Lorn not to finish an old grudge?”

  “Lorn isn’t a murderer.”

  “No. He hurts men who deserve it, like Tactus. My father deserves it as much as any man. So we must hurry. And you must tell the rest of them about the Sovereign.”

  “Roque found out. Praetorians on the Warchild.”

  We walk back and I address my small council.

  “You know we come here for Augustus, but there’s a second reason we press on Agea. The Sovereign is here.”

  “No shit?” Clown mutters.

  Rotback scratches his head. “Goryhell.”

  “In the Citadel?” Pebble asks, excitedly nudging anxious Weed with her knee.

  “In all probability. We traced Aja here. Residual radiation from the bomb we hit her team with on Europa. The other assaults are designed to draw manpower away from Agea so that we will have a chance to break through her walls and capture Octavia before her Ash Lord arrives with the full might of her armada.” And if the Sons have done their part as Ares promised, we should be able to get into the city without fighting through a hundred thousand armored men and women.

  “Is Cassius in the city?” Sevro asks.

  Mustang nods. “We think so.”

  Sevro smiles.

  “If you come upon Cassius, do not engange him,” I say. “Nor Karnus, nor Aja.”

  “You’d have us run?” Clown asks, insulted.

  “I’d have you live,” I say. “The prize is the Sovereign. Don’t be distracted by revenge, or pride. If we seize her, we are the new power in the Solar System, my friends.”

  The Howlers share wolfish grins. Sevro squares his shoulders.

  “So lets stop picking our butts.”

  “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  Friendly ripWings roar overhead to clear out enemy forces along our path.

  With all our powers marshaled, we move through the green canyon. No creeping column. We go fast. Speederbikes have more pace than starShells. Those Grays and the ones on spiders tear ahead after the ripWings and heavily armored dropships that will deposit men even closer to the wall. Flashes ahead indicate they’ve detonated mines or the mine killers have done their job. No way to tell. The canyon here is narrowing. Verdant canyon walls tower hugely in the distance to either side, colossal and unreal, like the terrain of a greater, larger race than man. I can’t see all my force in so vast a place, just the tip of the spear. We come after the fast-moving Grays, a skipping column of dreadful knights in starShells of black. The deluge of rain falls even harder. Behind
us roll tanks and the infantry columns in their hover skiffs, lightly armored vehicles that can carry a hundred men in a flatbed. They’ll deposit them a kilometer from the walls. Lorn’s attack from the south will be much similar.

  “Drones!” Sevro shouts through the com. A cloud of metal rises toward us from a small depot in the canyon wall to the east. The Howlers streak after the threat, their guns ripping holes in the air. Still, dronefire shreds a squad of flying Obsidians. They plummet to the ground, bodies unrecognizable. We skim over buildings now. Small towns. Resorts. Estates. Granaries. We find ourselves over a lake. See our shadows as lightning flashes above, silhouetting us.

  I see the defensive wall now. It falls over the horizon like an iron curtain. Ninety kilometers across, at this stage of the canyon, and nearly two hundred meters high, it nips the lower edge of the shield. Lakes and rivers don’t find their terminus here, but instead run beneath the wall through a thick network of durosteel bars that are strong as a ship’s hull. It would take a hundred men ten hours to drill their way through those bars.

  Most cities do not have walls so massive. They cost too much. Agea and Corinth are alone in the quality of their fortifications. We could have come through the tunnels that wend through the belly of Mars and connect every city with their mines, but I didn’t want to. There are tactics I must save. And there is an example I must set.

  Assaults like this are not protracted things. I’ve seen the histories. They are wild and manic. Technology against static objects always wins, so long as the besieger’s resolve never runs dry. Once upon a time, castles were nearly impossible to take through direct assault on a capable garrison without the price of Pyrrhic victory. So field armies laid siege and starved defenders into submission. Now, no one has the patience.

  Agea is a city of twenty million souls, but how many of those will give a lick who wins today? There is no difference between the rule of the Bellona and the rule of the Augustus. Coppers and Silvers will care. But the Reds, the Browns, the Pinks will just watch another master take the chains.