“No, I would not press that upon her. Not this world of killing. She is gentle, in a way. She loves animals. It hurt her, the dragon hunt. But she will have flying ponies soon enough.” He frowns. “She did try to kill me at first, but I reasoned her through it. She saw how often she’s been used, and how I asked nothing of her. But she did join the hunt. It was she who captured their sigil beast. Abraxes. Tricked him right into a trap.” He laughs. “She might be a Valkyrie, but there’s a touch of that freelancer in her too.” He taps his ruined eye. “A worthy man. Oh, Atlas. I think that Gray would have been one of your favorite knives.”
“Does she know about me?” Atlas asks, a little perturbed by Fá’s excitement.
“No. Of course not. She believes the same thing we sold the Volk. That we do this to make a kingdom for Obsidian.” He pauses. “I worry she believes it too much, in a way.”
“And when she discovers that is a lie? Afterward, when you tell her of me?”
Fá brushes off the questions. “She is a creature of the cities. She is practical. She will understand and embrace our new life.”
“Will she understand, though?” Atlas asks.
Fá hesitates. “What do you mean?”
“Some things we cannot wash off, Vagnar. Once she realizes who you really are, who you really serve, she will abandon you. Especially if she believes the Volk should have their own kingdom. You know my own hardship in that.” The two go quiet, perhaps thinking of a tragedy that befell Atlas some time ago. “The only way for her to look past the stains on your hands would be for her own hands to be stained too,” Atlas says.
“Blood her in battle?” Fá seems hesitant.
“Yes…for a start.”
Fá looks down in deep thought before nodding at his teacher’s wisdom.
“She will love me more when she understands my sacrifice, yes. Thank you, old friend. You have given me much to think about.”
Growing tired of discussing Vagnar’s personal life, I clear my throat.
“Shall we have the battle plan then?”
“Fair enough,” Atlas says. “The plan is simple. Lysander, after this meeting you will take a suitably battered Rim shuttle and travel to the moon of Pasiphae with Rhone and your Praetorians. There, you will send a message to your fleet telling them you survived the ambush at Kalyke. You will order them to press on and rendezvous with you there. Once they have, you will sail on Io and reclaim the Garter in any way you see fit. Its shields will still be down, so I recommend an Iron Rain for maximum visibility across the Dominion.”
“And what of my ‘foe’？” I ask and eye Fá.
“Vagnar, sorry. Fá will leave mostly Ascomanni behind to garrison the Garter as he sails onward to assault other moons. Exterminate those wretches to the last and save the citizens you find in their ships, Lysander. The first two waves of transports are already rife with disease and off to the Kuiper, so that extermination is already set in stone. Once you have secured the Garter and installed a Core garrison, you will urge all remaining Rim forces to rally to you for a final confrontation with the dread Volsung Fá. In that confrontation, seen by your grateful allies, you will kill him and scatter his fleet to the winds.”
I look at Fá. “But it won’t be you I kill.”
“I should certainly hope not,” he says with a laugh, then more seriously, “You will kill Volsung Fá, but Vagnar Hefga will be long gone.”
Atlas explains, “Xanthus is already at work on a head for you to show the Moon Lords. Vagnar here will escape with a select force—enough to be useful to us should we have need of them against Atalantia or the Republic. Now, Vagnar, I know the timetable is extremely compressed, but will three weeks be enough for you to sack all the Galilean moons?”
Fá considers the question as if Atlas had asked about painting a wall. “Sack, no. Raze, yes. But we will have to resort to bombardment if you desire that sort of coverage.”
“That sort of coverage?” I repeat. “Atlas, Kalyke and Io are quite enough massacre to—”
“To humble a civilization that brushed off the burning of Rhea in less than a generation?” Atlas asks. “You said it yourself, Lysander. The Rim is proud, stubborn. They must feel existential fear. Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto must fall.”
“That’s hundreds of millions of people.”
“Yes.”
“That’s…gratuitous,” I say.
“The greater the trauma, the longer the peace.”
“No. If that’s your plan, then kill me and put Atalantia on the chair.”
He measures my resolve. It’s a bluff. He knows it. Fá knows it. I’ll have no leverage until my fleet arrives. Yet Atlas relents, and possibly always planned to.
“Very well. I am not unreasonable. You may choose one moon to spare. Io is finished. So that leaves Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Which will you grant reprieve?”
“I recommend—” Fá interjects.
“Thank you, Vagnar, but if this is the only power I have right now, I believe I will trust my own counsel,” I say.
He nods at my respectful correction of his overstep, and waits patiently. It is a question of arithmetic, so I choose the most populous by far. “Ganymede.”
“Very well. Ganymede will be spared,” Atlas says so quickly it seems as though he knew I would choose it, and may never have meant for it to be razed at all.
I feel sick. “Vagnar, you can move on to Callisto as soon as your braves have finished their feast. Europa after that, please. Raze the islands first, then invade the Deep.”
Fá grimaces. “My braves won’t like that. The riches are on the surface and the Deep is a deathtrap.”
“Then bribe them with a feast, with spectacle,” Atlas says. “Beat them with their own religion. Say their Allfather wills it. Whatever it takes. Burn all your capital. It’ll be their last mission before Lysander hits. There’s an infestation there I wanted rooted out.”
“Apologies, it’s hard to forget sustainability of the army is no longer a priority. It will be done. They do love their feasts,” Fá says.
“And where will you be during all of this, Atlas?” I ask.
“Oh, you know, around,” he says.
“Atlas, I just had to choose between moons to spare from annihilation. I’m all in, obviously. If you burn, I burn. If you don’t let me into the circle of trust now, how can we work together and, how did you put it, ‘get shit done’？”
Atlas considers. “Fair. I will be on a moon called Orpheus.”
“There is no moon called Orpheus,” I say.
“Not on any map, no. It is an irregular moonlet two point one kilometers in diameter with an orbit so close to Jupiter and so hidden by the planet’s radiation and magnetosphere that few sensor systems would notice it. If they did, their telescopes would see an uninhabited rock of little interest. Inside this rock lies the most secure vault in all of Ilium. This vault is guarded by an elite garrison of shadow knights. Its contents are so shameful to my family that not even its guardians fully know what it is they are protecting.”