“But you do?” I ask. I’ve never even heard of the term shadow knight. Atlas nods. “Shall I die of suspense? Am I in your circle of trust or not?”
“Very well. I will tell you what even Atalantia does not know, because unlike her you won’t salivate all over the table. This mission was organized to drain the Republic of its Obsidian weapons, punish the Rim, to unite it with the Core under a Sovereign, and to exterminate the Ascomanni, yes. But, there is a secondary goal that is arguably more important.
“As you know, I spent much of my youth in your grandmother’s vaults. The stacks there have information you’ll find nowhere else. I was particularly obsessed with the relationship between Akari and Silenius. In my readings, I found the true reason for the schism between the founders of our Society.
“Seven hundred and fifty years ago, Akari stole a weapon called Eidmi from Silenius. Eidmi is a virus with a modular half-life capable of targeting any of the fourteen Colors without secondary transmission to the rest. It is a weapon that will mean the end of war and ensure obedience to the Morning Chair for a thousand years. What planet, what Color, would dare raise arms ever again if they knew we could prune rabble-rousers out with a snap of our fingers?”
Silence falls upon my heart, and my mind conjures images of pristine worlds and cities where the sun still shines and the wind gently rolls, but are denuded of all human life, empty of laughter. I do not move for a long moment.
“Eidmi means, ‘I devour,’ ” I say. “In Hittite, no?”
“Yes. Devour, eat, consume. It is the root of the word ‘edit’ in many languages.”
“Edit. As in edit out a Color?”
“Yes, on whatever sphere it is deployed.”
“Even Gold?”
“Even Gold.”
I try a laugh to dispel the joke. Atlas and Fá do not smile. It is hard to embrace the reality of such a weapon. The application may seem enough. Blockade a planet, remove all the Reds, or Obsidians. Sanitary. Clean. And in Atlas’s hands, a terror like nothing ever seen before. But the ramifications are impossible to fully understand. Wars are inconvenient and expensive, atomics too destructive and radioactive to use without blowback. This is…genocide in a bottle. It wraps my heart in a cold silence and squeezes.
“You see why I did not tell Atalantia of this,” Atlas says.
I nod and look up, puzzled. “Why would the Raa, your family, steal it and not destroy it?”
“The same reason mankind never freed themselves from atomics. Fear there may come a day so dire it would have to be used.” Atlas opens his hands as if to say here is that day for the Rim. “That is why I needed Diomedes. Helios told me only a Raa with the scar can open the vault. Fortunately, I have Vela now. I anticipate it will be the hardest mission of my career. I have no information on the base defenses, nor its garrison. I expect I will lose many patriots. When I have Eidmi, I will rejoin you on the Lightbringer, Lysander. As for you, Vagnar, I fear we will not see one another again until we are toasting Thessalonican red at your penthouse in Hyperion.”
“I look forward to having you as my guest,” Fá says.
“Interference around Orpheus will be heavy. So if there’s any lingering questions now’s the time,” Atlas says.
I have one.
“You’ve killed your nieces, your nephews, your sister-in-law, and I don’t imagine Vela will survive Orpheus…so why is Gaia alive?”
Fá and Atlas exchange a look of amusement. Fá laughs. “Really, Dominus Lune. What kind of monster would kill his own mother?”
51
DARROW
Midnight Lands
WE ARRIVED ON IO and found it too dangerous to risk an approach. For three days we waited inside Io’s orbit in the cover provided by Jupiter’s faint ring system and magnetosphere as storms the size of Earth raged beneath. We circled Jupiter, matching pace with Io’s orbit, watching streams of transport ships depart until the Pandora and three Volk dreadnaughts slipped away from the moon with most of the Volk navy toward Callisto. When they disappeared around the curve of Jupiter, I told Cassius it was time to make our approach.
Virginia always thought it a strange perversity that so many of Jupiter’s moons were named after women or goddesses Zeus raped, and then graced with the ultimate torture—to be held under his gaze for eternity. From what I’ve seen on our journey into inner Ilium, Fá has been no kinder to the moons than Zeus was to his conquests.
Io floats alone beneath us, a ruin.
Its defenses have been smashed. Its cities razed; their smoke weeps upward to join the columns that pour out from Io’s four hundred volcanoes. It seems only the equator was spared Fá’s wrath. For good reason. There, an uninterrupted belt of green and gold pulses with life amidst a hellish landscape riven with volcanoes and desolate, frozen sulfur wastes.
Demeter’s Garter.
The breadbasket of the Rim. Infrastructure as crucial, perhaps more crucial, than the Dockyards of Ganymede I destroyed twelve years ago. Not all of Fá’s fleet has departed. Hundreds of strange warships that could only be Ascomanni-made gather over the Garter along with caravans of cosmosHaulers.
I cannot help but be impressed. Of the four Galilean moons—Europa, Io, Callisto, and Ganymede—Fá took the hardest and innermost moon first. It is exactly what I would have done: gain space supremacy by defeating the Raa navy, eliminate their moon defense bases, then capture the Garter to grip their whole civilization by the windpipe. Now that another leader has done it, the brutality the act required seems a sin against humankind. The consequences of the Garter’s loss will stretch far beyond Ilium to affect Rim civilization all the way to Pluto.
More and more Fá feels like my shadow, that darker part of myself that knows the shortest route often lies through the ruthless application of brutality.
Even Sevro does not laugh this time. Aurae’s lack of celebration when we saw the devastation around Kalyke was because she feared exactly this. She was right to, and Sevro was right to worry that Athena and her fabled ships may no longer exist. Still, we didn’t come all this way to turn back now. We need to contact Athena, and the only way to do that is to light Aurae’s omega torch in Sungrave.
Io is about the size of Luna, and tidally locked. One side always faces Jupiter. The moon is pulled in a constant tug of war between the gravity of Jupiter and the other Galilean moons. This creates tectonic movement, so Io is constantly bleeding fire from her heart. Some of her volcano plumes spew as much as five hundred kilometers out into space. Using one of these to mask our entry to the moon, we slip through Ascomanni patrols and descend toward the south pole.
I am extremely wary of putting the Archimedes at risk by approaching Sungrave directly. Surface-to-air missiles—either from Raa guerillas or Fá’s forces still on the moon—are as much a risk to the ship as enemy fighters or capital ships. So I have Cassius set down several hundred kilometers southeast of the city in a volcano range on the edge of the anti-Jovian Wastes of Naramoor. The spews and volcanic activity will hide our ship, hopefully. While Cassius stays behind with Lyria, Aurae, and our mute prisoner, Diomedes, I head to the cargo bay to gear up and disembark. Aurae passes me in the hall and tosses me a hair tie.