“Been a long road since the Marcher,” she says as I tie my hair up. “Be careful.”
I bump fists with her and descend into the cargo bay.
Sevro is there waiting, already dressed. I did not know if he was coming, but it seems he’s decided to step up after all. I give him a nod and he helps me into the Godkiller armor.
I skip the small talk and show him our route.
“The direct approach takes us through a briar patch of mountains and volcanoes. Anything could hide there, and we can’t afford to get shot down. If our oxygen reserves run out, the sulfur dioxide in Io’s thin air will react with the water in our lungs to form a strong acid. So we will head due west to the Waste of Karrack, then curve back toward the city on the seam between the mountains and the waste. Here just south of Darkfall. Complaints?” He shakes his head. “You’re better in boots. I suggest fly-hopper interchange, but you’re flight master. I’ll take your lead. Helm up. Boots prime. Let’s do it.”
The ramp lowers and we step out into the dimness.
Sevro and I fly from meager sunshine over plains painted shades of yellow, red, black, green, and white toward midnight lands where Jupiter hangs in the sky, supreme, mutinous, and huge. From the surface of the moon, Jupiter subtends an arc of 19.5 degrees, appearing thirty-nine times the apparent diameter of Luna from Earth’s surface. Even the many mountains of Io, some rising higher than Earth’s Everest, seem small in comparison.
We wind through the teeth of mountain passes, over vast sulfur plains and burping lava flows until the moon slips into Jupiter’s shadow. The celestial event, where Jupiter blocks Io from the sun completely, occurs every forty-two hours. Surface temperatures drop so low all sulfur on the moon turns to frost. The Ionians call it nivalnight.
The darkness grows Stygian, broken only by the glow of volcanoes, the throbbing of molten silicate lava lakes, and the blinking lights of high-altitude Ascomanni patrols. If there is Rim resistance to the Ascomanni, we do not see any signs of it, and that’s all the better. Dustwalkers, Obsidians, Ascomanni, those are my fears in descending order.
We alternate between sprints of low-altitude flight and hopping in our gravity boots. We pause at random intervals and Sevro peers into the blackness of the mountains or the shrouds of volcano plumes as if they concealed legions. There is no better scout in my army than Sevro save a few of Valdir’s lads, but we are warmlanders, softworlders, and I feel even Sevro’s fear.
An hour into our journey west we reach the Waste of Karrack. Over that barren plain, weird tentacles of light molest the sky. They are charged particles flowing off Jupiter to form auroras. They stain the frozen sulfur crystals mutating shades of violet, cerulean, and green.
Daring young Blues, styled “airdancers,” from Darkfall and Nightmourn used to sail those auroras with homemade Dedalian wings. Golds have bones far too heavy for the sport. No Blues dance in the sky tonight. I wonder aloud to Sevro if any Blues will ever dance here again.
He does not answer, or care. In the eight days since his fight with Cassius, Sevro has barely been seen, choosing to camp out and sleep in the machine shop or the escape pod and take his meals in private. I hoped for a new start after he revealed his grief for Ulysses. Maybe I was too hard on him. Or I was too optimistic, but even if he’s gone silent he is no longer pulling the team apart.
He comments on Quick’s armor though, and that’s something. “Shame we didn’t have this ten years ago,” he says of the new gear.
I don’t disagree. The gear is light, fast, stealthy without sacrificing power, and its updated generator can run the suit for days. It has three modes for power-usage. Typical of Quick, they all have dumb names. “Reptile” to run cold for stealth. “Lupine” for regular use. And “titan” to kill gods, apparently. We’ve only dared try reptile mode. Our juice runs out here, we’re dead.
Sevro grows somber as we pass the city of Darkfall.
Unlike many of the large-mass moons, Io was never terraformed. The moon and its air are still hostile to life. Life has been able to stubbornly survive here only beneath the surface of the moon or under the paradomes. Those domes that once harbored precious oxygen and sheltered the citizens of Darkfall from Jupiter’s radiation bombardment have now been shattered. The city, once famed for its orators, sopranists, and philosophy, lies quiet and cold as we pass. It is as if their stoic people have been eaten by the dark itself. I think of the transport ships that we saw trickling away from Io when we arrived, and know now what cargo they carried.
Men, women, children, bound for some frigid asteroid city far beyond the bounds of civilization. I can scarcely imagine what awaits them there. Even in Lykos, little trickles of hope made their way into the mines—whispers about Ares, beams of sunlight. I fear the captives of Io will receive no such inspiration. My chest grows tight after thinking of their fate.
If they are truly my enemies, then why do I want to weep?
52
DARROW
Sungrave
“BLOODYDAMN BELLONA. WHAT’S HE DOING? There’s three of them,” Sevro says from his perch on the ridgeline behind me. In reptile mode, our armor runs cold and has adaptive camouflage. Sevro is difficult to make out on any of my ocular filters.
From our vantage south of Sungrave, he monitors the approach from the south. I monitor the northwest. It is barren of life. The Obsidians have come and gone. The story of Sungrave seems no different from the tale we saw everywhere along our route. Death. Darkness. Silence. The only difference is the cemetery of war machines that sprawls out before the city. Sungrave did not fall without a fight. We checked the machines and found frozen Blues and Greens inside—not Obsidians at all. They had scars on their necks from pain collars. But it seems the enemy recycles, and took the collars back from their corpses.
“Three,” I say absently. “Should just be Cassius and Aurae.”
“Three.”
I frown. Frost crackles under my gravBoots as I slide down from my post, then jump thirty meters to join him in the shadows. He clings to the side of the dark rock like a gargoyle. “Lyria?” I ask. “She shouldn’t be off-ship with that concussion.”
“It’s not the Red. It’s the Raa.”
I pause. “He brought Diomedes?”
“Unless Lyria gained a hundred kilos overnight. Bellona’s off-mission. He’s masturbating over his own honor still. Maybe you need to offer him the airlock.”
“Let me talk to him this time.”
“It’s resolved,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“Ain’t your business.”
“Keep watch.” I descend from our position to meet Cassius at the base of the mountain. Sulfur crystals clatter as he sets down on his gravBoots. His own Godkiller suit mutates with the changing light. Nivalnight is waning, and the pitch-blackness slowly erodes into a forge-like glow sometimes caused by the refraction of the moon’s volcano light on the particle-thick air. I expect him to babble on about the armor. Instead, Cassius’s voice is like that of a man attending a funeral.
“These poor people. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“You will again if Atalantia takes Mars,” I reply. Perhaps too maudlin. “You brought Diomedes.”