“Good. Now, get thee hence, foul ragamuffin. I hear the Deep is gloomy and dour as a Moonie’s sonnet. You won’t want to miss it.” He hands me a tiny flask. I take it and give a little shake, feeling its contents slosh around. “Had to make sure it was good enough for your discerning palate,” Cassius says.
I thank him and head down the ramp to join the others. I stop in the rain and jog back to him. He smiles, a little confused. I say in a rush, “What you did on Io. Why you did it. It’s just…” I look down, feeling stupid, knowing he doesn’t need compliments from me. “I dunno. I just think you’re a good man and you have a huge heart and I don’t think people say that enough. Just wanted you to know that I see it, Bellona.”
For once, he doesn’t have anything ironic to say. His eyes glitter, and he bends, looks into my eyes, and kisses me on the cheek. I’m filled with an urge to protect him and his too-fragile heart. “Go on now. Before I try to keep you,” he says.
I catch up with Darrow and the others just as they descend the ramp to meet a new group of heavily armored Red troopers. They are tough, thick-necked men and women with buzzed heads, faces like a vagrant’s heel, and big guns. They greet Cheon with salutes.
An Orange man with a thin jaw and huge eyes grasps Cheon’s arm. “Ares fought.”
“Athena fights,” she replies. He repeats the rite with Aurae with a little more flirtation.
The Pink seems nervous around her own people. If she was deep cover, I guess she would feel like an outsider amongst the Daughters. She keeps glancing at Diomedes in worry. The Orange whistles when he spies Darrow and Sevro through the rain. “Honored, Reaper, Son of Ares. Honored. When the communique came through…Well. I didn’t believe it. Honored.” His eyes narrow when he sees Sigurd, as if he thinks the man’s hands should not be just bound behind his back but chopped off completely. His most unusual response is reserved for Diomedes.
He just starts laughing.
“How the mighty have fallen.” He spits on the Gold. Diomedes does not react, and the rain soon cleans the spit from his face. Par for the course: the man’s expression of boredom is chiseled in stone. Don’t think I’ve seen him emote once, except sometimes when he’s looking at Aurae when she can’t see him. Movement on the horizon draws my attention away. I squint through the rain, just making out the lights of an island city looming like a mountain out in the gloom.
When I look back to the group, almost everyone is gone down a stairwell. Cheon waves to me. “Any day now, lass.” I jog up. “You’re the pilot. Lyria of Lagalos. Cheon.” She extends a hand. It’s half again as big as mine, and her grip punishes.
“I’m not really a pilot,” I say and descend the stairs with her.
“I saw. And I’m not really a soldier either,” she rumbles, entirely unconvincing. “Was that man the Cassius au Bellona? Quite the gilded complement the Reaper has.”
“He saved those kids and Greens, I’ll remind you,” I say.
“Aye, at the cost of half my men.”
“I’m sorry.” She shrugs. “You’re a gas miner, yeah? From one of the floating rigs on Jupiter?” I ask.
“You a silk spinner? A spider breeder? Ain’t that what Red lasses do on Mars?” she replies.
“They also sing,” I say. “And serve on the front lines.”
“Just right, lass. Just right. We’re more than the utility they made us for,” she says.
Astounded by any Red who could or would go toe to toe with Obsidians, I had wanted to meet Cheon soon as she came aboard. Yet I find myself disliking her more with every passing second.
We reach the bottom of the stairs and come out onto a submarine dock. We pass a dozen lightly armored Grays stacked in a heap, dead. The former guards of the solar island, it seems. A black and gold sea beast is emblazoned on their chest plates. “Cyaxares,” I murmur.
“What you know about that monster?” Cheon says.
I shrug. “He might be on the menu soon. The dragon eaters are coming.”
The submarine that awaits us is shaped like a wedge of Lunese cheese. I file after the others into a pressurized hold located at the top of the dense and heavily patched craft. It stinks from a legacy of rust, brine, and sweating bodies. Cheon’s troopers lock into harnesses in a row of crash seats bolted to the floor. There’s enough for a hundred passengers. My party takes the row on the opposite side of the hold. Darrow locks in Diomedes’s harness before locking in his own. The bag he’s carried with him rests on the floor by his feet. Darrow and Diomedes look comical in the small seats. Sevro looks like he’d rather swim down than buckle himself into his seat. His anxiety is obvious.
I take my seat next to Aurae. She’s just as nervous as Sevro.
“Don’t like submarines?” I ask.
“Never been on one, but I do try to embrace new things,” she replies, her eyes on Cheon.
“You don’t like her, do you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I don’t.”
“It takes all kinds to wage a war,” she says. “Could you imagine her entertaining guests in the Raa court?”
“I can’t imagine you there either,” I say.
She looks at me, struck. “Thank you.”
I haven’t time to answer before the Orange barks for us to brace and the submarine plunges into the sea. The straps dig into my shoulders. My stomach leaps into my throat. Down we plummet. The hull creaks as pressure builds. Sevro looks like he’s going to throw up. Darrow yawns. I try to channel his calm.
“Passing through twilight,” the captain soon intones. “Midnight ahead.”
Aurae’s fists clench and I reach for her hand. She opens it for me and breathes a little easier.
By the time I twist in my seat to look out the small porthole, the twilight level of the ocean is behind us. Scum and darkness withhold most of the midnight level’s mysteries, but soon bright fauna and fish glow in the pitch water. They stretch like veins of blue, gold, and green fire. Aurae tells me that they are drawn to this level by the warm waters of the level’s jet stream, and swim in schools kilometers-long. By the look in her eyes, I know it’s the first time she’s seen the wonders of this ocean too. The Raa home where Cassius was prisoner must’ve been on the surface, I surmise.
“Entering the abyssal zone,” the captain says.
Beyond the warm waters lies a vast darkness, where not even the outlines of the beasts who call it home can be seen, as we go down, down, down toward Athena’s domain.
The submarine groans from the pressure. The darkness becomes impure. Light glows faintly in the distance. Soon the lights are bright and cast a blue-white haze over the variegated walls of subaquatic cities that sprout from the dark stone core of Europa’s underworld. I sigh. It looks magical and gloomy and weird. Somewhere within the core of the moon, Athena waits with the key to save Mars. Yet I can’t stop thinking of those on the surface.
Will she really leave them to die?
The submarine’s engines come alive as we near the ocean floor. Still Aurae doesn’t take her hand from mine. The captain guides us into the mouth of a trench lined with metal dock doors crusted over with giant deepwater barnacles as big as cows. There are no barnacles on the gun installations nearby. A hatch yawns open on one of the installations and three dark projectiles slither out. They disappear behind us, bound for some distant danger. We’re entering into a war within a war, a story that’s been going as long as I’ve been alive. I glance at Cheon, at Aurae, at Darrow. He’s yawning again. So is Diomedes. Sevro has finally stopped squirming.