“When and if you do, I advise you to kill him fast—and to make sure he’s dead.”
“It seems the Minotaur did not heed this warning.”
“No. Evidently not.”
He nods. “I would offer the same advice when you meet the Ascomanni. They are a race of relentless darkness. That is their home, after all: the darkness out there in the Kuiper Belt. And darkness always finds a way. They are the product of a failed rebellion. The scions of the warriors who followed King Kuthul. They are consummate survivors. Clever enough to know what they’re good at, wise enough to realize what they are not. To think of them as simply space-dwelling Obsidians is to underestimate them.”
“I underestimate no slave-turned-marauder.”
“They are slaves-turned-slaver. They learned the practice from the Core, but then advanced it. Made it crueller. Their very appearance now is the result of enslaved carvers. Our Blues, Oranges, Greens, Violets, Reds. Generations of them have been stolen from their families, then bred for more generations out there in their asteroid city-states. These Colors live in torment, simply because they can operate an energy grid, fly a fighter, craft weapons, develop technology. An Ascomanni king would risk five thousand of his braves to get one Orange like your Glirastes. Ten thousand to get just one grower from the Garter.”
I feel a pang of sadness as I recall an image of Glirastes hunched over a project, spouting lunacy about some new endeavor. “They really value Browns over Oranges?”
“A grower of the Garter, yes. They exist in only one place, and are the linchpin of our entire food supply. No enemy in history has ever set foot on that sacred ground where they engineer and advance the plants that feed billions.”
“Why is the Garter not constantly under siege then?” I ask.
“So many reasons. It is too far from their domain. It is too well protected. The Ascomanni are fractious, tribal, and most of their wars are against one another,” Diomedes says and points his fish bone like a baton. “And until now, they didn’t have ships that could dare meet ours in battle. They’d hit our peripheral industries from time to time. Helium gas refineries, ice speculators, terraformers, onyxian mines, you know. But now, thanks to Fá and the Republic’s stupidity, they have heavy Core ships. Not hard to imagine the danger of an exchange of ideas between the Volk and those reptiles from the Far Ink.”
“So they adapt.”
“They learn quickly. They have to.” He leans forward and dusts his hands off. “We have always hunted them and yet they are still out there. Even my dread uncle could not eradicate them. In fact, his very presence there stirred them up like a stick into an ant colony. This Volsung Fá began as a rumor more than a decade ago. A movement trailing in the wake of Atlas’s massacres, uniting the fragments. Our reports came mostly from torturing captured braves. We never concluded this movement was one man, nor how many tribes he’d united under his banner. My father wondered, though: did Atlas leave to fight the Republic as he claimed, or was he chased out because he feared what he had awoken out there in the dark?”
“That’s why you didn’t want war with the Republic. You thought they might invade—”
“Invade?” He laughs. “We never considered invasion. They didn’t have the ships for it. Raid Neptune’s moons, perhaps. Invade Ilium? Our Constantinople? Our Rome? Never. But, it seems they skipped Neptune and the fleet we stationed there. Made fools of us. I don’t intend it to happen twice.” His eyes narrow and fall on me. “You’ve been asking me to share our approach vector with your fleet. Come.”
Diomedes leads me to the map room where he slides a small blue ring onto his pinky and one hundred and twenty-one stones disconnect from the ceiling to float over the table. What the Raa call the Sea of Ilium—the moons of Jupiter, each with its own orbital speed.
Diomedes leads me through the outer ring of small stones, about one-fifth of the way through he stops. “We’re burning full torch to here. Kalyke,” he says and puts his finger behind a smooth gray pebble. “Helios has reclaimed it and is using it as his base of operations.” His finger follows the gray pebble as it moves slowly around Jupiter. “We will then ghost here,” he says. His finger jumps from the slow pebble to a larger, faster white marble as it passes. We’re now two steps closer to Jupiter in the middle behind a black marble. “And begin slingshot maneuvers. Twelve consecutive maneuvers with no more than one percent of thrust used.” He repeats the process a few times, hopping between passing stones until all that lies between us and Jupiter are four beautiful stones, one blue and green for Ganymede, one a deep sapphire for Europa, one steel and brown for Callisto, and the last and most important one, a poisonous yellow that moves faster than its companions. Io, home of the Raa and Demeter’s Garter.
I retrace the route. “Ghost sailing,” I say in admiration. “Is it true it’s more art than math?”
“Only for a navigator.” He shrugs. “Truly it depends on the orbits. Sometimes it’s bad weather—inconvenient orbital arrangements. Sometimes, very rarely, it’s good weather.” Diomedes’s finger settles on Io. “Before Sungrave’s communications went silent last week, my grandmother reported Obsidians on the ground. Fá’s ships will be at siege altitude. The mass of the moons and the radiation of Jupiter will hide us. They’ll have little notice that we are coming.”
“And what’s the weather report?”
“Perfect conditions. Orbits line up without us having to lose speed. Hence this approach.”
“I wondered why Helios was leading the scouts himself,” I say. At Kalyke the fleet will be vulnerable. Condensed. Cutting energy expenditure on shields to keep their approach off enemy scanners.
“Helios always leads from the front. Who better to secure Kalyke?”
My eyes go back to Io, where most of Fá’s big ships have been sighted, and settle on the thin band of green that wraps around the yellow stone that represents Diomedes’s home moon. “What happens if Obsidians do seize Demeter’s Garter? Over sixty percent of the entire Rim’s agriculture is produced there, no?”
“They will not,” he says flatly.
“But if they do get through the battlewalls and shields?”
He sighs. “The Rim is vast, cold. If the Garter falls to the Ascomanni, it would mean famine for many of our dependent worlds. The moons of Neptune and Uranus in particular. But the Garter has never fallen, nor has Sungrave. If the ghost sail succeeds, and I believe it will, we will hit Fá when most of his men are on the ground on Io and we will end this travesty before your fleet even arrives.”
“Then Mars,” I say.
“Then Mars.”
“So, it all begins here, at Kalyke,” I say.
“Yes. And when we arrive, I would like you on the bridge.”
“Why?” I ask.
“If Rim and Core are to be friends once more, moments like these will matter. I want the crew to see you there. Moreover, I want Helios to see you there.”
“You’ll suffer his displeasure for me?”