"Sevro."

"h.e.l.lo."

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Next time I see you, I'm going to bite you."

"I must go." Roque's light laughter fades. "We're engaging the main enemy element."

"What are you going to do, bore them to death with a light poetry reading?" Sevro again.

"You're a p.r.i.c.klick," Roque declares playfully. "May the Furies guide your swords and the Fates bring you home. Till then, my love is with you all."

The profession of love startles the Golds. Roque's com clicks off and we can hear him on the main frequency giving orders to attack an enemy destroyer.

"What a Pixie," Sevro mutters, but even a child could catch the tremor in his voice. He's afraid.

"Hic sunt leones," I say to my friends. "Be brave. Be brave and I'll see you on the other side."

"Hic sunt leones," they echo, not for Augustus, but because we wish we were brave as lions.

One by one, we say our goodbyes. Before I can stop myself, I hail Mustang's private frequency. It takes her twenty seconds to answer. "What is it?" Hesitation haunts her voice.

"Stay alive," I say.

A pause. Emotion? Annoyance?

"You too."

She closes the com link. Soon the gears begin to whir and click as I'm loaded into the firing mechanism of the tube.

I've acted this whole time like I know what's coming. Like I know what the Iron Rain is. But it looms before me like some dark, slavering beast. A mystery, though I've seen its face. I've seen the virtual reality experientials and HC clips. I know what it is the way a child knows flying from watching a bird.

"Deployment coordinates reached." Roque's voice fills the ears of every Gold in the fleet. "Let fall the Rain."

The whine of the magnetic charge in the tube fills me. I slide forward into the chamber, bracing myself, looking down so I don't snap my neck. Then it fires and I am claimed by velocity and battle as my stomach fills my throat with bile. I rip through the magnetic stream, out of the ship's tube into swarming chaos.

Fire and lightning rule s.p.a.ce. Behemoths of metal belch missiles back and forth, silently pounding one another with all the weapons of man. The silence of it, so eerie, so strange. Great veils of flak explode around the ships, cloaking them in fury, almost like raw cotton tossed into the wind. RipWings and wasps buzz at one another, p.i.s.sing streams of gunfire. They nip and slice at carapaces of metal, fighting in a dense giant cloud. In little packs they slip from their chaotic fights, spiraling silently toward cl.u.s.ters of leechCraft as the destroyers and carriers launch their troop transports across s.p.a.ce in undulating waves. It's a game of boarding parties. Over, under, and through the curtains of flak the leeches go, seeking a hull to clamber onto so they can pump their deadly cargo into the belly of crucial ships, like flies dropping larvae into open wounds. All flown by Blues raised to do only this one thing. Bellona craft pa.s.s those of Augustus, waves overlapping, breaking on one another.

All in silence.

Missiles leap toward the leeches, wracking hulls with detonations. No flames save where ships are punctured, leaking oxygen flames like harpooned whales of Old Earth would gout blood. Railgun discharges streak through s.p.a.ce, tearing through multiple leeches and smaller fighters at the same time, rending holes in the ranks. Ships rupture forth men and women as both sides target engines, hoping to cripple and capture instead of destroy. Amid the blue and silver enemy fleet, the ma.s.sive Warchild shatters corvettes and torchShips like a cyclops wading through sheep-club swinging pendulous and slow.

I hold my breath as Victra's destroyer, shielded by two others, slips towards the Warchild. She's strafed by railguns, and men-of-war garland her with missile fire. The Bellona must warrant she's too close to capture, because they open another salvo into her softened belly. Yet amid the fire she suffers, the corvette births out a desperate burst of forty leechCraft. Nearly ten times her normal complement. We carved her hollow to fit in the additional troop carriers. That is the war party of the Telema.n.u.ses.

Victra's ship cuts away from the Warchild, recklessly plunging into the Bellona formation where her mother's flotilla of ships bearing the bleeding sun support the Bellona eagles. Victra springs her second surprise.

Her mother switches sides, betraying the Bellona as Victra promised the Jackal and me. Her mother's ships unload more than two hundred leeches amid the core of the Bellona fleet. It is chaos.

My t.i.tans land on the hull of the enemy flagship, and soon the Warchild is festooned with leeches. Good luck, t.i.tans.

Bellona-friendly leechCraft redirect toward the Warchild to lend aid to the battle that'll clutter her halls with smoke and blood. RipWings zip past, shooting the landed leeches, trying to skin them off before they dump their men into the Warchild's body. It is an elegant dance of action and reaction and reaction and reaction.

I carry on my trajectory, unable to alter it. To my left and right streak thousands of Golds and Obsidians in armored starSh.e.l.ls, Grays in hivepods of twelve each. A rain of men and metal. Amid our current fly large storks packed with more Obsidians and Grays. Once we make landfall and secure the beachheads, the ma.s.sed legions will slip out of the dreadnoughts and carriers on landing craft and pour out behind us.

Despite what the Bellona and their allies think, they cannot stop us from landing men-the orbit around the planet is too large. That is why holding the cities is of such importance. They are island fortresses. The only realistic way of seizing them is making landfall and slipping under the two-hundred-meter gap between their disc-shaped shields and the ground. That requires men on the surface. Millions of men in coordinated a.s.sault.

We will establish a hundred beachheads, and then our battle will begin in earnest. In the chaos, missiles streak for our starSh.e.l.ls. Friendly capital ships deploy screens of flak behind us, and wasps cover our flanks. Enemy wasps manage to swoop in from the sides, strafing us. Dozens in the rain die around me, their armor folding back like burning paper. I hate this. I want to scream. Some do and we have to cut off their coms.

There is nothing I can do. Pray I don't die. Pray my friends don't die. But pray to what? The Golds have no G.o.d. We Reds have an Old Man in the Vale. But he does not help us in this life. He merely waits to shepherd and guard us in the next.

My heart rattles in my chest. Hyperventilating. Tearing out of my own skin. I feel like a boy. I want the comfort of home. Mother's soup, the touch of her stern hand, the love that blossomed in me whenever I managed to make her smile. Anything to feel the joy of realizing Eo loved me. I long for the cold, quiet nights before love when it was only l.u.s.t and hunger, where we would kiss in secret, hearts fluttering, like two little birds realizing they might build a nest together after all. That was what life was supposed to be. Family. First loves. Not falling through atmosphere where killers care for nothing more than to fill your body with hot metal before moving on to kill your friends.

My mind flees even as my body acts.

The planet grows and grows till it is a swollen colossus that consumes my vision. I do not know who is dead, who is alive. My display is too busy. We hit the atmosphere and sound roars back. Halos of color coc.o.o.n my trembling form. To my left and right, the falling soldiers look like raging lightning bugs jerked out of some Carver's fantasy. I admire one to my left, the bronze sun is behind him as he falls, silhouetting him, immortalizing him in that singular moment-one I know I shall never forget-so that he looks like a Miltonian angel falling with wrath and glory. His exoskeleton sheds its friction armor, as Lucifer might have shed the fetters of heaven, feathers of flame peeling off, fluttering behind. Then a missile slashes the sky and high-grade explosives christen him mortal once again.

The moment we clear the atmosphere, surface gunfire screams up at us, carving holes through our falling swarm. Like a beehive struck, we activate our gravBoots and fracture into a thousand different squadrons, each trying to follow its own coordinates. Enemy ripWings followed us into the atmosphere, but here we're more maneuverable, and we kill the big fighters with ease. I swoop in on one from behind with the Howlers hot on my tail, and slash it with my razor. I fly off as it spirals down through the clouds into the ocean below.

Antiaircraft fire screams up at us through the clouds and kills the Gold to my right-a Howler, though I don't know which till I look at my datapad. Daria the Harpy is dead. Just like that. No sacrifice to save another. No howl of rage at the end. No n.o.ble gesture. No emotion. The loyal girl who wore belts of scalps at the Inst.i.tute, who held Rotback and Screwface in thrall to her strange devices, is gone.

A stab of panic goes through me and I dive through the clouds with the rest of my legion's vanguard. We streak low over the ocean, where two waterships spit up fire. Sevro sends two missiles slithering through the air; they detonate, turning into a dozen micro missiles, which become another dozen each. They detonate like corn kernels over fire.

War is chaos. It always has been. But technology makes it worse. It changes the fear. At the Inst.i.tute, I feared men. I feared what t.i.tus and the Jackal could do to me. You see death coming there and can at least struggle against it. Here you don't have such luxury. Modern war is fearing the air, the shadows, fearing the silence. Death will come and I won't even see it.

I slam down on a snow-covered mountain. Clouds of vapor rise as I melt a hole in the white from the heat of my red-hot suit. The rest of my squad lands around me, finding safe harbor on the ground. Roaring down, meteor men from metal monsters. Thump. Thump. Thump. And the fog of war rises.

"Landfall," I snarl.

Sevro falls to a knee, pops open his helmet, and pukes into the snow. Others join him. Ugly Screwface gasps in sadness. Rotback grips his shoulder. Clown stands guard over them, his red-painted Mohawk sideways on his head. Harpy doesn't exist anymore. I didn't know it would be like this. I thought I knew horror. I didn't. More men died in the last minute than I've ever even known. Lorn's fear of war quakes through me.

This is war. Chaos. Chance. Death.

Sevro nods to me, wiping puke from his mouth. Jupiter helps him stand. Strangely, Sevro lets him. I look for Mustang's signature on my helmet's datapad. She's alive with the main element of my force, but we've been separated. I'm with a dozen Golds and forty Obsidians specially trained in hi-tech military equipment.

"Exos off," I bark at the Obsidians. "Omega, guard the perimeter."

We shed our clunky exo thermal armor to reveal the more agile starSh.e.l.ls beneath. I order helmets up. Metal demon and animal faces replace those of friends.

But there's beauty in this moment. In the half seconds where Golds and Obsidians nod to one another to pa.s.s on comfort before going about their tasks, finding solace in the coc.o.o.n of duty, in companionship, like I did in the mines.

I gather Sevro to me along with the Howlers. Ragnar, separated from his legion, stands in my shadow. We landed on the day-side of the planet. It looks like a meteor shower as the second wave of starSh.e.l.ls pierces the atmosphere, leaving trails of black smoke across the fire-scarred blue sky. Hundreds of ground cannons still shoot at the swarm that spreads from horizon to horizon, but slowly those gunstreams thin as the guns are targeted from s.p.a.ce or eliminated by squads like us on the ground. My squad is three hundred kilometers from where we need to be. How did that happen?

I call Mustang over the coms. She's fifty kilometers closer to the designated drop zone on some other mountain. Her force is nearer four hundred men.

"Looks like we're the idiots," Sevro says.

We go down the mountainside. We do not fly. Instead, we skip. In the Academy they taught us to think of it like skipping a rock over the surface of the water. We could fly in our gravBoots, but flying makes you a target to missiles and anti-aircraft, not to mention enemy hunting parties. So we jump fifty meters into the air, then use our gravBoots to jerk us back toward the ground.

Missile fire comes from a nearby peak. Sevro and his squad deal with it, skipping over thousand-meter ravines, skimming up the side of a steep rock facade as Ragnar and I press forward. A dull thump echoes over the mountain range as they rid us of the missile turret. The Howlers link up with us at the end of the mountain range. We perch on the side of a cliff, where low clouds gather. To the left, about twenty kilometers off, rise the towers of distant whitewashed Thessalonica, perched on the craggy coastline of the clear Thermic Sea. Tactus's home. I feel a pang of sadness.

We press north. I watch the towers fade, till they're nothing but glinting metal against the coast of that weirdly calm water. Explosions rumble in the distance. I feel the weight of a hand fall on my armored shoulder.

"Just like after we took Olympus." Sevro grins, looking down from a new mountain's peak at the land that lies open before us.

"Except everyone has gravBoots here." I check our coordinates in my helmet's HUD. The invasion continues above us. Enemy gunships, rarer now, flit across the sky. One targets us. It roars through a cloud and chews up the ground with chainguns. We take cover in a ravine. Snow kicks up around us. Then a missile slithers out and collapses a rock onto my legs in the explosion, pinning me down. Pebble and Clown stand over my body, shielding me.

"Ragnar!" I shout. "Kill it!"

I don't see what he does, but the sound is tremendous as the gunship smokes and spins from the air, teetering toward the ground, and then disappears in a cloud of shrapnel.

"Your legs?" Sevro asks frantically.

They pull the rocks off me. Gears groan and electrical components whir.

"Still work."

We descend the snowy mountain range into rugged Martian plains. A ma.s.s of heavy infantry like us moves to our left. Their transponders label them ours. But far off to the right, about thirty kilometers out, where the ground swells into subtropical highlands, a Bellona column skips forward-maybe three hundred in separate parties.

"Cracked one of our com sigs," a Green communications director in s.p.a.ce relays over a new signal. "They're hunting you, Icarus." My secondary call sign.

"Here's when we learn who is winning the heavens," I say. Sevro directs a tracking laser on the enemy squad, just as they set one on us. Theirs bobs on the ground in front of us like a frantic fly. We scatter, Sevro and I flying away together, and then a rain of fire descends on our enemy from two trajectories. At the same moment, Sevro IDs a drone deploying cl.u.s.ter missiles at us. He tags it, and a railgun from nearby Thessalonica fires a projectile that leaves a streak of blue fire across the horizon. The drone disappears in a blossom of red. This is the multi-madness of hi-tech war.

We make our way to Mustang's coordinates, sensors and eyes peeled for the death that hides in the mountains. It stalks the plains. It secretes itself in woods of towering G.o.dTrees and in the waters of infant seas.

A great lake stretches far to our left, while a dormant volcano so gradual in its incline that it seems little more than a snow-capped hill broods to our right. I soar higher along the spine of the mountain range we traverse to gain vantage over the surroundings. Periodic topographical data flickers onto my datapad as drones broadcast data, are shot from the sky, then replaced.

It is quiet inside my suit. I cannot hear the wind that whistles around me at this great height. A stormcloud, one of Mars's dramatic thunderheads, rolls in from the distant lake. When it hits the forest below the mountain, the rains come and lightning slashes the sky. Atop the craggy peak, snow swirls, melting against my suit.

I catch movement on a peak nearby. I hold off on discharging my weapon when I see it's no Bellona, but a carved beast. I magnify my vision and see the griffin clinging to the edge of a huge nest set into a narrow stone defile atop the peak, watching in wonder as men fly across her valley below. What a world these Golds have built.

My men rejoin me on the next peak over, pausing a moment to check the powercells in our starSh.e.l.ls. They won't last all day. Mustang's group slams into the ground around us, causing snow to scatter as four hundred starSh.e.l.led killers add their strength to ours. She b.u.mps fists with me.

"Icarus?" a voice crackles in my ear. "Icarus, do you read me?"

"Roque, I read. What's what?"

"Icarus ... urgent ... on ... read me?" His signal breaks up as lightning slashes overhead. Jamming devices from both sides already molest the airwaves. "Dar ... ead ... me ... in Agea."

"Roque? Roque?" I know the plan for the battle above, but the tone of his voice worries me.

"Coms are all scattered," I tell Mustang.

"Local frequencies are fine. It's the jammers and storm." Rain splatters over her armor.

Sevro points up. "Gonna have to get your a.s.s above it to hear." Above, a ship is struck by lightning. Her systems fail and she plummets before reactivating, only to collide with a pa.s.sing ripWing.

"Oh, goryh.e.l.l." I give Ragnar and Jupiter orders to push forward of the mountain range and secure the northern valley for our main force of Gray legions. While we besiege other cities to divert Bellona attention, to me Agea is all that matters. A million men will go at her walls. The Stained opens his hand to me in salute and then jumps off the mountain peak with Jupiter and a hundred Obsidian warriors.

Mustang and Sevro wait below as I rip up through the lightning-laced clouds with several of my bodyguards. Past the clouds, I float in relative peace, hailing Roque.

"Icarus!" he shouts into the com. "She's here. She's not on Luna or with the main Societal fleet! We just found out. Kavax's men found Praetorians on board the Warchild ... she's here! She came in secret without her fleet; we caught her."

"Roque. Slow down. What are you saying?"

"Darrow, the Sovereign is on Mars. Her shuttle is trapped behind the shields on Agea. She is trapped."

"Roque. I already know. She's why I want Agea."

39.

AT THE WALL.

He doesn't ask how I knew. Later I'll tell him that I let Aja escape from Europa so we could track her back to the Sovereign via my bomb's radiation signature. She's Octavia's personal killer. Of course she would return to her side. I've told no one but Mustang, the Jackal, and Sevro. I couldn't risk it spreading, especially with how Roque's been acting.

He hangs up the com without another word, bitterness evident.

The vanguard of my force, Ragnar's men, have made landfall in the valley ahead. I see the fat ships descending, then disappearing into the ground where the Valles Marineris stretches kilometers beneath. We have our Blues in s.p.a.ce lay fire down on Agea itself. The deluge heats the shield, causing it to pulse opaque. We'll be coming at her at ground level along the bottom of the hundred-kilometer-wide canyon from the north and south, just through the two-hundred-meter gap her shields must maintain above soil to avoid creating seismic disturbances.

I hop off the mountain peak at the head of my bodyguard. Sevro and Mustang accompany me as we jump to another peak, then skip through the lower foothills, taking fire as we go.

The Sovereign is the key to this war, the key to fracturing this Society so the Sons of Ares can rise. With her captured, the Society itself will wonder in confusion if it even exists without Octavia atop its throne. Senators and governors will try to seize power. There will be a dozen local wars, fracturing manpower and cohesion.

Beneath me, a world of bounty lounges along the bottom of the vast canyon-lakes and streams, waist-high gra.s.ses, trees blooming with flowers and Spartan pines growing at odd angles from the kilometers-high canyon walls despite the steep declivity. Above all this, the great floating mountain, Olympus, reigns. I glimpse the quiet castles and see deer running in the vale of Mars. But I see no children along the great rivers, no boys and girls in armor. Only memories and muddied earth. The students have already been collected. How strange that must have been-fighting for their lives with medieval weapons, only to be scooped up by dropships as invaders came from s.p.a.ce.

We meet with Jupiter and Ragnar on one of floating Olympus's white spires. There are dead men in the halls, on the slopes.

"They used it as a base," Jupiter says cheerily. "Your Stained disagreed with their presumptuousness. I like the beast!" Our men secure the section of the Valles Marineris set aside for the Inst.i.tute, far east of Agea in the upper arm of the grand canyon. I watch out the window as hundreds of friendly dropships descend on the staging ground, depositing more than three hundred thousand men in thirty minutes. A Gold runs out of each lowered ramp, always the first onto enemy soil.

"No resistance," I say quietly, my starSh.e.l.l helm popped. I look at Mustang uneasily.

She wipes blonde hair from her eyes. "The longer we're dug in, they harder we are to dislodge. Why are they waiting?"

"Want to cl.u.s.ter us up like a bunch of grapes before stomping," Sevro guesses. "Atomics?"

"Silly children." Jupiter goes through the pockets of one of the dead men. "That's why we have Grays. Let them be stomped. They will lubricate our pa.s.sage."