I leave her behind, confused and emotional. “What was that about?” I ask Mustang. Mustang looks at me as if I should know.
“She’s afraid.”
“Why?”
“She’s your mother.”
I walk up my shuttle’s landing pad, with Sevro and Victra who join Mustang and I at the bottom. “Helldiver…” Dancer shouts before we reach the top. I turn back to find the gnarled man with his fist thrust in the air. And behind him the whole of the stalactite hangar watches me, hundreds of deckhands on mechanized loading trams, pilots, Blue and Red and Green, who stand at the ramps of their ships or on the ladders leading into their cockpits, helmets in hands, platoons of Grays and Reds and Obsidians standing side by side carrying combat gear and supplies—the scythe sewn onto shoulders, painted onto faces—as they board shuttles bound for my fleet. Men and women of Mars, all. Fighting for something larger than themselves. For our planet, for their people. I feel the weight of their love. I feel the hopes of all those people in bondage who watched as the Sons of Ares rose to take Phobos. We promised them something, and now we must deliver. One by one, my army raises their hands till a sea of fists clench as Eo’s did when she held the haemanthus and fell before Augustus.
Chills run through me as Sevro and Victra and Mustang and even my mother raise their hands in union. “Break the chains,” Dancer bellows. I raise my own scarred fist and step silently into the shuttle to join the Red Armada as it sails to war.
The Yellow Sea of Io rolls in around my black boots. Great dunes of sulfur-laced sand with razorback ridges of silicate rock as far as the eye can see. In the steel blue sky, the marbled surface of Jupiter undulates. One hundred and thirty times the diameter that Luna appears from the surface of Earth, it seems the vast and evil head of a marble god. War grips its sixty-seven moons. Cities hunker under pulseShields. Blackened husks of men in starShells litter moons while fighter squadrons duel and hunt troop and supply transports among the faint ice rings of the gas giant.
It’s quite a sight.
I stand upon the dune flanked by Sefi and five Valkyrie in black pulseArmor waiting for the Moon Lord’s shuttle. Our assault ship sits behind us, engines idling. It’s shaped like a hammerhead shark. Dark gray. But the Valkyrie and Red dockworkers painted its head together on our journey from Mars, giving the ship two bulging blue eyes and a gaping mouth with ravenous bloodstained teeth. Up between the eyes, Holiday lies on her belly, sniper rifle scanning the rock formations to the south.
“Anything?” I ask, voice crackling through the breathing mask.
“Nothin’,” Sevro says over the com. He and Clown scout the little settlement two clicks away on gravBoots. I can’t see them with the naked eye. I fidget with my slingBlade.
“They’ll come,” I say. “Mustang set the time and place.”
Io is a strange moon. Innermost and smallest of the four great Galilean moons, she is a belt-notch larger than Luna. It was never her destiny to be fully changed by the Golds’ terraforming machines. She’s a hell Dante could be proud of. The driest object in the Sol System, rife with explosive volcanism and sulfur deposits and interior tidal heating. Her surface a canvas of yellow and orange plains broken by huge thrust faults from her shifting surface. Dramatic sheer cliffs rising from the sulfur dunes to scrape the sky.
Huge stains of concentric green freckle her equatorial regions. Finding crops and animals difficult to cultivate so far from the sun, the Society Engineering Corp covered millions of acres of Io’s surface with pulseFields, imported dirt and water for three lifetimes on cosmosHaulers, thickened the planet’s atmosphere to filter Jupiter’s massive radiation, and used the planet’s interior tidal heating to power great generators to grow foodstuffs for the entire Jupiter orbit and exportation to the Core and, more important, the Rim. She’s a farm deck with the biggest breadbasket between Mars and Uranus with easy gravity and cheap land.
Guess who did all the labor.
Beyond the pulseFields is the Sulfur Sea stretching from pole to pole, interrupted only by volcanoes and lakes of magma.
I may not like Io. But I can respect the people of this land. Ionian men and women are not like humans of Earth or Luna or Mercury or Venus. They are harder, lither, eyes slightly larger to absorb the dimmed light six hundred million kilometers from the sun, skin pale, taller, and able to withstand higher doses of radiation. These people believe themselves most like the Iron Golds who conquered Earth and put man at peace for the first time in her history.
I shouldn’t have worn black today. My gloves, my cloak, my jacket underneath. I thought we were going to the anti-Jupiter side of Io where sulfur dioxide snowfields crust the planet. But the Moon Lord’s operation team demanded a new meeting point at the last moment, setting us on the edge of the Sulfur Sea. Temperature 120 Celsius.
