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“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 starShells 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 pass on comfort before going about their tasks, finding solace in the cocoon 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 starShells 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 space 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-air munitions, not to mention enemy hunting parties. So we jump fifty meters in 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 façade 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 mass 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 space 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 cluster 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 secrets itself in woods of towering godTrees and in the waters of the 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 the 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 starShells. They won’t last all day. Mustang’s group slams into the ground around us, causing snow to scatter as four hundred starShelled killers add their strength to ours. She bumps fists with me.
“Icarus?” a voice crackles in my ear. “Icarus, do you read me?”
“Roque, I read. What’s what?”
