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“How can you even breathe with your nose so far up Reaper’s ass?” Clown asks.
“I hold my breath,” Alexandar replies. “Far easier that way, my goodman.”
“No one can hold their breath that bloodydamn long,” Rhonna says from her gun turret.
“Ragnar could,” Sevro says.
“Well, Ragnar could lift a mountain with his gorydamn pinkie,” Clown replies. “And drink an ocean without needing to piss a drop, so powerful was his bladder.”
“What’s the quickest way to a Peerless Scarred’s heart?” Pebble asks. “Ragnar’s fist.”
Sevro cackles. “Unlike mortal men, Ragnar didn’t sleep. He merely waited.”
They make me miss my old friend more than I can say. Seems so unfair Ragnar died without knowing that Tinos would be saved, and Luna would fall. “Remember today what the Ash Lord did to our friend,” I tell my men. “Remember that he made Ragnar a slave. That he made him kill his own ki
nd for sport. A debt is owed. Two Grimmuses have fallen. Two yet remain.”
“Atalantia au Grimmus. Magnus au Grimmus,” they recite as a promise, and I hope Atalantia is here with her father so we can end their family’s saga once and for all.
Tongueless drones the death rattle of the Obsidians. It fills my ears with righteous dread and I feel the bitter winter plains of Ragnar’s homeland roll inside me. I wish I had my old friend here today. What I’d give to see him lead this charge on his old master. To see the Golds quake as they did before no other man.
“Hyrg la Ragnar,” Sevro snarls.
“Hyrg la Ragnar,” the men bellow back.
The Nessus plunges into the darkzone. The external cameras go black. My com silent with static. I am no father. No husband. I summon my anger. My hatred. I am Helldiver of Lykos. The Reaper of Mars come to rip the life from the last great warlord of Gold.
Yellow lights flash outside my suit on the firing mechanism’s launch alert console; I stare at it hungrily. Desperate for it to turn green and release me. I perform preflight checks on my interior dampeners and pulseShield, power my gravBoots, charge up the particle cannon on my right shoulder and the railgun that makes a stump of my left arm. A whine from the particle cannon draws energy from my suit’s main reactor on the suit’s hunched back.
The light goes green.
The firing chamber’s hooks push me forward into the mouth of the railgun. I clench my teeth together and lower my head. Then the hooks propel my suit into the clashing current and I launch forward at three times the speed of sound, punching through the darkzone, my heart in my throat.
I tear into a scene of death.
No time to orientate myself. Proximity sensors scream with incoming ordnance. A particle beam smotes the sky in front of me, a pillar of light as thick as a forearm and as bright as a sunbeam. The impulse sensors in the formaGel that surrounds my body communicate with the suit and bank me hard. I pass the particle beam and feel the heat even through the layers of armor. My evasive maneuver throws me into the path of an anti-aircraft battery’s fusillade. Fist-sized shells detonate in clouds of superheated shrapnel. A shell detonates to my right, spinning me through the air, my pulseShield screaming from the kinetic energy transfer. I boost out of my spin, diving blindly toward the sea.
A bad start.
We’ve come out of the darkzone’s veil directly into the teeth of the enemy perimeter defenses. So much for the back door. Beneath, atop a cluster of atolls garlanded with anti-aircraft batteries, six automatic turrets swivel on gyroscopes, filling the air with metal. The guns slam munitions into the underside of the Nessus’s shields. She vaporizes an atoll with her main particle cannon. Colloway’s three ripWings are trapped in a frenzied dance with a squadron of enemy first-responder ripWings. Two of my starShells already smoke and limp away from the theater of fire, but ten others race with me down toward the atolls. No way to tell who is who in our uniform black. I race headlong toward the largest atoll, a towering pillar of rock crested with a particle cannon installation. Light crackles in its meter-wide barrel and then erupts upward at me. I weave right of the certain death and bring my smaller particle cannon online and draw a bead. I expand my left hand, building the energy in the battery. When I’m close enough I can see terrified parrots fleeing the island’s canopy of trees, I clench my fist and my cannon roars. Lightning crackles from my right shoulder and slices a molten gash through the base of the gun installation. I sweep my closed fist back and forth, guiding the cannon and lacerating the installation’s roof till I hit their power generator and the installation explodes. I bank up and see the Howlers destroying the rest of the gun installations.
When the last gun of the perimeter defense is silent, the starShells form up atop a rock formation on one of the atolls near the smoldering remains of a gun battery. Colloway’s ripWings fly a thousand meters higher, the Nessus floating above them. She tears apart the sky as she fires at the main islands in the distance. But they fire back.
It sounds like the planet itself is cracking in half.
One by one, the Howlers land on the rugged escarpment with me. The three-ton starShells, with their apelike elongated limbs and armored carapaces, make them appear in the bright daylight like a dark band of crustaceous golems. They stare at me through the triangular duroglass face shields. Smoke billows from the shoulder of Tongueless’s shell, but his flesh wasn’t hit. Thraxa steadies herself as she lands; the nuke launch tube is still strapped to her back. Sevro is the last to land. He hangs above us on the cliffside, holding on to an outcropping of rock.
Our coms are down from the darkzone’s interference, so I signal commands with a laser display on my armored chest. When I’m through, Sevro and I rocket upward from the island, gaining altitude to see the Ash Lord’s hidden world in its totality.
A placid emerald sea littered with volcanic islands stretches before us. Twenty kilometers in the distance, at the epicenter of the Ash Lord’s realm, lies a humped island with an impressive white spire atop its central rock formation. Reaching out from the island is a spine of towering jagged atolls and islets of shattered arms and legs that claw out at the sea. Pale sand, visible under the clear water, seeps around the bases of the islands like spilled marrow. Fire laces the islands from the Nessus’s gun batteries. Already the island’s main antenna is melting slag, but a shield generator has activated over the main island and its spire, leaving only a hundred-meter unshielded gap above the waterline.
Distant thunder rolls across the water.
Thirty kilometers away, past the island on the eastern expanse of the darkzone, a war rages. I magnify my vision. Apollonius’s ripWings twirl in a kaleidoscopic firefight with the Ash Lord’s over the sea. Streams of red railgun fire and electric-white particle beams streak up from submerged gun installations and anti-aircraft batteries hidden in the crests of the islands.
Concussions from bunkerbusters echo as Apollonius’s heavy, spider-shaped thunderWings make runs on the main islands. His ripWings have carved a hole in the defenders, and dropships filled with his legionnaires race through heavy fire across the no-man’s-land of water to make landfall. Despite heavy casualties, he makes progress.
Then I see something terrifying.
