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My body leans sideways as he puts us into a steep climb, straight at the enemy squadrons. As missiles leap from the ripWings, Colloway barrel-rolls sideways and slams us into a nosedive. The missiles blink behind us, some slithering off to follow our countermeasure drones. The rest scream after, undistracted. The desert pan races up to meet us. A thousand meters. Five hundred. One hundred. At fifty, Colloway activates the launch thrusters and the ship ricochets parallel to the ground like a skipped stone. My head jerks forward, chin slamming into the metal of my breastplate. I see stars and hear the concussion through the ship as the missiles plow into the ground. Those that follow are mowed down by Colloway’s rear railguns.
There are no cheers from the garage.
Colloway redirects toward Harnassus’s firing solution. Harnassus sends us a countdown. At three, we slip past the killzone. The enemy squadrons scream behind, spewing railgun fire. Our shields buckle and fall. I throw my bulk in front of Colloway. A hundred slugs the size of fists tear through the ship. One hits my shoulder instead of the back of his chair, overloading the shield, buckling the armor as I twist and redirect it into the ceiling. Half my body goes numb. Auto-response needles in the suit inject adrenaline into my bloodstream. My world pulses.
“And…boom.”
Through the sieve of slug holes, I glimpse the sky out the back of the ship just in time to see the LongMalice rounds arch down and detonate, releasing clouds of smaller munitions. RipWings disintegrate.
Our tail free, Colloway accelerates in a straight line. We’re out of the Ladon. The sky is blackening to the north. Faint traces of lightning slither through the firmament. The green grass of the Plains of Caduceus unfolds in front of us. It is bedlam.
In the shadow of mushroom clouds, lines of burning tanks and armored personnel carriers spread across the ground like frayed rope. Hundreds of thousands of men run on foot. GravBikes carrying four or five men apiece stutter toward Red Reach base.
“The shield is still up,” Colloway murmurs from his sync as the field headquarters comes into view. I barely believe him. Gigajoules of kinetic energy from particle beams turn its dome shield a bloody crimson. But sure enough, Red Reach has not fallen. Thank the Vale it wasn’t hardlined to Angelia. Dozens of legions swarm under its protective shelter, forming a logjam of tanks and war machines, which overflow from her acres of guns, barracks, and defensive works.
My Second Army is intact.
Above the shield dome swirls a dogfight of thousands. RipWings churn through the vapor of cumulonimbus clouds that bloom to the north, in from the sea. More dogfights flash all the way up to the stratosphere, buying time for my squadrons to intercept atomic ordnance. As it
has before, the grudge between the airheads and dustbacks vanishes. A Blue shield of sacrifice protects their brothers on the ground. They disappear by the dozens, careless of enemy fighters, hunting nothing but the falling missiles. In a way, it is beautiful. In every other way it is horrible to watch.
I must make their sacrifice count. It’s hard to see how. Pillars of white particle beams flare down from orbit, piercing clouds, vaporizing men and metal as they rake canyons in the ground. We are outmatched. There is no conventional answer to Atalantia’s orbital guns. But if Red Reach can just last…
To the south of Red Reach, in the mountains that overlook the northern plains, several ground-to-orbit batteries continue to fire upward. Colloway takes us through a mountain valley, aiming for one of the several dozen skyhooks I scattered across Helios. Of the five in our flight path, it is the only one that remains airborne, docked as it is under a leaning cleft of a mountain that also shelters a Drachenjäger garage. Thousands of starShell rigs await their pilots on the skyhook’s tarmac.
“Skyhook Eleven, Necromancer coming in hot. Thirteen elves, five giants, ten dwarfs, and one Reaper need heavy iron. Prep pitcrews for emergency gearup.”
“Copy. Bay two clear. Pitcrew on standby.”
We make an emergency landing on the floating supply platform. Pitcrews swarm its surface, shuttling munitions between the mountain supply depot and the skyhook. They load errant packs of aerial infantry into starShells, and send them into the fray. The purple and silver banners of the Arcosian Knights waver in the air as they land in gravBoots on the far side. There are few actual Arcoses amongst them, but all hail from client houses loyal to the widows of Lorn’s sons. I’ll need my best men with me.
As Colloway takes stock of damage done to Necromancer, I barrel out with the Howlers. A pitboss directs us to a rank of the armored starShells lying on their backs just beneath the garage’s vertical door. Inside the garage, the armored Fifteenth Legion Helldivers will be syncing with their Drachenjägers. The forty-meter-tall machines are made to dominate battlefields. They are shaped like boxy humans wearing spiked backpacks, except there is no head or neck, simply a hunched pilot cockpit set low between the shoulders. They have six jointed arms, multiple cannons at the elbows, and huge ion cleavers.
I check to make sure the master storm switch is still in the second right thigh box of my pulseArmor and lie down in one of the starShells, a four-meter-tall mechanized suit capable of flight meant to make men mobile tanks. In concert with Drachenjägers they make regular infantry nearly obsolete, but they are expensive, bulky, and eat fuel like mad.
A crew of twelve Oranges and Reds go to work around me, jacking data-links from the starShell into my pulseArmor, attaching a double magazine, calibrating the gear, priming the fusion sword, and sealing on an extra battery. Ten seconds flat is all they need. They clear off and move to the next. A hydraulic lift punches the back of the starShell. I lever to my feet flanked by nearly thirty armored Howlers. Two Reds hang on to the front of the four-meter starShell, securing the canopy over me. Through their working arms, I see the enemy aircraft making a coordinated mass maneuver away from Red Reach. We call it a nuke flower.
“Atomic brace!” I shout, and look frantically for Rhonna. I spot her rushing a wounded Howler to the skyhook’s medBay, too far to make it back to the Necromancer or in under the supply depot’s closing blast doors.
A siren screams. Hundreds of pitmen scramble for cover or to get off the exposed skyhook to the safety of the mountain garage doors. Rhonna won’t make it there. “Alexandar!”
He’s already moving, swinging the long arms of his starShell as he rushes to scoop her up and jump back to us. Colloway zips away on the Necromancer to hide behind the mountain.
One of the Reds atop me seals my canopy, catching the other’s arm in the sealing teeth. The Red jerks at his arm, unable to get down. His hand flails inside the canopy, not far from my face. Blood trickles down his forearm. His fellow abandons him. He can’t be more than twenty years old. An iron haemanthus pendant hangs from his neck. His eyes are wild with fear as they meet mine. He’s jammed the canopy. I can’t open it. I try to cover him with my arms. Alexandar curls his starShell around Rhonna like a cocoon. The huge blast doors close behind us. Pitmen hammer at the doors from the outside. Poor bastards.
“Brace!” I shout. Felix and an Obsidian pathfinder kneel in their starShells with me, forming a wedge with me at the point, sheltering Alexandar and Rhonna. Scores of other wedges form. Pitmen rush to take shelter behind them. The Red outside my canopy screams. Even if I free him, he cannot be helped. He isn’t in pulseArmor like Rhonna.
My amplified optics see it now over his shoulder. A lone dagger-shaped speck trailing vapor as it falls toward Red Reach base. Two ripWing pilots chase after it, spraying fire. They overload its shield, pierce its casing. And then orbital artillery wipes them away. The bomb falls uncontested.
I patch into Red Reach’s Central Command.
A warroom fills my view. Three dozen Martian officers, representing eight colors, stand like ghosts in the pale light of the battlemap watching the atomic fall.
“An omega-atomic will impact in thirty seconds,” I say quietly. The Red outside my cockpit is listening too, his face pressed to the glass just two hand spans away from my own. “Your fight is behind you. Remember now your beloved. Your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your daughter, your son.” I meet his eyes. They look so much like my mother’s. “Remember the sea, the highland forests, Agea at dawn, Olympia at twilight, Attica in spring, Thessalonica in harvest.” As I speak, they close their eyes and unscrew the canisters of Martian soil to clench in their hands. Gold and Red, Blue and Orange, Gray and Obsidian. My heart breaks in half. “Remember home. Remember Mars. You go there now to rest under the shade of her—”
They disappear in a wash of static.
Stillness, as if the sky inhaled sound and time. I close my eyes and hold the Red as tight as I dare.
