“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?”

“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 faceplate.

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

“Oh, goryhell.” 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 her personal killer. Of course she would return to her side. I’ve told no one but Mustang and Sevro. I couldn’t risk it spreading, especially with how Roque’s been acting.

He hangs up the com without another word.

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 space 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 grasses, 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 space.