Morning Star

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.

Sefi walks up to stand beside me with her new optics scanning the yellow horizon. She and her Valkyrie have taken quickly to the gear of war, studying and training day and night with Holiday during our month and a half journey to Jupiter. Practicing ship-boarding and energy weapon tactics as well as Gray hand signals.

“How’s the heat?” I ask.

“Strange,” she says. Only her face can feel it. The rest benefits from the cooling systems in the armor. “Why would people live here?”

“We live everywhere we can.”

“But Golds choose,” she says. “Yes?”

“Yes.”

“I would be wary men who choose such a home. The spirits here are cruel.” Sand kicks up from the wind in the low gravity, floating down in wavering columns. It’s Sefi who Mustang thinks I should be wary of. On our voyage to Jupiter, she has watched hundreds of hours of holofootage. Learning our history as a people. I keep track of her datapad’s activity. But what concerns Mustang isn’t that Sefi is fond of rain forest videos and experientials, but that she has spent countless hours watching holos of our wars, particularly the nuclear annihilation of Rhea. I wonder what she makes of it.

“Sound advice, Sefi,” I reply. “Sound advice.”

Sevro lands dramatically before us, spraying us with sand. His ghostCloak ripples away. “Bloodydamn shithole.”

I dust off my face, annoyed. He was incorrigible the whole journey out here. Laughing, pulling pranks, and slipping off to Victra’s room whenever he thought no one was looking. Ugly little man’s in love. And for what it’s worth, it seems to go both ways. “What do you think?” I ask.

“The whole place smells like farts.”

“That your professional assessment?” Holiday asks over the com.

“Yup. There’s a Waygar settlement over the ridge.” His Howler wolf pelt kicks in the wind, jingling the little chains that connect it to his armor. “Buncha Red hunched goggle heads carting distillation gear.”

“You’ve scanned the sand?” I ask.

“Ain’t my first slag, boss. I don’t like this face-to-face bullshit, but it looks clear.” He glances at his datapad. “Thought Moonies were supposed to be punctual. Pricklicks are thirty minutes late.”

“Probably cautious. Must think we’ve air support,” I say.

“Yeah. Because we’d be bloodydamn shitbrains for not bringing some.”

“Roger that,” Holiday says in agreement over the com.

“Why would I need air support when I’ve got you,” I say, gesturing to Sevro’s gravBoots. A plastic gray case sits on the ground behind him. Inside, a sarrissa missile launcher in foam padding. The same Ragnar used on Cassius’s craft. If the need arises I’ve got myself a psychotic Goblin-sized fighter jet.

“Mustang said they’ll be here,” I say.

“Mustang said they’ll be here,” Sevro mocks in childish voice. “They better. Fleet can’t squat for long out there without being spotted.”

My fleet waits with Orion in orbit since Mustang took her shuttle to Nessus, the capital of Io. Fifty torchShips and destroyers hunkered down, shields off, engines dark on the barren moon of Sinope as the larger fleets of the Golds swim through space closer in to the Galilean Moons. Any closer and the Gold sensors will pick us up. But as it hides, my fleet is vulnerable. With one pass a measly squadron of ripWings could destroy it.

“The Moonies will come,” I say. But I’m not sure of it.

They’re a cold, proud, insular people, these Jovian Golds. Roughly eight thousand Peerless Scarred call the Galilean Moons of Jupiter home. Their Institutes are all out here. And it is only Societal service or vacations for the wealthiest among them that takes them to the Core. Luna might be the ancestral home of their people, but it’s alien to most of them. Metropolitan Ganymede is the center of their world.

The Sovereign knows the danger of having an independent Rim. She spoke to me of the difficulty of imposing her power across a billion kilometers of empire. Her true fear was never Augustus and Bellona destroying one another. It was the chance that the Rim would rebel and cut the Society in half. Sixty years ago, at the beginning of her reign, she had the Ash Lord nuke Saturn’s moon, Rhea, when its ruler refused to accept her authority. That example held for sixty years.

But nine days after my Triumph, the children of the Moon Lords who were kept on Luna in the Sovereign’s court as insurance toward their parents’ political cooperation, escaped. They were assisted by Mustang’s spies which she left behind in the Citadel. Two days after that, the heirs of the fallen ArchGovernor Revus au Raa, who was killed at my Triumph, stole or destroyed the entirety of the Societal Garrison Fleet in its dock at Calisto. They declared Io’s independence and pressured the other more populous and powerful moons into joining them.

Soon after, the infamously charismatic Romulus au Raa was elected Sovereign of the Rim. Saturn and Uranus joined soon after that, and the Second Moon Rebellion began sixty years, two hundred and eleven days after the first.

The Moon Lords obviously expected the Sovereign would find herself mired on Mars for a decade, maybe longer. Add to that a certain lowColor insurrection in the Core and one can see why they assumed she would not be able to devote the resources needed to send a fleet of sufficient size six hundred million kilometers to quash their nascent rebellion. They were wrong.

“We’ve got inbound,” Pebble says from her station at the shuttle’s sensor boards. “Three ships. Two-ninety clicks out.”

“Finally,” Sevro mutters. “Here come the bloodydamn Moonies.”

Three warships emerge from the heat mirage on the horizon. Two black sarpedon-class fighters painted with the four-headed white dragon of Raa clutching a Jovian thunderbolt in its talons escort a fat tan priam-class shuttle. The ship lands before us. Dust swirls and the ramp unfurls from the belly of the craft. Seven lithe forms, taller and lankier than I, walk down into the sand. Golds all. They wear kryll, organic breathing masks made by Carvers, over nose and mouths. Looks like the shed skin of a locust, legs stretching to either ear. Their tan combat gear is lighter than Core armor and complimented with brightly colored scarves. Long-barreled railguns with personalized ivory stocks are strapped to their backs. Razors hang from their hips. Orange optics cover their eyes. And on their feet are skippers. Lightweight boots that use condensed air instead of gravity to move their user. Skipping them over the ground like stones on a lake. Can’t get much height, but you can move nearly sixty kilometers an hour. They’re about a quarter the weight of my boots, have battery life for a year, and are dead cold on thermal vision.

These are assassins. Not knights. Holiday recognizes the different breed of danger.

“She’s not with them,” she says over her com. “Any Telemanuses?”

“No,” I say. “Hold. I see her.”

Mustang steps out of the craft, joining the much-taller Ionians. She’s dressed like them, except without a rifle. Joined by another Ionian woman, this one with the forward hunching shoulders of a cheetah, Mustang joins us atop the dune. The rest of the Ionians stay near the ship. Not a threat, just an escort.

“Darrow,” Mustang says. “Sorry we’re late.”

“Where’s Romulus?” I ask.

“He’s not coming.”

“Bullshit,” Sevro hisses. “I told you, Reap.”

“Sevro, it’s fine,” Mustang says. “This is his sister, Vela.”

The tall woman stares down her smashed-flat nose at us. Her skin is pale, body adapted for the low gravity. It’s hard to see her face past the mask and goggles, but she seems in her early fifties. Her voice is one even note. “I send my brother’s greetings, and welcome, Darrow of Mars. I am Legate Vela au Raa.” Sefi slinks around us, examining the alien Gold and the strange gear she carries. I like the way people talk when Sefi circles. Seems a little more honest.

“Well met, legatus.” I nod cordially. “Will you be speaking for your brother? I’d hoped to make my case in person.”

The skin to the side of her goggles crinkles. “No one speaks for my brother. Not even I. He wishes for you to join him at his private home on the Wastes of Karrack.”

“So you can lure us into a trap?” Sevro asks. “Better idea. How ’bout you tell your bitch of a brother to honor his bloodydamn agreement before I take that rifle and shove it so far up your farthole you look like a skinny Pixie shish kebab?”

“Sevro, stop,” Mustang says. “Not here. Not these people.”

Vela watches Sefi circle. Taking note of the razor on the huge Obsidian’s hip.

“I could give a shit and piss who this is. She knows who we are. And she ain’t got a little trickle goin’ down her leg standing toe to toe with the bloodydamn Reaper of Mars, then she’s got less brains than a wad of ass lint.”

“He cannot come,” Vela says.

“Understandable,” I reply.

Sevro makes a grotesque motion.

“What is that?” Vela asks, nodding to Sefi.

“That is a queen,” I say. “Sister to Ragnar Volarus.”

Vela is wary of Sefi, as well she should be. Ragnar is a name known. “She cannot come either. But I was speaking in regards to that hunk of metal you flew here on. Is it meant to be a ship?” She snorts and turns up her nose. “Built on Venus, obviously.”

“It’s borrowed,” I say. “But if you care to make an exchange…”

Vela surprises me with a laugh before becoming serious once more. “If you wish to present yourself to Moon Lords as a diplomatic party, then you must show respect for my brother. And trust the honor of his hospitality.”

“I’ve seen enough men and women set aside honor when it’s inconvenient,” I say probingly.

“In the Core, perhaps. This is the Rim,” Vela replies. “We remember the ancestors. We remember how Iron Golds should be. We do not murder guests like that bitch on Luna. Or like that Jackal on Mars.”

“Yet,” I say.

Vela shrugs. “It is a choice you must make, Reaper. You have sixty seconds to decide.” Vela steps away as I confer with Mustang and Sevro. I motion Sefi over.

“Thoughts?”

“Romulus would rather die than kill a guest,” Mustang says. “I know you don’t have any reason to trust these people. But honor actually means something to them. It’s not like the Bellona who just toss the word around. Out here a Gold’s word means as much as his blood.”

“Do you know where the residence is?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “If I did I’d take you there myself. They’ve got equipment inside to check for radiation and electronic trackers. They’ve studied you. We’ll be on our own.”

“Lovely.” But this isn’t about tactics. No short-term game here. My big play was coming out to the Rim knowing I had leverage the Sovereign doesn’t. That leverage will keep my head on my shoulders better than anyone’s honor. Yet I’ve been wrong before, so I double-check and listen now.

“Do the rules governing treatment of guests extend to Reds?” Sevro asks. “Or just Golds? That’s what we need to know.”

I glance back at Vela. “It’s a fair point.”

“If he kills you, he kills me,” Mustang says. “I’m not leaving your side. And if he does that, my men turn against him. The Telemanuses turn against him. Even Lorn’s daughters-in-law will turn against him. That’s nearly a third of his navy. It’s a bloodfeud he can’t afford.”

“Sefi, what do you think?”

She closes her eyes so her blue tattoos can see the spirits of this waste. “Go.”

“Give us six hours, Sevro. If we’re not back by then…”

“Wank off in the bushes?”

“Lay waste.”

“Can do.” He bumps my fist with his and winks. “Happy diplomacy, kids.” He keeps his fist out for Mustang. “You too horsey. We’re in this shit together, eh?”

She happily bumps his knuckles with her own. “Bloodydamn right.”