“Hic sunt leones,” they echo, not for Augustus, but because we wish we were brave as lions.
One by one, we say our goodbyes. Before I can stop myself, I hail Mustang’s private frequency. It takes her twenty seconds to answer. “What is it?” Hesitation haunts her voice.
“Stay alive,” I say.
A pause. Emotion? Annoyance?
“You too.”
She closes the com link. Soon the gears begin to whir and click as I’m loaded into the firing mechanism of the tube.
I’ve acted this whole time like I know what’s coming. Like I know what the Iron Rain is. But it looms before me like some dark, slavering beast. A mystery, though I’ve seen its face. I’ve seen the virtual reality experientials and HC clips. I know what it is the way a child knows flying from watching a bird.
“Deployment coordinates reached.” Roque’s voice fills the ears of every Gold in the fleet. “Execute Operation Eagleburn.”
The whine of the magnetic charge in the tube fills me. I slide forward into the chamber, bracing myself, looking down so I don’t snap my neck. Then it fires and I am claimed by velocity and battle as my stomach fills my throat with bile. I rip through the magnetic stream, out of the ship’s tube into swarming chaos.
Fire and lightning rule space. Behemoths of metal belch missiles back and forth, silently pounding one another with all the weapons of man. The silence of it, so eerie, so strange. Great veils of flak explode around the ships, cloaking them in fury, almost like raw cotton tossed into the wind. RipWings and wasps buzz at one another, pissing streams of gunfire. They nip and slice at carapaces of metal, fighting in a dense giant clouds. In little packs they slip from their chaotic fights, spiraling silently toward clusters of leechCraft as the destroyers and carriers launch their troop transports across space in undulating waves. It’s a game of boarding parties. Over, under, and through the curtains of flak the leeches go, seeking a hull to clamber onto so they can pump their deadly cargo into the belly of crucial ships, like flies dropping larvae into open wounds. All flown by Blues raised to do only this one thing. Bellona craft pass those of Augustus, waves overlapping, breaking on one another.
All in silence.
Missiles leap toward the leeches, wracking hulls with detonations. No flames save where ships are punctured, leaking oxygen flames like harpooned whales of Old Earth would gout blood. Railgun discharges streak through space, tearing through multiple leeches and smaller fighters at the same time, rending holes in the ranks. Ships rupture forth men and women as both sides target engines, hoping to cripple and capture instead of destroy. Amidst the blue and silver enemy fleet, the massive Warchild shatters corvettes and torchShips like a cyclops wading through sheep—club swinging pendulous and slow.
I hold my breath as Victra’s destroyer, shielded by two others, slips towards the Warchild. She’s strafed by railguns, and men-of-war garland her with missile fire. The Bellona must warrant she’s too close to capture, because they open another salvo into her softened belly. Yet amidst the fire she suffers, the corvette births out a desperate burst of forty leechCraft. Nearly ten times her normal complement. We carved her hollow to fit in the additional troop carriers. That is the war party of the Telemanuses.
Victra’s ship cuts away from the Warchild, recklessly plunging into the Bellona formation where her mother’s flotilla of ships bearing the bleeding sun support the Bellona eagles. Victra springs her second surprise.
Her mother switches sides, betraying the Bellona as Victra promised the Jackal and me. Her mother’s ships unload more than two hundred leeches amidst the core of the Bellona fleet. It is chaos.
My Titans land on the hull of the enemy flagship, and soon the Warchild is festooned with leeches. Good luck, Titans.
Bellona-friendly leechCraft redirect toward the Warchild to lend aid to the battle that’ll clutter her halls with smoke and blood. RipWings zip past, shooting the landed leeches, trying to skin them off before they dump their men into the Warchild’s body. It is an elegant dance of action and reaction and reaction and reaction.
I carry on my trajectory, unable to alter it. To my left and right streak thousands Golds and Obsidians in armored starShells, Grays in hivepods of twelve each. A rain of men and metal. Amidst our current fly large storks packed with more Obsidians and Grays. Once we make landfall and secure the beachheads, the massed legions will slip out of the dreadnoughts and carriers on landing craft and pour out behind us.
Despite what the Bellona and their allies think, they cannot stop us from landing men—the orbit around the planet is too large. That is why holding the cities is of such importance. They are island fortresses. The only realistic way of seizing them is making landfall and slipping under the two-hundred-meter gap between their disc-shaped shields and the ground. That requires men on the surface. Millions of men in coordinated assault.
We will establish a hundred beachheads, and then our battle will begin in earnest. In the chaos, missiles streak for our starShells. Friendly capital ships deploy screens of flak behind us, and wasps cover our flanks. Enemy wasps manage to swoop in from the sides, strafing us. Dozens in the rain die around me, their armor folding back like burning paper. I hate this. I want to scream. Some do and we have to cut off their coms.
There is nothing I can do. Pray I don’t die. Pray my friends don’t die. But pray to what? The Golds have no God. We Reds have an Old Man in the Vale. But he does not help us in this life. He merely waits to shepherd and guard us in the next.
My heart rattles in my chest. Hyperventilating. Tearing out of my own skin. I feel a boy. I want the comfort of home. Mother’s blood soup, the touch of her stern hand, the love that flashed in me whenever I managed to make her smile. Anything to feel the joy of realizing Eo loved me. I long for the cold, quiet nights before love when it was only lust and hunger, where we would kiss in secret, hearts fluttering, like two little birds realizing they might build a nest together after all. That was what life was supposed to be. Family. First loves. Not falling through atmosphere where killers care for nothing more than to fill your body with hot metal before moving on to kill your friends.
My mind flees even as my body acts.
The planet grows and grows till it is a swollen colossus that consumes my vision. I do not know who is dead, who is alive. My display is too busy. We hit the atmosphere and sound roars back. Halos of color cocoon my trembling form. To my left and right, the falling soldiers look like raging lightning bugs jerked out of some Carver’s fantasy. I admire the one to my left. The bronze sun is behind him as he falls, silhouetting him, immortalizing him in that singular moment—one I know I shall never forget—so that he looks like a Miltonian angel falling with wrath and glory. His exoskeleton sheds its friction armor, as Lucifer might have shed the fetters of heaven, feathers of flame peeling off, fluttering behind. Then a missile slashes the sky and high-grade explosives christen him mortal once again.
The moment we clear the atmosphere, surface gunfire screams up at us, carving holes through our falling swarm. Like a beehive struck, we activate our gravBoots and fracture into a thousand different squadrons, each trying to follow its own coordinates. Enemy ripWings followed us into the atmosph
ere, but here we’re more maneuverable, and we kill the big fighters with ease. I swoop in on one from behind with the Howlers hot on my tail, and slash it with my razor. I fly off as it spirals down through the clouds into the ocean below.
Antiaircraft fire screams up at us through the clouds and kills the Gold to my right—a Howler, though I don’t know which till I look at my datapad. Daria the Harpy is dead. Just like that. No sacrifice to save another. No howl of rage at the end. No noble gesture. No emotion. The loyal girl who wore belts of scalps at the Institute, who held Rotback and Screwface in thrall to her strange devices, is gone.
A stab of panic goes through me and I dive through the clouds with the rest of my legion’s vanguard. We streak low over the ocean, where two waterships spit up fire. Sevro sends two missiles slithering through the air; they detonate, turning into a dozen micro missiles, which become another dozen each. The ships detonate like corn kernels over fire.
War is chaos. It always has been. But technology makes it worse. It changes the fear. At the Institute, I feared men. I feared what Titus and the Jackal could do to me. You see death coming there and can at least struggle against it. Here you don’t have such luxury. Modern war is fearing the air, the shadows, fearing the silence. Death will come and I won’t even see it.
I slam down on a snow-covered mountain. Clouds of vapor rise as I melt a hole in the white from the heat of my red-hot suit. The rest of my squad lands around me, finding safe harbor on the ground. Roaring down, meteor men from metal monsters. Thump. Thump. Thump. And the fog of war rises.