We arrived on Ioand found it too dangerous to risk an approach. For three days we waited inside Io’s orbit in the cover provided by Jupiter’s faint ring system and magnetosphere as storms the size of Earth raged beneath. We circled Jupiter, matching pace with Io’s orbit, watching streams of transport ships depart until thePandoraand three Volk dreadnaughts slipped away from the moon with most of the Volk navy toward Callisto. When they disappeared around the curve of Jupiter, I told Cassius it was time to make our approach.
Virginia always thought it a strange perversity that so many of Jupiter’s moons were named after women or goddesses Zeus raped, and then graced with the ultimate torture—to be held under his gaze for eternity. From what I’ve seen on our journey into inner Ilium, Fá has been no kinder to the moons than Zeus was to his conquests.
Io floats alone beneath us, a ruin.
Its defenses have been smashed. Its cities razed; their smoke weeps upward to join the columns that pour out from Io’s four hundred volcanoes. It seems only the equator was spared Fá’s wrath. For good reason. There, an uninterrupted belt of green and gold pulses with life amidst a hellish landscape riven with volcanoes and desolate, frozen sulfur wastes.
Demeter’s Garter.
The breadbasket of the Rim. Infrastructure as crucial, perhaps more crucial, than the Dockyards of Ganymede I destroyed twelve years ago. Not all of Fá’s fleet has departed. Hundreds of strange warships thatcould only be Ascomanni-made gather over the Garter along with caravans of cosmosHaulers.
I cannot help but be impressed. Of the four Galilean moons—Europa, Io, Callisto, and Ganymede—Fá took the hardest and innermost moon first. It is exactly what I would have done: gain space supremacy by defeating the Raa navy, eliminate their moon defense bases, then capture the Garter to grip their whole civilization by the windpipe. Now that another leader has done it, the brutality the act required seems a sin against humankind. The consequences of the Garter’s loss will stretch far beyond Ilium to affect Rim civilization all the way to Pluto.
More and more Fá feels like my shadow, that darker part of myself that knows the shortest route often lies through the ruthless application of brutality.
Even Sevro does not laugh this time. Aurae’s lack of celebration when we saw the devastation around Kalyke was because she feared exactly this. She was right to, and Sevro was right to worry that Athena and her fabled ships may no longer exist. Still, we didn’t come all this way to turn back now. We need to contact Athena, and the only way to do that is to light Aurae’s omega torch in Sungrave.
Io is about the size of Luna, and tidally locked. One side always faces Jupiter. The moon is pulled in a constant tug of war between the gravity of Jupiter and the other Galilean moons. This creates tectonic movement, so Io is constantly bleeding fire from her heart. Some of her volcano plumes spew as much as five hundred kilometers out into space. Using one of these to mask our entry to the moon, we slip through Ascomanni patrols and descend toward the south pole.
I am extremely wary of putting theArchimedesat risk by approaching Sungrave directly. Surface-to-air missiles—either from Raa guerillas or Fá’s forces still on the moon—are as much a risk to the ship as enemy fighters or capital ships. So I have Cassius set down several hundred kilometers southeast of the city in a volcano range on the edge of the anti-Jovian Wastes of Naramoor. The spews and volcanic activity will hide our ship, hopefully. While Cassius stays behind with Lyria, Aurae, and our mute prisoner, Diomedes, I head to the cargo bay to gear up and disembark. Aurae passes me in the hall and tosses me a hair tie.
“Been a long road since the Marcher,” she says as I tie my hair up. “Be careful.”
I bump fists with her and descend into the cargo bay.
Sevro is there waiting, already dressed. I did not know if he was coming, but it seems he’s decided to step up after all. I give him a nod and he helps me into the Godkiller armor.
I skip the small talk and show him our route.
“The direct approach takes us through a briar patch of mountains and volcanoes. Anything could hide there, and we can’t afford to get shot down. If our oxygen reserves run out, the sulfur dioxide in Io’s thin air will react with the water in our lungs to form a strong acid. So we will head due west to the Waste of Karrack, then curve back toward the city on the seam between the mountains and the waste. Here just south of Darkfall. Complaints?” He shakes his head. “You’re better in boots. I suggest fly-hopper interchange, but you’re flight master. I’ll take your lead. Helm up. Boots prime. Let’s do it.”
The ramp lowers and we step out into the dimness.
Sevro and I fly from meager sunshine over plains painted shades of yellow, red, black, green, and white toward midnight lands where Jupiter hangs in the sky, supreme, mutinous, and huge. From the surface of the moon, Jupiter subtends an arc of 19.5 degrees, appearing thirty-nine times the apparent diameter of Luna from Earth’s surface. Even the many mountains of Io, some rising higher than Earth’s Everest, seem small in comparison.
We wind through the teeth of mountain passes, over vast sulfur plains and burping lava flows until the moon slips into Jupiter’s shadow. The celestial event, where Jupiter blocks Io from the sun completely, occurs every forty-two hours. Surface temperatures drop so low all sulfur on the moon turns to frost. The Ionians call it nivalnight.
The darkness grows Stygian, broken only by the glow of volcanoes, the throbbing of molten silicate lava lakes, and the blinking lights of high-altitude Ascomanni patrols. If there is Rim resistance to the Ascomanni, we do not see any signs of it, and that’s all the better. Dustwalkers, Obsidians, Ascomanni, those are my fears in descending order.
We alternate between sprints of low-altitude flight and hopping in our gravity boots. We pause at random intervals and Sevro peers into the blackness of the mountains or the shrouds of volcano plumes as if they concealed legions. There is no better scout in my army than Sevro save a few of Valdir’s lads, but we are warmlanders, softworlders, and I feel even Sevro’s fear.
An hour into our journey west we reach the Waste of Karrack. Overthat barren plain, weird tentacles of light molest the sky. They are charged particles flowing off Jupiter to form auroras. They stain the frozen sulfur crystals mutating shades of violet, cerulean, and green.
Daring young Blues, styled “airdancers,” from Darkfall and Nightmourn used to sail those auroras with homemade Dedalian wings. Golds have bones far too heavy for the sport. No Blues dance in the sky tonight. I wonder aloud to Sevro if any Blues will ever dance here again.
He does not answer, or care. In the eight days since his fight with Cassius, Sevro has barely been seen, choosing to camp out and sleep in the machine shop or the escape pod and take his meals in private. I hoped for a new start after he revealed his grief for Ulysses. Maybe I was too hard on him. Or I was too optimistic, but even if he’s gone silent he is no longer pulling the team apart.
He comments on Quick’s armor though, and that’s something. “Shame we didn’t have this ten years ago,” he says of the new gear.
I don’t disagree. The gear is light, fast, stealthy without sacrificing power, and its updated generator can run the suit for days. It has three modes for power-usage. Typical of Quick, they all have dumb names. “Reptile” to run cold for stealth. “Lupine” for regular use. And “titan” to kill gods, apparently. We’ve only dared try reptile mode. Our juice runs out here, we’re dead.
Sevro grows somber as we pass the city of Darkfall.
Unlike many of the large-mass moons, Io was never terraformed. The moon and its air are still hostile to life. Life has been able to stubbornly survive here only beneath the surface of the moon or under the paradomes. Those domes that once harbored precious oxygen and sheltered the citizens of Darkfall from Jupiter’s radiation bombardment have now been shattered. The city, once famed for its orators, sopranists, and philosophy, lies quiet and cold as we pass. It is as if their stoic people have been eaten by the dark itself. I think of the transport ships that we saw trickling away from Io when we arrived, and know now what cargo they carried.
Men, women, children, bound for some frigid asteroid city far beyond the bounds of civilization. I can scarcely imagine what awaits them there. Even in Lykos, little trickles of hope made their way into the mines—whispers about Ares, beams of sunlight. I fear the captives of Io will receive no such inspiration. My chest grows tight after thinking of their fate.
If they are truly my enemies, then why do I want to weep?
