Morning Star

Chills run through me as Sevro and Victra and Mustang and even my mother raise their hands in union. “Break the chains,” Dancer bellows. I raise my own scarred fist and step silently into the shuttle to join the Red Armada as it sails to war.

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.