Golden Son

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.

We meet with Jupiter and Ragnar on one of floating Olympus’s white spires. There are dead men in the halls, on the slopes.

“They used it as a base,” Jupiter says cheerily. “Your Stained disagreed with their presumptuousness. I like the beast!” Our men secure the section of the Valles Marineris set aside for the Institute, far east of Agea in the upper arm of the grand canyon. I watch out the window as hundreds of friendly dropships descend on the staging ground, depositing more than three hundred thousand men in thirty minutes. A Gold runs out of each lowered ramp, always the first onto enemy soil.

“No resistance,” I say quietly, my starShell helm popped. I look at Mustang uneasily.

She wipes blonde hair from her eyes. “The longer we’re dug in, they harder we are to dislodge. Why are they waiting?”

“Want to cluster us up like a bunch of grapes before stomping,” Sevro guesses. “Atomics?”

“Silly children.” Jupiter goes through the pockets of one of the dead men. “That’s why we have Grays. Let them be stomped. They will lubricate our passage.”

“No atomics,” Mustang says. “Sensors would have picked them up from a hundred clicks away.” She looks out over the land. “They’re waiting because they don’t have enough men to contest our passage through the valley. Or we’ve caught them flat-footed, which is doubtful. Or they deployed too many men to halt Lorn’s advance. Or they’ve created choke points in the valley. Or they marshal them around the Citadel. Or there’s a trap ahead.”

Her mind is a machine.

“There’s a trap,” she says after a moment. “But they are overrelying upon it to stall us while they reallocate men and matériel.” She snorts in contempt. “Static defenses without massive mobile support haven’t been relevant since the Maginot Line.”

“But they know we don’t want to waste the city or the populace,” I say.

“They know that.” Mustang adjusts her datapad, examining the map. “Which shrinks our flexibility in tactics.”

“Total war is easier,” Jupiter grumbles. “Let’s use the Grays to lubricate our passage, then drop bombs at the walls under the shields. Entry gained.”

“It takes a day to break a city, then fifty years to rebuild,” Mustang snaps. “You want to sign up to oversee the reconstruction?”

“Do I look like a builder?” Jupiter asks.

“The passage to Agea is eighty kilometers wide on average, seven-kilometer-high walls on either side, all farming and agriculture for the city. Bellona likely littered the place with mines. If they had time. We didn’t exactly tell them we were coming.” Did they have time?

Mustang motions me to the side.

I walk with her away from the rest of my command staff, who roll their eyes at one another. The airy palace halls should remind me of past victory, but all I feel is steep melancholy being here. So many memories. So many lost friends, I think when I see Grays landing near Minerva castle where Pax and I once dueled.

“It’s eighty kilometers to the walls from here,” she says. “We could make the dash as planned. Just because they didn’t contest our landing doesn’t mean there’s something nefarious afoot.” She sees the hesitation in my eyes. “We are here for my father just as much as we’re here for the Sovereign. We have to move with pace.”

“You’re afraid Lorn is going to kill him if he breaks through the southern city walls first,” I guess. “Aren’t you.”

“You know their history.”

“I do.”

“And do you trust Lorn not to finish an old grudge?”

“Lorn isn’t a murderer.”

“No. He hurts men who deserve it, like Tactus. My father deserves it as much as any man. So we must hurry. And you must tell the rest of them about the Sovereign.”

“Roque found out. Praetorians on the Warchild.”

We walk back and I address my small council.

“You know we come here for Augustus, but there’s a second reason we press on Agea. The Sovereign is here.”

“No shit?” Clown mutters.

Rotback scratches his head. “Goryhell.”

“In the Citadel?” Pebble asks, excitedly nudging anxious Weed with her knee.