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As we pass into the mesosphere, we cross the planet’s meridian, from night to day. A golden bow of sunlight blazes around the planet as if it were Apollo’s own, and we the children of Hyperion, racing our chariots home. For a moment, it makes me miss that far-off city and the home I haven’t seen for half a life.

The day face of the world reveals itself.

Beneath the faint shimmer of Darrow’s shifting tropospheric shields are small, icy poles, strings of mountain ranges. Temperate alpine elevations characterize the north, jungles stretch to the south. Between them lies a mountain-studded equatorial desert.

The infamous Ladon. Eater of armies.

The infant typhoon detailed in the mission data report does not look too menacing. It forms a thin spiral cloud layer over the Sycorax Sea.

There is time enough to be lost in the majesty, and to remember nature did not provide this with her careless hand. My race of mortals carved this paradise from irradiated rock and violent gas by channeling the greatest virtues of all men in common cause.

A patriotic pride that I did not know I possessed fills me. The same blood flows through my veins as the man who sent the last of the Lovelock engines and Storm Gods here. But this zeal evaporates as soon as I realize I do not belong to the age of giants who made this, but to a smaller, meaner age where men think war the height of human endeavor.

I laugh at the cosmic joke. Only humanity could grasp the stars and then let them slip through its fingers for the pettiness in its heart.

But I feel hope. That pettiness defined my grandmother’s age. It may yet not define ours.

“Fine launch, goodmen. I trust everyone kept breakfasts down dinners up,” Ajax says convivially. There’s a chorus of laughter, and highLingo rebarbs. Do they really love this? What creatures could be so at ease here and now? Am I even the same species?

“Heliopolis will still be covered by the southern shield chain. We must penetrate via the breach and fly south. Passing coordinates.” The trajectory data appears on my display. His voice becomes solemn as he delivers the Grimmus creed. “Should the Void take you, celebrate, my friends. For before death, there was glory. Prepare for atmospheric entry.”

I wait for him to hail my private channel. But when the light blinks, it’s Kalindora, not Ajax.

“Don’t burn your main thrusters till we go horizontal. Let gravity do the work, not your generator. Simulators underrepresent drag. And don’t activate your pulseShield till breach. No telling when we’ll get a recharge. Last thing you want is your suit dying in a firefight.”

Friction heat glows ahead of me as the first starShells begin their descent. I see Atalantia’s Ash Legion descending to our left.

The planet resists my entry. The starShell bucks as it enters with enough kinetic energy to compress the air in front of me and turn it into a furnace. A brittle layer of thermal soak tiles in the entry carapace absorbs the heat and sheds away. All around, scores of starShells burst from carapaces winnowed by friction to scream like wrathful locusts down into the blue sky.

Wind and engines roar outside my s

hell as I join them.

We do not come under fire. The Republic’s shields that protect them from orbital bombardment also prevent them from contesting our descent. They shimmer fifty kilometers below, only eight kilometers above the planet’s surface. Atalantia parts from us, heading to the northernmost part of the breach as we head to the southernmost.

“Time to breach, twenty seconds,” Ajax intones as we pass over a mountain range toward the Ladon.

The horizon toward which we fly is a holocaust of artillery. The concentrated firepower of the Ash Armada bludgeons the thousand-kilometer-wide breach.

Particle beams divide reality. Mushrooms bloom on the surface.

In all the war, no one has used more atomics than this. I am horrified. The atomics drop on depopulated zones, but the fallout will kill thousands before it is scrubbed and meds distributed. Maybe more.

Impossibly, the Republic fires back. Particle beams lance up from the breach at strafing orbital torchShips and high-altitude corvette gunships. Guided missiles chase bombers and send them spiraling down to crash into the southern shields like skipping stones. Atomics flash pale white in the troposphere. A beam connects with a Bellona corvette. Light ripples as the shield overloads and a second beam carves through the helm of the ship.

Thirty million life threads interweave, some carrying on, others clipped short.

It is so horrible.

“Be a giant,” Ajax said.

How, in all this?

Strategists, I understand. But warriors…I thought I did until now. The insidious arithmetic becomes apparent of how overwhelmingly visionary warriors like Darrow, the Minotaur, and Atlas must be to be able to shift the face of a battle once it’s already begun.

“TOB ten.”

We’re over the desert now, skimming the shield dome.