Preview pages for the about to be released Voltron guidebook "The Paladins' Handbook" have confirmed the ages of the Paladins, and it looks like my estimates were off. Shiro is indeed 25, Keith is 18, Lance and Hunk are both 17, while Pidge is 15. I'll be going back and updating chapters in Hic Sunt Leones and Omnis Vir Lupus accordingly.
2/24/18: Rewrote this chapter almost entirely from scratch to account for significant changes to my outline for this fic. The fight with Cassius has been given to Mustang now instead of Shiro, although those of you who've read Morning Star should know how that will go. ;)
Chapter 5: Raw War:
Whitehold
Mars
March 16th, 2841
Forgive me. Shiro offered a silent prayer as his razor cleaved the hulking, mutated man in half. The Devourer's unclothed body fell to the side in pieces. Muffled gunfire reverberated through the underground tunnels that supplied electricity to Whitehold, the fortress serving as headquarters for the Martian branch of the Board of Quality Control. On the way to Mars, Ragnar had shared stories of his childhood on the ice of Mars' southernmost continent. And of the Obsidian tribes, the most feared were the Eaters of Men. Exiles banished from their clans as punishment for consuming human flesh. Most of these cannibals wandered the ice in search of any source of human meat they could find. But some were brought to Whitehold by the board and carved to become mutated sentries in the facility's lower levels. Shiro knew that these people were not completely innocent. They had chosen to eat their fellow humans, after all. But they'd had no choice in what the board had done to them. And so today, he mourned the loss of every life he took.
On a more positive note, the speed at which the lowColors of Agea responded to Darrow's call to arms was heartwarmingly fast. Despite this, Shiro and his team were encountering stiff resistance in their attempt to sneak into the board's central command through the back door. While Darrow and Ragnar took Agea and his boyfriend was off laying siege to Corinth and New Thebes, Shiro's unit was fighting tooth and nail just to make it up into Whitehold itself. The cold metal floor was a sea of red as Devourers tore into rebel troops only to be overwhelmed with pulseFists and razors in retaliation.
The Black Paladin himself was a rainbow amidst the sprays of blood and brain matter. The armor paint on his right arm glittered red as he swung his razor at one of the nude Obsidian guards. Then he turned on his heels and fired the green pulseFist on his left, taking off the head of another Devourer in the process. The blue paint on his right leg chipped as he kicked out at a Devourer's head, the carved man's claws leaving scratches along his armor. As the Obsidian stumbled back, he kicked out with his left leg and slammed his yellow-armored heel against the sentry's knee, the additional weight of the gravBoots breaking it and sending the poor soul tumbling to the ground with a scream. Voltron's chest emblem adorned the front of his black torso armor, while his helmet, along with the armor at his knees and elbow, were painted white.
It was his own way of paying tribute to his friends and his role as a Paladin without openly wearing his old armor. The red wolf of Darrow's army painted on his chest and left shoulder marked him as a member of the Rising to prevent friendly fire, and nobody questioned him when he suddenly changed his appearance. He still hated seeing that shock of white hair and the reminder of what it represented. But after weeks of dying his hair gold for his own survival, he was almost glad to see it. He was going to dye his hair black like he'd been wanting to ever since he'd escaped, but it still felt good to finally be done hiding. He'd been able to survive blending in among Gold high society, but now that they were in open rebellion against the entire hierarchy, there was no more reason to keep dying his hair. Mickey, the Sons of Ares' carver, had removed his sigils along with Darrow's, and he'd washed out the rest of the dye in his hair while the paint on his armor was drying.
He snapped back to reality as the Sons of Ares caught up and surveyed the carnage around him. While he'd been reflecting, he'd carved his way through the cannibalistic sentinels like a hot knife through butter. Blood spatters and brain matter were painted on the walls, floor, and ceiling of the underground tunnel, the Obsidian corpses on the floor coated in bodily fluids. In the span of fifteen minutes, he'd managed to kill ten Lurchers and half a dozen Devourers all by himself. Shiro felt sick to his stomach as he surveyed his own handiwork. The carnage he'd created reminded him uncomfortably of his days in the gladiator arena. When he was expected to do anything and everything that it took to stay alive. But even at his most intense, he'd never done something this brutal before.
What have I become? He asked himself as he forced himself to look away and take charge. It didn't matter that he'd nad no choice. It didn't matter that the Lurchers were all willing employees of the Board of Quality Control, and therefore complicit in thousands of crimes against humanity. The ease with which the Black Paladin resorted to such intense violence disturbed him. Despite Tactus and Mustang's assurances, he questioned whether he was still worthy to pilot the Black Lion anymore. He forced those doubts out of his mind as the strike team continued through the tunnel until they reached the main elevator shaft. They'd lost a fifth of the strike force to the Obsidian cannibals.
"Does the cipher work?" Shiro asked as one of the team's Greens, one of the original Sons by the name of Cylax si Nexiti, plugged his tablet into the elevator controls and got to work. Quicksilver had procured access codes for the compound years ago in case the Sons of Ares ever needed to infiltrate the facility. Now it was time to test if they were still useable. The strike team stood in tense silence as Cylax and the other Greens furiously attempted to hack into the building's mainframe.
"It's been accepted," Cylax finally sighed after two minutes as his datapad chirped in affirmation. "I've disabled the elevator. It should be a straight shot up to level four." Shiro nodded, his body tense. Their ultimate objective was to hold the facility and capture all members of the board. But he and Darrow both agreed that it would be good for morale and PR to rescue any prisoners being held at Whitehold. Level 4 was a high security floor, home to the facility's surgical wing, where most of the board's interrogations were reportedly held. That meant phase two of their mission just became more urgent.
"We need to hurry," Shiro replied as he leaped into the elevator shaft and magnetized his gravBoots to the nearest ledge. The rest of the strike team followed suit, with Cylax bringing up the rear. The rebels bounced up the elevator shaft from one ledge to another like a game of pinball. When they reached the fourth floor, they slowly ground the doors open and fired on the security guards. Shiro didn't even flinch as he shot one of the Grays in the head with his pulseFist. Another was felled by Wulfgar, one of the Obsidians given a razor by Darrow during the Rain three weeks ago. Blood sprayed everywhere as the two dead guards dropped to the ground before they could call for help. Shiro stayed by the doors watching
The halls were silent as Shiro and two dozen Sons of Ares sprinted through the corridor. The antiseptic smell of the facility felt unnatural and wrong as Shiro took cover behind a wall and discreetly surveyed the security station. After taking stock of the problem and formulating a plan, the rebels charged into action. The guard station erupted into an explosion of blood and bone fragments as pulseFist and scorcher blasts flooded into the room. Glass shattered and blood arced through the air as the off-duty security forces fell to the rebel assault. The Sons of Ares advanced through the halls of Whitehold, taking down security forces as they went. They reached a computer terminal without raising any alarms, and Cylax got to work.
Cylax had been to Whitehold before, accompanying Fitchner on a failed attempt to rescue the man's wife from the Board of Quality Control before her untimely demise. This gave the rebel forces an advantage in that they knew exactly where they were going, and Nexiti knew how to get around the lockdown. Fire suppression foam sprayed down from the ceiling, and Fennix, another veteran of the Sons, took down the startled Yellows as the strike force entered the surgical wing. Shiro whipped out his Razor and decapitated a security guard as they passed. The air was a cacophony of sound as security alerts blended in with the fire arm.
"Security breach! Security breach!" the PA system announced in the clipped dialect of a Green. "All security personnel to level 4! All personnel are to stay in secure areas. This is not a drill." More security forces emerged to confront the rebels after that, only to be caught off guard by the sheer number of intruders and felled quickly.
"It appears we've lost the element of surprise," Wulfgar remarked as he took down another enemy soldier.
"We wouldn't have been able to rely on it for long anyway," Shiro commented as Fennix pistol whipped a Yellow surgeon emerging from a nearby corridor. The time traveler turned to the hacker. "Have you found Prefect Vardan?" The other man nodded. Arturius au Vardan was, chief officer of the Martian branch of the Board of Quality Control. Which meant that to get the security codes to unlock all Whitehold's secrets and successfully take the facility, he was their main target. The fact that the man was wanted alive by Sevro for being the one to order his mother's execution was a bonus.
"He's in the middle of an interrogation," Nexiti answered. "Looks like they've finished with the interrogation and their moving on to dissecting the boy." The Green pulled up the security footage on his datapad as they ran and angled it so that Shiro could see a small, dark-clothed form strapped to the operating table. Cylax switched cameras to give the Paladin a better view of the prisoner. Shiro's face paled. The man – boy, really – looked barely older than eighteen. His clothing had been partially stripped away, showing a myriad of bruises on his torso. The Black Paladin didn't know when the boy had received those bruises, but he was not going to let anyone else get ripped apart by the board.
"We'll split up from here," Shiro ordered as the group came to another intersection. "Cylax, Wulfgar, take half the platoon and carry on with the mission. Get to the security station and take control of the building. Fenix and the rest will come with me and rescue the kid." The Sons of Ares, both veteran soldiers and the fresh recruits from Agea, nodded obediently. The lowColors still didn't trust this man who'd appeared to be Gold mere hours before. But the Reaper did, so they could give him a chance. Cylax's group broke off in the direction of the compound's security hub. Shiro and Fenix continued onward, accompanied by half their strike force. Also in their group included a former member of Harmony's splinter faction named Evey. The Pink had been horrified by Harmony's betrayal, and was doing her best to make amends for breaking away from the Sons.
They reached the surgical theater minutes later. The first thing Shiro caught sight of was a team of four Yellows inches away from cutting the helpless kid open. Two blasts from his pulseFist killed them all in as many seconds. He dialed up the strength of the gravFist on his right arm and punched au Vardan in the face, breaking the man's nose and knocking him unconscious. With the room secure, he breathed a sigh of relief as he looked down at the teen strapped to the table. After spending so much time taking lives, it felt good – cathartic, even – to actually save one for once.
Cylax, Fenix, Whitehold, and Arturius are from the Sons of Ares comic miniseries set 20 years before the beginning of Golden Son. I wanted to incorporate some of the characters into this fic, and when I was doing my re-writes I realized that the story I was now working on would make more sense to have Shiro going into battle elsewhere on Mars while Darrow, Sevro, and Ragnar were in Agea. Sevro's aunt Ryanna will definitely be showing up later on, too.