Sorry this chapter took so long, and that there was no chapter on Saturday. I needed to run to the library to get my hands on a copy of Iron Gold in the hopes of grabbing some reference info to use in this chapter, so it took me longer than usual to write it.
Chapter 27: Scar Hunters:
Endymion
Luna
March 24th, 2841
Luna was burning. The interlocked cityscape was a roar of sound as a cauldron of clouds swirled around the highest skyscrapers. Veins of flame bled across the horizon as war and riots raged across the moon. If Shiro were here, he'd probably make a comment comparing the sight to a scene from an Old Earth disaster movie. Despite Darrow's best efforts to minimize civilian casualties, the Gold loyalists continued to fight tooth and nail for control of Luna. The capital city of Hyperion was secure, along with the Lost City and several other areas, but large swaths of the moon remained in enemy hands. Imbrium and Endymion were currently where the loyalists were the most strongly concentrated.
The overhead lights of their assault shuttle pulsed an alien green as they cut through the skies toward the outskirts of Endymion. The fighting in the metropolitan areas was so intense that the city center was engulfed in a constant fog of ash. But out on the fringe, the interlocked cityscape was quiet, save for the crackling of fires that continued to burn long after the battle had migrated downtown. Looking out the window as he stood in the shuttle's cockpit, Darrow thought that Endymion looked more like a molten ruin than a pinnacle of human achievement. Trigg and his fiancé Ephraim stood behind the Reaper in the cockpit, wishing each other luck as they armed themselves for battle. Sevro remained in the flight cabin overseeing the troops as everyone prepared their weapons to face the next battle.
When loyalist forces began to push back against the Rising's conquest, Darrow had broken up the rebel army into smaller battle groups coordinated by Victra. In the meantime, Darrow and Cassius each took a strike team and carved their way across the moon, assisting battle groups where they were needed or engaging Society encampments themselves. Each strike team was comprised of a mixture of pro-rebel Golds (from the Howlers, the Reformers, or Darrow's army from the Institute), Sons of Ares soldiers, and Luneburn volunteers. With loyalist forces concentrated around defending two cities, the two teams had gone in opposite directions. Cassius had taken his group and flown off to capture Imbrium city, leaving Darrow's team to conquer Endymion.
Pulling out a set of long range scopes, Darrow looked out to see bodies in gravBoots jumping between towers spaced kilometers apart, usually followed or preceded by explosions as one side attempted to attack the other or to flee. Floodlamps in the distant marked temporary encampments as the city whirled in a dance of chaos and death. A ripWing painted with the Gold marks of the Society attempted to shoot down their shuttle, only for the rebel pilot to shred it with the assault shuttle's guns himself. It chilled Darrow's soul to watch the city burn. Every sign of destruction felt like an indictment of his planning and ability to influence people. It felt like the strand of his life was so strong that everyone else's, including those of his friends, frayed around him.
Their conquest of Luna had started out well at first. With the aid of the fleet defections in orbit and the reformers in the senate, they'd quickly secured control of government, military, and municipal buildings in several major cities before those loyal to Octavia could organize a counterattack against the Rising's sudden coup de tat. By the time the Hierarchy loyalists retaliated, the Sons of Ares had control over forty percent of Luna's surface. With the aid of lowColor civilians, loyalist resistance was quickly overrun in another twenty percent of cities. But it was now that they were down to conquering the last third of the moon that casualties began to skyrocket.
With the rendezvous coordinates for the rebel base camp taking them into the gloom, they had no choice but to fly straight into the firestorm. Sagging girders and dangling walkways kept emerging from the smoke as they flew among the skyscrapers. Silhouettes ranking from ghostly and pale to dark and solid were visible from the cockpit window, backlit by the glow of burning buildings and flaming shipwrecks. In the distance, a bombed-out skyscraper collapsed in on itself, bringing two of its neighbors down with it. Darrow didn't even want to think about how many people might have been killed in the building alone, let alone how many were crushed by the falling debris.
Suddenly, the cockpit exploded, and Darrow's back slammed against the wall, the bulkhead buckling under the force of the explosion. Trigg and Ephriam were flung backwards into the flight cabin. The Reaper quickly blinked the spots out of his vision as the glare of the explosion faded. The pilot was dead. The Sarissa missile had taken burst through the ceiling and taken off the top half of the Blue's body before punching through the floor. The wind shrieked, and in the flight cabin behind him, emergency masks fell into the laps of Rising soldiers. Warning sirens warbled as pressure rushed from the ship, whipping Darrow's hair as he retracted his demonHelm into his armor.
He could see the glow of the fires through the hole in the floor, and clouds of ash through the ceiling as smoke seeped into the shuttle. Everything human in Darrow was screaming, but this was not the time to panic. Grabbing the breath mask from the control console, he angled himself with the roll of the ship until he was able to fall into the empty co-pilot's chair. He landed awkwardly against the armrest but managed to drag himself into the seat and buckle in. You can do this, he reminded himself as he put his hands in the control gel. He'd learned how to pilot small craft like this at The Academy in case of emergencies like this. Hopefully he still remembered enough to land the ship safely.
More warning lights pulsed on the blood-drenched console. He spared a glance back into the cabin to see rebel troops bracing themselves for impact as the ship began its unexpected descent. His gut was vibrating, and his teeth clattered in his skull as the ship lurched downward. Thinking quickly, Darrow turned the ship to the left, in the direction the Sarissa missile had come from, hoping to spot the rooftop from which they'd been fired upon. Sure enough, he spotted an armored Golden knight in armor on the roof of a moderately sized skyscraper reloading his rocket launcher for a second attack. The Reaper manipulated his hands in the control prism and angled the ship so that it was bearing down on the unlucky bastard who'd had the guts to shoot down an enemy craft.
As soon as the Gold saw the ship heading their way, they turned around and started running towards the access door. But it was too late. There was a muffled crunch as the enemy gunner was crushed beneath the bulk of the tower as it skidded along the rooftop. Darrow engaged his helmet and felt the gel-like crash webbing tighten around his body as the nose of the shuttle ground to a halt just past the opposite edge of the building. A third of the assault ship dangled over open air, kept in place by the combined weight of the troops in the back half of the ship. Darrow quickly cut the engines and routed the ship's external cameras to his datapad.
"Everyone move to the back half of the ship!" he ordered as he disconnected the safety harness and carefully stood up from the co-pilot's seat. Moving slowly so as not to upset the ship's precarious balance, he made his way toward the back of the ship and only stopped to let out his breath once he'd made it safely back to the flight cabin. Sevro met him at the door to the cockpit, already chewing a piece of gum as he barked orders to their troops.
"Did we lose anyone else?" Darrow asked.
"Naw," Sevro commented. "A few broken ribs and shattered femurs but we'll live. Gonna have to leave the wounded here with a field medic till they can get proper medical attention." Darrow sighed in relief.
"At least it's not the worst-case scenario," the Reaper commented. Their shuttle was down a few kilometers from the rendezvous point, but thus far the only casualty was the pilot. As Darrow joined the Howlers and the rest of the strike team in the shuttle's cargo bay, an alert popped up on his datapad that the ship's external sensors had detected movement. He pulled up the display to find a squad of Praetorians in clad in their recognizable black and purple armor advancing on the shuttle with weapons primed. Darrow nodded to Sevro and turned to brief their troops.
It took them ten minutes to eliminate the Praetorian squad. With the rooftop clear, Darrow kicked open the stairwell door leading down into the building and lead his soldiers inside. Infrared vision in their demonHelms alerted them to the presence of additional Praetorians guarding one of the doors into the main building ten floors below them. So this isn't just another staging post for the Society, Darrow thought to himself as he convened Sevro and Trigg to discuss how to proceed.
A minute later, he leaped over the railing and let his gravBoots close the distance like a cheetah. He brought himself up short and decapitated the enemy troops before they could even react to his presence. With the coast clear, the rebel force followed down the stairwell. Once the group was together, he lead them single file out of the stairwell and into the hallway. The floor consisted of one long hall that encircled what appeared to be a large conference room. After taking one last moment to check their gear, Darrow forced the doors open, and the rebels charged forward to find themselves inside the enemy's command center.
A majority of the room was occupied by a handful of frantic, bedraggled midColors. lowColors milled about on the opposite end of the room stood Moira au Grimmus, ArchLegate Lucius au Sejanus, and two Peerless knights. The Storm Knight stood to the left of the Fury, while at the side of the ArchLegate stood Venetia au Rein, the previous Morning Knight before Cassius. Everyone only had a few seconds to blink and process the other side's presence. Low and midColors scrambled to safety through other exits as the room gathered its breath, seams straining, and metaphorical lungs fit to burst, with exhalation only a moment a way. Then Darrow fired the first shot, the loyalist command center erupted into a vortex of chaos and explosions.
Moira rushed to impale Sevro from behind with her razor as he tried to move past a Reformer, who was engaged fighting the two Olympic Knights, to get at Sejanus. Darrow fired his pulseFist point-blank into her side just before she could reach the new Ares. The pulseShield in her armor absorbed the first few rounds, creating a rippling blue cocoon around her. She stumbled sideways, and if Darrow hadn't continued to fire, she would have had nothing more than a bruise by the following morning. But today, Darrow's middle finger was heavy on the trigger of his weapon. In addition to her service as an engineer of oppression and one of the brightest minds of Gold, she had tried to kill Sevro. Bad move.
Darrow kept firing until her shields buckled inward. Until she fell to one knee. Until she twitched and screamed as the molecules of her skin and organs began to superheat. Boiling blood came out of her eyes and nose. Armor and flesh fused together, and Darrow felt the rage rise in him. He was the Reaper who slew Karnus. Who Gold could not kill. For the last week, he had tried to show mercy towards the Golds he faced in battle. But these circumstances would not permit mercy or compassion towards his adversaries. The Furies and the Olympic Knights who'd pledged them their loyalty were too dangerous to be taken alive. The only option was to kill on sight.
Moira's pulseFist fired wildly as her fingers contracted from the heat, shooting into the ceiling on full automatic. The woman twitched sideways, sending a stream of death across the room. Some of her own allies explode as they run for shelter. Howlers, Sons of Ares, and other rebel troops scramble for cover until the pulseFist glows molten on Moira's left hand and the barrel overheated to melt inward with a corrupt fizzle. With that last gasp of rage, the wisest of the Sovereign's Furies now lay dead in a charred husk. Two down, one to go.
So two Furies are dead. Now that leaves the Ash Lord, Atalantia, and the Moon Lords. I know I wasn't planning on taking a hiatus for the rest of the summer, but with all the news coming out of comic con, I feel like I need to take a break for a few weeks, both to give myself a solid idea of what I want to do re: the existence of Adam in this fic. The main reason I decided to pair Shiro and Tactus together was twofold: 1) I wasn't really a big fan of any of the existing ships for Shiro in the Voltron fandom, and 2) I wanted to give Tactus a happy ending. I still feel in hindsight that I rushed it a bit but I felt it would have had a bit more sense than Shiro and Cassius. But the reveal of SDCC at comic con this past weekend that Shiro had a boyfriend back on Earth who he was almost engaged to has completely thrown my future plans out of wack.
So I'm going to ask my readers for some feedback. Which would you prefer (Keep in mind, and I'm spoiling a bit here, that I plan to send Tactus, Cassius, and Lysander back to the VLD time period with Shiro and Keith):
A) Shiro and Tactus stay together to the bitter end, have an arc in my third story that deals with Adam coming to terms with the fact that Shiro has moved on, and pair Adam up with Cassius.
Or
B) Shiro and Tactus break up amicably (seriously considering because I haven't managed to actually write any scenes where they're interacting together outside of battle-related stuff), Shiro gets back together with Adam, Tactus hooks up with Cassius.