All the descriptions of Io and the Moon Lords are quoted from Morning Star. Same goes for Vela's dialogue.
Guest: He knows, the story just hasn't shown the times he thinks about it. I am planning to address how he reacted to that in a later chapter.
Chapter 31: Here Again:
Samuel Holt Interplanetary Spaceport
Kerberos
March 31st, 2841
Despite the trauma that had come after his first trip, Shiro felt nostalgic as he found himself leaving Kerberos for the third time in what, to him, was a little over a year and a half. When they had stowed away aboard the 11th Fleet supply ships, he hadn't had the chance to stop and look at how much the moon had changed since he'd been there last. What was once a barren, lifeless hunk of frozen rock at the outer edge of the solar system was now a bustling port. And with the coalition now making contact, the moon was poised to become a major gateway between the solar system and the universe at large.
Negotiations between the Solar Republic and the Voltron Coalition were still in progress, but things had been going well so far. After six days of negotiations, the two factions were starting to hash out the beginnings of an official treaty. In the early days of the negotiations, Shiro and Keith had served as liaisons between the Coalition and the nascent republic. Once things had settled down enough that the senate was willing to trust that the Coalition was on their side, Shiro and Keith had returned to the Kuiper belt to bring the Classis Plutus to bear on the rest of the war.
Under the leadership of Allura's second-in-command, Romelle, Coalition mechanics had begun rendezvousing with Rising-aligned warships and working to upgrade their engines with the same mix of Altean and Galra technology that had been put in use in the construction of the 11th Fleet. Depending on the size of each ship, the work took anywhere between several hours and a few days. The slight delay had been worth it, however, as he observed tactical reports in his demonHelm's HUD display showing the Norvo fleet reaching Triton in a fraction of the time it would have taken to reach Neptune's orbit from Jupiter's.
The war effort on the Rim had been progressing well in his absence. Under the leadership of Sevro's aunt, ten of Neptune's fourteen moons were now under the Rising's control. House Norvo's ships were decimating the Loyalist defenses on the remaining four, freeing up the warships captured from enemy Golds to advance inward to the moons of Uranus and Saturn. Romelle's mechanic teams were modifying those ships at that very moment, working to drastically shrink the fleet's travel time toward the inner Gas Giants. To compensate for the reduced travel time, Tactus had spent the last week taking small squadrons of the Classis Plutus on guerilla missions to strike at key targets throughout the solar system, and to ferry Coalition allies to rebel ships.
With humanity's outer defense fleet reduced in size for the time being, Romelle and the Coalition fleet had taken up the slack. While none of the enemies any of them were familiar with were still around, the two Paladins had looked over the Shirogane's log and seen the reports of attempted incursions by alien ships that had been repelled or destroyed by the 11th Fleet Garrison. While the alliance between the Coalition and the Rising would open the door for humankind to join the intergalactic community, there would also always be forces in the universe that wished to do them harm. The Galra Empire might be gone by this point in time, but he wasn't naïve enough to believe that new threats wouldn't eventually rise in its place.
There hadn't been a need for him to land on Kerberos before catching a shuttle up to the 11th Fleet ships in orbit. It had mainly been nostalgia on his part. Going to Kerberos had been his dream for so long. To stand at the edge of the solar system. Travel farther than any human had ever come before. But then the empire had arrived and swept it all away. He'd travelled beyond Earth's solar system, and the price had been a year of horror and experiments. The Arena. Haggar's lab. Sometimes he wondered if the nightmares were worth the cost. But then he reminded himself of all the good he'd been able to do since then. Both as a Paladin of Voltron and as a leader for the Rising. If he hadn't gone to Kerberos, Earth would have been conquered by the Galra long before the rise of the Color Hierarhcy. If he hadn't been thrown forward into the future, Quinn, Tactus, and so many others would be dead.
After their return from Luna, Shiro and Keith had spent a few hours on the surface of Kerberos before they received a transmission from Romulus au Raa, the ArchGovernor of Io. The children of the Moon Lords kept in the Sovereign's court on Luna as hostages had been returned to them, alongside the children he and the others had rescued from the massacre at the Triumph two weeks ago. Each had brought to their families a request from the Rising to negotiate with the Solar Republic. The hope was that their gratitude for the rescue of their loved ones might sway at least some of the major Golden houses of the gas giants to join the Reformer cause and throw their lot in with the Rising.
Unfortunately, those negotiations were not faring so well. Even with the rescue of their families from the Jackal's massacre on Mars, most of the Moon Lords were indifferent to the cause of the Rising. Their primary concern was their renewed attempt at independence from the Core. The Jovian Golds were a cold, proud, insular people. Roughly eight thousand Peerless Scarred called the Jupiter's Galilean Moons their home. Their Institutes were all out here. It was only politics, Society service, or vacations for the wealthiest among them that took them to the Core. Earth and Luna might be the ancestral home of their people, but it was alien to most of them. Metropolitan Ganymede was the center of their world.
Octavia had known the danger of having a Rim independent from the Core. When Darrow had met her at the Summit back on Luna, she had spoken to him of the difficulty of imposing her power across a billion kilometers of empire. Her truefear had never been Augustus and Bellona destroying one another, but rather the chance that the Rim would rebel and cut the Society in half. Sixty years ago, at the beginning of her reign, she had ordered the Ash Lord to destroy Saturn's moon, Rhea, when its ruler refused to accept her authority. That example had held for the last six decades. But now, with Octavia dead and the solar system in chaos, the Moon Lords were growing restless. Several were rallying around Romulus au Raa as a leader of the Rim and urging him to declare war on the Core forces stationed beyond the asteroid belt.
An hour later, Shiro, Keith, Tactus, and Wulfgar stood on the surface of Io, the famed Yellow Sea rolling in around their boots. Great dunes of sulfur-laced sand with razorback ridges of silicate rock stretched as far as the eye could see. The marbled surface of Jupiter undulated in the steel blue sky. At one hundred and thirty times the diameter that Luna appeared from the surface of Earth, Jupiter seemed like the vast and evil head of a marble god in comparison. But Shiro wasn't here for sightseeing. War gripped the planet's sixty-seven moons. Cities hunkered under pulseShields and the blackened husks of men in starShells littered moons while fighter squardons dueled and hunted troop and supply transports among the gas giant's faint ice rings.
After the surviving members of the Arcos family conquered Europa, nine moons fell to the Rising. Spurred to action by Darrow's speeches and Sons of Ares broadcasts, dock workers on Ganymede had stolen hundreds of ships, including the new moonBreaker that the late ArchGovernor Augustus had attempted to steal three months ago. The Obsidians who lead the hijacking had christened the ship Morning Star.
Io was a strange moon. Innermost and smallest of the four Galilean moons, she was a belt-notch larger than Luna. It had never been Io's destiny to be fully terraformed by the Golds' machins. As the driest object in the solar system, rife with explosive volcanism, sulfur deposts, and interior tidal heating, it was a hell Dante would've been proud of. The moon's surface was a canvas of yellow and orange plains broken by huge thrust faults from the shifting surface, dramatic sheer cliffs rising from the surlfur dunes to scrape the sky.
Huge stains of concentric green freckled the equatorial regions. Having found 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 cosmosHaulters, thickened the planet's atmosphere to filter Jupiter's massive radiation, and used the planet's interior tidal heating to power the generators needed to grow foodstuffs for the entire Jupiter orbit, as well as for exportation to the Core and, more importantly, the Rim. Io was a farm deck with the biggest breadbasket between Mars and Uranus with easy gravity and cheap land.
No surprise that the slaves did all the labor.
Beyond the pulseFields lay the sulfur sea, stretching from pole to pole with only volcanoes and magma lacks to interrupt it. Shiro was just glad that he wasn't wearing black today. Outside the protection of the pulseFields, the temperature was 120 degrees Celsius. Instead of his black and gold Augustan armor, or his Voltron-colored pulseArmor, he and Keith wore all-white suits of Altean make that Romelle had provided for them when she heard about the conditions on Io's surface. They were much more lightweight than the bulky armor Shiro had been wearing in battle for the last few months, and just as durable. Tactus and Romelle had spent the week that Allura and the two Paladins were on Luna testing the efficacy of Society weapons against the types of armor worn by the Voltron Coalition, and were satisfied with the results.
Three warships emerged from the heat mirage on the horizon. Two black sarpedon-class fighters painted with the four-headed white dragon of House Araa escort a fan tan priam-class shuttle. The ship landed before the rebels, dust swirling as the ramp unfurled from the craft's belly. Seven lithe forms walked down into the sand, each taller and lankier than even the Reaper. All of them were Golds, wearing Carver-made organic breathing masks called krill over their noses and mouths. The masks looked like the shed skin of locusts, with the legs stretching from either ear. Their tan colored combat gear was evidently lighter than standard pulsArmor and complimented with brightly colored scarves.
Long-barrled railguns with personalized ivory stocks were strapped to each Gold's back. Razors hung from their hps and orange optics covered their eyes. On their feet were skippers, lightweight boots that used condensed air to move their user instead of gravity, skipping the wearer over the ground like stones across a lake. From what Shiro had read, you couldn't get much high in them, but you could move nearly sixty kilometers an hour. They were a quarter the weight of a standard pair of gravBoots, have enough battery life for a year, and were dead cold on thermal visions. These were assassins, not knights. Shiro narrowed his eyes at the different breed of danger.
A tall woman stared down her smashed-flat nose at the party. Her skin was pale, her body adapted for the low gravity. It was hard to see her face past the mask and goggles, but she seemed to be in her early fifteens. He voice was one even note.
"I am Legate Vela au Raa," she announced. "I send my brother's greetings and welcome, Takashi Shirogane of Earth."
"Well met, legatus," Shiro nodded cordially. There were few Reformers among the Moon Lords, but if he was going to convince the Raa to put aside the Hierarchy and support the Republic, he need to speak their language. "Will you be speaking for your brother? I'd hoped to negotiate with him in person." The skin to the side of Vela's goggles crinkled.
"No one speaks for my brother," she answered. "Not even I. He wishes for you to join him at his private home on the Wastes of Karrack."
"How do we know this isn't a trap?" Keith demanded.
"If you wish to present yourself to Moon Lords as a diplomatic party, then you must show respect for my brother. And trust the honor of his hospitality."
"I've seen plenty of men and women set aside honor when it's convenient," Shiro commented probingly.
"In the Core, perhaps," Vela replied. "This is the Rim. We remember the ancestors. We remember how Iron Golds should be. We do not murder guests like that bitch Octavia, or like that Jackal from Mars."
"Yet," Keith interjected.
"It is a choice you must make," the Legate commented with a shrug. "You have sixty seconds to decide."
We are now halfway through Omnis Vir Lupus.
And yes, the spaceport named for Pidge's dad is another subtle nugget of the VLD cast having an impact on the history of the solar system in ways they didn't expect.