Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

Orion hears me enter and looks back. Her face is mottled with the resFlesh that has replaced the chunks Atlas took out. New metal fingers extend from her knuckles. “Trouble?” she asks.

“Pushy relations.”

Without a smile, she turns back to watch the polar sky. Beyond the atmosphere of the planet, Atalantia’s warships rove, waiting for us to just nip our heads outside the great shield chains so they can drop mass drivers down and make craters of us.

“Cold back here,” I say over the whistling wind. Our ship passes over the edge of an ice shelf. “Why don’t you head to mess? Colloway says it’s bad to sync on an empty stomach.”

“I like the cold,” she replies distantly. “And my autonomy.”

“Fair enough.” I settle in beside her to dangle my legs. I didn’t lie to Harnassus and my high command. She did pass her first psych evaluation, but I have the suspicion Colloway helped her cheat. For five days after her rescue, she spoke only in brittle, pixelated sentences, preferring the company of her protégé, Colloway, to any other. Then she asked to return to duty. I thought it would bring her back to herself. It hasn’t. Her duties may be completed on schedule, but she remains the same as all who survive the Fear Knight…altered.

I squint at mathematical notations written in the frost on the ship’s hull.

“Reminds me of home when they would turn off the heating,” Orion murmurs. “They liked to find new reasons to do that. First calculus I learned was on hull-frost. Fingers so numb I could barely hold the stylus.”

“Calculus. Poor lass. I only needed algebra,” I say, trying to draw her out of her daze. I wish I could say it was solely for her benefit. “Do it in marker on the side of the clawDrill cockpit with one hand.” I make a motion of digging with the other. “Can’t stop the drill, you see. Stop too long and you’re jammed.”

“You would need calculus to properly operate a clawDrill apparatus,” she replies.

“Yeah, well, Pa said the rest is all instinct. Disagree, maybe you and I can have a duel back on Mars. There’ll be new bunkers that need excavating.”

She ignores the challenge and watches a herd of pale seahorses crossing an archipelago of ice. They shake their manes and angle their fins as their stunted legs launch them off the ice back into the water. “Fathers are important,” she says. “My kind think the notion perverse.” She goes to chew her fingernails only to bite the metal of her prosthetics. She looks at the digits as if seeing them for the first time. “Still, they call me Mother, don’t they?”

“That’s the civil half of the name.”

She shrugs. “Children are disgusting. I would never have them. I cannot abide selfishness.”

There is no way, Gold or Red, to understand the empathetic connection minds make in the synaptic drift. Orion’s communication with her pilots in battle is nonverbal. Instead it is formed of a web where the electric currents in her brain bond and interact with those of the others. To have one side cut short is the cruelest of amputations. The ghosts of the dead linger in her synapses.

I wonder if she thinks of the sailors she lost in the ambush. If she felt like a mother when she saw the Annihilo break the Dream of Eo in half. If it is selfishness she cannot stand in children or if it is the fear of losing them.

“The Senate recalled too many ships. Even if you saw Atalantia coming, she would have held the orbit. The Senate lost that battle, not you.”

Her head snaps in my direction. “Harnassus lost that battle when he didn’t spit on the Senate’s orders, and sent half my fleet to Luna. Your wife lost the battle, when she did not override the Senate.”

“She will not break the New Compact—”

“And you think that a quality? Her precious morality for the price of my sailors? Or is it fear of becoming her father?” She shakes her head. “Harnassus and Virginia bear the guilt. I feel none.”

“I do. Often. For the Sons on the Rim. For the Dockyards of Ganymede.”

“Then you squander neurons.”

Her hard shell has always existed. But not to this extreme. It is easy to forget Orion’s roots. From an unsanctioned birth, then childhood, in the dim frost of Phobos’s Hive city, destined to pilot garbage haulers and take a government stipend till death, to the commander of the most successful fleet since Silenius’s Iron Armada. Amongst my own people, I had a home. Orion was never accepted by hers, until she climbed over their backs to the top, and looked down to see them all pretending to have lifted her up. Of all the soldiers left in my army, I trust her the most, because she alone has never let me down. Any other astral commander, including me, would have lost the Morning Star, the surviving ships, and the army itself.

“Rail against my wife all you like, she’s what keeps the Republic together,” I reply. “And Harnassus kept this army together when I wasn’t here, and you were captured.”

“Harnassus. Please. Oranges are pedantic apes with opposable thumbs used for two ventures: to spin wrenches and climb union ladders. He did what is in his nature.” She runs her hands along her head as if feeling for cracks in the skull.

“And what is your nature?”

“The same as yours. To kill the enemy.” As her eyes go distant, her voice softens. “Can you think in space?”

“Depends on who you ask.”

“I can’t think on the ground. Too much weight. Too many disgusting people and their refuse.” She wipes her calculus off the hull. “I know you think Atlas broke me.”

“If I thought you were broken, you’d be in the sick bay. I think you’re dented.”