Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

“Well, your kind can afford to round. Not you who does the dying.”

“Surprised to see you in the field, Imperator Aquarii.” Harnassus wheels those slumped shoulders toward me. “Why is she here?”

“I’ll tell you in the briefing.”

“Right. Operational security. Well, their meteorologists will have caught that spike, Aquarii. Might be evil little brainwashed warlocks, but they ain’t fools like the two of you. Flying in the same shuttle. Shit. What if the Fear Knight got both of you?”

“Then your dreams would come true,” Orion says. “And you’d lead the army. My engines are along the volcanic range. Your…warlocks will think it’s hydrothermal vents. They’ll never suspect it could creep to fifty Celsius.”

“Then what the hell do you need this one for?”

“Total control,” Orion says.

“Total control?” Harnassus’s suspicions of being kept in the dark are confirmed. He glowers back at the engine. “Didn’t you two read the stories? Pandora doesn’t like it when you play with her box.”

Orion regards him with as much respect as Sevro would a particularly small turd. “Pandora was a fiction written by men to blame the miseries of the world on women. I am not a fiction. So, can we see the merchandise? Or do you want to stand here bickering semantics and freezing our dicks off as I pretend a hundred thousand of my sailors didn’t die for your political wet dreams?”

The two unmovable objects glare at each other.

“You two done?” I ask. “Yeah, you’re done. I want that machine in the air. Now.”

* * *

—

/>

The ice is the color of cold lips as the men and women of the famed Second swarm over the metal hull of an unearthed colossus. Imprisoned for centuries in the ice, the curvature of the machine’s top hull, nearly a kilometer in diameter, is warped and rife with fissures. Harnassus roves the perimeter of the dig site bellowing gearslang. He’s been in a state of agitation since Orion and her Blues entered the machine more than two hours ago.

The Master Maker Glirastes stands wrapped in the fur of a polar bear. Lean, bald, and as cruel looking as a vulture, the most famous artificer in the Society wrinkles his nose and sniffs a line of demon dust from a dispenser. Orange like Harnassus, he is of an entirely different class. One that rubbed shoulders with Gold autarchs and sculpted libraries and arcane devices for their pleasure from Mercury to Luna. He is not of the Rising, though his cooperation was vital for my Rain on the planet.

“You’ve worked a miracle,” I say to him.

“A miracle he says.” The Master Maker snorts in derision and to claim the last of the narcotics from the right nostril of his hooked nose. “When you took this planet, you said in one year’s time I would weep in joy at the fruits a single year of liberty would bring. Peer upon this visage, young warlord, is it one in thrall to joy?”

“Year’s not up yet,” I say.

“These machines are of a primordial power not in concert with human affairs,” he says, turning to me with that withering, pinched gaze. “Considering my labors, I trust your promise holds.” Before my legions took the planet, I made a promise to Glirastes to avoid bombardment of population centers. Because of that promise, hundreds of thousands of my men died in our Rain, but millions of civilians were kept from the crossfire. That I honored the promise despite its dire cost is the only reason he trusts me enough to help restart the arcane tech within the engines. That and his fear of what Atalantia will do to collaborators, especially ones as famous as Glirastes the Master Maker of Mercury.

The promise I made him then has extended to the Storm Gods.

“It holds,” I say. “We won’t exceed primary horizon.”

“I will not be party to genocide. You know what will happen if…”

“Believe it or not, Mercury is as valuable to my cause as its people are to your sterling heart.” He senses my sarcasm and scowls.

“Gods know why Octavia kept these infernal beasts enchained,” he says, turning back to the engine with a gaze that is equal parts adoration, envy, and fear. “Even the Votum did not know what lay beneath the surface of their planet. Even I did not know.”

I hope that means Atalantia does not know.

“Why does a Gold do anything?” I ask him. “For control.”

The Storm Gods are leftover weather-shapers from the terraforming of the planet. They worked in lockstep with the Lovelock engines to make Mercury habitable. It took my wife four years and the labor of two hundred Greens to crack Octavia’s Crescent Vault in the Citadel. The secret treasures we found inside were worth a fleet of starships. I’m betting ten million lives that Octavia was too paranoid to let anyone but blood in on her family secrets.

Glirastes stares at the Storm God as if waiting for its colossal mass to whisper a secret to him, then he crosses his arms and recedes into the depths of his mental labyrinth. The Maker is a temperamental genius, but he cares about the people of this planet. Thank the Vale for that.

At the wail of a siren, the Blacksmiths begin evacuation of the pit via gravLifts. Above, the last of the clawDrills drift through the air, ferried by heavy-duty cargo haulers bound south, to be stored at our supply depot in Heliopolis. Orion and her Blues are the last to depart the engine. The engineers watch territorially as they float back to me on a gravSled. Glirastes sips the coffee his slave brings.