Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

Wreathing its shoulders and stretching toward the heavens is a swirling marble cloak of clouds veined with lightning. Beneath that, little more than a fringe to that cloak, is the swirling sand. Many of the animals who sought shelter here gather in the grip of its gravity engines.

It breaks something inside me to see an instrument of creation perverted into a weapon. Whatever doubt I held vanishes. Darrow is no longer a good man. Even Atalantia declined to use her atomics on actual cities. But to kill us, Darrow will drown the northern coast of Helios. Tyche, Kaikos, Priapos, Arabos, will all be in the path of tidal waves.

Millions will die.

I do not know if it can be stopped, but he must be.

“This feels like a dream,” Seraphina whispers. This war is proving to be all she ever wanted. Cicero eyes the woman with interest and calls something to her.

I can barely hear him for the wind. Our instruments are dazzled with false readings. I fear we will not be able to reach Ajax even in the morning. Which is why he is scheduled to come with pickup at 0600, if we manage to down the engine.

I find Kalindora at my side. Unlike Seraphina, she is not in thrall to the Storm God. Sorrow fills her eyes as she looks up and up. She has seen horror many times before. This is merely its bleakest evolution. “Your thermal runway,” I say.

She turns with a grim expression and pulls Rhone to her.

“Prepare to engage in six columns! Double heavy fronts. Prep three wedges for a flank charge!” She summons Cicero. Robbed of our orbital support, we will have to do this the old-fashioned way.

I check my ammunition just as there’s a flash from the Storm God. Cicero ducks with me. At the great distance, I cannot distinguish what it is. Before I can pull up my optics, Seraphina tilts her head back at me.

“Gahja, don’t be such a—”

And then the entire top half of her starShell disappears as a rail slug the size of a man rips Romulus’s daughter clean in half. My commands stick in the base of my throat as the legs of the mech teeter and collapse sideways, spilling her intestines out the top.

“Incoming!” Kalindora bellows.

THERE IS NO PLACE in all worlds like Tyche.

Set on an incline between the mountains and the sea on a great strip of lowland connecting it to the Talarian Peninsula, it is the ancestral home of the gens Votum. Though the city is famed for its white sands and coral reefs, there is a reason the Votum family crest is a hammer. They are builders. And they built this city not for greed, but for beauty and symmetry. Her old quarter is carved entirely of local stone and glass. Libraries the size of starships but shaped like bizarre human heads line the mountains behind the city. High, arching bridges link complex systems of archipelagos, some of which migrate into the northern sea in the late summer. Forests and gardens burst from rooftops and flowering plants creep down the narrow, cobbled streets, which then wind in spirals up her twelve great hills.

I remember the Liberation Day, nearly half a year ago now, when I woke in the early morning before the parade and walked alone down to the shore to listen to the gulls. I only wished my wife and son could have been with me to see that sunrise. For once, I did not glare at the sea and wonder how many of my men it claimed. I did not resent the world because it was made by slaves. I saw only a multitude of splendors. I think that’s what Sevro called it. On that day, Tyche was the second most beautiful city I had ever seen. I wanted to share it with Pax and Virginia.

Now I am in time to see the city die.

As we pushed through the reeling legions, the storm mutated from friend to wild, convulsing savage. Lunging in from the sea, giant waves crash over the north coast of Helios. As we neared Tyche, a wall of water nearly a half kilometer high forced us to run to higher ground lest it smash us as it does the Gold landing parties on the shore.

Boats float in the center of fields. A shark snaps for air in a tree. Our starShells can no longer attempt the sky. Trees, rocks, and signposts flung at hundreds of kilometers an hour damage our suits, killing two of my precious Obsidian pathfinders.

This is not the storm I was promised.

Orion has either disobeyed me or lost control.

Now, with dread in my belly, I rise unsteadily through the howling wind to the crest of a hill where the Arcosian Knights look down at a city drowning.

From Tyche’s southern wharf to the northern business district, a third of the city is underwater. The storm surge from the hypercane spreads east and shows no signs of stopping short of the mountains. Within hours, the entire city will be gone, with only the tallest towers peeking above the sea. The western reach of the city, where the lowlands connect with the Talarian Peninsula, is aflame and shattered by siege. Twisted wrecks of tanks and Drachenjägers litter the ground between huge breaches in the defensive wall where Feranis’s legion made its doomed last stand against an army thirty times its size—though only a small part was used to besiege the city. The rest assembles deeper inland on the peninsula highgrounds. Huge, shadowy forms descend in the storm, their eldritch contours suggested by spasms of lightning. Not the gilded might of the Venusian Carthii—which we smashed—but the Ash Legions of Luna and Earth. The heart of Atalantia’s loyalist army.

Her forward legions, which took the city, now choke on their victory. A sizable portion of their force has penetrated deep into the city, pressing for the mountains, but they are cut off from the main host. Thousands clog the waterlogged lowlands that connect Tyche to the Talarian Peninsula. The spiderTanks and titans that broke the walls sink in the mire. Men pile onto hovercraft and into any airship that dares take flight.

They stand no chance.

As I watch, the sea ripples like a single organism, and from the gray obscurity of the storm comes a wave that would make a Europan stop and stare. The tidal wave is a kilometer tall. It buckles the first twenty blocks of the city’s oceanfront and sweeps uphill toward the mountains, to be stopped only by elevation just short of the Harper’s Plaza. The greater body of the wave carries on toward the Ash Legions in the lowlands. A row of Gold knights in black armor stands on the peninsula’s rocky heights to watch the legions below be swallowed by the sea.

A hundred thousand men gone in a moment. I should rejoice.

But soon Tyche’s population will follow. How many millions down there? How many millions along the coast? This will not be isolated mayhem. A chain of tidal waves will devastate northern Helios. My promise to Glirastes was broken, but not on my orders.

I pull out the master switch I built in case it all went wrong. Turning it on is like killing part of myself. I never thought this moment could come. The moment where Orion failed me.

She has no intention of leashing the storm. It was to be my lever. She uses it as a hammer, not to punish just Gold, but the planet she hates. With seas churned to madness by the storm generators, a coastline is murdered.