Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

Soon those fading hearts will join the ashes of New Thebes in their silence. They will join the mining townships made into necropolises by the Rat War, the lingering rubble the Block War left strewn west of Hyperion, and the irradiated stormland of the Helios. I fear that my subjects will return to their private concerns after this speech. It is always the same. The eyes wander away and vapid glitter again rules the feed.

“Brothers and sisters.” My voice nearly falters as I feel more than ever the absence of my husband’s hand on my shoulder. My son will not be wai

ting on my shuttle to critique my speech. “Brothers and sisters…there will dawn a day when these hostile hours, these days of hatred and violence, seem the faintest of memories, but dark and steep and long is the road up out of hell. So do not tire, do not despair, do not abandon your brethren, and do not forget that through this darkness we and we alone carry the light of freedom. We must defend it with every cell in our bodies. If not now, when? If not us, who?” I make my hand a fist and raise it in salute. “Hail libertas.”

In the back of the room, beyond the jaded circus, an old Red janitor forgets himself and bellows with all his tiny might: “Hail Reaper.” More join him. “Hail Reaper!” More and more until half the room shouts my husband’s invocation. But the rest stare in stony silence.

At that moment, three hundred eighty-four thousand kilometers from my heart, in orbit one thousand kilometers above the wayward continent of South Pacifica, a new battery of twin prototype railguns, named the Twins of South Pacifica for Earth’s favorite son and daughter, set their telescopic sights on a path of empty space ten days ahead of Mercury’s orbital path and fire at full power. Projectiles skinned with stealth polymer race into the void at 320,000 kilometers per hour, ferrying not death, but supplies, radiation medicine, machines of war, and, if my husband is alive, a message of hope.

You have not been abandoned. I will come for you.

Until then, endure, my love. Endure.

LUNA IS A DREAM, a noise, a blaze of light, a soup, a swagger, a mother, a vampire, an addiction, a beggar, a lament, a suburb of Hyperion, and a memory of the future we thought we wanted. A dozen fleets waver through the gutter puddles of her rain-soaked streets, only to be shattered by the calf-high boots worn by the children of four planets and thirty moons. They swarm to her to climb her jigsaw bedlam of human and metal ladders. They are geniuses, architects, idiots, swindlers, warlords, the lost, the found, the indifferent. And indifferently she waits, throbs, beats, swarms, suffocates, promises, and robs.

They call her the City of Light, but no one calls her home.

“What does Luna mean to you, Centurion?” I ask from inside my private office aboard Pride One as we descend. Holiday ti Nakamura was raised along the sunny shores of South Pacifica, where there was not a building taller than a grain silo for a hundred klicks. I have named her Dux of my Lionguard—the elite bodyguard unit drawn from my house legions. Of the one thousand Martians, she is the lone Terran. That not a single man questions her appointment is proof enough of her reputation. They call her Six, meaning she’s always got your back.

“Quicksand,” she replies in regards to the moon.

The reply mirrors the cold-rolled spirit of the woman. Of all my husband’s instruments, it is Nakamura I’ve envied the most. Reputation, but little ego. Flexible, but unbreakable. Brutal, but not cruel. Over these last weeks, she has led the investigation into my son’s abduction with grace. When their shuttle went down during Ephraim ti Horn’s failed rescue attempt, it was as if the moon had swallowed Pax and Electra. I fought every instinct to tear apart the city to find them, knowing a stampede of Republic Intelligence would disturb the breadcrumbs. Holiday was the scalpel I needed.

“And you, ma’am?” she asks, folding her datapad back into its arm sheath.

What does Luna mean to me? How to answer that. A thousand things.

“Renewal.” I catch her smirk in the window. Like Daxo, she doesn’t suffer hollow sentiments. “Maybe one day that’ll be true. My mother loved Luna, in fact. Before she decided throwing herself off a cliff and abandoning us was preferable to a single day more of matrimony with my father, she told me Luna was a place of magic. For it was the one place even Nero au Augustus had to bow. Of course, she meant he had to bow to Octavia. Reductive thinking, really.”

Holiday waits for me to explain. I treasure her more than she knows. Especially over these last days. The unspoken peril of power is the receipt of unending, exhaustive peacocking. Unlike most, Holiday is not waiting for her turn to flash her feathers. She listens because she’s heard enough noise to know that truth, if it ever appears, creeps in on quiet little feet.

I step closer to the window.

“There’s something here,” I say. “Something…else that gnawed at Octavia. You know that feeling, Centurion.” I look back at her. The diamond teeth of skyscrapers reflect in her eyes as we pass Quicksilver’s Zenith Spire. “This moon hungers.”

She makes a small sound of agreement as we pierce the cloud layer.

Beneath it, Hyperion seethes in existential mania. For fear of Gold ships over her skies, protesters fill the streets. Violence has broken out between Optimate and Vox street factions. Watchmen sirens bathe the sky in green and silver. Strikes have shut down the public trams and now only the aerial arteries flow.

“Have you ever heard of Silenius’s Stiletto?” I ask.

“After the Conquest of Earth, the powerful houses engaged in a land grab,” Holiday replies. “Silenius was faced with a dilemma. To his left, anarchy. To his right, tyranny. Instead, he found the narrow path between. Barely wide enough for the edge of a stiletto.”

“Well, well. Look who found time to read Meditations.”

“If Virginia au Augustus gives someone something to read and they do not read it, they don’t deserve the faculty, ma’am.”

I raise an eyebrow at her. “You talk to your husband with that Copper tongue?”

She grins. “Then they’re a fuckin’ idiot, ma’am.”

I smile. Raw compliments are the best kind. “Whatever you think of his politics, Silenius was wise. He knew patience is the heart of cunning. Theodora has discovered Senator Basilus has been taking bribes from Sun Industries. I am allowing him to retire to his home in Echo City next month. I will need a replacement for him before the year is out.”

She blinks when she understands my intent. “I don’t know if a toga would fit me, ma’am.”

“How many senators were Praetorian dragoons who can also quote Silenius’s Meditations? Not one, I’d say. Aside from Rhone ti Flavinius, you’re the most famous Gray alive. And Earth loves you.” I set a hand on the shorter woman’s shoulders. She’s really built like a pit bull, isn’t she? No neck. “We need symbols, Nakamura. The old ones are fraying with use. Tell me you’ll think on it.”

She nods dutifully but, like all true soldiers, doubts she’ll survive long enough to have to make the decision. As much as I value her at my six, I wish she were with my husband on Mercury. Sevro too for that matter. My husband needs a conscience on his shoulder. Thraxa and Orion aren’t exactly a pacifying influence. As for Harnassus, well, dogs and cats.