Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

There’s little point to either anymore.

Under its conjoined domes, an army has assembled. Instead of armor, these soldiers wear high-collared suits, lion pins instead of phalera of valor, and carry datapads instead of rifles. The politicos of the Optimate Party are ready for war. As is Daxo’s floating office.

Inflatable beds fill hallways and offices in anticipation of the seventy-two-hour blitz before the vote. Coffee carts trundle. Medici prepare their stim stations. Commissaries check their food stores. Dozens of senators join us in hologram conference from their homes in Hyperion and offices in the Citadel.

The politicos assemble along the dome’s tiered rows of data stations that encircle the gravity shaft down to Daxo’s office.

The politicos applaud as I enter, hailing my speech and chanting for Mars in honor

of their fellow Martians, which comprise most of the Free Legions.

They know the vote will be momentous. Not just because of its material consequences, but because it represents a tectonic shift in our politics. Years ago, I predicted the natural evolution away from Color tribalism to planetary nationalism. Now it is here and people are shocked, as though interest groups carve themselves out of the ether.

We stand to lose moderate Lunese, who fear invasion. Dancer stands to lose most Martians, possibly all Reds—who often vote against me, but have rediscovered their zealotry for my husband after his victory. As for Earth—it’ll be up for grabs. But after all the shifting and shaking, the vote will come down to Copper and Obsidian—who have declared solidarity and plan to vote as blocs. Win one, it’s a knife fight. Win both, it’s victory. Lose any of our foundation—Silver, Gray, White—and it’s bedlam. The problem is, I know Sefi is not in her estate on Earth or on Luna. She smuggled herself to Mars weeks ago to link up with elements already there in Olympia. Bit by bit, she smuggles more Obsidian, and prepares her plans. Whole legions have gone missing. She thinks I don’t notice. But how will her senators vote, considering those plans? I haven’t the faintest clue.

I ask Flagilus, one of Daxo’s premier Pink apprentices, where his master is hiding.

“In a meeting with Senator Caraval.”

“A meeting? In his office?”

Flagilus’s cadre of politicos chuckle to one another. “Much to our dismay as well. It seems Senator Caraval has more testicular fortitude than his side part would suggest. Senator Telemanus asked for you to do the honors and to join him after.”

I feel a minor pang of disappointment. Only Daxo loves this weird game as much as I do. I was not as close with him as a child. In fact, I found his intelligence entirely too much like that of a shark—restless and indefatigably predatory. But it was not Pax or Kavax or their sisters who pumped the water from my lungs when I struck my head on a coral reef as a girl.

He saved my life then, a deed that would soon become a habit. How many days did we sit together composing ridiculous game theories and mock debates after I broke my leg in a fall from my father’s prized sunblood?

Without Daxo, this is a lonely endeavor. “They can wait,” Holiday says. She’s been watching me.

“That obvious?” I ask.

“I never drink tequila without Trigg,” she says. “You and the brain have been planning this for weeks. It can wait five minutes.”

It’s just the excuse I was looking for. I flash her a smile. “Careful of the politicos. They’re carnivorous.”

“Atlas already tried that. I’m inedible.”

“That I do not doubt.”

I jump down the shaft and free-fall two hundred meters until the gravity well slows my descent. My feet touch down in the center of an aquarium. Walls of water stand a hundred meters high, held back from the central axis of the office by a stasis field. Smaller bubbles of water, restricted by secondary fields, wander through the office ferrying carnivorous passengers to and fro.

It is a game, you see. The trick for Daxo is never to let one of his seventeen infant gigavok—cartilaginous pale deepsea predators—exist within a sphere or wall of water with another. The species has stunted pituitary glands that limit their size to one meter unless their glands are stimulated via cannibalism. In six years there have been no fatalities within Daxo’s office, except the unfortunate case of the Peerless Venusian assassin who thought Daxo was sleeping. Seven gigavok shared her for lunch. It was the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my life. Victra clouted Sevro bloody when she caught him showing it to their daughter Electra late at night up in Lake Silene.

My sister-in-law, for lack of a more accurate word, has a theory that is not altogether mad. “If Dictaeon Antron is actually supposed to be a brain, pray tell what is the purpose of giant albino swimmers? They’re sperm, Virginia. Giant predatory cannibal sperm, and not even five people have the nerve to say so. Daxo is playing a joke on the world, just to measure who isn’t afraid of him. I love that freak.”

And I miss that woman, despite her irascible idiocy. She might be the only human alive who can make me lose my temper with a single sigh about how coffee just tasted better when it was picked by slaves.

I follow the sound of Daxo’s voice through an amorphous corridor of water. A gigavok stalks me from a water bubble above. I try to ignore the metaphor.

I find Daxo reclining on a fainting couch set on a Turkish rug with the insouciant entitlement of a vacationing heiress, albeit a colossal, bald heiress who is equally at ease coaxing a political concession from a rival as he is smashing Venusian skulls with his personal collection of exotic weaponry.

Sitting across from Daxo in a simple, off-the-rack suit, legs folded, hair parted, unremarkable face passive, is Publius cu Caraval, The Incorruptible, Tribune of the Copper bloc, the media’s Voice of Reason, and the most important vote in the Republic.

What a catch. How in Jove’s name did Daxo manage to part him from his soup kitchen?

“Come, come, Publius,” Daxo purrs, making a small hand gesture to acknowledge my presence. “You know how the game works. Concessions are as detestable, natural, and necessary in politics as flatulence in humans.”

“Daxo, please. We both know when it comes to battles of rhetoric, you have me unarmed. I’ve told you once, I’ll tell you again, I cannot in good conscience vote to expand the Sovereign’s powers when she continues to let Quicksilver run roughshod over this government and its people.” His voice has a surprisingly alluring quality. He’s already a fine orator. If he weren’t so Pecksniffian, and added a little bombast to make up for his lack of presence, he would be nearly as good as me.