Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

“Going to let the airheads take your glory?” I ask.

He scoffs and hoists himself up another meter. By the time we make it to the top, a shuttle has sped ahead of the rest. They race us to hover over the hatch of a nearby obelisk. Screwface makes it to the top first. Me a second later, fingers aching like hell.

Screwface beats his chest and howls just before the shuttle makes it to the top of the closest obelisk. Through the viewport, I catch sight of Char giving us the crux.

“Infantry!” Screwface bellows. The men on the shore echo the call and join his howl. He slaps at me to do the same. I turn my attention to the hatch. It is painted with the Republic star.

Soon the deserted patch of coast swarms with engineers. Heavy hauler shuttles drag the obelisks to shore after the bomb squad inspection. I wait with Screwface and hundreds of perimeter guards and dockworkers as they open the first obelisk. It parts down the middle, revealing a superstructure of pods. They crack the first one open. It is filled with thousands of duroglass cylinders

.

I stumble forward and fall to my knees before a mound of the cylinders. Each is stamped with a silver winged heel. Each is filled with enough radiation meds to last a man a month, and there are thousands of pods, thirty-eight obelisks. Each cylinder will become a life saved from radiation. I run my fingers over them in a state of grace. Screwface collapses to his haunches beside me; he opens a pod and finds it filled with food, medicine, and materiel. He falls backward onto the sand, rolling around until he looks like a sugar-covered pastry.

I sit in shade as the rest of the boxes are unpacked and ferried back to Heliopolis. Inside one of the obelisks, they found a message for me. I rub the datadrop between my fingers, and activate it.

“?’Lo, husband,” my wife says with a gentle smile. I pause it. Her face floats in my palms. I hold it there for a minute, cherishing the words on her lips, the absence of any other thought but me on her mind. The wind makes the palm fronds overhead swish like the skirts of Red girls at Laureltide.

Reluctantly, I resume the message, and the strain of the worlds floods my wife’s face. I see the weight and worry behind the eyes—for our son, for me, for her Republic. Her battle may be different from mine, but it is battle all the same, and she is tired.

“I must be brief. These pods were launched with the new guns. It wasn’t the intended method of delivery, but efforts to send ships have…stalled. There are games afoot on Hyperion and beyond. Victra has quit Luna for Mars. Sevro has been chewing his way through the Syndicate here, and meddling with my own designs, as per custom. Sefi has disappeared, with machinations for the mines of Cimmeria. Though I no longer believe she is the Queen of the Syndicate, she has the children. I believe Pax is safe in her custody and will be ransomed back to Victra for her aid in Sefi’s acquisition of the mines.”

Relief floods through me. Despite the bedlam of Luna, my boy might have escaped it. He is not with enemies. Pax will be safe. Valdir would die before he let Sefi touch a hair on his head.

“An unseen hand moves the pieces, a clever one by any measure—Atalantia? Atlas? I presume so. My theories are attached. I believe I am beginning to divine the pattern, and soon I will make my move. I have included my files in case they aid your situation. Also included are the intelligence reports of the System’s current standing. They will be two weeks old, so use them wisely.

“I believe your victory has given me the momentum to swing the Senate. Five days from the time this message was recorded, we will have voted and the fleet will either be under way when you receive this or it will not. But no matter what the Senate decides, at midnight on the first of May, I will come to Mercury. If fortune favors, it will be as a Sovereign. If not, it will be as a wife.”

She pauses. Her voice softens, and she becomes my wife again.

“I know you are weary. I know you think Mercury will be your grave. That the Republic has abandoned you, and that the weight of what you have done threatens to eat a hole in you. But for me, for your son, I beg you not to despair. Our crusade was not founded on the success of our arms but in the righteousness of our cause, and our belief in our fellow man. So believe in your men. Believe in our Republic.” She smiles self-consciously. “Believe in me and in yourself.

“You know I believe we all begin equal parts light and dark. I fear you think your strength lies in your darkness. But the measure of a man is not the fear he sows in his enemies. It is the hope he gives his friends. I could no more ask Pax to stop tinkering with my datapad than I could ask you to change who you are. I know that. I only ask that you remember what you mean to me, to your people, to your son. You have not been abandoned. I will come for you. Sevro will come for you. The Republic will come for you. Until then: endure, my love. Endure.”

* * *

—

“Do you remember that spring on Earth in Pacifica?” I ask Thraxa as she walks me down the hall to the warroom. The high command has decided on a reply to Atalantia’s offer. “Daxo taught my son to build castles in the sand. Pax cried when the waves came in. Your brother sat him on his knee and told him that’s all life is. Moments you build only to see washed away. But that doesn’t mean it’s all for nothing.” I stop at the door and tap my temple like Daxo tapped Pax’s. “The key is having a long memory for the sweet, and a short one for the bitter. I will miss your brother, Thraxa. But he isn’t gone.”

She nods but does not smile. “You might be the only person from whom that sentiment doesn’t sound cheap. But if they killed Niobe or Kavax, I will personally drown Luna in blood.”

She opens the door and goes in.

Harnassus sits at the head of the warroom table in my chair. The rest of the high command fill either side of the table. I stand before them. “Right then, what’s what?”

“Darrow, I apologize that it took us so long to come to a decision,” Harnassus says. “But given its gravity, we wanted to give it due respect.” He turns his attention to the officers. “You all know I am a proud member of the Vox Populi and even prouder to have called Dancer O’Faran my friend. In his name, First Citizen Publius cu Caraval and the Senate have ordered me to seize command of the army, arrest Darrow as an enemy of the people, and surrender to the enemy, using the terms Atalantia and our Senate have agreed upon.” The officers sit without expression. “In reflection of this body’s consensus, I have sent a reply to Atalantia regarding her terms of surrender: ‘Bloodydamn.’?”

“Bloodydamn?” I ask. They begin to smile

A sucking sound comes from the heart of the sky. I rush to the terrace as several panes of the shield chain protecting the peninsula and the city disappear. A half breath later, the world is swallowed in light. There is a great roar. I’m blind for half a minute. When my vision returns, the afterimage ghosts of particle beams throb, and the distant guns on the mountains over the city glow like embers. In orbit, one of Atalantia’s dreadnoughts burns.

Her retaliation falls just as the shields go back up.

I walk back inside as the room vibrates with manmade thunder.

“Bloodydamn, and a full barrage from our particle cannons.” Harnassus leans back and grins. “I believe it is a well-measured reply that leaves little ambiguity for her deviant brain to conjure.”

He turns his eyes to the officers and cracks his knuckles one by one. “It’s been a long war. I’ve seen things that I’ll never scour from my memory banks, but never have I seen such a travesty as that farce on Luna.” He leans forward, true menace in his voice. “My friends, our system of governance has been hijacked. Our heroes murdered. Our Sovereign taken captive.” His lips curl back from his teeth. “That will not stand with me. We are in an alien, inhospitable land. We must get home before there is no home left.”