Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

I activate the Snowball’s autopilot and initiate its flight path. Back in the hangar, it will rumble over the paralyzed bodies of Gudkind and the two other skuggi.

The Valkyrie pick up speed, shoving the children between them. Dammit, this box is heavy. The Valkyrie’s helmet optics will spot me now despite the ghostCloak. I’m still forty meters out. There’s no trick that’ll work on them. No clever lie to interrupt their orders. All they’ll see is warped motion sprinting toward them.

Statues explode around me, throwing off the Valkyrie’s pulseRifles as the ghostCloak distorts their readouts of the debris. Two Valkyrie pop airborne. Oh shit shit shit shit shit. I jump as high as I can on the skipBoots, an ungainly ten meters. I hurl the neodymium box at them. They think it’s a bomb. They shoot it midair, melting the insulation and freeing the griffin-egg-sized magnet. It bowls straight into Braga on the ground, or at least I think it’s Braga in that armor. There’s a tug on my belt buckle as the magnet activates. The magnetism increases. Two airborne Obsidians dip. Their gravBoots’ thrust capability far exceeds the magnet’s force, but the metal components inside the boots’ gravity generators come apart under the shearing forces. The women fall pinwheeling out of the sky. The other Valkyrie lose their footing and weapons as they’re pulled toward the high-powered magnetic field in a knotted ball of twelve confused killing machines. Tiny explosions crackle around the ball of Obsidians as gas-powered munitions rupture.

I land hard on the ground, damaging my boots’ shocks, and spring one more time. The boots come apart midair from the magnetism as I land near Pax and Electra. I scream as something tears loose from inside my calf muscle and stretches my scarabSkin.

There’s a second pop in my chest, a hot needle of pain. I watch in horror as a small cylinder strains against the inside of my scarabSkin like a parasitic alien seeking the magnet. What is that? I take a wobbly step. The world is going sideways. Pax runs to me as the magnet loses power. He catches me as I fall. This is not going according to plan. The Obsidians are lurching like gout victims away from the magnet’s diminishing pull.

r /> Pax looks at something over my head and shouts at Electra. They tear off their jackets to reveal the harnesses he built for them in the garage. The harnesses are built according to the specs I gave him—simple but sturdy, secured through the legs and around the hips. A spool of fiberwire sits like a fishing reel at their belly buttons. They link the ends of the fiberwire together and inflate the helium sack at the junction. They rise fifty meters in the air, unspooling the fiberwire as they rush to separate themselves. There’s a roar overhead as the Snowball rumbles along its programmed course. Its catch-hook hangs from its belly and snags the joined fiberwire strands. The reels unspool. Pax runs over to me and hugs me like a koala as the fiberwire tightens and all three of us are pulled off our feet and carried after the Snowball as it climbs away from Eagle Rest.

It all goes woozy. Déjà vu as the mountains blur under my feet, and the Valkyrie set off in pursuit. Their boots will never catch the Snowball. I’m laughing and wheezing by the time the hook retracts us into the back of the ship. Pax disappears and Electra peels off my scarabSkin. RipWings will be in pursuit.

Electra grabs the medkit from the wall and I watch her face as she pulls a metal cutter from the wall and lowers it with narrow eyes toward my chest. What is she doing? I feel numb vibrations. Did she give me morphone?

Is that my sternum she’s cracking open?

Smoke sizzles up from my chest. She sprays a coagulant. The artificial gravity in the ship increases dramatically, sealing us to the floor as Pax puts us in a corkscrew. The ship vibrates as her twin railguns spew at something outside the hull. Time drips past as Electra works over me.

I stare at a bit of rust on the ceiling of the garage. I’ll have to scrub that out. The Snowball is far too pretty a ship to have rust. When I look back down, Electra is gone. It is dark out. How much time has passed? I’m still numb from the morphone.

I rise unsteadily to my feet and notice the long strip of resFlesh going down my sternum. It stretches when I move too fast. I’m glued together. That’ll hurt when the morphone wears off.

As I stagger through the halls of the Snowball to the cockpit, I remember the bodies falling over Agea. As I pass the small kitchen and dining nook, I see Volga and me bickering over Karachi as we sail between asteroid ports. I see her lying in her bunk listening to dreadful music. I see her ducking under the low doorways, whining about hitting her head. The Snowball hums around me, but it has no melody.

The little dream of our life on the lam erodes, leaving only a ship with nothing in it but the ghosts of what was never going to be.

I find the two Gold children in the cockpit. The Snowball flies dark, all her active instruments off, as she carves through a low fog layer. Only her passive sensors throb. The sea beneath is dark and choppy. They look back in shock from steaming cups of tea when I sit in the back row of the cockpit. “That was…”

“Lucky,” Pax says.

“Terrible! It was fucking terrible.” I groan and hold my chest. Feels like I’ve been kicked by a sunblood stallion.

Electra’s face gets even uglier as she wrinkles her brow. “How are you awake? I gave you enough morphone for an Obsidian.”

I thumb my chest woozily. “Addict. You didn’t even give me a blanket.”

“You weren’t hypothermic.” She pauses. “Were you awake that whole time?”

“You mean when you gleefully used a metal cutter on my sternum? Yes.”

“Fuck. Me.” She laughs. “That’s full metal.”

I moan at the dull ache building in my chest. “I might need a real hospital,” I say, probing the resFlesh. “What was…those? Were those.”

“Tracker in the calf,” Pax says, passing back a containment jar with two metal cylinders in it.

I look at my calf. Oh. It’s still weeping blood. “You forgot something.” I extend my leg to Electra.

“Juno’s cunt. I’m not your nursemaid. There’s a staple gun in the garage. Don’t be a Pixie about it.”

“You’re just a lovely person. What about this one?” I point to the small cylinder alongside the tracker.

“That, Tinman, was a heartspike on your aorta,” Pax says. “So they could turn off your heart with the flick of a finger.”

“Fuck. Me.”

“I think that was the general idea.”