Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

Deanna heads to the door. “Deanna, stay,” I say.

“No,” she says gruffly. “Maybe I can one day forgive you for doin’ what needs doin’. But I can’t give you permission to abandon my boy.” She steps out. Holiday still has not weighed in.

“Virginia, there’s something else you need to know,” Niobe says. “The Rim has made a secret alliance with the Core.” It can’t get any worse. Fresh ships, fresh legions of enemies, thrown into the fray at the exact moment they could break our backs. “They are currently unaware we have this intel. We don’t know where they will strike, but we can assume it will be decisive.” She looks at her husband. “Mercury is in far orbit. I think they will hit us as we cross near the sun, when our sensors are distorted.”

“No,” Kavax says, disagreeing again. “They will hit Mars. Take out the Phobos Dockyards. Eye for an eye.”

“And that is why we should return to Mars,” Niobe says. “Kavax knows better the Rim, and I know better Atalantia. Mars cannot fall.”

“No one has suggested rescuing Sevro,” I say.

“We sent three teams in through the tunnel after we evacked you. We lost contact with them ten minutes later.” Niobe steps toward the bed. “Virginia, we have four operatives still in the building under Moonhall. They are Sevro’s best chance. But if we try to hammer our way in now—”

Massacre, and the clone kills my friends.

“We can’t stay here,” Niobe says. “The Vox fleet wants a fight. They’re still pursuing and we’re a million klicks away from Luna.”

“Surely Publius can be reasoned with,” Kavax says to me. “To do all this he might have used the mob, but he can be rational. If we fight his fleet, no matter who loses, Gold wins.”

It’s almost too much to bear. “What do you think, Holiday?” I ask.

Finally, she meets my eyes. “Retreat is the only option, ma’am. We must regroup on Mars.” If we go, that leaves Earth alone with the Vox, and the swelling Gold host. It will fall unless the clone sees it is in his interest to try to defend it with his Lunese fleet. But Mars can be defended, without help from Luna. Earth cannot.

“Then we go to Mars,” I say.

Though I promised my husband I would come for him, I cannot. It is a betrayal that will haunt me to the grave.

Kavax sags in exhaustion. He sees me notice and finally seems to see the scores of wounds the mob gave me on my exposed arms, neck, and legs. I had forgotten them. The tears gather in his eyes as he leans over the bed. “All hope is not lost,” he whispers to me. I fail to see how he can believe that. He kisses my forehead. “I sent a man to Mercury to bring Darrow home if Heliopolis falls.”

“Who?” I ask.

“The same man who told us the Rim was coming.”

GLIRASTES THE MASTER MAKER stands before his crudest creation.

The starboard hangar of the Morning Star no longer exists. Harnassus’s engineering corps have carved through the midsection of the ship to create enough room to house the Spirit of Faran, our fastest and youngest torchShip. The insides of the Faran have been almost entirely gutted to make room for the most powerful electromagnetic pulse weapon assembled in all the campaigns of the war. It is not a new device on the surface, but it is the nature of war to inspire evolution.

In his purple robes, Glirastes resembles an evil necromancer from one of Pax’s storybooks. His hands labor with some Byzantine contraption designed for his fourteen fingers. It measures arcane readouts, the meaning of which only my wife and Harnassus’s astrophysicists could ever hope to understand. Old researchers with large rheumy eyes check their own notations and murmur to one another, while the younger breed crouch in isolation, their cranial implants flickering as they attempt to keep pace with the Orange idol.

As the EMP finishes its eighteenth preliminary test, I survey the length of the device, its nest of wave-shaped coils, each three times as thick around as a man, its blue lights and vacuum tubes. A steady whoomph, whoomph comes from the oversized helium reactor at the aft of the ship.

The lights dim.

Glirastes clicks his tongue at his servant, who bends to scratch his inner calf. Mid-scratch, he screams at a welder for silence. The thickset Red spits tobacco juice into the can tied to his neck by a string, turns off his torch, and hangs from the ceiling on his line. The engineers and construction teams hold their collective breath, not so much in anticipation of the result, but for fear of the Maker’s monstrous temper.

Green integers dance across his face as his eyes dart through the report, punctuating it with murmurs of “interesting,” “perfidious instantaneous amplitude,” “shit shit i

ndecorous shit,” and more esoteric Mercurian profanities.

“Do we have a problem, Glirastes?” I ask. Glirastes sighs as if in prayer to give himself patience.

“Problem? You ask if we have a problem?” The folds of his neck twist red as he cranes his head to glare at me like a frazzled yet contemptuous owl. “Young man, you bamboozled me into helping you activate the Storm Gods under the pretense that you would use them only in a limited capacity, and instead turned a city I love into a coral reef. Any compassion I had for your cause has been drowned by the encroaching sea. Yet if I do not help you again, as you so eloquently and brutally elucidated when you browbeat me into helping you on this fool’s errand to rid you from my planet, the city of my birth will resemble little else in the known universe except the center of a G-type main-sequence star. The fact that I find catharsis in profanity while endeavoring to fit three years’ worth of research into three weeks of practical application does not reflect upon my enthusiasm for the work, which is little, nor the necessity, which is great. So, yes, we have a problem, but the particular nature of my frustration is isolated to a conundrum which you have neither the patience nor the temperament nor cognitive ability to understand.” He turns the data on its side, scrolls through it again. “Ah,” he says. “Never mind. I solved it.” He twirls his finger. “You, why did you stop welding? Get back to work! Must I do everything?”

Glirastes stalks out of the Spirit and heads for his makeshift office on the floor of the hangar. “You’re all bloody saints,” I say to the welders.

“Aww, sir!” one croons.

“Can I have a kiss?” asks another.