Morning Star (Red Rising Saga 3)

—

The Hollows is a city of cages. Row upon row. Column upon column of rusty metal homes linked together in the null gravity as far as the eye can see here in the heart of Phobos. Each cage a life in miniature. Clothing floats on hooks. Little portable thermal press-grills sizzle with the foods of a hundred different regions of Mars. Paper pictures cling to iron cage walls by bits of tape, showing distant lakes, mountains, and families gathered together. Everything here is dull and gray. The metal of the cages. The limp clothing. Even the tired and wasted faces of the Oranges and Reds who are trapped here, thousands of kilometers from home. Sparks of color dance up from the datapads and holoVisor that glow through the city, bits of dream scattered on twisted scrap metal. Men and women sit penitent over their little displays, watching their little programs, forgetting where they are in favor of where they’d wish to be. Many have taped paper or blankets over the sides of their walls to give them some semblance of privacy from their neighbors. But it’s the scent and the sound you cannot escape. The throaty unceasing rattle of cage doors slamming shut. Locks clicking. Men laughing and coughing. Generators humming. Public holoCans yapping and barking the dog language of distraction. All stirred and boiled together to make a thick soup of noise and shadowy light.

Rollo once lived in negative south end of the city. Now it is deep Syndicate territory. The Sons were chased out more than two months ago. I fly along the lines of plastic rope that weave through the cage canyons, passing dockworkers and tower laborers who climb back to their little cage homes. They jerk their heads toward the throaty thrum of my new gravBoots. It’s an alien sound to them. One heard only over the holoVids or experiential virtual realities low world Greens hawk for fifty credits a minute. Most will never have seen a Peerless Scarred in the flesh. Much less one in full armor. I’m a terrifying spectacle.

It was seven hours ago that my lieutenants and I clustered together in the Sons of Ares ready room and I told them and Dancer back in Tinos my plan. Six hours since I learned of Kavax’s escape from our detention cell—someone let him out. Five hours since Victra delivered Quicksilver and Matteo back to their tower, where Quicksilver has spent the remainder of the night activating his own cells and contacts in the Blue Hives, making preparation for this moment. Four hours since Quicksilver joined his security teams with Sons of Ares and gave them access to his armories and his weapons depots, and we received word that two Augustus destroyers were inbound from the orbital docks. Three hours since Ragnar and Rollo took a thousand Sons of Ares to the garbage hangars on level 43C to prepare their skiffs. Two hours since one of Quicksilver’s private yachts was prepped for launch. One hour since the Society destroyers deployed four troop transports to dock at the Skyresh Interplanetary Spaceport and the new coat of blood-red paint on my armor dried and I donned it to march to war.

All is ready.

Now I carve a wake of silence into the heart of the Hollows. My bone-white razor is on my arm. At my side flies Sevro, wearing the huge spiked helmet of Ares with pride. He brought it along, but the rest of his armor is borrowed from Quicksilver. It’s cutting-edge tech. Better even than the suits we wore for Augustus. Holiday follows behind along with a hundred Sons of Ares.

The Sons are awkward on their gravBoots. Some carry razors. Others pulseFists. But, per my orders, not one wears a helmet as we fly. I wanted these lowColors of the stacks witnessing our treason, so that they feel emboldened by Reds and Oranges and Obsidians wearing the armor of the masters.

The faces are a blur. A hundred thousand peering from the homes in every direction. Pale and confused, most under the age of forty. Reds and Oranges brought here with false promises just like Rollo, with families down on Mars, just like Rollo.

Neighbors point in my direction. I see my name on their lips. Somewhere, the Syndicate watchmen will be dialing their superiors, relaying the news to the police or the Securitas antiterrorism apparatus that the Reaper lives and he is on Phobos.

I bait the beasts.

As I coast into the central hub of the city, I say a silent prayer, willing Eo to give me strength. There, like some pulsing electronic idol fenced in by metal bramble, a holographic display casts Society comedy programing one hundred meters long, fifty meters broad. It bathes the circle of cages around it in sickly neon light. Speakers laugh on cue. Blue light plays over my armor. Locks jingle as they’re undone and cages are pushed open so their inhabitants can sit on the edge and dangle their legs off to watch me without looking through the cage bars.

Quicksilver’s Greens focus their helmet cameras on me. The Sons array around, eyes smoldering out at the lowColors, my honor guard. Their red hair floating like a hundred angry torch flames. Holiday and Ares flank me to either side. Floating two hundred meters in the air. Surrounded by cages. Silence gripping the city except the laugh track of the comedy. It’s sick and weird as it cackles out of the speakers. I nod to Quicksilver’s Greens, and they cut the noise and somewhere in his tower, the hacker teams he’s assembled hijack every broadcast on the moon and issue commands to secondary datahubs on Earth, Luna, the asteroid belt, Mercury, the moons of Jupiter, so my message will burn across the blackness of space, taking over the data web that links mankind. Quicksilver is proving his allegiance with this broadcast, using the network he helped the Jackal build. This is not like Eo’s death. A viral video you have to dig for in the dark spaces of the holoNet. This is a grand roar across the Society, broadcasting on ten billion holos to eighteen billion people.

They gave these screens to us as chains. Today, we make them hammers.

Karnus au Bellona had his faults. But he was right when he said that all we have in this life is our shout into the wind. He shouted his own name, and I learned the folly in that. But before I begin the war that will claim me one way or another, I will make my shout. And it will be something far greater than my own name. Far greater than a roar of family pride. It is the dream I’ve carried and shepherded since I was sixteen.

Eo appears beneath me on the hologram, replacing the comedy.

A ghostly giant of the girl I knew. Her face is quiet and pale and angrier than in my dreams. Hair dull and stringy. Clothing drab and ragged. But her eyes burn out from her gray surroundings, bright as the blood on her mangled back as she looks up from the metal whipping box. Her mouth barely seems to open. Just a sliver of space between her lips, but her song bleeds from her, voice thin and fragile as a spring dream.

My son, my son

Remember the chains

When gold ruled with iron reins

We roared and roared

And twisted and screamed

For ours, a vale

Of better dreams

She echoes across the metal city louder than she echoed in that far-off lost city of stone. Her light flickering across the pale faces watching from their cages. These Oranges and Reds who never knew her in life, but hear her in death. They’re silent and sad as she

is walked to the gallows. I hear my vain cries. See myself sagging against Gray hands. Feel I’m there again. The hard-packed dirt on my knees as the world falls out from under me. Augustus speaks with Pliny and Leto as frayed hemp loops around Eo’s neck. Hatred radiates from the faces in the Stacks. I could no more stop Eo’s death then than I can stop it now. It’s as if it always has been. My wife falls. I flinch, hearing the rustling of her clothing. The creaking of the rope. And I look down at the hologram, forcing myself to watch as the boy I was stumbles forward to wrap his hands with their Red Sigils around her kicking legs. I watch him kiss her ankle and pull her feet with all his feeble strength. Her haemanthus falls, and I speak.

“I would have lived in peace. But my enemies brought me war. My name is Darrow of Lykos. You know my story. It is but an echo of your own. They came to my home and killed my wife, not for singing a song but for daring to question their reign. For daring to have a voice. For centuries millions beneath the soil of Mars have been fed lies from cradle to grave. That lie has been revealed to them. Now they’ve entered the world you know, and they suffer as you do.

“Man was born free, but from the ocean shores to the crater cities of Mercury to the ice waste of Pluto down to the mines of Mars, he is in chains. Chains made of duty, hunger, fear. Chains hammered to our necks by a race that we lifted up. A race that we empowered. Not to rule, not to reign, but to lead us from a world torn by war and greed. Instead, they have led us into darkness. They have used the systems of order and prosperity for their own gain. They expect your obedience, ignore your sacrifice, and hoard the prosperity that your hands create. To hold tight to their reign, they forbid our dreams. Saying a person is only as good as the Colors of their eyes, of their Sigils.”

I remove my gloves and clench my right fist in the air as Eo did before she died. But unlike Eo, my hands bear no Sigils. Removed by Mickey when I was Carved in Tinos. I am the first soul in hundreds of years to walk without them. The silence in the Hollows gives way to sounds of shock, fear.

“But now I stand before you, a man unbound. I stand before you, my brothers and sisters, to ask you to join me. To throw yourselves on the machines of industry. To unite behind the Sons of Ares. Take back your cities, your prosperity. Dare to dream of better worlds than these. Slavery is not peace. Freedom is peace. And until we have that, it is our duty to make war. This is no license for savagery or genocide. If a man rapes, you kill him on the spot. If a man murders civilians, high or low, you kill him on the spot. This is war, but you are on the side of good and that carries a heavy burden. We rise not for hate, not for vengeance, but for justice. For your children. For their future.

“I speak now to Gold, to the Aureate who rule. I have walked your halls, broken your schools, eaten at your tables, and suffered your gallows. You tried to kill me. You could not. I know your power. I know your pride. And I have seen how you will fall. For seven hundred years, you have ruled over the dominion of man, and this is all you have given us. It is not enough.