Morning Star (Red Rising Saga 3)

“Another refugee ship from Phobos,” the pilot answers. “Civilian vessel. No weapons.” But it’s closing fast. Trailing behind us by two hundred kilometers.

“If it’s a civilian vessel, why did it just appear on our sensors?” Mustang asks.

“It could have sensor shielding. Dampeners,” Holiday says warily.

The ship closes to forty kilometers. Something is wrong here. “Civilian vessels don’t have that sort of acceleration,” Mustang says.

“Dive,” I say. “Get us through the atmosphere now. Holiday on the gun.”

The Blue slips into defense protocols, increasing our speed, strengthening our rear shields. We hit atmosphere. My teeth rattle together. The ship’s electronic voice suggests passengers find their seats. Holiday stumbles up, rushing past us to the tailgun. Then a warning siren trills as the ship behind us morphs on the radar display, sharp contours of hidden weapons blossoming from its formerly smooth hull. It follows us into atmosphere, and it fires.

Our pilot twists her thin hands in the gel controls. My stomach lurches. Hypersonic depleted uranium shells scar the canvas of clouds and icy terrain, superheating as they streak past. The ship jerks as we hit atmosphere ourselves. Our pilot continues to juke, twitching her fingers in the electric gel, face placid and lost in her dance with the pursuing craft. Her eyes distant from her body. A single droplet of sweat beading on her right temple and trickling down her jaw. Then a gray blur rips into the cockpit and she explodes in a shower of meat. Spattering the viewports and my face with blood. The uranium shell takes off the top half of her body, then rips through the floor. A second shell the size of a child’s head screams through the ship between Mustang and me. Punching a hole in the floor and ceiling. Wind shrieks. Emergency masks fall into our laps. Warning sirens warble as pressure rushes from our ship, whipping our hair. I see the blackness of the ocean through the hole in the floor. Stars through the hole in the ceiling as our oxygen leaks out. The pursuing ship continues to fire into our dying ship. I huddle in terror with my hands over my head, teeth locked together, everything human in me screaming.

Laughter evil and inhuman rumbles so loud I think it’s coming from the buffeting wind. But it comes from Ragnar, his head tilted back as he laughs to his gods. “Odin knows we are coming to kill him. Even false Gods do not die easily!” He throws himself from his seat and runs down the hall, laughing insanely, not listening as I shout for him to sit down. Shells whisper past him. “I am coming, Odin! I am coming for you!”

Mustang dons her emergency mask and pushes the release on her safety webbing before I can gather my thoughts. The ship bucks, slamming her into the ceiling and the floor hard enough to crack the skull of any but an Aureate. Blood spills over her forehead from a gash at her hairline and she clutches to the floor, waiting till the ship rolls again to angle herself so that she can use gravity to fall into the co-pilot chair. She lands awkwardly against the armrests but manages to drag herself into the seat and buckle in. More warning lights pulse on the blood-drenched console. I look back down the hall to see if Ragnar and Holiday are alive only to see a trio of shells savage the room behind us. My teeth clatter in my skull. Gut vibrating with the champagne flutes in the cabinet to my left. I can’t do anything but hold on as Mustang tries to arrest our fall through orbit. The seat’s gel webbing tightens against my rib cage. I feel the g-forces crushing me. Time seems to slow as the world beneath swells. We’re through the clouds. On the sensor I see something small zip away from our ship and collide into the one trailing. Light flares behind us. Snow and mountains and ice floes dilate till they’re all I can see through the broken cockpit window. Wind howls, shatteringly cold against my face. “Brace for impact,” Mustang shouts over it. “In five…”

We plummet toward a sheaf of ice floating in the middle of the sea. On the horizon, a bloody ribbon of red ties the twilight sky to the ragged coastline of volcanic rock. A giant man stands atop the rock. Black and huge against the red light. I blink, wondering if my mind is playing tricks on me. If I’m seeing Fitchner before my death. The man’s mouth is an open dark chasm into which no light escapes.

“Darrow, tuck in!” Mustang shouts. I lower my head between my knees, wrap my arms around it. “Three…two…one.”

Our ship punches into the ice.

All is dark and cold as we sink into the sea. Water’s rushed in through the mangled back of the ship and gurgles through the dozen gaping holes in the cockpit. We’re already beneath the waves, the last air bubbling out into the darkness. The crash webbing synched tight around my body upon impact, expanding to protect my bones. But now it’s killing me, dragging me down with the ship. The water is freezing needles against my face. SealSkin protects my body, though, so I cut through the webbing with my razor. Pressure building in my ears as I search frantically for Mustang.

She’s alive and already working on escape. A light in her hand carves through the darkness of the flooded cockpit. Her razor’s out. Cutting through her webbing like I did. I push myself through the flooded cabin toward her. The back of the ship is missing. Three levels of vessel torn off and floating elsewhere in the darkness with Ragnar and Holiday inside. My neck’s locked up from whiplash. I suck at the oxygen from the mask that covers my nose and mouth.

Mustang and I communicate silently, using the signals of Gray lurcher squads. The human i

nstinct is to flee the crash as fast as possible, but training reminds us to count our breaths. To think clinically. There are supplies here we might need. Mustang searches in the cockpit for the standard emergency kit while I search for my equipment bag. It’s missing, along with the rest of the gear in the cargo hold that we were bringing the Obsidians to seize Asgard. Mustang joins me, carrying a plastic emergency box the size of her torso, which she pulled from a cabinet behind the pilot’s chair.

Taking a last breath, we leave the oxygen behind.

We swim to the edge of the torn hull, where the ship ends and the ocean begins. It is an abyss. Mustang turns off her light as I tie our belts together with a length of the crash webbing I took from my seat. Designed to keep the Obsidians trapped in their icy continent, the Carved creatures here are man-eaters. I’ve seen pictures of the things. Translucent and fanged. Eyes bulging. Skin pale, worming with blue veins. Light and heat attract them. To swim in open water with a flashlight would draw things from the deeper levels. Even Ragnar wouldn’t dare.

Unable to see farther than a hand’s breadth in front of us, we push away from the yacht’s corpse in the black water. Fighting for every agonizing meter. I can’t see Mustang beside me. We’re sluggish in the cold water, limbs burning as they claw darkness; but my mind is locked and certain. We will not die in this ocean. We will not drown. I repeat it over and over, hating the water.

Mustang kicks my foot, disrupting our rhythm. I try to match it again. Where is the surface? There’s no sun to greet us, to tell us we’re near. It’s wildly disorienting. Mustang kicks my leg again. Only this time I feel the ripple of the water beneath as something large and fast and cold swims in the depths below.

I slash down blindly with my razor, hitting nothing. Impossible to fight back the panic. I’m swinging at the darkness of the two kilometers of ocean that stretches beneath me and pumping my legs so desperately that I swim into the ice crust atop the water almost knocking myself out. I feel Mustang’s hand on my back. Steadying me. The ice is dull gray skin that stretches above us. I stab my razor up into it. Hear Mustang doing the same beside me. It’s too thick to push clear of. I grip her shoulder and draw a circle to signal my plan. I turn so my back is against hers. Together, nearly blind and out of oxygen, we cut a circle in the ice. I keep going until I feel the ice give slightly. It’s too heavy to push up without traction. Too buoyant to pull down with just our arms. So I swim to the side so Mustang can savage the cylinder we’ve cut with her razor. Mincing the ice enough to push the emergency box through first. She follows and extends a hand to aid me. I slash blindly back down at the darkness and follow her up.

We collapse headfirst onto the rock-hard surface of the ice.

Wind rattles over our shaking bodies.

We’re on the edge of an ice shelf between a savage coastline and the beginning of a cold, black sea. The sky throbs deep metallic blue, the South Pole locked in two months of twilight as it transitions to winter. The mountainous coastline dark and twisted, maybe three kilometers off, ice stretching all the way, punctured by icebergs. Wreckage burns on the coast’s mountains. Wind rushes in off the open water ahead of a coming storm, whipping the waves into calamity so salt and spray hiss over the ice like sand buffeting through the desert.

Water geysers into the air fifty meters closer inland as someone fires a pulseFist from underneath the ice. Numb and frozen, we rush toward Holiday as she pulls herself free, Mustang trailing behind with the emergency box.

“Where is Ragnar?” I shout. Holiday looks up at me, face twisted and pale. Blood pools from her leg. A piece of shrapnel sticking through her thigh. Her sealSkin has kept her from the worst of the cold, but she didn’t have time to don her suit’s hood or gloves. She tightens a tourniquet around her leg, looking back into the hole.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“You don’t know?” I rip free my razor and stumble for the hole. Holiday scrambles in front of me.

“Something is down there! Ragnar pulled it off of me.”

“I’m going down,” I say.