Morning Star (Red Rising Saga 3)

White spots flash across my vision.

I shake myself. Trying to bring my senses back.

I’ve spun off course. This rig isn’t meant for steering. About to slam into the MoonBreaker’s deck. Instinct doesn’t save me. My friends do. The clawDrill’s engines are slaved to the bank of Blues back on Orion’s ship. Someone reverses the thrusters at the last moment so I don’t crash. I’m slammed back in my seat as the clawDrill slows and then lands gently onto the surface of the Colossus. I jerk in my seat, laughing in fear.

“Bloodydamn” I whoop to my distant saviors, whoever they are. “Thank you!”

But the clawDrill itself is all manual. Blues can’t operate the digits any better than I can plot slingshots around a planet. My hands dance over the controls, flowing into my old mode of labor. I reactivate the drill, using my engines to push me down like a nail into the surface of the ship. Metal wheezes. Bolts rattle. And I begin to gnaw through the top layer of armor, which they said no leechCraft could penetrate.

Pressure hisses out around my drill. I ramp up the revolutions, my hands dancing through the controls, shifting the drill bits as they overheat, cycling through cooled units. Space disappears. I burrow into the warship. Carving not in a straight line, but a tunnel toward the front of the ship. One deck. Two decks. Chewing through halls and barracks and generators and gas lines. It’s hideous and as savage a thing as I’ve ever done. I just pray I don’t hit a munitions store. Men and women and debris fly out into space through the hole I’ve carved like autumn leaves sucked from the various deck levels I penetrate. Bulkheads will seal off the wound, but those caught between the bulkheads and the tunnel are good as dead.

Three hundred meters into the ship, my clawDrill breaks down. Drill bits spent and engine overheating. I reach down to pop my cockpit canopy to abandon the drill, but my hand slips on the lever. Blood coats it. I search my body frantically. But my armor isn’t punctured. The blood isn’t from me. It floats off the right cockpit wall, slick around the round railgun slug that pierced the three leechCraft to imbed itself in the support beam of my clawDrill. Bits of hair and a fragment of bone clump in the clotting blood.

I leave my clawDrill behind for the vacuum of the tunnel I carved. Air no longer gushing from the ship. It’s calm now, the pressure already vented and the emergency bulkheads closed to quarantine the compromised hull. The gravity generator in this section of the ship must have been hit. My hair floats in my helmet.

I look up. At the end of the tunnel, where I penetrated the hull, is a little keyhole to the stars. A dead man drifts just beyond it, slowly spiraling. A shadow grips him as Antonia’s flagship passes beyond, blocking the light reflected from Jupiter’s surface. Like the man, I’m left in darkness. Alone in the belly of the Colossus. My com a flood of war-chatter. Victra is launching from our hangar. Orion and the Moon Lords are in flight, knocked off the poles of Io and bound for Jupiter. Mustang’s flagship is now under assault by Roque’s ship as Antonia leads the rest of his fleet after the retreating Telemanuses and Raas.

Still, Sevro waits.

Thirty meters above me, something moves out from one of the levels I carved through, peering into the twenty-meter-wide tunnel. My helmet identifies an active weapon. I fly upward, activating my pulseShield as I go only to find a young Gray staring at me through the plastic faceplate of an emergency oxygen mask. He floats, one arm holding a ragged length of metal wall. Blood coats him. Not his own. The body of one of his friends floats behind him. He’s shaking. My drill must have gone through his entire platoon, and then space pulled their bodies out, leaving him alone here. The terror of me is reflected in his eyes. He raises his scorcher and I react without thinking. Putting my razor into the side of his heart, I make him a carcass. He dies wide-eyed and young and he floats there, upright till I put my foot on his chest so I can pull my blade out. We drift away from each other. Little droplets of blood dancing off my blade in the zero gravity.

Then the gravity generators reboot and my feet clomp to the floor. The blood splatters over them. His body flops to the ground. Light floods in behind me from the tunnel shaft. I pull myself away from the dead man and peer up into the tunnel to see a shuttle ripping in out of space. More follow. A whole cavalcade of assault craft led by Victra. RipWings chase them, but mounted guns on the back of the assault craft spray high-energy fist-sized rounds at them. Shredding the ripWings. More will come. Hundreds more. We must move fast. Speed and aggression our only advantage here.

Victra’s transport slows dramatically in the tunnel beyond my level, just above the clawDrill. Valkyrie pour out to join me. More transports unload on levels above. Holiday and several Reds with battle armor move with the Obsidians, carrying breaching equipment across the airless room toward the bulkhead door that seals us off from the rest of the ship. They slam the thermal drill onto the metal. It begins glowing red. They deploy a pulseBubble over the metal hatch so that when we breach, we don’t activate more bulkheads.

“Breach green in fifteen,” Holiday says.

Victra stands to the side listening to enemy chatter. “Response teams inbound. More than two thousand mixed units.” She’s also patched to the strategic command on Orion’s ship, so she can gather battle data from the huge sensor arrays on the flagship. Looks like Roque launched more than fifteen thousand men at us in his leechCraft. Most will be in the Pax by now. Burrowed through to find me. Silly bastards. Roque gambled big, bet wrong. And I’ve just brought three thousand crazed Obsidian berserkers to a mostly empty warship.

The Poet is going to be pissed.

“Ten,” Holiday says.

“Valkyrie, on me,” I boom, lifting my hands in a triangle formation.

The hundred Obsidians step over the debris of the commissary and gather behind me, just as we trained them to do on the journey from Jupiter. Sefi’s on my left hip, Victra’s on my right and Holiday behind. The superheated metal door sags. The Reds and Grays back away. All along the tunnel on the ten levels I carved through, teams like this will be preparing to breach just like us. Two of the other clawDrills hit home. Two thousand Obsidians are breaching there as well. Grays, Reds, and a scattering of sympathizer Golds will lead them against the security forces who take trams and gravLifts to ferry themselves to the new battlefront inside the ship.

This is going to be a firestorm. Close quarters combat. Smoke. Screams. The worst of war.

“Full power to shields,” I say in Nagal, facing the Valkyrie. They ripple iridescent as shields play over their armor. “Kill anything with a weapon. Harm nothing withou

t one. Doesn’t matter the Color. Remember our target. Clear me a path. Hyrg la, Ragnar!”

“Hyrg la, Ragnar!” they roar, beating their chests, embracing the madness of war. Most will have taken their beserker fungus in the shuttlecraft. They’ll feel no pain. They move foot-to-foot, eager for the succor of battle. Victra vibrates next to me. I remember sitting with her in Mickey’s lab as she told me how she loves the smell of battle. The old sweat in the gloves. The oil on the guns. The pulled muscles and shaking hands afterward. It’s the honesty of it, I realize. That’s what she loves. Battle never lies.

“Victra, stay at my side,” I say. “Pair up for the Hydra if we encounter Golds.”

“Njar la tagag…” Sefi says from behind me.

“…syn tjr rjyka!”

“There is no pain. Only joy,” they chant, deep in the embrace of the god’s bread. Sefi begins the war bellow. Her voice higher than Ragnar’s. Her two wing-sisters join her. Then their wing-sisters, until dozens fill the com with their song, giving me a sense of grandeur as my mind tells my body to flee. This is why the Obsidians chant. Not to sow terror. But to feel brave, to feel kinship, instead of isolation and fear.

Sweat drips down my spine.

Fear is not real.

Holiday deactivates her safety.