Morning Star (Red Rising Saga 3)

“Njar la tagag…”

My razor goes rigid.

PulseWeapon shudders and whines, priming.

Body trembles. Mouth full of ashes. Wear the mask. Hide the man. Feel nothing. See everything. Move and kill. Move and kill. I am not a man. They are not men.

The chanting swells….“Syn tjr rjyka!”

Fear is not real.

If you’re watching, Eo, it’s time to close your eyes.

The Reaper has come. And he’s brought hell with him.

“Breach!” Holiday roars. The door falls open. I rush into the pulseField surrounding the breach point. Everything condenses. Sights, sounds, the movement of my own body. All a haze. Holiday’s scatterFlash cackles through the two-meter opening in the bulkhead, frying any unshielded optic nerves on the other side. A secondary fusion grenade detonates. I jump through the hole into smoke, going right, Victra comes with. Sefi goes left. Enemy fire hits us immediately. My shield cackles with the sound of hail hitting a tin roof. The end of the hall a chaos of muzzle flashes and pulse fire. Superheated projectiles slice through the smoke.

I fire my pulseFist, arm jerking spasmodically. Ducking and moving so I don’t block the entrance. Something slams into me. I stumble to the left wall, superheated particles screaming from my fist. My shield crackles with coilgun rounds that impact the energy barrier and fall, flattened to the ground at my feet. More Obsidian fill the hall behind me. They move so fast. It’s a cacophony of sound. My tactical mind shoves the facts to the front. We’re pinned down. Men die in the breach. Must move forward.

Something whizzes past my head. It detonates behind at the entrance. Limbs and armor slop onto the floor. The helmet mutes the massive noise, saving my eardrums. I stumble forward, trying to get out of the killzone. Another grenade lands among us. Detonating after an Obsidian dives upon it. More meat for the grinder. Must close the distance. Can’t see anything in front of me. So much smoke. Fire.

To hell with this.

With a roar of frustration, I activate my gravBoots and rocket down the narrow hall eighty kilometers an hour toward our assailants, firing as I go. Flying a meter above the floor. Victra follows. It’s a whole squad of twenty Grays led by a Gold legate in brilliant silver armor. I crash into the Gold. Razor outstretched, piercing his shield and spearing his brain. Crash to the ground. Arm pinned under me. The Gray response team separates from one another, keeping me at the center as I struggle to my feet. One shoots an ion-charge into my back. Blue lightning spasms over my shields, killing them. I stab one Gray through the neck with my razor. Two others fire into my chest. My armor dents with a dozen rounds. I stumble back. A heavy railgun with a boring round in the chamber levels at my head. I dip and dodge to the side, slipping on blood. Going down. The gun goes off and opens a hole the size of a man’s head in the floor.

Then Victra smashes into the Grays. Bursting side to side with her gravBoots, an angry wrecking ball. Shattering bones between the walls and her heavily armored body. Then the Obsidians are among the Grays, hacking them to pieces with their pulseAxes. The Grays are screaming, falling back around the corner where they have fire support. A Gray’s leg is slashed off by Sefi and he stumbles, firing his weapon into the wall. She rips his head clean off from behind.

This is horror.

The smoke. The twitching bodies and evaporation of blood as it boils out of charred wounds. A dying man’s urine pools around my armor, hissing against the superheated barrel of my pulseFist as Victra helps me up.

“Thanks.”

Her frightening bird helmet nods to me without expression.

As the rest of my platoon files through the breach, I move forward to the corner around which several of the Grays escaped. Another enemy response squad hastily sets up a heavy weapon mounted on a floating gravPod about thirty meters down near a gravLift entrance. When it fires, a quarter of the wall above me melts. I order Holiday take my place at the corner with Trigg’s ambi-rifle.

“Four tins, one Gold,” I say. “They’ve got a mounted QR-13. Slag ’em.”

She adjusts her rifle’s multi-use barrel. “Yessir.”

At our breach point, six Valkyrie are down. A huge woman’s helmet peels back into her armor. She vomits blood. Half her torso smokes, molten armor still melting her flesh. She tries to stand, laughing at the pain, high on god’s bread. But this is a new type of war to these women with new injuries. Unable to support herself, the Obsidian slumps against a sister who calls to Sefi. The young Queen looks at the wounds and sees Victra shake her head. A quicker learner than the rest of them, Sefi knew well what this war would cost her people. But staring it in the face is something different altogether. She says something of home to the woman, something of the sky and the feathers at summer’s twilight. I don’t see the blade she slips into the base of the dying woman’s skull until she pulls it back out.

A hologram of Mustang’s face flashes in the corner of my screen. I open the link. “Darrow, have you breached?”

“We’re in. Double for my teams. Pressing to bridge now. What’s what?”

“You need to hurry. My ship’s under heavy fire.”

“We’re in. You’re supposed to bug out. Head to Thebe.”

“Roque used EMPs.” Her voice is tense. “Our shielding kept us up, but half my fleet’s engines are squabbed. We’re sitting dead, punching it out with him. Soon as your clawDrill hit, the Colossus started shooting to kill. They’re ripping us apart. We’re outgunned, hard. Main batteries are already at half strength.” A sick feeling rises in my gut. Roque can see us on the cameras in his ship. He knows the strength of my boarding party. It’s only a matter of time till I reach the bridge. Soon he’ll make an announcement over the com for me to surrender or he’ll kill her. “Get to the gorydamn bridge and put him down. Register?”

“Register.” I turn to face my troops, “We gotta move,” I say. “Victra, take squad command. I’m going digital. Sefi, range ahead.”

“Holiday, anytime,” Victra says eagerly, pacing back and forth in the hall. “The little lion needs our help. Come on! Come on!”

“Hold your tits,” Holiday mutters, adjusting her rifle and toggling the corner-shot feature. The barrel joints rotate so it peeks around the wall and feeds the visual link directly into her bionic eye. Four quick bursts tear out of the gun. Thirty rounds each from the ammo magazine in the back of her armor. “Go.”