Morning Star (Red Rising Saga 3)

They’re not soldiers. Not like us. Most are men, but there’s a scattering of women, mostly younger Reds and Oranges forced to migrate here for work to feed Mars-side families. Their weapons are shoddy. Some stand. Other are seated, turning from conversations to see our pack of Obsidian killers stalking across the metal deck, carrying bags of gear and pushing two mysterious carts. A small sadness grows in me. Whatever they do, wherever they go, their lives will be stained by this day. If it were my duty to address them, I’d warn them the burden they’re taking on, the evil they’ll be letting into their lives. I’d say it’s nicer to hear about glorious victories in war than to witness them. Than to feel the weird unreality of lying in bed every morning knowing you’ve killed a man, knowing a friend is gone.

But I say nothing. My place now is beside Ragnar and Victra, behind Sevro as he spits out his gum and stalks forward, giving me a wink and an elbow in the side, to stand in front of the small army. His army. He’s tiny for an Obsidian male, but still scarred and tattooed and terrifying to this company of small-handed garbage men and hunched tower welders. He tilts his head forward, eyes smoldering behind his black contacts. Wolf tattoos looking evil against his pale skin in the industrial light.

“Greetings, grease monkeys.” His voice rumbles, low and predatory. “You might be wondering why Ares has sent a pack of hardcore nasties like us to this tin shithole.” The Sons look to one another nervously. “We aren’t here to cuddle. We aren’t here to inspire you or give long-ass speeches like the bloodydamn Sovereign.” He snaps his fingers. Pebble and Clown wheel the carts forward and unlatch the tops. The hinges squeal open to reveal mining explosives. “We’re here to blow shit up.” He throws open his arms and cackles. “Any questions?”

I float in the back of the trash collector with the Howlers. It’s dark. The night vision of my optics shows the garbage that orbits us in shadowy green. Banana peels. Toy packaging. Coffee grounds. Victra makes a gagging sound over the com as toilet paper sticks to her face. Her mask is a demonHelm. Like mine, it’s pupil black and shaped subtly like a screaming demon face. Fitchner managed to steal them from Luna’s armories for the Sons more than a year back. With them, we can see most spectrums, amplify sound, track one another’s coordinates, access maps, and communicate silently. My friends around me are in all black. We wear no mechanized armor, only thin scarabSkin over our bodies that will stop knives and occasional

projectiles. We have no gravBoots or pulseArmor. Nothing that will slow us, cause noise, or trip sensors. We wear oxygen tanks with air enough for forty minutes. I finish adjusting Ragnar’s harness and look to my datapad. The two Reds crewing the old trash collector are giving us a countdown. When it reaches one, Sevro says, “Tuck your sacks and pop your cloaks.”

I activate my ghostCloak and the world warps, distorted by the cloak. It’s like looking through refracted, dirty water, and I already feel the battery pack heating up against my tailbone. The cloak’s good for short bursts. But it burns up small batteries like the ones we pack and needs time to cool and recharge. I grope for Sevro and Victra’s hands, managing to grasp them in time. The rest partner up as well. I don’t remember feeling so frightened before the Iron Rain. Was I braver then? Maybe just more naïve.

“Hold tight. We’re in for some chop,” Sevro says. “Popping top in three…two…” I tighten my grip on his hand. “…one.”

The collector’s door retracts silently, bathing us in the amber light of a holoDisplay screen on a nearby skyscraper. There’s a burst of air and my world spins as the trash collector ejects its load of garbage from the back of its hold. We’re like seed chaff thrown into the city. Spinning with debris through a kaleidoscope world of towers and advertisements. Hundreds of ships funneling along avenues. All a flashing, liquid blur. We continue to spin head over heel to mask our signatures.

Over the com, I hear the grousing of a Blue traffic controller, annoyed at the spilled trash. Soon there’s a company Copper on the line threatening to fire the incompetent drivers. But it’s what I don’t hear that makes me smile. The police channels drone on their usual slant, reporting a Syndicate airjacking in the Hive, a grisly murder in the ancient art museum near the Park Plaza, a datacenter robbery in the Banking Cluster. They haven’t seen us amidst the debris.

We slow our spin gradually using small thrusters in our helmets. Bursts of air bring us to a steady drift. Silent in the vacuum. We’re on target. Along with the rest of the trash, we’re about to impact on the side of a steel tower. Has to be a clean landing. Victra curses as we drift closer, closer. My fingers tremble. Don’t bounce. Don’t bounce.

“Release,” Sevro orders.

I pull my hands from his and Victra’s, and the three of us impact jarringly against the steel. The trash around us bounds off the metal, cartwheeling backward at odd angles. Sevro and Victra stick, compliments of the magnets in their gloves, but a piece of debris impacting in front of me bounces off the steel and hits me in the thigh, altering my trajectory. Tipping me sideways, hands windmilling for a grip, which causes me to spin.

My feet hit first and I bounce backward toward space, cursing.

“Sevro!” I shout.

“Victra. Get him.”

A hand grabs my foot, jerking me to a halt. I look down and see a warped invisible form grasping my leg. Victra. Carefully, she pulls my weightless body back to the wall so I can clamp my own magnets onto the steel. Spots race across my vision. The city is all around us. It’s dreadful in its silence, in its colors, in its inhuman metal landscape. It feels more like an ancient alien artifact than a place for humans.

“Slow it down.” Victra’s voice crackles in my helmet. “Darrow. You’re hyperventilating. Breathe with me. In. Out. In…” I force my lungs to breathe in sync with her. The spots soon fade. I open my eyes, face inches from the steel.

“You shit your suit or something?” Sevro asks.

“I’m good,” I say. “A little rusty.”

“Ugh. Pun intended, I’m sure.” Ragnar and the rest of the Howlers land thirty meters beneath us on the wall. Pebble waves up to me. “Got three hundred meters to go. Let’s climb, you pixies.”

Lights glow behind the glass of Quicksilver’s double-helix towers. Connecting the double helixes are nearly two hundred levels of offices. I can make out shapes moving inside at computer terminals. I zoom in with my optics to watch the stock traders sitting in their offices, their assistants moving to and fro, analysts signaling furiously on holographic trading boards that communicate with the markets on Luna. Silvers, all. They remind me of industrious bees.

“Makes me miss the boys,” Victra says. Takes me a moment to realize she’s not talking about the Silvers. The last time she and I tried this tactic, Tactus and Roque were with us. We infiltrated Karnus’s flagship from vacuum as he refueled at an asteroid base during the Academy’s mock war. We cut through his hull with aims of kidnapping him to eliminate his team. But it was a trap and I narrowly escaped with the help of my friends, a broken arm my only reward for the gambit.

It takes us five minutes to climb from our landing place to the peak of the tower, where it becomes a large crescent. We don’t go hand over hand, so climbing isn’t the true term. The magnets in our gloves have fluctuating positive and negative currents that allow us to roll up the side of the tower like we have wheels in our palms. The toughest part of the ascent, or descent, or whatever you’d call it in the null grav, is the crescent slope at the extreme height or end of the tower. We have to cling to a narrow metal support beam that extends out among a ceiling of glass, much like the stem of a leaf. Beneath our bellies and through the glass lies Quicksilver’s famous museum. And above us, just over the peak of Quicksilver’s tower, hangs Mars.

My planet seems larger than space. Larger than anything ever could be. A world of billions of souls, of designer oceans, mountains, and more irrigable acres of dry land than Earth ever had. It’s night on this side of the world. And you could never know that millions of kilometers of tunnels wind through the bones of the planet, that even as its surface glows with the lights of the Thousand Cities of Mars, there is a pulse unseen, a tide that is rising. But now it looks peaceful. War a distant, impossible thing. I wonder what a poet would say in this moment. What Roque would whisper into the air. Something about the calm before the storm. Or a heartbeat among the deep. But then there’s a flash. It startles me. A spasm of light that flares white, then erodes into devilish neon as a mushroom grows in the planet’s blackness.

“Do you see that?” I ask over the coms, blinking away the cigar burn the distant detonation made in my vision. Our coms crackle with curses as the others turn to see.

“Shit,” Sevro murmurs. “New Thebes?”

“No,” Pebble answers. “Farther north. That’s the Aventine Peninsula. So it’s probably Cyprion. Last intel said the Red Legion was moving toward the city.”

Then comes another flash. And the seven of us hunker motionless on the crest of the building, watching as a second nuclear bomb detonates a thumb’s distance away from the first.

“Bloodydamn. Is it us or them?” I ask. “Sevro!”

“I don’t know,” Sevro says impatiently.