Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga 4)

“And I am the son of Atlas au Raa. Sixth shade of the Shadowfall. Slayer of Petro au Bretta, the Desert Spear.” Bellerephon’s eyes glitter with delight as he gathers phlegm and spits it onto Cassius’s face. It drips down Cassius’s cheek, running diagonal with his Peerless Scar. “This is a blood feud. The blood of my grandfather and my cousin is upon your hands. Hear me now, you wretched worm. We are devils to one another. In the name of House Raa, I, Bellerephon au Raa, challenge you to single combat in the Bleeding Place till one heart beats no more.”

“Very well, my goodman,” Cassius replies with a brilliant smile. “I am delighted to accept.”

IT SOUNDS LIKE THE DAMN WORLD is ending. Clustered outside the downed Gold shuttle in the center of our trap, Volga, Dano, and I look up and feel the fear. Two escort ripWings chase after the downed Augustan ship. The blast door above us locks closed as the first round of gunfire pelts its reinforced surface.

The shuttle plummeted a kilometer through the city, drawn downward faster than the speed of gravity by the fleet-grade Sun Industries gravWell. The machine gripped the shuttle as soon as the EMP Kobachi built into the custom drone went off inside the shuttle. We almost lost the ship twice on the descent as its rotation made it drift out from the gravWell’s projection radius. Dano wrangled it back by increasing the gravity to four times Earth grav.

Aside from the shuttle, the gravity beam pulled down a deluge of rain, seven fliers, a forest of shrubs from balconies, several clotheslines, and three shattered hoverbikers who died by smashing into the floor at nine hundred kilometers per hour. All that haul lies in a broken bone and metal soup around the shuttle in the garage of the half-completed Lower West Hyperion Hospital. Dano kicks one of the shattered hoverbiker helmets away from the breech we’ve burned into the shuttle’s hatch. The head is still inside.

My stomach knots up. I’m back in the block war.

Digging through debris. Boots stomping over rubble and bits of men. Gasping like a dying fish, lungs starved from thermobaric burrow bombs that eat the oxygen out of the air.

I tear my eyes from the disembodied head, thankful for my helmet so my crew doesn’t see my horrified face. I didn’t take the zoladone tonight, afraid that the stomach cramps would knock me flat. I’m already feeling too much.

The blast door shudders above us as the escorts pour more munitions into it. Soon it will buckle. We’ve four minutes before a rapid response team of Hyperion’s counterterrorism Watchmen deploy from the Twelfth Cohort headquarters.

Already, there will be armored bodyguards jumping from the escorts, searching for some other way into my metal trap.

I stare into the mirage of heat as our breeching device burns a hole in the hull. Volga, armored in a military-grade chestplate and helmet, pulls the breecher off and slams a steel and lead battering ram into the metal. It caves inward on her third swing. She tosses the ram aside and moves into the ship. The green magazine globe of her plasma rifle’s barrel glows as she primes the generator. Dano goes in next. I follow with the Omnivore in my trembling hands. If even one of the nasty bastards inside didn’t get knocked flat by the anacene gas, this could turn into a bloodbath.

Trigg run through on a Gold’s razor.

Men crumpling like cans to powerHammers.

Ozone and burning flesh as the Gold skins my team alive.

My hands shake harder.

The ship is upside down and black inside. It looks like a party gone wild, all the revelers having drunk themselves to insentience right where they stood. Bodies, still buckled in their crash webbing, hang upside down in chairs from a ceiling that was once the floor. Others are sprawled atop each other in a living carpet with eyes that shine like fountain coins up at me. We pick our way through the arms of servants and leather-faced killers in tuxedos. The anacene-17 has made the muscles in their bodies, including their eyelids, unresponsive. Only their lungs and hearts still work, allowing them breaths so shallow they look dead.

There’s no movement.

My heart slams in my chest. We push for the forward passenger compartment in search of the prizes. As Dano bounces around the ship with a gymnast’s ease, Volga and I climb over the body of a titanic Gold with a red beard and almost step on a fox the size of a large child. It lurches up at us, snarling. I shout in surprise and kick it as it lunges. It flies down the aisle and onto Dano’s leg as he hangs with one hand from one of the upside-down passenger headrests. He screams and falls down.

“Get off me. Get it off!”

He flails, falling to his back, and points his gun at the animal’s skull, ready to blow its head off. Volga pushes the weapon aside and pries the fox’s jaw open to free Dano’s leg. “I’m gonna kill it!” Volga ignores him and grabs the flailing fox by the scruff of its red coat and locks it in the cockpit. We hear it slamming against the door as I haul Dano up.

“What the hell was that?” Dano shouts into his com. Blood dribbles down his leg.

“Shut up. Work.”

Amidst a thick human shield of bodyguards and Golds, we find the prize.

“He’s here,” Dano says triumphantly as he limps forward. “The little shit is bloodywell here!”

He says it like he doubted it. He’s not the only one. The intelligence was too good. The plan too big. The stakes too high. The players far too nasty. Yet it’s

all slick and clean. Even I smile when I see the prize.

The boy hangs suspended upside down, paralyzed and wrapped to his seat in crash webbing. Blood leaks into his hairline from a long gash on his forehead. He’s smaller than I expected, no giant like his father, but still at ten he’s almost Dano’s size. He’s dressed in a tuxedo with a gold lion clasp at his neck instead of a tie. His eyes stare at us in terror. Limping and muttering curses to himself, Dano roughly cuts the clasp off, pockets it for a trophy, and then starts cutting the crash webbing as Volga keeps her gun on the paralyzed bodyguards. We pull the boy from the seat. Dano hoists him over his shoulder and carries him out of the ship as Volga and I find the secondary prize three seats up. The slender Gold girl has a hatchet face and deep-set, angry eyes. Unlike the boy, she shows no fear, just absolute, unmitigated hatred. She’s promising me a slow death with that look as I cut her free of her crash webbing and cut the bleeding sun brooch from her jacket. I can’t resist patting her on the head. Volga puts her over a shoulder and departs the ship.

I stand alone in the dark vessel, listening to the thunder of their escorts against the blast door. Littered around me are the powerful and mighty who thought themselves untouchable. Thought themselves gods. A dark, unexpected thrill shoots through me as I realize I’ve humbled the lot of them.

I step atop the giant who the fox was protecting. The massive man has big iron on his hip. A razor just like Aja’s. My boots smudge dirt and biker blood into his tuxedo. A Telemanus. I recognize him now. I turn to regard the cluttered cabin, wishing they could see my face and know that a lowly Gray has driven them to their knees.

“Reap what you sow,” I say in a thick Red Martian accent. “Give my regards to your masters, my goodmen.”