Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

“Back to work!” Harnassus shouts. “We’re not payin’ by the hour.”

We find Glirastes sighing as he slumps into his Thinking Chair, a queer perch made from a single flowing branch of a sunblossom tree.

“I know it is beneath you,” Harnassus says as Glirastes’s servant pours his master a glass of port. “But would you mind explaining the device to the infantry, Master Maker? It would do them some comfort to know they’re not trusting their lives to magic.”

Glirastes surveys the commanders I brought with me.

“No. That sounds tiresome.”

He puts his feet on a silk stool and sighs as his servant removes his purple slippers and massages his heels with rose oil. Harnassus looks six seconds away from clouting Glirastes on the ears. He has little patience for snobs. I’ve more experience with the breed.

“It’s just an EMP. What’s so complicated about scaling it up?” I say, and wait for the explosion.

“Just an EMP?” Glirastes repeats as if reading his own obituary aloud. “Am I just an ambulating mammal?” His eyes scour me. “Did you not retain anything of your curriculum from the Academy aside from astral belligerency?”

“I retained enough, apparently.”

The infantry commanders chuckle.

Glirastes sighs in annoyance and regards Thraxa and my infantry commanders with distaste, offended by the sunburnt visages and thick chests of hardier mammals than he, and retreats to intellectual bullying. I track what he says, because I’m married to a woman who’d be insulted if I couldn’t.

“Weaponized transient electromagnetic disturbances have tenaciously sharp leading wave edges, escalating precipitously to their maximum level before decaying slowly. Imagine a double exponential curve. Problematically, the shielding made by the Venusian Dockyards is designed to recognize this sort of blunt belligerency”—he fixes me with a glare—“and provide countermeasures for Atalantia’s fleet. Consequently, I have decided to use a benign damped sine wave to create a coupling between the source and the victim equipment. Usually this is a by-product of a weaponized EMP, but the genius here is that instead of diminishing within the double exponential envelope, the sine wave wavelengths will increase. However, considering the distance required, the energy demand will be staggering. Creating a more efficient and staggered energy ignition is profoundly difficult absent a nuclear explosion, and if I do not perfect it you will all die in the sky.” He eyes me again. “Now that I have satisfied the curiosity of your apes, the zoo is closed.” He closes his eyes. “Begone lest you have an advanced degree or care to replace Exeter in massaging my feet.”

“I’ll take his spot if you like, Master Maker,” Thraxa says with a smile. She holds up her hands. “I know they look like elephant feet, but they’re tender to the right sort.”

Glirastes makes a face of distaste. “Such a bloodline, squandered on martial absurdity. You’ve genius in your line, woman. Your brother was the mind of a generation, and your father…” He sighs. “You waste your time playing soldier.”

“So that’s a pass?”

“Pfah.” He shoots Harnassus a look. “Don’t forget my breakfast tomorrow. I can’t work without sardines; tomorrow is a Tuesday, after all.”

As my infantry commanders file out muttering their concerns to one another, Harnassus follows me and Thraxa out of the Star’s hangar. “What do you think?” I ask him.

“He’s pigheaded, cruel, eccentric, fickle, and ten times as demanding as my first wife. But he’s a genius.”

“Was,” Thraxa says. “Riches made him slow.” She glares back at the man. “Little more than a lapdog to whoever holds Mercury.”

“You thinking he’ll betray us?” I ask.

“I’m thinking we should endeavor to remind him Atalantia is scared of us.”

“What do you have against him?” I ask.

“First off, his designs are rubbish. Robbing the Egyptians blind. And the bastard cozied up to the slavers, then to us. He’s a bloodfly. Invertebrate. Permission to pop him when we evac.”

“Denied, psycho,” Harnassus says.

“Wasn’t asking you.”

“He’s my second-in-command, Thraxa. When I don’t speak, he speaks for me,” I remind her.

“Uh-huh. But you’re speaking.”

“You’re not killing the Master Maker.”

She shrugs. “Sure.”

“Where were we?” I ask Harnassus. “Can we even tell if he’s full of shit? If he leaves us hanging up there, we’re all dead.”