Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

“Darrow will question him later,” Alexandar says. Ignacius nods. “You ever seen one of these?” Alexandar asks me, holding up a stim vial and looking at my burn.

“What is it?” I ask.

“It’ll make you fly, goodman.” He tilts my neck and injects it. “How do you feel?”

The military-grade neurotransmitter races through my veins like a galloping destrier, filling me with manic energy, and dulling the communication of pain receptors in my brain. For the first time in weeks my face doesn’t feel like it’s falling apart. There’s a rumbling groan from up the tunnel. Drusilla and Crastus return, stone-faced. “Armory was too well guarded, so we hit the commissary. They’ll be coming soon as they clear the rubble. We have thirty seconds at best.”

Alexandar smiles. “Then we have a head start, goodmen.” He slaps my shoulder and shoves one of the scorchers into my hands. “On me.”

WE FLEE INTO THE LABYRINTH. Alexandar sprints ahead as the stims lend his ravaged body fresh impetus. Buoyed by Mercury’s light gravity, Drusilla carries the Fear Knight over her shoulders. The other knights bring up our rear. The detonation of one of our stolen concussion grenades rumbles through the tunnel not far behind. Dust shakes free from the ceiling, clouding the glowlamp Alexandar uses to light our way.

The tunnel leads us into a convoluted maze cave, where a network of connecting cave passages forms a three-dimensional puzzle. Some asshole terraformer had a gory field day.

Alexandar guides us well with the map, but I hide my frustration by panting down at the ground when he needs to pause to reference it again and again. Small beeps sound from the walls as the Fear Knight’s datapad deactivates booby traps along the way.

After half a dozen turns, our tunnel tapers to a keyhole where only two can pass at a time. Drusilla shoves the Fear Knight through to Alexandar as one of their compatriots lays a laser trip mine at the keyhole, hoping to collapse it shut. Down a winding slope we go until we reach a fork of three routes lit by green Mycena chlorophos on the ceiling and floor. Bioluminescent juice squishes from the spores as we trod them underfoot to coat our bare feet a ghostly green.

Our mines do not detonate. The Gorgons are no amateurs. And they are gaining ground.

Right, left, down we go, against all instincts, deeper into the mountain, over a natural bridge that spans an underground river, through a chamber so filled with spores it seems nearly daylight, passing gloomy grottoes and opaque pools. Down and down. Somewhere through the walls rushes that underground river. It dwindles and for several minutes the only sound is the labored breathing of the Golds. My fear is as real as theirs. If Atlas’s men catch us, they will not talk to me. They will butcher me with Alexandar and his kin, and the Fear Knight will apologize to Atalantia as he delivers my mutilated corpse.

I feel that fear vibrating like a dark river, but I leech its power, and use the adrenaline for my muscles, to narrow my vision, to calibrate my senses to absorb the slightest change in stimuli.

Soon the stench of ammonia fills my nose. I hear a chittering. The air thickens and warms as we enter a microclimate and the mouth of the tunnel expands to a great cathedral, the floor and walls undercut and eroded by what I presume to be carbonic acid. I grab Alexandar to stop him just before he spills over the edge. His men almost bowl us over.

“By Jove,” he whispers at the dramatic drop.

He shines his light upward. In the vaulted reaches of the cathedral roost legions of bats. Their ranks cover the ceiling and disappear up into apse flutes where unseen millions must sleep.

“Milkbats,” Alexandar whispers. They paralyze their victims with spines on the insides of their wings. Then they feed on the helpless victim’s bone marrow. So Atlas did feed me bat.

Damn the blackmarket carvers. This is why the Board of Quality Control regulated them so assiduously. Men just want to create apex predators because it delights them, but then those predators kill off everything else, overpopulate, and break the ecosystem.

I almost laugh at the irony.

Beneath the sleeping horde lies a sea of guano. It stretches the entire length of the cavern, its surface writhing with millions of mothroaches and albino centipedes.

“How deep you think it is?” Drusilla whispers.

“Immaterial,” Alexandar snaps. “It’s just shit. Let’s go.”

“Those are milkbats.”

“I told you that.”

“Their guano can stretch as deep as thirty meters,” I say. “And there’s withertails in there.”

Drusilla tenses, staring at the albino centipedes. “What’s a withertail?”

“Worse than the bats,” I say.

“They’re coming,” Ignacius says with a growl. He squares his big shoulders to the tunnel behind us.

“It must be passable.” Alexandar scans the cathedral. “There.”

In the gloom he spots a narrow shelf of stone leading along right, around the guano sea. We rush along it as fast as we dare. Alexandar drags the Fear Knight awkwardly, and almost loses him off the edge of the shelf. “Six o’clock!” Drusilla shouts. One of the knights fires at the Gorgon coming out the tunnel. He misses. The Gorgons do not. A projectile hits the knight. His right leg disconnects from his body at the hip joint. He screams as he loses his balance and topples down into the guano. It absorbs him like quicksand. He tries to claw his way to the surface, but missing a leg, he can’t stay atop the sludge. Then he screams as the withertails find him.

Drusilla and the Gorgons exchange fire. High-velocity rounds hiss through the air.