Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

“He doesn’t want to hear about your eerie collection, Exeter. It is immensely creepy,” Glirastes says. Republic guards loiter in the foyer. “Exeter will see you to your room, Cato.”

“I rather hoped to have a discussion with you.”

“I have work to do. I will see you at supper, if I have time.”

“It is important…”

“I said if I have time.”

Knowing the spike will record all conversation via vocal vibrations, and cameras will record all the rest, I play the part of a libertine and treat myself to a long bath in the guest suite.

Inside, my clock is ticking. Four days before the strike. Four days and I sit in a bath of lavender oil. It takes me back to the horror of the impalement, and I puzzle over the enigma that is the Fear Knight. He is likely being tortured at this very moment. Why would he trust me with his life on so thin a plan? Could he possibly care so much for the people of Heliopolis? Do true servants of the Society exist now only in the most deplorable form?

After the bath, I stare at my face in the bathroom mirror. I do not recognize myself. The desert has weathered my visage and stripped away much of its youth. My right cheek is sunken and peeling from sunburn. Carefully, I take the resFlesh off my left cheek. The burn is livid. Drained of fluid, it gives the appearance of melted pink wax. It is not as grotesque as it must have been in the desert, but chunks of metal are still embedded too deeply in the drooping skin to be removed by anyone but an expensive surgeon or carver. The eye has gone smoky white. I am not repulsed. I always thought Golds who kept their scars to be a bit vain. But I understand it now. Too much has always been made of my looks, as if I earned them by virtue of being born.

This I earned. This is mine.

That night, Glirastes’s rose quartz table is set for one. I eat in silence, catered to by three servants. If they remember me, they do not show it. My old friend never comes.

The next morning, I learn he has not returned from his labor in the city. I spend my time in leisure, walking the orchard, swimming in his pool, conversing with the Rising guards, as much as they will talk to a Gold. Most want to kill me on sight. But I learn their patterns, and I yearn to investigate Glirastes’s domed workshop, but I d

are not.

After lunch, I walk the house, bouncing a rubber ball as I go, careful to remain frivolous. I let it bounce awkwardly off a step and chase the ball down a hallway into his library. There, I thumb through his dusty books and play games on a hologrid, and when I tire of them, I make my way up the spiral staircase of the tower, poking around until I stumble upon his old golden telescope that looks down at the city.

With a yawn, I look through, and make my first surveillance.

Stretching north nearly as far as the eye can see sprawls an architect’s delight of basilicas, temples, forums, triumphal arches, historical columns, amphitheaters, and the great Hippodrome. Only the distant storm wall does not shine white in the sun. In the western city, Corinthian-inspired office spires, broken only by parks, viaducts, and amphitheaters, stretch all the way to the Bay of Sirens. The mountains cup the fabled city in their loving palms. Their craggy summits are tipped white with snow and festooned with gun batteries. Their ranges stretch hundreds of kilometers, impassable by any land army.

To take the city by conventional means, Atalantia would lose millions of men she needs for her campaign. Her chemical option is not so insensible strategically, considering her losses in the battle on the Ladon.

But it is shortsighted and immoral.

When last I was here, the air above Heliopolis was clear but for the sparkling of an occasional yacht or policing units. Now it is mobbed by an ugly flood of heterogenous military vessels, haulers, and civilian rickshaws. The boulevards beneath teem with even more traffic and pedestrians. The city is near bursting with wounded and refugees. Military camps and field hospitals cover the parks and fill amphitheaters where low and high alike once gathered with chilled wine to watch Sophocles’s tragedies free of charge. Troops jog through the Via Triumphia where victorious charioteers would parade their steeds to the wild acclaim of the crowds.

To the southwest, on the outer limits of the sprawling city, I see Heliopolis’s spaceport. Beyond the smaller torchShips and destroyers, dwarfing even the mountains, lies a mound of metal.

The Morning Star.

Thousands of engineers work to repair her hull. Flights of haulers ferry fresh armaments from the southern missile factories to the spaceport. They unload the missile boxes on skiffs suspended on gravity cushions to funnel into the ship’s port side.

Heliopolis is much as one would imagine it to be: preparing for a siege.

However…Darrow knows he would never survive one.

So I pay close attention to the spaceport. There is an aberration in the pattern that sticks out like a loose thread.

I look back at the skiffs unloading the missiles, use the telescope’s relative positional measuring system on all forty of the unloading skiffs, yawn, and abandon the telescope tower for a book of poetry. My mind whirs as I stare at the words on the page. Those skiff models have a default 0.7-meter gravity cushion from the ground. More than half were at 0.4 meters according to the telescope. I calculate the volume of the missile boxes, and the mass that the pilum missiles should make. It does not account for the 0.3-meter sag. Not even close. Something else is in them, something at least five times as heavy. But what? Full to the brim, it would take something with a density of at least twenty grams per cubic centimeter.

There are only a few relevant elements with military application that are dense enough to fit in the volume of those missile boxes and have enough mass to account for the substantial sag in the gravity cushion. Osmium is too rare here, and to account for the high mass, it would need to be in its pure state, which would be ridiculous because it is nearly impossible to machine-form in that state. There’s plutonium, of course, which could be part of the puzzle, but why hide plutonium? Why the deception?

I lean toward iridium.

Iridium is a hard transition metal three times as dense as iron. It is often used in X-ray optics and as a contact metal because of its resistance to arc erosion. More importantly, it is used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators because it can withstand operating temperatures up to 2,000 Celsius. Unless they’ve nonsensically changed the default gravity cushions on only half the skiffs, or unless Darrow is making substantial repairs to the Morning Star’s reactors, which I can assume he is not because that does not explain the deception, he is either building a massive secondary generator or a sustained EMP device of unprecedented scale.

I close the poetry book.

That night, Glirastes is absent again. A Thessalonican Chianti is served with lamb drizzled with rosemary-infused olive oil. The wine is rancid. I spit it across the table after my first sip. Exeter appears from nowhere. “Is the wine not to the dominus’s satisfaction?”