Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

A gap in the artillery barrage opens as orbital ships redirect their guns to create a hellmouth—a corridor of protective fire. A second later, the first century of starShells from a Carthii destroyer enters the hellmouth and disappears into the breach. RipWings follow. The century after them disintegrates as a particle beam slashes up from the mountains.

“Breach,” Ajax says.

Our century streams into a hellmouth.

My senses overload.

Munitions blaze around us, blinding flashes, metal colliding and vaporizing. But we outrace the sounds of the explosions we see, only to cross into the rippling sound waves of prior explosions. I lose Ajax in the mayhem. Airburst shells keen and explode to disperse harpies—fist-sized drones packed with EMP or explosive charges. I fire my left shoulder cannon at a swarm of them. A dozen slam into a ripWing. The engines die and it careens out of the hellmouth into a friendly artillery shell.

Then I’m through.

“Fracture,” Ajax orders. The legion’s centuries splinter into hundreds of decades. I struggle to match their precision, nearly clipping Ajax’s heels as I follow him. Kalindora and Seraphina fall in behind me as we dive toward the jagged Hesperides range. “Clear your peaks. Leave the air to the rippers.” The com clicks as he switches channels to our decade. “Decade One, we’re on our own. Head north by—”

Seraphina’s voice cuts him off. “E spike. Shatter.”

My instruments register the electrical spike of railguns charging. Out of the corner of my eye, a pinprick of purple light flashes on a mountain ridge.

I fire my left shoulder thruster and shoot out of formation as a blur of dense metal whips through now-empty air. Four hundred slugs follow the first in three seconds. A starShell disappears in a shower of debris. I can’t tell whose. Then Seraphina’s rockets slam into the gun installation and bloom over shielding as it continues to fire, unaffected.

I activate my targeting laser, but before I can light the installation up, Kalindora’s illuminates it. An orbital strike falls. A beam of white light that would flashblind the naked eye cleaves the mountain peak like a hunk of cheese.

“Good spot, for a Moonie. Compliments on the lighting, Annihilo,” Ajax says. “Decade One, cluster on me. We’ve a mountain range to clear.” He lights up my personal channel. “How’s the war, little brother?”

I struggle to reply. “Fast.”

He laughs. “Tune down your inertial dampeners. It’ll help you feel the maneuvers. You’re flying that masterpiece like it’s a cosmosHauler. You quite nearly clipped my heels. Twice.”

“Apologies. It’s touchier than the sims.”

“Touchier than the sims. Ha! We’ll make a Peerless out of you yet. Now, belly down, goodman. Welcome party of aerial termites inbound.”

MY ARMY DIES. THE world has become a garden for mushrooms. They bloom on the bruised horizon, swelling two hundred kilometers high, dwarfing the mountains. Shockwave after shockwave, diffused by distance, rack the Necromancer as we streak north to get me back to Red Reach base and the heart of my northern armies.

With the shields down, we will be encircled. We must prepare to break out in the thin slip of time between bombardment and landfall. If we survive the bombardment.

Desert sand streams underneath the shuttle. Fortified mining cities disappear in flashes of white light. Great desert gun emplacements with enough firepower to take down a torchShip stream fury into the sky, only to be turned into glass by pillars of light hotter than the sun.

Colloway is silent and still wearing his synaptic halo. The ovular pilot’s chair bathes the dark man in blue light, making the fighter ace look an elfin boy half his age. Untethered from his body, he is the ship and the ship is him.

“Come on, Midnight,” I whisper.

“Almighty, give me space,” the ship replies dreamily. “This party makes Ilium look like a Thermic sailing race. Oh my. Incoming slags. I count…Can’t be right. Instruments are frazzed.” A pause. “Never mind. It is six hundred.”

“Kilometers?”

“RipWings.”

Shit.

In the wake of the first atomic barrage, the first river of enemy ripWings descend. Fifty squadrons stream down against the backdrop of a mushroom cloud like a school of piranha. Missiles stream from their bellies, cascading down on gun batteries and tank formations. Three squadrons peel off to engage us.

“I hope everyone relished their breakfast. You’ll see it again soon.”

My boots lock to the deck. My gut jerks as we spin in a never-ending corkscrew. I am helpless behind Colloway, despite my blood-red pulseArmor and all its armaments. Only the storm can stop what comes from the sky, and it is still in its infancy.

You could run a war from the Necromancer, survive almost any magnitude of EMP, outrace even a torchShip. But in atmosphere, she’s a big boat, and the ripWings gain on us fast.

I hail Harnassus for LongMalice support and give him coordinates. Over the static, I can barely hear his affirmative. In the Hesperides range, hundreds of klicks to the southwest, under the cover of our intact southern shield chain, fifty-meter guns will swivel on their gyroscopes. Colloway thumbs-up to show he heard me.