Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

“Ride hell!”

TWELVE RIPPLING RIVERS OF shadow move across a desert of white chalk. The shadows are cast by six thousand starShells flying in twelve iron columns.

It is two hours since breach and I do not feel sane.

My life has disintegrated into a series of fragmented moments of extreme fear and unreal violence. It is defined by new sensations. The crunching of ice under clawed titanium foot. The slip of snow. The scrape of rock. The whistling of air. The tangy chlorine smell of ozone from my railgun. The ever-present tension that a benign ridge will suddenly come alive with anti-aircraft fire.

I no longer trust stillness.

Stillness is the enemy taking careful aim.

After clearing the briar-patch of mountain gun installations, our legion linked with our launch partners, the Terran-born XX Fulminata, the Thunderbolt Legion, to swell our numbers and drive north to make a secure landfall for the first wave of one hundred fifty thousand, and then the two million that will follow in the second and third waves to take Heliopolis.

Sooty smoke rises from the ruins of Republic scout craft and gun batteries cleared by Fulminata. I am relieved to be out of the mountains. Amongst the icy peaks, Ajax took us headlong at any threat like some possessed Homeric hero. I barely managed to keep pace, but my blade is well blooded from the bunker hunts. Kalindora shadowed me through it all, muttering about young pups wanting glory. Seraphina is keen for glory too, but not keen enough to override her discipline.

She is a better soldier than she was a traveling companion. Twice she guarded my flank. Once in the ruins of a mountain bunker when an Obsidian charged from the rubble with an axe. Once in the air when I didn’t spot an anti-aircraft battery.

By midday, the first signs of civilization appear on the blasted landscape. A hotel for the wealthy beside a high mesa lake. Water farms, ore refineries, and a mining town with gold pyramids painted on their roofs to ward off bombardment. Small-arms fire flashes feebly at us from a rooftop.

“Leopard Eleven engaging sniper,” I intone. I have three rockets left. “Thermal readings indicate multiple civilians in adjacent basements. Red and Brown genus. Switching to guns.” Kalindora shadows me as I bank to make a precision shot at the two men on the roof.

A pillar of blinding light divides the horizon.

I break off to avoid the rippling shockwave.

When the orbital strike clears, the town is a molten crater. “Too slow on the draw,” Ajax drawls as I reel. “You’ll have to be quicker than a cat to steal my kills.”

“They were civilians…”

“Sympathizers. Don’t worry, you get half a notch. Used your targeting solution, didn’t I?”

“Only counts as one,” Seneca adds. “Hive mind.”

Laughter.

Kalindora hails my private frequency, but I reject the request.

Soon we are at the edge of the sky still protected by the Rising’s southern shield chain. This deep in the Ladon, there is no sign of the enemy. Heliopolis is still a hundred klicks south.

When we set down in a shallow playa west of a reservoir city, I am filled with contempt. I pop the starShell’s top, desperate for fresh air. But the desert heat hits like an anvil. An ache fills my lungs. Already, I feel the sun burning my ship-pale skin. I suck water from my suit’s caches and step away from the commotion of the landing legions. Ajax calls to me, but I ignore him.

I count the thermal signatures from my mental picture. Three hundred and eleven. Some too small to be anything other than children.

I knew war wouldn’t be clean. But he used my targeting data on children.

The sense of certainty and purpose that brought me here is fading. I feel like a boy from the crowd who thought he could tame lions by stepping in the cage with them.

Seraphina is fine in the cage. She stalks past with an excited glimmer in her eye. Ajax might hold the highest killcount, but she is not far behind. All will be recorded in holographic glory by their helmet cams, and tallied by administrators on the Annihilo. “War conforming to your expectations?” I ask.

“Beautifully so,” she says between gulps of water. “Beautifully so.”

As she walks away, I look out at the alien landscape. Between the Aigle Mountains and Hesperides is a flat belly of desert pavement broken only by dunes of white chalk, mushroom-shaped limestone hoodoos, and pale white cacti the size of houses. Mountains saw the horizon in half. Above them, the sun squats malevolently. White golems trudge through this bleakness like the mechanized overseers of Dante’s hell. Pale with desert chalk, the Golds spike beacons into the hard clay of the playa. Elsewhere, scouts in light armor and optics helmets set drones loose as if they were pet falcons. Everyone’s a hunter here.

Seneca, Ajax’s bodyguard, winks at me as his drones soar north.

There’s a crash to my right as Kalindora’s starShell lands in a cloud of dust. “Don’t waste the peace, Lysander. This grime will kill your shell sure as a railgun.” She bends her knees and uses her elbows to cushion her suit as it falls to a sitting position. I join her and we crawl out of our starShells to clean the outsides. I spare glances at Ajax conversing with the Fulminata Legate. I know I should suck down my rising disgust, shadow him, learn from him and make myself useful, but something about him out here makes me feel unwelcome.

I have the sneaking suspicion that the orbital strike was more a message for me than a necessary military action. Could he really discount lives so flippantly?