Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)
My datapad flickers with an incoming call. Nakamura heads to the door to give me privacy. “Wait.” I gesture to one of the ranadium chairs before my desk. “I’ll want your opinion afterward.”
As she sits, I open the call on the desk’s projector. Dancer appears from the waist up. He’s in a shuttle. A dark red jacket with a high collar substitutes for his loathed toga. The aging Red doesn’t look like he’s slept in weeks. Pressured by me for the vote, and with his radical left solidifying around ArchImperator Zan, the Blue commander of Luna’s defense fleet, how could he? As my father said: “Never trust the man who sleeps under siege. He’s either lazy or disloyal.”
“If it isn’t the loyal opposition,” I say with a smile.
“My Sovereign.” He says the word as if it carried no more weight than “coffee” or “peanut.” “Must say, for a kilo of gilded Palatine snakeshit, that was some damn fine oratory. Churchill?”
“Humans haven’t changed, why should the speeches?”
Despite the liver spots and heavy lines on his face, he is still as handsome a Red as I’ve ever seen. He grimaces. “I must say, it is odd. I’ve been called a traitor before. By Daxo, Quicksilver, Orion. Never suspected it’d feel so raw coming from you.”
“I didn?
??t quite—”
“Virginia.”
“I suppose I did.” I brush invisible lint from my jacket cuff and sigh. “A rhetorical ploy only, I assure you.” He’s no traitor. He’s just afraid, but if I accuse a Red man of that, he’ll bite down and hold on like a tick. “It doesn’t have to be this way, you know. You and I flourish when we cooperate.”
“We have had our moments.”
“But.”
“Here she goes…”
“But our system isn’t working as it should. The division of military command is a flaw we saw coming, yet kicked down the lane because we thought we were all going the same direction. Irresponsible of us, but understandable. Facts: our enemy can respond with greater urgency and secrecy than we can, and not all senators prize prosecution of the war over the continued habitation of their togas. I need to be able to run this war efficiently.”
He knows I admire respectful dialogue, and speaks in a neutral, even tone. “Virginia, the Senate was intended to be inconvenient. A check on despotism. You know as well as I: whatever the executive gets, it keeps. Forever. You are measured. You are thoughtful. If we give you temporary control over the defense fleets, it may work this time. May. But your hamartia is that you think wisdom is contagious. It fuckin’ ain’t. You won’t always be Sovereign. What if it’s Daxo next?”
“Or Zan?” I suggest.
“Or Zan.” He rubs his lantern jaw. “Only person besides you or me that wouldn’t wreck the world is Publius. Self-righteous little twat that he is.” Reds do hate their Coppers.
“Publius? Ha. He’d just give speeches all day on civic duty,” I say.
“And ladle soup for the poor.”
“Long as there are cameras.”
“Naturally.” We’re united in a smirk, then return to our corners as he continues. “Raw talk. You know I love the Free Legions. They’re the best of Mars. You know I love Darrow like a son. But he’s gone, Virginia. I buried him the moment I heard he landed in Tyche. Abandon this crusade, for the good of us all.”
I watched the speech he gave denouncing my first attempts to send a fleet. He looked like he was picking the varnish for his own son’s casket. The guilt must be devouring him.
“If he’s alive, he’s encircled,” he continues. “Atalantia will dangle him like bait. This is just another trap. We have more ships, but only if we leave a planet vulnerable. They will lure us out, take us away from our orbit guns, and kill us, or just slip past and kill the planets. We’re vulnerable in attack, strong in defense. Who do we have left that can match Atalantia and her Gold Praetors in space? Zan?” He shakes his head. “Atalantia’ll eat her alive.”
“Kavax, Niobe, and the Arcos matriarchs will lead the fleet.”
“Golds against Golds.” He hates that he wonders how it always comes to that, because he knows the answer. “Not one of ours under sixty. Atalantia is in her prime. Ajax is a rising terror. And Atlas…Fact is, there’s five hundred of them that’d make even Nakamura run in a meat straw.”
The old soldier likes his colloquialisms. This one is for a close-quarters battle where two sides blow men into either end of a ship corridor till one runs out of breath, or men. It is an infantry term, so it is rather gross.
“More like five thousand,” Nakamura murmurs. Not one for bravado, she makes a sniping motion, her only salvation against the apex predators of my breed. I’ve seen her take down a Peerless in close quarters. I also know the price she paid. Her legs are bionic from the femur down. At least they match her robot eye.
“And then there’s Aja’s brood,” Dancer mutters. “What happens if Ajax boards the Reynard? Kavax can barely walk around the garden.”
He knows what I know. Darrow was the force of nature we rode to victory after victory. Yet whenever the Gold Legates or Praetors caught our other leaders in the field, they consistently made mincemeat of them. Wanting lowColors to be equal to Peerless in warfare is not the same as them being equal.
Without Darrow, he has no confidence in our arms. But the risk is necessary.