Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  Five minutes later, I float over the starShells and the huge Drachenjägers behind them. They stretch into the mountain, rank upon metal rank. Helldiver Legion, the Armored Fifteenth. Martians all, my first and best Drachenjäger legion. I rode with them to end the Siege of Olympia to chase the Minotaur out of Cassius’s former home, and then again at Agea against Atlas and the Ash Lord.

  “Helldiver Legion! Enemy iron is inbound. Our coms are down. Soon the storm will claim theirs. The First Army will hit them at the Children and then retreat to Tyche. The city will soon come under siege by at least one full army group.

  “Legate Telemanus believes the Second Army is now streaming to Tyche to relieve that siege and clear her path of retreat. Of the Second Army, we are all that remains. If Tyche falls, our brothers are lost. Will Tyche fall?” In reply, five thousand pairs of Drachenjäger boots hammer the floor of the cavern with a seismic booom. “Atalantia thinks the Second Army is ash. Are we ash?” Booom. Booom. “Are we afraid?” Boom. Boom. Boom. “What are we!”

  “HELLDIVERS!”

  “Form columns!”

  The air warps with the thermal distortion of five thousand drachen engines growling to life. I see Rhonna slide into a black rig at the rear. Its arms pump as the bolts that stud her body sync with the Drachenjäger. My Howlers rise around me. The Arcosian Knights form columns in their starShells. At the vanguard, I turn to face the darkening world.

  Enemy iron streams down to the western and eastern horizons. Little more than gnats in the shadow of the atomics. Obelisks of radioactive smoke and debris grow upon the Plains of Caduceus. High above their stalks, the bulbous heads of the mushroom clouds disappear into the thickening storm cover. Black clouds ride. Lightning shatters the sky. Atalantia has shattered our jaw with her first punch. Now it’s our turn. I lift my slingBlade.

  “For the Republic! For Mars!”

  “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?

  “What’s your core status?” Kalindora asks.

  “Sixty-six percent.”

  “So he still listens.” She nods in disgust at the Iron Leopards. “Most of those whelps are walking around sub-fifty because they didn’t hold their burn. They’ll depend on recharge.”

  “That was a war crime,” I say. “It was only small-arms fire.”

  “Only a crime if there’s a court. Eat.” Kalindora tosses me a protein bar. “You move well,” she says. At any other time, I’d bask
in her compliments as I did as a boy. “Superb instincts. But you’re clumsy in takeoff and need to expand your field of vision. You act like you want to use your razor instead of your gun. This isn’t asteroid corridor fighting or whatever the blazes Bellona had you at. You did prime work on that aerial infantry though. I saw you put down four. Not your first kills, it seems.”

  “No.”

  She sees me staring at the ground. Her voice approaches anger. “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did you come back?” she asks.

  When I don’t answer, she turns her back and crawls into her mech. “Your sensors picked up some people.” She levers to her feet as I climb into my cockpit. “Did your sensors tell you they didn’t have weapons? No. Did they tell you they weren’t saboteurs or snipers? No. Or even Howlers? No. So how can mercy exist when anyone could carry an atomic rocket, and you don’t know? That’s the problem with this war. Cruelty is necessary. Yet cruelty is a thermal runaway.”

  The first wave of transports descends from the sky by the time I’ve sealed myself back in my starShell. Those ships with thrusters kick clouds of debris into the air. The ones with gravity engines form floating cloaks of chalk. GravBikes roar out of pens. Gray legionnaires skinned in desert armor and visor-bearing helmets pour out of personnel carriers. Dozens of humanoid titans, hoverTanks, and spiderTanks decouple from their transports and land on the dirt with a sound like hammers striking on wood.

  Then come the engineers.

  With a hundred fifty thousand men and women landed, the engineers rapidly begin securing and fortifying the landfall for the primary wave.

  I look past the disembarking troops to the north.

  There are shouts. Portable railguns swivel on their gyroscopes.

  “Signatures inbound!” Seraphina shouts from the perimeter. She bursts back.

  “Friendlies!” someone confirms.

  A swarm of starShells descend perpendicular to the main landing. They make landfall in a pyramid in front of Kalindora, nearly a thousand in armor of a dozen disparate houses. Not one amongst them is Gold.

  Only the best and most loyal of Grays are given license for starShells.

  Their leader clomps forward. His starShell viewport and the pulseArmor helmet beneath retract and the face of a young-gunslinger-turned-old-centurion stares at me as if he’s seen a man come back from the Void. One thousand mech-suited Praetorians fall to their knees.

  “SubLegate Rhone ti Flavinius and the First Cohort Praetorian Guard reporting for duty, my liege.” His cheeks are covered with more black and gold teardrops than when he served as my shooting instructor in the Citadel. I didn’t think there was any more room.

  The Gold knights surrounding us look back and forth between the most famous Gray alive, a thousand ex-Praetorians, and a scarless Pixie in borrowed armor with the Love Knight at his side.

  They need no further explanation.

  “Rhone ti Flavinius?” I say. “Hades didn’t reclaim you yet?”

  “And lose his best recruiter? Perish the thought, my liege.” His accent is pure Lunese stock. Last in a long line of Praetorians, from birth he was sponsored by my family, and excelled in the ludus until he proved himself in battlefields across a dozen spheres under the command of Aja and Lorn. He rose so high as to become second officer under Aja of the XIII Dracones. There is no more famous a Praetorian, save perhaps his treasonous understudies: the Nakamuras.

  On the day my grandmother died, he was in orbit preparing to face Virginia.

  He would have thought the Line ended that day.

  I wave him to his feet and tell him to rise.

  “I cannot, my liege. On behalf of the First Cohort of the thirteenth and the scattered Guard, it falls upon me to issue our grievous apologies for abandoning the search, and presuming you dead. Our oath was till the extinguishment of the Blood. If there’s punishment due, it is my duty to bear it for my men, in place of decimation, and an honor that my last order come from the Heir of Silenius.”

  The dragoon commander produces a Praetorian dagger and puts it to the dragon tattoos that circle his neck.

  “The fault lies not with you, but with your patron. I was the one who was lost. Now, on your feet, Praetorian.”

  He stands. In his forties, he’s no longer the arrogant lurcher I remember winning the Legion Pyramid at the summer martial games. War has aged him past his years, but the boyish glimmer remains in the sharpshooter’s pale eyes. “Exter? Fausta?” I ask, searching behind him.

  “Dead. Exter by the Goblin on Luna. Fausta from an orbital strike on Mars.” A shame. They were always kind to me, particularly Fausta. “Kruger is still shooting the wings off flies. He’s my decurion.”

  “How did you know I returned?” I ask. He looks at Kalindora. I turn on her in surprise.

  “Atalantia cares for Atalantia,” she says. “But there are many of us who would not see the heir die on the hour of his return. These men are sworn to you. As am I, my liege. Old oaths outweigh the new.”

  “Am I to take this to mean Atalantia means me harm?”

  “Of course not,” she replies. “She wept when she received your communiqué, but you are a Lune, and scar or not, you have no right to prevent these men from honoring their oaths.”

  This is not what I had in mind when I set out to prove my loyalty to Atalantia. It is a disaster. The Praetorians are not simply men sworn to my house. They are as much a symbol of the Sovereigncy as the Morning Chair itself. I search for Ajax but cannot find him in the mill of his landing legions. Seraphina has wandered over. She recognizes Rhone and takes a step closer.

  “I apologize I could not bring more men, and for the accoutrement,” he says, frowning at the blue and silver armor he wears. “We believed you dead. The most shameless have gone mercenary. Some have found work with the other houses. Most went to Atalantia. These here were with Julia au Bellona. Her house isn’t what it was, but she doesn’t spend men as quickly as the rest. She’s terminated our contract as a gesture of fidelity to you.”

  I feel a pang of guilt. My own family glowers at me with suspicion, and Cassius’s mother sends me an olive branch. More. A backing of my claim. I know enough of the woman to know she’s playing her own little game, but now she’s beginning to interrupt mine.

  “The Lady Bellona knows I’ve returned, then,” I say to Rhone.

  “Little escapes Julia au Bellona.” He smiles. “It was a long-range communiqué. But she says she will be joining you shortly. More of the Guard will come from the other houses as soon as they hear of your return.” He clears his throat, suddenly very serious. “It will be as it was, my Sovereign.”

  I look past the man to see Ajax watching us.

  His eyes are filled with so much wrath you would think I had just arranged for the Morning Chair to be delivered straight to the desert.

  “So much for your word to my brother,” Seraphina says. Her Rim eyes are chromed out for the desert light and unreadable, but her look of disdain is total.

  “Lower your voice, man. I am not the Sovereign,” I tell Rhone. “Nor do I intend to be. Purge it from your thoughts lest you wish to see me dead.” I wheel on Kalindora. “How dare you presume—”

  “Am I to be scolded like a child by a child?” she asks. “How odd this world is.”

  “Don’t mock me. You know how this looks.”

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I do.”

  Dammit all to Hades. I stomp away from her and the Praetorian, hoping to get a word with Ajax, but he is clustered in a thick knot of his officers. They sit on the edges of their cockpits. Seneca has produced a metal canteen from a thigh storage pouch. Another Gold supplies small tin cups, which Ajax fills. “To life and landfall,” he says, and they tip the whiskey. “We’ll finish the rest in Heliopolis. Sorry, little brother. Lost you in the sea of Pra
etorians. You should wear a crown so we can find you.” No whiskey is poured for me. A woman gives me her own cup too eagerly. I’m wearing my suit, so I can’t take it.

  The first suitor makes their bid, poorly.

  Ajax notices.

  “May we have a moment, Ajax?”

  He ignores me to address his men. “The intel and sensors didn’t lie. We’re five hundred kilometers from their nearest deployed force. We are in a slow tango with Heliopolis. They never thought we’d sneak a hand up the back of their skirt.”

  Atalantia’s gambit is bold. While the bulk of the army focuses on the battle with the Republic in the north, she looks beyond the battle. The capital, Tyche, is the emotional victory for Votum. But Heliopolis is the prize—control it, control the south and her thousands of iron mines. Grimmus troops will occupy the Sun City, and they will stay for generations. The poor Votum have no idea what they’re paying for her to take their planet back.

  It is shameful. And none of them care. As cliens, or clients of House Grimmus, Atalantia, their patronus owes them protection and sponsorship. She will be sure to richly reward their loyalty and service in arms.

  “It will be an assault,” Ajax says. “Soon as the ground iron and infantry land, we push west in force. Seneca, take a century. Harass their vedette and drones. If it breathes or beeps, it dies. I want them blind as we—”

  Ajax is interrupted as a signal comes over the general officer channel. The Golds slide in unison back into their starShells and latch up as the message crackles.

  “All officers…is Fury Command. Have…situation developing. Stand…for update.”

  “THIS…ARCHIMMUNES UMBERTO’S FANT…FIVE HYPERCANES…FORMED OVER…SYCORAX….ANOMALOUS PRESSURE CENTERS…EIGHTY KILO…PASCALS. THE LARGEST…WINDSPEEDS OF EIGHT HUNDRED KILOMETERS PER…MOVING SOUTH” The signal cuts out and reestablishes. “WILL MAKE LANDFALL ON…HELION COAST IN TWENTY…EXPECT CLOUD COVER TO THIRTY KILOMETERS. HEAVY…FALL, TURBULENCE, ELECTRICAL…INTERFERENCE AND STORM SURGES…SECONDARY STORM FORMING OVER…WASTE OF LADON…”