Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  I’m coming, Atalantia. I’m coming for your head.

  ONE THOUSAND PRAETORIANS, the Love Knight, and the daughter of Romulus follow me west to seek the eye of the desert storm.

  It makes us a thousand and three worlds of misery. Seraphina and Kalindora flank me. Each man, each woman, alone in the darkness of their suits, imprisoned by the wind and sand.

  Left foot. Right foot. Left foot.

  Courtesy of Seraphina’s storm experience, we employ a Rim trick. Towing wire holds us together like grapes so we do not lose one another in the storm. Periodically, Seraphina and Praetorians with storm experience detach to scout our perimeter.

  Still, our progress is slower than desired. Storm winds hit us head-on and increase to over eight hundred kilometers per hour, with visibility of scarcely two meters. The storm robs us of the sky and our instruments. Bit by bit, trespassing against the wind drains our starShells.

  After eight hours of this, only the transition of the storm’s dimness to absolute darkness denotes the arrival of night. When the wind lulls, we jog, tripling our pace by using the thrusters in small bursts. Several lines snap because of this, and we lose Praetorians in the storm.

  There is no going back for them or for us.

  The fear that gripped me in the tube of the Annihilo is gone. The sensation of standing on the edge of the cliff was worse than the fall.

  Life has winnowed down to a simple task and survival. That simplicity is a comfort. For years I was in a torpor and cowardly in indecision. Here I have certainty. I will prove myself to Ajax. To Atalantia. I am their family, not their rival.

  Forward. Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot.

  “Something is out there,” Seraphina says. I peer into the darkness and see nothing. Still, Kalindora gives the order to hunker down. We prime our weapons. “Holy hells. Contact.”

  There’s a chorus of hold-fire calls from the scouts.

  Dread shapes move in the murk. Only when they come within five meters and they engage their lights can we see they are starShells. Ten of them. Our headlamps illuminate Votum hammer sigils painted on the chassis. Might be hundreds behind them for all we can see. One steps out before the others.

  My com crackles and a handsome, sundark face illuminated by starShell interior lights glows in my HUD. “Ebb of the evening, goodmen. And we thought we were the only civil company for a thousand klicks. Is that not Kalindora herself I gaze upon?”

  “Cicero, you scoundrel. You’re supposed to be in the Plains of Caduceus.”

  “Squeaks the mouse to the rat,” he says with light menace. “Mayhaps Love is lost in the storm, my friends. Didn’t you know Heliopolis is just a skip to the south?”

  A beat of silence. “I go where I am ordered.”

  “Like a good knight. The peril of oaths, no? But fear not, my intrepid father noticed a certain lack of Leopards on his flank in the Plains of Caduceus and has sent us to ensure that no skullduggery is afoot at the gates of Heliopolis.” His voice lowers. “The city belongs to my father, Scorpio, and House Votum. And we are weary of Grimmus henchmen skulking in the dark.”

  “Prepare to fire,” Kalindora says over the private channel.

  “I have them flanked,” Seraphina intones. “I count four hundred. Could be more.”

  “Belay that,” I snap. “No Praetorian will fire on allies. Nor will you, Seraphina.”

  “Yes, dominus,” Rhone says and gives the order for all Praetorians to stand down. Kalindora goes into a stony silence.

  “Private communications, eh, Kalindora? I don’t need to crack your code to know what you said,” Cicero says. “Not enough that that Lunese bitch tries to steal our city. She’ll spill old blood like there’s so much of it left.”

  “Salve, Cicero,” I say, taking over from Kalindora.

  “And who’s that?” he asks. I share my face via hologram. I knew Cicero as a child. Not well, but on the occasions when his family visited Luna, Grandmother insisted I entertain the voluble heir of House Votum. To be honest, I found it tiresome, if not a little entertaining. He is ten years older, and thus his condescension is limitless, and hilarious. Yet unlike Ajax, he recognizes me immediately.

  “Hades on high,” he says without an ounce of surprise. “Is that Lysander au Lune in the pinkish flesh?” So his father told him.

  “You never do forget a face, Cicero.”

  “Not the pretty ones, at least. Father didn’t lie—not dead after all. My, my. Atalantia has roped you into her schemes? How the beast now leads the master.”

  “We are en route to destroy the Storm God,” I say.

  “There aren’t any Storm Gods on our planet.”

  “There are. Explanations can wait. You want your city back, I won’t stop you. But you won’t get there if those engines are still running. I imagine your cores are as depleted as ours.” He does not reply. “We have a pickup scheduled.” That gets his attention. “What say you lend us a hand, and we ride for Heliopolis together in the morning?”

  He laughs as if he were on a beach. “For such a dramatic union, I’ll play earnest, so long as you support our claim to Heliopolis when we find Ajax, that mischievous little tart.”

  Kalindora reminds me that it would put me in direct conflict with Atalantia. But she’s already done that by summoning the Praetorians.

  “Heliopolis was built by House Votum, with House Votum it should remain,” I say.

  “Splendid. Then the Scorpion Legion is at your service, my goodman. Or is it my liege? I suppose Father will decide. If he survives the north. Calamity, goodman.” His mind darkens. “Calamity.”

  I cannot divine the strength of the Scorpion Legion as they add their numbers to ours. Though Cicero continues to babble in my ear, I’m soon lost in the now-familiar grind.

  Left. Right. Left.

  I’m deep in the drudgery when a hand grips my armored shoulder. I blink out of my daze to see that it is three in the morning. Landfall plus seventeen. I look back to see the Praetorians arrayed fifty deep to my right. The Scorpions emerge from the dust to my left. They must be several thousand in number.

  At dire cost to our energy cores, we have made it to the eye of the storm.

  I hadn’t even realized.

  It is a different world. The eye is fifty kilometers in diameter. The air pacific and clear of sand, as if held in static twilight. A desert deerling watches us with suspicion. A formless beast lurks beneath the mass of a hoodoo, its eyes winking like coins. More beasts of all varieties float within the gravity shadow of the engines. They didn’t even bother to diffuse the gravity shadow.

  All this is surrounded by a vortex of sand, which swirls around a monolith of gray metal.

  The Storm God floats kilometers above the desert.

  Wreathing its shoulders and stretching toward the heavens is a swirling marble cloak of clouds veined with lightning. Beneath that, little more than a fringe to that cloak, is the swirling sand. Many of the animals who sought shelter here gather in the grip of its gravity engines.

  It breaks something inside me to see an instrument of creation perverted into a weapon. Whatever doubt I held vanishes. Darrow is no longer a good man. Even Atalantia declined to use her atomics on actual cities. But to kill us, Darrow will drown the northern coast of Helios. Tyche, Kaikos, Priapos, Arabos, will all be in the path of tidal waves.

  Millions will die.

  I do not know if it can be stopped, but he must be.

  “This feels like a dream,” Seraphina whispers. This war is proving to be all she ever wanted. Cicero eyes the woman with interest and calls something to her.

  I can barely hear him for the wind. Our instruments are dazzled with false readings. I fear we will not be able to reach Ajax even in the morning. Which is why he is scheduled to come with pickup at 0600, if we manage to down the engine.


  I find Kalindora at my side. Unlike Seraphina, she is not in thrall to the Storm God. Sorrow fills her eyes as she looks up and up. She has seen horror many times before. This is merely its bleakest evolution. “Your thermal runway,” I say.

  She turns with a grim expression and pulls Rhone to her.

  “Prepare to engage in six columns! Double heavy fronts. Prep three wedges for a flank charge!” She summons Cicero. Robbed of our orbital support, we will have to do this the old-fashioned way.

  I check my ammunition just as there’s a flash from the Storm God. Cicero ducks with me. At the great distance, I cannot distinguish what it is. Before I can pull up my optics, Seraphina tilts her head back at me.

  “Gahja, don’t be such a—”

  And then the entire top half of her starShell disappears as a rail slug the size of a man rips Romulus’s daughter clean in half. My commands stick in the base of my throat as the legs of the mech teeter and collapse sideways, spilling her intestines out the top.

  “Incoming!” Kalindora bellows.

  THERE IS NO PLACE in all worlds like Tyche.

  Set on an incline between the mountains and the sea on a great strip of lowland connecting it to the Talarian Peninsula, it is the ancestral home of the gens Votum. Though the city is famed for its white sands and coral reefs, there is a reason the Votum family crest is a hammer. They are builders. And they built this city not for greed, but for beauty and symmetry. Her old quarter is carved entirely of local stone and glass. Libraries the size of starships but shaped like bizarre human heads line the mountains behind the city. High, arching bridges link complex systems of archipelagos, some of which migrate into the northern sea in the late summer. Forests and gardens burst from rooftops and flowering plants creep down the narrow, cobbled streets, which then wind in spirals up her twelve great hills.

  I remember the Liberation Day, nearly half a year ago now, when I woke in the early morning before the parade and walked alone down to the shore to listen to the gulls. I only wished my wife and son could have been with me to see that sunrise. For once, I did not glare at the sea and wonder how many of my men it claimed. I did not resent the world because it was made by slaves. I saw only a multitude of splendors. I think that’s what Sevro called it. On that day, Tyche was the second most beautiful city I had ever seen. I wanted to share it with Pax and Virginia.

  Now I am in time to see the city die.

  As we pushed through the reeling legions, the storm mutated from friend to wild, convulsing savage. Lunging in from the sea, giant waves crash over the north coast of Helios. As we neared Tyche, a wall of water nearly a half kilometer high forced us to run to higher ground lest it smash us as it does the Gold landing parties on the shore.

  Boats float in the center of fields. A shark snaps for air in a tree. Our starShells can no longer attempt the sky. Trees, rocks, and signposts flung at hundreds of kilometers an hour damage our suits, killing two of my precious Obsidian pathfinders.

  This is not the storm I was promised.

  Orion has either disobeyed me or lost control.

  Now, with dread in my belly, I rise unsteadily through the howling wind to the crest of a hill where the Arcosian Knights look down at a city drowning.

  From Tyche’s southern wharf to the northern business district, a third of the city is underwater. The storm surge from the hypercane spreads east and shows no signs of stopping short of the mountains. Within hours, the entire city will be gone, with only the tallest towers peeking above the sea. The western reach of the city, where the lowlands connect with the Talarian Peninsula, is aflame and shattered by siege. Twisted wrecks of tanks and Drachenjägers litter the ground between huge breaches in the defensive wall where Feranis’s legion made its doomed last stand against an army thirty times its size—though only a small part was used to besiege the city. The rest assembles deeper inland on the peninsula highgrounds. Huge, shadowy forms descend in the storm, their eldritch contours suggested by spasms of lightning. Not the gilded might of the Venusian Carthii—which we smashed—but the Ash Legions of Luna and Earth. The heart of Atalantia’s loyalist army.

  Her forward legions, which took the city, now choke on their victory. A sizable portion of their force has penetrated deep into the city, pressing for the mountains, but they are cut off from the main host. Thousands clog the waterlogged lowlands that connect Tyche to the Talarian Peninsula. The spiderTanks and titans that broke the walls sink in the mire. Men pile onto hovercraft and into any airship that dares take flight.

  They stand no chance.

  As I watch, the sea ripples like a single organism, and from the gray obscurity of the storm comes a wave that would make a Europan stop and stare. The tidal wave is a kilometer tall. It buckles the first twenty blocks of the city’s oceanfront and sweeps uphill toward the mountains, to be stopped only by elevation just short of the Harper’s Plaza. The greater body of the wave carries on toward the Ash Legions in the lowlands. A row of Gold knights in black armor stands on the peninsula’s rocky heights to watch the legions below be swallowed by the sea.

  A hundred thousand men gone in a moment. I should rejoice.

  But soon Tyche’s population will follow. How many millions down there? How many millions along the coast? This will not be isolated mayhem. A chain of tidal waves will devastate northern Helios. My promise to Glirastes was broken, but not on my orders.

  I pull out the master switch I built in case it all went wrong. Turning it on is like killing part of myself. I never thought this moment could come. The moment where Orion failed me.

  She has no intention of leashing the storm. It was to be my lever. She uses it as a hammer, not to punish just Gold, but the planet she hates. With seas churned to madness by the storm generators, a coastline is murdered.

  The wind whips around us.

  “This is genocide,” Alexandar roars into my ear. I push him off.

  Orion, what have you done? What did I let you do?

  I focus a coms laser out into the gloom to form a direct line on Orion’s engine, which hovers twenty kilometers offshore. She appears on my screen. She is breathing heavily. Her skin is covered in sweat. She kneels in the center of her circular syncNest from where she guided the hive mind. Of the six hologram Blues who should surround her, only one is not dead. He shivers on his knees, blood sheeting out his nose and ears from a cerebral hemorrhage. The blast doors of the nest are sealed. She’s locked out my security teams.

  “Orion?” I say. “Orion, can you hear me? If you can hear me, stick out your right thumb.” Slowly the thumb extends. “I need to speak with you, Orion. Can you slip from the sync?” I wait. Nothing happens. Suddenly her eyes open. Her voice is a faint whisper.

  “The dataflow was…too much.”

  “Orion, we’re on second horizon, going straight for three. You swore we wouldn’t pass primary. What happened?”

  “Four…is desired.” Her eyes close to slits. “Four will teach them.”

  Four is terraforming level. The complete annihilation of the planet’s surface by storm. Her eyes are nearly closed. She can’t devote attention to anything beyond the drift much longer. “Orion, it is Darrow. Listen to me. You must turn off the engines. Scale back the storm. Can you do that for me?”

  “They can’t win with Venus alone. So I will take Mercury.”

  “Orion, think of the army. Think of the people. There’s nearly a billion here.”

  “Rats are…complicit…rational transaction.”

  “I can stop you.” Her eyes flutter. “I told you I could. Don’t make me do it.” She no longer replies to me. She is back in the sync. Without Orion’s input the Storm Gods will level-off and avert planetary destruction. But if I sever her connection, her mind will be lost by the sudden schism. I look down at the city, back to the hologram of my friend in the visor. The storm’s death will not be instantaneous. But th
e longer I wait, the worse it will get.

  I initiate the override.

  For a moment, nothing happens.

  Then Orion’s body seizes and goes limp.

  It happens that fast.

  She lies there with her mouth agape. Her bright blue eyes staring at nothing as they twitch in her head. Her metal finger scrapes against the floor and then goes still. I swallow a knot in my throat. For ten years no Gold alive, not their science teams, not the crème of their astral academies, not their assassins, could kill this woman. She was a myth. And I turned her off with the flick of a switch. She was not ready for this. I felt it, but I could not believe it. Now Mercury pays.

  Numb and quiet inside, I turn off the hologram, and use the override to reduce the Storm Gods’ output to zero. Then I am back in the storm.

  The sound of the wind and thunder is tremendous. More knights have run up to watch the city drown. Alexandar shouts at his cousin Elandar. The two young Golds point down at people flooding toward the gravLoop and the Ash Legions stomping through them to get there themselves.

  I try to make sense of the mayhem, and ask myself how we can help those still trapped in the city. I find myself without an answer. No transport ships could fly in this. We can’t carry them. We can’t even stay aloft ourselves. Alexandar jogs to me. “I’ve spoken with Elandar.” Just over two hundred Golds with the purple griffin stamped on their chests wait behind him, helmets down. “We request permission to enter the city to lend aid.”

  “Permission denied.”

  “Sir…”

  “There’s nothing you can do down there. Tyche is lost.”

  “But its people needn’t be,” he snaps. I turn to Alexandar, furious that he would contradict me now. “They’re swarming for the gravLoop—many can still escape under the mountains. But the Ash Legions in the city know it’s the only way out. If they reach it, they will mow through the civilians and use it to evacuate their men, right into Heliopolis. Again, the knights of House Arcos request permission to deter them.”