Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  Rough hands cut me from my starShell and drag me out. Men with masks of child’s faces tear off my gravBoots. The pilot screams above me. A boot stands on my throat as the man in the Pale Mask treads the sand to squat in front of me. They pour engine solvent on my face to clean off the blood. A hunched Obsidian with giant sunburnt arms looms with a blowtorch.

  “It’s him,” a heavy Obsidian voice confirms.

  “Gratitude, Falthgar.” The Fear Knight takes off his gloves and puts them in a pocket of his scorosuit. It is a simple radiation-resistant and water reclamation suit. No armor for this impaler of men. No vestments of rank or gaudy embellishments. His cloak is tattered and eaten by the desert. His forearms cracked and baked brown. His gloveless hands pallid and thin as spider legs. He leaves his mask on. It is the face of a sexless child ringed with hair of serpents. No matter which way he turns his head, the child’s eyes stay focused on me. The Pale Mask.

  “You asked me a question long ago,” the mask warbles. “It was on Mars before we lost her. You asked, what do I fear? I fear a man who believes in good. For he can excuse any evil.” He holds up a hand to feel the wind. “What have you done?”

  I try to spit on him, but there is no moisture in my mouth.

  “Show me your face!”

  “Fear has no face.” His head tilts. “You still don’t understand. No matter. Falthgar, Ravan, Kestril, Thorhand, Kaffa. You have the cameras for his wife?” Five of his hunting beasts step forward. “Prime. Castrate him. Fuck him bloody in the ravine.” He pauses. “Before you slit his throat, feed him his cock.”

  “Yes, dominus.”

  Animalistic fear. I struggle in vain against the huge Obsidians. They lift me as if I were a Red again and drag me toward the ravine behind my slaughtered men. The Fear Knight sits in the sand to watch them rape me as Heliopolis falls.

  Not like this. Not like this.

  The slaveknights toss me to the ground and shove my face in the sand as the rest watch. A boot pins my head down. I can barely breathe as they discuss how to cut off my armor, and then who will go first. A scorosuit buckle tinkles as it is unclasped behind me. A growing nausea and terror and…lightness. The hand that pushes on my head loses its strength. I twist my head. Grains of sand trickle upward. The Obsidian’s white hair floats in a corona. A shadow creeps across the sand. They try to push me down, only to float upward themselves. A horrible laugh bubbles out of me as a voice filled with static sings over my open com.

  “If your heart beats like a drum, and your leg’s a little wet, it’s ’cause Midnight’s come to collect a little debt.”

  “You pricklicks,” I hiss through the sand. “You forgot Colloway xe Char.”

  With all my might, I shove off the ground. Combined, they weigh more than a ton in their gear, but in the gravity shadow of the moonBreaker, there is no weight. We launch upward. The sudden reversal confuses their equilibrium. They held me down with boots and pressure but had no clean grip. They try to invert themselves to grab at me, but only turn themselves into a spin. I float cleanly away, waiting till a boot spins past my head. I seize it and jerk down, levering the top of my skull into the bottom of a jaw. It shatters. I pin the larger man to myself and headbutt his face until I feel it cave in. Dizzy, I strip his long knife and ride his body to the ground, where I launch up to the next. Blood in my eyes, I can barely see. He tries to orient himself. But I’ve played more in zero-G. I pass him without touching, drawing the long knife along his body and opening his torso from groin to throat. Two of the others fire at me, and suffer the consequences of recoil. They become minor threats. The last, five meters away, pulls his gun, but the movement itself sends his body spinning backward. I throw the knife and suffer the spin.

  I crash upside down into a rock wall. My armor crunches and I hold on backward. I try to orientate myself. The Fear Knight saw me kill his men from only fifteen paces away, but only just escaped the clutter of his floating men. He uses his boots to burst toward me, sliding sideways through the air, his long rifle aiming for my head through the floating mechs. He fires. Then gravity returns. A falling mech intercepts his shot. His men slam downward as the Morning Star bursts out of the shroud of dust that hangs over the desert. It boosts upward and roars past toward Heliopolis. I nearly lose purchase on the rock and fall to my death as blinding light explodes from the battered moonBreaker to wipe away an entire cohort of enemy tanks.

  A wall of iron churns over the desert to the northeast, appearing out of the shadow of the Morning Star and its own shroud of dust.

  The First Army has come to Heliopolis.

  It passed through the Waste of Ladon in the night, through a path paved in the storm by the Morning Star. Most of her cannons have been mangled by the storm, but ripWings pour out of the moonBreaker, followed by starShells, transports, and barges of infantry. A great howling fills the air. A magnificent dusty figure in a streaming wolfcloak and bearing a warhammer falls from the sky.

  The Fear Knight looks up at Thraxa au Telemanus in full-charged wargear, looks at me, takes aim, and then disappears in a missile strike. Thraxa catches me before my fingers give out on the rock face. She floats me down to the ground, kissing my face with her fox helmet.

  “You beautiful bastard. Rhonna found us. The Star paved our way. You beautiful genius. You sick, twisted god.”

  A quaking of fear enters my chest, and then warps into fury as I think of how they nuked my men, cut their throats, pushed my face in the dirt. Feed me my cock, will they?

  I push Thraxa off. “I need boots. StarShell. Ammo.”

  “And this, sir,” a voice says. Rhonna skims toward us with my slingBlade. Her mech is gone. “Found it in the sand.” I catch it in the air. Thraxa pats her hammer with a smile.

  “Shall we?”

  * * *

  —

  The battle tips with the coming of the Morning Star, but with most of her cannons damaged, it does not end. She diffuses her gravity shadow, and hangs over the battle to serve as a support platform. The bulk of the killing lasts well into the mid-afternoon. Temperatures swell to 190 degrees Fahrenheit, where resting a naked hand on metal will blister the skin in half a second. The bloodiest of the fighting takes place at this miserable hour, and it is then that the Iron Leopards’ armored line finally breaks. With the mighty main corps finding nowhere to retreat, the infantry is pressed against the broken walls of Heliopolis and butchered.

  The bodies stack five meters high. Infantry choke the giant fissures in the wall. Tanks roll over them in the smoke and their desperation to escape. Many suffocate in the press or drown in mud made of blood, urine, and coolant fluid mixing with the dust.

  Those who manage to escape the First Army leak into the city, where they are hunted down by Harnassus’s enraged defenders, the sky rangers, and the aerial infantry dropping from the Morning Star.

  I cannot stop the bloodshed. Nor do I stop my own.

  Wild and driven mad by the atomic bombardment, the storm, and the desert crossing, my men descend the moral ladder to become demons, severed of any creed they once possessed. The butchery is staggering. Those of the enemy unlucky enough to be cornered can do little but add their corpses to the bulwarks of the dead.

  Still they refuse to surrender.

  I have never seen such valor. If it is not that, it must be madness.

  The Terran legions refuse to yield. They retreat, rally, retreat, rally. Ajax stokes them to a fevered mania. He roams the lines, always just out of my reach. Always sallying forth. Time and again they leak through our assault so that I feel like a man rushing between cracks in a dam trying to hold back a flood with his bare fingers.

  I range across the thirty-kilometer front, everywhere and nowhere. I blunt a tank breakout on the western flank, exchange starShells at the foothills of the Hesperides after taking a round to the chest. I chase Gray riflemen into the jagged hoodoos of the
Aigle Mountains to the east. I fight two Obsidian berserkers until they crawl legless toward me still swinging their axes. I stifle a counterattack of Gray heavy infantry and take respite and water in the shade cast by a crashed torchShip before abandoning my fourth starShell of the day. Few remain operational. Those that do drain their energy cores before the sun begins to set—a full thirty-eight hours after the battle began.

  When Ajax is left alone with a cadre of his personal guard after attempting a breakout, he finds himself cut off. When he sees me coming, he finally takes flight with a fifty-strong core of Peerless. A cry of mockery goes through my legions. I set off in pursuit, but my boots have little energy left. Thraxa likewise only makes it five klicks before doubling back to see me exchanging my gravity boots. She sits down in the shade of the tank beside me and sifts through a stack of battery spikes, inserting one at a time to rebuild her pulseArmor’s charge.

  “Fuckin’ snakeshit,” she growls in disappointment. “I wanted that Grimmus head.”

  A munition slams into the top of the tank above our heads, and skitters into the sky to detonate. We barely look.

  “Atalantia might demand it from him after this,” I say.

  I wait for her to finish off the last bat spike. She picks up her gore-spattered hammer. “Ready?”

  “Was waiting on you.”

  None keep up with me the entire battle, not even Thraxa or Screwface. I rotate bodyguards by the hour, surviving off stims injected into the neck or snorted from smashed cartridges or chewed with my cracked molars. The world is thin and two-dimensional, color leached like a faded mural in the ruins of a child’s bedroom. My body is lead. The cells leeched of energy. Stims doing nothing but thinning my patience. The restraint that keeps me from sobbing or laughing maniacally is only as substantial as porcelain.

  As the sun begins to set, I hitch a ride on a transport missing its back half to the top of the storm wall.

  There I watch the spasms of the desert storm. Waves of sands blanket the fallen. The ranks of the dead stretch farther than the eye can see. My hysterical mind wanders. For a delusional moment I believe the planet knows how far those boys and girls are from home and thinks they are asleep, so it sends them blankets of sand to tuck them in for the night.

  A tight pain squeezes my chest. The breath goes out of me. Flanked by exhausted bodyguards, I hunch there on the shriveled husk of a broken gun. Harnassus arrives on the wall with a dozen lieutenants in tow. He stares at me as if I were inside out. “Here you bloody are! I’ve crossed the entire front,” he barks. “They must have released psychotropic gas. Every single man I spoke to swears on his mother that he saw you. Where have you been?”

  “Everywhere,” Screwface growls from my side.

  Harnassus looks confused. He looks ragged. A nasty gash on his forehead leaks blood.

  “Report,” I rasp. His eyes narrow.

  “Darrow, your hand.”

  I look down at my naked left hand. My gauntlet broke, it seems. My skin is bubbling against the sun-heated metal. I pull it away and watch the blisters contract. Ah, there’s the pain.

  Harnassus babbles something about the enemy rallying at the Hippodrome, and a force of enemy tanks lost in the storm now approaching. I try to reply, but my raw vocal chords finally surrender to the abuse of the day.

  Harnassus blinks. Something frightens him. As if he saw a spider on my face. I look down at my arms and legs. A second skin of clay made from blood and dust and irradiated ash coats me. My armor is holed and melted into the cauterized wounds. Joints failing to respond to my depleted battery. The tightness will not let go of my chest.

  “By Jove, man, are you having a heart attack?” Harnassus calls for a medicus. The Howlers rush to support me as I nearly tip over. I fail to push them off. Rhonna comes to my aid, understanding my distress.

  “Not in front of the legions,” she says. “What do you need, Uncle?”

  “Stims,” I mumble.

  “How many pops has he had?”

  “Thigh pack’s empty. At least six.”

  “Got four marks on his neck.”

  “Ten? That would kill a bloodydamn horse.”

  “Stims,” I mutter again, feeling dizzy.

  “You’ll die, you dumb bastard.” Harnassus looks about to fall over himself.

  “Men trapped in…desert…” I look out over the battlements. I still have work to do. I look down to see Harnassus trying to push me back.

  “Darrow. Stop.” Harnassus reaches high to grab my face between his hands. “You’ve done enough. Let us carry the rest.”

  I stare through the wisps of his hair to the bodies melted into the steel of the wide parapet. They look like gargoyles with the faces of teenagers. The wind licks the dust from them. They are teenagers.

  The full weight of exhaustion settles on me.

  “Who has a boot battery?” Rhonna calls. “Come on. You, hey, shithead. Gimme.” She takes the batteries from one of Harnassus’s bodyguards and switches mine out. “Uncle, you need to fly now. Do you understand me? For your men.”

  “He can’t even stand,” Harnassus says. “He needs a medicus and an airlift.”

  “Back off,” Screwface says.

  “Who are you?”

  “Screwface.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “He is,” Rhonna says. “Mickey.”

  “Oh. Well, I am in command now, Gold,” Harnassus says. “Darrow needs—”

  “Unless you got a cloak, he ain’t your pack. He’s been mine since I was sixteen. You’ve got a battle to finish, sir.”

  Harnassus walks up to him and sticks a finger in his face. “Get him inside somewhere and keep that man alive.”

  “Man?” Screwface laughs. “Hic est Lupus, motherfucker.”

  Harnassus departs.

  “Use my arm, Uncle.” I feel Rhonna take my weight. She can’t handle all of it. Screwface comes to my other side.

  “Got you, boss. Nice and easy. Just a little drama and you’re done, yeah?”

  With my surviving Howlers around me, we take to the air. The ragged army pouring into the city roars in a weary wave as they see our tattered wolfcloaks soaring toward the Mound of Votum. When we reach the Mound, the Howlers set me down near the top of the sand-covered steps. Armed men swarm the plaza below, bringing the wounded to the triage stations. Titan cannons boom near the spaceport.

  I cannot walk under my own power, but my Howlers cluster around me so tight it appears as if I am unwounded. Dying men call my name. I stop when I can, but soon Screwface and Rhonna haul me away to the Votum family’s reception chamber. It alone provides privacy. Under defaced Gold statues, I collapse on the stone stairs, too tired and wounded for my Howlers to dare strip off my armor. A medicus visits. I don’t know him. I threaten his life if he tries to make me sleep. Screwface threatens his balls if I die. Rhonna pats his shoulder. The medicine the man administers eases the tension in my chest. I am numb with exhaustion, but I watch through the triangular hole in the ceiling as night falls. Screams and gunshots and wailing machines leak in from the darkness.

  In the early hours of the night, there is a commotion in the hall outside. Screwface goes to check on it. Rhonna sits on the steps below me, not speaking, a gun in her lap even though Howlers keep watch all around the building. Blood clots on the right side of her head. The great double doors swing inward and Harnassus and Colloway enter. Thraxa au Telemanus stomps in behind them, brown with dust and blood, her armor holed like cheesecloth. She throws a bundle of Gold standards on the floor. Dozens more legionnaires file in behind her, each hauling an armful of enemy standards, some with Gold gauntlets still gripping their poles. They pile them until the stack is even taller than Thraxa herself. She slams her heels together, raises her burned fist, and declares, “Victory.”

  It is easier to find men who will volunte
er to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.

  —JULIUS CAESAR

  I STARE HALF BLIND INTO a firing squad of fly-eyed cameras. Out the viewport behind me, battle stations and ships of war float beyond the upper atmosphere of Luna.

  Eight billion eyes watch me.

  “Citizens of the Republic, this is your Sovereign. I come to you with dire news from aboard the SRN dreadnought Echo of Ares. On Friday evening last, the third day of the Mensis Martius, I received a brief from the brave men and women of the Republic Reconnaissance Division. This brief, gleaned from our human and mechanical network of sensors, telescopes, scout ships, and informants throughout the Core, indicated that a large-scale Society military operation was under way in the orbit of Mercury. The largest in materiel and manpower since the Battle of Mars, five long years ago. I considered it in the public interest that this information be kept secret until a resolution was found.

  “The darker heart of me feared it would be my part to announce the greatest military disaster in our short but storied history. I thought—and many studied minds, civilian and military alike, agreed—that the whole of the Republic Expeditionary Force would be shattered by orbital bombardment, fractured into isolated centuries, and decimated by artillery, disease, starvation, and thirst. That the Free Legions, the beating heart of this great human enterprise, which has broken the chains on Luna, Earth, and Mars, and around which we were to build future legions of liberty, would perish under an Iron Rain in the deserts and mountains of Mercury.

  “Now I stand before you with that precious word on my lips. Victory. Attacked from all sides, bombarded from the sky, unsupported by warships or satellites, outnumbered by the enemy air force ten to one, the Free Legions shattered the pride of the enemy host, encircled and destroyed most of their vanguard against the walls of Heliopolis, and, in the face of overwhelming odds, survived. That is victory—resounding, but not eternal.