Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  Seawater is not kind to a dead body, nor are fish. But on Orion’s swollen right hand is the trident ring I gave her when I named her Navarch of the Fleet. It rests on my shoulder as we carry her to the field of the dead and lay her amongst the lavender and corpses of fallen ripWing pilots. Colloway falls to his knees there. At first I think it from his exertion. Then he breaks into sobs. I squat behind him, knowing there is nothing to say. I take him by the shoulder to lead him away, but he thrusts my hand off and wheels on me.

  “Plus twenty-four, sir,” he says. “But they’ll just send more. There are no more Orions.” He storms away from the funeral, making it halfway across the tarmac before collapsing. Medici rush to him and bear him away toward the city.

  “Twenty-four makes 193 kills in six days,” Thraxa says with a whistle. “A feat which will never be encroached upon in our time.” As others grow numb, she grows callous.

  I stare after Colloway.

  Despite his natural laziness, there has always been a fever behind his eyes—even back on Luna with a Hyperion sprite splayed across his lap. I suspected it was a fever for kills, chasing some imaginary number where his soul would finally be quenched and deem it enough. Today is the first time I realize the number isn’t counting up. It’s counting down. How many more can he kill before he goes?

  I look back on Orion’s body one last time. It is a horrible thing to see someone so full of life, so important in yours and those of others, humbled by death. The corrosion of the sea was cruel. It is no comfort to know this thing is no longer her, just the rotting shell of what held a miracle of a soul. Does she go to Eo and Ragnar and Fitchner? Or is she simply gone? I do not know. Nor do I know how I will go on without her. I feel cold despite the sun, desperate to feel the warmth of my family, my wife, my son. Knowing how short our time in the light is, am I the greatest of fools to not spend every moment by their side?

  Thraxa lights a burner. “Here’s for you, old girl. How many kills you suppose you got? Bet it was more than a hundred ninety-three.”

  Fighting the instinct to break Thraxa’s jaw, I turn away from her and return to the officers. Soon the warning siren blares. The legionnaires and I turn our heads. Bright white light flares from the Morning Star, washing away the meager light of morning, and when we turn back, the men are nothing but ashes. The smell of ozone sanitizes the air, and their comrades walk forward to scrape the ashes of their friends into canisters in hopes of one day giving them back to Mars. Not one of us believes we’ll ever see home again, but they sing nonetheless.

  * * *

  —

  Defense barricades and screening facilities have been erected around the mouth of the Tyche-Heliopolis GravLoop Station, which towers at the east end of the Water Plaza. With the power severed in Tyche, the loop’s cars stranded many refugees in the tunnel. I stood in silence watching our first convoys ferry the refugees through. I thought it would be a miracle if Alexandar saved a thousand. But the convoys continued to flow for nearly three days—families and children of all Colors. Each sharing the same story of the Griffin Knights who held back an army to give them time to escape the sea.

  Whether or not they know we summoned that sea is another matter. Some blame the Society. Some us. Others blame nature herself.

  Eventually the flow became a trickle and the trickle became no one at all and the fragment of me that held out hope submitted to reality. Alexandar will not appear staggering behind the last survivors, with a limp, a wry smile, and somehow perfectly coiffed hair. He is drowned in the sea. Sentimentality is no reason to allow this potential enemy highway to continue to exist.

  “How long has she been here?” I ask the centurion in charge of the barricade. A Red, he wears a bandage over his eye and a necklace of Red charms around his neck. A rat skull is most prominent. Rat Legion. Toughest of those who fought in the Rat War in the tunnels of Mars. Of course they survived the storm, and labor while the others lick their wounds.

  “Going on six hours, sir. She’s in the atrium. Do you need an escort?”

  “No. We’ll be out in a minute. I put Rat Legion on R&R. What are you doing here?”

  “Nineteenth lost most of their men to a gravity bomb. Thought they wouldn’t mind us picking up the slack, sir.”

  I nod. After holding Heliopolis against Ajax’s army for half a day, if anyone deserves rest, it’s Rat Legion. “Prepare the charges.” With my bodyguards scanning the surrounding roofs for snipers, I head up the station’s main steps.

  I find Rhonna sitting against the base of a broken statue inside the atrium. The right side of my niece’s head is shaved from where the surgeons repaired the gash a Gray digger bullet made as it tore open her helmet.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in the medWard?” I ask.

  “Ain’t you supposed to be running an army?” She chews her nails as she watches the stairs leading up out of the tunnel.

  “Can I sit?” She shrugs and I slide down next to her with a sigh.

  “Didn’t want to miss the Princess’s dramatic entrance,” she says.

  “If he were coming by tunnel, he’d be here by now.”

  “I know.”

  “Then you know we have to collapse the tunnel. It would be difficult to explain to my brother why I did it on his daughter’s head.”

  “Yeah.” She swallows, thinks about saying something, then forgets it. We sit in silence watching the stairs. In truth, I’ve been afraid to see her since we took the city. I’m not so distracted I couldn’t see the tension between her and Alexandar was growing into something else. For two people who can’t stand each other, they certainly found enough reasons to always be in the same room.

  “He may still have taken the Kylor Pass,” I say.

  “I know what’s what. Even if he got through the storm and the Votum, those mountains will be crawling with Gorgon.” She looks over at me. “If it had been me instead of Alexandar, would you have let me go?” My first instinct is shame, because I’ve always resented the sort of Gold Alexandar represented—haughty, entitled, rich. But it wasn’t enmity that sent him to Tyche, it was respect.

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t just…dispose of him…” she asks plaintively.

  “Of course not.”

  That answers something for her. “Such an asshole. Just when he starts being worth a damn…” She shakes her head and looks once more at the stairs. “All right. Slag it.” She forces herself up. She wobbles, still woozy from the operation. I steady her and we walk out together to join the centurion behind the barricade.

  “What’s the final refugee count?” I ask the centurion.

  “Eighty-three thousand four hundred and twenty-six souls, sir.”

  “Eighty-three thousand four hundred and twenty-six souls,” I say to Rhonna. “Not many are lucky enough to know how much their life is worth.”

  She gives a small nod of appreciation. I signal the centurion. The engineers go to work and soon two thousand meters of tunnel caves in on itself. Rhonna watches dust billow out from the mouth of the station and then turns to me at attention. “Request permission to return to duty, sir. I’m no good to you in the medBay.”

  “Granted.”

  She nods and heads back to my transport. She looks so small against the towering statue of Poseidon. The god of the Water Plaza holds up ninety-nine disks of water, and thousands of thirsty birds. Rhonna disappears inside the shuttle. She’s a soldier now. Like me.

  I linger to witness the last of the rocks settle. Knowing that Alexandar is dead, that those people he saved will soon forget him or may die yet in the siege, I wish for one small moment that I were a young man again who could charge forward nourished by his own righteousness. That man would damn the danger and search for Alexandar as Colloway searched for Orion. But that man would have died in the desert and taken all his men with him. That man isn’t what my arm
y needs. Hell, I don’t know what they need except for a miracle. I turn and head back to my transport, dragged forward by the weight of the day.

  * * *

  —

  West of the city, between the Bay of Sirens and the old city, squats the four-century-old Votum government complex known as the Mound. It is a heavy basilica straddled by a half-kilometer-tall statue of the city’s patron god, Helios. Each of the fourteen spikes on his sun crown stretch the length of ten men to puncture the blue sky. His left hand holds a scepter, and the right moves according to the path of the sun, so that at sunset he will cup it in his palm as it sinks beyond the horizon. As if any man had such control.

  “The rain is radioactive,” Harnassus says, dumping a box of dead cats on the table of the old Votum warroom. Thraxa paces along the arched windows, more interested in the bunkers our clawDrills are carving than the inconvenient report. We are all bald by now.

  “We eat here, thank you very much for the drama,” Thraxa says.

  Harnassus grumbles on. “…fallout from the atomics used locally. So far the Golds are scrubbing the stratosphere so there’s limited risk of permanent global contamination. But we’re in trouble. Orion drowned half our anti-rads in Tyche before we could evac them. The Gorgons eliminated another third in that bombing before we rounded them up.” Sweat soaks Harnassus’s dirty uniform. He looks even more exhausted than I feel. Like me, he put on a brave face for the men at the funeral, but the Gorgons who snuck in before we locked down Heliopolis are giving us hell, and native insurgencies have sprung up faster than Screwface can put them down. “Bottom line: we don’t have enough for our men and the civilians.”

  “Why are you always bringing me bad news?” I ask him. Harnassus’s bitterness has increased exponentially since Orion summoned the storms. I sympathize with the man, even if I find him a damn thorn in my side. Hate the storms all he likes, the only reason we have an army at all is because of its cloud and electrical cover.

  “Because I’m the only one not sucking your balls.”

  “Oh, do say it more directly,” Thraxa says. “As if it adds gravitas…”

  I rub my shoulder as I receive an anti-rad shot from the Yellow medicus. The nausea has come in waves over the last days. I thought it would be starvation that ended us, not fallout. On my way to the Mound, I saw men with red-stained handkerchiefs, others sitting in the shade with their heads in their hands as they queued for the latrines.

  Harnassus plods on. “Engineering corps believes the symptoms will spike dramatically. We’re already experiencing weakness, nausea, and headaches. It will progress to vomiting and diarrhea. Which I’ve already got. The civilians will soon figure it out. We’ll have full-on riots soon as the deaths start.”

  “There’ve already been riots,” Thraxa says, turning her eyes from the mountains to the refugee-choked streets of Heliopolis. “If we share our supplies, we won’t make it two weeks. We’re already on half-dose, already denying it to five hundred thousand men too far gone. These people are not our allies.”

  She’s not wrong. We are not wanted here. Tyche was a fine enough home. But of the Mercurian breed, Heliopolitans are the most cantankerous, cruel, and noisy. Save Glirastes, it is hard to remember even one who welcomed us when we took the planet. And with Orion’s storm and our waning campaign, the teeth have come out. My soldiers dare not go anywhere alone at night. Mobs have already tried storming the food centers I set up. Even Glirastes has spurned my calls, lurking in his palace above the city after haranguing me about betraying my oath not to raise the storms past primary horizon. He doesn’t believe Orion went rogue.

  I find myself thinking about Pax, and if I would have sent him into Tyche like Alexandar. Would I spend my boy as I’ve spent so many others? Didn’t I spend him in a way by not returning home? It all seems so transactional, war. Did I spend my boy the day he was born by the virtue of my role in the Rising? I can only hope that my wife has found him by now. That they are together and that the fleet is coming for us. Hope. Hope won’t bring back Orion or my men. But my wife deserves it. And here, shorn of everything else, I am sustained only by her strength.

  “We brought this upon them, Telemanus,” Harnassus says, cooling himself with an absurd peacock fan. All power, including that of the climate control, is being conserved for the defense. “First we invade their planet and bring war to their cities. Then we sink a coastline. Now we let them wither as we huddle in their city?”

  “Did I create the Mercurians to be of insubstantial fiber?” Thraxa asks. “No. They lack the warrior constitution to fight for their own freedom. Mercurian Reds are anemic compared with ours. Well, if they want to be slaves so badly, let them embrace their own degradation, I say.”

  “Thank you, Ash Lord. Let me get this proper. Because they do not agree with us, we let their children decay and their families die?” Harnassus sneers. The two have been at each other’s throats since we returned to Mercury. The enmity has grown worse in Heliopolis. Harnassus considers Orion’s storm a genocide. Thraxa thinks it the noblest of sacrifices.

  “The populace is a time bomb,” Thraxa says. “You want to keep it ticking. We could just let it fizzle out.” She looks to me. “They’re going to take up arms against us. We can make sure right here, right now, they can’t lift those arms.”

  “I always suspected you were a demokrat of convenience,” Harnassus replies. “At least Orion’s villainy can be traced to anger. Yours is just cold blood.”

  “Cold blood wins wars,” Thraxa says. “You should know. You’re no snowy virgin yourself. Not after Echo City.” Harnassus’s jaw clenches. “If the Vox had more cold blood and less envy, the fleet would never have been split and vulnerable to Atalantia, and we’d never be in this quagmire. Your friends are to blame, Harnassus. You are to blame. And now you quibble and pretend like this is all Darrow’s fault. The hypocrisy disgusts me.”

  Harnassus stands to his full unimpressive height. “I will not stand by and watch children decay.”

  “Then you will lie on your back shitting blood as your men decay,” Thraxa says. “While my men do not.”

  “Enough,” I snap. “You’re like children. At least try, for me?” The door opens and Screwface prances in.

  “Apologies,” he says, stripping off his scarlet Heliopolitan scarf and riding gloves. “Two Gorgon were caught in the water filtration plant. Blaggards thought the Reds would be on their heels from rad poisoning. Sturdy Rat Legion is sturdy. I got this place on lock.” He flops down in a chair and wrinkles his nose at Harnassus’s cats. “What’d I miss?”

  “We’re just cutting to business,” I say, “Harnassus, you’ve taken stock of the engineer and support legions, Thraxa the armored and heavy infantry, Screw the special ops and navy. What do you perceive our chances of escape to be?”

  They grow quiet. Screwface looks at his manicured hands.

  “That low? You’d never guess we just won our greatest statistical victory of the war.”

  “We just don’t have the ships to escape,” Harnassus says. “Four torchShips, one destroyer. The Morning Star may never fly again. If we take out all extraneous systems of the other ships, we could just barely fit the men. Doesn’t matter anyway. Just two of Atalantia’s dreadnoughts will make us atoms, and those torchShips of theirs are faster than the Star. If we get to space, they’ll hunt us down. But we won’t get to space. They have the gravity well. If a single ship made it to orbit, it would be a miracle.”

  “What if we…acquired their ships?” Thraxa asks, looking to Screwface. “Get a team to orbit and try to take one or two of those dreadnoughts.”

  His eyes go wide and he whistles. “I wouldn’t volunteer personally…they’re blasting anything that comes within a hundred klicks. And the Gorgon have response teams on board. Atalantia’s just waiting with a net.”

  “She knows me too well for that to work this time,”
I say to Screw’s nod of agreement. “If we saw an opening, it would likely be a trap. The noose is tightening. If we move outside the shield, she’ll stomp on us like bugs.”

  I intended to move the ships in the storm cover, under the veil of electronic interference, to prepare some devilry for Atalantia. But the level of storm Orion summoned made that impossible, and even killed four of our torchShips. Now all my cards are used up. They know it. I know it. And I have the sneaking suspicion Atalantia knows it. There are no tricks left to play. “We are in a cage,” I say. “All that can deliver us is the Sovereign. And I believe she will.”

  “You believe?” Thraxa says. “She won’t move the Senate. The Vox will sacrifice us. Dancer will let us die to get back at you for the Sons on the Rim. No one is coming.”

  Sadly, Harnassus agrees. “I know Dancer. He’ll wear diamonds before he risks Atalantia’s trap, not after that false peace. He’s prouder than he thinks. I know neither of you want to hear it, but after that battle we’re not an army anymore. We’re just bait on a hook. All’s left to do is remove the bait.”

  “Surrender?” Thraxa asks in horror.

  Harnassus’s lips barely move. “Perhaps.”

  “If we surrender, they will kill all of us,” Thraxa says.

  “Worse,” Screw says. “I would know. I’ve watched her play with Howlers.” He blinks and covers his unease with a smile for a seagull that lands on the balcony outside.

  “They would torture and kill us four,” Harnassus agrees. “But they will need labor to rebuild after this. Not all of the men will survive, but some will. Some is better than none.” He meets my eyes. “At least tell me you will consider it.”

  I lean back in my chair as Thraxa and Screwface hold their breath. “Harnassus, in order for me to consider that, I would have to continue to make the same mistake that put us here: doubt my wife. I have done that before, to the detriment of us all.” With me taking shortcuts, as Sevro said. “And I would have to make a mistake I have not made in fifteen years: fool myself into believing slavery is better than death. I will not do that.”