Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  “You’ve a promise to keep,” she tells him. He holds the pelt for a quiet moment and looks as if he is going to weep. Then he throws it over his shoulders and binds it to his tattered shirt.

  Ignacius grins as he finds stims in the Fear Knight’s go-bag a moment later. They each shoot a vial into their necks. The zeal of the drug gives their tortured bodies new life, but it won’t last long. Correctly deducing that our breakout will be soon noticed, Alexandar dispatches Drusilla and Crastus to delay the pursuit.

  “How did you get back here?” Ignacius asks. “Why were you in his room?”

  “He was being kind to me,” I say. “He wanted me to trick you into…into…”

  “Doesn’t matter, Ignacius,” Alexandar says. “We have to move.”

  “We’re trapped,” I fret. “They’re going to impale us.”

  “No.” He holds up the map. “This is a back door. We knew he had to have one. We can escape. We are trained for this, Cato. I know you’re not, but if you keep up with us, we will keep you alive.”

  “Alexandar, we can’t afford to be slowed down,” Ignacius says. “He’s a loyalist anyway. He can’t—”

  “If we get Atlas to the Sovereign, what he has in his head will save millions,” Alexandar snaps. “This loyalist could have just won the war, and you want to leave him?”

  “He won’t talk.”

  “He doesn’t need to.”

  What does he mean by that?

  Ignacius isn’t convinced. “I don’t trust him.”

  “Darrow will question him later,” Alexandar says. Ignacius nods. “You ever seen one of these?” Alexandar asks me, holding up a stim vial and looking at my burn.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “It’ll make you fly, goodman.” He tilts my neck and injects it. “How do you feel?”

  The military-grade neurotransmitter races through my veins like a galloping destrier, filling me with manic energy, and dulling the communication of pain receptors in my brain. For the first time in weeks my face doesn’t feel like it’s falling apart. There’s a rumbling groan from up the tunnel. Drusilla and Crastus return, stone-faced. “Armory was too well guarded, so we hit the commissary. They’ll be coming soon as they clear the rubble. We have thirty seconds at best.”

  Alexandar smiles. “Then we have a head start, goodmen.” He slaps my shoulder and shoves one of the scorchers into my hands. “On me.”

  WE FLEE INTO THE LABYRINTH. Alexandar sprints ahead as the stims lend his ravaged body fresh impetus. Buoyed by Mercury’s light gravity, Drusilla carries the Fear Knight over her shoulders. The other knights bring up our rear. The detonation of one of our stolen concussion grenades rumbles through the tunnel not far behind. Dust shakes free from the ceiling, clouding the glowlamp Alexandar uses to light our way.

  The tunnel leads us into a convoluted maze cave, where a network of connecting cave passages forms a three-dimensional puzzle. Some asshole terraformer had a gory field day.

  Alexandar guides us well with the map, but I hide my frustration by panting down at the ground when he needs to pause to reference it again and again. Small beeps sound from the walls as the Fear Knight’s datapad deactivates booby traps along the way.

  After half a dozen turns, our tunnel tapers to a keyhole where only two can pass at a time. Drusilla shoves the Fear Knight through to Alexandar as one of their compatriots lays a laser trip mine at the keyhole, hoping to collapse it shut. Down a winding slope we go until we reach a fork of three routes lit by green Mycena chlorophos on the ceiling and floor. Bioluminescent juice squishes from the spores as we trod them underfoot to coat our bare feet a ghostly green.

  Our mines do not detonate. The Gorgons are no amateurs. And they are gaining ground.

  Right, left, down we go, against all instincts, deeper into the mountain, over a natural bridge that spans an underground river, through a chamber so filled with spores it seems nearly daylight, passing gloomy grottoes and opaque pools. Down and down. Somewhere through the walls rushes that underground river. It dwindles and for several minutes the only sound is the labored breathing of the Golds. My fear is as real as theirs. If Atlas’s men catch us, they will not talk to me. They will butcher me with Alexandar and his kin, and the Fear Knight will apologize to Atalantia as he delivers my mutilated corpse.

  I feel that fear vibrating like a dark river, but I leech its power, and use the adrenaline for my muscles, to narrow my vision, to calibrate my senses to absorb the slightest change in stimuli.

  Soon the stench of ammonia fills my nose. I hear a chittering. The air thickens and warms as we enter a microclimate and the mouth of the tunnel expands to a great cathedral, the floor and walls undercut and eroded by what I presume to be carbonic acid. I grab Alexandar to stop him just before he spills over the edge. His men almost bowl us over.

  “By Jove,” he whispers at the dramatic drop.

  He shines his light upward. In the vaulted reaches of the cathedral roost legions of bats. Their ranks cover the ceiling and disappear up into apse flutes where unseen millions must sleep.

  “Milkbats,” Alexandar whispers. They paralyze their victims with spines on the insides of their wings. Then they feed on the helpless victim’s bone marrow. So Atlas did feed me bat.

  Damn the blackmarket carvers. This is why the Board of Quality Control regulated them so assiduously. Men just want to create apex predators because it delights them, but then those predators kill off everything else, overpopulate, and break the ecosystem.

  I almost laugh at the irony.

  Beneath the sleeping horde lies a sea of guano. It stretches the entire length of the cavern, its surface writhing with millions of mothroaches and albino centipedes.

  “How deep you think it is?” Drusilla whispers.

  “Immaterial,” Alexandar snaps. “It’s just shit. Let’s go.”

  “Those are milkbats.”

  “I told you that.”

  “Their guano can stretch as deep as thirty meters,” I say. “And there’s withertails in there.”

  Drusilla tenses, staring at the albino centipedes. “What’s a withertail?”

  “Worse than the bats,” I say.

  “They’re coming,” Ignacius says with a growl. He squares his big shoulders to the tunnel behind us.

  “It must be passable.” Alexandar scans the cathedral. “There.”

  In the gloom he spots a narrow shelf of stone leading along right, around the guano sea. We rush along it as fast as we dare. Alexandar drags the Fear Knight awkwardly, and almost loses him off the edge of the shelf. “Six o’clock!” Drusilla shouts. One of the knights fires at the Gorgon coming out the tunnel. He misses. The Gorgons do not. A projectile hits the knight. His right leg disconnects from his body at the hip joint. He screams as he loses his balance and topples down into the guano. It absorbs him like quicksand. He tries to claw his way to the surface, but missing a leg, he can’t stay atop the sludge. Then he screams as the withertails find him.

  Drusilla and the Gorgons exchange fire. High-velocity rounds hiss through the air.

  “Crastus!” Alexandar shouts. He’s about to jump down to try to rescue his friend. If he dies, this is all for nothing. I grab him and shoot at the ceiling.

  A million bats explode in a fury. Let their thermal optics deal with that.

  I drag Alexandar and we make our way along the narrow shelf and out the cathedral, harried by bats the entire way. One’s attached itself to Drusilla. Alexandar cuts its head off with his razor and peels out its bristles. Drusilla sicks up on the floor, but stumbles after us, eyes dazed. Ignacius has to take the Fear Knight’s body. After a series of turns, we find ourselves near the end of the Fear Knight’s map. It is a limestone chamber filled with pools of dark water and stalactites dripping from the ceiling. I stop, searching the bioluminescent-lit walls, and feel panic rising in m
e. “What is it?” Drusilla asks Alexandar. “Are we lost?”

  “This isn’t on the map,” he says.

  “What do you mean it isn’t on the map?” she asks. Instead of two tunnels, there are seven.

  Ignacius hurls the Fear Knight to the ground. “I knew this was a fool’s errand. Looks like it’s a fight after all.”

  Drusilla slumps on a knee, breathing heavily from the milkbat venom. “We’re almost out of ammunition. Which way is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Alexandar says. He pockets the map and slaps the Fear Knight’s face. “Wake up. Wake up, damn you!” He doesn’t. “Shit. We make our stand here. Hit them as they come in. Make this a melee affair.”

  “They have Golds too,” I say.

  “Not like us.”

  “A lovely sentiment, but untrue,” Drusilla says. “There’s at least fifteen Scars. But it’ll be Berserks they send in first.”

  “Then we die with glory,” Ignacius mutters.

  Alexandar searches the tunnels. The wrong one will lead us off the map and we might starve to death before we find a way out. He’d rather fight than trust his chances with that.

  The Arcosian Knights follow Alexandar’s commands and take up positions around the room to ambush our pursuers, as if you can ambush anyone with thermal optics in a cold cave. If we wanted to fight, it should have been in the guano grotto. Positively criminal how quickly razors reduce genius IQs to simple grunt logic.

  I face the tunnels.

  There is no reason the Fear Knight would have a fake map in his private quarters. Therefore, the map must be real and cannot be wrong. If it is not wrong, then it is shorthand. Two tunnels were supposed to be here, yet there are seven. I search for a pattern of two. Ah, the pools.

  “I found the way,” I whisper.

  “Shut up. I hear something,” Ignacius says. Alexandar hides behind a stalactite, waiting for the Gorgons to come from the darkness of the bat cathedral.

  “The pools!” I hiss at the fools. Alexandar turns to me. “The pools lead to a tunnel.” I shine the glowlamp down. Sure enough, a tunnel large enough for three men to swim abreast is faintly visible beneath the surface.

  “You clever bastard!” Alexandar slaps me on the back.

  We dive into the pool. The water is hot and bubbles from cracks in the stone. The glowlamp splashes pale light on the slick tunnels beneath the surface. Alexandar covers the Fear Knight’s nose and mouth to stop him from inhaling water.

  When we emerge in a small grotto, I gasp for air and pull myself onto the slick stone. Alexandar and the others breach the water and I help them lever the Fear Knight out of the pool.

  We find the escape gravBikes underneath a camouflage tarp on the far side of the grotto. Concussion and gas traps deactivate from the passive signal in the Fear Knight’s datapad. We take a bike each, slash the fuel cells of the rest with our razors, and tie the Fear Knight onto the hauling rack of Drusilla’s under a portion of the camo tarp. Alexandar cuts the camo tarp into several more pieces and secures one on the hauling racks of each bike. Clever thinking.

  I nod when he asks me if I know how to drive one of the bikes. “Not much to do in Erebos except daylight fancies.”

  “Do not stop for anyone,” Alexandar tells us. He inserts the bike’s wired com into his ear and motions me to do the same. “Coms in. We’re playing clamshells, Goblin style. Head straight south for Heliopolis. Drusilla will have the Fear Knight. Everyone else, we’re only here to buy her time. They can’t use orbit support while we have Fear. So don’t shy off. Let’s get this bastard back to the boss.” He gives them a firm smile, forgetting me completely. “Hail libertas.”

  “Hail Reaper,” they echo.

  The engines scream like crying babies as we tear off down the tunnel toward daylight. The sunlight blinds, even this late in the afternoon. We take a thin track down the mountain. The gravBike sighs up and down on its gravity cushion, very similar to the bikes Cassius and I used in Darentan Station when running from Syndicate clone traders.

  The controls are touchy, especially to motor reflexes under the influence of stims, but they’re far simpler machines than starShells. A powerful engine provides thrust from behind, as low-powered gravity thrusters beneath create half a meter of floating clearance from the ground. The seat is curved to angle the rider forward, with a rear seat for the gunner. Soon I’ve the hang of it, though I’m by far the worst pilot.

  “Pup One to Howler One…” Alexandar announces over the com, using our transponders to boost his signal in a desperate bid to reach Heliopolis. It just might. The Society won’t be jamming its own frequencies. But if Heliopolis hears it, every Gold in a thousand kilometers will.

  I thought this would be a clandestine engagement.

  He just put it on the big stage.

  “Pup One to Howler One. Handshake: 2345209. We have Anteater. I repeat, we have Anteater. Sliders in pursuit. Are bearing south at 53.48, 113.41, requesting LongMalice support. I repeat…”

  The track spits us out into a salt flat. The knights push the bikes for all they’re worth. Alexandar’s wolfpelt streams behind. They start weaving in and out of one another to confuse enemy targeting. Seems unnecessary. Didn’t we destroy the other bikes? I start weaving with them, just a moment before Ignacius banks in front of me, then swerves back without the top half of his muscular body. His gravBike drifts sideways, losing speed.

  Snipers.

  I glance back. The cave is barely a dot. We must be five kilometers away, an impossible shot, even for lurchers…Something whips past and a huge crater opens up just left of my bike’s nose. I send my bike into frantic contortions, and soon it seems we’re out of range, but Alexandar has not let up. He hunches grim-faced over his handlebars, looking left and right and repeating his message to his master.

  Ah, of course.

  A swarm of hooded Gorgons on gravBikes flow down the nearly vertical face of a sandstone butte to our left. Another swarm pours out of a mountain valley to the right, racing to cut us off before we can get free of the mountains. All over the mountain range, the acolytes of the Fear Knight emerge from subterranean bunkers like hornets from a kicked nest.

  RADTATA­TATA­TATAT

  The ground in front of us ruptures with railgun fire, not to kill us, but to drive us west back into the mountains. We call the bluff and drive through it. Debris rips into my burn at two hundred kilometers an hour. A rock almost takes my head off. Then we’re through, pushing for the open desert, the pursuing bikes still kilometers off. Three hundred kilometers an hour. The world is a blur, but the Mind’s Eye makes everything feel languorous as I bob and weave around boulders and debris.

  A vertical silver slash comes down from the sky.

  WAAAAAAA­AAOOOO

  A beam of white light obliterates the horizon, leaving a gash of light across my vision. The sand of the desert pulses deep red as it’s turned to glass in a twenty-kilometer swath. “Idle banter!” Alexandar crows. “We’ve got your dog, Grimmus. We’ve got your dog!” I can’t help thinking of Cassius and Darrow riding over the Martian highlands of the Institute crowing nearly the same thing.

  We careen over the molten desert. The heat radiates upward. My bare feet begin to blister. I pull them up to rest on the chassis. Through the warped air, another squadron of Gorgons appears. “Split ’em. Cato, follow me.”

  Hadrian banks left with Drusilla. I follow Alexandar right. The Gorgons divide to follow us, not knowing which has the Fear Knight. More orbital strikes come down to hem us in, but Alexandar is a god on a bike. He leads a whole squadron of Gorgons into a particle beam. They disappear like mist as we bank into a canyon, then spit out the other side. I stick on his tail as we head to the open desert.

  I glance back.

  Two kilometers behind, an army pursues. We’ll never make it.

  “Pup One to H
owler One. Do you read me?”

  No answer but static. Soon Society air support will come. They’ll be scrambling ripWings. Aerial infantry will block our path.

  We continue our course. With no way to down us without killing the Fear Knight, it becomes an endurance race. The gravBikes holding steady behind us in the open desert, suggesting a trap up ahead. The giant sun begins to set and stain the horizon the color of hot metal. The stims have faded. The agony of the burn returns, and I see Alexandar slumping in his saddle. Drusilla has linked up with us again, though there is no sign of Hadrian. Only three bikes remain. Debris from the Battle of Heliopolis begins to litter the sand with shriveled remains of war machines.

  Soon we can see the storm wall of Heliopolis as a thin metal line in the far distance. But setting down between us and it is a line of mechanized Grimmus troopers. They’ll have electrical cannons to fry our bikes’ electronics. RipWings buzz overhead suddenly. The Society trap closes. “We have to run it,” Alexandar says. I see no way through. The pursuing Gorgons creep closer. “Pup One to Howler One,” Alexandar calls, panic finally making its way into his voice. “Our path is blocked. Pup One to Howler—”

  A voice unlike any other comes over the com.

  “Howler One to Pup One. Continue course. LongMalice deployed at danger close. Midnight inbound.”

  “Stick tight to me!” Alexandar says. “Cato, Drusilla! Stick tight!”

  Thooom. Thooom. Thooom.

  Huge explosions break the face of the desert. They blossom into acrid clouds of smoke and sand in the center of the Grimmus troopers. Darrow’s artillery guns send another salvo arching from the city through the air in the thin gap between the storm wall and the dome shield of Heliopolis. They decimate everything in their path. Huge holes are blown in the pursuing squadrons of gravBikes as artillery shells scream over our heads.

  It is all absurd sound and fury. Individual patterns in the metal and noise show the intelligent hands at work—move and countermove, measure and countermeasure—and how together they make insanity.