Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  Wounded, tired, spent from labor, she isn’t what she should be. But by killing her baby, these men get the Victra they made.

  She kills the first man by breaking his back with a kick to his lower spine. The second, she kills so she can use him and his thick blast vest as a shield. His body erupts when his boys fire on them. And then Victra is amongst them, not blocking their attacks as they come one by one, but pouncing on them, breaking them as she pivots to break the next. Those she doesn’t kill are mown down by their friends. Bullets and pulseblasts ricochet around the prison. I lie flat and two pulseblasts almost take off my feet.

  Harmony gets one look at this, aims down her rifle, and shoots one of her own soldiers in the back of the neck as Victra throws him through the air between them. He knocks Harmony down, and when she gets up, shaking her head from the collision, she sees Victra covered in gore, crushing men in her rampage forward.

  Like a good cockroach, Harmony bolts.

  Victra tries to give chase, but the Red Hands throw themselves like madmen in her path, eager to let Harmony escape even if it costs them their lives. Victra takes them up on that offer.

  When she takes her foot from the shattered back of her last victim, the room is still but for moaning prisoners. Victra hunches, breathing heavily, bullet through her shoulder, gashes around her legs, something red pulsing from her right buttock.

  Then she walks out of the room. I glance at the prisoners, who are just starting to look up from their bullet-riddled cells. They won’t be any use out there. They’re so thin. I run to catch up with Victra, calling her name in the hall. She’s already gone. Bloody footprints lead left. I follow them to the sound of wet thumps, and find Victra in the communications terminal I crept past earlier. Blood gathers around her bare feet as she absorbs the hologram feeds. One shows Volga and several dozen slaves firing up a tunnel at Red Hands. Several hundred more huddle behind them, ready to pick up a weapon if another drops. They’re outmatched by the Hand men pouring from the township down to meet them at the main tunnel.

  “You did this?” she asks without turning.

  “Yeah. But I think I need some help now.”

  She looks over, then back at the screens. Harmony is running up a stairwell.

  “She’s getting away,” I say.

  “I am aware.” She squints at the holograms, then sits at the console to take its controls. “What you are not aware of is that you have signed everyone’s death warrant. They have an army camped around the perimeter of the mine’s aperture. We’ll never get out.”

  “I called for backup,” I say.

  “Metaphorically or physically?”

  “Uh, physically.”

  She turns. “Howlers?”

  “Like I have their number. I did something called broad spectrum.”

  Her body tenses. “Did you use my name?”

  “I’m not an idiot.”

  “So you said,” she says, turning back to her task.

  Harmony runs from a stairwell into a large chamber with an open roof to the sky. Fifty men slide down the ladders dangling from the rim of the roof. Harmony shouts at a pilot and loads up into a shuttle. They’re airborne a moment later, rising slowly out of the mine. Victra’s fingers move over the keys and the camera shakes. The men who just slid down the ladders point upward. Then I see why. The sky is becoming smaller as the roof closes. It slams shut before Harmony’s shuttle can escape. The top wings of her shuttle snap in half as her ship collides with the closed ceiling and spins on sputtering engines to crash back down to the floor.

  Victra stands up.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, throwing an arm toward Volga’s holo.

  “To pay a debt.”

  “Volga needs your help. We all do!” I shout as she walks away. “She’s got dozens of men up there. If you die there, you can’t help anyone.”

  “And why would I help you?” she asks at the door with a turn. On the holo, Harmony is crawling free from the crippled shuttle. Her men drag her along to a gravity lift.

  “Because I helped you. So did Volga. And someone once told me revenge is patient.”

  She stares at me and tilts her head.

  “We can get her after. There’s girls down there. Girls that risked their lives because they couldn’t take it anymore. Are you just going to let them die like Ulysses?”

  She stiffens. Her eyes glare at me, then she looks at her bleeding wounds. “I will need proper armor.”

  I call out into the hall. “Vanna, it’s Lyria. You can come out now.”

  A maintenance closet door opens behind Victra, making her jump. Mops spill out onto the floor as Freckles stumbles out. Picking herself up, she looks sheepishly at the Gold and pulls the breastplate forward. “Ma’am. I brought you some armor.” She pulls out the razors. “And these.”

  Victra almost smiles.

  * * *

  —

  Victra, Freckles, and I look over the bridge down into the Common. Victra made us hide for ten minutes, though she refused to say why. Down below, the Red Hand has managed to gain order. While they haven’t found all the girls, they’ve found some. Dozens are gathered in the center of the township and under guard as most of the men pour toward the main tunnel to fight Volga’s fellow slaves. Then I see why Victra delayed. Unable to escape from the top, Harmony’s going out the bottom. She moves across the Common floor directing her men at the girls, and taking a group of more than forty down into the tunnels to link up with her larger force.

  “She means to hunt me now,” Victra says. “Fair enough.” Victra hands me and Freckles the grenades she scavenged from the men she killed. “Bring these to me at the bottom.”

  And then she jumps off.

  I thought Figment and Volga were top of the food chain until I see Victra descend into the township. While Freckles and I clamber down ladders, Victra vaults from level to level, sometimes two down, sometimes one up, killing men as she goes. She lands amongst three Red Hand men on a bridge and throws them off. She jumps a level up and destroys a portable gun turret before it’s brought online. Bullets eat into the stone around her as she jumps down two levels, dragging her razor through a dozen men as they descend a single ladder to the second level. She kills the rest that gather at the base, and then, almost for fun, takes the rifles of the dead and begins popping in and out of cover, two quick shots, duck, move, two quick shots, duck, move. Soon all the men guarding the girls in the center of the township are on their backs or crawling away with holes in them.

  We slide off the last ladder and rush up to Victra as she crouches behind cover, scanning for threats. Five rail slugs are flattened against the ill-fitted armor. I can see through a hole in her right biceps.

  “Took you long enough,” she says, taking the grenades.

  Her left ear hangs on by a strip of flesh. I motion to it.

  “Stop being distracted.” She tears it off and puts it under her breastplate, wheeling as a gun goes off. Little Lion, who’d been caught by the Hand men, now has one of their pistols and fires it at a man limping away until he goes down. It becomes less funny when she runs up to him and fires at his thrashing body until her magazine is empty. She looks up, spattered with blood, not a single emotion on her face. Victra looks to me. “One of yours?”

  “More or less.”

  She grunts. “Be right back.”

  “I’ll come—”

  “No.” She kicks my thigh so hard it goes numb, and then silently bolts toward the tunnels, killing two men who come from the main force engaged with the slaves. Then she disappears. A cramp grips my leg. I stumble up and hobble after her as Freckles pulls the girls away to find a place to hide. I follow Victra’s wake of dead men until the tunnel widens and I come out to maybe two hundred Red Hand men firing down the tunnel at Volga and her men. The sound is enormous. Victra is crouched behind
where they’ve gathered their wounded. She finishes throwing something and turns to sprint up the tunnel. She catches sight of me and motions me back.

  Thoom. Thoom. Thoothoom.

  The grenades begin going off behind the Red Hand soldiers, tearing holes in their ranks until the whole tunnel is filled with dust. The explosions echo away, replaced by a growing roar down the throat of the tunnel. The slaves rush up into the dust.

  I fall down behind a boulder with Victra, laughing as the Red Hand disintegrates in front of my eyes. “Don’t just sit there, you idiot,” Victra says from a knee, and picks off a Hand man as he runs half blind out of the dust. “Shoot something.”

  I join her on a knee, steady my arms on the boulder, and take aim. I fire until I see a woman pushing her way through the dust, shoving the bodies of her own men into the path of the freed slaves.

  Harmony is trying to escape. I point her out, but Victra is already on the hunt.

  I’VE LOST SIGHT OF VICTRA in the tunnel. When her men’s fortune finally turned, Harmony left them to die and made her escape through a side tunnel. Victra and I gave pursuit, but Victra’s long legs outraced mine, and left me behind. The gloom of the tunnel is nearly complete, but I can see my breath blooming in front of my face as I walk the steep path of a clawDrill.

  I stop suddenly, hearing a whisper, and go very still. Long shadows ripple on the ceiling of the tunnel, not twenty paces overhead. So that’s why she chose this tunnel. I take a step, and the shadows stop. Watching me.

  There’s gunshots ahead, past where the tunnel bends downward.

  I bolt, no time to see if the shadows are following.

  I scramble down the steep tunnel, sliding half the way in my haste, and find Victra crouched behind a rock. She darts to the next. A pulseblast turns the floor behind her molten.

  “You left your men to die,” Victra says. She moves to the next boulder. Two shots sizzle past her before she takes cover.

  “I’ll find more,” Harmony says from deeper in the tunnel, where it widens to form a chamber with slick, dark walls and no source of light but the acid green spasms of her firearm. She must be wearing optics to see down here. Wait, how can I see? The figures are murky, like shadows over ink, but I can make out Harmony as she peers down her rifle’s sights.

  “You murdered your own people.” Victra fakes a dodge to the next rock. Harmony sends a stream of shots along the path. Victra goes the other way, disappearing into a caved-in section of the tunnel. “You killed Ares.”

  “Because he was one of you!” Harmony shoots into the shadows. “Come out and fight me, bitch.”

  I lie in the shadows and take careful aim with my pistol.

  “You killed Lyria’s family.”

  “Who cares?” Harmony sneers. She checks her rifle’s ammunition gauge just as Victra swings down from above.

  Harmony pulls the trigger.

  Click.

  She exhales and then throws the gun at Victra and reaches for her bootknife. Victra catches the gun in one hand and smacks Harmony’s hand. Harmony stumbles back, fingers broken. The knife clatters to the ground. She swings at Victra with her other hand. Victra punches the balled fist, shattering it. I tuck my pistol away and walk after them.

  “You killed her child,” I say to Harmony. Victra cracks a flare and tosses it at Harmony’s feet. She rips off Harmony’s night optics.

  “She killed mine,” she snarls, tracking my arrival with almost as much hate as she does Victra. “They rotted from a disease we cured six hundred years ago. Why? For what?” She spits. “For this.” As I watch her froth with hate, she isn’t the monster I remember. The powerful force that ate up my brother and family out of this world. She’s just a woman enraged. It makes her so small to me, I can barely understand it myself. I pity her smallness, but not enough to scourge the hate from me.

  I hear something behind her. A deep whispering. I edge forward as she glares out at the world.

  “You’ll all burn,” Harmony promises. “I’ve got a torchShip. Gave the order if I don’t say otherwise, it’ll lay into this mine with everything it’s got. What it don’t burn to cinders, it’ll pinch in here under two hundred meters of stone. You’re trapped in here with me. But if I call in…we can play another day.”

  Victra raises her razor. “I’ll permit you what I permitted the poet. Choose your last words.”

  I creep closer to the whispering.

  “I’m valuable to the Republic.”

  “Nah.” Victra is about to stab Harmony through the heart when I grasp Victra’s thick wrist. She frowns at me.

  “Trust me. Not like this.”

  I walk up to Harmony and rip a flare off her belt. Cracking it open, I throw it toward the whispering. In its light I can see that not far from where she made her stand against Victra, the floor gives way. A narrow cleft of rock leads across a chasm, no doubt where Harmony was trying to lure Victra to her death.

  I kick the flare down the chasm as Victra drags Harmony forward. The flare lands amongst a pool of pitvipers gathered near the heat of a hot spring. Warm, clammy air oozes up.

  I turn to Harmony and see her looking down, childish with fear.

  She thought they were her salvation.

  “Those are adults,” I tell her. “They won’t kill you. They’ll give you enough poison to paralyze you, and then they’ll burrow their eggs inside. Few days’ time, you’ll be gobbled up from inside out.”

  “Poetry in motion. Bye, bitch,” Victra says and then grabs Harmony’s belt and collar and hurls her into the pit.

  Harmony’s arms windmill as she falls amongst the pitvipers. A nasty bitch thicker than both my thighs claims her first, striking before she even lands. The fangs make a meaty punching sound as they enter. Harmony grabs another knife from her waist, but the pitviper is already coiling around her arms and legs, immobilizing her with soft rustling sounds as it burrows its head into her lower stomach to implant its eggs out the womb sack in its neck.

  Harmony’s mouth opens in silent pain.

  Then, at last, she screams.

  I’ve never heard anything like it. Not when I look at her. Not when I reach the end of the tunnel with Victra and hear her pain echoing after us. It is the scream of a woman who lost everything far too long ago. Victra and I hear it, but we do not turn back.

  Harmony lived on pain. She’ll get it to the end. I don’t miss the lesson.

  * * *

  —

  The slaves have left the Red Hand soldiers dying on the ground in their quest for the surface. We find them gathered with nearly a hundred Red Hand prisoners in the center of the Common. Volga is giving orders to a group of bloody men and women, telling them to search for an exit. Six are Obsidian, the rest Red with crooked Gamma sigils branded onto their foreheads.

  I thought I was numb until I see my girls have come out of hiding. Lion sits with Freckles on the far wall. The older girl is crying and holding on to Lion. Lion squirms to escape and waves to me, her pistol tight in her hand.

  Some of the other girls kick downed Hand men. More women descend from the township, many those who were already dwelling here. The wives. Some of the slaves watch warily as the wives pick up rifles only to point them at other wives and push them in with the men. Some throw stones at their tormentors or pull their hair or try to brain them with rocks, shrieking with a rage beyond words.

  It isn’t my place to stop them.

  “Door out is shut,” Victra says.

  Volga wheels from her planning to find us coming toward her. She looks like hell, but drops her pulseRifle to wrap me in a hug. She spares a nod for Victra.

  “How did you—” Volga begins.

  “Later,” Victra snaps. She picks a piece of metal out of her bare foot. “Harmony’s…dealt with, but she said they have a torchShip. If that’s true, we have a problem.�
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  We do have a problem. While Victra may have sealed the doors, the camp outside the mine’s entrance is evacuating in clumsy fashion. Soon we see why. Via the cameras outside the mine, we watch the highland trees shiver as something rises out of sight. Soon a shadow stretches across them as a metal ship maybe six hundred meters long rises from the sea.

  The chair creaks as Victra leans back. “Well, girls, it was a nice run.”

  “Lyria says she got the signal out,” Volga says.

  “Scopes are clear,” Victra says. “No one listened.” She taps the instruments. “Who’d you call, anyway?” A dot appears on the scanner. Victra frowns and leans forward.

  I swallow as more dots appear. “Mars,” I whisper.

  TWO OF THE SNOWBALL’s javelin missiles streak toward the horizon. Thirty more missiles join them, dropped by the few ships in our ragtag fleet that possess the capability. They soar ahead in a thin line toward the monstrous six-hundred-meter torchShip and her iridescent shield that blocks our path to our girls and the last remnants of the Red Hand.

  When we received Lyria’s signal after two weeks of searching, we boosted it so half the continent of Cimmeria could hear. I did not expect a reply. Pax did. By the time we reached the North Thermic, our instruments looked like paint spatter from the incoming signatures. With the two juggernauts of Mars, the Obsidians and the Republic, busy assembling Armageddon, the people of Mars woke up.

  More than three hundred ships arrived—dated ripWings flown by Red militia from Acaron, sleek gunboats from patriotic Silvers of Nike and Attica, war-tested fighter ships from renegade Republic pilots, civilian cargo-haulers, fishing fliers, passenger shuttles, most weaponless, with open decks loaded to capacity with Gammas hastily assembled from mines, villages, and assimilation camps all across the north of Cimmeria. All streaking low enough to sea for their bellies to glimmer with water and salt. All come to give the Red Hand the ass-kicking they’ve been begging for. Mars was the first planet enslaved by the Golds. She became the cradle of liberty, and her children watched as the Reds who started it all were squashed by what came after. Now they shout: “Blood Red! Blood Red!” as they tear across the sea.