by Pierce Brown
“Not if he’s dead.”
I assigned Sevro to infiltrate the Citadel in Agea where the ArchGovernor is being held captive. But I did not tell him to kill Augustus.
“You’re not going to kill him,” I say with authority. “I forbid it. It is …”
“Necessary. You don’t need his legitimacy. Haven’t you figured us out yet? Here you get what you take, no matter the right of it.” He spits on the ground. “You are twenty years old. If you win Mars, Darrow, you become a living god. And so when you reveal what you really are … you transcend Color. Do I register?”
Sevro has grown wiser since we first met. No doubt about that. But I fear he thinks too much of me. Apollo thought he was a god. Augustus thinks he is. A god is not what I should be. A god is something to serve, something to worship. I’ve never wanted that. Eo never wanted that. Sevro will have to learn. This is about freedom. Yet it seems like everyone just wants to follow.
Mustang oversees the troop operations today. She floats through the air with Milia, the horsefaced Gold we adopted at the Institute. Nearer me saunters an ambling, pitiless Gold with a familiar face. I laugh and point him out to Sevro, who curses poignantly.
“Proctor Jupiter?” I call to the man. “Darling, could that really be you?”
“Who else would it be, you uppity brat?” Jupiter comes before me. He’s tall. Careless in the eyes. Hair bound tight. Half a foot taller than me, he’s a sinful, hedonistic beast of a man with an arrogant streak a kilometer long, and it is clear that he and Ragnar are two misunderstandings away from opening each other up. He eyes the razor wrapped around my forearm, and I see his is worn in the same new fashion. “I heard you’re the one responsible for the new style.” He holds up his arm. “I do approve. Bold as a naked prick in an ant nest.”
“Limping still?” Sevro asks.
“Shut up, Goblin,” Jupiter sneers.
“Daddy dearest had a little duel with Proctor Jupiter here to win the Rage Knight post.” Sevro smiles. “Old man sliced him up the same place I did. Right in the ass.”
“That slippery slag Fitchner is … tricky.” Jupiter nods grudgingly. “Very, very tricky. I have been helping the lady,” Jupiter rumbles on, gesturing to Mustang.
“How so?” I ask.
“Most of the Augustus cities are on communication interdict. Can’t get a word out or in. I’m the emissary to those still loyal. Sneak in. Sneak out. Been doing it for weeks now and sending word to remote dropCaches and the other loyal cities. A whole war’s been going on here with her agents and her brother’s while you were out stitching together a fleet. It’s been nasty, my goodman.”
“So what can you tell me?” I ask.
“Well, Daddy Bellona commands the house fleet against your friends. Cassius and Karnus have been allocated to ground operations inside Agea. I am going to help you find them and kill them.” Jupiter raises his large eyebrows, as though telling us how tedious he finds the chore. “That is the point—kill the Bellona family members and all their allies will suddenly wonder why they’re fighting—isn’t it?” He winks at Sevro. “Next best thing to pounding that Luneborn Sovereign’s head in.”
“You sure all Bellona are in Agea?”
Jupiter nods grudgingly. “Last we saw. That was a couple days ago, though, after they brought Augustus down in chains.” He airily holds up a finger. “And there was a peculiar series of heavy shuttles that landed last night.”
I wave a hand, ignoring mention of the shuttles. He squints at me, but I tell him to shut up and get behind me as I meet Mustang and her entourage.
“Everything is prepared,” she says. “We’re awaiting launch orders.” She wrinkles her nose as if smelling something foul. “Sevro, do watch Jupiter. He tends to shit where he eats.”
Jupiter yawns. “Pleasure working with you too.”
“Milia, lovely seeing you washed,” I say.
“Reaper.” She nods and smiles, an ugly thing on her face. “Still playing with scythes? Warms the heart.”
“You’ve a heart?” Sevro chuckles.
She examines his height. “A full-sized one.” She pauses. “I saw Pollux just yesterday, on the other side, however. Been sneaking in and out with Jupiter here. You’ve arranged us all a little reunion. I heard about Tactus. He was a bastard.”
True enough. I glance at my datapad. We’ll be at the launch coordinates in five. My team disperses. Mustang lingers, face thoughtful.
“What’s what?” I ask. “Worrying about me already?”
“A little,” she confides, coming close enough for me to smell the scent of her. “But it’s my father. What if they kill him before we even make landfall?”
“They won’t kill him. They’ll need him as a bargaining chip. Or if they’ve lost, they’ll spare him and hope we do the same for all the Bellona family members. You don’t kill men as important as him.”
I reach for her hand to comfort her, but she pulls it away, turning from me. “We have a planet to invade.”
I watch her go, shouting orders to her men.
38
The Iron Rain
All I see is metal. I’m one of a thousand in the honeycomb of spitTubes. Beyond the metal tube, a battle rages. I feel nothing. Not the shudder of the Pax. Not the missiles as they range through space to bring silent death. Just the throbbing of my heart. Mickey told me it was the strongest he’d seen in a Red, courtesy of the pitviper poison that traced my veins when I was young. It makes my hands shake now as it gallops in my chest. Fear rides in me. Fear of so many things. Fear of letting down my friends, of losing my friends. Of telling my friends the truth about what I am. Fear of being unequal to the task before me. Fear caused by doubt—in myself, in my plans for the rebellion. Fear of death. Fear of being lost in the darkness of space beyond the hull. Fear of failing Eo, my people, myself. But chiefly, fear of hot metal.
Chatter comes over the coms. Perfunctory. The plan is in motion, and I’m nothing but a cog now. The battle is too large for me to take part in all of it. I wanted to lead the Pax from her bridge so I could watch the enemy ships fall to my fleet. But Orion and Roque are better than I am in space.
I wanted to be in the leechCraft carrying the boarding parties through the breech into enemy hulls; I wanted to storm bridges, repel invaders from my own ship, bounce from destroyer to dreadnought, making them mine. But I will not capture Imperator Bellona. The Titans will do that. In the end, my enemies dictate where I go. I chase the grand prize.
A prize that has been my target since after I left Luna.
My true pegasus pendant is cool against my chest. Eo’s hair lies within. Focus on that. On the way her hair moved. Drifting on deepmine winds. Focus there. Thinking of her, I am beset with guilt. I like this life. No matter my reluctance to play the Gold, no matter the sorrowful excuses I make, part of me is like them. Perhaps I was born to be of two Colors.
Slag that. Man wasn’t born to be any Color. Our rulers decided that. And they were wrong.
“Audentes fortuna juvat, darlings,” Sevro says over a private comline. I burst out laughing at the Latin.
“More ‘Fortune favors the bold’ crap? Why not just say carpe diem?”
“Because it’s tradition to say …”
“Do you boys always flirt like this before battle? It is adorable,” Victra adds.
“You should have seen them at the Institute, love at first howl,” Mustang laughs.
“I saw the clips! What a lovely couple.”
I hear the smile in Mustang’s voice. “They even wore matching garments. Stylish, weren’t they, Roque? And smelly.”
“I certainly took no notice.”
“Why not?”
“Sevro scared the piss out of me. I wasn’t looking at what he was wearing,” Roque replies, drawing laughs. “I thought he’d been bitten by a squirrel and contracted rabies somehow.”
“Roque?” Sevro calls sweetly.
“Sevro.”
“Hello.”
“Hello?”
“Next time I see you, I’m going to bite you.”
“I must go.” Roque’s light laughter fades. “We’re engaging the main enemy element.”
“What are you going to do, bore them to death with a light poetry reading?” Sevro again.
“You’re a pricklick,” Roque declares playfully. “May the Furies guide your swords and the Fates bring you home. Till then, my love is with you all.”
The profession of love startles the Golds. Roque’s com clicks off and we can hear him on the main frequency giving orders to attack an enemy destroyer.
“What a Pixie,” Sevro mutters, but even a child could catch the tremor in his voice. He’s afraid.
“Hic sunt leones,” I say to my friends. “I’ll see you on the other side.”
“Hic sunt leones,” they echo, not for Augustus, but because we wish we were brave as lions.
One by one, we say our goodbyes. Before I can stop myself, I hail Mustang’s private frequency. It takes her twenty seconds to answer. “What is it?” Hesitation haunts her voice.
“Stay alive,” I say.
A pause. Emotion? Annoyance?
“You too.”
She closes the com link. Soon the gears begin to whir and click as I’m loaded into the firing mechanism of the tube.
I’ve acted this whole time like I know what’s coming. Like I know what the Iron Rain is. But it looms before me like some dark, slavering beast. A mystery, though I’ve seen its face. I’ve seen the virtual reality experientials and HC clips. I know what it is the way a child knows flying from watching a bird.
“Deployment coordinates reached.” Roque’s voice fills the ears of every Gold in the fleet. “Execute Operation Eagleburn.”
The whine of the magnetic charge in the tube fills me. I slide forward into the chamber, bracing myself, looking down so I don’t snap my neck. Then it fires and I am claimed by velocity and battle as my stomach fills my throat with bile. I rip through the magnetic stream, out of the ship’s tube into swarming chaos.
Fire and lightning rule space. Behemoths of metal belch missiles back and forth, silently pounding one another with all the weapons of man. The silence of it, so eerie, so strange. Great veils of flak explode around the ships, cloaking them in fury, almost like raw cotton tossed into the wind. RipWings and wasps buzz at one another, pissing streams of gunfire. They nip and slice at carapaces of metal, fighting in a dense giant clouds. In little packs they slip from their chaotic fights, spiraling silently toward clusters of leechCraft as the destroyers and carriers launch their troop transports across space in undulating waves. It’s a game of boarding parties. Over, under, and through the curtains of flak the leeches go, seeking a hull to clamber onto so they can pump their deadly cargo into the belly of crucial ships, like flies dropping larvae into open wounds. All flown by Blues raised to do only this one thing. Bellona craft pass those of Augustus, waves overlapping, breaking on one another.
All in silence.
Missiles leap toward the leeches, wracking hulls with detonations. No flames save where ships are punctured, leaking oxygen flames like harpooned whales of Old Earth would gout blood. Railgun discharges streak through space, tearing through multiple leeches and smaller fighters at the same time, rending holes in the ranks. Ships rupture forth men and women as both sides target engines, hoping to cripple and capture instead of destroy. Amidst the blue and silver enemy fleet, the massive Warchild shatters corvettes and torchShips like a cyclops wading through sheep—club swinging pendulous and slow.
I hold my breath as Victra’s destroyer, shielded by two others, slips towards the Warchild. She’s strafed by railguns, and men-of-war garland her with missile fire. The Bellona must warrant she’s too close to capture, because they open another salvo into her softened belly. Yet amidst the fire she suffers, the corvette births out a desperate burst of forty leechCraft. Nearly ten times her normal complement. We carved her hollow to fit in the additional troop carriers. That is the war party of the Telemanuses.
Victra’s ship cuts away from the Warchild, recklessly plunging into the Bellona formation where her mother’s flotilla of ships bearing the bleeding sun support the Bellona eagles. Victra springs her second surprise.
Her mother switches sides, betraying the Bellona as Victra promised the Jackal and me. Her mother’s ships unload more than two hundred leeches amidst the core of the Bellona fleet. It is chaos.
My Titans land on the hull of the enemy flagship, and soon the Warchild is festooned with leeches. Good luck, Titans.
Bellona-friendly leechCraft redirect toward the Warchild to lend aid to the battle that’ll clutter her halls with smoke and blood. RipWings zip past, shooting the landed leeches, trying to skin them off before they dump their men into the Warchild’s body. It is an elegant dance of action and reaction and reaction and reaction.
I carry on my trajectory, unable to alter it. To my left and right streak thousands Golds and Obsidians in armored starShells, Grays in hivepods of twelve each. A rain of men and metal. Amidst our current fly large storks packed with more Obsidians and Grays. Once we make landfall and secure the beachheads, the massed legions will slip out of the dreadnoughts and carriers on landing craft and pour out behind us.
Despite what the Bellona and their allies think, they cannot stop us from landing men—the orbit around the planet is too large. That is why holding the cities is of such importance. They are island fortresses. The only realistic way of seizing them is making landfall and slipping under the two-hundred-meter gap between their disc-shaped shields and the ground. That requires men on the surface. Millions of men in coordinated assault.
We will establish a hundred beachheads, and then our battle will begin in earnest. In the chaos, missiles streak for our starShells. Friendly capital ships deploy screens of flak behind us, and wasps cover our flanks. Enemy wasps manage to swoop in from the sides, strafing us. Dozens in the rain die around me, their armor folding back like burning paper. I hate this. I want to scream. Some do and we have to cut off their coms.
There is nothing I can do. Pray I don’t die. Pray my friends don’t die. But pray to what? The Golds have no God. We Reds have an Old Man in the Vale. But he does not help us in this life. He merely waits to shepherd and guard us in the next.
My heart rattles in my chest. Hyperventilating. Tearing out of my own skin. I feel a boy. I want the comfort of home. Mother’s blood soup, the touch of her stern hand, the love that flashed in me whenever I managed to make her smile. Anything to feel the joy of realizing Eo loved me. I long for the cold, quiet nights before love when it was only lust and hunger, where we would kiss in secret, hearts fluttering, like two little birds realizing they might build a nest together after all. That was what life was supposed to be. Family. First loves. Not falling through atmosphere where killers care for nothing more than to fill your body with hot metal before moving on to kill your friends.
My mind flees even as my body acts.
The planet grows and grows till it is a swollen colossus that consumes my vision. I do not know who is dead, who is alive. My display is too busy. We hit the atmosphere and sound roars back. Halos of color cocoon my trembling form. To my left and right, the falling soldiers look like raging lightning bugs jerked out of some Carver’s fantasy. I admire the one to my left. The bronze sun is behind him as he falls, silhouetting him, immortalizing him in that singular moment—one I know I shall never forget—so that he looks like a Miltonian angel falling with wrath and glory. His exoskeleton sheds its friction armor, as Lucifer might have shed the fetters of heaven, feathers of flame peeling off, fluttering behind. Then a missile slashes the sky and high-grade explosives christen him mortal once again.
The moment we clear the atmosphere, surface gunfire screams up at us, carving holes through our falling swarm. Like a beehive struck, we activate our gravBoots and fracture into a thousand different squadrons, each trying to follow its own coordinates. Enemy ripWings followed us into the atmosph
ere, but here we’re more maneuverable, and we kill the big fighters with ease. I swoop in on one from behind with the Howlers hot on my tail, and slash it with my razor. I fly off as it spirals down through the clouds into the ocean below.
Antiaircraft fire screams up at us through the clouds and kills the Gold to my right—a Howler, though I don’t know which till I look at my datapad. Daria the Harpy is dead. Just like that. No sacrifice to save another. No howl of rage at the end. No noble gesture. No emotion. The loyal girl who wore belts of scalps at the Institute, who held Rotback and Screwface in thrall to her strange devices, is gone.
A stab of panic goes through me and I dive through the clouds with the rest of my legion’s vanguard. We streak low over the ocean, where two waterships spit up fire. Sevro sends two missiles slithering through the air; they detonate, turning into a dozen micro missiles, which become another dozen each. The ships detonate like corn kernels over fire.
War is chaos. It always has been. But technology makes it worse. It changes the fear. At the Institute, I feared men. I feared what Titus and the Jackal could do to me. You see death coming there and can at least struggle against it. Here you don’t have such luxury. Modern war is fearing the air, the shadows, fearing the silence. Death will come and I won’t even see it.
I slam down on a snow-covered mountain. Clouds of vapor rise as I melt a hole in the white from the heat of my red-hot suit. The rest of my squad lands around me, finding safe harbor on the ground. Roaring down, meteor men from metal monsters. Thump. Thump. Thump. And the fog of war rises.
“Landfall,” I snarl.
Sevro falls to a knee, pops open his helmet, and pukes into the snow. Others join him. Ugly Screwface gasps in sadness. Rotback grips his shoulder. Clown stands guard over them, his red-painted Mohawk sideways on his head. Harpy doesn’t exist anymore. I didn’t know it would be like this. I thought I knew horror. I didn’t. More men died in the last minute than I’ve ever even known. Lorn’s fear of war quakes through me.
This is war. Chaos. Chance. Death.
