by Pierce Brown
“Sixty ticks till Howler coms go black,” Virga intones from her station as Victra enters the bridge, wearing thick golden armor painted with a Red slingBlade on the chest and back.
“The hell are you doing here?” I ask.
“You’re here,” she replies innocently.
“You’re supposed to be on the Shout of Mykos.”
“This isn’t the Mykos?” She bites her lip. “Well, I suppose I got lost. I’ll just follow you around so that doesn’t happen again. Prime?”
“Sevro sent you. Didn’t he?”
“His heart’s a black little thing. But it can break. I’m here to make sure it doesn’t by keeping you nice and cozy. Oh, and I want to say hello to Roque.”
“What about your sister?” I ask.
“Roque first. Then her.” She elbows me. “I can be a team player too.”
Grinning, I turn back to the pit. “Virga, give me a helmet patch to the Howlers.”
“Aye, sir.”
The com in my ear crackles. I activate my armor’s helmet. The transparent heads up display shows me the tags on my crew, ranks, names, everything that’s logged into the central ship register. I activate the com holo function and a semi-translucent collage of my friends’ faces appear over the sight of my ship’s bridge. “ ’Sup boss?” Sevro asks, his face is painted Red with warpaint but bathed in blue light from his mech’s HUD display. “Need a goodbye kiss or something?”
“Just checking to make sure you’re all tucked in.”
“Your kin could’ve carved us a bigger nook,” Sevro mutters. “It’s foot to face to fartbox in here.”
“So you’re saying Tactus would’ve liked it?” Victra asks. She’s patched into the panel so I hear her voice in link.
I laugh. “What didn’t he like?”
“Clothing, predominantly,” Mustang replies from her own bridge. She wears her battle armor as well. Pure Gold with a red lion roaring on her chest.
“And sobriety,” Victra adds.
“This moon smells like royal shit,” Clown mumbles from his own starShell mech. “Worse than a dead horse.”
“You’re in a mech in vacuum,” Holiday drawls. I hear the clang and shouts of the people behind her in the hangar bay of my ship. She wears a huge blue handprint on her face. Given to her by one of her Obsidians. “It’s likely not the moon.”
“Oh. Then it must be me,” Clown says. He sniffs. “Oh, ho. It’s me.”
“I told you to shower,” Pebble mutters.
“Howler Rule 17. Only Pixies shower before battle,” Sevro says. “I like my soldiers savage, stinky, and sexy. I’m proud of you, Clown.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Threka! Put your safety on,” Holiday shouts. “Now! Sorry. Bloodydamn Obsidians walking around with their fingers on the bloodydamn triggers. Shit is terrifying.”
“Why do we laugh and speak like children?” Sefi booms over the com, so loud my eardrums rattle.
“Bloodyshit in a handbasket,” Sevro yelps. There’s a chorus of curses at Sefi’s volume.
“Turn down your output volume!” Clown snaps at the queen.
“I do not understand….”
“Your output…”
“What is output…?”
“ ‘The Quiet’ is a bit of a misnomer, eh?” Victra asks. Mustang snorts a laugh.
“Sefi, bend down,” Holiday barks. “I can’t reach. Bend down.” Holiday’s found Sefi in the hangar and helps her turn down her output volume. The Obsidian queen sleeps with her new pulseFist every night, but she’s a bit behind on her understanding of telecommunication equipment.
“So, like the big girl asked, was there a reason for this little tête-à-tête?” Holiday says.
“Tradition, Holi,” Sevro says, mimicking her twang. “Reap’s a sentimental sap. He’s probably going to give a speech.”
“No speech,” I say.
My odd little family whines and catcalls. “You’re not going to admonish us to rage, rage against the dying of the light?” Sevro asks. But the joke feels strange, knowing it is what Roque would have said. My chest tightens again. I feel so much love for this band of misfits and oathbreakers. So much fear. I wish that I could protect them from this. Find some way to spare them the coming hell.
“Whatever happens, remember we’re the lucky ones,” I say. “We get to make a difference today. But you’re my family. So be brave. Protect each other. And come home.”
“You too boss,” Sevro says.
“Break the chains,” Mustang says.
“Break the chains,” my friends echo.
Sevro’s face becomes a snarl as he booms out: “Howlers go…”
“Ahhhwwwooooo.” They howl like fools, cracking up. One by one, their images flicker away, and I’m left in the solitude of my helmet. I breathe and say a silent prayer to whoever is listening. Keep them safe.
I let the helmet slither back into the neck of my armor. My Blues watch me from their displays. A small coterie of Red and Gray marines stand by the door, waiting to escort me to the hangar. The strings of so many lives from so many worlds all intersecting here, at this moment around mine. How many will fray? How many will end this day? Victra smiles at me, and it seems I’m too lucky already for this day to end in joy. She should not be here. She should be across the void at the helm of an enemy battle cruiser. Yet she’s here with us, seeking the redemption she thought she could never have.
“Once more unto the breach,” she says.
“Once more,” I reply. I address the crew. “How do you all feel?”
Awkward silence. They exchange nervous glances. Unsure of how to answer. Then a young Blue woman with a bald head bursts up from her console. “We’re ready to kill some bloodydamn Golds…sir.”
They laugh, tension broken.
“Anyone else?” Victra booms. They roar in reply. Marines as young as eighteen and as old as Lorn would be now slam their steel-heeled boots against the ground.
“Patch me through to the fleet,” I command. “Broadcast on an open frequency to Quicksilver. Make sure the Golds can hear me so they know where to find me.” Virga gives me a nod. I’m live.
“My friends, this is the Reaper.” My voice echoes over the master com in all one hundred and twelve capital ships in my fleet, in the thousands of ripWings, in the leechCraft and the engine rooms and the medbays where doctors and newly appointed nurses walk through empty beds with crisp white sheets, waiting for the flood. Thirty-eight minutes from now Quicksilver and the Sons of Ares on Mars will hear it, and they’ll boost the signal to the core. Whether we’re alive at that time will depend on my dance with Roque.
“In mine, in space, in city and sky, we have lived our lives in fear. Fear of death. Fear of pain. Today, fear only that we fail. We cannot. We stand upon the edge of darkness holding the lone torch left to man. That torch will not go out. Not while I draw breath. Not while your hearts beat in your chests. Not while our ships yet have menace in them. Let others dream. Let others sing. We chosen few are the fire of our people.” I beat my chest. “We are not Red, not Blue or Gold or Gray or Obsidian. We are humanity. We are the tide. And today we reclaim the lives that have been stolen from us. We build the future we were promised.
“Guard your hearts. Guard your friends. Follow me through this evil night, and I promise you morning waits on the other side. Until then, break the chains!” I pull my razor from my arm and let it take the shape of my slingBlade. “All ships, prepare for battle.”
Red tribal drums played in the belly of one of my ships, The Evening Tide, beat through the speakers in a martial rendition of the Forbidden Song. A steady undulation of defiance as we roll toward the Sword Armada. I’ve never seen a fleet so large. Not even when we stormed Mars. That was just two rival houses summoning allies. This is the conflict of peoples. And it is appropriately massive.
Unfortunately, Roque and I studied under the same teachers. He knows the battles of Alexander, of the Han armies, and Trafalgar. He
knows the greatest threat to an overwhelming power is miscommunication, chaos. So he does not overestimate the power of his force. He subdivides into twenty smaller mobile divisions, giving relative autonomy to each Praetor to create speed and flexibility. We face not one huge hammer, but a swarm of razors.
“It’s a nightmare,” Victra murmurs.
I thought Roque would do this, but I still curse as I see it. In any space engagement, you must decide if you’re killing enemy ships or capturing them. It seems he’s intent on boarding. So we cannot slug it out with them and hope for the best. Nor can we lure his fleet into my trap from the first. They’ll muscle through it and kill the Howlers. Everything depends on the one advantage we do have. And it’s not our ships. It is not our hundred thousand Obsidians I have packed in leechCraft. It is the fact that Roque thinks he knows me, and so his entire strategy will be predicated on how I would behave.
So I decide to overshoot his estimation of my insanity and show him how little he really understands the psychology of Reds. Today I lead the Pax on a suicide mission into the heart of his fleet. But I don’t begin the battle. Orion does, soaring forward ahead of me on Persephone’s Howl with three quarters of my fleet. They cluster in spheres, the smallest corvettes still four hundred meters long. Most are half-kilometer-long torchShips, some destroyers, and the four huge dreadnoughts. Long-range missiles slither out from the Gold ships and from our own. Miniature computer-guided countermeasures are deployed. And then Roque’s fleet flashes into motion and the black space between the two fleets erupts with flack, missiles, and long-range railgun munitions. Billions of credits’ worth of munitions spent in seconds.
Orion shrinks the distance to Roque’s fleet as Mustang and Romulus’s ships hurtle toward the southern edge—per Io’s pole—of Roque’s formation, attempting to hit the only vulnerable place on a ship, the engines. But Roque’s fleet is nimble and ten squadrons divide from the rest, orientating themselves so their bristling broadsides face the bows of the Moon Lord ships coming up from the planet’s south pole and rake them with railgun fire. A hundred thousand guns go off simultaneously.
Metal shreds metal. Ships vomit oxygen and men.
But ships are made to take a beating. Huge hulks of metal subdivided into thousands of interlocking honeycombed compartments designed to isolate breaches and prevent ships from venting with one railgun shot. From these floating castles stream thousands of tiny one-man fighter craft. They swarm in small squadrons through the no-man’s-land between our fleet and Roque’s. Some packed with miniature nukes meant for killing capital ships. Helldivers and drillboys trained night and day in sims by the Sons of Ares fly with squadrons of synced Blues. They slash into the Society’s war-hardened pilots led by ripWings striped with Gold.
Romulus’s force peels away from Mustang’s to link with Orion, while Mustang continues toward the heart of the enemy formation, preparing the way for my thrust.
We close to three hundred kilometers, and the mid-range rail guns open up. Huge barrages of twenty kilogram munitions hurtling through space at mach eight. Flak shields plume over the entire Gold formation. Closer to the ships, PulseShields throb iridescent blue as munitions crack into them and careen off into space.
My strike force lingers behind the main battle. Soon it will become a war of boarding parties. LeechCraft launching by the hundreds. Aggressive Praetors will empty their ships of their marines and Obsidians to claim enemy vessels, which they will then keep after the battle, per rules of naval law. Conservative Praetors will hoard their men till the last, keeping them to repel boarding parties and use their ships as their main weapon of war.
“Orion’s given the signal,” my captain says.
“Set course for the Colossus. Engines to ramming speed.” My ship rumbles under my feet. “Pelus, the trigger’s yours. Ignore torchShips. Destroyers or larger are the order of the day.” The ship groans as we hurtle forward from the back of Orion’s fleet. “Escorts keep tight. Match velocity.”
We pass the artillery ships, then the four-kilometer-long Persephone’s Howl as we emerge out the center of Orion’s front with the enemy like a hidden spear, now driving into the fifty kilometers of no-man’s-land, aiming for the heart of the enemy. Orion’s ships fire chaff, creating a corridor to protect our mad approach. Roque will see what I intend now, and his capital ships drift back from mine, inviting me into the center of his huge formation as they rain fire down on my strike force.
Our shields flicker blue. Enemy munitions sneak through the chaff and punish us. We return fire. Raking a destroyer as we pass with a full broadside. It loses power. LeechCraft pour out of it to try and slip through our chaff tunnel, but our escorts shred the small craft. Still, we’re hit by the guns of a dozen ships. Red glows around our shields. They fail in stages, local generators shorting out on our starboard side. Instantly, our hull is punctured in seven places. The honeycomb network of pressurized doors activates, shutting the compromised levels of my ship off from the rest. I lose a torchShip. Half a click off bow, a full barrage of rail-munitions rake her from stem to stern, fired by Antonia’s dreadnaught the Pandora.
“Seems my sister is enjoying my ship,” Victra says.
Bodies erupt out of the torchShip’s bridge, but Antonia continues to fire on the much-smaller ship until the nuclear core of her engines implodes. Pulsing white twice before devouring the ship’s back half. The shock wave pushes our craft sideways. Our EMP and pulse shielding holds, lights flickering just once. Something huge slams into the ten-meter-thick bulkhead beyond the bridge. The wall bends inward to my right. The shape of a railgun munition stretching the metal inward like an alien baby. Our gunners rip apart the 1.5-kilometer destroyer that fired on us, loosing eighty of our railguns directly into her bridge. Two hundred men gone. We’re taking no prisoners at this stage. It’s staggering the amount of violence the Pax can deal out. And staggering the amount we’re taking. Antonia dissects another part of my strike force.
“Hope of Tinos is down,” my Blue sensor officer says quietly. “The Cry of Thebes is going nuclear.”
“Tell Tinos and Thebes helmsman to punch negative forty-five their midline and abandon ship,” I snap. The ships obey and alter course to ram Antonia’s flagship. She reverses her engines and my dying ships carry on harmlessly into space. One goes nuclear.
We’re outmatched and outgunned here in the heart of the enemy formation. Trapped. No escape. A sphere forming around us. I only have four torchships left. Make that three.
“Multiple deck fires,” an officer intones.
“Munitions detonations on deck seventeen.”
“Engines one through six are down. Seven and eight are at forty percent capacity.”
The Pax dies around me.
Roque’s MoonBreaker looms ahead. Twice the length of my ship, three times the girth. A floating military dock city eight kilometers long. With a huge crescent bow, like a shark with an open mouth swimming sideways. She retreats from us at the same pace we advance. Making sure we cannot ram her as she punishes us with her superior weaponry. Roque thought I would pull a Karnus. Try to slam into their capital ship with my own. That’s now impossible. Our engines are nearly done. Our hull compromised.
“All forward guns target their railguns and missile launchers on their top deck, carve us a shadow.” I pull up a hologram of the ship and circle the area of fire with my fingers, directing the fire as Victra gives commands to the fighter groups which we’ve held on to till now. The ripWings scream out into space. The Pax rotates to present her main gunbanks to the Colossus to open a broadside.
It doesn’t matter what we do at this stage. We’re a wolf pinned to the ground by a bear and it’s smashing our legs one by one, carving off our ears, our eyes, our teeth but keeping our belly nice and ready for a raking. My ship shudders around me. Blues rip out of sync, vomiting in the pits as the datanerves in the ships, to which they’re linked, die one by one. My helmsman, Arnus, has a seizure as the engines are shredded.
Roque is inviting us to launch our leechCraft, drawing the Colossus closer to my dead ship. A kilometer away now. I accept the invitation. “Launch all leechCraft at the surface of the MoonBreaker,” I say. “Now. Fire the spitTubes.”
Hundreds of empty suits fire out the spitTubes as they would in an Iron Rain. Two hundred leechCraft launch from the four hangars of my ship. Spewed out in a stream of ugly metal, each could carry fifty men to pump into the guts of the MoonBreaker. Controlled remotely by Blue pilots on board Persephone’s Howl, they race fast as they can to cross the dangerous space between the two capital ships. And they’re wiped away before they make it half the distance as Roque detonates a series of low-yield nuclear warheads.
He guessed my move.
And now my flight of ships is nothing but debris floating between the two vessels. Emergency sirens flash on the ceiling of my bridge. Our long-range sensors are down. Our guns smashed. Multiple deck breaches.
“Hold together,” I murmur. “Hold together, Pax.”
“We’re receiving a transmission,” Virga says.
Roque appears in the air before me. “Darrow.” He sees Victra too. “Victra, it is done. Your ship is dead in the water. Tell your fleet to surrender and I will spare your lives.” He thinks he can end this rebellion without putting us in the grave. The entitlement of it rankles me. But we both know he needs my body to show the worlds. If he destroys my ship and kills me, they’ll never find me in the wreckage. I look at Victra. She spits on the ground in challenge. “What is your answer?” Roque demands.
I bend my fingers crudely. “Fuck you.”
Roque looks off screen. “Legate Drusus, launch all leechCraft. Tell the Cloud Knight to bring me the Reaper. Dead or alive. Just make sure he’s recognizable.”