by Pierce Brown
I will see you in the Vale, brothers.
I patch in to Central Command in Tyche. Panic creeps into the professional clip of officers as they report multiple reactor explosions around the Waste of Ladon, stretching all the way to the Petasos Peninsula and the whole of the Plains of Caduceus. Six cities have lost power. More will follow in a chain reaction. Without power, the whole northern shield chain will fall. I wanted a window, but Atlas just kicked in the sky.
Atalantia is coming.
“Someone betrayed us,” Thraxa growls.
Or Atalantia is smarter than her father.
“How many generators will fall?” I ask Thraxa. She stares at Marbles’s information readout and makes a mental calculation. Too slow. I toss it to Alex. He barely blinks before he has an answer.
“It’ll be everything north of Erebos, except Red Reach and Tyche. Their domes are locally powered. They’ll hold.”
Heliopolis is safe, then. Still protected south of Erebos. Which means the escape route through Tyche is viable if Tyche holds. But six million men will be cut off from the city by bombardment. How do I get them back?
“By the Vale itself…” someone whispers.
The Howlers watch in despair out the back of the shuttle as the translucent shield that protected us from the might of the Gold Armada flickers and then disappears one panel at a time until the whole northern sky is naked to the armada above.
My com pings with incoming transmissions. Rhonna fields a call. “Harnassus requests orders of retreat.”
Thraxa steps between me and the other aides fielding calls. “Let him think.”
In her shadow, I watch the sky. Flashes in orbit. Friction trails scar the blue horizon. The first bombs begin to fall.
The vanguard legions will come soon after. Bloody Peerless cohorts in fast boots and starShells, dropships packed with veteran Gray shock troops, Obsidian slaveknights stoked to mind-melting bloodfrenzy by the drugs of their masters, tanks, titans, esoteric war machines, the full might of a militarized empire out for revenge.
We are out of position. Our mobility will be frozen by bombardment. Legions and static defenses erased by atomics. Those who don’t die will be hopelessly shattered and fragmented. Then Atalantia’s forces will flank and encircle the marooned remains of my army before we can attempt a breakout.
There is only one option, and it isn’t retreat.
“Thraxa.” She steps up to me. “We must take the punch.”
“Can we?”
“Yes. Atalantia needs Mercury. She won’t nuke the Children cities. Red Reach and Tyche are independent of the shield chain. Their domes will hold. And soon we’ll have the storm—”
“It will take hours for the—”
“I started the engines two hours ago.”
She blinks in surprise. “And the First Army? They won’t make it to the cover of Red Reach.”
It comes out in a cold rattling of sentences. “Then I’ll bring them a shield. Atalantia will likely land south of Pan with at least a third of their army. She’ll bottle up the Children and take the cities one by one, trapping our garrisons. If we abandon the cities and mass the garrisons from the Children at Kydon, we can sally to Pan and make an oblique front. It won’t hold, but if we hit them from behind with the Second Army out of Red Reach and drive them toward the sea, we can hurt her while the First Army clears a route to Tyche from the north.” I grip her shoulder. “Take all six starShells. Go to Kydon and lead the tank legions.”
“You need the starShells.”
“You need them more. I’ll find a skyhook.” I look at the darkening sky. “You’ll have cover soon. Hold, and I’ll gut them from the southwest, then we haul ass to Tyche together. A double atomic burst will signal my coming. Go.”
Stalwart Thraxa, spine of the infantry, favorite of her father, knows I send her into the teeth of the enemy. She smiles at me nonetheless. “Hail Reaper.”
“Hail Telemanus.”
She rushes for the starShell spitTube, taking five of her Golds.
“Sevro, call Harnassus…” I turn and find Rhonna at my shoulder instead of my trusted shadow. She looks like I’ve slapped her. “Rhonna, tell him to send reinforcements to Tyche via the loop. I want every single reserve ripper in the air and bound for the plains. Interdiction protocol. If they don’t take out some of those missiles, we’re done. Go.” It will leave Heliopolis naked, but she isn’t their target.
“Alex—” He doesn’t respond. His eyes are fixed on the bombs that already race down through the atmosphere. This is my fault, he will think. I actually do slap him.
His eyes light up in anger.
“Contact Feranis. Tell her to expect heavy mechanized assault from the northwest from landfall on the Talarian Peninsula. She’ll have to hold Tyche without the Morning Star. I need Star and the Drachenjäger cohorts at…” I glance at the map.
He intuits my purpose. “Sector Seventeen.”
I nod. “And call your cousin, tell him to meet us at Skyhook Eleven. I’ll ride with the Arcosians today.” He rushes to the communications room as I hail Orion. Her bright eyes are glazed. She’s in the synaptic drift with the storm.
“How are your storm pilots holding up?”
“Handling…the flow. There have been spikes, but…within range.”
“How long till electronic interference?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Can you slow it to twenty?”
“We will try. Must concentrate now.”
I click out. The rest of the Howlers haven’t moved. They watch the friction trails, a sense of doom upon them.
“You waiting for a formal invitation from the Fury? Asses to the armory. Iron up.” Finally, they move. I shout up the corridor to my pilot. “Colloway! Get me to my army.”
The ship accelerates, nearly knocking me from my feet. Steadying myself, I take the com off the wall and patch my signal into the powerful transmitters on Tyche to speak to my army while I still can.
“This is Reaper. Broken Sky. Repeat, Broken Sky. The enemy has breached the northern shields. Missiles are already en route. Expect heavy bombardment of north Helios and coms blackout presently. Operation Voyager Cloak is canceled. All officers, open your blackpacks. Keyword: hazard bedlam.”
Across Helios, thousands of low-ranking officers, from infantry centurions to ripWing squadron captains, will be opening metal canisters to receive briefings on Operation Tartarus and the conditions they will soon face.
“Operation Tartarus is now live. Second Army, abandon your positions and rally at Red Reach. First Army and all other Cloak units, rally at Sector Seventeen. Cover is inbound. Third Army hold in the Children until the Rain comes, then rally to Kydon. Legate Telemanus is on her way.”
About to bark out a curt farewell, I pause, seeing that none of my Howlers have moved. The roughest veterans of a generation stare at me, knowing all is lost. Eight million more are out there in the desert, mountains, coastal jungles, without shields. They need more than orders.
I rasp into the com.
“Brothers, sisters. Atalantia has come for our lives. She thinks we wait looking at the sky for rescue, that fear has made a home in our hearts. She thinks we have forgotten ourselves. But I have not forgotten what we are. We fought in the ruins of Luna. On the plains and oceans of Earth. In the mountains and the tunnels of Mars. Whatever soil we have stood upon, we have freed. We are not marooned refugees waiting for rescue. We are not prisoners waiting for chains. We are the Free Legions. And today we become the rock they break upon. All legions, prepare for Rain.”
Then the horizon stutters with white light, and the mushrooms grow.
“LET FALL THE RAIN.”
The disembodied voice of Atalantia comes through the communications nodes secured on my auditory canals. Like a conductor’s baton, it sweeps the mu
sic into motion.
Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump, go the spitTubes.
My world turns and my starShell is ingested into the honeycomb of the wall. Outside the shell’s facial shield, the throat of the spitTube pulses with red light.
Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump. Another hundred men.
When falls the Rain, be brave. Be brave, my grandfather said.
I do not feel brave. I am not the center of this symphony. No one even cares I’m here.
Where is the immortal majesty the poets promised me? Where is the stern will my ancestors preached to their children?
It was just an illusion conjured by fools who never left their libraries, or by agents of necessity.
This is the Noble Lie.
Every frayed nerve, every quaking cell, screams in horror, urging me to crawl out of the tube, to escape this insanity. Is a man a coward if he realizes that bravery is just a myth the old tell the young so they line up for the meatgrinder?
My first toy was a wooden sword.
Adults think it adorable.
“Better dead than a coward,” Aja would say when a member of the Palatine would fall in combat on some far-off sphere. Better rotting meat for worms than the butt of a passing joke or an embarrassment to the beloved dead. What hilarious things we do for people who will never know we did them.
I have not used the Mind’s Eye since the Rim. It makes me feel like my grandmother’s puppet. But in my fear, I have nothing else on which to rely.
“Fear is the torrent,” I whisper. “Fear is the torrent. Fear is the torrent.”
I am not here. I am no physical being.
Electricity tethered to carbon. I am a pattern.
And so is the world.
With that acceptance, I release a measured breath, and sink molecule by molecule into the Mind’s Eye.
I see Octavia as if she were before me.
She sits in her Ocular Sphere. The glass walls of the room are open and the city laid out beneath her. Her eyes look down at the Oracle on my wrist, its stinger waving.
“Do not let fear touch you,” she whispers. The intricate creases in her face are like the spiderweb in the high corner of the room. “Fear is the torrent. The raging river. To fight it is to break and drown. But to stand astride it is to see it, feel it, and use its course for your own whims. Now, Lysander, I want you to lie to me, if you can….”
The memory sputters, invaded by another.
Curtains waver like guttering candle flames. I’m walking down a hall toward a black door etched with a single phrase. Music tinkles behind the door. There is laughter. But as I reach forward with my little hand to push it open, I am swallowed by shadows.
The spiderweb emerges from the shadows. A fly struggles to escape, but with each strain entangles himself further.
“Fear is the torrent,” I rasp with Octavia. “Fear is the torrent.”
Her face is bathed green.
I surge forward.
Urine streams into the catheter. My stomach drops to my heels. My vision flickers; a ball of vomit catches halfway up my esophagus as blackness crawls at the corner of my sight. By the time I remember to breathe, the Annihilo is already twenty kilometers behind me. My gut swirls again and I cough up bile. It sprays, murky brown, into a plastic catch over my mouth.
Around me, my suit whirs and flashes with the nonverbal communication between Blue pilots and Gold flight leaders. Clipped commands crisscross over the com. I narrow my mind’s pupil to constrict the influx of information and collate in the background as I slip into the flight flow etched into me by Midnight School aviators.
My mind runs through a collection of instruction sequences, eyes siphoning and collecting data till I’ve assured myself and Overwatch, the maintenance support brigade on the Annihilo, that my systems are nominal.
Only then do I look up and gape at the grandeur.
The invasion sweeps along in its silent song.
Ahead, the silhouette of Ajax’s starShell is dark against the nightside of the onrushing planet. It flickers like white phosphorus as the particle cannons of the Annihilo and her gunships lance diagonally across the horizon and toward the breach.
The energy beams illuminate streams of starShells all around me. Hundreds of men in metal. And yet they form little more than a tributary of the great flooding river gushing from the fleets of the Two Hundred lesser houses, and giants Grimmus, Falthe, Carthii, and Votum.
The vanguard of our force falls, uncontested.
The ships become fainter than needles in the darkness behind. The planet grows. Its night face is black, the continents laid out like tatters of a death shroud trimmed in gold by city lights along the coasts. Its North Pole wears a mutating crown of electric green aurora.
As we pass into the mesosphere, we cross the planet’s meridian, from night to day. A golden bow of sunlight blazes around the planet as if it were Apollo’s own, and we the children of Hyperion, racing our chariots home. For a moment, it makes me miss that far-off city and the home I haven’t seen for half a life.
The day face of the world reveals itself.
Beneath the faint shimmer of Darrow’s shifting tropospheric shields are small, icy poles, strings of mountain ranges. Temperate alpine elevations characterize the north, jungles stretch to the south. Between them lies a mountain-studded equatorial desert.
The infamous Ladon. Eater of armies.
The infant typhoon detailed in the mission data report does not look too menacing. It forms a thin spiral cloud layer over the Sycorax Sea.
There is time enough to be lost in the majesty, and to remember nature did not provide this with her careless hand. My race of mortals carved this paradise from irradiated rock and violent gas by channeling the greatest virtues of all men in common cause.
A patriotic pride that I did not know I possessed fills me. The same blood flows through my veins as the man who sent the last of the Lovelock engines and Storm Gods here. But this zeal evaporates as soon as I realize I do not belong to the age of giants who made this, but to a smaller, meaner age where men think war the height of human endeavor.
I laugh at the cosmic joke. Only humanity could grasp the stars and then let them slip through its fingers for the pettiness in its heart.
But I feel hope. That pettiness defined my grandmother’s age. It may yet not define ours.
“Fine launch, goodmen. I trust everyone kept breakfasts down dinners up,” Ajax says convivially. There’s a chorus of laughter, and highLingo rebarbs. Do they really love this? What creatures could be so at ease here and now? Am I even the same species?
“Heliopolis will still be covered by the southern shield chain. We must penetrate via the breach and fly south. Passing coordinates.” The trajectory data appears on my display. His voice becomes solemn as he delivers the Grimmus creed. “Should the Void take you, celebrate, my friends. For before death, there was glory. Prepare for atmospheric entry.”
I wait for him to hail my private channel. But when the light blinks, it’s Kalindora, not Ajax.
“Don’t burn your main thrusters till we go horizontal. Let gravity do the work, not your generator. Simulators underrepresent drag. And don’t activate your pulseShield till breach. No telling when we’ll get a recharge. Last thing you want is your suit dying in a firefight.”
Friction heat glows ahead of me as the first starShells begin their descent. I see Atalantia’s Ash Legion descending to our left.
The planet resists my entry. The starShell bucks as it enters with enough kinetic energy to compress the air in front of me and turn it into a furnace. A brittle layer of thermal soak tiles in the entry carapace absorbs the heat and sheds away. All around, scores of starShells burst from carapaces winnowed by friction to scream like wrathful locusts down into the blue sky.
Wind and engines roar outside my s
hell as I join them.
We do not come under fire. The Republic’s shields that protect them from orbital bombardment also prevent them from contesting our descent. They shimmer fifty kilometers below, only eight kilometers above the planet’s surface. Atalantia parts from us, heading to the northernmost part of the breach as we head to the southernmost.
“Time to breach, twenty seconds,” Ajax intones as we pass over a mountain range toward the Ladon.
The horizon toward which we fly is a holocaust of artillery. The concentrated firepower of the Ash Armada bludgeons the thousand-kilometer-wide breach.
Particle beams divide reality. Mushrooms bloom on the surface.
In all the war, no one has used more atomics than this. I am horrified. The atomics drop on depopulated zones, but the fallout will kill thousands before it is scrubbed and meds distributed. Maybe more.
Impossibly, the Republic fires back. Particle beams lance up from the breach at strafing orbital torchShips and high-altitude corvette gunships. Guided missiles chase bombers and send them spiraling down to crash into the southern shields like skipping stones. Atomics flash pale white in the troposphere. A beam connects with a Bellona corvette. Light ripples as the shield overloads and a second beam carves through the helm of the ship.
Thirty million life threads interweave, some carrying on, others clipped short.
It is so horrible.
“Be a giant,” Ajax said.
How, in all this?
Strategists, I understand. But warriors…I thought I did until now. The insidious arithmetic becomes apparent of how overwhelmingly visionary warriors like Darrow, the Minotaur, and Atlas must be to be able to shift the face of a battle once it’s already begun.
“TOB ten.”
We’re over the desert now, skimming the shield dome.