by Pierce Brown
A gap in the artillery barrage opens as orbital ships redirect their guns to create a hellmouth—a corridor of protective fire. A second later, the first century of starShells from a Carthii destroyer enters the hellmouth and disappears into the breach. RipWings follow. The century after them disintegrates as a particle beam slashes up from the mountains.
“Breach,” Ajax says.
Our century streams into a hellmouth.
My senses overload.
Munitions blaze around us, blinding flashes, metal colliding and vaporizing. But we outrace the sounds of the explosions we see, only to cross into the rippling sound waves of prior explosions. I lose Ajax in the mayhem. Airburst shells keen and explode to disperse harpies—fist-sized drones packed with EMP or explosive charges. I fire my left shoulder cannon at a swarm of them. A dozen slam into a ripWing. The engines die and it careens out of the hellmouth into a friendly artillery shell.
Then I’m through.
“Fracture,” Ajax orders. The legion’s centuries splinter into hundreds of decades. I struggle to match their precision, nearly clipping Ajax’s heels as I follow him. Kalindora and Seraphina fall in behind me as we dive toward the jagged Hesperides range. “Clear your peaks. Leave the air to the rippers.” The com clicks as he switches channels to our decade. “Decade One, we’re on our own. Head north by—”
Seraphina’s voice cuts him off. “E spike. Shatter.”
My instruments register the electrical spike of railguns charging. Out of the corner of my eye, a pinprick of purple light flashes on a mountain ridge.
I fire my left shoulder thruster and shoot out of formation as a blur of dense metal whips through now-empty air. Four hundred slugs follow the first in three seconds. A starShell disappears in a shower of debris. I can’t tell whose. Then Seraphina’s rockets slam into the gun installation and bloom over shielding as it continues to fire, unaffected.
I activate my targeting laser, but before I can light the installation up, Kalindora’s illuminates it. An orbital strike falls. A beam of white light that would flashblind the naked eye cleaves the mountain peak like a hunk of cheese.
“Good spot, for a Moonie. Compliments on the lighting, Annihilo,” Ajax says. “Decade One, cluster on me. We’ve a mountain range to clear.” He lights up my personal channel. “How’s the war, little brother?”
I struggle to reply. “Fast.”
He laughs. “Tune down your inertial dampeners. It’ll help you feel the maneuvers. You’re flying that masterpiece like it’s a cosmosHauler. You quite nearly clipped my heels. Twice.”
“Apologies. It’s touchier than the sims.”
“Touchier than the sims. Ha! We’ll make a Peerless out of you yet. Now, belly down, goodman. Welcome party of aerial termites inbound.”
MY ARMY DIES. THE world has become a garden for mushrooms. They bloom on the bruised horizon, swelling two hundred kilometers high, dwarfing the mountains. Shockwave after shockwave, diffused by distance, rack the Necromancer as we streak north to get me back to Red Reach base and the heart of my northern armies.
With the shields down, we will be encircled. We must prepare to break out in the thin slip of time between bombardment and landfall. If we survive the bombardment.
Desert sand streams underneath the shuttle. Fortified mining cities disappear in flashes of white light. Great desert gun emplacements with enough firepower to take down a torchShip stream fury into the sky, only to be turned into glass by pillars of light hotter than the sun.
Colloway is silent and still wearing his synaptic halo. The ovular pilot’s chair bathes the dark man in blue light, making the fighter ace look an elfin boy half his age. Untethered from his body, he is the ship and the ship is him.
“Come on, Midnight,” I whisper.
“Almighty, give me space,” the ship replies dreamily. “This party makes Ilium look like a Thermic sailing race. Oh my. Incoming slags. I count…Can’t be right. Instruments are frazzed.” A pause. “Never mind. It is six hundred.”
“Kilometers?”
“RipWings.”
Shit.
In the wake of the first atomic barrage, the first river of enemy ripWings descend. Fifty squadrons stream down against the backdrop of a mushroom cloud like a school of piranha. Missiles stream from their bellies, cascading down on gun batteries and tank formations. Three squadrons peel off to engage us.
“I hope everyone relished their breakfast. You’ll see it again soon.”
My boots lock to the deck. My gut jerks as we spin in a never-ending corkscrew. I am helpless behind Colloway, despite my blood-red pulseArmor and all its armaments. Only the storm can stop what comes from the sky, and it is still in its infancy.
You could run a war from the Necromancer, survive almost any magnitude of EMP, outrace even a torchShip. But in atmosphere, she’s a big boat, and the ripWings gain on us fast.
I hail Harnassus for LongMalice support and give him coordinates. Over the static, I can barely hear his affirmative. In the Hesperides range, hundreds of klicks to the southwest, under the cover of our intact southern shield chain, fifty-meter guns will swivel on their gyroscopes. Colloway thumbs-up to show he heard me.
My body leans sideways as he puts us into a steep climb, straight at the enemy squadrons. As missiles leap from the ripWings, Colloway barrel-rolls sideways and slams us into a nosedive. The missiles blink behind us, some slithering off to follow our countermeasure drones. The rest scream after, undistracted. The desert pan races up to meet us. A thousand meters. Five hundred. One hundred. At fifty, Colloway activates the launch thrusters and the ship ricochets parallel to the ground like a skipped stone. My head jerks forward, chin slamming into the metal of my breastplate. I see stars and hear the concussion through the ship as the missiles plow into the ground. Those that follow are mowed down by Colloway’s rear railguns.
There are no cheers from the garage.
Colloway redirects toward Harnassus’s firing solution. Harnassus sends us a countdown. At three, we slip past the killzone. The enemy squadrons scream behind, spewing railgun fire. Our shields buckle and fall. I throw my bulk in front of Colloway. A hundred slugs the size of fists tear through the ship. One hits my shoulder instead of the back of his chair, overloading the shield, buckling the armor as I twist and redirect it into the ceiling. Half my body goes numb. Auto-response needles in the suit inject adrenaline into my bloodstream. My world pulses.
“And…boom.”
Through the sieve of slug holes, I glimpse the sky out the back of the ship just in time to see the LongMalice rounds arch down and detonate, releasing clouds of smaller munitions. RipWings disintegrate.
Our tail free, Colloway accelerates in a straight line. We’re out of the Ladon. The sky is blackening to the north. Faint traces of lightning slither through the firmament. The green grass of the Plains of Caduceus unfolds in front of us. It is bedlam.
In the shadow of mushroom clouds, lines of burning tanks and armored personnel carriers spread across the ground like frayed rope. Hundreds of thousands of men run on foot. GravBikes carrying four or five men apiece stutter toward Red Reach base.
“The shield is still up,” Colloway murmurs from his sync as the field headquarters comes into view. I barely believe him. Gigajoules of kinetic energy from particle beams turn its dome shield a bloody crimson. But sure enough, Red Reach has not fallen. Thank the Vale it wasn’t hardlined to Angelia. Dozens of legions swarm under its protective shelter, forming a logjam of tanks and war machines, which overflow from her acres of guns, barracks, and defensive works.
My Second Army is intact.
Above the shield dome swirls a dogfight of thousands. RipWings churn through the vapor of cumulonimbus clouds that bloom to the north, in from the sea. More dogfights flash all the way up to the stratosphere, buying time for my squadrons to intercept atomic ordnance. As it
has before, the grudge between the airheads and dustbacks vanishes. A Blue shield of sacrifice protects their brothers on the ground. They disappear by the dozens, careless of enemy fighters, hunting nothing but the falling missiles. In a way, it is beautiful. In every other way it is horrible to watch.
I must make their sacrifice count. It’s hard to see how. Pillars of white particle beams flare down from orbit, piercing clouds, vaporizing men and metal as they rake canyons in the ground. We are outmatched. There is no conventional answer to Atalantia’s orbital guns. But if Red Reach can just last…
To the south of Red Reach, in the mountains that overlook the northern plains, several ground-to-orbit batteries continue to fire upward. Colloway takes us through a mountain valley, aiming for one of the several dozen skyhooks I scattered across Helios. Of the five in our flight path, it is the only one that remains airborne, docked as it is under a leaning cleft of a mountain that also shelters a Drachenjäger garage. Thousands of starShell rigs await their pilots on the skyhook’s tarmac.
“Skyhook Eleven, Necromancer coming in hot. Thirteen elves, five giants, ten dwarfs, and one Reaper need heavy iron. Prep pitcrews for emergency gearup.”
“Copy. Bay two clear. Pitcrew on standby.”
We make an emergency landing on the floating supply platform. Pitcrews swarm its surface, shuttling munitions between the mountain supply depot and the skyhook. They load errant packs of aerial infantry into starShells, and send them into the fray. The purple and silver banners of the Arcosian Knights waver in the air as they land in gravBoots on the far side. There are few actual Arcoses amongst them, but all hail from client houses loyal to the widows of Lorn’s sons. I’ll need my best men with me.
As Colloway takes stock of damage done to Necromancer, I barrel out with the Howlers. A pitboss directs us to a rank of the armored starShells lying on their backs just beneath the garage’s vertical door. Inside the garage, the armored Fifteenth Legion Helldivers will be syncing with their Drachenjägers. The forty-meter-tall machines are made to dominate battlefields. They are shaped like boxy humans wearing spiked backpacks, except there is no head or neck, simply a hunched pilot cockpit set low between the shoulders. They have six jointed arms, multiple cannons at the elbows, and huge ion cleavers.
I check to make sure the master storm switch is still in the second right thigh box of my pulseArmor and lie down in one of the starShells, a four-meter-tall mechanized suit capable of flight meant to make men mobile tanks. In concert with Drachenjägers they make regular infantry nearly obsolete, but they are expensive, bulky, and eat fuel like mad.
A crew of twelve Oranges and Reds go to work around me, jacking data-links from the starShell into my pulseArmor, attaching a double magazine, calibrating the gear, priming the fusion sword, and sealing on an extra battery. Ten seconds flat is all they need. They clear off and move to the next. A hydraulic lift punches the back of the starShell. I lever to my feet flanked by nearly thirty armored Howlers. Two Reds hang on to the front of the four-meter starShell, securing the canopy over me. Through their working arms, I see the enemy aircraft making a coordinated mass maneuver away from Red Reach. We call it a nuke flower.
“Atomic brace!” I shout, and look frantically for Rhonna. I spot her rushing a wounded Howler to the skyhook’s medBay, too far to make it back to the Necromancer or in under the supply depot’s closing blast doors.
A siren screams. Hundreds of pitmen scramble for cover or to get off the exposed skyhook to the safety of the mountain garage doors. Rhonna won’t make it there. “Alexandar!”
He’s already moving, swinging the long arms of his starShell as he rushes to scoop her up and jump back to us. Colloway zips away on the Necromancer to hide behind the mountain.
One of the Reds atop me seals my canopy, catching the other’s arm in the sealing teeth. The Red jerks at his arm, unable to get down. His hand flails inside the canopy, not far from my face. Blood trickles down his forearm. His fellow abandons him. He can’t be more than twenty years old. An iron haemanthus pendant hangs from his neck. His eyes are wild with fear as they meet mine. He’s jammed the canopy. I can’t open it. I try to cover him with my arms. Alexandar curls his starShell around Rhonna like a cocoon. The huge blast doors close behind us. Pitmen hammer at the doors from the outside. Poor bastards.
“Brace!” I shout. Felix and an Obsidian pathfinder kneel in their starShells with me, forming a wedge with me at the point, sheltering Alexandar and Rhonna. Scores of other wedges form. Pitmen rush to take shelter behind them. The Red outside my canopy screams. Even if I free him, he cannot be helped. He isn’t in pulseArmor like Rhonna.
My amplified optics see it now over his shoulder. A lone dagger-shaped speck trailing vapor as it falls toward Red Reach base. Two ripWing pilots chase after it, spraying fire. They overload its shield, pierce its casing. And then orbital artillery wipes them away. The bomb falls uncontested.
I patch into Red Reach’s Central Command.
A warroom fills my view. Three dozen Martian officers, representing eight colors, stand like ghosts in the pale light of the battlemap watching the atomic fall.
“An omega-atomic will impact in thirty seconds,” I say quietly. The Red outside my cockpit is listening too, his face pressed to the glass just two hand spans away from my own. “Your fight is behind you. Remember now your beloved. Your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your daughter, your son.” I meet his eyes. They look so much like my mother’s. “Remember the sea, the highland forests, Agea at dawn, Olympia at twilight, Attica in spring, Thessalonica in harvest.” As I speak, they close their eyes and unscrew the canisters of Martian soil to clench in their hands. Gold and Red, Blue and Orange, Gray and Obsidian. My heart breaks in half. “Remember home. Remember Mars. You go there now to rest under the shade of her—”
They disappear in a wash of static.
Stillness, as if the sky inhaled sound and time. I close my eyes and hold the Red as tight as I dare.
Primordial light. Intense, tiny, like the pupil of a god followed by a second expanding flash so brilliant and vast it makes my eyelids transparent and reveals every bone, joint, and blood vessel in the Red pitman stuck outside my canopy. I see the X-rayed bones of a dozen others through their flesh. A curled engineer makes a silhouette, transparent like the image of a fetus asleep in the womb.
The flash contracts to reveal a mutinous fireball at the hypocenter of the blast. Air, grass, rock, metal, and men vaporize as their matter heats to match the heart of a sun.
A wall of thermal energy washes outward. A ghost of fire walks through me. The Red’s eyes that look like my mother’s begin to bubble and then they melt with the rest of him. In the wake of the heat, a colossal wave of pressure races toward us at the speed of sound. The skyhook rocks backward against the face of the mountain. The bones of the Red shatter and blow away in the wind. His severed hand falls off inside the canopy. My boots spark on the flattop surface as the shockwave pushes me back. I stagger, supported by the Howlers. Pitmen who took shelter behind mechs in front of us look like autumn leaves as their tattered bodies are hurled off the floating platform down into the mountains. Others are lifted from their feet and slam into starShells, turning to pulp. Clothing is torn away. Blues and Oranges with weaker bones are pulverized on the spot to become liquid bags held together by bubbling flesh.
Then the debris.
Charcoal birds fall from the sky and crumble to pieces on the concrete. RipWing detritus hails down. A flattened tank cartwheels past, thrown dozens of kilometers from the plains, to crash into a mountain façade above our base. A great grumbling fills the mountain range as hundreds of avalanches roll down the sheer granite cliffs. I swear I even see the planet ripple. I look up, and up, and up, through my starShell canopy; the fireball articulates skyward, with a vortex of debris and smoke swirling around a molten heart of fire where once there was my Second Army.
A million men, tanks, and arms to ash.
The hollow abyss of despair calls to me. The voice that found me in the Jackal’s prison tomb. Reaper, Reaper, Reaper. Look what you have done. Look what you are. In your shadow, nothing can survive.
Somewhere above, Atalantia will be smiling.
Alexandar’s mech steps to my side. I search desperately for Rhonna. She staggers to her feet, her pulseArmor fried, but she is alive. Relief floods me.
“Your order, sir?” Alexandar asks.
The mushroom is reflected in his canopy.
Orders? What orders can be given in this madness? Our long-range coms are down. I cannot adjust my plan. Thraxa is unsupported. About to be cut off. I would pray if I knew any gods were listening. Let the First Army have survived the blast. Let the Morning Star have arrived in time for them to shelter under her shields. Let there be life in all this ash. No god listens. There are only men. And what one does, another may undo. That is my only religion. That of the hand and the lever.
“Midnight, are you out there?”
“Barely. EMP nearly fried me. Ship is falling to pieces.” Even at short range I can barely hear him.
“The storm is coming in earnest. Can you make it to Kydon?”
“If I have to flap the wings myself.”
“When you get there, tell Thraxa to break off and make for Tyche. The Second can’t reinforce her. The First is coming to help her retreat to Tyche.”
“Where are you going?”
“To make sure Tyche is still ours when you get there.”
He says nothing for a moment. “Happy travels, sir. Midnight out.”
His engines flare and he lurches away. Only my starShells remain on the platform. I give them orders to abandon the stuttering skyhook and gather inside the opening blast doors of the garage. “Rhonna.” She whirls to face me. “The Helldivers are inside. See if they got a spare rig. I need a full-metal god.”
“Yessir.”