Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  “Now is not the time to congratulate ourselves, or claim we are responsible for this miracle. We are responsible only for this crisis. Lured by the false promises of an enemy plenipotentiary, we allowed our resolve to weaken. We allowed ourselves to believe in the better virtues of our enemy, and that peace was possible with tyrants.

  “That lie, seductive though it was, has been exposed as a cruel machination of statecraft created by the newly appointed Dictator of the Society remnant, Atalantia au Grimmus. Under her spell, we compromised with the agents of tyranny. We turned on our greatest general, the sword who broke the chains of bondage, and demanded he accept a peace he knew to be a lie.

  “When he did not, we cried, Traitor! Tyrant! Warmonger! In fear of him, we recalled the Home Guard elements of the White Fleet from Mercury back to Luna. With the Echo of Ares and her battle group undergoing repairs on Phobos, this left Imperator Aquarii with barely half her fleet to fight the duplicitous Dictator. Now, her fleet, the fleet which freed all of our homes floats in ruins. Two hundred of your ships of war destroyed. Thousands of your sailors killed. Millions of your brothers and sisters marooned. Quadrillions of your wealth squandered. Not by virtue of enemy arms, but by the squabbling of your Senate.”

  I gesture to the forty-five Blue captains of the Ares’s battle group and twenty-eight wrathful centurions of my husband’s Seventh Legion standing behind me. While their brothers die in the Ladon, the legion agonizes on Luna, trapped after being summoned to walk in the Triumph honoring Mercury’s liberation, of all things. A Triumph the Senate commissioned. They are not pleased with the irony. And I am not pleased Sevro would rather play avenging father than stand with them. I wave my hand at the noble soldiers.

  “The Echo of Ares, her battle group, and the Seventh sail for Mercury in four days’ time. The Senate says they will sail alone. Against the Ash Armada, they will most certainly perish. But they sail nonetheless, because they do not abandon their own.

  “Were it within my power, I would send the entire might of our planetary defense fleets to aid them in this venture. But it is not within my power. That power lies with your Senate. From the inception of this crisis, I have urged them to use it. To bolster this rescue fleet with ships from Earth and Luna’s Home Guard or Mars’s Ecliptic Guard. Again and again my efforts have been rebuffed by the demagogues of the Vox Populi. They refuse to act. And they are not without support from you.

  “I have heard it said in these last months, in the halls of the Senate, on the streets of Hyperion, on the news channels across our Republic, that we should abandon these sons and daughters of liberty, these Free Legions. I have heard them called, in public, without shame, ‘the Lost Legions.’ Written off by you, despite the courage they have summoned, the endurance they have shown, the horrors they have suffered for you. Written off because we fear that to part with our ships will invite invasion. Because we fear to once again see Society iron over our skies. Because we fear to risk the comforts and freedoms the men and women of the Free Legions purchased for us with their blood…

  “I will tell you what I fear. I fear time has diluted our dream! I fear that in our comfort, we believe liberty to be self-fulfilling!” I lean forward. “I fear that the meekness of our resolve, the bickering and backbiting on which we have so decadently glutted ourselves, will rob us of the unity of will that moved the world forward to a fairer place, where respect for justice and freedom has found a foothold for the first time in a millennium.

  “We have let our union erode to tribalism. We hoard our wealth. We abandon our votes for violence. We summon tantrums instead of gritting our teeth in common purpose.” I pause and make sure this stands apart, knowing that the Syndicate Queen, wherever she is, will understand my declaration of war. “We aid our enemy. Even now terrorist organizations like the Luna-based Syndicate and its franchises eat at our foundation like termites by funneling helium-3 into the bellies of Society war machines and the ships of Ascomanni raiders.”

  Reporters murmur from the shadows beneath their camera drones.

  “I fear that in this disunity we will sink back into the hideous epoch from which we escaped, and that the new dark age will be crueler, more sinister, and more protracted by the malice which we have awoken in our enemies.

  “I believe this truth manifest: the Free Legions are not lost.” My fist hammers my lectern. “While we abandoned them, they did not abandon us. They did not cave to despair. In the cold of our neglect, in the shadow of atomic clouds, they triumphed. Yet. Despite this victory, their time is short. They have blunted Atalantia’s blade, but not her will. Pushed back to the city of Heliopolis and its attendant lands, millions of free men and women dig in to face the onslaught of enemy armor. Their supplies run low. They are surrounded. They are outnumbered. They have risked all to protect you. Now it is your turn to risk something for them.

  “I call upon you, the People of the Republic, to stand united. To beseech your senators to reject fear. To reject this torpor of self-interest. To not quiver in primal trepidation at the thought of invasion, to not let your senators hoard your wealth for themselves and hide behind your ships of war, but to summon the more wrathful angels of their spirits and send forth the might of the Republic to scourge the engines of tyranny and oppression from the Mercurian sky and rescue our Free Legions.”

  I let the silence stretch to the hearts of the free, and into my own. There was a moment before this doom. One I cradle close, like the last candle on a dark day. A moment of peace, where Darrow was not yet my husband, and we sat in the sands of Earth watching Sevro and Victra swim out to see the eagle nests amongst the sea stacks. Darrow cradled Pax in his arms. They had only just met. But he loved him because he was my boy, and bit by bit he realized he was his boy, our boy that we made together.

  He put his ear to Pax’s chest to listen to his heartbeat. He told me then what he felt when he declared this war within the Hives of Phobos. How he was not close enough to hear the fading beat of his father’s heart, or Eo’s. But how, in that moment, he could feel the hearts of his people beating across the darkness. How in the heartbeat of our son, he could hear them all again.

  I have never equaled my husband’s spirit. For so many years, I led for guilt, for duty, seldom for love, all while fearing the coldness in my ancient blood would forever rob me of the passion to hear the pulse of the people.

  But I hear it now. I hear it as free hearts beat behind me. As they beat in their bunks on the torchShips that patrol the edges of free space. As they beat in the shadowed veins of asteroid mines, in the smoky dens of hinterland trade depots, in ore caravans, deepspace waystations, in the rattling assembly lines of Phobos that make the ships which protect our liberty. I hear it in the megalopolises of Mars, the broken streets of fallen Olympia, the tempestuous wine bazaars of Thessalonica, the quiet shadow of the Agean Citadel from which my father once gripped the throat of a planet and now there towers a monument to the rebel girl he hanged and made immortal. I hear them in the jungle sprawl of Echo City. In the glittering spires of Old Tokyo. In the martial training grounds of New Sparta.

  Yet I sense them fading in the assimilation camps, the overflowing prisons, the broken cities, the tenement houses filled with laborers who have lost their purpose to progress, in the chanting Vox hordes who clog the streets of Luna, and in the halls of power where senators whisper how much they charge.

  Soon those fading hearts will join the ashes of New Thebes in their silence. They will join the mining townships made into necropolises by the Rat War, the lingering rubble the Block War left strewn west of Hyperion, and the irradiated stormland of the Helios. I fear that my subjects will return to their private concerns after this speech. It is always the same. The eyes wander away and vapid glitter again rules the feed.

  “Brothers and sisters.” My voice nearly falters as I feel more than ever the absence of my husband’s hand on my shoulder. My son will not be wai
ting on my shuttle to critique my speech. “Brothers and sisters…there will dawn a day when these hostile hours, these days of hatred and violence, seem the faintest of memories, but dark and steep and long is the road up out of hell. So do not tire, do not despair, do not abandon your brethren, and do not forget that through this darkness we and we alone carry the light of freedom. We must defend it with every cell in our bodies. If not now, when? If not us, who?” I make my hand a fist and raise it in salute. “Hail libertas.”

  In the back of the room, beyond the jaded circus, an old Red janitor forgets himself and bellows with all his tiny might: “Hail Reaper.” More join him. “Hail Reaper!” More and more until half the room shouts my husband’s invocation. But the rest stare in stony silence.

  At that moment, three hundred eighty-four thousand kilometers from my heart, in orbit one thousand kilometers above the wayward continent of South Pacifica, a new battery of twin prototype railguns, named the Twins of South Pacifica for Earth’s favorite son and daughter, set their telescopic sights on a path of empty space ten days ahead of Mercury’s orbital path and fire at full power. Projectiles skinned with stealth polymer race into the void at 320,000 kilometers per hour, ferrying not death, but supplies, radiation medicine, machines of war, and, if my husband is alive, a message of hope.

  You have not been abandoned. I will come for you.

  Until then, endure, my love. Endure.

  LUNA IS A DREAM, a noise, a blaze of light, a soup, a swagger, a mother, a vampire, an addiction, a beggar, a lament, a suburb of Hyperion, and a memory of the future we thought we wanted. A dozen fleets waver through the gutter puddles of her rain-soaked streets, only to be shattered by the calf-high boots worn by the children of four planets and thirty moons. They swarm to her to climb her jigsaw bedlam of human and metal ladders. They are geniuses, architects, idiots, swindlers, warlords, the lost, the found, the indifferent. And indifferently she waits, throbs, beats, swarms, suffocates, promises, and robs.

  They call her the City of Light, but no one calls her home.

  “What does Luna mean to you, Centurion?” I ask from inside my private office aboard Pride One as we descend. Holiday ti Nakamura was raised along the sunny shores of South Pacifica, where there was not a building taller than a grain silo for a hundred klicks. I have named her Dux of my Lionguard—the elite bodyguard unit drawn from my house legions. Of the one thousand Martians, she is the lone Terran. That not a single man questions her appointment is proof enough of her reputation. They call her Six, meaning she’s always got your back.

  “Quicksand,” she replies in regards to the moon.

  The reply mirrors the cold-rolled spirit of the woman. Of all my husband’s instruments, it is Nakamura I’ve envied the most. Reputation, but little ego. Flexible, but unbreakable. Brutal, but not cruel. Over these last weeks, she has led the investigation into my son’s abduction with grace. When their shuttle went down during Ephraim ti Horn’s failed rescue attempt, it was as if the moon had swallowed Pax and Electra. I fought every instinct to tear apart the city to find them, knowing a stampede of Republic Intelligence would disturb the breadcrumbs. Holiday was the scalpel I needed.

  “And you, ma’am?” she asks, folding her datapad back into its arm sheath.

  What does Luna mean to me? How to answer that. A thousand things.

  “Renewal.” I catch her smirk in the window. Like Daxo, she doesn’t suffer hollow sentiments. “Maybe one day that’ll be true. My mother loved Luna, in fact. Before she decided throwing herself off a cliff and abandoning us was preferable to a single day more of matrimony with my father, she told me Luna was a place of magic. For it was the one place even Nero au Augustus had to bow. Of course, she meant he had to bow to Octavia. Reductive thinking, really.”

  Holiday waits for me to explain. I treasure her more than she knows. Especially over these last days. The unspoken peril of power is the receipt of unending, exhaustive peacocking. Unlike most, Holiday is not waiting for her turn to flash her feathers. She listens because she’s heard enough noise to know that truth, if it ever appears, creeps in on quiet little feet.

  I step closer to the window.

  “There’s something here,” I say. “Something…else that gnawed at Octavia. You know that feeling, Centurion.” I look back at her. The diamond teeth of skyscrapers reflect in her eyes as we pass Quicksilver’s Zenith Spire. “This moon hungers.”

  She makes a small sound of agreement as we pierce the cloud layer.

  Beneath it, Hyperion seethes in existential mania. For fear of Gold ships over her skies, protesters fill the streets. Violence has broken out between Optimate and Vox street factions. Watchmen sirens bathe the sky in green and silver. Strikes have shut down the public trams and now only the aerial arteries flow.

  “Have you ever heard of Silenius’s Stiletto?” I ask.

  “After the Conquest of Earth, the powerful houses engaged in a land grab,” Holiday replies. “Silenius was faced with a dilemma. To his left, anarchy. To his right, tyranny. Instead, he found the narrow path between. Barely wide enough for the edge of a stiletto.”

  “Well, well. Look who found time to read Meditations.”

  “If Virginia au Augustus gives someone something to read and they do not read it, they don’t deserve the faculty, ma’am.”

  I raise an eyebrow at her. “You talk to your husband with that Copper tongue?”

  She grins. “Then they’re a fuckin’ idiot, ma’am.”

  I smile. Raw compliments are the best kind. “Whatever you think of his politics, Silenius was wise. He knew patience is the heart of cunning. Theodora has discovered Senator Basilus has been taking bribes from Sun Industries. I am allowing him to retire to his home in Echo City next month. I will need a replacement for him before the year is out.”

  She blinks when she understands my intent. “I don’t know if a toga would fit me, ma’am.”

  “How many senators were Praetorian dragoons who can also quote Silenius’s Meditations? Not one, I’d say. Aside from Rhone ti Flavinius, you’re the most famous Gray alive. And Earth loves you.” I set a hand on the shorter woman’s shoulders. She’s really built like a pit bull, isn’t she? No neck. “We need symbols, Nakamura. The old ones are fraying with use. Tell me you’ll think on it.”

  She nods dutifully but, like all true soldiers, doubts she’ll survive long enough to have to make the decision. As much as I value her at my six, I wish she were with my husband on Mercury. Sevro too for that matter. My husband needs a conscience on his shoulder. Thraxa and Orion aren’t exactly a pacifying influence. As for Harnassus, well, dogs and cats.

  My datapad flickers with an incoming call. Nakamura heads to the door to give me privacy. “Wait.” I gesture to one of the ranadium chairs before my desk. “I’ll want your opinion afterward.”

  As she sits, I open the call on the desk’s projector. Dancer appears from the waist up. He’s in a shuttle. A dark red jacket with a high collar substitutes for his loathed toga. The aging Red doesn’t look like he’s slept in weeks. Pressured by me for the vote, and with his radical left solidifying around ArchImperator Zan, the Blue commander of Luna’s defense fleet, how could he? As my father said: “Never trust the man who sleeps under siege. He’s either lazy or disloyal.”

  “If it isn’t the loyal opposition,” I say with a smile.

  “My Sovereign.” He says the word as if it carried no more weight than “coffee” or “peanut.” “Must say, for a kilo of gilded Palatine snakeshit, that was some damn fine oratory. Churchill?”

  “Humans haven’t changed, why should the speeches?”

  Despite the liver spots and heavy lines on his face, he is still as handsome a Red as I’ve ever seen. He grimaces. “I must say, it is odd. I’ve been called a traitor before. By Daxo, Quicksilver, Orion. Never suspected it’d feel so raw coming from you.”

  “I didn�
��t quite—”

  “Virginia.”

  “I suppose I did.” I brush invisible lint from my jacket cuff and sigh. “A rhetorical ploy only, I assure you.” He’s no traitor. He’s just afraid, but if I accuse a Red man of that, he’ll bite down and hold on like a tick. “It doesn’t have to be this way, you know. You and I flourish when we cooperate.”

  “We have had our moments.”

  “But.”

  “Here she goes…”

  “But our system isn’t working as it should. The division of military command is a flaw we saw coming, yet kicked down the lane because we thought we were all going the same direction. Irresponsible of us, but understandable. Facts: our enemy can respond with greater urgency and secrecy than we can, and not all senators prize prosecution of the war over the continued habitation of their togas. I need to be able to run this war efficiently.”

  He knows I admire respectful dialogue, and speaks in a neutral, even tone. “Virginia, the Senate was intended to be inconvenient. A check on despotism. You know as well as I: whatever the executive gets, it keeps. Forever. You are measured. You are thoughtful. If we give you temporary control over the defense fleets, it may work this time. May. But your hamartia is that you think wisdom is contagious. It fuckin’ ain’t. You won’t always be Sovereign. What if it’s Daxo next?”

  “Or Zan?” I suggest.

  “Or Zan.” He rubs his lantern jaw. “Only person besides you or me that wouldn’t wreck the world is Publius. Self-righteous little twat that he is.” Reds do hate their Coppers.

  “Publius? Ha. He’d just give speeches all day on civic duty,” I say.

  “And ladle soup for the poor.”

  “Long as there are cameras.”

  “Naturally.” We’re united in a smirk, then return to our corners as he continues. “Raw talk. You know I love the Free Legions. They’re the best of Mars. You know I love Darrow like a son. But he’s gone, Virginia. I buried him the moment I heard he landed in Tyche. Abandon this crusade, for the good of us all.”