Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  “What is it?”

  “I want to show you something, boss.”

  I’ve nearly died that way before. When Cassius took me down to the river to stab me, and Lea led me into Antonia’s trap at the Institute.

  “Just tell me here,” I say.

  “Oh, come on. Who do you trust, if you don’t trust old Screw?” He has been with me since the beginning. Never asking for anything. Never earning fame like Sevro, or family like Pebble and Clown. He is maybe the most like me. A creature of war. It looks lighter on him. He extends a hand down to help me up. With a weary nod, I take it.

  My friend leads me by the pale light of a lamp through the pale stone halls of the Mound. Maritime wind lolls through the open windows, carrying the tang of brine and the murmurs of seagulls. It creeps past the guards of the night watch, stirring their cloaks, to kiss the bald, weary soldiers who cough flecks of blood under the gaze of Votum portraits in the grand ballrooms, libraries, and pillaged galleries of a more decadent age.

  We go out the back of the palace. Descending down the switchbacking sea cliff stairs that connect with the ancient seawall. The sky pales to a dull chrome in anticipation of sunrise, but the bay beneath remembers the darkness of night. Its high tide crashes against a coral scarp at the base of the seawall. And with a backrush, the tide reveals a second world of wildlife. Coral crabs and sealarks skitter and dodge the gulls and fire eagles that swoop through the spray to feed.

  We pass Red Rat legionnaires sharing coffee at the base of particle cannons. While the rest of the army withers from radiation poisoning, only my Reds soldier on. In the absence of Pegasus Legion, Rat Legion has become the spine of the army. They nod to us and return to their coffee. Soon we pass lines of coughing Mercurians fishing off the side of the seawall, then descend the wall’s interior stairs and exit through a gate that leads out beyond the wall to a barrier beach running parallel to the shore.

  A congregation of two parts gathers in the gloom. Men and women wet from the sea make the first. They are jubilant. An aching song drifts from them, a Red one I remember hearing as a child. But it is not just Reds who sing it; other Colors are scattered through their ranks. The second and more numerous group by far is a long line of hunched, bitter creatures who wait in silence. One by one they slump out to a man who stands waist-deep in the surf. He whispers something to them. They clutch their fists out before them and shout as they are dunked into the sea. Many are blind. All are already so sick with radiation, they don’t fear the seawater.

  It seems I have entered a dream, and it cracks as I am seen. The song fades. And they turn warily to watch me. Even the blind know I am here. I feel ashamed to have intruded on this private moment. They are Martians all. The dirt so many of them brought in canisters from home is clutched in their hands. They followed me here, but I do not feel like one of them any longer. These arms and legs that have stripped lives from so many seem all the heavier and more alien here. This height given to me by a mad carver seems like a monstrous feature I wish I could hide and be rid of so that I could stand amongst them, part of them, a man of mines, following someone else.

  I salute them and retreat across the sand.

  Screwface catches up to me. “What was that?” I snap at him.

  “I thought—”

  “That I wanted to have a holy communion? You think those men need to see their Imperator begging for forgiveness?”

  “Nah, but I thought maybe you needed it.”

  “What I need is to be left alone.”

  He doesn’t leave me alone, and I don’t want to go back to the Mound and face the decision of the high command or be burdened with more endless complaints and problems. I don’t want to sit in my room and think about my son and wife. So I strike south along the beach, leaving the penitent behind, wishing I could join them, but knowing a leader cannot.

  It would be immoral to rob them of that last bit of confidence they have left in me.

  In time, I begin to forget where I am as I walk. Screwface follows behind at a distance. The ocean sighs against the shore. Sand crabs skitter along the waterline, navigating mounds of kelp populated with sea fleas. I walk until we reach a climate seam. Soon, low-altitude Agathis trees sway along the shoreline. Migratory Nymph trees wade in the water on legs of white and pink roots. Jungle archipelagos dapple the horizon, the nearest home to a Free Legion defense gun. Local birds perch atop its metal barrel.

  The topography reminds me of South Pacifica, where outside his ancestral estate Daxo taught my son to build a sandcastle. He spent more time with Pax that day than I did, taking him into the woods with the huntmasters, walking through his statue garden to listen to birds and see if he could name them, and back to the beach to see their mighty sandcastle washed away by the night tide. All while I sat inside preparing the invasion of Grimmus-held Africa.

  How sad I didn’t cherish a moment there with my son.

  All moments are like that sandcastle, it seems.

  There is no permanent happy future. There is no Vale.

  It all washes away.

  The shield flickers overhead. I glance back at Screwface with a frown. Barefoot, he jogs up holding his boots. “Friendlies?”

  I see them now through the clouds. Streaks of falling fire. The shield ripples back on, killing birds in its energy arc, but now the falling projectiles are inside it. My first thought is that we’ve been betrayed. But the projectiles slow over the sea. The air around them distorts from gravitational fields. Water floats upward along with fish and a long ebony squid before crashing back down.

  Nearly forty six-story obelisks stand end-on-end offshore. The water boils around them as they cool.

  “What are they?” Screwface asks.

  “That looks like Sun Industries stealth hull,” I say.

  He gives me a bored look and raises an eyebrow. “What say we do a little reconnaissance, boss?”

  “We should wait for reinforcements.”

  “Some badass you are.” He strips off his shirt and pants and runs to the water. “Where’s your sense of adventure!” He dives into a wave.

  “Ah, shit.” I strip off my shirt and follow him in. The sea is warm as bathwater. Flash-cooked fish float around the obelisks, killed when the obelisks transferred their heat into the sea. I dive down and find the bottom of an obelisk thoroughly embedded in the seafloor. By the time I surface, Screwface is already climbing up the slippery hull along a line of rivets. I follow. There seems to be a hatch at the top.

  “Ah, the cavalry,” Screwface mocks a minute later as a line of shuttles swoop our way from Heliopolis. There’s men onshore waving to us from beside their gravBikes. They seem to be celebrating. My fingers ache from supporting my body weight with their tips. Screw shows off by hanging on to the rivets with two fingers and leaning off to wave to the men. He glares at the shuttles.

  “Going to let the airheads take your glory?” I ask.

  He scoffs and hoists himself up another meter. By the time we make it to the top, a shuttle has sped ahead of the rest. They race us to hover over the hatch of a nearby obelisk. Screwface makes it to the top first. Me a second later, fingers aching like hell.

  Screwface beats his chest and howls just before the shuttle makes it to the top of the closest obelisk. Through the viewport, I catch sight of Char giving us the crux.

  “Infantry!” Screwface bellows. The men on the shore echo the call and join his howl. He slaps at me to do the same. I turn my attention to the hatch. It is painted with the Republic star.

  Soon the deserted patch of coast swarms with engineers. Heavy hauler shuttles drag the obelisks to shore after the bomb squad inspection. I wait with Screwface and hundreds of perimeter guards and dockworkers as they open the first obelisk. It parts down the middle, revealing a superstructure of pods. They crack the first one open. It is filled with thousands of duroglass cylinders
.

  I stumble forward and fall to my knees before a mound of the cylinders. Each is stamped with a silver winged heel. Each is filled with enough radiation meds to last a man a month, and there are thousands of pods, thirty-eight obelisks. Each cylinder will become a life saved from radiation. I run my fingers over them in a state of grace. Screwface collapses to his haunches beside me; he opens a pod and finds it filled with food, medicine, and materiel. He falls backward onto the sand, rolling around until he looks like a sugar-covered pastry.

  I sit in shade as the rest of the boxes are unpacked and ferried back to Heliopolis. Inside one of the obelisks, they found a message for me. I rub the datadrop between my fingers, and activate it.

  “ ’Lo, husband,” my wife says with a gentle smile. I pause it. Her face floats in my palms. I hold it there for a minute, cherishing the words on her lips, the absence of any other thought but me on her mind. The wind makes the palm fronds overhead swish like the skirts of Red girls at Laureltide.

  Reluctantly, I resume the message, and the strain of the worlds floods my wife’s face. I see the weight and worry behind the eyes—for our son, for me, for her Republic. Her battle may be different from mine, but it is battle all the same, and she is tired.

  “I must be brief. These pods were launched with the new guns. It wasn’t the intended method of delivery, but efforts to send ships have…stalled. There are games afoot on Hyperion and beyond. Victra has quit Luna for Mars. Sevro has been chewing his way through the Syndicate here, and meddling with my own designs, as per custom. Sefi has disappeared, with machinations for the mines of Cimmeria. Though I no longer believe she is the Queen of the Syndicate, she has the children. I believe Pax is safe in her custody and will be ransomed back to Victra for her aid in Sefi’s acquisition of the mines.”

  Relief floods through me. Despite the bedlam of Luna, my boy might have escaped it. He is not with enemies. Pax will be safe. Valdir would die before he let Sefi touch a hair on his head.

  “An unseen hand moves the pieces, a clever one by any measure—Atalantia? Atlas? I presume so. My theories are attached. I believe I am beginning to divine the pattern, and soon I will make my move. I have included my files in case they aid your situation. Also included are the intelligence reports of the System’s current standing. They will be two weeks old, so use them wisely.

  “I believe your victory has given me the momentum to swing the Senate. Five days from the time this message was recorded, we will have voted and the fleet will either be under way when you receive this or it will not. But no matter what the Senate decides, at midnight on the first of May, I will come to Mercury. If fortune favors, it will be as a Sovereign. If not, it will be as a wife.”

  She pauses. Her voice softens, and she becomes my wife again.

  “I know you are weary. I know you think Mercury will be your grave. That the Republic has abandoned you, and that the weight of what you have done threatens to eat a hole in you. But for me, for your son, I beg you not to despair. Our crusade was not founded on the success of our arms but in the righteousness of our cause, and our belief in our fellow man. So believe in your men. Believe in our Republic.” She smiles self-consciously. “Believe in me and in yourself.

  “You know I believe we all begin equal parts light and dark. I fear you think your strength lies in your darkness. But the measure of a man is not the fear he sows in his enemies. It is the hope he gives his friends. I could no more ask Pax to stop tinkering with my datapad than I could ask you to change who you are. I know that. I only ask that you remember what you mean to me, to your people, to your son. You have not been abandoned. I will come for you. Sevro will come for you. The Republic will come for you. Until then: endure, my love. Endure.”

  * * *

  —

  “Do you remember that spring on Earth in Pacifica?” I ask Thraxa as she walks me down the hall to the warroom. The high command has decided on a reply to Atalantia’s offer. “Daxo taught my son to build castles in the sand. Pax cried when the waves came in. Your brother sat him on his knee and told him that’s all life is. Moments you build only to see washed away. But that doesn’t mean it’s all for nothing.” I stop at the door and tap my temple like Daxo tapped Pax’s. “The key is having a long memory for the sweet, and a short one for the bitter. I will miss your brother, Thraxa. But he isn’t gone.”

  She nods but does not smile. “You might be the only person from whom that sentiment doesn’t sound cheap. But if they killed Niobe or Kavax, I will personally drown Luna in blood.”

  She opens the door and goes in.

  Harnassus sits at the head of the warroom table in my chair. The rest of the high command fill either side of the table. I stand before them. “Right then, what’s what?”

  “Darrow, I apologize that it took us so long to come to a decision,” Harnassus says. “But given its gravity, we wanted to give it due respect.” He turns his attention to the officers. “You all know I am a proud member of the Vox Populi and even prouder to have called Dancer O’Faran my friend. In his name, First Citizen Publius cu Caraval and the Senate have ordered me to seize command of the army, arrest Darrow as an enemy of the people, and surrender to the enemy, using the terms Atalantia and our Senate have agreed upon.” The officers sit without expression. “In reflection of this body’s consensus, I have sent a reply to Atalantia regarding her terms of surrender: ‘Bloodydamn.’ ”

  “Bloodydamn?” I ask. They begin to smile

  A sucking sound comes from the heart of the sky. I rush to the terrace as several panes of the shield chain protecting the peninsula and the city disappear. A half breath later, the world is swallowed in light. There is a great roar. I’m blind for half a minute. When my vision returns, the afterimage ghosts of particle beams throb, and the distant guns on the mountains over the city glow like embers. In orbit, one of Atalantia’s dreadnoughts burns.

  Her retaliation falls just as the shields go back up.

  I walk back inside as the room vibrates with manmade thunder.

  “Bloodydamn, and a full barrage from our particle cannons.” Harnassus leans back and grins. “I believe it is a well-measured reply that leaves little ambiguity for her deviant brain to conjure.”

  He turns his eyes to the officers and cracks his knuckles one by one. “It’s been a long war. I’ve seen things that I’ll never scour from my memory banks, but never have I seen such a travesty as that farce on Luna.” He leans forward, true menace in his voice. “My friends, our system of governance has been hijacked. Our heroes murdered. Our Sovereign taken captive.” His lips curl back from his teeth. “That will not stand with me. We are in an alien, inhospitable land. We must get home before there is no home left.”

  He rises from my chair and walks across the room to stand close to me as if in challenge. He points to the chair.

  “That is a chair I cannot fill. I will not fill. Every man and woman in this army volunteered to fight with the understanding that they would be led by the Reaper of Mars. Behind him, we liberated our homes. Behind him, we found our way from the desert. He will deliver us from this planet. And he will take us home, where we will fix this madness and string Caraval up by his ears.” He tilts his chin upward. “Even if he does not, I would rather follow him to the Vale than abandon him and live to a hundred and fifty.”

  “Fuck the Vox,” Colloway calls from his chair. “Hail Reaper.”

  The officers echo the call.

  I walk to the chair without a word. I pause before it. It is an ornate Votum treasure carved with birds and trees. I did not notice before, when it meant nothing to me. I sit down in it, and the arms of it embrace me. For a moment, I imagine they are the arms of my wife and son. I close my eyes and think of them. I believe they are alive. I believe I will return to them. And if not, on the road to home is where I will die. I grip Pax’s key on its chain. When my eyes open, my officers are waiting
for a miracle. This is my family too. Colloway, Screwface, Harnassus, Thraxa, Rhonna. We have given Mercury Alexandar, Orion, Tongueless, Felix, Marbles, and so many more. I am done with sacrifice. I will get my family home. I will endure.

  “Summon the Master Maker Glirastes.”

  I LIE ON THE COLD FLOOR, starving myself to death.

  When last did I dance? When ever did my brothers spin me between them till I tumbled to the dirt and watched their pale legs move beneath a horizon of skirts and ribbons? Was the rhythm of life really once made by dancing drums and shift-calls and boots rattling as Gamma miners came home to the squealing of kettles?

  Or was that all a dream?

  They said we were slaves. And we were, I reckon. I ain’t so dumb or so lonely to forget that forty years once marked a man as old, or the radiation tumors that’d make a child’s belly swell. But that world at least made sense, before we were told it didn’t.

  It had rhythm I felt. It had family I loved. We had purpose I understood. Now that world’s gone. Not just for me. For everyone.

  But there was no purpose to the assimilation camp, where my family was hacked to pieces by the Red Hand. There was no family in Hyperion. Save Liam. And no rhythm in this prison chamber where I lie victim to sound and light.

  Light spasms in the center of my prison. The light combusts with the violence of deepmine gas, only to melt into thin red ribbons like the ones sweethearts would tie on the sleeves of Lagalos gallants for the Laureltide dance.

  Noise pumps through the walls to torture me. Not music, but human screams that morph and stretch and scrape like teeth along ragged rock. Deafening percussion makes my eardrums crackle. I’d cover them but then I can’t cover my eyes, and even when I cover my eyes, the light flares so bright I can see the bones in my hands. They look like the veins of a leaf.

  What I’d do to hear a leaf whisper in the wind again.

  Sometimes when all those bodies crammed into my family’s shack grated on my nerves, I’d go sit at the edge of the jungle and listen to it speak.