Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  She wouldn’t.

  It had to be Volsung Fá. He’s got Sefi’s number, setting up a war. Volga was likely one of those bodies dropped over Agea. The thought almost sends me into a downward spiral. But I can’t let it distract me. Without Volga, Sefi has no leash on me. She’ll freeze my movement. She’ll trap me in the sinking ship. Worse. She’ll trap the kids. And from what I’ve seen of Volsung Fá, he has a plan, and its escalation. With the tensions between the Republic as they are, this will be war if they buy that the Alltribe was in on this.

  That means the kids become real hostages.

  So I gotta get them out, and my window for exit is quickly closing.

  That kid better be wearing his harness under his clothing. I didn’t get him that garage just to tinker with gravBikes.

  I take care to choose spider-paralytic from the designer rounds and fit a magazine into my pistol, then throw on my jacket, loop a pack of explosives under my arm, and run to the Snowball to attach the hook Pax made in the garage to the back of the landing ramp. Oh, this will be nasty. I pick my gear back up.

  “Grarnir?” a man says from behind. I turn. Gudkind, Freihild’s replacement as vynKjr of the skuggi, stands in the doorway of the hangar. Two of my cleverer skuggi flank him. “Grarnir!” he calls without aggression. “The Queen commands your presence. You’re to join her in the western bunker.”

  There it is. Sefi’s soldiers won’t mean me harm, but she’ll never let me go out of her sight with the kids again. I have to act now, while I still have access to my ship.

  When Gudkind sees my scarabSkin, the neodymium carry case, and the bag of explosives, his hand drifts toward his poison-edged throwing knives. The other two skuggi frown and turn the safeties off their pulseRifles. They’re confused. They just wanted to bring me to their queen.

  “Sorry lads. It’s not personal.”

  I get the drop on them, but damn they’re fast.

  In one fluid motion, I grab my pistol in its holster, fall flat on my back to minimize my exposure, and push my toes down on the pressure pads. The skipBoots release an impulse that shoves me into a ten-meter backward slide. I fire three times through the holster. Gudkind’s knives skim centimeters above my nose. Their pulseRifle rounds pound into the hangar walls behind me. I stand up. All three skuggi are rigid as boards from the paralytic slugs embedded in their foreheads. And then they teeter over, drooling foam.

  I strip their coms and as I bound on the skipBoots like a grasshopper, I apologize. “I know you’re just following your Queen’s orders. But this boat’s going down.”

  As I plant the explosives on the southern landing pad, I watch Mars go mad. The Republic news channels froth with anger and racial vitriol at the attack on the Pandora. They claim it was Sefi’s version of poetic irony. The rain on Mercury claimed one million Obsidians. Here is Sefi’s rain, on the home of Lionheart and the Reaper, on the capital of the Rising. The revenge of the coldbloods. The inevitable pestilence of their nature.

  The world outside churns by the time I make it to an overlook of the training ludus. The children are not at their lessons. I don’t have access to their safety protocols for obvious reasons, but if Sefi is in the west bunker, they will be headed there too. Going aerial is dangerous with soft targets, so they would have taken the tunnels that emerge in the western statue park just near the bunker. I can beat them there if I fly.

  Oh Hades, I’m going to die.

  My mind races as I bound up marble steps and across snowy courtyards. It wasn’t the Alltribe in those ships. It had to have been Ascomanni. They’re trying to start a war. Volga was in a cell. If they boarded, there is almost no chance she escaped. I see her falling in that rain over Agea. Her bones turning to splinters on the concrete roads.

  This is the worst time for the insurance plan. I thought I’d have more warning when things started going south. Maybe I should have left the second Fá showed up, or when Valdir went berserk. I waited too long. There will be too many of them. I holster my guns and clutch the neodymium box tighter. Against a pack of armored Obsidian, a pistol won’t do much.

  The exponential escalation has begun between the Republic and Alltribe.

  Seems the Republic is eager to blame the Obsidians for the attack.

  I hear it in the ripWing engines lifting off from high-mountain hangars. In the thunder of metal boots. In the drums beating in the army camps west of the city. I see it in the throngs of mid- and lowColors the Obsidians herd away from sensitive areas. And in the metal glinting in the sky as orbital fleets prepare for a Republic response. Dammit, Sefi. Don’t strike first at them. This is what Fá wants.

  Volsung Fá isn’t a barbarian like I initially thought. If he organized the attack on the Pandora, he’s trained in regime destabilization. It’s textbook.

  Sooner or later, some nervous finger will twitch.

  Or Fá will play another card.

  Then the dominoes fall. And the nukes go off.

  This is how a world ends.

  I won’t sit here and wait for it.

  I’m too late to set up the neodymium magnet. I spot the children in the center of a cluster of Valkyrie making their way across a statue park toward the western bunker. The female warriors each wear sixty kilograms of pulseArmor, gravBoots, and full complements of weapons. Their helmets are up. Shit, there goes any chance at sonics. In battle, they could take a whole century of Gray legionnaires. But this isn’t a battle, and the last thing I want is to kill them.

  My legs burn as I close the distance to the Valkyrie. I shift to ghostCloak, and activate the bombs on the southern landing pad. They’re just big enough to break windows and make huge mushrooms of smoke. Sirens wail. The tactical response teams on deck in the heights of Griffinhold deploy like meteors toward the pad and away from me.

  I activate the Snowball’s autopilot and initiate its flight path. Back in the hangar, it will rumble over the paralyzed bodies of Gudkind and the two other skuggi.

  The Valkyrie pick up speed, shoving the children between them. Dammit, this box is heavy. The Valkyrie’s helmet optics will spot me now despite the ghostCloak. I’m still forty meters out. There’s no trick that’ll work on them. No clever lie to interrupt their orders. All they’ll see is warped motion sprinting toward them.

  Statues explode around me, throwing off the Valkyrie’s pulseRifles as the ghostCloak distorts their readouts of the debris. Two Valkyrie pop airborne. Oh shit shit shit shit shit. I jump as high as I can on the skipBoots, an ungainly ten meters. I hurl the neodymium box at them. They think it’s a bomb. They shoot it midair, melting the insulation and freeing the griffin-egg-sized magnet. It bowls straight into Braga on the ground, or at least I think it’s Braga in that armor. There’s a tug on my belt buckle as the magnet activates. The magnetism increases. Two airborne Obsidians dip. Their gravBoots’ thrust capability far exceeds the magnet’s force, but the metal components inside the boots’ gravity generators come apart under the shearing forces. The women fall pinwheeling out of the sky. The other Valkyrie lose their footing and weapons as they’re pulled toward the high-powered magnetic field in a knotted ball of twelve confused killing machines. Tiny explosions crackle around the ball of Obsidians as gas-powered munitions rupture.

  I land hard on the ground, damaging my boots’ shocks, and spring one more time. The boots come apart midair from the magnetism as I land near Pax and Electra. I scream as something tears loose from inside my calf muscle and stretches my scarabSkin.

  There’s a second pop in my chest, a hot needle of pain. I watch in horror as a small cylinder strains against the inside of my scarabSkin like a parasitic alien seeking the magnet. What is that? I take a wobbly step. The world is going sideways. Pax runs to me as the magnet loses power. He catches me as I fall. This is not going according to plan. The Obsidians are lurching like gout victims away from the magnet’s diminishing pull.
r />   Pax looks at something over my head and shouts at Electra. They tear off their jackets to reveal the harnesses he built for them in the garage. The harnesses are built according to the specs I gave him—simple but sturdy, secured through the legs and around the hips. A spool of fiberwire sits like a fishing reel at their belly buttons. They link the ends of the fiberwire together and inflate the helium sack at the junction. They rise fifty meters in the air, unspooling the fiberwire as they rush to separate themselves. There’s a roar overhead as the Snowball rumbles along its programmed course. Its catch-hook hangs from its belly and snags the joined fiberwire strands. The reels unspool. Pax runs over to me and hugs me like a koala as the fiberwire tightens and all three of us are pulled off our feet and carried after the Snowball as it climbs away from Eagle Rest.

  It all goes woozy. Déjà vu as the mountains blur under my feet, and the Valkyrie set off in pursuit. Their boots will never catch the Snowball. I’m laughing and wheezing by the time the hook retracts us into the back of the ship. Pax disappears and Electra peels off my scarabSkin. RipWings will be in pursuit.

  Electra grabs the medkit from the wall and I watch her face as she pulls a metal cutter from the wall and lowers it with narrow eyes toward my chest. What is she doing? I feel numb vibrations. Did she give me morphone?

  Is that my sternum she’s cracking open?

  Smoke sizzles up from my chest. She sprays a coagulant. The artificial gravity in the ship increases dramatically, sealing us to the floor as Pax puts us in a corkscrew. The ship vibrates as her twin railguns spew at something outside the hull. Time drips past as Electra works over me.

  I stare at a bit of rust on the ceiling of the garage. I’ll have to scrub that out. The Snowball is far too pretty a ship to have rust. When I look back down, Electra is gone. It is dark out. How much time has passed? I’m still numb from the morphone.

  I rise unsteadily to my feet and notice the long strip of resFlesh going down my sternum. It stretches when I move too fast. I’m glued together. That’ll hurt when the morphone wears off.

  As I stagger through the halls of the Snowball to the cockpit, I remember the bodies falling over Agea. As I pass the small kitchen and dining nook, I see Volga and me bickering over Karachi as we sail between asteroid ports. I see her lying in her bunk listening to dreadful music. I see her ducking under the low doorways, whining about hitting her head. The Snowball hums around me, but it has no melody.

  The little dream of our life on the lam erodes, leaving only a ship with nothing in it but the ghosts of what was never going to be.

  I find the two Gold children in the cockpit. The Snowball flies dark, all her active instruments off, as she carves through a low fog layer. Only her passive sensors throb. The sea beneath is dark and choppy. They look back in shock from steaming cups of tea when I sit in the back row of the cockpit. “That was…”

  “Lucky,” Pax says.

  “Terrible! It was fucking terrible.” I groan and hold my chest. Feels like I’ve been kicked by a sunblood stallion.

  Electra’s face gets even uglier as she wrinkles her brow. “How are you awake? I gave you enough morphone for an Obsidian.”

  I thumb my chest woozily. “Addict. You didn’t even give me a blanket.”

  “You weren’t hypothermic.” She pauses. “Were you awake that whole time?”

  “You mean when you gleefully used a metal cutter on my sternum? Yes.”

  “Fuck. Me.” She laughs. “That’s full metal.”

  I moan at the dull ache building in my chest. “I might need a real hospital,” I say, probing the resFlesh. “What was…those? Were those.”

  “Tracker in the calf,” Pax says, passing back a containment jar with two metal cylinders in it.

  I look at my calf. Oh. It’s still weeping blood. “You forgot something.” I extend my leg to Electra.

  “Juno’s cunt. I’m not your nursemaid. There’s a staple gun in the garage. Don’t be a Pixie about it.”

  “You’re just a lovely person. What about this one?” I point to the small cylinder alongside the tracker.

  “That, Tinman, was a heartspike on your aorta,” Pax says. “So they could turn off your heart with the flick of a finger.”

  “Fuck. Me.”

  “I think that was the general idea.”

  “I can’t believe Sefi didn’t trust me,” I say, genuinely upset. They laugh like I’m joking. “Where…” I forget what I was going to say. “Agea?”

  “We’re not going back to the Republic,” Pax replies. “They’ll just make us wait in the Citadel. That will not do.” Atta boy. He looks like a man sitting there in the cockpit. Not that he’s grown. But he’s definitely changed. The surety in his eyes, the set of his jaw—when did it happen, when he stopped letting others choose for him?

  I admire the change even as I feel it’s a loss to the world that he’s no longer a boy. The world has enough men. But maybe he can be a different kind of man. Probably not. But maybe is enough.

  Dammit, my chest hurts. There’s a tube in my arm. I pull on it until I see I’ve been trailing a blood bag. Oh. I reel it in as he continues. “If Aunt Victra managed to get to an escape pod, she’ll have fallen in the northern hemisphere.”

  “Very specific,” Electra mutters.

  “Shut up. With all the debris, the telemetry was—”

  “You shut up. You almost didn’t wear your harness.”

  Pax looks back at me. “That’s not true. I had to twist her ear to get her to wear hers.”

  “Teacher’s pet.”

  “Troglodyte.”

  “Omniprick.”

  “Hatchetface.”

  Electra gasps. They pout at each other in silence. I chuckle. “I knew that got under your skin.”

  “Shut up,” they say in unison.

  I just grin.

  “If they’re alive, we’re going to find them,” Pax says after a long silence.

  “Them?”

  “Our people, and yours, Tinman. Like it or not, you’re with us now. And we’re done watching everyone else slag everything up. It’s our turn.”

  Electra gives me the fakest smile I’ve ever seen and sneaks me the crux when Pax isn’t looking. I close my eyes, feeling a weird warmth in my chest as I sigh. “What could go wrong?”

  AFTER MY MOTHER THREW HERSELF off the cliffs of our Martian estate, my father came to me. It was one of the few audiences with him in which I was not summoned to stand sweaty-palmed before his desk next to that bloodstain in the carpet. He found me in the stables sitting in the sawdust. He was a giant to me in those days. He stroked the muzzle of my favorite horse and said:

  “Self-pity is the plebeian’s luxury. All that occurs is either endurable or unendurable. If it is endurable, endure it. If it is unendurable, follow your mother.”

  For once, I am thankful for the lesson.

  “Kavax au Telemanus.”

  A thousand reveries dance in the air. Memories drawn from the activity of my brain’s neurons by means of the Pandemonium Chair. Free associations for the Vox to pick apart and glean and use to hunt down the remnants of my family. The Greens on the other side of the shaded glass catch these images in a net and move along to the next, cataloguing and sifting.

  Hiding place.

  Secret base.

  Fleet orders.

  Active Howlers: Locations. Orders. Rendezvous coordinates. Rescue routes.

  Sevro au Barca.

  Black Cathedral. What is Black Cathedral?

  Doomsday protocols.

  Skyhall nuclear launch codes.

  Relevant faces and words speed in the air in front of me. It is a linear assault meant to bypass my brain’s security conditioning. The words are an attempt to stimulate the visual word-form area; the faces, to stimulate the fusiform face area. This causes neuro
n activity in the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes, which Octavia’s Pandemonium Chair then converts to visual and auditory replications.

  I am no easy victim.

  As part of the conditioning designed by Daxo’s psychotechs, every night I digested false memories, which I signified by populating the scenes with private totems—Spanish Renaissance paintings, off-colored birds, certain songs or low-frequency hums, the smell of a gauche perfume—so that I can distinguish the false from the real. The information they are gathering is a soup of false positives, incorrect data, passwords that trigger auto-destruct and locking mechanisms, and general incoherence that would take a thousand psychotechs ten years to sort. Fortunately there are not a thousand psychotechs in existence. And those my enemies use are no match for me.

  At times they try to use my own technology against me; they embed small silver psychoSpikes in my forehead in an attempt to force-hack their way through. This is much more painful.

  Time dilates, distends, slows, stops, disappears.

  I may be in Publius’s clutches, but it is Lilath who did this.

  Lilath went after my child.

  Lilath butchered Daxo.

  Lilath toyed with me.

  The Lion of Mars was shot down over Hyperion ten years ago to stop her from fulfilling my brother’s last wish: for Luna to burn. But somehow, some way, she survived. I don’t understand. Lilath isn’t clever enough to do all this. She is a killer, not an architect. Did Atalantia plan it? Atlas?

  When I am not in the chair, my senses are robbed from me by the psychoSpike. I cannot tell where I am imprisoned. If I even ever leave the chair.

  I float in nothingness. No sight. No smell. No taste. No hearing. I am only consciousness in a void. It is my fear of what the afterlife truly holds for us.

  In that void, I float alone with my private fears. What my husband will do when he discovers my fate. What devious designs my enemies have for my child. What evil has befallen Sevro and our Republic.

  The despair is total and unyielding.

  I continue to exist, only because with existence there is still hope.