Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  Only to find a fucking torchShip blocking our path.

  Pax theorized it would be understaffed, with poor discipline. He was right.

  No flak shield devours our missiles. Without Blue allies to neural-link to the ship or sophisticated AI to control it, the Red Hand has to go manual. Men will be sprinting through corridors, barreling down gravity slides to reach the starboard cannons. It takes them just long enough for us to draw first blood.

  Our missiles detonate in a crackling line. Their shields flash and buckle under the kinetic impact. “Alpha Squadron: Stage Two,” I intone into the com. “Beta Squadron: Stage One.”

  With the Snowball responsible for boosting the signal, Pax urged me to seize authority, ordering the other ships to rendezvous with us over the sea south of the distress signal. The scattermash of ship captains bickered so much as they gathered that I took command more out of frustration than ambition. My extensive vocabulary of profanity and my badass ship certainly helped establish dominance over the pack.

  According to my plan, the armed ships burst upward as the torchShip opens up a wall of fire. Meanwhile the unarmored civilian ships sweep in west and east behind the shelter of the mountains, skirting the torchShip’s line of sight to make landfall near the mine to rescue the besieged.

  Hold on, Volga, baby. If you’re there.

  Railgun rounds whistle past the Snowball. Half a dozen of our ships become debris. Even if the Red Hand torchShip is understaffed and a hundred years old, we’re outgunned. “Alpha: Stage Three.” A kilometer out from the torchShip, we dive hard at a sixty-degree angle. Screaming tendrils of turret fire lick out at us. Pax takes us into a mind-bending corkscrew and then cracks a shot on a whim.

  Hot damn, he can fly.

  Our railguns pour a quarter of their magazines into the starboard fuselage of the torchShip, taking out three rail batteries. Two mysterious black gunboats from Nike with twice our firepower unload their main particle cannons. Fissures of white light divide the world. When they fade, ten banks of the torchShip’s turrets have been replaced by a gash of molten metal.

  Using the opening, a flight of three rickety ripWings with Gamma militia sigils swoop into the gap and drop their payloads before nose-diving between the ship and the sea. The bombs rupture gaping holes ten levels deep in the decks. Seawater presses downward from the shockwaves. Men on fire jump to tumble like embers into the sea.

  The Snowball jolts. Our shields collapse as the torchShip’s particle beam lashes into our port side and overloads the secondary reactor. Warning lights throb.

  “Please silence that,” Pax murmurs. Sweat drips down his brow. I silence the alarms. I was hesitant to let him fly, but truth be told he’s better than I ever was or could be. I don’t have the reflexes his DNA gives him on the stick, and I can’t even consider syncing. Electra waits behind us, a compact rifle across her lap and Braga’s stolen razor wrapped around her waist.

  “Fat bitch is rolling,” she says.

  “Yes, but slowly,” Pax drones. “Told you they’re understaffed.”

  Out the viewport, the torchShip begins a slow rotation so that its flaming starboard side will face the sea, minimizing its exposed profile as it shreds us with the unharmed topside. The com fills with mayday calls as the fresh guns of the torchShip open up. Fireballs bloom. The air shudders. “Clever bastards,” I mutter. They lower their elevation as they turn, leaving no more than ten meters’ room between their burning hull and the waves. “That’s a narrow slip.”

  Pax tries a run, but is headed off by cannon fire. He banks around. “Gunboat One, Gunboat Two, I need a path.”

  “Is that a child?” one of the captains asks.

  Pax gestures to me impatiently. I clear my throat. “Gunboat One, Gunboat Two, are you going to give me a slagging path or am I going to have to carve it my damn self?”

  “They’re too low to the deck.”

  “Not for my pilot.” I set a hand on Pax’s shoulder. Electra swats it away.

  “Register. Form in our shadow.”

  “Ephraim, get a sick bag ready,” Pax says.

  “I can handle a few G’s.”

  “Not these.” Pax banks the Snowball at a sickening angle to take it low and behind the two gunboats as they sweep in a parabolic arc back toward the torchShip. Blood thunders in my head. My stomach reels at the aerial acrobatics.

  Our ragtag fleet is being slowly swatted from the sky. The Snowball rumbles as we fall into a dive with the black gunboats and level out to skim the water, driving for the torchShip. Water is caught in our gravity cushion. Spheres of it float around us as we rocket toward the torchShip.

  I hold on to the crash padding of my seat. The chop kicks our belly, heaving us upward. The gunboats unload the last of their hi-tech javelin and open up with their particle cannons. Fire laces the torchShip. Something punches a hole in the fuselage of the left gunboat, sending it skipping into the water. Its particle beam continues firing as it tumbles, superheating strips of water. Sheets of vapor erupt upward. The second gunboat is hit and peels off.

  The torchShip looms before us. The gap between water and hull barely thicker than a razor. Acceleration pins me to my seat. The sea is less than two meters below. If we so much as nick it, it’ll ricochet us up into the hull of the torchShip at just under the speed of sound.

  The cannon on the lateral-facing topside pours fire at us. Water vaporizes all around. The gap grows, still so terribly small. We slide between the cannon’s firing solutions, and I close my eyes. When I open them, we’re into the gap. Something breaks off the top of the Snowball. The sun disappears, replaced by the smoldering underside of the torchShip. Pax shunts our gravity field, forcing us into a gut-wrenching spin and my organs to thump into my ribs. He unloads the last of our railgun magazine into the exposed underbelly. Debris rains down on us. I cover my head, waiting for the whole ship to fall as the world blurs past.

  Then sunlight.

  We spin out the other side and, with a burst of acceleration, flip upside down and shoot landward. “You forgot the missiles!” I shout.

  Pax smiles.

  Thunder claps behind us. I watch through the rear display as the torchShip heaves upward along her midline, like a bucking horse, and then succumbs to gravity, breaking in two down the center. As if a spell’s been broken, her gravity engines fail and she plummets into the sea.

  I grab the sick bag just in time to hurl up my breakfast into it.

  Electra cackles and pets my head like I’m a puppy.

  * * *

  —

  The unarmed civilian ships landed ahead of us on the outskirts of the mine to unload their cargo. Thousands of armed miners, fishermen, old soldiers, men, women, and teenagers roll through the Red Hand, disarming them and taking prisoners by the hundreds in the camp around the mine entrace. Since they all saw my green ship delivering the killing blow to the torchShip, they raise their fists as we pass over them to land.

  “What are they singing?” I ask, still a bit woozy from the G’s that the kids seem barely to have noticed. Pax amplifies the ship’s external ears.

  “The Song of Persephone,” he says, and takes us down.

  As we watch from the ramp, there is no hysteria in the victory. No rampant revenge or the beheading of kneeled enemies. Only a sweeping sense of fraternity and weary justice that even an outsider could sense. After the brutality of the Obsidians, it is beautiful.

  I spot flags and armbands with the Gamma crest. And then other crests, other tribes: Lambda, Beta, Alpha, Omicron, Silver trade icons, Gray mercenary bands, and more. Already hundreds of Red Hand soldiers have been gathered on an empty airpad.

  These are the demons of Mars. The butchers of Lyria’s family.

  More than half of them couldn’t have been more than ten years old when the Rising began. Stripped of their weapons and coats, they loo
k sickly, and they shiver in fear as they are surrounded by the people they tortured for so many years. Do they even know why they did it? In defeat, they’ve abandoned any creed. They huddle not together in a band, but each isolated and alone in their misery.

  I’d pity them if I didn’t loathe them so much.

  A crowd of Gammas and their new allies rush toward the Snowball to celebrate the pilot and his prophetic maneuver against the torchShip. From a distance, they think it was me and not the small human by my side. As they see our faces, they slow and then stop, gathering in a sort of wary perimeter. Their faces are young and old, all sunburnt. They hold antique rifles, household pistols, even slingBlades. A ripple of recognition goes through them when they spot Pax and Electra. Then understanding as they see the pilot halo Pax wears. It isn’t disbelief on their faces when he takes it off. It is fulfillment. As if they believed in something once, grew to laugh at the naïveté of their own conviction, only to see that they were right all along.

  I sense the weight of the moment, and it chills me.

  This is how a legend begins. The First Boy. The Son of the Rising, fulfilling his parents’ promise. He looks afraid to step into his new world, as if he feared this moment but knew it would come. I wait for him to look at me to give him a nod of encouragement. This time, he needs none. With Electra at his side, he steps past me and into the crowd, which parts and raises their clenched fists in salute as they chant his father’s name.

  I follow at a distance.

  * * *

  —

  The heavy mine doors dilate open with a groan. The first up the maintenance stairs is a young girl jabbering a woman’s name. A man shoves his way through the crowd and scoops the young girl up. They’re hit from the side by a woman who wraps them in a wild embrace till they are huddled together crying in a mess of limbs and red hair. This scene repeats itself until I stand stock-still, dreading my own reunion with Volga.

  I wait with Pax and Electra in the shadow of this communion. Each of us heavy with dread, fearing we won’t get to share the joy of the others. Each grime-spattered face, each weary set of shoulders that comes up the mine stairs, brings fresh hope and then disappointment. Where is Volga?

  A scrawny Red wearing a tattered, ridiculous dress and carrying a big rifle comes up the stairs. She’s functioning as a crutch for a huge Gold woman who looks fresh out of a ten-year stay in hell, stomach still swollen from pregnancy, but no child in her arms. Victra au Julii. In the flesh. I take an involuntary step back as Pax and Electra rush to the woman. She scoops them up at the same time, and holds them a meter off the ground in absolute silence. The Red watches with a faint smile.

  “Rabbit,” I call. The Red turns. She’s barely recognizable in all the dirt and blood and in that stupid dress. When she sees me, she breaks into a high laugh. She drops her rifle and sits on the ground, laughing so hard I can’t tell when she begins to weep.

  “You brought the army.” She laughs. “You.”

  “Where’s Volga?”

  “You were right,” she says, looking over my shoulder. “He did come.”

  “Ephraim.” I don’t turn, afraid my eyes will make my ears liars. Afraid now in the moment. Terrified that while I remember the good in our past, she will remember how we parted. What I made her do. What I said. “Ephraim.” I turn and see her. She has lost at least twenty kilos. Her face is drawn and tired. Her pants tattered and bloody. Her arm in a makeshift sling. But she is alive.

  “Hello, Snowball.”

  “Are you wounded?” Volga asks. “You are shaking.”

  I tilt my head. “No. I— Yes, but no.”

  She squints. “You came for me.”

  “Are you stupid? Of course I—”

  Before I can finish the sentence, her arms are around me. For once I don’t hold back. I sink into the embrace. She is my home. She has been since I found her on Echo City. What a pity I only just realized it.

  “Victra, don’t!” Pax shouts.

  Volga and I part to see Victra au Julii storming toward me with a heavy pulseRifle held like a pistol. Volga pushes me to the side. “Victra. Enough.” I can’t believe my eyes when the oligarch stops dead in her tracks and Volga sets a hand on her shoulder. “Enough.”

  The Julii stares at Volga, her face coated with blood and dirt, her eyes gleaming from dark sockets, and it is as if all her hate turns to anguish. She heaves a horrible sob and turns away to stumble toward the treeline as if it held something that was hers.

  * * *

  —

  I lean against the wall of the shower, sinking into the heat. The scar on my chest is mostly healed thanks to the Julii’s medici. I’ve spent more time with them in her estate than with Volga. She said she had something to do. I exit the shower and dress in the clothes the Julii provided. I keep waiting for the trap to close, but it seems even a Gold can learn to forgive. Or become too tired for revenge.

  A holoCan plays in the living room. I find Volga there, back from her mysterious errand. She sits surrounded by half-repaired Olympian towers and a sea of chanting Reds and lowColor, each with a fist clenched in the air as they chant for the Reaper. Beyond the holoCan’s prism a city of mountain peaks glows. Attica.

  After all this time, it must be fate to end up here after all.

  The Reds go silent as Volga mutes the feed. “You’re awake,” she says.

  “Did you complete your mysterious mission?”

  Her face falls. “I wanted to see Ulysses. What they did to him.”

  “Oh,” I say awkwardly. She stares at a spot on the floor, then wordlessly speeds through the channels faster than I can follow.

  “How can you even follow that?” Undisturbed by the chaingun of information, she shrugs. “Stop. You’re giving me a…” I don’t finish. My train of thought has been hijacked by the silent stream of faces that flows through the living room. Volga never settles for long. Five seconds at a protest in Nike. Two seconds at a strike in a new Red mine city. Fifteen at two dead Obsidians carried by a mob through Olympia. Ten at Alltribe Obsidians landing to retrieve their brethren as pain tanks disperse the crowd with microwaves. Five of braves knocking down doors searching for terrorists.

  This isn’t what Sefi wanted. This isn’t the world she tried to make. It’s not fair for others to come in and cock it all up.

  “Sefi bit off more than she could chew. Typical Martian,” Volga mutters.

  “Hyperionin ain’t much better, love. We don’t even chew.”

  “They must have been high on God’s Bread,” she says in contempt of her own people. “As if Mars would want to be ruled by savages instead of the Reaper.” She whispers his name. A new reverence.

  “Sefi isn’t a savage.”

  Volga squints at me. “Concussion?”

  “Just getting old. I dunno.” I take the controls from Volga and turn off the holos. “I think it’s time you finally tell me where you’ve been. Hardly had a moment with you.”

  “I’ll tell you,” she says, heading to the kitchen. “But first we will need coffee.”

  “Make mine with whiskey.”

  She brings me coffee made of coffee. Passive-aggressive little shit.

  Over the pot, we share our stories as the sun sets over Attica. I go first. She grins when I tell her about fetching Pax and Electra from the Syndicate. And listens breathless to the dragon hunt and my stories of Valdir and Sefi. I do not speak of Fá. My heart breaks when I hear her tale, and at the end of it, I can only hunch forward and stare at a small crack in the table.

  “I’m sorry.” I meet her eyes. “I’m so sorry…”

  She crosses her arms. “For?”

  “Everything.”

  “Be specific.”

  “Julii rub off on you much?” She waits expectantly with a new air of confidence. “For, you know, trying to make you be like me.”
I sigh, feeling exposed. “Without me—” The words just don’t come.

  “Without you, I would be nothing. Still working the docks at Echo City. Or dead on a stupid battlefield. Or dead a dozen times before.” She puts a hand over mine. “You taught me how to survive. I am lucky. Not all girls have a father.”

  That one sucker-punches me.

  “Whatever you do, wherever you go…” She pokes my chest, then her own. “There is no distance between. Do you understand?” A snort escapes me. She reels back, insulted. “I am very serious—”

  “Sorry,” I say between fits of laughter. “That’s just so…dripping in syrup. That’s gotta be from Lyria.” She draws in on herself and I pat her knee. “Hey, hey. I know what you meant. Me too. Verbatim.” She relents and gives me a sideways grin.

  There’s a knock at the door. Volga rushes to open it. Pax walks in with a small box. I’ve seen little of him since we landed in Attica. He wears the crest of a lion on his right shoulder, and that of a pegasus on his left. He looks as if he has aged two years. “Your parents?” I ask.

  “They say my mother is alive. In captivity, but alive.”

  “Oh, kid.” I feel tears welling up and I grip his shoulder. “Your father?”

  He nods. “Alive. But the Golds are preparing a final assault on Heliopolis, and Luna is a mess. No fleet will come. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He nods and pushes the box into my hands. “Victra wanted me to give this to you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Why don’t you just open it?” I sit down. He turns to Volga and says, “Volga, we haven’t had a chance to meet. I am—”

  “I know,” she says, wide-eyed.

  He doesn’t blush away from the recognition. By the way he looks at her, I know he sees his father’s old friend. Julii told him. “You should know, Tin—Ephraim spoke very highly of you.”