by Pierce Brown
A bad start.
We’ve come out of the darkzone’s veil directly into the teeth of the enemy perimeter defenses. So much for the back door. Beneath, atop a cluster of atolls garlanded with anti-aircraft batteries, six automatic turrets swivel on gyroscopes, filling the air with metal. The guns slam munitions into the underside of the Nessus’s shields. She vaporizes an atoll with her main particle cannon. Colloway’s three ripWings are trapped in a frenzied dance with a squadron of enemy first-responder ripWings. Two of my starShells already smoke and limp away from the theater of fire, but ten others race with me down toward the atolls. No way to tell who is who in our uniform black. I race headlong toward the largest atoll, a towering pillar of rock crested with a particle cannon installation. Light crackles in its meter-wide barrel and then erupts upward at me. I weave right of the certain death and bring my smaller particle cannon online and draw a bead. I expand my left hand, building the energy in the battery. When I’m close enough I can see terrified parrots fleeing the island’s canopy of trees, I clench my fist and my cannon roars. Lightning crackles from my right shoulder and slices a molten gash through the base of the gun installation. I sweep my closed fist back and forth, guiding the cannon and lacerating the installation’s roof till I hit their power generator and the installation explodes. I bank up and see the Howlers destroying the rest of the gun installations.
When the last gun of the perimeter defense is silent, the starShells form up atop a rock formation on one of the atolls near the smoldering remains of a gun battery. Colloway’s ripWings fly a thousand meters higher, the Nessus floating above them. She tears apart the sky as she fires at the main islands in the distance. But they fire back.
It sounds like the planet itself is cracking in half.
One by one, the Howlers land on the rugged escarpment with me. The three-ton starShells, with their apelike elongated limbs and armored carapaces, make them appear in the bright daylight like a dark band of crustaceous golems. They stare at me through the triangular duroglass face shields. Smoke billows from the shoulder of Tongueless’s shell, but his flesh wasn’t hit. Thraxa steadies herself as she lands; the nuke launch tube is still strapped to her back. Sevro is the last to land. He hangs above us on the cliffside, holding on to an outcropping of rock.
Our coms are down from the darkzone’s interference, so I signal commands with a laser display on my armored chest. When I’m through, Sevro and I rocket upward from the island, gaining altitude to see the Ash Lord’s hidden world in its totality.
A placid emerald sea littered with volcanic islands stretches before us. Twenty kilometers in the distance, at the epicenter of the Ash Lord’s realm, lies a humped island with an impressive white spire atop its central rock formation. Reaching out from the island is a spine of towering jagged atolls and islets of shattered arms and legs that claw out at the sea. Pale sand, visible under the clear water, seeps around the bases of the islands like spilled marrow. Fire laces the islands from the Nessus’s gun batteries. Already the island’s main antenna is melting slag, but a shield generator has activated over the main island and its spire, leaving only a hundred-meter unshielded gap above the waterline.
Distant thunder rolls across the water.
Thirty kilometers away, past the island on the eastern expanse of the darkzone, a war rages. I magnify my vision. Apollonius’s ripWings twirl in a kaleidoscopic firefight with the Ash Lord’s over the sea. Streams of red railgun fire and electric-white particle beams streak up from submerged gun installations and anti-aircraft batteries hidden in the crests of the islands.
Concussions from bunkerbusters echo as Apollonius’s heavy, spider-shaped thunderWings make runs on the main islands. His ripWings have carved a hole in the defenders, and dropships filled with his legionnaires race through heavy fire across the no-man’s-land of water to make landfall. Despite heavy casualties, he makes progress.
Then I see something terrifying.
On the second-largest island, about four klicks from the Ash Lord’s spire, ripWings rise from a large airfield to join the fray. Three squadrons, thirty-six aircraft. Nearly two hundred more ships fill the airfield. Long metal buildings that look like barracks glint from the neighboring islands. Hoverboats are already speeding across the water, carrying pilots to their aircraft.
Seeing our presence to the west, an enemy squadron detaches from the wing from the airfield and slowly banks around to block Colloway’s ships from attacking the rows of waiting ripWings on the ground. I glance up at his squadron of three. Warlock’s going to have to earn his reputation today. Already long-range missiles streak between the craft.
Sevro and I lock eyes through our faceplates.
We have to eliminate the pilots before they reach their ships or we’re all dead. I drop like a stone, Sevro on my tail, and land amongst my men. I signal them to follow me. We plunge into the water as the ripWings engage out over the sea. Railgun rounds eat into the water, but shatter on impact above us. We dive to twenty meters and head toward the islands like a school of metal sharks. Two torpedoes fall into the water and detonate, bucking us sideways.
Then, from the deep, I see something moving through the water toward us, a blur of metal no larger than a fist. It slams into one of the Howlers’ shells and detonates, vaporizing half his body. More metal swims toward us from the deep. Minefield. I shoot upward out of the water, my Howlers hot behind, the mines screaming after them. A lance of fire streaks down from a belly turret on the Nessus and cuts the mines out of the air. Good shot, Rhonna! I could kiss her.
We surface just off the bow of one of the hoverboats. More than a dozen of them race toward the airfield. Two have already landed. I burst over to one and land on the deck just before the command cabin. Through a glass partition, I see the female Blue pilot and half a dozen Orange and Green crewmembers. I switch to the railgun implanted into the left arm of the suit and fire into the command cabin just as the pilot lifts her hands in fear. Superheated metal makes pulp of the men. Throughout the bay, my Howlers in starShells leapfrog back and forth between the fleet of hovercraft, massacring the command cabins. Thraxa wades into one against pulseRifle fire and slams a Gray twenty meters into the air with her powerHammer. She disappears inside. Light flashes from the interior. Sevro floats above another, firing down onto it. I burst forward through the shattered command cabin into the passenger hold of my own hovercraft, where two dozen uniformed Blues in flight gear stare at me in terror. Some are no older than Rhonna.
I pull the trigger and make meat of men.
Evaporated blood fills the air with a rusty mist as fragments of bodies twitch on the floor.
By the time I make it out of the hovercraft, their fleet is a ruin of smoldering, sinking wrecks. Sevro has marshaled the Howlers on the airfield island. I skip over the water and land next to him. “There’s no bloody back door!” he says of the main island, popping his top. “Place is a porcupine.”
“We’ll have air superiority soon. Those frigates are pummeling them.”
“Apple’s boys can fly,” he says with a laugh. “You see Colloway? He slagged half a bloody squadron on his own.” We peer up and see black specks swirling around each other in the clouds above. They look so peaceful. So too does the beach. It faces out to sea away from the main island. Water laps against the feet of my starShell. Crabs skitter along the sand. And out in the bay, hulking wrecks of the hovercraft smolder and sink to the deep.
“Who is missing?” I ask.
“Grana and Vandros,” he says quietly. Eight of our twelve remain. I try to pull up a battlemap, but static still distorts the sensors. It’s infuriating how little of the battlefield I can see. But this is what Niobe teaches our children, what Sevro and I learned long ago: rely on tech and you’ll soon be dead as your batteries are.
“Doesn’t look like he’s going to try a shuttle escape,” I say.
“Course not. For once he overestimated us. Prolly thinks we have a whole fleet waiting for him to try and escape
. Gonna make us dig him out.”
“We should wait for Apple’s forces to push inland on their side of the island,” Sevro says. Tongueless and Thraxa land together after scouting the coastline. Pebble and Weed watch the interior of the island where the airfields lie beyond white rock hills and olive trees. Alexandar joins them with several Howlers.
“Can’t wait,” I say. “Chances are they got a signal out before we destroyed the array. We’ll be dealing with reinforcements from the mainland soon.”
“Then let’s move our asses,” Sevro says.
The air’s a deadly place to be, so we move as a pack across the rocky island toward the coastline facing the main island, low to the ground, skipping thirty meters at a time. I send Tongueless, Alexandar, and Milia inland to demolish the ripWings on their landing pads. Plumes of fire rise over the hillsides from the airstrips before they rejoin us. In the sky we’ve had a drastic setback. The Nessus has lost its gun battle to the particle cannons on the Ash Lord’s main island and has been forced to retreat to a lower elevation to seek shelter. And another of Apollonius’s frigates has fallen from the sky.
Under the shelter of a ridgeline, Howlers help each other check their starShells as Sevro and I climb the ridge to look at the main island. A kilometer of open water separates the landmasses. Turrets line the rocky coast.
To our far right, Apollonius’s force has pushed in and landed troop carriers on the main island. Hundreds of mechanized soldiers storm the beachhead on grasshopper legs, supported by heavily armored spider tanks and the remains of his air force.
Into the teeth of death, the last legion of Valii-Rath charges.
The first wave is mowed down by cluster munitions fired by drones and gun batteries on the high cliffs. The ripWings drop bunker busters and big guns fall silent. Ash Legions, caught unaware, now pour out of subterranean barracks. I see a flash of armor in the sky as Apollonius, flanked by bodyguards, exits a troop carrier midair and falls for the bunkers in the cliffs. His holobanner glows in the sky above him, three times his own size: the raging head of a purple Minotaur, inviting all to come dance and die. He lands amongst a squad of Grays and decimates them.
Clang.
I’m kicked in the chest. Falling from the rock formation, I collide with the sand below and stare up at the sky, dazed. “Sniper!” Sevro shouts.
Sevro lands next to me. “Reap, where are you hit? Reap?”
“Oh, goryhell, he’s going to die!” Clown says.
“Shut up, asshole!” Sevro shoves him away.
Pebble kneels over me. “Darrow, can you hear me? Darrow.”
“Ow,” I say. They help me sit up. The armor-penetrating round pierced the starShell but was stopped by the pulseArmor underneath. The arms and legs of the suit won’t respond. Pebble and Weed help me activate the ejection port. The mech splinters apart and I crawl out, still dazed from the shot. There’s a dent in my pulseArmor.
“Where’s Thraxa?” Sevro looks around.
“Here,” she says, rushing up.
“Still got that baby nuke?” he asks, his face enraged.
“Yes, sir.”
“Give it.”
She unholsters the nuke launcher from the back of her armor and hands it to him. Without even lowering his helmet, he jumps thirty meters upward to clear the ridgeline. He hovers a half second in the air and fires. The small missile shrieks out of the tube. He lets gravity claim him and falls back to the beach as we rush to shelter against the ridgeline. He saunters over without a smile. There’s a flash of blinding light. The earth shudders. A blast wave of sand and debris roars over our heads and huge waves crash against the island. In the distance, the black distortion surrounding the Ash Lord’s island flickers and disappears, revealing the horizon.
I climb back out to see the devastation the half-megaton missile has caused to the island’s coastline. Smoke and dust particles clog the sky. A horrible wound has been carved into the Ash Lord’s island. The mushroom cloud blossoms. And above it, deeper inland where the white fortress of the Ash Lord towers upon the high peaks, sunlight catches on iron men.
Finally, the Golds have come to war.
I unfurl my razor and look to my Howlers. “For the Republic.”
I SOAR WITH THE HOWLERS into the wake of the nuclear blast, skinned in mechanized armor, smeared with char and blood, aimed like a driven spear toward the tower of the Ash Lord. The killsquad of armored Golds races to meet us. They are nearly twenty in number. Each will be a sworn Peerless of Legio XIII Dracones—dragoons. His elite bodyguards and exterminators. It was men wearing the sea dragon badge who liquidated Reds on Mars by the millions and dropped the nuclear ordnance that destroyed New Thebes, and who dumped my men captured on the battlefield out the back of transport ships three kilometers up.
They must all die.
Fire and mini-missiles streak between the war parties. Shields flash and armor buckles as life is ripped from men. Thraxa fires an EMP missile. It detonates amongst the Golds. None drop from the sky. They have the new EMP shielding too.
A Howler’s body is blown to bits in front of me. Two dragoons die as Sevro’s particle cannon slices through their ranks. Using Thraxa’s starShell to shield me in my thinner personal armor, I fly in her shadow and raise my razor ahead of me like a charging knight, the blade straight and true.
And then, just shy of the speed of sound, the two war parties of machine and men meet in the sky. They clang together like squadrons of fallen angels. A horror of metal. A scream of guns and fire and shimmering swords and engines. Milia spears a Gold through his head with her razor, then is cut in two by a passing sword. Her body divides and spins down without a sound. I block the same man’s blade aimed at Thraxa’s head as he rips past us. The force numbs my arm to the socket, but I hold on to the blade, plunging into their ranks. I launch off Thraxa’s flank and gore the chest of a Gold as we slam together. I twist myself at the last second so his blade nicks off my helmet. Without the starShell’s protection, I feel the wheeze of my bones as they nearly snap against the force of our bodies colliding. My vision wavers and we tumble.
We slam down on an outcropping of rock beneath, metal limbs tangled together. My helm is inches from his jaguar helm. He pushes his pulseFist toward my head. I let go my razor and use a kravat arm hold, pinning his arm to the side as I bring my own pulseFist to his belly and fire on full auto. His body melts in half and superheated stone kicks up from the mountain cleft to skitter against my visor. I push his smoldering corpse off and struggle to my feet as his legs flop off the ledge to the white rocks below. But before I can rise again into the air, I’m shot in the back. My skin sizzles as my pulseShield caves in and my armor melts into my lower back. I bellow in anger and jump off the ledge, swerving madly in the air to avoid my pursuer. I glance back just as Sevro smashes the Golden knight down into the mountainside with his starShell. Using the mech’s incredible power, he peels off the man’s arms and stomps his armored head flat. Another Gold rips past, strafing him with his pulseFist. Sevro lurches one of his starShell’s mechanized hands up and grabs the Gold’s foot. He jerks the leg so hard in the other direction that the opposing forces tear off the man’s leg at the hip. He spins off and collides into the mountainside at two hundred kilometers an hour.
“Get inside the tower! There has to be a door on the landing pad,” Sevro shouts. He fires up at the dogfight above him. “Without a starShell you’ll die out here. Get the Ash Lord.”
But it is my Howlers who are dying.
Our effort to pierce the Gold formation has failed. The battle has broken down into aerial dogfights and men killing each other on the face of the mountainside and against the walls of the tower. Our starShells gave us the edge, but the Golds are more maneuverable in their pulseArmor, and have the numbers. They’re overwhelming the powerful mechs like jackals taking down lions.
I see Thraxa’s mech fending off six Golds in an aerial cage. Men broken by her power hammer litter the mountainside below. She smas
hes another out of the air, but she’s speared from behind. Another hacks off her mech’s left hand. And a third stabs at her stomach repeatedly before Tongueless smashes into them. Below, in a ravine, Pebble stands fighting over Clown’s broken mech.
“Rally to the roof!” I call over the coms, signal going through now that the darkzone interference has gone. Sevro echoes the call.
The remaining Howlers fight their way to the roof to join Sevro and me as we fly up the mountain toward the high tower. At the top, the landing pad nearly sixty meters across is being used by a Gray sniper team and Obsidian reinforcements. They retreat as we land, seeking shelter behind the long wings of the Ash Lord’s personal shuttle.
Sevro and I land on the edge together and fight back a squad of Obsidians and Grays. I rocket into them at full speed, breaking the rib cage of a Gray against the concrete. Rolling up, I deflect the huge axe of an Obsidian and shoot him in the head. His helmet takes the blast, but I stun him enough to hew through his legs with my razor. I’m hit from the side by a Gold pulseFist before I can finish him. My shield absorbs it. I shoot up on my gravBoots, then straight down in front of him to exchange a series of razor slashes that ends with his arm off at the shoulder. Someone shoots him from the side. Sevro kicks a Gray off the roof with the boot of his mech. An Obsidian launches toward him and stabs a pulseSpear into his cockpit. He moves his head at the last moment, then pulls the Obsidian off. Blood showers his mech as he crushes the Obsidian’s head with a squeeze of his mechanized hand. Green plasma rounds pound the legs of his mech, melting them inoperable. A squad of hunched Grays fires at him from across the landing pad with huge anti-armor plasma rifles. I fire at them, cutting a hole of steaming meat through their ranks. Too late. An EMP rocket slams into the chest of Sevro’s mech. Blue electricity sizzles out, frying his circuitry. He manually ejects, shooting straight up, over the heads of Alexandar and Tongueless, who fight like mad together against the tide.