Dark Age Read online

  Free Legion contrails form over the sea in response. Atalantia’s strike force of dreadnoughts bombards an unshielded sliver of the planet. Ground cannons reply as Republic squadrons close in on the escaping corvette. Society ripWings descend from the Annihilo. It will be a hell of a party over the western hemisphere.

  We won’t be attending. And neither will the Olympic Knights.

  As the battle plays in the background, I follow Colloway’s scrutiny of the Waste of Ladon. “Getting a ghost in the eastern Ladon. That’s our bird. Hermes-class corvette.”

  “Wait for it to get into the debris field.” Sure enough, the corvette has no interest in the scrum over the western hemisphere. It pierces orbit over the eastern hemisphere and sprints for the debris belt. “Char, sick ’em.”

  “Boom goes the ion.”

  A thousand tons of high-grade engines and weaponry come alive in the hollow of the dead destroyer. Inertial dampeners throb as the Necromancer explodes out of its hiding place.

  “Chin to collar.” I remind my Howlers as Colloway weaves through the graveyard toward our quarry. They haven’t spotted us yet in the debris. “I am the tip of the spear. Move at my pace. Kill all hostiles. Momentum is everything. We stop, we die.” There’s a shudder as our ship hits debris. I see an open line between Alex and Rhonna. I click in.

  “Here’s hoping this one’s worth a wolfcloak,” Alexandar says.

  “Bah, he’ll make us die puppies,” Rhonna replies. “Stay sharp, Princess.”

  “And you, Ruster.”

  I click out.

  “Eyes on target,” Colloway drones. “Pricks and slits, guard your tenders, spit pending.” The ship rumbles as its cannons fire. They’ve spotted us. It’s a race now through the debris field toward their waiting armada. We spin like a top. Ordnance glancing off as the Blood Medusa returns fire. The seconds thicken. Each a test of patience. Three weeks I have waited. Three weeks in darkness. Three weeks in torment. Three weeks for this kill.

  A magnetic charge builds behind me.

  The lights go green.

  Yellow.

  Red.

  Gravity says hello.

  I launch from the spitTube.

  Momentum and sunlight and spinning metal. Our quarry barrel-rolls through the shards of a torchShip, exchanging fire with the Necromancer. Colloway sticks to its tail like a wicked shadow.

  The Howler signatures are lost in the debris. I take over my suit’s side thrusters and lock on to the corvette, trusting my team to follow. Five hundred meters out. Debris careens past. Globules of frozen blood and water from ship stores become blurs. The heartbeat monitors of my Howlers are jackhammering as they try to keep up.

  “Match me,” I say. “Match me.”

  In its desperation to escape the Necromancer, the Medusa nearly collides with the engine block of a destroyer. It hammers its starboard thrusters and turns at a right angle. Damn fine pilot. But the men inside will be slammed into walls if they’re not secure.

  I seize the opportunity.

  “Breach,” I say as I goose my gravBoots and leap forward. The Medusa’s hull grows larger. I aim for its centerline, directing Colloway to the breach point.

  Systemic rage builds as I prepare for contact.

  Atalantia thought she could steal my Imperator.

  That her Fear Knight could keep my friend as a toy for torture.

  That I would simply run back to Luna and let my men die.

  That she could steal my son and there would be no consequences.

  Well, here I am, you deviant bitch. Here I bloody am.

  The motherfucking consequence.

  “Five seconds to breach.”

  The hull of the corvette rips open as Colloway sends a miracle shot home. His warhead sprays out molecular crash webbing.

  Two seconds.

  One.

  Breach.

  I pierce the molten hole. The black blur of the molecular crash webbing expands like glossy, replicating fungus.

  I smash into the webbing. My teeth bite through my mouthguard. My internal organs throb. The webbing absorbed my crash, but quickly becomes a liability, as Alexandar warned. It seals the breach and traps me upside down in its embrace. I can’t reach the dispersal agent on my pulseArmor’s thigh.

  As the webbing expands, I see only blackness. Masked enemies in tattered desert gear crawl through it. A moment before, the Gorgons were being pushed out the breach into space. Now they are as trapped as I am. I can’t reach the razor on my wrist. Not half a meter away, a sunburnt Obsidian with chromed-out desert eyes points a pistol at my head. I push the barrel away and, slowed by the webbing, thrust my left hand into his stomach until the flesh gives. He screams as I reach under his ribcage and squeeze his liver.

  “Sound off,” I bark.

  “Howler Three,” Thraxa says. “Enemy contact, releasing counter-agent.”

  “Pup Two. Landfall,” Rhonna says. “Drilling on your go.”

  “Pup One? Tongueless?” Only static replies.

  The crash webbing bubbles. Thraxa’s released the counter-agent. It dissolves into a black soup that hisses against the deck. Sheets of steam roll up. Released, my armor clunks to the floor, my hand still inside the screaming slaveknight. I pull out my razor and bury it in his face.

  Others move in the steam as he twitches. Six enemies, all coming for me. I struggle to stand. Then, one by one, the six shapes divide into twelve. A lean figure glides through them all like a Lykos dancer.

  “Pup One, reporting.”

  Alexandar, fresh from bisecting a half-dozen of the Fear Knight’s best men, slams to a knee in front of me. He wipes the blood from his family blade and helps me to my feet.

  The hole Colloway shot in the ship goes three decks deep. Sparks from broken instruments crackle. Molecular armor on the hull clatters as it seals the breach behind us, locking us in.

  Tongueless clicks over the com and appears from two decks below. He boosts up and assembles the ripWing cannon he and Rhonna harvested from the graveyard, hooking the man-sized gun to his armor’s homemade exoskeleton. Thraxa pulls herself from a mangled wall. Her fox warhelm is dented. A sharp piece of metal sticks through her lower guts and out the back of her armor. She bends the points of the metal shard down and looks toward the sound of enemies coming up from the lower decks and down the main corridor.

  I toss a grenade down to the lower decks. White light flares and a concussion thunders. I peek out into the main corridor.

  Masked men in tactical gear move like a hunched organism down the hall. I dip my head back just as bullets chew into the wall and it starts to melt.

  “Tongueless, give ’em a lick.”

  Tongueless levers the ripWing cannon forward on its hydraulic arm while Thraxa braces him from behind. The cannon is meant for ships. Not men. It screams toroids of energy down the hall, bucking the Obsidian into Thraxa. The frame rate of the world stutters. Behind Tongueless, Thraxa pulls her warhammer from its magnetic holster. Alexandar salutes me with his blade and turns to the main corridor.

  Kaleidoscopic carnage unfolds before us.

  “Pup Two, go for drill,” I say to Rhonna.

  “Copy.”

  “Invert,” I order. All except Tongueless rotate boots to ceiling. “One hundred meters to the Package. Push.”

  We charge into the wake of Tongueless’s maelstrom. Everything is upside down. The very air ripples with heat. Body parts steam all over the floor. Half-melted doorways tilt. The main corridor runs the spine of the ship. It is the most direct route to the prison cells. But it means we will be flanked in seconds. We must punch through, or it’s all on Rhonna.

  There’s a blur at the far end of the corridor. Drones scream for us, spitting munitions. Three of us open up with our pulseFists. Shrapnel pings everywhere. Then the Gorgons come to p
lay.

  Dozens of elite guerrillas fire around corners, but we roll down the ceiling like an upside-down wrecking ball made of energy, razors, and hammers.

  I fire point-blank into a Gorgon’s chest, killing the armored man behind him as well. The third bends impossibly and squeezes three shots at my head. But I’m already past him and firing my fist at an Obsidian.

  A homing grenade clatters against my right thigh. I cut it off with my razor and Alexandar kicks it. It detonates ten meters in front of us, lifting us backward.

  “Push.”

  I was a killer at sixteen. A warlord by twenty. But the younger me wasn’t this. He was still tender and new to war. If he was the Helldiver, I am the clawDrill.

  I carve through hardcore veterans of the Zero Legion as if they were made of pastry. Still, they pour from every hall. Existence is smoke and fire. My armor pings. Internal warnings scream. I flicker my pulseShields on and off, letting them cool so I don’t cook. The Gorgons will not die easy, and there are too many.

  We’re pinned. Flanked on three sides and can’t push forward. Tongueless fires back down the main corridor, sweeping it clear. Something hits him from his right. A hole smokes in his armor. He stumbles as I fire at his assailant and overlap my shields to guard him as he recovers.

  “Slide.”

  Alexandar seamlessly takes point and fires down the hall. Thraxa rotates to take his position. Tongueless recovers and takes hers. Alexandar flickers down the hall like a possessed flame, lashing out his razor in abject slaughter, inverting gravity better than any man I’ve ever seen save maybe Sevro. He tries to break through the crack fireteam barring our path.

  “Hull penetration,” Rhonna intones. “Breaching.”

  The Gorgon fireteam perform a perfect Flavinian armorkill on Alexandar. Three nail him with electrical rounds before he reaches them, lowering his pulseShield. Two deliver mass slugs that stun him senseless. He teeters there like a drunk. Their centurion delivers the coup de grâce. His muzzle flashes. Three armor-penetrating digger rounds scream toward Alexandar’s head.

  Thraxa bolts forward and the rounds sizzle as they ricochet off her intact pulseShield. One penetrates and rips a hole through her left shoulder, spinning her sideways.

  “Slide!”

  I rotate into her place, rocketing into that damn fireteam on my gravBoots to kill the entire lot. As their bodies drip off my armor and my friends fight behind me, I look down the smoke-filled corridor to see a red heart burning in the gloom. A white skull joins it.

  Two silhouettes bar our path to the prisons. The razors of the Olympic Knights glimmer like teeth. The heart and skull emblems of their office glow on their breastplates. The Love Knight and the Death Knight.

  Where is the Storm Knight?

  Where is Aja’s only son?

  I pray to a silent god he is not with Orion.

  I look left, Gorgons. Right, Gorgons. Then behind us to see three hundred and fifty pounds of apex predator crouched in the corridor, his black and gray leopard warhelm lowered for the hunt.

  Ajax.

  “Pup Two, we’ve got the Olympics. You’re clear. On me,” I bark.

  We launch away from Ajax for Love and Death. Each side in gravBoots and inverting gravity at will. Metal rings as we crash together. Death and I slam into the wall, the ceiling, the floor, smashing Gorgons still in their desert gear. We fire our pulseFists at the same time and melt each other’s into oblivion. The force sends us reeling into the Love Knight and Alexandar, who engage in a far more graceful duel of blades. Alexandar turns Love to Thraxa, who is just completing a huge swing of her hammer. Then Death bowls into Thraxa from the side, guarding his wingman’s back.

  Behind them, Tongueless unloads his cannon on Ajax. I’ve never seen one close so fast as Aja’s boy. He ricochets along the ceiling toward Tongueless, and then slashes down to slide sparking across the floor, flat on his back. Because the recoil of the cannon pulls its barrel upward, Tongueless is slow to angle it back down.

  Ajax counted on it.

  He slides past Tongueless. His wrist flicks. His slide stops and he pivots to the Root Cutter stance of the Willow Way. One of the last and most complicated forms his mother would have taught him before my friends and I killed her.

  Tongueless falls into four pieces, dead before he even hits the floor.

  “Thraxa! Hold for me!” I shout as she charges Ajax. She is fast, impossibly strong, tough as nails. But Ajax was born of the unholy genetic union of two apex bloodlines: Raa and Grimmus. He is her superior in every martial way except experience, and in that he’s gaining.

  He swims past her hammer and scores two strikes to her armor. She reels back, shocked by his speed. I rush to help, but Alexandar is pinned back by Death and Love. They block my way. Ajax has Thraxa on the ground. He bats her hammer to the side.

  I go Blood Red.

  The razor blows shiver up my arm as I give the Death Knight my undivided attention. He does well to last seven seconds. The opening is small and inelegant. He meets a crashing overhead, and tries to deflect it instead of absorb the blow. He forgets the curve. My blade doesn’t turn and my full weight jars his own blade into his armor. Before he can pull it out, I pivot and chop Death’s head off.

  I wheel around. Ajax was fifteen meters down the hall when I last saw him. He almost takes my head off as he passes above. I deflect his blade at the last millisecond, but the salvo we share would make his mother’s eyes gleam.

  A very good killer can string together a set of three moves in an onset—a one-second set of preprogrammed, carefully cultivated strikes. Everyone has their signature. As one of the top fifty with a blade in the Core, Cassius could do five. I once saw Lorn do eight. Ajax does eight. It isn’t to say he’s as good as Lorn, but he is as fast; and fighting him is like being plunged into cold water.

  Pure shock.

  I don’t really see the moves at this point. Even Gold eyes can’t track blades this fast. By the time he flips down to bar my way to the prison block, I’m nicked three times. But so is he. He swishes his blade like a walking stick as the Love Knight takes the opportunity to pair up with him and form the Hydra fighting stance. Alexandar limps to my side. Thraxa groans from behind us as she stumbles to join us.

  The two parties stare each other down in the narrow corridor. Everyone bleeds. Come on, Rhonna. I don’t want to pay this toll yet.

  “I hoped it would be like this,” Ajax says from behind his helmet. His voice is almost as deep as his grandfather’s. “First you. Then I work my way down the food chain. Your wife. Your shadow. Your Bellona.”

  As much as I want to cut off Atalantia’s left and right hands by killing her best two knights, as much as I want to end Ajax before he becomes something I can’t handle, dying here doesn’t end the war.

  I hail Rhonna. “Pup Two, status?” I say without taking my eyes off Ajax.

  “Package is wrapped. Present deposited. Attaching cord now. Char, anytime, please.”

  “Coming in hot. Getting frisky out here. Two destroyers and four torches inbound.”

  “Popping off. Three, two, one.”

  I turn from Ajax and wrap Alexandar and Thraxa in a hug. I had hoped my presence would draw the Olympic Knights. They all want to be the one who takes me down. I thought I could still punch through. But with the knights the Core has these days, you always buy insurance.

  While I drew their eyes, Rhonna’s starShell landed on the hull beyond the prison block and welded through to steal Orion from behind their backs.

  Duuuuu­uuuuu­uuuuu­m

  The aft section of the ship vaporizes behind Ajax and the Love Knight as Rhonna’s bomb detonates. A maw to space opens and the pressure of the ship rips them out into vacuum. We tumble with them into the debris field. Everything’s spinning, and all we can do is hold on to one another. I see flashes of the oncomi
ng enemy ships. RipWings slip through the darkness, and the Necromancer races toward us. Just when I think it will hit us, it tips on its nose, inverts, and inhales us into its back-facing garage. The doors seal instantly and we ricochet like marbles. Rhonna’s mech is locked magnetically to the floor with arms around a bag as if it were a baby.

  I grip a rung to pull myself to the viewport just as the reactors Alexandar and I retrofitted activate. A dozen dead ships glow with sudden light. Their hulks begin to crumple from the inside, and then the reactors overload in a wash of blinding light.

  The two onrushing destroyers and torchShips ripple as the energy waves wash across the graveyard. The corpses of my dead starships animate into frantic contortions. I howl with Alexandar and Thraxa as the derelict hulks splinter apart to cover our retreat, sending hundred-meter shards flailing into the enemy ships Atalantia sent into the graveyard.

  From the other side of the graveyard, her fleet watches their kilometer-long destroyers burn as we roar for Mercury. Colloway hails all Republic craft that the Reaper is inbound. We need cover fire.

  Dripping with sweat, I jump down to the floor. Alexandar helps pull Rhonna from her mech. Thraxa winces as she pulls the vacuum bag free of the mech’s embrace. We set it gently on the floor. I close my eyes before I open the seal. Tongueless died for this. Though I knew him less well than he deserved, he will have saved more lives today than he’ll ever know.

  I unzip the bag.

  Inside is a shriveled woman in a prisoner jumpsuit. An oxygen globe sealed over her head. I remove it. Her skin is ashen. Her face is half gone. It looks as if it has been eaten. But her eyes are as blue as I remember. They fill with tears as Orion reaches to touch my face with the stumps of her fingers. Through tattered lips, she sneers, “Hail Reaper.”

  Of iron is the last,

  In no part good and tractable as former ages past.

  For when that of this wicked age once open’d was the vein,

  Therein all mischief rushed forth, then faith and truth were fain,

  and honest shame to hide their heads; for whom stept stoutly in,