Dark Age Read online

  “Not to ramble.”

  Exposed to the harsh elements of Io, Romulus wasted precious air on his last proclamations, and fell short of reaching the tomb of his ancestor, Akari.

  I swallow my reply.

  Lost in thought, Diomedes looks back at Atalantia’s ship. After a time of consideration, he speaks. “You are the legal heir of House Lune, and stand to inherit whatever remains of its possessions.” He means ships, legions, oaths that have no doubt passed to House Grimmus. Any inheritance I am due will cost Atalantia dearly. “Will she see you as ally or rival?”

  I do not know.

  I embarked upon this course believing I could reason with my godfather. He was always rational, but now he is dead. Atalantia as Dictator is far more unpredictable.

  Ten years changed me. Did it change her?

  Though Atalantia detested children on general principle, she made an exception for her nephew, Ajax, and for me, the son of her best friend and heir of her mentor. I was Atalantia’s favorite because, unlike Ajax, I won the affection of the only midColor Atalantia has ever respected—Glirastes of Heliopolis. A hybrid architect-physicist, Glirastes was the greatest Master Maker in centuries, and the tastemaker of an age. And because Grandmother chose me to be the sole inheritor of the Mind’s Eye, the secrets to which Atalantia always coveted.

  Despite that affection, nothing from my childhood with Atalantia—not our nights at the Hyperion Opera, not our hand-in-hand critiques of Violet exhibitions, nor even our mutual affection for equestrian husbandry—could disabuse me of the suspicion that I was little more than a doll for her to dress up and parade around.

  I’m ashamed to admit I let her. With my parents dead and Aja often away, I found myself willing to go to great lengths for a kind word.

  And Atalantia gave so many, Grandmother so few.

  Yet one of Octavia’s axioms haunts me: “Fear those who seek your company for their own vanity. As soon as you eclipse them in the mirror, it won’t be the mirror they break.”

  I have no designs for rule. But convincing Atalantia of that is another matter entirely.

  “I cannot say how she will react,” I reply at last. “But so long as there is no scar on my face, I cannot inherit anything.” I chew the inside of my cheek. “Are you frightened?”

  “To meet Atalantia? Conditionally.” He pauses. “To see my uncle again? Certainly.”

  I am a little worried to meet the Fear Knight as well.

  OWING TO ITS TRAUMATIC REBIRTH, Mercury is a temperamental planet of moods and stark climate zones. Deeming it easier to change a planet than human nature, Gold worldmakers employed mass-drivers on Mercury to alter her rotational period to match Earth’s. Such heavy-handed terraforming is sometimes necessary, but it leaves visible seams.

  At the seam where the Sycorax Sea meets the polar ice, steam seeps from the wide mouth Harnassus’s blacksmiths cut into the façade of a glacier. Landing lights invite us into the glacier where a makeshift industrial world bustles around an excavation site. As we land, the sprawling barracks and engineering garages and mess halls on the floor look like toy blocks compared to the mass of metal being dug out of the ice. The ancient engine looks like an upside-down turtle shell pierced with a trident.

  Imperator Cadus Harnassus, the Terran hero of Old Tokyo, meets me on the sand-strewn tarmac. He is a geode of a man. Slump-shouldered, slow-walking, with umber skin and a bulbous drinker’s nose set in a face that looks increasingly like an angry puppy’s the deeper he plunges into his fifties—all of which belies the intricate intelligence of a starShell engineer who became the hero of his caste.

  For eight years, he’s kept his cherished Terran Second Legion Blacksmiths intact. In this war Gold may hold a monopoly on supersoldiers and military doctrine, but we have one on creativity. Wary as I am to admit it, much of that is thanks to Harnassus.

  I’ve had brilliant commanders, stupid commanders, and bloody commanders, but finding a steady commander is as rare as an honest man in a Silver guildhouse. If only this steady commander didn’t have ambitions of one day sitting in my wife’s chair.

  Formally speaking, he is the ArchImperator of this army, and I am an outlaw.

  It was Harnassus whom the Senate formerly anointed my successor when I went rogue. Orion, they knew, was far too loyal to me. And it was Harnassus who, either for political gain or out of pedantic obedience to the law, overruled Orion and sent nearly half the fleet back to Luna, setting the stage for Atalantia’s attack on the remnant. Gone are the days when he could sit at any table and chew the fat with the infantry. The men, like Orion, blame him for this.

  But in the end it wasn’t Harnassus who chose to invade Mercury. That’s on me.

  “Look at that. The Myth and his puppy.” Harnassus’s Orange eyes dance over Rhonna and me as if he knows a private joke. “Have you come to join me in my northern banishment?”

  “You’re behind schedule, Imperator,” I say with a salute.

  He returns a half-hearted one and spits out a stream of tobacco juice. It freezes in his tangled beard.

  “Then the schedule’s wrong.” He scratches his head and pulls out a hair. Not that he can spare many. “My lads are worked to the bone for this damn insanity you and the airhead cooked up.”

  I jerk my head to the engineers that disembark from the steaming shuttles. “That’s why I brought more. The Seventeenth is all yours. Their storm engine in the Waste is primed and ready. Orion has had four of hers in the Sycorax burning two klicks deep for a week.”

  He frowns. “There’s five others? You might have told me.”

  “There are six others. Operational security is paramount.”

  “Fancy way of saying you don’t trust me.”

  “I trusted you with this one, didn’t I?”

  “So much you came yourself. Seven all told then.” His mind goes to work. “How hot’s that witch’s cauldron? Forty, forty-one?”

  “Forty-three Celsius,” Orion says as she comes off the Pale behind me. Her six storm pilots flank her. I hide my irritation. She was supposed to wait. Harnassus eyes her. Privately, he expressed his doubts of her mental readiness for duty. Publicly, he salutes his equal rank.

  “I was rounding,” he says.

  “Well, your kind can afford to round. Not you who does the dying.”

  “Surprised to see you in the field, Imperator Aquarii.” Harnassus wheels those slumped shoulders toward me. “Why is she here?”

  “I’ll tell you in the briefing.”

  “Right. Operational security. Well, their meteorologists will have caught that spike, Aquarii. Might be evil little brainwashed warlocks, but they ain’t fools like the two of you. Flying in the same shuttle. Shit. What if the Fear Knight got both of you?”

  “Then your dreams would come true,” Orion says. “And you’d lead the army. My engines are along the volcanic range. Your…warlocks will think it’s hydrothermal vents. They’ll never suspect it could creep to fifty Celsius.”

  “Then what the hell do you need this one for?”

  “Total control,” Orion says.

  “Total control?” Harnassus’s suspicions of being kept in the dark are confirmed. He glowers back at the engine. “Didn’t you two read the stories? Pandora doesn’t like it when you play with her box.”

  Orion regards him with as much respect as Sevro would a particularly small turd. “Pandora was a fiction written by men to blame the miseries of the world on women. I am not a fiction. So, can we see the merchandise? Or do you want to stand here bickering semantics and freezing our dicks off as I pretend a hundred thousand of my sailors didn’t die for your political wet dreams?”

  The two unmovable objects glare at each other.

  “You two done?” I ask. “Yeah, you’re done. I want that machine in the air. Now.”

  * * *

  —
/>
  The ice is the color of cold lips as the men and women of the famed Second swarm over the metal hull of an unearthed colossus. Imprisoned for centuries in the ice, the curvature of the machine’s top hull, nearly a kilometer in diameter, is warped and rife with fissures. Harnassus roves the perimeter of the dig site bellowing gearslang. He’s been in a state of agitation since Orion and her Blues entered the machine more than two hours ago.

  The Master Maker Glirastes stands wrapped in the fur of a polar bear. Lean, bald, and as cruel looking as a vulture, the most famous artificer in the Society wrinkles his nose and sniffs a line of demon dust from a dispenser. Orange like Harnassus, he is of an entirely different class. One that rubbed shoulders with Gold autarchs and sculpted libraries and arcane devices for their pleasure from Mercury to Luna. He is not of the Rising, though his cooperation was vital for my Rain on the planet.

  “You’ve worked a miracle,” I say to him.

  “A miracle he says.” The Master Maker snorts in derision and to claim the last of the narcotics from the right nostril of his hooked nose. “When you took this planet, you said in one year’s time I would weep in joy at the fruits a single year of liberty would bring. Peer upon this visage, young warlord, is it one in thrall to joy?”

  “Year’s not up yet,” I say.

  “These machines are of a primordial power not in concert with human affairs,” he says, turning to me with that withering, pinched gaze. “Considering my labors, I trust your promise holds.” Before my legions took the planet, I made a promise to Glirastes to avoid bombardment of population centers. Because of that promise, hundreds of thousands of my men died in our Rain, but millions of civilians were kept from the crossfire. That I honored the promise despite its dire cost is the only reason he trusts me enough to help restart the arcane tech within the engines. That and his fear of what Atalantia will do to collaborators, especially ones as famous as Glirastes the Master Maker of Mercury.

  The promise I made him then has extended to the Storm Gods.

  “It holds,” I say. “We won’t exceed primary horizon.”

  “I will not be party to genocide. You know what will happen if…”

  “Believe it or not, Mercury is as valuable to my cause as its people are to your sterling heart.” He senses my sarcasm and scowls.

  “Gods know why Octavia kept these infernal beasts enchained,” he says, turning back to the engine with a gaze that is equal parts adoration, envy, and fear. “Even the Votum did not know what lay beneath the surface of their planet. Even I did not know.”

  I hope that means Atalantia does not know.

  “Why does a Gold do anything?” I ask him. “For control.”

  The Storm Gods are leftover weather-shapers from the terraforming of the planet. They worked in lockstep with the Lovelock engines to make Mercury habitable. It took my wife four years and the labor of two hundred Greens to crack Octavia’s Crescent Vault in the Citadel. The secret treasures we found inside were worth a fleet of starships. I’m betting ten million lives that Octavia was too paranoid to let anyone but blood in on her family secrets.

  Glirastes stares at the Storm God as if waiting for its colossal mass to whisper a secret to him, then he crosses his arms and recedes into the depths of his mental labyrinth. The Maker is a temperamental genius, but he cares about the people of this planet. Thank the Vale for that.

  At the wail of a siren, the Blacksmiths begin evacuation of the pit via gravLifts. Above, the last of the clawDrills drift through the air, ferried by heavy-duty cargo haulers bound south, to be stored at our supply depot in Heliopolis. Orion and her Blues are the last to depart the engine. The engineers watch territorially as they float back to me on a gravSled. Glirastes sips the coffee his slave brings.

  “Hardware is installed and operational,” Orion says. “So much for Harnassus’s whinging. Worked to the bone indeed. His Blacksmiths did fine work, for greasers.”

  “They’re doped out of their minds,” Glirastes adds.

  He’s right. If I were younger, I’d think valiant rage or purpose kept them steady. But I’m not the only one light on sleep. My army is a band of marionettes held up by strings called nazopran, dolomine, and zoladone.

  “Will it work?” I ask Glirastes.

  “I ran five million simulations, only two million of which ended in the engines imploding, killing all aboard,” Glirastes says. “So in theory, yes.”

  “Comforting,” I mutter.

  Harnassus trudges over, trying to catch our conversation. “Will you do the honors, Imperator?” I ask.

  “This is your monster. You wake it up.” He tosses the control pad to me.

  Annoyed, I activate the flight protocol. Harnassus doesn’t even watch to see the gravity engines flare underneath the ancient machine. For a dreadful moment, nothing happens. I stare down. Rise, you bastard. Rise.

  “I told you it was a mistake including Harnassus,” Orion whispers. “He thought this was the only engine. He sabotaged it.”

  “He’s an ass, not a traitor,” I say.

  Then the Storm God lets loose a terrible groan as it feels the force of Sun Industries gravity engines urging it to waken from its slumber. Except for Harnassus, all the aides and commanders beside me step back.

  With a shriek of metal, the machine begins to rise, climbing up and up until it hangs a hundred meters above, blocking the roof of the man-made cavern. Until its gravity engines create a languid field of low gravity beneath it, suspending blocks of ice. Soon the engine will be ready to join its brethren in the sea.

  I smile in satisfaction.

  UPON LANDING ON THE Annihilo, Diomedes and I lead the Rim deputation down a corridor of Ash Guard. Instead of the ceremonial armor appropriate for the reception of enemy dignitaries, Atalantia’s elite wear field armor. Perhaps that is because they do not formally recognize the Rim’s independence. The beetle-black metal of the field armor is dented and scuffed from war on four spheres. But the pearl House Grimmus skulls upon their breastplates are polished to a gleam.

  The slight was not meant to go unnoticed, nor does it.

  This is not the welcome for a prodigal son or an old ally.

  This is a presentation of force to blood traitors.

  As we pass the rows of hostile Grays, I wonder how many of them Atalantia pillaged from my Praetorians and my family legions. I search, but find no Praetorians. No Rhone ti Flavinius, no Exter ti Kaan, nor even Fausta ti Hu standing as officers before the ranks.

  At the end of the corridor of Ash Guard, ten calamitously large Obsidian Stained stomp their axe hafts into the deck to bar our path to the waiting cadre of Core Golds. The Stained step to the side, and for the first time in a decade, the two breeds of Aureate measure one another face-to-face.

  The Golds of the Core—battle-scarred and vain—drip in priceless armor gilded and monstrously shaped by the finest artificers the worlds have ever seen. Most wear their hair short, in war fashion, and their eyebrows notched. Their thick-boned frames are fortressed by heavy muscle grown under strict prenatal observation, esoteric chemical protocols, and tenacious physical competition with their peers.

  I would not say they are humanity perfected. They seem more like racing Thoroughbreds jockeying for position.

  In comparison, the Golds of the Rim are lean and shabby. Their bodies, like their culture, hardened by privation and self-discipline. They wear their hair long, preferring to comb it before battle in the way of the Peloponnesians. They are clad in simple leather boots and drab robes they sewed themselves. Not one amongst them wears anything that couldn’t be bought at a lowColor bazaar for fifty credits, except their kitari short swords and their long razors, which they call hasta.

  The silence between the two parties stretches with contempt.

  When at last one of the Core Golds speaks, it is a Martian I long thought dead. The winged
shoulders of her swan armor are dented, but the flaming heart of her breastplate burns bright in the drab hangar. Her face, smooth as alabaster in memory, is now tough as a miner’s heel. But not even war could dim the spark in the eyes of Kalindora au San. The Love Knight.

  I remember her as a demure, gentle creature in love not with the glory of war, but the grace of poetry and architecture. When I was a boy, I held only one other woman her age in equal esteem: Virginia au Augustus. The wife of the Reaper, and my grandmother’s usurper.

  As a man, I behold Kalindora far differently.

  Even Diomedes takes a second look. Her lips, though riven by two scars, are full and seem only capable of whispers. Her nose is small and sharp, but her defining characteristic is her eyes. Every gradient of gold that exists spirals toward the pit of her pupils, paling in hue as they approach that darkness so it seems as if one stares at an eclipse.

  “Is it him?” Kalindora asks a taller, younger knight in armor the color of a storm cloud. His skin is black, his eyes violent amber. The pelt of a pearl leopard sways from his powerful shoulders as he steps forward to examine me. For a moment, it feels as if we’re both looking through a dirty pane of glass, leaning and squinting to see if the apparition on the other side is really a long-lost friend or merely some trick.

  I barely recognize the man I once called “brother.”

  Only the long lashes of his eyes are the same.

  In the eleven years since I last saw him, his plump features, often an item of hushed ridicule on the Palatine, have melted away to reveal an Adonic visage so surly, so passionate, so manly even Cassius might, in a drunken moment, declare some minor flaw in the man in hopes of diluting his own utter jealousy.

  Octavia was always disappointed in her little genetic experiment. She would not be now. Ajax, son of the loveless genetic union of Aja and Atlas au Raa, is a masculine specimen.

  By the phalera that bedeck Ajax’s armor, I see he has already fulfilled his childhood dreams. He wears not just his Peerless scar, but insignia signifying the office of Storm Knight, and the rank of a full Legate infantry commander.