Light bringer a red risi.., p.11
Light Bringer: A Red Rising Novel, page 11
part #6 of The Red Rising Saga Series
“What is this?” he snarls. “Where are you, Reaper?”
My blade, held in front of me, shakes like a leaf. I have felt strength like this before, from Obsidian Stained, but those blows require a sacrifice in grace.
Apollonius’s attacks sacrifice nothing.
They are tight, well-timed, and so powerful I fear he’ll break my left arm if we continue parrying at the same rate. Cassius shouts instructions down from the pulvinar, but I can’t hear him in my panic or over the roar of the soldiers. Apollonius comes on again, hungry for the kill. Unable to meet him toe to toe, I bend and bend until I have to flow away, but his onslaught denies me any chance to plant my roots—even when I do, he hammers at them with a ferocity I can’t match, pressing, pressing, always pressing.
The shock is existential and indicts not just me, but the Willow Way itself. For the first time in my life, I realize not only am I not enough, but neither is my form.
He knows it too well. He’s learned how to break it.
We’re back on the Martian dirt now. He won’t let me escape his full-frontal assault. He herds me. A dozen minor wounds already rend my flesh. My arms and legs are coated with as much blood as sweat. It’s all I can do to keep the barrage of keening metal from taking a limb. I try to go around his right, but he mirrors me, denying me his flank and forcing me back, back. Sparks fly as I parry four onsets in a row. Blood sprays as we nick one another’s knuckles and forearms until he penetrates my guard and plunges his razor into my left breast, just above the lung.
He holds me there, our bodies pressed together, my blade pinned to my side.
“Reaper, where have you gone?” Try as I might, I can’t free myself from his anaconda-grip. “Where is the king of stains I sought?” he whispers. He lets me go. Blood pulses from the wound. I stagger away from him not knowing what to do.
He follows with a swing to cut me in two. I let my body go loose and bend backward, feigning retreat. I forget the Willow Way, and use my left arm to catch my fall and push me forward like a Lykosian tumbler. The move takes me past his right knee to finally turn his flank. I slash back and stumble up. He didn’t even bother parrying my swing. He steps clear and watches me as if with a broken heart.
I fall to a knee and pant in fear and exhaustion. Blood sheets down my chest. I’ve lost speed and strength over the years, while Apollonius seems to have reached his ultimate form. Lysander did more than give him Grays and iron. He must have taught him how to beat the Willow Way. I touch the wound on my chest. My eyes dart to Cassius, to the crowd, to space above to glimpse Mars twinkling in the distance. To see home one last time. The paradise planet blocks the view. I touch the key on my chest. I’m sorry, Pax. I’m sorry, Virginia.
“Scraps,” Apollonius murmurs in disillusionment. “That is what they will say of this. Atalantia, Atlas, Lysander, left me nothing but scraps to eat.” He blinks at the ground. “Apollonius the Vulture, they will call me. Apollonius who could not beat Darrow in his prime. This is not what I deserve. Where is the struggle? Where is the glory?”
I won’t die bad. I won’t die whimpering. I can trap his blade in my body. Kill him as I die. I spit blood out of my mouth and beat my chest at Apollonius. “Come on, you bastard. Come on!”
Reluctant, he obliges. But before he’s taken three steps, he stops and looks down at the sand with a frown. It has begun to shiver. In the stands, the legions stagger and sway. A great sigh goes through the station. The sand begins to leap like water boiling in a pot. Above, Venus stretches like taffy as a shockwave warps the coliseum’s dome and a rumble goes through the station.
I glance up to Cassius. He stares back, just as confused.
That was a bomb, but it wasn’t ours.
9
DARROW
Shit Escalates
“Atomic event detected on west spindle four. It was one of ours. Deterrent number eight. Preliminary reports suggest total structural and personnel loss. Damage indicated on second and third spindles. All power is lost in sectors nine through eleven. Sensors and coms non-responsive. Full damage report still pending,” reports the Blue.
Apollonius’s Golds and Gray officers have descended to gather around their commander as he listens to the report and dispatches response teams. He is the only one smiling. A dozen Grays shove Cassius down beside me in the sand. He tears off a piece of his prisoner kit to stanch the wound beneath my left collarbone. “Hold that. Darrow. Hold it.” He ties a bandage around my pierced calf. I hiss in pain as he does the same to a flap of skin on my left forearm.
“Spindle four? What’s happening?” he asks. “Aurae?”
“I don’t know,” I manage, though I have my suspicions. My wound stings. Not a single limb is without a slash. “He had a bitemark on his cheek.”
Cassius is too stressed to hear me. “Gorydamn, man. He whittled you like a stick.”
Bitemark. Bomb. Sevro?
“Only the rats know,” I murmur.
“What?” Cassius asks.
Hope stirs. Apollonius had Sevro. Sevro got loose. In the ducts? I hold on to that hope.
“I have the Eurytion. Asmodeus au Carthii is on the beam,” a Gold veteran calls to Apollonius, and projects the hologram of Asmodeus from her datapad. The eerie, ageless leader of House Carthii peers at Apollonius with slitted eyes.
“Asmodeus, you have no doubt seen the atomic detonation,” Apollonius says. “I am told your ships over the pole are mobilizing. According to the terms of the détente, Atalantia guaranteed my imperium over these docks. If you attack, you defy the Dictator’s edict, you compromise the war effort. Do not misread my intentions. I have no desire to destroy the dockyards. The detonation was an act of sabotage—”
“If I were a man looking for an explanation, I might care. As it is, I am a man looking for an excuse.
“When I stand before the Two Hundred and the Dictator with your head, mongrel, they will not indict me. They will applaud.”
Asmodeus disappears.
Apollonius shrugs. “Alas, the frailty of words. Steel, be thou my tongue. Attend me.” He lifts his arms and his Oranges look at each other, nod, and run forward with his armor.
“Carthii warships are moving off the pole…” a Gold officer calls and casts up a hologram for his commander. The Gold veterans watch coolly as the Carthii navy abandons their position over the north pole and streaks toward the dockyards. “What are your orders, dominus?”
Apollonius frowns, as if his Oranges fitting him in his purple panoply was an obvious mission statement. “Bequeath them hell, of course.”
The officer frowns at Vorkian, confirming with the archCenturion that the order meant open fire. She nods. Apollonius waves off the hologram as a forest of light lashes out from the station’s batteries toward the onrushing fleet. A throaty rumble trembles through the station as the enemy returns fire and the artillery battle begins. Nearly armored, Apollonius shouts to the legions who watch him from the stands.
“Legionnaires! Citizens of the dockyards! My noble friends! The dread Carthii come to drag you back under their perfidious yoke. They come in numbers many times our own. But do not quake, for I am with you. Your Minotaur will not abandon you! By my will and your hands, we took the station together. We hold it together! Summon your courage! Sharpen your will! Join your brothers and sisters at your battle stations! Carry my name! Seize your glory! Go!”
They chant his name and surge out of the stands to defend their stations.
Vorkian’s voice is flat and factual. “Dominus, we cannot stop the Carthii. They will board. They will swamp us. We will be outnumbered. Perhaps five to one. The bluff is called, and we’ve the low pair. We can’t hold the outer crescents much less the two axes.”
“They know not our true numbers nor the quality that awaits them here, Vorkian. Let them come. Let them die. Lune cannot afford to abandon me, and I grow tired of playing castellan. Let us force his hands to throw the dice.”
“Dominus, I recommend we cut our losses. Our ally would expect us to protect his investment—”
“I am his investment and so are the ships we protect,” Apollonius says. “Where is your spirit, Vorkian? Moments such as this are the forge of legends. For every campaign, there is always an inciting incident. Let this be ours.”
She pulls her sidearm. “Then let me at least tie up your loose ends.”
“My baubles?” Apollonius asks. “Horrible, no. Darrow and I have not finished our duel. I will not let him die while I am left unsatisfied. We pump him with protein and throw him a second try. There in Thessalonica where the Thermic meets the coast, we will dance again and let his blood water my vines. I will taste him in my cup with the dirt. Yes. Yes, that. A Rath red, a new vintage indeed.” He comes out of his reverie. “As for Bellona, Lune will need him for Julia. Her finances are crucial. Bring them.”
Apollonius peers at his Golds. “My fellows, I promised you the glory of reconquering our homeland. Mars lies through this moment. Go now to your legions. Deny the Carthii every meter of deck, and any measure of mercy. Ravage them. Break them. Venus is the planet of love. What is Mars the planet of again?”
They smile in silence, and rush off to answer with their deeds.
* * *
—
The hallway thunders with a storm of metal boots. Apollonius’s personal legion, the same scorpion-eating, rampart-breaking madmen who stormed the Ash Lord’s island with Sevro and me and then took on the dockyards themselves, jog down the hall singing their song.
Several hundred battle-hardened Grays, a few dozen Obsidians, and six Golds. We’re dragged on like pack mules, strapped with extra ammunition, fit with dilation collars and cuffs that can retract on command. The Obsidians make sure we keep pace and slap our asses with the hafts of their axes.
“We don’t have armor,” Cassius says. “We’ll be like peaches into a woodchipper when they hit the Carthii.”
I try to remember a line from The Path to the Vale that might console us but I’ve got blood crusted in my nostrils, on my legs, on my ribs. My only hope is that it is Sevro who blew the other bomb, and that he’s got a plan. I don’t. All I can do is wait for the opening and be ready.
“Be ready,” I say to Cassius.
“For what?”
“I don’t know.”
With Apollonius at the lead in his horned helmet we’re headed for the life-support nexus for this part of the station—which the Carthii will no doubt try to seize with their best men. My view is filled with the bobbing of metal shoulders and the glare of alarm lights and the glitter of hall cameras.
Twice the armored column has to divert because of a bulkhead that refuses to open. Suspicious. I peer past the armored shoulders and heads when we come to an abrupt stop in a corridor ten paces wide. The Grays twitch, restless. They’ve already taken their battle drugs. The column bends out of sight behind us with the curve of the hall. At the fore, Apollonius bellows in impatience at Greens in his command hub. The column about-faces to retrace its steps but the bulkhead at the rear must have closed too because the about-face goes nowhere. Centurions shout down the line for a breaching team.
“It’s him,” I murmur.
Vorkian shouts for silence. Up ahead, Apollonius puts his ear against a wall to listen for something. He backs away from the wall.
“LeechCraft!” he shouts. “Search for teardrops.”
The call echoes down the line behind us, out of sight. Cassius swallows. Teardrops. That’s what they call the first hint of molten metal on the wrong side of a leechCraft’s drill. A Gray triarius is the first to spot one. Cassius might have said something clever if he had his razor. But with his hands bound behind his back and only a prisoner jumpsuit between his body and what’s about to happen, he just looks at me.
“Peaches. Woodchipper.”
The column shifts with anxiety. They’re not in a good position should something go wrong.
Apollonius roars for the breaching team to hurry up and clear the bulkhead blocking us in. I search for some obvious salvation—a hatch opening, a plasma charge eating through the ceiling. Some sign of Sevro. Nothing. It’s enemies all the way to the bulkhead in front, enemies all the way to the curve of the hall behind. The corridors were designed to trap invaders. I’d know because I studied this place with Sevro for years. You don’t want to be trapped in a hall like this.
The breaching charges detonate against the bulkhead at the fore but fail to penetrate fully.
We’re not going to clear the hallway before the Carthii hit us.
There’s only one choice: hit the boarders in the teeth hard as possible.
Apollonius comes to the same conclusion.
Centurions bark orders and legionnaires grind into position around the breaches. The Obsidians’ grip on me tightens. Two more drill marks appear on the corridor’s left bulkhead halfway down the formation. Shit. Recognizing the danger the second and third breaches pose, Apollonius calls his Golds to the front. They open fire on the obstructing bulkhead with their pulseFists until it glows orange. They plunge their razors in like picks and hack holes in the thick metal, but they’re not faster than leechCraft drills.
Apollonius is a good enough commander to know what’s about to happen to his precious personal legion. You push other legions around like blocks, but your own you use as a sacred scalpel, delicate and sharp and fast, to find the arteries of the enemy. His precious scalpel is about to be shoved into a woodchipper along with us peaches.
A great roar comes from the man as he tries once more at the door before abandoning the lost cause and pushing himself to face the nearest breach. “Stack on breaches. Divide by cohort. Rank by heavy shields, triarii, velites. Crows and Peerless stack in pods for melee. Coriolanus, front cohort. Vorkian, rear. You have the prisoners. I have center.”
Phalanxes form before the breaches. A bulwark of energy shields, a hedge of glinting, armor-boring spears backed by a forest of rifles.
The Obsidians drag us through the legionnaires to the rear. They’re still manhandling us back around the curve of the hall when we pass the mouth of the last breach. I see down its molten throat all the way to the Carthii leechCraft where metal figures gather behind a glowing shield. A lone berserker, released before the rest, sprints down the throat toward us. In the heat-warped air, he is a mirage of terror. Naked, heavily tattooed with the eel-green ink of the Carthii gladiatorial clans, and raving mad. Vorkian stops, aims her rifle into the breach’s throat, and fires a single, perfect shot. It takes the Obsidian between the eyes. He falls short of the breach.
Such is the heat, he catches fire.
A sacrifice to the gods of death. Then the shield at the Carthii leechCraft winks out and the metal stacked behind it begins to move. RamLads, delirious with pharmaceutical courage, armored thick as rhinoceroses, rush down the throat with an oceanic roar. Vorkian and our Obsidian handlers drag us on as the Grays open fire.
I twist to see a ramLad stumble out the mouth of a breach into the hall. Bent forward like a golem trudging into a storm, he soaks up the fire, takes one last step, and collapses in a rent heap. In his wake come berserkers. This wave of genetically enhanced killing machines crashes upon the wall of stony Gray veterans and turns to red foam. The second wave breaks from torpedo rounds that turn them to human pyres. But their momentum, added with that of the unnatural delirium in the beasts behind them and the Carthii tolerance for high casualties, creates a surge of mass that cannot be denied.
Expensive Obsidian slaveknights in cerulean armor, heavy shields, and short spears form the third wave. Trampling over the corpses of their spent brethren, they crush into the first Grays and hack at the shield line as the spears of the second line impale them. With a cry nearly inaudible amongst the explosions and shrieking, Apollonius and his heavy Gold infantry charge into the Obsidian flanks at each breach. The corridor fills with smoke and noise and death.
My eardrums ache. Bullets hiss. Shrapnel pings off Vorkian’s helmet, slashes across the bridge of my nose, and peppers the armor of the Obsidian handler behind me. Cassius ducks. Down the hall, the battle takes on the sound of hundreds of spoons caught in an industrial fan. Something slams into the wall next to my head and ricochets, taking along a chunk of my scalp before embedding itself in the eyehole of one of my Obsidian handlers. His grip slackens. Before the second Obsidian sees his fellow teeter down, I slam my shoulder into the warrior. Off balance, he stumbles into the smoke.
I crouch, coughing, eyes burning. I can’t see Cassius. I can’t see anything but indistinct shapes and flashes through thick smoke. I go lower to find clear air for my lungs. A hand grazes my head and, finding no hair to grab, slides off. The dilation collar tightens. I can’t breathe. Blood sluices down my neck as the collar cuts into my skin. An Obsidian body lies on the ground nearby. I crawl to it and grope behind my back for his boot knife. I find the blade at the price of a few cut fingers. Fumbling, choking, I saw at the dilation bindings on my wrists until they come apart. My hands are free. Wheezing, I cut through my collar and suck down air.
Nauseated, vision swimming, I stay as low as I can in the smoke and search for Cassius. I see two figures staggering in an embrace, like lovers. One is Cassius. The other Vorkian. He’s headbutting her repeatedly. Unfortunately for him, she wears a helmet, and all Cassius does is knock himself out. He falls down into the smoke, but he bought us enough time. Vorkian reaches for the dilation-collar controller on the ground and I lunge up through the smoke to bury the Obsidian knife under her left armpit. I slam her against the wall and kick the controller away. I grab at her waist and come away with Bad Lass and Cassius’s razor before she disappears in the smoke and press of bodies.
