Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising Trilogy (16 page)

“The bloodyhell is this?” Narol asks, eying the cockroaches and the remains of the snake and the

bottles. The Howlers look at the ludicrousness of one another awkwardly.

“We’re performing a secret occult ritual,” Sevro says. “And you are interrupting, subordinate.”

“Right,” Narol says, nodding, a little disturbed. “Sorry, sir.”

“One of our Pinks stole a datapad from a Bonerider in Agea,” Dancer says to Sevro, not amused by

the display. “We found out who he is.”

“No shit?” Sevro says. “Was I right?”

“Who?” I ask, drunkenly. “Who are you talking about?”

“The Jackal’s silent partner,” Dancer says. “It’s Quicksilver. You were right, Sevro. Our agents say he’s at his corporate headquarters on Phobos, but he won’t be for long. He’s bound for Luna in two days. We won’t be able to touch him there.”

“So Operation Black Market is a go,” Sevro says.

“It’s a go,” Dancer admits reluctantly.

Sevro pumps his fist in the air. “Hell, yeah. You heard the man, Howlers. Get scrubbed. Get sober.

Get fed. We’ve got a Silver to kidnap and an economy to crash.” He looks at me with a wild grin on his face. “It’s gonna be a hell of a day. A hell of a day.”

P
hobos
means fear. In myth, he was the offspring of Aphrodite and Ares, the child of love and war.

It’s a fitting name for the larger of Mars’s moons.

Formed long before the age of man, when a meteorite struck father Mars and flung debris into orbit, the oblong moon floated like a cast-off corpse, dead and abandoned for a billion years. Now it is the Hive teeming with the parasitic life that pumps blood into the veins of the Gold empire. Swarms of tiny, fat-bodied cargo ships rise from Mars’s surface to funnel into the two huge gray docks that encircle the moon. There, they transfer the bounty of Mars to the kilometer-long cosmosHaulers that will bear the treasure along the great Julii-Agos trade routes to the Rim or, more likely, to the Core, where hungry Luna waits to be fed.

The barren rock of Phobos has been carved hollow by man and wreathed with metal. With a radius

of only twelve kilometers at its widest, the moon is ringed by two huge dockyards, which run perpendicular to each other. They’re dark metal with white glyphs and blinking red lights for docking ships. They slither with the movement of magnetic trams and cargo vessels. Beneath the dockyards,

and at times rising around them in the form of spiked towers, is the Hive—a jigsaw city formed not by neoclassical Gold ideals, but by raw economics without the confines of gravity. Six centuries’

worth of buildings perforate Phobos. It is the largest pincushion man has ever built. And the disparity of wealth between the inhabitants of the Needles, the tips of the buildings, and the Hollow inside the moon’s rock, borders on hilarious.

“Looks larger when you’re not on the bridge of a torchShip,” Victra drawls from behind me.

“Being disenfranchised is so damn tedious.”

I feel her pain. The last time I saw Phobos was before the Lion’s Rain. Then I had an armada at my back, Mustang and the Jackal at my side, and thousands of Peerless Scarred at my command. Enough

firepower to make a planet tremble. Now I’m skulking in the shadows in a rickety cargo hauler so old it doesn’t even have an artificial gravity generator, accompanied only by Victra, a crew of three Sons gas haulers, and a small team of Howlers in the cargo bay. And this time I’m taking orders, not giving them. My tongue plays over the suicide tooth they put in my back right molar after the Howler initiation. All the Howlers have them now. Better than being taken alive, Sevro said. I have to agree with him. Still. Feels strange.

In the aftermath of my escape, the Jackal initiated an immediate moratorium on all flights leaving Mars for orbit. He suspected the Sons would make a desperate bid to get me off planet. Fortunately, Sevro isn’t a fool. If he had been, I’d likely be in the Jackal’s hands. Ultimately, not even the ArchGovernor of Mars could ground all commerce for long, and so his moratorium was short-lived.

But the shock waves it sent through the market were staggering. Billions of credits lost every minute

the helium-3 did not flow. Sevro found it rather inspiring.

“How much of it does Quicksilver own?” I ask.

Victra pulls herself beside me in the null gravity. Her jagged hair floats around her head like a white crown. It’s been bleached and her eyes have been blackened with contacts. Easier for Obsidians to move about the rougher ends of the Moon than it would be without the disguise, and being one of the largest Howlers, she hardly could pass for any other Color.

“Hard to guess,” she says. “Silver ownership is a tricky thing, in the end. The man has so many dummy corporations and off-grid bank accounts I doubt even the Sovereign knows how large his portfolio is.”

“Or who is in it. If the rumors of him owning Golds are true…”

“They are.” Victra shrugs, which tips her backward. “He’s got his fingers everywhere. One of the

only men too rich to kill, according to Mother.”

“Is he richer than she was? Than you are?”

“Were,” she corrects, shakes her head. “He knew better than that.” There’s a pause. “But maybe.”

My eyes seek the Silver winged-heel icon that is stamped on the greatest of Phobos’s towers, a three-kilometer-long double helix of steel and glass tipped with a silver crescent. How many Gold eyes look on it with jealousy? How many more must he own or bribe to protect him from all the rest?

Perhaps just one. Crucial to the Jackal’s rise was his silent partner. A man who helped him secretly gain control of the media and telecommunications industries. For the longest time I thought that partner was Victra or her mother and he closed the loop in the garden. But it seems the Jackal’s greatest ally is alive and prospering. For now.

“Thirty million people,” I whisper. “Incredible.”

I can feel her eyes on me. “You don’t agree with Sevro’s plan, do you?”

My thumb picks at a wad of pink gum stuck to the rusted bulkhead. Kidnapping Quicksilver will get

us intel and access to vast weapons factories, but Sevro’s play against the economy is more concerning. “Sevro kept the Sons alive. I didn’t. So I’ll follow his lead.”

“Mhm.” She eyes me skeptically. “I wonder when you started believing grit and vision were the same thing.”

“Oy, shitheads”
—Sevro squawks over the com unit in my ear—
“if you’re done sightseeing or
humping or whatever the hell you’re doin’, it’s time to tuck in.”

—

Half an hour later, Victra and I huddle together with the Howlers in one of the helium-3 containers stacked in the back of our transport. We can feel the ship reverberate beyond the container as it links its magnetic coupling to the docks’ ringed surface. Beyond the ship’s hull, Oranges will be floating in mechanized suits, waiting to steer the weightless cargo containers onto magnetic trams that will in turn take them to the cosmosHaulers awaiting the journey to Jupiter. There they will resupply Roque’s fleet in his war effort against Mustang and the Moon Lords.

But before the containers are transported, Copper and Gray inspectors will come to examine them.

They’ll be bribed by our Blues into counting forty-nine containers instead of fifty. Then an Orange bribed by our contact will lose the container we’re in, a common practice for the smuggling of illegal drugs or untaxed goods. He’ll deposit it in a lower-level berth for machine parts, whereupon our Sons contact will meet us and escort us to our safe house. At least, that’s the plan. But for now we wait.

Eventually gravity returns, signaling we’re in the hangar. Our container settles on the floor with a thud. We steady ourselves against helium-3 drums. Voices drift beyond the metal walls of the container. The hauler beeps as it decouples from us and returns out the pulseField to space. Then silence. I don’t like it. My hand twists around the leather grip of my razor inside my jacket sleeve. I take a step forward toward the door. Victra follows. Sevro grabs my shoulder. “We wait for the contact.”

“We don’t even know the man,” I say.

“Dancer vouched for him.” He snaps his fingers at me to return to my place. “We wait.”

I notice the others listening, so I nod and shut my mouth. It’s ten minutes later that we hear a solitary pair of feet click against the deck outside. The lock thuds back on the container doors, and dim light seeps in as they part to reveal a clean-cut, goateed Red with a toothpick in his mouth. Half a head shorter than Sevro, he clicks his eyes over each of us in turn. One eyebrow climbing upward when he sees Ragnar. The other follows when he looks down the muzzle of Sevro’s scorcher.

Somehow he doesn’t step back. Man’s got a spine in him.

“What can never die?” Sevro growls in his best Obsidian accent.

“The fungus under Ares’s sack.” The man smiles and glances over his shoulder. “Mind lowerin’ the

nasty? We gotta move, now. Borrowed this dock from the Syndicate. ’Cept they don’t really know about it, so unless you wanna tangle with some professional uglies, we gotta box the jabber and waddle on.” He claps his hands. “ ‘Now’ means now.”

—

Our contact goes by the name of Rollo. Stringy and wry, with sparkling, bright eyes and an easy way with the women, even though he brings up his wife, the most beautiful woman who has apparently ever walked the surface of Mars, at least twice a minute. He also hasn’t seen her in eight years. He’s spent that time on the Hive as a welder on the space towers. Not technically a slave like the Reds in the mines, he and his are contract labor. Wage slaves who work fourteen-hour days, six days a week, suspended between the megalithic towers that puncture the Hive, welding metal and praying they never suffer a workplace injury. Get an injury, you can’t earn. Can’t earn, you don’t eat.

“Mighty full of himself,” I overhear Sevro saying under his breath to Victra in the middle of the

pack as Rollo leads on.

“I rather like his goatee,” Victra says.

“The Blues call this place the Hive,” Rollo’s saying as we head toward a graffiti-smeared tram in a derelict maintenance level. Smells like grease, rust, and old piss. Homeless vagrants festoon the floors of the shadowy metal halls. Twitching bundles of blankets and rags that Rollo sidesteps without looking, though his hand never leaves the worn plastic hilt of his scorcher. “Might be to them. They got schools, homes here. Little airhead communes, sects, to be technic, where they learn to fly and sync up with the computers. But let me learn you what this place really is: just a grinder. Men come in.

Towers go up.” He nods his head at the ground. “Meat goes out.”

The only signs of life from the vagrants on the floor are little gouts of breath that plume up from their lumpy rags like steam from the cracks in a lava field. I shiver beneath my gray jacket and adjust the bag of gear over my shoulder. It’s freezing on this level. Old insulation, probably. Pebble blows a cloud of steam through her nostrils as she pushes one of our gear carts, looking sadly left and right at the vagrants. Less empathetic, Victra guides the cart from the front, nudging a vagrant out of the way with her boot. The man hisses and looks up at her, and up, and up, till he sees all 2.1 meters of annoyed killer. He skitters to the side, breathing through his teeth. Neither Ragnar nor Rollo seems to

notice the cold.

Sons of Ares wait for us on the run-down tram platform and inside the tram itself. Most are Red,

but there’s a good amount of Oranges and a Green and Blue in the mix. They cradle a motley collection of old scorchers and strafe the other hallways that lead to the platform with edgy eyes that can’t help but jump our direction and wonder just who the hell we are. I’m thankful more than ever for the Obsidian contacts and prosthetics.

“Expecting trouble?” Sevro asks, eying the weapons in the Sons’ hands.

“Grays been sweeping down here last couple months. Not hollow-ass tinpots from the local precinct, but knotty bastards. Legionnaires. Even some Thirteenth mixed in with Tenth and Fifth.” He lowers his voice. “We had a nasty month, where they shred us up real bloodydamn bad. Took our headquarters in the Hollows, stuck Syndicate toughs on us too. Paid to hunt their own. Most of us had to go to ground, hiding in secondary safe houses. Main body of Sons have been helping the Red rebels on the station, obviously, but our special ops hasn’t flexed muscle till today. We didn’t wanna take chances. Ya know? Ares said you lot got important business….”

“Ares is wise,” Sevro says dismissively.