Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising Trilogy (32 page)

Holiday holds his hand. Both of hers not equal to the size of the massive six-fingered paw.

“Do you want them to win?”
Holiday asks.
“Wake up, Ragnar. Wake up.”

He jerks beneath my hands. Chest twitching as his heart kicks. Water bubbles out of his mouth.

Arms scrabbling at the ice in confusion as he coughs for air. He sucks it down. Huge chest heaving as he stares up at the sky. His scarred lips curl back into a mocking smile.
“Not yet, Allmother. Not
yet.”

—

“We’re fucked,” Holiday says as we look over the meager supplies Mustang managed to scavenge from our vessel. We shake together in a ravine, finding momentary respite from the wind. It’s not much. We huddle around the paltry heat of two thermal flares after having humped it across the ice shelf as eighty-kilometer winds shredded us with cold teeth. The storm darkens over the water behind us. Ragnar watches it with wary eyes as the rest of us sort through the supplies. There’s a GPS

transponder, several protein bars, two flashlights, dehydrated food, a thermal stove, and a thermal blanket large enough for one of us. We’ve wrapped it around Holiday, since her suit’s the most compromised. There’s also a flare gun, a resFlesh applicator, and a thumb-sized digital survival guide.

“She’s right,” Mustang says. “We have to get out of here or we’re dead.”

Our boxes of weapons are gone. Our armor and gravBoots and supplies sunken to the bottom of

the sea. All that would have let the Obsidians destroy their Gods. All that would have let us contact our friends in orbit. The satellites are blind. No one is watching. No one except the men who shot us from the sky. The lone blessing is that they crashed as well. We saw their fire deeper in the mountains as we stumbled across the ice shelf. But if they survived, if they have gear, they will hunt us, and all we have to protect ourselves is four razors, a rifle, and a pulseFist with a drained charge. Our sealSkin is sliced and damaged. But dehydration will claim us long before the cold does. Black rock and ice span the horizon. Yet if we eat the ice, our core temperatures will lower and the cold will take us.

“We have to find real shelter.” Mustang blows into her gloved hands, shivering. “Last I saw of the charts in the cockpit, we’re two hundred kilometers from the spires.”

“Might as well be a thousand,” Holiday says gruffly. She chews her cracked bottom lip, still staring at the supplies as if they’ll breed.

Ragnar watches us discuss wearily. He knows this land. He knows we can’t survive here. And though he will not say it, he knows that he will watch us die one by one, and there will not be a thing he can do to stop it. Holiday will die first. Then Mustang. Her sealSkin is torn where the beast bit her and water leaked in. Then I will go, and he will survive. How arrogant must we have sounded, thinking we could descend and free the Obsidians in one night.

“Aren’t nomads here?” Holiday asks Ragnar. “We always heard stories about marooned

legionnaires….”

“They are not stories,”
Ragnar says.
“The clans seldom venture to the ice after autumn has
fled. This is the season of the Eaters.”

“You didn’t mention them,” I say.

“I thought we would fly past their lands. I am sorry.”

“What are Eaters?” Holiday asks. “My Antarctic anthropology ain’t for shit.”

“Eaters of men,”
Ragnar says.
“Shamed castouts from the clans.”

“Bloodyhell.”

“Darrow, there must be a way to contact your men for extraction,” Mustang says, determined to find a way out.

“There isn’t. Asgard’s jamming array makes this whole continent static. The only tech for a thousand kilometers is there. Unless the other ship has something.”

“Who are they?”
Ragnar asks.

“Don’t know. Can’t be the Jackal,” I say. “If he knew who we were then he would have sent his fleet after us, not just one black-ops ship.”

“It’s Cassius,” Mustang says. “I assume he came in a disguised ship, like I did. He’s supposed to be on Luna. It was one of the positives of negotiating here. They get caught going behind my brother ’s back, it’s as bad for them as for me. Worse.”

“How’d he know which ship was ours?” I ask.

Mustang shrugs. “Must have sniffed out the diversion. Maybe he followed us from the Hollows. I

don’t know. He’s not stupid. He did catch you in the Rain as well, going under the wall.”

“Or someone told him,” Holiday says, eying Mustang darkly.

“Why would I tell him when I’m on the gorydamn ship?” Mustang says.

“Well, let’s hope it’s Cassius,” I say. “If it is, then they won’t just hop on gravBoots and fly to Asgard for help, because then they’ll have to explain to the Jackal why they were on Phobos to begin with. How’d it go down, anyway?” I ask. “It looked like a missile signature from the back of our ship.

But we don’t have missiles.”

“The boxes did,”
Ragnar says.
“I fired a sarissa out the back of the cargo bay from a shoulder
launcher.”

“You shot a missile at them while we were falling?” Mustang asks incredulously.

“Yes. And I attempted to gather gravBoots. I failed.”

“I think you did just fine,” Mustang says with a sudden laugh. It infects the rest of us, even Holiday.

Ragnar doesn’t understand the humor. My cheer fades quickly though as Holiday coughs and cinches

her hood tighter.

I watch the black clouds over the sea. “How long till that storm hits, Ragnar?”

“Perhaps two hours. It moves with speed.”

“It’ll get to negative sixty,” Mustang says. “We won’t survive. Not with our gear like this.” The wind howls through our ravine and the bleak mountainside around us.

“Then there’s only one option,” I say. “We sack up and push across the mountains, find the downed

ship. If it is Cassius in there, he’ll have at least a full squad of Thirteenth legion black ops with him.”

“That’s not a good thing,” Mustang says warily. “Those Grays are better trained for winter combat

than we are.”

“Better than you,” Holiday says, pulling back her sealSkin so Mustang can read the Thirteenth legion tattoo on her neck. “Not me.”

“You’re a dragoon?” Mustang asks, unable to hide the surprise.

“Was. Point is: PFR—Praetorian field regulations—mandate survival gear in long-range mission transport enough to last each squad a month in any conditions. They’ll have water, food, heat, and gravBoots.”

“What if they survived the crash?” Mustang says, eying Holiday’s injured leg and our paltry weapons supply.

“Then they will not survive us,”
Ragnar says.

“And we’re better off hitting them when they’re still piecing themselves together,” I say. “We go now, fast as we can, and we might get there before the storm lands. It’s our only chance.”

Ragnar and Holiday join me, the Obsidian gathering the gear as the Gray checks her rifle’s ammunition. But Mustang’s hesitant. There’s something else she hasn’t told us. “What is it?” I demand.

“It’s Cassius,” she says slowly. “I don’t know for certain. What if he’s not alone? What if Aja is with him?”

The storm falls as we climb along a rocky arm of the mountain. Soon we can see nothing beyond our

party. Steel-gray snow gnaws into us. Blotting out the sky, the ice, the mountains inland. We duck our heads, squinting through the sealSkin balaclavas. Boots scrape the ice underfoot. Wind roars loud as a waterfall. I hunch against it, putting one boot after the other, connected with Mustang and Holiday by rope in the Obsidian way so we don’t lose one another in the blizzard. Ragnar scouts ahead. How he finds his way is beyond me.

He returns now, loping over the rocks with ease. He signals for us to follow.

Easier said than done. Our world is small and furious. Mountains lurk in the white. Their hulking

shoulders the only shelter from the wind. We scramble over bitter black rock that slices at our gloves while the wind tries to hurl us down gulches and bottomless crevasses. The exertion keeps us alive.

Neither Holiday nor Mustang slow, and after more than an hour of dreadful travel, Ragnar guides us into a mountain pass and the storm breathes. Beneath us, impaled upon a ridgeline, is the ship that shot us from the sky.

I feel a pang of sympathy for her. Sharklike lines and flared starburst tail indicate she was once a long, sleek racing vessel of the famed Ganymede shipyards. Painted proud and bold in crimson and

silver by loving hands. Now she’s a cracked, blackened corpse impaled upside down on a stark ridgeline. Cassius, or whoever was inside, had a nasty time of it. The rear third of the ship sheaved off half a kilometer downhill from the main body. Both parts look deserted. Holiday scans the wreck with her rifle’s scope. No sign of life or movement outside.

“Something seems off,” Mustang says, crouched beside me. Her father ’s visage watches me from

the razor on her arm.

“The wind is against us,”
Ragnar says.
“I smell nothing.”
His black eyes scan the peaks of the mountains around us, going rock to rock, looking for danger.

“We can’t risk getting pinned down by rifles,” I say, feeling the wind pick up again behind us. “We need to close the distance fastlike. Holiday, you lay cover.” Holiday digs a small trench in the snow and covers herself with the thermal blanket. We cover that with snow so only her rifle’s peeking out.

Then Ragnar slips down the slope to investigate the rear half of the ship as Mustang and I press for the main wreck.

Mustang and I slink low over rocks, covered by the renewed vigor of the storm, unable to see the

ship till we’re within fifteen meters. We close the rest of the distance on our bellies and find a jagged hole in the aft where the back half of the fuselage was shredded by Ragnar ’s missile. Part of me expected a camp of warColors and Golds preparing to hunt us down. Instead, the ship’s an epileptic

corpse, power flickering on and off. Inside, the ship is hollow and cavernous and almost too dark to see when the lights crackle off. Something drips in the darkness as we work our way toward the middle of the craft. I smell the blood before I see it. In the passenger compartment, nearly a dozen Grays lie dead, smashed into the floor above us by the rocks that speared the ship as it landed.

Mustang kneels next to the body of a mangled Gray to examine his clothing.

“Darrow.”
She pulls back his collar and points to a tattoo. The digital ink still moves even though the flesh is dead. Legio XIII. So it is Cassius’s escort. I manipulate the toggle on my razor, moving my thumb in the shape of the new desired design. I press down. The razor slithers in my hand, abandoning its slingBlade look for a shorter, broader blade so I can stab more easily in the cramped environs.

There’s no sign of any life as we move forward, let alone Cassius. Just the wind moaning through

the bones of the vessel. A strange feeling of vertigo walking along the ceiling and looking up at the floor. Seats and belt buckles hanging down like intestines. The ship convulses back to life, illuminating a sea of broken datapads and dishes and gum packages underfoot. Sewage leaks from a

crack in the metal wall. The ship dies again. Mustang taps my arm and points out a shattered bulkhead window to what looks like drag marks in the snow. Smeared blood black in the dim light. She signs to me. Bear? I nod. A razorback must have found the wreckage and begun feasting on the corpses of the diplomatic mission. I shudder, thinking of noble Cassius suffering that fate.

A grisly sucking sound makes its way to us from farther on in the ship. We press forward, feeling

the dread of the scene before we enter the forward passenger cabin. The Institute taught us the sound of teeth on raw meat. But still, this is a horrifying sight, even for me. Golds hang upside down from the ceiling, imprisoned in their crash webbing, legs pinned by bent paneling. Beneath them hunch five nightmares. Their fur is grim and matted, once white but now clumped with dried blood and filth.

They gnaw on the bodies of the dead. Their heads are those of massive bears. But the eyes that peer through the eye sockets of those heads are black and cold with intelligence. Standing not on four legs but two, the largest of the pack turns toward us. The ship lights throb back on. Pale muscled arms, slick with seal grease to ward off the cold, dark with blood from skinning the dead Golds, move from under the bear pelts.

The Obsidian is taller than I am. A crooked iron blade sewn into his hand. Human bones strung together with dried tendon as a breastplate. Hot breath billows from under the snout of the ursine skull he wears as a helmet. Slow and measured, the deep ululation of an evil war chant blossoms from between his blackened teeth. They’ve seen our eyes and one screams something unintelligible.