Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising Trilogy (50 page)

“They’re for security.”

“But the rest of it is a lie?”

“Yes.”

“So you didn’t, in fact, come to my home with enough nuclear weapons to make our moons glass?”

“We did not,” Roque says. “The only warheads we have aboard are for ship-to-ship combat. Five

megaton yield, max. Romulus, on my honor…”

“The same honor you had when you betrayed your friend…” Romulus gestures to me. “When you

betrayed honorable, Lorn. My ally, Augustus. My father, Revus. That honor by which you watched as

my daughter ’s head was stomped in by a sociopathic matricide who takes orders from a sociopathic

patricide?”

“Romulus…”

“No, Imperator Fabii. I do not believe you deserve the intimacy of using my given name any longer. You call Darrow a savage, a liar. But he came here wearing his heart on his sleeve. You came with the lies. Hiding behind manners and breeding…”

“ArchGovernor Raa, you must listen. There’s explanation if you will just…”

“Enough,” Romulus screams. Surging to his feet and slamming his large hand on the table.

“Enough hypocrisy. Enough schemes. Enough lies you sniveling Core sycophant.” He trembles finally with the rage. “If you were not my guest, I would hurl my glove at you and cut your manhood away in the Bleeding Place. Your lost generation has forgotten what it means to be Gold. You have forsaken your heritage. Suckling at the tit of power, and why? For what? Those wings on your shoulders?
Imperator.
” He scoffs at the word. “You whelp. I pity a world where you decide if a man like Lorn au Arcos lives or dies. Did your parents never teach you?” They did not. Roque was raised by tutors, by books. “What is pride without honor? What is honor without truth? Honor is not what

you say. It is not what you read.” Romulus thumps his chest. “Honor is what you do.”

“Then do not do this….” Roque says.

“Your master did this,” Romulus replies indifferently. “If she could not make us bow, she would make us burn. Again.”

Mustang tries and fails to keep the smile from her face as Roque watches the Moon Lords slip through his fingers. A darkness enters his cultured voice. One which leaves my heart in tatters. To think that voice once defended me. Now he guards something far less loving. A Society that cares nothing for him.

I always wondered why Fitchner selected Roque for House Mars. Until his betrayal I had known him to be only the most gentle soul. But now the Imperator shows his wrath.

“ArchGovernor Raa, listen to me carefully,” he says. “You are mistaken in believing we came here

with intent to destroy you. We came to preserve the Society. Don’t give in to Darrow’s manipulation.

You are better than that. Accept the Sovereign’s terms, and we may have peace for another thousand years.
But
if you choose this path, if you renege on our armistice, there will be no quarter. Your fleet is ragged. Darrow’s, wherever it hides, can be nothing more than a coalition of deserters in borrowed vessels.

“But we are the Sword Armada. We are the iron hand of the Legion and the fury of the Society. Our

ships will darken the lights of your worlds. You know what I can do. You do not have a commander to

match me. And when your ships burn, the knights of the Core will pour into your cities at the head flying columns and fill the air with ash enough to choke your children.

“If you betray your Color, the Compact, the Society—which is what this will be—Ilium will burn. I

will acquaint you with ruin. I will hunt down every person you have ever known and I will exterminate their seed from the worlds. I will do so with a heavy heart. But I am a Man of Mars. A man of war. So know my wrath will be unending.” He extends a thin hand. The wolf of House Mars’

mouth is open in a silent, hungry howl. “Take my hand in kinship for the sake of your people and the sake of Gold. Or I will use it to build an age of peace upon the ashes of your house.”

Romulus walks around the edge of the table so that he is facing Roque, the younger man’s outstretched hand between them. Romulus draws his razor from where it is coiled on his hip. It rasps into rigid form. A blade etched with visions of Earth and of the Conquering. His family is as old as Mustang’s, as old as Octavia’s. He uses that blade to slice open his hand and suck the scarlet blood from the wound before drawing up and spitting it into Roque’s face.

“This is a bloodfeud. If ever again we meet, you are mine or I am yours, Fabii. If ever again we

draw breath in the same room, one breath shall cease.” It is a formal, cold declaration that requires one thing of Roque. He nods. “Vela, see the Imperator to his shuttle. He has a fleet to prepare for battle.”

“Romulus, you can’t let him leave,” Mustang says. “He’s too dangerous.”

“I agree,” I say, but for another reason. I’d spare Roque from this battle. I do not want his blood on my hands. “Hold him prisoner until the battle is over, then release him unharmed.”

“This is my home,” Romulus says. “This is how we conduct ourselves. I promised him safe passage. He shall have it.”

Roque dabs the blood and spit away with the same napkin he used for the cheesecake and follows

Vela away from the table toward the steps that lead back into the home. He pauses there before turning back to face us. I cannot say if he speaks to me or the Golds gathered but when he recites his last words, I know they are for the ages:

“Brothers, sisters, till the last

Woe that this has come to pass,

By your grave, I shall weep

For it was I who made you sleep.”

Roque bows minutely. “Thank you for the hospitality, ArchGovernor. I will see you shortly.” As Roque leaves the assembly, Romulus instructs Vela to hold him until I am safely off Io.

“Hail my Imperators and Praetors,” he tells one of his lancers. “I want them on holos in twenty minutes. We have a battle to plan. Darrow, if you would like to link in your Praetors…” But my mind is on Roque. I may never see him again. Never have a chance to say so many things which swarm my

chest now. But so too do I know what letting him go could mean for my people.

“Go,” Mustang says, reading my eyes. I rise abruptly, excusing myself and manage to catch Roque

as he finishes tying his boots in the garden. Vela and several others are moving him toward the iron gate.

“Roque.” He hesitates. Something in my voice causing him to turn and watch me approach. “When

did I lose you?” I ask.

“When Quinn died,” he says.

“You planned to kill me even when you thought I was a Gold?”

“Gold. Red. It doesn’t matter. Your spirit is black. Quinn was good. Lea was good. And you used them. You are ruin, Darrow. You drain your friends of life, and leave them spent and wasted in your wake, convincing yourself each death is worth it. Each death brings you closer to justice. But history is littered with men like you. This Society is not without fault, but the hierarchy…this world, it is the best man can afford.”

“And it’s your right to decide that?”

“Yes. It is. But beat me in space, and it will be yours.”

Blood drips from Mustang’s hand.

The voices of children drift through the air.

“My son, my daughter, now that you bleed, you shall know no fear.” A young virgin girl with hair

of white and feet bare on cold metal panels walks through the lines of kneeling giants carrying an iron dagger that drips with Aureate blood. “No defeat.”

Gold armor etched with deeds of their ancestors. The boy’s cloak innocent as snow. “Only victory.”

She slices the already-injured hand of Romulus au Raa, whose eyes are closed, his dragon armor white and smooth as ivory as his other hand holds his eldest son’s hand. The boy is no older than seventeen, only just having won his year at the Ganymede Institute. His eyes are flashing and wild for the day. If only his intrepid young soul knew what waited on the other side of the hour. His older cousin kneels by his side, her hand on his knee. Her brother beside her. The family forming a chain across the bridge. “Your cowardice seeps from you.” Behind the girl, more children walk through the fold, carrying the four standards of Gold—a scepter, a sword, and a scroll crowned with a laurel.

“Your rage burns bright.” She holds up the dripping dagger before Kavax au Telemanus and his youngest daughter Thraxa, a wild haired, freckle-faced, squat girl with her father ’s laugh and Pax’s simple kindness. “Rise, children of Ilium, warriors of Gold, and take with you your Color ’s might.”

Two hundred Gold Praetors and Legates rise. Mustang and Romulus at their head, flanked by the

Telemanuses and House Arcos. Mustang lifts up her hand and smears the blood upon her own face.

Two hundred killers join her, but I do not. I watch from the corner with Sefi as the combined officer corps of my Gold allies honors their Ancestors. Martian Reformers, Rim tyrants, old friends, old enemies clutter the bridge of Mustang’s flagship, the two-hundred-year-old dreadnought
Dejah
Thoris.

“The battle today is to decide the fate of our Society. Whether we live under the rule of a tyrant or whether we carve our own destiny.” Mustang catalogues the list of enemies for the day’s hunt. “Roque au Fabii, Scipia au Falthe, Antonia au Severus-Julii, Cyriana au Tanus.” Thistle. “These are wanted lives.”

I’ve been here before, witnessing this benediction, and I can’t help but feel I will be here again. It has lost none of its luster. None of the grandeur that so sheathes this remarkable people. They go to death not for the Vale, not for love, but for glory. We have never seen a race quite like them, nor will we again. After months surrounded by the Sons of Ares I see these Golds less as demons than falling angels. Precious, flaring so brilliantly across the sky before disappearing beyond the horizon.

But how many more days like this can they afford?

In the halls of our enemies, Roque will be reciting our names, and the names of my friends. He who kills the Reaper will have glory unending, bounty and renown. Young beasts with wide shoulders and angry eyes straight from the halls of the Core’s schools will hunt me. Ready to make their name.

So too will the old Gray legionnaires hunt me. Those who see my rebellion as the great threat against mother Society. Against that union which they have loved and fought for their entire lives.

And Obsidian will seek me, led by masters who promised them Pinks in exchange for my head. They

will hunt my friends. They will say Sevro’s name, and Mustang’s, and Ragnar ’s because they do not yet know he is gone from us. They will hunt the Telemanuses and Victra, Orion, and my Howlers. But they cannot have them. Not today.

Today I take.

I stand looking down at my Gold allies. I am encased in militarized metal. Two point one meters

tall, one hundred and sixty kilograms of death in a pulseArmor suit of blood-red. My slingblade is coiled around my right vambrace just above the wrist. A gravFist on my left hand. Built for collisions in corridors today, not speed. Sefi is just as monstrous as I in her brother ’s armor. Hate in her eyes seeing this host of enemies.

My allies needed to see her. To see me. To know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Reaper is more alive than ever. Many of the Martians fell with me in the Rain. Some look at me with hate.

Others with curiosity. And some—a very few—salute. But from most there’s a contempt that will never be washed away. That’s why I brought Sefi. Absent love, fear will do nicely in a pinch.

Upon hearing news that Roque’s fleet has begun its journey from Europa, I make my farewell to

Romulus and his coterie of Praetors who helped devise our battle plan. Romulus’s handshake is firm.

Respect between us, but no love. In the hangar, I say goodbye to Mustang and the Telemanuses. The

floor vibrates as shuttles ferry the hundreds of Peerless back to their ships. “It seems like we’re always saying farewell,” I say to Kavax after he says his goodbyes to Mustang, lifting her up easy as he might a little doll and kissing her head.

“Farewell? It is not farewell,” he rumbles with a toothy grin. “Win today and it becomes just a long hello. Much life left for the both of us, I think.”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” I say.

“What for?” Kavax asks, confused, as per usual.

“The kindness…” I don’t know how else to say it. “For watching over my friends when I’m not even one of you.”

“One of us?” His ruddy face smirks. “A fool. You speak like a fool. My boy made you one of us.”

He looks across the hangar where Mustang speaks with one of Lorn’s daughters-in-law near a transport. “She makes you one of us.” It’s all I can do to keep the tears from my eyes. “And if we damn all that, I say you’re one of us. So one of us you are.”