Light Bringer: A Red Rising Novel, page 19
part #6 of The Red Rising Saga Series
“What does Atalantia know?” I ask. “If you loved my mother and father like you always say you do, you’ll tell me. What were you doing on Mercury?”
“I told you to relax.” Atlas looks at me the way I’ve seen beastmasters look at hunting dogs that don’t quite turn out. He shoves the golden bowl from my party into my lap. It is full. “You can carry Tharsus.”
* * *
—
A few dozen antelope drink from a small pond. A brilliant yellow streak sprints at them from the cover of nearby brush, and the antelopes bolt. The herd draws dusty trails eastward over the plains, where two more cheetana emerge from the tall grass and herd them north. Then a lithe, dark-skinned woman bounds down the slope, leaving plumes of dust behind her. She draws her bow on the run and seems to fire two shots at once. Both arrows catch a cheetana just as it turns and send it sprawling down to the dry earth.
Sensing they are now the prey, the other two cheetana abandon their hunt and sprint west. It won’t matter. Atalantia sets off in pursuit. Her huntmaster, a grizzled Gray with keen falcon-mod eyes, spits and revs his gravBike.
Black and white tents waver atop a nearby plateau, a source of laughter and music. Atalantia invited her closest friends and allies to enjoy the hunt before the summit. Instead of lounging in the tents with them, I start up my own bike, apply my ointment, and fall in with the procession of supplicants to follow the Dictator’s hunt west.
Two hours later, I’m sweating like a pig under the North African sun while my betrothed guts the last of her three kills. The Mediterranean might lie just sixty kilometers north, but none of its cool breeze reaches the rocky North African plains. The heat is punishing. The golden bowl is growing hot in the sun and heavy in my hands. Tharsus’s head has become very popular with the flies. I’m the last supplicant to have his audience.
After years in the Belt, Earth’s gravity is a boot on my being. Atalantia knows it. My shoulders ache, and my blood feels thick as mud. Seemingly unaffected, Atlas squints up at the sky from his place in the shade. At first I think the rangy man is inspecting the siege of Luna in the obscure distance. But no, he’s admiring the glint of the Twins of South Pacifica—two elephantine orbital railguns that the Republic scuttled when Diomedes seized them months ago. He feels me watching him and his eyes shift lower to three small gray octagons floating in the blue. WarBastions descending from orbit. They’ll be bound for Asia, and then on to join the siege of stubborn South Pacifica. These craft are stamped with Bellona eagles.
I look back at the railguns, and wonder why Atlas shifted his eyes.
The cheetana’s double-jointed legs twitch as Atalantia skins it. Trained by her mother to hunt, Atalantia is at home field dressing her kill. She usually prefers hunting in their estates in the Rockies, but those mountains have yet to be pacified. Atalantia tugs off the last of the cheetana’s fur and tosses it to a lancer, a surly young Falthe, before opening its gut to heap organs onto the dirt.
Atalantia wears a traditional Carthaginian hunting tunic of turquoise linen and skipper boots. Her godwood bow and golden quiver hang from a knot on the nearby acacia tree, where a male Pink nymphyte cradles a tray of refreshments in his muscular arms.
“The head,” Atalantia says.
I bring the bowl forward and open it. She gives Tharsus a glance and makes a small sound of a pleasure before giving it to her houndmaster. “For the dogs.”
One of her lancers takes the bowl from me and pours water in it.
“I’ll make Africa pristine again,” Atalantia says and peers out over the plains and wipes sweat from her brow. “Humans can pollute the other continents. My engineers say it will take two years to remove all the rubble cities. Three to prune the populace. Ten to pick up its trash. I’ll make this my home again. Like it was before the disease that is Darrow. New Sparta will become the capital of Earth.”
“Who will serve as ArchGovernor?” I ask.
“Scipio au Falthe, of course,” she says, sparing a smile for the Falthe lancer. Like most of his kin, the son of Scipio looks made for one thing—frontal assaults. “I’ll be busy on Luna.” Ajax’s meeting me on the tarmac suddenly makes sense. He is not happy here.
“Not Ajax?” I probe.
“No.” Her eyes flick to me, dangerous, measuring. “The only forces Ajax controls are the ones I deign to give him. Scipio has seventeen legions, by comparison. After Mercury, I need the muscle. It will take time for my new crop of Grays to mature. I have forty legions back-ordered.”
The numbers are so casual and so elite I feel dazed. I have the Praetorian Guard—just over forty thousand—and two more house legions of fifty each. That’s it.
After angering House Carthii, Atalantia must bring her other allies closer, especially now that the fate of the dockyards is in question. Earth has barely fallen and already its continents have been divided up between Atalantia and her allies like pieces of a cake. With Earth’s populace to replenish her legions, in time her stranglehold on the Core will be insurmountable. I hope Valeria au Carthii is as eager to work with Horatia as she was with me.
“The future for the gens Falthe looks very bright indeed,” I say, wary of the small talk.
“As my favorite Roman strawberry once said, ‘No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.’ ”
“And Ajax? Most would say he’s done more to retake Earth than the Falthe. How is he handling the disappointment?”
“Poorly,” she admits. “His time will come. But could you imagine a man less fit for the duties of a governor? All passion, no tact. He has none of my ability to multitask. None of Atlas’s subtlety and prudence. Or your precocious charm.”
She returns to her work and pivots hard to business. “Tomorrow, due to the debacle on Venus, it is necessary to consolidate our holdings. I plan to announce my intent to invade Luna with an Iron Rain built around the Falthe legions—it’s what they owe me for the restoration of their lands here on Earth and the governor’s chair.”
Restoration of their lands. Half of which they stole when they slaughtered the gens Thorne at my grandmother’s final gala. “When will this invasion commence?”
“Six months from now.”
I laugh, thinking it a jest. It’s not. “That long? What about Mars? If Darrow makes it back…”
She shrugs. “My lads are hunting him. We’ll either kill him in the journey back or hang him on Mars where Nero hanged his Red bitch. I broke his spirit on Mercury. His sun has set.”
From anyone else except Atlas, it would sound like bravado. But this is Atalantia, the only person to have actually beaten Darrow in a fair fight.
The cheetana’s liver flops out of her hands into the dirt and rolls sideways so that it rests against her boot. From nowhere, flies descend to beset the purplish organ. She looks up at me. “You seem eager for a military action. So, I will give you one that’ll make Ajax weep with envy. You will fall on Luna in the vanguard with Scipio and his children, at the head of your Praetorians. You’ll get that auctoritas you’re so desperate to have.”
She’s playing up my rivalry with Ajax on purpose, but that’s not all she’s doing.
“The Rim will be furious with me,” I say.
“Yes, and they’re already angry with me. You and I are to be united in convenient matrimony, eventually. They should be angry at you too. We must stand as one against our rude kin, or they’ll think they can push us around. I thought you’d be pleased.” Atalantia pouts. “The Citadel of Light will belong to Gold again. The home of your ancestors. Your shame will be ended in a glorious Rain.”
“We should be invading Mars,” I say. “That is the logical strategic choice.”
“Strategic,” she mocks. “Oh, tell me more about strategy.”
“If we take Mars, the war is over,” I say. “Is it not?”
“Atlas, educate this puppy.”
“Mars is a Gordian knot,” Atlas explains. “Winning orbit will be difficult and costly. The Ecliptic Guard is good. Well equipped. Well led. Julii and both Telemanuses are top notch astral tacticians. As is Oro, their Navarch. Meanwhile, Phobos is nearly impregnable. Without Phobos, a siege of Mars is impossible, leaving a Rain the only option.
“But even then the planet itself is a logistical nightmare for an invader. Mars has far more land surface area than Mercury, yet it doesn’t sprawl as on Earth. She is compact, well shielded, with limitless energy and resources, and a hostile populace, which makes a Rain difficult and occupation costly. Not to mention, she’s riddled with tunnels which eliminates the prospect of orbital support. I fought in the Rat War. It was my least favorite theater. Ever.” He slips a piece of eel into his mouth, swallows it, seemingly without registering its taste.
“It seems they’re shorn of most of their best Obsidian veterans,” I contend.
“Yes, but when you fight Reds in their own mines…” He shakes his head. “Low estimate is two million casualties.”
“Two million?”
“In the first month, and that’s just the infantry. But if you don’t take the mines, they can wage a guerilla war with a full army, and still have a choke hold on their helium supply. I cannot express the level of difficulty this would present.”
“I did not say it would be easy. I said it should be done,” I reply. “You know how the Rim will react to this news of the invasion of Luna. They’ll know you’re just using them to wear Mars down as you build your strength.”
“I am.” She frowns, genuinely perplexed by me. “Lysander, really, what good are allies if you don’t use them to make you stronger?”
“What good are allies who just leave and carry a bad taste in their mouth home?” I reply.
“Let them bluster. They’re stuck with us and they know it. Time is on our side, Lysander. As Luna cannibalizes itself for want of food, Mars does the same for want of circuits, Blues, nickel, even uranium. All the little things from the Belt and Mercury and Earth that make their fleets run. And I haven’t even lifted a finger yet.”
She lifts a finger, feigning exhaustion with the effort. Her nymphyte swans forward. The man is no older than twenty, and is the picture of youthful Attican beauty. His olive skin, jet black curls, and pugnacious chin were likely designed by Atalantia herself and carved by one of her best. Atalantia receives the Pink with a kiss and, arms still bloody to the elbow, takes a frosted crystal glass full of a dark liquor from his tray.
“Answer me this, my love. The Rim wants a short war. The Rim wants Mars to fall. So why don’t they attack the planet and quit dancing about its perimeter?”
“They can’t,” I say. “Aside from the Dustmaker and a few others, they don’t have enough heavy ships.”
“That’s right. They can’t. Sure, they’re real bastards in asteroid combat and deep space affairs, but when it comes to breaking a planet, it takes tonnage, Newtons, manpower, and a strong stomach—most of your men will die. Why do you think Darrow and I are the only assholes who take planets?
“So the duty of taking Mars would fall to us. More specifically to me. To my armada. To my legions. I love my armada. I fucking love my legions. I want them to have pensions and live like gods into retirement until they exhaust themselves from slagging and drinking. I will not expend them on Mars just so the vultures can rip me apart and then steal the chair those men earned for me.”
She thinks I’m lying in wait for her to exhaust herself, only to steal her chair when games, not battles, are the order of the day. Others are lying in wait, certainly, but I know if I rose that way, my reign would be hollow and crumble soon as someone hit it with an iron fist. She is defensive. Dangerous. I can’t sidestep the conversation any longer.
“And so long as Mars is a threat, no one would dare question your power. Except me,” I say.
She flips a coin to Atlas. “I thought you wouldn’t have the balls to broach that subject.”
“I don’t know what Atlas has told you or what you’ve heard, but—”
“Let’s not dance around it. Atlas, fetch the dog.” Atlas screws closed his canteen and heads for the hound cages. “It’s not that I am allergic to dissent, Lysander. In fact, I depend upon the friction with Horatia, the Reformers, even Lady Bellona at times. I am the first of equals, of peers.” She smirks. “That is, until I am strong enough to drop the pretense and make them all kneel. My problem is when people reward my generosity by sticking a dagger in my back.”
When Atlas returns it’s not with a hound on his leash. Instead, it is a naked old man. My heart sinks. The man is bald and barefoot on the hot dirt and sharp grass. His skinny body sags with age and is mottled with bruises and superficial lacerations. Nausea churns in me as the man lifts his head and looks up at me with strained Orange eyes.
I thought he was safe in the mountains. How did they find him? I feel sick.
“Glirastes,” I whisper and take a step toward my friend. Atlas draws him up short of me, jerking his collar so Glirastes must fall to his knees in the low grass. “What have you done to him?”
Atalantia twitches another finger and a lancer sets down the bowl that contained Tharsus’s head. The blood has mixed with the water the lancer poured in. She snaps her fingers at Glirastes. “Drink, dog.” He drinks, feverish and thirsty.
“You did this to him,” Atalantia says. “You and all your scheming. The entitlement is what’s truly appalling. Did you think I’d just let you walk all over me as long as it was behind my back?”
Grief overcomes me as Glirastes shivers there on his hands and knees. All the vitality and genius and irascibility in the man is gone, replaced by a grotesque desperation to reach me. That desperation makes me almost recoil from him even as I yearn to embrace him and tear my hair out in penance. I had assumed Glirastes was safe on Mercury.
Did they take him right after I left? Was he on the Styx during our journey from Mercury? In a cage while the carver healed my scar? As Atlas and I dined in silence? Why did the Praetorians not protect him?
“You are useful to me, Lysander,” Atalantia says. “You are. A velvet glove for my iron fist. Useful. But not indispensable.
“This autonomy you’ve enjoyed…it was a gift from me. The breath in your lungs right now…a gift from me. I love you. I do. Since you were knee high. But I’m done tolerating your insolence. Trying to make a faction behind my back? You piece of shit.”
She slaps me and is on me again before I can recover. She slaps me again and follows me, slapping me with either hand until I rear back as if to strike her. Then I see why Ajax told me to go to my knees. Calculation waits behind her eyes. If I hit her back, I fall from one category into another. If I show too much spirit, I won’t leave this desert. Not in one piece, not in control of my own mind.
I release my anger and, as I so often have when I’m with Atalantia, channel my agony into a useful fiction. A few months ago Pytha asked if sleeping with Atalantia whenever she visited bothered me; I told her it didn’t, that it sharpened me. I lied. It’s the same lie I perpetually tell myself every time she touches me. I loathe the intimacies I allowed Atalantia, and had to allow her even after knowing her hands were covered in the blood of my parents. I hate her almost as much as I hate myself. I feel unworthy of my house and my dreams. My very skin crawls with shame, my eyes grow watery, my face hot. I let my arm fall to my side.
“Either you think I am stupid, or you want to wound me. Do you want to wound me, Lysander?” She slaps me again. “Do you want to wound me?”
“No,” I whisper.
She searches my eyes. “Then why send Apollonius’s men, you little rat? Why build yourself an army with a man who has sworn to kill me?”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“What? Louder.”
“I’m sorry,” I say and go to my knees. “Forgive me. I was…jealous. Ajax has been gaining one glory after the next. I play governor when others are fighting, dying. When this war is done, all will remember those who fought and those who did not. My reputation is hollow if I’m known for little more than a cavalry charge. I knew you wouldn’t let me in on the glory. So, I thought…if I had the Dockyards of Venus, if I had the Minotaur, I could attack Mars. Gain glory. Respect. I’m sorry.”
Her eyes narrow as she tries to decide if my tears are true. “Are you a Red? Then stand on your feet when you apologize to me.”
I stand, slumped with shame. “I apologize for my duplicity.”
She searches my eyes. She’s a master of the Dancing Mask and the emotional sciences of interrogators, so it is like having an Oracle on my arm. If she sees the hate, if she smells the loathing, if she so much as senses I know she killed my mother and my father, I’ll die right here. I embrace the Mind’s Eye more quickly than I ever have in my life. I feel only what I want to feel. I hold nothing inside but the false truth.
I pass her examination. Her tone softens. “Shhh,” she says, and kisses the pink flesh on my cheek. “Shh.” She embraces me, rubbing my back like a mother. “I know. I understand, dear heart. Better than anyone. It was always Aja and Moira that Octavia and my father saw. You feel unseen. It’s prime. You’ve had your tantrum. I hear you. I see you. I will bathe you in glory beyond your wildest dreams. But I need to know I can rely on you.”
“You can.”
“Can I? I know you value unity. This ongoing flirtation with the Rim. It’s beneath you. It is not the Core and Rim that must be united. It is you and me. We are the future.
“So tomorrow at the summit I will need a demonstration of fidelity. The Two Hundred chafe at my ascendancy. Their jealousy knows no bounds. They will look to you to oppose me. And what will you do?” She lifts my chin. “You will sit amongst my supporters, silent and stoic in your support. If you make a scene, if you contradict me, if you sow doubt, if you so much as frown, I will skin your Master Maker and make you a pair of Glirastes leather boots.” Locusts cackle in the distance. “Now, tell Glirastes you will protect him.”
