Golden Son (50 page)

The girl presses a button on the globe.

And that’s when we begin to die.

PART IV

RUIN

Rise so high, in mud you lie
.

—KARNUS AU BELLONA

40

MUD

The EMP detonates. Sounds like a giant child gasping when pricked by a needle. Our electronics die.

Our gravBoots sputter. StarShell synapses fail, causing the massive metal suits to be gripped by gravity. We plummet down. Most fall into the mud of the riverbank. I splash into the water. Sinking.

Sinking. Ears popping. Down and down till I lodge into the mud of the river bottom. Hitting hard.

Legs buckling under the weight of my starShell. Fall on my back. Can’t see my men. Only saw shapes moving over the surface of the water as I fell. Now too deep to see anything except how the river darkens with blood. Occasional lightning flashes silhouette fastsinking bodies.

I can’t move. My starShell is too heavy. I lie like a turtle, half stuck in mud at the bottom of the river. Confused. Fear rides in me. It happened so fast. Can’t even look to my left or my right to see who is with me. My com is dead. If it weren’t, I’d probably hear screams, curses.

This starShell brought me from space to land. A life raft, a personal castle in the middle of a war.

Now it’s my coffin.

Heart thudding. Want to scream.

Hyperventilating. Terror traps itself in my chest, tensing me, making me swallow the air, eating it as though it’ll give me power to move. Slow down. Slow down. Think.
Think
. Two bodies sink near me. Heavy in their armor, they fall fast to join the others on the bottom. No grace in death, spilling blood as they go. When the killers finish with those stuck in the mud of the riverbank, they’ll come for us down here. But they don’t need to. I slow my breathing. Limited oxygen left in the suit.

Recycler offline.

Cassius knew my plan. It had to have been him. Or was I betrayed?

I told no one but the Sons and Sevro and Mustang. None of them could have ratted. He just knew.

That bloody bastard. If I could surrender, I would. I’d save the lives of those with me. But I don’t have a com.

I jerk my body around, trying to push myself off my back. But I’m too lodged in the mud, and my

suit is more than one ton of metal. I can’t shed the weight. Can’t get the starShell off. I need the electronics for that. I push up with my arms. Nothing. The mud swallows me. Mustang got away. I think. I hope. Will she know we’re down here?

I look for Sevro, for Ragnar, my Howlers. Dark shapes around me. I’m dizzy. Slow the bloodydamn breathing. Slow.
Think
. They won’t even bother coming to kill me. I’ll die at the bottom of the river, staring up at the surface as one by one, my friends fall down to join me. So alone. Sevro.

Ragnar. Pebble. Weed. Clown. They’re dead. Dying. Watching the same thing as me. Or maybe they’re on the bank as the Bellona walk among the paralyzed suits of armor, killing at will. I want to cry at my impotence.

Stop
. Do something. Move.

“Rise so high, in mud you lie.”
It echoes in memory.

This is the third time they’ve left me in the muck and mire to die. I grit my teeth till I feel enamel crumble off as I put all my strength into moving my right arm. Slowly, so slowly, it makes an exodus from the sucking pressure of the mud. But it is all that’s freed. I won’t be able to get off my back. I’m too sunken in. Too heavy in the shell. Then I see it. When the EMP blast detonated, it shut down the electrical synapses, which means the suit froze, but the razor still works, and there it is like a white python around my arm.

It will save your life for the price of a limb
. Those are the words they told me when they put the slingBlade in my hand as a boy. Salvation is sacrifice. The razor ’s impulse is chemical. Its switch will respond to me. It will straighten. But around my arm … I have to be fast.

Taking a breath, I close my eyes, feeling the toggle against my suit’s thumb. I have to be faster than a licking flame. Faster than a pitviper. I flick the switch on.

The razor tightens as it straightens, slicing through metal like a knife through pudding.

Flick the switch off. It stops as it bites through muscle, but not through bone. I yelp at the terrible pain in my forearm. Water rushes through the shredded arm to cool the burning wound.

Then I feel terror. Water. I just opened my suit to water. Idiot. Soon it’ll fill. I can already feel it slithering up my neck on the inside. In minutes, two or three, I’ll drown. I work my bloody forearm arm free of the shredded metal carapace and slide the slack razor off so it floats like a tentacle. Then I activate it again. It forms into a deadly question mark and I angle it toward the other gauntlet.

My suit’s filled with water in the torso now. The air is thin. Each breath brings more stars behind my eyes. A sensation of lightness as blood seeps from the wounds on my arm. I can survive a long time holding my breath. But I hyperventilated and now I’m sucking in carbon dioxide. But then my other hand is free of the suit gauntlet. Bare and pale in the weird, dark light. Gentle clouds of blood plume from it.

If I were not made a Helldiver, I would die in this riverbed. As it is, I skin off my starShell and the armor beneath. It is my dexterity that saves me. I cannot move my head because of the weight of the helmet. Cannot see where I cut. My skin and the pain it registers serve as my eyes. Inch by inch, I remove myself from the starShell. Inch by inch, I drag the deadly blade along my body. Shedding my blood and the shell into the water. Parting the exoskeleton. I’m like a locust slipping from its dead husk. Very delicately, I remove the helmet, cutting it off at the neck. I hold my breath, and just nick my throat.

A scratch. So close to the jugular.

My legs are the last part of me I free. I sit up, the broken bits of my suit scratching at my skin, and jerk my right leg out of the hewn metal. I’m alive and wounded in the cold, dark river. Helmet off.

Holding my breath as spots bloom across my vision. Now I’m able to see the sunken field of men around me at the bottom of the riverbed. I swim over to the largest one and see Ragnar ’s closed eyes behind his starShell’s faceplate. Tears trickle from them. His lungs are large, but there can’t be much oxygen left in that suit. He can move better than I could, because of his great strength. But no armored man could swim in this water.

I did not think he could cry. Yet now he weeps, silently. Not great, dramatic tears. These are different, calm. And when he opens his eyes, I see something else in him. Some dormant part of his soul ignites. He was dead, had given in to his fate. Yet here I float in shredded black tactical cloth, bloody, looking positively deranged, but free of my shell. I’m his dark hope. I start cutting, even though my own lungs are screaming. I need him. I can’t search for Sevro. There’s no time. And I cannot surface just to be killed on sight.

I operate on him like a proper Carver, till he wrenches himself free of his exoskeleton. Others have seen what we’re doing. But we cannot help them yet. They must hold on.

Ragnar and I kick our way through the rough current toward the surface. Lungs starving. Ragnar ’s pale, tattooed body moves through the water with a grace I can’t match. I didn’t realize Obsidians were such swimmers. Makes sense for one born near the ice floes.

We’re near the surface when my mind loses to my body. Ten feet from the surface, I inhale water.

Darkness.

Feel mud between my fingers. Something moves through my chest. Water. I vomit it, hack it out into a rough hand clutched close to my mouth, quieting me. I keep puking through the fingers. Then feel an explosion of pleasure as I gasp finally for air. Beautiful air. Hand still covering my mouth.

And for a moment, there is nothing. Just the pure orgasm of life into my lungs. The full rush of oxygen on empty, aching organs. And suddenly the sound of distant warfare swells. And the groans of men. We’re in a field of corpses. The wall towers high overhead. The river runs fast at our feet. It’s been minutes since the EMP, but it seems the day has passed and left us behind.

Ragnar dragged me into the mud between two dead Obsidians. Two Bellona Golds, six Obsidians,

and six Grays walk along the dark riverbank, finishing those who lie helpless. We’re lucky the rest have quit the slaughter to return to the fight at the wall. Cassius will have led them away. That means he didn’t know it was me here, but he was well aware of the hole made by the Sons, at least. For me, he would have stayed. Lucky I didn’t carry the banner Clown and Weed made for me. Double lucky I didn’t let them wear their wolfcloaks.

This mud is a graveyard. My soldiers are half buried. Some try to rise in the heavy, dead armor, only to slip back into the mud or be kicked down by the Golds and mercilessly butchered. Most lie quiet. A field of armored beetles leaking red.

The Grays joke to one another as they go methodically about their task, taking their time on an Obsidian stuck on his back, using forcePikes to pierce the thick starShell and pin him to the ground like boys tormenting a stranded crab. They finish him eventually with armorboring bullets called diggers from their rifles.

Ragnar gestures to the mud. Half naked, he and I cake ourselves in the dark, heavy stuff. It cools the tracework lacerations on my body and covers the tattoos on his. I gesture to one of the Gold helmets and mime our survivors’ oxygen running out. Ragnar nods. I pull a razor from the body of a dead Gold. I can’t tell who. And hand it to Ragnar. It’s only ever seen Gold hands. No Praetorian, no Obsidian, not even one of those with badges from the Sovereign herself, has touched this weapon since the Dark Revolt. To touch it means death by starvation. No possibility of reaching Valhalla.

Only hunger and cold and the end. But our enemies will have pulseShields. No other weapon will do.

Ragnar drops it like it’s made of fire. I shove it back into his trembling hands.

“They aren’t gods.”

Like shadows pulled from the Styx, we slide forward through the graveyard. Our enemies are not

in their fighting bands. Easy targets. I scuttle forward on all fours like some horrible spider, hardly rising from the ground to kill two Obsidians before they even turn. Ragnar snaps another ’s neck and cleaves a second in half, the recoilPlate peeling away. Rising from my hands, I sprint at the tallest of the Obsidians, jump and bury my blade into his body. I land poorly on my wounded arm. I don’t even feel the pain. Too much adrenaline. I see the squad of Grays turning, so I fall with the Obsidian’s body and roll into the mud, lying in shadow and filth among the other corpses. Their recoilRifles and pulse weapons would rip me to ribbons without my shield and armor. Ragnar ’s disappeared too. I don’t know where.

Time ticks by. How much oxygen could they have left? The Grays hunting us shout something about ghostCloaks. The remaining Obsidian groups with the two Golds. The Grays go through the bodies, finishing my remaining men to flush Ragnar and me out for the Golds and Obsidian. Lea died like this, down in the mud. I won’t. Not again.

I rise, not with a scream, not with a howl. Silently. Let the Grays try to see me coming. I am fast.

And I’m nearly on them when they open fire. I rip toward them, dodging, weaving, like a loosed balloon. No beauty to my movement. Just frantic terror. I cannot see the bullets. Only feel their closeness. Sense the heat of them ripping past me. Feel the punch as I’m hit in the bicep. Shock through my body. The skin tears as the bullet goes through flesh, tendon, muscle, then out the other side, knicking bone. I grunt. And then I’m upon them, and they make no noise at all.