Light Bringer - A Red Rising Novel

Informationen zum Autor Pierce Brown Klappentext The legendary Reaper, Darrow, to defend Mars from a bloodthirsty would-be conqueror, begins his long voyage home, an interplanetary adventure where old friends will reunite, new alliances will be forged, and rivals will clash on the battlefield. Leseprobe 1 Darrow Castaway Our sun floats in darkness attended by moons made of trash. Long ago, when the planets were reshaped by mankind, the detritus of their terraforming operations was fused together into moon-­sized spheres by orbital compactors and shoved out toward Sol. Gripped by the gravity of her mass, most of these trash moons have completed their centuries-­long funeral march into the nuclear fires of the sun, but several hundred laggards still remain circling their eventual demise. Tethered to the barren landscape of a forgotten trash moon once catalogued as Marcher-­1632, a shipwrecked corvette named the Archimedes hides in the shadow cast by a waste escarpment a kilometer high. Martian slaves-turned-­soldiers-­turned-­castaways crawl over the ship. Our welding torches flare against the hull. Our space suits are stinking bogs. We are marooned two hundred million kilometers from home, and I stew in sweat, nausea, and discontent. That bloodydamn Bellona. That arrogant Peerless shit. I’m going to break his knee if I ever see him again. It should be him on this hull. I’d tell him to his face, but he took the only relic in the base’s hangar that could still fly and stole off with Aurae, his Pink accomplice, while I slept. He recorded a little message telling me to tend my wounds, and left his mess behind—­his crippled ship—­for us to repair. The bastard. More than a decade separated from Olympia’s airy sepulchres has done little to dim Cassius’s spectacular talent for condescension. Worst of all, in typical Cassius fashion, he’s taking his damn time. Six weeks he’s been gone on a mission to Starhold—­an ecliptic trade post between the orbits of Mercury and Venus—­to secure us the helium we need for the Archimedes. While here I am: either languishing in the old Sons of Ares base that’s hidden in the belly of the trash moon or latched onto the side of his ship like an industrious barnacle welding the days away, knowing time is running out. Hades, it may already have run out. Cut off from communication with the outside world, I have no way of knowing the course of the war I began. No way of knowing if Virginia and Victra have managed to weather the united power of the Golds of the Rim and the Core. No way of knowing if Sefi has come back to the Republic or if Lysander has used my defeat on Mercury as a ladder to the Morning Chair. No way of knowing if the enemy has already burned Mars, my family, my home. I think of Mars and her highland moors and whispering woods . . .  No. Virginia told me to endure. I’ve been imprisoned before. I know I must force away the thoughts of home before they make debris of me. Not for the first time, I try to seek refuge in anger. I want a fight. I need a fight. It’s how I’m made—­to struggle in eternal vain. But instead of a fight, instead of the forward motion that soothes my restless nature, all I get is the monotone hum of generators and the days congealing together, a litany of endless routine. I started this war. Others are finishing it. I must escape. Atalantia must die. Atlas must die. Lysander must die. I picture them each groveling before me, my ears deaf, my hand choking the life from them as blood swells in their eyes. The violent fantasies do nothing to ease my desolation. The anger that once made planets tremble is now toothless. Shorn of my myth by my failure, shorn of my army by my mistakes, shorn of my friends and family by the demands I made on them, I know hate will not return what I have lost or r...

Product details

• Authors: Pierce Brown, Random House Worlds
• Publisher: Del Rey
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 02.05.2023
• EAN: 9780425285978
• ISBN: 978-0-425-28597-8
• No. of pages: 704
• Dimensions: 167 mm x 242 mm x 44 mm
• Series: Red Rising Series
• Subject: Fiction > Science fiction, fantasy