I RUSH FIRST TO THE GOLD.
Her body is contorted and twisted inside the confines of her prison. A bent metal chair lies beneath her, having been used to beat her as she hung in the net. Her right hand is a charred, burned mess from the welding torch that sits on a table. Blood seeps there, dripping onto the floor. The smell of burned skin and hair claws into my nostrils, making my eyes water.
She’s dead. She has to be.
“Help us!” a Red woman whispers out of a bloody mouth. “Dominus…”
“Quiet,” I snap, glancing back at the door. Dozens of pairs of eyes stare out at me from behind the cages. Each prisoner pleading with me.
I creep closer to the Gold, and as I reach to touch the net, her eyes flash open in the low light. Goryhell. I almost fall down. She’s alive. Black engine oil has been slathered over her body, along with fouler-smelling things.
“Dominus…” a Brown hisses.
“Salve,” I say to the Gold in a Thessalonican drawl. “I’m here to help. My name is Castor au Janus.” She watches me without speaking, giving no sign that she even understands. “I’m going to help you out, but you have to be quiet and quick. The Ascomanni are still outside. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” she says. Hers is a rich Palatine accent. It startles me. The man was right. She’s from the Luna courts as well. What is she doing all the way out here?
“Stay very still,” I say. I stand beneath the net and slide my razor across the steel cable, cutting it from the ceiling. The girl falls into my arms. I expected her to lash out, but she stays still within the tight mesh. I see now how deeply the tacNet’s cut into her skin. TacNets, or birdcages, are fired from compressed fiber cartridges and designed for police forces to engulf and constrict around a prisoner to harmlessly subdue them. But if you toggle with the contraction restrictions, you can eviscerate a prisoner to death. I set the woman on the ground and cut the wires one by one until she’s able to crawl free. She lies there naked stretching her joints, teeth chattering with the pain.
I realize now that she’s young, maybe even younger than my twenty years. I feel an overwhelming urge to protect her. I cover her body with a plastic tool sheet.
“It is well,” I say. “You’re safe now.” I stand to go help the others.
“Stims,” she manages through her chattering teeth. “Need stims.”
I bend back down and produce a syringe from the dispenser on the right thigh of my EVO suit. It’s one of my last. She snatches it from my hand and stabs it into the bicep of the burned limb. Her body convulses as the drug rushes through her system. She sighs with pleasure. “More,” she demands. I glance at the other prisoners and produce my last two. She shocks me by injecting both at the same time. It’s too much for her body mass unless she’s built up a resistance to them, which inherently means something dangerous. There’s something wrong here.
Filled with a manic energy from the stims, she stumbles to her feet. I spring back to catch her from falling, but she steadies herself using the table.
“We must leave,” I say softly to the girl. “More Ascomanni are coming. We have to be gone before their ships dock. Help me with the others.” Nodding along, she finds her clothing in a pile on the floor near the door. Still covered in oil, she dons the pants and a green jacket, fumbling with the zipper because of the drugs in her system.
“Sander,” Cassius says in my ear as I bend to cut the Red woman from her cage with my razor. “What’s your status?”
“I found the Gold, Regulus.” I patch him to my visual feed.
“Copy.” He pauses, seeing the others. “Lysander…”
“Boy,” the Gold says from behind me. I turn. She’s less than an arm’s length away. “What docking tube are you using?”
“Two-B.”
“Two-B?” She nods more to herself than to me. “I’ll return it to you in four minutes. On my honor.”
“Return what?”
There’s a blur. I don’t even see her strike as the meat of her palm collides with the side of my temple. I stumble, and something, maybe her elbow or knee, slams into my opposite ear and I go down, seeing stars. There’s pressure on my hip, and I hear her footsteps going out the door. She’s four seconds gone before I realize what she took. My razor. The one Cassius gave me on my sixteenth birthday. The one that belonged to Karnus. Its custom Bellona hilt is covered by a plain metal shell, but to Cassius it is priceless. Dazed, I lunge after her into the hallway. My legs go like rubber and I almost fall.
The lowColors shout in fear, terrified that I’m going to abandon them. I lunge back toward their cages, but I don’t have anything to cut with. I can’t use my plasma pistol. The wire is too tight to their bodies. Panic threatens to grip me. I tug on the severed strands of the Red woman’s cage. “Lysander…” Cassius says. The lowColors are clamoring now, rolling around on the floor. “It’s too late.” I pull as hard as I can. The fiberwire of the net slices through my gloves and into my skin. Blood wells against the wire. “Lysander! You have to leave them.”
“No, I can help them….”
I groan as I pull with all my strength at the wire, using my legs as leverage. The wire cuts my fingers to the bone. And it doesn’t even fray. There’s a scream from the lowColors. I wheel around and see an Obsidian at the door. I grab my pistol and fire clumsily. The plasma bolt takes the Obsidian’s head off from the nose up. Another one fills the frame. I fire and he ducks back into the hall.
“Lysander, get out of there!” Cassius says.
A scream wells up inside, but doesn’t escape my lips. I stare down at the wailing lowColors, at the mothers and fathers I could have freed, their cries puncturing my fantasy of heroism and honor. They thrash on the floor screaming at me to save them, but I can’t. The Obsidian death warble echoes down the hall.
Fear has come.
I run like a coward. Back into the hall, firing around the corner blindly. The Obsidian’s chest melts inward as he swings his axe. I bend under it and slam into the far wall, where I use the impact to push off and struggle to my feet. The Obsidian’s chest is burned through to the liver, but he stumbles toward me—a tower of sinewy muscle and scrap armor and the pelts of dead animals. Aja and Cassius both told me never to come within arm’s reach of an Obsidian. They alone can break the reinforced bones of my kind. But there’s no other choice. He swings his axe again, and I charge inside the blow, hitting the inside of his axe arm with the point of my elbow, jamming the point into his brachial artery. His arm goes limp, but the force of the collision knocks me sideways. I use the momentum to flow left, and drive my right knee into the genicular artery on the inside of his leg. He roars in pain and charges straight into me, slamming me against the wall. It’s like the time I was kicked by one of Virginia’s stallions. The breath goes out of me. His right hand grabs my throat and lifts me up against the wall, straining to crush my trachea. Cartilage crackles. I lower my jaw against his grip, but the world’s going black. Bits of meat cling to his beard. The rancid smell of rotting teeth fills my nose. Twisting my body, I pull twice on the trigger of my pistol. The plasma enters under his rib cage at an angle and burns through his heart. His eyes go wide with shock and his body collapses, dead. I land and suck in air just in time to see the third Obsidian raging toward me down the hall.
I fire, miss, and run.
Darkened hallways and empty rooms flash past. I heave myself around them, gripping girders to tighten my turns around corners.
“The Ascomanni corvette’s docked on 1C,” Pytha says. “Dead ahead.”
I skid to a halt. I hear them ahead of me, their tribal voices echoing as they move into the ship through the transfer causeways. Their boots rattle the metal. Each half again my weight, maybe more. They’ll cut off the route to the lift. I turn back the way I came, checking my gun’s display. The energy cartridge has seventeen pulls in it. I feel naked without my razor. But fighting isn’t the answer today.
“Pytha. Hallway to lift 11A is closed. I need you to guide me.”
“Take your next left,” she says without missing a beat. Conscious that Cassius is listening, judging, I take the left. “Two hundred meters.” I dash the distance, slow in my EVO suit. “Maintenance lift is on your second right.”
I reach the lift and press the call button. It doesn’t respond. A little sign’s been affixed to the door itself, apologizing rather crudely for the broken lift by means of a talking phallus. “Lift’s out,” I say, making efforts to measure my breathing.
“Back twenty meters, left, stairs are right there. Twenty down.”
“Back?” I ask, hoping I heard wrong.
“Now!”
I backtrack without running into the Obsidian and find the stairs to begin my descent. Two levels down the stairwell, I pause. I hear them. Their boots beat the stairs two levels above me. Through the metal grating I see their dark shapes, their milk-pale hair. The chant, called the khoomei, groans through the hall. It is a plea to Hel, Obsidian goddess of death, to receive her offerings. I clear the whole next flight of stairs with a single jump, racing down the levels as fast as I can. Behind me, like a dark avalanche, gaining, rumbling, and threatening to swallow me up, rush the raiders. Can’t see their numbers. Can’t hear what Pytha and Cassius are saying. My body is distant and numb and my mind still and focused.
I lose my footing on a rusted stair and nearly fall as the weight of the suit pulls me toward the ground. I stumble up, firing two quick shots with my pistol. I score a lucky hit. Someone grunts and a shadow of blood sprays on the wall as the green energy bolts hit meat, giving me time to reach the docking level.
I race through the metal door and close it behind me, cranking on the hatch as hard as I can to seal it. But the wheel stops and then turns against me as someone stronger on the other side begins to open it. I backpedal and fire three shots into the hatch, turning the metal wheel into red-hot slag and jamming the door. The muscle fibers of my arm tremble from the pistol’s recoil. They’ll be through the door in a moment, but I bought myself precious seconds.
“Hundred meters straight. Fifth left. Straight twenty meters. First right.”
I follow Pytha’s instructions, but as I turn to flee the door, I slam into someone and we both go down, hard. I roll as I fall and aim my pistol back up at my assailant. But it’s not an Obsidian. It’s the Gold girl. She’s limping to her feet, bearing half a dozen new wounds on her oil-slick skin. Her jacket is in tatters. She carries my razor in her hand. It is bloody to the hilt. Clumps of white hair cling to the gore.
How she is standing is a miracle. At her stomach, layers of skin and fat pull back along a six-inch gash to the right of the belly button. Looks like an axe wound. She hunches there, listening to the Obsidians hammering on the door.
“Give me my razor,” I say.
“Move.” She lunges toward the door with her razor and sticks it through the molten metal. A raider on the other side screams and she draws the razor back. Blood hisses as the molten metal turns it to vapor.
“Where’s your ship?” she asks, turning on me with wild, incandescent eyes. The door wheezes as the Obsidians knock half of it off its hinges. “Where is your gorydamn ship?” The Luna accent falters under the adrenaline in her voice, replaced by something very different. The wound in her gut is leaking blood badly.
“This way.” I move to help her walk, but she flinches away. “Don’t be a fool. You can barely stand,” I say. Glancing back at the bending door, she relents with a hiss of air between her teeth and throws her arm around mine. We hobble fast as we can, putting the door behind us, passing through the cargo level, containers and cranes to every side.
We take a right. Cassius stands guarding the interior of the transfer bridge that connects our ship to the Vindabona, clad in his EVO suit and helm. He fires his pulseRifle over our heads at the pack that rounds the corner behind us. The distorted energy screams past my ears. There’s a howl. I glance back and see an Obsidian’s head disappear, neck spouting blood. Magnetically shot bolts as long as my forearm rip past us and embed themselves into walls. Then we’re past Cassius and stumbling into the narrow causeway. He follows behind me, his pulseRifle roaring as he unloads the last of its battery into an Obsidian warrior who jumps into the causeway after us. The man’s torso tears in half and spins backward, leaving his legs behind on the causeway. Cassius kicks the legs off the ship.
“Disengage!” he shouts to Pytha. Our bulkhead door seals, closing off the causeway as I spill with the Gold girl to the transfer bay floor inside the Archimedes, panting and soaked with sweat and blood. The girl leans her forehead against the metal floor and coughs in pain. Pytha pulls an emergency disengage from the Vindabona and we bank away. Cassius stares down at me. I feel his rage, despite his helm’s smooth visage.
There’s silence except for weeping from the crew we rescued. They’re sprawled like us on the floor, huddled together, some in exaltation, others still in fear, not yet believing that they could possibly be safe. They’re not.
“You idiot,” Cassius says down at me. “What the hell were you thinking?” Before I can answer, he kicks my razor from the Gold’s hands. He bends, as if to grab her face to look for the dread mark on her cheek, when the floor of the Archi opens up between us. He twists back and away as a fist-sized gray blur shrieks through and then goes out through the ceiling with a monstrous gasp of air. A hole has been ripped in the ship. Depressurization sirens scream. Red pulses from the overhead lights. Another railgun slug pierces our hull, slamming through the floor up through the body of the paunchy Red man we rescued, spraying us with his blood. Pytha shouts something in our coms. Pressure screams out of the holes. Then the cellular armor slides over the external damage and the mad gout of air stops. The sirens cease their wailing, but the warning lights continue to throb.
“Our engines are hit,” Pytha says. “Number one is at half power. Shunting energy from it to the shields.”
Cassius gestures to the gash on the Gold girl’s stomach. “Cauterize that or she’ll bleed out.” He rushes through the survivors of the crew to the bridge. The Gold girl is losing too much blood. Her skin is pale under the black oil and her chest rises and falls with shallow rapidity. I lift her arm to get her to the infirmary, but she’s too weak. The stims have overloaded her system. Her legs go out, so I loop my arm behind her knees and my other around her back and carry her through the narrow halls. The fierce face she wore when I first found her is gone. She’s quiet and still, her eyes watching me, so distant from the chaos around us. I lay her down on the medical bed as the Archi’s guns fire. The infirmary is small and understocked. Syringes tremble in their cases as we take another hit.
Those screaming faces of the lowColors.
The wails still chase me.
They’ll all die.
The girl watches as I cut open her soiled shirt with medical shears. Two minor lacerations rend her skin above her breasts. My main concern is the axe wound. It’s a deep and angry gouge six inches long in her lower left abdomen. What was she thinking, going back? What could have been so important? I clean the wound with an antibac spray and use the hospital-grade medical scanner to inspect her organs for damage. Her liver is lacerated. She’ll need a real surgeon, and soon. All I can do here is cauterize the capillaries and load her with bloodsim. Flesh sizzles under the laser. She groans in pain. Once it’s sealed, I apply a layer of resFlesh and strap on a compression pack. The ship shudders.
“Who are you?” I ask the girl. “What’s your name?”
She does not answer as her eyes drift closed. “S-1392,” she whispers. “Help…at…S-1392.” Her words trail away as she falls unconcious.
S-1392 is the asteroid she was heading toward. But what did she mean by “help”?
I examine her as if her face will hold the answers. The lashes of her eyes are longer than I might have expected. But even with the smear of blood and oil, I can see the stringy muscles of a fighter and a testament of old scars upon her skin. Too many for her young age. I trace my fingers over the six parallel scars that rake her lower back. Accompanying those scars are two old knife wounds near her heart, a terrible burn on her left arm, and the remnants of an old wound on the left side of her head that claimed the top corner of her ear. I thought of her as a girl when I found her in that cage. But she’s not a girl. She’s a predator in young skin. Who else would go back into that nightmare ship?
Why did you have to take my razor?
Did she leave something behind? I search her clothes, her body. There’s nothing hidden. No false teeth. But I have a suspicion. I run my hand over her face. The cheekbones are bold and high and covered like the rest of her face with oil. I scrape my nails along her closed eyelids. The false lashes there are well made and applied with some sort of resin. My fingers drift to her right cheek. Dread twists my belly as I feel the skin there give.
I stand up and away.
I know what she is.
I suspected when she stole my razor, and then when her voice broke from the accent of the Palatine. Was she affecting that one? Was it a guise? I pick the corner of the odd patch of skin on her face till a thin layer of resFlesh—the same sort Cassius uses to disguise himself—pulls away from the cheek, revealing what lies beneath. Along her right cheekbone, slashing through the black oil at a cruel angle, is the pale mark of a Peerless Scarred.