IN THE COCKPIT, PYTHA has gone silent, now locked into the ship’s battle sync. Her eyes stare distantly as her mind and the ship’s computer function as one. “Better start thinking about how you want to die,” Cassius says to me as I slide into the observation seat behind Pytha’s. “One engine’s down thanks to you playing Lorn. This is worse than the astral dump on Lorio.”
“Nothing’s worse than that.” I look at the sensor displays and the data readouts. “Never mind.” We’re being pursued by the three craft. Not slapped-together pirate ships, but military vessels. Doesn’t matter that they’re old. Their engines seem to be in prime shape. Pytha’s returning mid-range fire with our own railguns. Can’t see the drama of it—it’s all displays and sensor readouts in here. I feel the familiar shudder in the ship as her munitions funnel out of their magazines into the magnetic firing rods and race across space toward our pursuers. How many more shots till we run dry?
“Can we lose them in the asteroid field?” I ask.
“Not dense enough,” Cassius says.
“Can we set down?”
“They’re too close.”
“Can we—”
“No,” he says. “Can’t hide. Can’t run. Can’t fight. Dammit.” He slams his hand on the console. “You should have listened to me.”
“I’m sorry, Cassius.”
“Don’t use my name. We have guests on board.”
“She’s unconscious.”
“That crew isn’t. You want one of them trying to collect a Core bounty while we’re dodging Ascomanni?” He shakes his head, marveling at my stupidity.
“I wasn’t going to stand by and let those savages eat one of us.”
“ ‘One of us’…”
“My grandfather would have tried to save her.”
“Course he would have. He’d have gutted a hundred lowColors to save one Gold life. Today, you killed how many…a dozen?” I see their mouths frothing in fear. Their eyes wide like a dying horse’s. All white. “Was it worth it? You could have helped them,” he says sorrowfully. “But you went for her! One person!”
I take the punishment. It’s earned. But he’ll forget today. It’ll be diluted by time. For me I know it will not. My memory will trap me with those screaming faces even as I lie on my deathbed. I will see their cracking nails against the mesh. Smell the urine on the deck. And I’ll wonder how many I could have saved if I’d had more sense.
Our ship shudders again as another projectile hits us. Our kinetic shields send it ricocheting off into space. If they were aiming to kill, they’d use missiles, but they’re aiming for our engines. “They want us alive,” I say.
“Of course they do. They saw that we’re Golds. They’ll rape us and kill us when they get bored of it.”
“And they’ll eat us,” I say. “These ones are cannibals.” He catches the fear in my voice. “How long can the engines last if we overburn?” I ask, knowing the answer, but knowing too where I need to push him.
He glances down at Pytha. “Not long. Maybe an hour, two. Then we’re dead metal. But where would we go? Nearest asteroid city is five days out.”
“The Rim.”
“The Rim, he says. You forget your last name? My last name?” He lowers his voice, looking back down the hall. “Your grandmother ordered the destruction of one of their moons and their docks.”
“So they say.”
“They think I personally stomped in the head of Revus au Raa.”
“The Ascomanni won’t follow if we make the Line. They fear the Rim more than we do.”
“There’s a reason for that.”
“The chance they’ll have a warship even six days away from where we enter is negligible.” Our ship shudders again. Pytha jerks in her seat. Blood dribbles down her lips. She’s bitten her tongue. Her mouth guard wobbles on the console. I pry open her teeth and push the thin slip of plastic in. “I made a mistake in there. But this is a matter of probability. We can slip over the Line, shed the Ascomanni, fix our engines, then…”
“No ship has crossed into Rim Space in ten years. I won’t risk starting a war.”
“Then what’s your plan?” I ask.
“We turn around and fight. We can get inside one of their ships. Turn the guns on the other corvettes. I’ve seen men do it.”
Fight. Of course that’s his answer.
“We’re not those men,” I say. His warrior vanity looks wounded. “And we don’t have a launch tube on the rear of the ship. We’d have to pivot the ship starboard. And then we’d fire back into a fusillade of railgun fire. And if we make it through that, adding their current velocity to the velocity of the spitTube we will hit their viewports with…” I pull from my memory the detailed report and analysis my grandmother had me make on Darrow’s mathematically suicidal assault on the Vanguard. “…potentially nine times the velocity used to breach the Vanguard. Our bones will be indistinguishable from our urine.”
“Really?”
“Care to wager?”
“Shit.”
“What about S-1392?”
“The asteroid?”
“It’s the one the Gold bought passage to.” I reference the sensors. “It’s two hours away. Three hours closer than the Line. Before she fell unconscious, the girl said that help was there.”
His eyes narrow. “When exactly did you have time to have a conversation with her?”
“In the medical bay.”
“We don’t know who she is. We don’t know where she’s from. Do you even know what kind of help she meant?”
“No,” I confess. “But opportunities multiply as they are seized.”
“Don’t quote Sun Tzu at me like it was your idea. Her ‘help’ could be anyone. It could be the gorydamn Ash Lord himself.”
“That would be a boon for us.”
“For you, maybe. Your godfather would skin me alive.” He stares at the Obsidian ships on the sensors. “She used your razor. Did she have a scar?”
If I say yes, he won’t go to S-1392. He’ll try to fight.
“No. No scar,” I say. Then I feel the guilt building. My brain has always been faster than my conscience.
Our ship shudders again, harder this time, and the displays show damage to our starboard thrusters. Cassius winces with each shudder of the hull. It wounds him to see the Archimedes bleed.
“Slag it.” He grips Pytha’s shoulder. “Pytha, set course for asteroid S-1392. Increase engine output to fifteen percent over the redline. I don’t care if they melt together.” In her sync, she does not respond, but the ship does. I sit down as the Archimedes rumbles around us. The gravity pulls on my body as the compensators strain at the sudden acceleration and the Archimedes races for the asteroid. The Obsidians fall behind our sudden acceleration, but slowly they begin to match.
The die is cast.
While Cassius prepares the ship for potential boarders by outfitting the rescued crew with weapons, I return to the medbay to check on the Gold to see if I can draw any more information from her. She’s unconcious still. I watch her for a moment, feeling more protective than I should for a stranger. Tenderly, I cut the rest of her clothing away and begin to clean the oil from her skin with alcohol scrubs. I drape a medical blanket over her to protect her decency. When I look up, her eyes are open and seem to have been watching me for some time. I feel color rising in my cheeks, fearing that she’ll think I was doing something untoward. But her gaze is softer now than at our first meeting. Less animalistic. She looks at the razor on my hip.
“We’re bound for the asteroid,” I say gently. “You said there was help there. What sort of help?” She tries to speak, but her words are too weak to come out. “Salve,” I say, looking at the new layer of resFlesh I used to cover her scar. “Save your strength.” I set a hand on her shoulder. “I should check your wound. May I?”
She makes a small nod with her head. I pull the blanket to the side and examine the angry flesh. My cauterization was sloppy. I find a fresh bandage inside the cabinet and return to her wound. She flinches as I apply disinfectant cream. To soothe her, I recite one of my favorite verses from my mother’s library.
“As from the darkening gloom a silver dove
upsoars, and darts into the Eastern light,
On pinions that naught moves but pure delight,
So fled thy soul into the realms above,
Regions of peace and everlasting love….”
The girl’s fallen unconcious again by the time I finish the verse, and this time I let her alone. All those lives for her. As I leave, I smudge oil on her face to help mask the resFlesh covering her scar and hope that I’ve not lied to Cassius in vain.
At full burn we manage to close the distance to the asteroid in under two hours. The cabin is now bathed crimson by the warning lights as our last engine overheats. Our inertia carries us forward, but the Ascomanni are closing, eating up the distance between our ships. Soon they’ll reel us in with magnetic tow beams and burn through our hull. We sit in silence. Pytha’s un-synced with the ship now. Our guns are twisted scrap. Our shields are gone.
The whole ship vibrates as the largest of the Ascomanni craft locks onto our hull with a tow beam, slowing our velocity. Cassius unfurls his razor and I cradle mine. My hand is sweaty. My chest tight and my mouth chalky and dry. I sit with my legs crossed on the floor in silent meditation, letting the fear flow into me so I can be its master when its authors burn through our hull and enter our halls.
Cassius turns to me as he tightens the screws on the gauntlets of his pulseArmor. We’ve both discarded our clunky EVO suits for pulseArmor breastplates and arm gear. “We meet them at the door. I want you to stay behind me. There’s not enough room in the corridors for us to fight side by side. If I fall, make sure they do not take you alive.” He looks to Pytha. “I mean this since…”
His sentence drifts without finishing. I follow his eyes to the RAD sensor display. It warps sideways. The display’s pixels disintegrate into a dancing pattern of blue and black static. Pytha squints. “Someone’s jamming the nav.”
“Can’t be the Ascomanni,” I say. “They don’t have tech enough to compromise our instruments.”
“Who then?” Pytha asks.
“Oh hell,” Cassius murmurs. “Oh goryhell.” I follow his eyes out the viewport to the large, seemingly benign asteroid in the distance. S-1392. Pytha enlarges the visual display. Shadows cloak half the asteroid. The surface is dirty pearl white and riven with impact craters. The shadows stir. Something moves in the dark distance, streaking out from the bowels of the asteroid. It comes into space like a black eel squirming its way from the recesses of a dark sea cavern, flowing out of shadow, eyes glinting with pearly menace. But this eel is not made of flesh and blood. It is made of metal, painted black, and marked with a three-headed electric dragon on its sides.
It is a warship.
In this empty expanse, where no warship has flown for more than a decade, a first-rate destroyer races toward us. One point three kilometers long, brimming with weapons and high-grade shielding. And flanking it are two torchShips of an unfamiliar design. From their hangars depart three squadrons of strange fighter ships that look like deep-sea horrors.
They close the distance in half a minute and speed silently past us to shred the Ascomanni ships without even the formality of a radio broadcast. The fighter squadrons deliver elegant death as they lace the Ascomanni with railgun fire and spit off missiles that crackle silently over the blast-scored hulls of the raiders till each vessel vents oxygen and shivers apart to float dead and quiet into forever space. The engagement lasts less than a minute.
Debris pings against our hull.
Pytha’s voice trembles. “What was that?”
A blinking red light on the com signals an incoming direct transmission from the destroyer itself. It lurks in the distance, not approaching us. Beside me, I sense Cassius’s unease. “What kind of ship is that?” Pytha asks. “Lysander?”
I stare out the viewport. “I don’t know.”
But Cassius knows. And there’s a feeling about him, like he expected this. Like this was some inevitable end. I’m beginning to understand. “You lied to me,” he says. He looks over to me with heartbreak on his face. “She had a scar. Didn’t she?”
I accept his anger and meet his eyes. “She did.”
He thinks I have killed us. And maybe I have. But as long as we breathe, there will be more opportunities for escape. We’ve jumped from the fire into the frying pan.
“Open the transmission,” he says.
Static crackles through the open channel until a cold voice calls out from the deep in an accent not heard on the streets of Mars or the halls of the Luna since the Rim closed its borders a decade ago. The long, lazy vowels that linger in the back of the throat hail from the volcano moon of Jupiter. The same moon that House Raa, leaders of the Rim, call home.
It is the accent of Io and the Lords of the Dust.
“Attention, Archimedes,” the disembodied voice says. “This is the Rim Dominion Destroyer Charybdis. Your communications equipment is neutralized. Any deviation from present course will result in the destruction of your vessel. Any resistance will result in the destruction of your vessel. Stand by for boarding.”
The com goes off. Silence sits with us in the cockpit.
Desperate, Cassius grabs the com. “Charybdis, we are not in violation of Rim Space. Repeat, we are in neutral territory. This is a violation of the Pax Ilium. Repeat, we are not in Rim Space.” No response. Cassius hurls the com in anger. Pytha flinches as the plastic shatters against the metal bulkhead.
“Better our own kind than Ascomanni,” I say, though I’m disquieted by the fear I see in his eyes and Pytha’s. We can reason with them.
“Reason? Bring me the faciem, Pytha.” I look at him and wonder if his fear is warranted. “Lysander, get my box and yours and put it in the vault.” He pulls his House Bellona ring from the chain around his neck and pushes it into my hand. “Make sure there’s nothing that could lead them back to who we are. Holos, weapons, rings—everything goes in the vault. And Karnus’s razor. That cover you have on it won’t fool them. Hide it or we’re dead.”
I rush through the halls to the living quarters, where I collect Cassius’s oak box in which he keeps his family heirlooms, the meager remaining inheritance of a man who once could have ruled Mars. I fetch my own box, a large ivory vessel that carries the last relics of my past. I deposit both boxes in the hidden vault in the wall behind the ship’s oven. I frisk my body to make sure I’ve not forgotten anything. Grudgingly I take my grandmother’s ring that hangs around my neck and Karnus’s razor and push them into the box.
By the time I’ve returned to the cockpit, Cassius has opened the faciem, which we bought in a black market on Ceres. Set in foam is a honeycombed thin gray mask, a vial of smelling salts, a chemical ice pack, and a missing holster for the painkilling stim syringe, which we emptied weeks ago to fill our field kits. “You don’t happen to have any extra stims?” he asks me.
“I used them on the Gold. Don’t you?”
He shakes his head. “Gave them all to the prisoners.”
“Goryhell,” I mutter, looking at the mask’s honeycombs. “Cassius…”
He laughs and lets a bit of his old roguish smile break through. “It’s fine, my goodman. Pain’s just a memory.”
“Are you spacemad?” Pytha asks flatly. “You can’t use that monster without stims.”
“I can check the hold,” I say. “We might have missed a pack….”
Cassius shakes his head. “No time.”
Pytha’s horrified. “Lysander. Don’t let him…”
I meet Cassius’s gaze. “I’ll hold you down.”
Cassius glances down into the mask, a distant, forlorn look in his eyes. The same look he had when we had to pay for engine parts by collecting a bounty on a former Gold Tribune. It asks how it came to this. So far from what he thought he would be.
Sparing a gentle smile to us, one that belongs to another time, a gentler version of himself, he brings the mask to his face till only his eyes are visible. He tightens the plastic latch at the back so it is secure to his head.
“Don’t let me take it off,” he says.
“Coral hold?” I ask.
“Mantis lock. I’d break your arms in a coral hold.”
I obey. Sitting behind him, I wrap my legs around his midsection and loop my arms around his biceps, then under his armpits, and clasp my hands together at the middle of his spine. “Pytha, you flip the switch.” She creeps forward.
Muttering to herself, he grips the activation knob on the side of the mask. “On you.”
“Do it.”
Pytha twists the activation knob on the mask. There’s a sibilant hiss as the three hundred needles built into the plastic of the scrambler mask spring forward into the skin, bone, and cartilage of Cassius’s face. He jerks once. Twice. And then a gurgling scream escapes from beneath the mask like seething steam from a kettle. His muscles knot and clench rock-hard as he thrashes back into me, twisting so viciously with his arms that I think my own will break. He screams babbling, incomprehensible curses as he rolls, kicking out and almost catching Pytha in the shin. She jumps back. The mask mercilessly pumps artificial filler into his face, grafting imitation bone onto his jaw and forehead and eye sockets. In twenty seconds, the mask’s indicator blinks from red to yellow and the worst of Cassius’s convulsions begin to fade. We’re on our sides breathing heavily. He mewls and drifts into shallow insentience. The indicator blinks green. I disentangle myself from his arms. There’s a stabbing line of pain down my forearm that insinuates a stress fracture.
Pytha rushes to Cassius and gingerly unlatches the mask. His face is a bubbling mass of angry, swollen flesh. Like a wax figure strayed too close to flame. Bit by bit the swelling subsides under the anti-inflammation pack that Pytha applies.
When she pulls the pack away, our handsome friend is gone, replaced by a thuggish visage with a primitive forehead, a bulbous, veiny nose, chipped ears, and a slack mouth with engorged, lazy lips. The Peerless Scar is gone, recessed into this new Bronzie visage. Pytha wipes tears from her eyes.
She looks up at me in recrimination and jerks the smelling salts out of my hands to crack them under his nose. “You’re prime, dominus,” she says to him, cradling his head and wiping the vomit from his face as he comes to. “Easy as sin. It’s all over now. It’s all over.” He sits up with her help and together we watch out the viewport to see the destroyer opening its docking bay to swallow us whole.