THE BAKING SAND WARMS MY FEET. They’re smaller than I remember. Paler. And the gulls that careen overhead much larger, much fiercer as they spin and dive into the water of a sea so blue I cannot tell where ocean ends and sky begins. Gentle waves call to me. I’ve been here before, but I cannot remember when or how I came to be on this beach.
A man and woman are in the distance, their feet leaving slender paths that the waves, in time, slowly devour, step by step, then all at once till they are gone as if they were never there. I call to them. They begin to turn, but I do not see their faces. I never do. Something is behind me, casting a shadow over them, over the sand, darkening the beach and the sea as the wind builds to a feral howl.
My body jerks awake.
I’m alone. Far from the beach, drenched in sweat upon my sleeping pallet. A ventilator whirs rhythmically in the dimness of my room and I shudder a breath. The fear fades. It was just a dream.
Above me on the bulkhead, the words of my fallen house glare down at me, etched into the metal. LUX EX TENEBRIS. “Light from darkness.” And spinning outward from those words like the spokes of a wheel are the idealist poems of youth, the wrathful, slashing script of adolescence, when I was all blood and fury and ruled by wilder passions. Then, finally, the first fledgling steps of wisdom as I began to realize how terrifyingly small I really am.
My father never seemed small. I remember him and his immense calm. The smile lines around his eyes. His unruly hair, his slender hands, how they sat folded in his lap when he listened. There was a vast, settled peace inside him, a tranquility given to him by his father, Lorn au Arcos, who stressed duty and honor under the banner of the griffin. Lost things to this world. Though somewhere out there, the griffin still flies.
My memory is a formidable thing. In many ways it is my grandmother’s great legacy, her teachings preserved in me. Despite that, my mother’s face is a night shade in my mind, always roving in the chasms, slipping beyond my grasp. I’ve heard she was wild, a woman of vast ambition. But history is so often molded from tainted clay by those who remain. I know more of her from my grandmother’s mouth than from my own memory. Such was my grandmother’s grief after her passing that no servant was permitted to speak her name aloud. Who was she? The few pictures I’ve found on the holoNet are all obscured, taken from a distance. As if she were a figment even cameras could not capture. Now time erodes her face in my mind like waves did the footprints in the sand.
I was young when my parents’ starship went down over the sea. They say it was terrorists. Outriders from the Rim.
Only when I read the few poems my mother left behind in her notebooks do I feel her heart beat against my spine. Her arms wrapped around my shoulders. Her breath in my hair. I sense that strange magic of her that my father so loved.
“The night terrors again?” The voice of my teacher startles me. He stands looking into my room, Golden eyes dark pools in the starship’s night-cycle lighting. His powerful shoulders fill the doorway and he bends at the neck, wary of the low doorframe. The engines hum soothingly beyond my small metal room. The place had space enough when I was a boy. But twenty now, I feel like a potted plant spilling root and limb from a cracking clay bowl. Books fill the spaces between my bunk, tiny closet, and lavatory. Salvaged, stolen, purchased, and found over the last ten years. My new prize, a third edition of the The Aeronaut, sits by my bedside.
“Just a dream,” I say, wary of showing vulnerability in his eyes because I know how young the Martian still thinks I am. I swing my slender legs from the bed and bind my mess of hair behind my head with a band. “Have we arrived?”
“Just.”
“Verdict?”
“My goodman, do I look like your valet?”
“No. She was much fairer. With better bedside manner.”
“Adorable, pretending you just had one.”
I raise an eyebrow. “You should talk, prince of Mars.”
Cassius au Bellona grunts. “So are you going to sleep the day away, or get up and see for yourself?” He nods for me to follow; I do, as I have for ten years. I smell whiskey in his wake.
Once, the worlds called Cassius the Morning Knight, protector of the Society, slayer of Ares. Then he murdered his Sovereign, my grandmother, and let the Rising tear down the very Society he swore to protect. He let Darrow destroy my world and bring chaos to the Society. I can never forgive him for that, but neither can I repay the debt I owe him. He kept Sevro au Barca from killing me. He pulled me from the ashes of Luna and the chaos that followed, and for ten years he has protected me, given me a home, a second family.
We could be mistaken for brothers and often are. Our hair has that same luster of gold, though his is curled and mine straight. My eyes are pale as yellow crystal. His are dark gold. He’s half a head taller than I, and broader in the shoulders and manlier in the features—a thick, pointed beard, a prominent bold nose, where my face is thin and patrician, like most from the Palatine Hill. I wish I did not look so delicate.
My name is Lysander au Lune. I was named for a contradiction: a Spartan general who had the mind of an Athenian. Like that man, I was born into something that is both mine and not-mine, a heritage of worldbreakers and tyrants. Seven hundred years after my ancestor Silenius au Lune conquered Earth, I was born the son of Brutus au Arcos and Anastasia au Lune, heir to empire. Now that empire is a fractured, sick land so drunk on war and political upheaval it’s likely to devour itself in my lifetime. But that is no longer my inheritance. When I was a boy, the day after the fall of House Lune, Cassius bent on a knee and told me his noble mission. “Gold forgot it was intended to shepherd, not rule. I reject my life and honor that duty: to protect the People. Will you join me?”
I had no family left. My home was at war. I was afraid. And, more than that, I wanted to be good. So I said yes and for the last ten years we have patrolled the fringes of civilization, protecting those who cannot protect themselves in the Reaper’s new world. Roving between asteroids and backwater docks in the Asteroid Belt as the spheres change around us and war rages in the Core. Cassius brought us here in search of redemption, but no matter how many traders we save from pirates, or foundered ships we rescue, his eyes remain dark, and I still dream of the demons from my past.
I pull on a moth-eaten gray pullover and weave my way barefoot through the ship after Cassius, running my hands along the walls. “Hello, girl,” I say. “You’re sounding tired today.” The Archimedes is an old fifty-meter Whisper-class corvette of the once-great Ganymede Dockyards, with three guns and engines fast enough to push her from Mars to the Belt in under four weeks at near-orbit. Shaped like a reared cobra head, she’s made for scouting, raids. A hundred years ago she was top of the line, but she’s seen better days. The larger part of my adolescent chores was scrubbing rust from the inside hull, oiling her gears, and patching her electrical innards.
But for all that tending, it’s the Archi’s scars I love the most. Little beauty marks that make her our home. A dent under the kitchen’s oven where Cassius fell and struck his head when drinking long ago—after news reached us of Darrow and Virginia’s wedding. Charred ceiling panels made by the fire that Pytha started when she brought me a birthday pie when I was twelve and put the candles too close to a leaking oxygen pipe. Scratches on the walls of the razor training room. So many memories here woven together like those poems above my bed.
I enter the cozy, ovular cockpit. There is room for a pilot and two recessed seats for observation. Its original military lighting has been stripped out and replaced by warmer nodes. A thick Andalusian rug covers the floor. Several rows of mint and jasmine grow atop the console, presents I acquired for Pytha from a Violet’s streetside botany shop in the Hanging Market on Ceres. Incense from the Erebian Mountains not far from Cassius’s family home on Mars burns in the corner. Cassius and Pytha, our Blue pilot, peer out the cockpit windows.
Outside is the cargo hauler that drew us off our course to Lacrimosa Station. We were en route for ship repairs after last month’s skirmish with Martian scar hunters when we received the distress signal from the Gulf between Republic space and Rim territory.
I told Cassius it was too dangerous to investigate so low on provisions.
But his heart guides us more than his head these days.
The ship out the viewport is a giant cube five hundred meters at the edge. Most of her decks are exposed to vacuum by design, while superstructure lattice holds together thousands of cargo containers. Her tag IDs her as the Vindabona out of the trade hub Ceres. She sits adrift and dark—a very odd, very dangerous thing in the Gulf. Several wild asteroids the size of cities float between us, ice crystals on their surfaces winking in the dark. We used one to mask our approach. The Vindabona’s civilian instruments would never detect a military ship like ours in this briar patch, but it’s not the hauler that worries me. I scan the sensors for ghosts in the darkness.
“Well, she’s a deepspace mulebitch, all right,” Pytha murmurs in a monotone delivery that erodes punctuation and inflection. “Probably packing a hundred million credits of iron. Slag me but that’s a crew I’d like to be on.”
“Must you swear so early in the morning?” I ask.
“Shit, sorry, moon boy. Forgot to mind my fucking manners.” Pytha is in her late fifties, with distant, pale blue eyes and skin the color of a walnut. Like all Blues, she still harbors the neurodevelopmental sculpting that enhances human-to-computer interaction but impairs communication outside her sect. She doesn’t have the social niceties of the Palatine shuttle pilots.
My teacher grimaces. “Crew will make scratch,” he says. “Captain might get a share to keep him loyal, but that’s a hundred million credits of some trade lord’s coin floating out there.”
“A share, you say. What a novel idea for a captain to snag a share…” Pytha says.
“Pity you’re a pilot and not a captain.”
“Come now, Bellona. Between you and moon boy over here, you’ve got to have a dozen secret vaults. Why else do you think I signed up? Certainly wasn’t your chiseled chin, dominus.” She says the word sarcastically. “I’m sure you eagles have squirreled away some chit in hidden nests.” Pytha snorts a strange little laugh to herself and looks back to the datastream as letters and symbols trickle past. The untrained ear would hear the Martian drawl in her voice and be done with it. But I catch the spice of Thessalonica, that city of grapes and duels that sprawls white and hot by Mars’s Thermic Sea. Best known for the short tempers of its citizenry and the long list of deeds done by its most illustrious sons, the blackguard Brothers Rath.
That Thessalonican swagger is likely what got her expelled from the Midnight School and reduced to smuggling before her path crossed ours eight years ago. When Cassius learned she was Martian, he freed her from the brig of a mining city where she was imprisoned for a smuggling offense, and she’s worked for us ever since. I’ve certainly learned new words since she came aboard.
Bald and barefoot, Pytha leans back in the pilot’s chair, sipping coffee from the plastic dinosaur mug I won her in an arcade on Phobos years back. She’s in gray cotton pants and wears her old sweatshirt. Her limbs are thin as a grasshopper’s, the right bent under her, the left hanging off the side of the chair, which is shaped like half of a hard-boiled quail egg with the yolk scooped out. A second skin of stickers and decals from children’s video games festoons its gray metal backside. The ship may belong to Cassius, but Pytha’s left her mark.
“Sander, what do you think?” My teacher looks back at me.
I examine the ship out the viewport.
Cassius sighs. “Out loud.”
“She’s a VD Auroch-Z cosmosHauler. Fourth generation by my guess.”
“Don’t equivocate. We both know you’re not guessing.”
I wipe sleep from my eyes, annoyed. “She has 125 million cubic meters of hauling capacity. One main Gastron helium reactor. Built in the Venusian yards, circa 520 PCE. Crew of forty. One industrial docking bay. Two secondary tubes. Obviously she’s a smuggler.”
“Sounds like the human encyclopedia’s got a turd up his nose,” Pytha drawls. She pours a cup of coffee from her carafe and hands it back to me. I wish it were tea. “The last of the beans till we hit Lacrimosa. Sip wisely, peevish one.”
I slip into the seat behind hers and take a mouthful of the coffee, wincing at the heat. “Apologies. I neglected to eat supper.”
“I neglected to eat supper,” Pytha repeats, mocking my accent. Born on the Palantine Hill of Luna, I have lamentably inherited the most egregiously stereotypical highLingo accents. Apparently others find it hilarious. “Haven’t we servants to spoon-feed His Majesty supper?”
“Oh, shut your gory gob,” I say, modulating my voice to mimic the Thessalonican bravado. “Better?”
“Eerily so.”
“Skipping supper. No wonder you’re a little twig,” Cassius says, pinching my arm. “I daresay you don’t even weigh a hundred ten kilos, my goodman.”
“It’s usable weight,” I protest. “In any matter, I was reading.” He looks at me blankly. “You have your priorities. I have mine, muscly creature. So piss off.”
“When I was your age…”
“You despoiled half the women on Mars,” I say. “And probably thought it was their honor. Yes, I’m aware. Forgive me, but I find books a passion more illuminating than carnivals of flesh.”
He looks at me in amusement. “One day a woman is going to make a pretty meal of you.”
“Spoken like a man who barely escaped the lion’s jaws,” I reply.
Pytha goes still and stares at Cassius for a long, awkward moment as her arithmetical brain endeavors in vain to divine whether he is offended or not. I sip my coffee again and nod to the ship. “To the matter, no legitimate Mars or Luna corp would send that poor girl out to the Gulf without escort. Not with Ascomanni about. Those Julii-Barca Solar markings are false flags: wrong shade of red on that sun. Should be scarlet, but that there is vermilion. The Syndicate would know that. So, low-rate smugglers. Like Pytha said, probably hauling ore from some off-grid mine to avoid customs. And please, stop testing me, Cassius. At this point, you know that I know.”
Cassius grunts, still stinging from the lion rejoinder. It was petty of me to say, and I feel lesser for having said it. Ten years recycling each other’s air will make the best of men devils to one another. After all, that is why Blues were raised in sects.
“No bloody way that vermilion is an actual color,” Pytha says.
Of course Pytha is as much an exile from her kind as we are from our own. I can’t imagine why.
“Sounds more like the last name of a Silver,” she adds. “Heh heh.”
“Care to wager on that?” I ask gamely.
She ignores me. “Blackhell. You gotta be a special kind of stupid to wander into the Belt without legs to run or claws to fight. Nearest Republic gunship is ten million klicks away.” She finishes her coffee and bites into the ion blueberry tail of a Cosmos Comet caffeine gummy. She offers me the remaining white tail, which I decline. “Suppose the distress signal was an accident? Didn’t last long.”
“Doubtful,” Cassius replies.
It’s too dark to tell if there are any carbon scoring markings along the outside of the Vindabona—the telltale sign of a forced breach. I don’t find any, but that hardly disproves their existence. Pytha looks back at Cassius. “Do we risk hailing them?”
“Let’s not announce ourselves just yet.” Cassius looks back at me and speaks the word on both our minds: “Trap?”
“Perhaps.” I overdo a nod to make up for my earlier barb. He doesn’t seem sore. “Might be a pirate ship strapped to one of those asteroids. I daresay we’ve seen this one before. Emit a distress signal for bait, then sit back and wait. But…it’s peculiar all the way out here. If it is a trap, it’s a poorly conceived one. Who would run across it? No one likes the Gulf.”
“So we should investigate.” Cassius uses his instructor’s voice.
“With caution,” I confirm. “There may be souls aboard. But we needn’t risk the Archi just yet.”
“My mind exactly. So what do we do, my goodman?”
I smile and put down my coffee. “Well, Cassius, I daresay we should put on our dancing shoes.”
Cassius and I float through space toward an oblong asteroid. It rotates lazily in the darkness. Veins of ice glitter and wind through her craggy skin as we coast into a rock formation at the edge of a shadowy canyon large enough to swallow the Citadel of Light. We arrest our motion on a jagged scree. My breath echoes in my ears. Darkness stretches under me, plunging into the fathomless depths of the asteroid. I doubt very much any man has ever set foot upon this cold chunk of rock, much less looked into its bowels. I feel it’s my duty to give in to temptation and shine a light down into the canyon. I flick the switch on my forearm and a beam of light cuts into the darkness and is devoured by the lower reaches. There is no bottom that my eye can see. But at least now a man’s eye has seen that.
“Turn that off,” Cassius orders over the com.
“Apologies. Was looking for space worms.”
“Biologically absurd,” Pytha mutters from the cockpit. “Organic tissue must have calories. What would they eat?”
“Spacemen,” I say with a smile.
“Spaceboys,” Cassius corrects.
I’m certain that, had I been born in a different time, I would have been an explorer. Since I was a boy, I’ve had an insatiable itch for things remote and unknown. In the Citadel, I dreamed of sailing the violent light of distant nebulas and charting astral seas. The great philosopher Sagan once preached it was in our nature as a species to explore. Despite the modern chaos, we do live in a new age of innovation. Perhaps some brilliant boy or girl who has yet to take their first step will one day make an engine to carry us faster than the speed of light beyond our single star. Beyond the stain of man. Would all this chaos be worth that one innovation?
I often imagine what humans could do if there were no scarcity. Nothing to fight over. Just an unending expanse to explore and name and fill with life and art. I smile at the pleasant fiction. A man can dream.
Not wanting to bring the Archimedes into a trap, Cassius and I pushed away from her airlock toward the nearest asteroid in our EVO suits fifteen minutes ago. Now we reorient ourselves and push off again toward the hulking Vindabona. Rows and rows of cargo containers drift suspended between metal beams, bound together by wires and mesh netting.
Cassius and I use our shoulder thrusters to slow our approach, settling into the floating carbon mesh that pins in a row of green crates. They’re stamped with Republic stars. With Pytha guiding us over the coms, we pull ourselves along the outside of the ship toward the central service airlock. There, I unscrew the paneling on the door’s locking mechanism and hijack the console till the orange doors open silently. Cassius and I drift into the airlock. The outer door closes behind us. We each grip the metal rungs inside. Red light throbs down from the ceiling as the airlock finishes its cycle. Pressure slowly pumps into the room. Then oxygen. Finally the pull of gravity. We remove our razors from their holsters on our hips. A pair of lazy silver tongues of metal float in the air, two meters long, stiffening to just over a meter of sword as we toggle them to their rigid state. His is straight. I prefer mine in the slight crescent of my house. The red light becomes green and the interior door of the airlock opens with an asthmatic gasp. As ever, Cassius makes sure he’s the first through before glancing back to make sure I follow.
The repair bay is empty except for tools and ancient EVO suits hanging from hooks. Pale lights embedded in the gray ceiling flicker, hurling shadows about the room. An indicator blinks green and so I retract my helm into a small compartment at the back of the neck and breathe in the scent of cleaning solution and oil. Reminds me of my early days with Cassius, hiding out in backwater transportation hubs, searching for a ship to carry us away from Luna. Away from the Rising.
That was a lonely time. The better part of me felt carved away as we fled Luna and I knew I would never again hear my grandmother say my name, never follow Aja along the garden paths to train before the morning pachelbel birds even woke. All the people who had ever loved me were gone.
I was alone. And not just alone, but hunted. I shove the memories in the void where my grandmother taught me to stow them lest they overwhelm me like they did her when she was a girl.
“Eagle to Mother Hen, we’re inside. Level sixteen. No signs of life,” Cassius says.
“Copy, Eagle. Do try to use words first this time instead of blades?”
“Unlike certain pilots I know, I have impeccable manners, Mother Hen.”
“Captain,” she stresses. “Call me Captain.”
“As you say, pilot.” Cassius lets his helmet retract and winks at me. His face is harder than when we first met. But every now and again there’s that twinkle in his eyes, like a light inside a far-off tent, making you feel warm even though you’re still outside. And I am outside. He thinks I don’t see how wounded he is. How I’m a replacement for the brother Darrow of Lykos took from him in the Institute. Sometimes he looks at me and I know he sees Julian.
A small, selfish part of me wishes he just saw me.
I follow Cassius into the hall. The ship is barren and gripped by silence. Something here is amiss. Quietly we make our way through the ship, but before we’ve gone long, we find a smear of blood on the floor leading from a side passage to a central lift. We trace the blood to the starboard escape pod bay, and there, before the large doors, we find a massacre.
Gore congeals on the walls. Bodily fluids pool on the dented floor. The whole room redolent with the tangy scent of iron and sick, so much so that I would gag were I not conscious of Cassius’s eyes on me. Red handprints streak the escape pod door, as if men were trying to claw their way out. Yet there are no bodies. I focus and try to view the room with the Mind’s Eye—removed, analytical, as my grandmother trained me.
“The crew was killed here. Under a day ago,” I say, examining the state of the blood. When I was a boy, my grandmother had Securitas investigators take me to murder scenes in Hyperion City to teach me the barbarism under the surface of civilization, under the manners of men. I bend on a knee and begin processing the scene. “Judging from the blood spatters, I would postulate that there were two assailants. Men or women of our size or larger, judging by their bootprints. No blast scoring or char indicates the work was done with blades…and hammers.”
“Ascomanni,” Cassius says darkly.
“Evidence suggests it.” I take a sample of the blood on my finger and wipe it on the datapad built into a socket on my EVO suit’s left forearm. “Brown, Red, and Blue DNA markers. Our smugglers. Several were killed and then dragged out. Others were still alive.”
“You watching, Pytha?” Cassius asks.
“Yes,” she says quietly over the com. Our suits feed her visuals as well. She’s more sensitive to violence than we are. “No sign of ship signatures from the Gulf. But if it’s all the same, will you please hurry it up? I’ve got an itch about this.”
As do I.
The term Ascomanni is derived from the Germanic for “Ash Men.” The first Vikings sailed down European rivers in boats of ash wood. And ash is what they left behind.
Once, the Ascomanni were just deepspace legends, dark whispers passed by traders and smugglers to new recruits in the shadowy hollows of asteroid cantinas or docking-bay watering holes. In the deep of space, so they’d say, there lurked Obsidian tribes who escaped the Society’s culling of the rest of their race following the Dark Revolt hundreds of years ago. Hunted by my family’s extermination squads and Olympic Knights, they fled into the darkness. For years they plagued the far colonies of Neptune and Pluto, remaining little more than myth to the Core.
But now, with the Obsidian diaspora from the poles of Earth and Mars, that myth has become reality. Bands of Obsidians, alienated by the new strange world, freed from military slavery to Gold masters—or exhausted from the Reaper’s war—embrace the legend of their ancestors.
They’ve not so much left the Ice as they’ve brought the Ice to the stars.
Inside the lift where the blood trail ends, viscera smear the button for the thirteenth deck. Cassius presses it with the hilt of his razor. I feel the righteous anger building in my friend as we rise. It infects me.
The lift wheezes to a stop, shuddering as the doors part and reveal the hall leading into the thirteenth floor of the old vessel. Cheap white lights burn down at derelict halls, casting wicked, sharp shadows. Air ventilators with clogged purifiers rattle in the ceiling. Down the center of the hall, a red trail bifurcates the rusted metal flooring. Handprints smear the ground to either side of the trail like crimson butterfly wings. Cassius leads and I follow the trail, our razors held behind us at a diagonal as Aja taught us, our aegis arms held before us, bracers cold and inert but ready to spring into a meter-square energy shield at a moment’s notice. My new plasma pistol is light against my right thigh.
Faded yellow signs on the walls indicate washrooms and crew quarters. We check the rooms as we go. The first several are abandoned. Unmade beds and overturned pictures and chairs remain as evidence of violence. The crew was caught sleeping.
Inside the next room, we find what’s left of the crew. Corpses have been stacked in a heap against the far wall. A stagnant pool of blood expands from the pile and in it I see the reflection of a single terrified eye. I rush to the pile and pull the dead to the side to find six shivering survivors beneath the corpses. They’re bound and beaten and tied feet to hands. I bend to free them but they flinch away, making inhuman, squealing sounds. Cassius bends to a knee and removes his right gauntlet so they can see the Gold Sigils on his hand.
“Salve,” he says in a deep voice. The prisoners calm, the sign bringing them courage. “Salve, friends,” he says as their eyes search his face and see the Peerless scar there. A scar I’ve never earned.
“Dominus…” they murmur, weeping. “Dominus…”
“Peace. We’ve come to help you,” I say as I ungag a paunchy Red man. One of his eyes is swollen shut from a gash at the eyebrow. He smells like urine. “How many are there?” I ask. His crooked teeth chatter together so terribly he cannot even utter a single word. I wonder if he’s ever spoken to a Gold. I feel such pity for him. I rest a hand on his shoulder, intending to comfort him. He flinches back. “Goodman, salve. Peace,” I say softly. “You are safe now. We have come to help. Tell me how many there are.”
“Fifteen…maybe more, dominus…” he whispers in a thick Phobosian accent, fighting back tears. I look over at Cassius. Fifteen is too many without our pulseArmor. “Leader is…on…on…the bridge with the captain. Are you Moon Lords?”
“How did they board you?” I ask, ignoring his question. “Do they have a vessel?”
He nods. “Came from the asteroids, they did. Therix—our helmsman—fell asleep uplinked. Drunk.” He shudders. “We woke and…we woke and they were in the halls. Tried to run. To get to escape pods. They punished us….” His crooked teeth chatter together. I’m so close I can see the blackheads on his bulbous nose. The veins on his neck stand out from fluid redistribution from extended travel in low gravity. He’s pallid and weak in the bones. I wager it’s been half a life since he’s felt the sun’s warmth. “Their ship boarded through the cargo hangar.”
“Explains why we couldn’t see it,” I say to Cassius.
He ignores me. “Why are you so far out here with full freight?” he asks the man.
“Shouldn’t have been…shouldn’t have taken the money.”
“The money from whom?” I ask.
“The passenger. The Gold.”
Cassius and I exchange a glance. “There’s a Gold on board?” he asks. “Did they have a scar?”
“Not Peerless.” The Red shakes his head, and Cassius breathes a small sigh of relief. “She came to the captain on Psyche. Paid us to…” He swallows, glancing over our shoulders as if expecting an Obsidian to appear there. “She paid us to drop her at an asteroid…S-1392.”
“That’s near the edge of the Gulf,” I say. “Just outside Rim territory.”
“Yeah. Captain told her nothin’ was there, but she paid much as our freight. Told him we shouldn’t get involved with Golds. But he didn’t listen. He never listens….”
“Did she give a name?” Cassius asks.
“No name.” The man shakes his head. “But she sounded like him.” He points at me, and I know Cassius has the same thought. Are the Obsidians here for the ship or the Gold?
“They might not be Ascomanni,” I say. “Could be the Rising.”
“Darrow wouldn’t massacre civilians.”
“In this war, two-thirds of the dead are civilians,” I say sharply. “Have you forgotten the Sack of Luna by Sefi’s Horde?”
“Not at all. Nor have I forgotten New Thebes,” Cassius replies, referring to when my godfather, the Ash Lord, orbitally bombarded one of Mars’s great cities after she fell to the Rising.
“Boys,” Pytha’s voice crackles in our ears, cutting through the tension between us. “Boys, we have company.”
“How many?” Cassius asks.
“Three ships inbound.”
I stand. “Three?”
“How the goryhell are you just telling us?” Cassius snaps.
“Couldn’t pick them up because of the asteroid interference. They must have called in more of them to haul in the Vindabona.”
The crewmembers sense our unease and begin to shudder again in fear.
“What grade?” I ask.
“Military, third class. Two four-gun lancers, and an eight-gun Storm-class corvette. They’re Ascomanni.”
“How can you tell?” I ask.
“They have bodies on their hulls.”
“It’s a gorydamn hunting party.” Cassius curses quietly. We could go toe to toe with one of the lancers, but a Storm-class corvette would rip Archi to shreds. “How long do we have?”
“Five minutes. Haven’t yet spotted me. I suggest you get off that heap.”
I rush to cut the remaining restraints off the prisoners. “Hen, I need you to pop off that asteroid and burn for the Vindabona’s transfer tube,” Cassius says. “We have people to evacuate.”
“They’ll see me if I make an approach,” Pytha says.
“They might have guns, but we’ve got engines,” Cassius replies.
“Copy.”
“Can you all run?” Cassius asks the crew. They stare up at him without answering. “Well, you’re going to have to. The Obsidians are still out there. You see them, you keep it together and get to the tube. Let us fight. You obey everything I say or I leave you to die. I need you to nod.” They do. “Good.”
“What about the Gold?” I ask Cassius. “They could still be alive.”
“You heard Pytha,” he replies. “We don’t have time.”
“I won’t leave someone behind for those barbarians to keep. Especially not one of us. It is not honorable.”
“I said no,” Cassius snaps, almost using my name in front of the smugglers. “It’s not worth the risk of all their lives for one person.” He surveys the wobbling crew before us. “Everyone quiet. Stay together. Now follow me.” Cassius, as always, is first out the door before I can reply.
The prisoners follow quick as they can into the hall back the way we came. I guard the rear, helping along a limping Brown. The bone of his right arm sticks out of a tear in his green jumpsuit. Cassius looks back to make sure I’m keeping pace. We load into the lift we rode up on to take it back down to the third level. But as the doors begin to close, I jump off the lift without a glance back at Cassius.
“Dammit, boy,” Cassius says over the com after the doors seal and the lift carries downward. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“What Lorn would do,” I reply, walking back the way we came. He says we don’t have time, but I know how careful he is with me, how cautiously he guards my life. “I’ll be sensible. Make a quick reconnoiter.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and I know he’s reserving his condemnation for later. “Hurry, but watch your tail.”
“Naturally.”
I adjust my hand on my razor and move back down the hall. I take efforts to calm my breath, but every corner I turn I expect to see a savage waiting with bloody teeth and hollow eyes. I feel the fear and remember my grandmother’s words. “Do not let fear touch you. Fear is the torrent. The raging river. To fight it is to break and drown. But to stand astride it is to see it, feel it, and use its course for your own whims.”
I am the master of my fear. I let myself sink into the Mind’s Eye. My breathing slows. A cold, distant clarity settles over me. I hear the rattle of air purifiers clogged by dust, the pulse of generators vibrating through the metal floor into my boots.
And then I hear them.
The low, quiet rumble of their voices drifts down the dark metal hall like a grumbling glacier. My hands sweat inside gloves. Everything Aja and Cassius taught me seems so distant now as the metal grating underneath my boots creaks. I’ve killed Ascomanni before, but never by myself.
At the end of the hall, I peer around the corner. I don’t see the Obsidians. The commissary is round and holds several tables, the centermost of which has been laden with mounds of clothing. I’m about to move into the room when the mound moves and I realize my mistake. Three Ascomanni sit at the center table. Their long, braided hair cascades white and dirty down broad backs. Pale, scarred skin peeks out from under scrap armor. They speak in nagal and are hunched together eating and drinking the foodstores from the ship. Revulsion and fear swirl together in the pit of my belly.
Be the calm.
I lean back behind the wall and listen to their conversation. The savages’ accents are thick, their voices sluggish and drunken. From Earth’s North Pole. One criticizes the flavor of the man meat and longs to eat fresh elk. His friend says something I do not understand. Something about the Ice. Another is irritated that she claimed no slaves in the taking of the ship. She asks if she could buy the Sunborn from the first. He laughs at her with his mouth full and says she belongs to their jarl, body and meat. The Sunborn; the Gold.
I expect Lorn would kill them. My own pride would see me do the same, to prove to myself that I am greater than the fear I now feel. But pride is a vanity I cannot afford. My grandmother’s lessons win out. Why fight when you can maneuver? I find a way around the commissary and continue my search, listening for any sound of life.
My pre-allotted time ticks away. I’ll have to double back in two minutes. There’s nothing but the Obsidian voices echoing down the halls and the unhappy rattle of distant generators. Then…I hear something. A faint creaking from behind a bulkhead. I find the door and clasp the narrow handle. It opens slowly, sliding back into its frame and squealing as it goes. I wince, praying to Jove that no one heard. I wait, poised with my razor in the hall for the Obsidians to come running. None do. I slip into the room.
It is filled with the rest of the crew. They litter the floor in mesh cages that constrict around their bodies. All lowColors. And hanging above them from the dark room’s ceiling is a thin wire net that’s been looped around a gas pipe. It sways back and forth and inside it, and hanging upside down as the wire cuts into her bare skin, is the body of a naked woman with Gold Sigils upon the backs of her hands.