Iron Gold

  I take the holocube that the Duke of Hands gave me and activate it. The pale light washes out the contours of my crew’s faces. The three locations glow in the air. I sit back in my chair, knowing they believe deep down we can pull this off. They’re young enough to have never failed. To never have been captured. But the chance for success is so small, so absurd, that I know we are gallows bound. Yet it seems a dignity to take that chance, to grasp it for all it is worth and not fall under the hacking of the blade of a bonesaw, not off the ledge of some thoroughfare, but on the stage, heart pulsing, feet racing, all the variables falling into place one last time.

  The game is afoot. And finally, I begin to smile.

  I’M BLIND WHEN THE COMMANDOS storm the ship. Their stun grenades emitted white flashes that activated every photoreceptor cell in my eyes. Though we surrendered, they beat us beyond sense. I take several rifle butts to the back of my head and finally reel sideways as one bloodies my nose.

  They grab my hair and slam my head to the ground. A boot presses down on my head as they frisk me and cuff my hands behind my back with magnetic shackles. They latch a second metal cuff around my right ankle and jerk the two shackles together so that I’m hogtied, blind, and bellydown on the floor. Something tight slithers around my neck and constricts.

  With six seconds of ancient method, they strip my humanity away.

  I feel them dragging me. Slowly, indistinct shapes coalesce, though a pulsing blue afterimage remains in my vision. They carry the crew we rescued out of the ship with me.

  I see one of them screaming uncontrollably and holding on to a metal panel. A soldier stomps on his hands till they break. The blood leaks down my throat from my broken nose. There’s horrible choking from someone nearby. Thick, asthmatic barking from animal throats and a blitz of commands.

  Stay down.

  Slag the floor.

  Hands behind your back.

  Nose to metal.

  Nose to metal, gahja!

  This is my fault.

  Not the choice to lead us to the asteroid, but my hubris or vanity or misguided honor, whatever it was that led me off that lift, into the corridor, wasting seconds and then making the gamble that might now cost us our lives. And for what? Out of loyalty to a Color so devious they destroyed themselves? It was such an illogical chain of decisions of which I am ashamed.

  A wet, mucus-filled mouth snaps centimeters from my face.

  Scaled paws and serrated talons scratch the metal deck. I twist myself and see point-blank the four-legged kuon hounds—insectoid-canid hybrids. There are three of them; bred for war. Chitinous black shells along their torsos ripple gray as they move. Spines of needle-thick translucent hair stand on end upon their backs. The Gray houndmaster jerks the beast back from me. Its bark is deafening, its eyes yellow and compound. I shudder away from the hound, trying to master my fear.

  It’s impossible.

  My grandmother’s lessons and Aja’s meditations flee as my heart slams in my chest, and boots against the deck match the beat as a second squad moves up into our ship. A terrifying old Gold woman in a brown cloak with a bald pate and a laconic drawl issues orders to the soldiers around her to search the ship for bombs and other passengers. A Blue woman, one of the crew we rescued from the Vindabona, finds the chaos more than she can bear. She panics and tries to run.

  They let her go, perhaps as sport, perhaps to set an example, and after her tenth step, the small metal cuff on her right ankle blinks green and detonates. The lower ends of the tibia and fibula explode. A flash of sizzling light cauterizes the wound. She screams and spills to the ground, leaving her foot behind. Leg wheezing smoke. The kuon hounds are released and pin her on her back, one tearing into her thigh, the other biting her right wrist, before waiting for the next command. The houndmaster looks to the old Gold woman. She gives the command herself.

  “Yokai.” The old Gold looks to the largest of the kuon. “Hakaisuru.”

  The largest kuon lunges like a rail slug out of a barrel and the Blue woman’s face disappears into its maw.

  “Stop!” I shout, trying to rise up.

  A steel-toed boot disabuses me of my empathy.

  —

  When I come to in a small pool of my own spit, I see the world sideways. The boot is still on my head. Nausea wraps me in a hot cocoon. There’s weeping to my right from the lowColors we rescued. Two of the hounds are still hunched over the Blue woman, snapping and snarling as they feed on Blue bones brittle from a youth spent in low gravity. I force myself to watch and see what my mistakes have wrought.

  Cassius meets my eyes from his place on the ground nearby. His face is unrecognizable but the cool look there gives me strength. Patience, it says. I focus on breathing, on allowing everything else to rage around me, and control myself.

  A bored young Gold with a hollow, pale face stands with her boot on Cassius’s head and her hasta, a long razor, balanced just above his spinal cord. Pytha shivers in fear beside me, listening to the hounds feed.

  “Do not be so maudlin, gahja,” the woman says to Pytha, pulling up her head by the hair so she must watch the kuons feed. “It’s just carbon.”

  I dare to steal a look at the Archi.

  They’ve pulled her into a large hangar with a pulseShield sealing the open bay to space. We lie in front of our home, surrounded by a cadre of Peerless Scarred. They’re tall and severe. Their bodies elongated by the low gravity of their birth. Their hands and faces pale from their long absence from the sun, but callused and battered by the harsh elements of their volcanic plains and ocean moons. They wear loose-fitting storm-colored cloaks. Arrogance earned fills the room, radiating from them. Gray legionnaires inspect the outside of our ship with Orange techs. Guarding each of us are several Obsidian slave knights. Not the freeColors of the Republic, but the indoctrinated slaves of an imperial system. In their minds, they serve the gods. They wear tribal cloaks, carry axes, and wear thin gray metal collars like the one they strap on my leg. Buzzing about the rest of them are half a dozen other Colors—mechanics and support staff. It’s like watching an ant colony.

  I’ve not seen such harmonized efficiency before, not even when watching Luna’s preparations for the Rising’s siege. The old Gold woman bends in front of Cassius and looks him in the eye. She doesn’t like the fierce look she finds there. She lets him go and turns to me.

  “The young one,” she rasps. She stands looking down at me as one of the Obsidians pulls me to my knees by my hair. Her cruel eyes are the color of bitter sulfur, set in a face calloused and riven with age. Lips like two whispers of shed snakeskin pull back from small teeth and receding gums. “You tread near our ink, gahja. Why?”

  “We’re traders,” I manage with little dignity, but I meet her eyes as best I can, hoping to merit some degree of respect from her for my obvious mettle.

  “Why?”

  “Ascomanni came….”

  “Why were you in the Gulf?”

  I fight back the quick answer. The frightened answer. And I follow a memory back to a room in the Citadel where I listened to my father whisper to himself as he read beside me so many years ago. I smell the bitter aroma of his tea, recall the crisp fibers of the cellulose pulp between my fingers as I turned the pages of my own book.

  “We…seek sanctuary,” I say, back now in the room with the Gold woman.

  “Sanctuary?” The Gold masticates the word.

  “Under article 13, clause c of the Compact: ‘Any full Aureate Citizen of the Society may, when life and property are threatened, invoke a right of temporary trespass on government, private, and military space to seek sanctuary from pirates and illegal elements.’ ” The words are verbatim those in my small copy of the Compact I owned as a child. I look into her dead eyes, seeking common ground, but standing my own. “The Core may have abandoned order, but it was my understanding that the Rim still obeyed the laws of our Ancestors. Am I mistaken?”

  Her face is a desert. No emotion. No life in the creases and
crags. Only a barren foreboding. Without blinking or moving her gaze from mine, she takes a gnarled thumb and slowly presses it into my right eyeball. I lurch backward, more struck and horrified by the casualness of the violence than by the pain it brings. Then she pushes harder, gripping my head with her other hand. I thrash. The capillaries pop, the tissue stretches inward, the nail cuts in.

  “You are spies.”

  I gasp. “We are not…”

  “Who paid you to cross the Gulf, gahja? Do you have sensor equipment in your ship? What is your name? Your mission? These are things you will answer.”

  “Venator!” a Gray calls from the ramp. “It’s her.”

  She removes her thumb from my eye and I gasp at the release from pain. Even in the haze of pain, I notice what they call her. Venator. The woman is some form of elite policing unit. She twists her turkey neck to look up at the Gray. “Her?” she rasps. “She’s in this ship?”

  “Yes, Venator. She’s in their medbay. Wounded direly.”

  “At last. Does she have a storage device on her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Find out.” She speaks into her datapad. “Break radio silence. Send a direct transmission to subQuaestor Marius. Tell him we have a small, flat stone in our possession and ask for instruction.” The woman turns to the Peerless behind her. “Is the Storm Knight back with his squadron?”

  The Storm Knight I knew is dead, killed by the Reaper himself above the Great Barrier Reef on Earth. They must have a new order of Olympic Knights out here. How antiquated they suddenly seem, seeking to replicate the glory of what once was. And yet some boyish part of me is glad that the order has not yet fallen.

  “They’re docking presently, Venator.”

  “Can they be stalled?” she asks quietly.

  “He’s already out of his cockpit. They’ll be here in minutes.”

  She makes a bitter face. “Seek him out. Tell him his sister is here, before he finds out from another. And summon a medical squad.” She turns back to me and Cassius, measuring us, wondering about our part in this, but not yet lifting us from the deck. It’s then I notice the onyx implant on her hand. A snake slithers around the webbing and up over her knuckle to devour its own tail. A relic from an earlier war. Krypteia. The secret police and intelligence agency of the Moon Lords. My grandmother claimed to have purged them all after Rhea burned. Who is this woman?

  There’s a reverent silence when a Peerless Scarred in his mid-twenties with shoulder-length white-gold hair streaked black marches into the hangar wearing the kit of a fighter pilot. Gloomy, narrow eyes brood within a pale, beardless face that bears the vestiges of beauty underneath a depository of brutality. Large lips, long eyelashes, the rest scars and scowls and crooked cartilage. He wears all gray, and on the helmet in his left hand is painted the image of a dragon cloaked in cloud and lightning. As for ears, he has only his right. Three men in gray follow him. The man’s eyes darken further as he sees the kuon hounds chewing on the remains of the crewmember. The force of him is so raw, so true and uncalculating, that he seems as pure as a natural element. Undimmed by compromise, untamed by society. He makes me feel trapped, impure, and suddenly so small as I realize men like him can exist.

  The old woman stands before him as if facing down a thunderhead.

  “Diomedes,” she says.

  “Venator Pandora, where is she?” His low voice is a product of hardship, but it is the name that shakes me from the spell he’s cast. Pandora. I thought she was a Rim myth. Their greatest assassin. The Ghost of Ilium, withered and aged, but breathing still.

  “On the ship. The medics are bringing her out,” Pandora rasps. Diomedes storms past her up the ramp just as the Yellows bring the Gold girl out on a gurney. They stop as he approaches.

  “Little Hawk,” he says tenderly. He kisses the girl’s face and pushes his forehead to hers, nearly weeping. “Little Hawk. I thought you were for the dust.”

  “Diomedes,” she says in a low voice, barely audible from my place on the deck. Nearly delirious from the morphone, she reaches up to caress his face as I strain to see it better. “My joy. What…how are you here?”

  “Where else would I be?” He smiles slowly. “When a sister is lost, a brother seeks. Father sent me, Seraphina.”

  Seraphina…I know the name, just as I know her brother’s. I glance over at Cassius. The names have not been lost on him, and any hope that was in my friend expires.

  “Father…” she murmurs.

  Diomedes nods. His voice tightens. “Pandora is here as well.”

  “No…” the girl says with a start. She turns to see Pandora standing at the bottom of the ramp. Her eyes widen in fear. “No.”

  “Rest now,” Diomedes says. “All is well.”

  She pushes against him. “Where is Ferara? Hjornir?”

  “Ferara and the rest of the traitors are in the hold,” Pandora says. “Breathing. Which is more than I can say for your crow. He told us your return vector after I took his teeth.”

  “You old bag of bones…” Seraphina claws to get off the gurney.

  Pandora looks to a Gold krypteia who shakes his head as he exits the ship, carrying the girl’s meager belongings. “Where is it?” Pandora asks, coming closer to the girl. “You didn’t come all this way for nothing. Is it in your teeth? Your belly?”

  “I found nothing,” Seraphina says bitterly. “I was wrong.”

  I glance at Cassius, wondering if this makes more sense to him than it does to me. What errand would send her into the Gulf? What would make this girl violate the Pax Ilium? A trespass that would most certainly mean death…

  “Be still, Pandora,” Diomedes warns. He tries to calm his sister, pushing her down into the gurney. “Seraphina, Father sent us to bring you home. Both of us. Now you must see the surgeons.” But she won’t listen. Even now she’s trying to rise from the gurney to get at Pandora. He motions to one of the medics, and they dart forward to plunge a syringe into her shoulder. Slowly the fight leaves her eyes and she sinks into the gurney. The medics try to lift it back up, instructed by the krypteia, but Diomedes stands in their way. An awkward standoff ensues between Diomedes’s men and Pandora’s.

  “My lord, she must be questioned,” Pandora says. “If she found something…”

  “What could she find, Pandora?” he asks. “What is my father afraid of?”

  “Nothing, my lord. But diligence must be done. Your father…”

  “Is not a sadist. He desires his daughter back, alive. A state uncommon to those you question. I don’t blame you for your nature, Pandora. You serve my father well as a huntress. But if you wish time alone with my sister, you must first pass through me.” Her eyes search him and he smiles. “In your day, it might have been a question. But your day has passed. She is under my shield.” She nods acquiescence. He looks at the kuon hounds, then the rest of us before his eyes settle on Cassius. “As are the rest of the prisoners until our Sovereign renders his judgment.”

  “He’ll want them interrogated. They could be spies.”

  “What a gift you have, to know my father’s mind so many leagues away.” The words cow her. “We make for home. Recall the rest of your pickets.”

  “Is this fleet no longer mine either?” Pandora asks. “Do the powers of an Olympic Knight stretch so far?”

  Diomedes blinks, caught off guard. “No. Apologies. You are right, of course. I overstep.” He bows deeply, and stays bent.

  “Forgiven,” the old woman sighs. He straightens, turns from her to lift his sister from the bed to carry her from our ship into theirs. When he’s gone, we’re left alone with Pandora’s men.

  “Shall we take them to the white tanks, domina?” a soldier asks.

  She contemplates it. “No. You heard the Storm Knight. Put them in the cells.”

  Spared from torture, I should be overrun with joy. But as they drag me away from Cassius and Pytha into their ship, fragmented facts coalesce into shape: the scar, the razor, the brutal violen
ce of the girl, the warship, the dragon sigils, and now the names. I knew the lineage of my own house going back to Silenius the Lightbringer before I was five years of age. I knew the rest of the major houses by seven.

  But even an average child of the Palatine to some lesser prelate would know the names Diomedes and Seraphina. And even a street urchin on the wharfs of Venus would know their father. So long as there are men, his name will be remembered. The man who allied with the Reaper to break the Society in half. Sworn enemy of my grandmother and my godfather—Romulus au Raa, Sovereign of the Rim Dominion.

  This is his ship, his children, and we are now under his power.

  WE GATHER GEAR QUICKLY, raiding the Den’s armory for provisions. I watch the city move outside the window as I pause inside the concrete and metal room. Two Red Howlers push a crate of specialized combat armor out the door behind me. “So you know how we’re marching into almost certain death?” Sevro says from behind me.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I reply without turning.

  “If we’re to go to Venus, slip past their orbital checkpoints, planetary patrols, and the Ass Lord’s own private army, I need something from you.”

  “Name it.”

  “I need to see my girls before we go.”

  I feel a pang of sympathy. “That’s not a good idea.”

  “Neither is yours. They cancel each other out.”

  “I want to see Pax too….” I try not to think of his face. Of the betrayal that will be in my son’s eyes. “But the Wardens will look here first, there second.”

  “You got Lionguards there,” Sevro says. “Wardens won’t get past them. It’s Augustus House territory.” It’s a good point. “The others can get the Nessus from orbit and we’ll rendezvous. No time wasted…” He looks at me hopefully, and I know whatever I say, he’s going to go.

  This constant pull of duty and family. We bear it together, but he bears it naturally. I feel I’m not the father my son needs. I should not leave before telling him I love him. But still I’m afraid to face him. The memory of him in the dueling grotto staring up at me lingers.