Iron Gold

  “I’ve been given orders by the Senate and the Sovereign to place you under arrest.”

  And the Sovereign. I resist looking back at my wife.

  “So you’re with them then. You want to barter with the Ash Lord.”

  “I am with the Republic, Darrow. As are you. Do not claim I betray you. No man is above the law. And the law will find you innocent. The People would not let the Reaper be punished. You will rise stronger than ever.”

  “Is that what you think?” They’ll put me in a cell. I feel the Jackal roving through the back of my mind. Hear the dinner plates echoing through the stone. I told myself long ago that I would never be a prisoner again. To have my choice robbed from me, to have my body constricted…I cannot fathom allowing any man or woman to ever strip me of my liberty again.

  “You really think the Ash Lord is ever going to accept peace?” I ask. “You’re sharper than that. You saw New Thebes. Death for forty kilometers.”

  “It is my duty to uphold the New Compact and obey the Senate. Just as it is yours. That is what I know.”

  He’s too starry-eyed to see there’s a vast gulf that separates his idea of the Republic and the corrupt reality of what it’s become. “I thought you might say that.” I nod to my ship. “You’re going to have to move, Wulfgar.”

  “I will not.”

  “You don’t want me to move you.” I take a step forward. The knights ripple back. Their cloaks roll up into compartments in the back of their armor.

  “Darrow, stop,” Wulfgar says with a laugh. “We’re in SI-7 pulseArmor. You’ve got a leather jacket.”

  “So?”

  His voice softens. “Think what you risk.” He nods back to the house. I look back for Mustang. She stands on the edge of the clearing, letting the law do its own work. “Would your son be proud?” He steps forward, voice plaintive. “Would he understand?”

  His nearest man is ten meters away. I’ll never close the distance before they put me down. “One day he would,” I say. I’m buying time for Sevro to join us. I’m not sure they’ve clocked him back at the house.

  Wulfgar’s face hardens as he sees I’m not going to come with him. “Out of respect for who you are, I will ask you one last time to come peacefully.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  He opens his hands. “There will be violence.”

  Sevro must be out in the darkness somewhere. Even with him, the odds are not good. But the odds will be far worse if I let them take me into custody. I’ll be at the mercy of bureaucrats and they won’t let me out till Dancer’s peace is made and the Ash Lord’s trap sprung. Or my men will break me out, and start a civil war.

  “Have it your way.” I toss my razor to the ground.

  “On your knees.”

  I obey. Three Wardens come forward, a Gold, an Obsidian, and a mechjob Red. They carry a metal electrical collar and train their weapons on me.

  I look past them to the rest of Wulfgar’s men. “Which of you served with me on Earth?”

  “I did, sir,” a young, pale Gray woman says. “Eighth Legion, Second Cohort. I followed you through the pass of Kardung La against the Minotaur and again through the Gates of Paris.”

  “And who served with me on Mars?” A Gold and a Red nod solemnly to me.

  “And who serves with me still?” I ask. They look to one another.

  “Remember your oaths,” Wulfgar says, his left hand drifting to the razor on his arm. “Stand fast!” The men coming to arrest me look back for instructions.

  “Hail libertas,” I say past them.

  “Hail Reaper,” two of the veterans answer. They step back from the line and turn their gravRifles on their own. The air thumps and two Wardens are punched twenty meters through the air. The rest wheel toward the new threat.

  “Put him down—” Wulfgar roars.

  The half-second distraction is all I need. I grab my razor from the ground. It hardens into a slingBlade. And there, at the center of three Wardens, I hack off the barrel of the Gold’s rifle, as well as several of his fingers. I slash backward and sever the ligaments in the sword arm of the Obsidian. The Red I finish with four alternating thrusts delivered to kneecaps and wrists. They don’t get a shot off. In three seconds, three Wardens fall screaming to the ground. Injured but alive.

  Then the air erupts from the firing line.

  I use the Gold as a human shield, catching him as he stumbles back from the wound I gave him, and rush at the remaining men as my two veterans sow chaos. I fling my razor out at an Obsidian’s pulseRifle. The razor wraps around the muzzle as he pulls the trigger. I jerk it sideways and nonlethal charges spray down the line into his armored companions, slamming two to their knees. I retract the whip, severing the muzzle from his rifle, then cut off half his hand as he reaches for his razor. Another man is shot by my Gray ally. Wulfgar flings up his aegis, and the pearlescent energy shield blossoms from his right arm. He takes the fire of the Gray behind their line and launches toward her with his gravBoots. The edge of his aegis melts through her bare skull, sheaving it in two. She falls dead. Wulfgar bowls into the Gold veteran, their armor making a terrible clang. Their rifles tangle and their razors flash out.

  I’m hit in the left shoulder with a glancing energy round as the Wardens try to keep their distance to use their nonlethal munitions.

  The nerves from shoulder to elbow go ice cold. I roar in rage and kick one of their Reds so hard in the chest he’s lifted off his feet. Someone hits me from the side with the shoulder of their armor. My teeth clack together. A birdcage is fired a half second later. Instinct saves me. I see the blur and slice it in half midair before the round can expand. I whip my razor around the foot of an Obsidian as he flies upward on his gravBoots to escape my charge and get a better angle to shoot down at me. I let him carry me up off my feet, then I retract the razor, ripping off his foot. I fall back down amongst the men below as he sputters sideways, screaming.

  As I land, I throw my razor at a Gray leveling a rifle at me from ten meters off. It goes end over end and spits him through the shoulder, piercing his armor and jutting out the other side. I grab a razor from the body of a downed Red and roll to my feet just as a razor emerges from my left bicep as if my body is giving birth to a meter-long tongue of grisly metal. The Obsidian woman on the other end tries to stake me to the ground, but I pull sideways and let the blade go through the meat. Then I turn on her and exchange a fury of blows, but don’t have time to finish her off before the remaining three Wardens charge from the left. I spin backward and toward them, so that I alter the angle to face one man on their flanks, his body blocking the others. I slap his blade to the side and stab his left shoulder, then his right elbow. Neither a killing blow. His razor drops.

  I spin and slap my razor in Lorn’s Whirlwind movement, creating chaos for the last two Wardens, and moving so fast they seem stuck in mud. I forgo killing blows and hack off two hands, one right after another, razors still clenched in their grips. Then I fire the gravity gun point-blank at a Gray who just gained his feet. He shoots backward into a tree, cracking branches as he goes.

  I turn on Wulfgar as he pulls his blade from the Gold’s sternum. She’s dead on the ground.

  “Darrow…”

  I fly at him in a fury. He is a warrior of the ice. Sold as a child, he fought in the pits as a gladiator and rose by the strength of his sword arm. He fights with wild, hacking power, but I am the last student of Arcos. I grind the taller man back, our blades a kinetic shower of sparks and blood-hungry metal. Reverberations gnaw through my hands. My breath is measured; my feet sound against the grass. I’m going to win. I see his balance go several sets before it happens. Two slashes at the legs, a jab at the knee, then the armpit, using the momentum of his blade’s deflections to move my blade to its next attack. I slash sideways at his bicep. He twists and moves back, shoulders extending too far out from his center of gravity. I pursue, leading with my blade rigid and aimed for his sword shoulder. Then there’s a wail from behind
me. An energy round, the cool blue of a stun weapon, slams into the armor of his thigh. It’s absorbed harmlessly, but it pushes him sideways into the path of my thrust.

  Resistance pushes its way down the blade to the handle. Blood follows.

  Wulfgar steps back. His legs sluggish. His eyes confused and blank as he teeters there. The blade has entered through his mouth and out the back of his skull. Blood spills down into his beard. His teeth click against metal.

  He falls to his knees, and there, dead, stares on at me down the length of my blade.

  Instinctively, I pull the blade from his mouth. Then the realization falls upon me with all its weight.

  “Darrow!” Sevro sprints from the house toward me, a multiPistol in hand. He stares in horror at the body of Wulfgar. “Darrow.” I kneel in front of the fallen knight. The rage that gripped me when my blood was high gives way to crushing sorrow.

  No. No. No. Wulfgar…

  This is not what I wanted.

  Wulfgar’s head bubbles blood into the summer grass. His wounded men, those who can, rise to stare at him, at me. I step back from their eyes, seeing not anger in them, but utter confusion and betrayal. The only others dead besides Wulfgar are the Gold and Gray who fought for me. I stumble back as I realize the horror I’ve made.

  “Darrow…” I hear Mustang’s voice behind me. She stands weaponless at the edge of the fray. She drifts slowly toward me. “What have you done…”

  This death will reach beyond this small plot of earth and rattle the Republic to its foundations. Wulfgar carried the luster of Ragnar’s legend with him. He was a hero. More than that. He was a symbol, and not just to the Vox Populi. The people will hate me. Especially the Obsidians. I’ve taken one of their favorite sons, one of their great bridges to the Republic, and cut him down in the grass.

  What did I think would happen?

  Sevro looks back at me, his eyes red. “Darrow, more will be coming.” He grabs me when my own legs won’t move. “It’s time to go. Reap. Come on.” I look over at him and see the fear in his eyes.

  Amidst the bodies, Mustang looks a ghost of herself. Ten years of building, and one night has broken it all. “I’m sorry,” I say. She stares at me, finding no words for her horror, and I let Sevro pull me away.

  As we lift off from the landing pad, I stand looking out from the closing passenger ramp and see my wife standing amidst the ruin I’ve left behind, and beyond her, in the shadow of a conifer pine, my son watches me leave the killing field behind.

  A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.

  —LORN AU ARCOS

  WE HURTLE LIKE A black thunderbolt over a pale waste of silicate dust and sulfur dioxide frost in a starship adorned with electric dragons. Out the breath-fogged window, a yellow-green sulfur plain stretches toward the dark side of the moon, broken only by lava floes, volcanoes, ash plumes, and mountains. They do not rise in chains according to the humors of tectonic activity, but in isolated, violent surges out of the moon’s crust, so that they look like leprous old giants wading through the stained sea.

  Each day, 3600 rems of radiation—enough to wither a man’s DNA in hours—bombard the moon that was once one of the driest objects in the Solar System. But now, six hundred years after the first ice was carved from Europa and transported to Io, she has become the breadbasket of Ilium—as the Jovian Moon Lords prefer to call their cluster of moons.

  Despite the fear I feel at my incarceration, I can’t help but be enamored by the testament to human will.

  The Conquerors were not daunted by Io’s temperament. Wise as they were, they did not try to change her face, but instead created bold bubbles of life upon her surface. Out the small dirty window on the other side of the passenger aisle, I glimpse a chain of agricultural domes, docks, and skeletal tramways. There, botanical enterprises manned by lowColor slaves produce enough food to feed Ilium and, with Titan, feed the rest of the Rim.

  Io is a contradiction, and so, I know, are its inhabitants. Something I must keep in mind if I am to find some means of escape for my friends.

  The ship jerks against sudden turbulence. I lose hold of the plastic cup that I’ve brought up to the edge of the metal muzzle that’s affixed to my head. It drops to the floor, spilling the water across the deck. The guard stares at the water running along the floor planking with dull, mole eyes. He is disgusted by the waste and my noises as I lick the mesh of my muzzle, desperate for any last drop of moisture for my swollen mouth. He moves on, the magnets in his boots securing his rangy legs to the deck despite the turbulence from the atmospheric entry.

  “May I…” My dry throat closes around the words. “May I have another cup?” I rasp out, eyes on the man’s boots, trying and failing to keep the desperation from my voice. This one’s name is Bollov. He has an unyielding disposition, a tremor in his right hand. He likes power and teaching lessons to spoiled Corish Pixies like myself and Cassius. I wish I knew why; perhaps then I could dismantle him. My grandmother once told me, “A new wound can take a body. Opening an old one can claim a soul.”

  I observe the small exchanges between the guards, the idle chatter in halls or as the watch changes; but these Rim dwellers hoard their emotions. Better to guess the thoughts of a lizard than those of Bollov. My head pounds from the dehydration headache that I’ve been nursing for thirty-four days. My sleep has been restless, filled with visions of the crew I abandoned.

  The water deprivation is civilized torture, and I know deep down Pandora yearns for something more barbaric. It seems only Diomedes’s protection has staved off that course. Could he be a potential ally? Pandora is certainly not. She’s a savage. Two days into my capture, the old woman visited my cell. For an hour she sat cross-legged on the floor and watched me, saying nothing until she asked if Seraphina brought a datacube onto the Archimedes. I told her I didn’t know of such a cube. She left without a word and I’ve been unable to discern just what the datacube could contain.

  Since that day I’ve been given just enough water to survive, but no more. My muscles ache like they’ve seen hard gravity. My gums are swollen, mouth like chalk. Every day she would return, watch me like an old, evil owl, and make the same request. I’d give her the damn datacube if I’d seen one. It doesn’t matter to Castor au Janus, the persona supported by our ship’s logs. Cassius is Regulus au Janus. We’re Martian traders from New Thebes who were on the Rim ferrying water to blackmarket ore miners.

  The fact that I still have my skin must mean they haven’t found our vault yet.

  “Please,” I implore Bollov. “Just one more cup.”

  “That was your cup, gahja.” Their word for outsider. Derived from the original Japanese language that was the native tongue of the Raa, before the arrival of a South African strain of Golds. “Waste not. Want not.” Bollov moves on.

  Beside me, Cassius hunches in his seat, his arms sealed in metal cuffs and locked to his chest, with just enough room to bring his cup to the steel mesh muzzle that’s wrapped around his head. He’d share with me, but he’s already gulped his down. A thin chain connects the jaw of his muzzle to a belt around his waist, so he’s hunched in permanent supplication, even when he walks. Together in the tan prisoner uniforms, we look like a pair of pre-Neanderthal hominids. But my friend is alive, and that is all that matters.

  This is the first I’ve seen him in the month voyage from the asteroid belt to Io. Based on Jupiter’s current orbit, these new ships of theirs are faster than they have any right to be. I crave to see their designs, their new engines, but my world has been a steel cube three meters by three by three. I almost wept when I saw Cassius waddling toward me in the hall before we boarded this shuttle, his face still as ugly and bulbous as the day we escaped the Ascomanni.

  Despite the joy of our reunion, a pall hangs over us. We don’t know if Pytha is alive. If this is how they treat Golds, it makes my heart ache to think what misery her life has become. I’ve not stopped thinking about how I could have averted t
his. How I could have done better. What action would I adjust? What different move would I make?

  “Give him another cup,” a voice tells Bollov from behind me. Coming up from the storage hold of the dropship through the prisoner section is Diomedes au Raa. His hair is loose and falls around the shoulders of a gray scorosuit, a hooded body-fitting polymer suit with electromagnetic radiation shielding and water reclamation pockets. His storm cloak flows behind him and seems alive with mutations in the color.

  “If you’re so afraid of Pandora, set it there and go on.” The guard does just that, leaving the plastic jug on an empty seat. I nearly pitch sideways to steal the whole thing, but I wait patiently as Diomedes opens the jug and pours me another portion, hoping to impress upon him that we are of the same breed. He gives me just one cup to replace the one lost. There’s little mercy here, but even amongst the guards, there’s been less callous cruelty than in the Interior since our imprisonment.

  “Thank you,” I manage. The lukewarm water gives new life to my throat.

  He looks down at me without a smile and then moves away toward the main cabin.

  “Why was she in the Gulf?” I ask. He stops and I wish I had read his psychological profile in Moira’s SIB database when I was younger. I remember he was secondary heir to his older brother Aeneas, who died at the Battle of Ilium. He’s risen to the challenge of being an heir, it seems. No easy task. I would know.

  “Shut up, Castor,” Cassius mutters to me. “Take your gift and be silent.”

  I don’t shut up. Whether Cassius wants to admit it or not, these people are our kin. And if I do not stir the pot, the only opportunities will be the ones they choose to give us. That is unacceptable.

  “She was in the Gulf for a reason,” I say to Diomedes. “And without permission from your father, it would seem.” Diomedes turns back, measuring me with a blademaster’s gaze: eyes then hands then scars. “Do you even know why? Or is that Krypteia jurisdiction?” His silence speaks for him. There it is. A chink in the emotional stoicism of the man. I appeal to what seems his strongest sense, that of a soldier’s honor: “If you are truly thankful that we saved Seraphina, save us. Do not let us see Io. We’re traders, that is all. We thought we stumbled upon salvage. All we’ve seen is a hangar, cells, and this ship. If we see anything beyond this ship, we both know we will never leave. Let me and my brother and our pilot go back from where we came. Escort us to the edge of your space and send us on our way. That is what is honorable. Life for life.”