I yawn. I’m thinking too much again, so I pop a zoladone, stand and pace as the drug leads my wandering thoughts back to my employer with a cold, distant hand.
Oslo, if that is in fact his name, is an inoffensive, impossibly meticulous creature with a dreadful sense of calm that borderlines on the robotic. Slender, and professional in his white business tunic with a starched high collar and sleeves to his knuckles. His skin is squid ink black. His head bald and the irises of his eyes an unsettling white. He adjusts the digital monocle on his right eye.
“I do believe this is the item my clients requested,” he says in a harmonic baritone.
“As I said. Can we wrap this up?” He leans closer to the blade one last time before straightening and sheathing it very carefully into a gel-insulated metal briefcase.
“Citizen Horn, as ever, you delivered the requested item in a timely manner.” Oslo turns back to me, typing into his datapad. “You will note that the agreed-upon sum has been deposited into your Echo City account.”
I pull up my own datapad to check. His right eyebrow goes up. “I trust everything is satisfactory.”
“Yut,” I mutter.
“Yut?” he says in curiosity. “Oh yes, legion speak. Denoting an affirmation, usually done to convey affirmative sarcasm to a disliked officer.”
“It’s called dog tongue,” I say. “Not ‘legion speak.’ ”
“Of course.” He touches his chest. “In fact I studied it extensively. I suppose you could say I’m a bit of a military enthusiast. The traditions. The organization. ‘Merrywater ad portas,’ ” he says with a smile, using the phrase that seven centuries of legionnaires have shouted in memory of John Merrywater, the American who almost turned the tide of the Conquering by invading Luna—a reminder that the enemy is always at the gate.
I let it go, reminded of something the Ash Lord said to my cohort as a valedictory speech. “Those you protect will not see you. They will not understand you. But you are the Gray wall between civilization and chaos. And they stand safe in the shadow you cast. Do not expect praise or love. Their ignorance is proof of the success of your sacrifice. For we who serve the state, duty must be its own reward.”
Or something like that. Good branding. Works like a charm on sixteen-year-old gray matter.
“Now, what is next on your mysterious employer’s list?” I ask. “The sword of Alexander? The Magna Carta? The blackened heart of Kuthul Amun? I know. The knickers of the Sovereign herself. If she wears any…”
“There will be nothing else.”
“Between you and me, I doubt she wears—wait, what?”
“There will be nothing else, Citizen Horn,” Oslo says, picking up the briefcase containing the razor.
“Nothing?”
“Correct. My client has found this business relationship most satisfactory, but this piece will be the final acquisition, completing their collection. Thusly will we conclude our affiliation. Your services will not be required in the future.”
“Well, my bank account’s sorry to see you go,” I say, feeling a nasty hollowness knowing no job is waiting in the wings. It’s the first time in three years I’ve not had one on deck. “But nothing good can last forever, eh?” I stand and offer my hand to the taller White. He shakes it gently, and I hold on. The platinum rings on my forefinger dig into his tissue-thin skin. “So you’re still not even going to give me a hint about who I’ve been stealing for all this time?” He jerks his hand away and I narrow my eyes at him. “Just a hint.”
Oslo stares at me intensely.
“Why did curiosity kill the cat?” he asks me.
“Is telling riddles part of the job requirement?”
He smiles. “Because the cat stumbled upon the anaconda.”
—
I linger in the suite after Oslo has left, long enough to dull the bitterness of his words with a couple more glasses of vodka. Out the window, my city of towers writhes. She looks prettier in the dark.
Idly, I cycle through the contents of my address book, looking for a distraction. It’s a sea of detritus: bodies I’ve explored, relationships I’ve stretched past fraying. And floating amidst that wretched digital sea, standing in front of the city that never sleeps, surrounded by a billion breathing mouths, I feel the dark creep of despair. I pour one last drink, willing the numbness to spread.
—
A half day later, after a nap and a sobering plate of Terran noodles, I meet my crew to disburse the funds, though I hardly feel like company, on account of the date. They’re huddled in a booth in an uppity South Promenade bar on the fringe of Old Town, drinking vibrantly colored cocktails. Volga twirls a pink umbrella between massive fingers. The bar itself is located inside the gutted carcass of an old advertising dirigible that someone renovated in an attempt to commercialize irony. Seems to be working despite the wartime rationing. The place buzzes with soldiers, packs of slick, suited Silvers, new-monied Greens and Coppers. All the ones near the right levers to make cash when the free market opened, now surrounded by the gaggles that attend them like brightly plumed vultures. It’s mostly midColors, and there’s been more than a few nervous glances aimed at Volga. The big girl has ordered me something called a Venusian Fury. It’s dark as its namesake, Atalantia au Grimmus, and tastes like licorice and salt. Something in it makes the back of my eyes buzz and my groin swell. “What do you think?” she asks hopefully.
“Tastes like the ass end of the Ash Lord.” I push it away. She looks downcast at the table. In my haze, pity is slow to come, and dull when it does. I hate bars like this.
“You know what the Ash Lord’s ass tastes like?” Cyra asks.
“Look how old he is,” Dano says, taking a break from staring at a beautiful slip of a Pink at the bar, who looks nervously at his nasal piercings. His head is buzzed in popular fashion with Obsidian dragons. “Tinpot’s been around long enough to try everything.” I don’t reply, trying to hold on to the buzz left over from Oslo’s vodka. I’ll need it where I’m going.
“Whose idea was this commercial shithole?” I ask.
“Not mine,” Dano says, holding up his hands. “Not nearly enough bare tits in this place.”
“It was mine,” Cyra says defensively. “It was featured in Hyperion Weekly. You know, Eph, it is humanly possible to enjoy something different. Something new.”
“ ‘New’ generally means someone’s just trying to make money off something old.”
“Whatever. It’s better than the black-hole dives you visit to pickle your liver. Least here I’m not worried about getting an infection just by walking in the door.”
“Let’s get this over with.” I pull up my datapad so they can all see, and transfer the funds into each of their accounts. Sure, they’d see the balances change on their own pads if I’d just done it over the net. But there’s something incredibly human and satisfying for them to see my thumb disburse the money. “All done,” I say. “Six hundred apiece.”
“Even for Limey?” Dano asks. “Thought she was getting half.”
“What the hell does it matter to you?” Cyra snaps.
“The rest of us did our jobs without a bloody hitch.” He goes back to looking at the Pink girl, who’s talking with her friends. “No reason we shouldn’t get a little bonus for that action.”
“I need no bonus,” Volga says.
Dano sighs. “You ain’t helping the cause, love.”
“What the shit is your damage?” Cyra glares at Dano past Volga between them. “Always jacking on about my business? Why don’t you tend your own and focus on catching diseases from Pink slips.”
I lurch to my feet. “All right, this was fun. Try not to catch anything.”
“And he’s out like a Drachenjäger.” Dano checks his newest shiny chronometer. This one has rubies embedded in the hands. “Two minutes flat.”
“When’s the next job?” Cyra asks.
“Yeah, boss,” Dano says. “When’s the next job? Cyra’s got bills to pay.”
r /> She flips him the crux and stares at me with more desperation than she probably means to show. It’s pitiful. “So? Your man’s got another job, right?”
“Not this time. We’re all done.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said.” Seeing rain slithering down the windows, I pop the collar of my jacket.
“Ephraim,” Volga says plaintively. “You just arrived. Stay for a drink. We can order you something else?” She stares up at me with those big mopey eyes, and for a moment I consider it, until I hear a telltale hush of the patrons and turn to see two towering figures emerge from outside through the dirigible’s metal door. Golds. They wear black jackets with legion epaulets, their shoulders eclipsing the heads of the other patrons. They blithely survey the room with entitled eyes, before one of them catches sight of Dano’s Pink and strides to the bar. The others make room and he introduces himself without a care in the world. There’s an iron griffin pin on his chest. Arcos spawn. Dano’s eyes go down as the Gold’s hand drifts to the Pink’s waist.
“Boss…” Dano says, eyeing me warily.
I realize my hand has drifted to the butt of the pistol under my jacket.
Bloodydamn Aureate. We should have purged the lot of them, or exiled them to the Core. But that chance is gone. All for the war effort.
“Just one drink, Ephraim,” Volga says plaintively. “It will be fun. We can tell each other stories. And share jokes, as friends do.”
“It’s always the same story!”
As I leave the dirigible in the gravLift, the warm laughter of one of the Gold youths chases me down into the night.
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 alon
g 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.