by Pierce Brown
“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.”