It is the accent of Io and the Lords of the Dust.
“Attention, Archimedes,” the disembodied voice says. “This is the Rim Dominion Destroyer Charybdis. Your communications equipment is neutralized. Any deviation from present course will result in the destruction of your vessel. Any resistance will result in the destruction of your vessel. Stand by for boarding.”
The com goes off. Silence sits with us in the cockpit.
Desperate, Cassius grabs the com. “Charybdis, we are not in violation of Rim Space. Repeat, we are in neutral territory. This is a violation of the Pax Ilium. Repeat, we are not in Rim Space.” No response. Cassius hurls the com in anger. Pytha flinches as the plastic shatters against the metal bulkhead.
“Better our own kind than Ascomanni,” I say, though I’m disquieted by the fear I see in his eyes and Pytha’s. We can reason with them.
“Reason? Bring me the faciem, Pytha.” I look at him and wonder if his fear is warranted. “Lysander, get my box and yours and put it in the vault.” He pulls his House Bellona ring from the chain around his neck and pushes it into my hand. “Make sure there’s nothing that could lead them back to who we are. Holos, weapons, rings—everything goes in the vault. And Karnus’s razor. That cover you have on it won’t fool them. Hide it or we’re dead.”
I rush through the halls to the living quarters, where I collect Cassius’s oak box in which he keeps his family heirlooms, the meager remaining inheritance of a man who once could have ruled Mars. I fetch my own box, a large ivory vessel that carries the last relics of my past. I deposit both boxes in the hidden vault in the wall behind the ship’s oven. I frisk my body to make sure I’ve not forgotten anything. Grudgingly I take my grandmother’s ring that hangs around my neck and Karnus’s razor and push them into the box.
By the time I’ve returned to the cockpit, Cassius has opened the faciem, which we bought in a black market on Ceres. Set in foam is a honeycombed thin gray mask, a vial of smelling salts, a chemical ice pack, and a missing holster for the painkilling stim syringe, which we emptied weeks ago to fill our field kits. “You don’t happen to have any extra stims?” he asks me.
“I used them on the Gold. Don’t you?”
He shakes his head. “Gave them all to the prisoners.”
“Goryhell,” I mutter, looking at the mask’s honeycombs. “Cassius…”
He laughs and lets a bit of his old roguish smile break through. “It’s fine, my goodman. Pain’s just a memory.”
“Are you spacemad?” Pytha asks flatly. “You can’t use that monster without stims.”
“I can check the hold,” I say. “We might have missed a pack….”
Cassius shakes his head. “No time.”
Pytha’s horrified. “Lysander. Don’t let him…”
I meet Cassius’s gaze. “I’ll hold you down.”
Cassius glances down into the mask, a distant, forlorn look in his eyes. The same look he had when we had to pay for engine parts by collecting a bounty on a former Gold Tribune. It asks how it came to this. So far from what he thought he would be.
Sparing a gentle smile to us, one that belongs to another time, a gentler version of himself, he brings the mask to his face till only his eyes are visible. He tightens the plastic latch at the back so it is secure to his head.
“Don’t let me take it off,” he says.
“Coral hold?” I ask.
“Mantis lock. I’d break your arms in a coral hold.”
I obey. Sitting behind him, I wrap my legs around his midsection and loop my arms around his biceps, then under his armpits, and clasp my hands together at the middle of his spine. “Pytha, you flip the switch.” She creeps forward.
Muttering to herself, he grips the activation knob on the side of the mask. “On you.”
“Do it.”
Pytha twists the activation knob on the mask. There’s a sibilant hiss as the three hundred needles built into the plastic of the scrambler mask spring forward into the skin, bone, and cartilage of Cassius’s face. He jerks once. Twice. And then a gurgling scream escapes from beneath the mask like seething steam from a kettle. His muscles knot and clench rock-hard as he thrashes back into me, twisting so viciously with his arms that I think my own will break. He screams babbling, incomprehensible curses as he rolls, kicking out and almost catching Pytha in the shin. She jumps back. The mask mercilessly pumps artificial filler into his face, grafting imitation bone onto his jaw and forehead and eye sockets. In twenty seconds, the mask’s indicator blinks from red to yellow and the worst of Cassius’s convulsions begin to fade. We’re on our sides breathing heavily. He mewls and drifts into shallow insentience. The indicator blinks green. I disentangle myself from his arms. There’s a stabbing line of pain down my forearm that insinuates a stress fracture.
Pytha rushes to Cassius and gingerly unlatches the mask. His face is a bubbling mass of angry, swollen flesh. Like a wax figure strayed too close to flame. Bit by bit the swelling subsides under the anti-inflammation pack that Pytha applies.
When she pulls the pack away, our handsome friend is gone, replaced by a thuggish visage with a primitive forehead, a bulbous, veiny nose, chipped ears, and a slack mouth with engorged, lazy lips. The Peerless Scar is gone, recessed into this new Bronzie visage. Pytha wipes tears from her eyes.
She looks up at me in recrimination and jerks the smelling salts out of my hands to crack them under his nose. “You’re prime, dominus,” she says to him, cradling his head and wiping the vomit from his face as he comes to. “Easy as sin. It’s all over now. It’s all over.” He sits up with her help and together we watch out the viewport to see the destroyer opening its docking bay to swallow us whole.
I STAND UPON MY TOWER as a hard rain falls.
Before me, the steel skin of the Eternal City yawns into the night. Amidst the reaching towers and bloated stadiums and buzzing complexes lie dark pools of shadow where the Jackal, and the years of war that followed, left their mark. Now, with the radiation scrubbed and pulsedomes removed, arthropodal construction ships from Sun Industries drift with lazy purpose there, hauling and ferrying workers and metal.
Hyperion may be rebuilding itself, but the southern cities were all but destroyed by the Ash Lord’s forces under his mad Minotaur, Apollonius au Valii-Rath, before the latter’s capture and imprisonment in Deepgrave.
My people do suffer. But Dancer’s false peace is not the answer. In my youth I was consumed with the fever of war. I don’t feel that fever now. I only feel the cold weight of duty, and the fear of what it will do to my family. A ship glows as it approaches the top of my tower and sets down on the landing pad.
A thickset Silver man with a bald pate walks down the ramp. He wears a high-collared white velvet jacket. The eyeball of a Gold glints from a ring on his heavy hand.