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.