Not the busy silence of space, where air purifiers hum and engines tremble through the metal. It is the silence of stone and the silence of darkness that stretches into an unseen, unending frozen landscape. A cavernous, alien silence.
Those crewmembers on the Vindabona will be dead by now. It’s the only mercy I know to hope for. How long did they last?
Two lonely lights glide across the plain in the distance, too low to be aircraft. Hoverbikes? Where are those two souls going? What errand do they attend? Are they lovers? Friends? Then a score of lights burns out of the blackness behind them, chasing them across the expanse. I lean forward in excitement as bright orange tongues of flame lick out from the pursuers and the two leading lights vanish in blossoms of white fire.
Two more fall to the coup. It seems it is not as peaceful as Dido would like us to believe. Cassius is right, yet again.
All across the city men will be dying. Silent squads will arrest loyal members of Romulus’s faction. The cells will fill. Guns may rattle. Razors drip with blood. All balanced and gambled on the promise of the evidence Seraphina brought back.
I know coups, and am little impressed by them. They’re more common than weddings in my family. These Rim rustics hold their noses at Golds of the Interior, at my family and the “bitch on Luna.” But they’re little better.
Then I remember Seraphina. How she stood before her father, and the sadness I saw upon her face when she realized his intent. Torn between the love of her people and mother, and the love of her father. What choice would I make?
I see my own father in my mind’s eye and try again in vain to summon my mother. I reach for her, but my fingers rake nothing but shadow, and I feel, in no small way, that her absence is my fault. I did not study her enough. Did not love her enough. And so, she will never hold me in her arms, never kiss me upon the brow. As if she never existed.
My thoughts are interrupted when a jammer activates with a static pop behind me.
I swing around to see a pair of amber eyes staring at me from the shadows of the sitting room. “Jove in hell!” I flick on the glow lights to reveal a woman sitting on my sleeping mat. She watches intently as I scramble to put my robe back on. “Seraphina?” She’s at home now, her prisoner jumpsuit gone, and wears the garb of the Io. A gray wool cloak held together with a charcoal sash. She peers up at me, amused.
“Do all Martians have such dreadful hearing?”
Her eyes rove as I pull tight my robe. She wears rubber-soled slippers and two heavy rings—on her left middle finger a dragon eating a lightning bolt, on her right a simple iron Institute ring of House Diana’s stag’s antlers. I should have guessed she’d be a hunter.
“Are all Moonies as rude as you?” I look at the door, and know it made no sound, and, more impressively, neither did she. Must have come through the walls, then. A secret door. “Are you lost?”
She frowns. “Lost?”
“Well, you do seem to be in my room.”
“Your room?” Her sudden laugh is surprisingly girlish. Then the drawl comes back. “You are in my city, gahja. On my moon. There are cameras in the stone. What does it matter that I watch you through the camera or here? This is more honest, no?”
“Well, it is entirely eerie either way,” I say with a smile. “Most inhospitable.”
“If I remember correctly, you are a watcher too. I saw you looking at me on the table….”
“You were injured,” I say. “I was checking your—”
“Tits?”
“Your wound. The one on your—”
“Breasts.”
“Stomach. You’re clearly still insensate. Took a knock on the head, turned a bit mad. Or do your kind all talk like gutterborns?”
“I have manners,” she says with a smile. “The dust is a hard teacher.” She hurls a package at my face as she stands. I barely catch it. “Clothing. Yours was soiled from the journey.”
“Charitable of you.” I open the package to don the clothes. “Our pilot,” I say. “You said she’s alive and well. I want to see her.”
“No.”
“No negotiation? Very well.” I thumb the clothing she brought. She doesn’t turn away or leave. “Do you mind?”
“Mind?”
“Yes, I’d like to change now.”
She cocks her head in challenge. “I have seen naked men before.”
Unlike her own, mine was a solitary upbringing. “A Sovereign is an island,” my grandmother would say.
“It’s just carbon. Are you ashamed of your body?” she asks. “Or perhaps you are embarrassed you do not know how to use it?”
“So that’s why you sent the Pinks. So you could watch?” I find myself unusually pleased by the revelation. “Why so curious?”
Her brow wrinkles. “Were you injured? Is that why you turned them away? Does your manhood not work?”
“That…is absolutely none of your concern. Thank you for your interest, however. It works just fine.”
“I am sorry,” she says. “I did not mean to offend.”
“Well, you’re quite accomplished at it. Compliments to whoever taught you.”
“Would you be at ease if I were naked again too?” Even under the folds of her loose tunic, I see the subtle rise of her breasts, the length of her muscled legs, and…
I cough and shake my head. She waits patiently till I have a small, annoying epiphany. “Do you always toy with your guests?”
“Sometimes.” She smirks. “You do look a little like a toy. All that hair and those dandy little limbs.”
“Dandy?”
“Dandy. And your nose has only been broken recently. Are your eyes real?” She leans in. “You didn’t have them carved like a Corish Pixie, did you?” I don’t dignify the question with an answer.
“You’re not going to leave, are you?”
“Why would I? Everyone is busy preparing for supper. I am bored. You are entertaining.”
“Very well then.” I drop my robe to the floor, intending to embarrass her. She doesn’t look away. She scrutinizes.
“You have more scars than most Pixies,” she says after a moment.
“Because I am not a Pixie.”
She surprises me with a laugh and counts my scars till she finds one curious. It is a long, thin scar, like a necklace around my neck. “Who gave you this one?” Her pale fingers brush against the scar, and impossibly I hear the howling of the wind outside my window. And in the darkness there and in my mind, he lurks, the Reaper’s beast, the demon of my childhood. Instinctively, I put my robe back on and sit on the ground. She looks suddenly apologetic.
“A man gave it to me when I was young,” I say, chastising myself for losing control of the memory. Some demons never leave. Grandmother wanted to laser the scar off. I convinced her to let me keep it.
She joins me on the floor. “A lover?”
“No.”
“Did you kill him for it? For hurting you?”
I shake my head.
“Why not?”
“Like I said, I was young. He was not.”
“Did you find him and kill him later? You are a man now.”
“No.”
“Why not? If he hurt you and remains alive, then he is your master. That is why I slayed the Obsidian warchief who beat me on the Vindabona.”