Golden Son (29 page)

“We made these ships so we could empty them. Why? Not because we distrust your loyalty—in fact

we rely on that—but because there are still”—I look at the roster one of the Blues gives me—“sixty-one Golds on board. They are loyal to the Sovereign. I am her enemy. They will not obey me. They will sabotage the ship, attempt to take the bridge; they will rally you, abuse your loyalty, and lead you to certain death. Because of them and their hatred of me, you will never see your loved ones again.

“There is yet another complication. Beyond this hull, the Sovereign wonders what happened here.

Soon she will realize the pride of her armada no longer belongs to her. It is mine. Her Praetors’ ships will vomit out squadrons of leechCraft carrying legions of Obsidians and Gray marines. They will be led by Gold knights who want my head, fully prepared to kill all in their path.

“If I vent you into space, there will be no one to stop them from killing me. So you see, you are my salvation, and I am yours. I will not sacrifice twenty thousand of you to kill sixty-one of my enemies. I chose this vessel above all others because of its crew. The best the Society can offer. To me you are not expendable. So what I ask of you is this: choose me as your commander and overwhelm those Golds who think you expendable.

“You have my permission, my warrant and the badge of the ArchGovernor of Mars, Nero au Augustus, to capture or kill your Gold commanders for me. Take their weapons and subdue them, then make fast the ship against the invaders who come to destroy us. Do it now. If you wait, they will kill you! I will know the first men and women to rise up. As your new master, I will reward you. The ArchGovernor will reward you. Do it now! For I have just opened every armory throughout the ship.

Seize weapons, and neutralize the tyrants.”

A heavy silence as the first sparks of revolution are struck.

Sevro comes close. “That was rousing.”

“Too demokratic?” I whisper.

“I don’t think autocratic demokracy counts.” Sevro wrinkles his nose. “You did threaten to vent them into space.”

“Threaten? I thought I implied it rather smoothly.”

“Smooth as gravel, dipshit.” Sevro cackles a bit too enthusiastically and slaps his leg with his mech hand, denting the metal there. He winces, then looks up at me, slightly embarrassed. “Slag off.”

The door behind us begins to hiss. I turn to look at the glowing bulkhead. My enemies have brought a drill to assail me. My hands shake from the adrenaline. I feel the weight of dozens of blue eyes. The red of the door deepens, spreading. We haven’t long.

My razor ripples into killing form, long and terrible. “Company soon,” I say. I glance at Sevro, who has been distracted by one of the holo screens. I order the Blues to take shelter.

“They’re doing it,” Sevro murmurs. “Goryhell. Darrow, come look.”

He cycles through live visuals of Oranges and Blues ransacking the armories. Some Grays help them. Others stand by, unsure of their prerogative even as others shoot at the tide of their fellow shipmates. But no bullets can hold back this tide. They take weapons, run sloppily through halls, swelling their ranks. The roughest lead—not Blues, but Orange hangar workers and mechanics, along with Grays … one I recognize. The middle-aged corporal on my ship at the Academy, the one who

escaped with us. He directs a score of men and women into the stateroom of a Gold. They subdue him respectfully. That peaceful accord is not far spread.

Three powerful squads of Golds, leading Obsidians and Grays, marshal in the life support rooms,

at the engines five kilometers back to the aft of the ship, and just outside the bridge door. Those outside the bridge door number four Golds and six Obsidians. Ten Grays load weapons behind them.

“We’re still going to have company,” I say.

They’ll be coming through the door at any moment. Sparks spit from the inside of the bulkhead as their heat drill gets the better of the door. Metal drips inward, bubbling to the floor. The Blues shiver in terror, and Sevro and I square ourselves up and don our helmets, preparing for the new onslaught.

Again the stench of my sick fills my nostrils. I tell the Blues to hide in the communications bay.

They’ll be safe there.

A com light suddenly blinks on a console near me. Instinctively, I answer. A voice like thunder sends tremors through my bones. There is no visual.

“Can you hear me?”
it asks.

“I can.” I glance over at Sevro. Whoever calls us is using a voice amplifier that sounds like the breaking of thunder. Sevro shrugs as if he hasn’t a clue who it is. “Who is this?”

“Are you a god?”

A god? An eerie quiet settles in me. That is no voice amplifier. I should have known by the cold, sluggish accent. I choose my words carefully, remembering my lore. “I am Darrow au Andromedus

of the Sunborn.”

“You took the vessel and you are not yet Praetor? How?”

“I flew in through the bridge.”

“Alone from the Abyss?”

“With a companion.”

“I will come to meet you and your companion, godchild.”

The Blues look to one another in terror. They mouth something.
Stained
. The heaviness of fear settles on my shoulders. Sevro and I peer around the bridge, as though the beast were hiding somewhere in the shadows. More of the door peels away, dripping inward like some glowing red, rotting fruit.

Then one of the Blues gasps and we glance back at the HC monitor to see the cameras in the halls outside the bridge door relaying a scene of horror. It—
he
—runs at them from behind as they prepare to make entry into the bridge—an Obsidian, but larger than any I’ve ever seen. But it’s not just his size. It’s how he moves. A dread creature stitched from shadow and muscle and armor. Flowing, not running. Perverse. Like looking at a blade or a weapon made flesh. This is a creature that dogs would flee. That cats would hiss at. One that should never exist on any level above the first tier of hell.

He smashes into the kill squad from behind with two pulsing white ionBlades that extend out of his armor three feet from his hands. The Grays he simply runs through, crushing them into the walls with his shoulders, splintering their bones. Then he starts the real killing. It’s so savage I have to look away.

The heat drill continues melting the door of its own accord. And in its center forms a hole.

Through it I can see men and women dying. Blood sizzles on the overheated metal.

When the Stained is done, he’s bleeding from a dozen wounds, and there’s only one Gold left. She stabs him with a razor, piercing his dark armor through the breastplate. He twists his body, locking the blade in, and then clutching it when she lets the blade relax back into a whip. Then he grabs her by her helmet, her golden armor glittering under the hall’s lights. She tries to escape, tries to scramble away, but like a lion with a hyena in its jaws, he need simply squeeze. When she is gone, he lays her gently on the ground, tender now that he’s brought her a good death. Sevro involuntarily steps back from the door.

“Mothermercy …”

The Stained stands on the other side, the door between us slowly melting from the center. When the hole in the door is the size of a torso, he removes his helmet. A hairless, pale face stares as me. Eyes black. Wind-weathered cheeks armored with calluses like the hide of a rhinoceros. Head bald except for a meter-long white shock of hair that hangs to his mid-back.

We lock eyes and he addresses me.

“Godchild Andromedus, I am Ragnar Volarus, the Stained firstborn of my mother, Alia
Snowsparrow of the Valkyrie Spires north of the Dragon’s Spine, south of the Fallen City, where
the Winged Horror flies, brother of Sefi the Quiet, breaker of Tanos, which once stood by the
water, and I make you an offering of stains.”

He splays out his gigantic bloodstained hands and then reaches through the door with his right hand. His ionBlades retract into his armor. The razor still juts out of his ribs.

I’m pissing my bloodydamn suit.

“Well, frag me blind,” Sevro mutters. “Do it, Darrow. Before it changes its mind.”

Taking my helmet off, I step forward. I want this one.

“Ragnar Volarus. Well met. I see you wear no badge. Do you have a master?”

“I bore the mark of the Ash Lord, and was to be presented as a gift with this great vessel to
the Family Julii. But you took this vessel, and so you have taken me.”

The Julii? A gift for their betrayal of Augustus, no doubt.

And did he just use a bureaucratic loophole to justify killing his master ’s men? If there’s irony in his voice, I can’t find it. But why would he do that? Do those black eyes of his know me? Stained cannot use tech other than military matériel. He could never have seen me before, yet his hand remains, waiting to grip mine.

“Why do you do this?” I ask. “Is it the Julii?”

“They trade my kind.”
I had forgotten. It is Julii ships that carry Obsidian slaves across the abyss.

They know to fear the speared sun of Victra’s family crest.

He is not practiced at hiding his hate. It is cold as the ice the man was born into.

“Will you accept these stains, godchild?”
he asks, leaning forward, voice plaintive, a strange worry creasing the corners of his mouth. Golds did this after the Dark Revolt, the only uprising to ever threaten their reign. We took their history, took their technology, wiped out a generation, and gave their race the poles of planets, the religion of the Norse, and told them we were their gods. A few hundred years later, I stand looking up at one of their most terrifying sons, and wonder how he can think of me as a god.

“I accept these stains in my name, Ragnar Volarus.” Terrified, I reach forward and, with superheated metal surrounding our arms, clasp hands, nearly equal in size, though mine is sheathed in metal. I take the blood that his hand spreads to mine and wipe it over my exposed brow. “I accept their burden and their weight.”

“Thank you, Sunborn. Thank you. I will serve on the honor of my mother and her mother
before her.”

“I have friends aboard the stork in hangar bay three. Save them, Ragnar, and I will owe you a debt.”

Yellow teeth are revealed as he smiles, and from him undulates a war chant deeper than the ocean at storm. It fills the halls with dread. Fills me with joy and fear and primal curiosity. What did I just gain?

22

FIRE BLOSSOM

My body trembles in the aftermath of the giant’s departure. Steadying myself, I turn back to the Blues, who stand transfixed, unsure of whether to look to me or the HC displays or the scanners that show the Sovereign’s men-of-war encircling us. “You have nothing to fear here,” I say. “The captain of this ship was demoted because he left his viewports open. Foolishly. Rank does not excuse mistakes. I wish for a new captain. We haven’t much time. So I will decide in sixty seconds.”

The proud-shouldered Blue comes forward past her fellows. At first, I thought the tattoos on her hands featured floral lines. Then I note a stream of mathematical notations: the Larmor formula.

Maxwell’s equations in curved-space time. Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory. And a hundred others

that even I don’t recognize.

“Give me the badge and I’ll carve you a hole back to Mars, boy.” Her voice has no inflection. It is flat. Precise and lazy all at once. Emotion bled out of it till only the letters and sounds of the words remain like equations in the air. “I swear it on my life.”

“ ‘Boy’?” I ask.

“You’re half my age. Shall I call you ‘lord boy’? Or will you be offended?”

Sevro raises an eyebrow, flummoxed at the Blue’s bland audacity.

“Forgive her,
dominus
,” another Blue says smoothly. “She is an ensign with—”

I hold up a hand. “What’s your name, Blue?”

“Orion Xe Aquarii.”

“That’s a boy’s name,” Sevro says.

“Is it? I hadn’t noticed.” Blues can be sarcastic? “My Sect intended for me to be a man. I surprised them.”

“What Sect?” Sevro asks.

“She has no Sect. She was appropriated by the Copernican Sect, but dismissed shortly thereafter, for obvious reasons,” that officious Blue interrupts again. “She’s a Docker.”

Orion flinches. She swivels on the other Blue. Her voice does not rise. “And what are you but a pedantic little gasp of a fart, Pelus? Hm?”

“You see,” Pelus explains placidly, “she is a Docker. Emotional metrics are unmanageable. Not her fault. She is a product of her
greasy
environment.”

“Bolly that,” she says, stepping forward quickly.