Also by Christopher Ruocchio

The Sun Eater Cycle

Empire of Silence
Howling Dark
Demon in White
Kingdoms of Death (coming March 2022)

The Lesser Devil

As Editor
Sword & Planet (coming December 2021)
Star Destroyers (with Tony Daniel)
World Breakers (with Tony Daniel) (coming August 2021)
Space Pioneers (with Hank Davis)
Overruled (with Hank Davis)
Cosmic Corsairs (with Hank Davis)
 Copyright © 2021 by Christopher Ruocchio.
All Rights Reserved.

Cover art by Nathan Anderson.

Page design by OBrienMediaGroup.com.
Published through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the
permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic
editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your
support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

First Published April 2021.

 CONTENTS

Introduction

The Demons of Arae

Victim of Changes
Not Made for Us
The Night Captain
The Duelist
The Parliament of Owls
The Pits of Emesh

Afterword
Lexicon
Index of Worlds
 INTRODUCTION

I NEVER SET OUT TO WRITE SHORT STORIES. Those of you familiar with my
novels will know that they’re anything but short, and besides…it’s not
1920. In Lovecraft and Howard’s day, a writer could live by short stories
alone, but today’s writers must write novels or starve (and even writing
novels is no guarantee of bread). So I focused on my novels and told myself
that if the opportunity to write a short story or two came along, I’d jump on
it, but I never expected to have many opportunities to do so.
I was wrong, as usual.
While I was still at university, I backed into an internship with Baen
Books, an internship that I managed to parley into a job, a job that I’ve held
now for more than five years. Part of that job involved helping to put
together anthologies of reprinted stories from science fiction’s pulp and
golden ages—as well as some so-called modern classics and even some
original pieces. To date, I’ve assembled four anthologies for Baen: Star
Destroyers, Space Pioneers, Overruled, and Cosmic Corsairs. I have at
least three more on the way, and it’s been an educational experience
working with senior editors like Tony Daniel and Hank Davis. Besides, who
wouldn’t want to read science fiction classics for their day job!
With each of these books, I was given the opportunity to submit a story of
my own. My name was going on the cover as editor, after all, and it seemed
appropriate to include some of my work. And after Empire of Silence came
out, I started receiving invitations to contribute to other projects as well.
Before long, I had a small collection of stories tucked into a corner of my
hard drive. Rather than leave them there collecting proverbial dust, I
thought I’d put them together into this collection. Better to have them in
one place, after all, than force readers to track down half a dozen other
anthologies! Here then are seven stories: four previously published in Baen
Books anthologies, one independently published online, another specially
written for a podcast performance, and the last an original written just for
this collection (because I’ll never release a collection without including at
least one piece of new material).
You’ll notice I’ve called this book Volume 1. There will be at least a
Volume 2. As I write this, I have two more published stories that do not
appear in this collection. These are each tied up in exclusive contracts for
another year or so, and by the time I get the rights to reprint these stories
back, I should have enough stories to fill out that second volume.
But until then: thank you for buying this book and for supporting the Sun
Eater universe. I hope you’ll enjoy these stories. If you came here from
Empire of Silence or any of my other works, I hope these short jaunts back
into the distant future will entertain. If, on the other hand, this is our first
meeting, Reader, I hope these stories will be not only entertaining, but a
gateway to Empire of Silence and the rest of my books.
—C.R.
 THE DEMONS
OF
ARAE

Enter Hadrian Marlowe. Soldier. Scholar. Hero of the Empire…a man who
they say cannot be killed. When two Imperial legions go missing on a
routine transfer to the outer provinces, Hadrian and his loyal Red Company
are dispatched to bring them home. Tracking the lost legions to the barren
world of Arae, the Red Company finds itself up against a pirate army. But
there’s something else in the pirate fortress—something more, something
darker—and their battle will bring Hadrian face-to-face with an enemy
more terrible than he could have ever imagined.

Originally published in Parallel Worlds: The Heroes Within.

 CHAPTER 1
THE MOUTH OF HELL

FIRE SCREAMED ALL AROUND US, and the violent shock of atmospheric entry
that shook the ship beneath my feet was like the coming of an avalanche.
Faceless men stood about me, gripping their restraints. The red glow of
emergency lighting reflected off their featureless ivory masks.
Then the thunder stopped, and we were falling through clear air beneath
yellow skies.
Arae.
“You’re sure they’re on Arae?” I remembered asking before we set sail
from Nessus on this expedition.
Captain Otavia Corvo had only shrugged her broad shoulders. “It’s your
Empire’s intelligence, Lord Marlowe. They said they tracked this lost
legion of yours to within a dozen light-years of the Arae system. If they’re
not on Arae, they’re somewhere in the Dark between, and we’ll never find
them.”
An entire legion had vanished. Four ships. Thirty thousand men.
Gone.
At first Legion Intelligence had suspected the Cielcin. The xenobites
needed to eat, after all, and four troop transport ships with the legionnaires
already on ice for the long voyage were indistinguishable from meat lockers
to them. But when we arrived in Arae system, we found something we
hadn’t expected.
“Pirates?” Corvo didn’t believe it. I could see it in the way her brows
arched above black eyes. “What sort of pirates could capture an entire
Sollan legion?”
We all knew the answer. I could feel the eyes of my officers on me, as if
each man and woman was daring me to say it first. I glanced from one to
the other: from the Amazonian Corvo to her bookish second-in-command,
Durand; from green-skinned Ilex to solemn Tor Varro.
“Extrasolarians,” I’d said.
After Vorgossos, the word carried a poisonous aftertaste for me and for
every member of my Red Company. The Extras had been an Imperial
bogeyman for thousands of years, the sort of monsters mothers scared their
children with. But I knew the truth, I knew that those men who—fleeing
Imperial control—had fled to the blackness between the stars, to rogue
planets and lost moons far from the light of Imperial order, had bought their
freedom with a piece of their own humanity. As a boy, I’d believed the
Chantry’s proscription against intelligent machines and against the
augmentation of the flesh was nothing but reactionary cowardice.
I know better now.
Monsters are real, and I had met them. Met not only with the Cielcin who
threaten mankind from without, but met also with the monsters we’d made
in our own image and in the image of our innermost demons.
Repulsors fired, and our descent slowed, forcing my bile up as we came
out of free fall. I shut my eyes, mindful of the quiet chatter of my men
through my suit’s comms, of the way the thermal gel-layer clung to me
beneath the armorweave and ceramic plates. I still felt half a clown wearing
it. I was no soldier, had never trained to be one. I’d wanted to be a scholiast,
in Earth’s name!
But I was a knight now, one of His Radiance’s own Royal Victorians. Sir
Hadrian Marlowe. And after Vorgossos I knew there was no going back.
I undid my restraints and moved into the middle of the cabin, conscious
of the faceless soldiers watching me through suit cameras. My own suit
worked the same—though my black visor was fashioned in the image of an
impassive human face and not a blank arc of zircon. Almost it seemed I
wore no helmet at all. Images from outside were projected directly onto my
retinas, and but for the indicators in my periphery that displayed my heart
rate and the integrity of my Royse shields, I saw plain as day.
 “They’re putting us down close to the door as they can!” I said, voice
amplified by the speakers in my breastplate. “Petros’s team should have
those gun emplacements on the south ridge down by the time we make
landfall. Pallino’s got the north. The Sphinxes have air support! All we have
to do is back the Horse!” They knew all of this already, had gone over the
assault plan with their centurion before we’d left the ship, but it bore
repeating.
“You ready, Had?” that same centurion asked me, clapping me on the
shoulder as I took my place front and center by the exit ramp.
Beneath my helmet mask I smiled and returned the gesture. “Just like the
coliseum back on Emesh!” I seized hold of one of the ceiling straps to
steady myself as the dropship banked into an arc.
“Let’s hope!” Siran replied. The woman had been by my side a long time.
Long before Vorgossos, when I had been little more than a slave in the
fighting pits of Count Balian Mataro.
Turning back to face the fifty men that stood in the cramped hold of the
Ibis-class lander, I got a clear look at myself in the mirrored glass at the rear
of the compartment. Like all Sollan Imperial combat armor, my suit’s
design recalled the style of ancient Rome, the shape of it speaking to
cellular memories of ancient power. The muscled breastplate was black as
anything I had seen, embossed with the pitchfork-and-pentacle I had taken
for my sigil when His Radiance the Emperor restored me to the nobility.
Beneath that I wore a wide-sleeved crimson tunic darker than the ones worn
by legionnaires. Strapped pteruges decorated my shoulders and waist,
marking me for an officer. Black boots and gauntlets contrasted the Imperial
ivory and scarlet, and I alone wore a cape: a lacerna white as snow.
How had I ended up here? I’d left home to go to school, to join the
scholiasts. Not to fight a war. Still, I raised my voice. “Some of you won’t
have fought the Extras before! Whatever comes our way, remember: the
Extras die just like any other man! Keep your heads and keep moving
forward!”
My tutor always said I had too-developed a taste for melodrama. Maybe
he was right. Or maybe whatever gods there are share my love of theater.
Whichever is the case, no sooner had I said these words than the landing
alarm blared and each of us felt the Ibis buoy on its final approach.
The landing ramp slammed downwards, admitting the orange Araenian
sunlight.
I turned and drew my sword, kindling the weapon’s exotic matter blade
with a button press. Liquid metal the color of moonlight gleamed in my
gauntleted fist, and I was first onto the shattered tarmac and the approach to
the pirates’ fortress.
The mountain rose before us, the last lonely peak in a chain that broke
upon the salt flats of the Soto Planitia. Arae had never been settled—its air
was carbon monoxide and ammonia, and there was little water. But for the
remains of a few mining expeditions, the pirate fortress was the only
settlement on the planet. I could see the fingering shapes of antennae and
other comms equipment bristling on the ridgeline above, and the smoking
ruins of gun emplacements where Petros had taken our Fifth Chiliad and
wiped out the artillery.
Battle raged about us, plasma fire splitting the cancered daylight like
lightning, black smoke rising from bodies and from the wrecks of ground-
effect vehicles and three-legged machines that I think had governed
themselves.
And ahead—between the two reaching arms of that final mountain—
stood the Horse.
Our colossus.
The titan stood nearly forty meters high, its legs more like the arms of a
crawling man than those of a horse. The earth trembled with each mighty
step it took, and the men who stood against it could not so much as scratch
its armor with their arms. Beyond it, the hardened outer wall of the fortress
rose two hundred feet above the landing field, black as the space we’d come
from. A stray shot pinged off my shield, and not ten yards off the tarmac
exploded as a plasma cannon struck ground, sending dust and bits of
shattered concrete fountaining skyward. Above, three of Sphinx Flight
streaked overhead, single long wings tacking like sails against the wind,
filling the air with the thunder of their drives.
“Why haven’t they cracked the wall?” I asked, toggling to the officer’s
channel.
“It’s shielded, lord,” came a thin, polished voice. “Crim took a few shots
at it with the Horse’s artillery, but we’d have done as well to scratch at it
with our fingernails.”
I cursed. “How are they powering a shield of this size, Lorian?” I asked,
“I thought your people didn’t pick up a fusion reactor on your scans.”
From his position on the ship in orbit, Commander Lorian Aristedes
wasted no time in answering. “Could be geothermal. Arae’s core runs hot
thanks to all those moons. I’ve ordered the Horse crew to deploy sappers. If
they can attach a plasma bore directly to the door, the shield won’t matter.”
“We’ll clear the tarmac then,” I said in answer.
I did not hurry, but allowed the bulk of our soldiery to fan past me,
soldiers moving in groups of three behind their decurions. One of the
colossi’s massive feet descended, cracking the pavement. The earth shook,
air filled with a noise like drums.
For a moment, all was silent and still. Far above, a cloud passed before
the swollen circle of the sun.
An awful cry resounded off the surrounding rocks, high and shrill.
“The hell is that?” Siran’s words came in clear over my armor’s internal
comm.
A terrible sense of foreboding blossomed within me. Some kind of
alarm? I half expected to see the light of sirens flashing in the gray stones
above us, but there was nothing.
“On our left!”
“I see them!”
“The right, too!”
I turned my head, trying to see just what it was the others were seeing
through the smoke and the ranks of men to either side.
Then I saw them and swore.
 They must have come from bolt-holes hidden in the arms of the
mountain. Hundreds of them. They had no arms, nor shields—but they
needed neither. The SOMs feared neither death nor pain, and came forward
with the focused scramble of a swarm of ants trying to bridge a puddle with
their own bodies.
They were men once. Before the Extras carved out their brains and filled
their heads with kit, before they meddled in the subtle language of their
genes to harden them against the poisonous air. They had no will any
longer. They never would again. They were only tools, puppet soldiers
controlled by some intelligence—human or artificial I dared not guess—in
the fortress ahead of us.
“Hoplites!” Siran exclaimed, singling out our heavy, shielded infantry.
“Shield walls!”
All about us, the army shifted, hoplites shifting from the point position in
their little triases towards the outside of our line.
“Fire!”
The hoplites opened fire, phase disruptor bolts crackling in the warm air.
Siran seized my arm, “We need to get you to the Horse, Had.”
She wanted to escort me to safety, to get me out of danger and the enemy
charge.
She wanted me to abandon my men.
“No!” I shook her off, then toggled my comm once more. “Commander!”
Lorian Aristedes replied at once, “Yes, my lord?”
“Order Sphinx Flight back around! Strafe the enemy line!”
The ship’s tactical officer acknowledged and relayed my orders.
The SOMs were still coming, loping across the flat ground to either side.
How many armies had died thus? Smashed between the horns of the
enemy? Shots rained down from above, and turning I saw men standing on
the platforms above the Horse’s thighs and the fell light of the colossi’s rear
cannons gleaming. It wouldn’t be enough, and it was only then I realized
the source of that awful keening sound.
The SOMs were screaming, howling like a band of blue-faced Picts out
of the deepest history.
Then I realized Siran’s mistake. Ordering the hoplites forward was
standard procedure: they had the expensive shielding and the disruptor
rifles, the heavy firepower. They were meant to shield the more numerous
peltasts, who—without shields and with lighter armor—were cheaper to
outfit and less costly to replace. But the peltasts carried bladed energy
lances.
They had spears.
We had no time.
“Peltasts!” I called, transmitting my words to everyone in the line.
“Forward! Forward!” There was a fraction of a second’s hesitation. I
suppose I cannot blame them, the order was unorthodox in our age. But
they got the message when I added the crucial word: “Bayonets!”
A double line of light infantry stepped forward, allowing the hoplites to
turn and fall back towards the center of the column. They moved with
gearwork precision, the result of weeks of careful drilling and a course of
RNA learning drugs. From above, it must have been beautiful, and for a
moment I envied Lorian Aristedes and Captain Corvo their bird’s-eye view.
The peltasts lowered their spears, beam weapons firing into the galloping
horde. I saw SOMs fall smoking from laser burns, only to be trampled over
by the ranks behind. The puppets did not care for the loss of their brethren,
did not care that they were charging without so much as a knife at two triple
lines of armed Sollan legionnaires.
My men all did their best, but stopping the onslaught was like trying to
block the tide. The enemy crashed against us from either side, throwing
themselves against our spears like fanatics, only for their brothers to vault
over them and hurl themselves at us. From the rear, the hoplites fired over
the heads of the lines before them until the air was thick with the static
aftershock of disruptor fire.
Where was the air support?
One of the puppet-men leaped fully over our line and landed in the
narrow gap left between. For a moment it just stood there, processing, as if
not quite sure what to do. It turned its head to look at me, and I think it
understood who I was. The man it had been was shorter than I, bald as an
egg and pale, skin burned and peeling in the chemical air. How it breathed
at all I couldn’t say, though the gleaming black implants in its chest and
throat perhaps had something to do with it.
It lurched towards me, and before Siran or any of the hoplites could
intervene, I pushed past them and lunged, sword out-thrust. The highmatter
blade passed through the SOM’s flesh as easily as through water, and it fell
with no legs to support it. For a single, awful moment, the upper half of the
once-human form dragged itself forwards, clawing towards me until one of
my guards shot it with a disruptor.
A metallic screaming filled the air, and glancing up a moment I saw the
blade-like profile of five lighters burning across the sky. Sphinx Flight.
Plasma fire picked its way in twin rows along the enemy line, parallel to our
own. One of the SOMs fell smoking at my feet, and I slashed it in half for
good measure. The earth groaned once more as the Horse advanced, closer
and still closer to the wall and gate of the enemy fortress just as Sphinx
Flight wheeled round for another pass.
I seized Siran by the arm. “Order everyone towards the Horse! We need
to deepen the lines!”
She nodded and went about her orders. Turning, I proceeded up the no-
man’s land between our lines, cutting down those enemies who’d made it
through. “Commander!” I yelled into the line. “Find Petros and tell him to
get his men down here. It’s time they were the ones surrounded!”
If young Aristedes replied I did not hear it. One of the SOMs threw itself
at me and I had to duck to escape it, keeping my sword up so the creature
cut itself in two for its trouble. Blood and something the color of milk
spilled out and beaded on my cape. Disgusted, I shook out the garment and
continued my advance. Behind me, the line was falling back, collapsing
into a kind of mushroom shape as it thickened and grew shorter, making it
far harder for the SOMs to clamber over.
The Sphinxes wheeled about once more. Plasma fire split the air and tore
through the enemy. I’d nearly made it to the rear legs of the Horse. Ahead
men were climbing the legs of the colossus to reach the platforms where
their brothers rained fire down from above. The sound of the lighter craft
overhead screamed across the sky, and I saw their wing-sails flatten to yaw
them round for another pass.
Our lines were holding, thickened as we were into a tight box about the
rear legs of the Horse. Where was Siran? I could hear her voice on the
comm, ordering the ranks of our line to rotate, fresher troops in the rear
replacing the spent men in front. Looking past those leading men, I saw a
sea of scabrous faces, hollow eyes, and grasping fingers spreading back as
far as the southern ridge of the mountains. And behind them?
I thrust my sword into the air and let out a cry.
Petros and the Fifth Chiliad had come. Another thousand of our troops
crashed into the hollow men from behind, splitting the attention of the fell
intelligence that governed them.
“Concentrate air fire on the northern side!” I ordered, turning Sphinx
Flight away from the narrowing slice of the enemy between us and Petros’s
relief force.
Fire reigned.

SMOKE FOLLOWED.
Not even the airless vacuum of space is so quiet as the battlefield when
the fighting is done. Pillars of oily smoke held up the sky, and though my
men busied themselves unloading the plasma bore from the Horse’s
underbelly and the winds scoured in off the salt flats of the Soto Planitia, I
heard nothing. I stood watching from the shadow of the massive gate, my
guards around me and my friends: Siran and Pallino, who had come with
me out of Emesh.
Thus we waited.
The plasma bore had the look of some swollen jet engine mounted on
four legs. It took a man to pilot it—no daimon intelligences here—and the
tech moved forward step by lurching step, extending the cigar-shaped body
of the bore forward like a battering ram against the gates of ancient
Jerusalem.
As the ground crew busied themselves with their preparations, I cast my
eye skywards, past the circling shapes of Sphinx Flight and the sulfurous
clouds. Somewhere above, our ship waited, locked in geostationary orbit.
The SOMs had been a nasty welcoming party, but everything had gone
according to plan in the end. One of the once-human creatures lay not far
off, dead eyes staring at the umber sky.
“Do you ever wonder who they were?” I asked aloud, indicating the
corpse. There were burn lines on his flesh where the disruptor fire had fried
the implants that enslaved him. I hoped that—for a fleeting moment, in the
instant before he died—the fellow had remembered who he was, and that he
was a man. I wondered what his name had been, and if he’d remembered it
before the end.
“Some poor sod, most like,” Pallino answered in his gruff way.
“Merchanter or some such as got skyjacked by this lot.”
Cape snapping about myself, I advanced and turned the fellow fully on
his back with my toe. The man was bald as the first one I had cut down and
pale almost as the Cielcin who drink the blood of worlds. My heart fell, and
I swallowed, kneeling to get a better look at the tattoo inked on the side of
the man’s neck. It showed a fist clenched around two crossed lightning bolts
above the Mandari numerals 378.
A legionary tattoo.
“I think I know what happened to our lost legion.”
Silence greeted this pronouncement, deeper and darker than the quiet that
had come before. I stood, turning my black-masked face toward the
towering expanse of grim metal looming from the mountainside before us,
and at the vast war engine and our army arrayed beneath it.
The silence broke with a great rushing of wind as the plasma bore roared
to life, sucking at the air around us. The mouth of the plasma bore was
pressed right against the bulwark, passing clean through the high-velocity
curtain of the energy shield that guarded the gate.
The metal began to glow and run like water.
It was time.
 CHAPTER 2
THE CAPTAIN

ALL WAS DARK WITHIN but for the flashing of sirens that warned the
defenders their fortress was breached. I followed the first wave of my men
over the threshold, the heat of still-cooling metal beating on my suit despite
the coolant sprays the plasma bore had released when its work was done.
There I stood a moment, surveying the hangar before me, the parked
shuttles and stacked crates of provisions and equipment.
“Search the shuttles and drain the fuel tanks!” Pallino called out,
signaling a group of his men to advance. They did, moving off in groups of
three, rifles and lances raised.
“Mapping drones have gone ahead, my lord,” said Petros. He saluted as I
drew nearer, his fist pressed to his chest. He extended his arm as I
acknowledged the salute. “It’s a fucking maze. Tunnels go on for miles
under the mountain and down…”
A wire-frame map of the fortress was even then sketching itself in the
bottom left of my vision. The levels that rose stacked above the hangar bay
seemed straightforward enough, but the warren of tunnels and caverns
carved deep into the living rock at the base of the mountain were anything
but.
“I don’t want anyone wandering off,” I said to Petros and Pallino.
“Groups of two and three decades should stick together. We should assume
there are more SOMs where those others came from.” If the entirety of the
378th had been taken and converted by the Extras, it was very possible that
thousands more lay in wait for us, but I couldn’t help thinking that if such
were the case, these pirates would surely have deployed them before we
breached their fortress. Perhaps some of our soldiers were still alive.
Perhaps most of them were.
My officers turned to go about their duties, and I was left with Siran and
a vague sense of deja vu. The caverns—vaguely damp and lichen-spotted—
reminded me of the city on Vorgossos. I shut my eyes, as if by doing so I
might retreat to some other place: to the cloud forests on Nagramma where
Jinan and I had hiked to the old Cid Arthurian temple; or the foggy coast at
Calagah. Instead, I saw
swollen hands rising from black water and the countless blue eyes of the
Undying King of Vorgossos, and despite the warm wind from the Araenian
desert outside, I shivered.
“Get a seal on that door!” I said, gesturing at the smooth hole the plasma
bore had put in the main gate. “Static field will do! I don’t want anything
impeding our exit should it come to that.”
I could still feel those bloated fingers on me, and shook them off with the
memory of their touch. This was not Vorgossos. This was Arae. On
Vorgossos I had been alone, but for Valka. Here I had an army at my back,
my Red Company.
“Lord Marlowe,” came the voice of some centurion I did not recognize,
one of Petros’s men, “we’ve captured their captain. He’s offered to
surrender.”
Unable to suppress a crooked smile, I said, “Very good, centurion. I am
on my way.”

SUNLIGHT FELL THROUGH WINDOWS narrow as coin slots high on the high
chamber’s walls. The turret was in the very highest part of the mountain
fortress, and through the holograph plates that imitated larger windows I
could see the Horse; the arms of the mountain spread out below; and the
infinite, sterile whiteness of the Soto Planitia stretching out to where the
horizon bent and rolled away.
The man who sat in the chair between four of my soldiers wore an old
gray and white uniform. His face was as gray, and his hair with it. He did
not look like an Extrasolarian. He looked...ordinary, the very model of the
old soldier. Indeed, he reminded me of no one so much as Pallino: aged and
leathered, with a sailor’s pallor and sharp eyes—though unlike Pallino this
man still had both his eyes. The fellow had the stamp of the legions about
him. A former officer, most like. Such men often turned mercenary, if they
did not turn gladiator. I knew his type.
“What’s your name, soldier?” I asked in my best aristocratic tones. There
was enough of the Imperial iron left in the man to straighten his spine at the
sound of it.
“Samuel Faber, sir. Captain of the Dardanines.” From his accent I
suspected the man was at least of the patrician class—though certainly he
was not palatine.
“The Dardanines?” I echoed, stopping five paces before the chair.
Turning to survey the room, I caught sight of the dozen or so other officers
who had surrendered with Captain Faber.
Faber cleared his throat. “Free company.”
“Mercenaries?” I said, and arched my eyebrows behind my mask.
“Foederati?” But it did not matter, not then. I pushed on to more pressing
matters. “Where is the Three Seventy-Eighth?” I saw a muscle in Captain
Faber’s jaw clench, but his gray eyes stayed fixed on my face. He did
answer. “Legion Intelligence tracked a convoy carrying the 378th Centaurine
Legion to within a dozen light-years of this system, captain. I need to know
what you did with them.” I did not say what you did to them.
Faber was silent for a moment, and when he did speak it was with the air
of one resigned. “I know who you are.” Seeing as he had started talking, I
did not interrupt, only tried not to glance towards Pallino where he stood
near at hand. “Is it...true you can’t be killed?”
I did look towards Pallino then. The old veteran alone of those in the
room knew something of the answer to that question. Voice flattened by the
suit speakers, I answered, “Not today, captain. Not by you.” The man
seemed to chew on that a moment—or maybe it was only his tongue. He
looked down at his scuffed boots and the gunmetal floor, arms crossed.
“Tell me: How does a man go from a posting with the Legions to
kidnapping one for the Extras? Was the money that good?”
I expected the man to rage, expected that there must be enough of the
Legion officer he had been left in him—and enough honor—to insult him. I
wanted him to stand, to take a swing at me, to give me an excuse to put him
right back in his seat. The man had sold human beings—his fellow Sollans,
his fellow soldiers—to the barbarians who dwell between the stars.
I did not expect him to shake his head and press his lips together, as if he
were afraid to speak. Taking a step forward, I asked again, “Where is the
legion, Captain Faber?”
Nothing.
Gesturing to Siran, I stepped aside, saying, “I had hoped it would not
come to this.” I had seen video of the mercenary captain relayed to my suit
before we’d boarded the lift to come upstairs, and I’d guessed at his
legionary past. Four men entered the command chamber a moment later,
carrying a fifth between them. They stopped just before Faber’s seat and
dropped the body there, face down.
The SOM did not move.
For a moment, I said nothing, only hooked my thumbs through my belt
and waited for the shoe to drop. Faber must have felt it coming. Kneeling, I
turned the dead man’s head with one hand, presenting the fist and crossed
lightning bolts of the 378th Centaurine. Then nothing needed saying, and
Faber found he could no longer look at the dead man or myself. He looked
rather at the dozen of his own lieutenants who knelt on the ground to one
side, manacled with guns aimed at their backs.
“We’re both soldiers, you and I,” Faber said into the vacuum growing
between us, and for once I did not argue the label. He was nodding steadily,
hands clasped in his lap. “I’ve done things I’m not proud of, Sir Hadrian,
for the Empire and after. But that’s the job.”
“These were your brothers, captain,” I said, more regretful than angry.
The anger stayed far below the surface, churning like a river-full of eels.
“It was the job,” he said again. “That’s what they paid us for. Tag a
convoy while the men were still in fugue, bring them here. It’s not even
hard if you know where the ships are going to be—and they did. They must
have a mole in Legion command.”
I took a step that put me between Faber and the corpse on the floor. “Who
is they? Who are you working for?” Faber only shook his head, still not
making eye contact. I could see the whites there, and the way his hands
shook. Was he afraid? Not of me, surely?
Letting out a sigh, I reached up behind my right ear and clicked the hard
switch there before keying a command into my wrist-terminal. The sigh
turned to hissing as the pressure seals in my helmet relaxed. The black
titanium and ceramic casque broke into pieces that folded flower-like away
from my face before coiling into the collar of my hardsuit, and for the first
time I looked down on Faber with my own eyes.
With a rough hand, I pushed back the elastic coif that covered my head
and shook out curtains of ink-dark hair. Coming to within two paces of
Faber’s chair, I crouched to put us at a level. “You were a soldier, you say.
Then you know we can take the answer from you. I would prefer not to
have to.” Reaching out, I seized Faber’s clenched hands with my own,
looking like some parody of the vassal kneeling before his lord, of the
devoted son before his father. I squeezed. “Who hired you to betray your
brothers?” I glanced back at the dead man behind me. I could see Faber was
looking.
Then his vision shifted, and we regarded one another eye-to-eye. “You
don’t understand. These people. The things they can do...”
But I had been to Vorgossos, to the lowest dungeons of the Undying. I
knew full well what horrors, what abominations, mankind was capable of in
the name of science, of progress. I have seen the body farms, the surgical
theaters. I have seen armies of puppet SOMs larger than this, and had seen
machines to violate every natural law. I knew exactly what the
Extrasolarians were capable of—knew it was every bit as vile and
unthinkable as the rape and pillage the inhuman Cielcin carried out as they
conquered our worlds. And worse. Worse because the Extrasolarians were
human, even if they tried not to be.
 “Give me a name, Faber. Please.”
The man swallowed. “You have to take my people out of here.”
“You are in no position to be making demands,” I said, standing, my
finger in his face. I turned my back on him, pondering what to say next.
“You misunderstand, Marlowe. That’s not a demand. It’s the terms of my
surrender.” I stopped mid-step and turned around, hands back at my sides. I
waited him out. The man had been in the Legions. Surely he knew that the
Empire would put every one of his men in a prison camp for the rest of their
lives. Surely he knew his own life was forfeit. For an officer of the
Imperium to take up arms against the Empire was a grievous crime, one the
Emperor would never forgive. “Passage out of here for every one of my
men, even if it’s to Belusha,” he said, naming just such a prison planet as
I’d imagined.
“What are you so afraid of, Captain Faber?” I asked. “Your employers,
plainly, but why? The fortress is ours.”
The older officer glanced at the dozen or so of his men again, then once
more at the SOM dead at his feet. “MINOS, they’re called MINOS.”
I blinked, “Like the Minoan king?” Minos was a character out of ancient
myth, the ruler of vanished Crete. It was he who had built the labyrinth into
which Theseus had ventured to fight the Minotaur. Thinking of Theseus
brought a grim smile to my lips, and I saw once more a stony shore. A
black lake. Slippered feet standing on the surface of the water. And against
a wall of bare stone, a tall red fountain rose dreadfully distinct.
“The what?” Faber said stupidly. “No, I—I don’t know.” He wrung his
hands, eyes fallen. I let him take the time he needed; could sense the
stripped, exhausted gears in his mind still turning. “Have you ever heard of
the Exalted?” he asked, voice very small.
“Yes.” The Exalted were amongst the most dangerous of the
Extrasolarian tribes—if tribes was the right word. They had abandoned their
humanity—they would say transcended it—replaced their bodies with
machines, altered their neural chemistry to suit their whims, discarded their
humanity like so much rotting meat. They crewed massive interstellar
vessels and never set in to port, fleeing from the Empire and the Holy
Terran Chantry as shadows flee from the sun. Many had lived for eons
preserved like medical specimens in jars of their own making. It is the
Exalted every little boy and girl in the Sollan Empire grows up afraid of. It
is they we imagine when he hear stories of the Extrasolarians and the things
they do to innocent sailors.
“MINOS makes them. Designs them. And they make...” he nodded
weakly towards the SOM still lying at his feet, “...those things.”
“And they hired you to acquire materials,” I said. “They’re building an
army. For whom?”
The Dardanine captain screwed his eyes shut. “I don’t know. I don’t
know. On my honor.”
“Your honor.” It was all I could do not to sneer. “Your honor, M. Faber?
Just what honor do you think you have?”
“Enough to plead for my men,” Faber replied without hesitation. “Do
with me what you will, but get them out of here. And get out of here
yourselves. If you know what the Exalted are, you know what trouble you’ll
be in when they arrive.”
“They’re coming here?”
“Most of the MINOS staff fled the moment your ship came out of warp,
but not before they summoned the others.”
Petros barked a laugh, “At warp? That’ll take years!”
“No,” Faber said flatly.
Petros hadn’t been with us at Vorgossos. He didn’t understand.
We might only have hours. Maybe less.
All at once, Captain Faber’s surrender took on a more dire cast. It was as
if the sunlight had changed, or the sun itself had gone behind a cloud. “This
has gone on long enough, captain,” I said, falling back on the aristocratic
sharpness with which I’d begun our little meeting. “If what you say is true
then we haven’t much time. If you want your men to live, you will
surrender any of these MINOS people still on base and for the love of Earth
and all that’s holy you will tell me where my legion is.”
 CHAPTER 3
THE LIVING FAILURES

IT WAS SO COLD in the depths of the fortress warrens that I’d had to put my
helmet back on. Frost misted the air and massed on coolant lines bracketed
to the walls, reminding me of veins in the limb of some giant. Far above,
bay doors of steel and reinforced concrete stood closed to the yellow sky.
Through that aperture—hundreds of meters long—the Dardanines had
lowered dozens of troop transport units: ugly, rectangular pods each holding
two centuries of Imperial legionnaires.
“How many are left?” I asked.
“Thirty-seven, lord,” Petros replied.
“That’s what? Seventy...four hundred soldiers?” I drummed my fingers
against my side as I ran the numbers. It wasn’t even a third of the full
legion. I tried not to imagine where those other men had gone. Turning to
where two of Petros’s centurions stood near at hand, I said, “One of you:
head up top and signal the Tamerlane. Tell Aristedes to deploy the cargo
lifters, double time. Are we any nearer finding the controls for the bay
doors?”
I directed that last bit to everyone in the vicinity, voice amplified by my
suit’s speakers.
A decurion answered in a thin voice, “My lord, we’re locked out of the
control room.”
“Where?”
“Here, lord!”
The door looked to be solid steel, the first in an airlock that separated the
landing bay from the inner fortress when the roof was open to the sky. Just
as my man had said, the control panel beside the door was blacked out,
dead as old stone.
No matter.
“Stand back!” I said, holding out one hand to fend my soldiers away. I
drew my sword, kindled the blade. The highmatter cast spectral highlights
—white and blue—against the brushed metal walls. Its cutting edge was
fine as hydrogen, and I plunged the point through the reinforced steel as
easily as through wax paper. Moving steadily, I carved a hole in the door
just large enough for a man to step through. The door fell inward with a
slamming sound like the unsealing of a tomb, and—sword held out before
me—I stepped inside.
Into darkness.
I activated my suit lights, revealing abandoned banks of control consoles
and inert projector plates. My men followed me over the threshold, and
behind them I heard someone—Siran, possibly—calling for a scout drone.
The device whizzed over my shoulder, emitting a faint, ultrasonic whine as
the scanning lasers fanned across the room before vanishing through an
open door at the far end.
Pausing, I tapped one of the consoles. It flared to life, holograph readout
filling the space above the desktop. “Get the techs,” I ordered one of the
others, “tell them to get those bay doors open. We need to lift the survivors
out, double quick. The rest of you: with me.”
Captain Faber had said the MINOS staff had fled the base when we
attacked. That had been a lie. We would have noticed any ship attempting to
leave Arae when our assault began. There had been none.
They had to be down here somewhere.
I have seen more than my fair share of dark, demon-haunted tunnels in
my life. I have said before that light brings order to creation, and that in
darkness order grows ever less. The magi teach us that before the First
Cause and the cataclysm that birthed the universe there was only Dark, and
that it was from that darkness—the infinite chaos and potential that exists in
the absence of light—that anything might happen. And so everything had
happened, and the universe had emerged, birthed not—as the ancient
pagans would have it—by the declaration of a deity, but born of the
limitless chaos that comes in the absence of light.
That is why we fear the Dark. Not for what it contains, but for the threat
that it might contain anything. Aware of this fact, I pressed down the hall
after the drone, following the path laid out in the display at the corner of my
vision. Doors opened to either side, revealing storerooms and offices and
what reminded me of nothing so much as medical examination rooms. Cold
sweat beaded on the back of my neck. A powerful sense of dread settled on
me, crouching like a gargoyle. It was almost like being back on Vorgossos,
in the dungeons of the Undying.
“My lord!” a voice rang out from behind me, and as I turned the soldier
added, “Over here!”
I joined the man in the arch of a broad doorway opening on a round
chamber. The roof above was supported by a single central pillar, and the
floor was a tangle of cables, as if someone had pulled apart and rewired
several machines in a great hurry.
And then I saw them, sitting in seats around the outer wall, each slumped
as if in slumber, hands unfeeling in their laps. There must have been three
dozen of them, men and women alike.
None moved.
“Dead?” Siran asked. “Earth and Emperor protect us. What is this?”
Lowering my sword but keeping it lit, I approached the nearest corpse.
She didn’t look like an Exalted. None of them did. Each of the dead men
seemed human enough. On a whim, I flicked my suit’s vision from visual
light to infrared, saw the cooling nimbus of life’s heat fading in her core.
“Still warm,” I said, and fingered the braided metal cable the dead woman
still grasped in both hands, tracing its course from the floor all the way up
to the base of her skull. “They’re not dead,” I said, and with a vindictive
turn of my wrist I slashed the cable with my sword. “They’re gone.”
Two the soldiers nearby made a warding gesture with their first and last
fingers extended. One asked, “What do you mean, gone?”
“Synaptic kinesis. I’ve seen it before,” I pointed to the column in the
center of the room with my sword. “That’s a telegraph relay. This lot wired
their brains in and broadcast their minds offworld. Probably to a ship.
They’ll have new bodies waiting for them.” They’d discarded their old ones
like sleeves, abandoned them here to rot. The eels churned within me once
again, and I turned my head. It was easy to imagine the Exalted growing
these bodies for just such a reason: to wear for a time and discard. I was
prepared to bet my good right hand that the true owner of the flesh before
me was some brain trapped in a bottle up in the black of space like some
foul djinni. “Once we get the soldiers out, bring atomics down. None of this
can be left. And don’t touch anything. Who knows what they’ve left
behind.”
No sooner had the words left my mouth then a shot rang out, and turning
I saw one of the bodies tumble from its chair with a smoking hole in its
chest. “Hold your fire!” I called, raising a hand.
“I thought it moved, sir,” the soldier said, voice higher than I’d expected.
“Like the ones up top.”
“No, soldier. We’ve nothing to fear from these.”
Have I said the universe shares my love of theater?
Something shot out of the darkness and sliced clean through the
armorweave at the base of the man’s neck. There was no noise save the sigh
of impact and the dull smack of blood against the wall behind him, no crack
of gunshot or crash of bullet against the wall. He took a moment to fall, and
in that space whatever it was hit another of my men.
“Shields up!” Siran bellowed into the sudden stillness.
I saw a flicker of movement out the corner of my eye—the trailing hem
of a robe. I started after it, Siran close behind. Had some of Faber’s men not
surrendered with the rest? Or had one of the MINOS personnel remained
behind when the others fled by their unholy road?
The tunnels ahead were a labyrinth still incompletely mapped. We were
near the bottom of the fortress now, almost to where I guessed the
geothermal sinks and the power station must be. All the world was low
ceilings and blind turnings in the dark, the walls lit only by the rare sconce,
fixtures yellow with neglect. I could just make out the sound of soft
footfalls on the ground ahead, and skidded round a corner in pursuit. Once
or twice I saw a human shape round a bend ahead.
There!
A stunner bolt flew over my shoulder from Siran’s hand. Was that a gasp
of pain?
“Missed,” Siran spat, making the word a curse.
She was right. It must have been a glancing blow, for when we caught up
to the next bend there was no one there, but I knew what I had heard. There
was a door up ahead on the left, and it stood open. Inside, the shadowed
hulks of nameless machines stood in rows.
“Reinforcements are right behind, Had,” Siran said. “We should hold.”
“And let them escape?” I said, brushing past. I knew what Siran was
thinking, that this was some kind of trap. But if what Faber said was true,
this whole thing was a trap and the Exalted would be on us in hours.
I stepped inside.
Immediately my shield flashed as the strange bullet impacted against it.
It flashed again. Again. Held. The icon in the side of my vision indicated
the shield was still blue.
“You should have hired better mercenaries!” I called out, not seeing my
quarry among the slumbering machines. “Your Captain Faber’s
surrendered!”
“He bought the time we needed!” a cold, high voice returned. “You see
my fellows have already escaped, gentle lord.” I scanned the darkness
ahead of me, but save the tongues of chilly fog twisting in the air, nothing
moved. I swept the beam of my suit lamp ahead and above me, searching
the narrow catwalks and raw plumbing.
Nothing.
“You work for MINOS?” I asked, signaling for Siran to cover my back.
“I’m certainly not one of Faber’s little boys,” came the reply. “And I
know all about you, Lord Marlowe. The Emperor’s new pet. Killed one of
the Cielcin clan chiefs, did you? Is it true you twisted the Undying’s arm to
do it? The Lord of Vorgossos does not bend easily. I did not think he could
bend at all.”
Behind my mask, I smiled.
After a moment’s silence, I said, “Who did you sell the legion to?”
No answer.
No surprise.
I tried a different tactic, anything to keep her talking. The longer she kept
talking, the better the odds were my reinforcements would catch up.
“MINOS produces the Exalted?”
“Abstraction. Body modification. Yes,” the voice floated down from
above. “We provide design and fabrication work for the captains and the
clans. Life extension. Maintenance of the cerebral tissue—some of our
clients are thousands of years old, don’t you know? Whatever they dream—
and can afford—we make real.”
Still searching for her, I passed a bit of machinery shaped like a vast,
squat drum. Frost rimed its surface, but something there—a glimmer of
movement, perhaps?—caught my attention. If there was something inside, I
could not see it, but I sensed something there the way the swimmer senses
the passage of a fish in dark waters.
“What are these?”
“Prototypes,” she said. “Failures.”
“Failures?” I drew back.
On our private band, Siran said, “I see her, Had. Up and left. She’s
limping.” I looked and, seeing, understood why I hadn’t seen her sooner.
She was far too cold to be human, and my suit’s infrared pickups nearly lost
her against the awful chill in that room.
“Progress is never without loss.”
“On the contrary,” I said, and it was my tutor who spoke through me, a
response out of childhood, “any progress which is accompanied by loss is
no progress at all.”
“Spoken just like an Imperial dog.”
“Or like someone who reads.”
 Siran fired, stunner flash splitting the gloom. She struck true, and I heard
a clatter as a body hit the catwalk above.
“Good shot!” the woman’s voice rang out. “You got me!”
Siran froze before she could start her search of the room’s perimeter.
Over the comm, I heard her whisper, “What the hell?”
“Some sort of nervous bypass,” I answered over the private channel.
“Kept her conscious. Is she moving?”
“No.”
“Get up there and lock her down before she recovers.” That at least had
explained how the woman had kept running after we shot her in the hall.
“We’ll put her in fugue and bring her back with the rest.”
Not so fast! The woman’s voice crackled over the speakers inside my
helmet—over the private frequency. Damn these Extrasolarian demoniacs
and their machines! It’s you who won’t be going anywhere, Lord Marlowe!
I switched off my communicator with a glance, sealing my suit off from
Siran and the datasphere. The last thing I needed was this Extra woman
crawling around in my armor’s infrastructure, shutting off my cameras or
my air. I had visions of being trapped there, locked and blind in my suit,
waiting to be found by the Extras Faber warned us were coming. An
unceremonious end to Hadrian Marlowe, Knight Victorian.
But the MINOS woman had something else in mind.
A light, cold and blue as forgotten stars, blazed in the drum—the tank—
before me, and a moment later something huge and heavy thumped the
glass from the inside. Hairline cracks spiderwebbed from the point of
impact, and I lurched backwards, scrambling to put as much space between
myself and the thing, the failure, that lurked in the woman’s tank.
It struck again and the glass splintered. Super-cooled fluid flooded out,
changing the air to a thick, white fog that dragged the thing within outward
like an unborn calf from the corpse of a stranded whale. The thing within
lurched on unsteady limbs, hands and feet of steel clanging, scraping the
ground as it struggled to rise, to right itself.
Words fled me, and my mind with them, and for a single, terrible moment
it seemed I stood once more upon the shore of the sea beneath Vorgossos,
with that great daimon of the ancient world rising to meet me.
“Hadrian!” a voice cried out. Siran’s voice—and I remembered.
Remembered who I was and what I was there to do.
Remembered the sword in my hand.
The failure pushed itself to its feet. Hunched and lurching as it was, still it
towered over me: ten feet or twelve of white metal and jointed bone. It had
no face that I could see, for like the helms of our legionnaires, its visage
was blank and pitiless as ice. It lunged towards me, clawed hands
outstretched, but it lost its footing and crashed to its knees. One of the arms
bifurcated, the upper half folding up and out from its shoulder like the
pinion of some dreadful wing. Seeing my chance, I lunged, hewing at the
creature’s arm. The highmatter blade bounced off, ringing my hand like a
bell. Wincing, I recoiled, boots unsteady in the rapidly warming coolant. I
might have known. I had fought the Exalted before, on Vorgossos and after,
and I should have guessed this creature’s body would be proof against
highmatter, forged of adamant or some composite whose molecules would
not be cut.
I bared my teeth.
Things had just gotten a great deal more difficult.
Siran opened fire, violet plasma scorching the side of its head. She might
have been throwing rocks at the Horse for all the good it did. The beast
turned to look at her, and I fancied I could see the wheels of its still-organic
mind turning. I could see common metal shining in the elbow and shoulder
joints, beneath the armored carapace. It had weaknesses. I took a measuring
step closer, hoping to try to my luck. I didn’t make it far. The third arm that
sprouted from the top of its shoulder whipped round like a peasant’s scythe
so fast it vanished. My reflexive flinch was far too late, and I was saved the
impact only by the energy curtain of my shield flashing about me.
Letting out a piercing cry, the living failure rose once more to its feet, one
leg sliding out from under it. This time it steadied itself, one massive hand
striking the wall of the tank beside it. I wondered what was wrong with it.
Something in the way the Exalted’s mind interfaced with its new machine
body? Something that made it slip and stagger so?
“Stand aside, beast,” I said, aiming my sword at it like an accusing finger.
I had fought worse and more dangerous creatures than this. The beast
howled again and cracked its third arm like a whip as it advanced, loping
forward on legs bent like a dog’s. As a young man in the coliseum on
Emesh, I had battled azhdarchs and ophids, manticores and gene-tailored
lions large as elephants. And once, after our victory on Pharos, I had faced a
charging bull with no shield and only a rapier for defense.
The principle here was the same.
By rights, the abomination ought to have been faster than me, fast almost
as that evil appendage that sprouted claw-like from its shoulder. By rights, I
should already have been no more than a dark smear on the floor of that
hall.
Siran shot it in the head, for all the good it did. The creature shook it off
like a slap. There was something in the way it shook its head that was
familiar to me, pulling its ear towards its shoulder in sharp, repeated
movements. I had no time to think about it, only about the way its fist
slammed down like the hand of God. I threw myself sideways, aiming a
desperate cut at the side of one knee. The blade pinged off the metal, and
just like the bull on Pharos I swung round my enemy like a gate about its
hinge, undoing the magnetic clasp of my cape as I went and tossing the
garment aside.
“Go find the doctor, Siran!” I ordered, “Don’t let her get away!”
“And leave you?”
“Go!” I ducked a mighty swipe of the creature’s arm and stepped
forward. I’d seen a slight gap where the ribs ought to be, between the
armored breastplate and the interleaved segments that passed for a stomach.
How thin it was! Too long and too narrow to be human anymore. If I could
get the point of my blade in that gap...there might be something underneath,
some delicate system or piece of the mostly discarded flesh.
I did not find out.
 The knee lanced out to meet me. Not fast—certainly not fast enough to
engage my body shield—but it did not need to be fast. The knee was
titanium wrapped in adamant and zircon. There were softer statues.
My armor alone saved my ribs and the heart and lungs beneath them, but
the wind was driven from me. I flew backwards as if thrown and struck the
wall behind me so hard I imagined the dull metal cracking like glass—or
maybe that was only my skull.
Where were the others?
My vision slipped and blurred, righted itself only when I forced myself to
slow my breathing and the mutinous hammering of my heart. It was
coming, and there I was resting with my back against the wall like some
derelict watchman. It leaped towards me, and it was all I could do to roll
away as the machine collided bodily with the wall just where my head had
been. I regained my feet, glad of the positive pressure in the suit forcing air
into my lungs.
There!
Before the beast could turn, I lunged, the point of my sword burying itself
in the back of the Exalted’s knee. Common metal parted like paper, and a
violently white fluid bled out, running down the ivory calf to the floor. The
scythe-arm lashed against my shield then, and slowly began to wind itself
about me. I stumbled backwards, but the thing wound itself about my chest.
I could feel the thermal layer hardening to protect against the pressure. The
creature turned, reached down towards my face with a six-fingered hand.
Six-fingered.
“Iukatta!” In my winded state, the word was little more than a whisper,
but my suit amplified it to a shout. Stop!
The beast dropped me, surprise evident in the way it just stood there.
“Nietolo ba-emanyn ne?” the creature asked. The alien within the
machine. You speak our language?
I made the sharp sound that passed for yes in their tongue. The Cielcin
tongue. “What have they done to you?” It wasn’t possible. The Cielcin and
the Extrasolarians…working together? But no, the Cielcin clans had been
dealing with the Extras since before they invaded the Empire—since before
we had even known they existed. That they would work together against the
Empire should not have surprised me, and yet...seeing the xenobite standing
there encased in so much Extrasolarian kit...I felt a thrill of holy terror.
The creature’s blank faceplate opened like a jewel box and folded away,
revealing the milk-white flesh; the eyes like twin spots of ink on new paper,
large as my fists; and the teeth like shattered glass. “They have made us
strong,” it said, gnashing its teeth. “Strong enough to defeat you yukajjimn.”
Vermin, it said. Its word for human. “Strong enough to defeat the Lie.”
“Strong?” I echoed, drawing back, putting distance once again between
me and this Cielcin-machine hybrid, demon and daimon. “You can hardly
stand.” And no wonder. MINOS and the Exalted had had thousands of years
to perfect the systems that bonded man to machine. The Cielcin were not
men.
“We were only the first.”
In the quiet of my heart, I imagined armies of such creatures falling from
the sky to sack world after imperial world. Dust to dust by the million,
humans carried back to the stars and the dark ships the Cielcin called home.
I remembered the slaves I had seen, mutilated by their alien masters, and I
knew at once what had happened to the rest of our lost legion. MINOS had
offered them to their Cielcin friends in payment or in tribute. They were
dead, and worse than dead: still living. This was something new. In all my
years of fighting, this was something I had never expected: the black
marriage of Cielcin and machine.
“Who is your master?” I demanded, “Which clan? Which prince?”
“You cannot stop him. Or his White Hand.”
“Iedyr Yemani?” I repeated the words white hand, not sure I had heard
them correctly. Not sure I understood. “Who is he?” Its prince, certainly. Its
master.
“He will tear your worlds from the sky, human!” the Cielcin roared, and
beat its chest with its hands. “He has conquered an army for himself, and he
is coming!” Then the creature pounced, thinking me distracted. But I was
ready, and lunging aimed my sword at the creature’s unprotected face. It
was my only chance. My only hope was that whatever was wrong with the
hybrid would slow it down. As it hurtled towards me, claws outstretched, I
saw the visor begin to close like an eyelid snapping shut. The adamantine
faceplate slammed with the point of my sword caught between its flanges,
and almost the weapon was wrenched from my hand. I grinned savagely.
It had worked exactly as I’d planned.
The beast landed badly, and its ruined knee went out from under it. It fell
with a crash, and I leaned all my weight against the hilt of my sword. I
bared my teeth, eyes stretched wide as I pushed the sword downwards. The
point moved only slowly, metal grinding against liquid metal as the
highmatter sank home, piercing flesh and bone. And brain.
Like a muscle relaxing, the visor fell open once again, revealing the neat
hole between the massive eyes, and the black blood running like tears.
I found Siran and the MINOS doctor moments later. My fears were
justified. The doctor—a small, gray woman dressed in white—had indeed
possessed some implant or artifice that had saved her from the stun. While
I’d been distracted with her experiment, she had crawled along the catwalk
to a room overlooking her lab.
Siran handed me the gun as I entered, cape firmly back in place. It was a
strange thing, silver and strangely organic. I looked down at the body at my
feet and the name embroidered above the breast pocket of her lab coat.
“Severine,” I read aloud, eyes wandering to the perfectly round hole
she’d punched through the bottom of her jaw and out the top of her head.
She had carefully missed the delicate hardware at the base of her skull.
“She escaped then?”
“Like the others?” Siran asked, “Guess so. By Earth, Had. This shit’s
beyond me.” Her blank-visored face turned up to look at me, looking for all
the world not so different from the helmet of the creature I had slain. “Are
you all right?”
I caught myself rubbing my hands—as if trying to remove some spot on
the black gloves. “They were mingling the Cielcin with machines. That’s
what that thing was.”
“Are you serious?” I could imagine the look of shock on her face, eyes
white and wide in the dimness.
“The body is just down there,” I gestured to the room below. “We’ll need
to bring it back with us, and everything we can get from these machines.”
Breaking off, I looked round at the banks of computers rising all about us,
the machines through which the ghost of Dr. Severine and her fellows had
escaped. “The Cielcin said its master had raised an army. That it was
coming for us.”
The centurion—my friend—moved to stand beside me, her arms crossed.
“The Cielcin have been invading for hundreds of years. That’s nothing
new.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “This time it’s different.” I let my hands
fall, looked back through the open door to where the failed hybrid lay on
the floor. “A Cielcin prince willing to work with the Extras… The world is
changing.”
“Lord Marlowe!” a voice rang out from below, “Lord Marlowe!” The
questing beams of suit lights blazed up from below. My men had found us.
Too little. Too late.
I did not step out to speak to them at once, but turned to Siran.
“Something’s coming. Mark my words. This war of ours is about to get a
good deal worse.”
 VICTIM
OF
CHANGES

It is forbidden to pollute the sacred flesh with machines, and the lives of
those who do—cyborgs, chimeras—are forfeit. Sarana is a praetor of the
Holy Terran Chantry, a holy judge tasked with rooting out these
abominations. But when the defendant’s guilt is evident, what is to be done
with the innocents caught in the middle?

Originally published in Overruled.

THE CREATURE the cathars brought before the praetor had been human once.
The mighty chains that bound it hand and foot rattled against their moorings
as the guards drew them tight, forcing the metal beast to kneel. Its hunched
shoulders were twice as broad as any man’s, but the face—bloodless and
pale as stars—was that of a woman. Seated in the praetor’s throne, Sarana
stirred as the creature turned milky eyes towards her. Sarana had sentenced
a dozen such creatures to death before for the great sin of profanation, but
they had all been men. Why should it bother her so much more that this
creature was a woman? Or had been one? She wasn’t sure, and that was the
worst part. Sarana was an inquisitor of Mother Earth’s own Holy Chantry, a
praetor, no less. A praetor must be certain. Perhaps it was only that the face
shrouded in all that ceramic and steel looked just that much more like her
own.
Or perhaps it was that the abomination was not alone.
Chained at its side—almost like a pet, to Sarana’s eye—was a child. A
little girl, no more than three or four years standard, in a drab gray gown the
sisters who tended the clients in the bastille had given her. The girl was not
bound hand and foot, but clung to the behemoth’s thigh as any child might
her mother’s skirts.
Sarana’s mind balked at the comparison, and she swept her flinty gaze
over the room.
The court was by design an unforgiving place. Men and women did not
come before a praetor of the Holy Inquisition for forgiveness. The old gods
forgave, or so the magi said. Mother Earth did not. The chamber was
fashioned all of gray stone, the throne and jurors’ bench brutal
constructions of concrete without ornament or device, the lights harsh and
colorless. The very shape of the chamber spoke of power, as did the black
robe she wore, the black robe and the high, white crown and stole whose
shape evoked the pharaohs and pontifexes of antiquity, symbols whose
origins were lost in the minds of most of Earth’s children, but whose mute
power remained stamped in the cellular memory of every human being in
the galaxy.
 “State your names for the record,” Sarana said, steel in her voice to match
the flint of her eye.
The mighty beast twitched. It moved strangely, hobbled by more than the
chains. Sarana knew her people had combed over its systems before
admitting it into her presence and that of the thirteen who sat to advise her
judgment. Whatever threat the once-human thing might have posed with its
mighty arms and metal body was ended.
“Leocadia,” the beast replied. Her voice—its voice—was decidedly
human.
Strange that such a monster could sound afraid. Sarana peered into the
bloodless face. At twenty paces distant, the praetor thought she spied the
shape of wires and hoses beneath the skin where the flesh flowed into
plastic.
“And the girl?”
The child had not spoken. Had not looked out from where she hid in the
shadow of the monster’s thigh.
Leocadia spoke and tried to lower one massive hand to touch the child’s
shoulder. “Tell her your name, sweetheart.”
One blue eye—identical to the blue eyes of the once-human thing in the
chains before her—peered up at Sarana. “Inas,” the girl said.
Satisfied, Sarana gave the scribe an officious nod. These barbarians more
often than not only had the one name. No house, no family to speak of. The
scribe bent to his task, mechanical keys clicking in the still air. Certain
electronic devices were permitted under the Chantry’s Writ, but none was
permitted within the court, particularly when so profane a creature as this
Leocadia was present. The woman had perverted her Earth-given flesh,
carved it away until she was a face and a spinal column and a bit of nerve
wired into steel and rubber. Sarana had examined the scans. The barbarian’s
heart was still there…her kidneys and liver. But the lungs were gone,
replaced with a system that breathed for her, even and unceasing.
“Do you know why you are here?” Sarana asked.
“Because you think you own us!” the beast replied. “We are not your
subjects!”
Untroubled, Sarana pressed her fingertips against the broad arms of her
seat. “All the Mother’s children are our charge. Though you spit on her and
turn your back and sell your flesh to daimons.”
The creature flinched, servos whining in its mighty limbs, rattling the
heavy chains.
“Do you know why you are here?” Sarana asked once more, fingers
drumming against the arm of the judge’s throne.
Silence.
“You have been found guilty of Abomination under the Writ of Earth’s
Holy Chantry. You have profaned your body with machines and consorted
with daimons. For these crimes against your own humanity and for your
sins in the eyes of the Earth, Our Mother, you will be put to death by fire.”
“Crimes against my own humanity?” The giant strained against its bonds.
“I am human, you cow!”
The cathars pulled the chains tighter, massive winches tugging at the iron
limbs until their mechanisms screamed in protest and the human face that
once had been a woman named Leocadia grimaced in fury and frustration
both.
“The status of your humanity is not open to debate. It is gone,” Sarana
said, surveying the bonds that kept her prisoner in place. They ought to
hold, even against a hybrid twice the size of this. “This is merely a
sentencing hearing.”
“Then why bother bringing me here at all?” the thing asked. “Just kill me.
You’re going to anyway.”
Sarana’s clawed nails clicked against the concrete arms. “The forms must
be obeyed.”
“The forms…” the hybrid echoed, venom on her tongue. Sarana noted the
way the face did not move as it spoke, the voice issuing instead from
speakers near where the beast’s ribs ought to be, beneath flanges in the gray
chassis.
Unmoved by this realization, the praetor said, “There are questions
regarding the nature of your depravity whose answers will impact the
severity of your sentencing, not least of which being the disposition of your
companion.” Here she raised a finger and indicated the apparently human
child clinging to the hybrid’s dog-legged thigh.
“My daughter, you mean?”
Sarana thought that if the giant could have stepped forward or pushed the
child behind her that she might have done. A derisive laugh almost escaped
her. Almost. The beast thought the child needed protecting from the
Chantry? That was almost too rich.
“Your…daughter,” Sarana echoed the words. She’d been briefed on the
unnatural association between the once-human thing before her and the
child, but to be faced with the reality of the situation beneath the cold light
of the courtroom lamps was something else entirely. The thing that called
itself Leocadia looked more like a freight lifter than a human being. Sarana
imagined the hybrid carrying its child in a tank on its back and shuddered.
Fixing her eyes on the girl, she asked. “Inas, was it?”
The girl turned away, clutching at the machine’s leg to hide her face.
“Is she human?” asked one of the jurors.
At the sound of the questioner’s voice, the chimera swiveled its turret of a
head so that the plastinated human face regarded the juror. “Human?” it
sneered. “Human? It’s you priests I’m not so sure about.”
From the praetor’s seat, Sarana could see the blood drain from the juror’s
ashen face. She shared a portion of the man’s horror. The creature’s head
had rotated on its neck far more than was natural. With a glance to the
guards and the cathars who held the restraints in check, she reasserted
command of the chamber. “You have been found guilty of Abomination
under the Writ of Mother Earth’s Holy Chantry and Her Inquisition. Of
profaning your given flesh with machines, of consorting with machine
intelligences, of permitting those same intelligences to possess your body
and mutilate your soul. These are deadly sins and disgraces in the eyes of
She who made us…” While she spoke, Praetor Sarana settled back against
the throne, her high, Egyptian-styled miter just touching the backrest. “But
the Mother is not without mercy. Repent. Renounce your sinful ways.
Cleanse yourself of these machines.”
“And what?” the beast spat. “You’ll let me go?”
The praetor shut her eyes, the better not to look upon that ghastly, once-
human face. There were some crimes—some sins—which no mortal judge
could expiate. For such sinners, there was only death. Only Mother Earth’s
mercy. Her justice. Some affronts were beyond mortal forgiveness, beyond
the powers of men to make right.
“You will be permitted to die clean,” the praetor answered. “Clean and
free of this taint you have brought upon your body and your soul. Renounce
your machines.”
“Commit suicide?” the creature asked. “If you’re going to kill me, kill
me. I won’t do your work for you.”
“There is the matter of your immortal soul to consider,” Sarana said.
“My soul!” the chimera echoed. “You’re one to talk, lady.”
“And there is the matter of your child—if she is your child—to consider,”
the praetor said, angling up her chin. “Cooperate, and it will be easier for
her.”
A horrid sound, low like the grinding of stones issued from the creature
below the dais. The thing that once had been woman snarled, strained
against her chains. The cathars scrambled, guards training lances on the
thing’s shoulders. An instant later, the chimera tore itself apart. The turret
head with its human face fell forward, bringing a huge chunk of its torso
along with it. Sarana saw the scuttling of limbs—arms or legs she could not
tell. Too many. The thing took half an instant arranging itself on the floor,
but for the woman in the chair time seemed to slow as she beheld the horror
of it. Snakelike, spiderlike and fashioned all of steel it was, a human face on
the end of a braided metal spine seven feet long and big around as a man’s
arm, with six legs, each razor-edged and graceful as a blade and tipped with
splayed, three-clawed feet.
In that same moment, Sarana reflected that her cathars had failed her, had
failed to detect this smaller body housed within the larger shell. That was
the trouble with these demoniacs. No two Extrasolarians were alike: each a
puzzle box of danger and mechanical horror. The cathars had sworn they’d
defanged the creature, removed all its built-in weapons, but this body had
gone undetected, had appeared little more than an endoskeleton contained
within the larger shell that hung open and lifeless in chains before the
judge’s seat.
Sarana knew she was going to die, her and possibly several of the jurors
before the cathars and the guards could stop it. Even still, Sarana wondered
what the creature thought it could accomplish. Even if it killed her—killed
everyone in the room—there was yet the entire bastille and temple complex
beyond the doors of the court. Thousands of clergy and armed guards.
It could not get far.
All this passed through Sarana’s mind in the space of a lightning strike, in
the time it took for the chimera to find its clawed feet and launch itself at
the judge’s throne like a panther from the branches of some tree in the
jungles of mankind’s mythic youth.
It crashed against an invisible barrier mere inches from the foot of the
dais and fell in a tangle on the floor.
The praetor gasped. She had forgotten about the prudence barrier. In all
her years of judgment, in all her hundreds of hearings…she had never
needed it before that day. Unlike the standard Royse body-shields, whose
limited power supplies meant they could guard against only high velocity
projectiles, the prudence shield was powered by geothermal sinks that drew
energy direct from the planet’s core. Though it was invisible as air, the
prudence barrier was solid as stone, as impenetrable to artifice as it was to
brute force.
A curious thrill pulsed through the praetor’s body, and she sat forward,
the better to watch. The thing called Leocadia righted itself, six limbs
clicking as it reared up, body like some six-limbed stick figure of a man.
The still-human face contorted, hissing with fury, it drove its spike-like
arms into the barrier curtain. Fractal shimmers sparkled and died where it
struck, claws bouncing back scarce two feet from the face of the judge.
 Mastering her fear and her instinct to flinch away, Sarana sat forward.
She could no more pass through the membrane than the beast could, and so
was at no risk of endangering herself. The cold lighting of a stunner bolt
splashed against the shield. Leocadia’s head rotated a full one hundred
eighty degrees. The snakelike spine and shoulder joints flexed oddly as
three of the arms rolled over in their sockets. The guards advanced, lances
raised. One man leaped bravely forward—what he was thinking Leocadia
never knew—and thrust his zircon bayonet towards the demoniac’s face.
Leocadia caught the ceramic blade in its pincers and snapped it clean in
two. The poor fellow never stood a chance. Two more metal arms lanced
out, skewering him at the neck and in the soft place beneath one shoulder.
He died instantly, red blood gushing across the gray concrete at the foot of
the brutal dais.
Another of the Chantry guardsmen opened fire, and his lance’s beam
sliced across one of the chimera’s legs at the joint. The limb smoked and the
metal monster staggered, but another of the arms shot out, razored edge
slicing through the man’s red tunic and the black underlayment beneath.
Iron claws seized the fellow’s lance and pulled it from its owner’s hands.
Another shot caught the creature in its shoulder, but it swung its stolen
lance around and clubbed its attacker in the head with its haft. The man
reeled and hit the floor with a groan. The daimon fired its stolen lance. One
guard’s head exploded with the heat, and he fell like a toppled tower.
Black-robed cathars drew back—they were no soldiers. The knot of
torturer-technicians retreated towards the door, one of them shouting at the
sergeant-at-arms to summon more guards. The demoniac advanced on
them, lance raised. It fired, and men died. The cathars had no armor. No
shields. They never stood a chance.
“Summon the guards!” Sarana shouted from the safety of her seat. The
sergeant-at-arms—an older man, bald as all legionnaires are bald—nearly
tripped in his scramble to pull the chain that would sound the bell in the
guard room down the hall. Its deep chiming filtered through the heavy
concrete and steel of the court’s walls, urgent and melancholy at once. The
jurors—safe themselves behind a similar prudence barrier—nevertheless
scrambled to leave the chamber by the side door. There were only three
guards.
“Cowards…” Sarana muttered, and watched as the demoniac leaped upon
another of her guardsmen and pinned him to the ground with three of its
bladed limbs. Blood flowed freely from wounds at wrist and elbow as the
machine-creature lowered its serpentine bulk atop its victim like the body of
some vampire. It twisted, fixing humanish eyes on Sarana as it drew a
fourth arm smoothly across the throat of the downed man.
Slice.
The guardsman twitched, but with his arms pinned at the elbow there was
nothing he could do. Sarana thought she could see Death’s gray shadow
rush over him as the blood ran out. But the demoniac woman had made a
mistake.
Lance fire scraped across its back, braided metal glowing where the high-
energy beams heated it to a fevered scarlet. The demoniac lurched behind
the hulk of its abandoned, larger body and returned fire, but the guards had
gotten shields up and circled round. The sergeant at arms still pulled on the
chain, bell tolling for aid in the halls outside. Sarana heard—or thought she
heard—the hammer of booted feet and rattle of armor without.
“Freedom!” the creature screamed, and swung its lance down at the
nearest guardsman. The white zircon bayonet flashed in the stark light and
clubbed the man in the shoulder with such force the fellow went to his
knees. Leocadia whirled the lance in a circle to strike the man in the neck.
A little shape darted out from the shadow of the giant’s abandoned husk—
running for the doors and the bodies of the dead cathars.
The child. Inas.
Too slow.
The whirling lance caught Inas on the flank. Sarana heard a cry and
watched as the little girl went skidding across the floor, tumbling until she
struck the prudence barrier at the base of the jury stands.
The child lay very still.
 For an instant, nothing moved in the courtroom. Nothing save the slow
spread of blood on the floor from the wreck of dead men and the frantic
scramble of the sergeant at the bell.
“No!” Leocadia exclaimed. “No no no no no!” The demoniac scrambled
across the floor towards its child’s prone form, six feet scraping against the
stone. It coiled round the child’s form, razor edges smoothing away as it
traced a line of the girl’s face with one tripodlike hand. “Inas, are you all
right?”
Sarana stood. She did not think the girl was bleeding—it looked like the
energy-lance had just clipped her flank. Nevertheless, the force of that blow
had surely been sufficient to shatter bones, and the praetor was certain the
girl had at least one broken rib. She felt a twinge of pity for the child, who
had not asked for so unnatural a mother, nor so dangerous a one.
The child made no sound. Was she unconscious?
The doors to the court chose that very moment to burst open, jerking
Sarana’s attention from the pair on the floor. Three dozen men in the white
armor and red tunics of the common Sollan Imperial legionnaire streamed
in, lances raised and ready. Sarana saw the red points of targeting lasers
track across the prudence barrier and take aim at the serpent-spider thing
huddled around its still-human young.
“Hold your fire!” Sarana shouted, raising both arms. With her loose
sleeves, she cast a cruciform shadow on the floor beneath the dais. The bell
had stopped ringing, and the old sergeant stood ready behind the new.
“You’ll hit the child!”
The men did not fire, but kept their lances trained on the metal monster.
The praetor descended from the dais and advanced until she almost
pressed her nose against the prudence barrier. In a voice tense but flat of all
feeling, Sarana asked, “Is she alive?”
The demoniac was slow to answer her. In the silence, the men advanced,
and the creature shouted, “Don’t come closer!” It clutched the child to
itself, weapon raised. “She’s still alive!”
“No thanks to you,” the praetor said, cold and distantly. “Put down the
lance and step away, and we may be able to save her.”
“Save her?” Leocadia almost choked. “You lot?” Metal arms flinched,
tightening about the child. “No closer, I said!”
“If she is human,” Sarana replied. “She has nothing to fear. Prove there is
still some humanity in you and stand down. Let us save her. From you.”
The once-human monster snarled. “From me! She would not be here
were it not for you!”
“No,” the praetor said, and pressed a hand against the prudence barrier. It
felt smooth and unyielding as glass. “She would not be here were it not for
you. You did this. It is because of you that you are here, and it is because of
you that your child suffers. Your violence.”
“Me!” the thing repeated. A hollow laugh escaped it. Arms still tightened.
“Look at yourself!” Sarana shouted. “You’ll crush her!”
“I…” the serpent’s human face flitted back and forth from Sarana to the
guards and back.
“Look around you, creature.” And here the praetor spread her arms. “You
killed ten of my people. I am trying to save one of yours. Ask yourself:
which of us is the danger here?”
Leocadia snarled again, iron fingers wringing the haft of its stolen lance.
“You cannot win,” Sarana said, and was pleased to hear her voice so
smooth and even. “And you cannot save the girl. Submit. Repent. And die
human.”
How human the eyes still seemed! The shine in them, the film of tears.…
Whatever engineer had saved that flesh and transmuted it to plastic had
done his vile work too well. It was all Sarana could do not to recoil, to hold
herself fast by the energy curtain. She was Earth’s holy representative, the
goddess-mother’s avatar in the living world. She could not be afraid, and so
held the monster’s gaze.
Human and inhuman stared at one another.
Inhumanity blinked.
“You’ll help her?” Leocadia asked, relaxing her grip on the child. In the
harsh light of the chamber, Sarana though she could see bruises flowering
where the metal arms had bit the child’s flesh.
“If she is human.”
“She is, you bitch!” The serpent coiled closer about its child. “As if you’d
know the difference.”
Sarana ignored the monster’s needling. There was no reasoning with the
profane.
Metal hands cradled the unconscious child while other hands still held the
lance, its bayonet aimed at the three dozen men shielded and clustered by
the door. Doubtless some machine eye or sense stranger still kept watch on
the ranks of armed men, but the human face looked up towards the judge,
and expression forming there that Sarana did not expect to see from a
monster like the one before her eyes.
Horror.
It was a human face again. In that moment. Leocadia’s face. Gone was
the feral snarling, gone the hollow-eyed lethality of the thing that had killed
her cathars and her guards. Here was only the woman. The mother. Here
was only Leocadia, eyes wide with fear and shame. It was as if the woman
had awoken from a dream. Her eyes darted round the room as if she had not
truly seen it before—as if she had never seen it. She had the nervous energy
of one who knows not where she is standing. Sarana felt pity for the woman
within the machine, for she was a victim, too. Her own victim, to be sure,
but a victim all the same. A victim of the changes she’d wrought on her
body, of the machines she’d let into her mind. No human mind could
undergo such changes to the body without changing itself—and the woman
she was or might have been was not the creature that crouched coiled before
the praetor’s throne.
“Let the child go,” Sarana said. “Put her down and the weapon. Lie on the
ground.”
The woman inside the machine glanced down at her child, at striped
bruises on her arms where the metal appendages had dug in. “I…I don’t…”
“Mama?” the child’s eyelids fluttered. “Mama, it hurts. Breathing.”
The monster sobbed, and Leocadia clutched Inas against its central
column where a breast ought to be, limbs approximating the gestures of
human tenderness.
“Put her down,” the praetor said. “Let her go.” She raised a hand to the
old sergeant. “Send for a med team, Arleg.” The bald officer bobbed a
quick bow and vanished out the open double doors. Refocusing on the
demoniac, Sarana said, “Put the weapon down, at least.”
Tears began to fall. “You’re going to kill me,” Leocadia said, and Sarana
sensed it was the woman speaking, not the machine she had sacrificed
herself to become.
“You’re killing her!” the praetor said.
The creature’s lance tumbled from fingers that had never known nerves.
Limbs buckled, and the tight coil the beast had made loosened from around
the child. It had not known its own strength. Its grip—which had it been
human would have been only the desperate embrace of the concerned
parent—had in its current form been a kind of vise. It had nearly crushed its
own child in its arms, another victim.
Sarana sorely hoped she’d have to burn but one of them that day.
“I’m not…” the creature stammered, “I’m not a monster.” Those still-
human eyes squeezed shut. Tears pressed between the lids. “My name is
Leocadia. Leocadia.”
“You have been using your child as a shield since my men entered this
courtroom,” the praetor said. “You slaughtered ten of my men in seconds.
You would have slaughtered me.” Once more, Sarana pressed her hand to
the prudence barrier.
“You’re going to kill me!” the creature said.
“I have a sacred duty to defend the Mother’s children from what you have
become,” Sarana said. “Including your daughter.”
Another sob shook the metal serpent with the woman’s face. Sarana made
a gesture, and the men advanced, weapons still trained on the figures
huddled beneath the judge’s seat.
A flurry of motion by the door distracted the praetor, and looking up she
saw four women in the white and green of medical staff entering with
Arleg, the old sergeant. She nodded approval. The old man had gone for lay
nurses and not summoned more of the cathars. That was well, it would not
do to frighten young Inas just then.
“Put her down,” Sarana said, voice clear and sharp, filling the brutal
concrete space. The nurses had halted just behind the guards, unwilling and
afraid to come too near. “Put her down and lie on the floor.”
The chimera stood there, unmoving, still clutching the human child to
itself. Was that blood on the child’s arms? For a long while nothing moved.
The guards could not fire without harming the child, nor the chimera fight
back for the same reason. Sarana stood upon the lowest step of the dais,
waiting. Waiting.
On Earth of old, in the Golden Age of man, it was said that holy men
burned witches alive. Sarana knew better, for the Golden Age had been
before Columbia, before the Mericanii conjured the daimon machines and
brought their sickness into the world. There could be no witches without
daimons. No demoniacs. Whoever those holy men of old had killed, they
were no abominations, were nothing like the beast before her. They had
murdered innocents.
But theirs was not the Golden Age.
Their witches and daimons were real.
And if it was a great sin for the ancients to falsely condemn the innocent,
it was a far greater evil not to burn the guilty. For how could good men—
faced with monsters like the witch before the dais—do anything but burn?
The witch knew it. Sarana could see the glassy fear in those eyes as
Leocadia looked up at her. Or was it only glass? She knew she’d reached
the end, that the face of her judge and the old sergeant and the faceless
masks of the armored guards would be the last she would ever see. Theirs,
and the face of her daughter.
“Put down the child and step away,” Sarana said again, more forcefully.
“Now!”
With excruciating slowness, the demoniac uncurled, razored limbs
unclasping. Leocadia stooped, lowering itself like some hideous iron
vampire over the limp form of its child and laid the girl on the floor. Still
bending, the monster’s human face drew close to the barely conscious girl.
Weapons tensed, but the praetor raised a hand, and watched in astonishment
as the mother-monster kissed its child on the brow…and drew away.
In short order the medical team swept in while the guards and cathars
worked to secure the demoniac, binding it with magnetic chains to keep the
bladed limbs pinned to its side.
The praetor regained her high seat as the jurors returned to their seats,
black robes fluttering, making them look like a murder of ravens. Sarana
looked down upon the tableau on the bare floor, the medics, the bodies of
the cathars and the guards, the new guards standing over the demoniac
bound in chains. Leocadia’s face turned up to look at her, all defiance gone
from her eyes. She kept looking to the injured girl and the flock of white-
dressed nurses about her. She did not speak.
“Leocadia,” Sarana said, using the creature’s name for the first time.
“You have been found guilty of Abomination under the Writ of Earth’s
Holy Chantry. You have profaned your body with machines and consorted
with daimons. For these crimes against your own humanity and for your
sins in the eyes of the Earth, Our Mother, you will be put to death by fire.”
It was the same speech she had made at the start of the hearing, before the
violence had ended things. This time, the creature did not interrupt. The
eyes still seemed human to Sarana, still brimmed with tears. Sarana shut her
own. Justice should be blind. “But the Mother is not without mercy.” More
words she had said before, as if time had turned round again. “Renounce
your ways, cleanse yourself of these machines, and you will not be given to
the fire. You will be permitted to take your own life.”
“Will she be all right?” the creature asked, looking at the child.
Sarana raised a hand. “Do you renounce evil?”
“Is she alive?” Leocadia asked, ignoring the judge.
“Do you renounce evil?” Sarana asked again.
The creature strained, craning its neck to try and peer past the wall of
medical personnel.
 “I will not ask again, Leocadia,” Sarana said, losing her patience, “Do
you renounce evil?”
“To hell with you and your questions, woman—is my daughter all right?”
Sarana shut her eyes again. “Take her away, Arleg.”
The guards had to drag the demoniac like a sledge, metal grinding against
the concrete floor, leaving pale scratches on the cement. It would be the fire
for her, after all. Sarana hung her head and wrung her hands in her lap. She
did not open her eyes. Why should this one be so much harder than the
others? It didn’t make sense.
“Just tell me she’s all right!”
Those were the last words Leocadia ever spoke—or the last that the
praetor ever heard. The doors of the hall banged shut behind her, leaving the
court in uneasy and incomplete quiet. The jurors muttered on their bench,
their presence a vestigial formality—there had been no need to determine
guilt, not when the guilty’s own body shouted the crime.
Sarana opened her eyes, studying the hulking body of the demoniac still
suspended in chains in the center of the hall. Was she imagining it, or was
there a single blue light flickering in the compartment at the neck whence
the snake-like Leocadia had sprung? Was there yet some spark of the
demoniac alive in its outer shell?
“Have this destroyed as well.” She gestured at the hulk and stood,
sweeping down the stairs she approached the nurses. Five of them knelt
about the bandaged child while a sixth wielded a medical scanner, checking
for internal injuries. Inas lay flat amongst them, pale face thin and drawn
with pain.
Sarana glanced at the hulking machine, at the light shining in its depths.
“She’s alive,” Sarana said. “Will she recover?”
Could the mother hear them still, even through the walls of the
courtroom? Possibly. Sarana found that she hoped it could. The forms
demanded that the witch be put to death, but nothing in the Chantry’s Holy
Writ forbade this little mercy. She would die, but she would die with one
less victim.
 “Yes, praetor,” said one of the nurses. “She’ll live.”
The blue light flickered…and died.
As if this was her cue, as if the world were set upon some poor
dramatist’s stage, the child’s eyes fluttered open. Seeing the nurses and the
cold praetor looking over her—or perhaps simply from the pain—she began
to cry.
Sarana raised a hand to the sergeant, who shouted orders that the
prudence barrier be dropped. The judge stepped over that previously
impassable threshold then and knelt before the monster’s still-human child
and victim. She was an orphan now—or would be in mere moments. She
was young, doubtless they would see her installed in a convent, provided
she was as free of perverse genetics as she was of her mother’s machine
sorcery. The clergy could always use more.
“Hush, girl. Let’s have none of that,” Sarana said, and drew a white
kerchief from her sleeve to dry the child’s tears. “You’re safe now.”
 NOT MADE
FOR US

Life in the Imperial Legions has never been easy. Certainly for some it
means a life of adventure. For others, it’s the only way out of planetbound
serfdom. And for Carax of Aramis, it means pay and a better life for his
woman and child at home. But the world has changed while Carax has slept
for decades in cryonic fugue…and now it seems like he may never see his
home and family again.

Originally published in Star Destroyers.

“I THINK THEY THAWED OUT THE WHOLE CHILIAD,” Larai said at mess. She
hadn’t touched her food. The printed beef had gone cold on her tray. That
bothered me. Can’t say why, only that Larai usually put away her rations
faster than either Soren or me—faster than anyone on the decade—which
were crazy, small as she is. Not today. She just sat there, hands on her bald
head. Hadn’t spoken the whole meal. Not even touched her coffee.
Soren don’t usually talk much, so I said, “You sure?”
She nodded. “Heard one of the medtechs say H-Deck was emptied out.
Ninth Century’s out of the ice. Guessing the Tenth’s not far behind.”
“That mean a big campaign?” I said.
“That means a fucking big campaign,” Soren put in, setting down his
fork.
Took me half a second to realize he was eyeing me. “What?”
“You’ve not had a proper campaign, son.” He had this weird look in his
eyes, like he were my da back on Aramis. I was about to respond when a
voice came from my right. Gave me such a start I dropped my knife.
“My money’s on annexation, lads!” I didn’t see the decurion sneak up on
us, but there he was: Peter Thailles in his black fatigues. He looked a little
older than he had when I’d gone into the ice, making me wonder if he’d run
up his clock somehow while we slept. Soren says officers always time-out
faster than us groundlings. He noticed I’d dropped my knife and—clapping
me on the shoulder all friendly—
added, “Sorry, Oh-Four! You frighten that easy? Scarier than me’s coming,
you mark my words.”
I didn’t say anything. I don’t like the decurion much. Probably shouldn’t
write that, never know when an officer will root through my things. He’s a
decent enough officer. Just don’t like the way he talks to Larai and the other
ladies in the decade, but he’s my commander…and I guess that’s what I
should expect from some black-barred patrician like him. All the ego of a
nobile, none of the sting—gives him a real chip on his shoulder. “Reckon
it’s Normans,” he said, leaning in over his dinner tray. “Reckon brass
picked out another one of their freeholds. We’ll see how long they hold
free, eh?”
“Hopefully good and long,” Soren said, jerking his head at me. “Last
annexation I was on took seven years. Weren’t even hard. Those Normans
can’t fight for shit.”
Decurion Thailles narrowed his eyes, “Language, Oh-Six. This isn’t that
three-bit whorehouse they raised you in.”
If Soren didn’t like the decurion talking to him like that, I couldn’t tell.
Old bastard grinned lazily at the officer and said, “Were a four-bit
whorehouse, sir. Might be they cut you a discount.”
I had to wait until the others started laughing before I joined in. Even so, I
kept my eyes down on my tray and didn’t look the decurion in the face. His
eyes freak me. Too blue they are, like a bird’s egg. Ain’t natural. Earth and
evolution didn’t mean for men to have eyes like them, but the pats and the
nobiles do what they want. Chantry lets them. Ain’t that kind of pride a sin?
“They told you something they’ve not told us?” Larai asked the officer.
The decurion, he turned to her—and I still don’t like the look in those
eyes of his—and he said, “They’re always telling me things, Oh-Five, but
they haven’t said a thing.” He were in the dark much as us, then. That
makes sense, right? Captain Vohra’s supposed to give us a talking-to over
internal comms, but no one’s heard from her or Commander Kolosov.
Shuttles have been going back and forth from the Sword of Malkuth and the
Prince Raphael, though. Business as usual. I know it’s been only four days,
but am I wrong to want some kind of clue from on high? I’ve heard
everything from pirates to Extras to Thailles’s Norman theory. One kid in
the Third Century said something about Mericanii war machines like in the
old stories, but his centurion gave him extra PT for saying that shit, so I
doubt we’re flying into the sort of hell they write operas about.
Going to sleep. Hope there’s more answers tomorrow.

THERE’S THIS MOMENT, right after I seal the helmet on but before the cams
come on, where it’s completely dark and mostly quiet. You can hear
everyone else kitting out: seals hissing in place, laughter, the grind of straps
tightening, someone swearing at their tunic for not draping right; but you
can’t really hear straight. You’re alone. Then the suit comes online, puts up
a set of readouts in the peripheral: heart rate, blood pressure, charge levels
on plasma burner and phase disruptor, communications channels with my
trias, my decade, and up and up to Captain Vohra on the command line.
Then the vision flips on, filling the inside of the helmet with a flattened-out
version of the world. How they do it I don’t know. Chantry swears there
ain’t no daimons in the suit thinking for us, and they’d know, but the
helmet’s visor sifts out a lot of the crap: shadows, tricks of the light, that
sort.
That moment—when I stop looking at the world with the eyes my mother
gave me and start looking at the screen the Empire tells me to use—that’s
when it changes. I ain’t me no more, or not just me. I’m them. I’m Empire.

THE TEN OF US PILED INTO OUR SHUTTLE, pressed tight together, pauldrons
grating as we get jostled by the thrusters firing. “Shields at full charge!” the
decurion called from the back of the shuttle, behind his three triads. “Oh-
One, you and yours start shooting the minute you’re over the lip! You heard
the captain, there are no friendlies on the other side of that door. Second and
Third, fan left and right, secure a position near the shuttle—we may need to
make egress fast.” I wasn’t looking at him—barely heard him through the
blood hammering in my damn ears—but he must have turned to the pilot
officer in back because he said, “You keep the engines warm, boy, and keep
an eye out for anything coming at you down the hull. No idea what sort of
hull defense they’re fielding, but if you get jumpy, you scream.”
Thailles kept talking, but I don’t remember much of it. I was staring at
the door. Perfect round, it was, and wide enough to fit three legionnaires
shoulder to shoulder. When it opened, I had no idea what would be on the
other side. Laser cutters on the outside could make a door just anywhere,
cut through anything short of highmatter or the long-chain diamond they
use on some warships. Our shuttle would clamp onto the outer hull like a
burr don’t come off, cut its way in without causing a leak. This was the sort
of thing you think about when they scoop you up in the levies—or when
they got you in the signing center like me. You think about seizing Mandari
trade ships operating in Imperial space without papers, about putting down
rebellious lords with as little loss of life as possible, about reclaiming
stations captured by the Extras or bringing some colonists into the light of
the Empire.
Something hit the ship then, or nearly did. Maybe it bucked our shields. I
lurched sidelong into Larai, who shoved me straight again. Funny how little
you hear things, just by the sounds pushed into the hull. Shrike shuttles are
small, fast, ugly things not meant for the sky. Outside, they look like cigars,
or like one of the sword handles the Imperial knights carry around—only
bristling with little engines. They’re fast. Damn fast. Suppression fields cut
most of the inertial bucking, but someone out there was firing on us, and
that changed things faster than the field could track, rattling us in our armor.
Don’t remember much else of the approach. Don’t even know how long it
was. I was watching the clock in the corner of my suit’s visual field, but the
numbers wouldn’t stick. Only thing I remember’s my breathing. I was
sealed in my suit, sealed in that shuttle. It was all I could hear outside the
groaning of the ship. I was breathing like I’d been at wind sprints, or
sparring for a good hour. I looked back, past the three soldiers behind me
and Thailles to where the pilot officer sat in his chair. Unlike the rest of us, I
could see his face through his visor. He was gritting his teeth.
Then it went real quiet, and Soren said, “We close to the hull? Inside their
line of fire?”
“Stow it, Oh-Six!”
“Wish we could get a look at the thing,” I said.
“You wouldn’t see shit anyhow,” Larai said.
“I said stow it!”
We hammered into the side of the ship, and I had to hold to a loop on the
ceiling to keep from falling on my face and knocking Oh-One into the door.
Something high-pitched whirred like a metal demon in front, and I thought
of little teeth chewing on whatever it was we’d clamped onto. I know that
ain’t right, but I can’t shake it. I was shaking then, even though I didn’t
know. I was so scared. Like I said, that door could open on anything.
Anything. I imagined Extrasolarian mutants all metal and slime, or Jaddian
janissaries in bright silk and those mirrored masks of theirs. Maybe I was
picturing monsters like the ones the lords keep for sport, or pirates like I
used to play at as a kid on Aramis. And that were just the shit I’d heard of. I
tried to tell myself I were ready for it, trained for it. It didn’t matter. Back at
camp on Orden they said you forget everything you learn the minute the
shit hits.
I did.
The whirring stopped, the door opened. Just inside, the walls of the ship
glowed like old coals where the Shrike had cut in, and all was dark beyond.
Not that it mattered. Helmet cameras compensated for the low light inside,
boosted visuals with infrared and sonic mapping. Everything looked gray,
and there wasn’t much to look at.
“Black planet!” said Oh-One, leading the way in.
“The hell sort of ship is this?” Larai said.
Soren were praying, muttering under his breath just soft enough I
couldn’t make out the words. Someone told him to stop, and he did, turning
left to look down along the hall. Everything looked green and granular. I
kept my plasma burner down, arms straight, waiting.
The gravity felt off. Lighter. I didn’t like that. Heavier’s easier to deal
with than light; suit’s exoskeleton kicks in. Low grav means less control.
Thailles jumped down out of the Shrike. I could make him out in the light
of the shuttle door, taller than the rest of us and with the two red dashes on
the blank white plane of his visor above the right cheek to mark his rank.
The left side of his visor was painted in, black with a yellow bird on in
profile—his house’s seal. The way he hefted his burner rifle, he looked
downright terrifying, red cloak drifting in the micrograv. He oversaw
deployment of the mapping drones—which went spinning off into the dark
—and said, “Oh-Six, take yours down and right, I want to know what we’re
dealing with.”
 Soren gestured understanding and we went off down the hall, if you could
call it that. The walls were like cave walls, and the floor was uneven and
rolling, like we’d come into an asteroid someone’d dug out. My foot
splashed in something.
“What kind of ship is this?” Larai asked, repeating the question from
earlier. She shined the light off her plasma burner up at the ceiling…
highlighting where huge pipes were bracketed to the stone. “There’re no
lights.”
“Mining rig, maybe?” Soren put in, turning back to look at us. “You seen
any doors?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“You don’t have to sir me, boyo.” I could hear the grin in his words.
“Stay sha—!”
I remember seeing him standing there, lit by the backscatter off Larai’s
and my plasma burners and green in my suit’s viewfinder. Then I blinked
and he was gone, knocked flat on his ass by something that came flying
unseen out of the dark. Whatever it was banged off his shield, making the
energy curtain momentarily visible, casting faint lights up the stone walls. I
flinched away. Larai surged forward, weapon raised. Fumbling with the
controls on my vambrace, waving my weapon round like an idiot, I dialed
my suit lights all the way up to give her something to see by, ready with
cover fire. Soren was a good two meters back from where we stood,
struggling to his feet. For a second, I couldn’t find whatever it was that had
hit him, but Larai swore all kinds of fierce and moved off to his left.
“What the hell is going on?” Thailles’s voice rattled in my ears. “Oh-
Four? Oh-Four!”
“Something hit Oh-Six, sir!” I kept looking, weapon up, careful to keep
Larai out of my line of fire. Spotted movement in the dark, turned toward it.
I panicked, squeezed off a shot, plasma burner coughing violet light.
“Contact! Contact!” The thing were small, and I must have missed, cause it
came tearing into the light and straight at me, forgetting about Soren. It
were a snake, a flying snake about as long as my forearm and just as big
around. I saw its teeth flash in my face—and then I were flying, knocked
off my feet just like Soren. Plasma light flashed and my head rang when I
smashed into the wall. Larai stood above me, offering a hand. I took it.
“What in nuclear hell was that?” Soren asked, sounding a little worse for
wear.
I followed Larai over to the smoking remains of what she’d shot, keeping
my weapon—God and Emperor, I’d been useless—trained on the damn
thing.
“It’s a machine!” Larai said, nudging it with her boot, “Look!” She made
a warding gesture with her free hand. Protection against evil.
Crouching, I looked. It weren’t teeth at the business end of the snake, but
bits like on the end of a drill. I swore, and said, “Imagine what that’d do, if
it got past your armor.”
Thailles came in over the comms, and Soren explained. “Oh-Four and me
got knocked the hell down, sir. Some kind of drone…”
“You ever seen something like this?” I asked Larai, looking up from
where I was crouched over the thing.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Think it’s Extras? They use all sorts of crazy-ass machines, right? Evil
shit? Shit Chantry burns you for?”
“Could be.” She straightened, checking the safety on her burner. “Never
been up against them.” She took a second, keyed up her own suit lights to
match mine. Up ahead, one of the pipes was venting steam into the hall.
Somewhere behind, I heard a thud banging through the wall and knew
another Shrike cutter had grappled the hull and that somewhere another
decade was on their way in. I could see the map of the ship taking shape in
my suit’s display, threads linking up like spider webs as the other decades
deployed their drones.
“Best get moving,” Soren said, “want to find a door or something.”
Something screamed.
Earth and Emperor preserve me. The sound of it…like metal tearing ice.
I didn’t want to be a soldier. Didn’t want to leave Aramis. I done it for
Minah. For the boy. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to throw down my
gun and run back for the ship, hide there with the pilot officer until it were
over.
They came out of the fog, and I still don’t quite believe it. The stars ain’t
had anything like them around when I gone under. The worlds changed
while I been froze…got…monsters in them now. And we got sent in to
fight them without a word of warning.
At first I thought they was men. They had arms and legs like men.
Walked like them. But as they got closer and got into the light, I saw they
wasn’t like us at all. They were tall. Taller than Thailles. And the arms
stretched to their knees. And their faces—if they were faces—were like our
visors. Smooth. White. With eyes big as my fist, black as space. No nose,
no ears, but a mess of horns like on some devil from up on the Chantry
walls.
I staggered back, mind locked up like I was some kind of idiot. Didn’t
even see the knife in its damn fist until it was on me. I couldn’t think. I just
froze, figured I was dead already.
“Carax! Down!”
My name got through to me. Not sure if it were Soren or Larai what said
it. I fell into the wall and a shot flew past me, going wide as the thing
lurched toward me. It stopped, pulled something from its waist, and threw
it. One of those drone things. I heard someone cry out, tried to make myself
aim, tried to control my breathing. I raised my burner and fired, hit the thing
in the shoulder, but that didn’t hardly seem to slow it down.
There were more of the things then, three or four coming out of the fog
down the hall. Loping, doglike, only on two legs. Another shot went past.
In the shaking lights off our suits, I saw teeth like broken glass snarling. It
didn’t go down. It didn’t go down.
A huge hand grabbed me by the neck and pushed me up the wall. It
squeezed, but the suit underlayment hardened and wouldn’t let it choke me.
I could feel the fingers tighten. I panicked, dropped my gun and tried to pull
its fingers off me. They were like steel. And the face…Earth and Emperor,
the face. I seen statues of Death in Chantry, all skull with empty eyes. Up
close it were like that, like someone forgot to finish it, but poured white
wax over a skeleton and called it done. Horns snarled above those huge
eyes, curved back in a crown. We was nearly eye to eye, only there weren’t
nothing in its face, no light like a man has, no fire like a woman. Just
empty. Flat. Like my da’s eyes had been when I seen him dead as a boy.
That made me think of my boy and Minah, and I remembered my knife. I
pulled it from my belt and brought it up under the monster’s arm. Must
have found something, because it hissed and dropped me. I fell like a bunch
of sticks, slipped down the wall. Damn ankle went out from under me, and I
think I yelled. Don’t know what happened to the creature. Soren came out
of nowhere, holding his burner out, one-handed, the other pressed to his
side. The old man fired, shouted, “On your feet!”
That were when another loomed up out of the darkness, a long, white
blade in its hands. I tugged my phase disruptor free from its holster, raised
my arm. The thing hummed silent in my fist, and the energy current struck
it blue in the chest. It went down spasming, long arms twitching as the
disruptor burned out nerve channels and fried the creature in its own meat.
Soren looked down at me. “Thanks.”
I nodded, trying to find my wits. My first real fight. I wasn’t ready. Not
for this. I should have been back on Aramis. Should have lived to death
with Minah. I could still run. Thailles would have me whipped, but whipped
ain’t dead, and the Shrike weren’t far.
Thailles’s voice was filling my ears on comms, shouting orders that
didn’t mean nothing anymore. Sounded like they’d found them too. It
weren’t real. This were just some nightmare I wasn’t supposed to have. The
hull around us shuddered like we was inside a metal drum. More Shrikes
clamping on. More soldiers. Maybe that were the seals popping on
cryofreeze. Maybe I was waking up.
“Carax, stand the fuck up!” Soren screamed. In a lull, he fiddled with his
burner—swapping from shot to torch mode—then turned and sprayed a
great stream of plasma fire over the things.
 “Carax!” Larai added.
I was so gone I thought it were Minah for a moment, and that got me
standing. The disruptor had no kick to it like the burner, so I pointed one-
handed at another of the monsters, leaning against the rough stone wall. The
energy bolt found its mark on the side of its head, and it went down
smoking. Think I shouted something, because Soren glanced back over his
shoulder. “Nice shot!” I could hear the grin in his voice. He sounded
normal. Maybe he needed to sound normal.
Then it all went wrong. More wrong.
The wall blew apart in a flash of light and Soren were…he were just
gone. Him and the demons. One second he was standing there, looking back
at me, then nothing. The wind blowing out howled louder than the
explosion. My ears rang. I couldn’t think. I was ripped off the ground and
thrown out the new hole. The wind froze around me and I spiraled out into
the Dark. Something grabbed my leg. One of the demons, it had to be. I
kicked, figured I’d smash its skull-face in. Only then the words screaming
over my suit’s comm got through to me: “Carax! Carax it’s me!”
Larai.
You’re not going back to the ship now, farm boy.
“It’s not real,” I kept saying. “It’s not real. It’s not real.”
But it were. I tried to stop us tumbling, but as we got farther and farther
away…I could see it. The ship—if it was a ship—was huge, so huge it
vanished into the Dark, lit only by the running lights of a hundred Shrike
cutter craft clamped on the outer hull. “Is that ice?” I remember it was the
first coherent thought I’d had since the shuttle door opened.
“What?”
“Ice!” I tried to point. “It’s covered in it.” In the light of the shuttles, we
could see pieces—just pieces—of a ship growing out of the Dark. Parts was
metal, parts stone, all covered and glittering in a thick layer of ice. We was
still getting signal fed in from the mapping drones on board, and I could see
the full scale of the craft taking shape in the corner of my eye. It were huge.
Bigger than the Inviolate, bigger than any ship I’d ever heard of, so big it
distracted me from the fact that Larai and I were careening out into naked
space.
“Oh-Four, Oh-Five! Report!”
“Thailles?” I practically choked. “Soren’s dead. Got hit by something
from outside.” Just then another explosion tore into the icy mass, and we
saw flames spill out behind a blinding flash and fade to darkness. “Larai
and I are…sir. We’re dead.”
I weren’t scared. Maybe I didn’t have no scared left in me.
“What?” Thailles said. “I’ll have none of that. You two get the hell back
here and help us hold until the whole Chiliad’s on board this damn ship. I’m
not losing anyone else. I—”
“We got blown outside, sir.”
The Decurion swore. “How?”
“Something hit the outside,” I said, “hull defense, maybe? Or one of
ours? Didn’t get a good look.” The words was just spilling out.
Larai cut in, “You can’t send the shuttle for us?”
Sounds of fighting over the line. The only sound in our world, except the
breathing. I already knew what Thailles would say. Was thinking about
Minah, about what it would be like to see her when the Earth comes again.
And the boy. We’d be a family, right and proper. And there wouldn’t be no
demons.
“No.”
Larai’s hand tightened on my leg where she still held on. She swore. I had
to shut my eyes, the spinning were making me sick, watching that
impossible big ship get farther and farther away. I tried to guess the
distance. We might have only been a thousand feet out, but that were good
as light-years, unless…
Unless…
Unless I did something very stupid.
“You still got your burner?”
“What?”
“I lost mine when that…that thing grabbed me,” I said. “Do you have
yours?” I looked down at her where she held my ankle, and it were like I
could see through her visor and feel her eyes watching me.
“What are you…?”
“Just give it over!” I snapped, head going clear. Minah would wait. The
Earth had not come back to us today, and even if the priests was wrong and
the universe weren’t made for us…I didn’t think Soren would want me
giving up. I’d already betrayed the old bastard’s memory with my coward’s
thoughts, but I wasn’t going to just let us die. We’d have to find our own
way back to the ship.
It were harder than I thought getting the gun from Larai—without losing
it or her in the Dark. Took longer, the stars all around, cold like eyes
watching. I had both my hands free, and fed a cartridge into the side of the
weapon.
I remembered that in orientation right before the freeze a couple of the
others—I forget what decade they was—got busted racing in one of the
null-G parts of the Inviolate with fire suppressant tanks, using them to fly
around one of them big storage bays. Got dressed down direct by the
captain herself for that shit, rest of us had a laugh. This were the same
thing, only the burner had a little more kick to it.
No air to pull out there, nothing around us but our suits. I switched the
burner to torch mode and squeezed off a couple short bursts. The violet
plasma streams slowed our roll enough that I could point the thing straight
away from the ship. Larai got the idea and held on with both hands. I were
not going to die out here, choking on my own fumes. I weren’t going to let
Larai go the same way. No.
Just had to get back to the ship. I tried to keep that in mind. We just have
to get back to the ship. I tried not to think about the demons, about their
white hands and those black eyes.
I fired, squeezed the trigger down for a good five seconds. “You all
right?” I asked Larai, shouting despite the comms tying us. She nodded, but
didn’t answer. Maybe she thought she were going to be sick. I get that. We
wouldn’t be the only ones thrown out into the Dark. I tried not to think
about that, about our brothers and sisters dying out there. Or about what
else were dying with us.
The frozen ship got closer, flickering in the running lights off our shuttles
clamped to its surface. I fired again. A good, long burn. The ship must have
gotten closer, but it didn’t seem to. A note blinked in my suit helmet, and I
expelled the burner’s plasma reservoir with a click that went all the way up
my arm.
“Damn torch mode burns through the packs fast,” I said, and slotted one
of the replacement reservoirs into the gun. Fired.
Fired.
Fired.

“THIS THE ONE we got blown out of?” Larai asked, pointing down into the
hole. The ice around it was cracked, whiter than elsewhere in the light off
our suits. The metal beneath tore inward, stone shattered. Debris drifted
there, like it was floating underwater.
Peering over the edge of the hole, I shook my head. “No, don’t think so.
Don’t recognize it.” Not a hall inside. Looked like some sort of cargo hold.
Red lights hung from what I guessed were the ceiling, faint as old coals. I
wondered if these demons saw in the dark, or if they was blind. My da used
to tell me things what live in space go pale over the years, living in the dark
of their ships. Hadn’t happened to me so I figured he was full of it, but I
can’t stop thinking about that white hand on my throat.
“Decurion?” I tried my comms. Nothing. “Decurion Thailles, this is Oh-
Four. I have Oh-Five and we’ve made the ship again. Repeat, we’ve made
the ship.” I looked at Larai, tried to imagine her face through the visor of
her helmet; those big eyes wide or narrowed. Were she scared? Or did she
set her jaw that way she had? Seemed like she was taking this whole
situation better than me.
She tried Thailles on her comms, then toggled over to the main channel.
Nothing.
“They jamming us?” I asked, not wanting to think about the other option.
 “Must be, reckon we can only hear each other because we’re right here.
Give me my burner back, eh?”
I passed the gun to her. “Could try raising the Inviolate.”
“Done that,” she said, swinging herself down through the hole. “We’ve
got to find a unit. Any unit.”
I followed on after her, stomach lurching as the gravity field inside the
ship snagged us out of null G and dropped us to the floor. Storage
containers and bits of trash and broken hull filled the hold—and more than
a few bodies. None of them was ours, though. Just…them. I stopped a
second, mindful again of the breathing in my own ears. “The hell’d they not
tell us for? What we was getting into? Scaring the shit out of us don’t make
sense.”
“Bet they didn’t want us panicking aforehand,” Larai shot back, checking
the charge on her plasma burner. I wished I hadn’t lost mine. “You imagine?
Ship full of two thousand Legs learn they’re walking into this? Captain
don’t want that.”
That didn’t sit with me, still don’t. “You reckon they were afeared of
mutiny?” Then another idea hit me, and I said, “You reckon this is first
contact?”
I could see her shake her head. “I bet that happened while we were
icicles, Carax. The world changed while we were getting our beauty sleep.”
Tried raising Thailles on the comms again as we crossed the floor of the
hold toward what looked like doors. Faint blue lights pulsed next to them,
and I wondered if they was sealed up against the vacuum. They was, and
Larai used her burner to cut through the black metal. Wind started whistling
out—you could see it cooling the red edges of the hole she’d made. We
forced our way through. I never heard such noise: the wind screaming out,
weird alarm howling like a stuck pig, and us only still on our feet because
of the rail inside the hall we pulled along.
“…rendezvous at…”
“They’re coming out of the walls!”
“—all back! Fall back!”
 Snatches of comms chatter broke through as we pulled ourselves down
the hall. Up ahead, I could see a massive bulkhead beginning to close. The
blue lights flashed ahead even as the ship rocked under what I guessed were
more collisions from Shrike fliers clamping on. I had to turn down the
audio relays in my helmet—the static kept snapping in my ears. “Come
on!” I shouted, doubling back to haul Larai past me and up the rail. The
door was closing slow—way slower than they did on our ships during drills.
Maybe it were old, maybe it were broken, maybe all those prayers I said in
Chantry as a boy was worth something. We made it to the other side.
The alarm were still going, all high and thin sounding. Reminded me of
the whistle Crazy Hector used to control his dogs back on Aramis, like
there were more sound we wasn’t hearing.
“The hell are we?” Larai asked, and I saw the problem. The mapping
drones had done a merry job sketching halls and chambers in all kinds of
details—but we wasn’t on it. Whatever were jamming the comms were
jamming our suits’ telemetry, too.
“No idea,” I said, more comms chatter crackling in my ear. None of it
made sense. I went a ways up the hall, disruptor held straight-armed and
ready. Couldn’t hear nothing, couldn’t see a thing outside what my suit lit
up. Bits of cloth hung from the walls, black and blue, painted with these
round symbols in white and red and pale yellow. They fluttered in the air—
still not settled from the venting. Passages opened behind some of them.
That scared me. Whatever these things was, they didn’t seem to need their
eyes much as Larai and me.
“Looks like we have to find a way up—” I broke off, the next thought
hitting me like a tram. “I wish Soren were here.”
Don’t know why that didn’t settle in sooner. Maybe it were because we
were only just then getting time to breathe. There hadn’t been time to really
think about it until then. The old bastard hadn’t even seen it coming.
I didn’t get time to keep thinking about it.
“You cage!” something screamed. Or something like that. “You cage! You
cage!” Then a bunch of sounds that made no sense. Then Larai shouted.
One of the…things had emerged from a side passage and grappled her. It
happened so fast. She hit the ground and it stooped over her like a revenant
in the stories they used to tell us as kids. I didn’t see a weapon, but it had its
hands on her face. Them long fingers found the hardware clasps there and
worked them free. I heard Larai gasp as the seals vented, could hear the air
hiss out as the pressures balanced. The faceplate of her helmet fell away,
and the creature lowered its face to hers. She screamed.
I fired.
The disruptor burst caught the creature full in the back, and it slumped
where it crouched over Larai. Thin gray coils of smoke rose out of my suit
lights and away into darkness. I lowered the disruptor, stepping forward to
look down at the beast. Only then did we see it were different, not dressed
in the black armor the ones up top had been, but in simple gray clothes.
There were a hole in the back of the shirt where the disruptor had taken it,
smoking and black where the nerves had burned away.
“Are you all right?” I asked, crouching to hand Larai back her faceplate.
“It stinks in here,” she said, taking the mask back. It took her a moment
to shake herself free. Dead, the creature was all a tangle of limbs. Larai
kicked it, ran a hand over her face. Took me a second to see she was
shaking. “Its teeth…”
“I seen them,” I said, checking behind one of the hangings.
“They go all the way back…”
“I said I seen them.” Talking about it only made it worse. I couldn’t listen
anymore. All I could think on was getting back. Getting up. I decided I
wasn’t going to go out like Soren. It didn’t matter if Minah was dead back
home. Her and the boy. I were still fighting for them. For Aramis. For Earth
and Empire—even if the Empire didn’t give a shit about me. Even if all
they do is tax me and ask me to die fighting their wars. Shit, they’re better
than these monsters. Anything was. And I weren’t fighting for no Empress
anyhow. I were fighting for home, for whatever family I had left—even if
they didn’t remember stupid old Carax who flew off to be a soldier.
Wherever they were, whatever had become of them, I am still me. Still
alive. I had signed up for them. I was still fighting for them. That hadn’t
gone anywhere, that hadn’t changed—whatever else had.
Larai tried to get her mask back on.
“Black Earth! Bastard broke one of the seals.” Still swearing, she tripped
the catch at the base of her jaw and pulled the rest of the helmet off by the
neck flange.
“Tiny gods, it’s rank in here.” She sniffed. “Smells like ass.”
“I’ll keep my helmet on, then,” I said, forcing a laugh that failed to reach
her. I was trying not to think about what her losing her helmet meant. About
how vulnerable it made her. We hurried on, checking behind the hangings
and around corners that branched off and wandered down into darkness. Off
the hall, the rooms were more like little caves than real rooms. Here and
there the natural stone would give way to a dead or blinking console, the
screen so faint I couldn’t see anything on them, even in the full light of my
suit lamps. Once or twice we thought we heard something in the dark, but it
were nothing. Larai stuck close.
After Earth knows how long like this, at last we found a passage leading
up. It weren’t no stair, but a sort of ramp spiraling up and out of sight.
“Smells like plasma burn in here…all cooked,” Larai said. Without her
suit, her voice sounded thick and muddy in the air. “Where is everyone?”
I spoke through my suit speakers. “Maybe they’re higher up? Fighting the
others.”
We’d gone into a side room then, a series of small rooms behind a black
hanging. Food—some kind of raw meat, looked like—lay on a table high as
my chin. Storage cabinets in the walls made of some sort of flow-mold
plastic. “I don’t think this is a military ship, Larai.” I’d found a tiny figure
—bits of carved bone and metal pegs—shaped like one of the monsters.
There were a faint blue flush in its hollow cheeks, and it had this sort of
black robe. Dress. Thing. It were a toy, or I felt sure it must be. I put it in
my sabretache with my extra air cells. It had a long knife in its hand, like
the one I’d almost been stabbed with.
“Carax, come here.”
 I moved to stand by her. She’d climbed up onto a step by the table to get
a better view of the food there. I swore. Meat, a huge piece of it, bones
pulled apart and yellow-brown from the oven. When she spoke, her voice
went all kinds of distant. “I recognized the smell.” She reached out, turning
the food a little on its tray. It had been roasted in its skin, the flesh crackled
and leaking juice. As she turned it, the lines of a tattoo—some Mandari
symbols—came into the light. She said again, “I recognized the smell.”
I swore, “Earth and Emperor.” From the size of it, she had been a woman.
Once. Pieces of her were set on smaller trays about the table, half-eaten.
“We interrupted their meal.” I thanked Earth I couldn’t smell, not through
the suit. I wanted to throw up. To cry. To kill something. I staggered back,
vision blurring a little. “Where did they get the…the body?”
“I don’t know,” Larai said. “Captured a ship before? Maybe that’s why
we’re here? Revenge?” She shook her head. “Justice.”
“Reckon there are more prisoners?”
I didn’t hear Larai answer. The comms channel chose that moment to spit
out more noise.
“What?” I said.
“I said did you hear—” She whirled, fired. The plasma left a glowing
pockmark in the wall. “Something ran past us!” Then she was gone, back
toward the hall. I followed, cursing to myself, but glad to leave that place
and its terrible meal. Suit systems relayed an amplified model of the tunnels
around, ghost paths off suit sonar showing the way around corners. I heard
Larai shoot, saw the flash of plasma fire backscatter off the walls. When I
caught up with her, she was standing in the middle of the hall, in an arch
opening onto a massive space. At least, it felt big, I couldn’t see the roof in
my suit lights, even with my vision enhanced.
“Where’d it go?” I asked.
“Where do you think?” she hissed, jabbing her burner at the room ahead.
“Shit.” I didn’t like the look of it. We’d climbed a fair way since
reentering the ship—and seen almost nothing in all that time—but this spot
were so exposed, and there was only us two.
 There weren’t nothing for it, but had I known what were out there, I’d
have liked to stay in that arch another hour, or gone back down and out
again. I don’t expect to be quit of the memory until they put me back on ice.
But I didn’t know that, and I opened my damn mouth. “We got to make a
break for it.”
“What?”
“Well, we can’t stay here.”
“If there’s anyone out there, they’ll see us. We should turn out the lights.”
“Then we won’t see shit. These things live in the Dark, Larai,” I said. She
swore, but in that way she had where I knew she agreed with me. She was
all pale looking in the scant light, like one of Them. “You ready? Your
shield still good?”
“Took a bit of a hit on the way outside,” she said. Then, “Yeah.”
I checked my disruptor, keyed up the spotlight under its slit of a barrel,
and hurried out into the Dark at a jog. Larai moved past me soon enough,
but held pace just in front of me, which was good. I still had my helmet, so
my vision were better. I could see ahead more clearly. Even so, I didn’t see
the others until we were on top of them.
Until they screamed.
There must have been half a hundred of them, all gathered around the
foot of a huge, black stone, between the arms of some shrine or altar built in
the grotto. The darkness stretched out forever around us, and even the door
we’d come through were lost. Red lights burned remote as dying embers on
the arms of the shrine, cast upon the carved surface of the black monolith.
Were they praying to it? Or only sheltering themselves, hoping to ambush
us as we went by?
These was no soldiers. These was others like the one I’d shot in the back,
dressed in simple clothes and not armor at all. But they was still monsters,
still with slitted noses and black eyes the size of my fist, like I’d walked
into some goddamned tomb. Larai fired before I could think, taking down
two, three, four. The beasts hissed and drew back. But they didn’t draw up
like I expected, using their height to scare the piss out of me. They shrank
down, away. Some fell over the others to get away.
“Wait!” I shouted, and were surprised when I didn’t sound scared. I sure
felt scared. “Larai, wait.”
“What is it?” She’d backed up so we stood almost shoulder to shoulder. I
reached up and unsealed my helmet, letting the mask slot back properly.
“What in Earth’s Holy Name…?”
“They ain’t soldiers. Look.”
Without the flattening of the helmet’s vision, I saw what they was.
Monsters, yes, with glass fangs and those horrible, melted-skull faces. But
with my own eyes I could see the way their nostrils flared, eyes wider than
seemed possible. They was scared. Same as me. Or maybe their scared is
different. They ran, scattered toward exits I could only guess at. The noise
they made—high and cold—I haven’t stopped hearing it. I put my helmet
down on the floor, lowered my weapon. That’s when I heard it. Shots.
Plasma fire. Yelling.
Soldiers. Legionnaires.
Humans.
We stood there stunned, watching them go—watching still more huddle
against the black monolith or against the arms of the shrine. I must have
turned my head for two seconds, but it were enough. I heard Larai scream
even as something huge hit me full in the side, and I went down with one on
top of me. It shrieked like metal tearing, like cold wind.
I thought about Soren, about the meal we had found…about my Minah
and the boy. The creature’s arms were like iron about me, fingers wedged
between the plates of my armor and the underlayment, tearing. I felt a clasp
pop somewhere about my ribs. For a moment, I’d forgotten the disruptor
was in my hands, forgotten the creature was not armored. Its breath hissed
in my ear, and I thought it were going to bite me. I fired, insulated from
collateral nerve shock by my suit. The creature went limp as a sack of wet
oats, and I peeled it off me, staggering to my feet again.
Another of the creatures had Larai pinned down. Her burner’d been
knocked away, and it had each of her wrists in its huge, long-fingered
hands. It stooped over her, its face near to hers. I remembered their snarling,
jagged teeth, and didn’t hesitate. I were done hesitating. I squared my
shoulders and fired. There were a flash of blue light and it fell on top of her.
Better to fight. Always better to fight.
I kept my disruptor raised, circling away from the shrine and the crowd of
demons. Slowly. Sounds of fighting and gunfire came from up the hall.
“Over here!” I cried. “Over here!” Then more quietly to Larai, “You all
right?”
“Help me up!”
The beasts nearest me turned, unsure where to go. I could see the fear in
them eyes, and knew it were fear like mine. One saw me and froze. Larai
said something, but I couldn’t hear her. I was watching the creature. Its
huge eyes. Its horns. Its white hair tangled on its shoulders. It looked at me
a good long time, flinching away. Not knowing why, I held out my free
hand, above my head. I smiled. It cocked its head, took a step forward.
Then I saw the stains about its mouth, on its chin. Red stains on the blue-
white face.
“Carax, what are you doing?” Larai hissed.
“Quiet,” I said, and moved slowly for my sabretache. I fished the strange
doll out and held it out, keeping my disruptor primed, aimed at the floor
beside me. The child—I don’t know why I think it was a child, for it was
taller than I was by a head—inched forward, raising its own hands, reaching
for the doll I held. I weren’t going to shoot. Monster or not, man-eater or
not, I wasn’t going to gun a child down. Fighting for the Empire was better
than letting these monsters eat us, but I knew where I draw the line. I
glanced at the helmet I’d left on the floor, then back to the creature. It
looked me in the face, eyes narrowed, teeth bared.
And then it had no face. Only smoking ruins.
I don’t think it were Larai who shot it. I think it were one of the others.
One of the bone-colored Legionnaires in their red tabards looking like the
enlistment posters. Faceless as the creature were now.
But they was a human kind of faceless.
 THE NIGHT CAPTAIN

It takes decades to travel between the stars, even at faster-than-light speeds.

For these journeys, ships are run by skeleton crews under the command of a
junior officer called a ‘night captain.’ Untried and inexperienced,
Commander Roderick Halford must defend his crew and his superiors
against that great enemy of sailors since time immemorial: pirates.

Originally published in Cosmic Corsairs.

 CHAPTER 1
BLADES IN THE NIGHT

FIVE YEARS OF DARKNESS already. Five years since they set sail from Forum
and the primary crew went to their icy beds. Five years of night.
Five years…and another twenty to go before they reached Nessus. Once
upon a time, a single twenty-five-year night cruise would have been enough
for an officer to live out his commission. There were times—none of them
in living memory—when Roderick Halford might have expected to retire
on landfall at Nessus and settle into a life of desk work or a posting with
one of the civil services. He might have settled down, started a family, kept
a modest estate in the countryside of some backwater world in the Expanse
and lived out his days in peace.
That was before the war. Before the Cielcin. Before he’d been assigned to
ferry Lord Hadrian Marlowe’s Red Company from the core to the frontlines
and back. He supposed he shouldn’t complain. He had the easy job: mind
the ship at warp between the stars, keep the lights on and the ship fueled—
on schedule and on course. The Imperial Legions survived off the back of
officers like himself, ferrymen whose job it was to run the ship while the
more senior officers and combat personnel slept in cryonic fugue, awaiting
deployment when they arrived at their destination. It was not a glamorous
posting, but it was honest work…if lonely and quiet.
This was to be Halford’s third voyage as night captain aboard the
venerable battleship. By its end, he would count forty-seven years of
service on this commission. Nearly twice the minimum of what a night
officer might have served in peacetime. He was grateful his palatine
genetics ensured that he still had centuries to look forward to. There was
always the chance the war would end before he was too old to enjoy it.
 Maybe.
It was quiet. The Tamerlane was always quiet during these long nights.
More than ninety thousand souls called the old Eriel-class vessel home—
Mad Marlowe’s Red Company—but fewer than a hundred of those still
drew breath. The rest slumbered in icy coffins, awaiting the trumpet blast.
Halford’s footfalls rang in the metallic silence, mingling with the pulsing
of the music through the conduction patches behind his ears as he went
about his morning jog. The ship was quieter than usual, without the distant
hum of the warp drives undergirding everything, and through the windows
he beheld not the violet fractals of space-at-warp, but the seeming static
stars, distant and cold.
They’d put into port at the fuel depot 0.1 light-years out of Nagapur
system three days ago to refuel the ship’s antimatter reservoirs. A short
layover, but one that allowed the novelty of fresh faces and an opportunity
for the night crew to explore the ring-station’s scant offerings.
He could see the station through the slit windows of the Tamerlane’s
equator, a promenade that circled the arrowhead-shaped battleship beneath
the armored dorsal hull. Each morning, Halford liked to jog two or three
miles of the ship’s length before attending to his duties. The Tamerlane was
vast, a dozen miles end-to-end, with dozens of decks and hundreds of
chambers, so much of it disused and sealed off while the main crew slept. It
was good for a captain to make his rounds, however slowly, to be apprised
of problems and things in need of repair during the long and silent crossing
between the stars.
“How long until we’re ready to depart again?” he asked, slowing his jog.
He leaned against the rail, looking down from the promenade to where the
ranks of Sparrowhawk lighters slumbered in their berths, wings folded for
deployment above their mag-tubes. One of the lighter craft had its cockpit
open, and a repair kit lay abandoned by some workman on the strand above
the little black starship. Halford frowned; he wasn’t aware that one of the
mechanics was working on the lighters.
“Another five hours, captain,” came the lieutenant’s reply. “Port
authority’s finished refueling, but we need to pass safety clearance.”
Five hours…that was enough time to shower and have a quick meal
before it was time to be off. His lieutenants had said there was a restaurant
not far from the gangway that served curries in the Nagapuran style. It
would be nice to have something not synthesized or grown on board.
Nagapur was to be their last and only stop on this voyage, and this would be
Halford’s last opportunity for a meal prior to departure. “Very good,
Kessan. I’m nearly done here.”
“I’ll keep you apprised if anything changes, sir,” said Lieutenant Kessan.
“But all’s quiet and smooth.”
Halford hissed and made the sign of the sun disc. It would not do to so
tempt fate.
“Tell the port authority we’ll have all the paperwork cleared in five hours
time. I want us leaving on schedule.” A couple hours would not make much
difference in a journey of twenty years, but Roderick Halford was not going
to be the man who made Lord Hadrian Marlowe late. The Devil of Meidua
was His Radiance the Emperor’s newest Knight Victorian, and this mission
in the Expanse was of crucial importance to the war effort, everyone said.
Thinking better of his thoughts of a final expedition off-ship, he said, “Send
Yuri to the station; have him pick up food for the bridge crew. On me.”
Kessan’s voice brightened, “Aye, sir.”
It was a trifle, but morale was built on trifles.
Halford resumed his run. It was early in his day for such food, but five
hours was enough time. At any rate, Kessan and Yuri and many of the
others were just coming to the end of their shifts, and they’d had the
thankless task of watching the fuel gauges rise all through the night. One of
the section bulkheads cycled as he approached, permitting him to pass
beneath the sloping arch into the next length of bay. His music played on,
rough sounds urging him forward.
Nothing quite like a run to shake the blood loose in the early morning.
The bulkhead hissed shut behind him, and ahead the promenade stretched
for nearly half a mile to the next one. Through the high, narrow windows,
he could see Nagapur Station’s white limbs turning in outer space’s
limitless day, like a fleet of pale-masted ships swaying at anchor in time to
his music. Halford was a man of schedules, of databases and time charts.
He could appreciate the orderly beauty of the station’s mechanics, and of
the mechanisms that triggered lights and doors as he progressed. It was
what had attracted him to the role of a night captain in the first place: the
maintenance of order. The quiet, careful hours. The clear goals.
The next bulkhead opened, beeped, closed behind him.
Feet drummed the metal floor, rattling where the promenade ran over
another bank of Sparrowhawks waiting in their mag tubes. He passed doors
on his right that opened onto halls that led inward, past offices and armories
toward the tram line that ran along the Tamerlane’s spine from bow to stern
clusters. Above his head, pipes gleamed and mechanisms clicked with
clockwork precision, controlling the shutters that controlled the narrow
windows. Even his footsteps were a part of that gearwork symphony. A part
of the ship, as was he.
The next bulkhead did not open. Halford drew up, waved a hand at the
overhead sensor. He frowned. That shouldn’t happen. He checked the lights
on the door panel. All systems were blue. A glitch? Still frowning, he
punched the door controls, keyed the door to open.
It didn’t move.
The only reason the bulkhead would be non-responsive was if the
environment beyond were compromised, but if there were a hull breach or
radiation leak, there would be alarms.
“Kessan, check the E-12 bulkhead on the equator. I think there’s a fault,”
Halford said, and watched disquiet grow on his face reflected in the black
alloy of the door.
Kessan didn’t answer.
“Lieutenant?” he asked. Still nothing. “Lieutenant Kessan, this is
Commander Halford. I said check the E-12 bulkhead on the equator. Do
you copy?”
Silence.
 Real silence.
Halford turned. None of the shutter controls in the ceiling above were
moving.
Something was very wrong. Cycling channels on his wrist-terminal, he
checked behind his ears to make sure he’d not sweated off the conduction
patches. They were still there. Broadcasting on all ship channels, he said,
“Commander Halford to Tamerlane, do you read? I’m having trouble
raising the bridge. Can anyone confirm?” Even the port authority should
have been able to hear him. “What in Earth’s name is going on?”
Had there been a systems error? He didn’t like to think what sort of error
could have stopped all ship-board communications and jammed up the
doors. He turned back and returned down the length of the promenade to
the last bulkhead he’d passed through. There was no sense panicking yet.
There were surely a dozen explanations for the broken door, and any
number of things might have happened to the comm system.
The other door would not open, nor the round portal of the first side door.
“Halford to bridge, do you copy?”
Silence.
“Damn it.” He let the terminal fall, muttering to himself. There was a
manual override on one of the interior doors not far down. He found the
yellow lever and pulled, forcing the maintenance hatch open just wide
enough to shoulder his way through. The old mechanisms clearly had not
been used in decades. He’d make a note to have them oiled. The access way
paralleled one of the common corridors, all gunmetal and low, red lighting.
Halford hurried along it toward the center of the ship. Though he was quite
sure he’d never traveled along this particular access tunnel before, he knew
it should terminate near hydroponics and the tramway that ran along the
center of the vessel.
Halford pressed on, twice pausing to try his terminal again with no
success. He might have been alone on the mighty vessel—alone in all the
world. He wondered if the port authority had noticed the fault on their end.
Surely they would send a team to the airlocks as soon as they noticed the
trouble with the comms. Nagapur Station was small by the standards of
Legion fuel depots, so there was no excuse for ignorance.
“They’ll have it sorted before you get to the door at this rate, Halford,” he
muttered to himself. He couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong. There was
no excuse for a systems failure on this scale. His people were inspecting the
ship constantly.
Could it be foul play? Unlikely. Piracy at refueling stations was not
unheard of, but at a Legion depot? It just didn’t seem possible.
The doors opened on another manual lever, but this hatch did not grind
like the first and opened smoothly. The corridor beyond was dark, and
emergency lighting had taken hold, red as the lighting in the maintenance
passage.
The night captain swore.
For power to be out in this section, they were looking at something far
worse than a mere technical fault. His hands went to his belt, but he
remembered—too late—that he was wearing his exercise gear. He had no
belt. No glowsphere, no torch, no plasma burner. He was unarmed and
unequipped, unprepared for whatever was going on.
“Halford to bridge,” he tried his terminal again, but the line was dead as
ancient kings. “Do you copy? Damn it.”
Hydroponics was just ahead. Aquaculture provided produce sufficient to
supplement the crew’s diet of bromos hyper-oats, even when the Tamerlane
was fully staffed. The section comprised several long, half-cylinder
chambers that paralleled the central tram line. If the tram was down—and
Halford was sure it was—the greenhouses would be one way for him to
work his way along the Tamerlane’s long axis and reach the bridge.
That was when he heard it.
“Ryude said it weren’t far, right?”
“Should be right ahead.”
“You hear something?”
“No. You?”
“I thought…”
 “Move it, Jakis! Captain said there ain’t much time!”
Captain? Halford stopped in the mouth of the access way. They weren’t
talking about him. Stowaways? On the Tamerlane? It shouldn’t be possible.
But he didn’t know any man named Ryude, and there was certainly no man
called Jakis amongst the skeletal night crew. Halford cursed silently. He
should have had his sidearm, should at least have been wearing a stunner.
He looked back and forth, trying to catch sight of the owners of those two
voices. Even in the dark, he should be able to see the men. They’d sounded
so close.
“Told you!” said the first voice, the man called Jakis.
A hand seized Halford by the collar and spun him about. The night
captain slammed against the bulkhead with enough force to knock the wind
out of him. Gasping, Halford got his hands up to guard.
“What’s this then?” said the owner of the second voice, a short,
powerfully built man with a face like weathered stone. “One of the crew?”
There was something off about the two men. They were too short, too
broad in the shoulder. Were they mutants? Tank grown homunculi bred for
rough labor? Their arms were thicker than their necks, and both men wore
gray environment suits with badly scarred ceramic armor painted a burnt
red color. One thing was certain: they were no members of his crew.
“Who the hell are you?” Halford asked, and he was pleased to find his
voice was steady.
“Who are we?” asked the man called Jakis. “Ain’t it fucking obvious?”
The other man raised his voice and shouted. “Doran! Gann! Got us a live
one here!”
Two more of the strange homunculi emerged from an open side passage
and slouched closer. “Looks high-born, this one,” said one.
Jakis nodded, “That he does.” The craggy man leaned forward. He stank
to high heaven. “What’s your name, man?”
“Commander Roderick Halford. This is my ship.” He realized his mistake
the moment after he stopped talking.
“Your ship, is it?” the fellow asked. “This is just our lucky day. Caught us
the captain, lads!” The men around slapped one another on the shoulders.
“Has to be a record, that.”
Four of them…
The door to the maintenance shaft was still open, and he knew the way
was clear back the way he’d come. If he could make it to the hatch, he
could close it, buy a little time, find another way forward and sound the
alarm.
Invaders. Pirates…on his ship? How? How could pirates get aboard an
Imperial battleship? Why would they dare?
“I see you looking, captain,” said Jakis. “Don’t try anything, or my lads
here’ll beat you bloody.”
Halford clenched his jaw. He’d never been in a proper fight, and he
wasn’t looking to start now. Discretion was the better part of valor, was it
not? Better to run and fight another day. There was nothing he could do
unarmed and alone.
He saw his window and dove.
One huge ham fist rose and socked him in the belly, nearly lifting him
from his feet. His teeth rattled, and he gasped, staggering back. How he
managed to keep his feet was anyone’s guess. The brute hit like a
sledgehammer, and it took all Halford’s concentration just to remember to
breathe.
“Thought I told you not to try anything, little man!” Jakis said, massaging
his knuckles. “Ryude will want you alive.” He made a sign, and another
blow took Halford in the side of the head. He folded like a house of cards,
face cracking against the floor panels. The night captain had a dim
impression of legs crowding around him like a forest of angry red trees.
The first kick caught him just beneath the ribs and he doubled over, trying
to protect his head. The next took him in the back, and he clenched his jaw
to stop from accidentally biting his tongue. Halford told himself he would
not cry out. He would not give the pirates the satisfaction.
“Woo lads!” said one of the others. Gann maybe. “Don’t want him broke.
Captain’s after ransom, remember. He’s no good dead!”
 “How…” Halford rasped, not lifting his face. “How did you get on
board?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Jakis asked, and though Halford did not
raise his eyes, he could imagine the ogre’s leer clear enough.
“I certainly would!” came another voice. A strange voice. Deep and dark.
Not coarse like the voices of the sub-human pirates, but polished, the sort of
voice a holograph opera villain would be proud of.
The lights went out.
All the lights went out. Only the pale indicators on the pirates’ suits still
gleamed red and white.
“The hell?”
“What’s that?” Jakis asked. “What’s going on?”
“A question I should very much like the answer to,” came that dark voice
again. “Identify yourselves!”
“Lights up, boys!” Jakis cried. A moment later, four suit lamps blazed,
white cones illuminating the way down the hall to either side.
“There!” one of the pirates shouted.
A stunner flashed, and Halford thought he saw the whirl of a black cloak
at the edge of the lamplight.
“Missed me,” the voice said.
Halford righted himself, scuttled away from the pirates like an upset crab.
The voice was familiar to him, but he couldn’t quite place it. It was one of
the officers, but it couldn’t be. They were all on ice. In fugue. Or should
have been.
“Who’s there?” Jakis asked. “Show yourself!”
“As you wish.”
Blue light flowered in the darkness near at hand. The voice had come
from much closer, and Halford saw a spike of gleaming crystal rise and fall.
It was the blade of a highmatter sword, its edge sharp enough to cut
between molecules, its substance bright and cold as distant stars. By its pale
radiance the commander saw a tall, thin man dressed in armorial black, an
officer’s greatcoat fluttering about his shoulders. The blade sheared through
one of the pirates effortlessly, slicing the man in half from shoulder to
opposing hip bone. The night captain saw blood and heard a wet slap as the
two parts of the man hit the deck. The blade cut effortlessly, without
resistance…and vanished.
One of the pirates yelled and fired his stunner wildly in the direction of
the newcomer, but the muzzle flash revealed only empty hallway. The man
in black was gone, twisting away faster than the homunculi and their suit
lamps could track. Halford sat frozen against the corridor wall, paralyzed.
He’d never been in any sort of combat situation before, never seen a man—
even an enemy—die, much less die so awfully. In the quasi-dark, he kept
seeing the split shape of the dead pirate falling.
“Where’d he go?” Jakis asked. “Doran?”
“He got Doran!” said one of the others.
“Captain won’t like this…”
“Quiet!” Jakis hissed. “You hear that?”
In the darkness, Halford saw the shimmer and flash of knives. The three
men held blades at the ready, supporting their stunners as they looked up
and down the hall, casting their pale lamps to and fro. That was common
practice for fighters aboard starships. There was no telling what system or
environment seal an errant shot or arc of plasma might damage.
“Still got the captain, though…” one said, his beam glaring in Halford’s
face. “Didn’t run when he had the chance.”
“Rot the captain,” Jakis said. “Where’s the other one? He can’t have gone
far.”
Combat had moved the three men down the hall to one side, and Halford
looked back. From his vantage point he could see down the hall and across
to the far side where the hatch to the maintenance tunnel still stood open.
Just inside he could make out a black shape standing, barely lit by
backscatter from the three pirates’ lamps.
The fellow raised a long, white finger to his lips.
Halford swallowed.
The lamps all shifted, all turned the wrong way a moment after.
 Because he was listening for it, Halford heard the dry snap of a bootheel
on the metal floor. A moment after, the blue light blossomed once again as
the exotic nuclei of the highmatter sword changed energy states and
coagulated on the air. Its radiance was a thing utterly without warmth. Like
moonlight, it cast pale highlights on the hall, on the pirates, and on the man
who held the weapon and pointed it at his quarry.
Tall he was and thin, broad-shouldered and clad from head to toe in
black: black tunic over black trousers with a double stripe of darkest red to
hide the outer seams. Polished black boots cuffed below the knee. The coat
he wore was blacker still, high-collared and long-tailed. Of silver were its
buttons, and silver too were the buckles on boots and waist and sleeve. And
his face! Pale, pointed, and unsmiling it was beneath a wild mane of hair
blacker than his clothing.
And Halford knew him.
The pirates whirled and fired, but their stunner bolts all pinged off the
newcomer’s shield curtain, pale fractals shimmering in the gloom.
“Get him!” Jakis yelled, and rushed forward.
Abandoned by his men, the big homunculus charged alone. He tried to
catch the arm of the man in black as he raised his sword and held it long
enough to stab his foe, and though he caught the wrist it was no good. The
man in black turned and sliced clean through Jakis’s arm. The pirate did not
so much as scream, but staggered back, staring at the stump in numb
disbelief. He must never have faced highmatter before. In an ordinary
ceramic sword, there would not have been enough force behind so small a
movement to so much as scratch his armor…
Highmatter needed no force.
The man in black thrust his sword out, skewering Jakis beneath the lungs.
He stepped forward, dragging the blade up and out through the bigger
man’s shoulder, leaving a smooth, horrible gash through every rib he had.
Halford shut his eyes, and so didn’t see how the third pirate met his end. He
opened them on a crash and saw the fourth man had fallen, scrabbling
backwards, his knife and stunner abandoned in his horror.
 “I yield!” the man said. “I yield!” It was the one called Gann, flat eyes
wide in the glow of his own lamp.
The man in black stood over him, sword clean and shining in his hand.
“Who are you? And what are you doing on my ship?”
“Your ship?” Gann echoed, stupidly. His eyes found Halford, sitting on
the floor himself. “I thought he was the captain?” The other raised his
sword, threatening. Gann’s voice jumped an octave as he answered,
“What’s it look like? You’re being robbed.”
The tip of the highmatter blade flicked up, hovered mere fractions of an
inch from Gann’s chin. “That isn’t what it looks like to me,” the man in
black said.
“Captain will be on his way out by now,” Gann said. “We were just
having a look round.”
“What are you after? Weapons?” That made sense. Attacking a Legion
vessel like the Tamerlane at a fuel depot mid-warp—when it was at its most
vulnerable, its least manned—there was an elegance to it that Halford could
respect.
The pirate pushed himself away from the blade and back against the edge
of the corridor. “Ransoms. Legion ships got officers. Nobile houses will pay
rich for their boys and girls back. Or the Empire will.”
Halford frowned. “Ransoms?” he spoke barely above a whisper. The
pirates were after ransoms, which meant they’d be raiding the cubiculum,
the sleeper cells many floors above, beneath the Tamerlane’s dorsal hull.
The man in black laughed. “You picked the wrong ship for that,” he said,
and even with his back turned Halford could hear the grin in his voice. “Do
you know what ship this is?”
“Tamerlane,” Gann said.
“Very good, you can read,” the man in black glanced back at Halford, and
for the first time Halford realized he was wearing a pair of red glass
spectacles over his eyes. Had they allowed him to see in the dark? “Do you
know who I am?”
The pieces seemed to come together in Gann’s slow, subhuman mind.
“You’re not…Lord Marlowe?”
“Got it in one.”
Gann’s eyes went wide, and without warning he lurched to one side,
rolling to try and get his knees under him on his way to his feet. The blue
blade flashed and took one of Gann’s legs out from under him. He toppled
to the ground with a cry and a yelp of pain as his stump collided with the
deck plates. “You were supposed to be in fugue!”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” said Hadrian Marlowe, planting his foot
squarely on the squat homunculi’s chest. “You’re going to bleed out from
that leg of yours, and quickly. So answer my questions, if you want to live:
Where is your captain now?”
“Gone above!” Gann said, not even hesitating. “Went to take your
sleepers himself.”
“And how many men has he got with him?”
“Fifty!” Gann almost shouted, voice cracking.
Marlowe’s blade flicked down, notching the man’s armored shoulder.
“No,” he said. “How many?”
“About twenty,” Gann said, wincing. “Rest of us split up. Teams of four
like us.”
“Why?”
“Diversion,” he groaned as Marlowe pressed his heel into his chest. “We
were going to set hydroponics on fire. Burn your crops.”
“Villains!” Halford managed to say. He’d found his feet at last, and his
voice with them.
“Good of you to join us, Commander,” Lord Marlowe said.
The night captain had the good grace to look down at his feet. He knew
he ought not to have locked up like that. It was no way for an officer of His
Radiance’s Legions to act under pressure. He’d dishonored himself, his
ship, and his crew.
But this was not the time to reflect on it.
“Where is your ship?” Lord Marlowe had turned back to Gann bleeding
beneath him.
 The homunculus shook his dull-featured head.
“How did you get on board?” Halford came forward, careful not to step
in any of the blood that puddled on the deck. He did not envy whoever
would have to clear the bodies away when this was all over. Clearing his
throat, the night captain asked, “Did the port authority help you?”
Rather than answer, Gann raised a hand. Marlowe saw something there a
moment before Halford did and leaped away, blade flashing, severing the
last pirate’s hand at the wrist. A thin stream of violently orange fluid
fountained from a hose woven into the fabric of the pirate’s suit, filling the
air with the faintly sweet stench of a chemical accelerant.
Gann had tried to torch Marlowe.
Lord Hadrian didn’t hesitate. A single bounding step closed the distance
between him and Gann. The blue sword flashed, and its point drew a red
line across Gann’s exposed neck and gouged the wall behind him. Stepping
neatly back, Marlowe unkindled his sword. The blade and gleaming
quillions vanished in a faint mist.
“We have to move quickly, commander,” Marlowe said, shaking the
blood from his hydrophobic clothes. “Arm yourself.”
 CHAPTER 2
DIVIDE AND CONQUER

“WHERE ARE WE GOING, LORD?” Halford asked, keeping pace beside the
black-clad palatine.
“To the cubiculum,” Lord Marlowe said, not breaking stride. “If they’re
after ransoms, that’s where they’ll be.” He almost laughed. “They picked
the wrong ship to rob, I tell you. They won’t get much for our people.”
Halford did not interrupt. “Aristedes is nobile, and Koskinen…a few of the
junior officers.”
Unable to help himself, the night captain added, “And me.”
“And you…” Marlowe answered. “But the rest of them? The Empire
wouldn’t spend a spare bit on Corvo and the others…” Marlowe had turned
the emergency lighting back on in the hallway from an override console
half-concealed behind a panel in the wall, and red light shone on his pale
face as he looked back. “We have to get up to C-Deck.”
Halford frowned. “The lifts won’t be operable.”
“Our friends got down somehow.”
“May I ask a question, lord?”
Hadrian Marlowe pre-empted his commander, saying, “Why am I not in
fugue?”
Halford blinked. They said Mad Marlowe could see the future—could he
read minds as well? “Well…yes.”
“A man in my position, Commander Halford, does not get much time to
himself. I often wait years before going into the freeze on these long
journeys, besides…” Lord Marlowe’s voice trailed off, and he paused a
moment, one hand on an arch that supported the canted walls of the
corridor. “I have bad dreams.”
 The commander had no idea what to say to that. You couldn’t dream in
fugue. It wasn’t possible. Men in fugue did not so much as breathe: heart
function and metabolism were all but halted, and brain activity hovered
microns above nil. Men in fugue were as good as corpses. They could not
dream. But Halford was not about to brand the Lord Commandant a liar,
especially not to his face. He’d met Hadrian Marlowe only twice before:
once on Forum at an officers’ meeting and again on the occasion of his
transfer to the Tamerlane. As night crew, Halford had expected to have
virtually no contact with the Tamerlane’s master.
His counterpart, the primary ship’s captain Otavia Corvo, was a
barbarian. A Norman homunculus nearly seven feet tall that Marlowe had
brought in from the wild space beyond Imperial borders. Much of
Marlowe’s crew was composed of such misfits. They said his lover was a
witch, a clanswoman of the vile Tavrosi who made congress with machine
daimons and mingled her flesh with technologies unholy in the eyes of
Mother Earth. Halford had seen her only briefly: a darksome, unpleasant-
looking creature with reddish-black hair and a dreadfully pale complexion,
her left arm covered in those unsightly tattoos the clansmen wore. Pretty
enough in her own way, he supposed. For a woman, and a low-born
foreigner to boot.
“Commander?” Lord Marlowe had asked a question, and Halford had to
shake himself out of his reflection.
“Sorry, my lord.”
“Are you all right?”
The junior man inhaled sharply and stood a little straighter. “Quite, sir.
It’s only…I’ve not seen action before.”
Marlowe’s face darkened, brows pulling down. “A highmatter sword’s an
ugly way to start.” He brandished the unkindled hilt in his fist. “I’m sorry.
But I need you here, commander. Are you with me?”
Halford shook himself. “Aye, sir.”
“Top man.” Marlowe turned away and resumed his progress down the
hall. “They must have climbed down the maintenance shaft parallel to the
lifts. It’ll be a long climb.” He groaned. “Why did they have to take out the
power?”
The night captain grimaced. They’d have to climb more than twenty
decks to reach C-Deck where the sleepers lay in their icy beds, and in the
heavy false gravity of the suppression field, no less.
The suppression field…the suppression field was still active.
“They didn’t,” Halford said, clearing his throat. “The suppression field’s
still on.”
Marlowe didn’t break stride. “And?” Halford stopped in his tracks.
Marlowe’s voice had gone so cold that Halford felt almost flash-frozen to
the spot. He hadn’t meant to give offense, and said as much. “Get to your
point.” Lord Marlowe stopped, realizing his subordinate had stopped
following him. He turned back, eyes hidden behind his red lenses.
“Artificial gravity should have failed when we went to emergency power,
but it didn’t.” Halford adjusted the awkward drape of the shield-belt he had
taken from one of the slaughtered pirates. “That suggests we didn’t go to
emergency power at all. My lord, I think they’ve hacked the ship’s
datasphere.” If he expected Lord Marlowe to interrupt him, the night
captain was surprised. The dark lord only looked at him. He continued. “If
we can get to the racks, I might be able to restart the system, get us control
of the comms and the locks.”
“And we’ll be able to contact the bridge?” Marlowe asked.
Halford blinked. “And security.” He frowned, thinking of his officers
spread throughout the ship, each of them unaware of what was going on.
“The racks are down and aft, in engineering. If we hurry…we can be there
in…fifteen minutes?”
Marlowe was shaking his head. “We can’t abandon the sleepers to our
new friends, Commander Halford.” He turned away in a whirling of black
coat. “Head for the racks; I’ll handle the cubiculum.”
“Alone?” Halford hurried after his lord. “But we don’t know how many
of them there are!”
“And they don’t know we’re coming,” Marlowe said. “I’ll try and head
them off, buy some time for you to get the comms working and alert
security.” The palatine knight clapped Halford on the shoulder in what was
meant to be a comradely way. “Move fast. I don’t know how much time
we’ve got.” He drew back, and gesturing at his ear, he said, “Call me when
you’re done.”
And with that he turned and hurried off down the hall, a darker shadow
moving against the blackness. Halford watched him go, standing gormless
in the hall. The man had just run off into the bowels of their crippled
starship to face Emperor only knew what with little more than a sword in
hand.
“Mad Marlowe, indeed,” he muttered.

HALFORD HAD NEVER VISITED THE RACKS alone before, let alone when the
lights were out. His breath frosted the air, rose and vanished in the red
gloom. He held the pirate’s plasma burner in unsteady hands, advancing
between the rows of ytterbium crystal storage.
The racks were situated to the rear of the old battleship, on the highest of
the engineering decks, above the manifold turbines and reactors and the
antimatter reservoir that powered the vessel’s faster-than-light drives. The
banks of crystal storage and processors had to be kept cold, and so relied on
the same liquid helium coolant that maintained the antimatter’s magnetic
containment systems.
But he was right.
The air around him was so dry he felt the moisture being leeched from
him. His cold sweat cracked on his skin.
It was full of droning. Had power really been cut, all but the core systems
would have dropped dead and left the room silent. All about Halford
resounded the faint groan of fans and magnetic drives. Here and there a
microfilm deck whirred. Indicator lights winked at him from the banks to
either side: red and blue and yellow.
The machines were active. They were still drawing power.
Trying not to think of Lord Marlowe and the way the pirates had fallen in
bloody pieces all around him, Halford pressed forward one careful step at a
time. His own breath came louder than that of the machines, ragged and
uneven.
His mind concocted shapes in the waiting shadows ahead, but each step
revealed only empty darkness. He was alone. And yet the pirates must have
sent a man down here. Someone had tampered with the ship’s computer—
unless they had a mole aboard. But that was surely impossible!
Or they might have hacked the system portside, said a more optimistic
voice in his ear. It was possible that these lowlifes had a man on the
station’s work crews. It was also possible these lowlifes were the station’s
work crews. He shook his head, dismissing these considerations. They
didn’t matter. All that mattered was restoring the comms and alerting
Kessan and Yuri on the bridge.
He didn’t have much time. Marlowe was surely making the long climb to
the cubiculum at that very moment. When he got there, his lordship would
need support, would need Halford manning the doors, the lifts, the lighting
grid. The cameras.
These thoughts consumed him as he reached the end of the row and
turned a corner. He didn’t even see the cables until it was too late. He
tripped and had to hop comically on one foot until he regained his balance,
swearing under his breath all the while. He caught the next rack with one
hand to steady himself, twisting to look back.
“What the…?” He pointed the plasma burner’s torch beam at the
offending bit of machinery.
A collection of braided cables, red and silver, looped from the back of the
machines and puddled near the floor where some hurried workman had
improperly replaced them in the slot between black-to-back rows of sleek,
black towers. Halford crouched, tugged the tangle free. Someone had cut
the ties that secured the cables in neat bundles. Why?
He had his answer a moment later. A thin glass wire—ephemeral almost
as spider’s silk—hung amidst that chaos. Halford followed it, traced one
end to the back of the nearest computer tower and the other…like a
fisherman pulling his quarry from the depths, Halford tugged on the line
until he fished out a little black box.
In spite of the danger of the situation, Halford laughed. It was an antenna.
At least that answered the question of how the pirates had gotten control of
the ship’s systems—though how they’d gotten the antenna installed was a
question for another time. With a savage grin, he tugged the device free. He
dropped it at his feet and crushed it with his heel.
The lights did not come back on, but then he’d not expected them to.
Finding the antenna had been a stroke of good fortune. He swept the rows
with his torch beam. On reflection, maybe fortune had had little to with it.
The sabotage was obvious. They must not have counted on any of Halford’s
skeleton crew making it down to this level with the comms disabled and the
doors mostly locked.
If memory served, the command terminal was dead ahead, in the far
corner against the rack room’s outer wall. Memory did serve, and a few
simple keystrokes were enough to conjure the holograph display, tiled
panels blossoming ghostlike in the darkened chamber.
Halford laughed again. He may be have been worse than useless up
against those pirates, but he’d guessed their problem in one. The ship’s
computer was still operable; it was only that the network was down. Each
terminal, each console, each system on the Tamerlane was a point that
formed the datasphere web, but most were only appendages. The machines
in the rack room were the spine, and the interlopers with their antenna had
severed it. But it was a surprisingly simple error to correct.
“Kessan!” Halford spoke into his terminal. “Kessan, this is Halford, do
you read?”
“Sir?” the familiar voice came in a moment later. “Sir, there’s been some
sort of systems fault. We’re sealed on the bridge. Comms were down until
—”
The night captain overrode his lieutenant. “We’re under attack. Lord
Marlowe and I found four pirates on the mezzanine near hydroponics.”
“Pirates?” Kessan said, then, “Marlowe? He’s awake?”
 “Yes and yes,” Halford snapped, “and how it is none of us knew his
lordship was still out of the ice is a question for another time. I’m in
engineering. Our guests backdoored their way into our datasphere, attached
an antenna direct to the mainframe. I’ve taken care of it. Marlowe’s on his
way to the cubiculum on C. Pirates are after highborn ransoms.”
“We don’t have many of those,” Kessan replied, repeating what Marlowe
himself had said.
“No, we don’t.” As he spoke, Halford brought up security feed after
security feed, trying to get eyes on Marlowe. How had the pirates gotten
past security in the first place to install their antenna? Surely
something would have flagged on their sensors. “But alert the security
teams. I want all hands to converge on the cubiculum as fast as possible.
Lord Marlowe needs backup.”
“Where is he now?”
“Climbing one of the maintenance shafts.” Halford’s eyes swept over the
display again, searching.
There he was! One of the holograph panels displayed the black shape of a
man climbing the maintenance shaft parallel to the lift’s vacuum tube.
Halford wasn’t too late! More holograph panels opened about him,
flowering in the air until Halford stood in the center of an arc of little
ghostly screens. He tabbed through them, camera after camera displaying
rank after rank of icy creches like the cells of a beehive: the frigid beds of
nearly ninety thousand undead. For a moment, he felt as if all the
Tamerlane were unrolled before his eyes. Every corridor, every bay and
cabin, every spire and airlock and hold. He saw the back of Kessan’s head
at the central holography well on the bridge, and the equatorial promenade
where he’d been about his morning run. He saw Marlowe still climbing
level after level to reach their enemy—and he saw the enemy themselves,
dark shapes moving in the aisles beneath the frosty faces of the fugue
creches.
“Lord Marlowe,” he said, changing channels on his wrist-terminal.
“Halford to Marlowe.”
 The nobile’s voice came strained. “I take it you’ve solved our computer
problem?” For a moment, the black shape climbing the ladder faltered.
“Yes, my lord,” he said, and relayed what he had explained to
Kessan.
“But how did they get hardware into engineering without our
knowledge?” Marlowe asked and resumed climbing.
“I’m not sure,” Halford answered. “My lord, there must be thirty of them
where you’re heading.”
To the night captain’s astonishment, Hadrian Marlowe did not stop
climbing for an instant. He only asked, “I trust you’ve alerted security.”
“On their way.”
“How many?”
“Twenty.”
“Noyn jitat!” his lordship swore. Halford did not recognize the language.
Was it Jaddian? “It’ll be an all-out firefight if we attack them in the
sleepers’ hold,” Marlowe said. “Security will have to stand down.”
Halford swallowed. “But…my lord.”
“Any stray shot in that hold could damage one of the sleeper pods. We’ll
lose people.” Marlowe paused, and Halford saw the way his shoulders
hunched on the holograph. “We have to let them pull the pods they want.
We’ll hit them on the run back—do you know how they got in?”
“No, lord.” He’d been looking, but all the airlocks were clear. “They must
have cut through the hull somewhere. No sign on the airlocks. They can’t
have cut through the dorsal hull. It’s two meters of adamant at its
thickest…”
“You think they came in through the bottom?”
“I think they came in near engineering. Think about it: they had to get at
the datasphere core here.”
Marlowe was silent a moment. “Lock yourself in, Commander Halford. If
you’re right, you’ll have company.”
Halford hurried to find the controls that sealed engineering. His reset had
temporarily unlocked the doors again, and he heard the distant squeal and
clank of pneumatics slamming bolts into place. There was nothing to be
done for the manual lock on the hatch he’d used to get in, unless…
His eyes drifted to the plasma burner on the console to his right.
Grimacing, Halford snatched it up. “What are you going to do, lord?”
“Sound the general alarm,” Lord Marlowe replied. “We need to flush
them out.”
Midway down the aisle toward the hatch, Halford stopped. “If I do that,
they’ll know we’re onto them.”
“Good,” Marlowe answered. “It’s time they were on the defensive.”
Something clanged in the rows off to Halford’s left, and he flinched,
jerking his plasma burner up, spare hand thumbing his pilfered shield-belt.
The barrier’s energy curtain snapped into place with a static crackling and
the bitter smell of ozone—but it was only another of the doors cycling shut.
The rest was silence.
Shaking himself, Halford hurried back along the aisle, breath rising in
white clouds made pink by the low light. The hatch was dead ahead: a pill-
shaped aperture secured with the familiar yellow lever. He leaned on it, felt
the gears grind closed. Fumbling with the weapon’s dials, Halford set the
burner to steady state and aimed at the base of the lever. A stream of violet
plasma fountained forth, fusing the lever in place. Heat wafted off the
weapon in waves, alien in the sterile cold of the rack room. The fused metal
gleamed white hot in the darkness. Halford took aim at each of the bulky
hinges in turn. They could repair the hatch in flight if they had to. One
ruined door was a small price to pay.
Something rattled in the walls—or was it in the room behind him?
Halford whirled.
There was nothing there.
“Jumping at shadows, Roderick…” he muttered to himself, and jogged
back to the console. “I’m sealed in,” he said, tamping one finger to the
conduction patch behind his ear to make sure the thing was seated properly.
Marlowe’s answer came through loud and clear. “Very good,
Commander. I’m in position.”
 “What exactly are you going to do?”
“Just…drive our friends toward the lifts and have security in position,”
came the reply.
Halford relayed all this to Kessan and Yuri on the bridge. Toggling
through panel after panel, the night captain called up the controls for the
general alarm.
“On your mark, lordship,” he said, hand hovering over the ghostly button
projected on the console.
“Just do it, Roderick!” Marlowe barked.
Halford slapped the holograph. The button dissolved, and three things
happened at once.
First, the lights flared on: white and blinding after so much time in the
soft, red darkness.
Second, alarms blared: rough and raucous where before the sleeping ship
had seemed so silent.
And last—almost unnoticed in the instant before all that light and sound
—a trigger clicked right behind him.
Halford froze.
 CHAPTER 3
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

“STEP AWAY FROM THE CONSOLE with your hands above your head, sirrah,”
came a smooth voice from the space behind Halford. “And drop the plasma
burner. You’ll not be needing it.”
Halford did not move. He stayed hunched over the command console.
Turned out his paranoia was not misplaced. Those noises he’d thought he’d
heard inside the rack room had come from inside the rack room.
Vwaa-vwaa! The alarms wailed. Lights red and white flickered and
flashed. He could pretend not to have heard his attacker, though what good
that would have done was a mystery to him.
“I said turn around with your hands on your head!” the other man
shouted.
There was nothing for it. Halford turned, plasma burner still in his hand,
and faced the strangest creature he had ever seen. If it was a homunculus, it
was of a different stock and race than those Lord Marlowe had dispatched
outside hydroponics. Where those creatures were bulky, this man—if man it
was—was thin as a rail, his torso cadaverous beneath shoulders too wide
and arms too long and gangling. What was worse, the creature’s torso was
too short by a third, the legs too long like the arms, giving the impression of
a man stretched as if on one of the Chantry’s torture racks.
It wore no helmet, and the only feature that hinted that it was a man and
no woman was the voice. That had been deep and commanding. The face
was androgyn, bleach-white and hairless, reminding Halford of nothing so
much as the alien Cielcin he had seen in war holographs.
But this was no Cielcin. Cielcin did not speak the tongues of men—and at
any rate, the Cielcin had horns and eyes large as a man’s fist. They had no
nose, no ears, and wore black armor of organic style, evoking the shape of
muscle and bone. This creature wore a tattered green coat over what looked
like a scratched suit of combat armor that might once have been mirror-
polished and smooth.
“Are you Ryude?” Halford asked, recalling the name of the captain Gann
and his lot had mentioned.
The creature brandished its weapon, a high-powered phase disruptor. “I
said hands up, sirrah!”
Halford raised his hands, forgetting that he was shielded and so relatively
safe.
“Drop the weapon!” the stranger said.
Panic gripped him, and he said, “I am Commander Roderick Halford,
captain of this ship.” Perhaps that information would give the creature
pause. Halford’s eyes flickered from the monster’s face to the blue slit
gleaming at the muzzle of its phase disruptor.
“Captain is it, commander?” the fellow sneered. “Then surrender! Step
away from the console, and you’ll not be harmed.”
“Who are you?” Halford asked, hands still in the air. “What are you?” He
had to do something. Without him, Marlowe and the security team would be
at the mercy of the pirates. He had no way of knowing if Kessan and Yuri
on the bridge had access to the security cameras given the ship’s current
state. He had no idea what the pirates had done to his ship, what worked
and didn’t, and if he stood down and stepped aside, this creature would
have control of all of it. He glanced back at the arc of security feeds shining
in the air above the console. He thought he saw the crystal spike of
Marlowe’s sword flash on two of the screens. Had he engaged the bulk of
the pirates? Were those shots ringing out on other feeds? Was the security
team with him?
Halford felt powerless before his enemy, just as he had been useless in
the hall. He was an officer of the Imperial Legions, but he did not feel like
one. He felt like an idiot child, as if his life as an officer had only ever been
a presumptuous form of play. He was no soldier. He wasn’t even a night
watchman. He was a glorified baggage porter, unworthy of title and rank.
He was nothing more than the remaindered scion of a lesser house, a spare
son who’d chosen an easy posting for the promise of promotion to a desk
job.
Well, serving Mad Marlowe had put an end to those dreams.
“Put the gun down, commander!” the stranger said again, brandishing its
phase disruptor. “It’s ransoms we’re after.”
Halford didn’t reply, nor was he sure what madness moved his hand. But
move he did, jerking his borrowed plasma burner down to fire wildly at his
assailant. Violet plasma arced free, rushing forth in a continuous stream that
lanced toward his foe in a tight arc that looped like a solar flare. It was still
set to continuous stream.
The stranger fired. Blue lightning cracked against Halford’s shield, and
he flinched. His assailant dove to the right, long limbs skittering spiderlike
across the metal floor, fingers leaving fine scratches on the enameled steel,
its tattered coat smoldering.
To Halford’s astonishment, the creature ignored its burning coat and
neither removed it nor extinguished its flames. Halford guessed how the
pirates had cheated security and come aboard.
“You’re an Extra!” Halford said. The creature was more machine than
human. Halford was willing to bet his body was steel from the neck down.
A full prosthetic. There was no telling what other hardware the creature
concealed in its body, but it must have had the means to bypass ship’s
security and make it to the very heart of the Tamerlane. That thought gave
Halford pause. He’d never seen a demoniac before, one of the barbarian
witches who traded their humanity for metal. He clenched his fist about the
grip of his burner to keep his hand from shaking. Machine or man, his
opponent wore no shield. He still had a chance.
“You missed me!” the Extra said.
Halford glanced back at the monitors. Mad Marlowe stood alone, his
back against the wall as he dogged the pirates’ steps. On several of the
panels, Halford saw the floating coffin-shapes of fugue creches pushed or
dragged through the air by a motley crew of men and homunculi. Word
must not have gotten through to Kessan and Yuri, after all. They must not
have had access to the security feeds, either. They were blind, with no idea
where to send the security team.
Another shot crackled off his shield’s curtain, and Halford snapped his
attention back to his opponent. The machine-man lumbered forward,
shoulder first. Halford bit his tongue as the impact took him, and he felt his
feet leave the ground. Then the ground was above him. It took the
commander a moment to realize his enemy had flipped him ass-over-tea-
kettle and slapped him against the floor. Still, he had the presence of mind
to roll away. Some piston in the other man’s leg wheezed as he turned,
stumbling about to loom over his fallen prey.
The night captain scrabbled to his knees and opened fire. An arc of
plasma shot forth, bathing the monster’s knee. The Extra did not slow its
advance, for metal feels no pain. Fingers hard as iron seized Halford by the
scruff of his shirt and half-lifted him from his knees. The other hand—the
hand that held the phase disruptor—cracked down across his face. Halford
felt a tooth crunch. At least one. His vision blurred as he hit the deck again
and spat blood on the deck.
“You should have come quietly, commander,” the man said. “It would
have been easier on you.”
Lying on his belly, Halford looked up. The machine-man stood over him,
tattered coat still smoldering like a demon out of the oldest, foulest fables.
The metal of its left leg glowed cherry red, but it didn’t seem to mind.
“Don’t be afraid,” it said. “You’ll be with the rest of your people soon.
Once the Empire pays up, you’ll be right back here.” The stranger leveled
his weapon at Halford—more for effect than anything. Halford was still
shielded, still proof against disruptor fire. “You’re a naval officer. Naval
officers don’t die unless their ship does. It’s your men who’ll get it if you
don’t tell them to stand down.” Was that bitterness in the creature’s voice?
Had he been a soldier, once? When he was a man?
Over the monster’s shoulder, Halford saw Hadrian Marlowe’s image
again. The palatine knight had gotten round the retreating pirates. Wherever
they were going, wherever their escape shuttle was, Marlowe had put
himself between them and it. They were running right into him.
But he was alone, and so in a sense he was running into them. Sharp as
his sword was, and deadly, he could not fight twenty men. He was mad. His
vision still blurred, Halford cocked his head.
No. Marlowe wasn’t mad. He meant not to fight twenty men, but to
engage them. To engage them because the only alternative he had was to let
his people go, and the only way he would allow that to happen was over his
dead body.
They said Hadrian Marlowe could not be killed. Halford had heard the
stories. Pallino, who was troop commander of the first thousand, said he’d
seen Marlowe cut down in single combat with a prince of the inhuman
Cielcin. He wasn’t the only one. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps Marlowe did
not fear death because it could not touch him. Or perhaps…perhaps he
feared it and stood anyway.
Stood.
Spitting blood and bits of broken tooth, Roderick Halford turned and
surged to his feet. He would run clean down the aisle and lose himself in the
racks. He would get away long enough to call in the order on his terminal.
The Extra might get him, but its people would not get away. He expected
iron fingers on his arms at any moment; expected to tumble down again;
expected the cold muzzle of the phase disruptor rammed against his chin,
his back; expected the cold snap of lightning burning down nerve channels.
Expected unconsciousness.
Expected death.
He heard a clatter, but did not turn back. Racks of black computer towers
flashed past him as sirens wailed. Red lights and blue winked at him like
distant stars. And nothing happened.
Nothing happened.
No lightning. No disruptor fire. No grasp of iron fingers.
He turned back.
 The machine-man had fallen, half-veiled in smoke from its burning
jacket. It dropped its gun, both hands gone to its glowing knee. Unshielded
as it was, the plasma had scorched the exposed metal…and fused it to the
bone. The creature’s one leg had stuck in position, its complex and delicate
mechanics reduced to a bar of honest steel. The Extra had tried to chase him
and fallen.
Heart hammering, vision blurred, face bruised and dripping blood,
Halford raised his burner and was surprised to find his hand was steady.
He fired.
The pale, androgynous face vanished in a nimbus of purple fire.
Headless, the metal hulk keeled over. Dead.
Halford staggered against the rack of computers at his left. Dropping his
smoking gun, his fingers fumbled the controls on his wrist-terminal. “This
is Halford,” he said, and his mouth ached. “All security forces converge on
C-Level near lift carousel 13. Repeat. All security forces converge on C-
Level near lift carousel 13.” It hurt to speak, but he tried not to think about
it. Broken teeth and a fractured orbital could be repaired easily enough. He
would sleep it off in fugue while the surgeons plied their trade.
Lift carousel 13 would put the security team behind the pirates, would
split their attention with Marlowe. His lordship would have a chance.
Stepping round the ruined hulk of his enemy, Halford sank into the seat
before the security monitors.
“Can you see what’s happening?” he asked his men on the bridge.
“No, sir,” Yuri replied. “Feeds are still down on our end.”
Halford nodded and did not answer.

HADRIAN MARLOWE STOOD ALONE. The alarm rang all about, lights flashing
red and white. Any minute now, the doors ahead would open and his quarry
would come rushing through. His shield was holding steady, but he didn’t
like his chances against twenty armed men, even shielded. He tested the
weight of his sword unkindled in one hand, pressed the palm of the other
against the door.
 Any second now…
Surprise would win him a brief advantage. He might cut down a few
before those in the rear understood what was happening. They’d rush him,
hoping to overwhelm him and take away his sword. They’d succeed in
time. Twenty-to-one. Fifteen-to-one. Ten. It was all the same. But he would
not let them take his people away.
Gunfire sounded on the far side of the door, and the sounds of distant
shouting issued through the steel.
“Halford?” he asked. The night captain had gone quiet minutes before.
He was certain the fellow was dead. “Halford, do you copy?”
The door opened an instant later, and he saw the whites of his enemies’
eyes. The blue blade shone constant against the red-white flash of the
alarms. He saw those whites go wider and pressed forward, pivoting to one
side as the lead pirates shoved the first floating creche forward. The blue
sword drew down, slicing through suit and sailor alike. Disruptor fire
flashed from behind, filling the air. A stray shot coruscated against his
shield curtain, and he surged forward, dragging his blade through a flat arc
that severed the arm from another man.
That first fugue creche bumped against the wall behind like an old crate
tossed on the sea. Hadrian kicked it clear of the fighting and slashed
through the long knife of a third pirate. The man threw the busted weapon
and retreated, fumbling with his sidearm.
“Security’s coming,” came the night captain’s words on the line. “Was
attacked. Sorry.”
Roderick Halford’s voice sounded broken.
“Good!” Marlowe replied, seizing the second floating coffin in the line.
He shoved it forward, catching one of the pirates in the gut. The man
grunted and fell, the coffin floating over him. Marlowe let it slide, striding
past the downed man with a casual sweep of his sword. At the other end of
the hall, the figures of men in the black suits and white armor of security
personnel appeared, guns blazing. Rather than be caught in the crossfire,
Hadrian doubled back behind the last of the floating fugue crèches,
dragging it to one side of the broad hall. Frost rimed the surface of the
chamber, and through violet suspension fluid he beheld the darkly chiseled
face of Captain Otavia Corvo, fast asleep.
This reminder of what it was these pirates meant to take from him lit a
fire in the young lord, and with a cry he vaulted over Corvo’s sleeper pod,
lashing out with his sword.
Left. Right.
Two men fell dead, and a moment after, two more closed in. Before he
could turn and face them, huge arms wrapped about his waist. Big fat-
fingered hands seized his sword hand, trying to immobilize him. A shot
rang out, and the arms about his waist slackened. Twisting, Hadrian forced
his blade down toward the man’s opaque black visor. Closer. Closer. The
pirate resisted, but Hadrian Marlowe threw both hands behind the weapon.
The pirate was strong, made stronger by the gene tailoring that made the
homunculus what he was. But Hadrian was a child of the breeding looms of
the Imperial High College.
He was stronger.
The blade met no resistance as it passed through black glass and the flesh
beneath it. Slowly, the homunculus’s grip slackened. He crumpled slowly.
Breathing hard, Hadrian looked around, holding his sword at the ready.
But the battle was over.
Soldiers in the black-and-white hurried forward, their disruptors raised.
The last of the pirates threw down their weapons. Blade still in hand,
Hadrian advanced toward the nearest of these: a tall, thin man in faceless
matte gray.
The pirate said nothing.
“Where is your ship?”

QUIET AT LAST.
Halford hadn’t moved from the terminal chair. His head swam. About and
above him, the monitors flickered with movement. He saw little,
remembered less. The remaining pirates were escorted to the brig pending
release to the port authority. Marlowe led the team onto the pirate’s shuttle
where it had cut through the hull in one of the lower sections, in deep
among the engine clusters.
It was over.
Cool hands on his face. A woman’s voice. Another’s—a man’s.
“Got smashed up real bad,” one of them said.
“Can you patch him up?”
“Can, lordship,” the medtech answered. That other voice…the dark,
sardonic one. That was Marlowe. Halford could just barely see Hadrian
Marlowe: a white patch atop a dark blur to one side. How long had he been
sitting in that chair? Hours? Days? “Be a few months growing the new teeth
in. Don’t think there’s damage. Pupil response is good.”
“Punched me in the mouth…” Halford tried to say. He wasn’t sure if the
words came out.
The dark blur moved to stand before him, and Halford felt a hand on his
shoulder. Marlowe’s hand. Marlowe’s face was still a blur.
“You saved our people, commander,” he said, and squeezed the hand of
Halford’s shoulder. “You saved me, come to think of it.” He drew back, and
for an instant his face floated into focus. He’d removed those ridiculous
dark spectacles. Without them, Halford thought he looked a hundred years
older. It was the same sharp face, the same pointed nose and chin, the same
gaunt cheekbones—but the eyes were far away. They were not the eyes of a
young man—and Hadrian Marlowe was a young man, not much older than
Halford himself.
But those eyes…they were like distant stars.
The men all said Marlowe was mad, but was it madness if all the stories
about him were true?
Halford didn’t know the answer.
 THE DUELIST

Originally written as an audio performance, this story is a bit of an outlier.

A lighter, more comedic affair and more a scene than a full-blown story, it
showcases some of the ways in which fighting with a highmatter sword
differs from fighting with a traditional metal blade. And when a lady’s
honor is on the line, it behooves a man to bring his every skill to bear to
win the day!

Originally published on the Simultaneous Times podcast.

THEY SAY A BLADE forged from highmatter can cut anything.
It isn’t true.
Highmatter can cut almost anything. Not itself. Not the bonds between
atoms in a molecule. But metal? Stone? Flesh and bone? These it cuts
easily. The liquid metal edge of a highmatter blade is thin as hydrogen, and
so glides between the molecules of its target without resistance, without
pain. No one remembers when it was discovered, or what its original
intended use was. It is not truly metal—is not truly matter at all, leastways
not in the conventional sense. The substance is composed entirely of a
species of exotic baryon mined in the great particle foundries of Elos; or on
Phaia, whose craftsmen are renowned across the galaxy; or on the holy
planet of Jadd. A single sword might take half a century to synthesize and
program into shape. Each is a work of art, a badge of honor and a symbol of
knighthood in the Sollan Empire harking back more than ten thousand
years.
I remember when I first kindled one in my hands, the way the blade
shimmered star-bright and pale in my fingers—so white it was almost blue.
The poetry of it, the weight and perfect balance, the way the leather grip felt
in my hands. None of the women I have known were so beautiful, and only
a few were so deadly.
“Domeric!” the cry split the foggy morning, and I turned from my place
by the marble railing overlooking the sea where Ostama’s two suns were
rising pale and muted by the overcast sky.
“Look who’s here,” said Alexi, my friend and second, grinning beneath
his thin goatee.
“Florian would be the type to be late to his own funeral,” I said, reaching
up to undo the cape fastened at my right shoulder. “Hold this, would you?”
The other man raised an eyebrow, “What am I to you? A coat rack?”
“You aren’t tall enough for that,” I said, and turned.
The offended nobile appeared in the middle distance, chest puffed out and
chin held high amidst his father’s retinue, his long red hair streaming in the
wind. I stood square to face him, adjusting the buckles that secured my
gloves. “Well met, Kay!”
Even at a distance, I could feel the fury boiling off the younger nobleman.
“Ooh, he didn’t like you using his nickname,” Alexi said.
Caius Florian raised his voice. “My sister’s honor will not wait a moment
longer!”
“Your sister can defend her own honor if she wishes!” I called back. “But
I did not hear her complaining last night, which makes a fellow wonder
why you’re so eager for a different kind of stabbing!”
Behind me, Alexi choked.
I made a placating gesture. Kay Florian’s father was the Marquis of
Sarmatia, a minor Imperial world in the Upper Perseus, but a man far more
powerful than my own father, a humble Baron in the Spur of Orion whose
only claim to fame was a minor victory against the Aurigan rebels more
than two centuries ago. And who was I? Only a young galavant come to the
games on Ostama with a fondness for the Colosso and count’s daughters.
That wasn’t a crime, but if Kay insisted on treating it as one, he should
get his money’s worth. Besides, anger would make him sloppy, and that was
all the better.
“You dog!” the younger man cursed. “You think you can just insult my
family and walk away?”
I glanced back at Alexi, who rolled his eyes. “What insult? I spent a night
with your sister. She’s a grown woman. It’s her right.”
“Her right?” Kay snarled. “To whore herself to some layabout from the
inner systems?”
Layabout. I mouthed the word, but checked my response. “Whore
herself?” Forcing myself to smile, I said, “Well now you’ve done it. I won’t
let you call your own sister a whore, Sir Caius. Draw your sword and have
at you!”
Clearly flustered by this turnabout, the younger knight clenched his jaw.
“I’ll not have you play the hero! She is my blood, Sir Domeric. My sister!”
“Then you should not insult her so!” I said, and unclasped the hilt of my
sword from the magnetic catch on my hip. I had no desire to kill the angry
young man, but he needed to be taught to cool his head. His sister Viola and
I had shared a night, as I said. Nothing more, and nothing special for two of
our rank. Such trysts were ordinary among the nobility, and Sir Caius had
no cause to act like a door warden of a Jaddian harem.
He said nothing.
“That’s first blood already, Dom!” Alexi called out. I could hear his wry
grin without having to turn round.
In answer, Kay snapped his own sword from its holster and kindled the
blade. It cut the eye like neon, blue-white in the morning air so that the fog
about the young man glowed and highlights shone on his sharp features and
in his scarlet hair.
“Shouldn’t we wait for the justice?” I said, referring to the prefect who
would judge our fight was fair and by the book. All duels between members
of the nobility had to filed with the local authorities. Everything had to be
right and proper to prevents families from going to war over the actions of
their drunk or proud children.
“Damn the justice!” Kay spat, and gesturing to his followers and to Alexi,
he said, “We have our witnesses. You friend can record it all with his
terminal if he likes. I care not.” He advanced, circling left. “It’s time to
teach you some respect.”
“Respect?” I said, incredulous, sword still quiet in my hand. “From the
man who called his own sister a whore?” I pressed my free hand to my
chest. It was time to goad the fellow. “I assure you. I paid her nothing.”
Kay charged into a lunge, point aimed at my chest. I swung aside just like
the matador I had seen in the coliseum the day before, my own blade
fountaining to life in my hands to brush his aside. In all two hundred seven
years of my life, I have fought thirty-three duels.
I’ve lost only two. How many duels young Kay had fought I’d no way of
knowing. Fewer, of that I was certain. The other man rounded on me, a
snarl twisting his face. I raised my sword, arm extended, point thrust out
like an accusing finger. Thus I kept my own blade as far away from my own
body as possible, for any stray touch of that blade was as lethal to me as to
my opponent, and I’d no desire to kill the young upstart. Only to sever a
hand.
They could re-attach a hand.
The first flood of anger seemingly rushed by, Kay rounded on me, sword
clasped before him with both hands. I could almost hear the gears in his
head turning, reassessing the situation. He’d not expected me to move so
quickly, or to respond to his assault with such ease. More cautious now, Sir
Caius advanced, punching out with both hands to throw a straight cut at my
face. I stepped right, rolling my wrist to brush his blow aside as I stepped
in, forcing the younger man back. Kay just caught the parry, circling round
to my left.
“Have you fought with highmatter before?” I asked, sparing a glance for
Alexi, who stood with arms crossed by the rail. I was sure he must see it
too. Kay fought like a man too used to blunted steel weapons and training
skins. Like a child.
“Of course I have!” he said. He advanced again, aimed a cut for the side
of my head. The electric sound of highmatter splashing on highmatter filled
the air and mixed the fog with ozone. I drew back, sword still pointed at the
younger man’s chest. When I was a boy, my father had forced me to stand
for an hour at a time with a metal rod in my hand, forced me to stand until
my arm ached and my hand screamed with pain. But it had paid off. I could
hold my sword in line like that all day if I had to. Not bad for a layabout
from the inner systems.
Kay attacked again, this time with a rising cut that would have opened me
from hip-bone to shoulder had I let it by. I beat down, trapping Kay’s blade
beneath my own. I extended my arm, sliding my blade in a flat cut that
would have slashed Sir Kay across the chest had he not blocked it and
circled away.
“That’s better!” I said, cajolling. The flush crawled up the younger man’s
neck, and even at five paces distance I thought I heard his teeth grind.
“Shut up!” Kay lunged, point accelerating for my hip. I snapped the blade
down to parry, but the young man was faster. The blade’s tip whistled round
and stabbed towards my eyes. I leaped back, just barely catching his attack
with my sword as I recovered to guard.
Okay, I thought. Enough toying with the other man. Time to move.
Fighting with highmatter is not like fighting with steel. Not at all.
Highmatter needs no force to cut. The barest scratch can be lethal, mere
contact can maim. I stepped in, thrusting the point towards Kay’s chest.
Predictably, he parried, bringing his sword across his body, point high. Still
stepping in, I circled right, twisting my wrist so that the blade came around
his, twisting like the arm of a lever against its fulcrum. The move would be
useless with an ordinary sword. I might have scratched him, but with steel
there was no guarantee of even that: the leather of his jacket might have
saved him. The blade would have clipped into Kay’s shoulder—would
have, had the younger man not retreated. Had he not panicked, he might
have counterattacked, forced me to retreat instead, but that panic had gotten
the better of him.
I watched that realization dawn on his face a moment too late, and he
surged forward, rushing to recover that lost opportunity before his window
closed.
And so I slammed said window on his fingers, drawing my sword hand to
my forehead with the blade aimed straight down so its length shielded me
as I pivoted round the young knight like a gate about its hinge.
“You’re too slow!” I called, backing away. “Are you sure this isn’t your
first time?” I’d put enough space between us that I felt certain Kay would
charge again. I tapped the sword against the paving stones and notched the
granite.
To my surprise, the young knight did not charge. He didn’t even reply.
His eyes hardened, jaw tensed.
“Careful, Dom!” Alexi shouted from behind.
Kay advanced quickly, raining cuts at my head. Once, twice, three times
—redoubling his lunge with each blow. He recovered forward, pushing me
towards the rail and the gray sea beyond. Our swords rang and spat in the
morning air, and the smell of ozone mingled bitterly with the smell of damp
earth and wet grass. I thrust, and pressed against the weak of the other
man’s blade in an attempt to push through it and so score a glancing blow.
The end came quickly. I felt Kay’s blade give. He felt it, too. He started to
retreat. I pressed forward, lunging to rake the point of my sword in a
shallow gash that would have opened his leather jacket and shirt and just
scratched through his ribs to leave him a scar he’d remember and in sore
need of medical aid—surely the justice would not be long now with the
standard medics in tow.
But Kay dropped his point, he let my blade past sooner than I’d expected,
and the slash winged by. Too soon. Too shallow.
I stumbled, and something unpleasant and warm ran down my right thigh.
The pain came an instant later, white hot—and looking down I saw the thin,
deep slice in the top of my thigh, so deep I fancied I could see the marrow
of the notched bone.
I hadn’t even felt it.
Alexi swore. “Black planet!”
I told myself I wasn’t going to fall. I wasn’t going to cry out. I wasn’t
going to give the boy the satisfaction of winning.
But he had won. And won on a fluke.
“Blood!” Alexi shouted. “First blood!”
“Are you satisfied?” I asked. “Enough of this farce, boy. You’ve won.” It
took every ounce of fiber in me to keep that leg from buckling. The cut was
clean, nothing a few weeks in a medical corrective would not set right—but
it was humiliating. To lose a duel to a stuffed-shirt upstart like Caius called-
Kay Florian...
My third loss, and my least proud.
“Am I satisfied?” Kay asked, incredulous, looking round at his suited
retainers. “With my house’s honor at stake? My sister’s honor?”
Sword still in my hand, I said, “For the last time: your sister’s honor has
nothing to do with me. And it has nothing to do with you, either. She’s a
fine woman. So let’s have done. You’ve won.”
“A fine woman, is she?” Kay’s sword jounced in his hand, and he looked
round. “Do you know what you’ve done?”
It was more than I could take. “I fucked your sister, Kay. Is that what you
want me to say?”
“She’s betrothed to Duke Ramsay’s son!” the younger man practically
shrilled. “No, I am not satisfied!”
“Damn it,” I heard Alexi groan.
Kay Florian struck at me, and I deflected the blow only clumsily, hopping
back on my good leg. I slashed wildly, anything to clear the space between
us. I could not believe I was going to die over Viola Florian. What did a
marriage arrangement to House Ramsay have to do with anything? It was
all so, so stupid.
Or maybe I’m stupid.
Managing to put a little weight on my wounded and bleeding leg, I held
my ground, forcing my sword back up and in line to fend off another assault
from the young Florian. I limped back, gritting my teeth through the flare of
pain as my torn quadricep flexed. I stumbled sideways and nearly ate the
next of Kay’s attacks, but I swung my sword up into an ugly static block.
Ugly—but it saved my life. I struck back, and the young man caught the
blade with his own and forced my weapon down, trapping it beneath his
own in a simple bind.
You have seen holograph operas, and so you will know what to expect.
You expect me to deactivate my sword, to knock Kay off balance and to re-
activate it, putting the point up through the younger man’s chest.
You expect wrong.
Real life is not like the holograph serials. Highmatter blades cannot be
cycled on and off like hand lights. It takes about three seconds for the exotic
nuclei to collapse into their inert state in the core of the handle, and three
seconds is a century in fight.
But Kay Florian had made a mistake.
He was too used to steel practice swords, whatever he claimed. He had
trapped my sword beneath his sword and the ground, which should have
forced me to stagger back on my wounded leg, doubtless opening me up to
attack.
But for highmatter, the ground was no trap at all.
I remember the look in his eyes. The fire. The heat. To this day I cannot
fathom why my daliance with his sister had angered the boy so.
It doesn’t matter.
I turned my wrist, whirling my blade through an arc that slashed through
the granite paving stones and up—still beneath the other man’s blade—and
cut through his foot just below the ankle.
When Kay tumbled backwards, he left his foot on the newly cracked
stone like a child’s discarded shoe.
Behind me, Alexi made a small, satisfied sound.
Blood ran across the stone and into the cut I’d made.
“Well, I’m satisfied,” I grunted. At my feet, the younger knight howled,
clutching at his stump. For his dignity, I won’t describe the sounds he made.
“Oh, stop whining,” I said. “The justice will be here in a moment. The
medics will fix you up.” I slid my good foot against the hilt of Kay’s
discarded sword and kicked it clear. “Do you yield?”
It wasn’t how I’d wanted to win, but I knew it was the kind of win men
would speak of.
“Cut through the ground!” Alexi exclaimed. My friend was at my side in
seconds, putting my arm around his neck to take the weight off my leg.
“Remind me not to fight you, Dom—that was a low trick.”
“We’re both alive, aren’t we?” I said, directing the question as much to
the man at my feet as to the one at my side. “Isn’t that what counts?”
 THE PARLIAMENT
OF
OWLS

Life is hard on the rough edge of human expansion across the galaxy. Once
a soldier, Kalas now spends his days as a bounty hunter on the frontier
planet of Kanthi, a glorified repo man working for the Wong-Hopper
Consortium. When valuable terraforming equipment goes missing, it falls to
him to track it down.…

Originally published in Space Pioneers.

THE SKY ABOVE ABHANRI CITY was gray as the city itself. Concrete and steel
and mirrored glass vanished into low cloud only to emerge again, higher
and higher until—like shadows vanishing into the arriving night—they
were lost in the heavens above.
Kalas missed trees. He missed the wheat fields and the rolling meadows
of his home. Missed the grape vines ripening on the old trellis, and the way
the trees would bend when fliers streaked low above their boughs, making
for the village of his birth. Anything would have been a welcome relief to
all that grayness and the neon flash of advertisements tall as houses that
shone from the sides of buildings.
He missed home, though he had not seen Maglona in twenty-four years,
and it had not seen him for going on eighty. He had shipped out on the
Emperor’s coin, taken commission with the 212th Centaurine Legion. He’d
wanted an excuse to see the galaxy, wanted an excuse to leave his dusty old
village and a life as farmer and make a name for himself. He hadn’t thought
to ever be looking back.
He hadn’t ever thought to be trapped in a place like Abhanri either, on
Kanthi, beyond the borders of his Empire. Hadn’t expected to be working
for the Consortium either, doing enforcement. He’d always pictured himself
fishing. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe because there weren’t any oceans back
home on Maglona—but there were no oceans on Kanthi either. Just gray.
“I’ve got eyes on our guy here, Kal,” Gant said, voice coming in through
Kalas’s ear piece. “Coming out of the lift.”
“Good,” Kalas replied, subvocalizing. He checked his phase disruptor
was set to stun and moved to station himself in the shadow of the curtains
that hung to one side of glass wall that overlooked the city. He shut one eye,
kept the other fixed on the door. For a moment, all was perfectly still. The
apartment’s climate control had stopped running when Kalas had disabled
the suite’s security, and even the white noise hum of electronics was dead.
Once upon a time, this would have been the moment where the rush of
blood pounding in his ears deafened him. But Kalas had been a hunter a
long time, and moments like these had ceased to frighten him.
 Gant’s voice came low in his ear, as if his Kanthite partner stood at his
ear. “At the door. Look sharp now.” Kalas didn’t reply. He waited, pointed
his disruptor at the door, his reflection a faint greenish blur on the brushed
metal wall.
The airlock cycled red to blue, and the inner seal came unglued,
admitting the doctor back into his home. Anwen Sen was a small man, on
the young side of middle age, with thick black hair and the copper
complexion that marked him as a descendant of Kanthi’s first wave of
colonists. He hadn’t seen Kalas, was busy undoing his nose-tubes and
unzipping the puffy dun jacket he wore against the planet’s interminable
chill.
The hunter watched him go, hardly bothering to control his breathing as
the small doctor crossed to the little kitchen unit, fussing with the contents
of his pockets.
“You know the trouble with thieving?” Kalas asked, leveling the stunner
at the doctor. The man froze, hands on the blond stone of the counter.
“There’s always something missing. People notice.”
Dr. Sen did not turn. He did not move. That was good. That meant Kalas
didn’t have to shoot him and tie him to a chair. Yet. In a high, nasal voice,
the geneticist said, “You’re from the Consortium? One of their dogs?”
Kalas took one careful step closer, footfall light on the thick carpets. He
did not lower his arm. “Same as you.”
“I’m not a dog,” the man said. “I do research.”
“You’re a rat,” Kalas cut him off. “What did you do with them, Sen? Are
they here?”
He could see sweat beginning to well up on the back of the man’s neck.
For all that, Kalas had to admit the man was surprisingly calm. Most of the
bonecutters Kalas had known would have fainted already from the stress.
“You’ve turned the place inside out, haven’t you?”
“He doesn’t have them, Kal, I’m telling you,” Gant said over the comm.
Kalas ignored him, but he knew Gant was right.
The hunter took another measured step closer, adjusted his aim. “Who did
you sell them to?”
Sen whirled.
Bang!
Where he’d gotten the handgun Kalas wasn’t sure. Had it been in his
coat? His sleeve? The bullet went wide, shattered against the metal wall
behind him and he lunged to the right, firing back. The stunner bolt struck
the cabinetry just above Sen’s shoulder, leaving a smoking mark on the
glass there. Sen fired again, but he was no marksman.
His hand was shaking. Kalas could see it. The man was afraid of his own
gun, as such men so often were. He regained his footing. His balance. His
aim. The stunner bolt took Dr. Sen in the shoulder, and he dropped his gun,
eyes wide with mingled terror and frustration. The nerve damage had
cascaded down his side, and his right leg buckled, tipping him back into the
range. Kalas cleared the space between him and the doctor in three bounds,
scooping up the old-style autorevolver. Without breaking stride, he threw an
elbow across the doctor’s face, and while the man was reeling slid his
stunner back into his pocket before he seized the man by his shirtfront.
In a voice of forced and practiced calm, Kalas said, “You know why I’m
here.”
“I sold them!” Sen said, then yelped as Kalas shook him.
“To who?”
“To whom!” Gant corrected, forcing a snarl from between Kalas’s teeth.
Kalas placed the mouth of Sen’s own revolver against the man’s shoulder,
the weapon awkward in his left hand. “Who’d you sell to?”
The man’s eyes widened, “I don’t remember! Some fence in the
Narrows!”
The hunter tightened his grip on the doctor’s shirt, “Which is it?” The
doctor made a confused noise, and Kalas said, evenly, “Do you not
remember? Or was it a fence in the Narrows?”
The doctor shook his head furiously, tried to dislodge Kalas’s hand with
his still functional one. Moving deliberately, Kalas moved the autorevolver
down to the man’s thigh and fired. Dr. Sen made a choking sound, then bit
back his cry, blood beginning to soak down his leg. He swore, breath
coming in hissing gasps, “You shot me!”
“And I will again if you don’t answer my questions, doctor,” Kalas said.
Not hurried. He’d seen worse on the battlefield from his time in the
Legions. He’d done worse. He’d had to. “Who did you sell to?” Sen
wheezed, stun-lame arm flapping as he tried to put pressure on his gunshot
wound. Kalas brushed the weak arm away with the autorevolver. “None of
that now. Who did you sell to?”
The geneticist shook his head more fiercely, “Said she had a client
looking for seed stock. Some offworlder looking to jump-start their own
colony in the Veil. I didn’t ask questions.”
“I do.” Kalas shot the man in his other thigh.
“You hunters…” the doctor hissed, teeth clenched.
“Answer my questions and you can call the health service,” Kalas said. It
was a lie, and perhaps the doctor knew it. He was a hunter for the Wong-
Hopper Consortium, and the Consortium was not so forgiving of those who
stole its product to sell on the black market.
Kalas hoped the apartment walls were a thick. There was little law
enforcement on Kanthi worth the name, but the last thing he wanted was a
shootout with prefects of the colonial authority or—more likely—
whichever enforcement syndicate Sen’s apartment tower had on the payroll.
Kalas pressed his knee into one of the doctor’s wounds. Sen whimpered.
He didn’t cry out—for which Kalas was grateful—he only clenched his jaw
to stop from screaming. Words shaking, Sen said, “Vela! Vela—her name’s
Vela. She works out of one of those old stockhouses in the Narrows, down
by the reservoir and the fisheries, you know?”
“I know!” Gant’s voice chimed over the ear piece. Kalas had almost
forgotten the younger man was there.
The hunter eased the pressure on Sen’s knee, glad the hydrophobic
wicking in his long coat and pants had kept the blood off. “Good, good.
And the buyer?”
“I don’t know! For Earth’s sake! I don’t know!”
 Kalas let the little man go, and taking a step back he shook his head,
“Doctor, I will shoot you again. I swear by Earth and Emperor, I will.”
Anwen Sen allowed himself to slip down to the floor to sit amidst the
smeared blood—the red of it stark against the pale tiling. Thus freed, he
pressed his good hand to one thigh, wincing. “Black planet…I…I don’t
know much, all right? She said something about someone called Giacomo.”
“Giacomo?” Kalas repeated, keeping the gun pointed at Sen from his hip.
“What is he? Jaddian?”
“Hell if I know,” Sen said, gritting his teeth. “I told you I don’t know, you
bastard.”
“Two names is more than nothing, friend,” Kalas replied, crouching down
so that he looked Sen directly in the eye. “Now tell me everything, and this
will go easier for you.”
Gant’s voice came low in one ear, “Still nothing on the comm channels,
Kal. But it’s almost too quiet. I don’t like it.”
Kalas didn’t move, kept his elbow propped on his knee, the gun leveled at
Sen’s head. He didn’t need to ask any questions, the man knew what he
wanted.
Sen tried to speak, but the pain caught in his throat, and he choked.
“The…the Parliament of Owls,” he managed after a moment’s strain.
“Giacomo and the Parliament of Owls, that was what she said. Vela, I
mean.”
“The what now?” Gant’s confusion over the comm was thick enough to
scrape over bread.
Kalas understood how he felt, “The what now?”
“That was what she said,” said Anwen Sen once more. “The Parliament
of Owls. That’s really all I know.”
“What is it? A company?”
“Sounds more like a cult to me,” Gant put in, unhelpfully.
The little man was shaking his head. “I don’t know, I really don’t know.
Maybe a company, maybe a ship, maybe it’s the name of some colony state
—I don’t know, man. I sequence genomes. That’s all I know!” His fingers
squeezed the wound, blood welling up between his fingers. Tears brimmed
in the doctor’s eyes, “You’re going to kill me.”
Kalas nodded once, “Yes.”
Sen swallowed, “I just wanted…just wanted to get offworld. Needed the
money.” He sniffed, sucking back the panic that was starting to run down
his face.
“You and me both, pal,” Kalas said. And fired.
Dr. Sen’s head hit the door of the oven behind him, blood and brain
spattering as the black glass cracked. At once it was very quiet again, the
only sound the distant rush and murmur of the city: the faint beep and
squeal of groundcars, the whine of fliers. Kalas stood, slid the autorevolver
into the pocket of his coat and returned his phase disruptor to his shoulder
holster. He turned, found a gray cat watching him from atop one neatly
arranged bookcase. The useless thing hadn’t so much as raised a paw to aid
its master. Kalas looked back at Dr. Sen’s body, not sure if it was the man or
the little beast he felt sorry for.
Kanthi was a gray purgatory Kalas had come to at the end of a long
campaign. Sen had been born here, near as Kalas could guess. He couldn’t
blame the man for wanting to get out. When he’d been a boy, the Legion
recruitment posters on Maglona had told of strange places and foreign
peoples, enticing the grubby peasant boy he’d been to strike out among the
stars, following in the footsteps of those first pilgrim-pioneers that had left
Old Earth so many thousand years ago.
It hadn’t been worth it.
Home—Maglona—had been as near to Earth as terraforming and hard
work could make it. Blue skies. Green hills. No seas, of course, but lakes
and little rivers. So many of the worlds Kalas had seen were not. They had
been places where the sun was strange, weak and red, reflected by the glare
of orbital mirrors. Places where the gravity pulled too heavily on the bones,
or not heavily enough—as was the case here on Kanthi. Places where the
people seemed hardly people at all, so changed were they by their environs.
Places where the air was poison.
 Places like Kanthi.
Kalas fished his nose-tubes out of the collar of his coat. He passed the
line up over his ear and plugged the things into place. Turning on his
osmosis pack, he felt the chilly flow of clean oxygen start, and turned
towards the airlock and the bitter world beyond.

“YOU’RE AWFULLY QUIET,” Gant said from the driver’s seat. As he spoke, he
tipped the controls, steering the flier in low over a block of drab tenement
buildings. “That doctor get to you?”
Kalas glanced at the younger man. Gant had the manners of a cat. He
dressed like one of the lordlings Kalas had seen swanning about so many an
Imperial palace in his day: in a long suit of gray and black, the lapels of
crushed velvet, twirling vines embroidered about silver buttons. He wore a
wide-brimmed hat that matched, a white feather in its band—and in place of
boots he wore buckled shoes and a pair of tight gaiters patterned white-on-
white that accentuated the flare of his jodhpurs. He didn’t look like a thug at
all. He looked like a procurer, one of the leno who used to come round
selling women and boys to the legionnaires when they put in at port. He
was the sort of man as like to smile as shoot, the sort of man who fussed
about getting blood on his hands but not about the trigger. Kalas did not like
him, but he was efficient, and he knew Abhanri City.
“No, no, just thinking’s all,” Kalas said, and massaged one hand with
another. “Sounds like someone paid this Vela to find the seed and Sen was
the first nut she could crack, paid him to smuggle it out of the of
Consortium park.” He could see the park buildings towering away in the
distance: three massive white cubes more than half a mile high standing on
the tundra between downtown Abhanri and the starport. From their height
he could see the horizon curling away on all sides, see the CO2 plants in the
air farm belching greenhouse gas into an atmosphere that needed it so
desperately. Maybe one day people could breathe on Kanthi without air
tubes and osmosis packs. Maybe not. He’d heard there was talk of plantings
being done in the equatorial regions: beans and peas and the like trying to
enrich the quality of the thin and rocky soil.
It was a start, but it would be centuries—maybe millennia—before
Kanthi flowered the way Maglona did. How had he been so stupid not to
see it? Why had he ever left?
“You think there are others?”
“No, that’s what I’m saying,” Kalas replied. “Not that it wouldn’t hurt to
warn the folks in HR, tell them to scan company and personal
communiques—but I reckon this was a one-off. This Giacomo person…Sen
said he was an offworlder. I bet my boots he came here knowing we had a
Consortium center but very little planetary government—no Empire, say.
Figured that’d make the heist easy, just pay off a disgruntled employee to
smuggle the stock out of cold storage. If he’d wanted more I think we’d
have more stolen property on our hands. So I figure either there was more
as got stolen that we haven’t heard about, or they tried to steal more and
only Sen carried it off proper. Or what Sen took was all this Giacomo guy
asked for.”
Gant sucked on his teeth, angled the flier into a sweeping arc that brought
it down towards the car park at one end of a high street in the Narrows.
“Still seems like a lot of effort to go through for seed, be better off just
paying.” Smoke stacks rose like the turrets of some ugly castle from the
gray mist, rust red or black. Even from the comfort of the flier Kalas could
feel the damp already, the damp bricks and sweating metal walls of the low
town.
“Shit’s expensive. Paying someone like Vela for the heist’s gotta be
cheaper. Paying off a disgruntled employee like Sen definitely is.”
The younger man grunted. “You’re probably right.”
“I’m definitely right,” said Kalas, checking the seal on his nose-tubes
again. “You ready?”
“Man, you know I’m always ready.” Gant flashed his artificially bright
smile. He’d had his real teeth shattered two years back when he’d been
caught by a lowtown gang, and rather than pay to have a bonecutter regrow
them, Gant had opted for ceramic implants.
The flier’s door seals hissed—although Gant had never bothered to scrub
the internal compartment—and the two hunters slung out from under the
big gull wing doors and hit the street. It had snowed again not two days
past, and the black slush stood piled against the curb and the sides of the
buildings, soot-stained and filthy. The heat of the buildings would melt it
eventually, or the street sweepers would clear it away—but it would never
really melt. Kanthi had not experienced anything any reasonable human
being would have called summer in perhaps millions of years. Kalas
popped his over-sized collar and clicked the magnetic clasps to baffle the
thing over his lower face like a scarf, and added warm air and sunshine to
the list of things he missed.
Adri’s was still there, crouched beneath the shadow of a warehouse, the
bright neon in its windows contrasting against the dead-eyed frosted glass
of the buildings around, inviting in that threatening way all such dives were
inviting. They brushed past a trio of big men in striped nylon racing suits
crouching at the stoop and through the airlock with a gesture. Kalas knew
the men on sight. Mother Earth knew he drank at Adri’s often enough.
Despite the fact that it was only mid-afternoon, there was a fair crowd
inside already. Doubtless some were poorer spacers on different clocks than
the planetside natives, but Kalas recognized a few old stalwarts, and tapped
his fist to his chest in quiet salute to the old man watching from the bar.
He’d been a veteran of the 225th, a centurion—which meant he was owed
Kalas’s respect.
“Kalas, you old goat! Is that you?”
“Yes, ma’am!” Kalas replied, unclipping his collar from his face and
pulling out his nose tubes with relief and a big sigh.
The woman behind the bar set down the mug she was cleaning and came
round the table to give the older hunter a hug. “Been a couple weeks, we
were starting to worry you’d been done for.” She kissed him on the cheek,
one hand lingering on his arm as she pulled away, looking up at him. Adri
had owned the little pub for more than a decade—going on two, maybe—at
any rate far longer than Kalas had been on Kanthi. She’d started it young,
and might have been only a year or two his junior. She smiled crookedly up
at him, the heavy makeup around her eyes making her look more tired than
beautiful—not that Kalas didn’t think she was beautiful. She was the sort of
woman they said had aged gracefully, who’d come to the good side of
middle aged looking only a little older than she had as a girl. A little wiser,
perhaps. A little more sad, with a knowing light in those blue eyes. She was
an offworlder like him, yellow hair shot now with gray she hadn’t bothered
to hide.
Kalas smiled back at her, “I’ve been working. You know how it is.”
Glancing at Gant, she said, “The peacock’s looking a bit drab today.
Where’s all the purple, Gant?”
“He’s in mourning,” Kalas said wryly, stepping aside as Adri thrust out
her hand.
“Mourning?” she echoed, “What for?”
“His fashion sense, mostly,” Kalas said.
Adri thrust out her hand for Gant to kiss it, which he did, saying, “You’re
looking lovely as ever, Miss Adri. Did you change your hair?” She hadn’t.
“Do you like it?” Adri asked, tossing her head.
“I’m sure you’d put a palatine duchess to shame.” Gant grinned, looking
like nothing so much a satyr with his sculpted goatee.
Adri swatted at him and returned to stand behind the bar, leaning over the
half-cleaned mug in such a way that Kalas could see down her loose blouse.
He looked—as he was meant to—then tracked to her face as she said, “So
what can I get you?”
“Zvanya for me,” Kalas replied, leaning over the bar, “the peacock will
doubtless take something questionable—”
“But delicious,” Gant interjected, “Sunrise Sultana, please.”
Adri groaned.
“Someone’s going to kick the shit out of you for ordering that drink there,
Gant,” Kalas said, settling against one of the stools bolted to the floor.
The other man shrugged. “Let them try. You’re the one drinking that
Jaddian piss that smells like someone set a cinnamon tree on fire.”
“You don’t make it sound so bad when you put it that way.” The
proprietor busied herself cleaning the glass she’d abandoned and set it back
in the chiller before she poured Kalas his drink and set about mixing Gant’s.
“What are you boys in for? Because I know this ain’t a social call.”
Kalas threw the Jaddian liquor back in one shot, grimacing, but Gant beat
him to the response, “Vela.”
The barkeep stopped midway through shaking Gant’s drink, “I don’t
know what you’re talking about.”
“Now see, if that were true, Adri,” Gant said smoothly, propping his
elbows on the surface of the bar, “you’d have just said, ‘Who?’” The
younger man leaned in over the bar as he spoke, the shadow of his wide-
brimmed hat drawing a line across Adri’s painted face.
Kalas put a hand on the younger man’s arm to stay his advance. “You
know what we do, Adri. That’s no secret. Word is she fenced or is fencing a
supply of Consortium seed stock boosted from Park Towers three days
back.”
Still clutching the silver mixer in her hands, “You know I don’t want any
trouble…”
“And we’re not looking to bring it,” Kalas said, glancing round the dingy
room. Another group of men sat in the far corner, huddled around a hookah
that stank of jubala, while not far off a mixed group of men and women
watched a recorded Colosso match projected in miniature on a holograph
table. No one was really listening, not even the old centurion in his cups.
Still, Kalas was too much the former Sollan legionnaire to lose the sense
that they might be being listened to. Speaking more softly then, he said,
“We’re just trying to find the tech’s all.”
Blue eyes narrowed and Adri shook her head, “You’re missing my point.
It’s not you I’m scared of. It’s her.”
“Vela?”
The barkeep flashed Gant a look that probably soured the liquor in her
mixer, which she still clutched to her breast like a talisman. To Kalas she
said, “Now you being new from offworld I can understand you not
knowing, even in your line of work, but you?” She glared at Gant, not
breaking eye contact as she poured the man’s violently orange drink into a
broad cocktail glass. The drink immediately began to separate in the grimy
yellow light, the lowest portions turning a bright, sunny blue. “How in
Earth’s name do you not know about her?”
Gant sipped the Sultana, a puzzled look indicating that a thought had
penetrated his perfectly coiffed haircut and the skull beneath it. “She’s not
the one who did for old Arturo and his lot, is she?”
Adri nodded. Gant swore.
“Does the name ‘Parliament of Owls’ mean anything to you?” Kalas
asked, shaking his glass to signal for a second shot, which Adri obliged.
Putting the glass stopper back in the bottle, she said, “No. What is it?”
“The buyer, I think,” Kalas replied, downing the cinnamon liquor, “that
was all our…informant said. Said this Vela of yours was selling our
contraband to someone called Giacomo and the Parliament of Owls.”
“Sounds like a sex club to me,” Gant put in, speaking around the rim of
his cocktail glass, “a weird sex club.”
“You’d know,” Kalas said, turning his glass over.
“Would not.”
“What’s Vela’s deal?” Kalas asked Adri, jerking his chin up, “Why’s she
got you so tight-lipped?”
Adri’s deep blue eyes swept over her attendees, taking in the sights.
“She’s a big fish is all. Eyes everywhere, fingers in everything. Been
knocking off a bunch of the small timers for years now. Making noise.
Surprised you lot haven’t heard of her, or did you pop your eardrums living
so high up in those Consortium towers?”
Both men snorted at the same time, prompting Kalas to glare at his
partner. “Big fish…” he repeated, thinking it a strange expression to bring
this world where fish were so few. “Heard she works out of a stockhouse
down here. Any idea which one?”
“You know the old Narayan Shipping offices? Right on the
reservoir?”
“Sure.”
The barkeep looked down and away, as if unsure she’d said the right
thing.
“What is it about this Vela woman’s got you so scared?” Kalas asked, and
thinking of his time in the Legions added, “I’ve met worse.”
Adri looked him in the face, eyes narrowing, searching for her answer in
Kalas’s face. “Word is she’s the one you go to if you want to trade with the
Extras.”
Gant choked on his drink, “The Extras? You sure?”
The Extrasolarians. The word had a special sharpness for Kalas. As a boy
—in the Empire—the Extrasolarians were the stuff of nightmares. Monsters
his gran had threatened him with, pirates who dwelt between the stars, who
kidnapped children and turned them into their mindless machine servants.
Adri looked from Gant to Kalas, gave them a slow nod.
But Kalas had lived long enough and fought long enough to take this in
stride. It was a rumor—and even if it was true, it didn’t change the fact that
he had a job to do. He stood, drew out his credit chit. Seeing her cue, the
barkeep keyed a number into the scanner—the price of three drinks and a
bit of information—and Kalas paid. No matter. It was Wong-Hopper money
anyway. Gant hadn’t stirred for any of this, and Kalas had to haul him off
his stool even as he struggled to drain the last of his garish drink. “Thank
you for the drink, Adri,” Kalas said.
“That’s it?” Adri asked, stunned. “Just like that?”
“Unless you know more.” Kalas shrugged, “What am I supposed to do?
Gant and me—we don’t get paid unless we recover the Consortium’s
property.”
The woman only shook her head, muttered, “I guess a hunter is a
hunter…”
They turned to go.
“And Kalas!” the barkeep’s words caught them before they’d gone five
paces. He turned. Waited. “We still on for next week?”
 The old hunter bobbed his head ever so slightly and gave her a neat half-
salute, tapping his chest with his fist. “Yes ma’am.”
In a small voice—so small that Kalas wasn’t quite sure or not if he was
meant to hear it—she said, “You be careful.”

THE NARAYAN BUILDING was easy enough to find. Like most of the oldest
buildings in Abhanri City, it wasn’t gray, but white: assembled from
prefabricated units brought in from offworld on some super-carrier and
assembled on the ground. It wasn’t tall—Kalas only counted twelve stories
—but it dwarfed the massive concrete drums of the water reservoir and the
fisheries around it. Even with his nose-tubes in place, Kalas could smell the
mercury stink of fish and of the algaes living and dead that helped feed the
fish and clean Kanthi’s poisonous airs. It would take a lot more of such
algae to make the planet’s poisonous air breathable, and for that it would
take a lot more water. The experts said that water was trapped in permafrost
and the ice caps far to the north and south, but Kalas wasn’t sure.
He’d believe it when he saw it, and he’d be dead by then.
“You sure this’ll work there, Kal?” Gant’s voice came clear through the
earpiece.
The old hunter grimaced and did not respond, but clambered up onto the
top of one of the great fishery vats, looking down on turgid green waters
tossed here and there by rippling movement. Great plumes of white steam
rose from stacks on the low buildings around, and his osmosis pack buzzed
to indicate that it was safe to remove his nose-tubes.
He didn’t, turned instead to the height of the tower near at hand.
Subvocalizing again, he said, “There it is, see?”
“Ooh…” He could hear Gant’s grin over the line. “I knew I liked you.”
The old Narayan building was separated from the top of the fishery by a
space only perhaps a dozen feet wide, near enough that a man might leap to
it if he started high. “These prefab units are almost all Wong-Hopper
standard kit, the sort they sell to new colonies,” Kalas said. “Used to see a
lot of them back in the Legions. Colonists buy them cheap and in bulk.” He
squinted, judging his chances. He didn’t like them.
The building units were all built to a similar plan, and Kalas had been in
and out of hundreds on them on a dozen worlds in his day. Towers like the
Narayan building were built simply by stacking the same ugly white block
of a unit atop its duplicate over and over and over—in this case, twelve
times. The windows were in the same place on every level, as were the
exterior lights. Perhaps the units’ inner walls varied floor to floor, perhaps
not—it wasn’t important.
What was important was the door, or doors, rather. The Narayan Shipping
company had built the tower when Abhanri City was just a few thousand
people brought in to mine the massive vein of tungsten that had attracted
the first wave colonists. They’d built cheap and fast. The prefab units came
in sets of three, which meant every third floor on the tower had the same
doors as the first floor. Someone had come after and built balconies outside
the main doors, but the side doors? The emergency exits? No. There was
only a narrow shelf, perhaps eighteen inches deep, set beside a fire-escape
ladder that stood hiked up to the third story.
“But are you sure this’ll work?” Gant asked again.
“Consortium hasn’t changed factory codes in seven thousand years,
Gant,” Kalas replied, lips barely moving. “You know that just as well as
me.” Theoretically, it should be possible to use the manufacturer’s override
codes to open that back door without triggering any internal alarms. And
they were the manufacturers—or their hired guns. The Wong-Hopper
Consortium had its fingers in everything: interstellar trade, starship
manufacture, raw materials prospecting…even politics. But it was the
colonial trade that had catapulted them to power and prominence.
Terraforming equipment, construction gear, orbital mirrors, hightower
anchor stations and counterweights, prefabricated housing, industrial, and
commercial buildings. And genetic seed stock: everything from super-
oxygenating designer algaes and plastic-eating fungi to dogs and oaks and
moray eels.
Everything.
 “You, uh…you gonna make the jump there?”
“In a minute,” Kalas said, squaring his shoulder and turning away from
the edge. “You want to do this instead? I’ll wait until you can get down
here.” He glanced up towards the factory smokestack where Gant crouched,
nestled in the scaffolding.
Gant liked to run support when it came to this part of the job. I’m just not
a blunt instrument, he often said, pressing one hand to his chest. How the
fellow had survived in this line of work for so long Kalas could never quite
understand. At least not until Gant started shooting, that was.
“You got about forty guys in there, or so the thermals say. No telling how
many of them are fighters though.”
“Best assume all of them.” Kalas swore. “Any sign of the hardware?”
The seed stock would be chilled, but there was no telling how well shielded
the crate might be. Sen would have had to pack it pretty well to smuggle it
out of the research park. It could have been in a sub-basement for all Kalas
knew.
“No shine, boss.”
Kalas swore again.
At that moment, a shadow passed over the stars, and Kalas ducked, pulled
by some primordial reflex, as if he were some brush-dwelling rodent
shrinking from a hawk in the night. Or an owl. He heard something. A high-
pitched, thrumming whine. Drive cores. Repulsors. A ship overhead. He
didn’t see the tell-tale blue-white glow, nor the flashing green and blue of
wing lights.
Pressing the comms patch against the skin of his throat, he said, “You
hear that?”
“Sounds like a ship, but I don’t see anything on the scope.” Gant’s words
came across slow and considering, as if he was thinking hard.
The old hunter overrode him, “Bugger the scope, man! Use your eyes.” It
was thermal emissions a ship would try the hardest to hide. “Look for a
shadow.” He had a sinking feeling that Vela’s buyer had arrived. He’d
known time was short, had known it since Director Yin had ordered him
and Gant to recover the contraband. Kalas knew he must be cursed. He
must have had the worst luck in the whole damned Imperial universe and
beyond. Couldn’t they have come an hour later? Or two? Two would have
been better.
He was getting too old for this sort of thing.
“I still don’t see…” Gant’s voice trailed off, and Kalas imagined him
squinting over the railing, peering down over the stinking fisheries and
Narayan building and the lower structures around. “No, there it is!” He
sounded like he was pointing. “Right on top of the building, hanging off the
south side. I don’t recognize the make, though.”
Kalas peered up at top of the building, but there was nothing to see. Some
sort of active camouflage? That did not bode well. Abhanri didn’t restrict
flight, didn’t have a customs office. Who would cloak themselves in such a
place? Who would need to? “I’d better move fast,” Kalas grumbled, more
to himself than to his companion. He gauged the jump one last time, aimed
for the ladder, and leaped.

THE FACTORY CODES had worked perfectly, and Kalas slunk through the
hissing airlock into a dimly lit hall. Only the odd glow panel still shone in
the ceiling. Only the odd door stood open. Kalas moved slowly, careful not
to make a sound as he moved down the hall. Not for the first time, Kalas
understood the attraction of the sensory implants common out here beyond
the borders of the Empire. He could never quite bring himself to get them,
citizen of the Empire that he was. The mingling of man and machine was
forbidden by the Holy Terran Chantry, and fear of such machines and
loathing ran deep in Kalas, whatever his more freethinking tendencies. He
might have had his eyes genetically augmented, but at home such
augmentations were reserved, awarded for exemplary service by the great
lords and ladies of the Empire. It felt wrong to Kalas to bypass the cultural
order. Call him old-fashioned.
The hallways were precisely as Kalas expected them, the standard office
unit made available by the Consortium. If he turned left, towards the center
of the building—yes, there were the lifts. He didn’t like his chances with
those lifts, not with a guest arriving on the rooftop. There should have been
service stairs…he turned right, glad not to have been seen, and moved
along a side hall, past a graffitied mural of a naked woman defaced by rude
words in angry, block letters and a busted drinking fountain. A man
emerged from the bathroom ahead. Kalas fired his phase disruptor without
breaking stride, caught the man full in the side of his face with a stun blast.
He spasmed, slumped against the door. He’d barely made a sound.
“I hope you’re making progress with the cameras,” Kalas mumbled,
tidying the stunned man into the bathroom whence he’d come. He didn’t
envy the man. Taking a stunner shot at all was unpleasant, but to the face?
Crouching, Kalas checked to make sure the man was still breathing. Even
on its stun setting, a phase disruptor might disrupt the vagus nerve, stop a
man breathing. He was alive, if quite unconscious. He’d wake up with a
monstrous headache, and his face would be slow to recover its full motion.
But at least that was one of the tower’s occupants out of commission for the
foreseeable future. Kalas studied him: thick neck, shaved head. He was only
missing the tattoos to complete the stereotype image of the lowlife gangster.
He even wore the nondescript button-down shirt and gold jewelry one
expected, and a plasma burner at his belt. Kalas took the burner and cracked
the compressor unit with the spiked cap on the butt of his phase disruptor,
just in case this one woke up with a fury.
The stairs.
The stairs were right where Kalas expected them, right where they’d been
in a thousand identical buildings. He pushed the metal door with its peeling
white paint open and stepped out onto iron and concrete steps that switch-
backed up and down just inside the outer wall of the building.
Up or down?
“Gant, any sign of contraband?”
“I’m not sure, I—”
“On the roof, man,” Kalas cut into him. “With the ship.”
Kalas could practically hear Gant shaking his head, as he looked for signs
of the supercooled cargo, “No. No. About twenty guys, though.”
This wasn’t going to work. They hadn’t counted on a ship arriving while
they were just scouting things out. They’d been banking on a couple hours
recon, easy, find the payload, get it out and into the flier. Things were
starting to come undone. “Leave the scope up where you’re at,” Kalas said,
“monitor the feed from the flier.”
“What about cover?” Gant said, “I thought you wanted me shooting out
windows if things got hairy?” The other man had carried a heavy-gauge
MAG rifle up the stack with him. The magnetic rifle would put an iron slug
clean through the building if they had a mind, and irritating as he was, Gant
was not a bad shot.
“We gotta go fast,” Kalas replied. “I just want you ready with the flier at
a moment’s notice. I don’t like this, Gant. I don’t like anything about this.”
He made his choice.
Down.
The next floor was identical to the one he’d entered on: walls scratched
and badly graffitied, lights broken or fading. The same arrangement of
rooms. That was the trouble. It was hard to find a central anything in such a
place, where everything was duplicated. What they were looking for should
not have been that hard to find: a refrigerated metal cube about a foot and a
half to a side.
There was no one here.
There was nothing here.
“Gant, where are the other guards?” he asked when he reached the level
immediately above the ground floor.
The response was a moment coming, “Five floors up—two past where
you started—and on the front door. Rest are on the roof. Looks like they’re
waiting for—”
The comms line went dead mid-sentence.
Fearing an attack was imminent, Kalas pressed himself through a side
door into what once had been a set of office cubicles. Still holding his phase
disruptor in his right hand, he fiddled with his terminal. Access to the
Kanthi datasphere was blocked, and even the device’s more primitive radio
functions were blocked. It was no use trying to reach the Consortium’s
private satellite net, either.
His instinct to hide saved him.
“Arno! Bass! You two still fucking up in here?” a voice called from the
hall, “Boss wants us on the ground floor, make sure no one gets in.”
Another voice floated down the hall, nearer at hand, “She said she wanted
us covering the street from up here!”
“You heard me!” The first voice again.
“Yeah, and I also heard your mom sells tricks down portside for the price
of a cigarette,” came a third voice, higher and more nasal than the others.
“And not one of them good cigarettes, neither. Heard she sells out for those
T-free cigarettes what they sell to little girls in school trying to impress their
friends.”
“Fuck you, Arno!”
“Fuck you, Kees. It’s fucking cold out there and some of us still got balls
as might freeze off!” A pause. “Say, why’re comms out?”
Kalas pressed himself against the wall near the door, trying to see down
the hall. He could just make out a thin slice of a man standing at a door not
far down. The first man—Kees, if he was keeping track.
Voice suddenly hushed, Kees said, “The buyer. Boss agreed to let him
jam up comms until he had everything he came for.” That made Kalas sigh
with relief. They hadn’t been discovered, then. Everyone was jammed. “I’m
going back up to eight. If you assholes won’t do your job, don’t come
crying to me when the boss slaps you good.”
“Fuck you, Kees!” said both men in unison.
From his vantage point, Kalas watched what little of Kees he could see
turn, moving back up the hall. The old hunter gave the man two—three
paces to get away from the door he’d been standing at before he leaned out
into the hall and fired his phase disruptor. The shot spat silently down the
grimy hall, caught the man between the shoulder blades. He fell with a solid
thud—the stunner bolt had hit right over his spine. Not wasting time, Kalas
slid towards the door, barely pausing to note much about the two men who
sat by the big arc of window overlooking the street below and the bulk of
the heated fishery drums rising into the cold night air. He fired, dropping
both of them without ceremony.
If the comms really were down all over the building, he hardly needed to
hide the stunned men. It might be minutes before someone came looking for
Kees and his loudmouthed compatriots, and when they did they’d have to
come running up the stairs.
The old-fashioned way.
Kalas clenched his teeth. He almost grinned.
He was from the Empire. He was the old-fashioned way.

TWO MEN STOOD FLANKING A DOOR on the eighth floor, plasma burners
strapped to their thighs, hands ready, waiting. Kalas felt certain there had to
be more guards inside, and felt even more certain that he was in the right
place. None of the other rooms had been guarded. He stayed hidden around
the corner. Gant could have told him how many hostiles were in that next
room. Gant could have told him many things. He could—for example—
have told him about the lift carriage that had just arrived from the rooftop,
about the woman and her guest that had just stepped out into the lobby near
at hand.
He heard their footsteps first, coming from the other end of the hall,
beyond the guards. There was something wrong about them. Too heavy. Too
metallic. A little bit too far apart. And Kalas knew then that Adri had been
right all along, knew that sometimes the rumors were true—and the
childhood legends also.
A woman came into view, tall and with the native copper complexion,
dressed in a gown of simple black, and beside her…beside her walked a
monster.
The Extrasolarian stood nearly seven feet tall on legs bent backwards like
the legs of dog. His hands—where they emerged from voluminous black
sleeves, looked more like the anatomical sketch of a pair of hands than
hands themselves, with tendons and tissue of black carbon like pencil lead.
The feet were like cloven hooves shod with titanium, and his face…Kalas
had seen less pallor on a corpse. He might have been an albino, so pale was
he and hairless, his scalp glistening, studded with mechanical implants
behind his ears and along the column of his spine.
“My captain, Lady Marishka, is most grateful that you have found what
we required on such short notice, M. Vela,” the Extrasolarian said, and from
his hiding place Kalas felt certain that the man’s lips did not move, that his
sepulchral voice came instead from somewhere in his chest.
The native woman, Vela, replied, “It was no trouble, M. Giacomo. Thank
you for thinking of us.”
The impossibly deep voice again: “Hardly, madam. Your reputation
precedes you, and what you’ve gotten for us will go a long way to ensuring
that the Parliament of Owls will go on sailing for another four thousand
years.”
Sailing.
Kalas paused, watching the mismatched couple come to a stop at the door
with the two guards. Sailing. It was a ship. The Parliament of Owls was a
ship, one of the nightmare vessels that plied the Dark between the stars. It
was the type of ship his old gran had told stories about when Kalas was a
boy. He gripped his disruptor tighter, watching as the Extrasolarian and the
woman passed within. It was now or never, and so Kalas stepped out into
the hall, raised his arm.
And someone else fired.
The stunner bolt took him in the side, and he lurched into the wall. His
arm still worked, and in desperation Kalas aimed his stunner at the guards
on the door. Where had the shot come from? He fired, caught one man in
the face before he could turn. He crumpled even as the other man leaped
back, pounding on the door.
A second stunner bolt caught Kalas in the shoulder, and he fell.
Everything had gone wrong. Everything.
They should have pulled out the moment the ship arrived. Cut their
losses. Lied to Director Yin and the local board. Kalas’s last thought before
he lost consciousness was that he was going to miss his date with Adri after
all, and that he’d lied to her. Then a sound like rushing water filled his ears,
and everything went black.

RED PAIN LANCED ACROSS HIS FACE, went black as a thunderclap. Someone
winced. Was it him? He could move his arms. Good. Legs? Good. But
someone had tied him to a chair. Less good. His neck felt tacky where
someone had peeled the subvocalizing patch off, which meant that even if
the comms started working again, Gant was out of the picture.
“I said ‘Who are you?’” A woman’s voice. Adri? No, that was a native
accent.
Kalas looked up with blurry eyes, saw the woman in the black dress
standing over him. Vela. He would have touched his forehead in salute,
murmured instead. “Ma’am.”
She slapped him again, less hard. She wasn’t strong, but it was enough to
snap Kalas’s head back. Dimly, he was aware of the pale devil watching
him. That Extrasolarian with his satyr legs and black hands. Up close, Kalas
could see his eyes were all white, like the eyes of a statue. “Who are you?”
“Who do you think?” he said, words bitter. There was no point in denying
it. “Consortium repo man.”
Vela smiled, teeth almost as white as Gant’s. “Is that all? Are you all they
sent?”
He was ready for the next slap, and rolled with it. The woman had an
arm, but she was nothing next to the rebel on Janeiro who’d beaten the
young Triaster Kalas of Maglona nearly to death when he refused to talk.
“Didn’t find anyone else, did you?” Kalas asked, shrugging as if to say
Doesn’t that answer your question?
The woman smiled. “Those corporate sods are cheap.”
A smile flickered over Kalas’s bruised face. She was sloppy. At least now
he knew Gant was in the clear.
“I assume this is what you’re after,” she said, slapping a heavy, white
plastic crate a little more than a cubit to a side. She leaned against the edge
of the desk. “Did you kill Sen?” Kalas didn’t answer. His silence was loud
enough. “Seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a stack of human
embryos.”
“Ten thousand of them,” Kalas said, glancing over his shoulder at the
monstrous figure with his white eyes. “You could have just bought them.”
The Extrasolarian stepped forward—Kalas could hear the servos whining
in his legs. “No need.”
Kalas looked up into that dead, white face. He could see lights blinking in
the black metal implants behind the creature’s right ear; still more shone
from beneath the papery white skin. “What do you need them for?” Kalas
asked, looking to the crate. “The children, I mean.” Silence from the
woman and the machine man. “What?” he asked. “Won’t tell a dead man?”
“You’re not a dead man.” Cold ceramic fingers stroked Kalas’s cheek,
and he flinched away. “You’re coming with me. We need more men. You
will serve nicely.”
“I will not,” Kalas swore.
“You will.” Giacomo patted Kalas on the cheek with one cold hand. He
moved to stand in front of Kalas, between the old hunter and the woman at
her desk. He crouched on his satyr’s legs and smiling, said, “You see, we’re
a bit short-handed at the moment. We need good men…but they’re so hard
to find.” His teeth were the same white as his eyes, and those eyes seemed
to turn—how Kalas knew he couldn’t say—to look at the crate on the desk,
“So much easier to make, mm?”
Kalas was still enough the Imperial soldier to recoil. He thought of all the
embryos frozen in that crate. They had been destined for some colonial
world, to be raised by the few living colonists to inject genetic diversity into
their growing population. They would grow up slaves instead, transfigured
into something less than human to serve this pirate and his horrid captain.
Looking at the man, Kalas could see why the Empire forbade such
machinery. Giacomo was a monster.
“You understand, don’t you?” Giacomo said, “Children are the future.
But we cannot go on as we are.” He knocked on his metal chest to indicate
his problem. “We need a next generation. New blood.”
He found suddenly that he had nothing to say. Kalas had never been a
great talker, but surely he ought to have said something. But there was
nothing. He strained against his bonds, but nothing came. It was bad enough
that someone would choose to destroy his own body the way this man had
done—but to force such an existence on a hundred hundred lives?
“What did you mean, no need?” Vela asked, interposing herself once
more.
It took Kalas’s muddied brain a moment to catch up. No need. He’d asked
why the Extrasolarian hadn’t just bought the embryos from the Consortium
directly…it was all too much. Kalas started laughing. Not loud, but softly to
himself, shaking where he sat restrained by plastic ties. “He’s not going to
pay you, you idiot,” he smiled up at her.
Vela rounded on Giacomo, but the Extrasolarian was faster. One of his
ceramic hands lashed out, catching Vela across the face even as he lanced
out with one hoof—catching the seat of Kalas’s chair just between his knees
—and kicked. Kalas went skidding back against the wall with a crash as
Vela hit the edge of her desk and fell. Giacomo moved smoothly, reaching
out of a hand to take the crate.
Bang!
Something hit Giacomo in the shoulder, shattering his arm. Bits of
ceramic armor scattered on the air, carbon fiber tendons unraveling as the
heavy machinery fell apart from the shoulder. A red alarm began to sound,
indicating that the building’s air integrity was compromised.
Bang!
A second shot took Giacomo in the thigh, but succeeded there in only
bending his leg out of shape. A second later Kalas saw the tell-tale glimmer
of a shield’s energy curtain snap into being around the awful hybrid. A
moment after that Kalas realized what was happening.
Gant.
The peacock had done it! He must have gone back to his vantage point
after the communications went dead. Earth and Emperor! But he had
dramatic timing! He must have been waiting, watching to see what
happened, and seized his chance when he saw things start to fall apart. A
third shot from the man’s magnetic acceleration rifle caromed clean off
Giacomo’s body-shield and buried itself in an inner wall.
“Untie me!” Kalas yelled, hoping to reach Vela where she still slumped
shell-shocked at the foot of her desk. The Extrasolarian paid them no mind,
but seized the crate with his one remaining hand and turned to go, limping
badly on his bent leg. He looked at Kalas a moment—only a moment—and
reached the door just as Vela’s guards were coming in, drawn by the sounds
of scuffle. Giacomo kicked one square in the chest with his good leg,
staggering as his damaged limb took his weight. The fellow hit the far wall
of the corridor with such force that Kalas heard his skull crunch. The
second man got a shot off, but the bullet shattered when it hit the
Extrasolarian’s shield. Kalas didn’t see how he died.
“Untie me!” he snarled. “Cut me loose, damn it!”
Vela was slow to find her feet. She glared at him, hair falling across her
face. She seemed almost not to comprehend him, but when she did at last,
she clambered to her feet, stumbled towards him. “What are you going to
do?” she asked.
“Just get me out.”
He’d known, of course. Known what it was they were retrieving, what
Dr. Sen had stolen, and what this woman had sold—or tried to sell—to the
Extrasolarians. Growing new colonists was big business, and it wasn’t the
first time a stock had gone missing in the Consortium’s long history. Ten
thousand souls. Ten thousand lives yet unlived. Unless Kalas got free, they
would be ten thousand slaves, twisted as Giacomo was twisted.
Vela cut him loose, and Kalas stood, lurching as his muscles struggled to
remember their proper function. He was still numb in places from the
stunner fire, but his hands worked. Reminded by the alarm, he fished his
nose-tubes out of the osmosis pack at his belt and threaded them into his
nose, sucking deep breaths of oxygen. He stopped in the doorway. Were the
lifts left or right? Belatedly, he realized he was unarmed, and stooped to
examine the bodies of the dead men. One of them had a simple pistol,
which Kalas discarded. Giacomo was shielded. Bullets were useless. But
the other had a plasma burner, a heavy piece: gloss-black and threatening as
the Extrasolarian himself. Its range was limited, but against a shielded
opponent it was better than nothing.
“I set you free!” Vela called after him. “You owe me!”
Kalas looked back a moment. He ought to have shot her. Killed her. Had
she been a man, he might have done just that. But it didn’t feel right
shooting a woman, even a woman willing to sell human embryos to the
Extras. Still, he raised the plasma burner to make his point. She froze.
He walked away, hurried after the injured chimera. There were deep
gouges in the hard plastic floor where Giacomo’s injured hoof cut in, and
three bodies between Kalas and the lifts. It only took a moment for one of
the lift carriages to arrive, and Kalas punched the button for the roof.
When he’d been a soldier, he’d fancied himself a knight. The sort of
paladin they sang about in the old songs, the sort of hero who gave himself
to the people—who safeguarded the helpless and protected those who could
not protect themselves. The more time he spent in the Imperial service, the
more Kalas realized that real knights were no such men. They were men,
the same as all the rest, and he was only a man himself. A killer now. But
he’d realized, too, just how much the world needed real knights. Real
heroes. Or needed to believe in them.
He needed to believe in them.
As he checked the charge in his plasma burner—checked the heat sink
and the gas reserve—Kalas fancied himself a knight once more. It wasn’t
exactly a princess he was saving, but there was a tower with a dragon at its
top. Maybe he was only a hired dog, but it seemed to him that there were
lives on the line. Ten thousand lives unlived. And if he didn’t act the knight,
who would?
The doors opened.
The lift had played the role of airlock, and Kalas wasted no time. Dead
ahead, the Extrasolarian was limping across twenty yards of open space, his
one remaining hand still clasping the storage crate. Directly opposite, a
ramp seemed to disappear into nothingness, rising from the far edge of the
rooftop into the night. Kalas could almost see the shimmer of the cloaked
Extrasolarian ship. How it hid itself he couldn’t speculate, and he didn’t
care.
He was close enough.
He raised both hands and aimed, the plasma burner in one, Dr. Sen’s
antique autorevolver in the other. The hammer back, it was an easy thing to
fire the old-fashioned pistol. The handgun jumped in his hand, and the
bullet caught Giacomo between the shoulder blades. It caromed off his
shield, but the shot surprised the chimera, and he turned, snarling, teeth and
eyes so white they were almost blue in the night light. They glowed violet
as the plasma burned forth, chasing magnetic lines in a great arc like the
blades of chainsaw, shooting out and curling back again from the plasma
burner’s mouth like the bow of a solar flare. Blue and violet, half as bright
as Kanthi’s pale sun.
Kalas had aimed for the creature’s face, for the parts of him that were still
flesh—still human. The energy shield could absorb the kinetic energy of
impact, but the air plasma burned hot as the surface of a dwarf star, and that
heat at least would radiate across a shield’s curtain and cook the pirate like
lobster in his shell. But when the glow died down, Kalas saw Giacomo still
standing. His pale face had vanished, was lost beneath a caul of white
ceramic that shut over his face like a giant eyelid.
“You nearly got me, boy,” the Extrasolarian said, “that’s promising.” The
visor retracted, folding back up over Giacomo’s face and forehead. “You’re
not bad, you know? You’d make a fine addition to our crew!”
“Why would I want to do that?” Kalas asked, both weapons still pointed
directly at the Extrasolarian. Where was Gant? If he was still watching, the
other hunter should have seen what was going on. He should have gone for
the flier.
“Eternal life!”
 “Like you?” Kalas asked, taking in the dented horror of the man’s metal
body. “No thanks.”
“Very well!” The Extrasolarian let the crate with its stock of human lives
slide to the ground, arm lengthening to deposit its cargo. “Suit yourself!”
He leaped forward, faster than Kalas could have believed on his damaged
leg. The old hunter threw himself backwards, firing the old-fashioned
handgun on reflex. The bullets all shattered against Giacomo’s shield,
filling the air between them with shrapnel.
What had he been thinking? The man was more than half machine.
Stronger, faster, more resilient than any mortal man. What chance did an
old soldier from Maglona have against such a one?
A knight, indeed.
The handgun clicked—empty—and desperate Kalas threw it at the
chimera. It pinged off Giacomo’s head, but the man kept coming, reaching
out with his one remaining hand. Hard fingers seized Kalas by the shirt
front, lifted him bodily into the air. For a moment, Kalas feared to lose his
nose-tubes, but he had bigger problems. He pounded uselessly against
Giacomo’s armored torso as the man pivoted, hurling Kalas across the
plastic rooftop. He tried to get a bead on the Extrasolarian and right himself
at the same time. No good. The chimera was too fast, despite his injuries.
He seized Kalas again, by the throat this time, iron fingers implacable as the
crush of tectonic plates. He raised Kalas up before him, and Kalas could
sense the man’s smile even through that blank white plane he called a face.
“You could have been so much more, little man,” he said, squeezing. “I
don’t think you get it. There’s no place for us out here, not like we are.
Look at you. Can’t even breathe on the world you call home. We’re the
future humanity needs. Not the Empire, not you! We’re the ones who can
survive what’s out there!”
Though he could hardly breathe, Kalas managed to croak one word, one
single word, “Doubt…” And on that note he jammed the muzzle of his
plasma burner through the man’s shield and into the ragged hole in his
chassis left by the ragged ruin of his shattered arm.
 And fired.
The plasma chewed through Giacomo’s innards, melting wires and
sending ugly tongues of black smoke curling out through slits in his pale
torso. Kalas winced as he felt the skin on his hand sear from radiated heat.
He tried to cry out—to scream—but the pressure on his throat stopped his
voice with his breath. Until it didn’t. Giacomo released him, and with a cry
more of surprise now than pain, Kalas fell to the ground at the
Extrasolarian’s feet. Giacomo took a step backwards before keeling over.
Silent.
Dead?
Kalas found his knees, his feet. He’d dropped the plasma burner, and
clutched his burned hand to his chest, cradling it delicately so the oozing
flesh didn’t touch anything. The mere touch of the air was agony, and he
grit his teeth. There was the plasma burner, not three paces from where he’d
fallen. He stooped and collected it.
The crate wasn’t far—was right where Giacomo had left it, just near the
base of the ramp to his unseen ship. With his left hand fouled up, Kalas
shoved the weapon into the pocket of his coat and picked the crate up with
his good hand. It must have weighed forty pounds. Maybe fifty. He stopped
a moment, breathing deeply. He forgot to breathe in through his nose a
moment, and felt suddenly lightheaded.
He needed to go.
“Gant!” he said, and remembered—too late—that his comms patch and
earpiece had been taken away when he was stunned. He sighed. The lifts
then. He turned to go.
The whine of a flier’s repulsors filled the night, and a bright light came
streaking down from the heavens above. Kalas whirled, helpless with his
weapon in his coat pocket. Gant’s flier barreled down out of the darkness,
flying low and fast. Kalas had a brief impression of a white-armored figure
leaping towards him, one hand outstretched.
Giacomo.
The Extrasolarian wasn’t dead after all, but lumbering towards him across
the open rooftop. Gant’s flier collided with the chimera at full speed,
knocking the Extrasolarian off his course. Giacomo tumbled through the air,
soaring like a payload dropped out of the back of a shuttle in the moments
before the parachutes engage.
He didn’t fly far.
Something broke inside the machine-man’s chest. Some containment
field or fuel cell. A moment later Giacomo exploded, the white-armored
man transformed into a ball of white light. The sound of it crushed Kalas’s
eardrums, the force of it blew him from his feet, and he flew—and Gant’s
flier flew with him—back over the edge of the building.
He was a long time falling. The crate was still in his hand. A cool,
detached piece of himself nodded in approval. It wouldn’t matter anyway.
He felt certain that he wouldn’t live to collect the reward. No matter. He had
lived a life of violence. And violent lives should end violently. At least Gant
would be all right. At least they’d won in the end.
Kalas hit the ground a moment after and sank through it. The shock of
impact knocked the wind from him and made him release the handle to the
refrigerated crate. Something was wrong. Or right. He wasn’t dead, but he
couldn’t breathe either. There were hard pincers on his throat again, strong
as the hands of the Extra had been.
Water.
He had landed in one of the great fishery vats that stood open beneath the
Narayan building.
He was underwater.
Something brushed past him in the deep, green darkness. Another.
He tried to breathe through his nose-tubes, but nothing came. Which way
was the surface? Which way was up? Another something swam past him. It
touched his wounded arm, and the pain sharpened his vision. Green light
and red filtered up towards him past his boots. Up? No. Down. He’d fallen
in head first. And the payload? It must have sunk to the bottom. The
bottom?
Another something—something silver—flickered past his eyes.
A fish. Of course it was a fish.
He might have laughed. He found fish on Kanthi after all.
And soon enough someone would have to come fishing for him.
 THE PITS OF EMESH

History is a funny thing. It’s not the truth. The truth exists only in the world
itself, and though some men speak it, others do not. You’ve read a piece of
Hadrian Marlowe’s own story, but there are others. Some expose places
where the great hero spoke something less than truth, and others? Well,
some stories are even less than that.

Originally published in this volume.

 CHAPTER 1
THE MEGATHERE

I HAD THIS FROM ONE WHO WOULDN’T HAVE LIED, one who knew the man
personally—Marlowe the Great—when he was little more than a slave.
There are those who say the man’s greatness was writ upon the stars, and
maybe that is so—it is certainly so now—but I do not believe such things.
Heroes are not born, but made, and are made mostly by we historians and
by the panegyrists and the troubadours, not by themselves. No man can
deny that Marlowe was a cunning warrior. His victories speak for
themselves. None can deny his courage.
But his virtue?
Many attempts have been made to transform the Devil of Meidua into a
paragon of the Imperial knight. As though he were not outcaste! As though
he did not associate with inti and homunculi, with criminals and the very
dregs of society! As though he did not for centuries share his bed with a
witch of the clans of Tavros! A knight he might have been, but an exemplar
of knighthood?
Never.
Forget you that he began his career a gladiator? And less than a gladiator!
A fodder myrmidon bound to the coliseum, risking his life for coin! Those
who seek his virtue must seek far later in his life, must point to his record
serving the Imperium. But I seek the Truth only, and so bring you to the
beginning, to the very pits of Emesh.

THE CROWD GREETED THE MYRMIDONS with roars and jeering alike, waving
banners and thumping their bare and painted breasts as peasants do
anticipating the sight of blood. Hadrian Marlowe stepped out upon the
sands alongside his compatriots, a rough dozen warriors armed and armored
—ready to die.
Marlowe alone among their number counted himself one of the nobility.
Stripped of his titles, his inheritance—of everything but his bones—and
exiled to the far fringes of the settled galaxy, the coliseum had been his
home for more than a year. He raised his sword with the others in salute and
defiance of the chaos in the stands, and bowed to the Count of Emesh.
The noonday sun shone red as blood upon the arena, glinting off the
printed helms and shining swords and spear points of the men and women
arrayed upon the ochre sands.
“Steady on, lads!” said Banks, their captain, shouting over the tumult.
“What’s it to be, do you reckon?” asked Pallino, the second-in-command,
one-eyed and hoary.
The myrmidons fanned out, advancing onto the sands.
The gate ahead stood open, a black mouth opening on the lift shaft that
ran down into the hypogeum complex beneath the arena, open and
threatening as jaws. Marlowe shifted his shield on his arm, and sighting
through the holes of his secutor’s helm, he spied the shackles first of all the
myrmidons on the killing floor. Great rings of extruded titanium hung from
brackets to either side of the open gate, and through each of these was
threaded mighty chains of the same light but enduring metal, each braided
link large enough that a slave might wear one for a diadem and so make a
mockery of our holy Emperor—though it cost his life.
The chains ran down into the darkness of the lift and rattled where some
unseen horror shuffled and scraped against the walls of the lift itself.
“Pallino!” Marlowe raised his sword to point.
The older fighter cursed. “Azhdarch?” he asked, and cursed again.
“What’s so big it needs chains like that?”
“Manticore?” asked Siran, one of the rare women in the band.
“Manticores ain’t that big!” Banks barked over the crowd.
The surprise was part of the theater, you understand. This was no
exhibition, no demonstration of prowess such as might entertain the court
on Forum. Though the Count of that border colony was present and his
husband lord beside him, this was a show for the commons of Emesh, for
the artisans and salarymen, the guilders and the fisherfolk and the common
chaff of the city.
They wanted to see the myrmidons break and run in terror.
They wanted to see blood.
“And here we have our heroes!” The voice of the narrator roared over the
churning crowd in the stands. “Our venators! Our noble explorers, fresh
from their seed ship, the first men of Earth to stride these alien sands!”
Below the thunder of his voice, a stand of trumpets played, rude and brassy.
“But what world is this? What terror lurks beneath these skies heretofore
untouched by human eyes?”
“I hate this part,” said William of Danu, Marlowe’s closest friend, whose
stout heart would lead one day to treachery. “Can’t they just get it over
with?”
“You have no poetry in you, Will!” Marlowe said.
“And you too much!” the other man said, shouting as the clangor of a
great bell tolled over all.
A roar sounded from the maw of the open tunnel, high and ululating as
the throats of the fire-singers of Jadd and inhuman as the Cielcin who drank
the blood of worlds. The myrmidons all—Marlowe included—recoiled in
shock and terror, and lo! A great hand erupted from the depths and grasped
the lip of the arena floor with talons longer than any sword.
A second hand followed an instant later, talons scraping the brick beneath
the loose sand.
“This is Epidamnus!” the narrator cried, “Once our gateway on the
Galactic East! An uncut gem in the crown of Empire! Here grow the
egrandi trees, great as mountains! Here all the birds of Earth have made
new homes! And here the four-armed megathere walks and hunts intrusive
man by sun and light of moons!”
As if cued by the Colosso narrator, a third taloned hand gripped the sill in
the lift shaft, and another horrible roar echoed from the darkness ahead.
 “Will these worthies prove man the masters of creation once again? Or
will this first encounter prove a rare defeat for the sons of Earth?” The
narrator went silent then, and the crowd too, still stunned from the noise of
the beast below.
One great hand seized the very chain that bound it to the wall above and
pulled, and an arm thick as the bole of an ancient tree and just as dark
appeared, bristling with fur gray and dun, its individual quills thick as
wires.
“Megathere?” William of Danu asked at Marlowe’s side. “What’s a
megathere?”
As if in answer, a huge and hideous face emerged from the gloom as the
great bell rang a second time. Four eyes, two and two, peered wet and red
from the edge of a face flat as a spade to either side of its hooked and
pointed snout. At the sight of the men before it—and of the ruddy sunlight,
perhaps—the beast pulled upon its chain with two hands, using the others to
heave its horrid bulk onto the killing floor.
Even Marlowe stood frozen, mouth agape behind the cheap steel of his
helm.
“How are we supposed to kill that?” said one of the others.
“Is it a cull?” asked one of the others. “Are they trying to kill us?”
“Hold!” Banks bellowed.
“Hold?” Pallino echoed, “Have you gone mad?”
The captain of the myrmidons hefted his shield. “It’s chained! Can’t
reach us here!”
Marlowe drew up beside the older men, his palatine visage concealed by
his visor, his heart low in his chest. The titan reared, larger than any beast of
Emesh. The same brindled and wiry fur rose from the monster’s back save
where the bony protrusions of its spine rose like mountains from a sea of
dead grass. Its muscles bunched as it stalked forward, dragging itself with
its four mighty arms, its rear legs bowed and wide-spread, knees comically
high as its body moved, low-slung like a serpent toward them.
“Don’t count on it,” he said. “The chains are for the commons. Not you
and me.”
The megathere pounced, sunlight flashing red on fangs and on the bright
metal of its collar. The chain snapped tight, and the giant’s titanic bulk—it
must have been thirty feet from snout to claw—struck the floor like a
mountain falling down. The monster shook its head as if to clear its senses,
gouged the stone floor with its claws. They say the beasts of other stars
share nothing like human feeling, and maybe that is so, but for all the suns
under heaven, the beast’s frustration came off it in waves. It bared its fangs,
its mouth dilating to reveal a tongueless gullet lined with serrated teeth.
Pallino swore, and beside him Banks shouted, “Erdro! Alis! Javelins!”
Moving in tandem, twin knots of three men fanned out, circling the
chained beast. The megathere tracked their advance, its shoveled head
wavering side to side. Marlowe stood with the main body of the fighters in
the center, safe for the moment outside the ambit of the great beast’s arms.
The man Erdro hurled the light spear he carried with all the force he
could muster. The lance caught one of the bony protrusions along the
megathere’s spine and caromed off, drawing gasps and groans of despair
from the men and women in the stands.
“A bad start from our heroes!” the narrator exclaimed, voice like honeyed
thunder over all.
The megathere’s head snapped toward the offending fighter and let out its
horrid cry. Erdro stumbled back, tugging his second lance from the sling he
wore across his chest even as his two fellows threw their first. Heedless of
the javelins, the megathere propelled itself forward, pounding the sanded
bricks with four three-taloned hands.
Erdro and his companions danced back, escaping beyond the monster’s
reach by inches.
The men who had circled round were not so fortunate.
The creature roared once more as two javelins struck it in the back. It
rounded on its new assailants with a swiftness scarce to be believed of a
monster so great in size, and with the slash of one clawed and hairy arm it
swept the legs out from under two of the myrmidons, seized the second by
his leg and—lifting him as easily as a man lifts a child’s doll, smacked him
against the ground. At the sound of flattened armor and breaking bones,
Marlowe said, “We can’t wait here! We have to do something!”
“Do what?” asked Ghen, the largest of the fighters, a child himself
measured against the bulk of the megathere.
“Let them do their part!” Banks said. “Those spears will slow them
down!”
“Was it Arring?” asked William of Danu, naming one man it might have
been. “Or Vitor?”
One arm raised to stop Marlowe advancing, Pallino said, “Vitor.”
Erdro hurled his second javelin. The weapon caught in the meat of one
alien bicep, and the monster hurled itself against its chains in its desperation
to drive towards its prey. But Erdro had already turned and run away,
drawing his short sword as he went.
“Our heroes have weakened the mighty beast!” the narrator said, “But
will it prove enough?”
Humanity encircled inhumanity, both in the seats and on the sands.
Wounded, the megathere drew back, retreating toward the door whence it
had come. As the spearmen closed in, the megathere pounded the earth with
its hands and charged again, tucking its shoulder to slam the humans aside.
Erdro had moved too close, and the force of the megathere’s charge hurled
him half a hundred feet across the killing floor. He tumbled over the bricks,
sword thrown clear. In the seats above, the crowd gasped and seemed to
lean
forward.
They roared when the myrmidon found his feet an instant later, and
cheered and stamped their feet.
Taking this for his cue as though he were an actor upon a stage, the
grizzled leader of the myrmidons raised his voice. “Forward, lads!” Banks
shouted, banging his short sword upon his shield as he hurried forward.
Behind him, the man Pallino let out a cry and leaped after him, pulling
the others in their wake. Swept by their tide and the bloody tumult of
Colosso, Hadrian Marlowe followed, yelling along with his baseborn
companions as they closed the space between them and their foe.
“Get down!” Marlowe hauled William of Danu from his feet, hit the
stone with his tall shield beneath him as one mighty arm swept overhead.
Turning, Marlowe saw Ghen take the blow against his own shield, and such
was the strength of the man that he was only knocked to his knees behind
the clear acrylic of the scutum.
William leaped back to his feet, sword raised. It fell in a wild chopping
motion that scored the back of the monster’s forearm. Blood, bilious and
amber-colored, dripped from the fresh wound, and the megathere jerked its
limb back, talons great as swords scraping the brickwork. It snorted, shook
its head. Before it could reply, Banks and Pallino were in its face, spears
leveled at its two forward-facing eyes.
Had such a creature lived on Earth of old, the dawning men might have
worshiped it for a god, feared it for a demon, so huge and horrible was it, a
titan of forgotten lore. Rocked back upon its haunches, the megathere
roared again and, without warning, slammed its pointed snout down to
strike the floor. Its chains shook and snapped tight, and with a casual
gesture of its two right arms it hurled three men aside—Ghen among them.
Still huddled on his shield, Marlowe skidded inside the reach of those arms
and thrust his short sword down between the bones of the monster’s feet,
hoping to lame the thing. Above and behind him, the megathere squealed,
and the noise of it set the crowd to cheering as the narrator laughed and
said, “That’s got to hurt!”
“Had, get out of there!” cried the woman, Siran, who was to be Lord
Marlowe’s lictor later in life.
Hadrian Marlowe found his feet and hurled himself away from the
megathere, whose saber claws flashed through the air behind as the titan
tucked its head and used the spade of its jaw to hurl another man clear
across the open ground.
“The eyes!” Banks could be heard shouting above the din. “Get the
bastard’s eyes!”
 The megathere opened its hollow of a mouth again and roared, sputum
flying forth and speckling the armored men before it. One of Erdro’s
peltasts threw his lance, but the shaft and print-steel head bounced uselessly
against the bony plates of the beast’s forehead.
Marlowe leaned on his shield and caught his breath, watched as Banks
and Pallino thrust at the eyes of the megathere yet again. Thrust then
retreated, dancing back as the monster lashed out with arms twice as long as
a man. The titan strained to reach them, but Pallino stabbed the beast’s hand
as it grasped for them.
All the arena seemed to hold its breath.
They were at an impasse, man and beast. Man could not advance without
risking all—and the beast could not reach its tormentors with their long
lances. Nor could it win free. Again Banks thrust at its face when it stooped
to snarl and flap its jaw.
The myrmidon’s spear won home, and one red eye burst like the last
cherry of summer.
The megathere screamed and recoiled, dragging the leg that Marlowe had
maimed. The crowd screamed more loudly than the beast itself, and the
megathere fell back against the door from whence it had come, bloody
talons smearing their marks on the dull metal.
Foolish in his pride, the myrmidon captain closed in, spear thrusting up
once more at the great monster’s eyes. Growling, the megathere jerked its
head back, clutching its ruined eye with one taloned paw. How like a man it
seemed then! More like an ape of Old Earth than any beast of some foreign
star, so that even the pain and the fury in its three remaining eyes were clear
to any man who saw them.
The other myrmidons closed in about it, hemming it in, long spears out-
thrust.
“Watch the arms!” one cried.
“Get under the ribs! Under the ribs!”
“Look out!”
Three men—Banks and Pallino and one other—thrust their lances into
the flank of the megathere as it reared back. Marlowe threw a hand across
William of Danu to stop him rushing forward, urging caution.
His nobile instincts proved right, for an instant later the huge beast fell
upon the trias, yanking the spears from their hands and snapping the hafts
as it fell. The megathere pinned the nameless man with one paw and
pummeled him with another. His breastplate flattened and the chest beneath
it ran out onto the sands to the horror and excitement of the throng. But the
beast was not yet done, and—limping—dragged itself over its victim,
pursuing Pallino and Banks as they retreated, drawing their swords, back
beyond the line of the chains.
Lurching forward, the megathere reached the end of its leash and jerked
back with a groan.
“Javelins!” Banks shouted. “Javelins, all of you!”
There were but a few of the throwing spears left in the hands of the
remaining myrmidons, but throw them they did. Two struck the megathere
in the left flank, and a third rattled off the plated ridge that ran along its
spine. The great monster roared, launched itself straight forward at the
myrmidons in the center.
The captain, Banks, roared in answer, raised his sword to reply.
The chains that bound the megathere in place went taut as harp strings,
and though the beast swept the air with its saber-claws, it was only air they
found. Banks laughed in the face of the monster, and when it thrust out its
claws he slashed at its hands. Great it might have been in the jungles of
Epidamnus, but it was on Emesh then. In the arena, brought before the
cheering throngs of man, and man was master of the universe.
Banks slashed at the monster’s hand as it strained for him, and the
hulking beast drew back, nursing that wounded paw. Blood ran from its
ruined eye like tears, and the narrator shouted over all, “Our heroes have the
monster cornered! They have tracked it to its lair!”
It was all a script, you understand. Not preordained—the crowd might
have leered as readily at the sight of human blood upon the sands, and had
—but the narrator had his lines, his story, his message for the onlookers.
 “Epidamnus is ours! The galaxy is ours!” the narrator cried.
The megathere slumped against the wall, sulfurous blood staining the iron
doors. Marlowe and William made to advance, and Pallino and the woman
Siran.
Banks raised a hand for them to halt. He was senior-most among them
and captain.
It was his kill.
“Erdro!” he said, “Spear!”
The rope-headed myrmidon—having retrieved one of the great lances
that had missed its mark earlier in the fighting—hurried forward and
handed the thing to Banks. The captain took it, snarling like a beast himself,
and thrust the point towards the beast where it drew back against the door.
Once, twice, three times he jabbed at the monster’s remaining eyes, and
each time it jerked its head away, desperate to save itself.
Had the beast possessed the common heart of Earth—that blood which
links all the Mother’s creatures—the myrmidon captain might have seen the
warning signs before it was too late. Anger, fear, hurt… these things the
children of Earth recognize in one another, leastways among those species
closest to man. But the gulf that lay between the megathere and the human
heart was light-years deep and inscrutable as the dance of electrons on the
head of a pin.
The spear tip bit into the megathere below its alien ribs, and once more its
sulfurous blood spilled out thicker than oil.
The monster screamed and threw itself against its chains.
And the chains broke.
Marlowe cried out a warning, but seized William before he could
advance.
For a solitary instant, the old captain, Banks, stood resolute—spear up-
thrust—against the wounded titan. Master of the universe man might have
been, but Banks was only a man. The megathere might have been a
mountain falling.
Banks vanished under its bulk, smashed flat by paws large as a man’s
body. As one the crowd took in its breath, as if in doing so they might catch
some particle of the last air to escape the dead man’s lungs. Even Marlowe
stopped short, stunned at what had happened, unable for an instant to take
in the terrific change that had wrought itself upon the killing floor.
The chains had broken.
They should not have broken.
“Run!” shouted one of the others, and all about the exiled lord the
myrmidons began drawing back, for theirs was common blood and ran with
fear like water.
“Pull back! Pull back!” another cried.
But Hadrian Marlowe did not run. For as I have said, none could deny his
courage.
The hand that would one day strike down the princes of the Pale
tightened about his sword. An instant later he sheathed the weapon and,
turning, spoke through his helmet. “Will. Are you with me?”
“With you for what?” the younger myrmidon asked, eyes wide through
the slit in his visor.
They hadn’t any time. The megathere yet stooped over the flattened body
of its prey, its body low to the ground, its limbs splayed wide. Seeing his
chance, Hadrian Marlowe darted forward, his shield raised for all the paltry
defense it offered against so great an adversary. When he was mere yards
from one of the beast’s trunk-like forelimbs, he tossed his shield down and
—leaping—caught hold of the thick fur that thatched the arm of the
megathere.
“Have you gone mad?” Will shouted after his companion, and did not
follow.
Only slowly did the crowd realize what had happened. Banks’s death.
Marlowe’s desperate charge. All had happened in mere seconds, and in
mere seconds more the young warrior reached the monster’s back, climbing
along its arm to the shoulder.
“Holy Mother Earth!” the narrator cried out, all script and ceremony
forgotten.
 The megathere stood, unchained, and stretched to its full height, but
Marlowe held on, swinging from its shaggy shoulders as it pawed for him
with its talons and shook, trying to throw him off.
A thrown javelin caught it in the side, and it came down on the man who
threw it, and as it fell Hadrian Marlowe slid down its back and caught
himself on the armored ridge that ran along its spine. Safe there for a
moment, he braced himself and drew out once more his sword. The short
leaf blade flashed in Emesh’s carnelian sun as Marlowe plunged it down
into the soft flesh beside that bony ridge. The blade slid all the way to the
hilt as Marlowe leaned his weight upon it, passing with an awful grind
between two ribs.
Beneath him, the megathere let out a strangled cry, and lurched leftwards
and struck the wall of the coliseum. In his box above, the Count of Emesh
rose and leaned out over the rail to watch as his self-sold slave struggled to
keep a hold of his sword and of the bony projection of the megathere’s
vertebrae. But Marlowe did not fall, and drew out his sword. Golden blood
shone orange in the reddish light an instant, and again Marlowe plunged the
blade down into the back of the colossus to which he clung.
The crowd was ecstatic by then, and the narrator—having regained his
composure—was shouting words Marlowe little heard as he stabbed the
beast a third time.
The other myrmidons were closing by then, spears raised, swords drawn.
The megathere lowed sadly at the sky, swiped at a fighter as he drew near
and knocked him from his feet. But all who heard that sound knew. Knew
the beast was as good as dead. One clawed hand slid out from under it, and
its spade of a head struck the stone of the killing floor.
Hadrian Marlowe rolled free and tumbled across the stone, and in an
instant Ghen and Pallino were on him, dragging him clear of the dying
animal.
“You’re fucking mad, you know that?” Pallino hissed.
Extricating himself from the men’s grip, Marlowe stood. “It shouldn’t
have gotten out,” he said.
 “What?” Ghen asked.
“Those chains are titanium,” he said in answer. “They shouldn’t just
break.”

THE MEGATHERE WAS A LONG TIME DYING. Marlowe’s blade had pierced its
lungs, and the blood-like-oil slowly filled them. Each breath brought pain,
and with each, the beast grew weaker, weaker until it lay upon the sanded
bricks of the floor. As it lay dying, more the myrmidons—Erdro and Ghen
and Siran among them—clambered up upon the dying thing and stood upon
its back. Above them all, the crowd hurled down coins and tossed bottles
and articles of clothing for the conquerors to take.
But Marlowe spurned it all. Though his mates bore him up upon their
shoulders, his mind had gone elsewhere. He was ever an improper man, one
whose mind flew always from his body—from his place and time. He
should have exalted in his victory, and when after the celebration was done
and the beast well dead, he came before the Count’s box.
“What is your name, myrmidon?” the lord of that far world asked.
Marlowe removed his helmet as tradition expected and looked upon the
dark face of Count Mataro with a face pale as a funeral mask beneath his
long, black hair. It was the first time they would speak, man to man: the
young hero and the old lord who would redeem him from the gutter. History
hinged upon their words, as it always hinges upon the words of such great
men.
Upon the lords of empire.
“I am called Hadrian, Lord Count.” He did not give his name entire, for
in those days he was an exile, outcaste and contemptible, with nothing to
his name but his blood.
“You acquit yourself admirably, Hadrian!” the Count said, and tossed the
victor’s purse to the man on the sand.
As was custom, Marlowe knelt to take it, and though the crowd cheered, I
think his heart was troubled. I have heard it said that Marlowe never
celebrated his victories, for always his mind was with the dead. He had not
known the man called Banks well, though he had fought beside him in a
dozen events or more. And yet…to kneel there and stand while all the
thousands in that coliseum cheered was more than Marlowe could endure.
Any good Sollan should have felt pride at his accomplishment. There would
be lanterns lit to the memory of the fallen, for Banks and Vitor and the
other, but they had died in victory.
It was inappropriate to mourn.

HEAVY DRUMS AND THE MUSIC OF TRUMPETS accompanied them from the
field. Servitors hurried out to clear away the bodies of the dead men and to
carve the megathere into pieces. The crowds were beginning to disperse as
Marlowe and his companions tramped back across the threshold onto the
lift.
“Had!” William of Danu ran up, clutching something silver in his hands.
“Look!”
Hadrian Marlowe took what William proffered him. It took him a
moment to realize what it was he’d been given. It was a single link from the
great chain that had bound the megathere to the wall. The titanium was in
two pieces, half-ovals long as a man’s forearm. The extruded titanium was
nearly two inches thick. Strong as the beast of Epidamnus was, no limbs of
mere flesh and bone could break such a thing. It wasn’t possible.
The doors to the lift began to close as Marlowe placed the broken halves
together, completing the circle. Each of the link’s narrow ends had been
filed down, cut almost entirely through. Seeing this, Marlowe jerked the
link apart and shoved the broken pieces into his belt.
Looking his friend in the eye, he hissed, “Someone tried to kill us.”
 CHAPTER 2
THE MENAGERIE

ALL WAS DARK in the cramped little cell the exiled lord shared with his slave
in the bowels of the coliseum. All but the light of one solitary bulb. I have
seen such rooms, their stone walls plastered, paint peeling, sweating where
the radiator coils dripped on chipped tile, air smelling of mold. Marlowe
was luckier than most; many of the myrmidons—on Emesh and on a
hundred thousand worlds—lived not in private cells but in cramped
dormitories. Count Mataro was a more generous master than most.
Myrmidons such as Marlowe was in youth are not trained athletes, not true
gladiators. Lacking anywhere else to go, marooned on that far world and
penniless, Hadrian Marlowe had sold himself into bondage, into an
indenture lasting years, his pay—the great part of it—conditional on his
survival.
But he had some small coin and the freedom of the city. The myrmidons
were not slaves, but none could leave the city without breaching contract
and forfeiting their lives.
The same could not be said for the girl.
She was a creature of the coliseum itself, and I’ve heard it said that
Marlowe poured every kaspum, every steel bit of his paltry stipend to rent
and to secure her exclusive for himself, going so far as to cut purses and
throats in the streets of Borosevo for his bread.
Was it love? Or loneliness? Or some baser desire that motivated him?
Who can say?
Night after night she opened for him, and each day cleaned his clothes
and his armor and cared for his wounds. The coliseum kept many such
women and several boys for the fighters—for true gladiators and the
myrmidons alike.
“Is everything all right?” she asked him, when he had crawled from her
and moved to the rusted sink beneath the cracked mirror that—but for the
bed—was the cell’s only real furnishing. An opera poster was taped on the
back of the metal door to cover the face-sized porthole that was the cell’s
only window. It showed the image of Amazon warriors battling savages on
the boiling river that bore their name. “You should be happy. You won.
You’re a hero!” She rolled over on the bed, sheets tangled as her hair. “Had,
the Count asked you your name! You could be a gladiator soon!”
He looked up at her reflection in the mirror glass. Her wide, dark eyes;
her curling hair; her still-heaving breasts and the joy and the hopefulness
that lit her open face like the sun. “Maybe,” he said, unable to stop himself
from smiling, “if we’re lucky.” Her own excitement was infectious.
“And you could take me with you!” she said, propping herself on one
hand. The brass collar that marked her for a paracoita glinted as she tossed
her floating hair, eyes intent. “You could buy me off the vilicus.”
“I could buy you now,” he said, and glanced at the lockbox below the
sink that held his portion of the Count’s purse. It was more money than he’d
had in all his years since he fled his home on Delos. “It’s me I can’t afford.”
The slave girl’s eyes moved longingly to the dented metal chest. Seeing
this and sensing her interest, he turned, squaring himself to block the chest
from view. “But you’re right. Maybe the Count will send one of his
recruiters. Maybe this time next year you and I can have a suite in the
munerium…”
“Next year?” the girl pouted.
Marlowe did not seem to hear her, for a shadow had settled on him.
Becoming a true gladiator would mean turning on his boon companions, on
the very myrmidons at whose side he had fought for so long. The sudden
image of his friends emerging from the liftgate opposite his own flashed
across his cortex like lightning, and his face fell.
“I can’t make the recruiters come,” he said, and shrugged.
“Black Earth, Had!” she said, flopping back against the pillows. “This
was a good day! You won, you’re rich! Why is this a bad thing?”
Marlowe chewed his tongue. “Someone tried to kill us, Cat.”
She blinked at him. “What?”
“The chain,” he said, holding up his hands mere fractions of an inch
apart. “Someone sawed through one of the links. Nearly through. Just
enough to make it look like that megathere broke free on its own.”
The paracoita sat up, eyes very wide. “You’re serious?”
“I’m sure,” he said, moving to the recessed cabinet that held his kit and
clothes. The secutor’s helm stared out at him from its peg, its printed steel
scratched and dented from much abuse. He produced one half of the sawn
chain link and tossed it onto the bed. “Will has the other half. See how the
surface is smooth up to that last half inch?” He crossed the space between
them, gesturing at the chain with a finger.
Cat lifted it from the mattress to examine it, turned it over in her blunt,
plebeian fingers. She hunched, a crease forming between her brows. “And
this is where it snapped?” she traced the jagged edge of the metal with her
thumb.
“Yes.” Marlowe sat on the edge of the bed. “It was still strong enough to
take some thrashing from the megathere, but . . .” He mutely linked two
fingers together, mimed their snapping apart. “Make it look like an
accident. The douleters wouldn’t look twice at the chain when they were
cleaning up.”
“Unless…” Cat’s voice shrank to a whisper. “You thinking this were done
deliberate? Done by them, I mean. By them in charge?”
Swallowing his tongue, Marlowe nodded. The thought had already
occurred to him. The myrmidons got part of the pay for their indenture up
front—a stipend to live by—and bonuses, awards when they won a
stunning victory, like the purse the Count had cast at his feet earlier that
day. But the bulk of their payment came at the end, when they survived the
terms of their indenture, a year or two or five. Marlowe wasn’t sure it was
true—and I do not believe it—but low-born myrmidons the galaxy over
believe the lords of the Empire and the vilici they appoint to run their arenas
would often arrange for their myrmidons to have unfortunate accidents near
the end of their contracts. It might happen, but the paltry cost of a
myrmidon’s contract seems hardly worth the effort when an arena might
save ten times the cost by simply declining to order a single rare creature
from offworld in a season. The megathere Marlowe slaughtered that day
had cost more than Marlowe’s pay and that of all his fellows together, and it
had lived—in the eyes of the public—for a measly hour.
Did Marlowe wonder in that moment if it had been done because of him?
Did he believe his lord father had found him at last, and found a way to rid
himself of his troublesome heir?
“Who would know?” the girl asked.

ONE HAND ON THE SWORD at his belt, Hadrian crept forward, glad of his
helmet not just for the anonymity it provided him from the lazy eyes of the
cameras that watched the Count’s menagerie of death, but for the way his
own rebounded breath hid the raw stench of the place. It stank in the pens
beneath the coliseum, stank of sweat and shit and of unwashed bodies—
human and less than. The lamps were all tuned low, and the air was filled
with the steady sounds of the animals breathing.
A pair of terranic lions slumbered in a cage to the left—a male and a
female, judging by the mane. A manticore scuttled in the tank beside them,
heavy alumglass shielding the workers from the horrid venom the twelve-
legged horror could spit.
“What are those?” hissed Will of Danu, his sword already drawn. He
gestured at a tank that contained a pair of what seemed like two white
flowers sprouting from bushes of black leaves.
Marlowe stopped to look a moment, unable to help his confusion. “I have
no idea.”
The next cage held a dull-faced salamander large as the greatest
crocodiles who share the blood of Earth. It slumbered on a heated pad, and
across from it, white-faced savages that might have been men once stirred
and muttered.
 “Eno!”
One of the savages had stirred, turned his face to the glass at the sight of
them.
“Eno! Eno!”
Marlowe stopped, cocked his head at the man. He was human, or perhaps
some manner of homunculus near to human. What he had taken at first for
the man’s chalky hide was only a film of cracking paint. “Eno!” he said,
gripping the bar. “E’aba Eno?”
“Is that you, Ubaba?” came a tired voice from ahead. “What’s all the
chatter about? I told you I’d feed you and the lads in the morning. It’s night
time now! Go to sleep! You can gabble in the damn morning!”
A douleter in the dun fatigues of a zookeeper came round the corner then,
pushing a cart that housed a bucket and mop and other assorted cleaning
supplies. His eyes went wide when he saw Marlowe and the other
myrmidon standing in the aisle, William with his sword drawn, both men
cloaked and helmeted. He dropped the spare bucket he was carrying, and
the metallic ping of it startled the salamander, whose body at once crackled
with blue lightning.
Before the man could shout, Marlowe leaped at him, threw a hand across
the old fellow’s face as he drove him back against the armored glass front
of the cell that held the savages. With all his eugenic strength, Hadrian
Marlowe lifted the man bodily from the floor. The douleter was old, his hair
thin and gray, his jowls soft with the fast decay of time that so afflicts the
underclasses, and I do not doubt that he soiled himself almost as once, faced
with two faceless assassins in the dead of night.
“Was it you?” Marlowe hissed, not taking his hand from the man’s
mouth. Realizing he was ahead of himself, he walked back a step in his
mind. “Scream, and by the green hills of Earth, I’ll gut you where you
stand.” They say that Marlowe killed a man when he was a boy alone upon
the streets of that far world, and so I doubt not he made such threats.
If the douleter had not soiled himself already, he surely did then.
“The megathere,” Marlowe said, squeezing the man’s face. “Someone cut
its chain. Did you know?”
The old man shook his head.
Marlowe shook him, slammed his head against the glass while William of
Danu looked on. The douleter winced. “I don’t know!” he mumbled, trying
to reach up and massage his scalp. “I don’t know!”
The myrmidon slammed the old man against the glass again, slid him
higher against the glass. “Someone tried to kill us.”
“You…?” Sweat beaded on the man’s forehead. “You’re one of them?
They’ll kill you for coming down here!”
Marlowe’s fingers tightened on the man’s shirtfront. “No, they won’t,” he
replied. “They’ll whip us. And only if I’m wrong. We’re worth more to
them than you are, I promise you that.” It was only half true. The
myrmidons were worth more to the Count and to the guilds that ran the
coliseum than was a humble zookeeper, but that would not stop the secular
powers of Emesh from enforcing good order. An irony, that, as they would
hardly bother to enforce that same order if a myrmidon attempted to report
foul play in the arena to those selfsame powers.
Myrmidons were meant to die. If there were foul play, what of it? The
Count and the guilds could find new blood for the fighting pits. If indeed
what had happened on the killing floor that day was murder, there would be
no justice unless Hadrian Marlowe took it for himself.
“Let me go!” the old man said.
“Let him go!” William put a hand on Marlowe’s shoulder. “He doesn’t
know anything!”
The senior myrmidon let the man drop. His ankles twisted and he slid
down the glass front of the enclosure with a yelp. Cloak flapping about him,
Hadrian Marlowe drew closer, stooped over the groaning douleter like a
bronze-headed Death peering down at the old man. “What’s your name?”
he asked, voice softer, kinder.
“Orgo,” the old cleaner replied.
“Orgo,” Marlowe echoed, and reached under his cloak. “Orgo, someone
tried to kill my friends and me today. I want to know who did it.” He fished
out half the ruined link and held it up for the little man’s inspection. The
plebeian stared at it with watery eyes, the light of understanding sparking
there like distant stars. “One of your guild brothers must have done it.
Which of them had access to the megathere?”
The old cleaner’s eyes flickered to William of Danu, sensing the younger
man to be the more clement of the pair. “I don’t remember! You have to
believe me!”
“But I don’t, Orgo,” Marlowe said, still with the polished, polite tones of
a palatine nobile. “Look at it. Look! Someone cut through the chain. Do
you see?” When the man tried to look away, Marlowe slapped his cheek
with the broken bit of chain. Not hard, but enough to make him focus. “It
had to have been one of you douleters. Tell me, old man!”
Orgo shook his head, tried again to squirm out of Marlowe’s grasp, but
the exiled lord’s grip was iron. “I don’t know! Really! It were Nectan that
helped set up that megathere. His crew.”
“Nectan?” Marlowe relaxed his grip, let Orgo slide down along the glass
behind him.
Hearing his fellow’s name spoken aloud in the mouth of his attacker and
realizing his betrayal, the old douleter cried out, “Nectan, run!”
A clatter sounded from the far depths of the menagerie, followed by a
man’s rough cry. Without needing to be told, William of Danu turned and
chased toward it, sandals scraping the cracked cement as he skidded round
the next bend. Evidently Orgo had not been mucking out the stalls alone.
Marlowe dropped the old man without ceremony, abandoning him where
he fell. He might have killed the man—he had killed before, in the arena
and out—but a couple myrmidons roughing up a douleter or two was like to
prove beneath the notice of Colosso authorities. It was a rough business and
employed rough men. Violence was commonplace in those pits, and all who
entered there took their lives in their hands, no matter their station or rank.
By the time Hadrian reached the corner, he found William already atop
the other workman, pinning him face down against the stone, one hand
grinding his face into the cement. An overturned bucket spread foul water
upon the floor and soaked the man’s coveralls and William’s cloak.
Circling round the both of them to keep his eyes back the way they’d
come, Marlowe stood looking down on Nectan, a gray shadow in his
bronzed steel helmet and colorless mantle. Stooping at the waist, his hand
restored to the hilt of his sword, Marlowe asked, “You’re Nectan?”
The man didn’t deny it.
“Your friend sold you out, Nectan—I hate to say it.” He paused,
straightened. “Why’d you cut the chain?”
In the brief silence that must have followed, did Marlowe wonder if the
guilders who ran the Colosso events had ordered the chain cut? The thought
must have occurred to him, but what would he have done had the answer
been yes? Would he have fled the coliseum? Fled the city entire? Would he
have taken his whore, taken ship and made for one of the island townships,
or for the southern continent where indeed his future lay? Perhaps his very
innards wound themselves snake-like into knots. Perhaps concealed beneath
that cloak he wore already hung a bag filled with the spoils of the coliseum.
But when William cracked the man’s face against the stone floor and
Nectan blurted his response, he said, “It was Jaffa! Jaffa paid me! I’m sorry!
I’m sorry. Just let me go, I have kids to feed!”
“Jaffa?” Behind the round eyeholes of his mask, Marlowe blinked. “The
gladiator captain?” It didn’t make any sense. Why would a professional
gladiator involve himself in an animal exhibition affecting the contract
myrmidons? He saw the answer in the next instant. “Were we meant to fight
him soon?”
Nectan didn’t answer at once. The myrmidons were pitted against
professional gladiators in the melee from time to time, team against team.
The gladiators wore heavy armor, risked only paycuts and humiliation
against the myrmidons, who risked their lives. There wasn’t a melee on the
season schedule. Not one the myrmidons had heard of.
“For the Archon Veisi’s visit,” Nectan said. “In five weeks. They only
scheduled it four days back. Were going to spring it on you. Twenty on
twenty.”
 “Twenty on twenty?” William of Danu glanced sharply up, drawing
Marlowe’s eye. His own were very wide seen through the slit in his visor.
“A cull?”
That sick knot in Marlowe’s bowels tightened. They meant to throw the
myrmidons against the gladiators en masse without warning. It would be a
massacre the likes of which would make the event with the megathere seem
tame. He had survived such a cull once before, in his very first day in the
arena. But that had pit his myrmidons against only a small team of
gladiators.
“Twenty?” Marlowe repeated the number, and again shook his head.
“Why did Jaffa pay you to cut the chain?” A noise from back the way
they’d come made him flinch for his sword, but it was nothing.
“Your band’s good. Done good in the rankings.”
William backed off the pressure on Nectan’s head just a little. “Black
planet!” he swore, shock evident in his tone. “He’s scared of us?”
Marlowe almost laughed. “He should be!” he said, unable to keep the
dark and bitter edge from his tone.
“Mother Earth forbid he and his fine friends should have to risk their
necks in the arena,” Will said. He might have spat had his mouth not been
hid behind the visor. “That’s for us lowlies.”
“What are you going to do to me?” Nectan asked. He had since stopped
struggling beneath William’s weight. “Jaffa knew I needed the money. Lost
too much in the pools. I’ve got a wife, man. Kids at home! I just needed the
money.”
Hadrian was silent then a long moment, chin tucked against his chest,
shoulders hunched. A terranic bull snuffled in a glass-fronted cell opposite,
a bit of straw stuck to its nose. He caught himself wondering where in all
the hypogeum they’d kept anything so large as the megathere. The ceilings
were too low, implying the existence of some other, deeper dungeon in the
dark bowels of the coliseum.
“We could toss them in with the lions,” he said. “Or maybe there’s
something bigger down here.”
 Nectan writhed beneath Will then, and shouted for Orgo, who came
stumbling round the corner, limping where his scuffle with Marlowe had
hurt his leg. “You can’t!” he said. “You can’t do that, please!”
“Had!” Will said, aghast that his friend would even suggest such a thing.
“We have to cover our tracks,” he said, unapologetic. “And you just said
my name.”
The younger myrmidon flinched. Beneath him, Nectan groaned.
Marlowe crouched beside the douleter, looked up to hold Orgo’s eye. For
all his talk of retribution and the fire in his heart, these men were not his
enemies. Not truly.
He gave William a sign.
 CHAPTER 3
THE MURDERER

“DID YOU KILL THEM?” Ghen asked, peering out from under his hood.
Marlowe didn’t answer, nor William of Danu.
The three of them stood beneath a canvas awning in an alley overlooking
a spillway that ran down toward the wall of the White District and
overlooked the tangled canals and sloping rooftops of the lowtown.
Somewhere in that rusting labyrinth—stinking of fish—lay the lazaret in
which Hadrian Marlowe, delirious and fugue-sick, had first awakened on
that far world.
“Just as well,” the big horse of a man said, “they’d have run straight to
the bosses elsewise.” He tugged his hood down further to further darken his
dark face and shield it from the rain. “Fuck this rain, man.” Marlowe
marked the dart of his eyes as they flickered up at the marble facade of the
building opposite. “Don’t seem right,” he carried on, “them living in this
palace while we’re sweating out our asses under the coliseum with the other
animals.”
“Can’t have the fancy gladiators roughing it with us swine, Ghen,” said
William. “You know the game.”
“Sure,” the big man said, nodding steadily, “but flowers?”
He meant the vines climbing the exterior at one corner of the square
building, so green as to be black, even by the muted orange glow of the
streetlamps whose wind paddles turned in the nighttime squall. Their little
white blossoms danced and shone light stars where the wind and rain both
lashed. It was a far cry from their cramped cells in the coliseum hypogeum,
and for good reason. The gladiators were an investment. Most of the coin
brought into the arena was carried on their backs. Much of that coin flowed
to them, to their purses, to the trainers that readied them, to the equipment
that outfitted them, to the infrastructure that kept them in fighting shape. It
was the team of gladiators that battled teams from other houses and
prefectures in-
system, and who traveled the world and her two moons and across nearby
space to win prestige for House Mataro, for the guild, and for Emesh as a
whole.
“Must be nice,” Will agreed. “You’d think they could at least give us a
window or two.”
“It could be worse,” Marlowe said, huddled against the wall behind the
others, his eyes never straying from the door. “Half the lowtown floods
each year come monsoon season. We could be down there.”
“Fair enough,” Ghen said. “But I’m with the kid. Window’d be nice.
Don’t seem right they live in a palace and all we’ve got’s the hypogeum.”
Marlowe—who had been born on his family’s estate above the city of
Meidua—shook his head beneath his hood. “It’s not a palace, Ghen. It’s just
apartments.”
The trio fell silent a moment, each huddled beneath his cloak. Hadrian
drew the garment more tightly about himself, watched the raindrops bounce
and flow slickly off the garment. The night sweltered, even through the
rain, and what water had gotten beneath that cloak mingled with the sweat
of heat and nerves alike.
“How much longer, do you think?” Will asked.
Marlowe shook his head. Now that they had come so far to do the thing
they meant to do, he was not sure he wanted to. Perhaps the men from the
menagerie haunted him. Perhaps not. I have combed all the prefectural
records on Emesh from that time and have found no reference to the deaths
of the douleters, but I do not doubt my source.
Even if he had not done such violence, the violence ahead was enough to
give him pause.
It is no easy thing to kill a man, and harder to murder one.
“Not until the rain stops,” Marlowe said.
 “When’s that?”
The answer to William’s question came not long after. An hour, perhaps.
Little more.
The rain stopped, and as the water dripped from swollen gutters and the
flowering vines and ran down into the spillway, the man Jaffa emerged from
the side entrance. He never came through the front. As captain of the
Borosevo city gladiators, his face was known, and always there were
women and men with cameras hanging about the gates to the munerium
apartments where the great athletes had their quarters. And so it was the
captain’s custom to exit the compound by the loading dock in cap and cloak
and lose himself in the streets.
His destination was no great secret. The Rosemariner was one of the
city’s finer brothels and gambling dens, the sort reserved for men who paid
in Imperial marks, not the specied tokens—silver and gold—which were
circulated among the underclasses. Its clients were offworld bankers,
Consortium executives, the sons of nobile houses. Its girls were homunculi
designed and bred for pleasure, less than human and more than many a
human could afford.
Still Jaffa made his weekly pilgrimage. Many among the gossip writers
and holo newsies liked to say he’d fallen for one of the creatures on offer at
the Rosemariner, that he was as smitten with his inhuman sweetling as Lord
Marlowe was with his peasant whore. Others said it was the gambling that
drew him, that he made his fortune betting on his own fights.
Whatever his reason, he was there, face in shadows beneath a wide-
brimmed hat, his broad shoulders and muscled arms shrouded by a mantle
not so unlike those of the poor myrmidons who waited and composed
prayers to their knives.
“I’m not sure about this,” Will said, watching Jaffa hurry past the corner
where the vines concealed the way to the rear access.
“He killed Banks,” Marlowe said, coming off the wall.
“I know, but...”
“And Vitor.”
 “And Grell,” Ghen said. “He tried to kill us all.”
“But that’s the game, isn’t it?” Will asked, trying to slow his companions.
“Fair fight’s the game, kid,” Ghen said. “Not this cloak and dagger shit.”
“What are we doing right now?” said Will, flapping his cloak like wings.
Marlowe clutched his knife beneath his cloak. “He’s the one who
changed the rules. If he wanted a fair fight, we’d have given it to him. We
could have done this as men. He’s the one who wanted this.”
He didn’t wait for the others to follow him, but pushed past—
forcing them to choose. There are those among the scholiasts who say that a
strong man is he who forces his will on others, and that it is the weak who
are so forced, and that this—not strength of arms—is what separates great
men from lesser ones.
Drawing his sica, Marlowe pressed the point into the small of Jaffa’s
back. Before the man could swing around and pull himself away, Marlowe
wrapped an arm about his neck from behind and squeezed with all his
eugenic strength. “Don’t move,” he said.
The gladiator slammed his head back, hoping to break Marlowe’s nose,
but the myrmidon had expected that, and tucked his chin so the crown of
Jaffa’s head struck his forehead and not his nose. Wincing through the blow,
Marlowe twisted his knife. “What did I tell you?” he hissed as Ghen and
Will closed distance and joined him. “Cry out and you’re dead.”
They frogmarched the gladiator off the street back to the short alley and
down the narrow step into the spillway. Keeping his arm tight beneath the
gladiator’s jaw, Marlowe forced Jaffa along the raised path that ran
alongside the swollen watercourse toward the arched mouth of the culvert
ahead. The White District had many such spillways, and many such culverts
that pierced the wall of the acropolis that stood above the lowtown.
Marlowe—who had been a beggar in the streets of that stinking city—knew
them well, knew that the culvert ran some dozen yards before it bent and
ran down a gentle slope for half a hundred yards to an opening that dumped
the White District’s rainwater out upon the canals of lowtown.
It was precisely the cover they’d need.
 “Black Earth, it stinks in here,” Ghen said.
“Quiet!” Marlowe hissed.
“I don’t know who you think you are,” said Jaffa the gladiator. “But
you’re making a big mistake. Do you have any idea who I am?”
Marlowe shoved the man into the wall of the culvert, allowed him the
space to turn around as Ghen and William circled to hem him in. Jaffa
turned round, massaging his throat where Marlowe’s arm had chafed him.
His eyes widened when he saw Marlowe, narrowed as he said, “You lot!
Trying to thin the competition, is that it?”
“You should know!” Will said, tapping his knife against his leg in
agitation.
Jaffa did not stop squinting, but held his face—his whole person—with
deadly stillness. He was not a small man. His arms were big around as a
grown man’s head, and the tattooed shape of a kraken wound about his left
bicep, the tentacles embracing his forearm. His head was bald as Ghen’s,
white as Ghen’s was dark, and the neat spade of his beard jutted forward to
augment the strong line of his jaw.
“You don’t deny it?” Marlowe asked.
“Deny what?” Jaffa spat.
“Ghen?”
At Marlowe’s nudge, the hulking myrmidon slammed one ham-sized fist
into the belly of their foe. Jaffa doubled over, cursing more from shock than
pain. “Don’t play the fool, Jaffa. We know it was you.” Tossing back his
hood, Marlowe drew his half of the broken link from his belt, held it up for
Jaffa to see. “We paid a visit to the menagerie. Your friends were happy to
talk.”
Jaffa seemed to deflate for half a moment before he recovered his spine.
“What are you going to do? Kill me?”
“Yes.” Marlowe didn’t even hesitate. Jaffa blanched. The plain honestly
of the reply landed more sharply even than Ghen’s fist had done. “This isn’t
how the game is played. Three men are dead because you cheated, because
you couldn’t bear the thought of facing us in the arena.”
 “They would have died anyway against that megathere!” Jaffa said.
At another signal, Ghen walloped the gladiator in the belly a second time.
As Jaffa hunched and gasped for breath, Marlowe allowed, “Maybe. But
they deserved an honest chance. You thumbed the scale, and why?” The
great lord bent from his palatine height to glare in the face of the patrician
athlete. “Because you were afraid.”
The gladiator snarled and boiled off the wall, hands reaching for
Marlowe’s face. But Hadrian Marlowe raised his crooked knife and thrust
the point at Jaffa’s eyes. Panicking, the gladiator lurched back, and one
sandaled foot slipped on the damp concrete of the water walk, and he fell
sprawling amid the muck and trash that papered the culvert. Beyond the
roof and the city above their heads, the thunder rolled and cracked the sky.
Hadrian Marlowe stood above his foe, his cutthroat companions to either
side.
“You dare call me a coward?” Jaffa managed to say.
“You think it bravery?” Marlowe asked, looking to his associates. “You
would not have died fighting us. You gladiators never die. You risked only
your reputation, your combat stats. We’re the ones who risk our lives!”
Ghen chimed in, “Only fair we return the favor, I say.”
“I don’t like this,” William said, emboldened by Ghen’s injection. “Had, I
don’t like this at all.”
“Quiet,” Marlowe said, measuring his words. He did not shout. That was
the worst part. He had kept a hold of himself through the entire exchange.
Cold as the glass that holds back the void. “You could have fought fairly,”
he told the gladiator. “We could have fought as men, as we had before. Did
I not say?” He looked round at Ghen and William, who said nothing, but
did not argue. “But you chose the law of the fishes, my friend. And here we
are.” He indicated the culvert, the storm water rushing in from the
acropolis.
Jaffa spat again, spattering the hem of Marlowe’s cloak. “You gonna talk
me to death? What are you waiting for?”
“I want you to admit it,” Marlowe said, only realizing it was true as he
spoke. “I want you to say it was you.”
“So that you can sleep easy, is that it?” Jaffa laughed a rough laugh, the
sound of it playing against the stone above their heads and carrying up and
down the shaft. “Mother Earth rot your bones, lad. Kill me, if you have the
stones for it.”
“Ghen?”
The big man advanced to strike Jaffa a third time, but the gladiator
lurched aside and sprang to his feet, hand rushing for a knife of his own that
had stayed concealed beneath his rain cloak until that very moment.
He never reached it.
Hadrian Marlowe plunged the bent point of his knife into the meat of the
man’s shoulder, felt the printed steel grind on bone and the hot welling of
blood as it soaked Jaffa’s tunic front. Stepping forward, Marlowe drove his
shoulder into the man’s chest, pinning his questing arm with his free hand
as he torqued the hilt up to twist the crooked dagger down into Jaffa’s heart.
The gladiator’s eyes bulged as he struggled, but strong as he was, Marlowe
was stronger, and Marlowe’s strength was not running red down his chest.
Ghen and Will of Danu both stepped in to help their friend, but the damage
was already done.
Jaffa slid down the mossy wall of the culvert, his jaw already slack, as
Will pulled his friend away from the dying man. Marlowe drew the knife
out as he staggered back, feet splashing in the stream of the culvert. Jaffa
shuddered, coughed blood down the front of his tunic. Marlowe’s knife had
found not just the heart, but a lung as well. Just as his sword had slain the
megathere.
He never stood again, though his chest rose and shuddered, breath
bubbling as his eyes—two chips of ice, it seemed—locked on his killer’s
face.
Marlowe never moved. Never blinked. None could deny his courage,
even in the face of horror.
But his virtue?
That I deny.
 AFTERWORD

THANK YOU FOR READING! I hope you enjoyed this collection of short stories
from the Sun Eater Universe. Kindly consider leaving a review on Amazon
and/or Goodreads, and keep your eyes peeled for Volume 2, which should
be out some time in AD 2022.
The book’s not quite finished yet. Turn the page for a couple glossaries if
you want to refresh your memory. If this was your first foray into the Sun
Eater Universe, I hope you’ll check out my other titles! Hadrian Marlowe’s
story begins in Empire of Silence.
Check out my Amazon Author Page here:
https://www.amazon.com/Christopher-Ruocchio/e/B07FZX5GSD/.
For more information on the Sun Eater Universe, or to join my
newsletter, visit https://www.sollanempire.com.
 LEXICON

Here follows a glossary of the various technical terms or items referenced

in these stories which might be unfamiliar to a reader of our prehistoric era.
Several of these terms are borrowed from ancient Greek or Latin, in which
instances their updated definition has been provided.

abstraction: The process by which members of the Exalted remove

themselves from humanity through technological modification.
androgyn: A homunculus exhibiting either neither or both male and female
sex characteristics.
archon: Lowest rank of the Imperial noble hierarchy, ruling over a
planetary prefecture. Either a posted or an inherited position.
azhdarch: A xenobite predator common in the Colosso, like a lizard with a
long neck open from top to bottom in a fanged mouth.
Baron/baroness: Lowest rank of the Imperial palatine nobility. Rules a
planetary demesne. Title may be passed on through inheritance.
bastille: Any Chantry judicial and penal center, usually attached to a temple
sanctum.
bonecutter: A black market genetics surgeon, not sanctioned by the High
College.
breeding loom: A device for sequencing genomes and tailoring embryos,
especially human embryos, for gestation.
bromos: A protein-rich strain of engineered hyper-oat that serves as the
basis for ration bars and as protein base for artificial meat
 production.
cathar: A surgeon-torturer employed by the Holy Terran Chantry.
centurion: A rank in the Imperial Legions, commands a
century.
century: In the Imperial Legions, a unit comprising ten decades (100 men).
Chantry: See Holy Terran Chantry.
chiliad: In the Imperial Legions, a unit comprising ten centuries (1000
men).
Cielcin: Spacefaring alien species. Humanoid and carnivorous.
Colosso: A series of sporting events held in a coliseum involving
professional gladiators, slave myrmidons, animals, races, and
more.
colossus: Any huge mobile artillery unit, especially those designed to walk
on legs. May be several hundred feet tall.
commandant: The leader of a private mercenary company.
Consortium: The Wong-Hopper Consortium. The largest of the Mandari
interstellar corporations, specializing in terrforming
technologies.
cubiculum: A chamber where persons are kept in cryonic fugue, usually
aboard a starship.
daimon: An artificial intelligence. Sometimes erroneously applied to non-
intelligent computer systems.
Dark: Space. In the Chantry religion, a place of desolation and torment.
datasphere: Any planetary data network. In the Empire, access is strictly
restricted to the patrician and palatine caste.
decurion: A rank in the Imperial Legions, commands a decade (10 men).
demon: Chantry religious language. A xenobite.
demoniac: A person who has incorporated machines into their bodies,
particularly with the intent of altering their cognitive processes.
douleter: A slave overseer or trader.
egrandi: Any of a genus of tree-like organisms native to the planet
Epidamnus. Can grow up to nine hundred feet high.
Emperor: The supreme ruler of the Sollan Empire, considered a god and
the reincarnation of his/her predecessor. Holds absolute power.
Exalted: A faction among the Extrasolarians noted for their extreme
cybernetic augmentations.
Extrasolarian: Any of the barbarians living outside Imperial control, often
possessing illegal praxis.
flier: A flying vehicle about the size of a groundcar, used for in-atmosphere
flight and rapid travel. A shuttle.
foederatus: A mercenary.
fugue: The state of cryonic suspension induced to ensure humans and other
living creatures survive the long journey between suns.
gladiator: Professional fighting athletes in the Colosso.
glowsphere: A spherical, bright light source floating on Royse repulsors,
battery or chemically powered.
groundcar: An automobile, usually powered by internal combustion or
solar power.
High College: Imperial political office tasked with reviewing palatine
requests for children and with overseeing the pregnancies of
same.
highmatter: A form of exotic matter produced by alchemists. Used to
make the swords of Imperial knights, which can cut almost
 anything.
hightower: An elevator designed to lift cargo from the surface of a planet
to orbit and vice versa.
Holy Terran: State religion of the Sollan Empire. Functions as the judicial
arm of the state, especially where the use of forbidden
technology is involved.
homunculus: Any artificial human or near-human, especially those grown
for a task, or for aesthetic purposes.
hoplite: A shielded foot soldier. Heavy infantry.
hypogeum Chantry: The underground maintenance and housing complex
beneath a coliseum. More generally, any underground complex.
Imperium: See Sollan Empire.
inquisitor: A Chantry official tasked with conducting judicial
investigations and overseeing the torture of criminals.
intus: A palatine born outside the oversight of the High College, usually
possessing several physical or psychological defects; a bastard.
jubala: A powerful and popular offworld narcotic. Can be inhaled or
ingested in a kind of tea.
kaspum: Silver coin used among the Imperial peasant classes. 12 kaspums
make 1 gold hurasam. Print notes for various denominations
exist.
knighthood: Sollan military honor conferred by the nobility for services
rendered, usually includes a small fief. May carry highmatter
weapons.
Legion Intelligence Office: The Empire’s military intelligence, espionage,
and foreign intervention agency.
legionnaire: Any soldier in the Imperial Legions, especially the common
 foot soldier.
lighter: Any starship small enough to make landfall on a planet.
MAG: Refers to the class of magnetic acceleration weapons, either
handheld, artillery, or naval.
magus: An intellectual, most especially a scientist or natural philosopher.
Mandari: An ethnic group semi-detached from Imperial society, most
commonly found staffing the massive interstellar trading
corporations.
manticore: A species of large, venomous, insectoid predators common in
baiting events in the Colosso.
megathere: A massive, four-eyed predator native to the planet Epidamnus.
Mericanii: The ancient first interstellar colonists. A hyper-advanced
technologic civilization run by artificial intelligences. Destroyed
by the Empire.
munerium: The living quarters of a team of gladiators, usually attached to
a coliseum or on the coliseum grounds.
myrmidon: In the Colosso, any contract or slave fighter not a
professionally trained gladiator.
nobile: Blanket term referring to any member of the palatine and patrician
castes in the Sollan Empire.
Norman: Any citizen of the worlds of the Norman Expanse, especially one
descended from the first wave of settlers.
ophid: A large, serpentine creature commonly pitted against gladiators in
Colosso.
outcaste: In Imperial society, any former member of the palatine or
patrician castes stripped of their station. May also refer to
similar persons in Jadd.
palatine: The Imperial aristocracy, descended from those free humans who
opposed the Mericanii. Genetically enhanced, they may live for
several centuries.
panegyrist: A Chantry priest tasked with performing the call to prayer at
sundown.
paracoita: A female slave kept for the purposes of sexual gratification.
patrician: Any plebeian or plutocrat awarded with genetic augmentations
at the behest of the palatine caste as a reward for services
rendered.
peltast: An unshielded foot soldier. Light infantry.
Phase disruptor: A sort of firearm that attacks the nervous system. Can
stun on lower settings.
Plasma burner: A firearm which uses a strong loop of magnetic force to
project an arc of super-heated plasma across short to moderate
distances.
praetor: A judge or magistrate, especially one enrolled in the clergy of the
Holy Terran Chantry.
prefect: A law enforcement officer.
prefecture: In the Sollan Empire, any administrative district ruled by an
archon.
profanation: One of the Twelve Abominations. The mingling of human
flesh with machine implants or prostheses, especially in cases
where such modifications transcend ordinary human function.
repulsor: A device which makes use of the Royse Effect to allow objects to
float without disturbing the air or environment.
Royal Victorian Knights: A fraternal order of knights owing allegiance to
the Imperial House Avent.
Royse Effect: A method discovered by Caelan Royse for manipulating the
electroweak force. Allows for the existence of force fields and
repulsors.
Royse field: Any force field making use of the Royse Effect to stop high-
velocity objects from penetrating their energy curtain.
scholiast: Any member of the monastic order of researchers, academics,
and theoreticians tracing their origins to the Mericanii scientists
captured at the end of the Foundation War.
scutum: A tall, rectangular shield, usually of alumglass, used by urban
prefects and gladiators.
secutor: A class of gladiator or myrmidon distinguished by its large shield
and short sword.
sirrah: An honorific used to refer to one’s social inferiors, usually males.
SOM: The lobotomized shell of a human being animated by machines,
used for slave labor and as soldiers by the Extrasolarians.
stunner: See Phase disruptor.
Suppression field: A Royse Effect field designed to simulate gravity.
terranic: In terraforming and ecology, refers to any organism of Old Earth
extraction. Not extraterrestrial.
trias: A unit of three legionnaires, usually two peltasts and one hoplite.
Twelve Abominations: The twelve most grievous sins according to the
Chantry. Legal privileges do not apply in such cases.
venator: Any member of the first wave of colonists on a planet. May
sometimes refer to the entire colonial fleet or operation.
vilicus: The head of a team of douleters; chief overseer.
Writ: The Chantry’s legal and moral code, enforced by the inquisition and
the index.
xenobite: Any life form not originating in terranic or human stock,
especially those life forms which are considered intelligent; an
alien.
zvanya: A cinnamon-flavored distilled alcohol popular in Jadd.
 INDEX OF WORLDS

Here follows a list of the various planets in the Sun Eater universe
mentioned in these stories.

Arae: An uninhabited world in the Norman Expanse. Notably the site of the
Battle of Arae, where Hadrian Marlowe and his Red Company
defeated the Dardanine mercenaries and the Extrasolarians they
served.
Aramis: An Imperial agricultural colony in Sagittarius. Its star is dim, so it
uses orbital mirrors to intensify the sunlight and make the planet
livable.
Danu: A major Duchy in the Centaurus Arm, most notable in Lord
Marlowe’s account as the birthplace of his friend William, called
Switch.
Elos: A world renowned for its particle foundries.
Emesh: A watery world in the Veil of Marinus, seat of House Mataro.
Home of the coloni Umandh and the subterranean ruins at
Calagah. Originally a Norman colony.
Epidamnus: An Imperial County in the Sagittarius Arm, formerly a center
for trade and home to the predatory megatheres.
Forum: The capital of the Sollan Empire. A gas giant with a breathable
atmosphere in whose cloud belt are several flying palace cities
that serve as the administrative hub of the Imperium.
Jadd: The planet of fire, sacred capital of the Jaddian Principalities, on
 whose soil none shall tread
without the express permission of the High Prince.
Janeiro: A Norman freehold in the Expanse, annexed by the Empire.
Kanthi: A Norman freehold in the Veil of Marinus.
Maglona: A well-terraformed Imperial colony in the Perseus.
Nagapur: An Imperial trading post in the Centaurus,
stationed on the route between Gododdin and
Nessus.
Nagramma: A Norman freehold settled primarily by Cid
Arthurian religious refugees.
Nessus: Seat of the Centaurine Magnarchate and capital of the Sollan
Imperial provinces in the Arm of Centaurus.
Norman Expanse: The frontier of human settlement in the Norma Arm of
the Milky Way, near to the galactic core.
Old Earth: Birthplace of the human species. A nuclear ruin and victim of
environmental collapse.
Orden: A planet with an Imperial Legion training academy.
Ostama: An Imperial feudal demesne in the Sagittarius.
Phaia: A world renowned for its highmatter sword craftsmen.
Pharos: A Norman freehold ruled for a time by Marius Whent, an ex-
Imperial legate defeated by Hadrian Marlowe during his time as
a mercenary.
Principalities of Jadd: Nation of eighty former Imperial provinces in
Perseus that revolted over palatine reproductive rights. Heavily
militaristic and caste-driven.
Sarmatia: A minor imperial world in the Upper Perseus, ruled by House
Flavian.
Sollan Empire: The largest and oldest single polity in human-
controlled space, comprising some half a billion habitable
planets.
Spur of Orion: The first arm of the galaxy settled by humankind, site of
Old Earth. North of Perseus, but south of Sagittarius and
Centaurus. Comprises the core of the Sollan Empire.
Tavros: The primary planet of the Demarchy of Tavros, settled by a mix of
Nordic, Indian, and ethnic Thai peoples ahead of the wave of
Imperial
expansion in a region high above the galaxy’s ecliptic.
Upper Perseus: Those portions of the Perseus Arm of the galaxy nearer the
core, comprising a contested frontier zone between the Sollan
Empire, the Principalities of Jadd, and the Lothrian
Commonwealth.
Vorgossos: A mythical extrasolarian world orbiting a brown dwarf, said to
be a Mecca for the black market genetics trade. Formerly a
hideout for the Exalted, presided over now by a warlord known
as the Undying.