“Verdict?”
“My goodman, do I look like your valet?”
“No. She was much fairer. With better bedside manner.”
“Adorable, pretending you just had one.”
I raise an eyebrow. “You should talk, prince of Mars.”
Cassius au Bellona grunts. “So are you going to sleep the day away, or get up and see for yourself?” He nods for me to follow; I do, as I have for ten years. I smell whiskey in his wake.
Once, the worlds called Cassius the Morning Knight, protector of the Society, slayer of Ares. Then he murdered his Sovereign, my grandmother, and let the Rising tear down the very Society he swore to protect. He let Darrow destroy my world and bring chaos to the Society. I can never forgive him for that, but neither can I repay the debt I owe him. He kept Sevro au Barca from killing me. He pulled me from the ashes of Luna and the chaos that followed, and for ten years he has protected me, given me a home, a second family.
We could be mistaken for brothers and often are. Our hair has that same luster of gold, though his is curled and mine straight. My eyes are pale as yellow crystal. His are dark gold. He’s half a head taller than I, and broader in the shoulders and manlier in the features—a thick, pointed beard, a prominent bold nose, where my face is thin and patrician, like most from the Palatine Hill. I wish I did not look so delicate.
My name is Lysander au Lune. I was named for a contradiction: a Spartan general who had the mind of an Athenian. Like that man, I was born into something that is both mine and not-mine, a heritage of worldbreakers and tyrants. Seven hundred years after my ancestor Silenius au Lune conquered Earth, I was born the son of Brutus au Arcos and Anastasia au Lune, heir to empire. Now that empire is a fractured, sick land so drunk on war and political upheaval it’s likely to devour itself in my lifetime. But that is no longer my inheritance. When I was a boy, the day after the fall of House Lune, Cassius bent on a knee and told me his noble mission. “Gold forgot it was intended to shepherd, not rule. I reject my life and honor that duty: to protect the People. Will you join me?”
I had no family left. My home was at war. I was afraid. And, more than that, I wanted to be good. So I said yes and for the last ten years we have patrolled the fringes of civilization, protecting those who cannot protect themselves in the Reaper’s new world. Roving between asteroids and backwater docks in the Asteroid Belt as the spheres change around us and war rages in the Core. Cassius brought us here in search of redemption, but no matter how many traders we save from pirates, or foundered ships we rescue, his eyes remain dark, and I still dream of the demons from my past.
I pull on a moth-eaten gray pullover and weave my way barefoot through the ship after Cassius, running my hands alon
g the walls. “Hello, girl,” I say. “You’re sounding tired today.” The Archimedes is an old fifty-meter Whisper-class corvette of the once-great Ganymede Dockyards, with three guns and engines fast enough to push her from Mars to the Belt in under four weeks at near-orbit. Shaped like a reared cobra head, she’s made for scouting, raids. A hundred years ago she was top of the line, but she’s seen better days. The larger part of my adolescent chores was scrubbing rust from the inside hull, oiling her gears, and patching her electrical innards.
But for all that tending, it’s the Archi’s scars I love the most. Little beauty marks that make her our home. A dent under the kitchen’s oven where Cassius fell and struck his head when drinking long ago—after news reached us of Darrow and Virginia’s wedding. Charred ceiling panels made by the fire that Pytha started when she brought me a birthday pie when I was twelve and put the candles too close to a leaking oxygen pipe. Scratches on the walls of the razor training room. So many memories here woven together like those poems above my bed.
I enter the cozy, ovular cockpit. There is room for a pilot and two recessed seats for observation. Its original military lighting has been stripped out and replaced by warmer nodes. A thick Andalusian rug covers the floor. Several rows of mint and jasmine grow atop the console, presents I acquired for Pytha from a Violet’s streetside botany shop in the Hanging Market on Ceres. Incense from the Erebian Mountains not far from Cassius’s family home on Mars burns in the corner. Cassius and Pytha, our Blue pilot, peer out the cockpit windows.
Outside is the cargo hauler that drew us off our course to Lacrimosa Station. We were en route for ship repairs after last month’s skirmish with Martian scar hunters when we received the distress signal from the Gulf between Republic space and Rim territory.
I told Cassius it was too dangerous to investigate so low on provisions.
But his heart guides us more than his head these days.
The ship out the viewport is a giant cube five hundred meters at the edge. Most of her decks are exposed to vacuum by design, while superstructure lattice holds together thousands of cargo containers. Her tag IDs her as the Vindabona out of the trade hub Ceres. She sits adrift and dark—a very odd, very dangerous thing in the Gulf. Several wild asteroids the size of cities float between us, ice crystals on their surfaces winking in the dark. We used one to mask our approach. The Vindabona’s civilian instruments would never detect a military ship like ours in this briar patch, but it’s not the hauler that worries me. I scan the sensors for ghosts in the darkness.
“Well, she’s a deepspace mulebitch, all right,” Pytha murmurs in a monotone delivery that erodes punctuation and inflection. “Probably packing a hundred million credits of iron. Slag me but that’s a crew I’d like to be on.”
“Must you swear so early in the morning?” I ask.
“Shit, sorry, moon boy. Forgot to mind my fucking manners.” Pytha is in her late fifties, with distant, pale blue eyes and skin the color of a walnut. Like all Blues, she still harbors the neurodevelopmental sculpting that enhances human-to-computer interaction but impairs communication outside her sect. She doesn’t have the social niceties of the Palatine shuttle pilots.
My teacher grimaces. “Crew will make scratch,” he says. “Captain might get a share to keep him loyal, but that’s a hundred million credits of some trade lord’s coin floating out there.”
“A share, you say. What a novel idea for a captain to snag a share…” Pytha says.
“Pity you’re a pilot and not a captain.”
“Come now, Bellona. Between you and moon boy over here, you’ve got to have a dozen secret vaults. Why else do you think I signed up? Certainly wasn’t your chiseled chin, dominus.” She says the word sarcastically. “I’m sure you eagles have squirreled away some chit in hidden nests.” Pytha snorts a strange little laugh to herself and looks back to the datastream as letters and symbols trickle past. The untrained ear would hear the Martian drawl in her voice and be done with it. But I catch the spice of Thessalonica, that city of grapes and duels that sprawls white and hot by Mars’s Thermic Sea. Best known for the short tempers of its citizenry and the long list of deeds done by its most illustrious sons, the blackguard Brothers Rath.
That Thessalonican swagger is likely what got her expelled from the Midnight School and reduced to smuggling before her path crossed ours eight years ago. When Cassius learned she was Martian, he freed her from the brig of a mining city where she was imprisoned for a smuggling offense, and she’s worked for us ever since. I’ve certainly learned new words since she came aboard.
Bald and barefoot, Pytha leans back in the pilot’s chair, sipping coffee from the plastic dinosaur mug I won her in an arcade on Phobos years back. She’s in gray cotton pants and wears her old sweatshirt. Her limbs are thin as a grasshopper’s, the right bent under her, the left hanging off the side of the chair, which is shaped like half of a hard-boiled quail egg with the yolk scooped out. A second skin of stickers and decals from children’s video games festoons its gray metal backside. The ship may belong to Cassius, but Pytha’s left her mark.
“Sander, what do you think?” My teacher looks back at me.
I examine the ship out the viewport.
Cassius sighs. “Out loud.”