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

“Can you hear me?” it asks.

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

“Are you a god?”

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

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

“I flew in through the bridge.”

“Alone from the Abyss?”

“With a companion.”

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

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

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

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

The heat drill continues melting the door of its own accord. And in its center forms a hole. Through it I can see men and women dying. Blood sizzles on the overheated metal.

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

“Mothermercy …”

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

We lock eyes and he addresses me.

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

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

I’m pissing my bloodydamn suit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They trade my kind.” I had forgotten. It is Julii ships that carry Obsidian slaves across the abyss. They know to fear the speared sun of Victra’s family crest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

22

FIRE BLOSSOM

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

The proud-shouldered Blue comes forward past her fellows. At first, I thought the tattoos on her hands featured floral lines. Then I note a stream of mathematical notations: the Larmor formula. Maxwell’s equations in curved-space time. Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory. And a hundred others that even I don’t recognize.

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

“ ‘Boy’?” I ask.

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

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

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

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

“Orion Xe Aquarii.”

“That’s a boy’s name,” Sevro says.