“The place is crawling with distress signals,” Cassius says. “Doesn’t mean anyone’s alive.”
“This one is a heartbeat,” she says.
“And why didn’t the Obsidians pick it up?” Sevro asks.
“It’s short-range, whoever’s sending it must have waited until after they left,” Aurae says.
I look at Sevro. “You know our old braves. Do you really want to go deeper into the system blind?” He might be a pit of anger, but he doesn’t want to die out here either. “Aurae, pin the location. Cassius—”
“If you say ‘fly like an eagle,’ I am turning this ship around,” he says and pushes the Archimedes into the debris field. “Watch and learn, Lyria.” He winks at her. A piece of debris hits the hull. We all wince. “Starting now.”
* * *
—
The escape pod is shaped like an egg. Instead of escaping the battle as its pilot no doubt intended, it found itself embedded into the side of a dead destroyer’s hull. It is severely damaged. Sevro and I space walk out to it in our new Godkiller suits and cut open its hatch. Sevro enters first.
“We got a breather,” he says as I push my way into the pod behind him. “Barely.” The pod’s power is almost gone and its interior dark except for the glow of our headlamps. A single man floats covered head to toe in gray armor, his legs crossed in a seated position. “Big bastard. Gold no doubt.” Sevro peers around the pod collecting clues and wiggles a tube sticking into a port in the back of the man’s helmet. “He’s hooked directly to the shuttle’s oxygen reserves, what’s left of them. Probably brain dead by now. You saw the damage to the tanks outside. My guess: he tried coms, engine control, found they were slagged and saw his juice was running out so he put this kit on to keep the cold out, and went to sleep praying someone would find him.”
I find a few more kits of armor in a concealed rack. One is missing.
“It’s a bridge pod, looks like,” I say. “Lots of Gold-sized kits. That’s good. If he’s not brain dead, he’ll likely have a better idea of what happened than someone in the belly of a ship. Let’s get him back to the Archi.”
* * *
—
Sevro and I haul the lone survivor back to the Archimedes where we load him onto a medical gurney brought by Lyria and Aurae. Aurae is about to connect an oxygen recycler into his helmet when Sevro swats her hand away. “You stupid?” he asks.
I clarify. “Let’s get him out of his armor before we feed an enemy knight O2. Lyria, get the fusion cutter eight-millimeter. You know where it is?”
She’s already off to the machine shop. We hear a clanging, a banging, and a string of curses, then Lyria returns at a run. She tosses the fusion cutter to Sevro who gets to work on the armor. He’s not precise in his cuts, and the Gold’s blood dribbles liberally onto the gurney.
With every piece of armor Sevro cuts off, my grip tightens further on the hilt of my razor because it becomes more and more apparent that whomever we’ve saved is no rear echelon pixie. His arms are brawny. His legs thick and muscled from high gravity training. His chest like a barrel and his shoulders as wide as my own. And then, after Sevro cuts off his thermal body sleeve, there are the scars on the man’s pale skin. Not so many as I have, but enough to make a Gray leatherneck dip his head in respect. This is a frontline Peerless. A killer.
“Manacles,” I say.
Sevro is far ahead of me. When the man is secured, Sevro works on his helmet. It comes off with a pop and only a little spritz of blood. My own concentration on the tiny bristles embedded in the man’s hands is so intense I nearly miss Aurae’s intake of breath when Sevro wipes the man’s black-gold hair away from his face.
The man’s armor may be nondescript, but his heritage is unmistakable. It is like looking at a brawnier, gloomier, manlier version of either Atlas or Romulus au Raa. But unlike either of the famous brothers, this man is young and trends toward muscle.
“Is that who I think it is?” I ask.
Aurae takes a moment before nodding. “Only if you think it’s Diomedes au Raa.” Sevro looks up at her and casually puts the fusion cutter to Diomedes’s muscled neck. I swat it away, but Sevro was watching for Aurae’s reaction.
“What are you doing?” I ask him.
“He attacked Phobos,” Sevro says, still looking at Aurae.
“I thought you didn’t read the data packets.”
“Only the relevant ones,” he replies. “But I got all the data I need.” He tosses the fusion cutter to the side. “Information. Leverage. Hostage exchange. Use your head, Darrow. Why would I cut his throat? Aurae, aren’t you going to give your old master oxygen?”
Aurae puts the mask to Diomedes’s mouth. Sevro raises his eyebrows at me.
* * *
—
“Here’s what. We start skinning the Raa’s toes first,” Sevro says a few hours later. Diomedes has gained consciousness, and he’s not talking yet. Sevro has one of his knives out and leans back in one of the lounge’s sofas, his voice soft as if telling a children’s story. “You always start with the digits. I have made a paring knife that will do just fine. There’s lots of nerves in the toes. The most sensitive are under the cuticles. After we flay his toesies, we’ll salt them. Then we’ll bash them, right? One by one. Then I’ll use Tickler here and we’ll work our way up.”
He seems to relish the looks of horror on the faces of Cassius, Lyria, and Aurae, but I know he’s just winding them up, especially Aurae, to test how loyal to her former master she still might be. “Bellona, you have any acid on board?”
Cassius looks mortally offended. “I beg your pardon?”
“Acid. Hydrocloric or ipsoric are best. Naturally I prefer newt venom, but I didn’t see any aquariums on board. Unless you’re hiding them. Are you?” he asks Cassius, but watches Aurae.
“No.”
“Pity. Hear Raa are tough. Might take ipsoric.”
The excitement on the Archimedes after discovering the identity of our new prisoner is palpable. Unfortunately, he’s as silent as granite and just as unyielding. I questioned Diomedes about Kalyke. He stared back at me, unspeaking, unblinking except when I mentioned the toxin still in his bloodstream. An unknown compound that seems to be responsible for the fits of cramping that occasionally wrack the man. I’d think it a poison from an Ascomanni weapon, but the tiny hairlike thorns Aurae extracted from his fingers and face would suggest otherwise. Sevro was part right in his earlier diagnosis. Diomedes was paralyzed before he somehow got on the pod, then he must have recovered to turn on his beacon and armor up. After that, he must have gone into some sort of meditative trance to reduce his oxygen intake, because he should be dead.
What in the bloodydamn worlds went on around Kalyke?
“There will be no skinning, bashing, or salting on my ship,” Cassius says. He glances at Aurae for support. Since Kalyke she’s drawn inward. Doubly so since Diomedes was brought aboard. I’m hardly the only one who has noticed.
“All the same, I’d prefer to have answers for Kalyke before we get to Io,” I say.