I watch him for a moment. “The Pink isn’t here.”
He frowns. “And…what does that mean?”
“You’re sweet on her. Why else would you be so nice to me?”
“Shall I be rude?” he flirts and I blush. “Is that your bent?” He sighs. “Maybe that’s the fashion now. Haven’t been back to Mars in an age.”
“No,” I say. “It’s just…I know who you are.”
A cloud appears over him, dimming his features. “And who’s that?”
“You…well. You’re the Betrayer. The Turncloak. You let Darrow into the Dragonmaw to strike down Octavia the Tyrant. And…you killed Ares.”
“I did.” He pauses. “A long time ago.” He looks sad now. Maybe for a moment he thought someone didn’t know of his infamy. Maybe for a moment he thought he got to make his own first impression. He’s so downcast that I feel a kinship with him, a need to lift him up. How many times did others change when they learned I was a Gamma?
“They chose to be a Gold and a Blue, so they left,” I say. “You’re still here.” He looks at me with twinkling eyes. “Could use the company while I see about that plate. You can tell me about the Archimedes, and my job. I want to be a good hand. I won’t be dead weight. I can’t be.”
He considers. “Do you drink whiskey?”
“Red eyes. One-hundred-forty-proof blood.”
He looks up as if to heaven. “Finally, some decent company. You have a callsign already?”
“Red Banshee,” I say.
“It’s rude to start a friendship with lies,” he replies. “What is it really? You can be honest with me.”
I grimace. “Truffle Pig.”
“Oh dear.” A smile creeps across his face. “You really shouldn’t have told me that.”
43
LYSANDER
Fragment of Immensity
THREE AND A HALF weeks into our race back to Ilium, Diomedes extends an unexpected and remarkable invitation to join him on the bridge of the Dustmaker.
I smile at the stoic guards as I ride the lift from the rear of the ship where my handful of Praetorians and I bunk. I must be the first Core Gold to receive such an invitation in decades. More and more I believe I have a true partner in my quest for Rim and Core unity.
Diomedes may be taciturn in our weekly dinners with his officers, but he’s allowed my Praetorians to train with his Lightning Phalanx, and given them dispensation to use the solariums, gardens, and lap pools usually reserved for veteran Rim Grays. Even Rhone softens in his opinion of the Rim after a hard drill and a good swim, though the food is still not up to my dragoons’ standards.
Behind a kill zone and an immense door, the brain of the Rim vessel bustles like a busy, well-behaved library. In life, the Colors operating the ship may have personalities, wants. But at work in this ship, they are biological cogs in an immense vessel of war within an immense fleet within an immense military within an immense civilization spanning from the moons of Jupiter all the way out to Pluto. They seem to take a measure of comfort in their relative insignificance, or perhaps it is the pride in knowing they are an essential part in an effort so massive. The Core could learn from them.
In terms of territory, the Rim is the second largest empire that has ever existed, save the Society when the Rim was in the fold. With awesome size comes logistics of impenetrable complexity. One artificial intelligence of sufficient computing power could run it in macro, of course, but that would be a gross violation of our humanistic principles. Instead, billions of humans work in concert, each suited to their task—those tasks foreign and opaque to any other Color—like fish to water. It makes me feel at peace in the center of this small but powerful fragment of their civilization, and it solidifies my belief in the Republic’s cancerous effect on the harmonious system our ancestors built.
Men like Volsung Fá only exist because of what Darrow began.
I summon the Mind’s Eye as I enter the bridge. My senses, now focused, produce a theater of texture and sound and detail. But it’s the blackheads on the nose of the Gold woman in milky white armor, and the baritone grumble of her thick throat, that overwhelm me. She is a destroyer. Huge, hard, violent. I stare at her like an urchin struck by the thunderbolt of Zeus.
“I am the bridge kidemónas. You have been given the honor of breathing beneath the gaze of Akari.” I let go the Mind’s Eye, and glance up to see an iron relief of the dead Gold staring down at me from the ceiling of the bridge. “You will submit your razor to my keeping.”
I submit it readily.
“A personal note.” She leans forward. “That blitz on Phobos. Simple. Rude. Effective. Proper iron.” She kisses her fist and punches her chest. “Behave, gahja. I would have more feats of renown from you.” I assure her she will, and request her name.
“Ophelia au Zagra.”
“Au Zagra, first into the breach on Deimos.” She nods as if annoyed by her rising fame, then waves me on. “The simulation will conclude soon. Stand there.”
Above an expanse of sunken pit crews that encircle a raised triangular platform, Diomedes commands the Dustmaker. He is surrounded by war—holograms filled with starships on fire. His left hand is sheathed in Helios’s god glove. It is bizarre seeing a man other than Helios wearing it.
The Cestus allows the Gold wielder to assume command of the ship’s major systems. It’s a mobile bridge, but if your DNA isn’t on file and you put your hand in the Cestus, they say it’s a death four times worse than death by fire. How they measure that, I have no idea.
The Cestus doesn’t beam an interface up toward Diomedes. Instead, his display is a constellation of free-floating globes navigated with a subtle twitching of his fingers. The Cestus is mostly ceremonial. It is far more efficient and precise to leave the running of the ship to the crew.
Watching the crew, I feel as if I am watching a dance. That is how the Rim battles. They rely on speed, surprise, elegant attack runs, not the brute strength common in the Core. It reminds me of Cassius’s razor lessons.
With a pang of nostalgia for the idle days I spent with Cassius on the Archimedes, I watch from the back of the bridge as the Blue and Green crew successfully fends off the wave of Ascomanni boarders until the command deck’s holograms fade and the lights brighten. The performance seemed splendid, but not to Diomedes’s exacting standards. Still, he thanks them for their efforts over the last two weeks he’s been in command, and the view screens return to displaying the view fed to the buried bridge by the cameras on the prow of the ship. We are almost through the vast emptiness of the Gulf. Jupiter hangs in the distance, as small as a drop of amber.
Diomedes motions me to join him on the command triangle. “They think my palms are sweating in the Cestus,” he says of the crew.
“Are they?”
He looks at the Cestus. “To be the master of so much power is to be trapped by it. I prefer my destroyer. To be a dragon rather than a volcano.”
With Helios running ahead of the main armada with his torchShip recon squadrons, Diomedes has been entrusted with the command of the Dustmaker. It is a stupendous sign of confidence from Helios.