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“Well, do it in your bunk, Stained. That’s an order,” I say, hating the master’s words as soon as they come from my mouth.
Reluctantly, he nods his head and slips silently down the hall. I watch him go as the door hisses closed. I turn to find Mustang inspecting my suite. It’s more wood and stone than metal, the walls carved and worked with woodland scenes. Strange the efforts these people go to in order to make themselves feel part of history and not a piece of the future.
“Sevro must pissed he’s not the only one lurking behind you anymore.”
“Sevro’s grown up a bit since you last saw him. He even sleeps in beds.”
She laughs at that. “Well Ragnar was so adamant I go away that I thought you might have company.”
“You know I don’t use Pinks.”
“It’s big,” she says of the suite. “Six rooms for little old you. Aren’t you going to offer me something to drink?”
“Would you—”
“No, thank you.” She tells the room’s controls to play music. Mozart. “But you don’t really like music, do you?”
“Not this sort. It’s … stuffy.”
“Stuffy? Mozart was a rebel, a brigand of monolithic genius! A breaker of all that was stuffy.”
I shrug. “Maybe. But then the stuffy people got ahold of him.”
“You’re such a roughneck sometimes. I thought that Pink of yours—Theodora? Thought she would have managed to feed you some culture. So what do you like, then?” She runs her hands along a carving of a wolf leading its pack. “Not that electronic madness the Howlers thump their heads to, I hope. Makes sense that the Greens came up with that … it’s like listening to a robot having a seizure.”
“Have much experience with robots?” I ask as she moves around the Victory Armor in a room off to the side of the entry hall. The Sovereign gave it to the Ash Lord when he burned Rhea. Mustang’s fingers play over the frost-hued metal.
“Father’s Oranges and Greens had a few robots in their engineering labs. Ancient, rusted things that Father had refurbished and put in the museums.” She laughs to herself. “He used to take me there back when I wore dresses and my mother was still alive. Absolutely detested the things. I remember Mother laughing about his paranoia, especially when Adrius tried restarting one of the combat models from Eurasia. Father was convinced that robots would have overthrown man and now rule the Solar System if Earth’s empires had never been destroyed.”
I snort out a laugh.
“What?” she asks.
“I’m just …” I catch my breath. “I’m trying to imagine the great ArchGovernor Augustus having nightmares of robots.” Another bout of laughter seizes me. “Does he suppose they’d want more oil? More vacation time?”
Mustang watches me, amused. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” My laughter gradually subsides. I hold my stomach. “I’m fine.” I can’t stop grinning. “Is he afraid of aliens too?”
“I never asked him.” She taps the armor. “But they’re out there, you know.”
I stare at her. “That’s not in the archives.”
“Oh, no no. I mean we’ve never found any. But the Drake-Roddenberry equation suggests the mathematic probability is N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L. Where R* is the average rate of star formation in our galaxy, where fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets … You’re not even listening anymore.”
“What do you suppose they would think of us?” I ask. “Of man?”
“I suppose they would think we’re beautiful, strange, and inexplicably horrible to one another.” She points down a hall. “Is that the training room?” She flips off her slippers and walks away down a marble hall, casting a look back at me over her shoulder. I follow. Lights come mutedly to life as we pass. She slips ahead faster than I care to follow. I find her moments later in the center of the circular training room. The white mat is soft under my feet. Carvings line the wooden walls. “The House of Grimmus is an old one,” she says, pointing to a frieze of a man in armor. “You can see the Ash Lord’s first ancestor there. Aucus au Grimmus, the first Gold to touch land in the Iron Rain that took the American eastern seaboard after one of Cassius’s ancestors, forget his name, broke through the Atlantic Fleet. Then there is Vitalia au Grimmus, the Great Witch, right there.” She turns to me. “Do you even know the history of the things you try to break?”
“It was Scipio au Bellona who defeated the Atlantic Fleet.”
“Was it?” she asks.
“I’ve studied the history,” I say. “Just as well as you.
“But you stand apart from it, don’t you?” She paces around me. “You always have. Like you’re an outsider looking in. It was growing up away from all this on your parents asteroid mine that did the trick, wasn’t it? That’s why you can ask a question like ‘What would aliens think of us?’”
“You’re just as much an outsider as I am. I’ve read your dissertations.”
