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“… ad astra!” the crowd roars.
I remain on the steps as the festival swings into motion below on the Field of Mars. The Golds disperse onto Citadel grounds, heading for our private feast. Augustus watches from my side. Behind us, the bronze sun sets on his city, stretching our shadows over the lowColors below.
“Walk with me,” he commands.
We walk surrounded by bodyguards. Unease spreads through me as I see them cluster tight about us. He’s spoken to his daughter. He knows. Of course he knows. I have my razor, no gravBoots. Just ceremonial armor. How many of the Obsidians could I kill before I’m overwhelmed? Not many.
Then I realize where he’s taking me and I nearly laugh at myself for being foolish.
The throne room burns with sunlight. Ceiling all of glass, marble columns stretching a hundred meters high. The expanse buzzes with no
ise. IonSaws, hammers, and the delicate thrum of seven ionScalpels on a lump of onyx twice my height.
“Out,” Augustus demands.
The Violets slide from their perches on the onyx and disperse with the Orange masons and Red laborers. Augustus’s bodyguards leave us as well. Our boots click against the floor, lonely sounds for such a room.
So he’s not going to kill me after all.
“They’re making you a throne,” I say, going to touch the onyx. I breathe out the tension. A lion’s paw takes shape near the base of the throne. To the left, its tail curls around the other side.
“You have broken the law, Darrow,” he says behind me. “You gave Obsidians razors. The weapon of our ancestors in the hands of the only Color to ever rise against us.”
“Is that all?” I ask in relief. “I did what I needed to do.
“An Olympic Knight was killed by your bodyguard. This is public.”
“If Ragnar didn’t take the wall, we would have lost, and you, my liege, would be in chains, or executed. You’d know better than I. He had my warrant.”
“My father taught me it is weak to ask others what they think of you,” he says, clasping his hands behind his back. “But I must. Do you think I am a cold monster?”
I turn to examine him.
“Without a doubt.”
“Honesty.” He looks up at the ceiling. “You’d think it would echo differently than all the other horseshit. What I am, Darrow, is a necessity. I am the force that corrects those who err. Tell me, why do you give an Obsidian a razor? Why do you urge lowColors to rise up? Why do you let a Blue run your ship when she should merely take orders and fly it?”
“Because they can do things I cannot.”
He nods as if I’ve proven his point.
“And that is why I exist. I know that Blues can command fleets. I know Obsidians can use technology, lead men. That the quickest Orange could, if given a proper chance, be a fine pilot. Reds could be soldiers, or musicians, or accountants. Some few—very few—Silvers could write novels, I wager. But I know what it would cost us. Order is paramount to our survival.
“Humanity came out of hell, Darrow. Gold did not rise out of chance. We rose out of necessity. Out of chaos, born from a species that devoured its planet instead of investing in the future. Pleasure over all, damn the consequences. The brightest minds enslaved to an economy that demanded toys instead of space exploration or technologies that could revolutionize our race. They created robots, neutering the work-ethic of mankind, creating generations of entitled locusts. Countries hoarded their resources, suspicious of one another. There grew to be twenty different factions with nuclear weapons. Twenty—each ruled by greed or zealotry.
“So when we conquered mankind, it wasn’t for greed. It wasn’t for glory. It was to save our race. It was to still the chaos, to create order, to sharpen mankind to one purpose—ensuring our future. The Colors are the spine of that aim. Allow the hierarchies to shift and the order begins to crumble. Mankind will not aspire to be great. Men will aspire to be great.”
“Golds aspire to be great, and we force the Colors to war,” I say, taking a perch on the black lion’s paw. Augustus has not moved from his place at the center of the floor.
“Yet there are men like me,” he replies so sincerely I nearly believe him. “I do not truly fight because I want to be king or Emperor or whatever word you slap above my name in the history texts. The universe does not notice us, Darrow. There is no supreme being waiting to end existence when the last man breathes his final breath. Man will end. That is the fact accepted, but never discussed. And the universe will continue without care.
“I will not let that happen, because I believe in man. I would have us continue forever. I would shepherd us out of the Solar System into alien ones. Seek new life. We are barely in our infancy as a species. But I would make man the immutable fixture in the universe, not just some passing bacteria that flashes and fades with no one to remember. That is why I know there is a proper way to live. Why I believe your young ideas so dangerous.”
His mind is vast. Worlds beyond my own. And perhaps for the first time, I really understand how this man can do what he does. There is no morality to him. No goodness. No evil intent when he killed Eo. He believes he is beyond morality. His aspirations are so grand that he has become inhuman in his desperate desire to preserve humanity. How strange to look at the rigid, cold figure he casts and know all these wild dreams burn inside his head and heart.
“What about all you said? What about the things you’ve done?” I ask, thinking of his first wife, whose mouth he stuffed with grapes. “You take advice from creatures like Pliny. You bomb innocent civilians, who haven’t broken any laws. You embrace a civil war … and you say you’re trying to save humanity?”
“I do what I need to do to protect the greater good.”
