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Cassius and I float through space toward an oblong asteroid. It rotates lazily in the darkness. Veins of ice glitter and wind through her craggy skin as we coast into a rock formation at the edge of a shadowy canyon large enough to swallow the Citadel of Light. We arrest our motion on a jagged scree. My breath echoes in my ears. Darkness stretches under me, plunging into the fathomless depths of the asteroid. I doubt very much any man has ever set foot upon this cold chunk of rock, much less looked into its bowels. I feel it’s my duty to give in to temptation and shine a light down into the canyon. I flick the switch on my forearm and a beam of light cuts into
the darkness and is devoured by the lower reaches. There is no bottom that my eye can see. But at least now a man’s eye has seen that.
“Turn that off,” Cassius orders over the com.
“Apologies. Was looking for space worms.”
“Biologically absurd,” Pytha mutters from the cockpit. “Organic tissue must have calories. What would they eat?”
“Spacemen,” I say with a smile.
“Spaceboys,” Cassius corrects.
I’m certain that, had I been born in a different time, I would have been an explorer. Since I was a boy, I’ve had an insatiable itch for things remote and unknown. In the Citadel, I dreamed of sailing the violent light of distant nebulas and charting astral seas. The great philosopher Sagan once preached it was in our nature as a species to explore. Despite the modern chaos, we do live in a new age of innovation. Perhaps some brilliant boy or girl who has yet to take their first step will one day make an engine to carry us faster than the speed of light beyond our single star. Beyond the stain of man. Would all this chaos be worth that one innovation?
I often imagine what humans could do if there were no scarcity. Nothing to fight over. Just an unending expanse to explore and name and fill with life and art. I smile at the pleasant fiction. A man can dream.
Not wanting to bring the Archimedes into a trap, Cassius and I pushed away from her airlock toward the nearest asteroid in our EVO suits fifteen minutes ago. Now we reorient ourselves and push off again toward the hulking Vindabona. Rows and rows of cargo containers drift suspended between metal beams, bound together by wires and mesh netting.
Cassius and I use our shoulder thrusters to slow our approach, settling into the floating carbon mesh that pins in a row of green crates. They’re stamped with Republic stars. With Pytha guiding us over the coms, we pull ourselves along the outside of the ship toward the central service airlock. There, I unscrew the paneling on the door’s locking mechanism and hijack the console till the orange doors open silently. Cassius and I drift into the airlock. The outer door closes behind us. We each grip the metal rungs inside. Red light throbs down from the ceiling as the airlock finishes its cycle. Pressure slowly pumps into the room. Then oxygen. Finally the pull of gravity. We remove our razors from their holsters on our hips. A pair of lazy silver tongues of metal float in the air, two meters long, stiffening to just over a meter of sword as we toggle them to their rigid state. His is straight. I prefer mine in the slight crescent of my house. The red light becomes green and the interior door of the airlock opens with an asthmatic gasp. As ever, Cassius makes sure he’s the first through before glancing back to make sure I follow.
The repair bay is empty except for tools and ancient EVO suits hanging from hooks. Pale lights embedded in the gray ceiling flicker, hurling shadows about the room. An indicator blinks green and so I retract my helm into a small compartment at the back of the neck and breathe in the scent of cleaning solution and oil. Reminds me of my early days with Cassius, hiding out in backwater transportation hubs, searching for a ship to carry us away from Luna. Away from the Rising.
That was a lonely time. The better part of me felt carved away as we fled Luna and I knew I would never again hear my grandmother say my name, never follow Aja along the garden paths to train before the morning pachelbel birds even woke. All the people who had ever loved me were gone.
I was alone. And not just alone, but hunted. I shove the memories in the void where my grandmother taught me to stow them lest they overwhelm me like they did her when she was a girl.
“Eagle to Mother Hen, we’re inside. Level sixteen. No signs of life,” Cassius says.
“Copy, Eagle. Do try to use words first this time instead of blades?”
“Unlike certain pilots I know, I have impeccable manners, Mother Hen.”
“Captain,” she stresses. “Call me Captain.”
“As you say, pilot.” Cassius lets his helmet retract and winks at me. His face is harder than when we first met. But every now and again there’s that twinkle in his eyes, like a light inside a far-off tent, making you feel warm even though you’re still outside. And I am outside. He thinks I don’t see how wounded he is. How I’m a replacement for the brother Darrow of Lykos took from him in the Institute. Sometimes he looks at me and I know he sees Julian.
A small, selfish part of me wishes he just saw me.
I follow Cassius into the hall. The ship is barren and gripped by silence. Something here is amiss. Quietly we make our way through the ship, but before we’ve gone long, we find a smear of blood on the floor leading from a side passage to a central lift. We trace the blood to the starboard escape pod bay, and there, before the large doors, we find a massacre.
Gore congeals on the walls. Bodily fluids pool on the dented floor. The whole room redolent with the tangy scent of iron and sick, so much so that I would gag were I not conscious of Cassius’s eyes on me. Red handprints streak the escape pod door, as if men were trying to claw their way out. Yet there are no bodies. I focus and try to view the room with the Mind’s Eye—removed, analytical, as my grandmother trained me.
“The crew was killed here. Under a day ago,” I say, examining the state of the blood. When I was a boy, my grandmother had Securitas investigators take me to murder scenes in Hyperion City to teach me the barbarism under the surface of civilization, under the manners of men. I bend on a knee and begin processing the scene. “Judging from the blood spatters, I would postulate that there were two assailants. Men or women of our size or larger, judging by their bootprints. No blast scoring or char indicates the work was done with blades…and hammers.”
“Ascomanni,” Cassius says darkly.
“Evidence suggests it.” I take a sample of the blood on my finger and wipe it on the datapad built into a socket on my EVO suit’s left forearm. “Brown, Red, and Blue DNA markers. Our smugglers. Several were killed and then dragged out. Others were still alive.”
“You watching, Pytha?” Cassius asks.
“Yes,” she says quietly over the com. Our suits feed her visuals as well. She’s more sensitive to violence than we are. “No sign of ship signatures from the Gulf. But if it’s all the same, will you please hurry it up? I’ve got an itch about this.”
As do I.
The term Ascomanni is derived from the Germanic for “Ash Men.” The first Vikings sailed down European rivers in boats of ash wood. And ash is what they left behind.
Once, the Ascomanni were just deepspace legends, dark whispers passed by traders and smugglers to new recruits in the shadowy hollows of asteroid cantinas or docking-bay watering holes. In the deep of space, so they’d say, there lurked Obsidian tribes who escaped the Society’s culling of the rest of their race following the Dark Revolt hundreds of years ago. Hunted by my family’s extermination squads and Olympic Knights, they fled into the darkness. For years they plagued the far colonies of Neptune and Pluto, remaining little more than myth to the Core.
