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“A plasma pistol?” he scoffs. “Clumsy weapon. Loud. Indiscriminate. Hardly an improvement over—”
I pull out my gun.
“An Omnivore-540,” he whispers. “Semiautomatic railgun. Titan Arms. Powered by a rechargeable ion cell to drive the round along patented parallel reactive conductors. Adjustable internal diameter, multicaliber friendly, with”—his voice goes hushed—“an autonomous
forge in the magazine.” He smiles dreamily. “Metal goes in. Death comes out.”
“No need to get dramatic.”
“Only twenty thousand were ever made. Where did you find one this side of the Belt?”
“A man’s gotta have his secrets.”
“I will buy. How much?”
“Not for sale. What I need is one of these.” I walk to a rack of glistening titanium hunterkiller drones, with silent engines and a neurotoxin deliverer concealed in their front faceplates. It is an assassin’s machine. “How small can you make it?”
OUR DROPSHIP SETS DOWN in a fortress carved into the heart of a lonely mountain. The gray stone juts up out of the frozen Ionian waste like a tombstone, while the hangar, cut into the top of the mountain just beneath gun bartizans, is vast and scored black from ages of passing ships.
A coterie of masked legionnaires and a tall Gold woman of mature years greet us. She’s lean, with withered patience, a pinched mouth, and a methodical, droll disposition. Her hair is chopped short, a cut that looks self-administered. Vela au Raa, sister of Romulus and his favorite captain during his war against my grandmother. Her mech units made hell out on the smaller moons, and gave me a fair amount of respect for guerrilla warfare as I watched from afar on Luna.
My neck aches from the injection site of the antiradiation drugs they pumped into me after my brief exposure. Nausea swirls. I watch Vela greet Seraphina with a chilly touch of their foreheads.
Seraphina does not look like the girl I rescued. The grime and blood are gone, the girl replaced by a woman who walks with a storm in her veins. Her lips are full, her nose slightly hooked, her dull Gold eyes sleepy and large, with thick eyelashes. Her hair is buzzed and notched on the right side. She is not beautiful by the standards of Luna’s courts. There’s something too feral about her. Something wild beneath the laconic movements and unsmiling face.
Little Hawk indeed.
Cassius catches me watching Seraphina. “What did he do to you?” he whispers, hunched in his manacles.
“Educated me.” I grimace and play off the horror.
“I told you not to run your mouth.” He eyes my wind-burnt face. “Gods, man. You look like a lobster.”
“I feel like one too. Cooked and buttered.”
He looks at the Golds preparing to lead us into the fortress. “Follow my lead. Every word here counts.”
I try to breathe out the sibling peevishness. It clings in me, but not enough to convince me that he’s wrong. If my little flight out the ship taught me anything, it is that Cassius knows these people better than I do, for all my studies.
The halls of the fortress are bare rock, like the hangar, and seem to have been carved crudely by clawDrills. Errant marks abound. Protection glyphs riddle the archways, like wood eaten by termites. The place is abandoned except for Romulus’s soldiers and the fortress’s other two breeds of denizen—robed Obsidians with bare feet and bald heads, with iron pyramids emblazoned on their simple gray robes, and several White hierophants who wear strange perruques made of coarse blue-black hair. This is a remote installation. A fortress that’s been left to molder. Why are we here and not in Sungrave?
Romulus is trying to hide something. Is it simply his daughter’s indiscretion? Or is it that recording Pandora asked about? What did she think Seraphina was bringing back? What could be so valuable to spark all this?
There is no furniture in the warroom of the fortress. Huge pillars support the uneven domed ceiling, and at the far side wait a coterie of shadowy forms.
My heart beats faster as we draw closer to a great stone throne made for a man larger than a Gold. I search the shadows, expecting the infamous warrior to be lounging upon it. But Romulus au Raa, twenty-third Lord of the Dust, Sovereign of the Rim Dominion, does not sit upon the throne. He sits at its foot, cross-legged on a thin cushion, wearing only a gray scorosuit.
His cheekbones are high, the lines of his jaw long and leading to surprisingly sensual lips riven with two scars. His hair is dark gold, streaked with gray and tied behind his head in a simple bun, through which pierces a stick of black wood. His right arm was lost in the Battle of Ilium and never replaced. A sliver of his bare chest, moon pale, shows as the collar of his suit falls open from his quiet labor.
He makes adjustments to a dissembled black hasta in his lap. Longer than the razors of the Interior, it stretches to two meters in its active, rigid form, resembling a lance. Silver figures are etched into the metal. It is not their ancestral sword, Starfire. That was lost at the Reaper’s Triumph when his father’s corpse was robbed—its owner now a great mystery.
I find myself admiring his poise.
There is an intensity to his quiet, like a lone cold stone sitting in a still pool of water. A humility to his bearing and expression that I did not expect, and in some way makes me feel as if we stumbled upon an ancient creature in his private garden, one who has seen the shaping of worlds, the sundering of empires. I feel calm, but very, very small as the myth earns flesh. Unlike me, he stood before the Reaper but did not surrender his moon. He gave an arm and a son to protect it.
The Obsidians push us to our knees.
An ugly Gold in his mid-twenties with a crisp dark goatee and close-cropped hair emerges from the shadows beside Romulus, watching us with intelligent, mismatched eyes. He looks like a spider smuggled into human flesh, all knobby joints and spindly appendages, lending him a covetous air. His forehead and jaw are overgrown, and the skin and coloring possess the anemic quality of a skinned rabbit, except on his neck where there are several small brown splotches.
