DARROW
Cacophony
AstheArchimedesapproachesthe asteroid that is said to hold the Republic’s salvation, I fidget with Pax’s gravBike key. Thraxa’s razor, Bad Lass, rests in my lap. I am thankful for both. One is a reminder to stay the path, the other is a tool to help me do so.
The asteroid does not look like much. It is gray, oblong, and lies on an outer shoulder of the Belt mined long before the age of Ovidius.
“Well, we made it here in one piece,” Cassius says and sips his caf. His thermal is pulled tight up to his neck. A bruise peeks out and stretches to his right ear. “Hard part’s done.”
“You’ve never had a conversation with Quicksilver,” I say and kick my feet up on the wall. He slugs me in the shoulder. “Sorry.” I lower my feet.
“You and Quick are close,” he says. “At least from what you’ve said. I thought you were his favorite.”
“True, but…he can be tricky.”
“Still no energy readings. Metal, yes. But this was a mining sector…. Should I start to hail the asteroid?” he asks.
“If he is here, he’s already seen us,” I say.
“We have a stealth hull.”
“Yes, one his company made. He doesn’t create questions to which he doesn’t have answers. My guess is if he’s in there, he’s been watching us for some time.”
“I bet he’s as horrified as I am about the state of the hull. My poorship is falling to ruins. Honestly, between you and Sevro it’s a wonder there’s not literal shit in the halls.”
“Sorry. We usually have janitors,” I say.
“Really? He doesn’t even flush. A life of privilege is no excuse for slovenliness.” He sets his caf aside, and sprays the wall where my foot touched with cleaning solvent and wipes it down. “You really must take pride in the things you own, Darrow.”
We fall into silence as we creep closer to the asteroid. Occasional reports come up the hall from Aurae who helms the sensor station between the cockpit and the lounge. The only other sounds are the whispers of the engines and the tremble of Sevro’s music from the machine shop in the aft of the ship. With the asteroid only a half hour away, the moment of truth is at hand. Did we come all this way for nothing?
All things considered, our thirty-six-day journey went well. It may have been fraught with anxiety, but actual threats to the ship were scarce. The Rim has already emptied most of their strength from the Belt to bolster the Dragon and Dust armadas in their attack on Mars. Only a few of their hunting parties gave us pause. As for the fabled Obsidian pirates, we saw not a one on our sensors. That is not surprising really. The Belt is so large it feels like an existential threat to sanity if you try to comprehend the expanse its asteroids fill.
Butfillis the wrong word. In the Belt, asteroids float so far apart they are more like islands on a sea so vast only metaphors can help the human mind understand it: if you poured all water from all the seas on all the worlds ever sailed by man into a giant ring and then dropped one grain of sand into it, that grain would not even represent Earth’s size against the tremendous expanse of the Belt.
Of course there is no celestial object out here so massive as Earth. Instead, there are tens of millions of asteroids in swirls, shoulders, clusters. Of those, only two and a half million are larger than a kilometer in diameter. Few are inhabited. Fewer still are populated with anything larger than mining outposts or pirate hideouts. Those asteroids that host actual cities are so rare and estranged from civilization, they are precious, the last lamps before the abyssal dark of the Gulf. That light from those lamps was once white, the color of the Republic. Now their bulbs either glow Raa blue, or they don’t glow at all.
Past those last outposts lies the Gulf, which once was the moat thatseparated the Dominion and the Republic. It seems abyssal, but its darkness is not endless. Beyond the Gulf lies the realm of shadow and dust—the gargantuan Gas Giants and the moons on which the Golds of the Rim have made their homes for centuries. House Raa presides over that far-flung civilization from its seat on the volcanic moon of Io.
There are asteroids out there too, with cities of their own, like Priam in the Trojan Cluster or Agamemnon in the Greek Cluster. Though these cities lie on Jupiter’s orbital path, they are cloaked by the mystery of distance and obscured even further by the hermit-like nature of their inhabitants. Even I know very little about those cities, their peoples, their ways.
Past Jupiter, of course, lie the orbital paths of Uranus, Saturn, Neptune. Places I have never sailed, and places I probably never will. And beyond that…far, far beyond that, twirls lonely Pluto—where civilization ends—and then, eventually the Kuiper Belt where sparks of the Society have flared occasionally against the edge of the true dark, but never for long.
It feels strange to contemplate what life is like on those spheres. In the Belt, I feel as if I am already deep inside the realm of darkness, but those who dwell in the shadows of the Giants would barely consider me on its threshold.
The last time I was so far away from the sun was when I was sailing for Luna aboard theMorning Star. Now Lysander is sleeping in my old bed on theMorning Star,and I’m sleeping in his bed on theArchimedes. Strange, the twists of fate.
It is scary out here, and not because of the Rim Golds or the Belt’s fabled Obsidian pirates. It feels like the sun, likelife,has forgotten you and you could just slip away into the dark without anyone ever knowing where or when you vanished. In some ways it makes me doubt I’ll ever see the godTree forests and fog-swaddled highlands of home again.
I notice that dread and let it pass through me.
Then Cassius throws me a live grenade made of anxiety. “What if Quicksilver’s not in there?” he asks. “This Lyria girl sounds scurrilous indeed.” He glances back to make sure Sevro isn’t behind us. “I mean, she stole your kids, man.” He nods to Pax’s key. “I’m no father, but that’s not just something you sweep under the rug. I don’t want to be a pessimist. But what if Virginia made up this fleet so you wouldn’t go on a suicide charge only to get nabbed by the Raa trying to get home?”
“You mean what if she’s just preying on my hope and lying to prevent the enemy from obtaining a political and propaganda weapon that could drive a stake through the heart of Mars?” I ask. “Namely my head?” I sip my caf. “Then I’d say she’s doing her job.”
“Shit.” He leans back in his chair. “I wouldn’t want to marry a Sovereign.”
“I didn’t. I married Virginia, and she married me. The Sovereign and the Reaper, they’re the shadows that come with us.”
