“When life springs forth, death follows behind,”interrupts Aurae, quoting from the book.“When goodness is found, evil is close at hand…”
“The path straddles the boundary between these things,”I reply. Aurae smiles.
“And just what the everloving hell does that mean?” Sevro barks. “Are we really taking our marching orders from your ad hoc interpretations of some dusty-ass tome?”
“Your father’s dusty-ass tome,” I say.
“And how’d that go for him?” he asks, and looks at Cassius. “Oh. Right.”
Cassius doesn’t rise to the bait. I watch the debris out the viewport. If the Rim Armada can be destroyed, somehow I doubt Sungrave is as Aurae left it. “If it’s the only way to contact Athena, then that is our road,” I say. Sevro stares at me, incredulous. “Cassius, set course for Io. But go slow. Fá’s out there somewhere—”
Silent, theArchimedessteers off Kalyke. I turn, expecting Sevro to have slinked off after our tiff, but am surprised to see him still there, still staring at me as if I am unrecognizable.
As much as I want to say something, to mend the chasm between us, I realize I cannot. I know Sevro better than anyone and there’s nothing he’ll hear right now. No sense or argument will sound good to him. So I shrug and turn back to the viewport where Jupiter gazes back at melike a disembodied eye, the moons held in its thrall winking motes twirling in their orbits.
Ping.A long moment.Ping.
We all turn to look at Aurae. “What is that?” I ask.
She frowns. “A distress signal,” she says. Sevro glares at her in suspicion. “I thought we should just keep looking, in case…someone was alive.”
“The place is crawling with distress signals,” Cassius says. “Doesn’t mean anyone’s alive.”
“This one is a heartbeat,” she says.
“And why didn’t the Obsidians pick it up?” Sevro asks.
“It’s short-range, whoever’s sending it must have waited until after they left,” Aurae says.
I look at Sevro. “You know our old braves. Do you really want to go deeper into the system blind?” He might be a pit of anger, but he doesn’t want to die out here either. “Aurae, pin the location. Cassius—”
“If you say ‘fly like an eagle,’ I am turning this ship around,” he says and pushes theArchimedesinto the debris field. “Watch and learn, Lyria.” He winks at her. A piece of debris hits the hull. We all wince. “Starting now.”
—
The escape pod is shaped like an egg. Instead of escaping the battle as its pilot no doubt intended, it found itself embedded into the side of a dead destroyer’s hull. It is severely damaged. Sevro and I space walk out to it in our new Godkiller suits and cut open its hatch. Sevro enters first.
“We got a breather,”he says as I push my way into the pod behind him.“Barely.”The pod’s power is almost gone and its interior dark except for the glow of our headlamps. A single man floats covered head to toe in gray armor, his legs crossed in a seated position.“Big bastard. Gold no doubt.”Sevro peers around the pod collecting clues and wiggles a tube sticking into a port in the back of the man’s helmet.“He’s hooked directly to the shuttle’s oxygen reserves, what’s left of them. Probably brain dead by now. You saw the damage to the tanks outside. My guess: he tried coms, engine control, found they were slagged and saw his juice was running out so he put this kit on to keep the cold out, and went to sleep praying someone would find him.”
I find a few more kits of armor in a concealed rack. One is missing.
“It’s a bridge pod, looks like,” I say. “Lots of Gold-sized kits. That’s good. If he’s not brain dead, he’ll likely have a better idea of what happened than someone in the belly of a ship. Let’s get him back to theArchi.”
—
Sevro and I haul the lone survivor back to theArchimedeswhere we load him onto a medical gurney brought by Lyria and Aurae. Aurae is about to connect an oxygen recycler into his helmet when Sevro swats her hand away. “You stupid?” he asks.
I clarify. “Let’s get him out of his armor before we feed an enemy knight O2. Lyria, get the fusion cutter eight-millimeter. You know where it is?”
She’s already off to the machine shop. We hear a clanging, a banging, and a string of curses, then Lyria returns at a run. She tosses the fusion cutter to Sevro who gets to work on the armor. He’s not precise in his cuts, and the Gold’s blood dribbles liberally onto the gurney.
With every piece of armor Sevro cuts off, my grip tightens further on the hilt of my razor because it becomes more and more apparent that whomever we’ve saved is no rear echelon pixie. His arms are brawny. His legs thick and muscled from high gravity training. His chest like a barrel and his shoulders as wide as my own. And then, after Sevro cuts off his thermal body sleeve, there are the scars on the man’s pale skin. Not so many as I have, but enough to make a Gray leatherneck dip his head in respect. This is a frontline Peerless. A killer.
“Manacles,” I say.
Sevro is far ahead of me. When the man is secured, Sevro works on his helmet. It comes off with a pop and only a little spritz of blood. My own concentration on the tiny bristles embedded in the man’s hands is so intense I nearly miss Aurae’s intake of breath when Sevro wipes the man’s black-gold hair away from his face.
The man’s armor may be nondescript, but his heritage is unmistakable. It is like looking at a brawnier, gloomier, manlier version of either Atlas or Romulus au Raa. But unlike either of the famous brothers, this man is young and trends toward muscle.
