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Christopher Ruocchio’s best-selling Sun Eater series chronicling the exploits of Hadrian Marlowe, who goes from rebel to slave to self-questioning hero, have attracted a strong following of readers. Marlowe has had shorter adventures as well, and when two Imperial legions go missing on a routine transfer to the outer provinces, Marlowe and his loyal Red Company are dispatched to bring them home. Tracking the lost legions to the barren world of Arae, the Red Company finds itself up against a pirate army. But there’s something else in the pirate fortress—something darker—and their battle will bring Hadrian face-to-face with an enemy more terrible than he could have ever imagined.


The Demons of Arae

Christopher Ruocchio


THE MOUTH OF HELL

Fire screamed all around us, and the violent shock of atmospheric entry that shook the ship beneath my feet was like the coming of an avalanche. Faceless men stood about me, gripping their restraints. The red glow of the emergency lighting reflected off their featureless ivory masks.

The thunder stopped. We were falling through clear air beneath yellow skies.

Arae.

“You’re sure they’re on Arae?” I remembered asking before we set sail from Nessus on this expedition.

Captain Otavia Corvo had only shrugged her broad shoulders. “It’s your Empire’s intelligence, Lord Marlowe. They said they tracked this lost legion of theirs to within a dozen light-years of the Arae system. If they’re not on Arae, they’re somewhere in the Dark between, and we’ll never find them.”

An entire legion had vanished. Four ships. Twenty-six thousand men.

Gone.

At first Legion Intelligence had suspected the Cielcin. The xenobites needed to eat, after all, and four troop transport ships with the legionnaires already on ice for the long voyage were indistinguishable from meat lockers where the aliens were concerned. But when we arrived in Arae system, we found something we hadn’t expected.

“Pirates?” Corvo didn’t believe it. I could see it in the way her brows arched above black eyes. “What sort of pirates could capture a Sollan legion?”

We all knew the answer. I could feel the eyes of my officers on me, as if each man and woman were daring me to say it first. I glanced from one to the other: from the Amazonian Corvo to her bookish second-in-command, Durand; from green-skinned Ilex to solemn Tor Varro.

“Extrasolarians.” After Vorgossos the word carried a poisonous aftertaste for me and for every member of my Red Company. The Extras had been an Imperial bogeyman for millennia, the sort of monsters mothers scared their children with. But I knew now. Those men who—fleeing Imperial control—fled to the blackness between the stars, to rogue planets and lost moons far from the light of Imperial order, had bought their freedom with a piece of their own humanity. As a boy, I’d believed the Chantry’s proscription against intelligent machines and against the augmentation of the flesh was nothing but reactionary cowardice.

I know better now.

Monsters are real, and I had met them. Met not only with the Cielcin who threaten mankind from without, but met also with the monsters we’d made in our own image and in the image of our inner demons.

Repulsors fired, and our descent slowed, forcing my bile up as we came out of free fall. I shut my eyes, mindful of the quiet chatter of my men through my suit’s comms, of the way the thermal layer clung to me beneath the armorweave and ceramic plates. I still felt half a clown wearing it.

I was no soldier, had never trained to be one. I’d wanted to be a linguist, in Earth’s name!

But I was a knight now, one of His Radiance’s own Royal Victorians. Sir Hadrian Marlowe. And after Vorgossos I knew there was no going back.

I undid my restraints and moved into the middle of the cabin, conscious of the faceless soldiers watching me through suit cameras. My own suit worked the same—though my black visor was fashioned in the image of an impassive human face and not a blank arc of zircon. Almost it seemed I wore no helmet at all. Images from outside were projected directly onto my retinas, and but for the indicators in my periphery that indicated my heart rate and the integrity of my Royse shields, I saw plain as day.

“They’re putting us down as close to the door as they can!” I said, voice amplified by the speakers in my breastplate. “Petros’s team should have those gun emplacements on the south ridge down by the time we make landfall. Pallino’s got the north. The Sphinxes have air support! All we have to do is back the Horse!” They knew all of this already, had gone over the assault plan with their centurion before we’d left the ship, but it bore repeating.

“You ready, Had?” that same centurion asked me, clapping me on the shoulder as I took my place front and center by the exit ramp.

Beneath my helmet mask I smiled and returned the gesture. “Just like the coliseum back on Emesh!” I seized hold of one of the ceiling straps to steady myself as the dropship banked into an arc.

“Let’s hope!” Siran replied. The woman had been by my side a long time. Long before Vorgossos, when I had been little more than a slave in the fighting pits of Count Balian Mataro.

Turning back to face the fifty men that stood in the cramped hold of the Ibis-class lander, I got a clear look at myself in the mirrored glass at the rear of the compartment. Like all Sollan Imperial combat armor, my suit’s design recalled the style of ancient Rome, the shape of it speaking to cellular memories of ancient power. The muscled breastplate was black as anything I had seen, embossed with the trident-and-pentacle I had taken for my sigil when His Radiance the Emperor restored me to the nobility. Beneath that I wore a wide-sleeved crimson tunic darker than the ones worn by legionnaires. Strapped pteruges decorated my shoulders and waist, marking me for an officer. Black boots and gauntlets contrasted the Imperial ivory and scarlet, and I alone wore a cape: a lacerna black above and crimson beneath.

How had I ended up here? I’d left home to go to school, to join the scholiasts. Not to fight a war. Still, I raised my voice. “Some of you won’t have fought the Extras before! Soldiers of the Empire, whatever comes at you, you will hold your ground!”

My tutor always said I had too-developed a taste for melodrama. Maybe he was right. Or maybe whatever gods there are share my love of theater. Whichever is the case, no sooner had I said these words than the landing alarm blared and each of us felt the Ibis buoy on its final approach.

The landing ramp slammed downwards, admitting the orange Araenian sunlight.

I turned and drew my sword, kindling the weapon’s exotic matter blade with a button press. Liquid metal the color of moonlight gleamed in my gauntleted fist, and I was first onto the shattered tarmac and the approach to the pirates’ fortress.

The mountain rose before us, the last lonely peak in a chain that broke upon the salt flats of the Soto Planitia. Arae had never been settled—its air was carbon monoxide and ammonia, and there was little water. But for the remains of a few mining expeditions, the pirate fortress was the only settlement on the planet. I could see the fingering shapes of antennae and other comms equipment bristling on the ridge line above, and the smoking ruins of gun emplacements where Petros had taken our Fifth Chiliad and wiped out the artillery.

Battle raged about us, plasma fire splitting the cancered daylight like lightning, black smoke rising from bodies and from the wrecks of ground-effect vehicles and three-legged machines that I think had governed themselves.

And ahead—between the two reaching arms of that final mountain—stood the Horse.

Our colossus.

The titan stood nearly forty meters high, its legs more like the arms of a crawling man than those of a horse in truth. The earth trembled with each mighty step it took, and the men who stood against it could not so much as scratch its armor with their arms. Beyond it, the hardened outer wall of the fortress rose two hundred feet above the landing field, black as the space we’d come from. A stray shot pinged off my shield and, not ten yards off the tarmac, exploded as a plasma cannon struck ground, sending dust and bits of shattered concrete fountaining skyward. Above, three of Sphinx Flight streaked overhead, single long wings tacking like sails against the wind, filling the air with the thunder of their drives.

“Why haven’t they cracked the wall?” I asked, toggling to the officer’s channel.

“It’s shielded, lord,” came a thin, polished voice. “Crim took a few shots at it with the Horse’s artillery, but we’d have done as well to scratch at it with our fingernails.”

I cursed. “How are they powering a shield of this size, Lorian?” I asked. “I thought your people didn’t pick up a fusion reactor on your scans.”

From his position on the ship in orbit, Commander Lorian Aristedes wasted no time in answering. “Could be geothermal. Arae’s core runs hotter than most thanks to all those moons. I’ve ordered sappers. If they can attach a plasma bore directly to the door, the shield won’t matter.”

“We’ll clear the tarmac then,” I said in answer.

I did not hurry, but allowed the bulk of our soldiery to fan past me, soldiers moving in groups of three behind their decurions. One of the colossi’s massive feet descended, cracking the pavement. The earth shook, air filled with a noise like drums.

For a moment, all was silent and still. Far above, a cloud passed before the swollen circle of the sun.

An awful cry resounded off the surrounding rocks, high and shrill.

“The hell is that?” Siran’s words came in clear over my armor’s internal comm.

A terrible sense of foreboding blossomed within me. Some kind of alarm? I half-expected to see the light of sirens flashing in the gray stones above us, but there was nothing.

“On our left!”

“I see them!”

“The right, too!”

I turned my head, trying to see just what it was the others were seeing through the smoke and the ranks of men to either side.

Then I saw them, and swore.

They must have come from bolt-holes hidden in the arms of the mountain. Hundreds of them. They had no arms, nor shields—but they needed neither. The SOMs feared neither death nor pain, and came forward with the focused scramble of a swarm of ants trying to bridge a puddle with their own bodies.

They were men once. Before the Extras carved out their brains and filled their heads with kit, before they meddled in the subtle language of their genes to harden them against the poisonous air. They had no will any longer. They never would again. They were only tools, puppet soldiers controlled by some intelligence—human or artificial I dared not guess—in the fortress ahead of us.

“Hoplites!” Siran exclaimed, singling out our heavy, shielded infantry. “Shield walls!”

All about us, the army shifted, hoplites shifting from the point position in their little triases towards the outside of our line.

“Fire!”

The hoplites opened fire, phase disruptor bolts crackling in the warm air. Siran seized my arm, “We need to get you to the Horse, Had.”

She wanted to escort me to safety, to get me out of danger and the enemy charge.

She wanted me to abandon my men.

“No!” I shook her off, then toggled my comm once more. “Commander!”

Lorian Aristedes replied at once, “Yes, my lord?”

“Order Sphinx Flight back around! Strafe the enemy line!”

The ship’s tactical officer acknowledged and relayed my orders.

The SOMs were still coming, loping across the flat ground to either side. How many armies had died thus? Smashed between the horns of the enemy? Shots rained down from above, and turning, I saw men standing on the platforms above the Horse’s thighs and the fell light of the colossi’s rear cannons gleaming. It wouldn’t be enough, and it was only then I realized the source of that awful keening sound.

The SOMs were screaming, howling like a band of blue-faced Picts out of the deepest history.

Then I realized Siran’s mistake. Ordering the hoplites forward was standard procedure: they had the expensive shielding and the disruptor rifles, the heavy firepower. They were meant to shield the more numerous peltasts, who—without shields and with lighter armor—were cheaper to outfit and less costly to replace. But the peltasts carried bladed energy lances.

They had spears.

We had no time.

“Peltasts!” I called, transmitting my words to everyone in the line. “Forward! Forward!” There was a fraction of a second’s hesitation. I suppose I cannot blame them, the order was unorthodox in our age. But they got the message when I added the crucial word: “Bayonets!”

A double line of light infantry stepped forward, allowing the hoplites to turn and fall back towards the center of the column. They moved with gearwork precision, the result of weeks of careful drilling and a course of RNA learning drugs. From above, it must have been beautiful, and for a moment I envied Lorian Aristedes and Captain Corvo their bird’s-eye view. The peltasts lowered their spears, beam weapons firing into the galloping horde. I saw SOMs fall smoking from laser burns, only to be trampled over by the ranks behind. The puppets did not care for the loss of their brethren, did not care that they were charging without so much as a knife at two triple lines of armed Sollan legionnaires.

My men all did their best, but stopping the onslaught was like trying to block the tide. The enemy crashed against us from either side, throwing themselves against our spears like fanatics, only for their brothers to vault over them and hurl themselves at us. From the rear, the hoplites fired over the heads of the lines before them until the air was thick with the static aftershock of disruptor fire.

Where was the air support?

One of the puppet-men leaped fully over our line and landed in the narrow gap left between. For a moment it just stood there, processing, as if not quite sure what to do. It turned its head to look at me, and I think it understood who I was. The man it had been was shorter than I, bald as an egg and pale, skin burned and peeling in the chemical air. How it breathed at all I couldn’t say, though the gleaming black implants in its chest and throat perhaps had something to do with it.

It lurched towards me, and before Siran or any of the hoplites could intervene, I pushed past them and lunged, sword outthrust. The highmatter blade passed through the SOM’s flesh as easily as through water, and it fell with no legs to support it. For a single, awful moment, the upper half of the once-human form dragged itself forwards, clawing towards me until one of my guards shot it with a disruptor.

A metallic screaming filled the air, and glancing up a moment, I saw the bladelike profile of five lighters burning across the sky. Sphinx Flight. Plasma fire picked its way in twin rows along the enemy line, parallel to our own. One of the SOMs fell smoking at my feet, and I slashed it in half for good measure. The earth groaned once more as the Horse advanced, closer and still closer to the wall and gate of the enemy fortress just as Sphinx Flight wheeled round for another pass.

I seized Siran by the arm. “Order everyone towards the Horse! We need to deepen the lines!”

She nodded and went about her orders. Turning, I proceeded up the no-man’s land between our lines, cutting down those enemies who’d made it through. “Commander!” I almost yelled into the line. “Find Petros and tell him to get his men down here. It’s time they were the ones surrounded!”

If young Aristedes replied I did not hear it. One of the SOMs threw itself at me and I had to duck to escape it, keeping my sword up so the creature cut itself in two for its trouble. Blood and something the color of milk spilled out and beaded on my cape. Disgusted, I shook the garment out and continued my advance. Behind me, the line was falling back, collapsing into a kind of mushroom shape as it thickened and grew shorter, making it far harder for the SOMs to clamber over.

The Sphinxes wheeled about once more. Plasma fire split the air and tore through the enemy. I’d nearly made it to the rear legs of the Horse. Ahead men were climbing the legs of the colossus to reach the platforms where their brothers rained fire down from above. The sound of the lighter craft overhead screamed across the sky, and I saw their wing-sails flatten to yaw them round for another pass.

Our lines were holding, thickened as we were into a tight box about the rear legs of the Horse. Where was Siran? I could hear her voice on the comm, ordering the ranks of our line to rotate, fresher troops in the rear replacing the spent men in front. Looking past those leading men, I saw a sea of scabrous faces, hollow eyes and grasping fingers spreading back as far as the southern ridge of the mountains. And behind them?

I thrust my sword into the air and let out a cry.

Petros and the Fifth Chiliad had come. Another thousand of our troops crashed into the hollow men from behind, splitting the attention of the fell intelligence that governed them.

“Concentrate air fire on the northern side!” I ordered, turning Sphinx flight away from the narrowing slice of the enemy between us and Petros’s relief force.

Fire reigned.


Smoke followed.

Not even the airless vacuum of space is so quiet as the battlefield when the fighting is done. Pillars of oily smoke held up the sky, and though my men busied themselves unloading the plasma bore from the Horse’s underbelly and the winds scoured in off the salt flats of the Soto Planitia, I heard nothing. I stood watching from the shadow of the massive gate, my guards around me and my friends: Siran and Pallino, who had come with me out of Emesh.

Thus we waited.

The plasma bore had the look of some swollen jet engine mounted on four legs. It took a man to pilot it—no daimon intelligences here—and the tech moved forward step by lurching step, extending the cigar-shaped body of the bore forward like a battering ram against the gates of ancient Jerusalem.

As the ground crew busied themselves with their preparations, I cast my eye skywards, past the circling shapes of Sphinx Flight and the sulfurous clouds. Somewhere above, our ship waited, locked in geostationary orbit above us. The SOMs had been a nasty welcoming party, but everything had gone according to plan in the end. One of the once-human creatures lay not far off, dead eyes staring at the umber sky.

“Do you ever wonder who they were?” I asked aloud, indicating the corpse. There were burn lines on his flesh where the disruptor fire had fried the implants that enslaved him. I hoped that—for a fleeting moment, in the instant before he died—the fellow had remembered who he was, and that he was a man. I wondered what his name had been, and if he’d remembered it before the end.

“Some poor sod, most like,” Pallino answered in his gruff way. “Merchanter or some such as got skyjacked by this lot.”

Cape snapping about myself, I advanced and turned the fellow fully on his back with my toe. The man was bald as the first one I had cut down and pale almost as the Cielcin who drink the blood of worlds. My heart fell, and I swallowed, kneeling to get a better look at the tattoo inked on the side of the man’s neck. It showed a fist clenched around two crossed lightning bolts above the Mandari numerals 378.

A legionary tattoo.

“I think I know what happened to our lost legion.”

Silence greeted this pronouncement, deeper and darker than the quiet that had come before. I stood, turning my black-masked face toward the towering expanse of grim metal looming from the mountainside before us, and at the vast war engine and our army arrayed beneath it.

The silence broke with a great rushing of wind as the plasma bore roared to life, sucking at the air around us. The mouth of the plasma bore was pressed right against the bulwark, passing clean through the high-velocity curtain of the energy shield that guarded the gate.

The metal began to glow and run like water.

It was time.

THE CAPTAIN

All was dark within but for the flashing of sirens warning the defenders that their fortress was breached. I followed the first wave of my men over the threshold, the heat of still-cooling metal beating on my suit despite the coolant sprays the plasma bore released when its work was done. There I stood a moment, surveying the hangar before me, the parked shuttles and stacked crates of provisions and equipment.

“Search the shuttles and drain the fuel tanks!” Pallino called out, signaling a group of his men to advance. They did, moving off in groups of three, rifles and lances raised.

“Mapping drones have gone ahead, my lord,” said Petros. He saluted as I drew nearer, his fist pressed to his chest. He extended his arm as I acknowledged the salute. “It’s a fucking maze.”

A wire-frame map of the fortress was even then sketching itself in the bottom left of my vision. The levels that rose stacked above the hangar bay seemed straightforward enough, but the warren of tunnels and caverns carved deep into the living rock at the base of the mountain were anything but.

“I don’t want anyone wandering off,” I said to Petros and Pallino. “Groups of two and three decades should stick together. We should assume there are more SOMs where those others came from.” If the entirety of the 378th had been taken and converted by the Extras, it was very possible that thousands more lay in wait for us, but I couldn’t help thinking that if such were the case, these pirates would surely have deployed them before we breached their fortress. Perhaps some of our soldiers were still alive. Perhaps most of them were.

My officers turned to go about their duties, and I was left with Siran and a vague sense of déjà vu. The caverns—vaguely damp and lichen-spotted—reminded me of the city on Vorgossos. I shut my eyes, as if by doing so I might retreat to some other place: to the cloud forests on Nagramma where Jinan and I had hiked to the old Cid Arthurian temple; or the foggy coast at Calagah. Instead, I saw swollen hands rising from black water and the countless blue eyes of the Undying King of Vorgossos, and despite the warm wind from the Araenian desert outside, I shivered.

“Get a seal on that door!” I said, gesturing at the smooth hole the plasma bore had put in the main gate. “Static field will do! I don’t want anything impeding our exit should it come to that.”

I could still feel those bloated fingers on me, and shook them off with the memory of their touch. This was not Vorgossos. This was Arae. On Vorgossos I had been alone, but for Valka. Here I had an army at my back, my Red Company.

“Lord Marlowe,” came the voice of some centurion I did not recognize, one of Petros’s men, “we’ve captured their captain. We’re bringing him to you.”

Unable to suppress a crooked smile, I said, “No need, centurion. We’ll come to you.”


Sunlight fell through windows narrow as coin slots high on the high chamber’s walls. The turret was in the very highest part of the mountain fortress, and through the holograph plates that imitated larger windows I could see the Horse; the arms of the mountain spread out below; and the infinite, sterile whiteness of the Soto Planitia beyond.

The man who sat in the chair between four of my soldiers wore an old gray and white uniform. His face was as gray, and his hair with it. He did not look like an Extrasolarian. He looked . . . ordinary, the very model of the old soldier. Indeed, he reminded me of no one so much as Pallino: aged and leathered, with a sailor’s pallor and sharp eyes—though unlike Pallino this man still had both his eyes. The fellow had the stamp of the legions about him. A former officer, most like. Such men often turned mercenary, if they did not turn gladiator. I knew his type.

“What’s your name, soldier?” I asked in my best aristocratic tones. There was enough of the Imperial iron left in the man to straighten his spine at the sound of it.

“Samuel Faber, sir. Captain of the Dardanines.” From his accent I suspected the man was at least of the patrician class—though certainly he was not palatine.

“The Dardanines?” I echoed, stopping five paces before the chair. Turning to survey the room, I caught sight of the dozen or so other officers who had surrendered with Captain Faber.

Faber cleared his throat. “Free company.”

“Mercenaries?” I said, and arched my eyebrows behind my mask. “Foederati?” But it did not matter, not then. I pushed on to more pressing matters. “Where is the Three Seventy-Eighth?” I saw a muscle in Captain Faber’s jaw clench, but his gray eyes stayed fixed on my face. He didn’t answer. “Legion Intelligence tracked a convoy carrying the 378th Centaurine Legion to within a dozen light-years of this system, Captain. I need to know what you did with them.” I did not say What you did to them.

Faber was silent for a moment, and when he did speak it was with the air of one resigned. “I know who you are.” Seeing as he had started talking, I did not interrupt, only tried not to glance towards Pallino where he stood near at hand. “Is it . . . true you can’t be killed?”

I did look towards Pallino then. The old veteran alone of those in the room knew something of the answer to that question. Voice flattened by the suit speakers, I answered, “Not today, captain. Not by you.” The man seemed to chew on that a moment—or maybe it was only his tongue. He looked down at his scuffed boots and the gunmetal floor, arms crossed. “Tell me: How does a man go from a posting with the Legions to kidnapping one for the Extras? Was the money that good?”

I expected the man to rage, expected that there must be enough of the Legion officer he had been left in him—and enough honor—to insult him. I wanted him to stand, to take a swing me, to give me an excuse to put him right back in his seat. The man had sold human beings—his fellow Sollans, his fellow soldiers—to the barbarians who dwell between the stars.

I did not expect him to shake his head and press his lips together, as if he were afraid to speak. Taking a step forward, I asked again, “Where is the legion, Captain Faber?”

Nothing.

Gesturing to Siran, I stepped aside, saying, “I had hoped it would not come to this.” I had seen video of the mercenary captain relayed to my suit before we’d boarded the lift to come upstairs, and I’d guessed at his legionary past. Four men entered the command chamber a moment later, carrying a fifth between them. They stopped just before Faber’s seat and dropped the body there, face down.

The SOM did not move.

For a moment, I said nothing, only hooked my thumbs through my belt and waited for the shoe to drop. Faber must have felt it coming. Kneeling, I turned the dead man’s head with one hand, presenting the fist and crossed lightning bolts of the 378th Centaurine. Then nothing needed saying, and Faber found he could no longer look at the dead man or myself. He looked rather at the dozen of his own lieutenants who knelt on the ground to one side, manacled with guns aimed at their backs.

“We’re both soldiers, you and I,” Faber said into the vacuum growing between us, and for once I did not argue the label. He was nodding steadily, hands clasped in his lap. “I’ve done things I’m not proud of, Sir Hadrian, for the Empire and after. But that’s the job.”

“These were your brothers, Captain,” I said, more regretful than angry. The anger stayed far below the surface, churning like a river of eels.

“It was the job,” he said again. “That’s what they paid us for. Tag a convoy while the men were still in fugue, bring them here. It’s not even hard if you know where the ships are going to be—but they did. They must have a mole in Legion command.”

I took a step that put me between Faber and the corpse on the floor. “Who is they? Who are you working for?” Faber only shook his head, still not making eye contact. I could see the whites there, and the way his hands shook. Was he afraid? Not of me, surely?

Letting out a sigh, I reached up behind my right ear and clicked the hard switch there before keying a command into my wrist-terminal. The sigh turned to hissing as the pressure seals in my helmet relaxed. The black titanium and ceramic casque broke into pieces that folded flower-like away from my face before coiling into the collar of my hardsuit, and for the first time I looked down on Faber with my own eyes.

With a rough hand, I pushed back the elastic coif that covered my head and shook out curtains of ink-dark hair. Coming to within two paces of Faber’s chair, I crouched to put us at a level. “You were a soldier, you say. Then you know we can take the answer from you. I would prefer not to have to.” Reaching out, I seized Faber’s clenched hands with my own, looking like some parody of the vassal kneeling before his lord, of the devoted son before his father. I squeezed. “Who hired you to betray your brothers?” I glanced back at the dead man behind me. I could see Faber was looking.

Then his vision shifted and we regarded one another eye-to-eye. “You don’t understand. These people. The things they can do . . .”

But I had been to Vorgossos, to the lowest dungeons of the Undying. I knew full well what horrors, what abominations mankind was capable of in the name of science, of progress. I had seen the body farms, the surgical theaters. I had seen armies of puppet SOMs larger than this, and had seen machines to violate every natural law. I knew exactly what the Extrasolarians were capable of—knew it was every bit as vile and unthinkable as the rape and pillage the inhuman Cielcin carried out as they conquered our worlds. And worse. Worse because the Extrasolarians were human, even if they tried not to be.

“Give me a name, Faber. Please.”

The man swallowed. “You have to take my people out of here.”

“You are in no position to be making demands,” I said, standing, my finger in his face. I turned my back on him, pondering what to say next.

“You misunderstand, Marlowe. That’s not a demand. It’s the terms of my surrender.” I stopped mid-step and turned around, hands back at my sides. I waited him out. The man had been in the Legions, surely he knew that the Empire would put every one of his men in a prison camp for the rest of their lives. Surely he knew his own life was forfeit. For an officer of the Imperium to take up arms against the Empire was a grievous crime, one the Emperor would never forgive. “Passage out of here for every one of my men, even if it’s to Belusha,” he said, naming just such a prison planet as I’d imagined.

“What are you so afraid of, Captain Faber?” I asked. “Your employers, plainly, but why? The fortress is ours.”

The older officer glanced at the dozen or so of his men again, then once more at the SOM dead at his feet. “MINOS, they’re called MINOS.”

I blinked. “Like the Minoan king?” Minos was a character out of ancient myth, the ruler of vanished Crete. It was he who had built the labyrinth into which Theseus had ventured to fight the Minotaur. Thinking of Theseus brought a grim smile to my lips, and I saw once more a stony shore. A black lake. Slippered feet standing on the surface of the water. And against a wall of bare stone a tall red fountain rose dreadfully distinct.

“The what?” Faber said stupidly. “No, I—I don’t know.” He wrung his hands, eyes fallen. I let him take the time he needed; could sense the stripped, exhausted gears in his mind still turning. “Have you ever heard of the Exalted?” he asked, voice very small.

“Yes.” The Exalted were amongst the most dangerous of the Extrasolarian tribes—if tribes was the right word. They had abandoned their humanity—they would say transcended it—replaced their bodies with machines, altered their neural chemistry to suit their whims, discarded their humanity like so much rotting meat. They crewed massive interstellar vessels and never set in to port, fleeing from the Empire and the Holy Terran Chantry as shadows flee from the sun. Many had lived for eons preserved like medical specimens in jars of their own making. It is the Exalted every little boy and girl in the Sollan Empire grows up afraid of. It is they we imagine when we hear stories of the Extrasolarians and the things they do to innocent sailors.

“MINOS makes them. Designs them. And they make . . .” he nodded weakly towards the SOM still lying at his feet, “. . . those things.”

“And they hired you to acquire materials,” I said. “They’re building an army. For whom?”

The Dardanine captain screwed his eyes shut. “I don’t know. I don’t know. On my honor.”

“Your honor.” It was all I could do not to sneer. “Your honor, M. Faber? Just what honor do you think you have?”

“Enough to plead for my men,” Faber replied without hesitation. “Do with me what you will, but get them out of here. And get out of here yourselves. If you know what the Exalted are, you know what trouble you’ll be in when they arrive.”

“They’re coming here?”

“Most of the MINOS staff fled the moment your ship came out of warp, but not before they summoned the others.”

Petros barked a laugh. “At warp? That’ll take years!

“No,” Faber said flatly.

Petros hadn’t been with us at Vorgossos. He didn’t understand.

We might only have hours. Maybe less.

All at once, Captain Faber’s surrender took on a more dire cast. It was as if the sunlight had changed, or the sun itself had gone behind a cloud. “This has gone on long enough, Captain,” I said, falling back on the aristocratic sharpness with which I’d begun our little meeting. “If what you say is true then we haven’t much time. If you want your men to live, you will surrender any of these MINOS people still on base and for the love of Earth and all that’s holy you will tell me where my legion is.”

THE LIVING FAILURES

It was so cold in the depths of the fortress warrens, that I’d had to put my helmet back on. Frost misted the air and massed on the coolant lines bracketed to the walls, reminding me of veins in the limb of some giant. Far above, bay doors of steel and reinforced concrete stood closed to the yellow sky. Through that aperture—hundreds of meters long—the Dardanines had lowered dozens of troop transport units: ugly, rectangular pods each holding two centuries of Imperial legionnaires.

“How many are left?” I asked.

“Thirty-seven, lord,” Petros replied.

“That’s what? Seventy . . . four hundred soldiers?” I drummed my fingers against my side as I ran the numbers. It wasn’t even a third of the full legion. I tried not to imagine where those other men had gone. Turning to where two of Petros’s centurions stood near at hand, I said, “One of you: head up top and signal the Tamerlane. Tell Aristedes to deploy the cargo lifters, double time. Are we any near to finding the controls for the bay doors?”

I directed that last bit to everyone in the vicinity, voice amplified by my suit’s speakers.

A decurion answered in a thin voice, “My lord, we’re locked out of the control room.”

“Where?”

“Here, lord!”

The door looked to be solid steel, the first in an airlock that separated the landing bay from the inner fortress when the roof was open to the sky. Just as my man had said, the control panel beside the door was blacked out, dead as old stone.

No matter.

“Stand back!” I said, holding out one hand to fend my soldiers away. I drew my sword, kindled the blade. The highmatter cast spectral highlights—white and blue—against the brushed metal walls. Its cutting edge was fine as hydrogen, and I plunged the point through the reinforced steel as easily as through wax paper. Moving steadily, I carved a hole in the door just large enough for a man to step through. The door fell inward with a slamming sound like the unsealing of a tomb, and—sword held out before me—I stepped inside.

Into darkness.

I activated my suit lights, revealing abandoned banks of control consoles and inert projector plates. My men followed me over the threshold, and behind them I heard someone—Siran, possibly—calling for a scout drone. The device whizzed over my shoulder, emitting a faint, ultrasonic whine as the scanning lasers fanned across the room before vanishing through an open door at the far end.

Pausing, I tapped one of the consoles. It flared to life, holograph readout filling the space above the desktop. “Get the techs,” I ordered one of the others. “Tell them to get those bay doors open. We need to lift the survivors out, double quick. The rest of you: with me.”

Captain Faber had said the MINOS staff had fled the base when we attacked. That had been a lie. We would have noticed any ship attempting to leave Arae when our assault began. There had been none.

They had to be down here somewhere.

I have seen more than my fair share of dark, demon-haunted tunnels in my life. I have said before that light brings order to creation, and that in darkness order grows ever less. The magi teach us that before the First Cause and the cataclysm that birthed the universe there was only Dark, and that it was from that darkness—the infinite chaos and potential that exists in the absence of light—that anything might happen. And so everything had happened, and the universe had emerged, birthed not—as the ancient pagans would have it—by the declaration of a deity, but born of the limitless chaos that comes in the absence of light.

That is why we fear the Dark. Not for what it contains, but for the threat that it might contain anything. Aware of this fact, I pressed down the hall after the drone, following the path laid out in the display at the corner of my vision. Doors opened to either side, revealing storerooms and offices and what reminded me of nothing so much as medical examination rooms. Cold sweat beaded on the back of my neck. A powerful sense of dread settled on me, crouching like a gargoyle. It was almost like being back on Vorgossos, in the dungeons of the Undying.

“My lord!” a voice rang out from behind me, and as I turned, the soldier added, “Over here!”

I joined the man in the arch of a broad doorway opening on a round chamber. The roof above was supported by a single central pillar, and the floor was a tangle of cables, as if someone had pulled apart and rewired several machines in a great hurry.

And then I saw them, sitting in seats around the outer wall, each slumped as if in slumber, hands unfeeling in their laps. There must have been three dozen of them, men and women alike.

None moved.

“Dead?” Siran asked. “Earth and Emperor protect us. What is this?”

Lowering my sword but keeping it lit, I approached the nearest corpse. She didn’t look like an Exalted. None of them did. Each of the dead men seemed human enough. On a whim, I flicked my suit’s vision from visual light to infrared, saw the cooling nimbus of life’s heat fading in her core. “Still warm,” I said, and fingered the braided metal cable the dead woman still grasped in both hands, tracing its course from the floor all the way up to the base of her skull. “They’re not dead,” I said, and with a vindictive turn of my wrist I slashed the cable with my sword. “They’re gone.”

Two the soldiers nearby made a warding gesture with their first and last fingers extended. One asked, “What do you mean, gone?”

“Synaptic kinesis. I’ve seen it before.” I pointed to the column in the center of the room with my sword. “That’s a telegraph relay. This lot wired their brains in and broadcast their minds offworld. Probably to a ship. They’ll have new bodies waiting for them.” They’d discarded their old ones like sleeves, abandoned them here to rot. The eels churned within me once again, and I turned my head. It was easy to imagine the Exalted growing these bodies for just such a reason: to wear for a time and discard. I was prepared to bet my good right hand that the true owner of the flesh before me was some brain trapped in a bottle up in the black of space like some foul djinni. “Once we get the soldiers out, bring atomics down. None of this can be left. And don’t touch anything. Who knows what they’ve left behind.”

No sooner had the words left my mouth than a shot rang out, and turning, I saw one of the bodies tumble from its chair with a smoking hole in its chest. “Hold your fire!” I called, raising a hand.

“I thought it moved, sir,” the soldier said, voice higher than I’d expected. “Like the ones up top.”

“No, soldier. We’ve nothing to fear from these.”

Have I said the universe shares my love of theater?

Something shot out of the darkness and sliced clean through the armorweave at the base of the man’s neck. There was no noise save the sigh of impact and the dull smack of blood against the wall behind him, no crack of gunshot or crash of bullet against the wall. He took a moment to fall, and in that space whatever it was hit another of my men.

“Shields up!” Siran bellowed into the sudden stillness.

I saw a flicker of movement out the corner of my eye—the trailing hem of a robe. I started after it, Siran close behind. Had some of Faber’s men not surrendered with the rest? Or had one of the MINOS personnel remained behind when the others fled by their unholy road?

The tunnels ahead were a labyrinth still incompletely mapped. We were near the bottom of the fortress now, almost to where I guessed the geothermal sinks and the power station must be. All the world was low ceilings and blind turnings in the dark, the walls lit only by the rare sconce, fixtures yellow with neglect. I could just make out the sound of soft footfalls on the ground ahead, and skidded round a corner in pursuit. Once or twice I saw a human shape round a bend ahead.

There!

A stunner bolt flew over my shoulder from Siran’s hand. Was that a gasp of pain?

“Missed,” Siran spat, making the word a curse.

She was right. It must have been a glancing blow, for when we caught up to the next bend there was no one there, but I knew what I had heard. There was a door up ahead on the left, and it stood open. Inside, the shadowed hulks of nameless machines stood in rows.

“Reinforcements are right behind, Had,” Siran said. “We should hold.”

“And let them escape?” I said, brushing past. I knew what Siran was thinking, that this was some kind of trap. But if what Faber said was true, this whole thing was a trap and the Exalted would be on us in hours.

I stepped inside.

Immediately my shield flashed as the strange bullet impacted against it.

It flashed again. Again. Held. The icon in the side of my vision indicated the shield was still blue.

“You should have hired better mercenaries!” I called out, not seeing my quarry among the slumbering machines. “Your Captain Faber’s surrendered!”

“He bought the time we needed!” a cold, high voice returned. “You see my fellows have already escaped.” I scanned the darkness ahead of me, but save the tongues of chilly fog twisting in the air, nothing moved. I swept the beam of my suit lamp ahead and above me, searching the narrow catwalks and raw plumbing.

Nothing.

“You work for MINOS?” I asked, signaling for Siran to cover my back.

“I’m certainly not one of Faber’s little boys,” came the reply. “And I know all about you, Lord Marlowe. The Emperor’s new pet. Killed one of the Cielcin clan chiefs did you? Is it true you twisted the Undying’s arm to do it? The Lord of Vorgossos does not bend easily. I didn’t think he could bend at all.”

Behind my mask, I smiled.

After a moment’s silence, I said, “Who did you sell the legion to?”

No answer.

No surprise.

I tried a different tactic, anything to keep her talking. The longer she kept talking, the better the odds were my reinforcements would catch up. “MINOS produces the Exalted?”

“Abstraction. Body modification. Yes,” the voice floated down from above. “We provide design and fabrication work for the captains and the clans. Life extension. Maintenance of the cerebral tissue—some of our clients are thousands of years old, don’t you know? Whatever they dream—and can afford—we make real.”

Still searching for her, I passed a bit of machinery like a vast, squat drum. Frost rimed its surface, but something there—a glimmer of movement, perhaps?—caught my attention. If there was something inside I could not see it, but I sensed something there the way the swimmer senses the passage of a fish in dark waters.

“What are these?”

“Prototypes,” she said. “Failures.”

“Failures?” I drew back.

On our private band, Siran said, “I see her, Had. Up and left. She’s limping.” I looked, and seeing understood why I hadn’t seen her sooner. She was far too cold to be human, and my suit’s infrared pickups nearly lost her against the awful chill in that room.

“Progress is never without loss.”

“On the contrary,” I said, and it was my tutor who spoke through me, a response out of childhood, “any progress which is accompanied by loss is no progress at all.”

“Spoken just like an Imperial dog.”

“Or like someone who reads.”

Siran fired, stunner flash splitting the gloom. She struck true, and I heard a clatter as a body hit the catwalk above.

“Good shot!” the woman’s voice rang out. “You got me!”

Siran froze before she could start her search of the room’s perimeter. Over the comm, I heard her whisper, “What the hell?”

“Some sort of nervous bypass,” I answered over the private channel. “Kept her conscious. Is she moving?”

“No.”

“Get up there and lock her down before she recovers.” That at least explained how the woman had kept running after we shot her in the hall. “We’ll put her in fugue and bring her back with the rest.”

Not so fast! The woman’s voice crackled over the speakers inside my helmet—over the private frequency. Damn these Extrasolarian demoniacs and their machines! It’s you who won’t be going anywhere, Lord Marlowe!

I switched off my communicator with a glance, sealing my suit off from Siran and the datasphere. The last thing I needed was this Extra woman crawling around in my armor’s infrastructure, shutting off my cameras or my air. I had visions of being trapped there, locked and blind in my suit, waiting to be found by the Extras Faber warned us were coming. An unceremonious end to Hadrian Marlowe, Knight Victorian.

But the MINOS woman had something else in mind.

A light cold and blue as forgotten stars blazed in the drum—the tank—before me, and a moment later something huge and heavy thumped the glass from the inside. Hairline cracks spiderwebbed from the point of impact, and I lurched backwards, scrambling to put as much space between myself and the thing, the failure, that lurked in the woman’s tank.

It struck again and the glass splintered. Super-cooled fluid flooded out, changing the air to a thick, white fog that dragged the thing within outward like an unborn calf from the corpse of a stranded whale. The thing within lurched on unsteady limbs, hands and feet of steel clanging, scraping the ground as it struggled to rise, to right itself.

Words fled me, and my mind with them, and for a single, terrible moment it seemed I stood once more upon the shore of the sea beneath Vorgossos, with that great daimon of the ancient world rising to meet me.

“Hadrian!” a voice cried out. Siran’s voice—and I remembered.

Remembered who I was and what I was there to do.

Remembered the sword in my hand.

The failure pushed itself to its feet, and hunched and lurching as it was, still it towered over me: ten feet or twelve of white metal and jointed bone. It had no face that I could see, for like the helms of our legionnaires its visage was blank and pitiless as ice. It lunged towards me, clawed hands outstretched, but it lost its footing and crashed to its knees. One of the arms bifurcated, the upper half folding up and out from its shoulder like the pinion of some dreadful wing. Seeing my chance, I lunged, hewing at the creature’s arm. The highmatter blade bounced off, ringing my hand like a bell. Wincing, I recoiled, boots unsteady in the rapidly warming coolant. I might have known. I had fought the Exalted before, on Vorgossos and after, and I should have guessed this creature’s body would be proof against highmatter, forged of adamant or some composite whose molecules would not be cut.

I bared my teeth.

Things had just gotten a great deal more difficult.

Siran opened fire, violet plasma scorching the side of its head. She might have been throwing rocks at the Horse for all the good it did. The beast turned to look at her, and I fancied I could see the wheels of its still-organic mind turning. I could see common metal shining in the elbow and shoulder joints, beneath the armored carapace. It had weaknesses. I took a measuring step closer, hoping to try to my luck. I didn’t make it far. The third arm that sprouted from the top of its shoulder whipped round like a peasant’s scythe so fast it vanished. My reflexive flinch was far too late, and I was saved the impact only by the energy curtain of my shield flashing about me.

Letting out a piercing cry, the living failure rose once more to its feet, one leg sliding out from under it. This time it steadied itself, one massive hand striking the wall of the tank beside it. I wondered what was wrong with it. Something in the way the Exalted’s mind interfaced with its new machine body? Something that made it slip and stagger so?

“Stand aside, beast,” I said, aiming my sword at it like an accusing finger. I had fought worse and more dangerous creatures than this. The beast howled again and cracked its third arm like a whip as it advanced, loping forward on legs bent like a dog’s. As a young man in the coliseum on Emesh, I had battled azhdarchs and ophids, manticores and gene-tailored lions large as elephants. And once, after our victory on Pharos, I had faced a charging bull with no shield and only a rapier for defense.

The principle here was the same.

By rights, the abomination ought to have been faster than me, fast almost as that evil appendage that sprouted claw-like from its shoulder. By rights, I should already have been no more than a dark smear on the floor of that hall.

Siran shot it in the head, for all the good it did. The creature shook it off like a slap. There was something in the way it shook its head that was familiar to me, pulling its ear towards its shoulder in sharp, repeated movements. I had no time to think about it, only about the way its fist slammed down like the hand of God. I threw myself sideways, aiming a desperate cut at the side of one knee. The blade pinged off the metal, and just like the bull on Pharos I swung round my enemy like a gate about its hinge, undoing the magnetic clasp of my cape as I went and tossing the garment aside.

“Go find the doctor, Siran!” I ordered. “Don’t let her get away!”

“And leave you?”

“Go!” I ducked a mighty swipe of the creature’s arm and stepped forward. I’d seen a slight gap where the ribs ought to be, between the armored breastplate and the interleaved segments that passed for a stomach. How thin it was! Too long and too narrow to be human anymore. If I could get the point of my blade in that gap . . . there might be something underneath, some delicate system or piece of the mostly discarded flesh.

I did not find out.

The knee lanced out to meet me. Not fast—certainly not fast enough to engage my body shield—but it did not need to be fast. The knee was titanium wrapped in adamant and zircon. There were softer statues.

My armor alone saved my ribs and the heart and lungs beneath them, but the wind was driven from me. I flew backwards as if thrown and struck the wall behind me so hard I imagined the dull metal cracking like glass—or maybe that was only my skull.

Where were the others?

My vision slipped and blurred, righted itself only when I forced myself to slow my breathing and the mutinous hammering of my heart. It was coming, and there I was resting with my back against the wall like some derelict watchman. It leaped towards me, and it was all I could do to roll away as the machine collided bodily with the wall just where my head had been. I regained my feet, glad of the positive pressure in the suit forcing air into my lungs.

There!

Before the beast could turn, I lunged, the point of my sword burying itself in the back of the Exalted’s knee. Common metal parted like paper, and a violently white fluid bled out, running down the ivory calf to the floor. The scythe-arm lashed against my shield then, and slowly began to wind itself about me. I stumbled backwards, but the thing wound itself about my chest. I could feel the thermal layer hardening to protect against the pressure. The creature turned, reached down towards my face with a six-fingered hand.

Six-fingered.

“Iukatta!” In my winded state, the word was little more than a whisper, but my suit amplified it to a shout. Stop!

The beast dropped me, surprise evident in the way it just stood there.

“Nietolo ba-emanyn ne?” the creature asked. The alien within the machine. You speak our language?

I made the sharp sound that passed for yes in their tongue. The Cielcin tongue. “What have they done to you?” It wasn’t possible. The Cielcin and the Extrasolarians . . . working together? But no, the Cielcin clans had been dealing with the Extras since before they invaded the Empire—since before we had even known they existed. That they would work together against the Empire should not have surprised me, and yet . . . seeing the xenobite standing there encased in so much Extrasolarian kit . . . I felt a thrill of holy terror.

The creature’s blank faceplate opened like a jewel box and folded away, revealing the milk-white flesh; the eyes like twin spots of ink on new paper, large as my fists; and the teeth like shattered glass. “They have made us strong,” it said, gnashing its teeth. “Strong enough to defeat you yukajjimn.” Vermin, it said. Its word for human.

“Strong?” I echoed, drawing back, putting distance once again between me and this Cielcin-machine hybrid, demon and daimon. “You can hardly stand.” And no wonder. MINOS and the Exalted had had thousands of years to perfect the systems that bonded man to machine. The Cielcin were not men.

“We were only the first.”

In the quiet of my heart, I imagined armies of such creatures falling from the sky to sack world after imperial world. Dust to dust by the million, humans carried back to the stars and the dark ships the Cielcin called home. I remembered the slaves I had seen, mutilated by their alien masters, and I knew at once what had happened to the rest of our lost legion. MINOS had offered them to their Cielcin friends in payment or in tribute. They were dead, and worse than dead: still living. This was something new. In all my years of fighting, this was something I had never expected: the black marriage of Cielcin and machine.

“Who is your master?” I demanded. “Which clan? Which prince?”

“You cannot stop him. Or his White Hand.”

“Iedyr Yemani?” I repeated the words white hand, not sure I had heard them correctly. Not sure I understood. “Who is he?” Its prince, certainly. Its master.

“He will tear your worlds from the sky, human!” the Cielcin roared, and beat its chest with its hands. “He has conquered an army for himself, and he is coming!” Then the creature pounced, thinking me distracted. But I was ready, and lunging, aimed my sword at the creature’s unprotected face. It was my only chance. My only hope was that whatever was wrong with the hybrid would slow it down. As it hurtled towards me, claws outstretched, I saw the visor begin to close like an eyelid snapping shut. The adamantine faceplate slammed with the point of my sword caught between its flanges, and almost the weapon was wrenched from my hand. I grinned savagely.

It had worked exactly as I’d planned.

The beast landed badly, and its ruined knee went out from under it. It fell with a crash, and I leaned all my weight against the hilt of my sword. I bared my teeth, eyes stretched wide as I pushed the sword downwards. The point moved only slowly, metal grinding against liquid metal as the highmatter sank home, piercing flesh and bone. And brain.

Like a muscle relaxing, the visor fell open once again, revealing the neat hole between the massive eyes, and the black blood running like tears.

I found Siran and the MINOS doctor moments later. My fears were justified. The doctor—a small, gray woman dressed in white—had indeed possessed some implant or artifice that had saved her from the stun. While I’d been distracted with her experiment, she had crawled along the catwalk to a room overlooking her lab.

Siran handed me the gun as I entered, cape firmly back in place. It was a strange thing, silver and strangely organic. I looked down at the body at my feet and the name embroidered above the breast pocket of her lab coat.

“Severine,” I read aloud, eyes wandering to the perfectly round hole she’d punched through the bottom of her jaw and out the top of her head. She had carefully missed the delicate hardware at the base of her skull. “She escaped then?”

“Like the others?” Siran asked. “Guess so. By Earth, Had. This shit’s beyond me.” Her blank-visored face turned up to look at me, looking for all the world not so different from the helmet of the creature I had slain. “Are you all right?”

I caught myself rubbing my hands—as if trying to remove some spot on the black gloves. “They were mingling the Cielcin with machines. That’s what that thing was.”

“Are you serious?” I could imagine the look of shock on her face, eyes white and wide in the dimness.

“The body is just down there,” I gestured to the room below. “We’ll need to bring it back with us, and everything we can get from these machines.” Breaking off, I looked round at the banks of computers rising all about us, the machines through which the ghost of Dr. Severine and her fellows had escaped. “The Cielcin said its master had raised an army. That it was coming for us.”

The centurion—my friend—moved to stand beside me, her arms crossed. “The Cielcin have been invading for hundreds of years. That’s nothing new.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “This time it’s different.” I let my hands fall, looked back through the open door to where the failed hybrid lay on the floor. “A Cielcin prince willing to work with the Extras . . . The world is changing.”

“Lord Marlowe!” a voice rang out from below, “Lord Marlowe!” The questing beams of suit lights blazed up from below. My men had found us. Too little. Too late.

I did not step out to speak to them at once, but turned to Siran. “Something’s coming. Mark my words. This war of ours is about to get a good deal worse.”


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