DARKNESS.

Green eyes watched from the darkness like statues in a fog. I felt them like fishhooks in me, dragging me upward. I felt wrong. Cold. The image of Bordelon’s face on the holograph—moments before I wiped it from existence—seemed to float on the air. His was not alone. Gilliam’s was there, lips twisted as he was, a sneer made flesh. And Uvanari. A confusion of sound filled my universe: the screams of dying men, the cheering of the Colosso crowd, my own blood pounding in my ear.

I knew then, knew that I had been dead, and that all this sensory weight was the cost and burden of consciousness returning. Of being alive. I was alive. Again.

“Lord Commandant?” A familiar voice, strangely accented, hinting at a language I could not remember—if indeed I knew it at all. “Lord Commandant?”

I was hiding in a basement on Pharos, that was it. There was a woman with me, a woman I loved, her hair blacker than the shadows. We were hiding from Bordelon and the Normans after they sold us to Admiral Whent. No. No, that was a long time ago, and a long time since Emesh, but my confused brain drank the scent of her and of burning wood, recalling the warmth of her and the taste of the ration bars we had shared alone in the darkness.

“Lord Commandant?”

The fog was clearing, retreating into the depths of history and of time as yet uncounted. I could still hear shouts, sobs, and I knew they were my own, conducted through bone and time to make me feel and see the horrors of my past because to know them was to be alive. Hard fingers tore my clothes that night in Borosevo, Cat’s body sank into the canals . . . At once sharp as new experience, my memories retreated from me like votive lanterns to the skies. I grasped at them, and found my arms like trunks of lead, unmoving. Warmth was rising in me, chasing out that pelagic cold, bleeding in from both my arms.

Bleeding.

I was in a bed. Or else in something very like a bed, and someone was standing over me. I beheld old Tor Gibson, his gray eyes green in my delirium—green as his robes—his leonine mane and whiskers bristling in the wind off Meidua’s waters.

“Dead?” I croaked, unsure if I meant himself or me.

The old scholiast smiled. “Not yet. We might avoid that yet.”

“Lord Commandant, lie still please.” That strange voice. Familiar. It came from Gibson’s mouth, or so I thought. “You’re still fugue-blind.”

“No,” I said, looking at the scholiast. “I can . . . can see Gibson.”

“There’s no one here but us!” The voice had moved, was opposite Gibson now, but the scholiast had not changed.

When Gibson spoke, his lips did not move. The actor knows he is on stage. The character knows there is no stage. It sounded like one of his scholiast’s aphorisms, but I could not remember it.

I was going mad. I was in a basement on Pharos—or was that years ago? She had been there with me, with Admiral Whent’s thugs out after us, and we had come out alive. And Gibson was dead. And I’d been dead—or nearly so. Frozen.

“Do you know where you are?”

A question, a question that spoke to the oldest exploratory and orienting circuits in the ancientmost corners of my brain. Do you know where you are?

As if the curtains on a stage were pulled back and the holography of the set pieces generated, the fog cleared and the real world took form. I was in medica. White walls, white floor, white ceiling. Too clean. I lay in the opened husk of a portable fugue crèche that someone had floated in here and bolted to the slab for revival. Turning, I saw that Gibson was gone. A hallucination? A vision brought on doubtless by the fact that there was still a part of me that thought in Gibson’s voice.

Twelve years since Emesh.

It came back to me. “We’re on the Pharaoh.” We had acquired the ship on Pharos, had taken it after that business with the Normans and Admiral Whent, after Bordelon betrayed us. We had been hired—alongside Bordelon’s company—to run weapons to freedom fighters attempting to overthrow the planetary dictator Marius Whent, all part of our efforts to build our credibility as a mercenary outfit as we hunted for Vorgossos. But Bordelon had betrayed us, and we had been forced to fight our way out. Marius Whent had been forced to surrender. Emil Bordelon had been killed, betrayed in his turn by his own soldiers—because I’d made them an offer they could not refuse.

The woman at my bedside, an ink-skinned Norman with hair like curling steel, nodded a judicious little nod. “Yes. And do you know who I am?” She wore a set of burgundy fatigues, form-fitting. A uniform. My uniform, I had designed it, with the flapped pockets and piped sleeves.

“Doctor Okoyo,” I said, an address and not an answer, “I don’t think there was any cryoburn.” I tried to sit up, at once aware as Adam of my nakedness.

“Don’t move, Lord Marlowe.” She pushed me down, gentle but firm, and said, “I’ve not got all the TX9 out of you.”

Turning, I saw the blood bags hanging from their staff beside me. AB Positive. Opposite was a drip pan emptying the anti-freezing agent from my veins. It shone cerulean in the too-white light; almost black. After a moment, I said, “You could have left me for a medtech, doctor.”

Okoyo snorted. “Commodore Lin would skin me if I did that, and you Imperial types actually skin people.”

“You have a point,” I conceded, “but you’ve nothing to fear from us, surely.” We sat in silence a moment, the doctor busying herself with a diagnostic terminal while I pretended I was not naked and aware of it. I tried to sort the visions I had seen. Waking from fugue was never easy. The men who had abandoned me on Emesh had shoved just enough blood in me that they could not be accused of murder, and I had been unconscious for that ordeal, but on each occasion since, I had passed through a warren of memory and noise to the quiet of the world. The brain hyper-acted, so they said, on returning to consciousness. It was like dying, I thought, for in fugue the processes of my life were suspended as in formaldehyde, and that was as good as being dead. I was little different than a corpse, or a side of meat in a freezer.

I was wrong, of course. It is nothing like dying. Nothing at all.

“What’s the standard date?”

“Sixteen two-nineteen point one-one.” She did not turn her head.

“November,” I mused. Of the Year of our Empire 16219. Forty-eight years since Emesh, though I had lived but twelve of them. Forty-eight years pretending to be mercenaries. Forty-eight years free of Count Mataro and his designs on me for his daughter. Forty-eight years a special conscript of the Legions of the Sun.

Forty-eight more years of war. Of the abortive, genocidal crusade against the Cielcin, the xenobites who drank of human worlds and preyed upon our people like wolves among sheep. Forty-eight years hunting for Vorgossos, carrying Cielcin prisoners and the hope of parley. Of peace.

“Is there some news?” I asked, sitting up now that the doctor could not stop me. My head swam, and I braced myself against the hard edges of my crèche. After a moment I stabilized, and tore a folded robe from the slab beside me. “Did we get a lead on that arms dealer the pirates gave us back on Sanora?” The doctor turned at the sound of my movement and hurried to my side. Her voice strained, she tried to lay me back down, but I held up a hand. “I’m just trying to cover myself.”

Okoyo glowered. “You’re just trying to make yourself pass out, Lord Marlowe.”

“It’s all right,” I murmured, voice suddenly faint. “It’s all right.”

She kept an arm around my shoulders, and it was all I could do to puddle the robe in my lap—but that was enough. My own breathing consumed my attention, thick and wet. Rolling, I bent over the drip pan and coughed up a glob of the violet suspension fluid that yet settled in my lungs. “You’re not all right,” Okoyo said. “You’ve been an ice cube for the last six years.”

“Six years?” I asked, surprised. I had not done the math. “Where are we?”

The doctor shook her head. “Best leave that to the Commodore, Lord.”

Bassander Lin looked older than I remembered, and I wondered just how much of the intervening travel time the prickly captain had spent awake. I say captain, of course, because that was what he was. His role as Commodore was a mask, a persona, as much as was my position of Lord Commandant. The change in him was a subtle thing: no creasing about the eyes or mouth, no gray at the temples. But then, Lin was patrician, a bronze-skinned Mandari from an old family, his blood nearly so elevated as mine. The only real change lay within those black eyes of his. Something had hardened in them, the slow venom of our long association transmuted to amber; crystallized. His quarters aboard the Pharaoh had belonged to the Norman Commodore Emil Bordelon, and Bassander Lin had made some effort to remove all signs of the rooms’ previous occupant. The pornographic artwork was all gone, the ornate frames discarded, the carpets removed. I could still see the fixtures in the floor where the Commodore’s too-large bed had been, replaced by a simple soldier’s cot. There were no blankets.

“Sleep well?” he asked, surveying me from behind his desk. “Okoyo gave you a clean bill of health.” He had an annoying habit of answering his own questions. So I didn’t speak, but slumped low in my chair, uncomfortable in my crimson uniform. Bassander was dressed identically, but on him the high collar and tokens of rank seemed to rest easy. I at least had no badges to wear, save the sigil I had made, picked out in gold thread on the left bicep. Bassander toyed with a heavy mug on his desk, not looking at me. “That woman Corvo thinks she’s found our man.”

I sat upright, leaning over the edge of the desk. Lin’s flinty gaze tripped over my face, and he took a drink. “The Painted Man?” That was what the Sanoran pirates had called him.

The captain shook his head and stood, turning his back. “Some bastard called Samir. He works for The Painted Man, or so Corvo tells it.” He was built like a rapier, rail-thin and slim-shouldered, and stood framed against a holograph plate depicting a collage of security feeds from inside the Pharaoh. “She sent one of her lieutenants down to the planet. He made contact.”

“We have Vorgossos, then?” I asked.

Bassander did not move, save to toggle the feeds on his holograph plate, displaying other parts of his ship. “No.” He put his hands on his hips, and I noticed the highmatter sword clipped there. It had belonged to Admiral Marius Whent, who had nearly cost us our lives during the Pharos affair. “Corvo’s man says Samir’s a local, just someone who covers for the Extrasolarian.”

“We need to set up a meeting . . .”

“It seems that way.” The captain shrugged, running hands through his wood-smoke hair. “Wouldn’t be a problem if we had the 437th with us, but . . . with a band of misfits like ours . . . it’s a joke.” We could not have called for reinforcements in any case. They were thousands of light-years and decades of real time away.

“Just because we’re a front, Bassander,” I said, biting off his name, “does not mean we’re a joke.”

Bassander Lin made a small dismissive noise in his throat and looked back at his screens. “We’re outnumbered six to one by those Normans you picked up, as if your Colosso rats weren’t bad enough.”

It took a long, steady breath to keep me from hurling his mug at him. I crossed my arms instead. “We needed reinforcements.”

“We needed soldiers.”

“They are soldiers.”

“They’re foederati!” Bassander turned around at last. “They’re loyal so long as we pay them. They’d turn on us in a moment if they saw a better offer.”

“Then we don’t let them get a better offer.” It was my turn then to snort derisively. “We’re paying them half again as much as Bordelon was.”

“That’s not to say a higher bidder won’t come along. I don’t trust them. I don’t trust Corvo. It’s only working because the money is steady.”

“Won’t it stay that way?” I asked, putting my face in my hands. My head was pounding; I’d left medica far too soon. “The Empire. The Legions are backing us. Corvo knows that. The Meidua Red Company—”

“The Meidua Red Company,” Bassander sneered, shaking his head as he slung back into Commodore Bordelon’s old chair. “Do you know what it is? For me?”

I pressed my fingers against my eyes, tried to clear my head. “The tribune gave us a mission, to find the Cielcin, to try and—”

“It’s a punishment post. She’s saddled me with you and your misfits, Earth only knows why.”

My eyes narrowed. “How long have you been awake?” He spoke like a man too long on his own, like he’d rehearsed this conversation with himself a thousand times in the naked corridors of the Pharaoh while the rest of us slept. Bassander seemed to take my point without answering it. He glowered, allowing me the opening to ask, “So you want me to head down to the surface? Find Samir? Find this Painted Man?”

The Commodore who was truly a captain frowned. “I just want you holding Corvo’s leash. Like I said: I don’t trust her.”

“She’s been with us now for seventeen standard years,” I said. “I gave her command of the Mistral.” At another look from Bassander I raised my hands, temporized, “We gave her command of the Mistral. She’s good at her job.” Before that, Otavia Corvo had been Emil Bordelon’s third officer on the Pharaoh, and if the way she turned on her previous master was any indication, the man left much to be desired where commanding officers were concerned. Still, I couldn’t say that I did not understand Bassander’s trepidation. Unbidden, my eyes went to the front of the desk, where tangled relief carvings of nymphs and satyrs writhed in unprofessional ecstasy.

Bassander took a long drink from his mug. “I just . . . want you around for it.”

I felt myself smile, knowing it did not reach my eyes. “That’s very kind of you to say.”

Lin grunted. “I don’t want you leading another bloody away team, though. Not after Pharos. We nearly lost you and Captain Azhar. And the last thing I need is the Jaddians upset I lost their representative.”

“Someone important to the Company has to make contact with this Extrasolarian, The Painted Man. We can’t send Corvo and I won’t send Jinan.” When Bassander looked to be on the verge of interrupting, I said, “Neither represents the Empire, Bassander. That rules out Corvo and Jinan, that rules out Valka. That leaves you and me, and we can’t send you. It has to be me.” The quiet tossed between us like a fish upon the strand. “But we don’t know anything yet . . . Corvo’s man’s setting something up, right?”

“He’s made it known we’re after atomics . . . antimatter weapons, that sort of thing.”

“Daimons?” I said, unable to help myself.

“What?” Bassander’s eyes went suddenly wide. “God and Emperor, no!”

I understood his antipathy. I was a son of the Imperium myself, raised in the long shadow of the Mericanii, whose inhuman congress with artificial intelligence had nearly consumed mankind in the days before the Empire. I half-expected the fastidious Bassander Lin to reprimand me and accuse me of heresy, but he only ground his teeth, affording me the chance to shrug and say, “I’m only saying that if we’re going to the Extrasolarians, we shouldn’t just ask for a crate of plasma burners.”

“Where in the word ‘atomics’ did you hear ‘plasma burners’?” He looked up at the ceiling as he spoke, as if looking for some god to give him patience.

I dismissed this with a gesture. “Do you want me on the away team or not?”

“No, I do not.” Bassander leaned back in the huge chair. “But it’s been nearly fifty years since we left Emesh, Marlowe. Fifty years. Do you know how many colonies the Cielcin have razed since we started off on this ridiculous adventure of yours?”

“Knight-Tribune Smythe agrees that—”

“Thirteen.” Bassander cut me off. “Thirteen, Marlowe.” He rattled off the names: Bannatia, Lycia, Idun . . . “I go into fugue, and each time I wake up there’s another one on the list. Millions dead. Each time. And I haven’t done a thing to stop it.” His voice had risen with each passing word until he was almost shouting.

I had to struggle not to stand. “What do you think we’re doing?”

“Wasting time!” he spat. “I have another transmittal compiling from the telegraph right now, for Earth’s sake! Another attack, Marlowe—I don’t know how bad.”

“If we can secure a peace with even one Cielcin clan, we’ll have changed the face of this war more than any battle has.” I did stand then, tugging at the hem of my short jacket to straighten it. “Whether you like it or not, I have to be on that away team.”

Bassander only bobbed his head in agreement, rubbing the spot between his eyes. “You’re probably right. Earth forgive me.”

“I’ll need a shuttle over to the Balmung,” I said, turning distractedly away. “Is there time?”

The captain in Commodore’s clothes massaged his jaw, but did not look at me. How small he looked, in Bordelon’s oversized chair, behind that vasty desk, bent by the weight of the years we had in common and those he’d spent alone. “We’re still waiting on Corvo’s man. There’s time.” As I turned to go he said, “Marlowe.”

I stopped. “Yes, Lin?” I switched back to his last name. He never seemed to notice a difference, as if such shaded distinctions were meaningless to him.

“Joke or not, we’re a military operation. Not a chauffeur service for your harem.”

Rage flickered through me like an electrical current, made me twitch. Fists clenched, shoulders tightened. I let it go, said, “One woman is hardly a harem, captain.” I did not look back, but I felt a disturbance in the air. The captain had stung our Commodore.

“Are you all right?” A familiar voice asked when I stepped from Bassander’s quarters into the gunmetal hall. Turning, I found my lictor standing at his post just beside the door. His crimson company uniform looked rumpled, as if he’d been leaning against the arched bulkhead. “You look like someone’s been using you for combat practice.”

“I feel like it, Switch,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “And Lin’s been his charming self all afternoon.”

“That bad? And it’s morning, actually,” Switch said, falling into step beside me as we went down the hall, bootheels clacking on the decking.

“Is it really?” I said dumbly. “Dark take me . . .”

We passed a pair of junior technicians—some of our Normans—and I returned their salutes and their “Lord Marlowes!” with a smile and a wave, the effort of which made my head ache.

Switch thumbed the controls to summon a lift and we stood by the doors a moment. He’d gained some years on me in fugue. There were crow’s feet about the muddy green eyes, and straw and silver fretted in his reddish hair. The face I saw in my own mirror had not slipped or aged a day since Emesh, while Switch’s had leathered just a bit. But then, I was born in a castle, grown by design and to order while my parents waited, my every gene surgically exact and more than human. Switch had been born the son of a clerk, sold to settle a debt and abused up and down the spaceways until his childhood ended. His blood was low as it came, and yet Fate or Chance had danced and there we stood together as comrades.

“Shuttle’s waiting in the hold,” Switch said, adjusting his hair and his uniform in the faint reflection of the lift door. It hissed open, and he grinned sheepishly at the legionnaire inside. The man shouldered out, bowing—not saluting—to me as he sped up the corridor. “Captain Azhar had me sent over the minute she got word Lin was decanting you.”

I stood a little straighter at the mention of Jinan Azhar. “Excellent, I can’t stay on this ship another minute.” Bassander had moved to the Pharaoh after we’d taken it during the Pharos affair, declaring it the flagship of our newly expanded fleet. The Norman, Corvo, he’d shunted over to the Mistral, a small Uhran interceptor we’d taken when we took the Pharaoh. Our original ship, the ancient, refitted Imperial destroyer Balmung, he’d left in command of our Jaddian emissary, Captain Jinan Azhar. Bassander trusted her and her copper-skinned soldiers from the Principalities. They were professionals, after all, true soldiers honor-bound and sworn to the service of His Highness, the High Prince Aldia di Otranto, First-Among-Equals of the Princes of Jadd. She was like Lin—and very unlike Lin—and so we’d filled out the command structures of our three ships. One Imperial captain, one Jaddian, one Norman mercenary, with the lower-ranking officers of each group distributed between the three ships so that everyone watched everyone else, and Bassander watched them all.

That was why I needed off the Pharaoh. It was bad enough there were Imperial officers reporting to Bassander every time I left my room, but on the Balmung he could not watch me through his camera feeds. And there were . . . other reasons. Our Cielcin prisoners were on the Balmung, for one. The massive fugue crèches we kept them in—the sort used to transport livestock between the suns—couldn’t be moved between one ship and the other, and so Bassander had left them in Jinan’s care when he gave her command of the old flagship. Valka Onderra was there, unwilling to move her many papers and data crystals from the study she had made for herself in the Balmung’s hydroponics department. Many other of my friends were there: Switch, for a start. And Ghen and old Pallino, a few of the other myrmidons from my days in the fighting pits of the Borosevo Colosso. The rest were distributed between the Pharaoh and Mistral. And there was Jinan herself, who was as much an improvement over stolid Bassander as a flower is over sand.

“You been up long?” I asked, massaging my temples.

Switch shoved his hands in his pockets. “About three weeks. Jinan woke me when Corvo sent Crim down to the surface.”

“Crim, eh?” I asked, thinking of the young Norman lieutenant, Karim Garone. “Good, I was worried Lin might have sent Soisson or Dulia.”

I could hear Switch grin. “Only if he wanted to start another fire.”

We laughed then, and the lift hissed along. The Pharaoh was a proper Uhran-made capital ship. Two miles long, with a profile like a knife blade: wider than it was tall, pointed on the front end, with the bridge far in aft atop a conning spire like a fin two hundred and fifty meters high. Bassander’s quarters were in that spire, near the bridge, but we plunged out of it before the lift entered a horizontal shaft that carried us along a good hundred meters of tube before dropping us down and further aft. Toward her stern, the Pharaoh flared wider to accommodate her engine cluster—enclosed in the ring of her warp drive—as well as the docking bays for her various shuttles and the two dozen Sparrowhawk lighter craft she could field for inter-ship combat. I watched us descend on the lift’s terminal screen, a little red node moving against the blue wire frame.

Leaning my forehead against the wall above the screen, I said, “How’s Etienne?” Meaning the Norman soldier who was the latest in Switch’s string of lovers.

Switch didn’t answer for a moment, then said, “Done, but he’s over here and I’m on the Balmung so that’s all right.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.

“I’m not,” he replied. “He had it coming. What about you and the woman?”

Thinking of Bassander’s comment about my harem, I looked down at my feet. “Good. It’s good.” Whether out of respect for my migraine or because he had nothing more to say, that was all Switch said, and so we exited into another hallway, larger but identical in design to the one we had just left: square, rounded corners, with ribbed supports arching every ten meters or so. Diode lamps built into the ceiling or ensconced high in the walls shone unflickeringly as I followed Switch out, past three legionnaires in their burgundy fatigues. If they saluted me, I did not see.

The shuttles hung in open bays beneath the Pharaoh like remoras beneath a great shark, accessed by an umbilical gangway. Switch went first, per protocol, and cleared the shuttle for me. There was no one aboard except the pilot officer, a young Norman man with olive skin and blond hair. Switch took the seat behind him—facing me—and I sunk into the bench in the rear. I returned the pilot officer’s greeting as best I could and settled back. For the first time since my revival I could look outside, through the alumglass windows.

“Canceling suppression field,” the pilot officer said, and a moment later the artificial gravity was gone, leaving me floating against my restraints. Addled as I was and fugue-sick, it was not a pleasant feeling. Switch was studying his hands. A loud metallic sound reverberated through the hull around us. “That’s umbilical separation.”

The rest of the pilot officer’s technical patter fell away as we did, dropping out of the Pharaoh’s hold and into darkness. As we cleared the dark mass of metal and came out into open space, I beheld the cloud-streaked umber disk of the planet Rustam. It had been an Imperial colony not long ago. Now it was nothing at all. Through the window I could just make out the black scar on the face of one continent—very near the terminator—where the Cielcin had gouged a city out of the native rock.

I swallowed, and for a moment forgot my aching head. Seldom had I seen a thing so horrible, and seldom since. I knew Switch was watching me, and I looked down at my lap.

“Wiped out the palatine house completely,” he said, “the whole government, about ten years back. The new city’s on the far side, can’t see it here.”

“How many?”

“Dead?” Switch asked. “Not sure. Lin reckons about two million. There’s twice as many down there that lived, though.”

I had to look away. The black ruin was like a slitted eye peering at me. Through me. “Maybe Lin’s right. We’re taking too long.”

“You couldn’t have stopped this.”

“No,” I said, “but we might stop it happening ever again.” A lie. We both knew it. As we spoke, in some corner of the Norman Expanse the Cielcin were burning another world.

I shut my eyes against the Dark, and found only another darkness, deeper still.