Morning Star

The storm falls as we climb along a rocky arm of the mountain. Soon we can see nothing beyond our party. Steel-gray snow gnaws into us. Blotting out the sky, the ice, the mountains inland. We duck our heads, squinting through the sealSkin balaclavas. Boots scrape the ice underfoot. Wind roars loud as a waterfall. I hunch against it, putting one boot after the other, connected with Mustang and Holiday by rope in the Obsidian way so we don’t lose one another in the blizzard. Ragnar scouts ahead. How he finds his way is beyond me.

He returns now, loping over the rocks with ease. He signals for us to follow.

Easier said than done. Our world is small and furious. Mountains lurk in the white. Their hulking shoulders the only shelter from the wind. We scramble over bitter black rock that slices at our gloves while the wind tries to hurl us down gulches and bottomless crevasses. The exertion keeps us alive. Neither Holiday nor Mustang slow, and after more than an hour of dreadful travel, Ragnar guides us into a mountain pass and the storm breathes. Beneath us, impaled upon a ridgeline, is the ship that shot us from the sky.

I feel a pang of sympathy for her. Sharklike lines and flared starburst tail indicate she was once a long, sleek racing vessel of the famed Ganymede shipyards. Painted proud and bold in crimson and silver by loving hands. Now she’s a cracked, blackened corpse impaled upside down on a stark ridgeline. Cassius, or whoever was inside, had a nasty time of it. The rear third of the ship sheaved off half a kilometer downhill from the main body. Both parts look deserted. Holiday scans the wreck with her rifle’s scope. No sign of life or movement outside.

“Something seems off,” Mustang says, crouched beside me. Her father’s visage watches me from the razor on her arm.

“The wind is against us,” Ragnar says. “I smell nothing.” His black eyes scan the peaks of the mountains around us, going rock to rock, looking for danger.

“We can’t risk getting pinned down by rifles,” I say, feeling the wind pick up again behind us. “We need to close the distance fastlike. Holiday, you lay cover.” Holiday digs a small trench in the snow and covers herself with the thermal blanket. We cover that with snow so only her rifle’s peeking out. Then Ragnar slips down the slope to investigate the rear half of the ship as Mustang and I press for the main wreck.

Mustang and I slink low over rocks, covered by the renewed vigor of the storm, unable to see the ship till we’re within fifteen meters. We close the rest of the distance on our bellies and find a jagged hole in the aft where the back half of the fuselage was shredded by Ragnar’s missile. Part of me expected a camp of warColors and Golds preparing to hunt us down. Instead, the ship’s an epileptic corpse, power flickering on and off. Inside, the ship is hollow and cavernous and almost too dark to see when the lights crackle off. Something drips in the darkness as we work our way toward the middle of the craft. I smell the blood before I see it. In the passenger compartment, nearly a dozen Grays lie dead, smashed into the floor above us by the rocks that speared the ship as it landed. Mustang kneels next to the body of a mangled Gray to examine his clothing.

“Darrow.” She pulls back his collar and points to a tattoo. The digital ink still moves even though the flesh is dead. Legio XIII. So it is Cassius’s escort. I manipulate the toggle on my razor, moving my thumb in the shape of the new desired design. I press down. The razor slithers in my hand, abandoning its slingBlade look for a shorter, broader blade so I can stab more easily in the cramped environs.

There’s no sign of any life as we move forward, let alone Cassius. Just the wind moaning through the bones of the vessel. A strange feeling of vertigo walking along the ceiling and looking up at the floor. Seats and belt buckles hanging down like intestines. The ship convulses back to life, illuminating a sea of broken datapads and dishes and gum packages underfoot. Sewage leaks from a crack in the metal wall. The ship dies again. Mustang taps my arm and points out a shattered bulkhead window to what looks like drag marks in the snow. Smeared blood black in the dim light. She signs to me. Bear? I nod. A razorback must have found the wreckage and begun feasting on the corpses of the diplomatic mission. I shudder, thinking of noble Cassius suffering that fate.

A grisly sucking sound makes its way to us from farther on in the ship. We press forward, feeling the dread of the scene before we enter the forward passenger cabin. The Institute taught us the sound of teeth on raw meat. But still, this is a horrifying sight, even for me. Golds hang upside down from the ceiling, imprisoned in their crash webbing, legs pinned by bent paneling. Beneath them hunch five nightmares. Their fur is grim and matted, once white but now clumped with dried blood and filth. They gnaw on the bodies of the dead. Their heads are those of massive bears. But the eyes that peer through the eye sockets of those heads are black and cold with intelligence. Standing not on four legs but two, the largest of the pack turns toward us. The ship lights throb back on. Pale muscled arms, slick with seal grease to ward off the cold, dark with blood from skinning the dead Golds, move from under the bear pelts.

The Obsidian is taller than I am. A crooked iron blade sewn into his hand. Human bones strung together with dried tendon as a breastplate. Hot breath billows from under the snout of the ursine skull he wears as a helmet. Slow and measured, the deep ululation of an evil war chant blossoms from between his blackened teeth. They’ve seen our eyes and one screams something unintelligible.

The ship wheezes and the lights go out.

The first cannibal vaults toward us through the cluttered hall, the rest behind him. Shadows in the darkness. My pale razor lashes forward and hews through his iron knife, through his breastplate and clavicle straight into his heart. I twist aside so he doesn’t crash into me. His momentum takes him past me into Mustang, who sidesteps him and cuts his head clean off. His body spills to the ground past her, twitching.

An audible grunt, and a spear with a jagged iron end flies from one of the other cannibals. I duck under it and punch upward with my left hand, deflecting it into the ceiling, just over Mustang’s head. Then the Obsidian behind slams into me as I rise. As large as I am. Stronger. More creature than man. Overwhelming me with the frenzy of a lost mind, he pins me to the wall and snaps at me with blackened, sharp-filed teeth. The lights of the ship flash illuminating the sores around his mouth. My arms are pinned to my sides. He bites at my nose. I turn my face just before he rips it off. Instead, his teeth sink into the meat at the base of my lower jaw. I scream in pain. Blood flows down my neck. He chomps down again, pulling at my face. Eating me alive as the lights go out. His right hand tries to work a knife through the sealSkin to slide it between my ribs and into my heart. The fabric holds.

Then the cannibal goes slack, twitching, and his body falls to the ground, spinal cord severed by Mustang from behind.

A black missile blurs past my face and slams into Mustang. Knocking her off her feet. The fletching of an arrow sticks from her left shoulder. She grunts, scrambling on the ground. I lunge away from her, toward the three remaining Obsidian. One’s nocking another arrow, the second hefts a huge axe, the third holds a huge curved horn, which the cannibal brings through the bearhelm to its mouth.

Then a terrible howl comes from outside the ship.

The lights go out.

The darkness ripples with a fourth shape. Shadowy forms lashing at one another. Metal cutting flesh. And when the lights come back on, Ragnar stands holding the head of one Obsidian as he pulls his razor out of the chest of the second. The third, bow cut in half, pulls a knife, stabbing wildly at Ragnar. He hacks her arm off. Still she rolls away, mad, immune to pain. He stalks after her and rips off her helmet. Beneath is a young woman. Face painted white, nostrils slit open so she looks a snake. Ritual scars forming a series of bars under both eyes. She can’t be more than eighteen. Her mouth slurs out something as she stares at the vastness of Ragnar, large even for her people. Then her wild eyes find the tattoos on his face.

“Vjrnak,” she rasps, not in terror, but fevered joy. “Tnak ruhr. Ljarfor aesir!” She closes her eyes and Ragnar cuts off her head.

“You prime?” I ask Mustang, rushing to her. She’s already on her feet. The arrow sticks out from under her collarbone.

“What did she say?” Mustang asks past me. “Your Nagal is better than mine.”

“I didn’t understand the dialect.” It was too guttural. Ragnar knows it.

“Stained son. Kill me. I will rise Golden.” Ragnar explains. “They eat what they find.” He nods to the Golds. “But to eat the flesh of Gods is to rise immortal. More will come.”

“Even in the storm?” I ask. “Can their griffins fly in this?”

His lips curl in disgust. “The beasts do not ride griffin. But no. They will seek refuge.”

“What about the other wreck?” Mustang asks, pressing on. “Supplies? Men?”

He shakes his head. “Bodies. Ship munitions.”

I send Ragnar to fetch Holiday from her post. Mustang and I stay with plans to search the ship for gear. But I remain standing motionless in the cannibals’ charnel house even after Ragnar’s slipped out into the snow. The Golds might have been enemies, but this horror makes life feel so cheap. There’s a cruel irony to this place. It is terrifying and wicked, but it wouldn’t exist unless Gold made it exist to create fear, to create that need for their iron rule. These poor bastards were eaten by their own pet monsters.

Mustang stands from examining one of the Obsidian, wincing from the arrow that’s still imbedded in her shoulder. “Are you all right?” she asks, noting my silence. I gesture to the broken fingernails on one of the Golds.

“They weren’t dead when they started skinning them. Just trapped.”

She nods sadly and holds out her palm. Something she found on the Obsidian body. Six Institute class rings. Two Pluto Cyprus trees, a Minerva owl, a Jupiter lightning bolt, a Diana stag, and one which I pick from her palm, emblazoned with the Mars wolf head.

“We should look for him,” she says.

I reach up to the ceiling to examine the Golds who hang upside down from their seats. Their eyes and tongues are gone, but I can see, mangled as they are, none are my old friend. We search the rest of the upside-down ship and find several small bedroom suites. In the dresser of one, Mustang finds an ornate leather box with several watches and a small pearl earring set in silver. “Cassius was here,” she says.

“Are those his watches?”

“It’s my earring.”

I help Mustang remove the arrow from her shoulder in Cassius’s suite, away from the gore. She makes no sound as I break off the tip, push her against the wall, and jerk the arrow out by its tail end. She curls in on herself, slumping down to her heels in pain. I sit on the edge of the mattress that’s fallen from the ceiling and watch her hunch there. She doesn’t like being touched when she’s wounded.

“Finish up,” she says, standing.

I use the resGun to make a shiny patch over the hole on the front and back, just under her collarbone. It stops the bleeding and will help repair the tissue, but she’ll feel the wound and it’ll slow her for days. I pull her sealSkin back up over her bare shoulder. She zips the front up for herself before patching the wound on my jaw as well. Her breath fills the air. She comes so close I can smell the dampness of the snow that’s melted in her hair. She presses the resGun to my jaw and paints a thin layer of the microorganisms onto the wound. They scramble into the pores and tighten to make a fleshlike antibacterial coating. Her hand lingers on the back of my head, fingers wrapped in the strands of my hair, like she wants to say something but doesn’t have the words. Nor does she find them by the time Holiday and Ragnar return. Hearing Holiday calling my name, I squeeze Mustang’s good shoulder and leave her there.

Most of the ship’s gear is gone. Several sets of optics missing from their cases. The armory missing entirely, scattered across the mountains as the ship came apart and the cargo hold ripped open. The rest has been torn through by Obsidians or broken in the crash. All I get is static from the transponder and com gear.

Ragnar discerns that Cassius and the rest of his party, some fifteen men, departed several hours before we reached the vessel. They stripped it bare of supplies. The Eaters likely descended as soon as it landed, otherwise Cassius wouldn’t have left those Golds behind to be eaten. Supporting this idea, Mustang finds several Eater bodies nearer the cockpit, which means Cassius and his men were under attack as they left. Snow’s almost covered the corpses. We stack the fresher bodies outside in the snow in case worse predators than Eaters come to visit.

After scavenging the ship for supplies, I have Mustang and Holiday seal us inside the galley. Fusing the two entrances shut with welding torches found in the ship’s maintenance closet. The weapons and cold gear might have been stripped clean, but the ship’s cistern is full, the water inside not yet frozen. And the galley’s pantries are stocked with food.

It’s passingly cozy in our shelter. The insulation traps our heat inside. The light from two amber emergency lamps bathes the room in soft orange. Holiday uses the intermittent power to cook a feast of pasta with marinara sauce and sausage over the galley’s electric stoves as Ragnar and I plot a course to the Spires and Mustang sorts through the stacks of scavenged provisions, filling military packs she found in storage.

I burn my tongue as Holiday brings Ragnar and me heaping portions of pasta. I didn’t realize how hungry I was. Ragnar nudges me and I follow his eyes to watch quietly as Holiday brings Mustang a bowl too and leaves her with a small nod. Mustang smiles to herself. The four of us sit eating in silence. Listening to our forks against the bowls. The wind shrieking outside. Rivets groaning. Steel gray snow piles against the small circular windows, but not before we see strange shapes moving through the white to drag off the corpses we set outside.

“What was it like growing up here?” Mustang asks Ragnar. She sits cross-legged with her back against the wall. I lay adjacent to her, a backpack between, on one of the mattresses Ragnar dragged inside the room to line its floor, on my third serving of pasta.

“It was home. I did not know anything else.”

“But now that you do?”

He smiles gently. “It was a playground. The world beyond is vast, but so small. Men putting themselves in boxes. Sitting at desks. Riding in cars. Ships. Here, the world is small, but without end.” He loses himself in stories. Slow to share at first, now it seems he revels in knowing that we listen. That we care. He tells us of swimming in the ice floes as a boy. How he was an awkward child. Too slow. Bones outracing the rest of him. When he was beaten by another boy, his mother took him to the sky for his first time on her griffin. Making him hold on to her from behind. Teaching him it is his arms that keep him from falling. His will. “She flew higher, and higher, till the air was thin and I could feel the cold in my bones. She was waiting for me to let go. To weaken. But she did not know that I tied my wrists together. That is as close to Allmother death as I have ever been.”

His mother, Alia Volarus, the Snowsparrow, is a legend among her people for her reverence for the gods. A daughter to a wanderer, she became a warrior of the Spires and rose in prominence as she raided other clans. Such is her devotion to the gods that when she rose to power, she gave four of her own children to serve them. Keeping only one for herself, Sefi.

“She sounds like my father,” Mustang says softly.

“Poor sods,” Holiday mutters. “My ma would make me cookies and teach me how to strip down a hoverJack.”

“And what about your father?” I ask.

“He was a bad sort.” She shrugs. “But bad in a boring way. A different family in every port. Stereotypical Legionnaire. I got his eyes. Trigg got Ma’s.”

“I never knew my first father,” Ragnar says, meaning his birth father. Obsidian women are polygamous. They might have seven children from seven fathers. Those men are then bound to protect the other children of her brood. “He went to become a slave before I was born. My mother never speaks his name. I do not even know if he lives.”

“We can find out,” Mustang says. “We’d have to search the Board of Quality Control’s registry. Not easy, but we can find him. What happened to him. If you want to know.”

He’s stunned by the idea and nods slowly. “Yes. I would like that.”

Holiday watches Mustang in a very different way than she did just hours before when we were leaving Phobos, and I’m struck by how natural this feels, our four worlds colliding together. “We all know your father.” Holiday says. “But what is your ma like? She looks frigid, from what I’ve seen, just on the HC, you know?”

“That’s my stepmother. She doesn’t care for me. Just Adrius, actually. My real mother died when I was young. She was kind. Mischievous. And very sad.”

“Why?” Holiday presses.

“Holiday…” I say. Her mother is a subject I’ve never pushed. She’s held her back from me. A little locked box in her soul that she never shares. Except tonight, it seems.

“It’s all right,” she says. She pulls up her legs, hugging them, and continues. “When I was six, my mother was pregnant with a little girl. The doctor said there would be complications with the birth and recommended intervening medically. But my father said that if the child was not fit to survive birth, it did not deserve life. We can fly between the stars. Mold the planets, but father let my sister die in my mother’s womb.”

“The hell?” Holiday mutters. “Why not give her cell therapy? You got the money.”

“Purity in the product,” Mustang says.

“That’s insane.”

“That’s my family. Mother was never the same. I’d hear her crying in the middle of the day. See her staring out the window. Then one night she went for a walk at Caragmore. The estate my father gave her as a wedding present. He was in Agea working. She never came home. They found her on the rocks beneath the sea cliffs. Father said she slipped. If he was alive now, he’d still say she slipped. I don’t think he could have survived thinking anything else.”

“I’m sorry,” Holiday says.

“As am I.”

“It’s why I’m here, since that’s what you were wondering,” Mustang says. “My father was a titan. But he was wrong. He was cruel. And if I can be something else”—her eyes meet mine—“I will be.”