Golden Son полностью

I pop my helmet. The sick drips out. I tell him he’s to go to the corner and strip off his star badge of rank. Trembling, he doesn’t get a chance to obey. Sevro lurches forward, takes his badge, and picks him up and moves him like a doll.

A long-faced, proud-shouldered woman with deep olive skin snorts at the demotion. Her gaze is peculiarly shrewd for a Blue. Bald, like the rest, with digital azure tattoos swirling not only along crown and temples, but over hands and neck.

Sevro lopes back to me.

“Sevro, stop pissing around.”

“I like being big.”

“I’m still bigger.”

He tries flipping me the crux in his suit, but the mechanical fingers aren’t so agile.

I give orders to the Blues in the tech pits that our friends in the stork are to be given access to one of the hangar bays. After settling themselves back into their stations, they obey. All here are loyal, because I have them under my power. But throughout the ship, who knows? They may be loyal to the Sovereign. Or they may only be loyal to the man who rules this ship. It’d be foolish to think they all operate under the same creed. I’ll have to make them.

I watch the stork coast into a hangar bay on a display. She’s barely held together by her bolts. Two leechCraft festoon her. My Howlers will have to fight off the squads of killers they contained. They might manage, but if the Vanguard’s Obsidians and Grays besiege them in the hangar, then all is lost.

Sounds come now from the bulkhead that connects the bridge with the rest of the ship. A deepspine hissing. The door glows red from heat, a small pupil in the center of the thick gray durosteel. Obsidians or Gray marines, no doubt led by some Gold, endeavor to reclaim the ship. Should take them a little while.

“Is there a holoCam in the hall?” I ask the Blues.

They hesitate. “Blackspace, you daft gasbags,” curses the female Blue I noted before. She pushes another Blue out of the way and syncs her tattoos with the console. A holo appears on one of the screens, confirming my fear. Golds lead the party attempting to make their way onto the bridge.

“Show me the engine room, the life support nexuses, and the hangar bay,” I demand. She does. Again, Golds lead parties of Gray marines and Obsidian slave-knights to secure the ship’s vital systems. They’ll try to wrest control of it away from me. Worse, they’ll try to board or destroy the stork to kill or capture Mustang and my friends.

“Who wants this ship?” I ask severely. I stalk along the raised command podium, kicking aside a body in my way, and look down at the communications Blues in their pit. They dodge my gaze, two women no older than I. Faces pale and fresh, like morning snow, now stained with tear tracks and grime. Wide cerulean eyes raw-rimmed and shot with red. They’ve seen friends die today, and here I rage selfishly, acting as though this is my triumph. It’s so easy to lose myself.

Never forget what I am, I remind myself. Never forget.

We’re being hailed by a dozen ships and the Citadel ground command. What’s happened? they want to know. TorchShips and destroyers coast warily toward us. I open a closed-circuit com channel to the whole of my ship.

“Attention, crew of the vessel formerly known as the Vanguard, hereafter known as the Pax.” I pause dramatically, knowing that any good song, any good dance, is a game of tension leading to a climax of sound and movement.

Sevro can’t stop grinning boyishly at me. He looks like an imp in the huge suit, head so small with his helmet off. He makes a big motion with his hands to try to make me laugh. I shake my head at him. Now isn’t the time.

“My name is Darrow au Andromedus, lancer of the Martian House Augustus, and I have claimed this vessel as a spoil of war. It is mine. This means, per Societal rules of naval warfare, that your lives are mine. I am sorry for that, because it means you will likely all die.

“Your lives have been dedicated to one vocation or another—electronics, astral navigation, gunnery, janitorial service, lighting and repair, martial combat. My vocation is conquest. They teach us it in schools. And in school, they instructed me on the proper method of invading, seizing, and possessing an enemy warship. After one has captured the bridge of an enemy-held vessel, the procedure taught to us is simple: vent the ship.”

Sevro activates the hidden console secured in the back side of a navigation display, one only Golds can access. The Blues recoil in surprise. It is like going into a man’s kitchen and showing him a nuclear bomb hidden under his sink. The console scans Sevro’s golden Sigil and blinks gold. All he need do is push in a code, and the entire ship will open to space. Twenty thousand men and women will die.