Someone’s shouting my name. Sound fades back into being.
Lights bathe the bridge, alternating shades of murderous red. Warning sirens. The ship’s swan song. Theodora’s delicate old hands pull at me, like a bird pulling at a fallen statue. I’m bleeding from my forehead. My nose is broken. I wipe the stinging blood from my eyes and roll onto my back. A broken display sparks beside me. It has my blood on it. Did it fall on me? A bar lies beside it, and my eyes drift to Theodora. She pried it off. But she’s so small. Her hands cup my face.
“Get up. Dominus, if you want to live, you have to get up.” The old woman’s hands tremble from fear. “Please, get up.”
Groaning, I pull myself to my feet. My command escape pod is gone. In the collision, it must have launched. Either that or they left me behind. So too has the Blue escape pod jettisoned away. The frightened Blue has become a stain on a bulkhead. Theodora can’t tear her eyes away from the sight. Tears make glassy her eyes.
“There’s another pod in my quarters,” I mutter. Then I see why Theodora winces. Not from fear, but pain. Her leg is shattered, splayed off to the side like a length of wet, cracked chalk. They don’t make Pinks to last this. “I won’t make it, dominus. Go, now.”
I bend to a knee and throw her over the shoulder of my good arm. She whimpers horribly as her leg shifts under her. I feel her teeth rattle. And I run. I run through the broken bridge toward the wound that is killing my ship, through the bridge level’s hallways into a scene of chaos. People swarm the main halls, abandoning their posts and functions as they race to escape pods and the troop carriers in the forward hangar. People who fought for me—electricians, janitors, soldiers, cooks, valets. They’ll never make it to safety. Many change course when they see me. They tumble forward, leaning against me, panicked and crazed in their mania to find safety. They pull at me, screaming, pleading. I push them off, losing a small part of my heart as each falls behind. I can’t save them. I can’t. An Orange grabs Theodora’s good leg and a Gray sergeant hits him in the forehead till he drops like a stone to the ground.
“Clear a path,” the thick Gray bellows. She whips her scorcher out of her tactical holster and shoots it into the air. Another Gray, remembering himself, or perhaps thinking I’m his ticket out of this deathtrap, joins her in parting the chaos. Soon two more carve a path at gunpoint.
With their help, I make it to my suite. The door hisses open at my DNA’s touch and we move through. The Grays back in after us, training their scorchers at the thirty desperate souls who ring the entrance. The door hisses as if to close, but an Obsidian pushes through the crowd and jams herself into the doorframe, preventing the door from closing. An Orange joins her. Then a low-ranking Blue. Without hesitation, the Gray sergeant shoots the Obsidian in the head. Her companions gun down the Blue and Orange and shove them off the doorframe so it can close. I tear my eyes away from the blood on the ground to lay Theodora on one of my couches.
“Dominus, how much room is there in the escape pod?” the Gray sergeant asks me as I head to the pod’s entry lock. Her hair is buzzed in military fashion. A tattoo on her tan neck peaks from under her collar. My hands fly over the control prism, entering the password with a series of hand motions.
“Four seats. You get two. Decide amongst yourselves.”
There’s six of us.
“Two?” the female sergeant asks coldly.
“But the Pink’s a slave!” one of the Grays hisses.
“Not worth shit,” says another.
“She’s my slave,” I growl. “Do as I say.”
“Slag that.” Then I feel the silence as much as hear it, and I know one of them has pulled a gun on me. I turn, slowly. The stocky old Gray is not a fool. He’s backed out of my reach. I’ve no armor, only my razor. I might be able to kill him. The others ask what the hell he thinks he’s doing.
“I’m a free man, dominus. I should get to go,” the Gray says, voice trembling, “I have a family. It is my right to go.” He looks to his fellows, bathed in the nasty red of the emergency lights. “She’s just a whore. A jumped-up whore.”
“Marcel, put the gun down,” says the dark-skinned corporal. His eyes are heavy for his friend. “Remember your vows. We’ll draw lots.”
“It’s not fair! She can’t even have children!”
“And what would your children think of you now?” I ask.
Marcel’s eyes fill with tears. The scorcher quivers in his thick hand. Then a gunshot. His body stiffens and crumples lifelessly to the deck as the bullet from the sergeant’s scorcher carries through his head to slam into the metal bulkhead.
“We do it by rank,” the sergeant says, holstering her weapon.
Were I still the man Eo knew, I would have stood frozen in horror. But that man is gone. I mourn his passing every day. Forgetting more and more of who I was, what dreams I held, what things I loved. The sadness now is numb. And I carry on despite the shadow it casts over me.
The escape pod opens, magnetic lock thudding back. The door hisses upward. I pick Theodora from the couch and strap her into one of the seats. The straps are too big, made for Golds. Then something deep and horrible roars in the belly of my ship, half a kilometer away. Our torpedo stores detonate.
Gone is the artificial gravity. Gone are the stable walls. It’s an insidious sensation. Everything spins. I slam into the escape pod’s floor, ceiling? I don’t know. Pressure vents out of the ship. Someone vomits. I smell it rather than hear it. I shout at the Grays to get in the pod. Only one stays behind now, face drawn and quiet, as the sergeant and a corporal pull themselves into the escape pod. They strap in across from me. I activate the launch function and salute the Gray who stays behind. He salutes back, proud and loyal despite the quiet in him as he faces his last moment of life, eyes distant and thinking of some young love, some path not taken, perhaps wondering why he was not born Gold.
Then the door closes and he is gone from my world.
I’m slammed into my seat as the escape pod shoots away from the dying ship. Ripping through debris. Then we’re weightless again and drifting away from trouble as inertial dampeners kick in. Out our viewport I see my flagship burping plumes of blue and red flame. Processed helium-3, which powers both ships, ignites near my man-of-war’s engines, causing a chain-effect explosion that rips the ship apart. Suddenly I realize it wasn’t debris I felt against my escape pod as I left the ship. It was people. My crew. Hundreds of lowColors spilled into space.