The Rise of the Mantis

I spent twenty-seven thousand credits on a Marksman's AA-99 last week and hadn't had a proper chance to use it yet. So when the Denebola I-b lead from the Spacer slate panned out and I found a compound crawling with Spacers on approach, I told the crew to stay with the ship and went in alone.

This was partly practical and partly I just wanted to see what I could do on my own.

The compound had layers — not just Spacers, but a story underneath the Spacers, assembled piece by piece through slates and terminal recordings as I worked through the rooms. There is a figure the Spacers call the Mantis. The name carries weight in a way that a name attached to a real person usually doesn't — it's become mythology, which means it's bigger than whoever originally wore it. The Spacers in that compound were scared of this place in a way that had nothing to do with whoever was currently alive in it.

It... reminded me of Batman.

The deeper I went, the more specific it got. The compound was the Mantis's base. I learned by the end of this that the current (or most recent) iteration of the Mantis was a woman named Dorianne, and she'd died of illness — not in combat, which felt important somehow — and before she died she'd tried to reconnect with her son Leon. She hadn't told him what she was. She'd called him here under the framing of an inheritance, which was true, just not the kind he'd assumed. He came to collect whatever she'd left him without knowing she'd spent her life as a living terror to criminal operations across the settled systems.

Leon's recordings trace his confusion from the surface entrance down into the facility, piecing together the same story I was piecing together a week later. He didn't want it. That comes through clearly. He didn't want the Mantis or the legacy or any of it. He wanted money, not a legacy, not even to understand his mother, and instead he got a lair.

He didn't make it out.

The mother-son angle didn't land for me the way it might for someone else. My relationship with my own mother was not good — borderline abuse at moments, if I'm being honest — and I've spent most of my adult life carrying the faint social guilt of not particularly caring for her. Society is very insistent about mothers. That insistence doesn't do much when the reality doesn't cooperate. I felt more for Leon than for Dorianne. I understood not wanting anything to do with your mother, and then ending up suffering for her instead.

She'd left a clue to the laser hall, though apparently none of the spacers before me figured it out — a corridor of pressure plates that triggered turrets, with no obvious answer posted anywhere. What she'd left was a recording where she mentioned a phrase she loved. Sic Semper Tyrannis.

Thus always to tyrants.

I know that phrase. From Brutus and from John Wilkes Booth and from a history I grew up with — it attaches itself to the most dramatic acts of defiance in the record, for better and worse. That a vigilante had adopted it as her motto, had loved it enough to encode it into her legacy, is something I've been sitting with since I walked out of there.

I spelled out TYRANNIS as I crossed the floor. The turrets stayed quiet.

Past the hall were robots, and past the robots was the inner sanctum, and in the sanctum was the suit.

It's white. I'd expected black — the Batman instinct — but it's white, and clearly designed to unsettle in a different way. The Mantis wasn't hiding in the dark. The Mantis was meant to be seen, in white, in the moment before things went very badly for whoever was looking.

There was also a ship.

I put on the suit before I left.

I didn't really decide to. I was standing in front of it and then I was wearing it. The practical argument exists — Spacers fear the Razorleaf on sight, that's genuinely useful — but I don't think that's why I did it. I think I just wanted something that was mine. Not borrowed, not inherited through circumstance. Mine, because I chose it.

The Razorleaf is not dramatically larger than the Frontier on the inside — I want to be clear about that, because I walked aboard expecting to finally have space and discovered that "larger" and "more spacious" are not the same thing. The crew will fit without someone sleeping in the cargo hold, which is progress. But what I keep coming back to isn't the square footage. It isn't Barrett's ship. It isn't Constellation's ship. Nothing in this century has been mine before this. The Frontier always carried the implicit asterisk of borrowed, temporary, someone else's. The Razorleaf has no asterisk.

I sat in the pilot's seat for a while. Then I flew it out.