Watching the robes and armor the Black Order soldiers had set before him on the stone table, James waved them away with a careless flick of his hand. He wasn't in any hurry to put them on.
The Sanctuary II flagship was built in a remarkably archaic style.
Its interior was dark and solemn, like the cavernous belly of a mountain made of basalt. The harsh lines of its architecture and towering pillars led James to suspect that the starship might have been built with technology from the long-extinct Titanians.
The robes and armor worn by the Black Order's various ranks followed broadly similar styles.
The cannon fodder at the very bottom of the hierarchy went naked. Almost all of them were genetically modified bioweapons, mindless, emotionless beasts or humanoid animals.
During peacetime, they slept packed together like canned food in incubation tanks inside one fortress after another, each shaped like a triangular pyramid.
The lower-ranking warriors, drawn from several different intelligent species across the universe, usually wore black or gray armor. These soldiers formed the backbone of the Order's forces. They were well-equipped and individually powerful, on par with the Kree Empire's core legions.
Only those with a certain standing—even those who had risen to the ranks of the Black Order—were permitted to wear armor made partly of dark golden metal.
The Black Order's rank and station could be clearly discerned just by observing its soldiers' appearance and attire.
Sanctuary II and its accompanying ships had descended over the largest city on Korbin, the planet Beta Ray Bill had once mentioned to James.
That night, the settlement where Bill lived had already lost half its population, in accordance with the Order's customary "culling."
This so-called indiscriminate slaughter, which spared neither rank nor age nor sex, was in essence still