Oaths of Legacy

by Emily Skrutskie

  At a command I hear faintly from her earpiece, she flips our gyros, reversing the ship’s orientation along its vector. My stomach flips along with them, and rather than leaning over to watch her instruments, I close my eyes and brace against the deceleration of the main engines firing, waiting for the telltale jolt of the docking arm.

  I open them in time to catch the friendly clap Ettian lays on her shoulder and the quiet, proud smile she gives him in return. A twinge of jealousy snaps through my heart. I try to mold the desire into something more appropriate—I wish I had that with someone on my side, I miss my academy friends, I wonder where Ollins, Rin, Rhodes, and Hanji are right now—but every sentiment resonates false against the truth still shuddering in my flesh.

  I miss intimacy. A weird thought for a guy who made out with someone less than a day ago, but I’m not about to fool myself into thinking a few brisk minutes in a darkened passage make up for a long, lonely month and a half. Being Ettian’s captive has stripped away the camaraderie that used to sustain me, and the rate at which it chips away at me doubles whenever I see what I’m missing out on.

  The rear of the ship rattles with the noise of Tarsi and the other gunner extracting themselves from their nests, pulling me out of the funk threatening to pin me in my seat. I pluck halfheartedly at the buckles keeping me strapped down, but with my hands still cuffed, I can’t do much. Ettian clambers over to help me, and I keep my gaze firmly pinned on the metal binding my wrists together this time. I’m not about to let him see that he’s gotten to me—that he did it without even trying.

  “We have a seal,” Wen confirms, springing up from the pilot’s seat as she finalizes the tiedown. The Kino quiets around us, settling into its berth. I duck into Wen’s wake as she sweeps down the hall after Ettian, tempted to latch onto her belt just to keep her close. I don’t know what good it could possibly do, but in the palace, I was mostly surrounded by the court and a few guards.

  On the Torrent, it’ll all be soldiers. People who don’t just want me dead—people who have the skills and tools to make it so.

  I seize the reins of myself, hauling my brain away from the panic winding around my throat. Later. I can break later. I can think about how I’m about to step onto a ruttin’ Archon dreadnought bound for the front later, when I have…already stepped onto the ruttin’ Archon dreadnought. My desperation hardens into reckless resolve, because it feels like it’s the only thing that’s going to save me from cracking. I will survive this. The doors open to me on Rana have closed, but I can find new ones. I’ve made it this far already. I have to keep fighting, or else the blood in my veins is worthless.

  We arrange ourselves at the rear ramp, waiting for the last security clearances to pass and unlock it. Ettian leads the party, his helmet tucked neatly under one arm and his posture poised and princely. The snipers flank him, still blacked out. Wen and I bring up the rear—she takes a step back and slips a gentle hand around my biceps as if she senses the fears rocketing around my head.

  “You could have said,” I mutter to her.

  “You’re the enemy, Gal,” she reminds me. Maybe I’m imagining things, but it almost sounds like she’s joking.

  A klaxon sounds, announcing the ramp’s descent. There’s a slight hiss as it cracks open, the air pressure between the Kino’s cabin and the dreadnought core equalizing in an instant. The sound triggers an instinctive response in me, stalling my next breath in my lungs. A flicker of childish shame teases the skin on the back of my neck. I was scolded once for the habit, the first time I shipped from the Umber Imperial Seat on Lucia to Naberrie, the world where I began my schooling when I was ten.

  It’s not going to make a difference whether you’ve got air or not if there’s nothing on the other side of that door. I can barely remember the guard’s face, but her words have stuck with me for years.

  But there’s more than air on the other side of this door. As the ramp descends, I get my first good look at our welcoming party over Ettian’s shoulder.

  “Commodore,” the emperor says warmly. “I’m thrilled you could join us.”

  Adela Esperza holds her salute, but a wry smirk pulls up the corner of her lips. “Pleasure’s all mine, Your Majesty. Welcome aboard the Torrent.” Ettian inclines his head to her, and she drops her glimmering metal hand, stepping forward to offer a shake. The officers surrounding her let down their own salutes, but none of them can share the same degree of familiarity.

  When we first met this woman, she wasn’t a commodore and neither of us were calling ourselves princes. Ettian and I were desperate to get a stolen ship off our hands, and out of the shadows of a Corinthian borderworld city slunk Adela Esperza, driving a hard bargain that softened just enough for her to send us on our way with a cheap room to hide us.

  Imagine our surprise when we arrived at an Archon base to find her in uniform. Turns out the Esperza we’d met in Isla was a half-truth—and an enigma to boot. She’d apparently spent her youth as a pirate on the Umber fringes having adventures that ranged from sacking cargo ships to getting her right hand blown off. Then she ran into an Archon knight, got entangled in the affairs of an empire she had nothing to do with, and somehow ended up a ranking officer in General Iral’s resistance movement.

  Her ex-pirate tricks paid off in a major way when they started hijacking dreadnoughts, and now she wears a commodore’s platinum and answers only to Iral and the emperor.

  Her gaze slips past Ettian and lands on me, and I see the immediate hardening of something deep inside her. “Well, hello there, kiddo,” Esperza says. Even in uniform, dressed to meet an emperor, she’s still got a bit of pirate swagger clinging to her as she saunters forward. “Believe we haven’t been properly introduced.”

  I glance down at the metal hand offered to me, whirling through the calculation it sets off in my head: Don’t take it—show fear, give her the satisfaction, confirm to everyone around you just how weak you are. Take it—look stupid, unthinking, and snap go your bones.

  After a breath of hesitation, I slide my hand into hers, squeeze firmly, and shake, trying not to flinch as the cuffs rattle obviously. “Gal emp-Umber,” I tell her, my voice miraculously even. “Congratulations on your promotion, Commodore.”

  She returns my squeeze with just enough force to remind me who’s in charge here, but she lets me go with all my fingers intact. I’ll take whatever victory I can get. “Credit where credit’s due—I’m not surprised often, but you kids managed to pull off a good one,” Esperza says. Her eyes flick to Wen. “What about you? You got anything up your sleeve?”

  Wen’s got a bit of a starstruck glint in her eye, and it takes a jostle from me for her to realize the commodore’s just asked her a question. “N-nothing you need to know at the moment,” she stammers, flashing a nervous grin. I struggle to keep my jaw from dropping—I’ve never seen the famous Flame Knight so flustered.

  Esperza meets her with an earnest, steady smile. “I like this one,” she tells Ettian over her shoulder, and Wen’s fingers crimp hard into my biceps. I nudge her in the ribs once the commodore’s turned back around, genuinely delighted. Wen getting all moon-eyed over Esperza is material—I just need to figure out how to hone it into a weapon.

  “How soon until we’re moving?” Ettian asks. The longer this ship sits so close to Rana, the sooner suspicions might arise that it’s got ulterior motives beyond putting a decisive end to the Umber attack.

  “As soon as we get tiedown confirmation from every ship coming aboard, we go superluminal,” Esperza replies, beckoning him to fall in step with her as she sets off down the hall. The rest of us follow in their wake. I take advantage of Wen’s eagerness, lengthening my strides so that the two of us keep pace directly behind the emperor and commodore.

  “Thank you,” Ettian murmurs to Esperza, low enough that most of our escort couldn’t possibly hear it. “I know the general has his doubts, but the extrac
tion worked as smoothly as we could hope for.”

  It isn’t exactly surprising to hear, but it warms me all the same to know that Iral and Ettian are still at odds—and to know that Ettian defied him on my suggestion alone. Of course the general would try to stall any concrete plan that would ferry the emperor to the front. As soon as Ettian commands by presence instead of proxy, he’ll scatter Iral’s best-laid plans with overrides the general can’t counter. And the fact that the Torrent—and more important, the commodore herself—ended up at Rana anyway has interesting implications for where her loyalties lie.

  Or maybe Esperza is just a pirate through and through, happy to buck the rigidity of military command when it suits her. She looked pleased enough with herself when she greeted us.

  For a treacherous second, my thoughts stray to the Umber soldiers she pulverized with her maneuver.

  Only a second. I blink them away with my mother’s practiced poise, my stride never faltering. This is the heart of the Archon operation. To show weakness is to draw attention, and the last thing I need them to notice is how easily they’ve just welcomed me into their command core.

  Esperza walks us through a security checkpoint, where I’m aggressively scanned and patted down, rolling my eyes all the while. They practically yanked me out of bed on Rana—what business would I have trying to smuggle something in? The patrols that conduct our search are noticeably armed. At first blush, it seems ridiculous that anyone would need to carry a weapon when you’re protected by miles of dreadnought on all sides.

  But then you remember how these dreadnoughts fell into Archon hands in the first place, and it all starts making sense. Esperza knows that it isn’t enough to have a trick up your sleeve—you’ve got to make sure the same trick won’t ever work again once you’ve played it. If an enemy force makes it this deep into the Torrent, intent on overtaking the cityship, they’re gonna find themselves roasted by the boltfire these patrols are packing.

  I try to lift my chin, try not to let my eye be drawn. I have to appear aware, but not focused. Confident, but not overly so. These are new people, people who haven’t had a chance to form an assumption about what my captivity looks like. If I play this right, they become assets.

  If I rut it up, they become obstacles.

  From the checkpoint, Esperza guides us through the maze of honeycombing corridors. “We’ve set up quarters for you adjacent to the bridge. Recreation, dining, and most other facilities are on the outer edge of the core, but we have the essentials stocked within every siege-able ring, just in case,” she says with a reassuring shrug.

  I have an academic knowledge of dreadnought structure, but seeing a command core in the flesh is another thing entirely. The term “cityship” should really tell you all you need to know—and yet, there’s something about seeing it function up close and personal that grounds it in a reality you can’t ignore. People spend their entire lives on these things. I’m pretty sure I spot a sign for a nursery around a corner. To get to the bridge, we summon an elevator that moves laterally as well as up and down, shunting us up and over until at last it releases us at the innermost ring of the core.

  “Emperor on deck!” Esperza calls out as she strides off the elevator. A ripple goes off across the massive room as techies and sector captains rise from their stations and salute. The bridge is built around the same principles as the dreadnought itself, arranged in concentric circles that trickle down to the most important position. At the center of the room sits a massive circular command station, visible only because of the layers of clear screens flowering around it. Perched in the middle of it is a woman with deep midnight skin and captain’s platinum decorating her shoulders.

  She rises from her chair and salutes like the rest of her crew, but while everyone else fixates on Ettian, her eyes immediately drift to Esperza and a slight frown creases the edge of her lips. “Your Majesty,” Esperza says as we approach the captain’s station. “Allow me to introduce Captain Deidra con-Silon.”

  I grit my teeth. When Archon commandeered this dreadnought, it was under the command of a woman named Nita con-Silon—not a relation to the current captain but a member of a bloodline Umber installed to a continental governorship on Rana. With Rana now under Archon control, it seems Silon’s reverted to the people who once laid claim to it, and one of those people went ahead and staked her claim on this ship while she was at it.

  “A pleasure to meet you,” Ettian says smoothly. He should shake her hand, but the screens ensconcing her stand in his way, and she doesn’t show any signs of letting them down. At his nod, Silon drops her salute.

  Then her eyes slip to me, and her frown deepens. “Your Majesty,” she says, her voice smooth and melodic. “I can’t help but notice that an enemy agent seems to have infiltrated my bridge. I hope you won’t hold it against me.”

  The veneer of her diplomacy is as thin as an onion skin, but with her pleasant tone and the vague deference she paid to the chain of command, there’s nothing to call her on outright. I hold my breath, waiting for Ettian’s response.

  “Excuse my subordinate,” Esperza says, putting a hefty emphasis on the last word as she steps between the emperor and the captain. “Silon here likes things to be in their proper places.”

  “Like dreadnoughts in their positions on the warfront,” Silon retorts mildly. “Prisoners in the brig. That sort of thing. Call me organized.”

  “And when your meticulous organization slows this ship down so much that it gets you vaporized, I’ll be sure to divvy your remaining electrons into neat little boxes,” Esperza replies with an exasperated smirk.

  “Captain,” Ettian says, neatly sidestepping Esperza. “I greatly appreciate this ship’s assistance. I understand it may be frustrating to be pulled from the fight, and I’m just as eager as you to set a vector back to where the Torrent is needed most.”

  “Unfortunately ‘where’ is an ever-shifting quantity that depends on ‘when,’ ” Silon says with a sniff, settling back in her command chair, which swivels slightly as it takes her full weight. With the pivot, she’s able to access every screen surrounding her—which she does, almost absentmindedly, one hand tapping away at the display as her eyes flick back and forth between it and Ettian. “The Torrent’s whens and wheres are usually up to the general’s strategy.”

  She says “the general” with an interesting note of reverence, one I’m sure Ettian doesn’t miss either. Seems the Torrent’s loyalties are…skeptical, at best, of where the emperor really belongs in the chain of command.

  Silon glances over to another screen on the opposite side of her station, letting out a long-suffering sigh. “Looks like the last ship finally logged a tiedown. Navigation?”

  “Ready,” an officer across the room replies.

  “Ship is clear for departure. Get us oriented on a heading. Engineering?”

  “Ready.”

  “Confirm our superluminal drives are ready to fire. Communications?”

  “Ready.”

  “Send our Intent of Arrival ansible to the fleet’s main body with target coordinates attached. Then put out an unencrypted broadcast for ships in the area alerting them that we’re about to jump to superluminal.”

  As Silon spirals further into the preparations for our superluminal leap, she all but melts into the helm. On a smaller starship like the Beamer we flew to Delos, jumping to superluminal was as easy as jamming down a button. But the complexity of coordinating a jump increases exponentially with the scale of your craft, and for the miles and miles of the Torrent, the process is almost too intricate for a single mind to grasp.

  Back at the academy, we’d run dreadnought command sims designed to push our teamwork to the limit. I found that I got a bit of a thrill from disappearing so entirely into the operation of a starship that it started to feel like an extension of my body. I’d fantasized that it’d be something like running an empire�
��at least up until the moments when Hanji would stick her finger in my ear to see if I was “still in there.”

  But nothing I achieved at the academy is anywhere near watching Silon work. Trying to keep up with the commands she rattles off is hopeless for us onlookers, but her bridge crew picks up each order and socks it down the correct channel on reflex. She’s a weaver at a loom, gathering together every color of thread and running her shuttle effortlessly through the steps she needs to achieve her goal.

  “Confirmed for jump to superluminal,” Silon announces at last, and only then do I realize that at some point I stopped breathing. For the first time she hesitates, a flicker of consternation passing over her features. “Commodore,” she grinds out. “At your mark.”

  Esperza shrugs, glancing sidelong at Ettian. “You ready, Your Majesty?”

  Ettian squares his shoulders—just a tad, just enough that for a moment, in his well-fitted tac armor, with his chin lifted just-so, he looks like a little bit more than a kid dressing up as a soldier. “Punch it,” the emperor says.

  The synapse of command fires, his words snapping through Silon’s orders and branching through her subordinates. A great inhale goes up around the room as a vibration pulses through the floor, everyone bracing for a massive acceleration that never comes.

  And just like that, we’re past the speed of light. From the interior of the Torrent’s core, it’s like nothing’s changed at all. If we had some sort of window through the armor of the hull, we’d see that the blackness of space has bled to gray around us. But with no other reference, the only confirmation we get is the engineering chief straightening in her chair and announcing, “Course confirmed. Ten seconds to arrival.”

  The Torrent’s path isn’t an average superluminal journey. Instead of spanning the galaxy in a long, restless week, we’re leaping across the Tosa System. Usually superluminal travel within a star system is banned, but wartime makes exceptions and dreadnoughts eat excuses for breakfast. They do their best to calculate a clean path, but there’s always a small risk they might run someone down streaking through the black so recklessly.