Oaths of Legacy

by Emily Skrutskie

  Wen grits her teeth. She knows that, but Ettian’s made his expectations clear. “The emperor’s orders are to hold the line until he’s back on his feet—literally,” she says with as much firmness as she can muster. Her gaze flicks down to me for backup, and I throw her back a wide-eyed What do you expect me to do about it? look. If she’s looking for a better advocate for the emperor’s wishes, she’s not going to find one in me.

  If it weren’t for the political situation, I’d agree that, from an Archon perspective, holding back the war for the sake of Ettian’s recovery is stupid as hell. Every point Iral has raised in this debate is completely valid. The rebellion’s next strike will be on Imre, Berr sys-Tosa’s unofficial capital, the roots that hold him in this system. Knock them out and Tosa’s reach is all but claimed for Archon, which means the Imperial Fleet must be screaming on its vector from the Umber Core to put a stop to all of this. The system governor’s advantage only grows the longer Archon waits to launch the offensive. If it were a fleet under my command, I’d be on his heels already.

  But we can’t do that under Iral’s leadership. At least, not without putting up a fight to remind him where true power lies.

  “True power” lies in a hospital bed with a hole in his gut, I hear my mother snidely remark. I shut out the echoes of her voice in my head. I can’t lose sight of the fact that I won’t survive to see the Imperial Fleet arrive if Iral ousts Ettian from the seat of power.

  That isn’t true.

  I don’t want to think about how it isn’t true—how I’ve been given two outs back to back and taken neither. First Wen tried to cut and run and I talked her down. Then Hanji gave me the line to the rest of her squad and I turned it over to Wen. I jam my thumb against my broken finger and try to center myself in the dull, throbbing pain. We need to focus on keeping Iral’s power in check, which in turn keeps my head on my shoulders and keeps Archon from gaining any more ground in this war.

  It would be easier if Esperza had our backs, but the commodore’s stayed on the fringes of the argument, fidgeting disinterestedly with her metal fingers and contributing little. I suspect she falls more on Wen’s side than on Iral’s, but she doesn’t want to undermine her standing in the general’s eyes by appearing to favor her protégée.

  Wen can’t call her out on that and Iral won’t. So I guess the task falls to me.

  “Commodore, you’ve been quiet,” I say, cutting through the cyclical prattle bouncing back and forth between Iral and Wen. “It’s your fleet the general would be committing to this assault—surely you have some input.”

  Esperza glances up at me coolly, her prosthetic’s fingers curling and uncurling with steady, practiced precision. “The ’nottie fleet under my command is resupplying after the Ellit offensive. We’ve lost one ship entirely in the initial attack, and sustained damage to the others that still needs to be repaired before they can be cleared for combat. We’ve also added two of the blockade dreadnoughts to our number, but converting and outfitting them is only adding to the strain. With more time, we’d be able to space out our depletion of our new acquisition’s resources, which ultimately would be better for the cohesion of our reborn empire. On the other hand, I’m wary of an ill-planned strike. But for the battle strategy, of course, I defer to my general. If he believes it possible, I’m bound by rank to follow his orders.”

  Wen stiffens. “But the emperor—”

  “Is not here,” Iral replies, the harshness of his words ringing off the walls of the bridge. “And rather than consulting with his established leadership, he’s shoved you forward to make his demands.” He leans forward over his station, his eyes steady and intent on her. “Lieutenant Iffan, what is it you want here? What do you possibly have to gain from being Ettian emp-Archon’s mouthpiece?”

  And for the third time, I watch Wen grapple for an answer that isn’t there. These past months, she’s been scrabbling to gain just a shred of legitimacy in the eyes of the Archon administration. She thought the formal rank would help. Then she thought it would be enough to distance herself from me and prove she could stand on her own. But despite all that, she’s crumbling—because the only thing she ever wanted to do was protect Ettian, and she couldn’t even do that.

  Now the reckoning of Iral’s scrutiny has settled on her shoulders. So Wen draws herself up straight and says, “I’m a servant of the Archon people, same as you. I want to fight for their freedom from Umber tyranny, same as you.”

  “And yet you’re obstructing that very goal, all so the emperor can feel like he’s a part of it.”

  “What more can I do for this empire than what the emperor asks of me?”

  To my surprise, Iral rocks back, ingesting those words with worrisome seriousness. He reaches down to his station, fingers skimming for some piece of data that he finds and, with a familiar motion, passes it over to Silon at the center of the bridge. The captain looks up at him in alarm the second she registers what he’s sent, but Iral only gives her a steady nod.

  A projection flares to life over her screens. But instead of a battlefield or a fleet layout, this offers only an image of a room that looks something like a lab. In its center stands—

  No.

  No, it’s not possible. They’re supposed to be gone. Eradicated. They were all destroyed at Knightfall.

  But in the middle of this room, splayed out like it’s just waiting for someone to step into its embrace, is a powersuit. A few technicians bustle around it, but the checks and tests they seem to be performing have a perfunctory air to them that locks in my terrible gut feeling. This thing is fully operational.

  “If you want to protect our empire, do it the way you’re best suited for,” Iral says.

  Did he say “empire” or “emperor”? Because I swear I heard the former, but Wen’s face looks like she heard the latter, and it seems to be tearing her down the middle. I can all but hear the vicious line of thought carving through her mind. She sees the armor and immediately her memory goes back to that day on Ellit and the bullet that tore through Ettian’s stomach. She remembers holding him in her arms as he bled out, powerless. She remembers the day she failed to protect him and the quiet vow she made to never fail like that again.

  She imagines how easy it’d be to keep that vow in a suit like this.

  And she knows. She knows exactly why Iral is laying it at her feet now—why he’s clearly been preparing to lay it at her feet now when he’s obviously had the suit for much, much longer. If she puts on the suit, she steps away from this bridge, this position, from all the things she’s carefully built in the time since she came aboard the Torrent. She goes back to being the emperor’s wildcard instead of Esperza’s handpicked protégée. Wen tried to elevate herself in the eyes of Iral, to earn his respect as a leader.

  Now he’s telling her in no uncertain terms that her place isn’t with the emperor’s administration—it’s out in the field, a sword in hand.

  My mind goes a step further, to the inevitable end of every single suited knight Archon ever threw out onto the field. Knightfall came for them all. My mother came for them all.

  I know what her answer will be a second before she makes it. I’m whisked back to a night not long ago, a night when I lay in a dusty vent and tried my best to pick her apart—and still couldn’t break the longing in her voice as she danced around naming exactly what she craves.

  I see the echo of that longing in the look she’s giving the powersuit right now—like it’s everything she’s never dared to want out loud.

  “I’ll do it,” the Flame Knight says.

  * * *

  —

  It takes twenty minutes to get her into the suit. Even with the metal flexing around her with eerie intelligence—intelligence that speaks to how sophisticated these machines are and why they’ve never been replicated since Knightfall—she needs extra hands to build her into it. They say this proce
ss will get easier the more she does it. That the suit will learn to embrace her, and she’ll learn to embrace it in turn.

  I watch it slowly consume her, wishing I knew how to stop any of it. As each of its joints comes online, they wrap around Wen’s body with a possessiveness I find absolutely nauseating. When her head disappears into the chest piece and the helm snaps down over it, my heart sinks. I’ve lost her. She had the nerve to go and become someone in my life worth protecting, and now that she’s committing to reviving the legacy of the Archon knights, there’s nothing I can do to save her. The moment she steps onto an active field, she’ll be blown to dust.

  But right now, I’ll admit, it looks like nothing could possibly take her down. She wears the armor like a second skin, striding off the mounts in a fluid step that surprises her so much that she freezes. A few of the technicians reach up as if they could possibly steady her five-hundred-pound mass, but she waves them off, a muffled laugh echoing from somewhere in the suit’s chest. Wen straightens and flexes her biceps, dancing along the thin line between looking like a kid puffing out her chest and a steel-wrapped god.

  Esperza and Iral stand on the sidelines, and for once they both wear the same expression, torn between the grief of what’s been lost and the awe of this moment where it seems like they could get it all back. Ten years after Knightfall, a suited knight stands before us. Ten years after he lost his lover and she lost her best friend, a new hope has risen to take their places. I’m sure it’s touching for Archon. I might even be moved—if I wasn’t certain the only way this ends is with Wen in smithereens.

  She takes another couple of steps, her confidence blooming with each stride. I’m almost certain she’s about to start skipping, but then she seems to remember something else. Wen halts in the middle of the room, turns her palm upward, and peers curiously at the mechanism situated there.

  “Now, hold on,” Iral says with a degree of panic I’d find laughable if it weren’t for the way several of the techs ducked back just now. “The safest way to start using those things is in a zero-g environment. Not something for the lab—got it?”

  The powersuit tilts its head in a way that so clearly reads as Sure, Dad that I have to hide my mouth behind my hand to keep from grinning. Before anyone else catches the gesture, Esperza steps forward and the room’s attention swings to her. “With permission, sir, I’d like to be the one to take her out.”

  Iral looks Wen up and down, and for the first time I realize this goes even beyond seeing the suited knights resurrected again. This suit, as I understand it, was dug from the rubble of Torrance con-Rafe’s headquarters by the general himself. It’s not just his lover’s legacy that stands before him—Rafe was literally the last person to wear this powersuit. Iral is usually a stone wall, not a hint of softness in him, but now there’s a sheen in his eyes that it looks like he might need time to process.

  “Permission granted,” he says with a stiff nod.

  * * *

  —

  Less than ten minutes later, we’re streaking out of the Torrent’s maw in a Beamer—Esperza at the helm, me in the copilot’s seat, and Wen sealed in the back hold. I’m sitting rigid, strapped in with all my harnesses double-checked, mired in memories of the terrifying ride that ensued last time Esperza took me for a spin in a Beamer. Of course, that had been when she was trying to bully us into lowering the ship’s price, but I’m still watching for the moment she tries to throw the blocky little shuttle into a loop it clearly wasn’t designed for.

  “All right, we’re coming up on our designation,” Esperza announces over the ship’s comm. “How’s your breach sealing?”

  “Oxygen levels look good,” Wen replies. I glance down at the camera feed from the hold to catch the thumbs-up she gives us. “The suit says I’m clear for vacuum.”

  “Suit’s probably right,” Esperza says with a smirk. “Okay, I’m giving you a three count and then dropping the ramp. Sound good?”

  “Sounds good,” Wen says. I’m not sure if the tremor in her voice is more nerves or excitement, but it’s definitely some combination of the two. On the hold feed, she squares up, facing the rear, and leans forward slightly as Esperza flips our rotary thrusters around and starts decelerating the Beamer.

  “Your Highness, if you would be so kind,” Esperza mutters, nodding to the ramp controls on my side of the console. I didn’t realize I was here as anything more than deadweight, but Esperza returns my bug-eyed stare with a look that tells me she’s not asking twice. “Three. Two. One.”

  I consider not doing it. Putting my foot down and declaring that I won’t unleash her on the galaxy—and pointedly not mentioning that I won’t unleash my mother on her. But I see the way Wen’s poised to leap and I know that in the powersuit, she could blow clear through the hold’s wall if anything tried to stop her.

  I jam down the button, the ramp drops, and the audio feed from the hold goes silent as the vacuum rushes in. There’s a pinch of a sharp inhale on Wen’s line that shifts to a long, slow exhale as she realizes her suit’s seal is holding.

  “Ready when you are, kid,” Esperza says as the Beamer’s deceleration zeroes out.

  On the video feed, Wen rocks back on her heels, then throws herself forward, diving straight out of the rear hatch. Certain by now that Esperza’s not going to take my head off for acting like a proper copilot, I reach up again and switch our displays over to the camera streams from her helmet. Wen falls away from us, slowly turning end over end. The massive specter of the Torrent looms in and out of the corner of her vision, and the sight of it alone gets my stomach churning. But Wen’s a pilot through and through—on the readouts I see her heart rate settle where mine would only be skyrocketing.

  “All right, start with the palm thrusters,” Esperza calls into her comm. “Gently—” she adds a second too late.

  Wen pulls her triggers hard and sends herself spinning ass over teakettle as the miniaturized thrusters in her hands fire at full capacity. Her arms are wrenched up over her head, the suit stiffening dynamically to keep them from snapping off from the force that pirouettes her through the void.

  “Gods of all systems, she’s gonna black out,” Esperza mutters, glancing helplessly down at the controls under her hands. I realize too late that I should have seen this coming—Ettian had a near-identical experience when he introduced Wen to flying in zero-G. They spun out, and he was barely able to wrench the ship out of it in time.

  Now she’s in a powersuit, completely untouchable, and spinning unstoppably away from us.

  But just as I’m about to start yelling out suggestions, Wen twists one wrist, the suit’s reinforcement reading the intention of her motion and lending its own power to help her wrench it around. With a series of quick bursts from the thrusters, she slows herself until she’s turning pendulously, and—gods, of course—quietly chuckling to herself through the comm.

  “Okay, very funny.” Esperza sighs. “C’mon—if you’ve really got a feel for it, prove it to me.”

  Wen evens herself out with a few quick bursts from her palms. I pull up a feed from the Beamer’s rear camera to get a wider view of her, finessing the controls until I’ve got her aligned in the frame.

  A second later, she lowers her hands to her sides, pulls her triggers, and catapults out of the shot.

  “Iffan,” Esperza yelps.

  As if that’s going to stop her. I whip the camera back and switch to infrared, zeroing in on her rapidly fading heat signature. She’s streaking straight for the Torrent, her internal cameras pointed downward to catch the furious burn of the thrusters attached to her arms. From the look of it, she’s trying to max out her acceleration—and doing quite well at it. There’s just one massive, hulking, looming problem.

  “Wen, look up.” I sigh into my comm.

  If I sounded like I was trying to give her an order, I doubt she would have paid me any attention. It
’s an old trick I learned from Hanji—a failsafe for wrangling even the most unruly pilots from the tower. It works like a charm. Her helmet cams whip forward to find the sheer, unyielding hullmetal of the Torrent’s flank approaching at a rate edging from worrisome into inevitable.

  “Rocks,” she chokes, wrenches her arms forward, and leans like she’s pressing against an invisible wall to brake until her speed burns off. “Didn’t think I was that close.” She lets out a nervous chuckle.

  “Think about it in terms of mass,” Esperza says. “Those little engines in your hands were designed to shunt starships around—things that weigh tons. You weigh about five hundred pounds in that suit. But that thing is also engineered to keep you from feeling the impact of accelerating like that. I don’t get the physics of the inertial dampening going on, but I’m sure you feel the end result.”

  “Barely feels like I’m moving at all,” Wen murmurs wondrously. Her cameras shift down to her feet. “Gonna try the boot thrusters now.”

  This time she’s careful to point herself away from the Torrent, using quick bursts from her palms to get her body oriented along the vector she wants to follow. Once she’s aligned, she presses gently on the triggers. Twin flares ignite from her heels, and she sways unsteadily as she tries to settle herself on top of the force they produce.

  The more comfortable she gets, the more I want to melt into the seat. Wen’s shakiness is quick to bleed away. Once she’s sure of the boot thrusters, she jams her triggers down harder, throwing herself as fast as they’ll let her go. Then she tries to throw the palm thrusters into the mix, using them to push herself into long, curving arcs. There’s a certain threshold she vaults over after a matter of minutes—the point when she goes from looking like a kid clomping around in her parents’ shoes to a terrifying echo of the footage of Archon suited knights. She’s moving at starship speeds with an agility that starships could never hope for, and even though she lacks the finesse of her priors, the sight of her gamboling against the stars is enough to chill my blood. I’m not sure what’s worse—that Archon is about to field a new vigilante, one who’s already built a reputation for reckless destruction, or that the newest suited knight, whom my mother will no doubt kill in an instant, is one of the few people in the galaxy I can call a genuine friend.