Oaths of Legacy

by Emily Skrutskie

  Don’t, I want to beg her. Don’t make me believe you might survive this. I should be pleading for the exact inverse of that. I want her to live. But I want her to never go out there in the first place.

  “Gal,” she repeats. “You’re clearly freaking out about this.”

  “You’re clearly not freaking out enough about this.” My eyes fix on the airlock, and I feel my entire body go rigid as if braced for it to blow out at any second. On the other side of those doors is nothing but the void she’ll hurl herself into and never come back from. “Wen, I…I know I said if you had me, you’d live. And I stand by that, but I need you to listen to me.”

  After a beat of silence, she startles. “Oh—yeah, I’m listening to you.”

  I sigh through my teeth. “No, not like that. I mean when I’m in your ear, I need you to take orders. Like, the way Silon takes this ship into battle. I’m Silon. You’re the Torrent. I’m…scared that nothing less than that degree of seamlessness will keep you alive.”

  “Thought you hated Silon,” Wen notes, picking absently at one of her greaves.

  “She’s done her fair share in ruining my life, but gods, you’ve seen her work.”

  That admiring note reflects right back at me in the shine of Wen’s eyes. Esperza may have done her damage, but she’s also shown me all the easy ways to catch Wen’s attention, ways I’ll deploy mercilessly if it’s what it takes to keep her alive. Flash someone else’s talent in front of her eyes and imply she might live up to it, and Wen’s as good as gone.

  And not a moment too soon, because seconds later, I hear the door at our backs slide open and know without looking that my escort has arrived.

  “Ettian,” I say without turning around. He’s come with no others. There are no techs to support Wen’s deployment. I’m alone as always. It could be the last time the three of us are alone together, and for a moment it dizzies me how far we’ve come from that night we slept side by side on the rooftops of Isla. Ettian wears a crown. Wen is resplendent in that monstrous armor. And I’m in platinum cuffs.

  I pivot to face him, and the sight hits me worse than the powersuit. He carries himself stiffly, one hand subtly pressed against his still-healing wounds. The day’s activity has clearly already taken its toll on him, and the day’s barely begun. He’s still kitted out in the regalia he wore to Iral’s departure, the twisted crown and the platinum bars gleaming against the lock’s harsh lights. His eyes are harder than both of them, ready for the fight ahead.

  “You should be in a wheelchair,” Wen says, nodding at the injury Ettian’s doing his best to conceal. “Did you even ask the ward for one?”

  “I just gotta make it to the bridge,” he mutters sheepishly. “If I keel over, Gal will drag me there by my ankles.”

  “I dunno if I can with all that metal on you,” I fire back. “You’re better off with Little Miss Tin Can here.”

  He takes her in, the steel of his eyes going soft. I know he must have seen her in the suit before, but never without the rest of the Torrent bustling around them. With us, Ettian doesn’t have to hold himself as an emperor. He can let loose a boyish grin as Wen jokingly flexes her metallic casings, posing like a bodybuilder. His free hand comes up to cover his mouth before he does anything more undignified with it, but it barely muffles the joyful little hum that escapes him.

  It feels so wrong that I can’t stop myself from letting out a snort. Both of them glare at me, and I hold up my hands. “You already know my opinion on the matter, and it ain’t changing. Can’t help that both of you are trying to kill yourselves—just gonna do my best to keep you alive despite that.”

  Ettian looks momentarily perturbed, his eyes flicking to Wen. I sense an opening. I could lean hard on his doubts, make him realize he needs to protect her from what’s about to happen if she steps out on the field. But he’s already wise to that act, and there’s no stupider way to blow the trust I need from Wen right now. All I can do is hope he draws the conclusion on his own. I wait with bated breath.

  Wen must sense the change in the winds, because she claps her hands together, her armored fingers clacking like a gunshot. “Remember when you used to be the dire one, Ettian?” she says with a smirk.

  He nods, looking a little bit sadder and a little bit softer than he should on the verge of a battle. “I miss when I was allowed to be dire. Now Gal just says all my dire thoughts out loud.”

  It’s my turn to glance nervously between them. Has he told her about our last interaction? Primed her to be wary of every word that comes out of my mouth? If she’s already wise to my act, I might not be able to pull this off. But I don’t have time to untangle what she does know and what she doesn’t. The distant drums echoing through the halls have shifted to a new rhythm, summoning us to our stations.

  Ettian straightens when he hears them, taking a sudden step toward Wen. She catches him by the shoulders, looking him steadily in the eye. With the powersuit, she’s gained the inches she needs to lord over him, lending to the weight in her voice as she says firmly, “Don’t make it goodbye. It’s not. It won’t be. Go do your job, and I’ll do mine.”

  He gives her a stiff nod, believing her as easily as he always does. “Keep flying,” he murmurs, catching her forearm and squeezing it gently. “No matter what, keep flying.”

  Bitterness curdles in the back of my mouth, but I swallow it as Wen releases Ettian and shifts her focus to me. “We’re a weird team, Gal, but I think it’s gonna work.”

  “Whatever you say, firecracker,” I reply, taking the hand she offers and giving it a firm shake.

  “Hey, Iwam’s the only one who gets to call me that.”

  Ettian grimaces as his hand drifts back to his wound. “Well, if this isn’t a goodbye, no point in dallying.”

  It is a goodbye. It very much is. I feel it hit in my gut as my fingers slip from Wen’s for the last time. A fear, verging on a certainty that I won’t be able to keep her alive. That we’re all doomed to die at the hands of Berr sys-Tosa’s fleet—and if not his, then my mother’s, when the Imperial Fleet strafes this system. I don’t believe in Archon. Not the way these two seem to.

  But I do believe it’s worth it to try my best to keep them alive. That much I can say for sure.

  Ettian and I turn away from her together and set off for the bridge with me a half-step behind him. There will be no goodbye for us. No matter how this goes, we’re stuck together till the end.

  CHAPTER 24

  “Emperor on deck!” Communications calls over the low, rolling thunder of the war drums.

  I toss her a sunny smile and mouth Thanks, just to watch her expression pucker in distaste. Ettian has to stop himself from rolling his eyes. I smirk. I’m feeling a little more certain of myself now that the ceremony of Iral’s departure has passed, and if today is the last I get, I’m going to die as I lived—insufferable to the end.

  We settle down at our stations, Ettian immediately swallowed by a deluge of clearance requests and me kicking back, folding my arms behind my head, and letting the atmosphere of the bridge wash over me. It’s not nearly as frantic as the previous times the Torrent has ridden into battle, which in itself is a little disturbing. Though maybe it shouldn’t be surprising. The first battle I weathered on this ship was a surprise attack. The second I only experienced from a distance, shipped off with Ettian to wait it out. I’ve never seen a planned engagement from this position, but it’s the kind these soldiers have been training for their entire lives. Everyone is on task. Everyone’s steadfast. And everyone but me crews their stations with utmost confidence that we’re going to make it through this.

  “Communications pivot is in position,” the tech I grinned at calls across the bridge, and at the room’s core, Silon’s head jerks up. Commodore Esperza’s ship has reached the midpoint between here and Imre, ready to conduct both waves of the attack. Now that she’s ready, the assault wi
ll launch at any moment.

  Ettian rises out of his seat next to me, doing his damnedest to make it look like the motion doesn’t hurt at all. “Torrent bridge,” he announces. “The last time I droned on for too long, someone shot me through the gut, so I’ll do my best to make this brief.”

  It nets a few laughs, a few more tight smiles, and a long, exasperated sigh from me.

  “We’ve fought like hell for this moment. We’ve lost, suffered, and bled just to stand here on the precipice of reclaiming the Archon Core.” Ettian pauses. I wonder if anyone else picks up on how much he desperately wants to collapse back in his chair. Finally, he gives his audience a grim little nod. “And I don’t know about you all, but I think I could stand to bleed a little more.”

  The bridge swells with applause as the emperor takes his seat again. The noise of it covers the shaky breath he lets out. I’m torn between concern for his pain and sheer confusion over how effective those lines were at pumping up his people. “Bleeding a little more” isn’t something any leader should aspire to. We have people devoted to bleeding for us. If a leader is bleeding, shit’s gone far sideways.

  But there’s no time to parse the strangeness of Archon thought processes—not when Silon’s already throwing telemetry from Esperza up on the screens at the core of the room. Two clocks run in tandem at the bottom of it. The first shows the time Esperza’s signal was sent and the second shows the current time, roughly nine minutes later. Interplanetary warfare relies on constant awareness of how much can change in those nine minutes of delay. The Torrent’s efficacy will hinge on Silon’s ability to weigh the information and orders Esperza can relay against the information the commodore doesn’t have yet. From what I’ve seen so far, she’s more than up to the task.

  Eyes on your own paper, Umber, I can all but hear Esperza chiding me. I run my fingers through the familiar paces of setting up my station, balancing where my feeds are coming from and double-checking my connection to the bay where we left Wen. I bring up the controls of the airlock doors down there on one side of my screen, then pull Wen’s line up on the other.

  “Torrent bridge to Flame Knight, Flame Knight do you copy?”

  “Hi, Gal.”

  “I think you mean something like ‘Flame Knight to Torrent bridge—’ ”

  “Rust that—half the reason I chose you to run my comms was ’cause I knew you wouldn’t try to pull that formal bullshit on me.”

  “Bold assumption,” I fire back with a chuckle. “You forget that I’ve been stripped of a formal rank for months now. It’s shaken me to my core. I need the validation.”

  “Of being called ‘Torrent bridge’?”

  “I’ll take what I can get. I’m about to run a test on the permissions for the airlock controls.”

  “Fire away, Torrent bridge,” she replies. I draw up the video feed from her loading zone just to confirm how pleased with herself she looks.

  “Testing the inner door…now. There should be a light confirming it’s unlocked. Do you see it?”

  “Light’s on.”

  “Perfect. Now the outer lock. First I’m locking down the inner door…now. Can you confirm the previous light is off?”

  “Light’s off.”

  “Good.” There’s a failsafe built into the ship’s systems that prevents the inner and outer doors from being opened at the same time. If the inner door is unlocked, the outer door will be impossible to open. “Unlocking the outer door now. If you look in the chamber, do you see the outer door’s light on?”

  On the camera, I watch Wen peer through the airlock’s porthole window. “Yep, it’s unlocked. And now it’s locked. Unlocked. Locked. Having fun up there?”

  “Someone’s gotta,” I reply, sitting back in my chair. Ettian casts me a sidelong glance. He’s noticed I look a little too happy to be here—and he’s right to worry. I should probably tone it down, lest he suspect the real reason I’ve wheedled myself into this chair. I tap my temple and point at his workstation in the most condescending eyes front gesture I can manage.

  Which, all things considered, he needs. If he fought like hell to sit on this bridge for the battle, the least he can do is keep his focus on it. And to his credit, Ettian takes less offense than I would have expected. He smirks slightly, then turns his attention back to his own work.

  Now I’m a little offended myself. “What’s that for?” I ask.

  “What’s what for?”

  “You’re smiling. About me. Something’s wrong.”

  “Always thought it would do you some good to hang out with Wen. Didn’t realize it’d get you here at my side for the fight to decide the fate of this system, elsewise I would have straight-up handcuffed the two of you together. And it looks like you’re having fun with it too.”

  I glare. “This isn’t fun. None of this is fun. You’re about to tear the roots out of a stable system, probably triggering several more copycat rebellions that’ll lead to other systems collapsing in the process. The damage you do today will be felt for centuries.”

  “And you’re right at my side, helping me do it. Just like I always hoped.”

  My nose wrinkles of its own accord, even before my brain finishes processing the bullshit. “No,” I say. “No,” I repeat more firmly when he has the audacity to smile at the first one. “I’m…that’s not how this works. That’s not what’s happening here, you vast, void-headed fool. There’s an empire of distance between me sitting here because I’m on your side and me sitting here trying to save someone’s ruttin’ life—whether it’s you or Wen or both depends on how much the gods like me.”

  Ettian shrugs, still not nearly serious enough for my liking. “Looks the same to me.”

  The words fall like a hammer to the head, leaving me stunned and slumped in my chair, my hands frozen hovering over my station. Across the bridge, Communications calls that the first wave has made the leap to Imre, but it barely registers. I’m on their side. I’m not out for my own ends. Not doing all this as an elaborate ruse to wait for them to get sloppy and escape. That hasn’t been driving me since…Well, since Ettian got shot through the gut.

  Ruttin’ Hanji Iwam. She came to break me out, and instead she locked me in.

  But doing it is one thing. Thinking about why I’m doing it is terrifying, and it’s the thought that has me pinned in my chair, unable to process the sounds of the war drums intensifying as the battle goes hot at Imre. Thinking about it makes it a choice. And am I really choosing this?

  It’s maybe the worst possible moment to decide.

  I had a plan for this battle. A plan I could still enact without drawing a hard line on my stance. But if I ride through the fight without doing anything but sitting primly at the emperor’s side, isn’t my stance clear enough already?

  No, I want to say—out loud, again. Wanting to keep Ettian and Wen alive is related to the survival of the Archon rebellion, but it’s different. It has to be different. I’m not doing it for the empire attempting to usurp my territory.

  I’m doing it for him.

  Oh gods of all systems. Rut me ruttin’ sideways.

  But before my internal crisis can come to its peak, the crisis going on outside the walls of my skull boils over. All at once, I realize the drums have shifted their rudiment to a frenzied tempo that spears panic through me. The first broadcast from Esperza’s pivot point has hit. And the scene of the battlefield is…

  Well, at first it’s difficult to untangle. I wipe my station clear and blow the field’s telemetry as large as it’ll go, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. Imre was ringed by six of Tosa’s dreadnoughts, according to the scouting from this morning. According to what the advance forces are relaying, only two remain. But from the massive heat signatures still eddying against Imre’s outer atmosphere, the rest of them were there up until just minutes ago. They’ve gone superluminal, leaving only
a rear guard to defend the planet.

  Where exactly they set their vectors for only remains a mystery for a minute more. “Dasun!” Telemetry calls. “Their vectors are all pointed at the Dasun Yards.”

  “The commodore’s sent a scouting shuttle after them,” Silon says, and a hush falls over the bridge. Even the drums slow to a steady, mournful beat, recognizing the inescapable fact that Esperza’s just committed that shuttle to a suicide mission. Once it uses its superluminal jump to skip to Dasun, there will be nothing left to get it home. Those soldiers will die in the shadow of the massive gas giant and the shipyards built in its icy moons.

  In twenty minutes, when the signal reaches us, we’ll find out what they died for.

  If, in those twenty minutes, we haven’t decided to follow them into the maw. There’s a strong argument to be made for it. All of those ships that were just guarding Imre have now wasted their superluminal leap to take us by surprise with their escape to Dasun. If we chase them down by a superluminal advance, we could catch them before their drives cool and ensure they can’t escape us again. It might be all it would take to stamp the governor’s forces out of the system entirely.

  Or it could be a trap we’re meant to walk right into. My thoughts stray to the Imperial Fleet. Is this the moment my mother has chosen for her grand entrance? If we stake our remaining dreadnoughts on Dasun without knowing what awaits us, there’s a nonzero chance we end up impaled on the tip of her spear. Years of academy training rise to the tip of my tongue, daring me to blurt out the possibility.

  On the other hand, if only two dreadnoughts hold Imre, we can take it easily. And it seems to be there for the taking—abandoned, just like Rana was months ago, when Berr sys-Tosa sacrificed my identity and fled to regroup. Which probably means that’s a trap too. I catch Ettian’s eye, noting the deep furrow in his brow. He’s stuck in the same loop as me—no surprise, since we were both raised in the same military strategy classes. “If we hold the capital, we’ve as good as won,” he says out loud.