Crownchasers

by Rebecca Coffindaffer

  He’s sitting in the copilot jump seat, his eyes steady on the conn, monitoring the Vagabond’s outer hull as we take another low pass over Drake’s Solar Sea.

  It’s an entire ocean of liquid fire. Liquid fire. I remember reading about it when I was a kid, and now I’m actually getting to clap eyes on it. I almost wanna bounce in my seat.

  I lean on the controls, swinging the Vagabond into a series of wide loops so the cameras and scientific instruments the Explorers’ Society set us up with can get a broad range of data. It’s a simple assignment overall—go down to the planet and collect as much information as you can without getting burned up—and I’m glad for it. All I have to do right now is fly my ship like a badass, and that’s one thing I never have to be self-conscious about. When I’m at the controls, I know exactly who I am.

  I check a readout on the conn. “We’ve gotten quite a bit of data recorded already. How’s she doing?”

  Hell Monkey grunts. “Pretty good actually. That extra heat shielding is holding up perfect.”

  “Well, you did an awesome job installing it, so that tracks.”

  Dead silence from his side of the bridge. I shoot a side glance at him and . . . is he blushing?

  Rose’s voice cuts through the air. “Emergency alert, Captain Farshot. Sensors detect extreme seismic activity near our current position. Tsunami wave rapidly forming. Projected crest: two kilometers. Estimated time to impact: five seconds.”

  A flame tsunami. Holy hell, that would be something to see up close. But I shouldn’t take the risk, not with a brand-new crew member on board. I’ve already lost engineers over situations just like this.

  Hell Monkey sits back in his chair. “Y’know . . . I bet the science guys at the Society would piss their pants to get data from a real-life flame tsunami.” He raises an eyebrow at me, a little smile creeping onto his face.

  Delight fizzes through me, and I laugh out loud. “H.M., I think we’re gonna be a good pair.”

  Then I flip the Vagabond around and head straight into trouble.

  Thirteen

  Stardate: 0.05.18 in the Year—ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW? COY IS FALLING OFF A DAMN CLIFF!

  I HAVE BASICALLY THE SPAN OF A HUFFAR’S HEARTBEAT to make it to the cliff’s edge. (Huffars have the fastest natural heart rates in the quadrant, so it’s a really short space of time, okay? Trust me on this one.)

  Honestly, I don’t know how I did it. I heard Coy’s name tear out of my throat and felt my body moving, and suddenly I’m hanging over the edge with my butt in the air and one hand wrapped around Coy’s wrist. I fumble around with my free hand trying to find something—anything—to lever against, but there’s nothing. Just the weight of my own hips and legs to keep us from free-falling.

  Reaching down, I wrap my other hand around her arm too, just to make sure I’ve got a good grip. Coy’s face has gone a bit green underneath the gray, and her eyes flick nervously to the empty black underneath her dangling feet. She looks up at me, her immaculate savior, and says . . .

  “I knew you were attached to me, Farshot, but this is somewhat next level, don’t you think?”

  And then she grins.

  My arms (one of which was recently dislocated, thanks very much) are shaking, my muscles are starting to burn, and this jerk-off is cracking jokes.

  “Nathalia Coyenne, put that stupid smile away and start getting some purchase on this cliff or I swear to every god in the empire that I will drop your ass!”

  She keeps grinning, but at least she swings her legs over and uses her toes to find some leverage. It’s not much like scaling a regular rock face—it’s a lot more sheer—but the building blocks of the blotinzoid homeworld do stick out into little ledges here and there. With her climbing and me pulling, we manage to get both of us clear of danger and onto our feet.

  I bend over at the waist, my heart racing, my breath coming fast. Looking up, I catch Coy’s gaze, and underneath it I see a flicker of something dark and scared. Like she really thought for a second there that she was a goner.

  So did I.

  I start to say something, to reach for her arm, but I hear a shout and whip around to see Faye and Owyn Mega racing toward us.

  “Time to go,” says Coy.

  She takes off over the uneven landscape, and I start after her, pausing for half a second at the top of the first rise to look back—

  They make the jump. Both of them. Good.

  I throw myself into the race, closing the distance to Coy quickly, trying to catch up with Setter, who seems impossibly far ahead. I can see his dark figure jumping over obstacles, skimming up the sides of columns, making it all look easy. This kid is a damn surprise for sure.

  My scrambling is a lot less graceful, but it is effective. I manage to stay ahead of Orso and Mega and even have an edge on Coy. I know she and I aren’t technically in a competition, but (a) no one else really knows that; and (b) old habits die hard. We spent too much time as kids racing along hallways and up and down access shafts, seeing who could beat whom to whatever random point we’d decided on.

  This time it’s that bright light of the beacon on the last rise.

  I reach the base just as Setter clears the top, touches the light . . . and disappears.

  The hell?

  “Hell Monkey,” I call into my wristband as I start to climb.

  “Here, Captain.”

  “Get the Vagabond geared up. I want to be ready to go.”

  “Less talking, more climbing, Farshot,” Coy barks just behind me.

  Yeah, yeah, yeah . . .

  My fingers find the top, and I haul my body up with a grunt and a curse, rolling onto my feet, just about bonking my head on the stupid camera drone as it sweeps around, trying to get the best angle.

  There’s a gray metal platform sitting on the ground in front of me, maybe a meter high, and hovering several centimeters above it is a glowing sphere. It’s hard to see much more than that because the sphere is so bright that you can’t look quite at it, but there’s definitely . . . something inside that light. Something moving. Almost like a million tiny somethings.

  Coy’s head clears the edge as I reach a hand out and touch the light—

  —and then I’m on my back, staring up at the lavender sky of AW421979. It feels like all the wind has been knocked out of my lungs, and I gasp in a breath, coughing as I push myself into a sitting position.

  I’m by the Vagabond. Right by her nose, actually, and when I crane my head back, I see Hell Monkey pressing his face to the window to get a sight line on me. His shoulders visibly relax when he sees me conscious and moving. I check myself over—nothing broken, nothing bloody. But there is something new imprinted on the skin of my palm. It’s a replica of the royal seal, and it looks almost like a tattoo, but it’s shimmering and metallic and—I look closer, bringing it right up to my nose—shifting very subtly.

  From the beacon there’s a blinding flash. I scramble to my feet and run around to the back of the Vagabond just in time to see Coy appear beside the Gilded Gun, coughing and looking disoriented.

  The Wynlari’s engines hum, and she starts to lift off the surface.

  Crap.

  I nod at Coy and then race up the aft ramp into the Vagabond, calling to Hell Monkey over the comms. “I’m in, I’m in. Get her up and follow Roy.”

  By the time I make it to the bridge, we’re taking off into the planet’s skies. Doesn’t look like the camera drone made it back to the ship in time. That’s a shame.

  Hell Monkey keeps steady eyes and hands on the controls as I come up behind his chair and take a deep breath, smelling the metallic tang of recycled air and the scents Hell Monkey always carries on him—coolant and conduit oil and the dark, spicy soap he uses.

  “Little dicey there for a second,” he says, his voice kinda quiet. “I’m not used to you almost kicking it without being right there beside you.”

  Something about his tone makes me pause. I’ve never really been scared of de
ath—it’s not like I’m gonna feel anything on the other side of that river, right?—but I have a sudden image of Hell Monkey sitting, alone, on the Vagabond with nothing but memories to hang on to.

  Like me with Uncle Atar.

  I clear my throat around the ache that’s squeezing at it and punch Hell Monkey in the arm. Keeping it light. Keeping it playful.

  “Are you kidding me? We’re gonna go down in a blaze of glory together.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “That a promise?”

  “Of course it is.”

  He smiles just a little as we break atmo out into the sweet darkness of the stars. The Wynlari is visible about three kilometers off our bow. I drop into my jump seat, holding my palm up to my face, trying to figure out why we raced all that distance just to get a fancy tattoo.

  “Did you get what we needed?” Hell Monkey asks without looking away from the controls.

  “I’m not sure. . . .” I glance up and watch as Setter’s ship blurs and then jets away, jumping into the hyperlight lane. He must’ve figured something out. What does he see in this that I don’t? “Rose?”

  “Yes, Captain Farshot.”

  “I need you to analyze something.” I pull up a scan pad on the conn and press my palm against it, feeling it warm against my skin.

  “Of course, Captain Farshot. Scanning now . . .”

  I wait, holding my breath.

  The lights on board flicker.

  And then every system on the Vagabond Quick goes completely dead.

  Fourteen

  Stardate: 0.05.18 in the Year 4031

  Location: Dead in the water above a stupid planet in the middle of a stupid contest and everything is stupid

  Greetings, crownchaser. Congratulations on accessing the initial beacon. You were the second person to reach the touchpoint; you must now wait while the winning crownchaser is given a head start. All ship’s systems except for emergency air and lighting will be offline for the next one (1) standard imperial hour. Time penalties increase according to crownchaser ranking by one (1) standard imperial hour. In the event of a proximity alert, ship’s thrusters will be made available to you. Our apologies for any inconvenience.

  I SCOWL AT THE MESSAGE ON-SCREEN AS MY HEAD bumps against the ceiling of the Vagabond’s bridge for the thousandth time.

  When I was about ten years old, I used to run off with Coy and Faye and sometimes even Owyn and Setter to this dusty meeting room with a really high ceiling. It was on one of the lower levels of the kingship, without some of the soaring views of higher up, so it was empty a lot, and we figured out how to isolate its grav controls so we could float around in there, bumping into each other and doing sweet flips and other stupid stuff until we were caught and lectured and sworn off of doing that anymore.

  That was fun and thrilling. When I was ten.

  Spinning around in zero grav is significantly less fun now because I do not have time for this crap.

  Which I guess is kind of the point. Gotta offer some kind of advantage for getting to the beacon ahead of other crownchasers, otherwise how are you gonna get that good footage of us all scrambling over each other? There’s a countdown clock on the display right underneath that stupid message and it’s currently sitting at 57:38 and ticking away.

  Hell Monkey drifts by me, stretched out horizontal, his hands behind his head. “Welp. That didn’t really go to plan.”

  I brace myself against the ceiling and throw a leg out, nudging him hard off course with the toe of my boot. He flails, trying to stabilize, but not before he collides gracelessly against one of the bulkheads.

  “All commentary that isn’t useful commentary is extremely unwelcome right now.”

  He rights himself against the wall. “Define useful. I mean, I think most of what I say has some use.”

  “We need to go see if we can get the power back on. Can you go check the engine room? I’ll try to get a panel on the navcomm open and see if I spot anything.”

  Hell Monkey shoots me a side-eye. “Okay, but . . . don’t . . . touch anything, okay?”

  “Are you kidding me? It’s my ship!”

  “Oh, I know. I saw how things got fixed around here before I came on board.” He pushes off the wall, propelling himself down the corridor toward the engine room. “Just stay on the comms and tell me if you see anything weird.”

  Grumbling, I maneuver my weightless body down off the ceiling and underneath the navcomm controls. There are half a dozen panels about the size of my face scattered along the bottom of the dash so you can access interior wiring and circuitry when you need to fix something. Which . . . I’m not gonna give Hell Monkey the satisfaction of telling him he’s not wrong, but . . . he’s not wrong. I cycled through a few engineers before he came on board—not everyone gets my unique sense of adventure—and I’ve had to jury-rig repairs on my own. Just me and the ship’s AI trying to guide me along. It’s not that I’m totally terrible, but my work isn’t exactly professional grade. That’s what I hired Hell Monkey for.

  “Hey, Captain.”

  Speak of the devil. His voice comes over the comms as I’m craning my neck in a painful way to try to get a better angle on the Vagabond’s guts.

  “You find something?”

  “Not exactly.”

  I let my head fall back on the floor with a thud. “Not exactly? What exactly does ‘not exactly’ mean?”

  “It means that so far I’m not finding anything. Which tells me a lot of something. Does that make sense?”

  I snort as I wiggle sideways to get to the next panel. “Complete sense. I’m starting to worry about how much time we spend together, H.M.”

  His laugh rolls over the comms. “I’m serious, though, Captain. They didn’t say anything about this when they prepped you before the chase began?”

  I try to think back to those half-blurred days. I don’t think so? But gods, I don’t remember much about any of it, really. I just remember . . .

  . . . Uncle Atar’s body being whisked away from me and Charlie before he was even cold . . .

  . . . crying, sharp and jagged sobs, in the darkness of my old childhood quarters . . .

  . . . the guttural hallüdraen funeral dirges blaring in my ears as I watched the royal oseberg ship arc across the sky on its trek to deliver my uncle’s body into the center of Apex’s sun . . .

  “Alyssa?”

  “I’m here.” Tears have crawled into my eyes, and I swipe at them and clear my throat. “Yeah, I dunno. I wasn’t really present and accounted for at the orientation meeting.”

  I hear Hell Monkey sigh. “I dunno. Something just seems off about it to me. I saw those crownchase guys work on the Vagabond. They got the job done, but they weren’t exactly graceful about it. Putting a freeze on our ship? I’d expect to see fingerprints for something that big. Something new installed. It’s like . . .”

  “Like there’s a third party at play,” I finish for him.

  “Yeah . . . Powerful enough to ghost into our systems like nothing. I gotta be honest—that’s enough to twist a guy’s underwear.”

  “Well, there’s a visual for you.” I put the panel cover back up and wiggle to the next one. I’m not even sure why. I didn’t see anything out of place in the last few, and I doubt I will in the others either. But what the hell else am I gonna do for the next half an hour?

  And it’s a loooooong half hour. I bounce around the bridge, popping panels and checking behind bulkheads. Hell Monkey keeps talking from the engine room, doing this thing where he tries to come up with more and more groan-inducing puns. I tell him he’s the worst, but I actually love it and he knows that, the jerk.

  I spend the last several minutes of the countdown in my captain’s chair, glowering at the clock, feeling itchy all over. I hate feeling stuck, I hate feeling trapped, and I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but I’m seriously pissed at Uncle Atar right now.

  I thunk my head back against the headrest, squeezing my eyes shut against the total
lack of anything going on. Why the hell did Uncle Atar even want me to do this so bad anyway? I’d make a terrible empress. I wasn’t even good as an emperor’s niece, for stars’ sake. I hate sitting still, I’m not great with responsibility, I was a horrible, disobedient kid—there’s nothing about me that should’ve made Atar go, “Yes, she’ll be perfect!”

  I shouldn’t even be doing this. That illness must’ve gotten to him at the end.

  My mind drifts, pulling at my memories of my uncle.

  Of sitting with him in his favorite observatory, looking out over the Eastern Sea while he told me stories of the Faroshti homeworld and my mother and the family he lost in the Twenty-Five-Year War.

  Of him pulling me away from my tutors to take me to the kingship planetarium, how we’d sit there for hours while he displayed one planet after another, reciting everything he knew about the people who lived there.

  I want to see them in person, I’d tell him. Every single one.

  You will, Birdie, he always said. You will see all their faces, and then you’ll know.

  Know what?

  He’d turn and take my face in his hands. How to make something new. Something amazing.

  He never elaborated beyond that. He’d thought there’d be time for that later. We all thought there would be.

  I open my eyes again, zeroing in on the countdown clock.

  00:03

  00:02

  00:01

  00:00

  The lights flicker on.

  Go time.

  Fifteen

  AS SOON AS THE VAGABOND POWERS UP, ROSE’S electronic voice fills the ship, and I’ve never been so excited to hear her.

  “Captain Farshot, all systems are online again.”

  “Thank all the stars and gods. Rose, you all right?”

  “I am functioning as specified.”

  My mouth twitches with half a smile as I lean forward and program new coordinates into the conn, ones that’ll take us to a somewhat central part of the quadrant. I have no idea where we’re gonna need to go next, but hell if I’m staying put any longer. The Vagabond hums to life, her engines heating up, and then she surges forward—and we’re in hyperlight.