Crownchasers

by Rebecca Coffindaffer

  I jam an elbow into his side. “Great. That isn’t at all helpful.”

  “What did you expect?” He rubs at the sore spot, his big shoulders lifting in a shrug. “I’m good with numbers, but I like them in context, where they’re related to something. Not just floating around all willy-nilly. What does Coy have so far?”

  “Nothing. If she had any leads, why would she be needing us to look at it?” I step into the middle of the room, bringing my hands out in front of me. “Rose, give me full manual control of the image, please.”

  “Manual control initiated, Captain Farshot.”

  “Thanks, Rose, you’re a peach.”

  “Has Coy done anything with it so far?” Hell Monkey asks, circling around the edge of the room. “Basic record searches?”

  “Yes, she did. And it was totally simple and we’re just trying to see if we can solve it again for funsies.”

  Hell Monkey glowers at me. I just give him a shrug and start manipulating the three-dimensional numbers in the air in front of me. Bringing them up to eye level, splitting them into groups and then into pairs and then combining them again.

  “Rose,” I call, and she chirrups a little note of acknowledgment. “I’m betting on you being a better ship’s AI than Coyenne’s shabby hunk of metal. You can kick the Gun’s ass, right?”

  “I do not understand your query, Captain Farshot.”

  “We’ll work on it. Just tell me: Can you find anything that might correspond with a string like this of thirty-two numbers? Something that could conceivably be applied to the crownchase. Like, not thirty-two numbers that’s the high score of some person’s bagautchi game or something.”

  “You never know. It could be pointing to a bagautchi score.” Hell Monkey crouches in the corner, fingers threaded in front of him. He’s still glowering at me. “Maybe it’s the key to the universe.”

  I match his expression. “Maybe your face is.”

  “Inspiring words. Truly you are meant to sit on a throne of royalty.”

  Rose’s voice cuts through our squabbling. “Captain Farshot, I can find nothing that fits your specifications.”

  “What about dividing it up?” H.M. asks. He pushes back onto his feet and walks right up behind me, reaching over my shoulder to fiddle with the number string. He splits it in two, sending one to either side of the room, and then he starts fussing with the latter half, dividing sixteen into two eights and then the eights into four sets of four and rearranging them and flipping around. “Rose, any leads if we divide it up more like this?”

  I drift toward the rest of the string, the first set of sixteen numbers, as the AI responds overhead.

  “Searching for potential combinations for numerical groups—sixteen sets of two, eight sets of four, four sets of eight, two sets of sixteen, and variations therein—as they could relate to a point or points connected to the crownchase . . .”

  0437192251623609. Something about it bothers me. Like it’s poking at the edge of my brain, saying, You should know this, Alyssa, wake up.

  “There are five hundred seventy-three potential solutions to your query.”

  Hell Monkey growls. “Well, damn. What’s the word, Captain? Should we make a list? Divide it up with Coy?”

  “Yeah, okay,” I say, half listening. “Call Coy. We’ve got work to do.”

  As soon as we get a response from the Gilded Gun, we start processing through the metric ton of options that Rose provided to us. Combinations that refer to manufacturing numbers and market codes, transactions and ship keys—we look at each one, try to plug in the numbers we have, see what it pulls up, and then cross it out when it’s nonsense or set it to the side when it holds a scrap of possibility.

  It’s mind-numbing. I’m not a great student, to be honest, and I wander off a few times, going back to the display of the numerical string. Gods, I know there is something about this that I should recognize. It’s like when you wake up and you’re trying to remember the dream you were having and the feeling of it is still there, on the tips of your fingers, but you can’t grab it all up before it slips away.

  We’re two hours in when Hell Monkey shouts, “LATITUDE!”

  On the expanded display, Coy leans back in her chair, boots up on the desk, one eyebrow raised. “I’m sorry—are you having a fit?”

  Hell Monkey makes a gesture at her. Not a nice one.

  “Longitude and latitude, Coyenne. If you take out all the divisions and put the numbers together, they’re sixteen numbers.”

  Oh shit. I jump up from where I’ve been sitting on my bed and wade into the middle of the projection again, spreading the numbers out in front of me at eye level. I’m staring at them so hard my eyes are burning, but I can feel it. The impression of something coming into focus.

  “So, that could explain half of the numbers,” Coy says, bringing her feet down to the floor.

  I swipe aside everything except the first sixteen numbers, the ones that have been nagging at me for hours now, and I start to break them into pieces.

  Drinn grumbles, rising to his considerable vilkjing height. “Need a planet or they’re useless. Random longitude and latitude—could apply to anywhere.”

  Hell Monkey sighs. “Okay, that’s true, but it’s more of a start than we had five minutes ago so—ah!”

  He jumps as I grab him suddenly by the shirtsleeve, bouncing a little on my toes. “I’ve got the rest of it,” I say, my voice tight with excitement. “The last half is where you look on the planet, but the first half”—I bring the number string up so everyone can see—“is the planet you’re going to. They’re celestial coordinates, just like the Society gives us when we’re headed someplace new. They’re just stripped of all the spaces and labels and stuff. See?” I swipe my hands around, dividing up the projection again and bringing each part up one at a time. “0437—that’s 4:37 a.m., the time of day to orient you. 192251—the right ascension: 19 hours, 22 minutes, 51 seconds. And the last part, 623609—that’s the declination: +62 degrees, 36’ 09”. TA-DA!”

  Drinn stares at the screen for a few seconds, then grunts and nods, which I choose to take as a celebratory hug. Hell Monkey whistles his appreciation, but then he holds up a finger.

  “One problem, boss. Celestial coordinates need a point of origin. Without that, we don’t know if we’re aiming at the right planet.”

  Coy finally gets up, flinging an arm around Drinn’s shoulder, and there’s a broad grin on her face. “Now it’s my turn to be clever. Because they’ve already told us where our point of origin is.” With her free hand, she gestures at the screen, bringing up that phrase that I’d almost forgotten about. “‘From the crown, I see it.’ It’s the kingship, darlings. We’re starting at Apex.”

  Thirty-Five

  Stardate: 0.05.30 in the Year 4031

  Location: Face-first in a cup of coffee. Also, hyperlight.

  WE DON’T ACTUALLY HAVE TO FLY TO APEX.

  I mean, I guess we could’ve, but it’s way easier and less time-consuming to just have Rose calculate where the celestial coordinates are pointing based off the kingship’s location. Beats adding several days of hyperlight to our trip.

  It turns out the numbers line up with the planet Deoni, the fourth planet from the sun in the Roros system. Definitely a few days’ journey by hyperlight—hello, vastness of space—which is fine because I’m not in a hurry to see what’s planned for us once we get there.

  That’s not a knock on Deoni. The people of Deoni are almost universally great. I’ve been there for a couple different missions for the Society, and everyone I’ve met there has zero pretension. It’s refreshing as hell. The climate of their planet, though, can be a little . . . let’s call it challenging. It’s dry, it’s prone to massive dust storms, and almost everything that grows there is either spiky, bony, poisonous, or some combination of those three.

  Basically it’s an ideal setting for whatever the crownchase has cooked up next.

  We’ve had some time to rattle around in
side the Vagabond Quick. Try to figure out what to expect for the next round. I wake the mediabot up because I feel a little bad seeing it propped up in the corner of the bridge, thinking it’s got no other point on here. Good ol’ JR comes out swinging with the questions, and I give it one super-short interview about why I’m back before shooing it away to wander the ship and try to entertain itself. Hell Monkey spends most of his time fiddling around on the bridge, tweaking the controls on the conn, messing with the settings on all the different displays and viewscreens. I even catch him cleaning—he really hates being bored.

  And me? I go find Uncle Atar.

  It’s occurred to me recently how little time I’ve spent—sober—dealing with his absence. Truly, seriously dealing with it.

  Staring grief in the face isn’t my forte. It requires cruising into uncharted stars with no shields, no guns, and comms channels fully open. That’s not something I generally do.

  But hey, I’m trying something new these days. Why not.

  I keep to my quarters, and I start flipping through all the things I have left to connect me to Uncle Atar. His life, his work, our life together on the kingship for all those years.

  There aren’t a lot of actual physical mementos. I didn’t take much when I left. I had just wanted to be shed of everything, but I’m kind of regretting it now. I wish I had something more tangible in the narrow little closet of stuff in my quarters. I unearth just about everything in there, dumping it out on the bed and the floor, wading through clothes and shoes and old plaques of commendation that I always meant to hang up somewhere but then never got around to it because who really wants to spend an afternoon trying to mount frames totally straight.

  At the very back, in a dark, dusty corner, I finally find it: a box only about thirty centimeters long and fifteen centimeters wide. In it are a handful of childhood keepsakes. Proof that I hadn’t been completely heartless when I’d set off for the stars. I’d stuck it back here and forgotten about it over the years.

  On the very top is Gamgee, a stuffed blue-and-gray leviathan plushy, well-worn and faded from years of snuggles. He had been my favorite friend and sleeping buddy for most of my life, even after I had gotten too old to play with those kinds of things. I cradle him in my lap, running my thumbs over the patchy fur on his face. Gamgee had been here with me during my first nights on the Vagabond Quick, when the bigness of the universe had seemed ready to eat me up. But then I’d taken on my first engineer, and I’d gone from “girl by herself on a ship” to “captain.” Captains needed to be adult and serious. They shouldn’t be cuddling stuffed animals. So I’d stowed him away.

  “Sorry, Gamgee,” I whisper, giving his cartoonish face a kiss.

  I tuck him underneath my arm and sort through the other items in the box.

  A raw golden stone from the moons around Ysev—Charlie had gotten it for me. Ysev had seemed so far away back then, so exotic. I’d worn some of the jagged edges smooth from handling it over and over and over again. Picturing myself out here.

  A few keepsakes Atar had given me that had been favorites of my mother’s—a vial of perfumed oil from Nysus, a hallüdraen ceremonial knife passed down from my great-grandmother, a bangled armband made from dark blue iridescent metal found on Dalis. I’d had other things of hers, but these had been the ones I came back to again and again.

  A handful of holodiscs, each holding images and recordings I had made or other people had made. One is of Atar and Charlie and me. One is of my mother that Uncle Atar had put together from his own images and recordings. One is of me and Coy and a few of the other prime family kids that Coy had given me as a gift for my fourteenth birthday.

  And one is a holodisc that Uncle Atar had given me on the day I left. A special message, he’d told me. For once you’re up there in the stars.

  I hadn’t watched it. I’d been afraid it would make me feel bad for jetting away, so I’d set it aside.

  Better late than never.

  I clear a space on my messy floor and set the disc down, sinking back onto my bed as a life-sized image of Emperor Atar Faroshti, ruler of the United Sovereign Empire, fills the space.

  It hits me in the chest like a blaster shot. To see him there as he was a few years ago, looking tall and healthy and not gaunt and half–wasted away like he’d been the last time I saw him. The blue of his eyes is so bright, his face full and handsome instead of sunken in like a skeleton. He looks so real in this moment that I ache to hug him, to feel him put his arms around me and hold me and tell me that it’s going to be okay, that I’m doing things right, that I’m still and always will be his little Birdie.

  Tears spill out of the corners of my eyes as the holographic Atar smiles gently and starts to speak.

  “Hello, Birdie. Or I suppose I should call you Captain Faroshti now. I’m glad you’re listening to this. I was worried you wouldn’t.” I half laugh, half sob, squeezing Gamgee against my chest. “I know you’ve been itching to leave the kingship for a while now, and I can’t blame you. Not when there is so much to see in this universe. I got to see it once, when I was young, before the war. Your mother and I traveled the stars, and it shaped so much of what she and I dreamed of for this empire. They are some of my fondest memories of Saya—crisscrossing the quadrant, staying up late and talking about our visions for the future. She was . . . such a brilliant fixed point in my world. I wish you could have known her.” Holographic Atar pauses, a few tears slipping over his high cheekbones. “As much as those years meant to me, this has meant even more—raising you, seeing you grow and develop and reach for the edges of the horizon. It has been everything to me, Birdie. More than a thousand empires. Charlie and I will miss you very much. Please come back and visit sometimes. We love you.”

  The holodisc goes dark. But I don’t notice. I pour every tear in my body into Gamgee’s soft, tiny body.

  I’m still crying, curled on my bed, when Hell Monkey comes to find me two hours later. He takes me in with one look and lies down next to me without saying a word. His big arms wrap around me, anchoring me to him, and he’s my only source of gravity for the rest of the night.

  Thirty-Six

  Stardate: 0.05.31 in the Year 4031

  Location: Approaching the planet Deoni with clean hair and clean pants—it’s a miracle

  WHEN ROSE’S VOICE SINGS OUT THE NEXT DAY TO say we’re dropping out of hyperlight, I step onto the bridge clear-eyed, cleaned-up, showered and everything. I’m not even wearing my typical jumpsuit. I’ve put on my mother’s favorite armband, wrapped around my right bicep, and I found a new coat when I was stuffing all my clothes back in my closet—Charlie’s parting gift from when I first left Apex. Tunic-length, high-collared, sleeveless, fitted, in a deep blue fabric with etchings in faint gold. Its design is hallüdraen, made up for nobility and the house colors of Faroshti. It’s the first time I’ve ever worn it, and it feels like armor somehow.

  Hell Monkey raises an eyebrow when he sees me, and there’s the ghost of a smile on his lips.

  “Captain,” he says, and the layers of meaning he manages to put into that one word make my heart flutter a little.

  I grin at him and waggle my eyebrows. Ever the professional. “What’s the situation? I was busy primping.”

  “Approaching the planet Deoni. I’ve already laid in coordinates to move us into orbit.”

  I step up next to him. My eyes are fixed on the sandy-brown planet in our viewscreen, but I barely see it. My mind is one hundred percent focused on the engineer beside me. “What would I do without you?” I say, but it’s not a light, teasing question. It’s an honest-as-hell question.

  He doesn’t answer. He just gives me a playful nudge with his elbow.

  “Proximity alert,” Rose calls.

  I shoot a look at Hell Monkey, who shrugs. “Probably Coyenne just got here before us.”

  “Probably. Put it on the viewscreen, Rose. Identify.”

  There’s a beat, and then Rose says, “Identification: Worldcruiser S576-
034. No name on record. Currently registered to crownchaser Edgar Marius Tycho Voles.”

  My eyebrows shoot up so high they probably hit my hairline. “Well, that’s a first.” I slide into my jump seat, working the touch screens on the conn to do a sensor sweep of the other ship. I’m not sure what I’m expecting to find, exactly. I only get the basics: it’s a worldcruiser, there’s a person on board who’s probably Edgar Voles–shaped, and there isn’t any other biological life-form with him.

  It’s surprising to see him here, to say the least. There’s no rule that says you have to perform the challenges that have been set out—otherwise I would’ve been disqualified the moment I ran for Shisso. The only real goal is to find the seal, however you choose to go about doing that. You can try to hang back and watch, ride people’s tails, but the galaxy is a big-ass place and you can’t track someone once they hop into a hyperlight lane. Which means the challenges are often your best bet to find the seal, so the less you participate in them, the less likely it is you’ll be the first person to the finish line.

  That’s the theory anyway.

  But here’s Edgar, who hasn’t shown his face anywhere near the crownchase for weeks, three steps ahead of us. That’s not just odd—that’s almost impossible. Unless he’s got insider information. Or unless . . . he’s had eyes on us this whole time. Something stealthy enough to evade all our internal sensors . . .

  “Hell Monkey, start scanning the planet surface. There should be four different points that match the latitude-longitude coordinates you figured out, so we just need to sort out which one it is.”

  “On it, Captain.”

  I bend over my own section of the conn, using my body to try to hide the series of intensive commands I type into the dash. I could just tell Rose what to do, but my gut says I should go for subtle and secret here instead of shouting about it out loud.

  Rose’s voice breaks in. “Proximity alert. The Gilded Gun is dropping out of hyperlight.”