Empress of a Thousand Skies

by Rhoda Belleza

  Her father at the head of the long table, teaching, always. “As empress, you must be fair, but decisive,” he’d said, smearing his toast with one stroke of butter, as if to demonstrate his point. He’d been talking to Josselyn, of course. Her older sister had known all her life that she would rule.

  Funny. Without the cube, parts of the memory receded into the background while others rose to the surface. How Josselyn had fed a piece of meat to their hounds under the table, winking at Rhee as if they were in on a secret. While on her cube, she had never replayed the memory that far.

  She opened her eyes just as a particularly dazzling display of flares burst across the sky. Orange marks clawed against the darkness and faded just as quickly. The silence made it feel like a sacred act. Or an omen.

  She looked over at her trainer, who threaded his fingers behind his back. He faced the window, shoulders squared and chest out. Like the soldier he was. He’d barely said anything since they boarded.

  “Are you angry with me?” she asked him.

  “No,” Veyron said, though he wouldn’t meet her eye. “But they do things differently in the capital. Running away from your duties would not have been tolerated there.”

  “They’ll think whatever they please.” Her habit of wearing pants, her martial arts training—it would all strike them as odd. But Rhee feared something worse than popular opinion. She feared that after all this time, all this preparation, she would freeze when the time came to avenge her family and kill Seotra.

  But she could not allow Seotra to live. He’d masqueraded as her father’s friend, but it was Seotra who’d arranged for their departure and seen them off that very night. How many times had she replayed the memory of the fight she’d interrupted?

  Half the beings in the galaxy will want you dead. Seotra’s bared teeth. The certainty, the hatred, in his voice. Surely this was why her father had gathered them in the darkness of night. Seotra made the Emperor believe they had to flee for their lives, and then he destroyed their craft.

  “The Crown Princess has always been so obstinate,” Veyron said now.

  Crown Princess. She scowled at her trainer. “You know I don’t go by that title.” It was Joss’s claim. She’d been next in line to inherit the throne, and only because of her death would Rhee be empress.

  “I do.” He nodded again as he gazed back at the door behind them. The lights of the flares made red slashes across the side of his face. “But as we grow older, we must also accept the people we’ve become.”

  “What do you mean?” Something in his tone made prickles of anxiety spiderwalk up her back.

  Veyron turned, and she saw for the first time the look on his face. He had dark skin from his Wraetan side and blue eyes common in second-wave Kalusians—an unusual pairing, and evidence of his mixed heritage. It was strange to see him upset; he was always so good at concealing his true feelings. At that moment, his resemblance to Julian was striking. “I’m sorry, Rhee. I hope the gods forgive me.”

  “Sorry for—?”

  Before she could say what, Veyron grabbed her throat and pushed her hard against the window. Her headdress fell from the force of the impact, and Veyron stepped on it, crushing the feathers under the tread of his boot. From his thumb to his index finger, the length of his hand fit cleanly around Rhee’s neck. He lifted her off the ground and squeezed. She felt her windpipe closing. She gasped for air as she tried to claw his fingers off one by one.

  It was impossible. His familiar face—the face of her best friend’s father, of the trainer she’d known for years—seemed to warp before her eyes. Everything was slowing. Her tongue felt thick and dry, and she fought for breath. White bursts of light softened the corners of her vision. The ancestors peered at her from their portraits, holos frozen in time, waiting to see how it ended. Would she would join them?

  “I’m sorry, Rhee,” he repeated. Even as Veyron brought his other hand up to her throat, tears were welling in his eyes. “They gave me no choice. I had no choice.”

  TWO

  ALYOSHA

  THE ship cut a hard left. Alyosha slammed against the boiler. The metal hull groaned and flexed. Tools flew off his belt and floated away; they landed just out of reach. His cube buzzed faintly on his neck. He tapped to answer.

  “What’s your status?” Vincent asked.

  “I lost my favorite wrench,” Aly said, squatting down to see where it had fallen.

  “And the grav beam?”

  “I’m ten minutes out from fixing it.” If he could find his socket wrench.

  “Work your magic and shave off some time, yeah? Just tried hailing this crazy-looking ship in a routine stop, but now the pilot is acting feisty.” Vincent sent a view of his dash, which played on the back of Aly’s eyelids, so that it briefly doubled his vision. The ship in question was shaped like a beetle, too small to be a cargo ship, too big to be a standard civilian pod, and about thirty klicks northeast. It wasn’t slowing down, even as they pursued it. The UniForce had a term for ships like this: noncompliant. They’d need the grav beam up and running to lock on to the target and reel it in.

  Annoying for Aly. Fantastic for ratings.

  “Seven minutes out,” Vincent said.

  “I’d work faster if I wasn’t trying to hang on for my life,” Aly told him, blinking out the image. “Where’d you learn to fly?”

  “Your mom’s bedroom—she taught me this move.” The Revolutionary barrel-rolled, and Aly scrambled for a handhold while the world somersaulted around him. What a showboat.

  “If I throw up in the reactor, it’ll be your fault.”

  “But we’ll all be dead, so who’ll blame me?”

  A freaking philosopher, this one.

  For the past sixteen months, they’d been aboard the Revolutionary together: a two-man sweeper staffed with a droid named Pavel that Aly had programmed himself. Pavel was a fan favorite—more famous than either Aly or Vin, which was saying something, because they were pretty popular. After all, they were the two stars of The Revolutionary Boys.

  Neither Aly nor Vin had set out to be famous. Far from it. As members of the UniForce, Kalu’s military, their assignment had originally been seen as a punishment for two slackers who’d barely survived basic. They’d been banished to the perimeter of the Outer Belt, policing renegade poachers and investigating claims of stolen or illegally modified ships when someone put a bulletin out, that sort of thing. When the producers had decided to bring the cameras on board for a short, feel-good pro-UniForce documentary, no one had expected the show to blow up.

  Well, almost no one. Jethezar, the Chram kid they’d come up with in basic, had called it from about a million miles away. Whenever Aly pulled up the memory of Jeth on his cube, Jeth would shake his head and exhale a plume of smoke through the gills on either side of his neck. “Y’all don’t forget me when you’re famous and stuff,” he’d said in that Chram twang, in a way that was so solemn Aly hadn’t known if he’d been serious or just had a really solid deadpan going on.

  Now The Revolutionary Boys was the most popular show on DroneVision. The cameras had stayed, and the whole thing became a production. They were on their second season, and Aly couldn’t scratch his butt without a camera beaming it to the worlds at all hours of the day. The single glorious exception was the hour in the morning when the two Kalusian moons, Nau Fruma and Rhesto, crossed orbits. Then, the DroneVision network was completely disabled—and there was no way any satellite signals could come in or out.

  It wasn’t exactly the life of a soldier. It was better. Sure, maybe Aly wasn’t a natural in front of the camera. Not like Vincent, who was game to smile for the daisies whenever and wherever; those little cameras brought out the best in him—the one-liners, the perfectly timed expressions, the mouthful of perfectly white teeth. But it was sure as hell better than being stuck in some Wray Town, coughing up dust.

  Plus, t
here were benefits to the The Revolutionary Boys attention. Like the girls. Rubbing elbows with celebrities (rubbing something, Vin had joked) at the occasional fund-raiser. All the fan messages that made him feel like he mattered.

  Of course, there were bad things too. There’d been a few signs at the last season-premiere party, on all the fan holoforums, pasted over the show’s advertisements: GO HOME, DUSTIES. It didn’t matter that Aly was always on his best behavior—he wanted to rep his planet right—but to a certain kind of person he’d always be the enemy. A lot of folks couldn’t get over the memories they had of the Wraetan uprisings, and the way Wraeta had sided with Fontis against Kalu during the Great War. That was why Aly had originally lied about having Wraetan blood. He’d heard stories about how Wraetans were treated in the UniForce, since there was still bad blood and the whole refugee situation—so he’d checked a different box and told a little white lie. No one would’ve known if it weren’t for the show, which sent a bunch of journalists digging into his past.

  At least the show had Aly’s back, so long as the ratings were good. When it was finally revealed that Aly had Wraetan blood, the producers ignored the protesters—the loud contingent of Kalusians who ran around calling Wraetans animals and savages, or worse: dusties.

  The Revolutionary angled left again. Vin cursed into his cube. “Aly! Target is taking evasive measures. Hurry up on the grav beam already.”

  “I’ll finish what I started—don’t worry about me. You focus on flying and try not to get us killed.”

  “Deal. You have six minutes now. Out.” It was probably the longest conversation they’d ever had over their cubes. Vin never kept his cube on when he didn’t have to. His parents were funny like that. Vin was forced to meditate and use visualizations and mnemonics, which kind of cracked Aly up, since a whole chunk of the universe had to do all that anyway. No fancy names required—it was just called being born poor. Only certain governments could afford to subsidize cube installations for their citizens.

  Aly wasn’t a native cube user, and he’d gotten his installed pretty late in the game. He knew there were all kinds of folks in the wider galaxy addicted to their memories. There were public campaigns to “stay healthy and in the moment,” which mostly meant not to waste away like those sad sacks who kept on revisiting their glory days when they had a full head of hair and a girl on their arm.

  Aly didn’t get that—why you’d want to live inside the past. He liked recording his new life. Maybe eventually he’d accumulate enough good memories to crowd out the bad ones, so that they never showed up again in his feed.

  A DroneVision camera zoomed into his line of vision, and Aly swatted it away. “At least do something useful if you’re gonna get up in my face,” he told the daisy. That’s what they called the DroneVision cameras—a linguistic evolution that started with the casual term day-sees, based on the cameras’ ability to provide bright lighting, and quickly became daisies—even though they looked more like giant spiders than any flower he’d ever seen, on any planet. “Light.”

  A light from its underside flicked on, illuminating the small room. The daisy was compact, the size of his palm, and it fluttered up to the low ceiling. Aly got on his hands and knees, staying close to the ground as the ship veered wildly from left to right. What the hell was going on up there?

  Finally, he spotted the wrench in the far dark corner, wedged in the middle of a network of pipes and wires. Two years ago he could’ve crawled over to it easily enough. But at seventeen, he was just shy of twenty hands tall and still going. His growth spurt had come late and with a vengeance—even his bones hurt, like he’d been strapped to an old-school torture device and stretched every which way. He wondered, now, how much taller than his dad he was.

  He knew for damn sure he was too big to fit through anything constructed by a Kalusian. They had leaner builds, and everything they made was, like, 25 percent too small for Aly to ever use comfortably—but their engineering was top-notch.

  His arms were long, too, which meant that: one, he could take Vin down in a slap-boxing match, and two, he could just brush the metal wrench with the tips of his fingers.

  He eased it into his palm, sprang up, and went to work on the grav beam core—ratcheting, tightening, realigning. His hands moved carefully; the trick was to focus on all the things he could control. Vin’s insane flying, the rusty ship two seconds away from falling apart, the cameras that crept up on him everywhere he went—all of that fell squarely into the realm of the things he couldn’t control.

  The Revolutionary jerked left again. Steadying himself, Aly planted his feet and worked quickly, ignoring the daisy that lowered to get a look at his face. It was always waiting to zoom in on “thoughtful” moments that the producers could use as B-roll and insert anywhere. Aly almost swatted it away again, but he caught his reflection in the lens—and the nick in his eyebrow that girls were always asking about on the holoforums. Even into the second season, he was still not used to the fame. He’d been the kind of kid who studied physics diagrams for hours, not the guy pulling pretty girls. It didn’t help that Aly was so dark. But now, for some reason, folks seemed to think he looked all right—describing his skin like it was kape or chocolate or an expensive type of wood. If he was being honest, it annoyed Aly—you never heard Kalusians compared to food. But it was better than catching taejis about it.

  He reached for the daisy. “Sorry, little guy. I need to borrow something,” he said. It tried to flutter out of his grasp, but his reach was long, and he snatched it up effortlessly. “Easy, easy . . .”

  He unscrewed its lens while the mini propellers still spun. When he got the lens free, the daisy shot up and fled toward the doorway. Aly jammed the lens into the core, adjusted the angle, and powered it on. There was a high-pitched whirl as the grav beam charged up. The sweetest sound, like a chorus of loyal subjects chanting his name.

  “I am the god of grav beams!” he called into his cube.

  “Great. Now come be the god of copilots and help me lock down this choirtoi of a target.”

  “On it!” Aly ducked through the short doorway and scrambled up the access ladder. Across the catwalk and down the corridor, he ran toward the bridge as fast as he could in point-three gravity. He’d never gotten used to the buoyancy. He’d been shuffled between refugee camps from one Wray Town to the next—his past was mostly a blurry series of evacuations—and even though he’d never had a home to call his own, he’d always had gravity.

  But up here, he half ran, half swam. At the next corner, Aly grabbed a makeshift handhold, swinging around the turn and launching himself forward. He’d set up dozens of shortcuts in the same way: broken poles and useless metal components all soldered to the inner hull. He and Vin scaled them like monkey bars.

  The door to the bridge slid open, and there was Vincent, standing over the ship’s console as he bore down on the throttle. He flew the Revolutionary like he was playing a video game, which was to say: recklessly. But he was a good pilot. A dozen cameras hovered around him in a semicircle, positioned at different angles and distances. He was a second-wave Kalusian and looked it, with light eyes and fair skin that turned golden when he tanned.

  “Just in time!” he called over his shoulder. “I’ve never seen this model. It’s unscannable, but the navigation equipment must be top-notch. I’ve lost it twice already.” Half the daisies turned in Aly’s direction, like a flock of ugly birds.

  He took his seat at the helm. “What do you mean, ‘unscannable’?”

  “I can’t get a read on it.” Vin tapped the screen on his console. “It’s invisible on all the nav equipment.”

  Aly touched his finger to his cube and magnified his vision. “It almost looks like it’s made of . . . wood?” It wasn’t impossible. Modified organic material could be used for all kinds of things in deep space. But not a lot of people had the tech. The UniForce definitely didn’t. “It’s kind of we
ird.”

  “Weird,” Vin agreed, with an edge in his voice.

  “Did it respond to your hail?”

  “Yeah, with some sort of code. I got your boy working on it now.” Vin gestured to Pavel. The droid’s eyelights pulsed—or rather the two soft blue lights where his eyes would be if he were human pulsed.

  “Twenty percent through my language database,” Pavel announced.

  Vin wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt—the only indication that he was stressed. “See if you can lock the grav beam on at this distance?” he said.

  A chase scene, Aly realized. High-speed chases weren’t as common as people thought, since 90 percent of ships would stop when hailed by the UniForce. But the producers had told them that the viewers loved chase scenes, which was a way of saying make them happen. Sometimes they even hired merchant crafts to go rogue, just to fill in footage of the Revolutionary wheeling through space in hot pursuit.

  Aly slid his chair toward the console and locked on the first try, but the pilot pulled up hard and shook them off.

  “You’re losing your edge, Alyosha. Whatever it takes,” Vin said. His blue eyes were wide and clear, and Aly expected him to cock his eyebrow at the daisies like he always did when he was hamming it up. But he didn’t.

  “Keep her still and I’ll take care of my end.” But they tried a dozen more times, and the ship outmaneuvered them every time. In the distance they saw the planet Fontis, known for its lushness, with the ocean that supposedly glowed at night. From where they were, the planet was swirls of blues and greens.

  Vin cursed. “You gotta be kidding me.”

  Pavel piped up. “Treaties dictate no military personnel—”

  “We know the treaty, P,” Aly said. Everyone did. The Great War had started off as a beef between Kalu and Fontis thousands of years old, but eventually it engulfed all of their colonies and allies, including Wraeta. It had officially ended nine years ago when the late Emperor Ta’an had signed the Urnew Treaty, when Aly was eight or nine. Each side was supposed to play nice now, try not to invade each other, that sort of thing. Once that ship broke Fontis’s atmosphere, it would be essentially claiming sanctuary. And since they were in a military craft, they wouldn’t be allowed to follow.