Lately, Nero had been doing feature pieces on the Countdown to the Coronation show, and even though it was girlie as hell, Aly had still watched. It was funny how every time they showed footage of the Princess, she’d been scowling at the camera. He thought he had it rough, but what were a couple of million viewers on some obscure DroneVision channel versus however many billion viewers across the galaxy watching your every move?
Some people were bothered by the idea of a sixteen-year-old running the whole operation. But there were loyalists who were adamant that a Ta’an—any Ta’an—needed to be on the throne, and that with the right advisers she’d manage just fine. Either way, no one thought she was ready, not really.
Still. Didn’t mean she deserved to die.
He suddenly remembered one of the kids who’d died on the road during the evacuation almost ten years ago. He’d been a little boy, just a couple of years younger than Aly, six or seven, and he must’ve been sick. His ma had cried up a flood and dragged him along like a rag doll, thinking he’d still wake up. And that’s when Aly’s dad had let go of his hand to carry the dead boy for miles . . .
Aly shook his head as though to clear it. He hated when memories crept up on him. Organic memory was what they called it. The organic ones hit harder, too, when you weren’t expecting them. He’d gotten his cube after his family had left Wraeta and moved to their first Wray Town; the Fontisian missionaries sponsored their installments. Any memories of his life before then weren’t stored—they just came exactly when Aly didn’t want them to, and they never left soon enough.
On the console, he saw that the autopilot had set a course for the closest base: Dembos Station. It was rare to dock at the enormous station—its own city in space—one of the largest, and most infamous, of its kind. Kalusian contractors had been hired to mine the nearby asteroid, and they ported at this station, too—which meant plenty of mining money and tons of stupid taejis to spend it on.
“We’re going to Dembos,” Aly said, dropping the Kalusian accent. He’d never seen Vin this pissed off and was careful not to meet his eyes. It was like when he was a kid, and a friend’s mom was yelling at the friend, and he didn’t know where to look while it happened.
“I’m beat. I’m staying on board.” Vin was staring out the window, his back to the bridge. “You should go down to base without me.”
“I was planning on it,” Aly said, maybe a little too quickly. He could get down with some alone time. That memory had him rattled, but there was something else, too—a feeling he couldn’t quite loosen, like a bolt he’d screwed on way too tight.
Vin raised his eyebrows. “You mind leaving Pavel here?” he asked.
Aly shrugged and looked to the droid.
“Cool with me,” Pavel said. It never got old, hearing him talk slang in his robovoice. He was mirroring language. It was how his vocabulary evolved. He blinked his two blue eyelights. “I’m scheduled for an update, and I’d also be interested in calculating the velocity with which—”
“Right, P. Sounds like a party.” Aly stood up, eager to get off the ship, away from Vin. “Ma’tan,” he said with a wave as he headed out.
Vin didn’t bother responding. He’d never seemed to care about politics, and Aly was suddenly annoyed that Vin was taking the news about the Princess so hard. The cameras were off. Vin didn’t need to keep up the act. He stopped at the doors off the bridge, working up the nerve to say what he wanted to say. Then finally: “What the hell was that back there?”
“What?” Vin turned around then, all those pretty-boy features hazed over with confusion—that playing-dumb expression Aly hated.
“What do you think? The stunt you pulled back there with the stealth ship,” Aly said, pointing out the dash. “You know how serious it could’ve been if we broke Fontisian atmosphere?”
“You’re pissed about that?” Vin asked. “That was . . .” He trailed off as Aly waited. “That was nothing,” he said finally.
“It’s not nothing to me,” Aly said. “I could get deported.” Not even the producers could protect him from that taejis storm. There were people foaming at the mouth to get the Wraetan refugees off Kalu.
“Sorry, man,” Vin said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
That was the problem: Vin never thought. He never had to. He was protected. Immune. All he had to do was visualize a problem, and it went away with a great big smile and a can-do attitude. Yeah, right. Kalusians didn’t know how the rest of the galaxy worked.
Meanwhile, Aly was constantly stressed about what to say or how to stand, always trying to look polite and friendly and not even a little bit angry—so that maybe for one second people could forget about the uprisings. It was easier than trying to educate them, to explain how the Wraetans were just trying to defend their own land. It was like everyone on Kalu had amnesia. And sure, he knew Vin hadn’t meant it. But that didn’t change the fact that Vin didn’t get it. He never would.
On the far side of the Revolutionary, Aly stripped off his black uniform until he was down to his military-issued ribbed tank and boxer briefs. He suited up and slipped into the Tin Soldier, the Revolutionary’s exploratory pod. Dembos was the Wraetan moon, which meant that in a way, he was headed home—or near it. Near enough to get a look, anyway. He plotted a course for the station that would allow him a decent view of northern Wraeta, his birthplace.
Or what was left of it, at least.
About an hour out, following a slightly curved trajectory, he was able to make out little specks emerging from the black space to his right. Wraeta.
Way back when, Wraeta was just the fourth rock from the sun—not particularly pretty, not especially powerful, and only a little bit useful because of the elements mined from there. For centuries, Wraeta had maintained political neutrality. When Aly’s great-grandfather was still alive, Wraeta had even hosted the G-1K summit—which stood for the “Galaxy’s One Thousand.” It was a meeting at which one thousand of the galaxy’s most brilliant scientific minds spent months tinkering and negotiating. The scientists of the G-1K had produced the universe’s first cube right on his home planet. On a school trip when he was little, Aly had even gone to see a monument dedicated to the first successful cube installation.
Fast-forward another sixty years, and the thing that actually put Wraeta on the map was the fact that Kalu had bombed its capital to hell a year before the Urnew Treaty was signed. The damage radius was as far as it was wide. Not to mention all the dust and debris sent into the atmosphere, the lowered temperatures . . .
Aly had survived, obviously—they’d started the evacuation months ahead of time. But Wraeta was destroyed, uninhabitable, and seeing the rubble of the former planet gave him a weird, floaty feeling in his chest, like someone was messing with his personal gravity.
He slowed down the Tin Soldier so he could stare. The last time he’d been here he’d thought the same thing: crazy there’d been a bright, shining planet a decade ago. Now it was half a planet with a massive bombed-out crater on the north side. A lot of people thought Wraeta had it coming because they’d thrown in with Fontis instead of staying neutral. But with Fontisian missionaries running around the planet, Fontisian money infusing its economy, it didn’t seem to Aly like they’d had a choice.
There were free-floating rocks that used to be pieces of the planet, naturally charged. It made them easy to corral within a fixed space, inside a massive electromagnetic net that prevented them from floating light-years apart. Thousands of tiny steel plaques reflected the lights of his pod. They’d been brought by mourners and released within the net, as mementos of the ones who were lost on the battlefields when Kalu invaded, or during the passage, or when they had refused to evacuate their homes.
Aly had released his own plaque two years ago, during his first visit. He scanned for the moment on his cube now, down in the knotted architecture of his memory. He knew many folks kept their cube spick-and-sp
an and were able to find anything anytime—and he wished he were that guy. But too much time had gone by, too many memories accumulated, none of them sorted.
It took him a couple of minutes. His vision clouded and his eyes ached during the search: It was like trying to find one single grain in a great big silo. But finally he located the memory file: two years ago, thinking of his mom and his sister as he ejected the plaque into space.
Now the great mass of rocks swayed, like a phantom hand was moving them.
And in the corner of his eye: a ghost, hurtling past the rocks of Wraeta. Aly followed it, or tried to, but he was still learning how to drive the Tin Soldier. The thing he’d seen—whatever it was—wove in and out of his vision, and there on the side he swore he saw it: the royal seal.
Impossible.
His heartbeat quickened. It was the royal seal, he was sure of it, which meant it was an escape pod from the royal ship. The Princess had been confirmed dead, but what if she had survived? What if she escaped?
What if she had survived? What if she had escaped?
“Dembos, do you read me?” Aly said, tapping his cube. “Dembos, this is Private Alyosha Myraz. I have a visual on an escape pod with the Eliedio call sign. Over.” But there was silence. He tried the station three more times, the Revolutionary twice, and a handful of satellites in southern Wraeta. No dice. The electromagnetic net that kept the various fragments of rock together was probably also messing with his signal.
He hesitated. He should go back, or at least loop around to get a signal and call it in—but he might lose the pod. This was his chance to do something big, his chance to be a soldier. He’d be a real hero, not just play one on DroneVision. And then they’d never send him away, no matter what.
The pod was disk-shaped and spun wildly, end over end. If the Princess was in there, she didn’t know how to drive the thing. Even watching it made Aly want to throw up. The Tin Soldier had about zero thrust and was more of a steering machine, but Aly found a current alongside the electromagnetic net and rode it hard.
Without thinking, there it was—the organic memory, the worst one. He was suddenly eight years old all over again, watching his mom and his big sister, Alina, pull away in the back of a truck loaded with a bunch of women from the Wray during the evac.
“Now or never,” the driver said. He was more like a savior, since he’d been there to take the ready and willing to work in the factories in the south of Fontis. Aly still remembered the look on his mom’s face when she saw there were only two seats . . .
So Aly had pushed Alina toward his mom and turned away. His ma started crying, grabbing Alina with one hand while she tried to reach out for Aly with the other. The Fontisian watched on like he was bored, and Aly’s dad had to step up, calm her down, be the wall that separated a mother from her son. “I’ll watch out for Aly. Take our baby girl,” he’d whispered.
And his ma went, crying her eyes out as she picked a thrashing Alina clean off the ground. In his memory, Aly stood behind his dad, clutching his dad’s shirt and willing himself not to break, not to make this harder on his ma. But as soon as the truck started, Aly was running, small and worthless, as gravel kicked out from behind the truck’s wheels and his family receded into the distance. His mother and Alina had looked like copies of each other, their smooth faces like dark pearls, big hair blown back as the truck picked up speed.
Aly didn’t want to think about that sad little kid who’d cried his eyes out, sprinting after a life and a family that wasn’t ever going to be. Aly knew the score now, and right in front of him he could see that he was closing the gap between his pod and the Eliedio’s. He locked on to it with his grav beam and slowly stabilized its spin. It’ll stop, he told himself. It has to.
And when it did, he clicked the air locks into place and shouted—a wild, primal scream. He grabbed the medbag from under his seat and waited for their air locks to depressurize.
The hatch hissed open, and the metallic smell hit him first. He stepped through and nearly slipped on the slickness underneath his feet. There was blood, lots of it. His heart shot up through his throat.
“Princess Rhiannon?” he called. His voice had cracked. Stupid, he thought. A dead girl couldn’t respond.
Do it, he urged himself—but waited until he thought his heart would burst before he finally went any farther. The first thing he saw was a boot. A guy’s boot. It wasn’t the Princess, but an old black man—maybe Wraetan, like him. He looked like the grizzled old veterans of the Great War who were so common at interstellar refueling station bars. Aly looked away and pressed his index and middle fingers lightly to each eye—as if he were asking Vodhan for mercy. His heart still beat rapidly. Relief and disappointment stirred in his blood.
He’d seen dead bodies before—he’d grown up in the Wray, after all, where it’d been crammed with refugees and a lot of taejis went down—but he’d never seen an old man who was murdered like this. His bloodied shirt was soaked through, and red handprints ran up his stomach and neck. Aly was so dizzy, so overwhelmed by the smell of blood, he almost missed the long, black braid laid across the man’s chest. It looked like a snake. The stupid part of him was scared, like it might come to life and snap at his feet.
But then he recognized it: The braid belonged to the Princess. Back in boot camp, Vin would freak him and Jethezar out with wild stories about the ancient traditions on Kalu, and how their warriors left locks of hair on the first person they ever slayed. As creepy as it sounded, he had a feeling that Princess Rhiannon had made her first kill.
FIVE
RHIANNON
RHEE had replayed at least a dozen times the hologram of the Eliedio exploding. Even more souls lost. Another explosion she’d escaped. She should’ve been among them . . .
“Don’t you get tired of watching the same thing?” asked the Fontisian. She’d recently learned his name was Dahlen, and that he was insufferable.
“No,” Rhee said. She pulled the handheld back, just out of his grasp, and the projected image distorted across the pod’s ceiling. “Not even close.”
Only a few passengers had managed to escape, Tai Reyanna among them. Rhee was relieved to hear of her Tai’s survival—her caretaker, who’d lived with her family even before the accident, and her only remaining tie to that life in the palace. Even now, Tai Reyanna was organizing a public vigil at the base of the sacred crystals in Tinoppa—a tiny asteroid currently equidistant from Kalu and Nau Fruma. It was famous for its ancient monument of crystals, impossibly large and arranged in a half circle. It was thought to be a sacred site, and it was there the galaxy would mourn Rhee’s passing.
Would Julian go? Could his mother afford it, now that Veyron was gone?
Rhee pushed the thought aside. Her skin felt itchy. The wool Fontisian-style tunic she’d been given to wear aggravated her skin, though anything was better than the red embroidered coronation dress.
Dahlen shook his head and placed a red pill on the console in front of her. After they’d jettisoned Veyron’s body in the Eliedio escape pod, she’d boarded the Fontisian’s craft; it was made of some kind of organic matter that must have belonged to his native planet. It smelled strongly of oak and cloves, and it looked like it was carved from the inside of a tree. It was bursting with plants, like a rain forest in the sky, and the green foliage seemed to angle toward Dahlen wherever he went. The console itself was a stump, with rings that Rhee could trace with a finger.
“You’re out of options,” he said. “Take this.” He couldn’t have been older than eighteen, but he acted like all adults did: bossy, distracted, annoyed to have to repeat himself.
“I told you already,” she said. “I won’t take it.” She picked it up to examine it.
The pill was the size of her pinky nail, and filled with a gel-like substance. It was a scrambler—it would rearrange her DNA so that the scans wouldn’t detect any trace of Rhee. Not in her eye
s, her fingerprints, her blood, or her saliva. If she took the red pill, Rhiannon Ta’an, the last empress of the Ta’an dynasty, would be gone.
Only for a time, he’d claimed. But how could she trust him? If he was lying, twelve generations of Ta’an would end with her.
“I can’t tell if you enjoy being this difficult, or if you’ve not been raised properly.” Dahlen had high cheekbones and thin lips that made his expression hard to read. Disinterested, like the sleek, wild desert cats that wandered the sands of Nau Fruma.
But cats pounced. She had to remember this. She cleared her throat. “My apologies,” she said, with deep sarcasm. “Was this supposed to be an easy kidnapping?”
“I’m not kidnapping you. If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead.”
“And yet you haven’t told me why the order sent you,” she said. Her hair fell in front of her face, and she tucked it back behind both her ears. It was short now—too short. She’d been growing her hair out for the royal braid since she was in diapers.
He claimed his mission was on behalf of a Fontisian order, the Order of the Light. Rhee had heard of them in passing—children ordained as religious warriors to defend their mountaintop monasteries. Half priests, half military elite, the Order of the Light had been established during the Great War. Rhee had always known them as a cult of sorts, elaborately tattooed to let the world know of their commitment to Vodhan. She’d heard of even stranger practices too. Animal sacrifices. Plant elixirs with psychotropic properties . . .
Dahlen didn’t seem like a religious fanatic, though. He wasn’t savage or intense so much as deeply composed—a calculated coolness that in some ways scared her even more.
Empress of a Thousand Skies Page 5