Empress of a Thousand Skies

by Rhoda Belleza

  “Undecipherable. His vocal cords have seized,” Pavel answered. “He has thirty seconds left to live.”

  “What are you waiting for?” Vincent. His friend. His best friend. Vin was back.

  “Positioning myself for maximum velocity,” Pavel answered. “I’ll have to puncture the chestplate—”

  Vin grabbed the syringe from Pavel and drove it down into Aly’s chest, through layers of muscle and bone.

  Suddenly, his heart flooded with the color purple, and the rising dawn. Every muscle spasmed, and he gasped for air. His body burned; heat came back to him in the form of a fire, coursing through his veins. Memories came back, a whole universe exploding inside of him, everything he had ever known and thought.

  “Sorry, man,” Vin said. When he pulled back, his smile was rough around the edges. Aly didn’t know if Vin was about to laugh or cry.

  Vin helped Aly sit up. “Where the hell did you go?”

  “Hiding in the engine room.”

  Aly realized it’d been too hot for Pavel to detect Vin’s heat signature down there. Why the hell hadn’t Aly thought of that? Vin stood and yanked Aly up to his feet, while Aly gripped on to Vin’s palm to make sure he was real. “I’m gone for five minutes and you inject yourself with tauri? Don’t explain,” he said, when Aly opened his mouth. “Let’s get going already, before any more of those metalheads come looking. No offense,” he added to Pavel.

  “‘More of those’?” Aly repeated. His head still felt like it had been stuffed with cotton balls.

  Vin and Pavel had to support him to the Tin Soldier; then Pavel picked Aly up and strapped him in. Back again, but in the passenger’s seat. It was a tight fit.

  “The droids aren’t the directive. They’re just following orders,” Vin said.

  “The directive? What are you talking about? Who’s the directive?”

  “The Regent is. Seotra killed the Princess,” Vin said. Simply. Just like that.

  Aly thought of the dead Nauie, the Princess’s braid. He felt like he’d been let out of an air lock. He’d been on Kalu’s side, served in their army, been the poster child for their little TV piece of propaganda. Vin was on UniForce enlistment posters, for taejis sake. And Aly couldn’t keep his thoughts straight anyway. Everything was gumming together, and then breaking apart.

  “Why would Seotra want her dead?” he asked Vincent slowly.

  “Why do you think?” Vin was breathing hard, scanning left and right, as if he expected another droid to spring on them. “He wanted to stay regent. Once she took the throne, he’d lose all his power.”

  “But what does that have to do with us?”

  Vin made a face. “I was compromised.”

  Aly stared at him. “Compromised?”

  The Revolutionary and the Tin Soldier had both been taken offline so that they couldn’t fly. But almost immediately Vin started working in commands to restore the system. Aly felt a creeping sense of anxiety. Where had Vin learned to override UniForce commands?

  “Back in business,” Vin said when the dash lights came on. He punched in coordinates for the Outer Belt.

  Feeling was creeping back into Aly’s body, like pins and needles along his fingers and toes—and with it, a new suspicion, even a dread. Vincent was his best friend. They could talk all night or spend the whole day in silence, and either way it usually felt pretty all right, natural in a way he’d never felt with even his own family. Sometimes Vin acted differently when the cameras were on, but he knew that was just for show. He knew the difference between the real Vin and the fake Vin. At least he thought he did.

  “Vincent.” He swallowed. “Who are you?”

  Vin got that squinty look on his face he’d get sometimes if he had a beer too many, just before he launched into some philosophical theory. Aly waited for him to explain. But then the look melted away, his face a slate wiped clean.

  Vin only said: “I’m the guy who’s going to save your sorry ass.” Then he lifted the transparent casing and pressed the red ejector button.

  They jettisoned into space, and the g-force bore down on Aly’s chest. Pavel had suctioned himself low to the floor. Vin gripped the throttle and had the nerve to grin.

  “Answer my question.” Blood was dripping from Aly’s forehead into his eye, and when he caught his reflection on the dash, he realized he’d split his eyebrow open again. He wiped the blood away and tried to pinch the wound shut.

  “Eyes on the heat sensors!” But as soon as Vin said it, he swerved right and just missed a laser beam. A white royal cruiser was at their rear and gaining speed. It fired a second laser, but Vin ducked their pod beneath it effortlessly—the only pilot Aly knew who could pull that off. Vin shot him an irritated look, as if to say told you.

  The cruiser was on their tail, and soon a second one joined it. But Vin didn’t seem afraid. He actually seemed kind of calm about the whole thing.

  “Answer me, choirtoi.” Aly was losing it. “Or—”

  “Or what?” Vin had to shout over the noise of the engine from the sentience systems. They went into a nosedive, then a barrel roll, avoiding the rapid fire that shot out from behind them. “Look, I’ve been working for the United Planets, okay?”

  “The United Planets?” Aly asked. It wasn’t the answer he’d expected—not that he knew what to expect. The United Planets was a neutral organization that played peacemaker between all the planets. As far as Aly knew, members of the United Planets sat around in a circle and asked nicely for favors and spent most of their time voting on things. As in, they didn’t get taejis done.

  “I was placed on the Revolutionary to gather intel on Kalu’s UniForce,” Vin said. “I wasn’t gaining any traction. Sometimes I forgot I was even a spy. But the United Planets made contact a few weeks back and said to keep an eye out, and that there might be an attempt on the Princess’s life. That pod we were chasing earlier—I had a bad feeling. So I tried to hail my contact. I was careful. But maybe someone got wise. Heard the message . . .”

  “You chased down that pod like a maniac. You think that didn’t put us on someone’s radar?” Aly shouted. “Then you hail someone, and you want me to think you were being careful? You don’t even answer your cube—”

  “I turned it off! They’re spying on us, Aly. I’ve been telling you for years to turn yours off too.”

  “I thought you were just one of those naturalistic freaks!”

  “It was a cover. I couldn’t be on DroneVision and start talking about conspiracy theories.”

  Aly shook his head. “Are you for real?”

  “Don’t even give me that look.” Vin pulled them into another nosedive. “Kalu has had the tech for decades. All those G-1K summits? You wouldn’t believe some of the shit they tried to do. You wouldn’t believe what they can do already. They can pull memories . . .”

  “You’re talking straight-up crazy,” Aly said, but he was shaken. He remembered what the missionaries had warned: the horrible rumors about soul-sucking, mind-pulling, the evil that would destroy you. The Ravaging. “How long have you been working this side hustle?” Vin wouldn’t look at him, so he leaned forward and got in his face. “How long have you been playing spy for the United Planets? And don’t lie.”

  “Since before boot camp,” Vin said after a pause. “Before I even knew you or Jeth or anyone else we trained with.”

  He didn’t realize he’d bit down on his tongue until he could taste blood in his mouth. He thought they had come after him because he’d found the royal pod. But Vin figured it was because his message had been intercepted. Aly didn’t know which one was true. The timing might’ve been a coincidence.

  Which meant there was a chance no one knew Princess Rhiannon might be alive. He’d keep that in his pocket for now. He wasn’t about to tell Vin, not when he’d held back so much for so long.

  Vin was still talking, trying to
tell him how it wasn’t all that big of a deal and everything was the same and that they were going to look out for each other. He was still spinning and dodging artillery like it was cake, notching up toward dangerous levels of interstellar speed like it wasn’t any kind of thing. “We have to get to Portiis. The Lancer will meet us to debrief, and until then we’ll be safe.”

  “The Lancer?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know his real name. Safer that way.”

  “In what universe is this safer?” They were headed toward a cluster of asteroids. Vin tilted the throttle so they squeezed, just barely, through a gap between two giant pieces of floating rock, and they zoomed in at an insane speed. Pieces of rock chipped off as their wings kissed the surface of the asteroids. One of the cruisers tried to follow, but the angle was off and it clipped its wing. Aly watched as it spun wildly, stark white against a sheet of black, before it receded and disappeared. Aly felt a brief burst of regret. He wondered if that pilot would survive. And if he didn’t, what would that make the body count today? Three? Four souls?

  “I know it’s a lot to take in,” Vin said—but with irritation, as if Aly were the one being unreasonable. “You gotta trust me.”

  “Oh yeah? And why should I do that?”

  “I needed to keep my cover. I was doing recon!”

  “Right. Recon.”

  “I saved your life.”

  “After you nearly got me killed,” Aly pointed out. “So what? You show up, to the rescue, with all this specialized training I never knew about. You tell me I gotta cut and run and leave everything behind. But you know what? I like my life. So just drop me off at the nearest station, and I’ll run over to the UniForce base and explain that I had nothing to do with your little spy game. I can just pretend this whole thing never happened.”

  “No, Alyosha. You can’t.” For the first time, he actually sounded sad. Vin pulled his handheld device out of his pocket and slammed it on the dash. “Enable newsfeed.”

  From a tiny opening in the front, it projected a hologram newsfeed between them showing footage of the Eliedio, the royal ship, exploding. Even in holographic form, the fire and the choking smoke were horrible to watch.

  A familiar voice, patched in over images of the gruesome explosion, reached out like a cold finger and moved all the way down his spine.

  His voice.

  “I’ll finish what I started,” he heard himself say. He looked up and saw dark, grainy footage of his face. His face was covered in shadow, his skin darker than it was in real life. You could only see the whites of his eyes. “Get ’em all. Get ’em all.”

  “I never said that,” Aly croaked. The sound of his voice, so soon after the edited version, seemed like a strange doubling. “They must have taken that audio from the show, messed with it somehow.”

  “I know,” Vin said. He looked sorry. “But it doesn’t matter what I think.”

  Under the footage a caption read, “Private Alyosha Myraz and Popular Revolutionary Boys Star Wanted for the Assassination of Princess Rhiannon.”

  Part Two:

  THE MARKED

  In the year 918, Kalusian forces bombed the planet of Wraeta.

  “I was on one of the last crafts to make it out of the blast radius. I was six. I didn’t see the bomb drop, but I saw the Kalusian vessel break the atmosphere. At first the side of the planet rippled. There was a huge explosion. Pieces broke off. I thought it would be loud, but it was quiet. All I heard were the people in my cabin, sobbing. Everything we’d ever known. Our homes. Taken away, destroyed.”

  —Wraetan refugee account

  NINE

  RHIANNON

  THEY’D arrived in Tinoppa early that morning and headed straight to one of Dahlen’s contacts. Since she had refused to take the DNA scrambler, Dahlen pointed out that she would need another disguise to get close to Seotra.

  The Fisherman’s workroom was dank, lined with dark tanks—empty but for stagnant and scummy water. A single cot and balled-up blanket had been shoved in the corner. Rhiannon couldn’t imagine living here, but supposed that the Fisherman was comfortable in wet, dark places. Judging from his stretched-out anatomy, he hadn’t grown up in a high-grav environment. Combined with his bizarre speech patterns, which made it sound like his vocal cords were full of liquid, Rhee guessed he was far from his native planet.

  She knew the feeling. They’d been traveling for three days and had barely gotten here on time; the ceremony Seotra was to attend was scheduled for this afternoon.

  And this afternoon, she would kill him, at last. At last, it would all be over.

  Then what? a little voice whispered. That was the problem with being without the cube. Not just the organic memories. The whispers, the doubts, the fears that crowded her like faceless spectators moving in the shadows.

  She forced the thought from her mind. Honor, loyalty, bravery. Revenge.

  “How long will the procedure take?” she asked.

  “As long as I want it to,” the Fisherman replied. He lifted his enormous hand to Rhee’s face, opening her hazel eye so wide she thought he’d rip her skin open at the corners. She flinched away but he grabbed her chin. He was pale blue with a long face—all his features crowded down onto the bottom half. He had human-like eyes, tilted down at a forty-five-degree angle, which gave the impression that his entire face had slid down over time. His thin mouth made a suction sound as he chewed his tobacco. The smell made her insides twist in disgust.

  But strangest of all: He had no cube. She’d never met a soul without one, though she’d heard of cultures in the Outer Belt that had refused to adopt them. The second G-1K summit had established interplanetary availability on every single world in the universe, to eliminate the technology gap. They’d even drafted a wide-ranging resolution so planets could modify their cubes according to local customs and traditions.

  That was decades ago now, and an interconnected universe was only a reality for the wealthier territories.

  Rhee wondered what it was like to live a whole life without a cube, or simply to turn hers off like Dahlen. She’d been without hers for just a few days and felt as if she were walking through a murk of uncertainty, with impressions that struck and then disappeared, a past unraveling behind her like a string. It was terrifying—but electrifying, too, as if she hardly existed at all.

  “Hold still,” the Fisherman said with a grunt. The tiny light he shined on her was impossibly bright, and Rhee felt her eye well up with tears. When she could no longer take it, she wrenched herself free.

  “Just as well, then,” he said, shrugging. “Before we get started we’ll need to discuss the matter of payment.”

  “Name your price.”

  “Credits amounting to five million,” he said smugly.

  “We don’t have it,” Dahlen answered. “On the honor of my order, I can assure you when she is empress—”

  “There is no guarantee that she’ll become empress.” He glanced over at her—it was hard to tell if he was smiling or not. She knew, and he knew, that it was a risk to come here and reveal her identity, but they had no choice. “Oh please, don’t glare at me, Princess. It’s not that I want you to fail. I just don’t care enough to have an opinion.”

  “You have no opinion on an intergalactic war?” she asked.

  “War was my father’s cause—not mine. Whichever planet rules supreme will do so for another twenty years, and then the power will flip, then flip again. Let all the planets who want to play raze each other to ash so the rest of us don’t have to deal with petty struggles.”

  Petty. Sheltered. Young. Blind. Rhee had been insulted more in the past three days than she ever had before. Rhee forced herself to reach into the folds of her tunic and pull out Julian’s telescope. She felt her heart splinter as she handed it over. “Here,” she said. “It’s pure silver.”

  “Must’ve cost something fi
erce.” The Fisherman brought the telescope close to his eye, not to look through it but to inspect it. She knew he’d never use it the way it was intended—to look up at the sky, to know you weren’t alone.

  Did Julian know he wasn’t alone?

  Did he think of her as often as she thought of him? She’d stayed up every night, terrified Julian would discover what she’d done.

  The Fisherman tossed the telescope up in the air and caught the other end, seemingly happy with the trade. He stood up, and she expected him to rummage through his cabinets for chemicals and salves. Instead, he tore the tarp off a nearby tank and stuck his arm in the cloudy water, all the way to his shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Most people reckon these here tanks are empty,” he said, by way of response. Then, with a grunt, he extracted his hand.

  Rhee gulped in a breath. In his palm was a creature with long tentacles frantically coiling and whipping through the air in all directions. She jumped back. Its bulbous head barely fit in the palm of his hand.

  “It’s what’s called an octoerces,” he said, looking at it with a sort of respect and affection.

  “Where—where did it come from?” Rhee licked her lips, regretting her decision to trust Dahlen.

  “The same place this silver of yours was mined.” Of course. It was from the Outer Belt in deep space, a free strip of interconnected planets that Kalu had wanted to colonize for years. She’d heard of locals who fished it with nothing but a suit and an alloy harpoon gun, snatching up creatures that could survive without light and atmosphere, creatures that defied everything anyone knew about life. “It’s a bit angry now. It doesn’t like air, see, doesn’t breathe it . . .”

  “But what are you going to do with it?”

  The Fisherman squinted at her. “For the mark. Your Fontisian didn’t tell you how the procedure works?”