“We hadn’t…we haven’t really talked about any mutual destinations before now. I mean, I’ve had ideas….” So many ideas. Of building something with her on Alaxak that could belong to both of us. Of being with her, only with her, for the rest of my life. But I’d never voiced any of that to her. “It was too soon,” I said aloud. “But now…none of that is possible anymore.”
At least, not in any form that I’d figured out how to articulate to her, yet.
“That’s scat. What is this, some stupid drama vid? You’ll just hold off on admitting your feelings for her, because that’s so obviously a good idea?”
“That’s assuming that Qole feels the same as I do. She’s never…” I felt like squirming in my seat, suddenly as awkward as a child being asked to confess something unpleasant. “She’s never said anything, either.”
Nothing that spelled out what was in my heart, the words I’d almost spoken to her on the beach in Gamut:
I love you.
It almost seemed cruel for us to do so now. Qole knew what declaring myself king meant. I would be taunting myself, at least, if not her, with could-have-beens. There were still…paths…but none as perfect as they had once lay for us in my mind. None that might look appealing to Qole.
“Sounds to me like you’re afraid of getting your heart broken,” Telu said, hammering into my thoughts. “You do what you have to, just don’t break her heart while you’re at it, is all I’m saying.”
“The voice of compassion, as always.”
“Damn straight.”
“And by the way, that was supposed to be a private conversation.”
“Please. The old man wouldn’t have stayed here if he hadn’t intended for me to eavesdrop.”
* * *
“Come in.” Qole’s voice was distracted after I knocked on the door to her quarters, and I saw why as I entered. She was engrossed in her infopad, and I knew she must have been reading communications from Alaxak on the QUIN. She was lying propped up on her bunk in a gray tank top and short bottoms that clung to her in a way that made something in my throat catch.
She didn’t look up right away, raising a finger as she finished what she was reading. There was a time when Qole would have been startled at me being in her private quarters, but over the past month it had become a thing of comfortable regularity, and for a second she had slipped back into that place. I wished I could have.
I cleared my throat. “Do you have a minute?” Not that I knew what I wanted to say to her. Rather, I did—I wanted to tell her that I loved her and never wanted to be apart—but that was the opposite of what duty demanded I say. So I was more content to just hear her voice.
She glanced over and gave me a wry grin. “Exactly one minute. Starting now.”
I settled onto the floor, leaning my back against the wall. “Oh good. Given that we are traveling through distorted space-time as we speak, I will choose to interpret that as meaning I have infinite time.”
“Even I know the Belarius Drive doesn’t distort time, just space.” Qole sat up on the bed and crossed her legs. “What distorts time is reading over supply lists and having people ask where I think they ought to be distributed after the attack.”
I made a sympathetic noise. “My mother always said that being a leader is a glorious term for being the person everyone delegates to.”
Qole snorted. “If things were getting delegated to me, there would be at least some level of organization. The villages all mostly self-govern, but there are decisions the new governor would have made that no one really wants to make. And I’m the person they are asking. It’s ridiculous. Hiat would be much better at this. I just can’t risk giving him the power.” She slumped, rubbing her forehead. “And I keep hearing…Well, I can’t blasted focus.”
I wasn’t used to seeing Qole looking so small, so young. Her assurance was such that it was easy to forget her age. But the vacuum created by the uncertainty of others was filled so naturally by her decisiveness that I wondered if she would just give all of herself up, let herself slip away into nothingness, consumed by responsibility.
I wanted to sit by her, put my arm around her, find a way to give her some of my strength, but I knew I couldn’t. I needed to prepare for the inevitable. To distance myself, as Devrak had instructed. Besides, Qole likely no longer wanted to be with the person I was now—not only royal, but the worst of them all, a king—and especially not in the limited capacity in which I was available to her. If she had ever wanted me wholly, before.
But then I was sitting next to her, my arm around her. I couldn’t even remember deciding to do it. She sighed, her body relaxing against mine.
“I can’t believe you need to go through another family ritual where you suffer pointlessly to prove something.”
“Sounds like life,” I grunted.
“Don’t steal my words.” I heard the smile in her voice.
“If I stole your words, they would be a lot angrier.”
“Do you think I’m angry?”
I paused. “Well, I believe we’re all keenly aware that you can get angry. But no, I don’t think you’re a fundamentally angry person. Angry people are looking for something to tear down. You only ever try to build up. You believe in a better future.”
Qole shook her head, the movement of her hair distracting against my cheek. “No,” she said quietly, “I just believe in what we have. That it’s worth fighting for. I’m not sure things will get any better than that.”
“They will.” I hadn’t intended for my tone to be so adamant. “Humanity wouldn’t have survived after the Great Collapse if things couldn’t get better. Unifier knows, the systems have been awash in the blood of warfare, but we’ve had relative peace for a hundred years. Things do get better.”
Qole laughed. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Keep believing in something better despite all evidence.” One of her fingers dug into my ribs.
“Well, that’s just what you inspire in me.” I tried to say it lightly, feeling awkward at how true it was.
She rested her head against my shoulder. “Great. Then we’re both delusional.”
Amid the worst chaos of my life, I somehow felt more at peace than I ever had. I knew I should get up, leave her side, go out the door that would set us on our separate paths, with our separate burdens.
I didn’t move. I could think of no better weight on my shoulder than hers.
* * *
I only realized I had fallen asleep when I woke up. The gentle haptic touch of the new wrist-comm Devrak had given me informed me of his message. Time to train.
I blinked, trying to clear the fog out of my brain. I must have been in a deep sleep, something I hadn’t experienced lately. It should have left me feeling better, but I only felt disoriented.
Qole was curled next to me, my arm around her. I gently extracted myself and drew a blanket over her, which she snuggled into without waking. Her face was relaxed, free of worry, and sinking down beside her to sleep for a week seemed like it would be the ultimate victory, the moment the Unifier had promised.
I turned away. I’d had my stolen moment. It was time to work.
* * *
Devrak was waiting for me in the hold, dressed only in black pants and a short-sleeved shirt. The hold was always cold, and I wondered how he wasn’t freezing.
In one hand, he held a similar set of clothing, which he tossed to me.
“Get dressed,” he instructed.
I raised an eyebrow. “Here? Trying to teach me a lesson in immodesty?”
“Preparedness.” Devrak crossed his arms. “Who comes dressed in a coat and pants that thick to a training exercise? The time is coming where you will not be able to rely on others to be prepared. You will be alone in every decision you make. A failure to think ahead will simply become fa
ilure.”
I fought to not roll my eyes as I changed. I had been trained to be a ruler since my earliest memories. I had been given every lesson, every example, for years. What could Devrak teach me in the next few days that would be useful?
His fist connected with my solar plexus as I turned, and I doubled over, mouth open, trying desperately to wheeze. He stood and waited while I struggled, before I finally straightened.
“Okay, is this just beat-up-on-the-prince hour? I…”
His fist blurred for my stomach and I blocked it, then the next strike at my face, then four more so rapidly there was no thought, only movement. I danced backward from the onslaught and Devrak followed steadily.
“This is why you lost to Suvis. You are rooted in the past.”
“What?” I desperately dodged a combination, attempted a snap-kick to drive him back, and was only tossed to the floor for my efforts.
“You are not a prince. You are a king. You gave up on your past life when you were exiled, and you never claimed a new one. What is your purpose? What do you fight for? Suvis knew exactly what he was after, and he achieved it.”
I scrambled to my feet. “Suvis? Hold on, Devrak, I can’t talk and fight….”
“Fight and think, or talk and be beaten.” Devrak pressed the attack without remorse.
I blocked, feinting, and moved backward in an attempt to catch my breath. Breathe. I calmed myself, and as I did so, it became obvious I could block most everything with relative ease as long as I stayed on the defensive, always moving. “Suvis was a Bladeguard. He’s older than me, but I remember him. Was he one of the ones I attacked in the citadel? Was that why he was willing to assassinate me?” Guilt surged in me, which I hated. Suvis was not someone I should feel sympathy for; he was a murderer.
Devrak shook his head, never relenting, his assault steady. “No, those Bladeguards are all dead.” I wondered if he intended for me to feel as wretched as I did at that. “Suvis was sent on a black-ops mission that went awry. He disappeared, assumed dead, only to reappear over a year later. He claimed to have been taken by slavers on a privateer vessel before escaping. But he was different, afterward.” He stopped, regret creasing his face. “He should never have been given a health clearance. But your sister insisted he be her personal guard.”
I remembered the strange way Suvis fought, and saw my opportunity, driving myself forward, knee first.
Devrak blocked it with both hands, sliding backward, happiness lighting his eyes.
“Yes! Defend, distract, find the opening. You’re still a quick study.”
I wiped my brow, grinning at the praise. It had been a long time since I’d felt successful at anything. “Why, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Devrak grinned back, his teeth flashing. “And you still have a lot to learn.”
Basra came up with a neat plan to gain entrance to Aaltos.
He made some comms over the QUIN, and then we stopped off at a trading station in the darkest depths of the Dracorte system, far from any smaller planetary subsystems. It hadn’t always been so remote, as a once-teeming hub near one of the intergalactic portals that was now only a floating ruin. Four hundred years ago, the portals had connected different systems of our galaxy together using instantaneous transportation, technology that no one fully understood after it catastrophically malfunctioned and vanished in the Great Collapse. Since then, Belarius Drives took us where we needed to go using faster-than-light flight. But they couldn’t take us everywhere.
The portals had not only interlinked our galaxy, but they had once connected us to other galaxies, each one as big and complex as ours, with many different systems, planetary subsystems, and peoples. The Belarius Drive couldn’t travel that far, not in human lifetimes. Entire galaxies had been lost to us, and now only the skeleton of such wondrous gateways remained. The ruin stretched longer than the station, even if it was only made up of empty girders as thick as skyscrapers.
The station itself was a multi-tiered conical complex that spun slowly around a central axis, each level meant for a different type of trade. Once largely abandoned after the collapse of the portals, its remoteness now served it well, since smugglers and black-market dealers had moved in. We fueled up in one section of the city-sized station, and then headed to another that, even from the outside, looked decidedly seedier. A steady flow of ramshackle hulks that barely looked fit for flight was swarming in and out like insects from a nest.
We didn’t stay long, because, in no time, Basra managed to secure new identification records for the crew and new registration files for the ship—all forgeries, of course—completely covering any digital trail that could link us to Alaxak. The cost must have been astronomical, because the quality was high enough that the documents would stand up to official scrutiny. To complete the picture in a more tangible way, he also bought an entire load of black-market cargo, with which we filled the hold.
There was something fittingly ironic about smuggling in the rightful Dracorte king onto Aaltos with a load of illegally trafficked goods. If we drew suspicion, crime would be our cover story for a legitimate mission, rather than the other way around. Only Basra could have come up with something so twistedly brilliant and bewildering.
Despite the absurdity of our situation, the danger of getting caught was still real as we approached Aaltos. There might have been plenty of civilian traffic to hide us, but it was still a planet dominated by the military and all the protocol that involved. The ship comms were quiet, everyone seemingly taking turns holding their breath. Aaltos grew in the viewport, coming into focus like the features of a fast-approaching stranger whose intentions were yet unclear—friend, foe, or entirely disinterested?
If planetary security found out who we really were, they would be much too interested.
The planet’s face was gray and lined—rocky canyons, Nev had told me, carving deeper than any I had ever seen between winding chains of mountains. The elevation varied so much in places that it was easily discernible from space. It seemed a harsh planet on which to live, especially with the higher gravity. Which was part of the reason it made an excellent military training ground.
I was shocked when we were approved to enter the atmosphere without incident or delay, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been. Not even Devrak had been able to find anything to fault in our new, forged identities. I brought the Kaitan down at a quieter shipping spaceport just outside the capital, AS-01, a name that told of the planet’s functional history, the letters standing for “Aaltos Settlement.”
“Can we…not sell this?” Nev murmured, grunting as he set down a crate. “I probably banned some of this stuff myself.”
“You expect the captain and me to miss out on a profit because of your qualms?” Basra asked, without bothering to look up from his infopad. “You chose your own mode of transport, Your Majesty.”
Arjan was grinning, probably over the fact that Basra, at least, could still put Nev in his place. Basra and my brother were exchanging smiles and covert glances more and more, a sight that filled me with happiness. I managed to keep a straight face.
Soon, a woman, one of Basra’s hundreds, if not thousands, of contacts through his role as Hersius Kartolus, who looked surprisingly prim and proper rather than shady, met us to begin arranging the selling of our goods. She moved easily in the heavy air, unlike the rest of us. Once Basra gave her some instructions, we left the cargo in her hands. I chose Telu to stay with the ship, where she would be able to send or receive messages through encrypted channels, in case of an emergency.
“I had to stay on the ship last time you guys got to explore a new planet,” Telu groused.
“Yeah, and I lost an eye when we did, so don’t feel too bad,” Arjan snapped back.
Maybe I should have ordered Arjan to remain on the Kaitan, but I didn’t think he would stay put.
A hired shuttle
took the rest of us into the city, more specifically to the Dracorte Military Headquarters, which included both a base and an enormous academy. The city rose gray and striking all around us, reflective steel buildings towering to mirror the stormy sky. If the capital of Nev’s homeworld, Dracorva, had looked as intricate and beautiful as frost on a windowpane, AS-01 was as sleek and practical as the tempered glass beneath it.
Nev took my hand in the shuttle, causing me to start. I realized I’d been making a fist as I stared out the viewport, my breath getting shallower. Across from me, Arjan’s jaw was tight as he peered outside too. As he’d reminded Telu, things hadn’t gone so well for us last time we were in a major Dracorte city. Not only had Arjan lost pieces of himself, we’d all nearly lost our lives and had to end many, many more. But maybe, with fewer frilly trappings than Dracorva, AS-01 wouldn’t be hiding as many horrible surprises.
Even if that were the case, this situation was about to entirely depart from the realm of my control. I would no longer be able to protect the crew on my own. We’d placed all our trust in Devrak, I realized. At the slightest word from him, all of us would be arrested and quite possibly executed for treason. Even Nev.
I tried to assure myself that Devrak could have done that multiple times already. There would be no reason for him to wait until now if that had been his intention, aside from dramatic flair, and he didn’t strike me as the dramatic type.
He directed our shuttle to a private back entrance to the main base headquarters, where we were stopped at a gate. I definitely held my breath, because if we didn’t make it to the highest levels of authority before being discovered, then those lower down might report us to the wrong people. At least Nev was wearing a small device clipped inside his jacket that masked his true biometric signal by transmitting a false one, so he shouldn’t set off any alarms. Devrak handed over all our ID chips—his real, ours fake.
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