“Hey, it’s okay. We’re clear. We’re off Rana. We fly for a day, get to a superluminal zone, and then we’re going to be on a direct vector to the Imperial Seat.”
The words hit like a hand on the back of my neck, and an instant, unshakable fear roots in me. Maybe Gal thinks of the Imperial Seat as his natural home, of the Umber core’s abundance as his birthright. Maybe he looks at Iva and Yltrast and loves them unconditionally, even if they stuffed him under a rug for the first seventeen years of his life.
I think of it and see my homeworld in ruins.
Rana’s sun-facing horizon glows beneath us, the night side of the planet dotted with the lights of cities. But my eyes find something else in the darkness—the subtle shadow of a massive crater north of Trost’s glimmer.
We call it the Warning Shot. Seven years ago, the Archon imperials were on their last legs, unwilling to yield even as the war reached the core of their shattering empire. Trost was under bombardment so thorough it was like the enemy had raked fiery talons across the city. And when the first Umber dreadnought broke through the defenses around Rana, it set its sights north of the Archon Imperial Seat and let off a single burst from its main gun, along with a message broadcast throughout the system. The Archon imperials were to surrender, or the next shot would wipe Trost from the planet’s surface.
Less than an hour later, the war was over, and the Archon imperials were on their way to the Umber interior in chains.
I look at that big, stupid hole in the ground, and I feel it inside me. A history so thoroughly annihilated that the only thing remaining is a huge empty scar. The Warning Shot is a reminder of how easily Umber takes, how blessed we’ve been that they didn’t take more. Rana used to be proud. A shining capital planet with a shining capital city, the heart of an empire comfortably bordered by Umber along one axis and Corinth along another. Spare in arable land but wealthy in metal, with some of the most advanced technologies the galaxy has ever seen. A place where it was common to see a human-shaped powersuit rocket over a city as a knight rushed off to save the day. A place where anyone with the drive to defend the empire and the prowess to wear one of those suits could be a knight, whether or not you had bloodright to your name. Now it’s just another battered jewel on the belt of Umber’s conquests.
And it still hurts to see.
I forsook the Archon Empire long ago. It felt like the only choice that would let me live, free from the guilt and horror and the way my stomach felt like it might empty every time someone mocked the empire’s platinum and emerald. It took years to build the walls I needed. I thought they were strong enough to hold.
But when you find out your best friend is blood of the blood that rained hell on Rana, it has a way of ripping open the wounds you thought had scarred.
An alert flashes on the dash, and I bolt upright, ice threading my veins. If the academy’s scrambled ships to bring us back, this Beamer is in for the flight of its life. It takes me a moment to make sense of what the instrumentation is telling me. Gal leans over it too, looking puzzled.
And then it clicks. I sink back in my seat, staring out the cockpit windows. As a pilot, I thought I understood fear. Escaping the academy, the missiles, and the planet tonight, I thought I’d run through the purest forms of that emotion. But the fear I feel now dwarfs anything I’ve felt before. That was fear of pain, of capture, of death. This is fear on a new scale.
This is fear of annihilation.
Two of them are visible. The other eight appear only on our readouts, somewhere off on the light side of Rana. They ring the planet, their noses pointed away from her pull, their engines firing in steady pulses with enough force to put a cigarette burn on a moon.
Dreadnoughts.
“Heavens and hells,” I whisper. The planet’s under blockade.
Gal leans forward over the controls, pinging satellites for information about the ships surrounding us. There’s so much hope on his face. A twinge of nausea rattles through me at the thought that someone could see one of these monstrous war machines and feel anything but a deep, rooted terror. There’s enough firepower ringing the planet to wipe out all life on its surface, and Gal thinks his parents must have sent it as a reckoning.
But not for long. His face falls as he finds what he was looking for. “Not Umber imperial,” he says. That’s obvious enough. If there were imperial dreadnoughts in orbit, the academy would already be blasted off the map for allowing an automated defense system to fire on us. “Looks like these all belong to…No, that can’t be right.”
“What?”
“The computer says they’re under the command of Governor Berr sys-Tosa. Not by proxy. By presence.”
Impossible. The system governor’s vector from Imre would take him two full days to complete under the mandated travel speeds that keep intrasystem traffic safe. He could be court-martialed for burning that hard within Tosa System’s radius, especially if he went superluminal. But apparently that doesn’t matter. Because unless the computers are lying, Governor Berr is aboard one of these dreadnoughts. He’s come for the Umber heir, and he’s brought his entire arsenal to keep Gal from slipping through his grip. And with the governor aboard, the chain of command is unquestionable, with no room for Gal emp-Umber’s golden voice to wrest control away.
There’s no way we’re clearing the system, let alone the planet’s orbit. No wonder no pursuit has locked onto our tail in the time since we fled the academy. They already knew we’d never make it past these ships.
“They’re hailing us,” Gal murmurs. His finger hovers over the button to accept the call. He looks to me as if I have any say in the matter, and it grounds me in my convictions—his decency makes him a different creature entirely from his parents. He has to take the throne.
I give Gal a slow nod. Better to let the negotiator have a crack at saving our skins. There’s nothing I can do with the planet caged by ten dreadnoughts, especially not flying a Beamer.
Gal presses down, and Berr sys-Tosa’s face fills the screen. The system governor is aging, his pale skin lined and veined. But beneath his papery complexion, there’s vigor. Hunger. His eyes aren’t focused on the camera, but rather something off to the side. Most likely our ship’s return signal. Most likely the face of the Umber heir, revealed to him after two years of hiding underneath his nose.
“Gal emp-Umber,” he says. It’s the first time I’ve heard Gal’s true title aloud, with his territory attached to his name instead of a family. I hate that it came from this man’s mouth. A whole host of opportunistic vultures swept in to claim positions of power when Archon fell, but none did it faster than Berr sys-Tosa. Tosa was formerly the younger brother of an Umber system governor, his bloodright not strong enough to overthrow his sister for the post. Instead he fell to commanding her war fleet, leading it in the campaign against Archon at the empress’s behest—but all the while he was scheming for something greater. Before the surrender, he’d already assembled an entire government underneath himself that he installed in the former Archon core the second the imperials handed it over. His forward thinking earned him the favor of the empress and served as a template that allowed Umber to rapidly take root in its newly acquired territories. He’s ruthless, relentless, shameless, and now the sound of Gal’s name on his tongue echoes in my head. I try not to let my disgust show.