I’ve committed crimes in dozens of degrees tonight. Unleashed a mob of naked, drunken cadets on the officer quarters. Broken a window. Kidnapped a prince. Stolen a military ship. Compared to all of that, speeding should rank as a minor sin.
I check our vector, whisper a prayer, and jam down the superluminal booster.
My body tenses, anticipating a sudden snap of acceleration that doesn’t come. It’s an instinct I can’t fight—something in my brain knows how fast we’re about to go and braces for it. But going superluminal defies the natural order of physics. There’s no lurch forward, no vicious, uncompromising acceleration. There’s only a sudden stillness as the thrusters go quiet, the drives fire up with a whine, and the black goes gray outside our cockpit windows.
“How long until they lock on?” Gal asks, staring intently at the instrumentation.
“We’ve got a thirty-second head start. Enough time to get on course.” Now that they’ve been given due cause, the dreadnoughts are immune to intrasystem speed limits—they’ll be on our tail as soon as the system governor gets his wits about him. Already I’m tugging at the controls to get us on our escape vector. The Beamer can move like a devil on a linear path, wondrously enough, but it’s another kind of nightmare to get it oriented.
“Ettian.”
“What?”
“We should be headed for the interior. Why are we—”
“We’d never make it all the way to the Imperial Seat with ten dreadnoughts on our tail. We can’t outrun them—we have to scrape them off somehow. So we go where they can’t follow.”
Gal pales. I almost apologize. He had no idea he was signing up for this when he got on this ship. Neither did I. But there’s only one course we can set that has a chance of peeling these cityships off our ass. We have to cross a border they’d never dare follow us over. We have to leave the Umber Empire entirely.
So I’ve set us on a course for Corinth.
CHAPTER 7
OUR THIRTY-SECOND HEAD start translates into an entire day of superluminal with the dreadnoughts safely at our rear. It’s enough to take us from the heart of the former Archon Empire to its borderworlds, and by the time we reach the fringes of the neutral zone that separates our empire from Corinth, the dreadnoughts have fallen off our tail. They know our gambit, and they’re forced to let us pull it.
To catch us, they’ll have to decelerate—and the instant they do, they’ll be detectable by Corinthian instrumentation. To do so in Corinthian space would be interpreted as an act of war on behalf of the Umber Empire. For a rogue system governor trying to steal the Umber Crown’s heir without the empress and emperor noticing, sparking a border skirmish would be downright disastrous. Berr sys-Tosa has no choice but to let us go.
But that doesn’t mean Gal has to be happy about it.
It’s been nearly a full day of silence. He left the cockpit and shut himself in the Beamer’s crew bunk, emerging only to grab a ration pack, heat it in the kitchenette, and then retreat once more. I stay at the controls, even though they barely need my attention now that our vector is fixed and we’re wrapped in the cocoon of grayed-out superluminal. All I have to do is sit back and let the Beamer do what it does best: fly in a straight line.
In the meantime, I try to sleep. Free from the cycle dictated by Rana’s rotation, the Beamer has switched its timekeeping over to the galactic standard, slipping an extra hour into the way its lights shift from day to night. Nothing about our situation lets me stay unconscious for more than an hour at a time, but I’m able to doze enough while slumped in the pilot’s chair that by the time Gal reenters the cockpit and flops down in the copilot’s seat, I feel nearly rested.
My head still throbs from where it hit the hangar floor, my mouth is sour, and I don’t even want to think about the way I smell. The environmental lights that stripe the cockpit are phasing out of dusk, melting from a pearly gray into darkness.
“We need to talk,” Gal says, rubbing his hands over his eyes.
“Understatement,” I mutter. Then I straighten and extend my hand to him. “Hi, my name’s Ettian Nassun. Nice to meet you.”
Gal plays along, taking it and giving it a firm shake. “Gal emp-Umber, future ruler of the galaxy at your service,” he replies with a grimace.
“It’s a pleasure, Your Highness. Or is it ‘Your Majesty’? I can never keep the two straight.”
“Rut off,” he says and chuckles.
“What’s your favorite color?”
“Still green, even though I don’t look good in it. And my favorite food’s still that meringue we found in the night market on Soata.”
“And I still say desserts are bullshit favorite foods,” I reply, but I can feel the tension loosening in my chest all the same. He may be the blood of Yltrast and Iva, the blood meant to rule the Umber Empire, but he’s still the Gal I know, the Gal I’d follow to the edge of the universe. Which is good, because I just burned down my life for this idiot.
I just…
A day’s worth of processing catches up to me like a ship at superluminal. “Gal, what the hell?” I blurt, and his head whips up.
“Are you…mad at me?” he asks.
“Yeah, I am!” I reply, sounding just as startled about it as he is. “All this time—”
“I couldn’t have told you—”
“All this time—”
“No one was supposed to know until after we graduated—”
“This. Entire. Time.”
“What should I have done? Violated seventeen years of tightly held protocol that protected the future of the empire just so you didn’t feel left out?”
I seethe through my teeth. “I’m not mad at you for not telling me who you are. I’m…” It takes a moment for the words to come. “I’m mad you let me get so close. I mean, I can’t blame myself for getting close to you—I didn’t know. But you knew. You knew exactly who you are and what you are, you knew where I came from, and you knew what the truth about you might do to me, and you let all this happen anyway.”
Gal scowls. “What was I supposed to do? Be a shitty roommate? A shitty friend? Hold everyone at arm’s length during the only time of my life when I don’t have to act like an imperial?”
“If you had any consideration for the rest of us, then yes.” My voice is rising steadily. I let it. We’re alone in the Beamer, nothing but vacuum around us—who cares how loud I get? Maybe if I yell loud enough, it’ll make it through Gal’s thick, imperial skull. “It’s like…you don’t exist on the same plane as the rest of us. You were never meant to. And you let us think…”