“If you don’t think I have a stake in this fight, you haven’t been paying attention,” she replies with a wry smile and a nudge of her shoulder.
Under any other circumstances, I’d be moved. But now I just feel sick. “It’s a war, Wen. It’s going to be a war.”
“I was born war-ready. I’ve been at war my entire life. You, though,” she says, her voice going soft with concern. “You seem like you’re worried you might not be able to handle another war.”
She doesn’t know the half of it. How terrifying it is to see this war looming on the horizon. How far I’ll go to keep it from happening. She’s getting swept away in stories of heroism and missing the brutal reality of the lies I’ve woven around her. If I were noble, if I were anything near good, I’d tell her the truth right now.
But the thought of an oncoming war has reminded me of a fact I can’t escape. After all of the grief I got about finding Wen a role in our scheme, I’ve made sure no one can contest that she’s needed.
Which means I can’t give her a chance to walk away.
Wen trusts me absolutely, and on the other side of this assault is the moment she sees me for what I really am. The moment I lose her for good—because I have no illusions that it could go any other way. It’s going to break my goddamn heart, and I’ll deserve every ounce of the pain.
So instead, I let her lean on me for a moment longer, breathing in the smoke, soaking in the electric night around us. “I’ll be fine. I’ve done it before,” I mutter, and Wen squeezes my arm.
“I believe you,” she says, then ducks back toward the fires before she can notice how deeply those words cut.
* * *
—
The Ruttin’ Hell departs the next morning, her cargo hold packed with ten hungover Archon soldiers and all of their tactical gear. I fly, with Gal sitting rigidly in the copilot’s seat and Wen lurking behind us, belted to an attendant bench that folds out of the rear of the cockpit.
It’ll take four days for the assault fleet to make it to Tosa System, and that’s including one full day at subluminal speed as we move to the outer edge of this system’s speed-limited zone. Our timekeeping switches from Delos’s long days to the shorter galactic standard, but the hours drag long in spite of it. I stay camped in the pilot’s seat, all too aware of the soldiers starting to stir in the hold. One of them is Sims, our persistently friendly former guard, who seems all but ecstatic to curl up with his audiobooks for the duration of the journey. Despite sitting in briefings together, I don’t really know any of the others, which seems like a prerequisite for people you’re flying into battle with—doubly so when you’re sharing a cramped Beamer with a single lavatory for four days.
But knowing what we have planned for these people, it’s better not to know them well. Gal’s warning from our first morning at Henrietta Base sticks in my brain. I have to guard my heart.
So I let the first day pass in silence. And when the fleet gathers at the edge of the system, pointing our noses along a uniform vector, I break that silence only to announce, “Brace for superluminal.”
I hit the booster, the black goes gray around us, and just like that, we’re on our way to war.
* * *
—
On the second day, the stories start.
Gal and I sleep in the crew bunk with Wen overhead, and when I shrug off his arm late in the morning, I hear them drifting under the door. I slip out into the corridor as quietly as I can, trying to pick out the shapes of words in the faint noises coming from the hold. My bladder pulls me to the lavatory, but my curiosity’s got it beat, and I drop into the shadows of the hall as I creep closer and closer to the ladder into the bay.
“…telling you, Meridian has Chorta beat by a long shot,” a sharp voice declares.
“Parts of Meridian, sure,” Sims’s voice shoots back.
“Come on, Chorta’s like ninety percent ocean. It’s underdeveloped.”
“Yeah, well maybe I just like beaches.”
“They’ve got beaches on Meridian too,” the first voice scoffs. I sink against the wall, trying to peer out and see which soldier Sims is talking to without losing my place in the darkness.
“Anyway, what I was saying was that Mom and Mama would take us out in the skiff before dawn, and I stand by my statement that there isn’t a prettier sight in all the worlds than a sunrise on Chorta. All three of us were small enough that we’d sit on one bench, and Mom was big enough to take up the other one entirely. Mama always manned the motor, and she gave us these little nets to scoop up the…Did you guys have them on your worlds? They might have been a regional species—we called them glowers, but they probably have a scientific name too.”
I know Chorta was an Archon world, but my knowledge of the former empire’s been buried over the years. My brow furrows as I try to place its system. It must have been a borderworld or a system’s minor planet. A sour taste builds in the back of my throat. I should know this. And the fact that I don’t has me clinging to the wall, greedy for the next words that float my way.
“They were these tiny bioluminescent jellyfish—we’d put them in jars and keep them by our beds. There’d be fields of them out there below the waves, waiting for the sunrise to tell them it was time to return to the deep. Someday I’m gonna make it back. I have to know if my moms are still there.”
Before Sims can continue, his companion’s sharp voice cuts in. “The empire’s glory wasn’t in its beaches, Sims. It was in its cities—the shit we built. You wouldn’t know it from any of the settlements on Chorta, I’m sure. But Golgorath was the emperor’s favorite jewel for a good reason.”
“Henrietta was the emperor’s favorite jewel,” Sims counters, and the hold fills with quiet chuckles of agreement.
“Right, but of the cities,” the interjector continues, undeterred. “Of the cities, Golgorath was the greatest. Those spires were miracles of engineering.”
“Were,” someone else interjects pointedly, and a sober silence sweeps over the hold like an Umber warbird’s passed overhead.
They’re dancing around a question without asking it. What’s left for them if they take back their homeworlds? The empire will never be the same again. Governments have been ousted, power redistributed, cities burned and built. I close my eyes, picturing Trost as it once was and Trost as it is now. The imperial palace and the system governor’s estate that replaced it after the warbirds bombed it into a husk. The massive crater of the Warning Shot, visible from the city’s downtown. The landscape of the old empire simply doesn’t exist anymore. These soldiers are wandering in memories that have no match in the Umber Empire’s reconstruction.