Empress of a Thousand Skies(14)

On the far side of the Revolutionary, Aly stripped off his black uniform until he was down to his military-issued ribbed tank and boxer briefs. He suited up and slipped into the Tin Soldier, the Revolutionary’s exploratory pod. Dembos was the Wraetan moon, which meant that in a way, he was headed home—or near it. Near enough to get a look, anyway. He plotted a course for the station that would allow him a decent view of northern Wraeta, his birthplace.

Or what was left of it, at least.

About an hour out, following a slightly curved trajectory, he was able to make out little specks emerging from the black space to his right. Wraeta.

Way back when, Wraeta was just the fourth rock from the sun—not particularly pretty, not especially powerful, and only a little bit useful because of the elements mined from there. For centuries, Wraeta had maintained political neutrality. When Aly’s great-grandfather was still alive, Wraeta had even hosted the G-1K summit—which stood for the “Galaxy’s One Thousand.” It was a meeting at which one thousand of the galaxy’s most brilliant scientific minds spent months tinkering and negotiating. The scientists of the G-1K had produced the universe’s first cube right on his home planet. On a school trip when he was little, Aly had even gone to see a monument dedicated to the first successful cube installation.

Fast-forward another sixty years, and the thing that actually put Wraeta on the map was the fact that Kalu had bombed its capital to hell a year before the Urnew Treaty was signed. The damage radius was as far as it was wide. Not to mention all the dust and debris sent into the atmosphere, the lowered temperatures . . .

Aly had survived, obviously—they’d started the evacuation months ahead of time. But Wraeta was destroyed, uninhabitable, and seeing the rubble of the former planet gave him a weird, floaty feeling in his chest, like someone was messing with his personal gravity.

He slowed down the Tin Soldier so he could stare. The last time he’d been here he’d thought the same thing: crazy there’d been a bright, shining planet a decade ago. Now it was half a planet with a massive bombed-out crater on the north side. A lot of people thought Wraeta had it coming because they’d thrown in with Fontis instead of staying neutral. But with Fontisian missionaries running around the planet, Fontisian money infusing its economy, it didn’t seem to Aly like they’d had a choice.

There were free-floating rocks that used to be pieces of the planet, naturally charged. It made them easy to corral within a fixed space, inside a massive electromagnetic net that prevented them from floating light-years apart. Thousands of tiny steel plaques reflected the lights of his pod. They’d been brought by mourners and released within the net, as mementos of the ones who were lost on the battlefields when Kalu invaded, or during the passage, or when they had refused to evacuate their homes.

Aly had released his own plaque two years ago, during his first visit. He scanned for the moment on his cube now, down in the knotted architecture of his memory. He knew many folks kept their cube spick-and-span and were able to find anything anytime—and he wished he were that guy. But too much time had gone by, too many memories accumulated, none of them sorted.

It took him a couple of minutes. His vision clouded and his eyes ached during the search: It was like trying to find one single grain in a great big silo. But finally he located the memory file: two years ago, thinking of his mom and his sister as he ejected the plaque into space.

Now the great mass of rocks swayed, like a phantom hand was moving them.

And in the corner of his eye: a ghost, hurtling past the rocks of Wraeta. Aly followed it, or tried to, but he was still learning how to drive the Tin Soldier. The thing he’d seen—whatever it was—wove in and out of his vision, and there on the side he swore he saw it: the royal seal.

Impossible.

His heartbeat quickened. It was the royal seal, he was sure of it, which meant it was an escape pod from the royal ship. The Princess had been confirmed dead, but what if she had survived? What if she escaped?

What if she had survived? What if she had escaped?

“Dembos, do you read me?” Aly said, tapping his cube. “Dembos, this is Private Alyosha Myraz. I have a visual on an escape pod with the Eliedio call sign. Over.” But there was silence. He tried the station three more times, the Revolutionary twice, and a handful of satellites in southern Wraeta. No dice. The electromagnetic net that kept the various fragments of rock together was probably also messing with his signal.

He hesitated. He should go back, or at least loop around to get a signal and call it in—but he might lose the pod. This was his chance to do something big, his chance to be a soldier. He’d be a real hero, not just play one on DroneVision. And then they’d never send him away, no matter what.

The pod was disk-shaped and spun wildly, end over end. If the Princess was in there, she didn’t know how to drive the thing. Even watching it made Aly want to throw up. The Tin Soldier had about zero thrust and was more of a steering machine, but Aly found a current alongside the electromagnetic net and rode it hard.

Without thinking, there it was—the organic memory, the worst one. He was suddenly eight years old all over again, watching his mom and his big sister, Alina, pull away in the back of a truck loaded with a bunch of women from the Wray during the evac.

“Now or never,” the driver said. He was more like a savior, since he’d been there to take the ready and willing to work in the factories in the south of Fontis. Aly still remembered the look on his mom’s face when she saw there were only two seats . . .