The clock on my uni ticks down. I’m jacked into the station network, glancing occasionally at the summit feed. Delegates are gathering in the Founders’ Enclave, a myriad of races and costumes taking their place in the concentric rings. In the center of the stage, a podium is picked out by a bright spotlight, a holo of the Aurora Legion sigil spinning in the air above it.
I realize I’m getting into restricted areas of the station now. I pass an automated security checkpoint in the vents, but the motion sensor and laser screen have been bypassed by a tiny jamming device pressed against the wall—no doubt courtesy of the GIA’s spec-ops division. I slide down a chute into wider vents, following Cat’s trail. I’m sweating in my suit now, temperature slowly rising. Passing another three security checkpoints, I see they’re all disabled.
I’d wondered if there might have been a bomb on the Terran delegation shuttle, or some device in the landing bay that might cause the station’s destruction. If Cat would hit the ammo stores or refuel supply. There’s any number of ways a saboteur could put this station on its heels with the right knowledge and enough time. But I know where she’s headed now. The most strategic choice. The most reliable place to kick off an explosion that’d wipe out the entire academy, no fuss, no survivors.
The reactor core.
Cat’s trail ends at another grille, and I pop it loose, slip free. I’m sweating so hard my jacket feels soaked through. Jonii will definitely have alerted station security to my presence by now, though they haven’t sounded any audible alarms—probably don’t want to disrupt the summit. Dropping to the metal floor, I see I’m in the reactor core itself, the dark metal walls stained vaguely blue by the overhead lighting.
This section is absolutely off-limits for cadet staff, and I admit I don’t know it too well. But I can still tell where Cat’s gone, even without a scuff trail to follow. Four security staffers are laid out on the floor ahead of me.
Kneeling beside them, I check pulses, but I already know they’re dead. The hatchway has been disabled, and through it, I find three techs and two more security team members, all gone. Glancing at the sec system, I see the cameras are offline, no doubt knocked out by another GIA jammer.
These bodies, this tech …
I shake my head. Understanding the planning and skill it takes to pull a job like this. How much of an edge the Ra’haam has, with the combined knowledge of every person it’s ever absorbed at its beck and call. I can see now how many moves ahead it has been this whole time.
The clock ticks down.
“Esteemed representatives,” comes a voice in my earbud.
I glance to my uniglass, realizing the opening address has begun. It’s being transmitted across the entire station network, and the voice of Admiral Adams rings on the walls as I steal on through steam-filled corridors, past more bodies, the heat stifling, the air thick and wet in my lungs.
“Honored guests. Friends. On behalf of Greater Clan Battle Leader de Stoy and myself, welcome to the first day of this Galactic Summit.”
I reach a massive heavy-duty door, marked with diagonal black-and-yellow stripes. Four more dead bodies are scattered on the ground in front of it. A sign is painted across the metal in large white letters:
WARNING: REACTOR CORE. NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY BEYOND THIS POINT.
The lighting around suddenly dims, turning bloodred.
“Oh Maker, not yet,” I pray.
26
KAL
Sempiternity is on fire.
Her hull is torn wide, leaking fuel and coolant into the void. The leak is ablaze, an arc of flames cutting across the dark, aglow with hundreds of tiny points of light. Each of them is a ship, Free Peoples or Ra’haam, friend or foe, all of them fighting and dying for this tiny chance at life.
“G Wing, you have incoming Ra’haam fighters! Mark six—”
“Roger, Trinity, this is the Do’Kiat, we are moving to intercept—”
“Maker’s breath, they’re all over us! We—”
In the Neridaa’s control room, the battle is projected all around us, as if the crystal walls were glass. I stand beside Aurora, watching all of it unfold, heart in my throat. Out in the black, new stars bloom briefly, missiles weave, tentacles clutch, the gutted hulks of wrecked ships list helpless, bleeding and burning. The Free Peoples of the galaxy fight with the kind of bravery that legends are spun from, that songs are sung of.
But if we fail here, there will be no one left to sing them.
And the Ra’haam is so many… .
“Hull integrity seventeen percent! We need help over—”
“Reading new bogies, multiple—”
“I’m hit! I—”
My mind is a storm, my father’s and my be’shmai’s power echoing inside my skull, charging the air with static. Midnight blue and bloodred, even here in the black-and-white colorscape of the Fold, intertwined in a symphony of destruction. Crushing corrupted ships around us to bloody smears and, always and ever, pushing the Neridaa forward—a spear of Eshvaren crystal the size of a city, flying at near-relativity-bending speeds toward our target.
It is hidden, slumbering out in the midst of all this gray, but …
“There!” I cry, pointing. “There it is!”
Beyond the bloodshed ahead, the ships killing and dying across the dark before us, the Fold ripples, as if a stone had been skimmed across its surface. Though space is soundless, I swear I hear a faint string of notes, beautiful and shimmering and tingling upon my skin.
Before us, I see it, just as I saw it back then—a tiny whirlpool of blacks and grays and whites, unfurling like a flower beneath a springtime sun. As if reacting to the presence of the Eshvaren’s Triggers. As if it knows …
“The gate,” I breathe, heart singing.
My father glances toward it, then back to the battle outside. Aurora is lost in the carnage, blood-slicked teeth bared as she seizes another Ra’haam ship and crushes it to splinters. But before my eyes, the portal spirals out, widening like an aperture, until it spans thousands of kilometers across—the gateway to the pocket dimension that hides the Eshvaren homeworld.
Briefly I remember the last time we came here—Aurora and Finian and Scarlett and Zila and I. That was a simpler time. A better time. I recall the warmth of their friendship, the joy I felt when our squad was all together, the feeling that, as one, we could somehow accomplish anything.
Despite the carnage around us, I find myself smiling at the memory. I thank the Void most of them did not live to see a future such as this. And I vow, with all inside me, that I will give everything I have to prevent it from happening again.
“Aurora, do you se—”
An impact rocks the Neridaa’s hull, crystal falling from the gables overhead and shattering on the ground beside me. My father glances from the projection, his right eye burning a furious, blinding white.
“Careful, girl!” he snarls.
Aurora wipes at the blood on her lips, ghost light spilling through the cracks around her eye. “I thought you had that one!”
“I cannot watch our flanks, bow, and stern! Concentrate!”
“I am! And I’d find that a lot easier without you shouting at me, you f—”
Another blast shakes us, the walls splintering as Aurora stumbles.
“Okay, that one was your fault!”
“Kal, this is Tyler, you read?”
I touch the comm at my ear, speaking swift. “Yes, Brother. The gateway to the Eshvaren homeworld is dead ahead.”
“We see it! But word is definitely out across the Ra’haam hive mind now! We got two more Weed battle fleets inbound, and our strength is down to forty-seven, no … forty-three percent.”
I look at the anomaly, teeth gritted, willing us on with every fiber of my being. “We are almost there. Hold on.”
“Is the Ra’haam going to be able to follow you across?”
I look to Aurora, but she is lost once more in the elation of the battle outside. My father glowers at the enemy, blood dribbling down his chin to spatter on the floor. But I can tell by the slight lift of one brow …
“We do not know,” I confess. “Possibly.”
“Roger that. We’ll cover you as best we … Oh great Maker …”