Star Wars, page 4
Before he could finish, before Gella could go back, red-and-white fire bloomed from Bly Tevin’s exploding devilfighter.
BEYOND EIRAM’S GRAVITY WELL
Bly Tevin had always wanted to see the blue waters of Eiram up close, even if it was a place he was supposed to hate. But the boy they called Blitz couldn’t hate anyone, not really. Not the way some of his fellow pilots did, with an anger so deep it was branded into their skin. That day’s mission should have been the first day of a long military career. An opportunity to finish what his sister had started, what his grandfather had fought for as a young man. For E’ronoh. Always for E’ronoh.
When he’d been reassigned to one of the new vessels, he’d reveled in the sensation of breaching the atmosphere into infinite space. It was something no simulator and no practice runs in the Ramshead Gorge could replicate. He’d prove himself. Not Blitz, the fumbling pilot. Bly Tevin, hero of E’ronoh.
But he hadn’t been the hero he’d set out to be. The moment he’d lost control, he’d attempted to steer the devilfighter off course, even if at first sight he could have been branded a deserter. He didn’t want anyone to get hurt, but the controls wouldn’t respond. They were programmed to fire and his ship was set on a collision course with Eiram’s capital.
It felt like he’d been out of control for hours, screaming into his own sick, before he heard her voice. Felt a pressure against his chest, clearing the clouds of fear until he knew what to do. He remembered the ceremonial bane blade at his hip. Sweaty, shaking fingers worked at the clasp until he freed it from its sheath. Passed down from his grandfather, it wasn’t sharp enough to slice skin on a first try but it would do the trick. He rammed it into the port. A current shorted the navigation and powered down his ship.
“I did it. I got it!”
He could manually restart the ship. He had clearing to land on Eiram of all places. He thought of his mother, sitting in their apartment. She’d promised to make a fresh batch of pilafa stew when he got leave, if the cease-fire held. That’s why he was up there, so far and so close to home. He thought of her then, smiling as he played with other children on the narrow, dusty streets outside the palace. A woman who could stretch a ration for days. A miracle, he thought once, until he realized how thin and sad she was stirring their pot of thin soup. Together they’d watched his sister fall out of the sky, and he thanked his lucky stars she never got to see him struggle during training, struggle as he crashed one simulation after the next until he was branded Blitz. Blitz Tevin. A name he laughed at with everyone else even though he hated it.
When he stopped shaking, and the manual restart began, he shut his eyes and thanked the old gods. The ones his mother still prayed to. Even then, he was certain she was waiting, climbing onto the watchtower where all the families waited for the ships to come home. Because she was why he did this. For her.
As his ship whirled back to life, and a countdown began, he called for help that wouldn’t come. Bly Tevin’s last thought was of his mother. She always wanted to see the turquoise seas of the enemy, too.
When stars fell over Eiram, no one looked up. The citizens of the capital knew there was nothing particularly interesting in hunks of rock from space, not when there were bellies to feed and dwindling rations being distributed. And so, as two objects pierced the mountainous clouds that perpetually clung to the planet’s skies, there was no panic. No fear. No spare wishes or awe. Soon the city’s defense missile towers would lock in on their targets, and in the event the missiles malfunctioned, the electrostatic domes that encased so many of Eiram’s major cities would shield the citizens beneath.
Phan-tu Zenn was the first person to spot the ships entering Eiram’s atmosphere. But the boy who’d come from nothing had a habit of gazing toward the clouds.
He had been distributing relief to the people in the Rayes Canal, a narrow waterway that emptied out into the Erasmus Sea. In this sector of the city, squat buildings leaned into each other like rows of rotten, crooked teeth. Drying seaweed and barnacles dotted the walls and waterline, breadcrumbs anyone could follow to the piers. Skinny saltwater birds that flew too close to the dome received a conk on the head and a shock. Though transparent, the protective shield around the city was visible across white electric bands tracing the patterns of cresting waves, marking entry points for ships to come and go, and the steady hum of the shield was ever-present.
Phan-tu shouldn’t have been in the Rayes Canal in the first place, but over the years he’d learned to shirk his security detail. He’d hopped on the back of an agopie and guided the water horse to his favorite pier.
Within moments, he’d been swarmed by people—those born and raised in the Rayes and the refugees coming in droves from the western islands, the latest to be attacked by E’ronoh’s forces. Phan-tu should have felt fortunate that the war with E’ronoh had yet to reach the capital, but the destruction of nearby towns meant the infrastructure of Erasmus was eroding as quickly as their coastlines during monsoon season. And it was those at the very bottom who felt that strain the most.
Even as he handed out rations of food, hydration pellets, and anything else he could salvage from the palace’s waste, he knew it was not enough. His cart had emptied and he’d only just started distributing. Pain wedged between his ribs as parents and elders walked away empty-handed. He’d gone as far as to offer the linenfiber tunic off his back, the gold-stitched slippers that made him feel positively ridiculous. But they never accepted. They never cursed him, never let their desperation turn into anger, not toward him.
Phan-tu was, after all, one of them.
He should have been on his way back to the palace. His mothers worried. But his muscle memory carried him to the pier. He made a mental note of how many people had left with nothing. More than he could count. The helplessness of it all was suffocating, and he sought solace from the sight of the sea.
At the southernmost edge of the canal a pale blue scorpion, the size of a pebble, crept along the cracked pier, too young to be poisonous yet and small enough it must have slipped through the dome. He toed it off the ledge.
Along the coast, tiny square houses crowded the shore. White stone washed in bright blues, greens, and yellows. Canvas awnings provided little shade at the height of the sun, but it was home. Once, before the worst monsoon in his lifetime, he’d lived there with his biological mother and Talla, his little sister. Once, when the electrostatic dome hadn’t been strong enough against the waves of a storm, they’d all been carried out to sea. Only Phan-tu had swum back.
As the crowds dispersed, a girl with short brown curls and a dress stitched of some sort of recycled canvas tugged at his pant leg. She looked so much like his sister once had, and so he got down on his knee and pointed to her closed fist.
“What have you got there?” he asked.
She seemed to lose her nerve, but Phan-tu only smiled patiently. The little girl had his same coloring, tawny brown skin, pale-green eyes, and a dusting of green freckles, the distinctive marking of Eirami who had settled on the planet generations before.
“For the queen,” she peeped, unfurling her tiny fingers to reveal a cluster of mud-flecked pearls.
“I know she will love them,” Phan-tu said, pocketing the gift.
As he stood, he caught the first flash of light in the sky and used the flat of his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. No one else looked up at first, used to the safety that the missiles and dome provided—in times of peace only used for storms.
Phan-tu watched the pair of ships falling from orbit, too obscured to be recognizable. He searched the sky for others, but these two were anomalies. The defenses should have been engaged by now, yet the vessels kept free-falling. He had the sinking realization that something must have gone terribly wrong with the escort mission of the Jedi transport.
One of the incoming ships bore the telltale metallic blue of Eiram’s fleet. Its wings were on fire, and in the moment he blinked, it released its cockpit bubble. The transparisteel was snatched up in the breeze and rammed into the dome. A prismatic shimmer rippled from the hit and spread. Someone screamed as the Eirami ship exploded on impact. He couldn’t tell if the pilot had ejected or not, and there was still the second starship obscured by the glare of the sun.
Phan-tu reached for his comm, then cursed himself for having left it at the palace.
The little girl tugged at his pant leg and asked, “Is that a shooting star?”
“No, dear heart,” he said, trying to keep his voice even so as not to scare her. He nudged her back up the pier. “Why don’t you go inside?”
As she took off in a sprint, the city’s alarms wailed to life and every Eirami in the streets finally looked up. They pointed fingers, clapped palms over their mouths. As it got closer, Phan-tu could make out the streaks across its hull like red wounds. An E’roni starfighter.
“All of you, inside,” Phan-tu shouted. “Now, please!”
To make matters worse, his security detail had spotted him and were running down the narrow canal street.
“My lord, this is not the place for you. We must hurry back,” said the leader. His distaste for the Rayes Canal was evident in the sneer of his thin lips.
“Not until everyone is safe inside,” Phan-tu muttered, pushing past the guards to help an elder climb the steps into her home.
“That is not your job, my lord,” the guard said, exasperated.
“You’re right, Vigo, it’s yours.” Phan-tu sidestepped the tall man and picked up a toddler, nose dripping as his cries put the alarms to shame. He scanned the crowd searching for the mother, but there were still too many bodies clustering to get a view of the crash. People climbed onto rooftops and clustered in doorways and windows. Terrible cries came from the refugee camps at the edge of the pier.
“Why aren’t the anti-missile cannons firing?” Phan-tu asked.
“All we know is there’s been some sort of accident and General Lao gave an order to stand down. But that was before—”
Phan-tu handed the baby over to a frantic young mother. She bowed low to him, and he ignored the feeling of discomfort at the deference.
“My lord,” Vigo tried again, clenching his gloved fist. “Might I remind you that you are my charge. The city’s defenses will hold.”
With his arms free, he whirled on his guard, pressing a finger on the man’s decorated vest. “I have been there when the dome failed. Have you?”
“No, my lord.” Vigo’s freckled nose wrinkled as he looked down to find his boots covered in mud. So far from the palace, and even with exploding ships in the sky, Phan-tu’s armed guard cared more about his boots. “But there isn’t anything you can do from here. Put Her Majesty at ease and come home.”
Phan-tu kept his feet squarely on the muddy ground, confusion and uncertainty thick in the air. He fixed his gaze on the remaining starfighter. Black smoke trailed from the wings. The canopy launched, along with a parachute, but the pilot must have been stuck in the cockpit. One of the wings sparked against the dome following the curve of the sphere. Then one of the dome’s panels directly over the Rayes Canal opened. A malfunction? An order? There was no way to tell. A prism of light refracted against the sun. Birds shot out into the clouds as the enemy ship came through the gap in the dome, barreling straight for the sea.
“How unfortunate that we can’t drown them all,” Vigo said with uncanny calm.
Phan-tu imagined the horror of falling from such a great height, helpless and stuck. Alone. No matter who was in there, he could never wish another being such a fate. Perhaps that’s why he ran.
“My lord!” the royal guard blustered. “Where are you going?”
But Phan-tu had already stripped off his sheer shawl and tunic, kicked off his ridiculous bejeweled slippers, and leapt off the pier. The tide was low, so he couldn’t dive. He splashed through the sandy muck of the canal, broken shells digging into the soles of his feet. He thanked the great sea gods for the calluses he’d earned from a lifetime of running barefoot through the streets.
Phan-tu was grateful for the life he’d had, the home he was given after the storm that changed everything. But in his heart, he was still a little boy from the poorest slum in the capital. The people of the Rayes Canal helped one another. His mother had, and it had led to her demise. Even now, fifteen years after her death, after the monsoon, he still heard her voice. Still knew that in the worst moments, in the face of war and death and drought, she would say that there was always someone in need of help. If he could do it, he should.
So it didn’t matter that the plummeting ship was from the planet across a corridor of space. It didn’t matter. If it was a life he could save, he had to.
When he was far enough out, the ship breached the turquoise sea. A huge wave followed and Phan-tu dived. He could hear shouting from the distant shore, and then the pounding of his pulse as he kicked. His eyes burned against the salty brine, but his limbs welcomed the sensation of being enveloped by the warm sea. Like generations of Eirami, Phan-tu could hold his breath for long periods of time. It was a trait that had come about from eras of diving for food. But even his strong lungs had a limit, and he swam for the wreck as hard and fast as he could.
The water was hazy with disturbed silt, though farther out there was less pollution than at the shoreline. For the briefest moment, he was ten years old again, sinking to the bottom of the ocean after that terrible storm.
He wasn’t helpless now.
He spotted the sinking vessel, dragging against the Erasmus Sea. It hit the shelf of a cliff and teetered at the mouth of the trench. If it tipped over, he wouldn’t be able to follow. Phan-tu cut through the water like a krel shark, with only the first signs of pressure on his lungs as he reached the open cockpit.
Phan-tu was startled at the sight of her. Red hair, dark as copper. Fear and distrust in her amber eyes as she struggled to get free of her harness. Streams of bubbles escaped her nose. She was losing too much air, and still she raised her arms as if to block his attack. As if he’d come all this way to hurt her.
He held up his palms and gave a slight shake of his head. Then she pointed to the floor, where she couldn’t reach. There was a glint of metal. A blade. He seized it, yanked it free of its sheath, and cut through the safety straps of the harness. There was a terrible crunch of stone giving way. He felt the shift in the water as the cliff ledge began to crumble under the weight of the ship.
As they sank, he grabbed hold of the second strap and sliced and tore through the fabric. There wasn’t time for her distrust, her fear of him as he grabbed the front of her red uniform. She clung to him as her vessel tumbled into the dark pit of the trench. Pain laced her features, but he tugged on her arm, and they kicked up toward the beams of light refracting under the sea. His insides screamed for oxygen, jaw trembling as he gritted his teeth and fought to not open his mouth wide and inhale.
The E’roni woman admirably kept pace with him, though when he looked back, he could see a trail of blood unspooling like a ribbon. He couldn’t tell which one of them was injured.
He’d swum his entire life, but the final meters put his mettle to the test, thrashing and kicking until he could feel the light on the surface, the fire in his lungs, and then the humid kiss of air as they broke the surface and choked on the ragged intake of oxygen.
The sea, which was never calm during the summer, steered them on rolling waves to the pier. They dragged themselves onto the muck of the canal, and up rickety wooden steps. Phan-tu dropped the dagger and flopped onto his back, coughing the salt water he’d swallowed.
“Are you all right?” He regretted the question the moment he voiced it. Because when he sat up, she was looming over him, water dripping from her hair, a bruise blooming on her forehead, and her dagger resting under his throat.
If there was one certainty in Axel Greylark’s life, it was that he could always bet on himself. Quite literally. Deep in the back room of Raik’s Parlor, Axel was one of five players hunched over a roulette wheel that the eponymous proprietor of the gambling den had created as a true game of chance. Illuminated by a low-hanging lamp, the chrome-and-gold pit spun, and each player tossed their cues into the fray. Axel kept his eyes trained on the shimmering carapace of his cue. He’d chosen the violet-and-emerald one because they were his family’s colors, and since he was gambling with his family fortune, the correlation seemed apt.
As the spinning slowed and each tiny sphere rattled into one of the forty slots, several players threw up their hands in disgust and disappointment. Axel squeezed his trembling knee as his cue teetered on the rusty line between two divots. He’d bet his last stack of credits, plus the chit Raik herself had backed him, on account of him being such a good regular and all.
The cue finally tumbled into the golden jackpot.
Axel blinked sleep-deprived eyes.
He’d won.
He’d finally won and it had only taken—Axel glanced at his chrono. Damn it all to hell, had he really been here for ten hours?
One losing player smacked the lamp overhead, causing it to swing and strike the dealer. Two hulking enforcers removed the poor loser, leaving those accusing Raik of fixing the games utterly silent. Axel eased back into his seat. His fingers had come away sticky from the armrest. He didn’t want to know what the secretion was, but he was certain it hadn’t come from him.
Axel’s droid, QN-1, nudged his pant leg below the table. Quin beeped something that sounded like disapproval of Axel’s choices, then opened the triangular panel on its chest. It offered up a small silver flask, which Axel accepted with a gracious smile. He unscrewed the top and took a quick nip. Smoky whiskey burned pleasantly all the way down as he carefully watched the patrons of the gambling hall thin out. Some headed to find better fortunes in the rat-infested dens lining the pleasure district. Others might clean up and head to the upper levels for the start of the workday. Axel gave no sign of moving, and neither did the Mirialan woman or a tipsy Rodian who tapped a credit on the lip of the table.
