Shadow Call

by Michael Miller

  Everyone fell silent as we all found a viewport or a feed that showed the descent of Nev’s pod, slicing through the night sky. Everyone’s breath was held. And continued to hold.

  Nothing.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” I began to chant again. And then I closed my eyes for a second, spoke to the darkness behind my lids. Shadow had helped me with so many things, but I couldn’t think of a way it might now. I only had a mindless plea: Please, please, please.

  I felt something, a fluttering at the edge of my senses, in the direction of the escape pod. Then a voice I’d never heard, like the hiss of air out an airlock, spoke in a whisper in my ear: “Yes.”

  My eyes flew open right as the chute deployed. It whipped and thrashed in the air behind the pod, and then the canvas unfolded in a rippling crack. The sudden resistance yanked the pod back violently before letting it fall, more slowly, toward the planet’s surface.

  Telu let out a shout of triumph. Basra sighed in relief. Eton grunted from up in the turret, and Arjan’s hands flexed on the edge of the dash. I was still too stunned, by both the voice and the seeming result of it, to react.

  “What now?” Arjan demanded, noticing my silence, my blank stare, with worry in his tone.

  “Nothing,” I said quickly. First, visual hallucinations, which I’d already experienced before…but now auditory hallucinations? Voices? I’d had feelings or thoughts in my head that didn’t seem like my own, but never spoken words. This was new, and it was not good, because it meant the Shadow poisoning—and the madness that went with it—was getting worse. But maybe using so much Shadow and going mad would be worth it, if Nev was still alive.

  “He still might not be alive,” Eton said from the turret, as if reading my thoughts.

  “Eton, shut the hell up,” Telu bit out.

  “I actually second that,” Basra murmured.

  It was nice to know that at least half of the crew cared if Nev lived or died.

  It didn’t take long for the escape pod to hit the ocean, sending up a giant plume of water and slush ice into the darkness of the night. The parachute wilted like a blossom around it, collapsing into the gentle rollers. I set the Kaitan down next to the pod, directed a spotlight at it, and then sat there. I wanted to move from my captain’s chair, but I couldn’t—both because I needed to control the ship and because my legs wouldn’t work.

  “Well, someone needs to see if he’s alive,” Telu said into yet another silence. “What if the door is stuck?”

  But the door wasn’t stuck. It ejected from the top of the pod. It spun once in the air and landed with a splash. By then, Nev had already poked his head out, and I’d already covered my mouth with my hands, gasping as if I hadn’t breathed since the first missiles had flown at the Luvos Sunrise. I didn’t even try to stop the tears that flooded my eyes.

  He’s alive, he’s alive. Ancestors, he’s alive…

  I managed to get myself under control enough to keep the ship steady while Eton tossed a line out to the escape pod and dragged Nev on board, soaked in freezing water. But as soon as I saw him, still breathing if pale and bloodstained under the bridge lights, the tears came again and nothing could keep me from hurling myself at him, my arms wrapping around him in something like a death grip.

  I didn’t even loosen my hold when the disembodied voice spoke again: “Yes.”

  Nev was holding me just as tightly, but he felt wooden. “My parents…,” he said again. The words caught in his throat.

  Of course he wouldn’t be able to appreciate being alive after what he’d just witnessed. Which meant I couldn’t tell him at what cost I had gotten him out alive—the cost of the voice. He would only feel worse. I held him tighter.

  “What happened?” I breathed into his neck. “I heard parts, but we had no visual. And then we lost all connection.”

  “That was because I smashed my wrist feed in the pod before it launched.”

  “Why?” Pulling away to give him a bewildered look, I noticed that the rest of the crew was staring at us, but I had a hard time caring. “We thought maybe…” I swallowed, still unable to imagine him dead even now that I knew he was alive. “I didn’t know what to expect.”

  “I had to.” Nev’s gaze floated off over my shoulder, staring. “The tracker…Solara has to think I died on board. If she could do this to our parents, to me, to get what she wants, who knows what she’ll do to all of you if she realizes I’m still here?”

  “Solara?” I said, uncomprehending at first. “Wait, she did this?”

  Nev shook his head, and yet he confirmed my disbelieving words. “She did it all. She didn’t wield the blades herself, but she might as well have.”

  “But she helped us in Dracorva! Why would she go to all that trouble only to do this? She could have just killed you then.”

  “No, she couldn’t. First, she had to ruin my reputation in the eyes of our citizens, and my parents. That’s what she helped me do so she could be named heiress before…before she…” He choked on a despairing laugh. “Unifier save us, but she’s the queen now.”

  “That’s what she wanted? But she never gave any hint of that, ever.” I glanced around, making sure I wasn’t the only one who had been completely fooled.

  Eton shook his head, eyes wide, while Arjan’s mouth was open in shock. Telu had never met Solara, so she looked understandably baffled by the sudden turn in the conversation. Basra pursed his lips thoughtfully.

  “Well, this changes things,” he murmured. If anything, he sounded vaguely impressed, as if someone else had made a clever trade before he’d thought of it.

  “There’s much more to her than meets the eye,” Nev said, as if repeating a joke that wasn’t funny. “This latest stage of her plan was apparently all to avoid having to share power through marriage. Or with me.”

  It was my turn to shake my head. “Heiress or not, there’s no way anyone is going to let her rule after this! She—”

  “She framed me, Qole.” Nev’s voice was flat, lifeless. He lifted his hands to stare at them, as if even he saw the blood there. “Everyone will believe that I was the one who murdered our parents, because no one will question her claims after what I’ve done. And now she’ll inherit the throne—has inherited the throne, in all but name,” he amended.

  “But…,” I stammered, “but she blew up their ship for no good reason, other than to kill you. No one is going to believe any story she comes up with.”

  “Oh,” Nev said with a ghost of his usual smile, “somehow I doubt that very much.”

  * * *

  The vid arrived a few hours later, in the still-dark morning, broadcasted across the inter-systems network. Solara had clearly been busy, since there was no possible way she was back on Luvos yet. She was working in transit.

  We’d barely had time to return to Gamut’s harbor and eat our first meal in a long while. It was an attempt to regroup—Nev tried to pretend like he hadn’t been hollowed out and somehow left standing, while I tried to pretend I couldn’t hear the occasional whisper in my ear or see bits of skin start to fly away from the backs of my hands. None of the rest of the crew really knew what to say. What did you say to a friend who had just seen his parents murdered before his eyes?

  None of us were very hungry, but somehow we weren’t tired, either. Maybe because we could sense what was coming.

  We sat in the ship’s messroom, gathered around the table to eat one of Eton’s latest creations: fried fish of some sort, with a flaky crust and delicate spices, piled with sautéed seaweed. The guy really did cook as well as he could shoot.

  When the emergency broadcast began, playing automatically across all vid feeds, we all stopped eating. Nev went entirely still.

  Solara appeared on the messroom screen, her dazzling blond hair falling in a glinting waterfall over one shoulder, her skin as radiant as sunlit snow, h
er lips as red as drops of blood. Her gown was also red, encrusted with enough gold embroidery that she shouldn’t have been able to hold herself upright. Her eyes, however, weren’t red, even though the moisture in them seemed to hint that she’d been crying. Through the liquid sheen, the sharp silver-gray irises flashed back at us.

  A monster glinting under the water’s surface. A psychopath dressed as a grieving young princess.

  “I have news of the greatest tragedy ever to befall the Dracorte family,” she began in a solemn tone. “My indecorous haste in making this announcement, even as I flee for my life to the safety of Luvos, is an attempt to put to rest the rumors that must already be spreading. Approximately three and a half hours ago, my parents—King Thelarus and Queen Ysandrei—were murdered, assassinated by none other than their son and my brother, Nevarian Dracorte.”

  On the table, Nev’s hands squeezed so tightly around his fork that he bent it in half.

  Solara’s features softened, and her eyes somehow grew wider, more vulnerable. Ancestors, she’s good. “Many of you might be wondering how this could be possible. I wouldn’t have been able to believe it myself if I hadn’t witnessed it firsthand. As you know, Nevarian committed treason barely a month ago, compromising the safety of our planet and very citadel, and so my father and mother had no choice but to exile him.

  “Still, we wished to believe the best of him, that he would someday be able to return to us. This made my royal parents particularly vulnerable to his pleas. At Nevarian’s bequest, the king and queen decided to take a journey, on which I was to accompany them, to the most far-flung planet in our system, Alaxak, for the purpose of making peace. I chose to view their decision as a willingness to forgive rather than a sign of weakness. If only I had argued more rigorously against it, perhaps I could have averted this tragedy.”

  Her lips trembled, but her voice didn’t. “As soon as my brother boarded our ship, I grew even more apprehensive. The comm channels went down and security feeds stopped recording. We were cut off. I know now that this was because Nevarian had once again employed the hacker who so recently compromised our citadel security, using her to infiltrate the ship’s network and block all outgoing signals—”

  “Hey,” Telu said, “I did not! I mean, I could have, but that’s a flaming load of scat!”

  “—which allowed my brother the freedom to put his deceitful plot into motion undetected,” Solara continued. “If my parents had been more cautious, less willfully ignorant of what he was capable of, then perhaps he wouldn’t have succeeded in planting high-energy explosives on board with the help of only a few other disloyal, murderous subjects. He set these explosives to detonate when he met with the king and queen, providing a distraction for when he…when he—” She paused, as if she couldn’t go on. “Well, I cannot put into words something so horrible that it can only be seen to be believed. Unfortunately, all that remains as evidence of this heinous crime is a vid that I recorded myself when I realized something was terribly amiss.”

  The picture cut to a shot of Nev approaching his parents, arms raised, then to his parents gasping with twin blades through their chests, and then to Nev holding his bloody swords, his parents’ bodies falling into him. It had obviously been edited heavily, but it still looked bad for him. Very bad.

  And yet, if anyone knew Nev half as well as I did, they’d know the look on his face in the vid wasn’t murderous. It was one of horrified shock.

  It was the expression he wore now, since he wasn’t able to turn away fast enough before rewatching the deaths of his parents. I put a hand on his knee as he turned to the wall, his jaw clenched, shoulders shaking. I wished I could comfort him in some other way, but I knew nothing I said right now would make this better. And besides, the broadcast wasn’t over.

  The feed cut back to Solara, who looked even more disturbingly undisturbed. She was putting on a good act, but next to the real thing, there was no comparison. “My bodyguards barely fought off my brother and got me off the ship, on an escape pod whose manual override function let us escape the hacker’s lockdown and flee to safety.”

  Telu snorted. “Does she mean the manual override that she’d overridden in order to keep the escape pods from escaping?”

  “The Luvos Sunrise attempted to fire upon us with artillery that would soon have overwhelmed us without a response. There was only one thing we could do.” She bowed her golden head, as if it pained her to say it. “We completed what Nevarian himself had already begun with his explosives, but at least we ensured that he would pay for his crimes. We shot down the Luvos Sunrise. There were no survivors. Inquiries will of course be made, and a full investigation launched. The logs from the ships that accompanied the Luvos Sunrise will provide information—”

  “That she totally fabricated, I’m sure,” Telu snapped.

  “—to help piece together everything that happened. Many lives were lost, but at least such a noble sacrifice permitted the execution of the worst traitor our family has ever seen: that of my brother-no-longer, Nevarian Dracorte.”

  Eton scoffed. “Well, that’s definitely not true.”

  Solara squared her shoulders, as if adjusting the weight of a heavy burden. “It is with great solemnity that I must now accept the Throne of Luvos far earlier than intended. My coronation will occur shortly after my arrival home. In the meantime, there is justice to dispense.”

  “What, is she going to try to kill him twice?” Arjan said.

  Nev was shaking his head. “This is not good,” he murmured.

  “What?” I asked, blinking at him.

  He didn’t answer, but Solara did. “Alaxak’s role in my brother’s treason has gone unaddressed long enough. Nevarian has paid for my parents’ murder with his life, but Alaxak must also answer for the deaths of their sovereigns—and the deaths of so many innocents. Their time as a planet on the fringes of society, divorced from Dracorte law and justice, has come to an end.”

  “Oh, blasted hell,” Arjan said.

  Oh no…

  “I will appoint a new governor of Alaxak—a position that has too long gone unfilled—and they will soon arrive with a much stronger contingent of law enforcement officers than the planet has ever seen. Not only will this force continue to guard our drone network in the region, but they will keep order, and also oversee our new Shadow operation.”

  “What?” The word came out of my mouth before I could help it, my own fork falling from numb fingers.

  “Shadow operation?” Arjan demanded.

  As if she’d heard him, Solara elaborated. “With our new bioengineered fuel, combining Shadow and algae, my family now has the ability to produce the most revolutionary new energy source in the systems, for the benefit of all. And yet, with Alaxak’s history of…disobedience—”

  “You mean history of being used,” Telu growled, slamming the table with her fist.

  “—we must take firmer control over our primary source of Shadow, lest it be threatened. From this day forth, the Dracorte family is laying rightful claim to the rich Shadow grounds in and around the Alaxak Asteroid Sea.”

  “Rightful?” Arjan hissed through his teeth.

  “Those. Are. Ours,” I ground out. Both my brother’s and my gazes were riveted to the screen, as if we could somehow get through to her.

  “The people of Alaxak will be compensated accordingly,” Solara said, her tone gracious, “and given jobs as they so desire on our new state-of-the-line Shadow rigs. The harvesting of Shadow on such an industrial scale will be controlled, safe, and profitable to all.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “Traditional means of harvesting are too dangerous and therefore prohibited, for everyone’s own good.”

  In those few words, I saw everything—my operation, my way of life, my people—collapsing.

  She smiled tremulously, though it never reached her eyes. “Justice doesn’t have to be harsh,
and can remain in keeping with the late king’s and queen’s…gentler…sensibilities. This way, the Dracortes will take steps to guarantee our security, and in return, Alaxak will no longer be a lawless den fit to harbor criminals. It will be a place of prosperity, safety, and stability.”

  And cultural annihilation. She’d left that part out.

  Solara frowned slightly, her tone reluctant. “Failure to comply with the implementation of this new system would leave us with no choice but to respond with far stricter measures, with the Dracorte military might at our disposal. Such justice would be the least that the late king and queen would truly deserve.”

  She took a deep breath. “Now it is time for us, and all of Luvos, to mourn. It is with great sorrow that I assume this heavy mantle at our dear sovereigns’ passing. The burden of rule is immense, but I won’t let my beloved parents, our noble legacy and lineage, nor our glorious system down. In the Unifier’s name, this I swear.”

  The screen went black. We all stared—and then jumped when a plate hit the wall and shattered, spraying food and bits of thick plastic everywhere.

  I expected it to have been Arjan or Telu, or even Eton—someone with a temper—but it was Nev’s arm that was left extended over the table, his gasping breaths that filled the silence.

  “If that isn’t enough,” Basra said calmly, almost mock-cheerfully, into the awkward silence, “the feeds are already exploding with her praise—beauty, strength, and poise in the face of tragedy.” He tossed his infopad down on the table. “She undeniably knows how to play the game better than I ever could have guessed, and that’s saying something.”

  “Sink them—Dracorte Industries.” We all looked at Arjan, who’d spoken up coldly, matter-of-factly. He pointed at Nev, his eye narrowed. “You warned his family not to mess with us, Bas. This definitely qualifies. You own so much of their resources and products, and you nearly did it once. So do it again. Wreck them financially.”

  So now he wanted Basra’s help. I supposed this was more important than a bionic eye or ship upgrades. Not that I’d yet seen much indication that Arjan had forgiven Basra for lying about his identity for so long, and I hoped that wouldn’t make Basra less inclined to help us.