“Duke.”
“You’re the boss,” Duke said, turning back to the control panel. “While you were gone, I took the liberty of performing a complete diagnostic, and I discovered a number of items…”
Of all the things Kira needed right now, listening to Duke prattle on about the ship’s functionality couldn’t be further from the top of the list. A warm bed would be nice; a drink even better. But she knew it would be more of a hassle to try to stop Duke than it was to just let him get it over with. So instead, Kira clasped her bloody hands behind her back and strolled to the Rubicon’s viewport. Normally, gazing into the endless wonder and beauty helped Kira feel at least somewhat at peace. She didn’t have the patience for spirituality, but she could look out to the stars for hours. But there was no peace for her today. Not with the numerous, unending scraps of metal obscuring her view. Shards of a mass-jump system. Slabs of what looked to be a sensor array and a thrusting panel. Together, all these parts and the technology that made them function constructed the Kundarian trade ship. But now the wreckage was nothing more than junk floating in space, waiting for an opportunistic scrapper to come along and haul it away.
Kira knew better, though. She knew this ship was the hope so many people on the Kundarian surface were waiting for; they needed supplies, food, and medicine, and Kira was supposed to deliver it all to them. But she didn’t. She’d stepped right into a trap laid by her father, and nothing was going to be the same with him in the picture. Because now, Kundar would slide into acquiescence rather than join her in the fight for freedom. Her failure to do as she promised would ripple throughout the galaxy, and other systems that flirted with the idea of revolt, like Kundar had, would cower back into silent obedience. Better to be whipped and alive than bold and beaten into misery. Though, to Kira, Praxis’s cruel punishment of Kundar—sabotaging their acquisition of essential goods—was all the more reason for planets to fight back. Sure, Praxis boasted order and peace, but anyone thoughtful enough to care about the fate of the galaxy knew that was a lie. The attack on the Kundarian trade ship was a manifestation of that lie, a revelation of Praxis’s true edict: control on its terms, enforced by any means necessary.
“—and the kkzzzztt hydraulic sensor is reading kkzzzztt below acceptable levels of kkzzzztt—”
Kira swiveled back to Duke, whose body was twitching and whose eyes were flickering like he was having a power malfunction or the drone equivalent of a stroke. “You okay, Duke?”
Seeing Kira, Duke’s head snapped back into focus. “Why, yes. Yes, I am fine. Thank you for asking.”
“Oooookay,” Kira said, slowly pacing toward Duke. “Why don’t you let me take over? I can get us home from here.”
“Not to worry, I can handle it while you rest. If you could just punch in the coordinates for our return trip, I’ll guide us there without delay.”
Kira shot a sideways glance at Duke. The drone was a lot of things—insubordinate, rude, and helpful only when forced to be. Polite and caring? Those traits had been weeded out of his programming over the years, if they’d ever been there at all. Which meant something was wrong.
“Why don’t you go ahead and put in the coordinates, Duke. You’ve got the control panel right next to you.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, of course.”
As Duke went for the control panel, Kira slowly reached across her body with her left hand, hoping not to draw Duke’s attention, and went for her sidewinder. But she was a second too slow on the draw.
Instead of going for the control panel, Duke thrust his hand toward the ground and came up firing with a snub-nosed charger pistol.
Kira dove to the ground at the sight of Duke’s sudden movement, just in time to avoid getting a hole blown through her face. She yanked out her sidewinder as she fell to the floor and fired off three wild, defensive shots; they came nowhere close to hitting Duke, but they gave her enough time to scramble for cover.
“Did you really think I’d let you leave?” Duke said as Kira pressed her back against the steel pillar that kept the cockpit together when it flipped on its axis. “I knew at least a few of you, if not all of you, would survive the ship’s explosion. I took the liberty of having your drone’s mainframe rewired so he could be my remote puppet.”
Though the voice belonged to Duke, Kira knew that the words belonged to Ebik. It was the second time he’d pulled the rug out from under her today, and she really did not appreciate her father’s underhanded diligence in trying to kill her. Though at the same time, she shouldn’t have expected anything less.
Kira whipped her head around the pillar; she was going to drill a dozen blaster rounds into Duke’s face and then dump him out the airlock and shoot him some more from the ship. She’d just have to apologize to Cade for killing his stupid drone later. Just as Kira turned, the Rubicon bucked like it’d taken a direct hit to its rear from a warship’s cannon. But Kira didn’t hear any impact, and she knew there were no other ships nearby. They hadn’t been hit with a ton of force, which meant Ebik had done something worse.
The ship was now screaming toward the Kundarian atmosphere, accelerating at a forty-five-degree downward angle and at maximum thrust, straight for Kundar’s surface. Or, if Kira knew her geography, they were more accurately heading for Rendariac, Kundar’s ice-capped mountain range.
“Ebik!” Kira screamed. “I swear, when I get my hands on you—”
Kira poked out her head, only to be greeted with a litany of blasts from Duke’s charger pistol. She ducked behind the pillar, and as she did, she heard the cockpit door whoosh open.
“What in the—ahhhh!” Mig screamed as he stepped into the cockpit and immediately took fire from Duke. He dove and avoided getting shot, but 4-Qel wasn’t as lucky. A blaster bolt bounced off his chest plating and ricocheted across the room. Getting shot didn’t hurt or damage 4-Qel. But it did make him mad. Very, very mad.
With Duke focused on 4-Qel and Mig, Kira rolled out from behind the pillar and drilled the drone with blast after blast from her sidewinder. Because he was an older-model drone, Duke had a reinforced exterior that protected it, to a certain degree, from blaster fire. As Kira’s blaster fire rattled Duke, even penetrated him at some points, 4-Qel rushed him. With one quick movement, just as Duke was about to turn his pistol on the drone that was bigger, faster, and stronger than he was, 4-Qel grabbed Duke’s head and ripped it off his neck. Sparks snapped from the shredded wires, yet the drone still had enough juice stored in his dome to keep going.
“Futile,” Duke said. “Everything you’ve done, everything you plan to do—”
“I never liked you,” 4-Qel interrupted, then he smashed Duke’s head between his powerful hands like it was a munta bug. He then tossed Duke’s crushed, severed skull over his shoulder.
“What the—why?!” Mig yelled as he slid forward with the ship’s downward trajectory toward the control panel. “Everything we do ends up crazy!”
Kira, like Mig, had to glide to the control panel. Only 4-Qel, with his gravity-lock legs, was able to move without taking into account the ship’s trajectory. She considered taking the stick and trying to pull the Rubicon up, but she knew that whatever was causing the ship to dive required a much more profound fix than a pilot could provide.
“All right, listen: My father hot-wired Duke to control him remotely, and he somehow sabotaged my ship. You’re up to speed, so no follow-up questions until we’re horizontal again. The question is, how do we do that?”
“Uh…,” Mig said as he tried to flip through the control panel’s functions, only to discover none of them were functioning.
Kira, meanwhile, turned her gaze toward the viewport just as the ship was breaking through Kundar’s atmosphere. Mountains, hazy and fog-covered, were starting to come into view. “Time’s a factor here, Mig.”
“Okayokayokay,” Mig said. “So, he couldn’t have cut any actual mechanical functionality, which is good. But he must have, I don’t know, rerouted … argh, just let me get under there!
”
Mig dove beneath the control panel and, as far as Kira could tell, started to pull out wires at random. Meanwhile, the mountaintops weren’t getting any farther away.
“Are you sure you know—”
“Zzt!” Mig barked at Kira. “Genius working!”
Kira looked at 4-Qel, who shrugged. “He is a genius,” he said.
As much as Kira appreciated Mig’s brilliance, she appreciated her own life just a little bit more. Coming on faster than she was comfortable with was a wall of solid rock that, without question, would rob both Kira and Mig of those things they loved the most. And, using her judgment as a guide, both were about to be taken away unless she pulled the ship up—
“Now!” Mig yelled. “Get us out of here!”
Kira hopped into her command chair, wrapped her steady hand around the stick, and, with all the force she could muster, pulled the Rubicon up and out of its descent. The ship had a tremendous amount of momentum dragging it down, but Mig’s fiddling had wiped out its autopilot commands and equalized the power back to the ship’s engines, giving it enough juice to overcome gravity. Eventually.
“We’re not going to make it!” Mig yelled, clutching the control panel.
“Yes. We. Are,” Kira replied through gritted teeth. The stick rattled wildly in her grip, overpowered by the gravity that was hot to keep the ship pulled toward the ground. But Kira kept it firmly in place despite its protestations. And just as the top of a mountain’s alabaster-capped peak came into view, she was rewarded with the feeling of her ship leveling out. It climbed and climbed, angling away from the jagged outcropping, and right when a blanket of snow was about to smother the viewport, the Rubicon thrust upward. The bottom of the ship skidded against the rock face, jostling everything and everyone aboard, but it was just a scratch. Kira had regained control of the ship, and no one had died in the process.
Well, except for Duke.
“Just for the record,” Kira said as she huffed to catch her breath, “if that were Cade flying, we would have crashed.”
“Oh, no doubt,” Mig agreed.
“Without question,” 4-Qel added. “Paragon or not, he would have ended us all.”
With the Rubicon heading in the right direction, Kira set the controls to cruise and flopped back in her seat.
“I’m guessing Duke is beyond repair?” she asked.
“Good only for scrap,” 4-Qel said. “I’ll dump him in the engine room.”
“No, wait,” Kira interrupted just as 4-Qel was grabbing the decapitated drone. “Scan him for a transponder. A tracking device.”
4-Qel did as requested and, sure enough, he located a tracking device in Duke’s back. He went to yank it out, but Kira stopped him.
“Keep it on him. Keep it right where it is, and dump him out of the airlock.”
Again, 4-Qel did as instructed and returned to the cockpit just in time to see Duke fall out of sight.
“Good,” Kira said. “Now Ebik thinks we’re dead. At least he will for a little while.”
“Yeah, about this whole Ebik thing,” Mig began. “What’s, um … what’s the deal with that? He’s your dad—like, your for-real dad?”
Kira bit her lip. This was a past she worked very hard to keep hidden, and she couldn’t do a thing but watch as the gravediggers dug it up, spadeful by painful spadeful. “I’ll explain another time,” Kira said, gaining a temporary respite from the question she knew, eventually, she’d have to answer. “Right now, we have to get back to base and figure out what to do before Ebik finds out that we’re still alive. Because I promise you, he won’t relent until he’s won.”
As much as it frustrated her to admit this, she knew it was true. Ebik was out there, prowling the stars with the single-minded purpose of destroying everything she stood for and fought for, and when he discovered she was still alive, he’d turn to destroying her as well. History was repeating itself, but this time, Kira vowed, things would be different. She wasn’t a helpless kid anymore, unable to stop her own father from running a triblade across her chest with the clear intent of murdering her. Kira drew a furious breath at the memory, picturing the remorseless look in Ebik’s eyes as he’d dug the blade into her flesh. And all because she refused to sit idly by as Ebik imprisoned Kira’s mother and usurped her seat on the Baron’s quorum. Kira’s escaping Praxis before Ebik could toss her in prison too threatened to make him look weak at a time he needed to look strong. Because only through his untarnished strength could he seize the power he lusted after and join the chorus of Praxian leaders who supported Ga Halle and her imperial ambitions. Despite her penchant for genocide. Despite the fact that she was completely out of her mind.
For her disobedience, Ebik tried to discard Kira like she was someone he didn’t even know. Worse, someone he utterly despised. There was no telling his recourse for the trouble she was causing now. And as much as Kira relished the opportunity to give her father exactly what was coming to him, the remembrance of everything he’d done to her and her mother filled her with a particular kind of fear and dread that was unlike any other she’d known. She’d faced down squadrons of Intruders in skies punctuated by the battered remains of her own squadron’s starships; she’d protected families against attack ships that were setting their crops ablaze for a perceived act of sedition; she’d raced toward a burning star and delivered a massive payload onto its surface, defying all odds, and struck a blow against Praxis the likes of which no one had ever seen. Still, she couldn’t help but feel a profound discomfort at her father’s reentry into her life.
The feeling must have projected onto her face, try as she might to suppress what was inside, because when she glanced at Mig, Kira could see the genuine look of concern on his face. It was almost like he was saddened by what he saw in Kira, and maybe he was; Kira knew that, like her own father, neither Mig’s mother nor father would ever win an award for how they nurtured their children.
“I know you don’t want to talk about everything with your dad, not in specifics, but do you want to talk about how you’re doing? I mean, are you okay?” Mig asked.
Kira shook off all the thoughts and feelings Ebik brought back to her and forced a smile. She’d made a vow to herself, long before she’d found a home at the Well, to always look ahead, to never dwell on what was behind her. And there was no way she’d allow Ebik to compromise her focus and make her break that vow. Not now, with all that was at stake.
“I’m good,” Kira told Mig. “Ebik stopped being my father a long time ago; at this point, he’s just another Praxian jerk who wants all of us dead. He can get in line with the rest of them as far as I’m concerned.”
“Yeah,” Mig said, nodding. “Yeah.”
“Besides, you know what? I should thank dear old Dad, because he was right; we’re never going to win over the galaxy one planet, one system, at a time. It’ll never happen.”
“I’m failing to see how this is a good thing to realize,” 4-Qel said.
“Look, we’ve gained a lot of allies since blowing up the War Hammer, and that’s great. But we’re still nowhere close to having the numbers needed to topple Praxis. And we don’t have the resources to win that kind of long game, not to mention we can’t possibly expect to stay hidden while we’re playing it.”
“So … what does that mean?” Mig asked. “Don’t tell me this is it.”
“No, this most definitely is not it,” Kira said as she punched in the coordinates for their base into the mass-jump drive. “This war isn’t over, not even close. We just need to change things up.
“And I know exactly how.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Cade woke with a start and gasped.
A gentle breeze brushed over the contours of his body, and with it came an earthy aroma, rich with a hint of derig spice. He breathed it in deeply as his eyes adjusted to the starlight that filled the narrow slits he’d exposed to the world. As his eyes focused, so did his sense of smell; he caught a whiff of recuperative balms mixed in with the ea
rth and spice and knew they were coming from his own body. The acrid scent was just potent enough to make Cade relish the idea of a hot shower. He pushed his body up from whatever it was he’d been sleeping on and groaned. Everywhere ached. His arms, his back, his head—Cade felt dehydrated, beaten up, and on the brink of catching a cold all at once. Metal sighed beneath him as he swung his feet around and forced himself upright. He rubbed his hands on the metal frame beneath his legs and the textured canvas mat that was tautly wrapped around it. He’d been curled up on a cot, but both where the cot was located and how long he’d been there were total mysteries.
Incrementally, Cade’s eyes adjusted. In the foreground, he was able to discern long, narrow stalks of derig grass swaying all around him. He stood on uneasy legs and walked into the field, running his fingertips along the spice grass’s coarse umber tips. With the force of his thumb and forefinger, Cade squeezed a derig bulb until its tangerine powder dusted his fingertips; he brought those tips to his nose and inhaled the aroma. He felt his senses sharpen. Derig was a potent stimulant, and Cade needed all the help he could get shaking off his slumber.
Though Cade’s vision had yet to fully return, the derig placed him back on Raja Prime. Back at the Renegade base.
He’d taken the smell of derig for granted in the four months he and all the other Renegades had occupied the small moon in the Vossalos system. The native spice had been lost in the stench produced by the makeshift encampment Percival and his Rising Suns had established. The grease of blaster fire, the heat of too many bodies too close together, the roasting of botho meat—all of it overwhelmed the small but abundant plant, and Cade didn’t again have an opportunity to appreciate it until now.
Until he was alone.
Cade rubbed the bleariness from his eyes and forced his sight to sharpen. He tried not to panic. The derig field began to take shape, and as it did, Cade began to recognize the outlines that marked where his camp used to stand. The oval shape of the mess hall on his right, the derig flattened where the building’s frame pressed into the ground. Cade swiveled to his left and spotted the outline where the armory once stood. He spun around. Surrounding the cot he’d just been lying on was the form of the medical tent. Peppered in between were the smaller marks left behind from where the sleeping quarters had been. All of it, gone. The cot was the only trace of the base that’d been there.
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