“Warsss,” Ixy said, her always slightly creepy voice making it sound that much worse.

  “War,” Gia agreed. “The largest and most brutal war the Spiral has ever seen.”

  “Bigger and uglier than the sigiltech war,” Keep added. “Under normal circumstances, even with fifteen additional duchies under his control, the other noble families might still be able to win a victory if they joined together. Unfortunately, there’s nothing normal about this whole situation.”

  “That's because Sedaya has sigiltech, multiple sigilships, and an army of Gilded,” I said, the reality of the situation sinking in.

  “I’ve already run simulations,” Gia said. “Hundreds of millions will die. More will suffer from famine or loss of habitat. The entire Spiral will collapse into a fractured hodge podge of individually controlled planets and systems. Chaos will reign.”

  “I don’t know,” Druck said. “That sounds pretty good to me.”

  “You won’t be alive to see it,” Emerald said. “You’re public enemy number five.”

  “Why five?”

  “Well, Ben is first. Matt's second. I’m probably third. Or maybe I’m second. Then there’s—”

  “Okay, I get it,” Druck said. “Maybe it isn’t so good.”

  “It’s horrendous," Keep said. “You can’t disrupt a system that’s been in place for as long as the Hegemony without causing an immense amount of suffering and strife. All of it so Sedaya can be the big cheese."

  I exhaled breathlessly, heart pounding. The parallels to my brain cancer weren’t lost on me. Sedaya's hunger for power was a cancerous growth as well, one that was metastasizing ever faster, infecting everything it touched. A downward Spiral, so to speak. “You’re saying we need to out Blorb before he can promote Sedaya’s sycophants.”

  “That would be a good start.”

  “It won’t be enough,” Quasar said. “There’s no way we can even get close to the palace again. And even if we somehow manage to kill Blorb-as-Empress, if her plans are already set in motion, they’ll still be executed. Sedaya will gain fifteen votes toward the selection of the next ruler of the Hegemony, which is most likely more than enough to get himself selected.”

  “Checkmate,” Matt said.

  “Wait, what about Prince Hiro?” I asked.

  “The odds that he’s still alive are extremely slim,” Gia replied. “Sedaya took him. He has no reason to—”

  “Sedaya didn’t take him,” I interrupted. “Neither did Succaath.”

  “So who did?” Gia asked, her face reflecting both surprise and concern.

  “You’re the supercomputer. You should be able to tell me. And I wouldn’t mind if you could tell me where he is while you’re at it.”

  “I helped you narrow it down. Why haven’t you figured it out yet?”

  “I’ve been a little busy saving the lives of my best friend and my crew,” I answered. “What’s your excuse?”

  “I can only access information that’s connected to the hypernet and info's that's not overly secure at that. I gave you the initial list of companies that could be involved, if you'll recall.”

  “Unfortunately, we've only managed to narrow it down by one,” I said. “But I’ve got a solid lead. Mushari Technical, in the Nobukku territories. Can you look into them?”

  “I already am. I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting. In any case, the Empress has called representatives from every duchy to the palace for the official announcement and swearing in of the new nobility three weeks from now. That’s how long you have to locate Prince Hiro.”

  “And bring him back to Atlas,” Keep said. “We deal with Blorb, get Hiro crowned and have him change the list of names. Easy peasy.”

  “Yeah, right,” Quasar said. "That won’t be enough to prevent a war. Sedaya’s not going to give up without a fight.”

  “No, he isn’t,” Gia agreed.

  “And there’s nothing we can do to stop him,” Matt said. “He’s got Dominator. He’s got the Star of Caprum. He’s got David and an army of Gilded. And we have one old robot head starship, one old wizard, a single gunship, Ben, and what else?”

  “Moxie,” Emerald said. “We have moxie.”

  “Well then, what else do we need?” Druck asked. “We’re all set.”

  “She’s not wrong,” I said. “We don’t have to deal with everything at once. We attack one problem at a time. We beat that problem and we move on to the next. That’s how we win.”

  “What if we don’t win?” Druck asked.

  “Then we’ll all be too dead to care,” Emerald said. “So we still win.” She started laughing. "We have to."

  “I guess she’s not wrong about that, either,” Druck added.

  My phone started vibrating in my pocket. It had been of so little use over the last couple of weeks that I’d forgotten it was even there. I pulled it out, tapping on the notification that a new ship had been picked up on sensors. Tapping through, a scaled-down version of the sensor grid showed me that Coil had gotten the Sanguine mothership moving in a wide ellipse rather than a tight circle.

  And that Radiance had arrived.

  “Dryka’s here,” I said, noticing Justus perk up at the news. I glanced at Keep before my perusal slid over the others. “Each of you is here for a reason. Each of you has unique skills and talents that will help us win. I know the situation might seem pretty dire right now, but I believe we can do this. Anyone who wants out, speak up now or hold your peace.” I glanced at Grizz, already knowing he wanted to go home.

  But he didn’t speak out, instead meeting my gaze and nodding with conviction. "I'm in." What he had just heard had obviously changed his mind. Nobody else spoke out either. All were in.

  “In that case, you’re all dismissed. Matt, you’ve got the stick.”

  “What?” Matt said, taken off-guard. “Me?”

  “You’ve been practicing all week.”

  “In my head.”

  “Well now you can do it for real. Just don’t let Colonel Dumbass crash into us.”

  He grinned widely and nodded. “Aye, Captain.”

  My phone vibrated again in response to Dryka’s hail. “Justus, Keep, you’re with me.”

  CHAPTER 6

  I rode the elevator to Deck Four with Justus and Keep, along with Matt, who split from us at the conference room. He continued on to the flight deck while I answered Dryka's hail.

  “Jacinda,” I said warmly. “You—”

  “Murdock,” she hissed angrily, surprising me with her vitriol. “What the hell is this?”

  “Wh…what do you mean?” I stammered back on the defensive.

  “The yacht doing donuts out there. What’s that all about?”

  I relaxed immediately. “Oh. That. Yeah. It’s a long story. But the ship’s harmless. It doesn’t even have any guns. It’s good to hear your voice too. I’m glad you’re still alive.”

  “If I were over there, I would wring your neck, Ben,” she answered, still mad.

  “Why?” I ventured, tensing up again.

  “I seem to remember a certain someone making a certain promise that they wouldn’t tell another certain someone else that I was still alive.” A sudden lump in my throat prevented me from replying. I had made a promise. And I had broken it. But I had my reasons. “I’m waiting, Ben.”

  “I…uh,” I sputtered.

  “Jackie,” Keep said, a slight quiver in his voice. “It’s good to hear your voice. It’s been a long time. Too long.”

  Dryka fell silent, the pause long enough I had started to think we’d lost the comm signal. “Avelus,” she said at last. “Damn it. I’ve spent every day since you disappeared hating you, and the first time I hear your voice it’s like I’m ten years old again and all I want is a damned hug. Right now I just hate myself for being weak.”

  Tears sprang into Keep’s eyes. “All I want is to hug you back, kiddo,” he replied. “But our airlock is occupied at the moment. Go easy on beating yourself up. You have every right to be angry.”

  “Do I?” she asked. “Because I’ve kept telling myself you left me to die that night so you could save your own boney ass.”

  “Whether or not that’s true doesn’t change the way you felt about it,” Keep said, expressing a softness I had rarely seen or heard from him. It was almost as if he were a completely different person with Dryka. “I’m sorry, kiddo. I’m sorry I left you. But the truth is, it was the only way to save your life.”

  “How am I supposed to believe that?” Dryka said. Her voice rose with each sentence until she was practically shouting. “You never came back for me. You never found me. Do you have any idea of the hell I went through because of what happened? Where the hell have you been?”

  “I couldn’t come for you,” Keep replied calmly. “I slipped Sedaya’s goons, but I always believed they let me go on purpose because you’d already escaped. They were on me for months, watching my every move, hoping I would lead them back to you. I couldn’t risk it. I’m sure you didn’t understand that when you were young, but I hope you can understand it now. By the time I could start searching for you, I couldn’t find a trace of you. I never gave up looking. Never.”

  “I do understand that part of it…now,” she replied after a short pause. “And you’re right, I didn’t understand it at all back then. Maybe that’s why I still want to be mad at you but can’t. Except, I don’t understand why you never found me. I was hiding from Sedaya, not you.”

  “I guess I never looked hard enough,” Keep answered. “Or maybe I always knew our paths would cross again no matter what. And here we are.”

  “Here we are,” she repeated, her voice softer now. “I’ve missed you, Avi.”

  “I’ve missed you too, kiddo. More than I can say. I’m sorry for everything that happened to you. I did my best to protect you back then and ever since, but things have changed. There's nothing I can do anymore to protect you. Not with the way things are going down with Sedaya. I'm sorry.”

  “Not your fault, Avi," she said.

  “Your Grace,” Justus said. “I’m here, too.”

  “Justus. Are you well?”

  “Better now that you're here.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. Not exactly subtle. “Jacinda, I need to tell you—”

  “Where’s your sense of honor, Ben?” she barked back before I could finish. “You made a promise to me.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. But like I was going to say, I had to tell Keep about you to keep the peace aboard my ship. Justus was having a pretty hard time accepting Keep's presence in light of his anger toward him. I'm sure you can understand that the security and well-being of my crew comes before any other promises I make. Besides, you’re not even mad at him anymore. It all worked out in the end.”

  “That’s not really the point, but I’ll accept your reasoning and your apology. We need to be allies now more than ever.”

  “I agree.” I paused, becoming nervous again. “I have more news to share. Unfortunately, it's painful news. Kat didn’t make it. He fell on Merton.”

  The silence that followed was deafening, but thankfully short-lived. “I didn’t expect everyone to survive where you were going. Is he the only one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let us honor him by completing the mission successfully. What else can you tell me to get me up to speed?”

  “We just heard from Gia. She informed us that Blorb is planning to install the new noble families three weeks from now, and that every single one of them is a hardcore loyalist from Sedaya’s territories.”

  “Why am I not surprised? What are we planning to do about it?”

  “We still need to find Prince Hiro,” I said. “And pray to whatever you believe in that he’s still alive. Did you have any luck with the information I gave you?”

  “Limited. Musashi is still our best lead, but we can’t count out Bracken Shipbuilders. Duchess Amara suggested there have been some strange rumors coming out of Jaito, which is the planet closest to Bracken’s deep space factory. They claim all of the employees fled the station and the whole thing appears to have been suddenly abandoned.”

  “Is that something that can possibly happen?” I asked. “Did the company run out of funds, maybe experience some supply shortages, or something else along those lines?”

  “It’s possible, but incredibly unlikely. Even if the rumors are true, their involvement is still questionable. If the blueburn’s fuselage was produced there and they wanted to cover it up, it would have made more sense to abandon the station and scuttle it, not leave it empty.”

  “Does anyone else smell a trap?” Keep asked.

  “Without a doubt,” Justus replied. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t our best lead. If whoever took Hiro expects us to try to track him down, they might be hoping to end things quickly by forcing our hand.”

  “Because we have no choice but to follow the lead,” I said. “We pretty much have to walk into the gaping jaws of the trap.”

  “That’s what I think.”

  “But we need to investigate Mushari too,” I said. “I bet they’re located in opposite directions; am I right?”

  “Yes,” Dryka confirmed.

  “So maybe Bracken is a red herring, meant to slow us down. We can’t be two places at the same time.”

  “Of course we can. We have two ships.”

  “I thought we settled on a rendezvous point so we could stick together. Otherwise, why come all this way?”

  “I loaned you Justus and Kat’s team to help you rescue your crew from Sedaya. From what I understand, you've completed that mission. I came to pick them up. I’d hoped to see Avi in person as well as discuss our next move.”

  “I didn’t think you were going to take them back so soon. They’ve been valuable to me.”

  “And they’ll be valuable to me, especially if we need to split up to track down Hiro. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I do.” But I didn't have to like it.

  “We have two good leads and two good ships,” Keep said. “Which one goes where?”

  “We’ll going to Bracken,” I said. “If it is a trap, we have a better chance of slipping it.”

  “Not if it’s a trap intended to capture or kill you,” Dryka said. “Your survival is more important right now than mine. We’ll go to Bracken.”

  “If Sedaya unifies the duchies then you’ll need to raise a fleet to fight him. Which makes you more important. It's better if we go to Bracken.”

  “If we can stop him before it gets that far, raising a fleet will be unnecessary. I can’t challenge him or his archons the way you can. Bracken is mine.”

  I almost laughed at the idea of us arguing over who was going to rush headlong into what seemed like more certain danger. I appreciated Dryka’s determination. “Maybe we should draw straws or something.”

  “We don’t need to decide that right now. Why don’t we meet in person? You can transfer over on the gunship hanging from your mouth with Justus and the others and we can fight one another to decide which of us will check on Bracken’s factory?”

  I did laugh at that. “You want to thumb wrestle me for it?”

  “I’m sure we can come up with a competition that’s fair for both of us.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “How else do you propose to solve the impasse?”

  “Okay, Duchess,” I said. “We’re on our way.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Keep and I were back in the hangar an hour later. Ki and the other members of Kat’s Litter had cleaned up their living space by then, leaving no trace that they had ever camped there in the first place. Not that they were eager to say goodbye, especially after finding out about their commander only an hour ago. Each of them had stiff upper lips, but behind their emotionless facades, I could see hints of sadness that they had to leave us mid-mission, especially after Kat had given his life to get us this far.

  Surprisingly, it was Justus who seemed the most reluctant to leave. Immediately following the conference room meeting with Dryka over the comms, he had approached Keep with his hand out to offer an apology for every negative thought he had ever entertained about him, and he admitted there were quite a few. Keep had accepted the apology without reservation. There had never been any hard feelings on his part, and he had always appreciated Justus’ loyalty to his liege. Just like that, they were friends.

  Justus had also gotten close with Leo over the last week, and of course we had bonded much earlier, first over our shared sense of morals and later over my health, which was the reason we were delayed in transferring to Radiance. He had insisted on running me through the autodoc one last time, and on showing Keep how to do the same. I only found out then that he had spent the transit time from Kirillia working on an algorithm that he'd programmed into the doc. It would output a number that represented the balance between restore, the chaos energy in my bloodstream, and my body’s rejection of the catalyst implanted in my skin. My own personal downward spiral. The autodoc being a much older model, it took some time for it to process everything and spit out the final result. He had waited behind hoping it would finish before we had to go.

  “Justus,” I said, tapping my comm badge. “We’re out of time, my friend.”

  “Damn,” he replied. “I’m sorry, Ben. I was sure I could get the results before we left. I’ve got a preliminary report, but not the final numbers.”

  “What does it say so far?” I asked.

  “Hold on.” I could easily visualize him scrolling through the AI generated text of the report, looking for anything interesting. I could read the reports, but not really understand them outside of certain keywords and values like white blood cell counts and the density of chaos energy nodules—an organic, battery-like structure which stored the energy—within each cell. “All your vitals look good. No indication of a recurrence of the cancer. CE counts are a little lower than normal but nothing that triggers a red flag. I mean, the high-level scan looks great. No concerns.”