Chương 1: Pinnacle Station

Pinnacle Station, Vidako Imperium Stellarum August 12, 2847"Watch where you're going, boy!" Arcturus Sandhurst rebounded off the arm of the Alu'kan spacer. The impact caused him to stumble and nearly lose his grip on the single, battered suitcase he'd lugged all the way from Zurah V. The Alu'kan, on the other hand, had all the size and density which the males of his species were known for, and was no more jarred by the impact than a star would be troubled at the impact of some unfortunate hunk of debris.

In fact, the man, his broad, square-jawed face stark white beneath the artificial lights of Pinnacle Station, caught Arc with one hand, steadying him before he could tumble down onto the floor of the crowded concourse. The Alu'kan's shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, exposing forearms thicker than Arc's thighs, colored white along the inside and fading to a deep, dark gray by his elbow.

The spacer was utterly without body-hair, like all of his species, and when he patted Arc's hand, the touch of his skin was so distinctly different from the texture of a human's that the sensation was jarring.

"Thanks," Arc stammered.

"I'm sorry—I wasn't looking where I was going."

"I've made enough mad dashes to catch a ship," the big man said, with a grin which exposed too-sharp teeth—predator's teeth.

"Go on, boy. And try not to kill yourself on the way there!" The last was called in Arc's wake, for he'd already dashed off again, weaving in and out of foot traffic as best he could, that old, battered piece of luggage dragging along behind him on spinning wheels. The ISS Kaladan had arrived near a standard hour late at Pinnacle, due to a hold up entering the Gate at Zurah V's L2 Lagrange point.

A cargo ship had needed to be towed out of the way, and while no one could have helped the delay, that single event had turned the entire rest of the voyage into one long, trembling fit of anxiety for Arc. Seven hours in from Vidako's Gate to Pinnacle Station, which might normally have been fascinating as his first voyage away from home, had instead alternated between boredom, panic, and recrimination.

After all, if he'd left Zurah V on an earlier ship, there'd have been no question of getting down to the surface on time. He'd have been cooling his heels in his assigned dorm at the Imperial Mech Academy for three days already, as his classmates filed in. Instead, Arc had to sprint all the way from the end of Terminal Delta to Gate P3, at the very center of Pinnacle, and he had to manage it before his elevator-car left without him.

If he missed this ride, the next open seat might not be for hours, and that would mean Arc would begin his career at the academy with the dubious distinction of having arrived late. That was something he couldn't allow. Not for himself, but for Phoebe. I won't mess this up, he promised her, once again. I'll get my wings. And then I'll find them for you. I swear it, Phoebe, I'll find them all.

He ducked past a small flock of Toreans, their brilliant plumage standing out like a splatter of paint on white canvas, then careened around a human mother trying to shepherd three children. Half a dozen men and women in grease-stained coveralls, wearing the tool-belts of ship's engineers, made a leisurely show of turning off the main concourse and heading up to the entrance of Uncle Human's Family Feed Bag, a chain restaurant that marketed 'authentic' human food to the other member-species of the Imperium.

Arc swallowed his curses and dove in between two of the engineers, then dashed past a duty-free liquor store selling bottles of some local intoxicant, complete with a dead serpent floating inside. And then, through two passing streams of foot traffic ahead, he saw it: a great, illuminated screen with the number 'P3' blinking, and the words, 'final call for boarding' just beneath.

"Excuse me!" Arc shouted, diving straight through the crossing lanes of traffic, and narrowly avoided a second collision, this time with two gray-haired men in fleet uniforms. He yanked his suitcase up behind him and, panting, patted his pants pocket for a moment of sheer panic before he felt his folded tablet and yanked it out.

"Relax," the woman at the gate told him, but that was easier said than done.

"I won't tell them we're all clear while I've still got someone in line. Take a breath. You've got your boarding pass?" Arc nodded, stabbed at the screen of his tablet, and then turned it to face her. There was a scan, and a beep, and a green light, and then he was heading through the gate without ever having gotten a clear impression of what the woman even looked like.

His heart was pounding almost as loud as the sound of his luggage wheels rolling down the ramp, and then Arc stepped through both doors of an open airlock into a positively crammed elevator passenger compartment. He hesitated there, for just a moment, upon the threshold of the inner lock, because of course he was absolutely the last one to arrive.

Every seat in the hexagonal car was taken up, and every overhead compartment already snapped closed on dozens of suitcases which were undoubtedly much newer and in far better shape than his.

"Find a seat," the uniformed elevator operator prodded him, "I can't close the airlock with you standing there." Arc stumbled forward, scanning desperately for an empty place. There had to be at least one, right? After all, he had a boarding pass, and they'd let him on. They wouldn't have done so if there was no space for him. Most of the young men and women in the seats, already buckled in for safety, didn't bother to look up or to meet his eyes.

The majority were human, but Arc caught sight of Alu'kans and Toreans both—and he wondered whether the passenger count had been thrown off by the fact a single Alu'kan male took up two regular-sized seats. But no, there was one empty space left, Arc saw with a sudden rush of relief, and he lugged his suitcase over to the sound of the operator's safety speech.

The luggage compartment had been left open with enough room to spare, though he felt a sharp and intense sense of shame the moment he wedged the secondhand suitcase his father had bought him in next to the sleek, utterly unweathered hard case which was already there. The thing didn't even have wheels that he could see—it must have been one of the newer hovering models.

Arc tried to make certain the two weren't even touching, because he didn't want to be accused of scratching the thing, and certainly couldn't afford to pay for any damage. Once he'd pulled the compartment door down and heard the lock click, Arc, still half-panting from his sprint through the station concourse, collapsed down into the aisle seat. The girl who'd been looking out the window turned to regard him with an utter lack of expression, and Arc felt his throat suddenly go dry.

He couldn't, for the life of him, figure out why the girl was all alone. Surely someone—the sort of overconfident boy who captained a secondary school sporting team, for instance—would have tried their luck? Because she was absolutely the most gorgeous person he'd ever seen up close. Her hair was dark, her skin pale, and her eyes the vivid blue of a tropical sea—the kind you saw plastered all over the ads for some island resort on Terra itself.

It was a color so utterly outside his experience—at least for a real, living person's eyes—that Arc couldn't help thinking they must be the result of genetic engineering. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Don't stare," the girl said.

"I hate it when people stare." Then, she turned back to the window, where the marbled brown, white, and blue world of Vidako was visible far beneath them. It was a sight that, Arc was forced to admit, was far more interesting than he was.

"Sorry," he apologized, and then coughed to clear his dry throat.

"I just—I need to buckle in." He grabbed the belt on his right side, which was dangling over the side of the seat into the aisle, but the matching half of the buckle was half beneath the girl's hip, and the thought of reaching over and touching her to get it out made his face hot. The blue-eyed girl turned away from the window, looked down, and then shifted.

"Oh," she said, and rocked to one side, then reached down, and pulled the belt and buckle out from beneath her.

"Sorry. Here." Arc took the buckle from her, and their fingers brushed for just a second. Then, the contact was gone, and she had turned away from him again. He mated the two halves of the buckle together until they gave a satisfying click, and then finally allowed himself to collapse back into the cushioned seat. A single deep breath wasn't enough to get all the tension out of his shoulders, but it was at least a start. He wouldn't be late.

He wouldn't be the absolute last cadet rushing through the gates of the academy, stumbling into an already begun convocation speech, perhaps, while every other cadet turned in their seats to witness his embarrassment. His fears, given an entire seven-hour trip to the station to build up, had taken on the quality of fantasies so exaggerated that even Arc knew they were worse than anything which could actually happen in real life.

With a sudden lurch, and the rising hum of an engine, the elevator dropped, and the view out the window began to move. The moment they slipped out of the station's artificial gravity field, the elevator car entered zero-g, and the only thing holding Arc down was the belt across his waist. Through the layered acrylic and glass, the hull of a Harrier ship caught his eye, and Arc leaned forward in his seat just enough that he could, awkwardly, crane his neck to look past the girl at his side and see.

A wisp of her black hair had come loose from her bun, and it drifted up, as if floating in water.

"First time on an orbital elevator?" Her voice was even and low, with the same sort of accent, Arc realized, you heard from news anchors and media personalities when they conducted interviews. She sounded, he realized, like a celebrity—but that didn't make any sense. She was too young to be anything but an actress, or perhaps a musician, and no one like that would be going to the imperial academy. Arc nodded and managed to respond before the silence stretched on into a truly awkward length of time.

"We don't have one on Zurah V," he admitted.

"I had to take a shuttle up from the spaceport into orbit. And it certainly wasn't anything like this."

"Zurah V," the girl said, repeating the name of Arc's home world as if she were reading from an academic text, or answering an instructor's lesson before the class.

"Second Wave, orange K type star, chief export Zuran Silk. Nearer to yellow than red, as I recall, on the spectrum. That's something we have in common, I suppose."

"You come from a world with an orange sun, too?" Arc asked.

"Yellow, but you're closer than just about anyone else here," she said, nodding with her chin to indicate the other seats and passengers all around them.

"The vast majority of imperial worlds orbit red dwarfs. I'd bet hardly anyone here has seen green leaves in real life, other than you and I." There was something about that, Arc decided, that was truly sad.

"We've got engineered mulberry trees," he said.

"Outside the city, it's green as far as the eye can see." After a moment's hesitation, he reached over to offer his right hand.

"Arc Sandhurst." The blue-eyed girl looked down, then back up to meet his expectant gaze.

"You really don't know?" she asked.

"How do you not know? I'm certain there's a planetary net on Zurah V."

"There is." Arc blinked.

"Know what?" Her lips parted, just enough for him to notice the motion, and the hesitation before she spoke.

"Cassie." Her cool hand slipped into his.

"It's nice to meet you, Cassie," Arc said, and couldn't help but grin. He realized that he'd held her hand for a moment too long, let go, and then desperately searched for something they could talk about without him looking like a fool. With a sudden burst of inspiration, he yanked his folded tablet back out of his pocket, opened it so that the full, inner screen lit up, and used one finger to scroll over to the icon of his note files.

"Is that your girlfriend?" Cassie asked. Arc's finger froze, and he felt his hand tremble. The background was the same as it had been for months now—a picture of him and Phoebe, squeezing up against each other and grinning wide, down on Thread City Beach. You could just make out the sun-kissed waters of the lake behind them, slightly out of focus, dappled with orange light. It had been a good day—one of the last good days.

"No," he said, and he was impressed with how even his voice came out.

"That was my sister." Arc stabbed a finger down at the screen and pulled up his course schedule. The word 'was' felt like dropping an armed bomb on a conversation that was already liable to fall apart at any moment. Arc didn't dare look up from his screen, because he didn't want to see one more face full of pity. There'd been plenty of that back home already.

"I'm sorry," Cassie said.

"I didn't know."

"You couldn't," Arc told her. If he let himself think about Phoebe, he'd start crying all over again, and he couldn't do that now.

"We just met. Anyway, what courses are you taking? You're the first other student I've had a chance to meet."

"Alright. Let's compare schedules, then," Cassie said, and Arc had the sense she was as relieved at the chance to change the course of the conversation as he was. She dug her own tablet out of one pocket, flipped it open, and their shoulders touched as she leaned in so that they could hold the screens side by side.

He knew, from talking to his sister, that it was a cardinal sin of space travel to force others to endure the scent of a strong perfume or cologne, locked together inside of a closed space, but when he breathed in the fresh smell of whatever shampoo Cassie had used before travelling, it sent his heart racing again.

"There, Astronautics, with Professor Void-Skimmer," Cassie said, pointing her finger at first one screen, and then the other.

"I think just about everyone who plans to get into space has to take that."

"I bet it's a lecture with two-hundred people in it," Arc agreed, and then a ripple of motion and the sound of raised voices caught his attention. All around the elevator car, prospective cadets were straining against their safety belts, leaning over each other, and pressing their faces to the windows. It was as if, in a single moment, every single one of them had shed a decade of life and become a child once again.

"What is it?" Arc asked.

"I can't see anything." Cassie grinned.

"An academy tradition," she said.

"You never heard of it?" She shifted away from him toward her window, and he couldn't help but feel regret at the sudden absence of body heat from where their shoulders had been pressed together. He leaned over, trying to see—and then it was there. No more than twenty meters from the descending car, thrusters flaring, a mech with the look of a bird of prey paced them. It was a Kestrel, of course—there wasn't much else that would be flying in planetary orbit, and it was too small to be a Leviathan.

But even without that knowledge, Arc would have recognized it in a moment. The short, nearly vestigial wings that came out from both shoulders, the enormous missile racks attached to the hardpoints on the thrusters, and especially the distinctive arms, which had sacrificed articulated hands in favor of twin, integrated heavy lasers. The entire mech was painted in the white and blue of a fleet dress uniform, with gold accents, and it paced them as if staring in through the window.

It was only when Cassie's voice came, practically in Arc's ear, that he realized he'd leaned entirely over her lap, to get as close to the window as he could, and that their heads were side by side.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Cassie said. Arc turned his head just enough to look at her face, and the movement almost brushed their cheeks. Her eyes were wide, shining. But when he looked back out the window, for just a moment, he imagined that the Kestrel's armor was painted black, instead of in fleet colors—that on that angled chest plate, just above the cockpit, was displayed a white skull and crossbones.

It was just as well that the pilot chose that moment to dip their wings in a salute, and then break away from following the elevator down, because suddenly Arc didn't want to see any mech at all. He carefully pulled himself back from the window and settled into his own seat, taking great pains not to jostle the girl next to him. The other Kestrels in the flight must have broken away at the same time, for the excited chatter among the other cadets died away.

A moment later, the elevator car had dropped low enough for Vidako's gravity to be noticeable, and the grav-field kicked on. Arc could feel it in his belly, and that one floating tendril of Cassie's hair hung down, now, rather than dancing in the air. The world beneath them grew impossibly vast, and Arc and Cassie fell toward it.