The Blighted Stars

Book 1: The Devoured Worlds

by Megan E. O'Keefe

Genres: Women's Fiction; Space Exploration

Synopsis

Stranded on a dead planet with her mortal enemy, a spy must survive and uncover a conspiracy in the first book of an epic space opera trilogy by an award‑winning author.

She's a revolutionary. Humanity is running out of options. Habitable planets are being destroyed as quickly as they're found and Naira Sharp thinks she knows the reason why. The all-powerful Mercator family has been controlling the exploration of the universe for decades, and exploiting any materials they find along the way under the guise of helping humanity's expansion. But Naira knows the truth, and she plans to bring the whole family down from the inside.

He's the heir to the dynasty. Tarquin Mercator never wanted to run a galaxy-spanning business empire. He just wanted to study rocks and read books. But Tarquin's father has tasked him with monitoring the settlement of a new planet, and he doesn't really have a choice in the matter. 

Disguised as Tarquin's new bodyguard, Naira plans to destroy the settlement ship before they make land. But neither of them expects to end up stranded on a dead planet. To survive and keep her secret, Naira will have to join forces with the man she's sworn to hate. And together they will uncover a plot that's bigger than both of them.

For more from Megan E. O'Keefe, check out:

The Protectorate 
Velocity Weapon
Chaos Vector
Catalyst Gate 

 

Read more

Release date: May 23, 2023

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 545

Sample

ONETarquinThe Amaranth

Tarquin Mercator stood on the command bridge of the finest spaceship his father had ever built and hoped he wasn’t about to make a fool of himself. Serious people crewed the console podiums all around him, wrist-deep in holos that managed systems Tarquin was reasonably certain he could name, but there ended the extent of his knowledge. The intricate inner workings of a state-of-the-art spaceship were hardly topics covered during his geology studies.

Despite Tarquin’s lack of expertise, being Acaelus Mercator’s son placed him as second-in-command. Below Acaelus, and above the remarkably more qualified mission captain, a stern woman named Paison.

That captain was looking at him now—expectant, deferential. Thin, golden pathways resembling circuitry glittered on her skin, printed into her current body to aid her as a pilot. Sweat beaded between Tarquin’s shoulder blades.

“My liege,” Captain Paison said, all practiced obeisance, and while he desperately wished that she was addressing his father, her light grey eyes didn’t move from Tarquin. “We are approximately an hour’s flight from the prearranged landing site. Would you like to release the orbital survey drone network?”

Tarquin hoped his relief didn’t show. Scouting the planet for deposits of relkatite was the one job for which he felt firmly footed.

“Yes, Captain. Do we have visual on the planet?”

“Not yet, my liege.” She expanded a vast holographic display from her console, revealing the cloud-draped world below. “The weather is against us, but the drone network should be able to punch through it in the next few hours.”

“Hold off on landing until I can confirm our preliminary survey data. We wouldn’t want to put the ship down too far from a viable mining site.”

Polite chuckles all around. Tarquin forced a smile at their faux camaraderie and pulled up a holo from his own console, reviewing the data the survey drones had retrieved before the mining ships Amaranth and Einkorn had taken flight for the tedious eight-month voyage to Sixth Cradle.

Not that he’d been awake for that journey. His mind and the minds of the entire crew had been safely stored away in the ship’s databases, automated systems in place to print key personnel when they drew within range of low-planet orbit. When food was so expensive, there was no point in feeding people who weren’t needed to work during the trip.

Tarquin’s father put a hand on his shoulder and gave him a friendly shake. “Excited to see a cradle world?”

“I can’t wait,” he said honestly. When he’d been a child, Tarquin’s mother had taken him to Second Cradle shortly before its collapse. Those memories of that rare, Earthlike world were vague. Tarquin smiled up into eyes a slightly darker shade of hazel than his own.

At nearly 160 years old, Acaelus chose to strike an imposing figure with his prints—tall, solidly built, a shock of pure white hair that hinted at his advanced age. It was difficult to look into that face and see anything but the father he’d known as a child—stern but kind. A man who’d fought to have Tarquin’s mind mapped as early as possible so that he could be printed into a body that better suited him after the one he’d been born into hadn’t quite fit.

Hard to see through that, to the man whose iron will and vast fortune leashed thousands to his command.

“My liege,” Captain Paison said, a wary edge to her voice, “I apologize, but it appears there was an error in the system. The survey drones have been released already, or perhaps were never loaded into

place.”

“What?” Tarquin accessed those systems via his own console. Sure enough, the drone bays were empty. “How could that have happened?”

“I—I can’t say, my liege,” Paison said.

The fear in her voice soured Tarquin’s stomach. Before he could assure her that it wasn’t her fault, Acaelus took over.

“This is unacceptable,” his father said. The crew turned as one to duck their heads to him. Acaelus’s scowl cut through them all, and he pointed to an engineer. “You. Go, scour the ship for the drones and load them properly. I expect completion within the hour, and an accounting of whose failure led to this.”

“Yes, my liege.” The engineer tucked into a deep bow and then turned on their heel, whole body taut with nervous energy. Tarquin suspected that as soon as they were on the other side of the door, they’d break into a sprint.

“It was just a mistake,” Tarquin said.

“Mercator employees do not make mistakes of this magnitude,” Acaelus said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Whoever is responsible will lose their cuffs, and if I catch anyone covering for the responsible party, they will lose theirs, too.”

“That’s unnecessary,” Tarquin said, and immediately regretted it as his father turned his icy stare upon him. Acaelus clutched his shoulder, this time without the friendly intent, fingers digging into Tarquin’s muscle.

“Leave the running of Mercator to me, my boy,” he said, softly enough not to be overheard but with the same firm inflection.

Tarquin nodded, ashamed to be cowed so quickly but unable to help it. His father was a colossus, an institution unto himself, a force of nature. Tarquin was just a scholar. The running of the family wasn’t his burden to carry. Acaelus released his shoulder and set to barking further orders with the brisk efficiency of long years of rule.

He gripped the edges of his console podium, staring at the bands printed around his wrists in Mercator green. Relkatite green. The cuffs meant you worked for Mercator’s interests, and Mercator’s alone. And while the work was grueling, it guaranteed regular meals. Medical care. Housing. Your phoenix fees paid, if your print was destroyed. The other ruling corporate families—who collectively called themselves MERIT—had their own colored cuffs. A rainbow of fealty.

Working for the families of MERIT kept people safe, in all the ways that mattered. While his father could be brusque, and at times even cruel, Acaelus did these things only out of a desire to ensure that safety.

The cuffs around Tarquin’s wrists came with more than the promise of safety. Mercator’s crest flowed up from those bands to wrap over the backs of his hands and twist between his fingers. The family gloves marke

d him as a blooded Mercator. Not a mere employee, but in the direct line of succession. Someone to be obeyed. Feared. His knuckles paled.

“Straighten up,” Acaelus said.

Tarquin peeled his hands away from the console and regained his composure, slipping the aristocratic mask of indifference back on, then set to work reviewing the data the ship had collected since entering Sixth Cradle’s orbit.

Alarms blared on the bridge. Tarquin jerked his head up, startled by the flashing red lights and the sharp squeal of a siren. On the largest display, the one that’d previously shown a dreamy landscape of fluffy clouds under the brush of golden morning light, the words TARGET LOCKED glared in crimson text.

That wasn’t possible. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone here except the Amaranth and its twin, the Einkorn. Of the five ruling corporate families, none but Mercator could even build ships capable of beating them here.

“Evade and report,” Acaelus ordered.

Captain Paison flung her arms out, tossing holo screens to the copilots flanking her, and the peaceful clouds were replaced with shield reports, weapons systems, and evasion programs. There was no enemy ship that he could see. A firestorm of activity kicked off, and while Tarquin knew, logically, that they’d rolled, the ship suppressed any sensation of motion.

“It’s the Einkorn, my liege.” The captain’s voice was strained from her effort.

“Who’s awake over there?” Acaelus demanded.

“No one should be, my liege,” the Amaranth’s medical officer said. Their freckled face was pale.

“Someone over there doesn’t like us,” the woman to Paison’s right said between gritted teeth. “Conservators?”

“It’s not their MO,” said a broad-chested man in the grey uniform of the Human Collective Army. “But it’s possible. Should I check on the security around the warpcore?”

“I iced Ex. Sharp,” Acaelus said. “Without her to guide them, the Conservators are nothing but flies to be swatted. Captain, continue evasion and hail the Einkorn.”

Tarquin cast a sideways glance at Ex. Kearns, Acaelus’s current bodyguard and constant shadow. The exemplar had the face of a shovel, as broad and intimidating as the rest of him, and he didn’t react to the mention of his ex-partner, Ex. Sharp. It had to sting, having the woman he’d worked side by side with turn against them all and start bombing Mercator’s ships and warehouses.

The fact that Naira Sharp had been captured and her neural map locked away didn’t erase the specter of the threat she posed. Her conspirators, the Conservators, were still out there, and Tarquin found Acaelus’ s

 quick dismissal of the possibility of their involvement odd.

The HCA soldier was right. They really should send someone down to check on the warpcore. Overloading the cores was the Conservators’ primary method of destruction. Tarquin rallied himself to say as much, but Paison spoke first.

“My liege,” she said, “the Einkorn’s assault may be a malfunction. The Amaranth’s controls aren’t responding properly. I can’t—”

Metal shrieked. The floor quaked. Ex. Kearns surged in front of them and shoved Tarquin dead center in the chest. The world tipped and Tarquin’s feet flew out from under him. He struck the ground on his side. Something slammed into him from above, stealing his half-voiced shout.

Tarquin blinked, head buzzing, a painful throb radiating from his hips where a piece of the console podium he’d been working at seconds before had landed. Red and yellow lights strobed, warning of the damage done, but no breach alarms sounded.

Groaning, he shook his head to clear it. The impact had pitched people up against the walls. Seats and bits of console podiums scattered the ground. Across the room, Paison and another woman helped each other back to their feet.

“Son!” Acaelus dropped to his knees beside him. Tarquin was astonished to see a cut mar his father’s forehead, dripping blood. “Are you all right?”

Tarquin moved experimentally, and though his side throbbed, his health pathways were already healing the damage and supplying him with painkillers. “Just bruised. What happened?”

“A direct hit.” Acaelus took Tarquin’s face in his hands, examining him, then looked over his shoulder and shouted, “Kearns!”

Kearns removed the piece of podium from Tarquin’s side and helped him to his feet. Tarquin brushed dust off his clothes and tried to get ahold of himself while, all around him, chaos brewed. Kearns limped, his left leg dragging, and Tarquin grimaced. Exemplars were loaded with pathways keyed to combat. For one of them to show pain, the wound had to be bad.

Tarquin nudged a broken chunk of the console podium with the toe of his boot. A piece of the ceiling had come down, crushing the podiums, and it would have crushed Acaelus and Tarquin both if Kearns hadn’t intervened, taking the brunt of the hit on his own legs.

A knot formed in his throat as he recognized the damage Kearns had taken on their behalf. Tarquin had never been in anything like real danger before, and he desperately missed his primary exemplar, Caldweller, but that man’s neural map was still in storage. Acaelus had deemed Kearns enough to cover both of them until they reached the planet.

None of them could have accounted for this.

“My liege,” Kearns said in tones that didn’t invite argument, “I suggest we move to a

more secure location immediately.”

“Agreed,” Acaelus said. “Captain, what’s the damage?”

“Uhhh…” Paison squinted at one of the few consoles that’d survived the impact. “The Einkorn’s rail guns tore through the stabilization column. This ship won’t hold together much longer.”

Brittle silence followed that announcement, the roughed-up crew exchanging looks or otherwise staring at the damaged bridge like they could wind back time. Tarquin studied his father, trying to read anything in the mask Acaelus wore in crisis, and saw nothing but grim resolve wash over him. Acaelus grabbed Tarquin’s arm and turned him around.

“Very well. With me, all of you, we’re evacuating this ship.”

Tarquin stumbled along beside his father, half in a daze. Kearns assumed smooth control of the situation, sliding into his place at the top of security’s chain of command. Merc-Sec and the HCA soldiers organized under Kearns’s barked orders, forming a defensive column around the rest. Paison threw a brief, longing glance at her command post before falling in with the others. Tarquin found himself in the center of a crush of people, not entirely certain how he’d gotten there.

How had they gone from looking at fluffy clouds to fleeing for their lives in less than ten minutes?

The HCA soldier next to him, the one who’d said this wasn’t the Conservators’ MO, caught his eye and gave him a quick, reassuring smile. Tarquin mustered up the ability to smile back and read the man’s name badge—DAWD, REGAR. That meager kindness reminded him that there was more at stake than his worries. These people had put their lives in the hands of Mercator.

If they died here, they could be reprinted later, but every death increased one’s chance of one’s neural map cracking the next time it was printed. Neural maps were never perfect; they degraded over time. Traumatic deaths sped the process exponentially, as even the best-shielded backups were never entirely disentangled from the active map.

As if there were fine threads of connection between all backups and the living mind, and sufficient trauma could reverberate out to them all.

Some people came up screaming, and never stopped. Some got caught in time loops, unsure which moment of their lives they were really living through. Neither state was survivable.

Tarquin summoned the scraps of his courage and stood straighter. He had no business in a crisis, but the employees looked to him for assurance. His terror no doubt added to their anxiety, and that was selfish of him.

Something metal groaned in the walls, taunting his ability to hold it together. Tarquin cast an irritated glance at the complaining ship. If only ships would fall in line as easily as people.

Acaelus pulled up a holo from his forearm, but whatever he saw there was blurred by his privacy filters. The information carved a scowl into his face. He slowed and swiped his ID pathway over the door t

o a lab, unlocking it.

“Everyone, in here,” he said.

They hesitated. Paison said, “My liege, the shuttle isn’t far from here.”

“I’m aware of the layout of my own ship, Captain. Get in, all of you, and wait. I’ve just received notice that Ex. Lockhart’s print order went through. I won’t allow my exemplar to awaken to a dying ship. You will go into this lab, and you will wait for my return.”

That wasn’t right. The secondary printing round wasn’t automated; it needed to be initiated. Tarquin frowned, watching the crew shift uncomfortably. Every one of them knew Acaelus was telling a half-truth at best, but none of them were willing to say it.

There was a slim possibility that whatever was causing the other errors had triggered this, but making all these people wait while Acaelus collected one person was a waste of time.

“My liege.” Paison stepped forward, squaring off her shoulders. “I can’t guarantee this ship will last that long, and we require your command keys to open the hangar airlock.”

“I am aware, and you are delaying. Get in the lab.”

They shuffled inside without another word, though they were all watching Acaelus warily. The terror of offending their boss was greater than the fear of being left behind to die. You could come back from death. You could never re-cuff for Mercator after being fired. The door shut, leaving Tarquin and his father alone with Kearns. Tarquin’s head pounded.

“What are you doing?” he demanded in a soft hiss. “Ex. Lockhart can handle herself. We have to get these people out.”

Acaelus shoved him down the hallway. “We need to get out. I printed Lockhart to help Kearns handle the crew, but you and I are going to cast our maps back and exit this situation, because I don’t know what’s happened here, and I’m not risking your map.”

Tarquin dug his heels in, drawing his father to a halt. “We can’t just leave. I’m not going to allow the Conservators to run us off before I have proof the mining process is safe.”

“If this was the Conservators, then we’d already be dead. All the nonfamily printing bays just went active, and I do not know who is coming out of those bays. We have to leave. Kearns and Lockhart will handle the rest.”

Tarquin rubbed his eyes in frustration. “We can’t abandon the mission.”

“We can, and we are. Come. This is hardly the place for an argument.”

Acaelus jerked on his arm. Tarquin stumbled after him, mind reeling. Sixth Cradle was supposed to be his mission. Supposed to be the moment Tarquin stood up for his family and finally squashed all those squalid rumors Ex. Sharp had started when she’d claimed the relkatite mining process was killing worlds.

While a great deal o

f what his family had to do to ensure their survival was distasteful, Tarquin was absolutely certain the mining process was safe. He’d refined it himself. Mining Sixth Cradle and leaving it green and thriving was meant to be the final nail in the coffin of those accusations. The one thing he could do for his family that was useful.

He wouldn’t run. Not this time. Not like he had when his mother had died and he’d fled to university to bury himself in his studies, instead of facing the suffering that weighed on his father’s and sister’s hearts.

“I’m sorry, Dad, I won’t—”

“Kearns, carry him,” Acaelus said.

Tarquin was thirty-five years old, second in line to the most powerful position in the universe, and Ex. Kearns scooped him up like he was little more than luggage and tossed him over his shoulder without a flash of hesitation, because Acaelus Mercator had demanded it. Kearns’s shoulder dug into Tarquin’s ribs, pressing a startled grunt out of him. His cheeks burned with indignity.

“I’m not a child,” Tarquin snapped, surprised at the edge in his tone. He never raised his voice to his father.

“You are my child, and you will do as I say.”

Acaelus didn’t bother to look at him. Tarquin closed his eyes, letting out a slow sigh of defeat. There was no arguing with his father when he’d made up his mind. He opened his eyes, and temporarily forgot how to breathe. The door to one of the staff printing bays yawned open, and it wasn’t people who emerged from that space. Not exactly.

Their faces were close to human, but something had gone off in the printing. A mouth set too far right. An ear sprouting from the side of a neck. An arm that bent the wrong way around. Half a chest cavity missing.

Misprints. Empties. An error in the printer slapping together a hodgepodge of human parts. The Amaranth wouldn’t have tried putting a neural map into any of those bodies, but whatever had caused the malfunction had also made the ship release the prints instead of disintegrating them into their constituent parts, as was protocol for a misprint.

What was left of those faces twisted, drew into vicious snarls.

“Kearns,” Tarquin hissed in a sharp whisper. His voice was alarmed enough that the exemplar turned.

Kearns pulled his sidearm and fired. The earsplitting roar of the shot in such a small space slammed into Tarquin’s ears, but his pathways adjusted, keeping him from going temporarily deaf. The misprints shrieked with what throats and lungs they had, and rushed them. Kearns rolled Tarquin off his shoulder and shoved him back.

Tarquin stumbled, but his father caught him and then spun, pushing him ahead. “Run!”

Fear stripped away all his reservations and Tarquin ran, pounding down the hallways for the family’s private printing bay, praying that he wouldn’t find the same thing there.

Kearns’s weapon r

oared again and again, a staccato rhythm drowning out the screams of the misprints. He looked over his shoulder to find Acaelus right behind him, Kearns farther back, his injured leg slowing him down. Tarquin faced forward and sprinted—the door to the printing bay was just ahead.

Kearns’s gun fell silent. His father screamed.

Tarquin whirled around. Acaelus was chest-down on the ground, misprints swarming over him, their teeth and nails digging into his skin, ripping free bloody chunks. He took a step toward them, not knowing what he could possibly do, and Acaelus looked up, face set with determination as he flung out a hand.

“Go home!” he ordered.

He met his father’s eyes. Acaelus pushed his tongue against the inside of his cheek, making it bulge out in warning. New terror struck Tarquin. High-ranking members of the corporate families often wore small, personal explosive devices on the interior side of a molar to use in case someone intending to crack their neural maps attacked them. Acaelus had one.

Tarquin fled. He burst through the printing bay door and slammed it shut behind him, leaning his back against it, breathing harder than he ever had in his life. The explosion was designed to be small. It whumped against the door, tickling his senses.

A gruesome way to die, but it was swift. Gentler suicide pathways had been tried, but they had a nasty habit of malfunctioning. Pathways remained frustratingly unpredictable at times.

He swallowed. The staff back on Mercator Station would reprint Acaelus the second they received notice that his tracker pathway had been destroyed and his visual feed had cut. His father would be fine. Tarquin forced himself away from the door, shaking.

One of the printing cubicles was lit red to indicate it was in use. He crossed to the map backup station and picked up the crown of electronics, running it between his hands.

Tarquin knew he wasn’t what his father had wanted. He lacked the clear-eyed ruthlessness of his elder sister, Leka. He couldn’t stand to watch people cower beneath the threat of his ire as Acaelus so often had to do to keep their employees in line. His singular concession to being a Mercator was that his love of geology and subsequent studies had aided the family in their hunt for relkatite.

His father never complained about Tarquin’s lack of participation in family politics. Acaelus had given Tarquin everything he’d ever asked for and had only ever asked for one thing in return.

When Naira Sharp had been captured and put to trial, Tarquin had taken the stand to prove her accusations false. As a Mercator, as the foremost expert in his field of study, he had disproved all her allegations t

hat Mercator’s mining processes destroyed worlds.

It hadn’t stopped the rumors. Hadn’t stopped the other families of MERIT from looking askance at Mercator and asking themselves if, maybe, they wouldn’t be better off without them.

They needed to mine a cradle world and leave it thriving in their wake to put the rumors to bed once and for all.

Tarquin could still give his father that proof, but he couldn’t do it alone. Not with misprints infesting the halls and the potential of a saboteur on the loose. He needed an exemplar.

He set the backup crown down and crossed to the printing bay control console, checking the progress on Lockhart’s print. Ninety seconds left. Enough time to compose himself. Enough time, he hoped, to get to the planet after she’d finished printing.

Tarquin had never disobeyed a direct order from his father before, and he hoped he wasn’t making a colossal mistake.

TWONairaThe Amaranth

It wasn’t the first time Naira Sharp had awoken in the wrong body, but it was the first time she had done so with the acrid reek of burning plastics in the air. People said that the first thing you saw in a new body set the tone for how that life would be lived, but Naira had been brought back often enough in the relkatite-green cubicles of her enemy that she’d abandoned visual superstition for olfactory. A decision she regretted right about now.

Naira lifted her arms and found them medium brown and well muscled, tapering to wrists banded in the green cuffs that marked this body as an employee of Mercator. The stranger’s skin glittered with pathways, golden implants reminiscent of circuitry. An experimental flexing of those pathways revealed they enhanced strength and agility.

An icy sensation built behind her eyes.

Breathe. She’d dropped into dozens of different bodies, and though this wasn’t the one she’d expected, its shape was surprisingly close to her preferred print. A little shorter, maybe. A little sturdier.

She’d been counting on waking up in the freshly printed body of Acaelus Mercator. Something had gone wrong, but this body wouldn’t stop her.

Because the fact she’d been printed at all meant that Kav had done it. He’d gotten her map off ice in time for the Sixth Cradle mission. She’d slipped Acaelus’s control at last.

Naira was free.

She planted pathway-enhanced legs against the hatch at the foot of her cubicle and shoved. Discarded biomatrix sloshed as the tray she’d been printed onto rocketed out, barely catching on the rails. Fresh air burned into her lungs, all at once refreshing and astringent.

“Whoa. Ex. Lockhart, are you all right?” a man asked.

Her pathways adjusted her vision, taking away the sting from the bright lights. She didn’t recognize the name, but she knew the title of exemplar. That solved the mystery of why she was crammed full of high-end combat pathways.

Naira rolled off the tray and dropped into a crouch, the cold floor shocking some of the haze from her mind. Slowly, she stood, flexing each muscle one by one. The circuit board lines mapping her skin glittered as she stretched.

“What’s happened?” she asked, to give herself time to think.

“I don’t know,” the man said. He stood by the printer control terminal and slid a panel closed before turning around to face her.

Dark brown hair fell to the edge of his jaw in wavy chunks, partially hiding an angular face with soft hazel eyes and thick eyebrows. The man’s demeanor lacked the arrogance common to his family, but there was no hiding the aristocratic lift to his chin, the aquiline nose.

Tarquin Mercator. Youngest child of Acaelus Mercator. Geologist, recluse. She’d never crossed paths with him when she’d been an exemplar.

But he’d crossed her, when he’d testified against her at the trial.

The basic facts of his dossier spun through Naira’s mind, something to hold on to so that she wouldn’t break him between her bare hands, punish him for taking the stand and explaining, with that faux-charm common to his family, that she’d been mistaken. That his family’s mining practices couldn’t be responsible for the conta

gion that collapsed ecosystems.

That killed worlds.

Naira wasn’t here for him. She was here to stop this ship. To keep Mercator lies from destroying yet another viable planet. He might have information and access that could help her accomplish those goals. It was a near thing, though, not indulging the urge to wring his neck.

“The Einkorn fired on us. We can’t raise them on comms,” Tarquin said.

“Situation on board?” She opened a bulkhead panel and pulled out a set of light body armor. The fibers went on baggy, then adjusted to conform to her body. The interior of her forearm lit up briefly, then turned clear, revealing the network system integrated with the skin of her arm. She flicked her gaze through the display, checking permissions. Ex. Lockhart had almost as much clearance as Acaelus. She could work with that.

Tarquin twisted his fingers together. “It’s a mess, E-X. There are living misprints roaming the halls, attacking people. I have a group of survivors that need an escort to an escape shuttle before the ship tears itself apart.”

Misprints assaulting people sounded highly unlikely. She needed someone who actually knew what was going on. “Where’s Liege Acaelus?”

“Dead.”

“His print failed?”

“He was printed. He lived. He and Ex. Kearns are both dead. We have to go.”

Her stomach swooped with the sway of the ship as the Amaranth lurched to one side. Red and yellow warning lights painted the printing bay in a sickly glow. The artificial gravity stuttered, filling the air with the harsh scent of ozone even as her weight vacillated between boulder heavy and feather light.

Destroying the relkatite containment of the ship’s warpcore had been the Conservators’ plan. The plan, however, had not included her being on the ship at the time. And it certainly wasn’t supposed to go in fits and starts like this.

The surge passed, leaving her panting with her hands on her knees. Tarquin slouched against the console podium he’d been working at, holding on for dear life. His complexion was wan and sweaty.

“That’s new,” he gritted out between his teeth and forced himself to stand.

“Warpcore’s damaged,” she said matter-of-factly, ripping open another bulkhead to find—ah yes, perfect—a wide selection of rifles and handguns. She selected a few weapons, strapped them on, then gave Tarquin a once-over.

“Can you run?”

“Yes.” He brushed a hand through his sweaty hair.

“Good. Follow me. Where are the other exemplars?”

“You’re the only one. There’s just a skeleton crew. We entered low-planet orbit five hours ago.”

“Then who the hell attacked the ship?”

“I really don’t know.”

Naira swiped up a map on her print’s built-in HUD. She put a pin in the location of the nearest shuttle, then switched her rifle to crowd-control mode

The last thing she wanted to do was accidentally kill any of her team. Naira stepped into the hallway.

Smoke hung thick in the air, stinging the back of her throat. Remnants of a small explosion painted the walls in greasy soot and gore. The Amaranth shuddered again, making her stumble, and she got a hand against the wall to steady herself as a group of people tore around the corner, rushing her.

Her blood ran cold. Blank faces stared at her even as they sped up, empty eyes tracking her every movement with less personality than a rock. Misprints. She really hadn’t believed Tarquin’s report, and found herself grudgingly impressed that the princeling hadn’t dissolved into sobbing panic.

Naira switched back to lethal and fired without a second thought.

“Let’s go,” she said to Tarquin once she’d dealt with the misprints. “Stay behind me.”

He edged into the hallway, throat bobbing as he followed. A little too tight on her heels, but she couldn’t blame him and didn’t have the time to tell him to back off. The HUD implanted in this print kept her updated on the Amaranth’s systems, and Naira didn’t like the amount of red in the display.

This ship was dying, and not in the tidy way the Conservators had planned. The Einkorn’s rail guns had torn through the ship’s stabilizers. She scanned the damage as she marched down the hall, checking her corners.

The hit was too clean, not a random misfire caused by the AI glitching. Whoever had fired from the Einkorn wanted the Amaranth not just destroyed, but crashed into Sixth Cradle. It’d kill everyone on board, but it’d also risk contaminating the planet with Mercator’s mining materials, priming it for the same collapse syndrome that infected the other cradles.

Naira clenched her jaw. She was a killer in a war few believed in, but this wanton destruction of both the human life on board and the planet wasn’t something she or the other Conservators would endorse.

If it wasn’t the Conservators, then who? Was she really free of Acaelus? Until she could rendezvous with her team and confirm the state of her neural map, she needed to stay alive. Otherwise, she might find herself back on ice.

And then the next time she woke it’d be in Acaelus’s labs, the subject of his experiments.

“E-X, wait.” Tarquin jogged up alongside her, and she bit back a remark about him staying behind as he swiped a hand over a door panel.

The door opened into a lab. A quick head count put the population inside at around fifty people. Mostly Mercator personnel, though five wore the gold-crested flak jacket and grey cuffs of the Human Collective Army.

Naira almost smirked at the HCA soldiers, but stopped herself. Acaelus must have hated being forced to bring the HCA on his mining missions

to “oversee” the process after she’d outed him for killing worlds.

She extended two fingers and pressed them against the top of her thigh, the signal the Conservators currently used to identify one another when inhabiting prints not their own. No one reacted to the gesture, so she turned it into a stretch.

“Liege Tarquin,” said a wiry woman inside the lab. She slammed a hand down over a holo to close it, but not before Naira caught a glimpse of what she’d been working on.

She’d had the controls to the hangar airlock open, doors that could only be unlocked by Mercator command keys due to the shroud protection protocols. Naira glanced at the woman’s jacket—CAPTAIN PAISON. The mission commander had been trying to find a way around Acaelus’s lockout. Naira liked her immediately.

Paison covered her surprise with a deep bow, and the confident posture Naira had seen seconds before melted away into practiced obedience. The others followed suit. At least this print kept her off the hook when it came to bowing to Tarquin. Exemplars didn’t look away from their charges. She’d have to remember to refer to the little shit by his title, though.

“We stayed put, as your father ordered,” Paison said, deftly reminding Tarquin that she was a loyal employee, “but we heard gunfire. Where is Liege Acaelus?”

“My father and Ex. Kearns are dead,” Tarquin said. “Please follow Ex. Lockhart’s guidance as we evacuate.”

“Group up,” Naira said. “This ship has another five minutes of life left.”

“Yes, E-X.” Paison gave her a salute that was arguably more deferential than the bow she’d given Tarquin.

The ship groaned, metal tearing somewhere. Heat rushed down the hall, her pathway-heightened senses picking up on it a second before the wall of flame hit.

Naira pivoted, rusty instincts kicking to the surface, and grabbed Tarquin in both arms, folding her shorter but stronger body over his as she slammed him against the wall. He smelled pleasantly of sun-soaked sandstone, which was rather irritating, as her enemy shouldn’t be allowed to smell like anything nice.

Fire licked up her hips and scoured through her light armor, chasing all thoughts away. Blisters bubbled across her back. Naira hissed, pain making her breath short as agony wrapped searing fingers around her and then—in a flash—was gone, the fire burned out as the suppression system kicked on, showering them all in chemical foam.

She released the princeling and staggered away, bracing one hand against the opposite wall. Char painted everything void-dark, grey flecks of suppression foam drifting through the air. Naira focused on the visuals, because to sink back into the base sensations of her body was to start screaming, and she had to hold it together. Had to get off this ship.

“E-X,” Tarquin said, shoving a hand over his mouth to stifle his revul

ion. Cooked meat perfumed the air. “Your pathways, are they damaged?”

Right, she’d almost forgotten. The circuit board patterns on her skin tickled as they vibrated, responding to her will, and dulled the exquisite edge of pain.

It would take time for the singed edges of the pathways on her back to build up enough skin for them to regenerate themselves fully, but the pain abatement would keep her moving. She checked her HUD. Three minutes until the Amaranth stopped listing and started dropping.

“I’ll hold.” She forced herself to stand straight, to take her hand away from the wall, testing her ability to stay on her feet.

The seared muscles of her back stretched with the motion, sparking fresh shock waves of pain. She trembled, cold sweat coating everywhere she still had skin, her teeth chattering with the beginnings of shock.

Naira ordered the pathways to flood her with all the painkillers they could synth, and her head spun with dizzy euphoria.

Tarquin touched her unburnt forearm lightly and met her gaze, holding her rifle out to her. “We have to keep moving.”

Naira nodded as she took the rifle and stopped herself from slinging the strap over her back at the last second. She dialed back the painkillers. Even though every step was agony, she couldn’t fight while high as a satellite.

“Form up,” she barked into the lab. “We’re running.”

“What the fuck was that?” one of the Merc-Sec asked.

“An explosion. Crashing ships have those. Move your ass if you don’t want to experience a bigger version.”

She didn’t wait to see if the others followed. She grabbed Tarquin by the back of his jacket and shoved him forward. Footsteps rushed after them, scurrying to keep up, and she heard someone sob softly. Someone else started vomiting. The vibration in her pathways mounted, a persistent ache, but ignorable, considering everything else.

Tarquin swiped them into a hangar. An Arrow-class shuttle waited, surrounded by pallets of supplies meant for the first expedition to the planet. Her grip tightened around the rifle. They didn’t have time to load the supplies. They’d have to make do with what they found on the planet. Which could get… complicated.

The doorframe was aglow with blue lights, indicating the hangar was free of shroud spore. Good. As desperate as Naira was to escape Acaelus, she would have let them all die with the Amaranth if it meant protecting the planet from shroud contamination.

“Board. Now,” Naira ordered. “Liege Tarquin, please enter your command keys into the control podium to release the airlock, then take a seat.”

“I can do that, E-X,” he said, overly eager, then hurried up the gangway.

Naira shook her head at his back and turned to Captain Paison. The captain eyed her warily, no doubt worried that Naira had seen what she’d been doing on that holo. With her grey eyes downcast and an affected slouch to her shoulders, she made herself unassuming. Nonthreatening. Clever woman.

Naira put one hand on Paison’s shoulder. She lowered her voice. “Can you get this shuttle to ground?”

“Yes, but I was only escorting these people. If the Amaranth is going down, I’m going with it.”

“Captain Paison,” she whispered, “bullshit. I saw what you were doing, and I’ll keep my mouth shut if you get us all down safely.”

Paison’s nostrils flared. She lifted her eyes to meet Naira’s, and Naira glimpsed the steel in her spine. The confidence she’d seen in the seconds before Paison had realized who had walked back into that lab. Slowly, she nodded.

“Copy that, E-X.” Paison jogged up the gangway, Naira right behind her.

Ninety-seven seconds. Naira slapped the button for an emergency takeoff and the shuttle’s gangway dropped, clanging to the ground, as the double doors of the airlock slammed shut.

“E-X,” one of the Merc-Sec called to her from their seat. “Strap in!”

She craned her neck around, eyed the harnesses over the seats, and suppressed a shudder. No way was she putting her raw back against a seat, let alone strapping on a harness.

Naira went into the cockpit and stood between the copilot’s seat and console podium. The podium raised to account for her standing. Paison glanced up and nodded to her, sliding over a command screen from her console. Naira bent her knees, lowering her center of gravity, and activated her pathways, sending strength into her legs. Taking some of the strength away from her back stung like hell, but it’d be worse in the chair, where the friction would do more damage.

“Integrity check clear. We are sealed and ready for vacuum,” Naira said, flicking through the holographic displays.

“Spooling engines,” Paison said.

The shuttle’s engines thrummed to life, vibrating through the floor. The soles of her boots softened. Naira sank slightly as the boots switched over to the sticky mode that would allow her to cling in place when they lost gravity from the larger ship.

“We’re green to go,” Paison said. The shuttle lifted from the floor. “Opening hangar airlock.”

In the corner of her eye, Naira’s HUD countdown to ship destabilization flashed red. She closed the warning so she could focus on the screens in front of her.

“What the—?” Paison cut herself off.

Naira followed Pai

son’s line of sight. The internal hangar door had opened, and a man strode into the room. The strobing red lights that warned of imminent depressurization obscured his features.

“Fuck.” Paison reached for the airlock controls.

“Continue,” Naira ordered.

“But—”

“It’s too late to let him on board. The Amaranth is going to drop like a rock in seconds.”

Paison’s fingers curled into ineffectual fists over her console display. It was true. She knew it was true. That didn’t make it any easier.

The man looked up, right at them, squinting through the tinted glass as if he could see them. Maybe he could. The skin of his face glittered with the presence of exemplar pathways.

He met Naira’s stare, pressed two fingers against his thigh, and winked.

The hangar opened, and the shuttle was yanked out into the thin air of low-planet orbit. 

THREENairaSixth Cradle

The blue marble rushed toward her, and it was wrong. A thick blanket of atmosphere covered the cradle, swirled with fluffy clouds. Glistening blue seas swathed the planet and that was correct, expected.

But a cradle—this cradle—was supposed to be an Earth-simulate. Green and lush and full of flora and fauna, but no people, not yet. Naira had been born on Second Cradle and had lived through that planet’s collapse. She’d seen the other cradles in footage, and in life, as she and the Conservators tore through the last two mining fleets, rending them into quantum foam before they could drop their terrible payloads and erase the green.

The green was what Naira protected. What she’d given up everything—everything—to preserve.

Sixth Cradle was not green.

A grey sheen draped the landmasses in funeral despair. The thin layer of shroud lichen enveloping the world glinted, shining at certain angles. Green existed, she noted with detached interest. It veined through the grey and dead things, whispered of growth and renewal. But Naira knew the progress of planetary collapse syndrome, and when the shroud lichen was that advanced, the fight was already over. Those threads of green were not spring come anew. They were a last gasp, a desperate burst of life before the end.

She had come to save this world, and it was already dead.

How? and why? were unhelpful questions when you were plummeting through an atmosphere at the terminal velocity of a shuttle’s mass, gaining in speed as the ship jerked, found an arc trajectory to the ground. Became ballistic.

Naira put all her stunned questions aside. Wrapped them up in a box to be opened later, and focused on landing this shuttle. You couldn’t answer questions when you were a smear on the ground.

“Decreasing speed,” Paison said.

“Absolutely not. Maintain trajectory and velocity. Hell, if this thing has any more kick in it, pour it on.”

“We don’t have a damping system capable of withstanding g’s any stronger than we’re taking, E-X. You want to live to see the ground, we have to slow this bitch down.”

“Don’t drop us below seventy-five percent of max,” Naira said. “We need that speed to get clear of the Amaranth.”

“What’s the state of the projected debris field?”

Naira blinked to bring up her HUD, which was still linked to damage reports from the Amaranth. The sea of red almost blinded her. She shunted that away, accessing a menu that would tie the shuttle into her HUD instead. The shuttle’s shields lit up with proximity warnings. Bits of the Amaranth headed their way.

“First impact wave in forty seconds,” Naira said.

Paison’s hands danced through her console’s projections, switching power from the engines to the shields. The shuttle whined as it was forced to power down, but in Naira’s HUD, the shields glowed a triumphant green.

“Impact,” Naira said.

The shuttle rocked, green shields wilting away to yellow, a freckle of red. Her stomach lurched as the shuttle rolled sideways. She gripped the edges of her console podium to brace herself.

“Don’t lose trajectory,” Naira said. “What’s wrong with the stabilizers?”

“This is a shuttle, not a warship,” Paison snapped.

Paison grabbed a smaller square of a menu and bunched it in her fist, then tossed it to Naira’s console. The manual controls for the stabilizers winked up at her, and the helpful letters that read AI GUIDANCE SYSTEM were solidly red. The GUI designer had even put a neat strike-through line across those letters, for extra emphasis when shit went sideways.

In theory, Ex. Lockhart could micromanage the stabilizer system with ease. In theory, Naira had the exact same training when she’d been an E-X in her own right. But theory didn’t do you a fuckload of good when you’d spent the last five years piloting raiding ships cobbled together from scrap out on the edges of society. This shuttle was so new she didn’t even recognize the layout of the stabilizers.

A menu caught her eye and she flicked aside the stabilizer controls, digging deep until she found a weapons panel. ...