The legacy, p.1
The Legacy, page 1
CONTENTS
Join the Crew!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Also By Kate Sheeran Swed
About the Author
Copyright © 2023 by Kate Sheeran Swed
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Cover by Deranged Doctor Design
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CHAPTER 1
REGGIE
I know this is a dream.
For one thing, there’s a waterfall. And though there are many oddities in our little corner of the space-faring universe, I personally have never seen a waterfall.
This one falls in a rush, as if the drops are racing each other to reach the perfect circle of a pool at the bottom. White rock frames the fall in a crisp semi-circle—too crisp to belong to nature, I would think—interrupted only by occasional sprays of plant life that burst out from between the cracks. The waterfall itself is wide, and it spills away from the top ledge in a perfect arc.
The second hint that this is a dream: the pool is too still. No bubbles. No churn. I stand beside it, allowing the gentle roar to fill my ears. It doesn’t matter that there is no churn, which means there should be no roar. It just is. Misty droplets coat my cheeks, and I don’t wipe them away.
The third thing is perhaps the most obvious: my mother is with me.
Mom stands with her dark hair loose around her shoulders, watching the waterfall with open awe. She got that expression a lot when she was alive, even after all she’d seen. The united fleet, the war, the Resistance, all of it. Whenever one of her inventions suddenly clicked into place and started to work, for example. Like she never really trusted her own brilliance. Or whenever we’d visit the crop decks, which was often.
“Look,” she’d say, “what incredible things humans have built. Cornfields! In the stars!”
“Look!” I’d reply. “We have to steal it to eat it!”
She always punched me gently on the shoulder for saying that, but I always said it, anyway. From a young age, I’d known it was my job to tug Mom’s feet out of the clouds. Figuratively speaking.
Try as I might, though, she never stopped smiling at the corn.
Dream-Mom doesn’t say any of that. She turns her awestruck expression on me, eyes shining in the dusky half-light. When she holds out her hand, she’s cradling a familiar wooden box in her palm. A hexagon, with flecks of gold dusting the lid. There’s a crank on the side, capped with a golden sphere. I know it well.
The music box lulled me to sleep as a child, its sweet tune comforting me through countless drafty nights spent shivering in the rafters between the hulls. Might seem like a poor blanket, but to me, it meant everything.
The music box was also the last thing Mom gave me before she disappeared, waking me in the dead of night by pressing it into my hand with a furtive look and a brief kiss to my forehead. As if she knew what was about to happen to her. As if none of her other belongings mattered.
It’s a moment I’ve replayed in my waking mind, again and again, since long before the tournament. Mom could have left me with the knowledge to recreate her inventions, brilliant designs that were always guaranteed to sell for a lot more than the naked catchers I scooped off the hull to survive. Instead, she chose sentiment.
When I fled Nero, I left the music box behind.
In the dream, I open the lid. Tucked alongside the bumpy roll that holds the tune is a rectangular key.
I meet Dream-Mom’s eyes, and she nods. Not sentiment, she whispers. Survival.
I always thought Mom spent her last moments on making sure I had something to remember her by. A not-small part of me even hated her for it.
But when the dream releases me to the waking world, I sit up knowing that it wasn’t sentimentality at all. In Mom’s last moment, she chose the Resistance.
And she chose them over me.
I wish Cam’s fighter had a shower. The dream’s left me shaky, and I could use a few minutes to calm my heartbeat. Also, not to put too much emphasis on it, but I doubt I smell very good right now.
As it is, the ship’s equipped with a flight deck, a bunk the size of a closet, and a bathroom that’s so tiny I have to use it with the door standing open to the bunk. Which luckily does have a door to separate it from the flight deck. Kind of a nesting-room situation.
When I’ve calmed myself as much as I can and splashed a few droplets of water on my face, I join Noah on the flight deck.
He’s got the pilot’s seat tipped back all the way, his auburn hair spilling across the head rest as he dozes, hands lifted to cradle his head. I’m not going to lie; he looks good lounging like that. Really good. Even my dream-addled brain can see that much.
He cracks one eye open as I enter and tips me a crooked smile when he catches me watching him, though the dark circles under his eyes tell me he’s as exhausted and worried as I am. We just suffered a major defeat on Caligula. We’re lucky to be alive.
I hope our friends are alive, too.
“Are we there yet?” I ask.
Noah raises the seat, and I wedge myself forward to drop into the copilot’s chair. “Sure,” he says. “We’ve been in the vicinity for a couple of hours. The problem’s getting in.”
I sigh. “I miss Sierra.” Sierra would loop a camera or send commands to redirect the landing bay guards. Something brilliant to sneak us onto the ship without getting caught. And she’d do it all without breaking a sweat. By now, Xavier’s people will be on the lookout for Cam’s fighter; they’ll know it’s stolen.
I don’t love being in the fighter myself, if I’m being honest. It’s not a reason to rush—we’ve got plenty of those already—but it’s uncomfortable to be in the ship my ex was using to work against the Resistance and the First Fleet. It’s still weird to think of Camron as the enemy, too, even with his rage carved so violently into my memory. That white-hot, zealous rage. He was like a stranger.
He wanted to kill us back there on Caligula. I think he would have, too, if our friends hadn’t intervened.
Also, the fighter’s uncomfortable because I prefer to avoid looking at the stars whenever I can, and in here it’s half instruments, half view. I know that probably seems like a small issue in comparison to our powerful, murderous pursuers, but you can’t tell the human brain what to be afraid of. And mine’s decided there’s nothing worse than existing with just a thin pane of glass between you and the stars. It’s hard to believe some people think they’re pretty.
I take a second to look out, anyway. Noah’s placed us between a couple of ships in the center of the fleet, if I understand Nero’s positioning correctly, but both look far away from here. At least their lights are burning brighter than the stars. I try to focus on that.
“I miss Eric, too,” Noah says.
Eric’s computer-breaking knowledge would come in handy right now, for sure. “True. Even if he is a little ruthless.”
“Ruthlessly focused.”
That’s for sure. Unfortunately, our friends are imprisoned on Caligula right now, if Xavier deigned to let them live. All because my ex-boyfriend got brainwashed by the admiral’s belief in a planet somewhere nearby. And also because Noah’s cousin decided to choose personal power over our freedom.
I know I’m in no place to judge, but Mae’s betrayal… it was unexpected.
Xavier wants to turn the entire fleet toward this supposed planet that doesn’t exist. As far as anyone reasonable can tell, it’s just an empty section of space. Yet Xavier supposedly saw a vision directing him there, and he wants to follow it into the unknown. It’s ridiculous. Mae should know it’s nonsense, but clearly she doesn’t care.
The problem, at least for Xavier, is that he can’t change the fleet’s direction in a major way without the physical navigation keys that lock into every dashboard in the fleet. The twist? That includes the ones from the ships that were destroyed during the war. The dashboards might be gone, but the keys still exist—and thanks to my mother and her Resistance friends, they’re scattered across the fleet. Who even knows where?
Except… except that I do. At least, I know about one of them.
But Cam knows about the music box, too. If there’s really a navigation key inside—my memory is telling me there is, though I’m afraid the dream’s corrupting it as badly as one of Xavier’s planet-finding visions—then Cam will remember, eventually. He and I used to sit together and listen to it, sometimes for hours. Talk about the future, as if we ever had one together. All that pointless stuff.
Even if he hasn’t pinpointed the music box, Cam will realize I’m coming back to Nero to search for the keys. Or, worse, he’ll get there first.
“Surely you know something about computers,” I say.
Noah shrugs, then reaches up to smooth his unruly hair. It just pops right back up; lost cause at this point. “I know a little bit about a lot of things. That’s the captain’s way. Doesn’t make me too useful.”
I beg to differ. Noah’s a natural leader, for one thing. He’s good at wading through arguments to arrive at the best choice. He’s also a good fighter. And he’s kind. Maybe that shouldn’t be so notable, but kindness is in short supply around here.
Also, and this is beside the point, but Noah’s an excellent kisser.
Noah points at me, and I jump, blushing, as if he can read my thoughts. “You’re the one who knows things,” he says.
Not the kind of things he tends to prioritize. “Yeah? Like how to double cross people?”
“You know how to survive.”
He wouldn’t have seen it that way a few days ago. I can’t help but feel like I’m corrupting the guy.
“So,” I say, “how do we survive our way onto Nero?”
Noah taps his finger against his lip. “Maybe we can pretend the ship is empty and float right in.”
I gesture around the cabin and my hand whacks into the side window, as if to emphasize my point. “Hide where? They’ll search every corner.”
And it’ll only take them about thirty seconds. A minute if they’re slow.
Noah’s got the kind of gleam in his eye I usually associate with trouble. “But will they search the outside?”
Turns out there actually is something worse than sitting with a thin pane of glass between you and the stars: floating with an even thinner atmo suit protecting you from them.
While hanging on to the underside of a fighter that’s drifting its way into the enemy’s maw.
One of the enemies. We’ve got a lot of them.
The stars watch. You can tell me all day they’re inanimate, burning balls of gas, that they warm the worlds that swarm around them like mindless devotees, that they’re harmless. As harmless as a burning ball of gravitational hell can be, anyway.
I’m sure it’s all true. But I also know it’s true that they watch. I can feel it in the chill down my spine, the goosebumps on my arms.
They’re not friendly.
Noah found the atmo gear stashed in a floor panel—turns out knowing a little about a lot of is more useful than he thought, though I could’ve told him that—and now we’re clinging to the outside hull of the fighter, tethered precariously to hooks that are no doubt meant for hauling guns or collecting salvage from destroyed fighters.
I fix my gaze on a particularly empty area of space, letting the stars blur into my peripheral vision. If I can’t see them, they can’t see me. Right?
We drift toward Nero, and the bay doors open without hesitation. Well, sure. They’re hoping to catch us, aren’t they? Probably hailing us right now, barking instructions at an empty flight deck. We’ve switched off our helmet comms, and every system on our suits except for the life support. The only power readings they’ll get, according to Noah, will come from the ship itself.
The last time I was in one of these suits, a catcher punched a hole in it and I almost died.
If the catchers that live on Nero’s hull see us clinging to the bottom of the fighter, they don’t let on. Probably have to touch the hull to activate their evil superpowers.
Nero swells until it blocks the stars, and Noah gives me a thumbs-up as the fighter sets down inside the bay, the sudden pull of the big ship’s artificial gravity dragging us toward the floor. But we were ready for that; we wedge our bodies up over the wheels and, flattening ourselves out as best we can, we wait. I can just see the doors from my hiding spot, and the officers waiting on the other side of the glass. I can make out the white of their sashes. And their guns.
The bay pressurizes, and the pair of lights above the doors flickers from red to green.
The officers don’t waste any time. They storm into the bay, footsteps thundering as they run, shouting and gesturing.
For someone who spent his life without officers around, Noah did a solid job predicting what they’d do. They swarm the fighter as a unit, half a dozen of them pouring into the tiny cargo hold and up the sides of the fighter.
And then they’re gone. Why leave guards outside when your quarry’s trapped within? But the fighter’s so small, I figure we’ve got about thirty seconds. At best.
We slide down from the wheels, and I can only hope there’s no one to catch us on the cameras as we run for the nearest vent and disappear into Nero’s hulls.
CHAPTER 2
NOAH
We’re in Reggie’s territory now.
The minute we hit the vent, she takes the lead, and I know better than to question that. I saw the way she moved through Caligula’s hulls; Nero’s are no different. Watching her crawl forward, navigating the tight space with absolute certainty, I can see how she survived so long tucked between the hulls with her mother.
My heart hurts for them, but they made it work. And then Reggie made it work on her own.
I’m pretty sure I would have given up. How’s that for captain material?
Sometimes I think about what it would have been like if the war had never happened. I grew up with more than forty other ships to explore, but what if there’d been a hundred? What if I’d met Reggie at a dance or a hockey game, instead of the farce of a tournament put on by Admiral Xavier? What if she hadn’t been forced to conceal her identity?
We’d be very different people. But I like to think I’d have been drawn to her in any case.
My new friends know how to move through the guts of their ships like rats born to the cause. I don’t mean that as an insult, though I guess it might seem like one at first blush. But rats are smart, and they’re survivors. Alistair always wanted to keep one as a pet, though it’s not allowed. Can you imagine them getting out and running amuck on the ships?
Anyway, travel via vent is still a new sensation for me. It’s cold in the vents, with a constant breath of chilly air that ruffles my hair. The base smell is machinery, though others mix with it as we make our way through. Food cooking, soap from the showers. Not sure I’d like to pass by water treatment, but I suppose it’s inevitable at some point.
After a few minutes of crawling, the passage ends. Reggie picked a good one, apparently; not many twists or turns. No need to climb. How she could have memorized her way through a ship like that, let alone keep her sense of direction, I’ll never know.
She eases herself out onto a narrow beam, then offers me a hand to help me. I’m not a fool; I know who the expert is here. I take her hand, and she steadies me as I join her on the beam.
“Welcome to the rafters,” she says.
It’s like Caligula’s rafters, at least from what I can see. It’s dim, no lights strung around to illuminate the place. There must be some maintenance lights around somewhere, though, because I can make out the silhouettes of the scaffolded beams, like charcoal lines in the shadows. My eyes will adjust.
I imagine Reggie living here with her mother, strapping herself to one of these branches to sleep at night or crawling along to evade sneaking officers.
And then, because this is where my brain goes nowadays, I imagine my parents. Could they be hiding out in a spot like this one? There’s a whole world back here between the hulls, one I never thought existed before coming to the tournament. They could have created an entire life.
