Last of Her Name Read online

  “I did trust you,” I whisper. “Of all the people in the galaxy, I trusted Clio and I trusted you. But then all this happens and—don’t you get it, Pol? I can’t trust you anymore!”

  He stares at me, speechless, and I know I’ve stung him. I feel monstrous; his father just died and here I am yelling at him, but I can’t contain the terror and guilt welling up in me. Caged up in this tiny ship, I feel like I’m about to explode.

  Pol shakes his head. “Then try to trust yourself. You must feel, somewhere deep down, that it’s true?”

  “All I feel right now is—”

  I’m cut short as the ship lurches around us. I’m thrown into Pol, both of us crashing into the bunks with startled cries. The walls groan and creak and flex. The caravel shudders, then goes still, the engine throbbing beneath our feet.

  “What happened?”

  “We’ve dropped out of warp. We must have reached Sapphine’s system, but we’ll have a bogey on our tail.” He pushes through to the cockpit. “Now we’ve got to reset the coordinates and warp out of here before they catch up or—”

  His reply is drowned out by an earsplitting crash. It sounds like some monster has ripped off the engine and is grinding it in its teeth. My stomach lifts as I go weightless, my boots leaving the ground and my head bumping against the ceiling.

  The gravity generator has gone out.

  The caravel pitches wildly through space. I grab hold of the bunk rail, feeling sick in the sudden zero g. Pol is shouting, but I can’t hear him over the noise. He pushes off the wall and makes for the doorway into the cockpit, but the ship spins and he slams into the ceiling instead. His eyes roll back and he falls limp in midair.

  “POL!”

  I lunge for him, managing to grip his shirt, just as everything goes silent.

  Too silent. The engines have cut out entirely.

  One by one, the lights in the cabin go out, until I’m floating in total darkness.

  For a moment, the only sound I hear is my own breath, amplified by the close space. I feel the rough texture of the scarf around Pol’s neck, and pull him closer with it, but I can’t see him in the darkness. I can’t see anything at all.

  Then, with a hum, emergency lighting kicks in and a dim red glow fills the cabin.

  Pol drifts past me, eyes shut, body limp. Drops of scarlet blood pop from the cut on his brow and float by my face.

  “Pol!” I turn him toward me and press fingers to his neck, breathing in relief when I feel his pulse.

  I push him onto a bunk—easy enough in zero gravity—and tie him down with his own belt, to keep him from smashing his face into anything else. Then I push through the flimsy door to the cockpit—and gasp.

  A blue planet fills the space ahead.

  I recognize it at once as Sapphine, though of course I’ve only ever seen pictures of it. An ocean planet, Sapphine is three times the size of my home world. Off to my left, its yellow sun is just setting over the horizon, and shadows slowly devour the planet.

  I pull myself into the captain’s chair, snapping the harness on to keep from floating away. Even so, I hover an inch off the seat, my hair drifting around me like tentacles. I tie it back quickly, assessing the controls. The emergency power should be stored in cells somewhere on board, holding just enough energy to keep the minimum systems running—life support, a bit of light, and the control board. But there’s not much point in controls for a dead engine.

  I do a visual check of as much of the caravel as I can see and don’t find any evidence of physical damage. So we’re not under attack. What went wrong, then? Something must have caused the gravity generator to go out, taking most of our power with it.

  The Prism is still glowing, but only faintly. And instead of spinning in midair inside its dome, it’s lying on the bottom. Like a dying bird.

  No spin, no power.

  Thinking back to my lessons on Prism mechanics, I remember that the crystal has to spin inside a specific gravitational field, much stronger than anything a human can stand. My instructor pointed out that this is the weak point of any interstellar ship. Take out the generator that controls the Prism’s gravity field, and you cripple the ship. Most vessels carry a spare generator or two for this reason, but the caravel is so small, there’s barely room for the original parts, much less backups.

  That’s the downside of relying on a single crystal to power your ship. You don’t need any fuel, but unless you have backup Prisms, you’re screwed.

  “Now would be a really good time to wake up, Pol,” I mutter.

  I glance back to see him still anchored to the bunk. He’s not bleeding anymore, thanks to a patch I slapped onto his forehead, and I can only hope there isn’t any internal damage. He got knocked around pretty hard. The best thing I can do for Pol is to fix our ship.

  I unclip the harness and go back into the cabin, where I find a hatch in the floor that takes me down to the cramped engine room. Clinging to a pipe, squinting in the pale red emergency lights, I study the apparatus jammed into the small chamber, trying to make sense of it all.

  The gravity generator is set between the air recycler and a heat converter. Squeezing into the small space, I take off my multicuff and pry open the tiny flashlight, shining it on the generator.

  What I see makes my stomach coil.

  The generator is crushed.

  The parts around it are perfectly intact, but the machine that controls the ship’s gravity looks like a crumpled piece of paper. The metal is hopelessly mangled. Even if I were the best mechanic in the galaxy, I couldn’t fix this mess. The only thing to do is replace the whole unit.

  “What in the stars happened to you?” I mutter, cautiously touching the warped metal.

  I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this. Generators don’t just spontaneously twist up like that. Nothing does. The more I stare at it, the less sense it makes.

  “Stacia?”

  Hearing Pol’s moan, I push off the floor and float back up into the cabin. He’s rousing, a hand pressed to his forehead.

  “Pull it together,” I say ruthlessly. “We’re in trouble.”

  While he struggles to take stock of things, I swoop back into the cockpit and into the pilot’s chair. A red light is flashing at the corner of the screen, but I ignore it; everything’s in emergency mode right now. I pull up a list of measurements—the distance between us and Sapphine, the planet’s gravitational pull, orbital charts. Thank the stars that much of the ship’s systems are still up. I start running simulations, hoping I’m not about to get us killed.

  Then I laugh darkly, realizing that either way, we die. If we stay up here like this much longer, we’ll run out of emergency power. The controls will go out first, then the temperature will drop. But we’ll suffocate long before we freeze to death.

  “What are you doing?” Pol asks in the doorway.

  I raise a finger to quiet him, waiting until I’ve input all the parameters for the simulation. Then I sit back and say, “Either I’m about to save our skins, or …”

  He sighs and takes the seat to my right. “Or you’re about to fry them.”

  I give him a weak smile.

  “Okay, Captain.” He winces and presses his fingers to the patch on his temple. “What’s the plan?”

  “I’m a mechanic, not a pilot.” I draw a deep breath, watching the simulations run at hyperspeed. “But I think, if we put on the space suits, then vent our remaining breathable air through the stabilizing thrusters, we might make it.”

  Pol stares. “Wait. You want to shoot all our oxygen into space?”

  “At our current speed, it would take days to reach the atmosphere, even factoring in the gravitational pull of Sapphine. We’ll run out of air long before then, anyway.” I tap a schematic of the ship’s O2 system. “We need accelerant, and this is the only accelerant we have.”

  He lets out a long breath. “Okay. But even if your insane plan works, we have a bigger problem.”

  He taps the blinking
red light that I’d been ignoring, and a message expands on the comm screen. I realize it’s a hail from a Sapphino patrol ship.

  Pol grimaces. “They’re asking for our clearance credentials, which we don’t have, of course.”

  “What do we do?”

  He pulls up a comm channel and keys in several numbers. A moment later, a reply message pops up. “Okay, I sent a distress code, and they’ve given us clearance to land if we can, but that’s it. We’re on our own, and they’ll expect us to check in with security as soon as we touch down.”

  “Nice work,” I murmur. “So they’ll wait to shoot us until after we’ve landed.”

  “It gives us a chance, at least,” he returns edgily. “By the way, I saw the gravity generator.”

  I pause to meet his eyes.

  “Stacia, what in the ever-blazing stars happened down there?”

  “Why are you asking me? It’s your secret spaceship.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  I look back at the controls. One of the simulations has settled on a course that should get us to Sapphine’s surface on what accelerant we have, but there’s little margin for error.

  “We can worry about the gravity generator when we’re safely on the ground. Or, uh, ocean.” Right. There is no dry surface on Sapphine. “For now, let’s just land this thing.”

  Once we’re in atmo, I can activate the ship’s emergency gliding function to navigate Sapphine’s skies and find safe harbor. But the wings won’t do us any good up here, where there’s no wind to sail upon.

  I grab the space suits from a narrow storage compartment in the cabin, tossing one to Pol. We put them on in silence.

  “Here,” he says, when I have trouble latching my helmet to my suit.

  I stand still as his fingers work under my chin. He looks pale, blood crusted on his temple, and his breath mists on his visor glass. I’ve always teased Pol for his seriousness, but now there is an even deeper set to his eyes; shadows cling to him that I’ve never seen before. I’ve been so angry with him the past few days I hadn’t even noticed how haggard and tired he looks.

  “Stace …” He pauses, his helmet nearly touching mine, but his eyes still lowered. “If we don’t make it—”

  “We’ll make it.”

  “Yeah, but still, there’s something I … need you to know.” He raises his eyes to mine, and they burn with such intensity that my stomach twists with sudden apprehension.

  “Stop. We’re not going to die today.”

  I turn and sit down, strapping into my harness. Oxygen vents from a tube by my ear. It tickles, a minor annoyance that seems magnified by my heightened nerves. I swat at it, but it stays in place, like a tiny snake hissing into my ear canal.

  My thumb hovers just a moment over the lever that will divert the ship’s air supply. Then, with a heady rush of recklessness, I flip it.

  The interior hisses as the air is sucked out of the cockpit and cabin.

  “If you’re wrong,” Pol says, “then you’ve just killed us.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I growl, and I punch in the command to commence venting.

  The ship creaks and groans as it tilts. The thrusters are meant for minor directional adjustments, not for propelling us across vast distances, but we’re in no position to be picky. We can’t hear the air leaving the ship, but I see it spurt from the caravel’s nose as it turns us to the left. That was two or three hours of life, gone in an instant.

  Stars, I hope I’m right about this.

  “These suits hold seventy-five minutes of air,” Pol says. “How long till we break atmo?”

  I mumble a reply, and he has to put a thick-gloved hand on my shoulder to make me speak it louder.

  “Ninety minutes.”

  Pol’s hand drops. He sits back, face white. “Stacia …”

  “No talking. Skip breaths. Make it last.”

  The next hour passes with excruciating slowness.

  If I’d known just sitting there—trying not to breathe, not to move, not to use up any excess air—would be so mind-numbingly awful, I’d have just vented all the oxygen without a suit on and saved us both time by getting it over with.

  But I’m too stubborn to die.

  And I have people waiting for me.

  So I think of them during the eternity it takes to reach Sapphine’s atmosphere: of Clio forcing me to try a popular romance show, and laughing when she caught me bingeing it obsessively through the night. I think of Mom, explaining some complicated surgical procedure with fiendishly grisly detail while I helped her clean her office. I think of Dad after too many glasses of his own wine, banging away on our ancient piano. He would urge me to dance, telling me stories about his wild younger days back on Snow, his home-moon in Alexandrine’s orbit.

  Alexandrine.

  He and Mom would have been right there in the thick of things when the Unionists laid siege to the imperial city. They never told me what they did during the war. Only that they’d fled the tumult and emigrated to Amethyne.

  They could have been at the palace that day, when the Leonovs were murdered by the direktor Eminent and his men.

  They could have left with a baby, smuggled her out the back door and onto a ship where Pol’s parents were waiting.

  There’s nothing I can do except let the ship follow the pattern I already locked in, but now I wish I’d taken manual control. Then I’d have something to do besides sit here, trapped in this suit, trapped in my own head.

  To distract myself from that unsettling thought, I ponder the crushed gravity generator instead.

  I lean forward and pull up a digital notepad, keying in a quick message. Then I flick it, and it slides down the board to Pol.

  What if this wasn’t an accident?

  He glances at me, then types a reply and sends it over.

  I was thinking the same thing.

  Our eyes meet. Then rise to the glass roof, searching the inky space around us. Someone tagged us before we left Amethyne’s system. If it was a Union ship, we’d have a fleet on our tail already. Our plan to warp out of Sapphine’s system and shake our pursuer was crushed along with the gravity. We’re easy prey, limping along in our broken caravel. All anyone would have to do is pluck us from the sky—or shoot us out of it.

  We don’t see any astronikas lurking in the darkness, but from the stories I’ve heard, orbital pirate fleets have ways of cloaking themselves from both radar and the naked eye—maybe Union ships do too. I’ve never heard of pirates who could crush a gravity generator, however. I’ve never heard of anyone who could do that. Not even vityazes with their top-of-the-line tech. But then, it’s not like the Committee has been sharing their secrets with me. Who knows what they’ve got up their sleeves?

  Pol slides over another note.

  We land, pick up a new generator, and we get out.

  He follows it up with, FAST.

  I nod and power down the holo to save power, then look out the window to my left so he can’t see the fear in my eyes. It’s a good enough plan, except it’s missing the most difficult step: surviving the landing.

  Fifteen minutes later, my suit begins to beep, a red light flashing on the lower left corner of my visor.

  Ten minutes of oxygen left.

  The ship begins to rattle as we near the outer fringes of Sapphine’s atmosphere. I can feel sweat running down my face. The oxygen tube by my ear is still hissing, and suddenly it doesn’t seem annoying at all. In fact, I hope it goes on happily hissing for ages, for eons, for epochs. Because the moment it stops, I’m dead.

  Sapphine fills the window, no longer just blue but every shade of blue, from palest gray to deep cerulean, all partially veiled by a ragged sheet of white cloud. We’re fully in her grasp now; the great planet pulls us in, lassoing the Laika with her immense gravity.

  Two minutes of air left. The beeping seems to get louder. My stomach lurches as I reach for the controls, preparing to take over for reentry. I swallow hard,
trying to focus on keeping calm. If I throw up, it’ll all float around in my helmet, making it hard to see.

  Also, gross.

  “Stacia?”

  “I got this. Quiet.”

  “Stacia …”

  Alarmed by his weak tone, I look over just as his eyes roll back and he goes limp.

  He’s out of air.

  Pol is suffocating right beside me.

  Desperately, I unclasp my harness and rip off Pol’s oxygen tube, then yank out my own. Flipping back my visor, I suck down one deep breath, then shove the tube into the receptor on his helmet. The ship rattles harder, starting to gather speed.

  One minute, Pol.

  That’s all I can give you.

  Pol sits up with a gasp as the caravel lurches forward. I redirect every last bit of power left in the ship to the thrusters, in an effort to control our plummet. The control board goes dark. The lights go off. We’re lit only by the ambient light of Sapphine’s sun.

  “Stacia, what did you do?” he shouts, his hand going to the O2 line connecting my tank to his suit.

  I can’t reply, because I don’t have a breath to spare. My mouth opens and I gasp, but there’s nothing to breathe.

  It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever felt in my life.

  Panic is an animal instinct, and it claws me from the inside out, as if my heart is trying to escape my body. I suck dryly for air that isn’t there, barely noticing Pol’s hands as he shoves me into my seat and buckles my harness around me. He’s trying to free the oxygen tube, but it’s too late. He’s out of air too.

  The caravel begins to shake as we break into Sapphine’s atmo. Flames lick the hull, and with the coolant system down, the interior heat is already rising.

  I’m starting to black out. My head nods, and I whip it up again. I can’t tell if Pol is conscious or not. I can’t turn my head to look at him for the force of the g’s pushing against me. I can barely reach the ship’s controls.