Bonds of Brass (The Bloodright Trilogy #1) - Emily Skrutskie Page 0,26

broke through the defenses around Rana, it set its sights north of the Archon Imperial Seat and let off a single burst from its main gun, along with a message broadcast throughout the system. The Archon imperials were to surrender, or the next shot would wipe Trost from the planet’s surface.

Less than an hour later, the war was over, and the Archon imperials were on their way to the Umber interior in chains.

I look at that big, stupid hole in the ground, and I feel it inside me. A history so thoroughly annihilated that the only thing remaining is a huge empty scar. The Warning Shot is a reminder of how easily Umber takes, how blessed we’ve been that they didn’t take more. Rana used to be proud. A shining capital planet with a shining capital city, the heart of an empire comfortably bordered by Umber along one axis and Corinth along another. Spare in arable land but wealthy in metal, with some of the most advanced technologies the galaxy has ever seen. A place where it was common to see a human-shaped powersuit rocket over a city as a knight rushed off to save the day. A place where anyone with the drive to defend the empire and the prowess to wear one of those suits could be a knight, whether or not you had bloodright to your name. Now it’s just another battered jewel on the belt of Umber’s conquests.

And it still hurts to see.

I forsook the Archon Empire long ago. It felt like the only choice that would let me live, free from the guilt and horror and the way my stomach felt like it might empty every time someone mocked the empire’s platinum and emerald. It took years to build the walls I needed. I thought they were strong enough to hold.

But when you find out your best friend is blood of the blood that rained hell on Rana, it has a way of ripping open the wounds you thought had scarred.

An alert flashes on the dash, and I bolt upright, ice threading my veins. If the academy’s scrambled ships to bring us back, this Beamer is in for the flight of its life. It takes me a moment to make sense of what the instrumentation is telling me. Gal leans over it too, looking puzzled.

And then it clicks. I sink back in my seat, staring out the cockpit windows. As a pilot, I thought I understood fear. Escaping the academy, the missiles, and the planet tonight, I thought I’d run through the purest forms of that emotion. But the fear I feel now dwarfs anything I’ve felt before. That was fear of pain, of capture, of death. This is fear on a new scale.

This is fear of annihilation.

Two of them are visible. The other eight appear only on our readouts, somewhere off on the light side of Rana. They ring the planet, their noses pointed away from her pull, their engines firing in steady pulses with enough force to put a cigarette burn on a moon.

Dreadnoughts.

“Heavens and hells,” I whisper. The planet’s under blockade.

Gal leans forward over the controls, pinging satellites for information about the ships surrounding us. There’s so much hope on his face. A twinge of nausea rattles through me at the thought that someone could see one of these monstrous war machines and feel anything but a deep, rooted terror. There’s enough firepower ringing the planet to wipe out all life on its surface, and Gal thinks his parents must have sent it as a reckoning.

But not for long. His face falls as he finds what he was looking for. “Not Umber imperial,” he says. That’s obvious enough. If there were imperial dreadnoughts in orbit, the academy would already be blasted off the map for allowing an automated defense system to fire on us. “Looks like these all belong to…No, that can’t be right.”

“What?”

“The computer says they’re under the command of Governor Berr sys-Tosa. Not by proxy. By presence.”

Impossible. The system governor’s vector from Imre would take him two full days to complete under the mandated travel speeds that keep intrasystem traffic safe. He could be