Leona released a bomb. An instant later, the tank below exploded.
"Incoming ships!" Coral cried.
Leona saw them. Several Peacekeeper vessels were flying from each side, lights flashing.
"Terrorist vessel, surrender!" boomed a voice on a megaphone. "Land now, or we will blast you from the—"
"Fire on them, damn it!" Leona cried.
Coral opened fire. On both sides of the Nantucket, cannons shot out spinning shells. The inferno roared across the Peacekeeper vessels. One of the enemy ships managed to fire two missiles before crashing. Leona spun the Nantucket around, grimacing. She fired a hailstorm of bullets from the Gatling gun on the prow, destroying one missile in midair.
The second missile hit the Nantucket. The hull dented. The ship rocked. The people in the hold screamed.
Leona raised her prow, kicked the engines into full afterburner, and soared toward the stars. Coral kept firing the side cannons. It only took a minute to breach the atmosphere, but it felt like a lifetime.
The Nantucket soared into space, rattling, wounded. Several Peacekeeper ships followed. Leona groaned. The Inheritor fleet was still a light-year away. She was alone here.
"Strap in, boys and girls!" she said. "This'll get bumpy."
As missiles flew toward them, Leona hit the warp drive.
She winced.
Like any starship worth its salt, the Nantucket was installed with an azoth crystal deep in its engine. Azoth was among the rarest, costliest material in the galaxy. Unless you limited yourself to wormholes, azoth made interstellar travel possible. Wormholes were like a subway system back on old Earth. A starship with an azoth engine was like having your own car. The way diamonds could refract light, azoth crystals could bend spacetime itself, the fabric of reality. Azoth crystals weren't just rare, found on only a handful of worlds; they also had to be cut by experts, calibrated down to the exact atom. When their angles were perfect, they could warp spacetime into a bubble around a starship, allowing it to fly faster than light.
There was only one downside.
Bending spacetime didn't work very well near planets.
A planet like Til Shiran, a massive world of rock and sand, itself bent spacetime by sheer force of gravity. Using an azoth engine nearby was like lighting a match at a gas station. Sometimes you were lucky. Sometimes you ended up as a pile of ashes.
At least the Peacekeepers won't be this crazy, Leona thought as her azoth drive kicked in.
Spacetime twisted around them like a wet towel.
Leona screamed.
All dimensions of reality swirled around her.
We're too close. Too close to bend reality. We—
She was suddenly ten feet tall, then flat in a two-dimensional world. Reality ballooned and she was everywhere at once. Her consciousness floated outside the starship, and then she felt herself inside the dashboard, inside the machinery. She tried to close her eyes, could not. Outside, the starlight curved. The planet unfolded into four dimensions, a curved cylinder tracing its orbit around the star.
She floated through time.
She was there again. Ten years ago. A seventeen-year-old girl with a swelling belly.
She approached the wedding arch with her groom. It was a sunny, green world, but she was scared and cold. Jake Hawkins was only a year older, a somber boy, the son of an Inheritor captain. Jake had not planned to plant life inside her, but every human life was precious. They would keep the baby. They would keep their honor. Both a priest and rabbi married them, remnants of their lost Earth faiths. The bride and groom sealed their love with a kiss, and Leona could practically imagine their parents with shotguns in the audience.
Yes, a shotgun wedding, she thought, gazing into Jake's blue eyes. But I love this boy. I love him so mucking much.
She drank. She danced. She had been married for only an hour when the strikers swooped from the sky.
Leona screamed.
Her father fought them. So many died. She grabbed a gun, and she fired, tried to stop them, but they ripped off Jake's legs, and he reached out to her, screaming, and Leona wept, wanting to save him, and she kissed his forehead as he died in her arms. A scorpion tore open her leg, but Leona barely felt the pain.
The Inheritors fought them hard. Their guns shook the sunlit world. The starships rumbled, and explosions lit the sky like fireworks. Leona knelt in the devastation, in the ruin of her wedding, clutching her belly as the blood flowed down her thighs, as the life inside her extinguished.
Weeping, she lay on the grass. She looked up. And she saw her there.
A girl.
A human girl with blue hair, with white skin, with madness in her eyes.
"Jade," Leona whispered, reaching out to her. "My friend. What did they do to you?"
The girl smiled and scorpions danced around her.
The stars burst into straight lines.
The Nantucket stormed forward through space, moving at millions of kilometers per second.
The desert planet vanished behind them.
Leona took deep, shaky breaths, finding herself back in the present. Once more, she was twenty-seven years old, an officer in the Heirs of Earth. Once more, the wound on her leg was just an old scar, a groove along her outer thigh.
The spacetime bubble had formed. She shivered. We're alive. We escaped.
Yet tears still filled Leona's eyes, and she placed a hand on her flat belly.
She had never used an azoth engine so close to a planet. She had not been ready for this. Not to gaze back through time. Not to see that day again.
"Leona!" Coral approached her. "Are you all right? You're trembling."
Leona looked into the weaver's purple eyes. She looked nothing like Leona. While Leona had olive-toned skin, Coral had skin like rich mahogany. While Leona had curly brown hair, Coral had silvery hair like flowing moonlight. But Coral was young, still full of life and light, a new warrior for Earth. Eager and hopeful.
So much like I was.
Leona looked down at a wound on Coral's leg, perhaps one that would leave a scar.
Like the scar I carry.
Leona rose to her feet. "The autopilot will keep the ship on its course. The Peacekeepers are too far behind to catch us now. Get some rest."
Before Coral could say more, Leona left the bridge.
She hurried through the hold, ignoring the passengers. A few spoke to her, offering to tend to her wounds. Leona barely heard them. She walked through the ship's cluttered hold, through a doorway, and into her cabin. She closed the door behind her, leaned against it, and took several long, shuddering breaths. Her eyes stung. For a long moment, Leona could merely stand still, eyes closed.
"I miss you, Jake," Leona whispered. A tear rolled down her cheek.
Through the porthole, she saw the starlight streaming, stretched into lines as the Nantucket flew through warped space. Leona stripped off her clothes and stepped into the shower. She let the water flow over her, washing off the blood, the sand, the shame. She let the water run so hot it nearly burned her. Pain was good. Pain helped her forget.
Finally she stepped out from the shower. She bandaged her wounds with numb fingers. She stood naked in the steam, gazing into the mirror. The scar ran down her thigh, a deep groove, a memory of that day. A scorpion claw had given her that scar.
She looked at her tattoos. On her left arm, she had tattooed a line from Moby Dick. She owned a single page from that old novel. She had read and reread it countless times, had inked words from that page onto her skin.
I love to sail forbidden seas.
Years ago, Leona had found that single page in an antique shop. A page from a real Earth book, printed on actual paper from an Earth tree. It was two thousand years old, had been preserved through the generations. The line from that page symbolized Leona's dream to someday return. To see Earth, to sail upon the seas, the captain of a sailing ship rather than a starship.