I fell asleep to the sound of it, bone tired, my grandfather's letter folded flat against my chest inside my shirt where I'd taken to keeping it, and the dream that found me there was unlike any dream I'd had before or have had since.
It didn't feel like something my own mind had invented. It felt handed to me, whole, too detailed and too specific to be anything I could have dreamed up on my own, the way you don't invent a stranger's face, you only ever remember one. It started long before I existed, in a shape too exact to be guesswork, on a ship that happened to share its name with the very tavern I was sleeping above.
◆ ◆ ◆
3,000 AD
"Korede, I need more thrust!"
Captain Corvin Ashe shouted into the ship's intercom, fighting to stay upright as the deck bucked beneath him. His ship was coming apart around him, and his crew were coming apart along with it.
"She hasn't got anything left, Captain!"
his engineer shouted back. Korede was the finest engineer in the fleet, and if a talent like that couldn't wrestle the ship back under control, nobody could.
"Reactors are down.
We've got structural failures across half the hull."
Panic is a liar, Corvin told himself, the way his mentor had drilled into him a hundred times over. Admiral Halvorsen used to say it plainly: panic tells you the ship is already lost before it's actually lost, tells you the crew is already dead before they're dead, tells you there's no time left when there's always a little more time than panic wants you to believe. The only way through was to slow the whole disaster down inside your own skull, to look at it from a vantage a thousand miles above, cold and unhurried, until the one true next action revealed itself.
Corvin closed his eyes and pulled three long breaths, a trick his mother's people had taught him before he could walk, and let it drag him down into a floating, watchful calm.
"Just give me something to hit," Dashiell said.
He was the ship's munitions officer, a big man who wore a permanent half-smile thanks to an old explosives accident that had left the muscles of his face slightly wrong, and he'd built a whole personality of sharp, self-mocking humor around it to put people at ease. Nothing about today struck him as funny. Corvin studied the tension riding his shoulders, the way his eyes wouldn't settle, the pitch of his voice climbing half a register higher than usual.
Fear, plain as anything, even on a man built like a wall. Nobody wanted to die tumbling through open space, and nobody wanted to die burning in a hull breach either.
Corvin didn't dare look around the cockpit. He didn't need to. He could feel the stares boring into the back of his neck like thrown knives.
His ship was crippled, spinning out of his control, and he had never once been well liked by this crew. He was human, captaining a hull full of red skinned, pure blooded Thornkin, and that fact alone had cost him more goodwill than any command decision he'd ever made. Corvin usually sailed with mostly human crews from Earth, third rock from a modest yellow star nobody outside the Sol system had any reason to care about.
The Thornkin, technologically far beyond humanity and psychically gifted in ways humans wouldn't develop for another million years of evolution, had found Earth, and rather than simply enslaving it outright, had folded it into their empire as a subordinate, useful caste. Humans understood trade, administration, industry, the unglamorous machinery that keeps an empire running, in ways the Thornkin found beneath their own dignity even as they depended on it completely. Over generations, certain human bloodlines had earned the right to intermarry with Thornkin nobility, and Corvin's own family had climbed that ladder.
One of the quieter perks of carrying Thornkin blood was an affinity for the raw current of life energy that ran under everything, the kind of gift it would take humanity a million years to grow into on its own. Full blooded Thornkin could ride that current to move at speeds no human nervous system could manage, speak mind to mind across a room without a word passing their lips, catch flickers of the future in dreams and gut instinct. Paired with his family's long practiced head for business, it made Corvin's bloodline something genuinely new: a strain of human with a real claim to rule, in a universe that mostly didn't want to let them.
He looked up through the forward viewport in time to watch the planet they'd been hurtling toward vanish behind a wall of light, smoke, and tumbling debris, most of it torn straight from his own ship's dying hull. Whatever world this was, whoever lived on it, it had the Lady Luck firmly in its teeth now. The freefall stretched out long enough to give Corvin far too much time to contemplate how he was going to die: the fall itself, the explosion likely to follow it, or one of the several murderous glares currently fixed on the back of his skull.
The bitter irony was that this crew had practically fought each other for the privilege of flying this mission. The hold was packed with Corvite, a rare mineral prized for building stealth technology, bound from Primus Antares to Dromund Na'as to be worked into usable modules, and the route ran straight past a hostile patrol of enemy cruisers. Corvin had a spotless record and a reputation to match, and even that hadn't been enough to see this particular gamble through clean.
Three enemy ships had intercepted him and opened fire to test his defenses. He'd thrown a handful of fighters into the gap to buy himself time for a hyperspace jump, and it had bought nothing. He'd managed to destroy one attacker, but its wreck had clipped him on the way down, driving the Lady Luck straight into the mouth of a wormhole with no say in the matter at all.