The Blighted Stars

ONE

Tarquin

The Amaranth

Tarquin Mercator stood on the command bridge of the finest spaceship his father had ever built and hoped he wasn’t about to make a fool of himself. Serious people crewed the console podiums all around him, wrist-deep in holos that managed systems Tarquin was reasonably certain he could name, but there ended the extent of his knowledge. The intricate inner workings of a state-of-the-art spaceship were hardly topics covered during his geology studies.

Despite Tarquin’s lack of expertise, being Acaelus Mercator’s son placed him as second-in-command. Below Acaelus, and above the remarkably more qualified mission captain, a stern woman named Paison.

That captain was looking at him now—expectant, deferential. Thin, golden pathways resembling circuitry glittered on her skin, printed into her current body to aid her as a pilot. Sweat beaded between Tarquin’s shoulder blades.

“My liege,” Captain Paison said, all practiced obeisance, and while he desperately wished that she was addressing his father, her light grey eyes didn’t move from Tarquin. “We are approximately an hour’s flight from the prearranged landing site. Would you like to release the orbital survey drone network?”

Tarquin hoped his relief didn’t show. Scouting the planet for deposits of relkatite was the one job for which he felt firmly footed.

“Yes, Captain. Do we have visual on the planet?”

“Not yet, my liege.” She expanded a vast holographic display from her console, revealing the cloud-draped world below. “The weather is against us, but the drone network should be able to punch through it in the next few hours.”

“Hold off on landing until I can confirm our preliminary survey data. We wouldn’t want to put the ship down too far from a viable mining site.”

Polite chuckles all around. Tarquin forced a smile at their faux camaraderie and pulled up a holo from his own console, reviewing the data the survey drones had retrieved before the mining ships Amaranth and Einkorn had taken flight for the tedious eight-month voyage to Sixth Cradle.

Not that he’d been awake for that journey. His mind and the minds of the entire crew had been safely stored away in the ship’s databases, automated systems in place to print key personnel when they drew within range of low-planet orbit. When food was so expensive, there was no point in feeding people who weren’t needed to work during the trip.

Tarquin’s father put a hand on his shoulder and gave him a friendly shake. “Excited to see a cradle world?”

“I can’t wait,” he said honestly. When he’d been a child, Tarquin’s mother had taken him to Second Cradle shortly before its collapse. Those memories of that rare, Earthlike world were vague. Tarquin smiled up into eyes a slightly darker shade of hazel than his own.

At nearly 160 years old, Acaelus chose to strike an imposing figure with his prints—tall, solidly built, a shock of pure white hair that hinted at his advanced age. It was difficult to look into that face and see anything but the father he’d known as a child—stern but kind. A man who’d fought to have Tarquin’s mind mapped as early as possible so that he could be printed into a body that better suited him after the one he’d been born into hadn’t quite fit.

Hard to see through that, to the man whose iron will and vast fortune leashed thousands to his command.

“My liege,” Captain Paison said, a wary edge to her voice, “I apologize, but it appears there was an error in the system. The survey drones have been released already, or perhaps were never loaded into place.”

“What?” Tarquin accessed those systems via his own console. Sure enough, the drone bays were empty. “How could that have happened?”

“I—I can’t say, my liege,” Paison said.

The fear in her voice soured Tarquin’s stomach. Before he could assure her that it wasn’t her fault, Acaelus took over.

“This is unacceptable,” his father said. The crew turned as one to duck their heads to him. Acaelus’s scowl cut through them all, and he pointed to an engineer. “You. Go, scour the ship for the drones and load them properly. I expect completion within the hour, and an accounting of whose failure led to this.”

“Yes, my liege.” The engineer tucked into a deep bow and then turned on their heel, whole body taut with nervous energy. Tarquin suspected that as soon as they were on the other side of the door, they’d break into a sprint.

“It was just a mistake,” Tarquin said.

“Mercator employees do not make mistakes of this magnitude,” Acaelus said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Whoever is responsible will lose their cuffs, and if I catch anyone covering for the responsible party, they will lose theirs, too.”

“That’s unnecessary,” Tarquin said, and immediately regretted it as his father turned his icy stare upon him. Acaelus clutched his shoulder, this time without the friendly intent, fingers digging into Tarquin’s muscle.

“Leave the running of Mercator to me, my boy,” he said, softly enough not to be overheard but with the same firm inflection.

Tarquin nodded, ashamed to be cowed so quickly but unable to help it. His father was a colossus, an institution unto himself, a force of nature. Tarquin was just a scholar. The running of the family wasn’t his burden to carry. Acaelus released his shoulder and set to barking further orders with the brisk efficiency of long years of rule.

He gripped the edges of his console podium, staring at the bands printed around his wrists in Mercator green. Relkatite green. The cuffs meant you worked for Mercator’s interests, and Mercator’s alone. And while the work was grueling, it guaranteed regular meals. Medical care. Housing. Your phoenix fees paid, if your print was destroyed. The other ruling corporate families—who collectively called themselves MERIT—had their own colored cuffs. A rainbow of fealty.

Working for the families of MERIT kept people safe, in all the ways that mattered. While his father could be brusque, and at times even cruel, Acaelus did these things only out of a desire to ensure that safety.

The cuffs around Tarquin’s wrists came with more than the promise of safety. Mercator’s crest flowed up from those bands to wrap over the backs of his hands and twist between his fingers. The family gloves marked him as a blooded Mercator. Not a mere employee, but in the direct line of succession. Someone to be obeyed. Feared. His knuckles paled.

“Straighten up,” Acaelus said.

Tarquin peeled his hands away from the console and regained his composure, slipping the aristocratic mask of indifference back on, then set to work reviewing the data the ship had collected since entering Sixth Cradle’s orbit.

Alarms blared on the bridge. Tarquin jerked his head up, startled by the flashing red lights and the sharp squeal of a siren. On the largest display, the one that’d previously shown a dreamy landscape of fluffy clouds under the brush of golden morning light, the words TARGET LOCKED glared in crimson text.

That wasn’t possible. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone here except the Amaranth and its twin, the Einkorn. Of the five ruling corporate families, none but Mercator could even build ships capable of beating them here.

“Evade and report,” Acaelus ordered.

Captain Paison flung her arms out, tossing holo screens to the copilots flanking her, and the peaceful clouds were replaced with shield reports, weapons systems, and evasion programs. There was no enemy ship that he could see. A firestorm of activity kicked off, and while Tarquin knew, logically, that they’d rolled, the ship suppressed any sensation of motion.

“It’s the Einkorn, my liege.” The captain’s voice was strained from her effort.

“Who’s awake over there?” Acaelus demanded.

“No one should be, my liege,” the Amaranth’s medical officer said. Their freckled face was pale.

“Someone over there doesn’t like us,” the woman to Paison’s right said between gritted teeth. “Conservators?”

“It’s not their MO,” said a broad-chested man in the grey uniform of the Human Collective Army. “But it’s possible. Should I check on the security around the warpcore?”

“I iced Ex. Sharp,” Acaelus said. “Without her to guide them, the Conservators are nothing but flies to be swatted. Captain, continue evasion and hail the Einkorn.”

Tarquin cast a sideways glance at Ex. Kearns, Acaelus’s current bodyguard and constant shadow. The exemplar had the face of a shovel, as broad and intimidating as the rest of him, and he didn’t react to the mention of his ex-partner, Ex. Sharp. It had to sting, having the woman he’d worked side by side with turn against them all and start bombing Mercator’s ships and warehouses.

The fact that Naira Sharp had been captured and her neural map locked away didn’t erase the specter of the threat she posed. Her conspirators, the Conservators, were still out there, and Tarquin found Acaelus’s quick dismissal of the possibility of their involvement odd.

The HCA soldier was right. They really should send someone down to check on the warpcore. Overloading the cores was the Conservators’ primary method of destruction. Tarquin rallied himself to say as much, but Paison spoke first.

“My liege,” she said, “the Einkorn’s assault may be a malfunction. The Amaranth’s controls aren’t responding properly. I can’t—”

Metal shrieked. The floor quaked. Ex. Kearns surged in front of them and shoved Tarquin dead center in the chest. The world tipped and Tarquin’s feet flew out from under him. He struck the ground on his side. Something slammed into him from above, stealing his half-voiced shout.

Tarquin blinked, head buzzing, a painful throb radiating from his hips where a piece of the console podium he’d been working at seconds before had landed. Red and yellow lights strobed, warning of the damage done, but no breach alarms sounded.

Groaning, he shook his head to clear it. The impact had pitched people up against the walls. Seats and bits of console podiums scattered the ground. Across the room, Paison and another woman helped each other back to their feet.

“Son!” Acaelus dropped to his knees beside him. Tarquin was astonished to see a cut mar his father’s forehead, dripping blood. “Are you all right?”

Tarquin moved experimentally, and though his side throbbed, his health pathways were already healing the damage and supplying him with painkillers. “Just bruised. What happened?”

“A direct hit.” Acaelus took Tarquin’s face in his hands, examining him, then looked over his shoulder and shouted, “Kearns!”

Kearns removed the piece of podium from Tarquin’s side and helped him to his feet. Tarquin brushed dust off his clothes and tried to get ahold of himself while, all around him, chaos brewed. Kearns limped, his left leg dragging, and Tarquin grimaced. Exemplars were loaded with pathways keyed to combat. For one of them to show pain, the wound had to be bad.

Tarquin nudged a broken chunk of the console podium with the toe of his boot. A piece of the ceiling had come down, crushing the podiums, and it would have crushed Acaelus and Tarquin both if Kearns hadn’t intervened, taking the brunt of the hit on his own legs.

A knot formed in his throat as he recognized the damage Kearns had taken on their behalf. Tarquin had never been in anything like real danger before, and he desperately missed his primary exemplar, Caldweller, but that man’s neural map was still in storage. Acaelus had deemed Kearns enough to cover both of them until they reached the planet.

None of them could have accounted for this.

“My liege,” Kearns said in tones that didn’t invite argument, “I suggest we move to a more secure location immediately.”

“Agreed,” Acaelus said. “Captain, what’s the damage?”

“Uhhh…” Paison squinted at one of the few consoles that’d survived the impact. “The Einkorn’s rail guns tore through the stabilization column. This ship won’t hold together much longer.”

Brittle silence followed that announcement, the roughed-up crew exchanging looks or otherwise staring at the damaged bridge like they could wind back time. Tarquin studied his father, trying to read anything in the mask Acaelus wore in crisis, and saw nothing but grim resolve wash over him. Acaelus grabbed Tarquin’s arm and turned him around.

“Very well. With me, all of you, we’re evacuating this ship.”

Tarquin stumbled along beside his father, half in a daze. Kearns assumed smooth control of the situation, sliding into his place at the top of security’s chain of command. Merc-Sec and the HCA soldiers organized under Kearns’s barked orders, forming a defensive column around the rest. Paison threw a brief, longing glance at her command post before falling in with the others. Tarquin found himself in the center of a crush of people, not entirely certain how he’d gotten there.

How had they gone from looking at fluffy clouds to fleeing for their lives in less than ten minutes?

The HCA soldier next to him, the one who’d said this wasn’t the Conservators’ MO, caught his eye and gave him a quick, reassuring smile. Tarquin mustered up the ability to smile back and read the man’s name badge—DAWD, REGAR. That meager kindness reminded him that there was more at stake than his worries. These people had put their lives in the hands of Mercator.

If they died here, they could be reprinted later, but every death increased one’s chance of one’s neural map cracking the next time it was printed. Neural maps were never perfect; they degraded over time. Traumatic deaths sped the process exponentially, as even the best-shielded backups were never entirely disentangled from the active map.

As if there were fine threads of connection between all backups and the living mind, and sufficient trauma could reverberate out to them all.

Some people came up screaming, and never stopped. Some got caught in time loops, unsure which moment of their lives they were really living through. Neither state was survivable.

Tarquin summoned the scraps of his courage and stood straighter. He had no business in a crisis, but the employees looked to him for assurance. His terror no doubt added to their anxiety, and that was selfish of him.

Something metal groaned in the walls, taunting his ability to hold it together. Tarquin cast an irritated glance at the complaining ship. If only ships would fall in line as easily as people.

Acaelus pulled up a holo from his forearm, but whatever he saw there was blurred by his privacy filters. The information carved a scowl into his face. He slowed and swiped his ID pathway over the door to a lab, unlocking it.

“Everyone, in here,” he said.

They hesitated. Paison said, “My liege, the shuttle isn’t far from here.”

“I’m aware of the layout of my own ship, Captain. Get in, all of you, and wait. I’ve just received notice that Ex. Lockhart’s print order went through. I won’t allow my exemplar to awaken to a dying ship. You will go into this lab, and you will wait for my return.”

That wasn’t right. The secondary printing round wasn’t automated; it needed to be initiated. Tarquin frowned, watching the crew shift uncomfortably. Every one of them knew Acaelus was telling a half-truth at best, but none of them were willing to say it.

There was a slim possibility that whatever was causing the other errors had triggered this, but making all these people wait while Acaelus collected one person was a waste of time.

“My liege.” Paison stepped forward, squaring off her shoulders. “I can’t guarantee this ship will last that long, and we require your command keys to open the hangar airlock.”

“I am aware, and you are delaying. Get in the lab.”

They shuffled inside without another word, though they were all watching Acaelus warily. The terror of offending their boss was greater than the fear of being left behind to die. You could come back from death. You could never re-cuff for Mercator after being fired. The door shut, leaving Tarquin and his father alone with Kearns. Tarquin’s head pounded.

“What are you doing?” he demanded in a soft hiss. “Ex. Lockhart can handle herself. We have to get these people out.”

Acaelus shoved him down the hallway. “We need to get out. I printed Lockhart to help Kearns handle the crew, but you and I are going to cast our maps back and exit this situation, because I don’t know what’s happened here, and I’m not risking your map.”

Tarquin dug his heels in, drawing his father to a halt. “We can’t just leave. I’m not going to allow the Conservators to run us off before I have proof the mining process is safe.”

“If this was the Conservators, then we’d already be dead. All the nonfamily printing bays just went active, and I do not know who is coming out of those bays. We have to leave. Kearns and Lockhart will handle the rest.”

Tarquin rubbed his eyes in frustration. “We can’t abandon the mission.”

“We can, and we are. Come. This is hardly the place for an argument.”

Acaelus jerked on his arm. Tarquin stumbled after him, mind reeling. Sixth Cradle was supposed to be his mission. Supposed to be the moment Tarquin stood up for his family and finally squashed all those squalid rumors Ex. Sharp had started when she’d claimed the relkatite mining process was killing worlds.

While a great deal of what his family had to do to ensure their survival was distasteful, Tarquin was absolutely certain the mining process was safe. He’d refined it himself. Mining Sixth Cradle and leaving it green and thriving was meant to be the final nail in the coffin of those accusations. The one thing he could do for his family that was useful.

He wouldn’t run. Not this time. Not like he had when his mother had died and he’d fled to university to bury himself in his studies, instead of facing the suffering that weighed on his father’s and sister’s hearts.

“I’m sorry, Dad, I won’t—”

“Kearns, carry him,” Acaelus said.

Tarquin was thirty-five years old, second in line to the most powerful position in the universe, and Ex. Kearns scooped him up like he was little more than luggage and tossed him over his shoulder without a flash of hesitation, because Acaelus Mercator had demanded it. Kearns’s shoulder dug into Tarquin’s ribs, pressing a startled grunt out of him. His cheeks burned with indignity.

“I’m not a child,” Tarquin snapped, surprised at the edge in his tone. He never raised his voice to his father.

“You are my child, and you will do as I say.”

Acaelus didn’t bother to look at him. Tarquin closed his eyes, letting out a slow sigh of defeat. There was no arguing with his father when he’d made up his mind. He opened his eyes, and temporarily forgot how to breathe. The door to one of the staff printing bays yawned open, and it wasn’t people who emerged from that space. Not exactly.

Their faces were close to human, but something had gone off in the printing. A mouth set too far right. An ear sprouting from the side of a neck. An arm that bent the wrong way around. Half a chest cavity missing.

Misprints. Empties. An error in the printer slapping together a hodgepodge of human parts. The Amaranth wouldn’t have tried putting a neural map into any of those bodies, but whatever had caused the malfunction had also made the ship release the prints instead of disintegrating them into their constituent parts, as was protocol for a misprint.

What was left of those faces twisted, drew into vicious snarls.

“Kearns,” Tarquin hissed in a sharp whisper. His voice was alarmed enough that the exemplar turned.

Kearns pulled his sidearm and fired. The earsplitting roar of the shot in such a small space slammed into Tarquin’s ears, but his pathways adjusted, keeping him from going temporarily deaf. The misprints shrieked with what throats and lungs they had, and rushed them. Kearns rolled Tarquin off his shoulder and shoved him back.

Tarquin stumbled, but his father caught him and then spun, pushing him ahead. “Run!”

Fear stripped away all his reservations and Tarquin ran, pounding down the hallways for the family’s private printing bay, praying that he wouldn’t find the same thing there.

Kearns’s weapon roared again and again, a staccato rhythm drowning out the screams of the misprints. He looked over his shoulder to find Acaelus right behind him, Kearns farther back, his injured leg slowing him down. Tarquin faced forward and sprinted—the door to the printing bay was just ahead.

Kearns’s gun fell silent. His father screamed.

Tarquin whirled around. Acaelus was chest-down on the ground, misprints swarming over him, their teeth and nails digging into his skin, ripping free bloody chunks. He took a step toward them, not knowing what he could possibly do, and Acaelus looked up, face set with determination as he flung out a hand.

“Go home!” he ordered.

He met his father’s eyes. Acaelus pushed his tongue against the inside of his cheek, making it bulge out in warning. New terror struck Tarquin. High-ranking members of the corporate families often wore small, personal explosive devices on the interior side of a molar to use in case someone intending to crack their neural maps attacked them. Acaelus had one.

Tarquin fled. He burst through the printing bay door and slammed it shut behind him, leaning his back against it, breathing harder than he ever had in his life. The explosion was designed to be small. It whumped against the door, tickling his senses.

A gruesome way to die, but it was swift. Gentler suicide pathways had been tried, but they had a nasty habit of malfunctioning. Pathways remained frustratingly unpredictable at times.

He swallowed. The staff back on Mercator Station would reprint Acaelus the second they received notice that his tracker pathway had been destroyed and his visual feed had cut. His father would be fine. Tarquin forced himself away from the door, shaking.

One of the printing cubicles was lit red to indicate it was in use. He crossed to the map backup station and picked up the crown of electronics, running it between his hands.

Tarquin knew he wasn’t what his father had wanted. He lacked the clear-eyed ruthlessness of his elder sister, Leka. He couldn’t stand to watch people cower beneath the threat of his ire as Acaelus so often had to do to keep their employees in line. His singular concession to being a Mercator was that his love of geology and subsequent studies had aided the family in their hunt for relkatite.

His father never complained about Tarquin’s lack of participation in family politics. Acaelus had given Tarquin everything he’d ever asked for and had only ever asked for one thing in return.

When Naira Sharp had been captured and put to trial, Tarquin had taken the stand to prove her accusations false. As a Mercator, as the foremost expert in his field of study, he had disproved all her allegations that Mercator’s mining processes destroyed worlds.

It hadn’t stopped the rumors. Hadn’t stopped the other families of MERIT from looking askance at Mercator and asking themselves if, maybe, they wouldn’t be better off without them.

They needed to mine a cradle world and leave it thriving in their wake to put the rumors to bed once and for all.

Tarquin could still give his father that proof, but he couldn’t do it alone. Not with misprints infesting the halls and the potential of a saboteur on the loose. He needed an exemplar.

He set the backup crown down and crossed to the printing bay control console, checking the progress on Lockhart’s print. Ninety seconds left. Enough time to compose himself. Enough time, he hoped, to get to the planet after she’d finished printing.

Tarquin had never disobeyed a direct order from his father before, and he hoped he wasn’t making a colossal mistake.