It would have been an easy job. Cadan arrived at Mercato Station in good time, and with all the supplies she needed. She just had to wait, to strike when given the opportunity and destroy the convoy of cargo eggs. They would never see her coming.
The Imperium would know they'd been sabotaged, but there would be no proof Cadan had ever been there. No proof Cadan had ever existed. The Imperium would be deprived of their planned food stores, and the King's hands would remain clean.
Cadan set up in the crowded bunkroom of a traveler's flophouse. Even she could go unnoticed among the drifters and sailors down on their luck. She was ready, every step of her plan clear in her mind, and then her communicator pinged with a message from Magnus.
"Come home!" Magnus's voice had never sounded like this, his panic barely held back. "Get in the Piercer. Now!"
She was running before the message stopped playing, the bag of her personal belongings slung over her shoulder and all thoughts of sabotage gone. Cadan hit the docking bay the same time a royal Piercer did. She dove through the line of waiting people, hurtled over the gates that would not open for her, took down the one security guard who tried to stop her with a single punch of her crackling fist, and crammed herself into the Piercer's just-opening capsule. It sealed around her instantly, already humming with energy and ready for the blink.
There was a moment of stillness, thirty seconds while her weight was manually entered into the ship's calculations, and then they'd blinked away from Mercato Station. Cadan hated traveling by Piercer. They were the fastest ships in the galaxy, needle-thin, which for some reason let the blattas blink them in the quickest routes, but they were miserable to ride in even for people who weren't as big as Cadan. It wasn't wide enough for her shoulders—they were pressed in by both sides of the capsule—and several centimeters too short for her to stand at full height. There was only just barely enough room for her bag between her legs.
Thirty minutes until arrival, a small panel blinked below Cadan's eye level, and then went dark.
It had taken Cadan five days, and two different loyalist cargo ships, to get to Mercato Station from the Royal Palace Station logged as "pantry essentials." Thirty minutes was a lifetime in comparison.
Magnus did not send ships for Cadan. Never once, in all the years she'd served him. There would be too many records of the ship coming and going, too much chance that it, and she, would be noticed. Cadan found her own rides, from loyalists who would transport an undocumented passenger for their king along their regular route, or, very rarely, from a smuggler who would carry anything if the pay was right. Something was wrong.
Much, much more wrong than just the Imperium pushing into Nidum sovereign territory.
Cadan endured the Piercer's capsule for the duration of the trip, her mind in red knots of fear, tangling and unraveling over and over. Her mother or fathers could be dead or dying, her half-sister Senan could have been taken hostage by the Imperial officers she had been negotiating against, or her ship could have exploded with her and her entourage inside it just like the former Queen's had, or Aunti Livia could have taken ill, or a rebellion was starting, or Magnus himself was held hostage in his own palace—each possibility was considered, discarded, and considered again.
Her hands clenched into fists at her sides, sparks crackling across the combat tech implanted between her knuckles, and Cadan forced them open. She couldn't afford to run down her power supply before she even knew what her target was. She needed to stay calm until she knew what she had to destroy, but her fists clenched back up as soon as her attention returned to the possibilities.
The Piercer docked, and Cadan ran out of it into the Royal Palace as fast as she'd run into it at Mercato. Faster, without her bag weighing her down.
"Magnus!" she shouted. She could hear the panic in her own voice to match the message he'd sent her. "Magnus!"
"The children's corridor," a footman whose name Cadan could not recall told her on her way past. His eyes were red; there were tears on his cheeks. Every face Cadan saw was like that, wild or horrified or agonized or numb. She couldn't stop to ask, to find out what had happened. She needed to get to Magnus, to make sure he was safe. She'd sworn it to him, when they were just children living in the same corridor whose artificial gravity Cadan was now scaling a wall to throw her body in to—the shortcut only she was strong enough to take. She'd sworn to serve and protect him and his above anything else; she was Magnus's hand, the vessel of his will, and she'd never regretted it for an instant.
It was only a three-meter drop after the gravity switch, an easy enough fall to roll through. There was Magnus, mighty shoulders bowed in and his hand over his mouth as he sobbed. His face was haggard when he looked up at her. Cadan wrapped her whole body around him and he crumbled against her chest.
"The children are gone." Magnus's voice was broken. "My children."
The entire universe tipped over, all that was true within it spilled out, tangled and wrong.
Gone.
The word echoed in Cadan's head, taking on a horrific unreality. Worse than the worst she had been able to imagine. The wordless wail of pain echoing through the corridor came from her own throat, a thousand light years away. Her body was strange, not her own. It could not support the weight of them both, and they slid awkwardly down the wall.
"How?" she managed somehow. "Where?"
The details were paltry, and Magnus's voice was hoarse with tears. Devin had flown them to Tserere in a shuttle to meet friends for the school party, a short enough trip a child could fly it on his own, but they'd never arrived. Their communicators had blipped out of contact in the middle of their route, and had not reconnected. None of the shuttle's fail-safes had been triggered to send out a distress beacon. They were nowhere they could have blinked in such a small shuttle, with only a single blatta. They had simply disappeared.
Everyone was searching, but there were no leads. Senan was pulling every string and calling in every favor she'd ever collected in her illustrious diplomatic career, with no results. Their grandmother Livia was returning to the Palace from her retirement and spousal mourning on Quarto in case any of her contacts as Dowager Consort could help find the children. Every resource the Kingdom of Nidum could gather was being deployed, and so was Cadan. Nothing was more important than this.
"It's the trice-damned Imperium, it must be!" Magnus raged through his pain, and Cadan wrapped herself around him tighter, held them both together. "They have taken my children, just as they killed my mother. They have always wanted to take our Kingdom and break our line." His deep-brown eyes burned. "There will be open war for this, Cadan. Bring them home to me. I will not have my children taken from me and played as pawns!"
"Get me Captain Pan Sophi of the Rhyssa," Cadan answered. It didn't matter how recent their last argument had been; she needed a criminal to think like a criminal, needed a smuggler to get the children back from wherever they'd been taken. Cadan had connections with a few loyalists on the Nidum side, but Sophi had far more on every side and in every underbelly of the system. There was no impossible job Sophi couldn't tackle.
"I will get them back," Cadan promised, holding Magnus tight. She tried, desperately, not to think of how impossible it would be to find three tiny bodies out in the deep emptiness of space.
They could not lie on the floor forever. Magnus wiped his eyes and left to send a summons to the Rhyssa—the one tiny thread of hope Cadan could offer—and orchestrate all the other search-and-rescue operations. Cadan was left alone in the corridor where she'd grown up, where so many of her best memories both old and new had been made.
The children were gone.
It could not be. They could not be gone. They would come running around any corner, fling themselves into her arms to tell her stories. Her mother found Cadan wandering the hallways in a daze, Erica's favorite plush anoloid dolly in her hand, though Cadan could not remember having picked it up as she'd searched for the children where they were not.
One look at her mother's wrinkled face, surrounded by her big, fluffy mane of white curls, and Cadan collapsed to her knees. Bryn's hoverchair whined under the unexpected strain of Cadan's weight as she buried her face against her mother's soft belly, clinging tight. At least there was still this: her mother zipping around in her hoverchair the way she had as long as Cadan could remember. She was always here to comfort Cadan when she needed it. Cadan had thought she would have the children far longer than she'd have the comfort of her parents.
"They're gone," she gasped. "How can they be gone?" If there was one thing true in the galaxy, it was that her family would be waiting for her at home, no matter where she went. She could bear any hardship, any separation, knowing they were safe. They could not be gone.
"We're all working on getting them back, and so will you," Bryn reminded. Her brown skin was papery with age, but her hand was still strong where she gripped Cadan's shoulder to give it a shake. "We will get them back. This failure is temporary; the victory of bringing them home will be permanent."
Cadan nodded. That hope, tenuous as it was, was something she could hold to. Failure was not an option.
*~*~*
Sophi leaned back, and the anoloids shifted beneath her to offer a more comfortable seat, the dry rasp of their pebbly skins against each other familiar and calming. Two of the little males slid down into Sophi's lap to soak up her warmth. The comfort this offered was minimal, considering the entire pile of her anoloid family was humming caution.
Even the blattas had picked up on the discomfort in the cockpit—their chittering, coming from their hiding spaces beneath the consoles and furniture, was agitated. Sophi twisted her long black ponytail around her hand, eyes closing as she listened to the murmurs passing between her human crew.
"It's got to be a trap. We go there, we'll get locked up forever."
"Why are they after us? We're just smugglers. We're small-time."
"We need to run, go to ground. Abandon Nidum-controlled space entirely!"
Kriikisiii lifted her head beneath Sophi's arm, a low rumble of disagreement quieting the crew's panic. Having an anoloid dominant as First Mate had its benefits.
"Play the message again, Farah," Sophi ordered the communications officer quietly, opening her eyes.
Farah hit a key on her console, and the king of Nidum appeared on the largest screen. It was undeniably Magnus Agyeman, immaculately dressed and decorated in royal teal; he was a stereotype of himself, right down to the dramatic lighting and direct stare he favored in his public addresses.
"Captain Pan Sophi of the Rhyssa, your presence is required at the Royal Palace for a very urgent matter. We wish to discuss a brief but lucrative arrangement with you, in person, on the behalf of a mutual friend. We believe you will find the terms of employment and compensation offered more than generous, in exchange for your speed and discretion."
The short message ended as abruptly as it began. There was nothing more, no hint of why he was taking an interest in her now. Sophi thoughtfully eyed the frozen last frame. Never had she imagined she would be deciding what to do about a royal summons, whether it was a trap or not.
"This smells like your favorite girlfriend," Gamal commented quietly, his hazel eyes meeting Sophi's from across the cockpit.
Sophi hissed between her teeth, crossing her arms. The thought had already occurred to her. It was true that Cadan was by far the closest person to the royals Sophi regularly had contact with. Who else would tell the king about her and her ship? Who else could he possibly refer to as a "mutual friend?" Their latest parting had been per usual, and surely that wasn't enough for Cadan to sic the king on the Rhyssa. She wouldn't do that, no matter how viciously they argued. Of course she wouldn't. In fact, the very idea was backward. Cadan was the attacker, and Magnus's the hand on the leash. Cadan went where Magnus ordered, and did what Magnus said, not the other way around.
Sophi was just convenient transportation and a warm bed along the way. Nothing more. Cadan might hate Sophi for her work and because she would not bow to the Agyeman dynasty any more than she did the Imperium, but she wouldn't compromise a transport that could take her places no other ship could reach. If only because getting rid of Sophi would make it harder to follow Magnus's orders.
It had to have been Cadan who'd told Magnus to bring Sophi in to discuss employment. If Sophi was taking this offer at face value, if it wasn't actually a trap, then a king's commission would certainly be lucrative. A job Magnus couldn't find anyone in his employ to do for him had to be worth a heavy payout in antimatter bouillon. They could store it up—a cozy little buffer against hard times.
It could be dangerous, maybe. But if the price was too low, or the danger too high, Sophi could just walk back out of the Royal Palace and disappear. As far as she knew the Agyemans didn't contract with anoloids for protection. Sophi had her family, Kriikisiii and her subordinates Siiki and Klirii, three full grown anoloids to back her up if it came to fighting. Abandoning Sophi would never occur to them as an option, since she was a male in their family. She would probably make it back to the Rhyssa if she had to flee the Royal Palace.
Still, Sophi shouldn't take the risk. Even if Magnus really wanted to hire her to do a job, it couldn't do anything good for her reputation to be seen cozying up to his faction. It was much safer to keep working with the few Nidum station governors and Imperial commanders she already knew and trusted. The Rhyssa could go to ground, send their regrets and make themselves scarce for a few years. Working in territory more firmly controlled by the Imperium and taking only the most cautious forays into Nidum space was the least risky course of action.
Cadan, though. The only way Magnus would know to contact the Rhyssa was if Cadan told him to, and Cadan only ever reached out to Sophi if she truly needed her help. Sophi gritted her teeth, digging her blunt fingernails into her braid. Her hair was just plain black today, no iridescent overdye to make her shine. She hadn't been feeling all that shiny.
It shouldn't matter that Cadan was the one calling for her, and yet...
"I'm going," Sophi interrupted. Her crew's discussion of different ways to slip Magnus's summons and see themselves to safety ceased abruptly. All eyes turned to her, and Sophi smiled that patented grin they'd all followed her for. The one that promised she was always going to come out on top, no matter the odds. She always had enjoyed a little risk, or she wouldn't be in this line of work. Time to roll the dice and see if it came up money or bust.
"I'll take only the cylinder core of the ship," she continued. "I'll go alone. Everyone else can take the ship's cargo segments and go to ground in the beltway hideout." The asteroid field was the perfect camouflage—no one but the crew knew how to blink into just the right space. "Imagine the payout if His Majesty has real work for me. So much antimatter," she purred, and the crew laughed. They knew how important it was not to live too close to the wire. A big payout would keep them safe, let them take only the jobs they really wanted.
"With. You." Kriikisiii pronounced the words carefully for the human crew's benefit, one heavy, clawed hand closing around Sophi's waist to hold her tight.
"Us too. Gamal, yes?" Farah looked up at Gamal from under her lavender headscarf. He nodded shortly, hand on her shoulder. "I'd like to see them try to keep me from broadcasting an infobeacon to the entire system if they imprison you without cause," Farah said.
This was their choice, putting their lives on the line at Sophi's side, and she could only nod her gratitude for their loyalty.
"The Rhyssa is my home," Dr. Hanne added from near the door, fiddling with hir cuffs. "I'll not be run off by any king... And if it does come to fighting..." Sie looked down, smoothing hir white coat along the round lines of hir body, not meeting anyone's eyes, "I'd rather be there to help if things go wrong. That's my place."
"Thank you," Sophi said, very quietly. It was more than she'd expected. There was no time for sentimentality, though. "Ten minutes," she ordered the rest of the crew. "Transfer any vital belongings to the living segment. I'll meet you in the beltway as soon as I can."
The preparations took over an hour rather than ten minutes, really. There was chaos in the hallways as food stores and living supplies were moved from place to place. The main engines charged the bones of the segments one last time, and then the cylinder sealed off from the segments and they slipped away from the core of the ship. Sophi watched them blink out before she nodded to Kriikisiii to set the Rhyssa on its way.
It took about a day to reach the Royal Palace Station, while keeping away from even minor shipping lanes and the system trackers that recorded every ship that passed through them. Sophi didn't call ahead to the Palace, either. No sense giving the king warning, if this was a trap.
She had never seen the Royal Palace in person before, and it was every bit as pretentious now as it was on a screen. It was all tall columns and expansive vistas, the entire thing designed to display the power the Agyemans wished they wielded. Sophi stepped out into it with Siiki and Klirii flanking her as though she were their dominant, both of them rumbling their displeasure in warning.
Kriikisiii waited just inside the Rhyssa's airlock, held in reserve in case she was needed.
"Captain Pan Sophi of the Rhyssa, answering the summons of King Magnus Agyeman," Sophi said to the subtly armed footmen who met her, and she was led to the audience chamber. At least it wasn't far from the docking bay, if she had to run.
There were more palace workers and guards and advisers along the walls of the audience chamber, as well as, surprisingly, Dowager Consort Livia. As as far as Sophi knew, Livia never left the royal compound on Quarto anymore. She was the nearest to Magnus, along with his seniormost adviser Bryn Martin, seated in her hoverchair and flanked by several of her husbands. They all seemed much older and more tired than they did in their public broadcasts. There was no sign of Cadan.
Magnus was standing where he would be lit to most dramatic effect, golden light flowing over him like a mantle. He lowered his communicator and looked down his nose at Sophi and her anoloid entourage. He probably looked down at people he wasn't a good third of a meter taller than, too. He seemed the type.
"Captain Pan Sophi," he said dismissively, turning back to his communicator. "You have an interesting career. Contraband smuggling, trafficking, petty larceny, even a few unsubstantiated reports of piracy."
"All those accusations are unsubstantiated, your Majesty," Sophi said, very calmly. She even managed to make the honorific sound polite rather than giving it the sarcasm it deserved. She'd never been caught by an agent of Nidum; they had no proof to tack anything onto her. Still, opening with a list of crimes wasn't the most promising start to an audience, and the skin prickled all the way down her spine.
Magnus just gazed coolly at her. "You are known to consort with criminals of all stripes," he said. "Your name comes up as a transporter in every backwater and underbelly orbiting my star."
Oh, this was definitely blackmail, not the paying job she'd been promised. He thought he could spout some threats and yank Sophi around just like he did Cadan. Use her as nothing but a tool for his own ends.
"I don't have to listen to this," she snapped. "I came here in good faith, expecting the employment you promised. I will not stand here and be threatened." The anoloids puffed up behind her, making themselves appear bigger. Sophi's heart was pounding in her fingertips, jittering in her throat. If it came down to fighting her way out of the Palace, it would not be pretty. "I'm done with this."
She spun on her heel, and did not run out of the audience chamber.
*~*~*
Cadan's broken heart shattered again when Sophi stormed out of her royal audience, the anoloids she'd brought trailing behind her. It had only taken a day for Sophi to answer when Magnus called. Cadan knew Sophi had no loyalty, but a royal reward should have been more than enough motivation to secure her help.
Clearly it wasn't. Sophi was leaving far too quickly to have even heard what Magnus had to say.
"That egotistical, puffed-up..." Sophi snarled, heading back toward her ship.
"Sophi!" Cadan bolted out of the side corridor she'd been lurking in to head Sophi off before she made it a few meters from audience chamber. Cadan had thought it best if she wasn't seen right away, considering how recently they'd fought, but she couldn't let Sophi go without securing her help.
"You?!" Sophi snapped, eyes blazing. "This is your doing. Understand this. I am no king's lapdog to be called on a whim. I'm going, and I will never—"
Cadan broke her off. "You can't leave!"
Sophi's heavy-lidded black eyes narrowed to furious slits. "Say. That. Again," she hissed. The unhappily rumbling anoloids behind her went deadly still and silent—eyes fixed on Cadan. They were apex predators, and somewhere in her core DNA, Cadan was prey. Every single hair stood up on the back of her neck.
She turned away immediately, putting her hands over her eyes as she turned her head even farther to the side to bare her neck. Anoloid submissive pose, human version. She was vulnerable, as nonthreatening as she could make herself to them. Cadan could—with her combat tech and her speed and a good dose of luck—take out a single anoloid. She had no illusions about how it would go if the two bruisers behind Sophi followed through on the threat of their silence. They might only be thigh-high to Cadan at the shoulder, but each one of them was at least five times her weight—with the natural advantages of thick, pebbled skin, wide, crushing jaws, a whip tail, and four sets of deadly claws.
"Please, Sophi," Cadan begged. "I need your help."
There was an awful moment of silence before Sophi hummed a note and the anoloids began rumbling grumpily to each other again. The danger was past, and Cadan dared drop her hands and look back toward Sophi. She was clearly still furious, but she was paying attention.
Sophi dropped her ultimatum. "You have one minute to explain."
"The children are gone." The horrible words stung out of Cadan's throat. She could feel her traitorous lip trembling with the tears she had not yet shed. "They've been taken, we don't know who. I need to find them, I—" Her voice betrayed her, choking off. She swallowed hard and forced herself to go on. "I attended their births." She'd held Magnus's hand through the hours of labor, breathing with him—he'd wanted to do things the old-fashioned way, since he was trans and could bear his own children. "I held them. I heard their first cries." They'd been so tiny and precious in her big hands, still all wrinkly and wet. She'd wrapped them in their blankets and tucked them into Magnus's tired arms and loved them with all her heart.
"I'm the one who taught him to fly," Cadan confessed, and there were finally tears on her cheeks now. Speaking it all made it real and she could not hold them back. "I taught him to fly and his shuttle disappeared with all three of them inside it." She mopped at her cheeks with her sleeve. "I'd tear the galaxy apart with my bare hands to find them, but I don't know where to start." There was nothing more she could say. Cadan could tell Sophi about every single sweet message she'd ever gotten, every present she'd brought home from the corners of the system, every little homemade gift she'd been given in turn, about every laugh or smile or hug they'd ever shared, and it would never be enough. "Please," Cadan begged. She had nothing left.
Sophi's rage had evaporated into shock and confusion. She reached forward, her delicate fingers circling Cadan's wrist as she stepped closer.
"Who are they?" Sophi breathed.
How could she not know? How had Magnus not opened with the most important part?
Cadan spoke the names of the children she loved as her own. "Devin, Erica, and Kofi."
Sophi gasped like she'd been dropped into an atmosphere that lacked oxygen. "His own children have been kidnapped, and he's dropping snide threats and standing around like a... a..." Sophi flapped a hand toward the royal audience chamber, at a loss for words.
Cadan sighed. "He's doing his stone pillar impression, isn't he?" Magnus had a tendency to when he was trying to hide strong emotion, and of course he wouldn't want to show any weakness to Sophi. "Believe me, his children are the gleaming stars of Magnus's heart. He cares for them more than anything else in the galaxy. We can pay a handsome reward for your help. No threats. Please," she begged one final time.
Sophi glanced at the anoloids, who were humming in complex harmonies Cadan could not follow. Sophi sighed and turned back. She slid her hand down from Cadan's wrist to twine her slender fingers through Cadan's as she reached up with her other hand to dab at Cadan's damp cheeks with her own sleeve. "All right," she agreed softly. "I'll help you."
*~*~*
Sophi would have blinked off and never looked back at the Royal Palace if it weren't for Cadan. She had never seen Cadan cry before, or beg, or look so horribly desperate. She wouldn't have thought Cadan capable of it. The king might have been acting like an over-decorated lump of rock with his children missing, but Cadan cared for them.
Cadan loved the royal children enough to drop any pretense of pride. The way she'd spoken of them, Sophi had been almost sure it was Cadan's own children who were missing. Sophi couldn't turn away from her, no matter how bruised she was from their latest explosion.
Sophi stomped back into the audience chamber with Cadan at her side and the anoloids at her back. Magnus was huddled up with Dowager Consort Livia and Bryn Martin, all three of their heads bent together as they murmured. Livia drew herself up, cold and haughty, as soon as she noticed Sophi had returned, and Magnus followed his mother's lead.
Their heirs were gone, and still all the royals could think about was their image. The royal family made a pretty picture smiling together in their press releases, but did they even care about the children if they could be so cold and calculating when they went missing? If Cadan didn't love these children, Sophi might have been tempted to think they'd be better off with their kidnappers.
Sophi named her price. "Fifty grams antimatter to take the job, two kilos when I finish it." She knew she'd gauged it right because Cadan's fists clenched to throw involuntary sparks. Magnus flinched before Dowager Consort Livia placed her hand on his shoulder to squeeze, then nodded, and he nodded with her. It would hurt, but they'd pay it.
"Two kilos antimatter bullion when you deliver my children safe into my care," Magnus agreed. "A footman will see you with fifty grams at the docking bay. Get them back." That last bit was not for Sophi, but was directed to Cadan, who nodded once, deeply.
There was nothing much to say after that. Sophi didn't need anything more from the royals. She led the way back to the Rhyssa with every scrap of information they'd managed to gather so far being transmitted to her communicator. For once, Sophi was glad Cadan didn't need to pack—that she lived with just the one beat-up bag, always ready to go at a moment's notice.
The Rhyssa blinked away from the Royal Palace, so Sophi didn't have to look at it anymore, and everyone gathered to plot in the helm. The anoloids piled together, humming. Gamal leaned against folded-up control panels on the wall, expression wary. Farah, nominally off shift, tugged a few final adjustments to the light-apricot headscarf that covered her hair and neck as she joined them. She leaned beside Gamal, their shoulders touching. Dr. Hanne stayed close to the door, twisting hir plump hands together in worry as sie listened. The blattas huddled in the corners or under furniture where it was comfortably dark, waiting for any task they were needed for. Cadan looked everyone over and nodded grimly to herself. She efficiently laid out what she knew about the disappearance of the royal children—where they had been taken from and how they had not been found.
"It must be the Imperium," she finished.
"No," Sophi dismissed. Kriikisiii rumbled her agreement, and Farah nodded. Taking three children and an entire shuttle was not the Imperium's method, and they didn't stand to gain anything by antagonizing the king or the Nidum citizens loyal to him. The Imperium wanted peaceful reintegration, not war.
"Who else has a motive?" Cadan demanded, voice hard even through the thickness of tears she was no longer shedding. "They are the ones who'd like to end the royal line!"
"Anyone who's hoping for a ransom has a motive," Sophi pointed out. "Or anyone who realizes how much money there's to be made off a war."
Cadan's eyes narrowed suspiciously at that, and Sophi bit back the instinct to lash out at her. They had only just begun working together, and this was important. They couldn't afford to blow up yet. Sophi might not have cared about the royal family, but she had a job to do.
"Yes, I make my money off the tensions," she admitted, "but war's too hot for me. I don't want to die for my work, and I have family on both sides, Kingdom and Imperium."
Cadan looked surprised at that, but nodded. She folded her arms, then shifted in her boots and rubbed at her mouth with the back of her hand, blinking hard to hide the gleam of tears. "I just... If all the kidnappers want is war, all it takes is an airlock." She looked down, voice barely audible. "Three tiny bodies out in the cold, empty—"
"No!" Sophi broke her off sharply. "The royal children are alive. They won't be killed, no matter who took them."
"How can you know that?" Cadan demanded. "They killed the Queen. It could be the same people!"
"That explosion was an accident," Sophi soothed. There had been detailed reports and reconstructions of the event, and they all said the same thing: it had been just a catastrophic equipment failure. "It could have happened to anyone!"
"I happen to people. I make 'accidents' like that. I could blow up a ship a dozen ways, but I don't. I don't kill anyone." Cadan flexed her hands where they gripped her biceps, sparks of light dancing against her light-brown skin all the way up her forearms. "We can't know if whoever took them kills or not. We can't." Her voice choked off and she shook her head, blinking hard to keep her eyes clear of tears.
"What would you give to know they were safe?" Gamal challenged, taking charge where Sophi's arguments were clearly not helping. "What would you do get them back?"
"Anything. Everything." There was no doubt in Cadan's answer, no hesitation.
Gamal laid it out patiently. "Then of course they're alive. If only because they're so much more valuable that way."
Sophi fervently nodded her agreement. "Gamal's right. It doesn't make any sense to kill them. They're out there, alive. We just have to track them down."
Cadan took a deep breath, squaring her shoulders as she nodded to accept Sophi and Gamal's assertions. It would kill her if they were wrong.
"First, we need to send word to the rest of the ship, let them know we'll be off communication for a while," Sophi ordered, and Farah quickly flipped down a control panel to do so. Sophi was more than glad she'd come to the Royal Palace with only the long, cylindrical core of the ship. She had a feeling they were going to be traveling fast and far, and the sleeker dimensions made blink easier. "Then we hunt the kidnappers down."
"Where do we even start looking?" Cadan asked.
Sophi grinned. "We start by asking someone who was with them when they were taken."
"They took the shuttle alone."
"They were flying," Sophi corrected. "That takes a shuttle, a pilot, and a blatta to blink."
Cadan's jaw dropped. Everyone always forgot the blattas. They were ubiquitous, unobtrusive, and everywhere. Even Cadan, who was always scrupulously polite to blatta workers, did not tend to think of them individually.
"If we're lucky, if something scared the blatta, ve will have blinked home," Sophi continued. "It's an involuntary reaction. Which pod mother supplies the Royal Palace with workers?"
"Oh," Cadan breathed. The hope on her face nearly hurt to look at. "It was..." She thought hard. "Many Be Her Segments And Vast Her Abdomen For The Strength Of Her Descendants. She orbits Quarto."
"Kriikisiii, calculate us a route," Sophi ordered.