Page 2 of Into The Rift

Chapter One

Prince Jago

Two months earlier

“Don’t worry, Jago,” Prince Rakkur said, glancing over at me as I nervously paced back and forth across the room, my sapphire blue robes swirling around my ankles. “I’m sure Tariq will be here soon. He may even be docking the ship now and will be coming through those doors any minute.”

“Should I go down and be ready to get onboard the other ship as soon as they arrive?”

He smiled and shook his head, waving a hand in the air. “Don’t worry so much. They won’t leave without you, that’s for sure.” He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “You’ll be there when you get there.”

I frowned. "I’ve never understood that saying—it sounds like something my omak would say. I mean, obviously, I’ll be there when I’m there. What does that even mean?”

“It means they’ll wait for you,” Rakkur said, smiling at me.

My omak was his older brother, Anarr, so the two of them had been raised by the same man, who just so happened to be a human named Blake and the author of those kinds of sayings. Or at least he was a serial repeater of them. He was the king’s consort and just full of old human sayings. This dubious pronouncement had no doubt come from him too.

“You outrank the captain and his crew,” he continued, “and not the other way around. You’re a royal, after all—the son of a prince and the grandson of a king. They’ll wait.”

“That sounds a little pompous to me.”

“Oh gods, I can just imagine Blake’s face if he heard you say that.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. Blake is the best, but I wasn’t raised the same as you, uncle. My father hates the idea of pulling rank on people.”

“Who does? Anarr? My brother, Anarr? That sounds absolutely nothing like him.”

“No, not him. The General.”

“Oh really? General Renard Ballenescu? Is that why he asks everyone to call him just ‘the General’ since he took that position as a co-commandant of Earth, along with Anarr. He uses that title instead of his given name now, right? Because he so hates using his position and throwing his rank and title around.” Rakkur laughed out loud again, and the sound must have been contagious, because I smiled too.

“He didn’t do that, really, though Blake likes to tell that story.”

“No, I get it,” Rakkur said. “You were mostly raised onboard a Voyager ship by your parents, and not in the king’s palace like I was. I learned about royal privilege early on at Blake’s knee, and so did Anarr, for that matter. I guess Renard is just now discovering it.” He shifted uneasily in his chair, rubbing a hand across his swollen stomach. “Wow. The baby’s restless this morning. It feels like he’s trying to kick his way out of there.”

“That can’t happen though, right?”

“Gods, I hope not,” he replied, snorting a little. Since Tariq and Rakkur got married, Rakkur seemed to be happy, and he laughed often. Even in a family like ours, renowned for its many “love matches,” his and Tariq’s had been a unique story. Colonel Tariq, an elite Imperial Guard, had accidentally imprinted on Rakkur while my uncle was still way too young for a romance with a grown man—he was just fifteen or so, and much too young to marry.

Tariq had left the planet and served far away for a long time and did everything he could to avoid his fate. Not that he hadn’t been totally in love with Rakkur the whole time, but Tariq had considered himself entirely unsuitable for the prince and had nobly done his best to distance himself from him, hoping the feelings would somehow go away.

Indeed, they’d only become stronger, and years later, they were thrown together again and wound up married. Rakkur was expecting Tariq’s child. His health had been a bit precarious for the first months of pregnancy—high blood pressure the doctors couldn’t seem to get low enough to suit them, and he hadn’t been allowed to travel back to Tygeria. Now, with a little over a month to go, he was recovering nicely and traveling home to have the baby there on Tygeria with the best physicians available.

As for me, I had been asked to keep him company on this ship until we got out of the “danger zone,” an area of space about two days out from Loros where there had been frequent attacks on Axis ships by the so-called Roth pirates, who the officials now thought were actually the Pton in disguise.

There had been some disturbing rumors about the Pton that had been filtering in after an attack on a settlement on one of the moons of a planet called Scullar, in the far northwest quadrant. According to witnesses there, some of the Pton soldiers who had attacked the settlement looked different than the regular soldiers we’d already seen. These men—who seemed to be the officers in charge—were taller and built on heavier frames. But that wasn’t the really frightening part.

People called them unnaturally handsome, and they said that parts of their skin were covered in scales of various colors—like red, blue and green. Witnesses said it wasn’t a lot of scales, but enough to make them appear very otherworldly, and strange, which of course, they undoubtedly were. The word “demonic” was thrown around a lot too. Because of their horns—elaborate, frightening horns, growing right out of their foreheads and curving back over their heads. The king had called it hysteria and dismissed it out of hand as just people’s vivid imaginations.

The demonic part, anyway. There were many different species in the known, habitable planets, with all kinds of characteristics. Tygerians, for example, had tiger stripes under the skin, so as Blake would say, people who lived in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

“What do you think of all the rumors, Rakkur? Do you believe what they say about the new Pton soldiers?”

“I think it must be people’s imaginations running away with them, like my father says. How could they be demons or devils, anyway? It’s not like we have a common religion.”

That was true enough, yet most all the old religions had some kind of devil-like figures in them. All the ones I knew of anyway. Devils in all the religions were evil creatures, liars and promoters of sin. They were a metaphor for everything bad.

But just like I didn’t believe in the gods, I didn’t really believe in demons or devils either. I wasn’t scared of them at least. In fact, I’d love to see one. Blake said that was part of my problem—I was fatally attracted to bad boys. Actually, I was a bad boy myself, according to him, and I was being sent home now because of it.

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