After sleeping for most of the journey, Lucian checked the voyage status on his slate to see there were only two hours left. He found a small ration in the seat pocket ahead of him, which his mother must have saved. He had one bite of the hardened, tasteless instameal before realizing he wasn’t hungry after all. For such expensive tickets, he would have thought they’d provide some half-decent food.

  Though this trip was only fourteen hours, he had to somehow survive the interstellar voyage of twenty-eight standard days. With distances so vast, it was a wonder humanity had managed to spread so far. Though the League of Worlds was still sometimes called the Hundred Worlds by older League citizens, the moniker was more than fifty years out of date. These days, there were far more than a hundred incorporated League worlds. One day, it might be that one could never make the journey from Earth to the Border Worlds in a lifetime.

  About an hour out from Sol Citadel, the captain made an announcement.

  “Good evening, folks,” he said, with a Texan drawl. Lucian wondered what made it “evening” out here. “Time of docking will be 24:22 Olympian. Those of you planning on boarding the Burung to Volsung, you’ll be meeting a Pan-Galactic attendant at the gate. Thank you, and we hope you’ve had a pleasant trip.”

  The intercom clicked off. Lucian looked at his mother, who had awakened during the message. The Burung was his ship.

  “Did you hear that?” he asked. “He said I’d need to meet someone at the gate.”

  She unlocked her slate, her eyes widening at some piece of news. “The Burung embarks in two hours! They bumped it up for some reason. You’ll barely have time to make it. Your gate is on the opposite end from where we’re docking.”

  When she took his hand, Lucian could feel it shaking. Lucian had been expecting to have one last day with his mother, seeing the sights of the Citadel. Now, that would never happen. It was like a punch to the gut.

  “I’m sorry,” he managed. “I’ve . . . been kind of an ass lately.”

  “If you’ve been an ass, I’ve been one too. For a lot longer. I put other things first, and you’ve grown up before my eyes.”

  This confession was followed by more tears. She had her own regrets, too. And those regrets seemed far heavier than his.

  “It’s okay,” Lucian said. “You were doing the best you could. I’m old enough to take care of myself now.”

  She nodded, wiping the tears from her eyes. “You can’t survive this universe alone, Lucian. One day, you’ll understand that.”

  Lucian wasn’t sure what to say to that. All he knew was that he didn’t like the sound of it. He had survived on his own so far, more or less.

  He could handle this too.

  Mars hung half a million kilometers away, a crimson red drop in the star-studded expanse, small enough to be covered by Lucian’s hand. The Citadel appeared tiny at first, a silvery star floating in the void easily missed by the naked eye. Lucian knew the Citadel was the largest station in the Worlds, the headquarters of the League Fleet, and the hub of all intersystem and interstellar travel for Sol, though it looked far too small for that.

  But as the shuttle neared, the station only loomed larger and larger. The first thing Lucian saw was the central spire, the great axis around which the fortress rotated. That spire was filled with thousands of viewports and hangars, seeming more like a skyscraper than the linchpin holding the orbital stronghold together—that was if a skyscraper could be ten kilometers long. Around it, the station’s gargantuan arms bloomed at intricate angles, a metallic lotus flower. Massive doors and hangars opened at the ends of those arms, while thousands of viewports gleamed from every surface. Countless bays lay open and ready to receive incoming vessels. Likewise, many small ships zipped silently around the fortress.

  Lucian’s jaw dropped at the sheer scale. He could see why they called it one of the wonders of the galaxy, along with the likes of the Forge of Heaven, the Domes of Nessus, and the Elevator of Hephaestus.

  Several large battleships and carriers floated a few klicks from the Citadel itself, far too large to dock there. As the shuttle drew closer, Lucian saw these vessels were mammoths in their own right. The supercarrier Volga was over a kilometer long and half again as wide. Battleships built for brute firepower were in even greater numbers. Lucian counted ten, each armed with plasma cannons, railguns, fusion lasers, and torpedoes. Beside them were even smaller vessels in greater numbers. Tiny fighters swarmed by the score around the capital ships, practicing coordinated maneuvers. Larger destroyers, like his mother’s LS Barcelona, sailed behind, drilling their point defense screening.

  These drills seemed to go beyond mere vigilance. War was looming. Coupled with the rumors that his mother had heard, the Swarmers were probably returning.

  “Looks like they’ve started the party without me,” she said, also watching. “Two weeks from now, I guarantee I’ll be passing through Centauri Gate.”

  “You think you will have to rebase at Alpha Centauri?” Lucian asked.

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  She looked back at him, her eyes hard to read. “A soldier’s sense tells me that. If the Swarmers come back through Kasturi, like last time, they’ll have to go through A.C. to reach Sol.”

  If that were so, then this would be her last time seeing Sol for a while, too. It was a dark thought, a thought that made Lucian numb.

  The ship began to slow, pulling toward one of the Citadel’s many hangars.

  “Time to move,” his mother said.

  Lucian followed her lead, grabbing his backpack from the overhead bin. He followed her down the empty aisle before other passengers could get the same idea. The transport was still pulling in, its deceleration offset by the inertial dampening. With a careful step, it was possible to make it to the airlock first.

  “Please remain seated,” the automated drone commanded. “Please remain seated!”

  His mother brushed past the drone as if it didn’t exist while other passengers grumbled. A male attendant near the airlock was about to reprimand her when she explained the situation.

  “He needs to get to the Burung. He’s going to miss his ship.”

  The attendant nodded. “That’s fine. We should be docking any moment now.”

  From outside the airlock door came a resounding click and the hiss of air. A moment later, the door hissed open automatically. The attendant gestured toward the open tunnel, and Lucian disembarked.

  “Mr. Abrantes?” came a female voice with a Nordic accent.

  In his rush to go down the tunnel, Lucian had almost missed the pretty blonde attendant dressed in a gray Pan-Galactic uniform. “Yeah, that’s me.”

  "Please follow me. The Burung is almost ready to depart.”

  He turned to face his mother, who gave him a firm nod.

  “Go, Lucian,” she said. “There won’t be another ship. I love you.”

  The attendant was already walking away, almost jogging, an action she performed easily in the low gravity despite her high heels.

  “I love you, too,” Lucian said.

  He turned to run after the attendant, who was at the end of the boarding tunnel. He looked behind one last time, but the crowds exiting the shuttle had obscured his mother from view. With a pang of regret, he realized that it might be the last time he ever saw her.

  “This way, Mr. Abrantes,” the attendant insisted, blind to the parting.

  Being addressed so formally was strange—the attendant couldn’t have been much older than him. Now out of the tunnel and in the main concourse, Lucian followed her down several flights of stairs. He didn’t even have time to take in his surroundings, other than the fact that the space they were in was massive, filled with escalators, stairways, and at least ten decks of stores and restaurants, all filled to the brim with travelers. He felt light on his feet as they raced toward the bottom level of the arm. As with the shuttle transport, Sol Citadel seemed to be calibrated to Martian gravity.

  The attendant pushed her way through the crowds to reach an unobtrusive airlock in the station’s side. Beyond that airlock was the vacuum of space, but connected to the airlock itself was a small, personal-sized shuttle.

  “This isn’t the liner, is it?” Lucian asked.

  She suppressed a laugh. “First time in space?”

  Lucian nodded. Everyone could probably tell he was an Earther just by the look of him.

  “This will get you to your gate. You’ll have to run the rest of the way down X Arm.”

  She input a key, and the door slid open, revealing the craft’s bare interior, which was about the size of a small car. There was only a single seat with a safety harness and a viewscreen. Everything must have been automated because there was nothing to steer with. Lucian realized that the stars outside were spinning slowly. The station was getting some of its gravity from centrifugal force, which was redirected by the dominant artificial gravity field.

  Before Lucian could ask anything more, the door slid shut and locked itself. It was hard not to feel exposed out here. How many centimeters were there between this metal shell and the cold vacuum of space?

  “Please harness yourself,” came a placid female voice from the console.

  Lucian followed the directions. He supposed he just had to hope his luggage made it with him.

  Not a moment after he was harnessed, the tiny vessel jolted away, piloting itself under the Citadel, pushing Lucian back into his seat. Once its top speed was established, he began floating against his restraints. The AG field didn’t seem to extend far from the station itself.

  The ship zoomed out of sight of the arm, heading to the opposite side of the Citadel. The vessel was aiming upward now, passing an arm jutting from the station. Another shuttle zipped past soundlessly. He felt a brief moment of vertigo as he gazed into the dark void before him, thousands of light-years of distance encumbered only by multitudes of stars.

  The shuttle moved at a low thrum, but other than that, there was a deep and profound silence. He suppressed a shiver.

  The vessel executed a half-flip, drawing underneath its target destination. Within a minute, it had docked at an arm on the highest level of the Citadel. The airlock clicked and slid open, revealing a wide terminal crowded with people.

  Lucian scrambled out of the shuttle and reached for his slate. Before he could even ask, it displayed a direction with a holographic arrow. In the background, an announcement about his ship droned.

  “Attention. The Burung is due to depart Gate X76 in ten minutes. This is the final boarding call for Volsung. Once again . . .”

  Lucian ran, his backpack bouncing on his shoulders. He skirted several people on his way up and ran faster once he’d reached the upper deck. The arrow pointed left, in the direction of a cavernous arm extending for at least a kilometer. Could he run that distance in time?

  Lucian sprinted as fast as he could in the Martian G while the stars spun outside the massive viewports. It was dizzying, as if he were running along the inside of a translucent drill. He passed shops, stores, banks of elevators, and Lev trains running on the arm’s periphery. There was little time to wonder at it all. Every fifty meters or so, he passed more gates, in ascending order. Knowing his luck, he suspected X76 would be at the very end. The crowds thinned as he made his way out from the station’s center until he was the only one left.

  At last, he reached the terminus of the arm: X76. He heaved a sigh and rushed into the empty waiting area. He slammed into the reception counter, behind which a young man in a gray uniform blinked at him in surprise.

  “I’m here,” Lucian said, between breaths. “Am I too late?”

  “Mr. Abrantes, I presume?” the attendant asked. “You have a minute to spare. Walk through the reader.”

  “What about my luggage? Did it make it?”

  The attendant didn’t seem to hear him. “The ship will leave in two minutes. Hurry!”

  Lucian cursed, then walked through the security arch. There was a moment of hesitation. When it beeped agreeably, he charged down the boarding tunnel. He could see the outer hull of the liner through the tunnel viewports. The vessel was many times larger than the one that had taken him here, with multiple decks. The name, Burung, was scrawled in all caps on the ship’s side. Lucian wondered what that word even meant.

  The boarding tunnel doors were closing.

  “No!”

  With one last burst of energy, he dove, tripping over the threshold and into the pristine white ship.