Page 1 of Commander’s Mate

Prologue

Zared

We won the war and came home to a world of smoke.

At first I refused to believe the images on the descent screen. The ship’s scanners showed thermal pockets where homes had burned for days, chemical residue where market squares had been blasted flat, and heatless bodies beneath collapsed dwellings. Numbers scrolled across the lower quadrant of the tactical display, cold and exact and obscene.

Estimated population loss.

Structural loss.

Atmospheric contamination.

Survivor clusters.

I had read battle reports since I was old enough to earn a training blade. I had written them, signed them, and sent them to men who would decide whether my brothers in arms had died well enough to justify the cost of their armor. I understood how reports made death manageable. They turned pain into categories. They turned slaughter into data.

But no report could explain the shape of my mother’s kitchen wall standing alone in a field of ash.

I stood before it with my helmet in one hand and my sidearm in the other, though there was nothing left to shoot. The air smelled of metal, wet stone, smoke, and something sweeter I would never allow myself to name. Snow drifted through the burned skeleton of my family home and settled on the blackened foundation where my father had taught my youngest brother to carve his first clan mark.

The house had been blue stone and white wood once. My mother had planted low red flowers along the front path because she said warriors needed beauty before they marched away. The path was gone now. So were the flowers. So was the door my brothers had dented during a wrestling match when we were boys.

So were they.

I stepped over a cracked beam and found the hearth. It had survived in pieces, the carved side cracked but visible beneath a layer of gray soot. My mother had carved our names there as each of us had left for service. Not because she approved of war. She never had. She said if the Consortium wanted our sons and daughters, it could at least be forced to remember we had names before we became uniforms.

I brushed ash from the stone with my thumb.

Zared.

Beneath mine was Jantu. Beside it, Tarem. Then the softer, uneven line where my little sister had carved her own name because she said she would not wait for anyone to decide when she was grown.

Meya.

A sound came out of me that did not belong to a commander.

It tore through my chest and scattered across the ruins. There was no one alive nearby to hear it. No child crying. No elder calling from beneath wreckage. No mother telling me I had always been too dramatic when wounded and too silent when grieving.

Only my breath. Only the snow. Only the dead.

I touched the comm in my ear because if I did not give myself an order, I might stand there until I froze.

“Report,” I said.

Static answered first. Then Lieutenant Pyrr Avantu answered, his voice rough enough that I knew what he had seen.

“Commander, we have found children in the east agricultural quarter. Twelve so far. Two elders. Three injured women.”

My hand tightened on the old hearth stone.

“Do they know where the others were taken?”

“Only that the Sargans loaded survivors into shuttles. The children hid in a grain storage tunnel. One saw his mother stunned and carried. Another said armed units separated young females from elders.”

Alive, then.

Some of them.