The Last Girl From Earth

The ship was breathing.

That was Lyra Vale's first thought, and it should have been impossible.

Dead ships don't breathe on Obsidian Moon. They rust. They get picked clean by scavengers who are faster, meaner, and usually deader than you. They are cold iron husks left over from the Cataclysm War, gutted for copper wire and oxygen filters and left to die in the grey dust.

This one was different. It was humming.

Lyra cut the engines on her salvage skiff, the Mira, and let the patched-together heap drift. The Mira was a joke - a cockpit from a Valkari fighter welded to cargo thrusters from an Imperial freighter, held together with sealant and prayers. It was the only thing she owned.

"Energy signature is wrong," Mira-7 said in her ear. Mira was Lyra's AI, seven generations obsolete, with the anxious personality of a mother who'd seen too many funerals.

Mira-7 had been with Lyra since she was nine. Lyra had found her in a junk pile, a cracked core that everyone else said was scrap. Lyra had touched her and Mira had woken up.

"I know it's wrong," Lyra muttered, locking her magnetic boots to the wing. "That's why it's worth money."

"The material is not in my database. It's absorbing your scanner ping. It's absorbing light. Lyra, Imperial law says any unidentified Aureli artifact must be reported -"

"Yeah, and Imperial law also says humans are extinct, so I'm pretty sure they don't have their facts straight."

Obsidian Moon stretched in every direction below her. From orbit it looked like a smooth black pearl. Down here, it was a graveyard. The entire moon was a bone-yard of warships. Thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands, crashed and abandoned when the Cataclysm War ended 183 years ago. The Empire never cleaned it up. They just declared it a Forbidden Salvage Zone and left the orphans and the desperate to fight over the scraps.

Lyra had grown up here. She knew every skeleton.

She had never seen this one.

It wasn't on any map. It was too big, too perfect. Most wrecks were torn open, their spines showing. This one was intact. Its hull wasn't metal. It was a matte, light-eating black, so dark her helmet's spotlight disappeared into it instead of reflecting. When she got closer, she saw faint veins of gold and pale blue light running under the surface, like blood under skin.

And it was warm. In the dead cold of space, where everything should be minus two hundred degrees, the hull was radiating heat.

She jumped.

In zero-G, Lyra wasn't clumsy. On the Moon, she was too tall, too sharp-tongued, always bumping into things. In space, she was a blade. She sailed over the ridge of the dead ship and landed light, her boots clicking.

Where she touched, the hull rippled.

A ring of blue light pulsed out from her glove, spreading across the black surface and then fading.

Lyra froze.

That had never happened before.

Well - that wasn't true. It had happened before, when she was little. When she was angry, old consoles would flicker on. When she was scared, doors would open. The other scavenger kids called her a witch. The depot masters called her a glitch. Lyra called it the static - that faint, high-pitched whine she'd heard in her head since she was six, on no frequency, like someone whispering her name from another room.

The static was screaming now.

The ship had no airlock. It had a seam. As she stared, the seam irised open on its own, peeling back like a living eyelid, exhaling a gust of warm, clean, sweet-smelling air. Air that smelled like rain and soil. Things that didn't exist on Obsidian Moon.

"Atmosphere," Mira-7 whispered, her voice actually shaking. "Nitrogen-oxygen. 21% oxygen. It's... it's Earth-standard. Lyra, that atmosphere has been sealed for almost two centuries. That's impossible."

Lyra's heart was hammering so hard she could hear it over the static.

"Log a claim beacon," she said automatically. Finders law. If she logged it, the ship was hers.

"I... I can't. The system won't let me. It says this vessel is already claimed. Sovereign-class. Royal registry."

Royal. There were no royals left. Humanity had no royals.

Lyra stepped inside.

The inside was not a wreck. It was a cathedral.

No dust. No bodies. No scavenger tags. The walls soared a hundred feet high, all the same black material, but inside, the gold and blue veins were bright, pulsing slowly, like a heartbeat. The air was warm. The light had no source - it just existed.

And in the center of the room, floating a meter off the floor with no wires, no grav-plates, was a perfect black sphere the size of her heart.

It was not a machine. It didn't look built. It looked grown. Its surface swirled with galaxies, nebulae being born and dying, slow and silent. And it was humming the exact frequency of the static in her head.

Lyra's breath caught.

She'd dreamed of this. Not this exact sphere, but this feeling. Since she was a child, she'd dreamed of a blue planet, of an ocean so big it made her chest hurt, of a woman with her face but older, wearing a crown made of living light, who held a baby and said, Forgive me. I have to hide you where the shadows can't look.

She never told anyone about the dreams. Orphans who claimed they remembered Earth were locked up. Earth-sickness, they called it. A mental illness.

Lyra took a step forward. Then another. Her boots didn't clang. The floor softened under her steps.

"Mira, what is that?" she whispered.

Mira-7 was silent for three full seconds. When she spoke again, her voice was different. Deeper. Older. Not her voice at all.

"Heart of Earth. Aureli Heart. Key of the Veil. Welcome home, Sovereign."

Lyra flinched. "Mira?"

"I... I don't know what that was," Mira said, back to normal, panicked. "My core just accessed a partitioned file I've never seen before! Lyra, we have to leave!"

The sphere pulsed, like it heard its name.

Lyra didn't realize she'd pulled off her glove until cold air bit her skin. Her hand was bare. On her forearm were three pale, strange scars she'd had since birth - not burn marks, but perfect geometric lines, like circuitry under skin.

As her bare hand got close, the scars began to glow. Bright blue-white. Gold.

The static in her head became a song.

"I know you," she whispered.

She touched it.

For half a second, nothing.

Then the sphere grabbed her.

It wasn't hot. It was absolute. Light - not bright, but pure information - shot up her arm, into her veins, into her head. Lyra didn't scream. She couldn't. Her mind was ripped open.

She saw - Earth, not dead, but wrapped in a shimmering Veil like a soap bubble, hiding it. She saw a woman who looked exactly like her placing a baby in a tiny escape pod. Her. She saw a man in Imperial white - Emperor Lucien, younger - shaking hands with the Queen and then stabbing her in the back. She saw seven alien dynasties dividing up human colonies like meat.

She saw something else. Something under Earth. A vast, silent darkness that wasn't dark, that ate light and memory. The Silence.

And she understood, in a flash that was too big for words: Humanity hadn't been destroyed. Humanity had hidden. They had made themselves go extinct to starve it.

And now she had just rung the dinner bell.

Across the galaxy, everything stopped.

Lyra was slammed back against the wall, the sphere now fused to her palm, warm and pulsing like a second heart. Through the open iris of the ship, she could see the sky above Obsidian Moon.

Obsidian Moon has no atmosphere. Its sky is always black, filled with dead satellites and drifting hulks.

Every single one had just gone dark. Her skiff. The depot lights on the horizon. The stars themselves seemed to dim.

For thirteen seconds, absolute, terrifying silence. No engines. No comms. No static.

Then -

Every system came back on at once, screaming.

And every communication system in the known galaxy - from a child's toy communicator on Caelum Prime to the Emperor's own throne display - received the same message, in the same dead language, in the same voice that Lyra had heard in her head since she was six:

EARTH HAS AWAKENED.

On her helmet display, warning lights exploded.

"IMPERIAL CRUISER! IMPERIAL CRUISER INBOUND!" Mira-7 shrieked. "Lyra, the Revenant! It's the Revenant! The Prince's warship just entered orbit! They tracked the Aureli spike! They tracked YOU!"

High above, the clouds of dust parted.

A shadow fell over the entire bone-yard. A ship so massive it blocked out half the sky. Twelve kilometers long, shaped like a black dagger, covered in weapons that could crack a moon. The most feared ship in the Empire.

Crown Prince Kael Veyron's personal dreadnought.

Lyra had spent her whole life hearing stories about him. The Ruthless Prince. The Emperor's Blade. The man who burned three rebellious moons because they refused to kneel.

He had come for her.

The sphere in her hand, which had been warm and welcoming, suddenly flared hot. A projection shot out of it - not light, but text, burned directly into the air in front of her in Old Earth Standard:

GENE-MATCH: 99.8%

LINEAGE: VALE - EARTH ROYAL PRIME

STATUS: SOVEREIGN CONFIRMED

The iris of the human ship, which had welcomed her, suddenly slammed shut.

It wasn't protecting itself anymore.

It was protecting her.

And outside, Lyra heard the unmistakable whine of Imperial drop-ships - coming down fast, right for her.

She clutched the Heart of Earth to her chest, turned, and ran deeper into the ship that knew her name, while the galaxy hunted the last girl from Earth.