As the morning dawned on the Imperial Library on Cordoba, Lin Carrageenan would have prepared for bed by squirreling into a dusty corner with a thing of green tea—a pan-fried lung ching or a steamed ryokucha—and booting up a game of net-chess.

  It was a game sometimes poisoned by analogue notions—materiel, positioning, development—but her mind had long boiled it down to a game of fixed decisions: you either moved this pawn or this knight on that turn. Together, all the possible decisions in a game formed a dense, sprawling tree. Making a move amounted to moving down a branch, and all the others fell away as if pruned, representing versions of the game made impossible by that choice.

  And on the living stalk, Black or White's win loomed larger over the leaves that remained.

  That's why she'd studied long openings since she was a little girl: strategies that stretched into what most people considered the midgame. Between the pages of the book she always carried, the dog-eared and annotated copy of "On The Trail of the King" that had fattened past its original covers and looked fit to burst, you could sometimes find a sticky note with a good move—Queen to C8, Knight to B6, double exclamation mark.

  Because with enough study, Lin could prune the tree so that her victory was inevitable.

  Why now then, after she'd tended to her tree for years—

  Nausicaa Vogel's voice filtered through the console speakers. "Madam President. We're disengaging as you requested, but the enemy reinforcements are right on top of us."

  Lin wiped her brow, although it felt colder on the bridge than she'd set the thermostat. She ducked her head, cringing at the idea that someone could see her now—but none of the students looked up from the blinking consoles below. A full classroom's worth were hunched over their assignments in the grid of marshalling symbols above the main projector.

  From the meridians alone, she could see who among the crew had friends in the sky today.

  Sending 1-E out with full arms had been prudent, but not sufficient. She saw their blue triangles entangled with an equal detachment of Federalist Sabers, scrap rectangles hurtling through the air with little regard for aerodynamics. She'd have trusted Nausicaa to down those, but a new wing of unknowns was closing over the horizon.

  Lin patched into one of the Imperial frigates, a golden spindle floating southeast of the furball. "Major Reynaud. Focus on the new arrivals. Fire on my mark."

  "Roger, madam president. Fire."

  Hundreds of anti-radiation missiles streamed over the rocks and mated with the incoming Federalist wing. 'X' after 'X' marked the point of impact seconds before the dull booms rattled the bridge on the Academy. For a moment Lin thought she could breathe, that she hadn't sent those students to their grave.

  But one of the yellows was still moving. Its flight path coiled around the class like a snake.

  "Pull it up on the projector." She gulped.

  Past the emerald waves of the Academy's shields, against the red sunset of Tyumen, they saw a black inter-atmospheric jet with a serpent's head painted on its cranked-delta wing. Its thrust-vectoring engines crossed like a ballerina's legs.

  The girls below chattered. "That's Klaus Schwartz, the Federalists' Black Adder."

  Lin felt cold fingers touch her trembling hand. Akira's. Her expressionless face was close, something metal glinting behind the irises.

  "Madame President, you look pale. Do you need a glass of water?"

  Lin could not see a single meridian on her maid's body. Akira sometimes unnerved the other Tian Lung when she approached from behind, but Lin had always found her presence soothing: like talking to a shade tree.

  "N... No. Set the kettle going, Akira." Lin took a sip of cold tea. "Have you managed to contact Fredda?"

  "Not yet. However, some of the expedition crew did return to the ship safely."

  "Did they have the Epitaph of Jade with them?" Lin asked.

  Akira lowered her head solemnly. "I'm afraid not."

  Dammit. She'd been up for days with her nose in the dirt of the dig site. The effort of supporting Fredda's research had cut circles of grey into her eyes. Without the Epitaph, they wouldn't even be able to reach the second system on the Trail.

  At this point, the cut-grass scent of lung ching was the only thing keeping her awake. But the steeps were getting further apart, and she'd need to wash the teapot soon.

  "I have a lock on him," said a girl from 1-E. "Fox two."

  The Black Adder didn't lower himself to missiles. His broad wings clawed at the air and whipped him in viciously tight circles. 38 students chased after him, but he always found a way to put one in front of his nose, and 1-Epiphyllum dwindled in silence to nothing. The tea rumbled in Lin's cup as the shockwave from each crashed Arrowhead reached the bridge.

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  Losing a student wasn't anything like she'd imagined. Nobody screamed or cried for help. She entertained that it was something in the House Benetnasch character, but it was likely just the way they'd set up the radios.

  Three of the operators stood around a girl who'd started weeping at her terminal. She'd known someone who'd been shot down. Don't worry, there's a chance she punched out before she hit the ground. No, no, no—

  "Contact from the Feds," the radio officer said.

  Lin shuddered. "P... Patch it through."

  Klaus Schwartz's dialect was rhotic and refined, the sneering drawl of Neo Xiaguan's upper class.

  "Monarchist dogs, the time of your festering king is lapsed. Power down your shields and surrender the Spine in peace. The New Huang Federation cordially invites you to return to your families in good health rather than in caskets."

  "Give me some time," Lin spat without thinking.

  He smirked audibly. "If you need some encouragement, you need but ask your sensor officer, Madam President."

  Lin looked to her right. The Academy's drones transmitted images of three rusted prisms shorn from old seaships, slicing between clouds in literally another time zone. Two hundred li due east, beyond the red horizon.

  "...Filiality-class beam frigates," the sensor girl identified. "A crude way to crack shields, but effective. They can't fire over the curve of the planet, but as soon as they have direct line of sight..."

  "You have fifteen minutes," Klaus said. "Death is waiting, Madam President. Best not bore him."

  Lin pounded her fists against the console and cradled her head.

  This wasn't anything. An intercept this late into the game was nowhere in the cards.

  Apart from the frigates floating nearby, not even the Imperial Navy had been informed of the first waystation's location. And besides, they'd needed a Benetnasch student to tune the spine for this jump since the warp-thread to Tyumen was so faint.

  To even reach this system, they Feds would at the very least have needed a traitor from House Benetnasch to grab the thread. Worse, to figure out the Academy was headed to Tyumen of all places—a lifeless rock on the way to nowhere at all—they'd have needed someone on the inside. A mole.

  Could Lin have invited this upon herself by being so open with the invitations?

  Her teeth clenched at the thought. She felt so humiliated at the idea that tears welled up in her eyes.

  In hindsight, the answer to Klaus' offer was clear: she couldn't be responsible for any more deaths. Even this much was going to tar the remainder of her life. She'd never be able to face those students' parents.

  "Madam President," Akira said. "It's been five minutes."

  "I know, just give me a second—"

  That's when she felt a meridian cross its arms in the corner behind her. A Vesta.

  "...What do you want, Vineta?" Lin grumbled.

  Based on the direction, she added: "You came from the hangar, didn't you? You Vesta are all the same: all you care about is glory..."

  Only Vineta's shoes made a sound as she approached the president and touched her shoulder. Her brow creased with uncharacteristic concern.

  "Come on now, Lin, take a deep breath..." She touched the book on Lin's console; the plump, annotated copy of On The Trail of the King. "We've known each other for a while now. I always see you lug this thing around. It's clearly precious to you. Getting us here—to the head of the Trail—was your life's work."

  For some reason Vineta liked to pretend things were heavy to her. Although she picked up the book in both skinny arms and pretended to heave, her heart meridian was still cold and silent. This girl was ultimately the same sort of gorilla as her pet ape Diane, albeit smaller.

  That kind of physical instrument affected the way you made decisions. When normal objects posed no resistance in your day-to-day life, you tended to extend that invincibility to every matter.

  "No shit, Vineta," Lin hissed. "Do you expect me to fight for it? Look where that's gotten us already. I can't bring all these girls down with me just because I wrote some papers. And besides, we lost the fucking Epitaph!"

  "Is that true?" Vineta looked to the radio operator, her jaw open.

  She nodded in her headset. "Some of the expedition crews came back here without the Epitaph—they say Federalists hit the dig site with shock troops."

  "See?!" Lin cried, clutching her head.

  "Still, breathe... Breathe..." Vineta rubbed her shoulder. "Give me a second with that Federalist," she proposed.

  "Do what you want," Lin huffed, and stuffed her face in her elbows.

  With that, Vineta gingerly picked up the microphone that had previously belonged to Lin and plugged in the first frequency in memory. She took a deep breath.

  "This one's name is Vineta Yellowknife." Her face contrived into a light smile. "Good man, may I ask if transport will be provided back to the core systems?"

  "I agreed to speak with Madam President." Klaus sounded irate.

  "Although I do not have authority myself, I fear she is indisposed, and what do you have to fear from speaking to a little old student as myself."

  "...We will generously allow you to decamp your supplies to the waystation and inform the Navy of our attack."

  "I shall inform the President—"

  "They mean for all of us to starve to death!" Lin yelled, bolting to her feet and slamming the desk. Her head felt hot from the effort of penetrating the ruse. "Nobody even knows we're here—there's a few months' supplies in that waystation at most! That Federalist bastard almost—"

  Vineta cupped Lin's mouth. "Shhhhhhh. Yeah." She smiled.

  "But what do we do about the Epitaph?"

  "Leave it to me," Vineta nodded. "1-Calla won't be the best in a dogfight, but we can shore up the search for Fredda's team."

  "I hope you know what you're doing."

  Lin slowly slinked back to her post, adjusting her disheveled uniform back to some semblance of dignity. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her disordered nerves, watching them cool as she swallowed her fury at being deceived. The game was not drawn yet.

  "Scramble the rest of the interceptors," she said, her finger dragging a gleaming line from the Academy over the horizon. "Take down those beam frigates before they get in range. As for the Imperial escort, have them move as far forward as they can and pick off any stragglers."

  One of the operators looked towards her for clarity. "Should we authorize the use of reaction warheads?"

  A late-game decision. Not one of her strong points.

  "...Leave it up to the individual classes to do so if they see fit," Lin dodged. "I know we had a few gunship pilots who might take issue with opening the RoE so soon."

  "Roger," the girl confirmed.

  "As for that bastard..."

  Lin gritted her teeth, watching Klaus's fighter circle the Academy like a vulture.

  "...send Tian Lung's Alice Specter."