From orbit it had looked like a jewel; all blues and greens that swirled together like the space opals in his mother’s bonding necklace. And for half a second, he’d almost bought the illusion… the cradle of humanity and all that, but then he’d dropped through the atmosphere.
The haze had swallowed him whole, but then he’d broken through the clouds and the full reality had hit him like a brick. The smog was thick enough to count as its own life form, and the tops of tower blocks crammed shoulder to shoulder rose from it like broken teeth.
He wrinkled his nose. “Seriously? People actually live here?”
The nav system threw up a population density figure that made his eyes widen before he dismissed it. He didn’t need numbers. He could see it laid out right in front of him.
Of course, the humans lived here. Their so-called Alliance was barely a fraction of the Latharian Empire, but they carried themselves as if they owned the galaxy. He’d give them this much: it took a certain stubbornness to breathe air like this every day and still act as superior as they did.
Well, as superior as certain people did. Lady Emily was lovely, but her mother… less so.
He pulled up the coordinates he’d been given for Lady Emily’s residence. The apartment sat in a mid-tier block on the eastern sprawl of whatever this city called itself. His eyes narrowed as he adjusted his flight vector to head that way. It wasn’t the worst sector, but he wouldn’t have stabled his kervasi here. Rust stains streaked the buildings, and the small, evenly spaced windows suggested residents were stacked rather than housed.
The console in front of him pinged. Okay, this was the place. Frowning, he looked down. The buildings were so tightly packed that there wasn’t anywhere to set down. His gaze skimmed over the rooftops.
Draanth, he didn’t fancy even trying to land the Vett’an on any of them. Some roofs looked suspiciously fragile, and those that didn’t were crammed with small wooden structures.
“Gonna need a little more room,” he muttered, increasing his circling pattern. Okay, there.
He smiled as he spotted a gap in the rooftops a short distance from his target. It wasn’t much, simply a gap where a building had been torn down.
Hovering over it, it took him a second to orient the craft properly. The last thing he needed was to scratch the Emperor’s paint job and end up in the brig or something.
“I’m a draanthing bodyguard, not a draanthing pilot,” he muttered, trying not to wince or scrape the sides of the buildings with the wings.
Human offspring, four or five of them, scattered the moment the Vett’an’s shadow fell across them. Retreating to the safety of the shadows of the surrounding buildings, they watched wide-eyed as he brought the yacht down.
He grinned. He knew what they were seeing. The hull gleaming as the landing struts unfolded like the legs of some huge metal beast, and hydraulics hissed vapor into the dead air. He’d done the same thing at their age, crouched behind a wall on the estate where he’d been fostered, watching as the warriors came home, all scraped armor and loud voices. He’d watched and wanted to be them.
The landing struts kissed dirt, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Again, he was not a pilot. Why the emperor had given him the Vett’an, rather than some bog-standard combat shuttle, was anyone’s guess. But no one questioned the emperor, not if they wanted to live.
Locking the craft down, he dropped the ramp. The air hit him like a wet rag… warm and chemical, tinged with something that might have been fuel or might have been dinner. If it was, it wasn’t any food he wanted. Trying not to breathe, he strode off the access ramp, throwing a grin and a wink at the children, who squealed in delight and scattered.
Chuckling to himself, he headed back to the apartment block that contained Emily’s residence. All he needed to do was grab the cat and hightail it out of here. Preferably before he got some kind of lung infection from breathing the fetid air.
It didn’t take him long to reach his destination. The apartment block rose ahead, a slab of dirty beige. It had probably been considered the height of human architecture once. He shuddered. It was ugly as all hell.
Up close, the place looked even worse. More than half the windows were broken. A few had been patched with tape, plastic sheeting, and one had what looked like the lid of a packing crate wedged into the frame. The window to the left of the entrance was boarded up with some kind of plasti-sheet while the one on the other side was boarded with wood, the screws were driven straight into the frame, like someone had just wanted it done and hadn’t cared how it looked. The door was metal, dented near the handle, the lock plate scarred. Someone had scratched a word into the frame. He couldn’t read it. He didn’t need to.
Holy draanth. Emily Evans had come from this?
Climbing the steps, he pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The apartment block’s interior wasn’t an improvement. Fluorescent lights buzzed in the stairwell, and the walls were a shade of beige that looked like they had started out white about three decades ago. The smell of stale food hung in the air, mingling with dampness and mold. Wonderful, he was going to get a fungal infection on top of the lung infection from the smog.
He ignored the lift; it probably wasn’t rated for the weight of a Latharian warrior anyway, and took the stairs. He took them two at a time. The less time he was in this draanthing place, the better.
Third floor. Unit 317.
It was at the end of a grubby corridor. The door was unremarkable. It was a pressed composite with a deadbolt and a peephole, with the surrounding wood all scratched. Pinned right in the middle was a single sheet of paper. He squinted, his brain taking a moment to process the Terran words.
It was an eviction notice.
He tore it down.
The paper was cheap, and the ink smudged where the printer had been running low. He read it, gaze skimming over the legalese and the signature block at the bottom. Then he read it again, slower.
For draanth’s sake. Emily’s mother had canceled the lease.
