Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanov stood on the forward observation deck of the Imperial cruise liner, the Lyubov Orlova, and nearly swooned with dismay at the planet just visible ahead. Its name was Yekaterinburg.
Once the Imperial Family had boarded the Orlova on Tobolsk, and all their belongings had been secured in the cargo holds, the Bolshevik Infantry Captain in charge, Yakov Yurovsky, had ordered all their servants off the ship.
"What's the meaning of this?" her father, former Tsar Nicholas, had said in his most commanding voice. A voice she'd rarely heard from him since he'd been forced to abdicate nearly a year ago.
"Pardon, your Highness, but we've received word that members of your retinue have been communicating with the White Navy. You'll get a full complement of service staff at our destination."
"I give you my personal assurance that that is not true. Where are you taking us?" Father demanded.
"A location being held in strictest confidence, your Highness, for your own safety."
Tsar Nicholas glanced around and lowered his voice, not seeing Anastasia half-hidden behind the door. "But surely you can tell me, can't you?"
Anastasia strangled the cry in her throat and drew back into the next room, tears springing to her eyes. Father sounds as if he were begging! she thought, disbelief and revulsion churning through her bowels. She scurried through multiple staterooms, the cruise liner rooms interconnected, as in their many castles. The Lyubov Orlova might have a Bolshevik navigator and crew, but it was and always would be the Imperial Cruise Liner, built to specifications laid out by Tsar Nicholas and furnished to the demands of Tsarista Alexandra.
Named after their family friend and child star, the actress Lyubov Orlova, the Imperial Cruise Liner had been built in two short years, and the Tsar had insisted on using it on a family vacation to the Dardanelles on Anastasia's thirteenth birthday, even as the ship was in its final stages of outfitting. Since then, they'd taken the Lyubov Orlova to the far reaches of the Russian Empire, all the way from the thriving Petrograd in the Pleiades Constellation out to the Kamchatka spur, a desolate string of constellations at the rim of the Milky Way. In all, the Imperial Family spent nearly three months of every year aboard the Orlova, enjoying its stately corridors, its plush bedrooms, and its vast and fancy dining halls.
Fancy as it is, Anastasia thought, it's still a prison. She looked around the forward observation deck. The gleaming brass handrails, plush-pile carpets, and velvet-upholstered chaises did nothing to relieve her feelings of oppression.
"Looks balmy at least," Alexei said, looking over at her. He sat slumped in his hoverchair near the floor-to-ceiling viewport, a cluster of escort vessels to port and starboard like sharks in the water. He jingled a handful of coins in his pocket.
But of more concern to Anastasia now was Alexei's suffering. The sight of her brother in his hoverchair clutched at her heart. Her younger brother had taken ill from the moment of their exile. Upon their confinement to the compound on Tobolsk, he'd tangled with a surly guard and had been thrown to the ground. Thirteen, still a stick-figure adolescent, his voice as warbly as a thrush, Alexei had suffered from compromised health all his life. The most advanced medical cures had proved ineffective, from clotting factor infusions to reparative theragenesis. The wealth of the Romanov Imperial Family hadn't been able to purchase the miracle cure needed to stave off Alexei's attacks, and he'd spent more time moaning in his hoverchair than he had playing with his older sisters, his childhood taken by disease.
Only the Starets, Rasputin, had found any way to give him surcease, and only his comfort seemed to ameliorate Alexei's suffering. But Rasputin had died six months before the Tsar Nicholas' abdication, a horrible murder intended to deflect the opprobrium that followed the Starets like a foul miasma. His death had done little to stave off the Tsar's removal from power.
Because of health, Alexei had been excused from the commotion on the promenade deck, where the Bolshevik ship captain was formally remanding custody of the Imperial Prisoner to the care of his Infantry colleague, Captain Yakov Yurovsky.
She followed Alexei's gaze to the planet. Cotton-fluff clouds swathed the blue-green ball taking up most of the viewport below the ship. "It's supposed to be quite a bit warmer than Tobolsk," Anastasia said, giving him a smile, doing her best to cover up her dread. She was convinced they wouldn't leave Yekaterinburg alive. She shuddered, unable to contain her fright.
"Fear not, Natsya," her brother said. Again, he jingled the coins in his pocket.
She looked at him closely, disturbed that he seemed so confident, wondering at the source of it. Of all the Romanovs, he seemed the most frail. Mother's constant state of the vapors and Father's distant stare were nothing compared with the vulnerability that Alexei displayed on a daily basis. Or usually did.
Now, he seemed to have livened up, his posture straight, his gaze clear, and his face bright. In this pose, he looked capable of anything—even of wresting the throne back from the Bolsheviks.
"Alyosha, child," she said, a pet name for him that she hadn't used in months, "tell your sister what you're up to. Don't tell me you've been feigning all this time."
He grinned at her. "Of course I have. What better way to lull our captors into complacency, eh? Something I learned from your good friend, Lyuba."
Yearning and desire flooded through her. Anastasia blushed at the thought of her friend, at the wonderful ways they touched each other when no one else was around.
"Your secret's safe with me, Natsya," he said.
She gaped at him, not realizing he'd known. "How long ...?"
"Awhile now," he replied. "And I have a secret to share, too." He swung around in his hoverchair, a faint hum audible under the hiss of air from its jets. His chair floated toward the lift. He was in it before she realized he was leaving.
"Wait! Where are you going?" Anastasia hurried to catch the lift before the doors closed. She stared at him as the floor sank beneath them, astonished he had contrived his episodes well enough to fool his entire family. Acting had been a favorite pastime amongst all the children even before Lyubov had been introduced to the family, the four older sisters having started prancing about in a frivolous fashion early on, seeking some way to distract Alexei from his misery. Over the years, he'd played many parts himself, but Anastasia hadn't thought him capable of feigning illness, the scourge all too ready to inflict its suffering.
Alexei met her gaze and grinned with a bravado she only wished she had.
"What are you up to, Alyosha?"
"You'll see," he said, handing her a pair of earplugs. He returned his hand to his pocket, jingling the coins again. Another of their father's failed experiments, the issuing of coin as currency had nearly bankrupted the Imperial Treasury. Fumbling for coins had replaced instantaneous transactions with retinal readers, and the Empire had nearly revolted.
The doors hissed aside, loosing upon them the thrumming of engines. Anastasia quickly put in the earplugs.
He gestured her to follow and led her deep into the mechanical forest. Conduits of all sizes crisscrossed the walls and ceiling. The metal-grid floor under her feet masked a thicket of machinery, its purpose elusive. She'd have been frightened if Alexei hadn't been with her.
"This way," he said, but all she saw was his lips move and his hand wave, his words drowned out in the deluge of sound. She snorted to clear from her nostrils the smells of lubricants on the ionized air.
He led her down the corridor to an intersection. In the side corridor, solid wall replaced ribs of piping. The metal-grid floor became a solid slab, but that was almost worse, the solidity sending tremors up through her legs to her spine. The noise was muted the farther along they went.
"Here," he said.
She realized she could hear him and took out the earplugs. The corridor was featureless but for an odd pattern of indentations upon the wall.
"What do you see?"
"Just these divots."
"What shape are they in?"
She looked at them closely, counting. Seven of them, none any larger around than a coin and just as shallow, spread out in a somewhat random constellation.
And then she knew: the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades.
She threw a bewildered glance at him. The Pleiades stood at the western terminus of the Russian Empire, at its center the grand planet of Petrograd, jewel of the Empire. She realized she wouldn't have noticed the depressions if he hadn't pointed them out. "What are they here for?"
He pulled his hand from his pocket and opened it toward her. The coins glittered under the harsh halon lights.
She glanced at the seven coins in Alexei's hand and then at the seven indentations. Of course. Tsar Nicolas had minted one-, two-. five-, ten-, twenty-, fifty- and hundred-ruble coins, seven denominations in all. Each coin was comprised of a disk of brassinside a ring of nickel. On each disk of brass was a face. "But which one goes where?"
"Ah, for that, you have to consider how bright the stars are."
"How am I supposed to know that?"
"Well, which one is the brightest?"
"Alcyone, here." She picked the one-ruble coin from his hand and placed it in the left-most divot. The coin lit up with a soft, surreal glow, as though electrified. The face of Tsar Nicholas lit up as if from theglow of his smile.
"The next is Electra," Alexei said.
She placed the two-ruble coin in the corresponding divot, her mother's face beaming with a light that Anastasia hadn't seen in years.
"And now Maia."
Alexei's likeness on the five-ruble piece held none of the drawn-faced desperation that had haunted him for the last year. The coin glowed in its divot.
"Merope, Taygeta, and Celaeno."
Anastasia placed the ten-, twenty-, and fifty-ruble coins into their respective divots, her sisters' faces beaming at her from each.
"And now Sterope," Alexei said, watching her carefully, a grin threatening to break out on his face.
Her own visage stared back at her from the hundred-ruble coin. The portrait had been taken during her first menses at age fourteen, and the look on her face had been foreboding. Anastasia remembered what a mess she'd made of her mother's favorite divan, the first gush having come without warning.
Anastasia placed the coin in the uppermost divot, the glow bringing her face to life.
Somewhere, a motor growled, and the entire wall slid into the floor. The darkened chamber beyond glimmered as if with its own luminescence. She gasped when she realized the chamber was filled with jewels—so many that she wondered whether the cache might rival the Romanov Crown Jewels in size.
Then as her eyes adjusted, she focused on one object: a scepter with a large, bluish-green diamond mounted at its head.
Knowing that scepter, she gasped again, and hurled a look at Alexei.
The cache didn't rival the Crown Jewels—it was the Crown Jewels.
"Where—?"
Alexei put a finger to his lips and a hand to his ear, his gaze distant. He pulled her back from the door. "Someone's coming. Quick!" He slapped a panel just inside the chamber, and the wall rose back into place.
She collected the coins from their divots, the glow dying as she removed each.
Alexei turned his hoverchair toward the lift. Following him, Anastasia slipped her hand into her pocket, not daring to let go of the coins, afraid she would lose them.
She marched along the corridor toward the intersection, the thrumming of engines increasing. Anastasia had just put in her earplugs when Captain Yurovsky loped into view, his boots causing the metal grating to shake.
"What are you doing here?!" His voice was barely audible under the rumble, but his words were clear.
"You're the intruder, peasant scum!" Anastasia yelled. "Get the hell off our ship!"
"Boyar bitch! What do you have in your pocket?"
Anastasia clutched the coins even tighter, half-turning away from him and holding her arm rigidly at her side.
Yurovsky lunged and put her into a bear hug.
She stomped his foot, twisted around, and brought her knee up toward his groin.
He deftly turned and deflected the blow. "Blyadischa! I'll show you who's boss!" He grabbed her wrist and ripped her hand from her pocket, nearly wrenching her shoulder from its socket.
Pain shot through her shoulder as she twisted away. Somehow, she freed her hand, took a step back, and hurled the coins at his face.
He raised his arm to block the projectiles, and the coins bounced harmlessly off his sleeve. They scattered in multiple directions, bouncing blithely off ribbed walls and piping, and then to the floor, where one by one, each coin disappeared through the metal-grate floor.
Anastasia could almost hear the coins as they worked their way downward through the machinery toward the bilges, in spite of her earplugs and the nearly deafening thrum of engines.
"Just a bunch of your father's stupid coins! Scrap metal. Both of you, come with me." And Yurovsky herded them into the lift.
Anastasia obeyed mutely, the fight gone out of her. As the lift doors closed, her gaze lingered on the metal-grate flooring where the seven coins had disappeared.