Luka closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe.

The cameras would be rolling any minute, and he still didn’t know what he was going to say.

“Be brave. Be strong,” his mother said, her face covered by a black veil. He almost couldn’t see the red of her eyes, or the tears on her cheeks. An Empress through and through, she mastered herself, and straightened proudly, unbent despite her terrible grief. “He always knew you could do it.”

“But never so soon” Luka whispered, and tried not to think about the hole in his heart. If he did, he was going to start crying again, and that was not the image to project. Not now, with so much riding on the next few minutes. “It was supposed to be years. Decades even.”

“Sir, we’re ready for you,” one of the cameramen caught his attention, and Luka nodded tightly.

He stepped onto the podium, and tried to smile for Amir when his cousin squeezed his shoulder. Just out of sight, Vree watched, kitty-lizard face twisted in concern. They had arrived minutes after Luka himself and barely left his side since.

Their presence helped. Of all his cousins, Amir was his favorite, and the one who understood why he needed to spend a year in the dregs of their empire, learning about his people.

“Sir?”

“Yes,” he dragged his attention back to the cameras, and the anxious faces behind them. “I’m ready.”

“When the light turns on,” the cameraman said, and signaled someone behind him. ”Three… two…”

The light went on.

Luka struggled not to break down with the entire Galactic Empire and all their allies watching.

“My name is Luka. I am eighteen years old, and six solar hours ago, I was a prince.” he said, struggling to get the words out through the lump in his throat. “Six hours ago, I was in bed, when I got a call from my mother that I hoped never to receive. Six hours ago, my father was murdered.”

His throat burned as he spoke the words he had been dreading, as if saying them made it all real.

His father was dead.

“Not only him,” he continued, because forward was the only way to go and if he stopped, he wouldn’t be able to start again. “Fourteen thousand, two hundred and nine of the best our Empire had to offer, aboard the Galactic destroyer, Australia were lost with him, at the hands of an unknown assailant.”

The Australia was one of their most powerful destroyers. No, she wasn’t a Carrier, but she was still a force to be reckoned with. And something had destroyed her even before the Emperor could get to his escape capsule.

Luka wondered if he had even tried. Emperor Nelius Hector Gaius was not the kind of man to run while others died in his name.

“To everyone who had family aboard the Australia,” he said, and felt tears growing in his eyes. His throat and chest burned as he kept the tears from falling. “I am so terribly sorry, and I grieve with you. This is a blow we did not see coming. It will not go unanswered.”

Beyond the cameras, he could see Tusca and his crew. The people who had become a second family to him over a year of living and working together in the hard life of those who scraped out a living in the Black. They had pushed their little ship to breaking to get him to the Pacifica so fast.

“My sister is without a father. My mother, without a husband, and they are not alone among the families who have lost so much to this attack,” he said, anger straightening his back as he accepted the mantle that he always knew would be his someday.

It weighed heavily on him, and he struggled to stand under the burden of the immense history that now rested on his shoulders. “But while this attack has taken much from us, it will not bring us to our knees. So I stand before you now. Before the Human Galactic Empire, and our allies. Before the people who murdered my father and stole fourteen thousand two hundred and nine precious lives from us.”

He gripped the pedestal until his knuckles went white and let his mask crack. All his pain and anguish spilled out for everyone to see. His rage, and the deep knowledge that he would never see his father again.

“To those who thought the death of Nelius Hector Gaius would cripple us, I say this;” he said, with his mother to one side, struggling not to cry, and his cousin on the other, absolutely still in that way that Amir always was when he was trying to keep it together. “My name is Lukas Rayhan Goliat. I am Emperor of the Human Galactic Empire, and we will not be defeated so easily.”