Firstborn

busy,” Kern said, then tapped his control pad. A list of dates and battles appeared on the wall. “You’ve got a lot of work to do.”
    “Lord Kern, Sir,” Dennison said, speaking with an attention to formality he rarely invoked. “I’m not my brother. I never will be.”
    “That’s no reason not to try and learn from him.”
    “He destroyed my life,” Dennison said. “From the first day I entered the Academy, I was fated to fail. How could I do otherwise, considering what others expected of me? Let me study someone else. High Admiral Fallstate, perhaps.”
    Kern thought for a moment, then shook his head. “You’ll do as I order, son.”
    * * *
    Each battle was a blow to his self-esteem. Even after studying Varion’s tactics, even after watching the battles replay over and over, Dennison had trouble winning. The simulator had a random factor in its programming so that he couldn’t just memorize and make the same moves that Varion had.
    Dennison sighed, rubbing his forehead as he watched a holographic replay of his latest battle. His year aboard the
Stormwind
had passed quickly and with an odd sense of distortion. He felt removed from events in the Empire. His entire world was shrunken to an endless replay of strategies, tactics, and failures, centered around a single individual.
    Varion.
    The replay of Marus Seven continued. By this point, Varion’s fleet had grown to several thousand ships, and had official Imperial support. Varion hadn’t even been at this battle in-person; he had directed from his flagship many light-years away. The larger an object was, the longer it took to reach its destination via
klage
—so, while visual communications were essentially instantaneous, flagships could take months to travel between distant points of the empire.
    These limitations frustrated Varion, so he had split his forces into two different battle groups, sending them in opposite directions. Dennison understood Varion’s reasoning now—a year of studying the Silvermane had immersed him in the worldview of a man he’d spent his life trying to escape. Who was Varion Crestmar? He was perfect. Dennison could no longer say that with even a hint of sarcasm.
    Every day spent living his sibling’s life through battle brought the two of them closer. Dennison found himself spending his extra hours in the hologram room, looking over his recorded battles, then watching Varion’s handling of the same conflict. He stopped looking for the strategies and instead focused on the man. What kind of person was this Varion Silvermane? He had been separated from his family for two decades, living in glorious self-imposed exile because the war effort required all of his attention.
    Many of these early battles in Varion’s campaign made perfect sense. Back then, Varion had still needed to persuade the emperor that he was worthy of trust and support. Dennison could see why the planet Utaries had had to be crushed quickly, because of its ability to rally other planets to its cause. He could follow the logical connection between subduing the Seapress people, then moving onto the less-powerful—yet technologically superior—Farnight union.
    As the Reunification War proceeded, however, Varion’s choices grew baffling. Why had he gone after New Rofelos when doing so had exposed his forces to division? What had been the purpose of committing so many of his forces to conquering Gemwater, a planet of little strategic importance and even less military power?
    Questions like these haunted Dennison. Varion’s true genius was in his ability to connect battlefields, to lead his fleets from one victory to the next, always gaining momentum, expanding his war to second and third—then tenth and twentieth—fronts. He didn’t just destroy or subdue, he converted. Before Varion’s conquering began, the empire had barely held enough ships to defend its ever-shrinking border. By Marcus Seven, however, the fleet had contained more ex-rebel ships than official ones.
    Varion was bold and daring, willing to take risks. Yet he was also lucky, for those risks always brought returns. Or,
was
it luck? Dennison’s father would have scoffed. “Each man has responsibility for his own existence,” would have been the characteristic pronouncement.
    In the hologram, Dennison’s flagship exploded in a spray of metal and light. Varion was perfect. And Dennison was perfectly incompetent. He didn’t make this acknowledgement despondently or with