Heir-Apparent Petra Drazsek

Petra was named heir to the Drazsek matriarchy at six, the day her mother died in a foundry accident and the succession had to be redrawn at breakfast. She is forty-six. Her grandmother, the Confederacy's oldest living foundry-matriarch, is still in the chair, still sharp, and still showing no interest in stepping down.

Petra has commanded the Throne Engine for eighteen of those years. The name was a family joke that stopped being funny. She is technically excellent: long-range artillery, three-beat volleys, a record the foundry vote would respect. She has nowhere to use it but the border patrols her grandmother assigns. She fights every engagement as if it might be the one that proves her fit for the chair, because it might. She polishes the bridge brass herself, in the hours before dawn. The grandmother lives. The ship waits.