“No, hold on. Shit, gimme a second.” Ipqen pops the lid of her beer can and stomps with purpose to the console. “You know what I’mma play? Me and Ruaq been listening to some Maekyonite music.”

“Oh, shit.” Grant sits further back on the floor. “Whatcha got?”

“I got all kinds of stuff. Chief Engineer slipped me a download of the cultural immersion packet.” Ipqen pauses her scroll. “Was she not supposed to do that?”

“Dunno,” Grant says. “Probably not.”

“It is off to the brig with her,” Ajax says, solemnly, into his half-empty beer.

“Overruled,” Grant says. This is the fifth time they’ve done this stupid routine and it’s only getting funnier as he gets drunker.

Ipqen queues up a song. “This one. Fuck yeah.” She nods along earnestly to the ripping guitars on its intro. “Now lemme ask you, what is making that racket?”

“That’s an electric guitar,” Grant says. “With the distortion way up.”

“It sounds like a planet getting torn in half. It sounds fatidic. Right?” she demands of Ajax.

“Uh, yeah,” the Master Sergeant says. “Sounds good.”

“You’re such a flightless bird, man,” Ipqen says.

“Ipqen.” Grant tries to shut down the vibration of his held laugh. “This is Meant to Live by Switchfoot.”

“And that’s… is that a bad thing?” Ipqen’s heavy brow furrows as the distorted Christian post-grunge fills the cabin.

“It is off to the brig with Switchfoot,” Ajax says, solemnly.

“No. No, I love—I mean, it was kind of a one-hit wonder, I think, and it’s Christian rock, but yeah.” Grant bobs his head along to the crunchy breakdown. “I can fuck with some Switchfoot. Love the chorus.”

“Wiiiwur menta live for so much moooore,” Ipqen sings, in butchered English. “This shit has me on the peak.”

“What’s its brain effect?” Ajax asks.

Ipqen takes the space of a swig to check in with herself. “Makes me wanna—like—break something. And then put it back together with really colorful tape.”

“I fucking missed this,” Grant says. “I missed you guys. Oh, no. I’m getting maudlin.”

“Do it, man.” Ipqen turns the music down. “Maudle shit up. You want something slower?”

“No, I’m fine. I just want—I need to be Grant somewhere. You know? Not just with Sykora. I mean, I love her so goddamn much.”

Ipqen’s great big palm braces his back. “Course you do.”

”And my kids. Holy shit.” Grant’s eyes sting. Don’t cry in front of your servants, But his voice is starting to shake. ”But it’s not the same. Or I don’t know. But they can’t be the only ones. Batty can’t be the only one I feel normal around. That’s not fair to—to her. Or me. Or to anyone.”

“Who’s Batty?” Ipqen whispers to Ajax, who shushes her.

”I just need to feel normal sometimes,” Grant says. ”I need to feel like nobody’s scared of me. Like you’re hanging out with me because you want to and I’m one of you. And without it I came so, so close to turning into something horrible. Into someone I couldn’t bear to be. I’m so—it’s so stupid. Forget it. I’m out-of-practice on being drunk. I’m…” He laughs despairingly. “I’m out of practice on being Grant.”

“If you need to be Grant, Maj—uh—Grant.” Ajax is trying as hard as his unwaveringly loyal Taiikari brain will allow. “If you need that, then you can have it.”

“Can I…” Grant hiccups. “Can I be fucking scared, then, too?”

“Why, Grant?” Ajax raises his anticomps. His goldenrod eyes are heavy with concern. “You worried about your world?”

“I feel that,” Ipqen says. “I was pissing myself when you went for Eqtora. But it worked out. Yeah? You’ll find a way.”

“We have,” Grant says. “And I think… I mean, it’ll be hard as fuck, but it’ll work, I think.”

“It will,” Ajax says. “Your servants will ensure it.”

“That’s not what I’m scared of.”

Grant lifts his palm from his beer and rests it on his forehead, feels the condensation, tries to ground himself here and now in the company of his friends.

“I’m scared of what comes first,” he says.

---

From the cabin’s trophy room wall, the ornamented Yavkjaji clock ticks its steady time.

Grant wills the seconds to stop, to suspend themselves so that he can spend more time in the dark, safe shelter of their kiss. His wife breathes deep, shifts herself, and here it comes, the moment where their lips part, and their foreheads touch, and she whispers, “I love you, Grantyde.”

“I love you, Batty.”

“Let’s win our babies their homeworld.” She turns from him to the cabin wall, hesitates, and turns back. “How do I look?”

He meets her gaze, beneath her tricorne, outlined by the smoky royal-ruby shadow she’s applied like warpaint. He steps to her side. “You look like the ruler of the fucking world,” he says.

And despite it all, Sykora smiles, if only for a moment. “Initiate connection,” she says.

The firmament out their window disappears into digital snow.

Two more ticks.

“-n’t care what that spoiled girl says. Her Governesship is annulled.” The Empress appears onscreen in the middle of a conversation. “She can pleasure cruise that moon without ruling it, and the degree to which her interest is clearly the former makes the course clear. The baronesses have spoken and so have I. Now I’m already overtime on this and I have another meeting waiting. That’s all. Glory to the Empire.”

She punches a button and with a squeak of casters pivots her seat to the camera.

“Thank you for your patience, cousins. Give me one minute more to refresh myself on this matter.” She bumps her glasses up her nose and squints through their lenses. “Ahhh, yes. The annexation of Maekyon. I see here that Cousin Sykora called this meeting.”

Sykora glances at Grant with a flash of the same skepticism he feels. The Empress is a busy woman, but it’s hard to believe she hasn’t been as anxious as they have for this. “High Majesty. I humbly thank you for your time.” Sykora’s ears twitch with the effort of keeping them steady and clear of her annoyance. “And I petition again that we conduct this interview in private.”

With an agitated flick of her tail she indicates the Void Princesses within the split-screen hexes, on either side of their view of the Empress’s marble office.

“I think not, Black Pike.” Dantia leers from her hexagon and her high ruffed collar. “You shan’t be rid of me that easily. I had to reschedule a duel between two of my least favorite Marquesses for this.”

Narika, bedecked in her circlet of office and her coatee of black and gold, doesn’t speak. If she wasn’t blinking occasionally, Grant might mistake her for a royal portrait.

“This conversation is germane to your neighboring Princesses,” the Empress says. “They are not to be excluded.”

“Germane by what metric?”

“By the metric that depending on what you say, Black Pike, Maekyon might be taken from you, and given to one of them.” The Empress shoots an icicle glare over the rim of her glasses. “I understand you are here to present an unorthodox proposal for the Maekyon annexation. Kindly begin, Cousin. My schedule is as razor-thin in its margins as ever.”

“In brief, then,” Sykora says. “We will not conquer Maekyon. We will honor the precedent of the Mandate Systems, and invite Maekyon into the Imperial sphere as a free protectorate.”

Narika’s eyes narrow. Dantia’s widen. She glances about as if there is some prank show waiting to leap from the heavy wooden furniture around her.

The Empress shows no reaction of any kind.

“Maekyon was not truly prepared for standard Taiikari annexation,” Grant says. “The sweep we detected was the work of a heretical agent called the Penitent. But we recognize that what’s done is done, and we will step in, as protocol demands of us. We won’t let whatever malignance the Penitent intends to fester upon my homeworld’s surface. We'll ensure the Penitent's plans, whatever they are for Maekyon, are brought to heel. And we won’t try to hide the Maekyonite immunity anymore. But these special considerations require a novel approach.”

“There will be no Taiikari presence on Maekyon’s surface save for an embassy city,” Sykora says. “Somewhere their nation-states don’t already use. Inhospitable terrain we can tame and inhabit as evidence of our abilities. From there, our people will remain as stewards and guests of the Maekyonite nations. Our sole responsibilities will be the amelioration of any world-threatening effects that occur as a direct result of our introduction, and the uplifting of all Maekyonites who choose to take Taiikari citizenship and depart their world for the firmament.”

“There’ll be pushback from the Maekyonite governments,” Grant says. “Tons of it, probably, at our offering of Imperial citizenship to their people. It’ll be a thorny process, and we’ll need to work out ways to impress upon the rulers of Earth the freedom their subjects will now have, to remain or to depart.”

Dantia raises a hand. “How do you propose this freedom of movement be implemented without a total remaking of the fabric of your society? Do you not presuppose millions or billions of departures? Entire nations drained of their people? And all the internecine conflicts that will surely follow?”

Grant shakes his head. “I don’t propose that. Maekyon will change, I know. When the pieces settle the world as it was will be irrecoverable. I am prepared to accept that and work to tame the chaos into a shape favorable to the Empire. But it must be by their will. Not ours.”

“Grantyde wanted to be a citizen,” Sykora says. “He wanted to be a Prince, he wanted a Taiikari wife, he wanted everything we gave him. He began his time aboard the Black Pike a furious and fearful prisoner. He fell in love with it. With me, and with the sector.”

With the Empire, she doesn’t say.

“All he required was the chance to choose,” she says. “And now he is as fine an example of Imperial unionization as there has ever been, coming to us from a world whose initial annexation reports are dire. All we need is patience and flexibility.”

“You vastly underestimate the work we’ll need to do carving out this new path, Black Pike.” Dantia cuts in, her expression narrow enough to serrate. “We place our people in direct danger. Even setting aside whatever schemes this Penitent might be cooking, these Maekyonite rulers will not sit meekly by and allow their subjects to change allegiances so easily.”

“If they won’t, we’ll entreat them,” Sykora says. “All the power we are loathe to bring to bear in conquering this world, we will be unhesitant to use in freeing its people to make their individual choice. I’ll shake palaces down, if I must. We will topple the few to win the many.”

“And for what?” Dantia demands. “You intend to bring that world’s dictators to heel, only to bow and scape to its menials? To a species of savage idiots who rattle nuclear spears at one another in between cooking themselves to death? High Majesty, did you know they have eight billion sapients on that world, and they’re still using petroleum?”

The Empress’s finger rests on her chin; she hasn’t said anything since she prompted Sykora to begin.

“It’s not a new path,” Sykora says. “The precedent, as I have said—”

“It is new, Black Pike,” Dantia interrupts. “You intend to issue a declaration of surrender to a planet whose biosphere we could boil in an afternoon.”

“And call it a victory? That is horrendous defeat, Dantia. As hollowed-out as your heart is, you cannot fail to understand that.”

“And you cannot fail to understand that they are not citizens yet, Sykora. Not until they kneel. You mean to spend all the blood and bullets required to liberate them, not in the name of your Empress but in the name of their own myopic independence.”

“Enough,” the Empress says, evenly. Sykora’s venomous counter dies in her throat. “Your thoughts, Cousin Narika.”

“My thoughts,” Narika murmurs.

The Empress allows an upturning at the corners of her mouth. “Don’t pretend at reticence, Glory Banner.”

Grant can’t help but be impressed at the self-control Narika shows; even with the Empress’s command she takes her time to put everything together behind her eyes.

“Sykora is correct in her censure of Princess Dantia,” she finally says. “We must not be so callous as to consider the scouring of Maekyon anything but unutterable tragedy.”

Sykora’s eyes light up.

“Dantia of the Bright Covenant is correct, too,” Narika continues. “Though I take no pleasure from the speaking of it. Maekyon is far less developed than any world in the history of the Mandate systems. The polycrisis it faces is considerable. If the planet were to survive long enough to discover the sweep on its own merits, it would likely be after a significant population crunch. We must consider the intervention of the Empire in those terms, and through the lens of a world still in its tempestuous adolescence for whom annexation might save many more lives than dereliction would take.”

“I am not arguing for dereliction, Narika.” Sykora says. “And we are not here to guess at Maekyon’s imagined future. Perhaps it’s as dire as my fellows suggest. I have been commanded to make contact, and I have, and will continue to. My focus is not on hypothetical disaster but on concrete mitigation. How difficult would it truly be to maintain Maekyon as a Mandate world? It’s more effort—I know it is—but we are willing to make that effort. We are proven; we’re ready. The Eqtoran annexation was unorthodox and we have transformed it into a proud beacon of the Empire. There is so much that is unique about this case. It demands care. I know you’re aware of that, High Majesty. I know that Maekyon is as special to you as it is to me. That it’s the culmination of so many of your hopes. Your enemies lurk at its fringes; your prognosticators project disaster. Let us not sleepwalk into preventable catastrophe. Let us give it Maekyon the consideration it deserves.”

The Empress is silent for what seems to Grant like a minor eternity.

“Let us, indeed,” she says. “You are relieved of your annexation duty, Cousin Sykora. You are no longer the ruler of Maekyon. I give the world and its conquest to Princess Narika of the Glory Banner.”