“She is fucking us. Gleefully.” Narika tosses the tablet onto the command deck table with a clatter and sits in a huff atop her throne. The pout of her lower lip and the way she crosses her arms—Grant would never say this aloud but it’s the most she’s looked like her twin sister since he first laid eyes on her. “She is sleepwalking us into catastrophe with our eyes wide open. Utter daft foolishness.”

“You’re being quite treasonous, you know,” Sykora says. Kiar’s tail wags as he drinks from her bared breast.

“I speak of her not in her capacity as my unimpeachably brilliant Empress,” Narika says, “but as my mother, who is a horrid old kindek. The body politic differs from the body busy.” She scowls again at the tablet. “Damn her stubborn cowardice.”

“Aww, poor thing.” Axyna kicks her feet from her perch on the throne’s armrest. “Is Mama telling you no-no?”

“Do be quiet,” Narika says.

“Make me,” Axyna says.

“There are ways of stilling your tongue permanently, Specialist-Gefreiter,” Narika says. “Do not think I’ve discounted them.”

“You’ve delivered the Empress’s response.” Sykora reflects her sister’s scowl. “Now depart.”

“She can stay,” Narika says. “Better here than skulking about somewhere knocking things off shelves.”

“It’s difficult to speak freely when the Empress’s minion is making leery faces at me.”

“I’ll flash anything sensitive out of her mind,” Narika says, as Axyna’s leery faces continue. “We needn’t worry about her. If you can bring your dependents I can bring mine.”

“I’m breastfeeding mine,” Sykora says.

Axyna snickers. “Well, if—”

“Quiet,” Narika says, eyes flashing this time, and Axyna’s quiet, though her grin has grown.

“So we’re stuck in reaction mode on the compound.” Grant gently takes Kiar from Sykora. “Let’s focus on what we can control, yeah?”

Narika sighs and rests her chin on her steepled fingers. “You already have your father voice down pat, don’t you?”

“He’s right, you know. Let’s get that first contact message recorded.” Sykora starts to tuck herself back in; Rory squalls, and she tsks and lets her daughter have a turn at the teat. “It might be best coming from you, dove.”

Grant grins and boosts Kiar onto his shoulder. The boy’s tail-wagging intensifies; he likes to be tall.

“Bagaga,” Kiar agrees.

“I think it’s got to be you, actually,” Grant says.

“Why?”

“Because you’re beautiful,” Grant says. “They should know you’re beautiful. And because in all the stories when the aliens come—the hopeful stories, anyway, the happy ones—they say four words to us. And it should be you who says them.”

“Four words?” Sykora tilts her head. “In English?”

“Well, more like seven. The preamble’s important, too.”

Narika taps her nails on the carved armrest of her throne, beside Axyna’s curled-in tail. “You don’t suppose you’d better write them down?”

“We can put them on the prompter,” Grant says. “But I’m sure you’ll remember. It’s not exactly difficult or poetical or anything, but it’ll move them.”

“What are these words?” Sykora asks.

He sits on the floor, kisses her wrist, and with their son giggling in his lap, he tells her.

---

Artem sits on an upturned paint bucket, head down, ears full of italo-disco, updating his tasker profile. His cousin says he really ought to smile on his profile picture. He thinks it makes him look professional.

Professional or not, the air conditioner install job on Cypress ave for tomorrow got cancelled. Artem clicks his tongue and messages his cousin.

Tasker job cancelled. I can drive the lyft tomorrow.

Canyon’s showed up at the graffiti’d wall where the guys idle while they wait for jobs. Artem gives him a wave and takes his earbuds out. His cousin has responded:

Car’s spoken for tomorrow, I’m picking up a girl

Not in our fucking car, you aren’t, Artem writes, and pulls up the front facing camera while his cousin spams him with complaints and calls him Курва.

“Hey! Arti!” Here comes Canyon, with his grin and his brown bag. “You trade again?”

“What do you got?” Artem asks. Everyone on the corner speaks English, when the groups do talk to each other; it’s the only one everyone understands. Artem’s English is pretty trash outside of phrases like to the left or pass the nailgun, but he’s been making the effort to get better lately.

“Habichuelas,” Canyon says. “Como se dice, uh, beans. You gotta try them.” He waggles the bag. Artem thought it’d be his mom’s pasteles again. “How about you? You got the pork?”

“I’m not trading them for your beans,” Artem says.

“You gotta try, though.” Canyon pulls a tupperware out of his bag.

“I’ve had fucking beans, amigo.”

Canyon puts a hand on his chest in offense. “You’ve had shit. Habichuelas guisadas ain’t whatever beans you had.”

“Troca,” someone yells, and the laughing and jostling ceases immediately. Everyone’s on their feet as the pickup rounds the corner.

“All right.” The guy at the wheel sticks his head out from a dashboard full of rubber ducks. “Four guys who do carpentry. I need four guys.” The men are mobbing the flatbed. He holds up four tattooed fingers. “Hey! Just four!”

Grumbling and shuffling as they negotiate with each other. Who’s getting a seat? Artem strays back. The Dominicans got there first, fair and square. He’s out of luck.

“Hey. Arti.” Canyon waves him over. “You gimme that pork, you get my spot.”

“Thank you.” Artem jogs over. “Muchas gracias.”

“Whoa, hey.” The guy in the truck eyes him. “What’re you asking for hourly?”

“No more than the usual,” Artem says, trying not to sound too desperate. “Twenty an hour. I do great work. In Ukraine I’m a master, uh—” Carpenty. What do you call that? Fucking English. “Carpentist.”

The laugh the guy gives him tells him that was wrong, but it’s not too mean. “All right, man. Come up.”

It’s a good job. Framing always is. Seeing the skeleton of a thing rise. Mister Rubber Ducks comes by around one with a box of doughnuts, the crappy American kind but that’s fine, and the guys climb from the scaffolds to eat.

“So Ukraine, huh?” The American leans on his flatbed. “You come here cause of the war? The—” He makes a gun gesture, like Artem hasn’t figured out what war means yet.

“Yep,” Artem says, which isn’t entirely true—he followed his cousin here before the lockdown—but when he plays along they tip him, sometimes. “Rough, rough shit. Really rough.”

“I hear that. I was part of the clusterfuck in the oughts. Operation Iraqi Freedom. I see videos of what’s going on out there, and fuckin’ hell.” The American chews his American doughnut thoughtfully. “Whole different ball game when they’ve got shit falling out of the sky onto you. Right outta the blue.”

“Uh-huh,” Artem says, but he’s only getting about half of what he’s hearing. Mostly he’s thinking about his car and what his dumb cousin is doing with girls in it.

“Wasn’t how it was when I was overseas. Seems like hell. Can’t hardly imagine it.” The American squints into the clear sky. “Right outta the blue.”

That’s when everyone’s phones switch on. They all start playing the same thing.

---

Waian’s head is notched into Chief Engineer Raklin’s shoulder, her eyes dancing across the hangar console. “Holy fuckin’ hellfire, kid,” she says, softly. “This macrolayer you’re running in here is fuckin’ gorgeous. I need this algorithm for the Pike.”

Raklin’s throat quivers with overwhelm. “You—you like my algorithm? The progenitor of the W-series wants my hangar algo?”

“Of course I do,” Waian murmurs, into Raklin’s neck. “God, they’re beautiful, these quotient numbers. It’s so tight on the membrane.” Her tail is cinching like a belt across Raklin’s waist, drawing the younger Chief Engineer flush against her. “But I bet it lets authorized craft slide in fucking perfectly, doesn’t it?”

“It—I—if they have the right membrane signature.” Raklin’s little fuchsia tongue slips across her dry lips. “I… I could show you. If you have time.”

“For this? I got all kinds of time.” Waian chuckles, low and heavy. Her metal hand slips into the front pocket of Raklin’s jumpsuit. Her lips inch closer to Raklin’s ear. “This kinda mind-meld is what our Princesses want, right?”

---

They’re not renewing Rebecca’s contract. She takes the time to cry about it into her muesli bowl, at her shitty breakfast table in her shitty studio, and then she’s back on the apps. Fuck my life with these apps, she thinks, but what’s the alternative? Start walking the pavement and showing her master’s degree to the Microcenter and the Verizon store?

She’s scrolling her LinkedIn feed when the popup blocks her view of the bullshit ghost job. It starts to buffer one of those mobile game ads with the pouty fantasy broads on it. She scoffs and swipes past it. These ads are getting so much more annoying lately.

Marissa’s calling. If it’s about the fucking wedding she can leave a voicemail. Rebecca is not in a position to worry about made-up problems right now. She picks up. “Are you about to Bridezilla me? Because I—”

“I need you to check your fucking DMs right now, Bex.”

“Why?”

“Why? Did you skip the video?”

“What video? Okay. God.” Rebecca puts Marissa on speakerphone as she finds their conversation history. There’s that pouty-lipped blue alien girl again. “Oh, this? I saw this already. What, is it a hack or something? Did I—did everyone get this?”

“It’s not a fucking hack, Bex.” Marissa sounds on the rim of panic. “It’s real. Turn the TV on.”

“Who has TV? This is—” Rebecca scrubs through the video. “This is AI or, or something. This—are you fucking pranking me?”

“Go to 50 seconds in. On the camera pan.”

Rebecca shifts the timestamp. The woman crosses through her sumptuously silk-hung backdrop, coming to a halt with her hand on the arm of—

“That’s him.” Marissa lets out a distraught laugh. “Tell me that’s not him. He got beardier and bigger and hotter but that’s fucking Grant Hyde. From sophomore fucking year.”

Rebecca stares at the image. She releases her finger and lets the video continue playing. Marissa is saying something else but it barely comes in through the ringing in her ears.

“Marissa,” Rebecca says. “Is your college ex invading Earth?”

---

“Do you need me to fix you up for the meeting?” Karita murmurs, framing Malus’s face in her hands. “I hear their Brigadier can be a bit of a hardass.”

“I shouldn’t,” he says.

“You’ve got your worry face on.” She traces his brows. “Up here especially.”

“I’m just… I’m bracing, you know,” he says. “For the hordes of Raptors that will seek someone to blame for the way this will go. For the decisions the Princesses make. The only Princess with a male Brigadier surrenders the annexation to a patriarchy world full of uncompellable men. Like a tawdry erotica.”

“Let them talk,” she says. “You know better than to listen to them.”

His shoulders droop. “I should know better.”

She rubs his jaw. “I only want to be helpful. Otherwise I’m just pacing the cabin and fretting. It’s the same thing every lady Brig has, you know? They were brought up with it. I really don’t think you need it. Not anymore, not usually. But it’s a momentous day. Your first annexation.”

“First half-annexation.”

She giggles. “Oh, well never mind, then. That makes this way easier, doesn’t it.”

“All right, little fiend.” He raises his anticomps and his wife’s muted amber-tinged skin resolves into its beautiful blue. “Hit me.”

Her eyes pulse red. “Remember who you are,” she says. “Remember what you’ve done to earn this.”

His tail winds around hers. His lips brush her forehead. He stands up straight and the cloud of doubt stays where it was, clinging low to the floor where it can’t reach him.

“To skef station and back, Brigadier,” she says.

“And twice on tenthdays,” he says, and marches from his cabin, head high.

---

In the yellow room they’re all gathered around the TV. The video loops.

“That’s not possible,” Henry says. “They don’t—she said they don’t do that.”

“They don’t.” Helen sips her green tea. “Doesn’t mean it’s not possible.”

“We’re fucked.” Tiff is rocking in her injection mold chair. “We are so fucked. Are we fucked?”

“I am the former captor of Sykora nai Kei’na Terokai,” Helen says. “I have collaborated with the enemies of the Empire and imprisoned one of their noblewomen. I am sure that Earth will give me up as part of the negotiations. I am most likely quite fucked indeed. The rest of you? Far from it. The work we did has made sure of it. I want you all to remember that.” The blue woman on the screen reflects in her glasses. She smiles. “I wasn’t sure, you know.”

Henry cocks an eyebrow. “About what?”

“I wasn’t sure about him,” she says. “I didn’t think they’d like beards. Their males don’t have them.”

The camera view swivels to the man standing by Sykora’s side.

“Hello, Prince Charming,” Helen says.

---

“So you have two majordomos, in essence?” Tari asks, as she pours more tea into Vora’s cup.

“Lomanza is thrice the majordomo I ever have hope to be,” the Princess-in-Waiting of the Pike says. “She was sent from the core when…”

She halts with a little hum of consternation.

Tari moves to her own cup. “When what?”

“When it was, uh… determined that Sykora should be in the running, I suppose,” Vora says. “Or when she was made a Princess Margrave. Ostensibly to have children, but I do believe the Empress wishes for her successor to hold a non-Void rank.”

“That makes perfect sense to me,” says Tari, lightly. “Why are you looking at me so fretfully?”

“Well… I was relieved of my position.”

“And you think that will happen to me?”

“I… well, I fear so.” Vora chews her lip and looks out at the starscape past the cafe’s bulkhead. “Yes.”

“God.” Tari chuckles. “I hope so.”

Vora blinks. “You hope so?”

"I’ve tried to resign four times and Narika has refused to accept it every time.”

“Wh—you resigned?”

“Tried to. She wouldn’t hear it.”

“Why?”

“Look at what she’s doing. The woman is incorrigible and ungovernable. The only reason she uses me for is to give her my wise and carefully constructed plan, nod sagely at me, and do the exact opposite.”

Tari blows across her tea.

“I love her like a sister, of course. But, hell. Look at her actual sister. The woman is a beast. Whatever majordomo they send as my replacement, I wish to them all the happiness they can extract and all the luck they will require.” She takes a long sip and savors the flavor. “Which is a goddamn ton.”

---

Ravi is helping the new kid take the guns apart. She’s a dumb shepherd and he should have known better than to care about her. It was because she looks too much like his little sister, maybe. And now the Type 56s he put her in charge of catch horribly on the cycle, and he’s doing his best to show her how to put them back together right, but she’s crying too hard to keep her eyes open.

“They’re coming back in five minutes,” he says. “If you don’t help me, they’ll know you messed up, and then I get in trouble, too. You have to help me.”

“I can’t.” She rubs her snot on her dirty dress. “I don’t know how.”

“You have to help me so pay attention,” he snaps, and tears the Type 56 from her hands. “Stop being useless.”

The chain on the door outside rattles loud as the padlock’s removed. Del is back.

“I must have shown her wrong,” he says. That’s not true. Why did you say that? Why are you sticking up for this fool? “She’s sorry.”

“Come outside,” Del says, monotone.

“Please, sir,” Ravi says, hating his own wheedling tone. “She’s been working hard. It’s just one—”

“No more work today.” Del sounds high; it’s too early for the soldiers to be high. “Come outside. There’s something happening.”

Ravi hesitates; Del’s already leaving the warehouse, ammo belts clattering.

“What’s going on?” the teary-eyed shepherdess asks.

“I don’t know,” Ravi says, which is the first time he’s allowed himself to say those words in front of the new kid. He leads her outside.

The squad’s ringed around their one TV, a flatscreen plugged into a generator on the back of a technical. They haven’t let anyone watch this thing since the World Cup.

Ravi stands behind a scarred man who’s chewing khat and whispering the lord’s prayer and squints. He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing? Some movie? The blue woman on the screen is speaking English, he thinks, but it’s subtitled for him to understand.

Or to read it, anyway. Understanding won’t come until much later.

“I am Sykora nai Kei’na Terokai,” she says, billions of times across the planet. “I have arrived with a message on behalf of the Taiikari Empire.”

She looks offscreen, then, and a little up. Maybe at someone outside the camera’s scope, or maybe she’s trying hard to remember the words, to get them right in the thick, melodious lilt of her accent. She says it in English; within the hour it’s translated into hundreds of languages, then thousands.

“People of Earth,” she says. “We come in peace.”