“What in smoldering hellfire killed the Argosy True?”

Sykora’s shined boots squeak together with the crossing of her legs. She frowns up at the holoprojected image of the Argosy True in happier times. The freighter consists of a stubby rectangular cabin in front, and then a line of long, warty cargo modules, like the segments of a spaceborne millipede, stretching across the command deck table.

A readout floats below the ghostly vessel, clinically reporting the vessel’s name, its complement of seventeen crewmates, and the last recorded sighting of the vessel in one piece.

“Three cycles ago, the Argosy True departed the planet of Myak.” Vora taps a button and a dot on the starmap highlights in red. “Counterspin border of the Cloud Gate sector. In the demimonde between Princess Kanori’s worlds and ours. Two cycles ago, pieces of the Argosy True peppered the Pryton repulsor field.”

“Judging by the speed of its shrapnel, the vessel was destroyed mid-sweep.” Waian’s plugged into her console today; her voice emerges amplified from the command deck’s sound system. A complex web of triangulations and shrapnel paths scatters across the projection like broken glass. “The natural assumption would be that they ran into a piece of debris during an illegal sweep shortcut outside of the lanes. Something big enough to puncture their membrane and pulverize them.”

“Setting aside whether that’s what happened,” Grant says, “Why were they sweeping illegally in the first place?”

“Not every Void Princess runs a sector with the same rigor as the Black Pike,” Hyax says. “Laxity in out-lane sweeping is a common enough condition.”

Grant shakes his head. “But what’s the advantage in avoiding the lanes?”

“It’s faster, for one thing,” Vora says. “You can hop through shortcuts that are too low-trafficked to make the repulsors worth it.” 

“The lanes are well-laid out in these systems, though.” Waian’s loudspeaker pipes in. “Credit where it’s due to Kanori for that.” 

“It’s also a way to move under wraps.” Vora steps along the side of the table, passing through the projection like a wraith. “Avoiding declarations and inspections, keeping your name out of the records.“

“A shame,” Hyax says. “If they were taking anything of extralegal interest off Myak, it was destroyed with them.”

“Let’s hope our Gravitas daemon wasn’t aboard,” Grant says. 

“Whatever happened, Myak is the key to finding out more.” Sykora’s finger rests on her lower lip. “Highlight the settled systems in Cloud Gate.”

Waian’s ear twitches and the projection floods with gold. Myak remains cast in red, far from any lit neighbors.

Sykora hums pensively. “Quite remote, that system. A homesteader, I presume?”

“Correct, Majesty,” Vora says. Myak was settled by…” She scrolls down her tablet. “Baroness Peala of Teii. The colony broke ground two decacycles ago.”

“What’s that?” Grant raises his hand. “A homesteader, I mean.”

“A noblewoman who organizes a colony on a previously unoccupied planet,” Hyax says. “A common way for new worlds to be added to the Empire.” 

Vora swipes on her tablet and a portrait of Peala blooms onto the holoprojector. She’s grimfaced and delicate-looking, her thin neck sprouting from an imposing orchid of a ruffle. The majordomo tilts her head as she examines the image. “If you’re caught between combative siblings or stakeholders, or if you’ve come out of the losing side of one of the peerage’s endless games, it’s a way to start over, or get an opportunity you otherwise wouldn’t. Secure some funding, get a charter from your Void Princess, and find a planet to set up shop on. Do well enough and you’re the Governess of a prosperous world, with no toadying or maneuvering required.”

“Do badly enough, and you slink back home in further debt,” Waian says. “Or you never come home at all. No, thank you. You ask me, if I’m a washed-up noblewoman, I’m joining the Navy. Flush toilets and three meals a day.”

“Are you a washed-up noblewoman?” Grant still doesn’t have a straight answer about what it was Waian did before she became a ZK fixture.

Waian unplugs from her console with an electric crackle. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Regardless of this Peala of Teii’s washed or unwashedness, she is our vector of information,” Sykora says. “She or some subordinate of hers are the best possible point of contact on the Argosy True. I do believe our next step is introducing ourselves.” She gives an incredulous squint to the portrait of Peala. “In-person.”

Vora clears her throat. “Are we sure that’s wise?”

“We are. Speaking with a Void Princess over a video call, when she’s not even your Void Princess? Simple and unthreatening.” Sykora puts on a whiny nasal affectation. “I do regret I cannot help you, Majesty, et cetera et cetera. Speaking to her when she’s looming over you with a voidship in orbit and a complement of marines at her back? That is how you get results.”

“That’s also how you get into deep shit with other Void Princesses,” Hyax says. 

Vora’s finger taps a nervous rhythm on her tablet’s rim. “Propriety dictates that we contact Cloud Gate if we’re paying Myak a visit. This is her territory.”

“So we ought to contact Kanori and seek permission.” Grant watches Tamion’s sunset out the window. Its dim and distant star becomes a crescent along its ashen surface. “But will we?”

Sykora hums reflectively. “You’re thinking what I was already thinking, I think.”

He nods. “Whatever is going on here, it’s already got us in a set of crosshairs. Maybe the fewer people who know, the better.”

“And the less time Peala has to prepare for our visit, the better,” Sykora says.

Hyax’s habitually-worn HAK armor clatters as she crosses her arms. “I remember thinking, when you made Grantyde a Prince, that perhaps he’d act as a voice of reasonable caution.”

“Afraid not, Brigadier.” Grant winds his hand through Sykora’s tail. “I enjoy pissing off noblewomen too much.”

“You can’t exactly fly a two-kilometer ship incognito into orbit around a world,” Waian says.

“Can we silent run?” Vora points at the map. “We sweep in, then shuttle an away team down to the world, staying outside sensor ranges.”

Waian sucks in air through her teeth. “Maybe. That sorta depends on the sensors.”

“A novice colony has to cut corners in places,” Hyax says. “Point satellites are often one of them. You save the expenditures to bolster your defense grid, you can become a thorny prize for a scant gain. Pirates don’t come knocking at such thresholds.”

“I buy that,” Waian says. “If we’re sweeping out anyway, we can halt on the outer lip of our sensors and get a good look at theirs.” She cracks the knuckles on her singular fleshy hand. “If Hyax is wrong, we can work out what to do once we’ve scoped the situation out.”

“I’m not,” Hyax says.

Waian smirks. “And if Hyax is right—I was getting to that, Hyax—I’ll slip us in like a knife between the ribs.”

***

The ship busies itself in preparation as the Myak sweep’s timer counts the hours down between now and the departure of the Pike from its sovereign sector. Hyax musters her marines and hand-selects her team. Vora prepares a missive to the Princess of the Cloud Gate, if they end up requiring one. Waian, whose job is done until the sweep exits, excuses herself for drinks with a small army of her paramours.

In the wake of the Tamion clusterfuck, Grant has decided that the fairest way forward in his Qarnak selection is the collection of proposals from the noblewomen. These have come to him in a pile of printouts, which he’s spread across the bed in the royal couple’s cabin. His wife lounges in the bath, fielding the questions he calls out over the bubbling hum of its jets. While they were in the Imperial Core, she took the liberty of buying a new tub, a his-and-hers that has a ledge for her and a deep end for him.

“What about Countess Rykanai?” Grant holds up a packet. “Have you ever worked with her?”

Sykora kicks her legs onto the tub’s lip. “She’d be all right, I think. A strong history of management with her holdings on Ramex. I think I use Rykanai-exported sabsum.”

“I’m a fan of her work too, then.”

“My hesitance with her is she’s gotten into a number of feuds.” Sykora’s tail lathers her calf with suds. “Always with a good enough reason, but she’s the common denominator. She seeks confrontation, I reckon. You’d want to keep an eye on that.”

“I think…” Grant sighs and rests the packet on his stomach. “I keep coming back to Countess Wenzai’s offer. It’s not worse than anyone else’s, and… I don’t know.”

Sykora submerges her head in the water, and comes up blinking crimson. “What don’t you know, dove?”

 I worry I’m evading this being the answer because I don’t want to just give it to her because we’re friends.”

“You do such lovely work as the righteousness in my ear.” Sykora beckons. “Come over here and let me drip some wickedness into yours.”

He climbs from their bed and wanders over to the lip of the tub. “All right. Drip on me.”

She sloshes onto her back. The peaks of her breasts bob up from the opaque, sweet-scented water.“I do believe you’re overthinking things, Prince Grantyde,” she says. “Eyes up while I’m being an evil vizier, mister.” 

He refocuses on her face. 

“Wenzai is qualified,” Sykora says. “Is she the best match for the job? Perhaps. Perhaps someone else edges her out. But she’s far from the worst. And you want to reward her and Tikani for their friendship. So reward them.”

He sits at the edge of the tub and dips a hand into the water. She holds it.

“You are going to spend the rest of your life in service to this sector,” she says, as her thumb kneads circles on his knuckle. “I will do everything in my power to ensure that it’s a wonderful life, full of happiness and excitement and love. But it will also be full of duty, and fake smiles, and rivalries, and difficult problems that you and I will have to solve together. So if I see you hemming and hawing on the edge of a chance like this, to be selfish and content without consequence, do you know what I’ll do?”

“What?”

Sykora stands up, sloshing water down her front, glistening in the firmament. “I’ll push you off it.” She leaps out of the tub and into Grant like a curvaceous blue cannonball. He manages a few stumbling steps backward in order to fall onto the bed and not the floor.

“My ridiculous Maekyonite,” Sykora says, when she’s through kissing him. “You can give this to her because you like her. I like her, too. It’s all right. We are not in a position where we need to explain ourselves. As long as things go right, anyway. And I have every confidence in the Countess that she won’t give us cause to regret her.”

“All right. All right.” He goes to prop himself up; Sykora’s tail yanks his arm out from under him and puts him down on his back again.

“I’m not letting you up until you say I’ll give this job to my friend,” she says.

He rests his palms on the globes of her butt. “I can just stand up.”

“I’ll bite you if you do.”

“I’ll give this job to my friend.”

“There, you see? That felt good.” The wagging of her tail sprays little droplets of water across the sheets. “All for the best, anyway. You got your proposals all wet. You really ought to be more careful.”

“There’s this alien that keeps jumping out at me,” he says. “A common Maekyonite problem. We watched a documentary about it last night.”

Sykora digs her nails into his chest and makes a xenomorph hissing noise.

He shakes his head. “And here I am without a flamethrower.”

“The flamethrower didn’t work.” Her tail curls up to his face and tickles his nose. “I cannot be defeated.”

“I don’t know about that.” He flips his giggling wife over, scattering damp pages across the bed. His knee rises and spreads her legs open. “There’s some tactics they never tried.”

***

“The carrier has room for a full platoon, Majesty.” Hyax’s half-grin is still on from sweep entry, when Waian begrudgingly reported that the sensor satellites in orbit around Myak are low-budget and ill-maintained.

“Twoscore marines is hardly necessary, Brigadier.” Sykora adjusts her tricorne in the dark reflection cast by their warmed-up carrier. “We’re aiming to give a little scare to a provincial Governess and shake some information from her, not put together an invasion force. We march up to the colony with a squad of marines and a Void Princess at their head, we get what we need, and off we pop again.” 

Hyax tsks. “And she goes crying to her Void Princess, one assumes.” She bows to Grant as he approaches, buckling his pistol to his waist.

Sykora plants a kiss on Grant’s knuckle and tucks his hand up against the nape of her neck. “By the time Kanori finds her fangs enough to chew us out, we’ll have enough of an understanding that we’ll be able to throw the Argosy True and whatever fate it met back at her.”

“Hmm.” Hyax flips her helmet right-side-up in her hands and puts it on. “As you say.” She exchanges salutes with Sergeant Ajax as he leads their escort up the carrier’s gangplank.

“Whenever you speak that authoritatively, something goes awry, you know,” Grant whispers, as they follow the Brigadier into the carrier..

“Shush, you.” Sykora flicks her tail into his arm. “This time it’s going to go perfect.”

Dockworkers in bright reflective red jog away from the bulk of the rising vessel. The carrier’s membrane thrums into consonance with that of the Black Pike, and with a white flash they’re out of the voidship and into the unending void.

Myak’s swirling gray marble grows in the cockpit window. Sykora’s foot finds Grant’s and perches on it as the atmospheric entry rattles the carrier and the afterburners roar. They punch through the bruise-colored cloud cover and out over a rain-slick landscape of craggy ridges and naked stone.

Distant lightning illuminates the thundercaps which swirl over the planet. Sheets of rain sluice off the carrier’s angular contours as its hydraulic legs hiss and lock. The Taiikari aboard (and their singular human) rock in their seats momentarily with the rumbling touchdown.

Hyax passes Grant a thick hydrophobic poncho. “Bet you wish you had a HAK suit for this rain, eh, Majesty?”

“I kind of wish I had a HAK suit all the time,” Grant admits, as the wind wails through the carrier’s expanding exit ramp.

From a rocky outcropping, the marines and their monarchs observe Myak’s sole colony, which sits at the cleft of a towering gray canyon. Prefab buildings ring avenues that spider out from the crag in mycelial zigzags, bending around uneven stone switchbacks and spires.

It’s dim and indistinct in the hazy rain. Grant lowers his binoculars and squints with bare eyes out at the complex.

“Hard to see it,” he says, passing Sykora the eyepiece.

“Hard to see it because there’s no lights on.” Sykora frowns. “Why in hellfire are there no lights on?” She turns to Hyax. “Hail them on comms, Brigadier. I’d intended to march up and knock, but this is… irregular.”

Hyax unhooks a mouthpiece from the boxy communicator on her back and punches a command into its number pad. “This is Brigadier Hyax of the Black Pike, speaking on behalf of Void Princess Sykora. We seek counsel with a representative of Governess Peala.”

Nothing on the line but popping static. Hyax repeats the message—still no reply. The Myak colony is dark and still.

“Right. No lights, no movement, no reply.” Hyax drums her fingers on the edge of her rifle. Which means either the—“

A star-bright flash from a tower at the colony’s edge, and the air fills with the chattering roar of gunfire.