”Ohhh here she comes! Here comes the interceptorrrr!”
Ziavra shrieks in delight as she bobs through the air, her midsection wrapped in her grandmother’s tail. Waian runs across the cabin, imitating a roaring engine with a long raspberry. “Indus Ziavra to the Pike! We’re coming in hot! All systems orange!”
Grant hunkers down and opens his arms. “Emergency landing!”
“Bwaaa!” Ziavra cries, fearlessly. Waian’s tail oscillates, bobbing her up and down one more time, and then deposits her in her father’s arms.
“Aaah! Heroine!” Grant spins with his baby held aloft. “It’s Lady Zee, the most fearless pilot in the Firmament!”
From her spot on the floor at the center of an exploded garment, Sykora sets her sewing gun aside and applauds. Ziavra burbles triumphantly, then spits up something pale onto Grant’s face.
Waian doubles over, cackling. Grant sits on the floor with his giggly daughter. “Oh my God,” he sputters. “Some of it got in my mouth.”
“Oh poor dove.” Sykora scrambles to her feet, muffling her own laugh in the crook of the arm that isn’t holding their son. Kiar, who was half-dozing at her breast, blinks awake and looks around alertly. “We have a casualty.”
“It’s okay. I’m a background character.” Grant goes to wipe his face with his sleeve, recalls the Taiikari dedication to sleevelessness, and holds his hand out. “Can you napkin me?”
Waian hands off a napkin, still quivering with mirth.
“Hold on.” Sykora’s digging in her satchel for her communicator. “Don’t wipe it off yet. I wanna take a picture of this moment. Aw, come on.” She clicks her tongue as Grant takes the fabric and daubs the spit-up away.
“The point of capturing these moments is to make sure we remember all of them.” He pats his daughter on the back; she lets out a tiny, adorable burp. “And I promise I won’t forget this one.”
The door chime sounds. Waian pads over to it, scooting around Aurora who’s picking apart one of the cabin’s curtain tassels with surgical concentration. “Whaddya want?” she demands through the plasteel.
“It’s Hyax.” The Brigadier’s voice is hoarse but calm, like she’s recovered from a crying fit—but that seems to deny a fundamental physical law, because Grant’s never seen Hyax so much as sniffle.
Sykora’s face displays the same perturbation Grant feels. Hyax is not one to “Come in.”
Hyax shuffles into the room, and the innocent cheer that had filled it excuses itself through the sliding door as it hisses shut. “Majesty,” she says. “Please pardon the interruption.”
“Of course, Hyax.” Sykora gives her Brigadier a probative once-over. “You look like you’re coming from a void funeral. What’s twisted your tail?”
Hyax turns stiffly to Waian. “I would request respectfully to the chief engineer that she depart.”
“Uhh.” Waian exchanges misgiving glances with the royal couple. “Yeah, okay. I, uh… should I take the kids?”
“Perhaps you should,” Sykora says, and hands Kiar over.
Waian gathers the babies and tarries at the threshold. “Whatever it is, I’ve got my communicator on,” she says. “Go easy, Hyax. Okay?”
Hyax nods her half-attention and does not depart her straight-ahead parade rest stare until Waian’s out.
“Okay.” Grant pulls up a chair and sits, to get on the level of the standing Taiikari women. “What’s up, Brigadier?”
“Majesty,” Hyax says, and then hitches like a frozen loading screen, mouth partway open.
Sykora’s tail meanders into Grant’s lap. He takes its tuft in his hand and squeezes tight.
Another fragment unpacks itself from whatever snarl is entangling their Brigadier. “I have.” Hyax gets caught again. She drops onto her haunches, crouched and staring at the ground.
“Whatever it is, we can figure it out,” Grant says, as in his catastrophizing mind worlds burn and ships explode.
“Please just a moment, Majesty.” Hyax stands again. “I have betrayed your trust and the trust of the Empress. I’ve disclosed the truth of Compound Seventy. I am prepared for whatever punishment you deem worthy of me.”
Sykora’s tail departs Grant’s hand. She crosses the few steps of carpet to her Brigadier with the care of a woman atop a thinly frozen ocean, takes the back of Hyax’s head light in her hand, and brings them forehead to forehead. “Who, Hyax?” she whispers. “Who knows this now?”
Hyax’s composure breaks, and for the first time in the decacycles he has known her, Grant witnesses his friend cry. “Please,” she sobs. “Please spare them, Sykora. We could inject them and flash them. It might not be too late. Do what you must to me. Let me pay the price for them. Just spare them.”
“I will do everything I can to preserve them, Hyax.” Sykora keeps her voice soft even as her tail straightens in shock at this display of emotion. “I swear to you on my children. But you must tell me who.”
“Ipqen.” Hyax says it like it’s being ripped from her chest. “And Ruaq. And if they come to harm because of me I’ll be torn apart, Majesty. I’ll—I don’t—I’m such a fucking fool and I’m sorry, I’m sorry I’m sorry—”
Sykora keeps hold of Hyax as the Brigadier wilts back into her weeping, and sinks with her to the floor. Her tail winds around Hyax’s and pulls it into a tight coil around them both. C’mere, she mouths to Grant over the head buried in her chest. Grant slithers from his seat and joins them on the knitted rug.
“Can I say what I think?” He puts his hand on its anchor-spot, the curve of Sykora’s back just above her tail’s root.
“If it’s what I think you think, then yes,” Sykora says. “Please.”
“Of all the servants aboard this vessel, Ipqen deserves to know this,” he says. “If I’ve earned that kind of trust, she has. Even if she’s not family.”
Sykora releases a held breath of relief, and nods. “An injection and mindwipe is an option, but if we try it and it fails, we lose her forever. It’s not exactly the ideal way of giving her the truth. But she deserves it, and she doesn’t have the mindset to keep her loyalty to us without it.”
Unlike Ajax, she doesn’t say, but he knows that’s the sorrowful addendum at the end.
“I can stand Jax giving me the silent treatment,” he says. Her little hand squeezing his leg confirms the subtext he read. “I mean, it fucking sucks, but the guy’s a Taiikari and a marine. He’ll keep for a while. Ipqen—she saved the Pike. And she got a hole shot through her over it. The more we let her in, the surer I am she’ll stay.”
“How’d they take it, Hyax?” Sykora asks.
“I don’t—I’m not sure. I was occupied with vomiting and panicking.”
Sykora rolls her eyes affectionately toward Grant. “Never mind that. Do you trust them?”
“I do, Majesty.” That from Hyax sounds surer than anything else she’s said in this soup of sadness.
“Well, that’s settled, then,” Sykora says, with a conscious injection of blasé cheer. “If you think all’s well then surely it is, Brigadier Majesty-You-Mustn’t.”
This wins them a tearstained chuckle from the puddle of Hyax on their floor.
“Brigadier Sourpuss,” Grant adds. “That’s still your name in my phone, y’know. Day two on the Pike, Kora put it there.”
“My lovely husband is confabulating,” Sykora says. “If a mind as treacherous as his can hold the secret surely your big sexy fishwives can. You should marry them to be sure. I need them monitored.”
Hyax’s eyes have slowed from a flood to a trickle. “If you command me I will. I’ll keep watch on them as long as I live.”
“I was being funny, Brigadier,” Sykora says. “Or attempting it. But that does have the sort of yearning romanticism tinged with morose duty that makes you such a poetical catch. And we do need to keep watch on them, as assured as I am of their allegiance. They’re in the circle of trust, now. I can’t promote them yet—especially not if word spreads that they’re boffing the Brigadier—but they’re in the circle of trust. And as the annexation continues I’ll want their counsel. Ipqen was clear-eyed during her own world’s uplift.”
“I’m sure they’ll assent, Majesty.” Hyax’s customary stiff upper lip has returned and her sitting posture is back in its stubborn squareness, though her tail is still looped with Sykora’s. “Their loyalty is as fierce as ours, I have found. But it’s to concepts, I think, above people. They have less patience for their leaders’ shortcomings. I find myself, uh… striving.”
“That does sound familiar,” Sykora says. “Another way the Eqtorans are more like Maekyonites than we are. That and their ability to make some supremely straitlaced women rather hornchoked.”
“That is not what happened, Majesty.” Hyax vehemently shakes her head. “I’m sure of it.”
Sykora grins. “Come now, Brigadier. It’s all right. I can hardly seal the cliff we both dwell in.”
“No, Majesty, I—I’m malfunctioning. There’s been a Loyalty Misalignment.” The way those words come out, they sound capitalized, like she’s declaring some officially designated disorder. “Even if I’m spared punishment, I need re-ed. The Empress’ place in my hierarchy.” She swallows her gorge. “It’s been compromised.”
And Waian’s words come back unbidden. Her fierce stare into Grant’s eyes. She’s not ready to hear this. But it’s you.
“We can discuss it after the annexation.” Sykora smooths down her Brigadier’s spiky pixie cut. “I understand how precarious you feel, but even now, Hyax, I see the woman I have loved and trusted all these hectocycles.”
“I don’t feel worthy of it,” Hyax whispers.
“I know that you are. Can that be enough?” Sykora kisses Hyax’s salt-streaked cheek. A quiver goes through the woman’s body, from ears to tail. “Can you be here for me, Hyax?”
“For you.” Hyax blinks away the last of her tears. “Yes.”
Sykora brings the Brigadier into a tight hug. Her tail loops around Grant’s arm and gives him an encouraging pull, and he joins in the embrace. Hyax goes limp as a noodle in her Prince and Princess’s arms.
“You’re okay?” he asks. Hyax’s bristly hair scrapes his forearm as she nods. “Can I have a turn, then? If today is a day for making shit weird?”
Sykora’s nose wrinkles. “You haven’t been spilling state secrets too, have you?”
“I had a conversation with Narika,” he says, and Sykora’s spine goes rigid. “She’s trying to get me to read something called a collateral infortunity report.”
“Grantyde.” Sykora eases back from the three-way embrace and worries her long hair between her fingers. “I know you’re yearning to trust her, but—”
“I’m not,” Grant says. “I told her as much. I don’t have room to, until Maekyon’s been claimed. But this is something we have, right?” Sykora nods uncertainly. Grant looks to Hyax. “You know what that is?”
“I do,” Hyax says. She’s back to her gravelly baseline, but there’s been a shift in her. Still all walls, but perhaps Grant’s on the other side of a few. ”I’ve contributed to it, at length.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a catalog of outcomes, I suppose,” Hyax says. “Of annexations.”
“I don’t remember this for Eqtora.”
“We weren’t responsible for the Eqtoran one.” Sykora picks up the thread. “For most annexations, it’s Coreworld clerk busywork. For unorthodox annexations, the ZKZ’s Brigadier leads a committee to file it. Maekyon qualified. Often it's just a box to be checked. One report among many. A rather unpleasant one. I can see why Narika would want to frighten you with it.”
“I'll keep the context in mind,” Grant says. “I promise. Narika said... let's see.” He goes back over his conversation. “She said you'd tell me it's not ready.”
Hyax looks at the floor. “It’s… we’ve been through a few drafts. The committee’s stance is, uh, as you say. It’s not ready.”
“I know it’s not,” Grant says. “But I think I need to see it.”
Hyax folds her hands in her lap. Her scarred, red gaze meets Sykora’s.
“That’s the committee’s stance, Hyax,” the Princess says. “What’s yours?”
“My stance.” Hyax sighs herself back to her feet. “My stance, Majesties, is that the committee can do as many drafts as they like. The truth is what it is.” She’s steady again, but somber. “We should convene the command group for this.”
She turns to the wide splash of firmament that takes up a full wall of the cabin.
“If we’re going to look into the dark, it should be together.”