A quick plea before we get into the chapter!
Headless Over Heels is currently on Rising Stars but the list is hugely competitive. I am really hoping that we can get onto the front page, so if you haven't already headed over there to follow, fave, rate, and/or review, please consider doing so.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313/headless-over-heels-a-dark-fantasy-dullahan-romancebook
To sweeten the pot I offer the following: in the event that HoH gets onto the front page, I will celebrate by commissioning a well-known shortstack artist to create a jaw-droppingly explicit image of Sykora getting her wish Granted, if you catch my drift.
On to the chapter!
“It is genuinely not ready, Majesty. Genuinely. The model has to run probabilistic spreads across the whole annexation window, and the Maekyon dataset is, it’s—” Specialist Dyanik gestures around the lab at the forest of screens, and the snowfall of figures cascading down them. “It’s just so noisy. We’re still reconciling census variance. Your species documents itself obsessively, and trusts none of the documentation, and it’s been brutally difficult to, to—”
Hyax shoots Dyanik a scowl from her spot near Grant’s hip. Her stutter ends in a blush.
“Please accept my apology for speaking out of turn, Majesty,” she says.
Grant crouches. “You have nothing to apologize for, Dyanik. Never think I would react with anger towards you doing your job as you’ve been asked to. I’m the one who needs to ask your forgiveness, that this is the first time I’ve really spoken to you. But this is mine to carry. I need a feel of its weight.”
Dyanik’s fangs—smaller than his wife’s, he notes—show as she gnaws her lower lip in agitation.
“If it helps, Dy,” he says, gently, “this is an order.”
Dyanik’s shoulders droop with relieved resignation. She steps to a terminal and taps a few commands into its circular keyboard. A whirr and then a chipper ding as a datawafer sprouts from its interface slot.
“We have three primary branches and a sub-branch complete.” Dyanik plucks the datawafer from the slot and hands it to Hyax. “So the probability matrix is still only half-full.”
“On background, Dyanik,” Hyax says. “I’ll have your grade of confidence in the general accuracy of this report.”
“Brigadier, we’re only halfway—”
“Answer my directive, Dy.”
Dyanik falters. She looks to her team, gathered behind her in concerned silence. The light catches her heavy rectangular glasses and occludes her scarlet eyes.
“High confidence, Brigadier,” she says. “Triple degree.”
“Right.” Hyax pockets the datawafer. “Thank you, Specialist.” She strides from the room; Grant goes to follow.
“Majesty. Uh.”
Grant turns back to the forlorn little woman in her gray coat, isolated in the light of the curved laboratory lamp.
“I wish it were some other way, Majesty,” Dyanik says. “And I hope it is. I hope this whole report proves useless, and I prove a fool. I hope…”
Her voice breaks.
She bows low enough to hide her face. “Please excuse me,” she says, and pivots on her heel on the rise. “Back to work.”
Waian halts the slow spin of her chair with a boot to the edge of the conference room table. “Keep smearing your sebaceous oil all over that sucker, it’ll stop working, Majesty.”
“There’s no way that your storage devices are that fragile,” Grant says, but he places the datawafer on the table anyway.
Sykora is perched on his armrest, her tail wrapped tight around his upper arm. “Where is that truant adopted daughter of ours?”
Waian snorts. “She’s my adopted daughter.”
“Spearfight you for her,” Sykora says.
“No thanks,” Waian says.
It’s command group classic, today, arrayed around the table, waiting for their final member. Lomanza is a friend, now, even if she’d be unnerved to hear it said. But she isn’t quite the inner circle they require today.
Here comes the woman she replaced now, striding onto the command deck in a pair of severely clackly platforms. “Pardon my lateness. Pardon me, everyone. Um, uh.” She unbinds the silvery cloud of her hair and shakes her springy locks out. “I must object to this course, Majesties, with great regret at my obstreperousness. This is, uh…”
She catches her breath and re-laces her Imperial half-cape, whose epaulette is dragging down her arm.
“I was about to say irregular,” she says. “But I’m sounding like every bureaucrat I’ve ever watched you steamroll. Grantyde, this is blatant maneuvering by Narika. Blatant.”
“I know she’s got ulterior motives.” Grant slides the datawafer across the table and back into his fiddling hands. “If you really think I shouldn’t see it, you’re the Princess-in-Waiting. Your voice counts.”
“Vora,” Hyax says, before that voice can pipe back up. “He must know.”
“It’s not ready,” Vora says.
“He knows that.”
“He’s not ready.” Vora turns beseechingly to her Prince. “Grant, please. Forgive me. But I’m your heiress now and I have to speak frankly. You’ve been such a phenomenon aboard the Pike, and you’ve managed so many miracles. This is the unglamorous side. You’re lacking context and experience.”
Sykora descends from her perch. “Vora,” she says, and nothing more, but the two syllables are so laden with emotive meaning she doesn’t need to.
Vora’s shoulders slump. “I don’t mean to make excuses. I just—this will hurt him. The reason we go through these committees is—”
“I know, Vora. But it’s better now than sometime in the future when there’s nothing to be done about it.”
Vora sighs and nods. She takes her place at the table.
Waian gestures for the wafer. Grant unclenches his fist and holds it out. She takes it, makes a show of wiping it on her coveralls, and plugs it into her tablet. The display mirrors itself on the holoprojector. “Right.” She hands it to Grant. “Top left and right buttons there to turn the pages between the branches.”
Hyax clambers onto the table and into the holoprojection’s teal figures. “This column is what Narika wants you to see, I expect. Here.”
Grant follows Hyax’s pointing finger. “That number is…”
“That is Maekyonite war dead, Majesty,” Hyax says, flatly. “Initial annexation, plus three hectocycles of occupation, presupposing its necessity. The military number there, and the civilian number there. Counting deaths from the resulting infrastructural failures.”
“This can’t be right.” Grant furrows his brow and swipes down the list. “It’s—I mean, it’s optimistic.”
“Look at the units, Grantyde,” Vora says, quietly. “The figures are in ten thousands.”
“Oh,” Grant says, and keeps reading. And nobody says anything else.
“Is this the worst case scenario?” he asks, eventually.
“This is the best case scenario, Majesty,” Hyax says.
“This—”
“There are four branches available here,” she says. “Total capitulation, a brief decisive war, an extended occupation… this is capitulation.”
“This is capitulation?” Grant’s hands are shaking so badly it takes him two tries to turn the page on Waian’s tablet. “What are these war dead?”
“Those are not wars with the Taiikari, Majesty,” Hyax says. “This is internecine. This happens when you take a species and rip the floor out from everything it knew about its place in the void. This is what you get when you introduce a megacycle’s worth of technology to a planet of eight billion people who are still fighting wars over petroleum. This is the consequence of nearly two hundred individual nations being re-cast into one, underneath the rule of a xenospecies. Our most optimistic estimate is twenty civil wars or comparable internal conflicts before the world is organized under our stewardship, and that’s with constant Imperial interventionism.”
“You said four branches,” Grant says. “And you named three.”
Waian silently reaches out and presses another button on the tablet. “Outbranch of the occupation branch. You gotta scroll down.”
Grant reads as much as he can stand.
“At a certain threshold of lost Taiikari lives, the Core will judge Maekyon’s civilization ungovernable,” Hyax says, as Grant breathes in on an eight-count to ward off a panic attack. “This is an outbranch of the occupation, triggered when the conflicts are too severe. The deaths—the physical deaths—are lower than the occupation branch, because the occupation branch keeps Maekyon’s civilizations and cultures alive through a troublesome interregnum. Here, the Empire takes it all apart and starts again.”
“Is this real, Brigadier?” Sykora asks, quietly.
“By nature, you know I am not an optimistic person, Majesty,” Hyax says. “And I am working off of incomplete information. Our first contact with humanity will tell us far more than these analyses or extrapolations. But.”
She pivots on her heel to Grant, like a tin soldier.
“We had a conversation once,” she says. “About the Maekyonite willingness to sacrifice for a doomed cause. I have studied your many histories. Your wars, invasions, occupations. Your uprisings. It has filled me with admiration and despair. Your people are, beyond question, the most courageous warriors I have encountered outside of eusocial hiveminds. Billions will convert; billions will capitulate. Millions will fight to the death. Millions, Majesty.”
Grant’s voice sounds dead and dry, like he’s speaking into a blizzard. “What are you saying to me, Brigadier?”
“I am saying yes,” Hyax says. “One of these is real. Which one, I don’t know. But no amount of fact-finding will change the fundamental defiance of your people. There is no song to sing for them. Not this time.”
“The branch where we never came for Maekyon at all has a number, too, Majesty,” Vora says. “It’s only that nobody writes that report. Nobody models the cradle that stays a cradle. The wars you’d have had without us. The diseases. The number in the dark is enormous, and it is invisible, because no one is accountable for it. We make ourselves accountable. That is what a Prince or a Princess does. That is our doom.”
“Out, please, everyone,” Sykora says.
Waian puts a hand on Grant’s forearm. “Kid—”
“Waian.” Sykora kisses her chief engineer on the cheek. “Please go.”
They leave him alone with his wife.
Grant feels like lead. There’s a violent static scream in a muffled place inside him, like it’s resounding up from some oceanic abyss, or from the distant future.
It was supposed to be bright. It is bright. It’s bright in the way a mushroom cloud is.
“Did you know?” he asks. “Have you read this?”
“I’ve read versions of it.” Sykora says. Nothing like this, not ever.”
He closes his eyes. Down in the bones of the ship, the great patient engine is carrying them all toward his homeworld, fourteen days out and counting. He opens his eyes again.
“All right,” he says. “We’ll do what we have to.”
Sykora blinks. “What?”
He flips away from the apocalypse and back to the best-case scenario. “If capitulation is the best we can get, let’s get that capitulation.”
“We’ll—” She blinks again. A tear shines in her duct. “No. No, this is all wrong.”
“You heard them,” he says. “This is just… I mean, if this is what we’ve been dealt—”
“No. No, no, no, no. Grant. I’m—”
The tear breaks and shines down her face.
“I can’t watch this,” she whispers. “I’m watching my kindness disappear.”
“Batty—”
“No,” she says, suddenly fervent. “I—I fell in love with you because you demanded an impossible, infuriating choice. A Maekyonite choice. And if you deny that to your homeworld, there’s a piece of yourself you’re killing. I thought—I thought I could watch it happen. I thought it had to happen. I thought—I wasn’t—I don’t know what I thought. But I can’t let it.”
“Batty,” He leans into her. “What are you saying to me?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how, I—I don’t know. But it can’t happen like this. I don’t want to be accountable. Not for this. If we are doomed, then let’s be doomed some other way. We have to find another way. We can’t let things turn like this for your people.” She’s on her feet now, silhouetted in front of the projector’s teal catastrophe. “We have to save them.”
Her tail lashes. He looks up into her fierce eyes. “Save them from what?”
“The Empire,” she says.
Jared engages his deadbolt, places his keys in his tote bag, and places the tote on the hook by the door. He takes off his shoes and slips them onto the rack. Jared has two spots on the shoe rack. Work shoes and tennis shoes. His wife has the rest. Louboutins, moccasins, boots, flats, heels. He scoffs gently and rights the left Doc Marten in her pair.
Little bits he can control. This will be important in the coming weeks. Little pieces of the world that still fit together. One thing at a time.
Jared undoes his tie and places it in the pocket of his suit jacket. Everything in its right place, in this apartment at least. Outside, the world is reversing its axis and his boss cried at her desk for hours and the aliens are coming. Inside, his shoes are on the rack, and his tote is on the hook.
He removes his watch and it’s 6:13, and dinner is at 6:30. Anya makes fun, and calls him Jaredtron, and he smiles gamely and never takes offense, because when he comes home she does this for him. Her way without words of showing her infinite tolerace for her funny little husband. He can predict nothing else that will happen to him, not anymore, not after what they showed him in the conference room. But dinner is 6:30.
“I’m back,” he calls, unbuttoning his jacket and shrugging from it and placing it on the line of hooks two spots away from his tote bag (the one between them is for his umbrella).
“You’re back,” Anya replies, from the lounge/kitchen thing in the next room. Kitchenette is probably the word.
“Weird day,” Jared says, and only realizes afterward that Anya didn’t ask, which is strange because she always does. “Weird day,” he repeats. “We, uh… well, hush-hush stuff.”
“Uh huh.” Anya sounds distracted. “Come in here, please.”
Jared frowns and checks his phone. Did he miss a text from her? Is she angry? She doesn’t always tell him when she’s angry, and then he doesn’t realize and she gets angrier. But asking are you mad is a sure way to make things worse, so they’ve figured out a dumb little walk he does on his socked feet when he’s sheepish and concerned and needs her to spell it out for him. It’s a Scooby-Doo kind of walk she calls his Jinkies Walk and whenever he does it she can’t stay mad at him for long anyway, it cracks her up too badly.
He Jinkies Walks into the kitchen. His wife is sitting very straight and still at the kitchen table. She is looking intently at the stove. There’s nothing on it.
“Anya?” He sits across from her.
Her eyes are wide and placid. Vacant, even.
“Anya,” he says, again. She doesn’t even look at him. “I did the… did you see?” He hunches his shoulders the way he does to make her laugh. She doesn’t laugh.
Something sharp that freezes and burns at the same time presses into his neck. He squawks with shocked pain and lashes his arm to one side and it hits something but there’s nothing there, and suddenly now there is, a blue tentacle—no, not a tentacle. A tail. And red eyes that glow bright and then grow and grow until they are the only thing in the world, the only eyes he ever wants to see, never mind Anya’s.
“Be very still,” the eyes say, and of course, he is. He’d stop his heart for them if he could.
There is a naked woman sitting on the kitchen table. A naked blue woman half the size she should be. A tiny scream echoes like tinnitus in the back of his skull.
“Go to your bag,” the woman says, “and retrieve your laptop.”
He does. He places the black plastic workstation on the kitchen table. His wife sitting across from him hasn’t blinked since he got home. He opens the laptop.
“Log in,” the woman says.
Jared clicks the username field and writes [email protected].