"Lady Ipqen." Grant steps past the last marine checkpoint, into the outer engineering ring, and waves at the coverall-clad shark woman. "Just who I wanted to see. How's it going?"

Ipqen looks up from her workstation, where a thicket of robotic arms code fine manipulations across a bank of circuits. She lifts her magnifying goggles. "Good, Majesty. Doing okay. Flying solo on some interceptor command chip conversions."

He smiles, and inclines his head to the hallway from which a distant humming drone sounds. "Come with me real quick."

"Uh, okay." Ipqen pushes her extra-large wheely chair out. "Sure."

She follows him down the eggshell-white hallway, past a strip of glass that overlooks the cavernous manifold chamber. They wind their way toward it.

"I've been thinking about how we left the last conversation," Ipqen says. "I feel like I was a little too hard on you. And I just wanna—"

"Don't worry about it." Grant points at a door with a big red triangle on it and a glyphic warning taking up a sizable panel beneath. He needs to get through that door. Needs it more than anything. "Open that for me? Your palm's got clearance, right?"

Ipqen's tail thumps nervously on the floor. "That's, uh… engineers only. Am I allowed to take you there?"

He chuckles, but behind his laugh his brain is growing barbs. "Sure you are. You want me to order you or something?"

She joins tepidly in on the laugh and scans her palm. The door hisses open and Grant is through, to a sublift that Ipqen squeezes into after him, typing away on her communicator.

Grant tries to look over her shoulder. "Who are you talking to?"

Ipqen shuffles the communicator to try to keep the screen from him. "Uh, Specialist Meena."

"Okay. What are you saying?"

She puts her communicator back in her coverall pocket. "Nothing."

They move to the last door. Even bigger, even redder. The hum is now a low roar that Grant has to raise his voice over. "Get me into the manifold chamber."

"Uh. Majesty, I don't know if I'm supposed to let non-engineers—"

"Ipqen." His laugh now has the tapered aggression of a battering ram. "I'm Prince of the Pike. It's all good."

"I'm—maybe let's wait for Meena, yeah?" Ipqen backs away from him, toward the sublift. "I'm sorry. I just, uh—"

"No saying sorry in the Empire, Ipqen. Remember?"

Her fringe flattens along her head. "Right."

"And no disobedience. Okay?"

"Okay. Uh… are you all right?"

"Sure I am," he says. "I told you that." He did, didn't he? His palms itch. Why is this servant not doing as she's told? "Open. The. Door, please, Ipqen. Now."

"I really think we gotta wait."

"Ipqen." And Grant isn't sure why her face looks like that until he glances down and realizes his gun's in his hand and it's pointed at the Eqtoran's chest. That makes sense. "Open the door or I'm going to open it with your limp arm while you're bleeding out."

Silently Ipqen lifts her hand to the lock and triggers the door.

Grant smiles at her. The knowledge that he's closer to his goal rests across him like a balm on a burn. "Thanks, Lady Ipqen." He gestures with the barrel. "You first."

She ducks her head and slides through the door into the manifold room.

"Keep going." He points. "Middle of the chamber. Go on."

He follows her in. "Okay," he says. "It's all okay. It's going to be okay."

He steps in front of the great whirring hexagonal ring that contains the Black Pike's manifold. Thrice his height. But he can fix that. Yes, he can. He will. He puts his satchel on the ground and pulls the bomb out and Ipqen is on him, two booming leaping steps and this huge alien woman is upon him, shark teeth bared.

The gun goes off with a bright, terrible CRACK. Ipqen slams into him with the full force of her 300 pound frame and bears him off his feet.

"Stop," he snarls. "Let me go." He scratches and tears at her, raking his nails along the thick skin of her forearms. "Let me the fuck go! I order you—"

"His anticomps!" A high voice is screaming from the doorway. "Ipqen! Get his anticomps!"

She reaches for him. He sinks his teeth into her wrist.

"Motherfucker," Ipqen hisses. Her tattooed arm lifts and then smashes down, knocking the back of Grant's head against the floor and sending a jagged zag of pain through him that jerks his jaw open.

A hand as thick and broad as a catcher's mitt pins him to the floor. Another rips his anticomps from his face with the snap of breaking plastic.

A freckly pink face fills his vision. A flash of red. "Freeze," Meena cries, and it's like a dump truck full of mattresses has just unloaded onto him. He sprawls on the floor, trembling and insensate. The Eqtoran atop him rolls to one side.

"Can you get him back to himself?"

"I can't—I just—" Meena's voice is high and hysterical. "I just compelled the fucking Prince. Oh my God."

"Can you compel him again?"

"No. No no no, we have to call someone, I—"

"Boss." Ipqen's voice goes firm. "Fix Grant."

Meena's face appears again. Flash. "Remove all compulsions," she says.

Grant sits bolt upright. "Oh my God," he says. "Oh my God, oh my God, we have to get Sykora. Thank you both. We have to—" He looks down.

He's covered in blood. Dark blood.

"I am so sorry, Majesty," Meena says, as he feels hurriedly around his chest. "Just so, so, so—"

Grant looks up. "Ipqen. You've been shot."

"Oh." Ipqen looks down and presses her palm to her ribs. It comes away slick with ruddy blood. "Fuck me. I thought you just kicked me hard."

Meena keeps babbling. "Majesty I'm sorry I'm so sorry."

Grant turns his head to her in a fog, like he's drunk. "What?"

"I compelled you. Twice."

"What? That's fine. It's fine." He gets to his feet. The back of his head feels achey and tender. "We gotta get Ipqen to a doctor."

Stolen novel; please report.

Ipqen holds a sticky palm up. "I'm good, man."

"Ipqen, I fucking shot you." He grabs her arm. "Come on."

"I'm—" She winces as she tries to stand all the way up and drops momentarily to a knee. Grant strains to keep her level "Okay," she says. "Okay. I can sorta walk, anyway."

"Grab my bag." Grant points with the arm that isn't supporting the woman he shot. "Meena. Grab that. Watch out for the bomb. Don't touch the detonator."

"The—" Meena looks into the bag.

She faints.

"The resilience of the Eqtorans shocks me. It really does." Technician Malo finishes wrapping the gauze around Ipqen's midsection. "If the Lady had been a Taiikari, we'd be fighting to keep her alive."

"But she's all right?" Grant blinks sweat out of his eyes as he looks over Malo's shoulder, as if the intricate biological readouts on the monitor meant anything to him.

"I'm the one who fainted. Ipqen got shot and I fainted." Meena scoffs from her corner of the examination room. "I'm such a goof."

"Ipqen." Grant stands at the Eqtoran's side, Ruaq squeezed in next to him. "I'm so fucking sorry, girl."

Malo and Meena wince.

"Wasn't you, Majesty." Ipqen pats his arm. "I know that."

"I offered you a better life than this." Grant steps back and lets Ruaq take up the whole bedside. "Both of you."

"No. Majesty, I—" Ipqen looks around the room. "It's, uh. Let's talk later, okay?"

Ruaq nuzzles her snout into Ipqen's. "Stop moving so much."

"I walked here," Ipqen says. "Everyone keeps acting like I can't walk."

A commotion sounds from outside. Hurried footsteps. Malo's ears perk up.

"Where is he? Where? Get him. Grantyde!"

"Be right back," Grant says, and opens the door of the examination room just in time for a wailing blue blur to leap into his arms.

"Oh my God. Grantyde. My love. My poor love." Sykora puts her hands on the side of Grant's face. "You're okay. You're with me and you're okay." She kisses his nose, his eyelids. He flinches. A cell of marines is behind her, led by a brooding Hyax, with Ajax's familiar sergeant halfcape a scarlet sight among the ranks.

"Yeah." Grant's hands go automatically to hold her up and against him, but there's a spikiness to him. A weird unwillingness to be touched. His throat is still so dry he isn't sure if he can even generate the spit to kiss her back. "I'm okay," he repeats after her.

"I'm gonna glass that loathsome grundle of a planet." She places herself nose-to-nose with him. Her eyes are so big and red and bright they hurt, almost, to look at. "There's already marines on the way to detain that bastard Askaro. We'll tear the college apart if we have to. I'm going to find the beast that did this and flay her. What they did. Oh, Grant. Dove. They fucking dared. I'll kill them—" Her brows furrow as she gazes into his anticomped face. She stiffens, then her tail opens his arm and slips out of his embrace. "Forgive me," she murmurs. "I don't—you need room to breathe."

"I'm okay. Really, I am." He gets down on a knee and rests his hands on her shoulders. His palms weirdly tingle. "A little, uh. Bruised." He notices the marks on his arms again. The bruises.

He swallows and feels the tenderness. He glances at the mirror set up in the examination room, where the Eqtorans are peering back at him with concern. The stripe-bruise of a tail wraps around his neck, faint but getting more visible as it darkens. Someone choked him. Someone fought him, and injected him with Compound 70, and he has no memory of it. A shiver racks him, hard enough that Sykora clearly feels it in his grip, the way her face falls.

"I'm okay," he says again. But his voice is scratched and wounded. Behind Sykora and the marines, the medtechs are whispering. Are they talking about him? His pulse elevates. He strains to listen. "We need to debrief," he says. "We need to, uh—the datawafer. What's on it?"

"Dove." Sykora's voice refocuses him on her. Those eyes. He's having trouble meeting her eyes. "Not yet. What can I do? What do you need?"

He takes a moment and a breath to actually ask himself that.

"I think maybe I need a second just to sit," he says. "By myself. Can I go sit somewhere quiet?"

"Let's, uh—" Sykora gives the lightest touch to his hand and turns. "We need a private room."

They guide him as if he's some kind of invalid to a vacant examination room neighboring Ipqen's. Sykora's the last to leave. She lingers at the threshold. "As soon as you need me, I'm on the command deck," she says. "But as soon as we're done up there, I am coming right back, okay? Right to the waiting room."

He starts to say something like I'm fine or I've changed my mind, I'll come with you. Instead, he says, "I love you."

She blows a kiss his way. "I love you, too."

She shuts the door.

He sits and stares at the wall for a while. He's not sure how long. He rubs his wrist. There's a bruise there, too, he sees.

He hears a muffled mmph mmph of voices outside.

There's a crust of dried blood under his fingernails. He should tell someone about that. He should get up and be useful. Give them DNA or something once he's ready to be out there again. Once he can stand in front of those red eyes again.

He scoffs at himself. What's with him? He's fine. Ipqen and Meena were there to stop him before anything happened. He really ought to be fine.

A knock at the door jumps his pulse into his throat.

"It's Ajax." The muffled voice has a HAK helmet's modulation on its edge. "Can I come in?"

"Sure," he calls, and the marine slips inside, quieter than a man in HAK armor has any right to move.

"I heard what happened," Ajax says. "On my watch."

"You're not about to blame yourself to make me feel better, are you?"

"I'm not. I mean, I do blame myself. But that's not helpful. Or what I'm trying to say." Ajax rubs his arm. "Uh—I'm gonna take my helmet off, if that's okay."

"Sure."

Ajax unlatches his helmet and tugs it off. His golden pupils take Grant in. "I think this is maybe supposed to be a surprise, so act surprised if it comes up, but we've requisitioned a HAK suit for you."

"You didn't have to do that."

"Not because of any of this. Just because you said you wanted it."

"I did, didn't I?" Grant feels wrung-out, like he's been awake for days.

Ajax sits in the attendant's chair in the room's corner.

"Last time I was compelled to do something I really didn't wanna do," he says, "it was an academy prank, and it fucking sucked."

Grant sighs and settles back. "What did they have you do?"

"I don't even want to talk about the specifics, to be honest," Ajax says. "It involved chili. And I refused to be compelled for hectocycles after, not until I met Meena. And I still don't eat chili."

"I didn't know Taiikari had chili."

Ajax snorts. "Kinda civilization would we be, coming up with interstellar travel and not chili?"

That gets Grant to grin a little. "Fair enough."

"Anyway, It was nothing like as bad as how you got it, but I just mean that I get it, you know?" Ajax leans his elbows onto his knees. "We all get it. Every guy on the Black Pike has a story. You're gonna have us all beat. Typical."

"You know me," Grant says. He's only half listening. "Big showoff."

"The shittiest part, for me," Ajax says. "Is I remember wanting to. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world. That's what I remember. Being powerless, but not feeling powerless. Feeling good about it, even. Proud that I was doing what I had to do."

Grant's attention is drifting more fully to the marine. "Yeah," he says.

"Afterward, for days, I just thought I could have stopped it." Ajax taps his forehead. "I could have broken out. Like if I'd really not wanted to do it, I wouldn't have. Like it only worked because on some level, I let it work."

Grant doesn't trust himself to speak. Ajax's words are drawing all of this out of his subconscious like a magician's scarf.

"That's what's really fucked about compulsion," Ajax says. "It feels like something it isn't. Like there was a choice when there wasn't. But I think—well. I don't know what you're thinking, or anything. But I got the blow-by-blow from Meena and Ipqen. And you know what I'm thinking?"

"What's that?"

"You could have shot Lady mek-Taqa," Ajax says. "Earlier, I mean. Straight away. If you were a different man. If you were a marine, or a badass, like I know you sometimes wish you were, if you'd been trained to do whatever it takes to get the mission done. You'd have shot and killed her, and used her handprint, and she'd never have been able to warn Meena, and you'd have blown yourself up down there. If they'd gotten me, it's what I'd have done."

He scoots his seat forward.

"But because you're you," he says, "you talked to her instead, long enough she could figure you out, and you only got the gun out when you had to, and you only used it when she rushed you. And then the first thing—the first thing you did, when you got yourself all the way back, was you helped her up here. Meena couldn't have moved her on her own. That was you."

Grant nods. Then he sniffs, then lets out a helpless laugh as a treacherous tear beads at the duct. "Shit." He puts his hand to his face.

Ajax's golden eyes flit away from him. "You need to let anything out, you let it out, Majesty."

"Grant." He hides his face in the crook of his elbow. "Please, Ajax. Grant."

"Grant,' Ajax says, gentler than Grant knew he could get. "Every badass bighorn marine you've ever seen has cried their fuckin' eyes out about this, at least once. I guarantee you they have, if they've been man enough to let themselves. It's good to let yourself. So just let yourself. Let it out and let it pass. And then get up and get back at it." The chair legs scrape. "You want me to leave you be, for a while?"

"Yes," Grant says, and he hears Ajax's armor clatter as he stands up.

"I'm gonna be right outside," the marine says. "And I'm gonna listen to some music. Cool? Nobody's gonna hear anything; nobody's coming in. Just tap my shoulder whenever, and we'll go wherever."

Grant nods again, because he can't form any words right now, and listens to the door open and shut.

A minute or two later, he's gotten up and washed his face and goddamn if Ajax wasn't right. He feels okay. Or at least a few shades less shitty.

True to his word, Ajax is standing at parade rest outside, back in his helmet and piping music into it loud enough that Grant hears the tinny rhythm. Grant touches his shoulder and gets his attention. "All right, sergeant." His voice is husky and stripped. "Let's get out of here."

Ajax salutes, straight and snappy and back in his marine persona. "Where to, Majesty?"

Grant scans the waiting room. No Sykora. The command group is still in session. The pitted feeling of aversion he felt a few minutes ago is suddenly dwarfed by a tidal wave of determination and the fervent need to see his wife again as soon as physically possible.

"Command deck," Grant says. "The Princess and I have a compeller to kill."

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