"Princess on deck." Brigadier Hyax's rough bark echoes across the hubbub of the Black Pike's bridge and brings it to a moment's stillness as the crew unanimously turn to the opening lift and put fist to chest in salute.

Sykora returns the gesture with the hand that isn't tight in Grant's. "Thank you, Brigadier."

Princess and Consort step off the lift, onto the familiar command deck where Grant first met Sykora's advisors—but rather than the unobstructed view of the cosmos he was treated to last time, he's now standing on it like it's a balcony, jutting out before a massive monitor window of the firmament which stretches at least thirty feet from floor-to-ceiling. It's composed of elaborate interlocking hexagonal panes, which shift and reorient like a sliding puzzle, rippling across the view and carrying intricate glyphic readouts to a glow-lit crowd of well-trained Taiikari a dozen feet below them, ducking between arches and climbing catwalks as they chatter between one another. The whole milieu is like a church nave, crossed with a NASA control room, crossed with an interstellar stock trading floor.

On the edges, the deck's telescoped into a pair of stairs leading down to the main floor. Sykora nudges him and points up. In the ceiling above them is a wide slot where the deck used to sit. "Two positions for the command deck," she says. "Private council and bridge overlook. That's where we are. You see the track on the wall behind us?"

"Oh yeah." He gazes at the casters that have guided the entire command deck from its council position to its overlook. "This is one fancy ship you've got, Majesty."

She winks, and saunters to the edge of the command deck. She leans against the obsidian-and-gold balustrade. "Is my bridge ready to bring the Empress's justice?"

A chorus of yes, Majesty greets her. She returns a wide, pointy grin.

She turns with a sweep of her topcoat tails (and her fleshy one) and drapes herself across the ornamented captain's chair. "Exit countdown on the main screen, Navigatrix, if you please."

"Countdown forty five seconds," trills a nasal voice from the pit, and the glyphs appear, ticking down.

Grant stands next to his wife and leans forward as they watch the timer. "I thought you said they were five times longer."

"These are nautical seconds. Wouldn't expect a landlubber like you to understand." Her tail bats his arm. "Chief Engineer Waian, could we get that Maekyonite-sized chair back up on the command deck, if you please? With a cushion this time."

"That's Vora's department." Waian's staring at a wireframe cross section of the Black Pike's cannon deck. "The power draw on this broadside is going to blow our dynamos, Majesty."

"We won't fire the broadside, Waian. We'll flaunt it. And if we do need ballistics, a half-barrage is more than enough to slag a pirate corvette. Majordomo Vora, chair for my husband, please. After this sortie."

"Yes, Majesty."

"He couldn't just perch on your shoulder?" Hyax gives Grant a dim look. "Or should we replace him with Vora's kindek, if we're all bringing our companions up here?"

"Maybe I'll perch on his, Brigadier. And you'll have to lean aaaalll the way back to turn up your nose at me." Sykora demonstrates the gesture. Hyax snorts.

The Navigatrix's piping countdown: "Five. Four. Three. Two…"

One thing you get used to on the night shifts Grant used to staff is the moment all the auto-shutoff machines—the displays, the HVAC, the fluorescents—deactivate. They take with them all that fuzz and hum you heard throughout the day, and in the sudden silence, whatever you were doing adopts a queer profundity. When he was guarding at the Potterfield, whatever he was doing was usually a sudoku or a fantasy novel from the 70's.

When the sweep-hum dies, and the kaleidoscope slides back into firmament, he's holding his wife's hand while he stares at a green-and-gold alien world, hanging like a jewel in the firmament.

Probably has sudoku beat, profundity-wise.

"All that yellow is sabsum." Sykora is playing with his fingers, bending and unbending the joints. "The grandest deposits on the frontier. On planet-level you can smell it wherever you go."

"What's sabsum?" Grant asks.

"Maekyon doesn't have sabsum?" She clutches his pinky. "Oh, Grant, you are going to love it down there."

"What's it smell like?"

"Well, I mist it on myself in the mornings." She grins. "So: me."

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"Oh." Grant's fingers stray further into hers, knitting them together. "I think I'd like to go there."

Her tail draws slow, contended orbits. "I'll take you. After we deal with the brigands."

Grant feels the scopaesthesian shiver of someone watching him and glances past the burnished edge of Sykora's captain chair. Hyax is gazing at him, chewing the inside of her lip.

Her eyes dart down to his hand, where the Princess is rubbing little circles around his knuckle, then back up to his face. She gives him a barely perceptible nod. He returns it.

"Intruders located, Majesty. Two corvettes. Modified ZKPs."

"Let's get them on-screen, Monitor." Sykora elbows her husband. "Ready to see your first pirates, dove?"

Dove. Grant feels a hot-cocoa warmth in his stomach that counteracts the shot of space-pirate nerves. "I'll brace myself."

The main screen telescopes outward into the firmament, and picks out two mosquito-dot vessels in Ramex's far orbit. The image zooms until two spidery vessels are in focus, their bodies pockmarked and studded with jagged metal.

"The Queen's really desecrated those damn ZKPs. Taste revolts." Sykora straightens in her seat. "Wide band, please, comms. Video and audio. Let's make sure our guests catch it. And whatever spooked civilians happen to be listening in."

"Wide band, Majesty. Broadcasting in three, two…"

Sykora squares her shoulders. "Attention, noncitizen corvettes. This is Princess Sykora of the ZKZ Black Pike. Your armed presence within a lunar span of an Imperial tributary lane is in breach of Imperial law and the Frontier Nonaggression Protocol. You have one minute to disperse. Acknowledge."

A tense silence.

"One minute, noncitizens. Consider your families." Sykora taps a button on her armrest and relaxes back. "Let's get a minute on the board, please, Monitor."

"One minute, Majesty."

"Grantyde. Over there." Sykora points to the holographic display that's floating in the air in front of Waian, whose prosthetic arm is plugged into her console at the wrist. The Chief Engineer's eyes are glassy and unseeing. "Infrascope view, please, Wai."

Waian doesn't speak or move beyond a twitch of her ear. The display shifts into a purple-and-red view of the pirate corvettes.

"See those little streaks on the infrascope? That's point communication." Waian's mouth isn't moving, Grant realizes, while she's saying this. The voice is coming from the console. "They've heard us. Now they're talking about what to do."

A yellow flare paints across the ships. "They've gotten their heat signatures up," Sykora says. "Powering the engines."

Grant watches the glow flicker through the diagrams. "That's what those are? The thin things?"

Sykora squints and frowns. "No. Those aren't the engines."

"Majesty?" A tentative call from the pit. "They've moved power to rail."

"To rail?" Sykora reacts to this as though someone had told her Bigfoot was requesting permission to come aboard. "Membrane focus to fore. Cut gravity on the bridge. Grab my hand, dear. Are you positive, Ensign?"

"Yes, Majest—"

A lance of molten light rips from the firmament. It splashes like a firework finale against the Black Pike, and kicks whirling nimbuses of energy in mad fractals across the bridge window. Grant staggers backward and loses his grip on his wife's hand; his stomach turns over as his feet leave the ground.

A chorus of oohs, shouts, and a whistle or two. "Nice try, ladies," one of the bridge crew calls, to scattered laughs.

"They are." His perplexed wife stares out the bridge window. "Good God." Her tail whips out and wraps around Grant's leg. She tugs him into her lap and holds him across it, Pietà-style.

"Don't worry, dove." She kisses his cheek. "We're quite safe. Helmsman, turn us about for a quarter broadside starboard and then hold."

"One quarter starboard, Majesty." A goggled, horned officer at the center of an eye-wateringly complex horseshoe control board twists a sizable two-handed yoke.

Hyax points at the starmap. "If we splash them now, we'll get shrapnel in Ramex's orbit, Majesty. And the tributary lane."

"Yes, Brigadier, but for all I know, they're going to try ramming next. What in hellfire are they up to?" Sykora steps off the throne and folds her arms. Her tail deposits Grant into the seat she just abandoned. "Let's prep a drone cloud, Chief Engineer. We'll pursue them through the sweep and find a nice deep-void spot to pulverize them."

"Aye, Majesty." Waian detaches her hand from the console with a static snap. She pushes off the balustrade and floats to the bridge floor, where she enters hurried conversation with a pair of male Taiikari huddled around a holographic dot-matrix.

Sykora turns to the other members of her command group and removes her tricorne. Her dark hair haloes out around her. "Does anyone have a guess why those people out there just committed suicide-by-Princess?"

"Faulty information, perhaps, Majesty," Vora offers. "Some promised wonder-rail that could damage a ZKZ membrane, or the false idea that we'll pursue without drones."

"Taking and holding attention," Hyax says. "They mean to keep us distracted."

"Interesting theories. Degravitize decks two through six and reroute the power to wide sensors. Let's make sure we aren't missing anything." Sykora glances to her husband. "We really are safe, dear. Click your heels twice for me."

Grant clicks, and his boots whir and slap magnetically onto the deck. "Oh. Groovy."

Vora's calling into an intercom. "Decks two through six, prepare for zero grav. Decks two through six, zero grav in thirty seconds."

Sykora squeezes her majordomo's shoulder as she passes her. "Let's see if we can't take one of these corvettes alive, yes? A breach pod's worth of marines, Brigadier, if you please."

"Aye, Majesty." Hyax snaps a salute and unholsters a boxy communicator.

Another scorching beam burns through the firmament into the Pike. Now that Grant's feet are back on the ground he feels the rumble. Sykora returns to him from her circuit around the command deck. She gives his shoulder a light squeeze as she stands by him and watches the firmament. "Is this my first space fight?" he asks.

"They won't breach the PD." Sykora shakes her head. "The Black Pike takes part in space fights in the way your shoe takes part in ant fights, dove. They don't have a prayer in a shootout."

Grant watches the magnified ships spread torn and tattered rainbow wings. "So they're luring us into chasing them?"

"If that's the plan, they're wasting their time. We're not following them anywhere. The sweep drones are. And when they run out of exo to burn, we'll overtake them and obliterate them." Her shoes clack in a stomping gait as she steps to the edge of the command deck. "I do hope that won't upset you, Grantyde."

He does a quick self-check. Will it?

"Hell no," he says. "Obliterate those assholes."

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