“I feel so helpless,” Sykora says. “I’m peeing twice an hour, I feel like a fucking loaded barge. And I feel like a God. At the same time. Like I’m the queen of creation. I feel like I’ve lost something, even as I’m gaining everything. An old me is going away forever, and there was so much about her I am waving goodbye to like this.” She waggles the horns at her invisible past self. “But my body isn’t just mine anymore. First it was yours and now it’s theirs, and I will never be just for myself again. Never ever.” She picks at the fringe of one of their bed pillows. “And I’m glad. And I’m excited. And afraid.”

  Grant nods into her hair as he rubs lotion on her baby bump.

  “How about you?” she asks.

  “I feel ready,” he says. “I’m tired of just watching you do all the work. I’m just sitting on my hands waiting for when I can pull my own weight with these little guys.”

  She tickles his nose with her tail. “Pull mine.”

  He sits up and tugs her into his lap. He leans down and kisses her, long and slow. He pulls away, and nuzzles his nose against hers. His warrior wife.

  “My husband is thinking about something.” Sykora blows cool air onto his forehead. “He’s got his little thinking lines.”

  “I’m thinking about all kinds of things,” he says. “I’m a thinker.”

  “You were looking at Mava ordering her siblings around this afternoon,” Sykora says. “And you had that lost Maekyonite rebel look on. You’re still not sure about the in-waiting thing, are you?”

  “I can adjust,” he says. “If that’s how it’s supposed to go then we can, I just… my natural reaction is to fret about it. Putting one kid on a pedestal like that. It’s everything you’re not supposed to do on Maekyon.”

  Sykora shakes her head. “We can discuss it, dove. If you want to figure something else out. We said we’d find a middle ground.”

  “Surely there are expectations, though. If they’re going to be the children of a Princess.”

  “Of course there are. But you—oh God… one second.” Sykora grunts to herself as she shifts in his lap and stands atop the bed, so they’re face-to-face. “You’re Grant Hyde. You’ve never let expectations stop you.”

  The cabin’s chirping alarm breaks them out of the followup kiss they’re leaning into.

  “Urgent tone. Hmm.” Sykora frowns. “Answer on speaker.”

  “Majesties.” Hyax’s clipped voice pipes into the cabin. “We have an emergent situation on the hab level that requires your attention.”

  Sykora’s frown cuts deeper. “What’s going on?”

  “Ensign Kamen has overindulged at the cantina,” Hyax says. “He’s drunk, and he… he is impugning His Majesty.”

  Sykora’s eyes narrow. “Impugning? How?”

  “With vulgar talk.”

  “What’s he saying?” Grant asks.

  “He has called Your Majesty, uh…” Hyax ahems. “a big pink brainless dildo.”

  With soothing words and promises of unsparing Imperial wrath, Grant manages to prevent his furious and extremely pregnant wife from fetching her spear and storming down to the hab level herself. He takes the lift with a pair of fully HAK-suited marines that Sykora has insisted he bring along.

  “Has he been doing this often?” Grant asks.

  “Not to this degree, Majesty,” Private Manirai says. “But he’s been—unwell. Ever since the action over Xivikan and the death of his… of Reina.”

  “Hellfire,” Grant mutters. “I should have been checking in on him.”

  “It doesn’t excuse it, Majesty,” Manirai says. “This is a ZK vessel. This is the way the Pike works. None of us are here without expecting a loss.”

  “Have you lost someone, Private?”

  Manirai hesitates. “Not yet,” he says.

  The lift coasts to a stop at the hab level. Grant emerges expecting the hubbub and jollity that usually greets him; instead he gets tension and fearful whispers. The bows and salutes that always follow him are lower and snappier, as though everyone is bearing the shame.

  A crowd has gathered outside of the cantina’s neon-decorated doors.

  Kamen sits alone in the booth.

  “Majesty.” A freckly gefreiter is at his hip, her ears fanned out. “We have a recording and a transcript, if you’d—”

  Grant waves the gefreiter off. “Thank you, Aluni. Not now.”

  He approaches Kamen, who’s glaring into his reflection in the glass stein in front of him.

  “Ensign,” Grant says. “This seat taken?”

  “I don’t wanna talk to you,” Kamen drawls. “I don’t wanna see you.”

  “That’s a shame, because here I am.” Grant sits. “I heard you had some opinions of me you were airing. I’m here now. You looking to share them to my face?”

  Kamen shakes his head rapidly. “I got nothing to say to you.” He rubs his face. “I’m drunk.”

  “I know. You expect me to excuse you over it?”

  “I don’t need you to excuse me. I don’t need anything from you.”

  “Ensign,” Grant says. “You need to relocate yourself and rest this off somewhere, before you make this mistake any worse. You’re not yourself.”

  “Good. I don’t wanna be myself. Who fuckin’ wants to be me?” Kamen glares at the gathered crowd and stabs his finger outward at them, clattering against the edge of the table. “All of you just pretending it’s all okay? Like she never existed?”

  “None of us are pretending that, Marine.” Grant pulls the stein away to keep Kamen’s flailing from knocking it over. “We all mourned Reina.”

  “You didn’t know her!” Kamen plants both hands on the table. “You sent her to her death and you didn’t even fucking know her.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Your Princess gave that order, Ensign.” Grant sits up, drawing himself fully to his considerable height. “She knew Reina. And Reina followed it without hesitation because she knew it was the right thing.”

  “Her Majesty would never have risked her people for those fucking convicts before you.” Kamen staggers to his feet. “You changed her. She loved us. Now she loves you more. Loves a fuckin’ alien more than her own servants.”

  “That’s enough, Ensign.”

  “I’m the only one saying it but everyone’s thinking it. All of them. I’m just the only one saying it. She let my girlfriend die just to please you. Let a quarter score people die just so—”

  “I said enough.”

  Grant stands and stares down at the glaring, teetering marine. Scores of crimson eyes stare at them in the sudden hush. He locates his marine escort at the front of the crowd.

  “Seize Ensign Kamen,” he says, “and confine him to the brig.”

  Kamen struggles only briefly as his companions turn on him and clasp his arms to his sides. Then he droops, ears folded back and tail dragging on the floor. The crowd turns as one to track his removal.

  “That’s all, everyone.” Grant places Kamen’s stein on the kitchen conveyor. “Back to your duty or your downtime.”

  Whispers sprout back into murmured conversation. Stragglers disperse.

  “Majesty.” The bar attendant, a thin, golden-haired woman, bows profusely as Grant emerges from the taproom. “I take responsibility for my failure to cut the Ensign off. I will be more careful from now on.”

  “That’s all right,” Grant says. “Sykora told me this might happen if we put the Eqtoran beers on tap. Maybe we ought to cycle them out.”

  A pained expression from the attendant at this—the Eqtoran brews are quite popular. But she doesn’t protest.

  Grant calls his wife on the lift down to the brig. She picks up on the first ring. “I saw the whole thing,” she says. “Camera link in the cabin. I will vent that pest.”

  Grant chuckles. “Let me talk to him before we decide on any vents. Okay?”

  “I’ve already decided on the vent. The one right by the engines, so his awful little ass burns in the repulsor flare. Or wait, no. That’s too quick and merciful.”

  “I have a couple of minutes left on this lift ride,” Grant says. “I’m going to sit with him. Do you have a real objection to that you wanna talk through, or do you want to just rage uninterrupted till I’m at the brig?”

  “I’d like to rage, please.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’ll launch a drone out there to film him,” Sykora says. “So I can watch his stupid face freeze in the vacuum. And I’ll broadcast it to the entire vessel so everyone knows what happens to anyone who bleats in my husband’s face the way he did. I’ll—”

  She continues to describe her intended tortures all the way to the brig. Then they send kisses to each other through the line, Grant promises to come right back, Sykora promises she’s staying hydrated, and they disconnect the call.

  A tech greets him outside the brig door with a sheepish bow. “We’ve administered detoxicants to him, Majesty. He’s lucid.”

  Grant hasn’t seen this cell before. It’s much smaller than the one he was imprisoned in during his first days aboard the Pike. Kamen sits on its thin memory foam bed, staring at the floor, his hands folded tight in his lap. He’s been stripped of his anticomps. A cuff is attached to his ankle.

  Grant drags a chair into the cell and places it in front of the Ensign. “Now let’s try again from the top.” He points at the chair. “Is this seat taken?”

  Kamen shakes his head and Grant settles in.

  “I’m here for your explanation, Marine,” he says.

  “I…” Kamen shuts his eyes for a breath and then reopens them. He tries to look Grant in the face, manages it for a humiliated second, and casts his eyes back to the floor. “I was drunk, Majesty.”

  Grant tilts his head. “I know.”

  He waits.

  “I can’t be in my own head right now.” A tear rolls to the edge of Kamen’s nose and taps to the floor. “When I’m off-duty, and I have time to think, I just—I go to bed, or I go drink, because otherwise I think. And when I think—”

  He bends forward and buries his face in his hands, folded so low by grief he’s nearly laying his head on his knees. “I loved her,” he sobs. “I love her. Present tense. And she never knew how much. I should have married her. I should have written her a fucking poem every day, or, or carved a statue, or—I still love her like she’s alive, and she isn’t. She isn’t.”

  His words trail off into a guttural sob and leave him. It’s been years since Grant has seen someone so stricken, so immobilized by grief they can only give it voice with a prelingual cry. Last time was his father, at Josh’s bedside, right after they took him off the machine.

  Grant reaches out and rests his hand on the marine’s shoulder as helpless tears slip through his fingers.

  “I have all this love and nowhere for it to go.” Kamen finally comes up for air. “And it’s turning so bad inside me. I’m sorry, Majesty. Please. I’m sorry.”

  Grant squeezes Kamen’s arm. “For whatever it’s worth, Marine, I accept your apology.”

  Kamen manages a nod and a screwed-tight “Thank you,” as he pulls himself further vertical, resting his forearms on his knees. The tempest has lessened a little.

  “I didn’t know Reina well,” Grant says. “I wish I had. The only comfort I can give you is that your Princess and I think about her sacrifice every day, and about the pain you’re in. Whenever you are ready to reach up, you’ll find hundreds of hands to pull you out. Mine included.”

  Kamen watches him stand and step to the cell door. “What now?”

  “I’m getting Oryn,” Grant says. “He’s asked to see you. I think it’s a good idea. The chief engineer’ll be down too. She wants to sit with you.”

  “I’d like that.” Kamen wipes his forearm across his sodden face. “When are you letting me go?”

  “You were directly insubordinate to your Prince, Marine,” Grant says. “You’re spending the next cycle in the brig.”

  He swings the cell door shut.

  Oryn is surprised at his own focus during his session with the mourning Kamen. He ought to be dwelling on Vora’s departure this morning. How she held back tears when she told him she couldn’t bring him. How small and uncertain his wife looked, loaded down with a heavy travel bag full of books and brain food and a change of clothes in case the exam enters a second day. The way she slumped into his arms for a moment as he held her outside the shuttle, how she breathed strength back into herself and kissed him, and told him: When I’m back, I’ll be back. All the way, I promise. No more of this sad, self-centered majordomo shit. It’ll be about us again.

  I’ll count the minutes, he’d told her.

  She’d smiled at that, and winked. Don’t be too mopey. Have fun staying at Waian’s. Save some sugar for me.

  And then the dwindling shuttle, flashing into sweep on its long, luminous path to the Core. The image should weigh on him. But setting up his and Waian’s chairs across from the glass cell wall and its tear-stained occupant, he finds it lending him strength, instead. No more of this uncertain demimonde. His wife is out there doing what she must. He is here, doing the same.

  Oryn does his duty to the Black Pike and to poor Kamen. Then he does the chief engineer. He approaches both with the same clarity of purpose.

  He sits up in bed, with Waian purring in the crook of his arm, and makes eye contact with her new bluff lizard. It goes bwuoarp at him.

  He examines it as the chief engineer’s tail tuft tickles his thigh. “I don’t know how I feel about Scaleface being right in front of the bed.”

  “Well, it’s where my condoms used to be,” she says. “And it’s a real bastard to move.”

  “I could give you a hand.”

  “Why?” Waian squints at the lizard. Its tongue darts out and moistens its single cyclopean eye.

  “She was watching us the entire time,” he says.

  Waian hums thoughtfully. “You’re not the first one to mention that. Maybe I oughta get a privacy curtain for Scaly.”

  “I really can help you move her, Chief Engineer.”

  “Promise you’ll stay shirtless for it and you have a deal.” Waian admires his chest, and the faint clawmarks she made across it. “Our girl seemed confident, huh? When she flew off.”

  He nods. “She did.” It isn’t true; Vora wept in his arms last night. But it’s what Waian needs.

  “When I heard she had an arranged marriage, y’know, I was ready to saddle up and go on the warpath,” Waian says. “As far as I can tell, you’re the only reason she hasn’t shaken all the way apart. Sheer luck she managed to land a man like you. Both my girls with big softhearted sex gods.”

  “You haven’t been with Grantyde, have you?”

  “Nah. Kora’d bite my throat out.” Waian stretches her leg out. “But you can just tell.”

  Oryn nods, his eyes unfocused. He’s back in his sessions with Grantyde, talking about the future, and its wonders and terrors.

  “It doesn’t bother you, does it?” Waian’s tail rests on his hip.

  “What does?”

  “The way I talk about your wife,” Waian says. “Like she’s my kid.”

  He shakes his head. “I wonder, though, why you’ve never had any yourself. I remember how you were with our boy Alakair.”

  “Well, for a long time, I thought I hated them. And by the time I realized I didn’t, I had Vora and Kora, and what new kids could compare to them, right? And I’d have to pick a man to do it, which seems unfair to all of you. Plus, I don’t go in for the bite thing. Too dommy, I guess.”

  “I noticed.”

  She chuckles. “Anyway, I’m about to be a grandma. Got a full calendar ahead of me, I’m sure. Taking care of the Princess-in-Waiting, whichever one she may be.”

  Oryn nods again. He purses his lips.

  “Chief Engineer,” he says. “Can I ask you something ridiculous?”