"I'll gut her," Sykora says, as Quartermaster Kymai and his fellow servers clear the table. "I'll skin her and tan her hide and line my babies' crib with her. This nothing little woman fills her expeditionary forces with convicts and sends them gallivanting about the firmament and then they come and tread on my toes? No no no no. She's answering for this. Hello, dove. Come help me devise tortures for my idiot rival."

"Hi, Majesty." Grant steps off the lift. "Please don't upholster the crib with her. Thank you for the feast, Quartermaster. Uniformly delicious."

"It was a tragic missed opportunity, Majesty," Kymai says. "The gravy's texture was all wrong. Positively claggy. I'm going to have to go back to the kitchen and—"

"It was delicious, Quartermaster," Sykora barks. "Don't change the goddamn gravy. Get out and go enjoy your Newtide or I'll have you thrown in the brig."

"Yes Majesty as you say Majesty." Kymai scurries off the deck, past his bemused Prince. His bowing adherents follow him.

Grant steps further onto the deck. The bridge is humming with activity. Hyax is intercepted by a pair of uniformed ensigns who pull her into a low-voiced conversation over a glowing tablet. Grant waves at his glowering wife as she paces furiously by the now-emptied table. "Everything's going good up here, then?"

"I have pregnancy rage," Sykora says. "And I am going to vent it by crushing Dantia of the Bright Covenant's stupid face with a clawhammer."

Grant picks his wife up. He crosses to her throne as she hisses and writhes in his grip like an upset cat, and sits down on it with her in his lap. "What's going on, exactly?"

"Dantia's privateers have begun to patrol the Pantyre sweep lane." Vora switches her table projector on and sends the starmap swooping into a patch of space just outside Black Pike's boundary. "A minor artery on the edge of the former Cloud Gate sector, linking together a few colony worlds. Nothing of tactical importance, really; the largest planet it services is a leisure-world. Pantyre terminates at this dark cluster, here." She points at an unlit section of the map.

Grant knows this one; Vora explained it to him a few cycles ago. A dark cluster is a chunk of unexplored firmament. It caught him offguard how little of the frontier is truly charted, how strange the work of exploration is in a place as vast as the firmament. The Princesses chase automated readings and surveyors through the lanes, leaving entire solar systems untouched between them. The frontier isn't a simple boundary; it's more like a bunch of holes being filled in, an empire spreading out like a mycorrhizal network. The process of determining and dividing sectors is much more arcane and nongeometric than he was prepared for. It doesn't confuse Sykora or her officers; he's usually content to leave it to them. But even he can see how close these Bright Covenant vessels are to the Pike's demesne.

"What the hell." He scoots his grousing wife onto one leg as he leans forward. "That's practically on our doorstep. What's Bright Covenant doing so far out before Kanori's ashes are cooled?"

"As far as we can tell, Majesty?" Vora raises a text box into the projection, a log of weapons readings. "Firing their cannons."

"Three ZKWs, none with the stock patterned salvos." Hyax returns to the table. Her saluting ensigns troop down the stairs back to the firefly pit of the bridge. "These are privateers. Dantia is often hands-off with them. But she gives them their marching orders, and she's sent them to lanes abutting our borders when she could solidify her hold far closer to home."

Vora sniffs. "That's quite presumptuous of her."

"This isn't presumption." Sykora scowls. "This is provocation. And right on Newtide, too."

"She thinks you're preoccupied, at a guess," Vora says. "Breaking ground on a new exo planet is a major undertaking. And, well. Official announcement aside, we haven't been exceptionally subtle about your pregnancy."

"She's mis-stepped, then," Sykora says. "Because I am delegating the exo planet to my wonderful husband. Freeing my focus to mash her into paste. She's always claimed that her ridiculous little privateer system is so efficient? Let's see her deal with a sector with two monarchs."

Vora glances Grant's way.

"If she thinks she can be a recalcitrant little foot-dragger during our initial petition phase," Sykora goes on, "and then come galloping in and start sweeping up our adjoining border, she has another—hmm."

She pauses.

Hyax glances from the starmap, concern knitting her brows. "Majesty?"

Sykora stands up from Grant's lap. "I will return presently." Her sentence ends with a woozy quaver. She strides off the deck.

"Uh, Grantyde. You might wanna go with." Waian jerks her head toward the door as Sykora's tail disappears through it.

Grant chews his lip. "Do you know what's going on?"

Vora hides her giggle behind her tablet. "Closest bathroom on this level is second door to the left, Majesty."

"Do Maekyonites not get the, uh…" Waian makes a gesture up her throat and out her mouth. "When they're expecting?"

"What—ohhh." He hops to his feet. "Be right back, ladies."

"Good sign, Majesty," Hyax murmurs, as he passes her. "You see? Just a worrywart."

Grant squeezes Hyax's shoulder and strides past the marines on guard outside the command deck.

The Taiikari use green for their occupied color; it took Grant some reprogramming to get used to it. He crouches outside the emerald-lit bathroom door.

"You okay in there?" he calls.

"Hello, husband," comes Sykora's scratchy reply. "I'll be fine in a minute."

She comes out of the bathroom. "This is your fault, you know."

"I was wondering whether the Taiikari have morning sickness," he says. "That answers that."

"Morning sickness. That's what you call pregnancy nausea?"

"Thats's what I was taught."

"What a lovely name for vomit." She dabs her chin with a lacy crimson handkerchief. "Would you care to escort me to the medtech, dove? It's time for our first check-in with the litter."

He kisses her cheek, then stands and extends his hand. "Let's roll, Majesty."

"Rolling won't be necessary quite yet." She rubs her stomach as they go. "But it's only a matter of time."

"As I'd suspected." Technician Malo scratches his sleek black crew cut and turns the screen around. "You see these flickers on the readout?"

Sykora is sitting in the sleek ergonomic examination chair with her feet up and her shirt lifted, a gel pad sitting on her stomach with a blinking blue diode attached at the stalk where it trails off of her. She squints at the chart and nods.

"Those are their hearts, Majesty," Malo says, with the same unbothered monotone you might use to tell someone their shoe's untied.

"Their hearts?" Sykora breathes.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Grant's hand tightens around Sykora's. He scans the machine's green-on-black display with a new urgency. "As in their hearts are beating?"

"Yes, Majesty," Malo says. "An excellent early sign of viability. In another two cycles, we'll be able to hear them."

"Oh," Sykora says.

"Their heartbeats, that is," Malo says.

"Oh," Sykora says.

"Your conception was a success, Majesty," Malo says.

"Oh," Sykora says.

"Maybe you could give us some space real quick, Technician Malo," Grant says.

"As you say, Majesty." Malo stands and bows, one hand on his uniform's slick white business cravat to keep it from dangling, and surreptitiously leaves the room as Sykora's breath sharpens.

The examination room door clicks shut. A cartoony vector-art poster on the other side grins at them, a Taiikari woman with a toothbrush in hand over a slogan in scarlet glyphs: YOU ARE THE FINEST WEAPON OF THE EMPIRE—KEEP YOUR POINTS GLEAMING!

The moment the leering poster is the room's only other occupant, Sykora erupts into tears.

"Their hearts," she wails. "Their tiny little hearts are beating!"

Grant chuckles, though his breath is almost as short and sharp as hers. "They are."

"I'm a MOM." She sputters through her leaking face, on the manic border of a laugh and a sob. "I'm pregnant, I'm a mom, I have BABIES." She grabs his face and stares wild and weeping into his eyes. "Your babies." She smushes his cheeks together. "I have your babies."

He takes her minuscule hand in his and kisses the salt from her cheeks. "I know you said you were going to make the crib out of Bright Covenant's skin," he says. "But one of Tikani's baby books said Taiikari infants run hot. I was thinking maybe muslin instead."

A tearful giggle from Sykora. "Oh, very well. If the book says so."

"Maybe we could do a Taiikari leather stroller instead," Grant says. "And we could turn it invisible so it looks like they're flying."

Sykora's giggling intensifies. She snorts wetly. "I'm such a goddamn hormonal typhoon. God. I need to find that technician and shake him down for drugs."

"For the morning—uh, for the pregnancy nausea?"

"Correct." Sykora steps to the door. "You're stuck with your weeping, screaming, ballooning bride for six more cycles. The least I can do is keep from puking on the damn floor."

"All right." He lifts her gently up and plants a kiss between her thick black brows. "Let's practice for the part where you don't lift a finger and just order your husband around all day. I'll get Malo."

"Grant," she whines. "I'm supposed to be vicious and pissed right now." She caresses his jaw. Her eyes are misty. "Their hearts."

She's staring with such awestruck devotion at the flickering on the screen. The sudden paternal need bubbles up in him to document every single thing about this process. He raises his communicator and cycles its camera on. "Hold still for a second. I need to get you both in the frame."

"Wait, wait. One second." Sykora wipes her face and straightens her shoulders. "There."

He lowers the camera. "You don't have to look all Princess-y in this one, babe."

Sykora looks down her nose at him. "I am all Princess-y."

"What's that you're doing with your mouth?"

"It is an expression of sophisticated satisfaction," Sykora says. "To broadcast my ack."

The ack is because Grant tugged on her tail simultaneously with taking the picture. "There we go," he says. "This is more like how gobsmacked you were."

"Husband." Sykora's fangs bare. "Delete that photograph."

"It's perfect. Your ears are doing that thing they do."

"Delete that or I will execute you."

"In a minute." Grant struts to the door. "Gotta go find the doctor."

Sykora tugs the pad off her stomach and scrambles out of her seat. "Grantyde, get back here."

The Pike slices through the sweep to a dark cluster planet called Xivikan, where the privateers' plasma discharges were traced to. The sweep's rainbow riot plays colorful counterpoint to the muted black and red of the Pike's bridge and the soldiers who scurry across it. Sykora is back atop her throne, antinausea medications in her stomach and Grant's communicator in her topcoat pocket.

"The nebula around Xivikan is wreaking havoc on our long range scanners," Hyax says. "We are entering this scenario blind, Majesty."

Sykora's tail flicks into a question-mark curve. "We haven't explored the planet, but we know where it is, yes?"

"Yes, Majesty." Hyax's earlier vulnerability has been fully subsumed back into her business-as-usual act. "But only through orbital analysis."

"If we come out the other end and they've found some way to scoot Xivikan into our path, my spirit will apologize to yours in the Heavenly Court." Sykora's found her good mood again. "That's the only thing on the other side of the sweep that could conceivably harm us. Three privateer frigates are not objects of concern."

Hyax turns to Waian, who's sitting idle at her station. "And you're not concerned, chief engineer?"

Waian's eyes flick up from her new mechanical arm. She's splurged even further on the replacement; this one's built-in console has color, and Grant gets a glimpse of a bright splash of blood on the game she's playing. "Nope."

"Normally you're lecturing someone about your membrane integrity by now."

"Well, you're doing the lecturing. And everything's calibrated. I get to take a break till we're out of sweep." She huffs. "Your distraction just killed me, Brigadier. I was gonna get on the leaderboard."

"Majesty?" A polite whisper at Grant's elbow. He looks down into the freckled and bespectacled face of his wife's majordomo.

"What's up, Vora?"

She gestures to the far end of the command deck, on one of its hexagonal points that's her favorite for whispered conference. "May I speak to you briefly?"

He follows her, and crouches beside her at the deck's edge. Below them, a bridge scan officer muffles a laugh at a joke his partner just told him.

"Is everything all right, Majesty?" Vora asks.

"What?" Grant redirects his full attention to her. "Sure it is. Isn't it?"

"I don't mean this in a nasty way. I swear. But you did a bit of a—" Vora imitates a pensive frown. "Earlier. When Sykora talked about delegating."

"Oh, that. Yeah, uh… I'm okay."

"A bit nervewracking knowing that it's for real, though, isn't it," Vora offers. "That Sykora's relying on you the way she says she is."

"I'm trying not to think about it like that."

Vora chuckles apologetically. "I know just how it feels. When I was in charge of the PIke last decacycle I felt like I was thrashing about in the ocean. Hyax needs to be at Sykora's beck and call during this whole thing. But Waian wants you to know that she is free and clear. The engineering corps will be crucial."

"I'm sure I'll be glad to have her."

"And I want you to know," Vora says. "I am as much your majordomo as I am Her Majesty's. That means anything you wish to delegate to me, I will handle. It doesn't matter what, though of course I have my specialties. I imagine I'd burn what Kymai would caramelize."

"Do you have any suggestions?"

Vora favors him with a gentle smile. "You're not sure how to use me."

He shakes his head, somewhat bashfully. The Majordomo has always been a bit of a mystery to him. Waian's job is obvious. Hyax's frowning, armored presence leaves little question as to what she does for the Pike.

"You have those review packets coming in every tenday, yes?" Vora says. "I saw you working on one while you should have been having fun, you know. Payrolls, cashflows, technological updates. I can handle those for you."

"What part?"

"All of them," Vora says. "All your balancing, all the calculations, all the busywork. Anything that doesn't require your decision-making. And for those I can summarize and offer my educated opinion, such as it is."

"You'd do all that?"

She nods. "I already do for Her Majesty. There are several additional planetary build-outs I'm managing. She's content to leave the particulars to me; you'll probably prefer a lighter touch on my end, since you're running the project with a more Maekyonite approach. That's all right. You can brief me on specific strategic directions or dogmatic underpinnings, and I'll supply an abridged report summary and a full accounting of my activities every evening."

"But that's, like, most of the job. I spend hours a night on those big dumb packets."

"You needn't." Vora bows. "Allow me, Majesty."

"I don't want to overwhelm you."

"That is truly kind of you, Majesty. But unnecessary. As Sykora was trained from childhood to be the ultimate warrior, so was I designed to be the ultimate bureaucrat." She sticks her chest out proudly. "I don't get bored and I don't get overwhelmed. Not by paperwork, anyway. I'm not fabulous at parties."

"Okay. Just promise to let me know if it's too much."

"I promise," Vora says, and it sounds like a cheerful lie to Grant's ears, but he sighs and nods regardless.

"Arriving in Xivikan's outer orbit in sixty seconds." The pinched call rises from the pit.

"Thank you, Navigatrix," Sykora calls in kind. "Countdown on the board, Monitor. Let's put the fear of the Pike in these mincing little privateers."

"We'll talk more," Vora murmurs. Grant nods and joins his wife.

"Oh, I do look forward to some good old-fashioned aggression." Sykora shimmies her shoulders on her throne. "Are you ready to watch your wife dominate her rivals, dove?"

"It wasn't long ago we were on the other side of this interaction," Grant says. "Enemy Princess sweeping in after we shot some cannons into her sector. You remember?"

"I do."

"So I'm just saying, maybe we start cool and collected, and go nova once we understand what's going on."

Sykora smirks. "I have every intention of staying measured. Never fear, dove. That's why I caterwaul in front of you and the command group. So I can be nice and calm when we punch back out of sweep. And I will meet Dantia's lapdogs and have a nice, calm conversation."

"Maekyonites have this phrase," Grant says. "Jinxing something. Does it translate?"

"No it doesn't," Sykora says.

"Yes it does." Waian looks up from her game and clicks its flip-out screen back into her arm.

"Do be quiet, chief engineer," Sykora says.

The navigatrix's voice amplifies across the bridge. "Exiting sweep in ten, nine…"

Sykora juts her chin out and squares her shoulders. "Get ready to acquire signal and put me through, Monitor."

"Four, three, two…"

The fabric of reality tears open into geometric ripples. The Black Pike lances from the vivid sweep into a nebula that splashes like a wine stain across the firmament.

All around them, plasma crackles and missiles swarm. Bright membrane impacts flash across Sykora's stunned face like an electronica strobe. A ruined vessel spins past them, leaving trails of vapor and caroming shrapnel in its wake.

The Pike has swept directly into a war in Xivikan's orbit.

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