"Majesty." A blue engineer with a Specialist's chevrons and a cascade of chocolate-colored ringlets bows and scrapes at the base of the catwalk steps. She is an average-looking Taiikari, which is to say that she is distractingly gorgeous, with big, trembly lashes and a long, straight nose that would be too big on some faces but works perfectly on hers. "So wonderful to finally, I mean, it's just, it's such an honor. I'm Specialist Mazek. And this, uh. You actually probably know her, definitely." She lets out a nervous giggle.

Ipqen encircles her eye with thumb and forefinger as she straightens up from her bow. "Hey, Majesty."

"Hey yourself, Lady mek-Taqa." Grant mirrors the gesture on his way down the stairs to the hangar floor—an Eqtoran blessing, he's given to understand—and nods to Specialist Mazek. "You're the one with the doodles, right?"

Mazek's eyes go wide and round. "Majesty?"

"I see you do little doodles on the fuel cap after you pre-check the carriers," Grant says. "In grease pencil."

"Uh—uh—" The Specialist's face is turning a mortified shade of violet at the shock of being perceived.

"It's fine." He chuckles. "It's a cute touch."

Mazek looks to be on the verge of passing out.

"How's it going up there?" Ipqen tightens her utility belt around her muscular waist.

"It's my first proper battle," Grant admits. "Hard to say."

"Pike's gonna be just fine," Waian says. "Your fleet scared me more than these suckers do. But we're losing interceptors. Two dead already."

"Shit." Ipqen looks down to the steel-shod toes of her clunky munition boots. "Apqar guide them."

"And they keep converging on us." Waian points past the hangar's ozone-scented skin to the whizzing alien machinery outside. "So either we fuck their systems apart, or we retreat and leave the Iron Promise behind. That taints the sacrifices those people are making out there. And I won't let that happen." She cracks her organic knuckles. Her shiny new arm glints against the strobing hangar membrane.

"It smells like a lightning storm," Grant says. "Is that the membrane?"

"Uh huh." Waian sniffs the air. "That brings me back to some shitty places. Howzabout we get this done." She snaps the communicator off her belt. "Black Pike: chief engineer's in hangar four with crew. Bring me a bogey."

Hyax's rasp over the link: "Acknowledged, chief engineer. The drone has been EMP-disabled and is showing no comms."

"This isn't one of the exploding ones, right?" Grant asks.

"Of course it isn't, uh—one second." Waian speaks into the communicator again. "This ain't one of the exploding ones, is it? I'm not gonna cut into a bomb?"

"No," Hyax says. "Gunner model. If it does have a self-destruct, it hasn't been using them."

"I'm gonna cage it just in case." Waian replaces her communicator and turns to the Specialist. "Mazzy. You got my modular bay?"

"Right here, chief." Mazek scurries over to an open, blue-lit spot in the hangar. There, a broad harness waits, laden with hoses and bars and heavy-gauge spikes like a huge, nightmarish bird cage.

"Put this on, Majesty." Waian tosses Grant a harness. "And one of these." He has to reach out and catch the followup helmet with the edge of his fingers. "Thank God we have the Eqtoran sizes around."

"Yeah. Thank God." Grant adjusts the strap on his hard hat to its narrowest point; it still feels like he's wearing a pot over his head. He's big, but he's not Eqtoran big.

Ipqen grins. "Lookin' slick, Majesty."

"Respect your sovereign, kid." Waian snaps her fingers toward a cubic, monochrome workstation at the fore of the bay. "Prep that realignment. One Interceptor-pattern membrane, one two-meter foreign object in tow."

Ipqen lifts the keyboard off the workstation and types on it one-handed, like a palmheld communicator. "Preparing realignment."

Waian watches the Eqtoran's thick fingers move with clear bemusement. "Mind if I check your work there, kiddo?"

Ipqen bends down and deposits the board back on the station. "Sure."

Waian's lips move soundlessly as she examines the glyphic lines on the screen. She squints. "Your K-quotient's too high for a membraneless object."

"Yeah, but I've got the axial manifold unbound from the K." Ipqen taps the bottom corner of the screen. "So that should be fine, right?"

Waian tilts her head. "It—who taught you that?"

"I can bind it back."

"No. No, that's… I mean, that's how I usually do it. I just didn't think they taught apprentices this." Waian beckons Specialist Mazek over. "Mazzy. Look at this. Did you teach mek-Taqa this?

"I didn't." Mazek does not seem nearly as thrilled as Waian does with the Eqtoran's upstaging. "Lowering the K-quotient is safer than unbinding the whole thing."

"My bad." Ipqen fidgets with the snaps on her crew gloves. "It just seemed like common sense."

"Nah." Waian waves her off. "No need for training wheels when your balancing is this good."

Specialist Mazek's face twists. She's clearly biting her tongue on being upstaged by an alien newbie.

"All right, tall people." Waian's tail shoos Ipqen away from the workstation. "Front of the bay. Get ready to catch. Me and Maz will stick it as soon as you hook it."

A polar chill and a slashing white glow accompany the interceptor's arrival. Its membrane is damaged; Grant has seen enough of them to know that by now. Fizzing fragments and boxy spirals crawl across its surface as if it's been dipped in liquid bismuth. The interceptor sags to one side as gravity takes hold of it and the drone tow-cabled to its underbelly: a green and gray thing shaped and finned like a great white shark. With a loud snap that leaps Grant backward and raises the hairs on his arms, energy leaps from the drone's blackened encasement to a grounding antenna sticking up from the modular harness.

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"Nudge it down." Waian holds her communicator in her flesh hand; her metal one waves the interceptor closer. "Nose to the back of the cage. There you go. Go, apprentice. Saddle that sucker."

Ipqen hustles to the cable and yanks slack into it. Her arm snakes around the bottom of the drone and holds it up. "Other end, Majesty."

Grant hurries to the inside of the cage and props the drone against its barred shelf. Ipqen unclips the cable from the drone; the weight bears down into Grant's grip and puts a burning strain into his arms for the few seconds it takes the Eqtoran to muscle her end of the drone back into the air. Goddamn, Ipqen mek-Taqa is strong.

"Unbound," the Eqtoran calls across the hangar. Waian flashes a thumbs-up to the interceptor. The air shimmers as the ship's repulsors whine it higher.

"You ought to stick around, Two," Waian says. "Your membrane's below seventy. We'll realign that for you."

"Negative, chief. There's people out there who have it worse." The pilot is surely outranked here, but the voice over the communicator is brooking no argument. "They need me."

Waian sighs. "All right, Liaga. Fly safe." She lowers her communicator. "Apqar be with you."

Ipqen's fringe perks up. "What're you doing calling on my gods, chief?"

Waian shrugs. "Can't hurt, right?" She snaps her metal fingers toward Mazek. "Put on the isolator for me, Mazzy. If you would."

"Yes, chief." Mazek takes position at the front of the modular harness and punches a row of glyphs into its console. "Not that we need it, if the EMP—"

The drone's cannons swivel. The glow rises in their dark tunnels. Grant is already moving.

He bears Maz off her feet. Behind them, the earsplitting roar of cannon fire. The rattle of the drone bucking crazily in its half-attached harness. Grant twists as they hit the floor to cushion the squealing engineer and yanks his pistol from his holster.

Ipqen slams shoulder-first into the drone, lashing an arm around its widest point and hulking it upward like an alligator wrestler. She rips the cutter from her belt and thrusts it into the central mass of the thing's bubbled-up control module. Sparks fly; fluid fizzes. The buzzsaw spinning slows to a click-click-click and then to silence.

"Holy fuck." Waian pokes her head up from the heavy workstation she took cover behind. She stares at the pockmarks that climb the hangar wall and speckle its ceiling. A jittery map of Ipqen's drone-wrestling.

Grant rises onto his knees and helps the little engineer he tackled up. "Are you okay?"

"Uh. Ah." The already stuttery Mazek melts further into incoherence. "Yes I uh yes. Yes, majesty. Thank you. I—oh, god. I need—can you pardon me, Majesty, please. Can you, uh."

She points behind him, where her hard hat is lying upturned on the floor, still slowly rotating from its flight off her head. He retrieves it for her, and notices, in the seconds before she hurriedly puts it back on, that her little blushing horns have sprouted out from her chestnut locks. Thank god for anticomps. If she knew where he was looking, she might have thrown herself out of the hangar membrane.

"Fucking goddamn." Waian slaps Grant's back as he stands. "How did this outfit live without two big beautiful bitches like you?"

"I busted it. I'm s—" Ipqen catches herself. Grant remembers how that feels.

"Shut up, mek-Taqa. You know you did good. Humble ass." Waian elbows Ipqen's hip and keys her communicator on. "Indus Blue. Your squadron just dragged an active drone into my hangar bay."

"We EMP'd it, chief," comes the reply. "Triple-confirmed. It was entirely inactive."

"How's an EMP not stop that? Fuck's sake." Waian makes a frustrated noise in her throat. "Get away from it, mek-Taqa. Before it pulls a self-destruct out of its ass. Put the isolator on, Maz."

"One second." Ipqen sniffs the drone. "Uh. Chief. Think I know how the thing didn't shut down."

"What's that?" Waian smells the air. Grant follows suit. Charred meat.

Ipqen hangs the drone back into its harness. Her ink-festooned muscles bulge beneath their sleeves as she mantles it in place. "Can you get this thing flipped on its tail after we isolate it, Specialist?"

"Er. Right." Mazek stabs a few buttons on her workstation and the modular harness hums into motion, clinging tight to the alien drone and turning it round. "Isolator engaged."

Ipqen gets her cutter back out and slices the drone along its central fuselage. She tugs armor plating away and shifts internal plates and components. A watermelon-sized lump of burnt and bleeding flesh is tucked into the central bubble.

"This thing isn't all-the-way robot," she says.

"Shitfire." Waian approaches the dented line drawn in gunfire across the hangar and pries something from the wall's puckered metal. She holds it up.

"This," she says, "is a fucking tooth."

Mazek has that about to faint look to her again.

Waian keys her communicator back on. "Majesty, these things have organic component failsafes integrated into their systems."

Sykora's incredulous voice crackles through: "You're saying these are living aliens?"

"Living? I dunno. Depends on your definition. I think they're still manufactured. What I'm looking at isn't… I mean, it's clearly built for purpose. They're machines. They're just machines made partially out of meat."

Grant moves to the side of the drone and holds it steady while Ipqen drives rivets through the harness, pinning the drone back into place in the web of cables and supports.

Ipqen holsters her rivet gun and prods at the nodule of flesh. "You wonder, uh…"

"What do I wonder?"

"It don't exactly smell bad," Ipqen says. Her tongue slips between her canines.

"Don't even think about it, Lady mek-Taqa," he says.

She holds her one free hand up. "I wasn't."

"You were wondering."

"Wondering ain't thinking."

"It totally is. It's a synonym."

"Maybe it's a translation glitch."

"This is another adaptation. Gotta be." Waian slips a knife along the vein and digs it out of the metal housing. "Either lab-grown, or they turned their originators into this… goop. Kept working on themselves with the corpses of their progenitors."

Grant's eyes are dry from staring. He forces a blink. "When Sykora originally told me about the Empire's technological sumptuary laws, I was skeptical."

"Oh yeah?" Waian wiggles the gridded net of veins on the tip of her knife. "How about now?"

"Now I have no comment," Grant says.

Waian titters. "Their dead creators tried hard as hell to rub them out. Like a penicillin-proof disease. Must have been a real fucking nightmare of an uprising." Her knife tip points like a lecturer's baton. "You can see it's already got fresh mechanical augmentations in place to counter us. The seams on this camera cluster here to track our ships through the digital chaff we put out, the enlarged bore on the guns when their old calibers weren't getting through the membrane. They've been shooting at us less than an hour and already they're morphing themselves to get better at it. Fuckin' freak stuff. No choice but to be impressed."

"And horrified," Grant offers.

"No. I mean, yes, but no, this is good. This is our vector. If it's meat and machine working in concert, what we do is attack the handshake." Waian turns to her Specialist. "Put that big beautiful nose to your console and run the standard diagnostics, Mazzy, but I don't think I'll need them. I have just the thing for this."

Ipqen wipes her grease-marked hands on her hips. "What is it?"

"Nuh-uh." Waian shakes her head. "You're like Grantyde. If I tell you, it'll horrify you."

"You're what. Giving these things cancer or something?"

Waian blinks. "How about you come with us, mek-Taqa. You deserve some slaps on the back up at the command deck. Or the butt, if that's all we can reach."

Ipqen's rumbling chuckle. "All right."

"Chief engineer," Grant says, his tone sharpening. "Are you giving these ships cancer?"

"Very, uh, very complicated processes happening here. Nothing that I could really—we're moving quick, okay? Good job, Majesty. Good stuff, Maz." Waian hugs Ipqen's thick treetrunk leg. "Great fucking job, apprentice. Taught this girl everything she knows, y'know."

"Sure did," Ipqen says.

"Yeah?" Grant follows Waian as she scurries out of the hangar. "Tackle practice?"

"Saving the fuckin' day practice," Waian says. "Come with me back to the bridge, boss. I'll show you."

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