The Black Pike’s gradual stretch across the horizon matches pace with the gradual widening of Ipqen-mek-Taqa’s eyes.

“How fucking big is this ship?” she breathes.

“Bit under two kilometers.” Ajax’s voice is flat, but Grant’s gotten good at telling when the marine’s grinning beneath that garnet glass. The physicist’s awe is bringing him no end of satisfaction.

“Eqt’s tits.” Ipqen deflates in her seat.

Grant pivots in his copilot's chair toward the Eqtoran, who’s jampacked into the back of the shuttle like a tinned sardine. “I bet Chief Engineer Waian would love to talk at you about how this whole thing works.”

Ipqen just nods mutely. She looks shellshocked. Grant files that away in the keep an eye on it drawer.

Her sleepwalking awe continues as the shuttle docks in the Black Pike’s grandiose hangar and the listening post party descends the catwalk toward the awaiting command group.

Hyax bows. “Lady mek-Taqa. Welcome to the Black Pike. The pride of the sector. You are the first Eqtoran to set foot on deck.”

Maybe Sykora’s right about Hyax’s predilections—the Brigadier seems remarkably unperturbed about the breach in ZKZ rules.

Ipqen gives an awkward little wave. “Hey,” she says.

Sykora steps regally forward. The golden chains across her epaulettes jangle. “Welcome, milady and Brother Tymar.” She kisses Grant’s knuckle. “Welcome back, husband.” She turns with stately grace to the command group and the delegation. “I wonder if the Prince and I might be excused for a while,” she says. “We have a great deal to discuss. Would you take command of the bridge, Majordomo?”

Her grip on him is handcuff-tight. She adjusts her tricorne; her horns are so outgrown they’re tipping its edge up.

“I will, Majesty.” Vora valiantly battles to keep a straight face. “I hope your discussions are fruitful.”

Sykora drags Grant into the lift. The moment the door closes, she leaps on him.

He folds his arms around her. She whimpers with overwhelmed joy as his hands sink into the soft, giving curve of her ass. “You’re home,” she manages, between their breath-snatching kisses. “You’re home, you’re home, you’re home!”

The lift opens, and she’s tugging him out of it, practically sprinting for their cabin.

“I missed you,” Grant says. “How was the—”

“No talking yet.” Sykora steps out of her boots. Her leggings are down around her ankles before the cabin door’s even fully closed. “Inside me. Now.”

Grant is about to say something pithy and humorous to this, and then Sykora yanks her topcoat off and bounces free of her blouse and he forgets what it was.

***

Grant reaches over to the nightstand, lifts the water bottle from its refrigerating pad, and takes a deep, slaking drink.

Sykora lies beneath him, spent and satisfied and purring like a well-tuned engine.

“I missed you, too,” she says.

“I can tell,” he says.

He nudges the bottle into her hand. He starts to roll off her, and her tail tightens around his waist to keep him in place. She finishes the water off and tosses it underhand out of the bed. She slithers beneath him onto her back and wraps her thighs around his midsection. “You’re never leaving me again.”

“Sounds good.”

“I’m serious.” Her legs tighten. “I’m going to tie my ankles together. We’ll have to conduct our business like this from now on. Joined at the hip. No more escape. No more side missions. No more independent investigations. I’ll drop whatever it is I’m doing and follow you to the other side of the firmament if I need to. Hang the invasion.” She exhales in faux-outrage as he shifts. “Where are you going?”

“Bathroom.”

“Take me with you.”

He laughs and pries her legs apart. “No.”

“Fine.” She tucks her calves up against her thighs and lets him up. “But come right back.”

He sits up. “With this view?” He kisses her knee. “They couldn’t keep me away with handcuffs.”

He does his business and washes his hands. The break from Sykora’s bed aboard the listening post, brief as it was, affected him more than he realized. The world has re-obtained a vividness, a light and airy felicity that he didn’t even realize had drained away. The tension’s out of his jaw. He wonders how long he’s been clenching it. He’s covered in hickies and sweat and saliva and he has some little hairs stuck in his teeth, but he feels cleaner and fresher than he has in days.

Sykora’s disarray concerned him when she reported it. Now he realizes he was feeling the same thing.

Maybe that’s the price for a love like the one he has for Sykora. It’s never happened to him before. Maybe that’s the trade you make for a connection like this. A piece of him always missing, unless she’s there. A piece of him that lives with her, that he can’t wrestle back.

Well, fine, he decides. Good thing we’re married.

He’s married. That’s his wife out there.

He picks that thought up in his mind, turns it over and inspects it, and feels its weight. Sykora is so new and so exotic, with a royal title and a warship and a body like a miniature blue pornstar, that it’s difficult to tell how much of this is lust and limerence. The extreme circumstances that threw them at one another, the extreme appetite they both feel. But he detects something deeper there. Something that’s been poured, set, and solidified. Something quieter and stronger and slowly, steadily growing.

He hears Sykora’s muffled voice and opens the door.

“We’ll keep her under strict watch.” His wife is laying on her stomach, her little feet kicking as she speaks into her communicator. “But the seal has broken. We have a citizen-alien aboard, and he arrived aboard the Pike under horrible circumstances, with every reason to sabotage and undermine us.”

She looks over her shoulder at Grant as he emerges from the bathroom. She tilts her hips his way and wiggles her taut blue butt at him.

“Grantyde is a male, Majesty.” The Majordomo’s voice saturates the sound system. “It’s different.”

Sykora rolls her eyes. “It’s just this little circle on the line, Vora. We needn’t pretend.”

Grant slips back into bed with her and kisses the back of her ear. She draws his arm over her.

“Of course, Majesty,” Vora says. “But appearances. You’re not worried about blowback from the Imperial Core?”

“This new plan is taking us far off the map,” Sykora says, as Grant plays with her chest. “If they want to end my career, they don’t need to point to an infraction like this to do it. The only way to avoid it now is to obtain a fabulous success and arrive triumphantly with Eqtora singing a high praise song to the Empress and waving the unstained flag of the Taiikari Empire, which I have every confidence we will. Lady Ipqen is untrained and unthreatening, and Hyax has an ill-disguised crush on her. I’m not worried about her going unmonitored.”

Hyax’s heated voice: “Majesty, I do not have a cr—”

Sykora turns the line off and puts her communicator on the nightstand. She rolls over to cuddle into Grant’s warmth. “Hello, Your Majesty,” she says.

He lifts her calf and tucks her back across his waist. “Hi, Your Majesty.”

“We’re spending the rest of the day in bed,” she says. “I know there’s a countdown. But I will hear no arguments. I need to be operating under optimal conditions. It is mission critical that my husband make me cum two to three more times.”

“If my Princess commands.”

“She does.” Her eyes flash. “Bang your wife.”

“Hmmm.” His nose rubs hers. “In a few minutes. Once you know it was my idea.”

“Tymar says you brought a bunch of fish back with you.”

“I did,” he says. “I thought I’d give it to Kymai and see if he can convince you to try it.”

“I followed you through the bounteous meadows of cheese, my Maekyonite,” she says. “Those were the high times. Now we stand before the gates of fish and I cannot in good conscience abandon you.”

He lifts her on top of his chest and scratches her back. “Thanks, squire.”

“We’ll just have him put a lot of something on it, so I don’t think too hard about what I’m eating. I am determined to get as many Maekyon experiences under my belt as I can, pre-annexation. Like poker

.” She snaps her fingers. “I want to play poker.”

“You’ve been reading my dad’s books, huh?”

“That’s right,” she says. “Amarillo Slim. You can shear a sheep a hundred times but skin it only once. What’s a sheep?”

“It’s a blobby farm animal,” Grant says. “We get wool from them. I’ll play, but I’m awful at it.”

“Suuure you are.” Sykora winks.

“No,” he says. “I really am.”

She winks again. “I know what a ringer is now, Grantyde. And a poker face. Mr. Slim has wised me up to your Maekyonite mind tricks.”

“Your confidence is appreciated, but misplaced.”

“Oh, well.” She clicks her tongue. “I suppose we’ll have to add it to the list of games I thrash you in.”

He cups her ass. “There’s a list, huh?”

“There’s a long list.” She sits up and straddles him. “I think I might be unconquerable.”

His grip on her tightens. “Oh yeah?”

She giggles and squirms as he binds her in his arms. Her horns are rising and curving. And there’s that adorable squeak, ambrosia in his ear, as he rolls her onto her back and lifts her wrists above her head. Her eyes flit to his lips; he lowers himself and they flutter shut.

He sinks into his wife’s deep, sandpaper-tongued kiss.

We needn’t pretend.

He raises his head. “You think of me as a man, right? A male?”

Her eyes flick open. “What? Of course I do.”

“Even though I can’t be compelled?”

“I don’t give a damn about that. You know I don’t.” A worried edge rises in Sykora’s voice. “Is Tymar giving you some kind of religious guff?”

“Are we, uh.” He tries to marshall his thoughts. “Are we…”

Straight? That’s not exactly the word, is it? But he can’t think of a better one. He’s hitting the limits of his new language. He gives up.

“Are we straight?”

A cloud of confusion passes in front of Sykora’s scarlet eyes.

“It’s okay if we aren’t,” he prompts, gently.

“We’re whatever we want to be,” Sykora says. “You’re whatever you want to be, surely.”

“I know. I’m not afraid of how you feel about me. And in my terms, as a Maekyonite, we are. I just want to know how you feel. It’s, uh—it’s silly of me. But I’m curious.”

“Um. Well, no, dove. We’re not. Not to me.” His reaction must show, because she gives a hasty, nervous laugh. “I thought you knew that.”

“I guess I didn’t.”

“Do you know what a duelist is?”

“Hyax told me,” Grant says. “It’s slang for, uh—”

For two lovers who can’t compel each other.

“I’m…” Sykora speaks up into Grant’s pause. “I don’t really know what I am.”

Grant thinks of the shivering, confused awe Sykora had after they began their romance. Why can’t you be happy with a normal love? With a safe love?

What have you done to me, Grant?

“But it’s exciting.” Her voice is hushed, like she’s speaking in an echoing cathedral. “It’s thrilling. It was scary, at first, but it isn’t anymore. I love it. I love being in love with you, Grant.”

“I knew we were different,” he murmurs. “But all my life on Maekyon I’ve been sort of the default, you know? Just a normal guy. I’ve never had to put any thought into it. Now I do. And it’s knocked me off balance. Just a little.”

“Don’t let it.” Sykora’s expression brooks no argument. “If this is normal to you, and that comforts you, then let it. It’ll be normal to me, too. Soon enough. And even if you don’t exactly fit into my preconceptions, I have never seen you as anything but my astonishingly manly husband.”

“Will everyone else? When they find out?”

A pause from Sykora. Grant’s stomach twists.

“They will,” she says. “And if they don’t, I’ll make them. And when Maekyon—when Earth is ours, there will be millions of Taiikari like me, and Maekyonites like you. I’m sure there will be. You’re all just so beautiful.”

“You’re all beautiful,” he says.

She beams. “There you are, then. There might be strangeness and reproach and growing pains. Just like there was for us. But our species will fall in love with each other. Just like we did”

Her hips sway gently as she speaks, coaxing the uncertainty out of him.

“And you and me go there incognito,” she whispers. “And we’ll do Earth couple things together. And you’ll be a normal guy, and I’ll be your infatuated little girlfriend, and we’ll go to bars, and concerts, and you’ll teach me all the Maekyonite courtship things. And nobody will look twice.”

Above her head, he laces her small blue fingers into his. “They won’t, huh?”

“Well. They will. But only because I’m an alien.” She breathes a laugh. “I’ll be the alien. How strange to think of it that way. Surrounded by your people again. But as a friend, this time. I hope.”

“You’ll need a lot of boosts, I think.”

“That’s what I have my sexy giant for. That…” She removes her hand from his and trails her fingers down his stomach. They wrap gently around his length. “And this.”

He lets her guide him to where she needs him. He watches her beautiful concord-dark lips quiver open into an overwhelmed O as her body welcomes him in.

He captures her mouth in another kiss. Her heat and her softness and her scent and the sounds she makes; he lets them carry him away from the dwindling time. From the cold calculus whispering ten days left.

No; tonight is hers. Nine.

Nine days left and Taiqan dies.