Sykora cries in his arms that morning.

“I won’t be afraid,” she whispers, when her eyes finally dry. “I’ll get up and I won’t be afraid. I won’t be, I won’t be. I won’t be weak.”

“You can be weak in here. It’s okay. Fall to pieces and I’ll pick them up.” He strokes her hair. “You told me that once.”

She giggles quietly. “You remember that?”

“Sure. I mean, I was drugged up and dryhumping you. But I’m a good listener.”

She feels him shift. “Wait. Wait. Please. Just a few more minutes.” Her hands close around his shoulders. “Let me fix this in my mind. Give me a happy moment to remember. Just in case.”

He keeps holding her. He counts the breaths that press her chest against his. Time slows, but—bastard that it is—it doesn’t stop.

The lift opens onto the bridge and Sykora releases a sharp stab of despairing laughter. “God help me. They’ve made it a fucking concert stage.”

The command deck is milling with sound technicians and lighting riggers. Spindly spots and soft ambient fill lights crowd like councilors around an elevated platform.

Sykora rubs her temples. “Can we please raise the deck up to its privacy station.”

“The bridge crew are all very excited for your debut, Majesty.” Waian is grinning like a hyena from within the thicket of equipment and engineers.

“We’re broadcasting across the firmament.” Hyax has crowded herself into an unobtrusive corner. “They’ll all see it anyway.”

“We need to be able to give orders, Majesty.” Vora sounds much more apologetic. “Perhaps we could set something up elsewhere, but the broadcast equipment is all here.”

“No. No, I’ll live. We have no time.” Sykora grimaces and steps gingerly around the snaking cords and setups, to the command deck bannister. “Crew of the Black Pike,” she calls. “Your attention.”

A universal salute assures her she has it.

“You have had cause to wonder where I was during your solemn preparations,” Sykora says. “I regret my absence; I pray that its result will serve as a worthy recompense. We are attempting a final broadcast to Taiqan in the hours before its destruction. For the millions of Eqtorans remaining on its surface, this will be our last outreach. And their last chance to spare themselves the wrath of the Empire.”

Attentive silence. The tension is thick. The grin is off Waian’s face.

“It has been my privilege to sail with you through tribulations and tasks within which the justice of our actions was never in doubt,” Sykora says. “I have never regretted the violence we have wielded in defense of Her High Majesty’s frontier. Today…”

She lets the rest of the sentence trail off into an uncertain exhale. Grant has never seen her look so unsure in front of her subjects.

“If this gambit is successful, we will avert a great and regrettable loss of life,” she says. “I have no doubt of your loyalty. If you are to kill a planet in my name, I will ensure that every alternative is exhausted. I could not bear to reward your faith in me with anything less. I ask one thing of you today in return.”

Her bare feet flex as she grounds herself in time and place on the deck.

“Don’t fucking film this,” she says.

A rustle of laughter as the bridge’s tension breaks.

“And don’t take pictures, and if possible, don’t watch. And don’t listen. I am serious.” Sykora balls up her fists. “If I see bridgebound footage, I am going to execute you all for treason.” She steps back. “Right. The bridge is yours, Majordomo.”

Vora raises her voice. “Prepare broadcast, Monitor.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

“Power to the holoprojector. All decks but the bridge, prepare for gravity loss.” Vora’s tail pokes Waian. “Forgive me, Chief Engineer. We’re going to need another close shave today.”

Waian puffs a strand of hair out of her face. “Figured.”

Sykora fades from view; her uniform slips to the floor. The costume lifts from the lip of the raised stage and slides across the flickering silhouette. A strapless top, billowing silk pants. Layers of scarves and shell. The blue curves reappear below the costume, and Sykora stands as tall as a Taiikari can as attendants paint her eyes with dark, asymmetrical kohl and line her lips with a deep merlot.

“Breathe.” Grant pulls his seat up in front of her and rests his guitar across his lap. “Proud, upright. You are what they need.”

“I am what they need,” she murmurs back. She cranes her neck to look into the humming dark of the bridge. “Translator Havnai. Some last go-overs on pronunciation, please.”

“May I move your place back, Majesty?” A chipper technician with an earpiece and a slick pixie cut indicates a spot. “We might catch a few inches of you if you get too animated.”

Grant obediently scrapes his seat backward.

“Oh—Majesty.” The technician frowns. “You’ll leave marks on the deck.”

“My bad.” Grant lifts his chair and places it where he’s been told.

Waian chuckles from her console. “Gonna make you buff out those scratches, Majesty.”

“A thousand space ships are about to try and blast the shit out of us with radioactive future-guns,” he says. “And I’ve got to be careful not to scrape the deck.”

Waian’s tail wiggles impishly. “That’s because I’m good at my job.”

“Transmitters active.” The Monitor Ensign’s pinched report rises from the bridge. “We’re targeting Tarruk City, the largest remaining population center on the planet. Stealth swarm is ready to broadcast.”

Havnai is at the Princess’s side as the makeup artists finish their work, squinting out at the main bridge monitor, where the phonetics are displayed in Grant-sized glyphs; Sykora’s memorized them anyway, just in case. “Verse two, third line,” she says. “That’s H-nuth-nah-kar.”

“From the diaphragm on the kar, Majesty.” Havnai demonstrates, her shy little Taiikari voice solidifying into a guttural growl. “Don’t be afraid to dig into those consonants.”

“Just keep them rhythmic,” Grant adds. “No need to rush or trip.”

“Thank you, Citizen Havnai.” Sykora bows the translator away along with the departing tide of attendants. She leans into Grant. “If this doesn’t work, dove, I’m going to bite you.”

“What if it works?”

She pokes her earbuds in. “I’m still going to bite you.”

The pixie-cut technician sticks a translucent, button-sized microphone to Sykora’s headdress and steps away. “Majesty—can you give us a test?”

“Testing. Testing.” Sykora lets out a lip trill, high to low. “One two three four. I’ll stab Grantyde with a sword. Test, test.”

“Bars are green. We’re reading you, Majesty.” The tech salutes and skitters for the bridge steps.

Grant leans into his mic. “Can you hear me in your in-ears, babe?”

“I can hear you.” Her voice is tremulous and breathy. She shuts her eyes. A shudder sends a resonant clatter through the bone-carved beads of her scarves.

“I love you, Sykora of the Black Pike,” he whispers. “You can do this.”

She nods. Her hips sway slowly left and right; her lips silently mark through the words she’s about to beam across a hostile civilization.

“Bring us down,” Vora calls. “Prepare for broadcast.” Grant is close enough to see her swallow.

“Empress’s fortune smile upon us.”

Waian grimaces as the horizon expands. But she’s biting her tongue. Unlike last time they tickled an atmosphere, she’s far from the tensest Taiikari on the bridge.

***

Death is descending on Laudr.

The streets and the kirks and the prayer houses fill. Families and lovers weep and cling to one another.

The world watches the ship descend. The grainy zoomed-in footage, the satellite imagery. The splinter growing in the sky. Hroq’s family has gathered in their sledgehouse’s kitchen, on their darned and dilapidated couch. They watch the apocalypse arrive through the fuzz-clouded aerial.

Hroq will not be afraid. He will not beafraid. The fear howling in his mind is the lie of the Tamuraq. The end is not the end. The gods wait for him. His death is not in vain. He must believe that.

Moran has fallen asleep between him and Aqva. Exhaustion finally dragging her under after a sleepless night.

Aqva leans across their wife. Her hand flattens against the back of Hroq’s neck. Her breath tickles his ear.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I fucked up.”

Hroq holds her closer. “What do you mean?”

“I should have been on your side.” Her face is shiny with tears. “We could have convinced Moran. We could be gone from here.”

Hroq’s head swims. Sweat slicks his palms where they rest on the couch. He loves Aqva; he wishes badly she had not said that.

“I fucked up, Hroq. I—” Aqva bites back a sob. “I shoulda protected us.”

“We don’t need protection,” he says. “We have the gods. This is right. We’ve made—” But the bottom of his stomach’s been knocked out from him, and all the bravery he crammed inside is leaking from him fast.

“We’ve made our choice,” he forces himself to say.

***

The sky lights up with the fiery streaks of Taiqan’s final, fruitless defense. The Eqtoran armada unleashes everything it has against the invaders. Atomics burst. Railguns whine and crackle. One ship attempts a terminal ram against the Pike’s prow; the bridge shares a collective ohh as they watch the cruiser’s pyrotechnic demise.

Atop the command deck, Hyax clicks her tongue. “Idiots.”

Grant watches its scattering shrapnel with dismay. “Are those the first deaths?”

The Brigadier shakes her head. “Blew apart a few other ships while you were out,” she says. “Zealots trying to destroy evacuees. And that’s not the first clueless captain who’s tried to ram us. Napkin math from me is we’ve killed twoscore or so Eqtorans. Not counting those fools who just killed themselves.”

“Why was I not told about this?”

“We had no time,” Hyax says. “And after the fact, Sykora thought it would distract you.”

Grant’s sharp rejoinder freezes.

Didn’t you say the same thing?

“I guess it would have,” he says.

“You’d have made it some kind of Maekyonite moral quandary.” She smirks. “We’d have weighed military and civilian lives and wrung our hands and raced against time to find some kind of nonviolent solution and you’d have pulled Sykora aside and she’d have made that awestruck face she always makes when you’re saintly at her.” She pooches her lips and widens her eyes.

“I—” A grin treacherously stretches Grant’s lips. “You’ve made your point, Brigadier.”

“And what you were doing took import.”

“Do you believe that? Do you think it’ll work?”

“Doesn’t matter what I believe.” A swarm of useless missiles casts a strobing membrane reaction across Hyax’s scar-pitted face. “We’re all about to find out.”

***

When the light appears and flares on the vessel’s prow, the measure of every faith is tested. Some stand, some sing, some hide. Some join a planetary scream of hysterical fear.

But the beam, when it touches Taiqan’s goldenrod surface, doesn’t bring the apocalypse.

It brings a skyscraper-sized woman made of light.

An alien woman, whose tail is thin, whose fringe is long and strange and made of silky fur, whose proportions are halfway between a keeper and a female, whose face is flat and strange and undeniably beautiful.

Every loudspeaker, every PA, every handset and radio across and above the planet—every single thing with a speaker and a receiver is captured and thralled to the alien warship.

A planetwide crescendo swells forth. A swirl of interlocking harmonies, with a cascading flow of notes over top like a silver waterfall, played by some stringed instrument—a lquok, at first blush, but when the spectrotheists examine their recordings, later, they’ll discard that idea as impossible; lquoks don’t have six strings.

The woman’s shade-streaked eyes are closed as she sways to the music. Just a slow, natural movement, at first, and then a hook in the song catches her, and tugs her on an invisible line into a graceful, full-body roll, fluid and feline, that ends with her eyes snapping open. Under those painted lids they’re red as a Harok sunrise.

And she sings.

She sings a soft paean to the dawn. She sings praise to the gods and to the children of Eqt. And as the music darkens and grows propulsive, and she twists and twirls with it, she sings of calamity. Her sinuous body evokes the tempest; her words are full of fire and flood. She sings of the bright day after the thunderheads have cleared. She sings an exhortation to life and its resilience.

She sings, loud and vivid. And beautiful, but unexpectedly. Not schooled. Not elegant or preening or robed in ornamentation. Unadorned and magnetic, beautiful in itself and not in its instruction. Like a first night with a new lover—vulnerable, exposed, but so overcome with need that the risk must be taken anyway, that courage and desire must overcome the monumental fear of disaster or embarrassment or the simple act of being perceived, truly and nakedly.

And, yes: she sings of submission. The invaders’ terms appear, again, lyrically and with the full force of sacrosanct music, and the terror of a final doom intermingles in her voice with the ecstatic promise that there is no true end. That all is to be endured.

Grant sings with her, his soulful scratched-vinyl voice mingling with hers, his fingers dancing across his guitar, and he marvels at his Princess, at how all the fear has fallen away from her, and the bridge gazes at them. The Eqtoran munitions burst and criss-cross the sky that frames her, like an unhinged fireworks display. Sykora’s hasty costume and her anxiousness have transmogrified. The big joke they were all in on has transcended into a radiant something, something Grant has no Taiikari word for. And for maybe the first time, he believes, with heart-racing faith, that this insane final plan is actually going to work.

The light fades from the surface of Taiqan. And the alien goddess is gone.

A few seconds of stunned silence across the radio waves and then the song begins again. The enforced image skips and repeats. The Pike bombards Taiqan. Not with bombs or plasma, but music. The loop abates from the official communication and emergency lines; but everywhere else, it plays, and plays, and it’ll keep playing for seven hours and forty-seven minutes, and then the Black Pike’s batteries will silence everything on Taiqan, forever.

In the wake of the bridge crew’s applause, the minutes tick by, and they seek any sign that their Princess’s last command to the people of Taiqan has been heard. Will the Eqtoran armada’s cannons be stilled? Will the evacuation ships begin again? Will the tide turn, and the council surrender? Will the gazing, murmuring servants of Sykora be delivered from their duty, or will they become the butchers of the Eqtoran Republic?

In the chapel of the Omnidivine, Tymar sits cross-legged, hovering in the air. Around him, the weightlessness bells chime sweetly as they spin and carom off one another in the ether. A set of unlit candles has slipped loose from the cage that a careless acolyte left open; they turn slowly in midair.

“Terribly sorry, Brother Tymar.” A cleric pulls herself hand-over-hand along the prayer booths toward him. “We ought not to be in here during zero gravity.”

“That’s all right, Sister. Thank you for the warning.” He favors her with a warm smile. “I’ll be okay. You can tell my sister you told me so if I clonk my head on a column, okay?”

She shrugs with affable helplessness and sets about trying to corral the candles.

“Did it work?” Tymar asks. “The final appeal?”

“Don’t know.” The cleric bats a candle toward its cage with her tail. “But you have to imagine we’ll know within the hour whether the ships are flying out again, hmm?”

“You do.” He holds a hand out. “May I have one of those candles, please?”

She smiles and pushes one over to him. “I’ll leave you to it. Just, uh—ears up for the gravity announcement, yes?”

“I promise.”

Her tail hitches around a column and drifts her toward the exit. “Omnidivine keep you, Tymar.”

Tymar closes his eyes behind the red shelter of his anticomps and prays. His hands clasp tight around his unlit candle.

He prays to the Heavenly Court of Empresses Past to keep Sykora’s works on the side of the Principled Good. He prays to Eqt and the gods of Taiqan to show mercy to the children still on the Bright Shore and bring them safely out of the storm. And then, for good measure, he prays to Jesus, with the timidity of a stranger who hopes to be a friend. He prays for the Lord to take up Grant’s burden, and sustain him, and—

“Never suffer the righteous to be moved.” Tymar finishes the psalm under his breath. He opens his eyes and looks out the chapel window at the planet they orbit. “Well, Lord. Maybe, for a few hours, we could make an exception to that last bit.”