“I should have been there,” Ajax says.

“Stop saying that, man.” Grant reaches across the carrier and delivers a light punch to Ajax’s armored shoulder. “We wanted a small escort, so it’s on us. And I’m all right. Really. I lived, right?”

“You got a goddamn racing stripe across your face, Majesty. I should have insisted.”

Grant folds his arms. “I order you not to beat yourself up about it, Sergeant Ajax.”

“Yes, Majesty.” Ajax’s impassive anticomp faceplate points straight ahead.

“Now you’re sulking and doing it internally. Which is treason.”

“I’m not, Majesty.”

“Prove it.”

“How, Majesty?”

“Tell me a joke.”

Ajax sits silently.

“I’ve got one,” says Lance Corporal Goran. His helmet’s on his lap; his olive-colored eyes are visible. And why not? It’s all guys back here and Gefreiter Reina, who’s an honorary guy. Hyax is back aboard the Pike while the rest of the command group tours the foundry. She was predictably grumpy about it, but the away team needs Waian to be the expert with the engineers, and Vora to be the Vora with the bureaucrats.

“He didn’t ask you, LC.” Ajax settled his elbows onto his knees. “Okay. Here’s one. A guy decides he’s going to become an intangible. He’s talking to his buddy—”

Grant holds up a hand. “What’s an intangible?”

“It’s a masculinist thing,” Ajax says. “It’s guys who insist on always going invisible around women. Protest sort of thing. They’re loony. Anyway, he’s talking to his buddy and his buddy’s like, surely that’s affected your dating life. And he says: oh, it’s all good still. Better than ever, even. I went home with this girl last night, and she said holy shit, you’re the biggest guy I’ve ever had. And the friend says: man, I bet she was just pulling your tail.”

A round of laughter from the marines in varying degrees of sincerity. “I think my great-grandma told me that one,” Reina says. “So dusty.”

“Dusty?” The sergeant tuts. “It’s a classic.”

Grant never really thought of himself as a one-of-the-boys-type guy when he lived on Maekyon. In Alberta he’d usually clock out and go home instead of out to the dives with the other guys. The stuff they talked about there and the way they bonded—he was too quiet and civil for it. Always pissed him off when they’d drop some epithet about a guy who wasn’t there to defend himself, or a girl who was just trying to get through her shift.

But there’s a camaraderie to the men of the Taiikari Empire, one strong enough to feel even at the remove his alien species and his noble title give him. Little nods to one another from across busy rooms; silent acknowledgements of the fellowship that their vulnerability has forced them all into. Grant loves Sykora more than he knew it was possible to love someone, and she’s consciously wonderful to him every moment of her life, and she’s come so far, but she’ll never quite understand, by her own admission.

An unwelcome whisper in the back of his head: And you will?

There’s that biological hiccup between him and every other man he knows. A gap that has never closed, despite that one lush night of compulsion in his past. A fundamental lie he’s keeping from every friend he’s made, from Ajax and Tikani and Tymar. He wonders what will happen when the truth comes out. He wonders how soon that’ll be.

“The invisibility was really what got me, with the assassin,” he says, to distract himself. “A lot more panic-inducing than I’d expected. There isn’t some kind of, like, visor or set of goggles to detect invisible people, is there?”

Ajax shakes his head. “Not at the level you need for CQC.”

“Why not?

“Cloaked Taiikari show up big and diffuse on thermals,” Ajax says. “Something about our skin. We’re fuzzy radiation blobs, not easy shapes. Useless for point shooting and hand-to-hand stuff. And that’s before you count thermal biomods, which I got, and I just about guarantee a trained assassin does, too. You can’t use them for more than a few minutes, or you cook yourself, but I doubt she’d appear as anything but a blue-on-blue haze. The way to deal with a cloaked Taiik is an infrascope painter or a grenade. I got grenades. You want a grenade?”

“No.”

Ajax shrugs. “Then infrascope painters are the only thing tight enough to get you within a few feet. You shoot the bead it makes, and you’re good. But those work off a visual baseline of a room. Takes a few seconds to reconstruct it, every time you move it around. Can’t strap one of those to your head.”

Grant sighs. “Okay. Well, next time we spar, we should train for an invisible opponent.”

“I am not getting naked and wrestling you without the express written permission of your wife, Majesty,” Ajax says. “Not even permission. Make it an explicit order from her. Meena’d kill me.”

“What am I ordering?”

The entire squad goes rigid in its seats, snapping a universal salute to Princess Sykora as she pokes her head into the room.

Grant stands up. “Naked wrestling with the sergeant.”

Ajax’s stony inexpressiveness deepens.

“Ooh. Like a steamy hornchoker comic. Vivid.” Sykora turns and gestures Grant forth with her tail. “We’re on approach to the foundry, dove. Come have a look.”

Grant gives the sergeant a salute as he follows his wife. Ajax returns it. The fist on his chest subtly flashes the horns.

Grant catches up with Sykora in the narrow hallway up to the carrier’s nose. “Anything on our dead lady?”

Sykora shakes her head. “Conspicuous in her absence from our records. And in any we can immediately access, which is most of the Frontier’s.”

“You think she’s Imperial Core, then?”

“She’s Core or she’s a noncitizen. Either way she’s trouble.” Sykora scoots to one side of the cramped hall as Grant inches past her to open the door for her. “You are such a gentleman, dove. Do you know that?”

“The more I focus on doors the easier it is not to smack my head on them.”

“I’ve been truant in raising the carrier doors,” Sykora says. “Too much focus on interceptors and shuttles.” She sighs. “I suppose we’ll be flying these Barracudas a lot more, now that we’re carrying a full complement of marines with us everywhere we go.”

“I think it all has to do with this daemon,” Grant steps through with her into the front cabin. “I really do. We have to be paranoid right now, but we won’t have to be forever.”

“I pray you’re right, Grantyde.” Sykora bites her lip. “What if it’s just how it is, to be a Princess come in from the Void? The Palatines and Margraves are as cold and remote as Eqtoran mountaintops. What if that has to be us?” And that this isn’t simply the life of a Princess who’s come in from the Void.

“It won’t be.” Grant waves at Waian, where she sits with Vora watching the soot-choked spires of the Kahanai Foundry rise from a disant magma river. Sykora gives her command group a smile that doesn’t reach her crimson eyes.

Grant sees she’s still adrift. He pauses, and solidifies a grip on her shoulder to pause her, too. “But if it is,” he whispers, “we’ll be alone up there together.”

She settles her hand on his.

The engagement ring he bought her kisses his knuckle.

***

The Prince, the Princess, and their clanking, well-armed retinue emerge onto a walkway speared in a pool of bright amber light above a factory floor glowing in dim red, from a sea of fabrication machines and great open vistas out to the permanent dusk of Tamion.

Marquess Reka awaits them on the circular balcony, her spurious smile gleaming in the spotlight. “Majesties,” she says. “Such a joy to see you again, hale and healed.”

Sykora, to her credit, returns the bow with which Reka accompanies her words. “Your prompt and thorough report was appreciated, Marquess. As our investigation continues, we’ll share with you such discoveries as we can.”

“Of course, Majesty.” Reka smooths out the hem of her hip-hugging pencil skirt. “And I am just so grateful that we’ve seen through this misunderstanding. How relieving to be cleared of the cloud of suspicion.”

Sykora’s formal smile doesn’t betray it, but Grant knows just how far Reka is from clear of suspicion.

A clattering footfall sends a bizarre jolt through him; he takes a moment to realize why. That’s what Thror’s talons sounded like, when he came into the bungalow on Ptolek II.

His brains were so pink when you blew them out of his skull. Bright pink.

An Amadari is approaching from the other end of the catwalk, in a pink hooded poncho, its lining a riot of color. A woman, if the swell and sway of her hips are any indication. She extends her four arms outward in ostentatious greeting. Unlike the late Marquis Consort of Entmok, the limbs are linked by a pair of bright feathery membranes—Grant mistook them for part of the poncho, which he now sees is plain pink.

The woman’s face reminds him of one of those birds with built-in drippy eyeliner. A secretary bird, if he remembers right. “Welcome to Kahanai Fabricant, Majesty.” The feathers trailing from the back of her head fan out with her bow. She’s taller than Thror was by about half a foot. Roughly the height of a Maekyonite woman. “I am Director Wex.” One of her four arms sweeps over to indicate a slim, svelte-horned Taiikari man in clunky full-wrap anticomps and a similarly pink stand-collar uniform. “This is Technician Sakko. Your visit honors us. Yes, it does.”

Sakko nods vigorously. A think chain loaded with datawafer cards clatters around his neck.

“The honor is ours, Director.” Sykora gives the customary half-bow of outranking nobility. Her tail’s found its way to Grant’s hip and stays there. The subtle caress it gives him tells him that Sykora is sensitive to the effect his second-ever Amadari is having on the violent memories he’s half-buried.

“Have you heard what we’re here for?” Grant asks. “We’re seeking a daemon. A specific one that was built in this foundry.”

“Daemon. Mmm.” Wex’s feather ponytail thing flickers. “A name primed to elicit superstition. What does it stir in you, sir Prince? When you first heard it, what did you picture?”

“Daemon?” Grant tries to answer honestly. “A kind of mythical monster with, uh—” with horns and a tail. “With a forked tongue.”

“You see?” Wex chitters a laugh. “I wish I knew where that ghoulish name came from so I could give the narrow minds behind it a percussive expansion. We prefer something more definitive and descriptive. Yes, we do. Replicated Competency Algorithms. NVIs.”

“Right. Thank you for the clarity, Director.” Grant removes a notepad from his belt pouch. “The NVI we’re looking for is Unit K-77272.”

Wex’s thick lashes beat slowly. “May I see?”

He tears the page out and hands it to her.

“Unit K-77272.” Wex taps the stubby hook of her beak with a talon. “K-77s are... antique. We’re on K-86 at this point, aren’t we, Technician Sakko?”

“Yes, Director Wex.”

Wex folds the page and secrets it beneath her poncho. “Do you know who purchased this, and when?”

“That is what we’re hoping to find out, Madame Director,” Sykora says. “That and what exactly a K-77 is.”

Wex’s toothy beak lets slip an uncertain hum. “The former we can’t always furnish—our clients often value discretion to the point of proxy and shell. But we will do what we can. Yes, we will.” She stretches a scintillating wing to the glass walkway. “Kindly accompany me, munificent shareholders.”

They move from the catwalk into the warm dark innards of the facility. Wex leads them through a twilit labyrinth of factory floors and offices cluttered with podded desks and holoprojector soundstages across which the hallucinations of a host of digital ghosts are observed and fine-tuned by a murmuring horde of technicians. The vast majority of them are Taiikari, but Grant’s seen a handful of Amadari by the time Wex leads them out of this first spire and across a skybridge that links them to the next over a lake of fire.

Waian excuses herself past yet another attempt by Reka to cozy up to Sykora (“It really is bracing, the warmth in these skybridges, isn’t it?”) and catches up with Technician Sakko. “Were those Ahaikan hand-fabricators I saw back there on those larger units?” she asks.

“They—”

“They were indeed.” Wex interrupts the guy. “We have strict expectations of our teams’ work, and we meet their strict expectations in turn.”

“I’ve been agitating for us to get a few of those on the Pike, y’know,” Waian says to Grant, sotto voce. “Your wife keeps clamjamming me. And now the corpo-bird is showing us up.”

“You don’t need hand-fabricators, Chief Engineer,” Sykora whispers, in the brief window Vora’s bought from the Marquess with a distracting set of social niceties around the subject of current tail-bangle fashions. “You have hands.”

“I’d need to send for a K-77 from our archive.” Wex blithely chatters away. “But they are not so different from an 86. It’s a reinterpretation of the same subject and the same competency. Yes it is.” She stops before the door to their destination tower and bends at the waist to place her eye against the scanner. “Just with an improved simulation and some rather fancy new housing.”

She takes them through a hushed, humming chamber penned in by glass columns filled with an array of carved wooden statuettes, each about the size of an academy award. In the main, they depict Taiikari, in a vast array of ostentatious dress.

Wex pauses before one column and holds her feathery hand out to her assistant. “If you’d pass the demo unit, Sakko.”

Sakko punches a few keys on a panel by the column; the whole thing telescopes downward, vending-machine style. The technician retrieves the statue on offer and places it in Wex’s claw.

Grant peers at it. A mahogany-esque statuette of a woman in a tricorne and topcoat not far off from Sykora’s, though with a more ruffled and antique look about them. She has one leg up, Captain Morgan style, on a cannon. The base atop which woman and cannon are perched is thick and cylindrical.

“That’s a daemon, huh?” Grant asks.

Wex nods and taps her claw on the cylinder. “All housed in there. The captain atop is for effect. Come come.”

She takes the statue and the troop of Black Pike guests up a spiraling flight of stairs into a stark white cylindrical room. Grant and his wife squint at the sudden bright intrusion.

“This is one of our room-form simulators.” Wex approaches a plinth at the room’s center. “Here we fine-tune the digital scenarios in which our NVIs operate. It’s not how our end users experience the daemon, of course, but it’s good for confirming verisimilitude and illustrating the way our Competency Algorithms work.” She raises her colorful brows at the assembled retinue. Her toothy grin spreads. “Who wants to go sailing?”

She places the statue on the plinth.

All around them, the walls and floor and ceiling dance into illuminated life, and then fall away. It is replaced by an image of bloodshed, gunpowder, and pandemonium.

Grant and Sykora are standing aboard a sailing ship, at the speartip of a naval formation that bristles with cannon and cutlass, and the sailing ship is on fire.