“Cover.”

Ajax says it without affect or emotion, like he’s saying excuse me to someone he’s squeezing past. He bolts into cover, raises his rifle and joins his squad’s hellacious chorus of return fire. The echoing report of the rifles bounce back to them from the high stone walls of the canyon.

Grant’s yanked behind a spire by Sykora’s tail. His wife moves so quick that it nearly bowls him over; her small, strong arms catch and steady him.

Hyax thumps into cover next to them. “You see them?” she calls to the sergeant, some dozen feet away on his stomach behind a low shelf.

“Negative.” Ajax triggers another blazing burst downrange. “Pentine, scope on the south tower.”

“It’s automated, sergeant. Count three emplacements, all automated.” Pentine’s voice sharpens. “We’ve got bounders, sarge.”

Grant risks a look over the stone. Flitting between the rocks are camouflage-painted, four-legged robots, the size of mastiffs. They pepper the ridge with fire from back-mounted swivel turrets as they skitter between cover in the valley below, advancing toward the marines.

“What the fuck,” he says.

“Hyax was right.” Sykora lets out a humorless laugh. “They dropped a trove on this defense grid.”

“Firstcell!” Ajax barks it. “Hit those bounders. Full adrenals. Hit ‘em if you haven’t. Adrenals, Private Laritas. I don’t give a fuck about your headaches.”

“We don’t have the gear to crack those emplacements, Majesty.” Hyax says. 

“The Pike does,” Sykora says.

“You want to call it into low orbit?”

“We’re well past doing this quiet.” Sykora’s ears flicker as a rifle burns out a burst near them. “Over to you, Brigadier. Call down the wrath of the Empress.”

“As you will it, Majesty.” Hyax unhooks her comm. “Brigadier to Black Pike, we are under fire. Descend to orbital strike range. Make ready to fire on marked targets.”

“Fucking hell,” Grant murmurs, curling into himself. His hands are shaking so hard he can barely get the snap off his gun.

“It’s all right, dove,” Sykora squeezes his wrist. “These automatons have nothing on ZKP Marines. It’ll be all right.”

“I know,” he says. “I know.” He doesn’t, but he tries to. Come on, Grant. You’ve been shot at before. Captain Tennek tried to splash you across the firmament during the Eqtoran annexation. Stay cool.

But that was through a cockpit screen, tucked behind a membrane. This is something different.

“Flare,” Ajax calls. “Give me a flare on that turret’s optics.”

Another snapping volley of gunfire rolls across the ridge. An arching, bright green spark whistles through the dim, throwing out sprinting shadows from the standing stones and skittering automatons. Ajax leaps to his feet and sprints. The turret roars reproof as he goes, knocking shards of stone from the ridge, but he arrives unscathed next to Grant, sliding into cover on his thick ceramic kneepads. “Hey. Majesty.”

Grant blinks rapidly. “Yeah?”

Ajax reaches into one of his belt pouches and pulls a silvery, thumb-sized sleeve out of it. He tips a pinkish candied disc out of it. “You want some gum?”

Grant shakes his head, but Ajax presses it into his hand anyway. He automatically brings it to his mouth and chews.

“I told you a Taiikari joke,” Ajax says. “Gimme a Maekyonite one.”

Grant’s sweating hard under his poncho’s hood. “What?”

“Remember mine? Now you.”

“Uh, fuck.” Grant rifles through his mental rolodex, jostled as it is by the intermittent chiseling gunfire. “A cop’s at a traffic stop and he pulls over a guy driving a truck and it’s got twenty lemurs in it.”

Ajax interrupts. “Hell’s a lemur?”

“Uh… what’s an exotic animal?”

“A tek’ka bird,” Sykora says.

“Reloading!” That’s Pentine.

Ajax leans up over cover and lets out a sustained hailstorm of bullets. He ducks back down. “Twenty tek’ka birds,” he prompts.

“Right. The guy’s truck has twenty tek’ka birds in it. And the cop says excuse me, sir, but you can’t have those as pets. And the guy says what do you mean? They’re not pets, they’re my buddies.”

“Bring the grenade launcher up,” Hyax calls. “Southwest side low.”

“The cop says well, whatever they are, you’re not allowed to keep them. You’re going to have to take them to the zoo. Are there Taiikari zoos?”

Sykora nods encouragingly. “We’ll go to one.”

“And the guy sighs and says fine,” Grant says. “And he drives off.”

“Frag out!”

“The next day—”

An earsplitting CRACK as the grenade explodes. 

“The next day the cop’s at the same spot.” Grant snaps his gum. “And here comes the truck again. And it’s still full of lemurs. Tek’ka birds. And the cop says I thought I told you take those things to the zoo. And the guy says, I did! And we—”

“Thirty seconds,” Hyax calls. “Thirty seconds to orbital bombardment.”

“We had so much fun we’re doing the beach today.”

Laughter breaks out along the ridge, between the gunfire.

“All right.” Ajax lowers himself onto his stomach and braces his rifle against his chest. “Pretty good.”

“Why have I not made you master sergeant yet, Ajax?” Sykora asks. “I’m making you master sergeant. Brigadier.”

Hyax looks up from her comm. “Majesty?”

Sykora glances upward at the churning storm above them. “Tell you in a moment.” She takes Grant by the shoulders and lies with him on the rain-slick stone. “Hold me,” she whispers. “Deep breath, yes?”

He closes his arms around her.

The sky cracks open.

A solid wall of sound collides with Grant, ripples the poncho, rumbles the ground beneath him. Then another and another and another, until Grant loses track. The air warms and glows. Sykora’s lips press to his forehead. His whole body tingles with the sheer apocalyptic force being turned upon the valley.

Dimness and reality reassert themselves. In the ringing wake of the barrage he hears Hyax’s voice.

“Towers down. Repeat, towers down. Solid hits.”

Cheers rise from the squad. “Holy shit, man.” Pentine is giddy at his scope. “That was insane.”

“Eyes up.” Ajax leans out of cover. “Watch for bounders.”

Grant looks over the lip of his cover, ears ringing. Plumes of dark smoke rise from the twisted wreckage of the colony’s defense towers. He stares at the field of charred metal, the blackened craters. “Hot damn.” He tugs his askew poncho hood back into place.

“Hey, Majesty,” calls a marine. “That’s your first firefight down.”

“Does it count?” Grant indicates his pistol, still in its holster. “Didn’t even get a shot off.”

“Any fight you don’t get your brain scooped out by a bullet counts.” Ajax holds down a button on his helmet near its ear sheath and drops his voice. “Line check on first cell. First cell, sound off.”

“I can’t help but feel a little useless,” Grant says. “You all swung into action and I just curled up and shook like a shaved kindek.”

“That’s what suppressive fire does, dove.” Sykora stands to her full height, which keeps her more than covered.

“Her Majesty is right.” Ajax releases the button. “You just acted how a rational person acts under automatic fire. You hunker down unless you’re crazy or trained. And Black Pike marines are trained to be crazy.”

Grant looks across the ridge at a pair of marines on the other side of it who are sitting with their heads tucked between their knees. “What’s going on with them?”

“Adrenal suite,” Ajax says. “Implants. Optimizes our adrenaline responses. More of the good stuff, less of the bad stuff. You can hit it manually with practice, but the idea is it replaces your normal stress response, so it triggers automatically. Laritas and Rohain get side effects. They’re kicking them.”

“Does every marine have them?”

“Yes, Majesty. Those two have it set to manual-only, though.” Ajax leans in. “You ask me, they’re just being difficult,” he murmurs. “We all had side effects to the suite at first. They just don’t let themselves acclimate.”

“How’s adrenaline feel now?” Grant asks. “Compared to before.”

“Don’t remember too well, how it used to be.” Ajax shakes his shoulder out. “These days? Feels pretty fuckin’ good.”

“Listen up.” Hyax raises her voice. “Rolling overwatch. First cell, first leap.”

“Pardon me, Majesty.” With a lash of his armored tail, Ajax mantles over the pockmarked stone shelf they were using as cover. “First cell, form up on me.”

The Black Pike marines peel off into two groups, and Ajax leads the first on a darting advance down the ridge. Those remaining behind keep their rifles trained on Hyax approaches 

“Kindly remain here where it’s safe, Majesties,” Hyax says. “I’ll wire you once we’ve secured the colony.”

“Brigadier,” Sykora says. “I want Sergeant Ajax promoted to Sergeant Major.”

“He wouldn’t like that, Majesty.”

Sykora furrows her brow. “Why?”

“His girlfriend’s a specialist under the Chief Engineer,” Hyax says. “That’s equivalent to a sergeant on the pay band. He doesn’t want to be promoted past where she is.”

Sykora scoffs. “Promote her too, then. I don’t give a damn. Is she good at her job?”

“You’d have to ask Waian, Majesty.” Hyax hands the comm over and clicks her helmet comms back on. “Second cell leap.”

Around them, the marines push off from their cover and hustle down toward the colony.

“You really did do fine, Grantyde,” Sykora says, once they’re alone on the ridge. “It’s your first time and you didn’t lock up or wet yourself. That’s well done.”

Grant watches the marines leapfrog through the ruins the Black Pike scorched into the planet surface. “How can you tell?”

“Tell what?”

He wrings a sleeve out where it poked through the poncho. “That I didn’t wet myself.”

She laughs. “Did you?”

“No. But I went before we landed.”

Sykora fidgets with the communicator Hyax left them. “I don’t want you hung up on this, dove. I didn’t fire a shot either, you know. Didn’t come loaded for bear. Maybe I ought to get you a HAK suit after all. I’m sure you’d look quite dashing in one.”

“I don’t know if the kind of training Ajax mentioned is something I’d like to have,” Grant says. “But maybe it’s necessary.”

Sykora shakes her head. “The sims the marines use can be quite brutal. Made to desensitize. I think the two of us leave the soldiering to them.”

“Did you go through them, the sims?”

“I did, indeed. I was trained the same way they use, though I started earlier.”

“How much earlier?”

“My second hecto, I was re-enacting the battle of Panatakus.”

Second hecto. She wasn’t even a teenager yet. “I assume that was a bad battle to be in.”

Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “One of the worst.”

He rubs her back through the material of her raincoat. He wonders, sometimes, about all the old scars in her. About how she was before him and where she’d be without him. “You didn’t have much of a childhood, huh?”

“I’ll have three of them. Vicariously.” Sykora sticks her tongue out and lets a raindrop land on it. 

Grant laughs at the little noise of surprise she makes. “Not used to rain, huh?”

Sykora shakes her head. “So much time in the void, and every time I’m planetside it’s always in climate controlled manors. How novel to be chilly. And rained on.” She holds her mouth open.

Grant watches his wife flinch happily against the droplets landing on her face. “Can I ask you something? About your training, sort of?”

She keeps her tongue out. “Uh huh.”

“The daemons’ simulations are all so detailed,” Grant says. “And the flight sims and apparently the war sims are, too. But everything else. Compared to what I’m used to, all your technology is really… not clunky, exactly. But intentionally simple.”

Sykora replaces her tongue into her mouth. “Well, that’s just to preserve the digital sumptuary laws.”

“Digital sumptuary laws? I haven’t heard of these.”

“How do I describe this.” Sykora rubs her chin. “There’s a psychological response in Taiikari to sufficiently convincing or rewarding digital programs. A dopamine dependency of a kind.”

“Oh.” He chuckles at her careful description of their shared tendencies. “Yeah, for sure. Maekyonites have the same thing.”

“I suspected as much,” Sykora says. “Your damned phone device thing. That’s what the laws are there to prevent. Digital reality replacement. Any program requires the minimal intrusiveness into reality. Training sims are an exception, since fidelity is important. But you won’t find them used as entertainment.”

“That’s… hmm.” Grant watches the rain ripple their reflections in the stony ground. “That’s going to be a friction point with Maekyon.”

“I’m sure it will be.” Sykora clicks her tongue bemusedly. “I got a look at that phone of yours.”

“I know you did. You stole it and then you tore it up and made a beacon out of it.” He bumps his hip into her shoulder. “Definitely voided my warranty, Batty.” 

“Well I think I did you a good turn on that.” She folds her arms. “Even without any English I could tell that thing was a dopamine machine. It was like a candy bowl, all those icons and gadgets. We won’t allow things like that anymore, once Maekyon’s a vassal.”

“Now that is definitely going to piss a lot of people off. We like video games.”

“Video games.” She laughs. “What a whimsical way to describe a sim. I suspect you’ll be able to keep your video games, Grantyde of Maekyon. Can’t imagine they’re at the level we worry about. I’m talking about programs that ruin lives. On the level of crippling addictions.”

“Huh,” Grant says, and decides not to say more than that. 

“The digital escape trap is a pitfall we’ve seen before,” Sykora continues. “At a certain level of advancement, a world either kicks it or lets it consume them. And the latter never manage to reach sweep.”

“I feel like Maekyon is on the way to consumption.”

“Don’t go bad-mouthing your own species, dove.” She pats his hand. “They’ll sort it out. And if they don’t, a bit of guidance will be all they need. There will be friction, I’m sure. We might need to wind down, release a few increasingly barebones versions of your—what’d you call them?”

“Smartphones.” 

“Smart phones.” She chuckles. “Now that sounds hazardous. We’ll wean Maekyon off them. Eventually, the Maekyonites won’t miss them.” Her big ruby eyes blink up at him. “Do you?”

Grant tries to remember what it was like to have a phone. The panicky transition and the war of wills kept him from thinking about the device Batty yoinked and cannibalized; and by the time that problem was resolved, he was too busy fucking the shit out of his wife and learning the ways of the Imperial Court to really notice.

He used to sit for hours at a time just looking at that thing. Now his days are so full.

“I guess I don’t,” he says, and she beams at him. “But not all of them are gonna have a cute gremlin to distract them,” he adds.

She snorts. “That’ll be by their own choice. You are going to be flooded with hornchoked bachelorettes. We might have to regulate that. Otherwise the husband-seekers might drive your world into a fertility crisis.”

He chuckles. She joins in, but adds: “I’m not kidding, you know.”

“I know. I just—this is the sort of thing that’s my concern now. It’s kind of hard to believe sometimes.”

“Believe it, Majesty. You and I, standing shoulder-to-shoulder against the incoming horde of desperate would-be brides.”

The communicator chirps before Grant can reply. The Princess clicks the switch on its side. “You have Sykora.”

“You can move into the colony, Majesty.” Hyax’s voice is clipped and free of emotion. “We’re clear.”

“Did you encounter any colonists?” Sykora asks.

“I suspect we just encountered all of the colonists, Majesty,” Hyax says. “Though we’ll have to dig all the bodies out and count them to be sure.”