Grant sidesteps the panicky medtechs on his way out of the clinic. A quick retinal scan and an ice pack are foisted on him before he manages to escape in Ajax’s train.

Out of the humming neon lift and a parting salute to Ajax—then he’s onto the crimson floorboards of the command deck, under its dome of stars. The command group are spread across their stations; Hyax and Vora in a murmuring huddle, Waian hunched over her console, and Sykora pacing, her ears encased in earmuffs again.

She looks up from her fretful perambulation and sees Grant entering. Her face lights up and for a moment she lurches toward him; then her steps halt and worried wariness appears on her face.

Grant crosses to her and boosts her into his arms. She makes a joyful little squeak and moves to take her earmuffs off. He gives her a quizzical look.

“Just let me take them off for a second,” Sykora says. “Just a second.” She tugs them free. “Hi,” she whispers.

He nuzzles his cheek against hers. “Hi.”

“My wounded warrior.” She kisses his scruff. “You didn’t need to come back so soon.”

“I’m good,” he whispers. “I’m up again. Not all the way, but most of the way. You’re using your earmuffs up here?”

“I’ll let Waian explain,” Sykora says. “She’s in one of her moods, and I’ve little choice but to humor her. It’s about the datawafer you brought back. Say my name one last time before I have to put these back on.”

“Batty,” he says. Vora gives them a wry glance.

Sykora’s face heats up. “In public, Grantyde. Really.”

He kisses her forehead. “That’s right.”

She scoffs. “You’re insufferable, you know. Pass me that.” She points to her tablet.

He lifts the tablet from the table. Written across it is a log of every word they’ve been exchanging. “Clever.”

“It’ll do. I just want to hear you again without worrying about my brain exploding.” She takes the tablet and secures her earmuffs back on her head. “Keep carrying me.”

Grant walks over to Waian with his wife in the crook of his arm. He’s able to carry his wife around even more easily than he used to, these days. His body’s been firming up further in the Pike’s heavy gravity.

“What was on that datawafer?” he asks. “What’d we get?”

Waian glances up over her shoulder, blinking the eyestrain of her console away. “Huh?”

“The data wafer,” Grant says. “Anything useful?”

Waian blows air out through her lips. “Datawafer’s in there.” She points at a boxy console on the command deck table. “I panicked. Tugged it out of the Black Pike systems as soon as we found out you’d been attacked. But it was in there for nearly ten minutes. So I gotta sweep every system, isolate every daemon.”

“There’s daemons aboard?”

Waian nods grimly. “About a half-score in total. I’ve got them siloed off and I’ve reset all of them. They shouldn’t be able to access any of the systems we’d gotten them hooked up to. The datawafer is in its own instance now, loaded into a totally offline console. I’ve been pulling what I can from it.”

“It’s the same one I took in, right? You’d be able to tell if it had been replaced.”

“I could, and it is,” Waian says. “But you remember how I said to put it in the console for five seconds?

“Yeah.”

“Did you put it in for five?”

“I did.”

“Well, the connection log says it was in for ninety,” Waian says.

Grant shudders. Again that woozy feeling of violation. Sykora’s tail wraps consolingly around his waist.

“I tried to get access to the cameras,” Waian says. “The one in 7-Thule was never on. So now we have a roster of clerks and visitors to 7-Thule, but we can’t know whether it’s been tampered with, or how much. Or what other kind of poison’s been poured on.”

“Are we safe?” Sykora asks, a little loud.

Waian rubs her face with her artificial hand. “I don’t know. I’d say yes, but if you asked me whether the massacre on Myak coulda happened, I’d have told you no. And I have to use my meat on this instead of my silicon on this, cause I’m not gonna plug myself into the Pike till I know it’s clean. So, no distractions, please. I’m gonna keep looking.”

“I never had any weird ideas about the chip,” Grant says. “Just about blowing the manifold up.”

“Still.” Waian’s ears twitch and she turns back to her console. “No distractions.”

Grant and Sykora exchange glances. She gives him a microscopic shake of her head. “I’ll stay with her,” she murmurs. He steps away from the frowning chief engineer as the readouts shine across her face. Sykora slips from his arms and hops to the floor.

Grant turns to see Hyax watching him from across the deck. She ahems and raises her voice. “A moment, Majesty?”

He crosses to her and pulls a seat up from the command table. It’s a women’s, so it’s boosted like a bar stool, but it puts them on slightly more equal footing, at least.

Hyax takes a clanking step forward and bows so low she takes a knee. “I wish to offer an apology on behalf of the Black Pike security corps,” she says. “We made assumptions I now recognize as foolhardy. Of course, a foe with knowledge of the kill phrases would also have access to Compound 70. I was a fool to ignore the possibility.”

“This entire mission has been a test in adapting to nasty surprises, Brigadier.” Grant taps a knuckle against Hyax’s pauldron. “Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

“I won’t.” Hyax stands. “I’ve apologized. My conscience is now clear.”

He snorts. “Oh, good.”

“But from now on, you’ll be engaging in decompulsion protocol.”

“What’s that?”

“On any outing or mission a male attends during which he isn’t in HAK, he has to check in with a female officer and submit to a compulsion that removes all previous ones,” Hyax says. “It’s standard procedure for the Taiikari men aboard.”

“I didn’t realize,” Grant says.

“Typically the Husband of the Void’s decompulsion is performed by the Princess. Nobody else may compel him.”

Grant remembers Meena’s raw panic in the manifold chamber. “I seem to recall being asked to fetch some tea,” he says. “First day I met you.”

Hyax’s narrowing eyes can’t distract from the blush that glows along her face. “That was an emergent situation. And I credit myself with discovering your immunity.”

“Sure.”

“That’s the reason Sykora hasn’t bothered with the protocol,” Hyax says. “But from now on, I’m afraid I must insist. I’ve been unpleasantly reminded that for all my training in spotting compelled males, prudence trumps perceptiveness.”

“Is it normally more obvious, then?”

Hyax nods. “You fooled everyone on the command group. Whoever attacked you was a master.”

“I didn’t know it was something that had to be mastered,” Grant says. “Thought there was no way to break out of it.”

“Compulsion training isn’t for strength,” Hyax says, “but for subtlety and complexity. To give you such a complicated command, wipe your memory of it while keeping it in your subconscious, and have us miss it. That is an intimidating ability. One that takes discipline and practice. A novice needs to babble on and on, come up with edge cases, be exact. An expert can transmit so much of her intent through simple words that it doesn’t matter. She can leave the details to her target.”

The skin crawls on Grant’s neck. “I guess it’s kind of consolation,” he says. “Knowing this was the work of a real expert.”

“I don’t mean to sound as though I am impressed.” Hyax’s fists flex. “I would dearly love to get my hands on whoever did this and watch the light flicker out behind their eyes.”

“Jeez, Brigadier,” Grant says.

“Pardon my upset, Majesty.” Hyax juts her chin out. “I won’t let something like this happen to you again. Not for as long as I can draw breath to prevent it. I swear on my spear.”

Grant leans forward on his red-upholstered seat. “How do you feel about compulsion, Hyax?”

Hyax tilts her head. “That is a hard question to consider, Majesty. It’s so fundamental to the way Taiikari are. A keystone of our Empire. I have trouble imagining my life without it.”

“But you don’t use it much.”

“I have no need for it, unless I’m on-mission,” she says. “Most of the men I know are my marines. Their loyalty is stronger than any compulsion could be.”

“So it’s not something you’ve put much thought into?”

“Everyone’s put thought into it,” Hyax says. “Across all the firmament it’s our unique gift. Or curse. There are other camouflaging species. Compulsion is unique. How I feel about it…” She purses her lips. “I suppose my answer varies, day-by-day. Today, I despise it.”

“Majesties.” Vora waves her tablet in the air. “I think I have something for you. Sykora. Over here.”

“Thanks, Hyax,” Grant says, and returns the Brigadier’s salute as he finishes his circuit of the command deck at Vora’s position by the holoprojector. Sykora gives a final whisper of encouragement to Waian and joins him.

“The data forensics team and I have been prodding around in the caged instance she made for us,” Vora says. “Seeking patterns or inordinate events.”

“Is it safe to rattle that cage?” Sykora asks.

“It must be,” Vora says. “There’s no outbound connections from that terminal.” She slips her finger along her tablet and slides her notes onto the projector. “One thing we’ve looked at is repeated visitor logs. We’ve cross-referenced the name of the clerk who was supposedly active in 7-Thule at the time of the transmission. And every time he has been in the office, we’ve received an uptick in visits and communications from… here.”

Vora tilts a topographic map of Chassak onto the display, rotating it away from the college of clerks by a few kilometers.

“The closest settlement to the college,” she says. “It’s a temple village. Formed around the Sisterhood of the Omnidivine Temple at Chassak.”

“I wasn’t aware there was an Omnidivine Temple at Chassak,” Sykora says.

“It’s a quiet mission.” Vora zooms in to an unremarkable, brutalist structure with a jutting hexagonal steeple like an industrial smokestack. “Something of a punishment duty, I gather. A lot of its people transferred in after disciplinary records elsewhere or post-scandal. I’ve gone through the roster. On a hunch, I suppose. It’s not so large. But I looked up specifically any sister who hasn’t been in residence of late. And you’ll never guess who we found.”

A face appears, floating above Chassak’s holographic topology. A woman in the corded robe of an Omnidivine cleric, her hair plaited in a three-part braid, her face stern. Grant squints at it for a moment, trying to place the woman.

“This is Sister Sifka of Chassak,” Vora says. “Former cleric of the Omnidivine. Decidedly former. Look familiar?”

Grant realizes why she doesn’t look familiar to him. Last time he saw her, her head was shaved. And there was a bullet drilling between her eyes.

Sykora’s tail lashes. “That’s the whore who poisoned me.”

Grant squints into Sifka’s post-mortem glower. “Why would a nun be the whore who poisoned you?”

“I am quite eager to find out.” Sykora picks at the bright red sleeve encasing her tablet. “Waian. Fire up our orbit repulsors and put us above that temple.”

“Hmm?” Waian looks up from her console. “Uh. Sure. Yes. Pardon me, boss.” She slips past Grant and descends the stairs to the bridge.

Sykora steps to the balustrade and folds her hands behind her topcoat. The repulsors thrum to life, and Chassak’s mottled surface crawls on the main display. Its mossy light casts the chattering workers and glowing consoles of the bridge in a queasy pall.

“Fifteen minutes of orbital flight,” Waian calls from the depths. “Then we’re over the temple village.”

“Very good, Chief Engineer.” Sykora gestures for Hyax and murmurs in the Brigadier’s ear. Hyax nods, salutes, and unhooks her communicator.

Grant moves to his wife’s side. “What’d you tell her?”

“I told her…” She studies his face, seeking some hesitation, maybe. Newest update provided by novel⦿fire.net

He crouches down on the balls of his feet, eye-to-eye with those crimson pools. “It’s all right, Sykora.”

“I told her to ready a platoon,” Sykora says. “I told her we’re going to find the people who hurt my husband and slaughter them. And I can’t let you stop me, Grantyde.”

“I’m not here to stop you.” He watches his words crawl across her tablet. “I’m here to watch them burn.”