Lakai stands in her cockpit, beaming and soaking up the applause the crowd bathes them in. She hops onto her dusty wing and tosses her helmet to a hangar worker.

Grant keeps an eye on how she dismounts the skiff—outer handle like a stirrup, hop to the dust-covered wing, shimmy down and hop off. He really clambered getting into this thing; he’s hoping not to do the same on his way out of it, now that the platform is crowded with people.

The applause crests as he opens the fuselage; he summons a ripple of gasps when he straightens from the cramped cockpit and his subjects see how tall he is.

A group has gathered around the shivering, weatherbeaten men (and they’re all men) who fell from the ring. They accept steaming mugs of tea and encouraging pats on the back from their boiler-suited fellows.

Grant stretches the cramps from his legs and holds his hand out to their rescuer. “Really excellently done, Boro.”

The thickset pilot bows before he accepts the shake. “Thank you, Majesty.”

Grant scans the crowd for Wenzai or his wife. A polite cough steers his attention back to Boro. “Uh—Majesty.”

“Yeah?”

“I just wanted to say, uh.” Boro clears his throat. “I wanted to say that you are, uh, to me, and to the men of the Empire, many of them, that you are very, uh—that we had never imagined being ruled by a man. And that you are very inspiring, Majesty.”

Grant grins. “I’m just some guy, Boro.”

“So am I, Majesty,” Boro says. That’s why you are inspiring.”

Wenzai has seen him first and is jumping up and down in the crowd, waving her arms. The motion it inspires on her chest nearly makes one of her rescue workers collide with a support strut. “Majesty! Hey!”

Grant gives Boro a quick parting nod and steps his way through the underfoot crowd to the Countess. “Hey, Wen. What’s going on? Do we have any answers?”

“Your Chief Engineer is here.” Wenzai gestures to a walkway off the landing platform, along which a group of Korak workers are guiding one of the crumpled pillars of machinery. “I don’t know if it’ll be easy as well there’s your problem. But we’re hoping.”

***

“Yeah, now, see. There’s your problem.” Waian stands from the windwhipped and weatherbeaten condenser stack, laid on its side in the hangar like a beached leviathan’s carcass. Her tail threads through her belt loop and tugs her riding-up coveralls back down. “These attachment clips for the exo ring’s undercarriage here and here. See? They’re mismarked.”

Wenzai rubs her eyes. “Goddammit.”

“Mismarked?” Sykora squats by the stack. “How?”

“These are TU-45-65s pretending to be TU-45-85s,” Waian says. “And 65s are from before we had the tech to make our stacks as big as we do. Clamps like these, you’d have to use more of them to hold stacks the size you’re working with, and you have to handle them softer. And so these markers here—see them?” She points at a series of metal sheets bolted to the side of the frame, with a raised pattern across it. “You task a drone to a piece of equipment, they scan these things and use it to guide their programming. Here’s the one for the TUs.” She taps one in the third row. “They treated these 65s like the tougher, newer 85s, and rough-housed ‘em on the install, damaged them further. I’d take a look at all your stacks down the line. Might find more of these bunk ones.”

“Is this something that could have been an accident?” Grant asks.

“Could be.” Waian blows air out from between her lips. “Could be. I mean I can certainly see how a worker would mistake these when eyeballing. The differences are pretty subtle unless you tear the gearbox open. What I can’t see is how they’d go out the door with the wrong marker. They don’t even make 65s anymore. Haven’t for hectos.”

“I’ve dealt with incompetence,” Wenzai says. “I’m sure we all have. There is no reason the rest of these stacks would be up-to-date and these clamps would be the only exception. This does not feel like incompetence to me.”

“Sabotage?” Grant asks.

Wenzai puts her hands on her generous hips. “Sabotage, Majesty. Someone swapped either the clamps or the markers.”

“Mmm. Maybe.” Waian retrieves the basket of fritters she came down to the hangar with, cupping it carefully in her grease-and-dust stained gloves. “Maybe it’s just a fabricant that needs its license revoked. Someone fritter me.” She opens her mouth. Grant takes a fritter from the basket and sticks it in her mouth. “Thanks majesty,” she says, around it, and chews. “Where’d these come from?”

“The cantina,” Grant says. “Good, right?”

“Meant the busted gear, Majesty, but yeah.” Waian swallows. “Nicely citrus-y.”

“I’d need to inquire with the Baroness who sold me this particular stack,” Sykora says. “We went wide after our first supplier gouged us.”

Waian taps her lip. “Might explain it.”

“Surely you’re not about to blame me, chief engineer.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Waian chuckles. “Look, I’ll tell you what. I’ll run these serials and see what comes up, though I wouldn’t trust what we get. You sabotage a marker, you can certainly sabotage a serial. Still, though.” She dusts her gloves off on the leg of her coverall. “Place to start, right? I take the back end, you take the front end.”

Sykora’s dark brows gather. “What do you mean, chief?”

“Gotta look at your gals, Majesty,” Waian says. “This could be an honest mistake from your workers. I can believe that, like I said. You’re hour six of your shift, you peep the label, the label tells you this is a TU-45-85, you’ve put about a thousand of these in place today already? You hook it onto a drone and send it down. So it’s an accident, or it’s a manufacturing defect… or one of your gals is the gal who switched in the bogus marker.”

----------------------------------------

Aokan of Lilek flicks his cigarette to the ground and grinds it out with his heel. The marine at his back nudges him forward into the prefab construction office where the Prince and Princess of the Pike await him at a plastic table, with Wenzai standing in the paper-cluttered corner behind them.

“Majesties.” He bows. “Hello again.”

“Good afternoon, Aokan.” Grant indicates the folding chair on the other side of the table. “Have a seat.”

Aokan winches the seat downward into maleborn configuration and settles into it.

“I presume you’ve guessed why we’ve called you,” Sykora says. Aokan shrugs.

The marine at the door—Agra, if Grant recalls correctly—pokes her head in. “Majesty, there’s someone—”

“I am his union representative and his owner.” Corska Ondai’s voice, brusque and insistent. “I have double the reason to be here.”

Sykora sighs. “Let her in, Gefreiter.”

Corska strides into the room and stands beside her indentured colleague. “What have you said?”

“We only just began,” Grant says. “We have questions for Aokan about the last shift he worked, before the accident.”

“You won’t believe me until you compel me.” Aokan drums his fingers on the table. “Let’s get to it and save ourselves time.”

“Is that consent to questioning?” Sykora asks.

“Consent?” Aokan holds up his black-banded wrist. “I’m property. Do what you gotta do.”

Sykora exchanges a look with her husband. “Go on,” Grant says.

She turns back to Aokan. Her eyes flash. “Answer my questions honestly.”

Aokan’s eyes stare dispassionately back. “I will.”

“Did you witness anything unusual about your shift?”

“Tarro wasn’t talkative like he usually is, but that’s because his husband is angry at him. Our shift manager was playing Eqtoran music today instead of her usual strala-jams.”

“Anything off about the equipment?”

“The drones took longer than usual to install today’s stacks. We put it down to the high wind speed; their repulsors were working harder to compensate.”

“Did you sabotage the exo ring, Aokan?”

“I didn’t.”

“Do you have knowledge of who sabotaged the exo ring?”

“I don’t.”

“That’s not enough, Majesty.” Wenzai detaches from the wall. “The way a syndicate uses a footsoldier is that they willingly get their memories wiped before and after their mission. That’s why we never caught Aokan’s compatriots last time. It’s possible he did it and then got it flashed right out of him.”

“Would you be willing to do something like that, Aokan?” Sykora says. “If asked?”

“Yes,” Aokan says. “I would.”

“Of course he would,” Wenzai says. “He’s Corska’s. We oughta shove him back in that cell.”

Aokan shrugs.

“Thought is not crime, Countess.” Corska’s tail stiffens. “This is conjecture.”

“Maybe she compelled Aokan and made him forget,” Wenzai says. “Or maybe she got someone else in the union to do this. Or maybe it isn’t even Ondai, but I refuse to accept this was an accident.”

“Wenzai,” Grant says. “Can you excuse us?”

“I’m telling you it was sabotage, Majesty. I know it sounds like an excuse. I know it does. But I wouldn’t mess up like this. Not on something like this. Please believe me. This project is—it’s—this is my children’s future. I wouldn’t—”

“I know, Wen. I promise I know.” Grant turns in his seat and puts a hand on the babbling Countess’s shoulder. “Just give me and Sykora a few minutes. It’s not about you.”

Wenzai catches her breath. A blush creeps across her face. “All right.”

“You may leave as well, Aokan of Lilek,” Sykora says. “We’re finished for now. Gefreiter Agra will escort you to your quarters.”

“Off I go, then.” Aokan stands up and bows. “Majesties.”

“So.” Corska tilts her head as the door clicks shut and she’s left alone with the royal couple. “Do you believe her?”

“Do I believe her about what?” Grant asks.

Corska winches the seat up and perches in it. “That I sabotaged you.”

“I believe,” Grant says, “that this is the second thing that went haywire out of nowhere.”

Corska puts on a grave face. “I understand entirely, Majesty. And I’m not disagreeing. It seems odd. I’m eager to assist you in whatever capacity.”

“I’m not sure you do understand,” Grant says. “I’m going to ask you, and please be honest with me: do you suspect actors within your union were behind this?”

Corska shakes her head. “I surely don’t, Majesty.”

“And the price gouging,” Grant says. “The moment where you and the Ptolek coterie raised them at the same time. Was that coordinated? Were you asked to do that?”

“I’m not sure what you mean, Majesty.” Corska purses her lips. “I don’t have insight into the workings of the nobility.”

“So you were risking the union losing out on its biggest contract in the Black Pike sector,” Grantyde says. “Risking it, without anyone waiting in the wings to make you whole if your hardball dealings lost you placement. Is that right?”

Corska’s eyes narrow. “That sounds like an accusation to me, Majesty.”

“I’m afraid it does to me, too, Representative.” Grant’s hand finds Sykora’s under the table and taps it twice.

His wife pushes her chair out. “I’ll return presently.”

Corska watches Sykora step out of the office. The union representative’s ears twitch with a suppressed urge to lie flat.

“Do you know something I find really beautiful about the Taiikari?” Grant says.

Corska glances away from the shutting door. “I have a few guesses.”

“I’m not talking about visually. One of the first Taiikari I ever met outside of the Pike was Garuna. Former Governess of Ptolek. You remember her, I’m sure.”

“Hard to forget.” Corska taps her chest, over the blue sash lying over it. “I can still feel some phantom bruises from some of those beanbag rounds her people fired at me.”

“You know what happened to her?

“Reassigned to a world on the rim, yes? Mineral extraction.”

“That’s right,” Grant says. “Still a Governess, but a huge step down. I checked in on her recently. Curious how she was doing. She’s living in a sad little prefab on her new planet, eating nootch and tromping around in a vacsuit to pinch pennies on her arcology buildouts. I wondered why.”

“You feel sorry for her?”

Grant wiggles his hand uncertainly. “I don’t know about that. She was a real hornsnapper.”

“She was.”

“But I looked into her funds. Her clan contributions haven’t changed. That’s why she’s living like this. It all goes back to her clan. Her mother’s still on Ptolek. In a very nice bungalow. I asked Sykora why—whether her family might have dirt on her, or something—and she told me, Garuna was always loyal. Just to the wrong people.”

Corska settles back into her seat. There’s a searching expression on her face.

“I saw the car you picked Aokan up in,” Grant says. “The union bosses on Maekyon, they have some nice cars. Yours is sort of a rustbucket, huh?”

“It gets the job done.” Corska threads her fingers together on the bumpy plastic table. “That’s all I can ask.”

“My wife is always talking about the loyalty the Taiikari have,” Grant says. “In my dealings with the peerage, I sort of thought she was blowing smoke.”

“What does that mean, Majesty?”

“Making shit up.”

“Ah.”

“I’ve seen corruption, piracy, murder... all the evil things that Maekyonites do, too, often out of selfishness. But I’ve come to understand that the Taiikari my wife and I have dealt with, even the ones who have done horrible things, weren’t selfish. Or even disloyal. They had a co-opted

loyalty. A loyalty to someone or something that supersedes the Empress. I admire that, even when it leads to crisis. I admire it very much. You love your union, right?”

“I wouldn’t be good at my job if I didn’t.”

“More than you love your Princess,” he says. “More than you love the Empress, even.”

Corska doesn’t respond.

Behind her head, the infrascope painter/camera array on the wall stops its slow automatic turn.

“I get that,” he continues. “I do. Hell, to be honest with you, I love Sykora more than I love the Empress. A lot more. That’s why I need to have this talk with you.”

Sykora re-enters the room quietly with a pair of water bottles. She slides one to Grant and offers the other to Corska, who murmurs “No thank you,” without taking her eyes off Grant’s.

“I’m the one who said we’d play ball with you.” Grant cracks the lid of his bottle. “I believe it’s the perfect time and place to strike at my wife. A place where she’s emotionally and financially compromised. And I can’t let that happen. If you have back-bitten us, it’s on me. My naivety. And so I really, really, really want to trust you.”

Corska gives him a thin smile. “I want that as well, Majesty.”

“Good.” Grant smiles back. “That’s good. But it means I have to do something I really don’t want to.”

“Now,” Sykora says.

A pale flash whips out from behind her back. A syringe held in an invisible hand.

Corska lets out a sudden, choked cry of surprise and lashes backward; her arm is caught and twisted around to her back. Her neck cranes. The floating needle jams into it.

Hyax of the Black Pike phases into view, her scarred, brawny arms locked around Corska’s face in a crushing headlock.

Her eyes flash. “Sit. Stay.”

Corska thumps back down into her seat, still gripped by the Brigadier. “What the fuck.” Her eyes widen with terror. “What the—”

“Quiet,” Hyax says. Her eyes flash. “Only speak to answer questions.”

Corska exhales a croaking sigh. Her mouth hangs open. Hyax releases her stupefied victim and steps to one side with a bow. “Majesties.”

Sykora salutes. “Thank you, Brigadier.”

Hyax salutes back. Grant gets a brief eyeful of the Brigadier’s body—pale, scar-crossed skin and the carved, sleek muscle of an ambush predator. Then she melts from view again.

Sykora leans across the table. Her eyes flash. “Answer my questions honestly. Do you understand?”

Corska nods dumbly. The door opens and shuts behind her as Hyax departs.

“Did you compel Aokan to sabotage the exo ring?” Sykora pockets the emptied applicator. “Answer.”

“No,” Corska says, raspy and stricken.

Grant’s wife puts her hand in his. “Do you have knowledge of who sabotaged the exo ring?”

“Nuh. No.”

“Okay.” Sykora frowns. “So she’s not our culprit.”

“Not for this,” Grantyde says. “Ask her about the manipulation. That pre-fold clusterfuck.”

Sykora flashes Corska again for good measure. “Did you knowingly work with members of the Ptolek coterie to financially imperil this endeavor?”

“Yy. Yes.”

Grant sees the chain reaction of fury start across Sykora’s face. He tries to snuff it before it detonates: “We should ask her if she has any intention of doing something like that again.”

“Even if she says that—”

“I know, hon. I know we’ll have to watch her. But it happened before I met her and laid out the ground rules. She hasn’t betrayed us since. I’m not ready to dump her and the union over this. Ask her what her plans are for this planet.”

Sykora removes the circlet from her head and fiddles with its platinum braid. Flash. “Tell me your intent with Qarnaq.”

“To make it a union stronghold,” Corska says. “To ensure that every refiner on this planet is a proud member.”

“Do you intend to betray my husband to do this?”

“Not—” Corska’s eyes flutter like she’s seizing. “Not unless I have to.”

“There you go.” Grant folds his arms. “She’s gonna be annoying as hell and combative at times. She already has been. Twisted my tail on cantina service. You should see some of the stuff we added to the menu. But I can work with her. I want to work with her.”

“Why?”

“There’s a Maekyon saying. The devil you know beats the devil you don’t. And I know this kind of devil.” Grant meets Corska’s wide, flickering gaze. “It’s just that she doesn’t know me yet.”

“There are other devils to introduce ourselves to, I think.” Sykora leans into Ondai’s face. “Who in the coterie did you conspire with during the price-gouging affair?”

“Nnn.” Corska’s mouth twitches grotesquely. “Narika of the Glory Banner.”