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  “I see,” Sediryl managed. She fisted her hand, shrinking the map until she could see just how large the Empire loomed in relation to the Alliance. Her own homeworld was lost against those two titans… barely a gleam in the bottom right. “Well. We have work to do, Maia-alet. I think it’s time we were about it. Will you prepare us for departure?”

  “Alet,” Maia said, bowing her glowing head, and vanished.

  That left Sediryl to tow her luggage into the suite and begin unpacking. Who had used this vessel last, she wondered? Liolesa herself? Or some other Eldritch whose secrets Liolesa had kept?

  Did it matter? Those Eldritch had obviously come home in one piece, if they’d managed to bring the ship back. Not only that, but unless Sediryl had completely misheard the subtext in the Queen’s message, those Eldritch had known how to pilot this ship themselves.

  She should learn. Learn, and come back one day having built on the legacy of those unknown women and men with stories of how she’d played a part in the salvation of three nations. There was no other outcome possible.

  The male who had once been Logistics-East was not overseeing the court dinner; or at least, not paying attention to it. He was sitting on its most rarified pillow, certainly, but his thoughts were distant, as they had been every day since he’d claimed the throne.

  Tonight, he was distracted by the problem of titles. Particularly his own.

  The male had not expected to find the multiplicity of his titles troublesome because he hadn’t expected to have a multiplicity of titles. He had been Logistics-East. Now he was the Emperor. And while he’d read the references to himself as the Usurper—always levied against him by anonymous Chatcaava on the Empire’s computer network skein—no one had yet dared call him that to his face.

  By all proper Chatcaavan standards, he should consider himself the Emperor. Somehow, though, he continued to think of himself as Logistics-East. And now and then, in his least disciplined moments, he found himself admitting “Usurper” was more satisfying than either of his other titles. He liked its implications: abrupt and violent, like a cauterization. He had amputated a diseased limb from the Empire, like a male Outside.

  Sometimes he found himself thinking of himself that way, as a male Outside. The males Inside were so… emotional. He found their irrationality frustrating. Did they not understand that allowing their reactions to drive them was unproductive? He himself was not subject to such drives. He knew better.

  The Usurper. The Usurper-Surgeon? He pondered permutations. Perhaps he had not settled on a title because none of them was the right title.

  “Do I find you brooding?” Second asked, draping himself on the pillow alongside him. “Look about you, Emperor, and see your subjects. They dine in orderly obedience, just as you decree.”

  The Usurper—that would do for now—glanced at the males sitting at the tables, ignoring the high table and talking in subdued murmurs. He found the custom of eating on the field outside the palace distasteful. Unhygienic. Who had originated the practice? Perhaps he should amputate it as well. “It is the least of what is required of them. You are tardy, Second.”

  “Speaking to the Lord of the Twelveworld, who is halfway back to his homeworld now. He should be back within a month with his fleet.”

  None of which interested Logistics-East at all, and he could think of himself as that title while remembering his duties as the military administrator of the Empire’s most industrialized quadrant. He didn’t care about the war he’d promised the Navy in return for their support in his bid for the throne. Second, who’d been Command-East, the fighting head of the eastern quadrant, did care, though, which is why the Usurper had left it in his hands. Still, he didn’t want the Navy losing. At least, not to the freaks. So he said, “I presume he made the journey because there’s some personal business he needs to arrange with those pirates of his.”

  “So he says.” Second leaned forward, plucked a strip of spicereed off his plate, chewed on it idly. “Apparently it was not much effort for him to induce the pirates to attack. What does require negotiation is inspiring them to dedicate enough effort to those attacks to make the wingless freaks nervous.” Second snorted. “Apparently the aliens are so spineless they ignore a great deal of lawless activity. The threshold at which they are willing to commit their militaries to the pruning back of piracy is ridiculously high. And then they throw everything at them. Presumably because they fear to lose.”

  Logistics-East eyed him. “This sounds like underestimation of the foe. I hope we are not being so stupid as to assume that because they are freaks they can’t actually fight.”

  Second snorted. “Be reasonable, huntbrother. It doesn’t matter how hard they fight. They’re going to lose. They don’t have the ships to meet us in battle alone. Us and pirates who have been stealing their own warships from them for years?” He shook his head, eyes narrowing and lips pulling back from his teeth. “They’ll divide their attention and die. They’ll have to; their own people will demand it of them. They aren’t like us. When one dies, they all wail for help.” When the Usurper didn’t respond, Second eyed him. “You’ve seen the numbers. You know I’m right.”

  He had seen the numbers. He even agreed with Second’s assessment. But he couldn’t help his nature, which was to plan for contingencies, and to see the seeds of the worst scenarios germinating in every situation. It was why he’d succeeded thus far, and he had no intention of devolving into complacency now. “So long as we remain vigilant.”

  “We shall. And to prove it to you, I have a plan to advance to you. One that will net you something you’ve been seeking for months now.”

  The Usurper cocked his head, skeptical. “This should be good. Go on. Huntbrother.”

  Second grinned, unoffended, and bit off the end of the spicereed. “How about a way to catch that Eldritch you wanted?”

  The Usurper stiffened.

  “Ah, you see? I do listen.” Tapping the edge of his plate with a claw, Second said, “The ridiculous plan the Slave Queen perpetrated to free her little confederates. The ones we didn’t want anyway. It occurred to me that she had to have aid, yes? And who was her special friend while she was here?”

  “The Emperor’s pet freak,” the Usurper hissed.

  “The former Emperor’s pet freak, yes,” Second said. “Who will no doubt be waiting for her wherever she’s supposed to have gone. I’ve found one of the traitors who helped smuggle out one of the groups and questioned him. He didn’t tell me everything, but enough to know where to hunt. We need only send a few ships out to wait and we will catch you an Eldritch of your very own.”

  The Usurper said nothing. He touched a hand to his chest with a frown, wondering why his heart had chosen this moment to beat erratically. He’d been curious about the creature that had ensnared the interest of the Emperor—former Emperor—enough that he’d sent some hunters to catch one, but all they’d brought him were frustrating reports of how well guarded those particular freaks were. His only promising lead had reported significant contact with an Eldritch willing to betray his people to the Chatcaava, but that male had vanished and the Usurper hadn’t heard from him since.

  The longer he went without owning one of these mysterious aliens, the more he wanted to understand their mystique. But as much as he wanted to examine one for himself, he wasn’t sure he wanted the Emperor’s particular Eldritch. What magic did that freak command to have corrupted a Chatcaavan as powerful as the male the Usurper had deposed?

  And yet, he had deposed the former Emperor, hadn’t he? As long as he was careful….

  “We have had a warrant out for that particular individual,” Second said casually. “And almost caught him on his way back to the freaks’ part of space. It was… embarrassing.”

  “And you want to be the one to bring him to heel, is that it?” The Usurper managed a thin smile. “Why not, then? Let’s see if your plan works.”

  “It will,” Second said confidently. Gazing out over the court, he
said, casual, “It’s a pity your predecessor won’t ever know that his precious pet alien died here at your hand.”

  The Usurper laughed. “Him? No. I imagine he’s not in a position to know anything ever again.”

  “Poor former Emperor,” Second said with a smirk. “Made friends with the freaks in time for them to teach him to trust. He should have known better.”

  The Usurper lifted his jeweled cup. “Everyone has a price.”

  “So they do.” Second toasted him. “To the demise of the former Emperor. May he live long enough to know himself betrayed.”

  “Or not,” the Usurper said. “The end is the same, and the end is all I care about.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was a piece of arrogance that saw him here. The Emperor leaned back in his chair, pressing the arch of his foot against the desk’s edge as he watched the stars streak through the window of the flagship’s stateroom. The sectors lining the Empire’s border with the Alliance belonged to the Lord of the Marchward Flight, a male who’d been staring spinward at the riches of the freaks for longer than the Emperor had sat astride the Thorn Throne. But was that male honest about his avarice? No. He’d waited for the court to show signs of dissatisfaction, and then reported that the sector furthest from the throneworld had become mysteriously subject to rebellion, one the Lord of the Marchward Flight said was being fomented by encroaching neighbors.

  It was a ridiculous fiction, as thin as tissue, and no real male would have resorted to it. Had he been worth his horns, the Lord of the Marchward Flight would have taken the adjacent sectors himself long ago. Instead, he would wait for the Emperor to pacify them—by destroying their system navies—and then sail in on the Emperor’s vortices to annex them without a fight.

  It was efficient, certainly. But it showed a pettiness of spirit that suited a male who had learned to make deals with pirates from the Lord of the Twelveworld. Both the Twelveworld Lord and Third evinced the same flawed mettle. That was what came of negotiating with lawless bandit freaks. To believe this was, the Emperor was almost entirely sure, a Chatcaavan thought, even if he knew the Ambassador would have agreed with it.

  Despite the genesis of his current errand, however, it suited the Emperor’s purpose to be here. There would be no holding the Empire together if he did not show it a strong hand now, and for that he needed not only these demonstrations of power, but to replace the ministers he’d been forced to kill at the court with a team at least as qualified. Not difficult, in Third’s case, but incredibly so in Second’s. His prior Second had been a male of rare loyalty, competence, and experience, and the Emperor regretted the necessity that had driven them to their lethal duel. The only male he thought capable of assuming Second’s title was Command-East, who had served with him for years in the Navy.

  Which was the problem. The court, composed as it was mostly of system lords, already despised the Emperor for rising out of the ranks of the Navy. Appointing another military male into the most coveted position in the administration was going to threaten the stability the Emperor had imposed on the court with his bloody execution of Second-that-was.

  He’d warned Command-East when offering him the new title that he would see at least one attempt at a coup while the Emperor was gone. That was all he’d given his newest appointee… and it was more than he should have. There was no choosing a new Second without evaluating his ability to meet the role’s challenges. Traditionally such trials involved duels against the Emperor, or his chosen tools; most males who served in the role of Second would have come up through the court’s ranks over the course of years.

  The Emperor thought leaving Command-East on the throneworld with a restive court that despised him would demand far more from him than any more traditional path. It would be a true test, not just of the male’s prowess with claw and teeth, but of his administrative and political acumen, his diplomacy, his discretion, his foresight. But they’d hunted together in the past, and there was a history there that deserved acknowledgment. One warning, then: that was all. If the Emperor returned to an obedient court, the Empire would have its new Second. If he didn’t… the male who’d been Command-East would have to die, if he hadn’t already been slain by their rivals.

  The Emperor would never have left the Queen on the throneworld if he’d believed Command-East would fail. But the form had to be observed. So he was here, on a ship on his way to chase down the Lord of the Marchward Flight’s too-convenient rebellion, where he had to be, because change would never come to the Empire through edict and proclamation and law. It had to come, raging and screaming and bleeding, because they were Chatcaava, and they had been trapped in this one shape too long to remember how to break free of it.

  He missed her. He allowed himself to think it, and then dismissed memory and longing.

  He missed him, also. That he thought even less on.

  The computer hissed, opened a channel. “Exalted?”

  The Emperor sat up, wings stretching behind him for balance. “Yes?”

  “We have arrived at Apex-East. Our ETA to Naval-East is four hours.”

  “Understood.”

  Four hours ride in-system, there to rendezvous with the fleet he would take with him to quash the Marchward Flight’s dissidents. The Emperor pushed himself upright and stalked to his chambers to prepare.

  The bridges of most Chatcaavan vessels were cramped and narrow cones that recalled the cockpits of the fighters they preferred to fly. The flagship’s bridge was an exception. Its ship class, devoted to the strategic oversight of battles complicated by the carriers they accompanied, was almost entirely administrative, with space for sophisticated detection and imaging systems. Those systems were a-blaze with lights when the Emperor joined the Admiral-Offense at the back of the flagship’s bridge. Apex-East was the central hub for the entire eastern quadrant of the Empire—the most industrialized and developed quadrant—and its naval base was the oldest, largest, and busiest of the Chatcaava’s military installations. The mooring lights of hundreds of carriers glittered around the base like a caul of stars, occluded by the passage of asteroids in the belt where the station had been anchored. Mining vessels stitched seams of light between those asteroids and the manufacturing platforms and drydocks that proliferated near the base; and the single habitable world, while technically in the possession of a system lord, was functionally a naval stronghold after years of close relations with the base. The orbital station and moonbase there provided training and extra factory capacity, and the world itself served as an idyllic refuge for overworked officers in need of fresh food and a sky to fly in. The volume of traffic entering and leaving Apex-East was so dense it was overseen by an entirely separate network of platforms and stations.

  This system was one of the Empire’s treasures, all the more gratifying because the Emperor himself had once been based here, had made many allies among its administrators and officers, knew them personally. Naval-East was the heart of the Navy, and the Navy had led the Emperor to the Thorn Throne. Even after he’d claimed the Emperor’s tower, he’d considered this place home. In some ways, he thought, it always would be.

  “It’s good to see it, isn’t it?” the Admiral-Offense said.

  The Emperor came to stand alongside him, refolding his armored wings and tucking them close despite the size of the room. Military habits died hard, like the males who learned them. “It remains the best of what we are.”

  “We’ve identified ourselves, though of course they knew who we were the moment we came in-system. We’re expected.”

  The Emperor said, “And our fleet?”

  “Already assembled near our departure arc. We are rising that way now, in accordance with traffic control’s directives.”

  “All the ships we expected?”

  “Yes. Twenty-five carriers with supporting screens—not one of them missing.” Admiral-Offense grinned then, a humorless flare of teeth. “I see that more often now that I accompany the Emperor on his missions. I recall it bein
g less of a certitude when we bore other titles.”

  “There are advantages to being what we are,” the Emperor observed, amused.

  “There are.” The other male shook back the neat club of his mane. “I admit I think back to the days when the fights were harder won, and miss them.”

  “We would not be what we are if we didn’t.”

  “No,” Admiral-Offense said. “I am getting old, though.”

  The Emperor glanced at him, arch. The other male was only two decades the Emperor’s senior, still in his prime: fierce, with a heavy frame that lent itself to punishing tackles, and an axe-slope head associated with battle prowess. He still had almost all his horns, though his light gray hide was seamed with scars where it was visible above the collar of his Naval body-armor. He had not risen to the title that permitted him to command an Empire’s primary active fleet without a survivor’s spirit.

  “You are surprised?” the other male said. He rolled his shoulders, wings flexing with a rustle that reminded the Emperor suddenly of his prior Second’s. “Well. So am I. I never expected to live this long.”

  “And having lived this long, do you suddenly wish to continue?”

  Admiral-Offense snorted. “Ridiculous question, Exalted. If I may be bold. The living do not, by nature, seek death. Say what you mean.”

  “Which is?”

  “You ask if I would avoid conflict to preserve my life,” the male said.

  “Would you?”

  “You know the answer to that.”

  The Emperor smiled a little, eyes narrowed.

  “You see? You wouldn’t be standing here if you didn’t.” The Admiral-Offense shook out his wings, making the light play down the force field projected by the armored arches over the wing-arms. “Sometimes I think you have been at court too long, Exalted.”

  “I am what I must be,” the Emperor murmured.

  “That also,” the Admiral-Offense said. “But a male grows complex who deals with courts and nations. You are what you must be, but I would not be you.” He canted his head. “Do you miss the simplicity of this life?”