NOVPUBOn the first day:
The comet streaks across the crushed-velvet sky above Reueq, the largest landmass on Eqtora. It craters into the Southern Ice Sheet. Its flames boil the frigid ocean beneath. Its passage is marked by a sparsely populated meteorological outpost, manned by a husband, wife, and their keeper. The throuple’s instruments tell them the impossible.
They pile breathlessly from their skidship at the site of the crash. They’ve been beaten, to the great wound in the ice, by a hunting party from the Nuktal Ocean tribe, whose divers are folding their frigid wetsuits by the radiator wagon.
“Did you find it?” The husband worries his fleece cap in his mitts. “Do you know what it is?”
“We did.” The scarred lead diver is sitting with his dorsal sweating before the iron grille of the radiator. “And we don’t.”
***
Grant knows when he’s about to make a blunder at Gravitas because his otherwise entirely po-faced wife’s tail wags before he puts the piece down. When she realizes the cue he’s using, she insists on tying her tail around her waist. Grant is far from competitive, but he challenges her to an immediate rematch so he can see the face she makes when she wins again.
“It’s a bunch of hurry up and wait,” Sykora explains. “And we’re far enough away from the quantum pylons and the comm lanes that nobody but the most determined bureaucrats can bother me. For the next tenday, the itinerary is monitoring the Eqtoran reaction to our little catspaw, making love to my husband, and kicking his adorable ass at Gravitas.”
Grant rubs the carved ivory of his mercenary carrier as he searches in vain for a move that won’t give ground. “I’m feeling good about my chances this time.”
Sykora sits cross-legged and perky in her nest chair, her voluminous silk robe pooling around her. She tilts her head. “You’re not going easy on me, Grantyde, are you?”
“Am I really that terrible?”
“You’re an excessively kind man. I wanted to make sure.”
“Untie that tail. I need a handicap.”
***
On the second day:
A small city of tents and government skidships encircle the impact site. The Nuktal Ocean tribe is forcefully ushered from their hunting ground. Its elders lodge a terse complaint with their Councilor, who’s vociferous in her complaints to the Security Commission—vociferous enough that they show her the thing they found under the ice, and tell her what they think it is.
That evening, she informs the Nuktal that there is nothing she can do. No video call. She doesn’t trust herself enough to keep her fringe from trembling.
***
Quartermaster Kymai watches fretfully over Grant’s shoulder (or, well, under it, thanks to the heights involved) as the Prince investigates the vast food stores in the Agro larder. He concludes that Anakvanai Peppers are close enough to jalapeños for his purposes.
“Make sure you de-seed those carefully,” Kymai says, and hastily adds “Majesty.”
Grant brings his bacon-wrapped chile rellenos to the next command group meeting. The Black Pike’s rulers review the intercepted pundit recordings to determine which news stations will be most amenable to Taiikari doctrine, and have their first taste of Maekyonite cuisine.
Vora gazes with awe at the melty pull of cheese that ascends with her fork. “There’s so much cheese in this, Majesty.”
“Is it really all that much?” Grant scoops a portion off the filigreed silver serving tray the quartermaster insisted on. “Kymai looked at me like I was a madman while I was stuffing them.”
Vora takes a bite. Her tail wags. “It’s not a complaint. You’re expanding my mind.”
“If you’re gonna let a Maekyonite rule this boat,” he says, “you guys had better get used to a lot more melted cheese.”
“I need us to do a Maekyonite night every tenday if this is how you people eat.” Waian spoons filling onto a slice of pepper. “Fuck me, that’s tasty.”
“I wish I knew enough Maekyon recipes to make that workable, Chief Engineer. These and sloppy joes are kind of my two tricks.”
Waian nudges Sykora. “We shoulda stolen a cookbook when you swiped that guitar.”
Sykora raises her hand. “A sloppy joe?”
“I’ll make those next.”
Vora titters. “Do we want to know what a Joe is?”
“A Joe is a guy. It’s a Maekyonite name.”
“Is he particularly sloppy?” Sykora asks.
“Infamously so.” Grant nods gravely. “He was the sloppiest Maekyonite to ever live. We write about him in our history books and speak his name in hushed tones.”
Hyax has been eating in stolid, hurried silence. Sykora elbows her. “You like my husband’s cooking, Brigadier?”
“It’s all right,” Hyax says, around a mouthful of ground meat and pepper.
“All right.” Sykora titters. “That’s her third, Grantyde.”
***
On the third day:
The Security Commission presents its findings to the Central Conclave of Fifty.
“The probe’s been retrieved, deconstructed, diagrammed.” The trembling keeper advances the slide. “Its nature is unmistakable. The jaunt mechanism aboard—it’s past anything we’ve ever built. It uses materials we lack names for.”
Councillor Teqya clears her throat. “You’re telling us it’s alien.”
“Uh—” the keeper cycles the slideshow forward. “There are a few explanations we’re ranking in order of likelihood, but—”
“Yes, Councillor. This is alien. There is an extraterrestrial race whose spacefaring mechanization makes our grandest vessels as impressive technologically as harpoons and hake-nets. We are not alone, siblings.” The project lead presses her shaking hands together and interlaces them in prayer. “Gods be merciful. Eqt keep us. We are not alone.”
Some of them pray. Some weep. Some already are engaged in whispered conference, on the close and crumbling edge of panic. The extant procedures for a revelation such as this are unsealed and judged, and found deficient. It’s one thing to idly imagine science-fiction invasions and first contacts. It’s another to stare at the singed, twisted proof.
***
Grant kisses the nape of his wife’s neck and rolls off her. Her ears twitch as she lays gasping in the memory-foam dent he pounded her into.
He scoops Sykora off her stomach and spoons her into his arms. “C’mere.”
She gives a weak, overwhelmed hum in reply. Her tail wags exhaustedly to the rhythm of her blown out lungs.
He brushes a few strands of her mane from his face. “Your hair’s so long, Batty.”
“Your hair’s long,” she mumbles.
He nuzzles into her neck. “Have you always had it like this?” he asks.
She sighs her exhalations steady again. “I wore it long, but never quite this long. It reached my waist during my stay on Maekyon.”
“You want to cut it?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She stretches smugly and burrows her blue butt further into the crook of Grant’s midsection. “I like it like this, I think.”
“I do, too.”
They lay together and watch the firmament drift by. He watches his satisfied wife’s horns gradually retract, until they’re just peeking out from her hair. A minute of deep-breathing recovery and Sykora twists around to give Grant that adorable puppy-dog face she has when she’s waiting for him to kiss her. He obliges.
“You’re doing so much better on the bows, dove,” she murmurs into his neck.
“I’m doing better at pretending, anyway,” he says.
“That’s the first step.”
“But I’m not really a Prince, yet, right? There’s paperwork to do. And approval from the Core.”
“I don’t give a toss about the Core. And neither does the Pike. They’ve always been ready to accept you.” She brushes his lengthening hair behind his ear. “All you ever had to do was accept them.”
***
On the fourth day:
The next to know are the generals. In the Highhall’s briefing room, surrounded by hanging, burnished astrodon bones, they clutch their pelt cloaks and stare with muted, fringewilted shock as the cobbled-together team of researchers present the latest version of their much-revised analysis.
“What if they’re hostile?” A temple militant rubs his jowled chin. “What if their weaponry is as advanced as this jaunt engine?”
Commander-councillor Quniag’s palms are flat on the table in front of her.
“Then we lose,” she says.
***
Grant finally convinces Waian to jam with him in the Princess’s cabin. The Chief Engineer brings with her a two-stringed acoustic instrument she calls a strala, whose ambiguous tuning and airy reverberations remind him of Chinese opera. She plays it with a happy-go-lucky jauntiness at odds with its haunting timbre, slapping her thumb into it like a clawhammer banjo to accompany Grant’s fingerpicking cascades.
“You’ve been holding out on me, Chief Engineer,” Grant says, as her strala’s wolf-call song slips through his strums. “How’d I have to find out you play from Sykora?”
“I don’t exactly advertise it. Be honest with you, it’s a little bit cheating with the hand. I can just program sequences into it if I need to.” She holds her bionic hand up on the strala’s neck; its joints click as it forms intricate musical shapes in the air, sending an arpeggio across the Strala’s strings. “Y’see?”
“Hey. The crowd doesn’t care where the tunes come from, you know. My dad’s favorite band never actually played live. Just stood in front of the speakers and pretended.” Grant absentmindedly travis-picks along a bluesy chord progression.
Waian tilts her head as he finishes the phrase. “What’s that one called?”
“I dunno. Just jamming.”
Waian blows out an unbelieving scoff. “You’re improvising, boss?”
“Yeah.”
“Fuckin’ hell. Sykora said you were good but I thought that was just her being dewy-eyed over her new husband.” She examines Grant’s fingers against the strings. “You are really goddamn good, Prince.”
“You and Her Majesty are going to give me a swollen head.”
“A what?”
“Uh—big ego.”
“Well, this is coming from someone who hasn’t rode the Maekyonite Meat Express. So you know I’m not just honing your horns.” Waian follows his melody with faltering experimentation. “Maybe you’re a dabbler on Maekyon. But that means Maekyon has some incredible musicians.”
“Huh.” Grant plucks a slide down his D string. “Guess it’s just something the species is good at.”
“Big hunks, good music, an entirely cheese-based cuisine.” Waian clucks her tongue and shakes her head. “You sure you don’t wanna just cut us loose on Maekyon? I think our species would have a real good time with each other.”
Grant chuckles. “I think I pass.”
“I reckon there’s more than a few Maekyonite men who’d be very upset with you if they knew you were the only thing keeping them from arranged marriages to horny little Taiikari wives.”
“Entirely possible, Chief Engineer.” Grant stops chording in favor of twiddly little pentatonic runs. “Someone has to think of the Maekyonite women, right?”
“Hey, now.” Waian wags a mechanical finger. “Don’t underestimate Taiikari boys. We ladies are built to take a good hard dicking for a reason, y’know.”
“Do you have a husband or a boyfriend or anything?”
“Nope.” Waian taps her knuckle on her instrument’s crossbar. “I got about two-score fuckbuddies, though. When we’re done here, I’ve got a date with a couple of marines to take turns on me.”
Grant chuffs a laugh. “I can never tell when you’re joking.”
“What, just cause I’m old enough to be your grandma?” Waian wiggles her brows. “That’s a little something called seasoning, Majesty.”
***
On the fifth day:
The council of 200 are given a limited version of the truth. The nearly intact probe from another world becomes an object of interest. Doubt and discretion, the constant friends of the temple, now wielded against its members.
The savvy read between the lines. Whispered calls are made. Contingencies are constructed.
Grant and Sykora finish their first full dance sequence without a single mistake. The Princess screams in warrior triumph and tumbles into her husband’s arms. Vora and Oryn whistle and applaud.
***
On the seventh day:
A hack journalist publishes the first They’re Here article, in a seal-whispering rag on Harok. Sensationalist stuff. No need to move on it.
The eighth day is when the story first appears, uncredited, in the Reueq Advocate. They find the writer and disappear him. In the echoing catacombs beneath the Highhall they try to terrify a name out of him. But he’s still and sedate beneath the black hood they draped over his head. His dorsal stands straight and proud.
“You’re trying to keep control,” he says. “It’s already gone.”
Grant convinces Ajax to lift with him by promising a spot in the command group’s private workout room. The Taiikari version of the bench press presupposes a tail. The sergeant looks askance at Grant’s butt-on-the-bench version. “You lift like how my girlfriend lifts,” he says.
“How’s that?”
“A lot more than I expected.”
***
On the ninth day:
The Eqtoran Armada secrets itself into an uncharted spot in deep space for its latest round of combat exercisers. Fanned formations and shifting lines of fire. They think they’re unmonitored. They’re wrong.
Grant and Hyax watch the gauss gun flashes from the Pike’s command deck. The Brigadier’s eyes are narrow and analytical.
“There’s too much variance between their COs,” she says. “Teaching drill to the rank-and-file isn’t enough if you don’t follow through on regulating doctrine in your command structure.” Her hands are folded behind her back. “Not that it matters, I suppose.”
“Ask you something, Brigadier?”
“Of course, Majesty.”
“Why the crash and the tenday wait? Why not send down a probe saying hi?”
“The uncertainty,” Hyax says. “It’s useful when monitoring a republic. Identifies the real power brokers, pokes at the cracks. If you let them sweat for a while, they do a fine job at destabilizing themselves. Fractious dioceses are much more easily brought into the fold than a single unified front. No manipulation required. It’s different with autocracy. When there’s a dictator, we often ride up to the door and knock.”
“Does it haunt you at all, Brigadier? The mustering, the useless preparation?”
“Why would it haunt me, Majesty?”
“Existentially, I mean.” Grant watches the alien formations shifting. “The nation I grew up in counted itself the greatest military power on Maekyon. But the Eqtorans would crush us. And you’re going to crush the Eqtorans. What if the Taiikari run into something greater again than what you’ve got?”
“What you’ve got, he says.” Hyax raises an eyebrow. “You’re part of the Imperial family now, Majesty.”
He presses. “Would you still fight?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Loyalty, I guess. Isn’t it your duty to die for the Empire if you need to?”
“Certainly. But my loyalty is predicated on the trust she’ll spend me right. If I found out I’d tossed myself away on a hopeless fight, I’d kick her ass in the afterlife, glory to her.”
Grant rubs the stubble on the shorn edge of his beard. “Maekyonite stories are full of people sacrificing their lives in the name of doomed causes.”
“Hmmm.” Hyax squints. “And this is a virtue?”
“Sometimes.”
“You fascinate me, Majesty,” Hyax says. “So intriguingly counterintuitive. The more I learn of Maekyon, the more I look forward to commanding human marines. Once we house-train your world, you’ll give us superb soldiers, I think.”
Sykora ambles between them. “Brigadier. Behave.”
Hyax clicks her tongue. “I did mean it as a compliment.”
“They don’t let aliens on ZKZs,” Grant says. “Free ones, anyway.”
“They didn’t,” Hyax says, “and then you came along.”
“I’d think one Maekyonite would be more than enough for you.”
“Not at all, now that we know the trick to domesticating them.” The corner of Hyax’s mouth hitches up. “You fancied yourself such a firebrand rebel. But all we needed to turn you into a faithful Navy nobleman was a Taiikari lover. And it’s not as though we’d be lacking in volunteers to shack up with handsome alien giants.” 𝑛𝘰𝘷𝑝𝘶𝑏.𝑐𝘰𝘮
Grant smirks back, but lets the matter drop. “Waian said the same thing. Is it true she’s some kind of sex maniac?”
“Oh, certainly,” Sykora says. “She’s slept with half the vessel. I have a clerk whose primary responsibility is keeping an unobtrusive eye on the woman.”
“She propositioned me, once. I told her the command group is no place for canoodling.” Hyax gives Grant one of her scarfaced looks. “This was before Sykora made you an honorary member.”
“And now it’s too late.” Sykora nudges her. “I think you’re developing a taste for seafood.”
Hyax looks stubbornly ahead at the main screen. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, Majesty.”
***
On the tenth day:
The aliens arrive.
