Princess of the Void-3.9. Hearth

The Eqtoran is lightly dressed, despite the chill of the facility, in a matching linen halter and pants, worn beneath an embroidered duster with its sleeves rolled up to expose her thickly sculpted arms. A hole in the back of the garment allows her blubbery tail through. Her fringe lays to one side across her head, like a punky side-shave. She waves. “Howzit, folks.”

The command group stands as the Eqtoran tromps into the room. Her thick leather boots give a vibrating rumble to her approach. She’s as tall and broad as the hologram suggested she’d be. And just as the command group surmised, Grant is the first Imperial citizen she approaches.

“Finally a fella I don’t got to strain my neck to talk to. Name’s Ipqen. Ipqen-mek-Taqa.” She extends her hand, palm angled skyward.

Grant haltingly takes it. Ipqen-mek-Taqa chuckles at his uncertainty. “First lesson, folks. Take the hand, turn it vertical, then bump forearms. Like this.”

Grant finishes the gesture. “I’m Grantyde,” he says. “Prince of the Black Pike. This is my wife and the Princess of the Pike, Sykora.”

There’s a silty clatter as Sykora hops onto the table, which brings her up almost to Ipqen’s eye level. She holds her hand out in the same odd fashion Ipqen did. “An honor to meet you, Ipqen.”

“Ah. I hadn’t—well.” Ipqen bumps forearms with Sykora, though there’s a hesitation to the movement this time. “Guess I can’t be too surprised that an Empire has royalty. Your Majesty.” She looks to Grant. “Do I bow?”

Grant holds up a hand. “Really no need. It’s all right.”

Sykora gives him a concerned glance, then refocuses on their guest. She departs the tabletop and sits behind it. “What do you do on Eqtora?”

“Harok, actually. Born and raised.” Ipqen steps into the center of the horseshoe, and puts her big paving-slab hands in her duster’s pockets. “I’m a physicist.”

Grant glances at her thick arms, the banded tattoos across them. “Really?”

“Yep. At the Nquei Conservatory on Harok. Or I was, anyway.” She scratches her snout. “Don’t know if they’ll let me back in when I don’t speak the language anymore. They asked for volunteers. Offered a title to anyone who’d do it. So I guess I’m Lady Ipqen now, but that was incidental.” She taps her forehead. “The real reason I got the damn thing stuck up in here is cause I wanted to grill these people on how the gravity’s being generated. Not that anyone’s fessing up. No knowhow. Or maybe just no inclination.”

“Oh, you give me a half hour.” Waian brightens. “I’ll blow the top of your head off.”

Ipqen laughs, a contralto rumble. “All right. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

Hyax has a funny look on her face. This might be the first time Grant’s seen the Brigadier’s tail wag.

“Theuqa—you’ll meet her, she’s a linguist—is drooling, trying to get me to recall Eqtoran so she can get more footholds into the language,” Ipqen says. “But the medical team kept going on about some sorta complication. Whatcha call it—cerebrolinguistic tangling.”

“They warned me about the same thing.” Grant gives a commiserating smile. “Sounds bad, huh?”

“Sure does.” Ipqen scoots a chair out and sits down carefully—her seat is clearly custom-built, but it still doesn’t have enough surface area for her broad rump. “So I suppose I’ve been—Well, I don’t exactly have anywhere to belong anymore.” The edge of her crest flutters. “Can’t really talk to any of my people, don’t really know what to say to any of yours. So if there’s some use for me, I’m happy for it.”

“It’s a brave thing you’ve done, Ipqen-mek-Taqa,” Grant says. “The same thing happened to me, but I wasn’t so close to others of my people. I can’t imagine how lonely it must feel.”

Ipqen shrugs.

“We’ll work to bring all of it back, as soon as the pathways are settled,” Sykora says. “It’s much easier to learn a language the second time, I’m told. You’ll glom onto it at speed. And thanks to the medical longevity we’re bringing with us, you’ll have as long as you need.”

“Yeah. The crew’s been telling me,” Ipqen says. “You’re getting ready to introduce yourselves, right?”

“That’s right,” Grant says.

“And you want me to hear you out? Give you a preview and a consultation, maybe?”

“Yes, Lady Ipqen,” Grant says, and he notices the little flinch the alien physicist makes at the title. “First contact is a tricky time. Any insight you might have on our approach, we’d welcome.”

“Go ahead, then.” Ipqen rests her cheek on her palm. “Tell me what we’re in for.”

She listens, with sober silence, to Grant tell her about the Empress, and the Empire, and the coming of the Black Pike to Eqtora. He and Sykora practiced this speech a few times.

“This is a new era for your entire civilization,” Grant finishes. “An era when your horizons will stretch further than you’ve ever imagined. The future has come, and you are alive to see it. You are not alone in the firmament, and the Empire that has kept you safe while you came of age is ready to joyously receive you.”

A few beats of unspoken absorption from the big slate-colored woman seated before them. She sits up and folds her hands in her lap. “So you’re here to conquer my people.”

“We’re here to welcome your people,” Sykora cuts in, unflappably. “As the latest piece in a tapestry that spans the entire firmament. The galaxy you’re about to discover is peaceful and prosperous. And united.”

“Okay.” Ipqen’s icy blue eyes flick to the sizable rifle hanging off Ajax’s shoulder. “Awful lot of guns for a peaceful galaxy.”

Sykora’s smiling charm stays on. “Peace is too precious to go undefended.”

“We’ve been observing your civilization for several Eqtoran generations,” Grant says. “And we’re encouraged by what we see. Pious, civically minded, interdependent. Your culture will fit perfectly.”

Sykora holds up a finger. “There’s sure to be friction, of course. But we’re willing to work closely alongside your council to address any sour notes that may arise if your leaders will work with us.”

“Mmm.” Ipqen’s face falls. “Yeah. Uh. So, take my words with a dram of vquek, because I’ve always tried to tune it out, right? Just sit in my little academic corner away from the council and the politics. But I don’t think it’s gonna go the way you’re hoping.”

Sykora’s brows lower. “How do you mean?”

“I wish I thought otherwise. Honest.” Ipqen’s sad smile shows her rows of teeth. “You seem… kind, I guess. Heart in the right place, anyway. And me, I’m drooling over peeling your stuff open and seeing how it ticks. I took the offer of your implant because it seems clear, looking at all of this, the way the wind is blowing. But Eqtora, and the council…” She sighs. “Ah, you don’t need to listen to me. I’m just some dame, Majesties. With an education that’s about to go obsolete in a hundred ways, as soon as you make yourselves known.”

“We want to hear from you, Ipqen,” Grant says. “Anything you can give us will help.”

“Uh. Well, Majesty. I think…” Ipqen looks out the conference room window into the firmament, at the distant speck of her homeworld. A profound shade of mourning crosses her bullet-shaped face, like the shadow of a thunderhead over a meadow. Her crest droops lower along the side of her head.

“I think something terrible is going to happen,” she says.

***

The Prince and Princess of the Pike follow Ipqen onto a cavernous, violet-tinted deck, its electric sky circumnavigated by the electric green glow of an aurora borealis.

This glimmering skybox shines on a clutch of domed buildings in wood and elegantly curved steel. Each puts Grant in mind of a yurt—a cylinder topped by a vaulting ceiling with an oblong chimney sticking from it, like the bulb of an onion. Wood smoke rises from some of them; the whirring roar of ceiling-mounted vent fans presses against Grant’s eardrums. This is Yuvik. The artificial village the Taiikari gathered.

Ipqen crouches and holds her arms open for a petite Eqtoran dressed in a flowing, colorful poncho, who comes running, her feet tapping across the metal floor. Judging by her stature, this must be Grant’s first ymeq. Her crest is a shade of cerulean close to his wife’s skin, and much longer than Ipqen’s. It flows behind her like waist-length hair. “Nueq’tqe Muetkqe, Ipqen,” she cries.

“Shhh.” Ipqen rubs the back of the petite Eqtoran’s head. “Ruaq. Hey, girly.” She looks to the translator. “Tell her we can’t talk yet. Brain’s still cooking.”

Ruaq’s face crumples as the translator speaks. She says something that finishes in a mournful decrescendo. The translator holds up a finger and whispers with Sykora for a moment before answering.

Ipqen watches the Taiikari with stoic resignation. “How is she?”

“She’s well,” the translator says. “I’ve told her we’re going to get you a translation device. We just need to ensure your language pathways are baked in and our linguists have finalized the protocols.”

“They’re close, thanks to you,” Sykora says. “And then you won’t need an intermediary any longer.”

“She doesn’t look happy about it,” Ipqen says.

The translator dithers. Sykora doesn’t. “It’s not coming back on its own,” she says. “She didn’t know that.”

“Tell her I knew, before I did it,” Ipqen says. “That I did it for her and for everyone else. And that I—hold on. I’m risking the tangling.”

“Oh, dear.” Administrator Oorta flinches forward. “You really ought not to.”

“Sorry,” Ipqen says, and Oorta flinches again. The big Eqtoran pulls Ruaq into a hug, and murmurs something to her. Ruaq shuts her eyes, nods, and holds Ipqen’s linebacker shoulders tight. Then she backs away.

Ipqen stands up. She fishes out a pair of earplugs and pops them into her blunt ears. “See? I’m wearing the earplugs, now, even. We’re all goozbklaingk.” Her eye twitches.

Oorta’s tail switches like a snake. “Oh, no—”

Ipqen laughs. “Just fucking with you, ma’am. C’mon.” She jerks her head toward the largest of the domed buildings, which is decorated with red-and-white geometries along its curved walls. “I’ll show you the meetinghouse.”

Ruaq watches them as they depart. She’s trying not to cry, with mixed success.

They move through the sliding-slat door into the meetinghouse. The brisk chill of the outside is replaced with the force of a shoulder tackle by dry, pine-scented warmth. A sizable fire sits in the round room’s center, penned in by hand-tooled stone. Shadows are thrown out from their feet to undulate across the walls. A half dozen Eqtorans are gathered, in various states of repose and conversation, around the firepit. One of them is playing some kind of five-stringed instrument, plugged into a compact amp that his thick-socked foot rests on.

The assembly looks to the visitors. They see Ipqen. In near-simultaneousness, they make some kind of greeting gesture—thumb and middle finger curled in and pressed to their eyes like a monocle. Ipqen makes it back.

She takes the group around the circle, introducing each of the Eqtorans in turn as they stare warily at their Taiikari captors.

“Here’s Puque. She worked at a fishery. She’s got a good attitude about this whole thing, on account of it’s not her dayjob, and we’ve been promised a stipend.”

“That’s Uqan over there. Veteran artilleryman. Tough piece, that guy. I can’t understand anyone anymore, but at least I’m not half deaf.”

“This is Tektnal. He’s a nurse from Hearth, does pediatrics.”

Grant raises a hand. “Hearth?”

“It’s what the translator is turning Eqtora into, Majesty,” the administrator says. “That’s where the name comes from. We’ll hammer that glitch out.”

As Ipqen exchanges one of those forearm bump things with Tektnal, a rumbling cry breaks over the roar of the fire and the bell tones of the instrument.

“Tamuraq!”

The word’s bellowed by the scarred male Ipqen called Uqan. His face is pierced and dotted with runic tattoos. “Tamuraq,” he repeats, lower and flatter, like a curse. He points one stubby finger directly at Grant. This is followed by a stutter-step flow of syllables, with those cracks and glottal stops that turn Eqtorish into such a percussive beatbox of a language.

The translator tries in vain to placate the old man; Ajax steps forward, hand resting on the stock of his rifle, and that’s enough to get him quiet again.

“What was he saying?” Grant asks.

“Old superstitious talk,” Ipqen says. “Apocalypse myths and such. Pay it no mind, fella. Uqan there’s just a surly one, that’s all.”

They depart the meetinghouse, back into the chill of the village center. Grant looks back at Uqan, who’s standing silhouetted in front of the fire. The edges of his body wave indistinctly in front of its light and heat.

His sunken, glaring eyes glint off the artificial sky as the meetinghouse door closes.