March 1907 E-10
—
The next time Fin ran into the Emperor of Aetheria—”Ev,” as they instructed him during that first chat log—it was their third trip to Talkian territory to deal with Starspawn, roughly two months after the first. They had kept in touch between that first chat log and this third visit, so when he jumped out of his landing voidcraft shuttle and marched towards them, he knew what he was expecting.
“I was twenty minutes away by voidship, Your Imperialness, and you couldn’t fucking bother to let me know you were hunting a Starspawn horde?”
The Emperor, to their credit, startled as he approached, looking up from their glitching HOLOpad and actually backing away from him. Their eyes flickered with apprehension, then recognition, then sparked as their hackles metaphorically raised.
“Don’t lecture me about lack of contact, Arv’hein Heran, I’m not the one whose local intelligence was faulty!” They waved their fizzling ‘pad at him as backed up again as he lunged for it. “When our HOLOservice was disconnected upon entry, we did what you told us to do and contacted local reinforcements, who were supposed to tell you we were fighting the horde in your backyard. It’s not our fault—”
Fin lunged forward and grabbed their HOLOpad out of their hands, backing himself up onto his own stairway of antigrav magic before they could fight him for it. “Hold your kestryls,” he snarled.
He tapped in his codes to the HOLOpad.
“These codes will grant that ‘pad—and only that ‘pad—access to the general HOLOnet service network in this region,” he snapped. “Next time, fucking comm me.”
He tossed the ‘pad back to them, no longer glitching, and dropped back to the ground, his tail flicking irritably in the grass. The Emperor watched the point of his tail move for a moment, as if they’d forgotten he had one. Then they looked at their HOLOpad, saw it was working, and glared at him.
“Isn’t giving me your codes—any kind of codes—a security risk?”
“Not when half the Talkian military uses the same access code to get on the good network every single day,” said a rough voice from behind him. A gloved hand scruffed him by his armored collar. “What have I told you about jumping out of moving vehicles?”
Fin bristled as his second, Noran Teldorae, joined the conversation. He was half a head taller than Fin was, and he still wore the heavy, dark armor of an advanced recon trooper despite having been second in command to all of Talki for a decade and a half. Fin moved away from him an inch or two, trying to put as much space between his mother’s former second as he could without telegraphing to everyone else just how uneasy the man made him.
Teldorae had stayed second in command, Captain of the Heran Manor Guard, when his mother abdicated the throne. Fin hadn’t had the heart to remove him, but every day he spent working with the former recon agent, he regretted that decision. Not that he wasn’t a great leader, it was just that he knew every idiosyncratic tell, process, and flaw Fin had, and instead of helping him improve on those things, Teldorae had taken to criticizing him flagrantly instead. It bled out from their personal paperwork hours into official meetings, and it was starting to reach a peak.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Teldorae said, extending a hand to the Emperor. “Captain Teldorae, Arv’hein Heran’s second in command. I imagine you’re one of the Empera’s team members?”
The Emperor—Ev, Fin noted, because their stance hadn’t shifted from that bristly, informal stance they’d met him head-on with and he considered the formal and informal personas different here—gave an uncomfortable shudder. They glanced from his hand to his face before tentatively reaching out and grasping forearms with him. Toldorae froze for a split second, imperceptible to anyone else but Fin, before squeezing the elbow of their vambrace in return and dropping his arm.
That was the Talkian way of greeting others, not the Aetherian way. Ev had managed to catch Toldorae off guard, just like they had Fin when they reacted the same way weeks ago. Either they had read in the way he held his hand out that that was the proper way to do it, or their culture had a similar way of greeting. Fin hadn’t decided which it was yet.
Then they smiled a curt, tight smile and tilted their chin downward with a mischievous glint in their eye. “Actually, I am the Emperor, Captain. Well met.”
Again, Toldorae froze almost imperceptibly. Then he returned Ev’s tight smile. “Well met,” he replied cooly.
He shot Fin a side-eye that demanded to know why this sort of thing had been kept from him. Fin looked back with the same cool irritability until Toldorae relented, stepping away.
“I’m going to check on the local ground troops,” he told Fin directly in Talkian. “Ping me if necessary, vi’Arvhein.”
Fin nodded curtly as he walked away down the hillside, the wind whipping his coal gray hair and the edges of his tasset jacket. He exhaled sharply before turning back to Ev, his shoulders still hell tightly at attention. He forced himself to relax.
“He’s… interesting,” the Emperor said, settling out of their own tense sort of parade rest.
“It’s okay, everyone knows he’s terrifying,” Fin sighed. “You can say it.”
They worried their bottom lip. “Is he always so—”
“Yes.”
They nodded slowly, watching Toldorae fade into the bustle of medics and Talkian soldiers at the foot of the hill, all milling around the survivors of the attack on the Starspawn horde that had moved into northern Talki just a few hours ago. Then their electric blue eyes snapped back to him.
Fin set his jaw and crossed his arms over his chest. “You should have contacted me directly, poli’kad to poli’kad.”
They opened their mouth to ask what that meant, and he cut them off.
“Poli’kad is the Tartarun word for a high-ranking political leader,” he said gruffly. He gestured between the two of them. “That means you and me. I thought we were on level playing field here.”
“You’re the one who told us to contact the locals if our service went out.”
“Why did you wait ‘til you were on Tartarus’s server block?” he demanded. “You could’ve comm'd me there was a horde landing in my backyard before you made landfall!”
“We didn’t have time!” they protested. “We were in Arcaxia, responding to a call from the Gardens of He’tara branch that was under siege by this horde that dropped out of nowhere with the Aetherian breach biotags on them. When they broke a wormhole through the dimension's rift barrier and took us here, we didn’t exactly have time to react rationally and fill you in minute by minute, Arv’hein."
Fin scowled at them, anger still broiling under his skin. “Asshole.”
“Back at you,” they snapped, squaring their shoulders.
They held each other’s stares a moment longer, then Ev shivered and dropped their stance, holstering their HOLOpad and looking out over the small camp of medical tents and the baker’s dozen of Starspawn corpses strewn across the plains and the edge of some poor firewheat farmer’s field.
“What were your casualties?” Fin asked, dropping his own shoulders and turning to look with them.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw their head shake in disbelief—or uncertainty. “I don’t know,” they revealed. “We had a cruiser with us before we followed the pack through the wormhole, but it didn’t make it through. It might have gotten caught in the close. We started with I think six squads—twenty-four, plus me and my SIC. I saw at least ten people go down, two were for sure killed…”
A familiar ache settled underneath his ribs. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Ev twitched—a flinch? “It could have been worse.”
“Sure, but it’s still bad to lose half your group,” he countered, sparing another glance in their direction. Their right hand was clenching and unclenching, as if it was unsure what it should be doing. “Are you alright?”
They flinched again and flashed him a tired smile. “I just want to get back to the cruiser in one piece,” they said.
There were dark circles under their black eyes. Fin sympathized. He nodded and turned back to the medical camp.
The Aetherians had lost eight people total when the counts were drawn up at the end of the night. The Emperor and their team left long after Tartarus’s moss ceiling had turned orange and dimmed, the campground lit only by glowworms and the lilies that lined the ridge above them. Their cruiser came to fetch them, docking just off the voidbank a mile or so away. Fin watched as the angular Imperial warship pulled away from the bank, mesmerized by the purple glow of its plasma jets and the lighter blue puffs from the stabilization thrusters.
Just one Aetherian warship—a cruiser no less, half the size of a proper destroyer-class ship—was almost the same size as Heran Manor.
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