15 Aranea Telam

"I will never understand your insatiable desire for attention."

"I will never understand your propensity for completely unnecessary insults."

"It's just banter. You're oversensitive."

"Banter is tasteless."

"Who are you, the Imperatrix of Eleutheria?"

"Yes."

Andromeda groaned. "Fine. I surrender. I still don't get why all of this is needed, though." Acidalia's landing had been as theatrical and overly dramatic as she could possibly make it; the Revelation's white exterior glimmered in Base Alpha's fluorescent lighting like a beacon that screamed I'm Acidalia Cipher, come and get me. That ship had top-notch cloaking systems, but the extravagant flamboyance and beauty of its design made them kind of moot; sure, enemy ships couldn't track it from a distance, but anyone with eyes could see the massive white mansion-with-an-engine hovering in front of them. If Acidalia had gotten ambushed and murdered on her way back from her impromptu journey to Mars, Andromeda wouldn't have been the least bit sympathetic.

Then again, she wasn't too sympathetic of Acidalia on a day-to-day basis, anyway—but Acidalia didn't need to know that. It was really better for her and everyone else if the Imperatrix Ceasarina continued to think of Andromeda as her right-hand-man, and honestly, there was no harm in that; they were on the same side, and they were brilliant leaders with levels of genius the rest of the movement could hardly hope to aspire to. If them getting along meant that Andromeda had to continue to pretend that she actually enjoyed spending time with this insufferable, melodramatic, over-glorified princess with more money than God, then so be it. She'd met worse people before.

Still, she grated her teeth a little bit as Acidalia's face came into her field of vision. Maybe it was Andromeda's high-definition cybernetic eye that made Acidalia look more annoying than she actually was… or maybe it was just her obnoxious, holier-than-thou personality.

Well, her absence had been nice while it lasted.

Acidalia was dressed in a long, sweeping dress intricate enough to be a wedding gown, because of course she was. If marriage was still a thing in Eleutheria, she'd have looked exactly like a bride. A delicate, sheer veil was draped over her perfectly-curled hair—a symbol of mourning that wouldn't be obvious to anyone who didn't know her intimately enough to understand that she was exactly the type to still use mourning veils, but only when they were bleached white enough to match her style. Andromeda almost wanted to ask what the point of a bleached-white mourning veil was—didn't its brightness kind of defeat the purpose?—but she already knew the answer; like everything else Acidalia ever did, it was for the aesthetic.

"You look absolutely ridiculous," she snapped, motioning to the veil. She realized suddenly that it was topped by a pearlescent quartz tiara studded with diamond flowers, and mentally facepalmed.

"My brother is dead," Acidalia said cooly. Next to her, David Seren shot Andromeda an ugly glare. She'd have told him to stuff a sock in it if his daughter wasn't standing right next to him.

"Then I guess we're on even footing," Andromeda shrugged.

Acidalia's expression didn't even change. "You never had any brothers," she said.

"And now you don't, either. See?" The see? at the end was unnecessary, but being patronizing felt good, and Andromeda had no time for this type of sentimental bullshit. Acidalia may as well have weighted herself down with six feet of black crape like the widows of old. Leave it to the Imperatrix to turn the death of a seventeen-year-old—who was, naturally, in no way special in any sense of the word when his relationship to Acidalia was removed from the picture—into a whole big elaborate production combined with a fashion statement.

Acidalia's eyes narrowed dangerously. "You know that witnessing a sibling's death and being born an only child are two objectively different things, Praetor."

Andromeda groaned internally at the use of her title, which Acidalia only used when she was trying to be quietly passive-aggressive. It carried the same weight as a parent referring to their child by her first, middle, and caste name all at the same time, and she had a sudden flashback of hearing someone yell Andromeda Amalura, Labora! and knowing she was in trouble. When most people called her a Praetor, she felt powerful—it was the highest military rank anyone in the Revolution could achieve, and she was quite proud of it—but Acidalia managed to make it seem infantilizing, and perhaps the most infuriating thing was that Andromeda responding to it would only make her look more childish.

"Everyone here has lost someone," she said, hoping she was coming across as stern instead of angry. "You know how many seventeen-year-old boys die on a daily basis? T wasn't special."

"Every person's life is special," David Seren said with faux-fatherly wisdom.

Andromeda rolled her eyes. "Oh, I'm so very sorry for not dropping everything to mourn some random kid who was exactly as special as every other random kid who ever dropped dead. It's almost like I don't place any extra value on his life just because he was related to a powerful woman… or I thought that's what you wanted? Unless nepotism is acceptable now."

"I never said that. Stop putting words in my mouth—"

"She's right, David," Acidalia interrupted, sighing. "More people are going to die if we don't start coming back from this, and none of those soldiers' lives are inherently more valuable than T's was. If he were still alive, he never would have wanted more boys being sent off to their doom because the leadership couldn't get its lives together."

David's expression softened, but he still didn't look entirely too pleased with Andromeda, who decided not to dignify him with a response. She could not possibly care less about the opinions of a random Martian farmer—or secretary of agriculture, whatever the hell that was—when it came to her relationship with Acidalia and her job.

"Okay," she said briskly. "Now that we've got that conversation over with, we should probably focus on the imminent military threats, which are much more important to me personally than the death of a guy whose body we can't even recover. Anyone else agree?"

"Yes," Acidalia said, "but you don't have to be so crass about it."

"More like you don't have to be an asshole about it," murmured a random girl Andromeda had never met before in her life. She was about to retort, but Acidalia said softly, "she's just being pragmatic, Athena."

"Why do you defend her?" David asked.

"Because her heart's in the right place, and she's a military genius."

Andromeda smiled. That's more like it.

"Can't argue with that," David said, "but—"

"No buts," Andromeda interrupted. "We're going to the Scorpio. Move."

***

The Scorpio was the exact opposite of the Revelation in every way, and that was just how Andromeda liked it.

It always astounded her how this military ship—a ship that was pretty much held together with duct tape, no less—managed to be more welcoming and human than the most expensive cruiser the entirety of the solar system had to offer. The Scorpio was a monument to Andromeda's achievements, but it was organic, living, full of humanity—not some stiff white statue dedicated to short-lived Imperial beauty. She loved it like she'd love her own child—if she liked children, which she didn't—and she felt that the affection was well-deserved; this ship had seen so many battles and bore so many scars on its steely black hull that it practically warranted its own Purple Heart.

Acidalia, of course, didn't see it that way. She hated the Scorpio, but she was too infuriatingly polite to say so, and Andromeda didn't know if that made it better or worse.

As they crossed the threshold of the ship, Andromeda felt everything in the left side of her body settle. Her cybernetics liked this place, and they had enough of a mind of their own that Andromeda thought it best to keep them happy. Human or otherwise, she was more than ready to grant rights to the systems that controlled her labored breathing and the pulse of her overworked heart (hearts? She'd lost track of her organs years ago—they were too numerous and fickle for her to remember any of them, anyway.) The mechanical half of her brain emitted a surge of dopamine, or something like it, in the same way a cat purred in contentment, and Andromeda's organic mind had to agree with it—the Scorpio was home.

"Take your shoes off," she called to the crowd behind her. (Why were there so many people here? she wondered. Acidalia and David, of course, and David's teenage daughter—but who had invited two Scientias, a mutant cantrix, and a random AX-class to this meeting?) Nonetheless, they all complied, even Acidalia—who, Andromeda noticed with annoyance, was wearing ridiculously tall high-heeled shoes that probably cost more than this entire base. She zoomed in on one of them with her left eye and saw diamond fire flickering in the center of each tiny gemstone—yep, those shoes were definitely worth somewhere in the millions to billions of dollars. And Acidalia had just casually tossed them to the side like they were $10 clearance pumps she bought from a department store. Of course she did—if a single jewel broke, she could have a dozen new pairs made for her by tomorrow, each more diamond-studded and more valuable than the last.

"You seem frustrated," Acidalia said, deliberately non-confrontationally.

"Yeah, well, I'd like to get this show on the road before all of Terra gets invaded by blue alien fish people," Andromeda replied pointedly. She couldn't do much, not when Acidalia was mourning a brother and dressed like an overgrown flower girl—anything Andromeda could possibly say would make her look like an asshole. If there was anything Acidalia excelled at, it was delicate, verbal manipulation, and she would have everyone convinced she was the victim within thirty seconds of being insulted. So Andromeda had to speak like a military commander who was worried about her movement instead of an irritated peer who didn't like the notion of spending millions of credits on shoes, and nobody would judge Acidalia at all. Such is life—or, as Acidalia herself would have said, c'est la vie (because of course she spoke fluent Francogallicus, a language that had been dead for over ten centuries. Again, aesthetic.)

Andromeda shook her head, trying to clear it. She was a Praetor, above all—and that meant that, unlike the Imperatrix, she actually had to do things other than flee from danger and look pretty on camera. She couldn't afford to be thinking like this any more than Acidalia could afford to grieve for her dead family. There was danger in the upper atmosphere and work to be done, and rationality and logic had to rise above anger and resentment, at least until the threat was gone.

She sat at the head of the table and pressed the big metal button at the center, changing the windows from translucent to opaque. The Scorpio was one of the most technologically advanced starships in the galaxy, and she could easily replace every mechanical switch with sleek holographics, but there was something visceral and satisfying about physically changing things with her fists, and exposed wires and motherboards scared her guests more than plastic and glass ever could. At the clicking sound of the button, the Cantator jumped, and Andromeda felt a wave of sympathy for her—she'd been like that once, too, in another lifetime.

Acidalia sat at her right hand side and David at her left, and that probably meant something, etiquette-wise, but Andromeda had no idea what it was. The others arranged themselves around the three seats of power awkwardly, like they'd never been in this type of situation before—save for Cressida Seren, who sat right next to her father with an air of arrogance and immediately started examining her fingernails in the universal sign of "I'm bored." Andromeda surveyed them all from left to right: a very clean-cut looking Scientia with short ombré gray hair and understated makeup, a significantly more disheveled Scientia with a bored smirk, a frightened and clearly genetically modified Cantator, and a soldier boy with tears in his eyes. "First order of business," she said, "who are these people?"

"David Seren, Cressida Seren, Carina, Athena, Lyra, and Ace," Acidalia said, rattling off the names like an Auctor teacher would say words on a spelling test. "David is the Secretary of Agriculture on Mars, quite obviously, and Cressida is his daughter. Athena and Carina are both astrophysicists who risked their lives to warn me about the assassination attempt staged by Cassiopeia. Lyra is a new recruit who accompanied Ace to Mars as a plan to safeguard him from Alestra, and Ace is my late brother's best friend, who saved me at the coronation. Each one of these people deserves to be commended for their bravery—they're risking everything they've ever known just by being around me."

Andromeda looked at them again. None of them looked particularly brave, and she was about 75 percent sure that Athena had stolen good sticking out of her pockets. Cressida was already scrolling through a Martian social networking website on her metadit, clearly not paying attention to anything that was being said, and Carina was rubbing the back of her neck like she didn't quite know what to do with herself. There was a decent chance that Acidalia had simply taken a personal liking to them and exaggerated their backstories for their sakes, but Andromeda decided not to question that—after all, these six strangers were the only people on the planet who knew Acidalia was alive, and that would be supremely important later.

"Okay," Andromeda huffed. "I'm assuming you're all trustworthy, right?" It really didn't matter if they weren't—this meeting wasn't exactly a secret. Acidalia nodded, though she did glance quickly at Athena's overflowing pockets and shot Andromeda a look that said, leave it be.

"I'm taking that as a yes," Andromeda continued. "So, second order of business: we might be getting invaded by aliens."

If that news surprised Acidalia at all, she didn't show it, but everyone else around the table jumped—save for Cressida, who had transitioned from Martian social media to a cheap mobile game with lots of flashing lights and obnoxious noises. "What do you mean?" David asked.

"I mean that the interstellar mermaid gladiator people who have been orbiting our planet for decades have finally made landfall," Andromeda said. "Look." She pulled up a map of Appalachia City and pointed to a glowing dot that hovered somewhere around the Imperial District. "That ship isn't Terran or Martian, and the signals I'm getting from it are showing me that it belongs to the Mira."

"How many are there?" Acidalia asked, concerned.

"Just the one, but that could change. We've been on even footing for a while, but now that our army is fighting itself, I think they've found the chinks in our armor. This might be their opportunity to land."

"Well, have they deployed any weapons?" Acidalia asked, "or done anything to indicate they want to harm us?"

"They're Mira, of course they want to harm us."

"But they wouldn't have sent just one ship if that were the case, would they?" Acidalia tilted her head in a pointed way, not exactly self-satisfied but close to it, and a surge of anger shot through Andromeda's body again. She was so infuriatingly good at being eruditely snobby without making herself snobby at all, and it bothered Andromeda because she knew damn well that her level of politesse was simply not high enough to counter Acidalia's. It didn't matter what she thought or said or did, every conversation she could possibly have with the Imperatrix Ceasarina would wind up making her look like an imbecile and Acidalia like an eloquent space queen.

"We don't know," Andromeda said, gritting her teeth. "They sent us a message, but I don't trust it."

"Play it for me," Acidalia said.

"It's written. Like an email." Andromeda pulled it up anyway and handed it off to Acidalia, who read it quietly for a few minutes. It was nothing remarkable—mostly it was an extraordinarily generic statement about wanting to meet with an Eleutherian diplomat, the type of thing any sovereign would send to another leader in the hopes of forging some kind of political relationship. If it hadn't come from an alien civilization Terra had been in a war of attrition with for the past God-knows-how-long, it wouldn't have rung any alarm bells.

"Well," Acidalia said, "they definitely know just what to say. This entire letter is written in Roman Latin too, did you notice that?"

Andomeda hadn't noticed that, but now that she was looking right at the words, it was obvious—the grammar was perfect. Eleutherian Latin didn't even bother with any sort of grammar as long as the speaker could get their point across, but Roman Latin was fancy and full of itself, with complex systems of declensions and phonemes and other linguistic words she could only half-remember. Not even the Imperials spoke in Roman Latin outside of very, very formal events, none of which Andromeda was privy to, and even then it was purely ceremonial—nobody actually put effort into speaking in that archaic dialect of a dead language. And yet, the Mira had put in all that effort.

"How would they even know what ancient Romans spoke like, anyway?" Athena asked, voicing what Andromeda was thinking. "Nobody even talks to the Mira. The cultural exchange between us is like, zilch."

"Well, it's not quite zero," Acidalia replied, "as we do know some things about them… namely that they're significantly weaker than us physically, and also much more aggressive, it seems. But that's all stereotypical and based on the experiences of a few men. They don't like to take prisoners and they most certainly don't like to be prisoners, so contact has been limited, to say the least. I do wonder why, out of all things, they would choose to learn an extremely antiquated form of Latin. Perhaps it's for the sake of getting our attention?"

"If they wanted attention, why are they just sitting there quietly?" Andromeda pointed out. "I think they're trying to lure either you or Alestra there, and then kill you. I mean, think about it: they have the perfect opportunity now. Eleutheria is tearing itself to pieces, you and your mother are both desperate to get the upper hand, and they've managed to breech our defenses, land in our capitol city, and bring a whole ship with them—not just a tiny fighter. If they want to occupy Terra, this is a good time. All they have to do is bring in their army and clear us out, and that starts with the leadership."

Acidalia frowned. "You may be right."

"Aren't I always?"

David rolled his eyes. "I think you're being a little pessimistic here. They aren't doing anything just yet—I think they might genuinely want to talk to us. If they want Acidalia dead, why haven't they hunted her down already?"

"Because she's in one of the most secure places on the planet? Not even the Nova have access to this base, and they're just as Terran as we are. The Mira are aliens. How could they possibly find it?" Andromeda said. "They're just waiting for Acidalia to come out of the woodworks."

"Doesn't the entire planet think Acidalia's already dead?" David asked.

Oh, right, Andromeda thought. Shit. With the Imperatrix sitting right here in front of her, she'd completely forgotten the fact that Alestra had announced the demise of her daughter to the entire planet just a few hours ago.

Acidalia sighed. "Do we know how much the Mira know? Because that could change everything. If they think I'm dead, then they wouldn't be trying to kill me, and they're not after Andromeda, either, because they have no idea she exists."

"Don't know she exists?" David said incredulously. "Isn't she like your equivalent of a general?"

"Yes, and I am a very, very, very secretive general," Andromeda replied. "If a job is well-done, people won't even realize that it was done in the first place. You know how many 'accidental' deaths were a result of me?" Her mechanical arm sprang to life, LEDs blinking like sleep-clouded eyes, and she flexed her hand to show off the metal. "I've got built in tasers and brass knuckles, plus a cybernetically reenforced steel skeleton. I'm about seven times stronger than the average man, and just as fast. I can beat someone to a bloody pulp and be gone before anyone saw me, and in case I need a little more subtlety than what a cyborg soldier can offer, I have the whole damn Revolution underneath me—including the spies. I can do whatever I want and nobody has to know."

David looked nervous. "Great," he said, sounding forced. "That's… cool."

"And," Acidalia continued, "they have no reason to want anyone else dead, either. I mean, they could be targeting Alestra, but again, why wouldn't they just kill her? We know she's not buried in some hidden Nova base—she was giving a speech about my 'unavoidable and tragic accidental death' a couple of hours ago, and she was standing right on the palace balcony. Surely they could have killed her then if they wanted to really cause chaos."

"There's still Mars," David said. "What about Arlen Tycho?"

"Do you really think they give a shit about Mars?" Andromeda laughed. "Come on, man. It's Mars. Not even Martians care about Mars. Besides, we all know the presidents are all doomed. Didn't the last guy die in office after he was rude to Alestra in public?"

"Last four," Acidalia corrected. "And their vice presidents shortly thereafter. I believe President Tycho was… President pro tempore of the Senate? He was third or fourth in line; my mother murdered all of his predecessors."

"Jesus," Athena huffed. "I never imagined the bureaucracy could be so exciting."

Before David could respond to that, Acidalia effortlessly inserted herself back into the conversation, interrupting so fluidly that it didn't feel like she was interrupting at all. "Either way," she said, "I think we've come to the conclusion that they don't want to kill us. I think we should send a diplomat."

"Or we could nuke them to death and forget the whole thing," Andromeda shrugged.

Acidalia practically gasped. "Have you gone mad? That's what landed us in this war in the first place."

"What?!" Andromeda snapped. "It's an effective display of power, at the very least. It'll show them we mean business. And, for the record, they have committed a crime—they'e trespassing on Imperial territory without permission."

"That is absolutely 100% not a nuke-worthy crime," David said, as if Andromeda would ever care about his opinion at all.

"I just think that sending a diplomat to this is dangerous and ridiculous," Andromeda said. "Who knows what they want? It's an eat-or-be-eaten world out there, literally. They kill us or we kill them."

"Not everything has to come down to that," Acidalia replied. "But I do agree that this is a mine field. This situation that calls for civility and grace, not nuclear bombs and indiscriminate murder. So, if we do send a diplomat, I propose that I go myself."

A chorus of questions came from the rest of the table. "You can't do that," David said. "It's too risky, and we need you."

"But it's a power play, and it gets them on our side," Acidalia argued. "Look at it this way. They're currently staring at a war-torn city on a planet they've thought of as backwards and barbaric for the past few centuries at the very least. They don't see a noble cause fighting against tyrannical overlords; they see two equally bad warring factions killing each other in a brutal and bloody civil war. But if we could get them to see us as friends and my mother as the enemy, two things happen: one, this war of attrition might end and they'll stop trying to hurt Terra, and two, we gain someone on our side, backing us up. But imagine what would happen if my mother got to them first. Either she kills them all and makes them angrier than ever, and all of Eleutheria falls to pieces because divided we fall, or she gains an ally. Both are bad."

David groaned. "I hate that you're right about this."

"And," Acidalia continued, "if I go myself, that immediately shows them that Alestra—and, by extension, the Nova—is duplicitous, manipulative, and all-around untrustworthy. What better way to showcase that than by proving that they lied about the death of an enemy leader? The Mira aren't dumb, and I'm sure they've had their suspicions for a while, but this will confirm them. And, hopefully, we can make them sympathetic to us. But it's going to take an expert politician to navigate this, which is why I propose that I go. Not to sound arrogant, but—"

Andromeda started playing white noise in her ears and promptly stopped paying attention. Whatever Acidalia was about to say after that but was not worth listening to—she'd learned that much. Listening to her talk about how good at politics she was was could bore any sane human being to tears, and it was especially grating to Andromeda, who had to put up with it almost constantly. She waited until Acidalia's sparkly red lips stopped moving, then returned to the conversation, hoping nobody had noticed her brief vacation from having to listen to the Imperatrix talk. Honestly, though, even if they had, she wouldn't care.

"I still think this is inordinately risky," David said. "Even if they're benevolent towards Acidalia, and that's a big if, what if they also just genuinely want our planet for their own? It's not like we can do anything now when the whole Earth is divided in two."

"We can still nuke them," Andromeda said again. Next to her, Acidalia rolled her eyes in annoyance. "What?" Andromeda asked. "Got any better solutions?"

"Yes. Diplomacy."

"And what if they kill you?"

"The planet already thinks I'm dead. It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me. It matters to the Revolution."

"You'll get over it."

"The scientists won't."

Acidalia sighed, looking very overburdened, and stared off into the distance—or, at least, she tried to. It would have come across as less spacey if she wasn't looking blankly at the Scorpio's opaque windows. "That's true," she admitted, her voice soft. "But they could learn."

"They won't learn without someone to teach them," Andromeda said, hoping she looked more enthusiastic than she felt. She had seen this type of thing before in dozens of people; one person died and suddenly everyone was borderline suicidal. Acidalia, for all her high-and-mighty queenliness, was not as immune to grief as she thought she was.

"You are right," Acidalia said, "but they aren't going to kill me. I'll go, and I'll take a guard and an entourage. It would look suspicious if I showed up alone, anyway—I want them to see me as a legitimate leader ousted from the palace, not a bastard rebel out for blood because my pure-bred little sister is getting the throne. Why doesn't David come with me?"

David sat up straight as a board, looking panicked. "What? Me?!"

"You're much physically stronger than I am," Acidalia said, "and I can't exactly bring anyone else, seeing as no one has any idea I'm alive. I suppose I could reveal myself now, but I'd rather stay silent and make a big show of it later—that way, if I should die before the victory comes, nobody will have known I was alive to begin with. As it stands, I'm a martyr and the Revolution is mourning me—they'll fight harder than they ever have before, because it's personal this time, and they're angry. So guards are out of the question.."

"But its been years since I was in the army," David stammered. "I'm not as tough as Andromeda, and I'm not a real a politician like you."

Andromeda snorted. "You're the minister of farming on a planet known for its farms, how is that not political?"

"Secretary of agriculture," Acidalia corrected. "But she's right; you are a politician."

"In name only! Mars is a meritocracy built around a computer program created a thousand years ago by some religious fanatics; the only reason I ever got power to begin with was because the whole internet thought my baby daughter was cute and that drove up my social points so much that my boss named me as his successor, and then my boss got shot and here I am. It was all just luck! Besides, nobody in the Martian government does any actual work—the Algorithm runs everything, we all just stand there and look handsome." Beads of sweat poured down from his curly hair into his unshaven stubble, and Andromeda wondered not for the first time where Acidalia was even finding these people. David Seren was like a bad one-credit-store, off-brand version of someone respectable—what help could he possibly be? And it wasn't like anyone else here would be useful, either—both of the Scientias seemed absolutely clueless, Cressida was still playing on her phone, and Lyra and Ace looked too sad to serve any real purpose.

Fucking fantastic. We're supposed to be meeting aliens and this is the team we have? When Andromeda was sixteen, she'd escaped from a jail cell with a crack team made up of four stim addicts and three separate men who had been arrested for public indecency, and every single person in that little cohort still managed to be more competent than any of the supposedly high-ranking, important officials standing around blankly right now. Andromeda had never felt smarter—probably because her IQ drove the mean of the people in this room up by at least ten points. She couldn't possibly let all of these morons go off to meet the Mira alone—with her luck, they'd all manage to stumble into the path of an asteroid or fall off a cliff or meet some other hilariously unlikely and horrible fate, because the universe just didn't seem to like them very much.

"You know what?" Andromeda said. "Fine. Fine. We'll go talk to the Mira, and David can stay on the ship and wait and see if they want a Martian representative before he gets off. And we can bring this disphit—" she gestured to Ace—"because one immune is better than nothing. As for the rest of you, do what you want—just be quiet about it. And I'm coming."

"You?" Acidalia asked, alarmed. "We can't have the both of us go; it's far too risky. We're putting all of our eggs in one basket, and there is no designated survivor or line of succession here. They think I'm already dead, but you—you're one of the biggest assets we have, we can't lose you and me both."

"Well, if I don't go, all of you are going to get your asses kicked," Andromeda snapped. "I mean, look at you. Acidalia, you're an excellent shot, but you're a twig. You got all cut up just from Ace trying to protect you—imagine what you'd look like if someone really wanted to hurt you. And these other people are, what, Scientias? Cantatores? They're not made for fighting. The only physically strong people here are Ace and David, and even David might be pushing it a little with that dadbod. You need someone to smash those blue fuckers' skulls in if things get dangerous."

"I have smashed plenty of skulls in throughout the course of my life, for the record," Acidalia said, ��but if you'd like to accompany me, I have no real qualms with that. I'm just concerned that both of us will—"

"'Both of us die? Anyone who wants me dead will have to fight me first." Andromeda flexed her metal arm. "No offense, but carbon nantoubule bones and steel muscle are a little harder to break than weak-ass myoblast fibers covering osteoporotic calcium bones."

"I am not osteoporotic, my ancestors were just accustomed to lower gravity—"

"Doesn't matter, the point has been made." Andromeda leant back and put her feet up on the table, partially to establish her dominance in the room and partially to show off her fancy new 3D-printed, custom-made metal prosthetics. Noir-black titanium alloys just seemed so much more intimidating than pasty pale flesh and blood, and they were prettier than the brusied, burnt skin that used to cover her body. "I'm going with you."

Acidalia looked like she wanted to protest, but she didn't. Instead, she swallowed her words and looked down at the holographic pinpoint representing the starship, examining it with uncomfortable closeness. "We should leave soon," she said finally, "before they assume we aren't coming. I'll draft a response to their letter."

"Sounds good," Andromeda said. "And as for the rest of you people, do what you want. Nobody here cares if you live or die, so you're free to make your own decisions."

Ace and the girls at the table looked at each other, semi-alarmed, as Andromeda strode away. It must be freeing, she thought, to live like that—to be a teenager with no real connections to anybody and no responsibilities. She'd never had the luxury of freedom; her entire life had just been falling from one type of slavery into another. Being a wage slave to the Revolution was better than being an actual slave to the Eleutherian government, but it still wasn't true freedom the way she'd always envisioned it—she was still trapped here, forever working. Serving the state and serving a master were not entirely different things, especially when she still had to put up with people as dumb as David Seren and as infuriating as Acidalia Cipher. And sure, this job allowed her to use her strategic mind a little more, but what was even the point if she wasn't allowed to play with her favorite toys? Nuclear bombs were horrific and useful, and they seemed about as appropriate a response to an alien landing as anything else.

But Acidalia said no, and that meant no.

Andromeda tried not to think about her as she stormed off down the landing ramps. Acidalia would get her dues someday, when she tried to fix some problem with friendly diplomacy but her enemies brought guns to a knife fight. Then she'd be sorry—sorry that she hadn't listened to Andromeda, the military genius who'd won every war she'd ever fought, and sorry that she'd been so inordinately idealistic about war, where everything is fair and the victors make the only rules long after the fight has ended. Andromeda played with fire, but she did it well; Acidalia just sat there surrounded by gasoline and matches, wondering what she should do.

Whatever. There was a time for diplomatic relations and a time for mushroom clouds, and Andromeda would be getting her way soon. If there was anything her life had taught her, it was that there are some situations where violence is the only answer—and if this war continued on the trajectory it was heading towards, it would be time for mushroom clouds very soon.