The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

It's time at last to lay all cards on the table, for the whole Greenfield family to come together and state plainly everything they've been keeping from each other. No more secrets, no more running from each other, just full disclosure and complete honesty.

What will happen by the end of the night? What relationships will change? What needs to happen for certain members of the family to let go of their past regrets with each other? And what will tomorrow look like?

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/44

And the Princess of the Void (and Grantyde) receive the Infortunity Report for Maekyon.

Waian halts the slow spin of her chair with a boot to the edge of the conference room table. “Keep smearing your sebaceous oil all over that sucker, it’ll stop working, Majesty.”

“There’s no way that your storage devices are that fragile,” Grant says, but he places the datawafer on the table anyway.

Sykora is perched on his armrest, her tail wrapped tight around his upper arm. “Where is that truant adopted daughter of ours?”

Waian snorts. “She’s my adopted daughter.”

“Spearfight you for her,” Sykora says.

“No thanks,” Waian says.

It’s command group classic, today, arrayed around the table, waiting for their final member. Lomanza is a friend, now, even if she’d be unnerved to hear it said. But she isn’t quite the inner circle they require today.

Here comes the woman she replaced now, striding onto the command deck in a pair of severely clackly platforms. “Pardon my lateness. Pardon me, everyone. Um, uh.” She unbinds the silvery cloud of her hair and shakes her springy locks out. “I must object to this course, Majesties, with great regret at my obstreperousness. This is, uh…”

She catches her breath and re-laces her Imperial half-cape, whose epaulette is dragging down her arm.

I was about to say irregular. But... this is blatant.

“I was about to say irregular,” she says. “But I’m sounding like every bureaucrat I’ve ever watched you steamroll. Grantyde, this is blatant maneuvering by Narika. Blatant.”

“I know she’s got ulterior motives.” Grant slides the datawafer across the table and back into his fiddling hands. “If you really think I shouldn’t see it, you’re the Princess-in-Waiting. Your voice counts.”

“Vora,” Hyax says, before that voice can pipe back up. “He must know.”

“It’s not ready,” Vora says.

“He knows that.”

“He’s not ready.” Vora turns beseechingly to her Prince. “Grant, please. Forgive me. But I’m your heiress now and I have to speak frankly. You’ve been such a phenomenon aboard the Pike, and you’ve managed so many miracles. This is the unglamorous side. You’re lacking context and experience.”

Sykora descends from her perch. “Vora,” she says, and nothing more, but the two syllables are so laden with emotive meaning she doesn’t need to.

Vora’s shoulders slump. “I don’t mean to make excuses. I just—this will hurt him. The reason we go through these committees is—”

“I know, Vora. But it’s better now than sometime in the future when there’s nothing to be done about it.”

Vora sighs and nods. She takes her place at the table.

Waian gestures for the wafer. Grant unclenches his fist and holds it out. She takes it, makes a show of wiping it on her coveralls, and plugs it into her tablet. The display mirrors itself on the holoprojector. “Right.” She hands it to Grant. “Top left and right buttons there to turn the pages between the branches.”

Hyax clambers onto the table and into the holoprojection’s teal figures. “This column is what Narika wants you to see, I expect. Here.”

Grant follows Hyax’s pointing finger. “That number is…”

“That is Maekyonite war dead, Majesty,” Hyax says, flatly. “Initial annexation, plus three hectocycles of occupation, presupposing its necessity. The military number there, and the civilian number there. Counting deaths from the resulting infrastructural failures.”

“This can’t be right.” Grant furrows his brow and swipes down the list. “It’s—I mean, it’s optimistic.”

“Look at the units, Grantyde,” Vora says, quietly. “The figures are in ten thousands.”

“Oh,” Grant says, and keeps reading. And nobody says anything else.

“Is this the worst case scenario?” he asks, eventually.

“This is the best case scenario, Majesty,” Hyax says.

“This—”

“There are four branches available here,” she says. “Total capitulation, a brief decisive war, an extended occupation… this is capitulation.”

“This is capitulation?” Grant’s hands are shaking so badly it takes him two tries to turn the page on Waian’s tablet. “What are these war dead?”

“Those are not wars with the Taiikari, Majesty,” Hyax says. “This is internecine. This happens when you take a species and rip the floor out from everything it knew about its place in the void. This is what you get when you introduce a megacycle’s worth of technology to a planet of eight billion people who are still fighting wars over petroleum and have begun to fight wars over water. This is the consequence of nearly two hundred individual nations being re-cast into one, underneath the rule of a xenospecies. Our most optimistic estimate is twenty civil wars or comparable internal conflicts before the world is organized under our stewardship, and that’s with constant Imperial interventionism.”

“You said four branches,” Grant says. “And you named three.”

Waian silently reaches out and presses another button on the tablet. “Outbranch of the occupation branch. You gotta scroll down.”

Grant reads as much as he can stand.

“At a certain threshold of lost Taiikari lives, the Core will judge Maekyon’s civilization ungovernable,” Hyax says, as Grant breathes in on an eight-count to ward off a panic attack. “This is an outbranch of the occupation, triggered when the conflicts are too severe. The deaths—the physical deaths—are lower than the occupation branch, because the occupation branch keeps Maekyon’s civilizations and cultures alive through a troublesome interregnum. Here, the Empire takes it all apart and starts again.”

“Is this real, Brigadier?” Sykora asks, quietly.

“By nature, you know I am not an optimistic person, Majesty,” Hyax says. “And I am working off of incomplete information. Our first contact with humanity will tell us far more than these analyses or extrapolations. But.”

She pivots on her heel to Grant, like a tin soldier.

“We had a conversation once,” she says. “About the Maekyonite willingness to sacrifice for a doomed cause. I have studied your many histories. Your wars, invasions, occupations. Your uprisings. It has filled me with admiration and despair. Your people are, beyond question, the most courageous warriors I have encountered outside of eusocial hiveminds. Billions will convert; billions will capitulate. Millions will fight to the death. Millions, Majesty.”

Grant’s voice sounds dead and dry, like he’s speaking into a blizzard. “What are you saying to me, Brigadier?”

“I am saying yes,” Hyax says. “One of these is real. Which one, I don’t know. But no amount of fact-finding will change the fundamental defiance of your people. There is no song to sing for them. Not this time. The prematurity of the approach, the brashness and beauty of your people, your immunity, your psychology, your societies. This is the perfect storm for tragedy. The worst situation one could comprehend. As if it were engineered to be the Empire’s worst-case scenario.”

Sic Semper Tyrannis, a voice whispers, echoing from the past. That’s what your people say. You know what every tyrant earns.

“The branch where we never came for Maekyon at all has a number, too, Majesty,” Vora says. “It’s only that nobody writes that report. Nobody models the cradle that stays a cradle. The wars you’d have had without us. The diseases. The number in the dark is enormous, and it is invisible, because no one is accountable for it. We make ourselves accountable. That is what a Prince or a Princess does. That is our doom.”

“Out, please, everyone,” Sykora says.

Waian puts a hand on Grant’s forearm. “Kid—”

“Waian.” Sykora kisses her chief engineer on the cheek. “Please go.”

They leave him alone with his wife.

Grant feels like lead. There’s a violent static scream in a muffled place inside him, like it’s resounding up from some oceanic abyss, or from the distant future.

It was supposed to be bright. It is bright. It’s bright in the way a mushroom cloud is.

“Did you know?” he asks. “Have you read this?”

“I’ve read versions of it.” Sykora says. “Nothing like this, not ever.”

He closes his eyes. Down in the bones of the ship, the great patient engine is carrying them all toward his homeworld, fourteen days out and counting. He opens his eyes again.

“All right,” he says. “We’ll do what we have to.”

Sykora blinks. “What?”

He flips away from the apocalypse. “If capitulation is the best we can get, let’s get that capitulation.”

“We’ll—” She blinks again. A tear shines in her duct. “No. No, this is all wrong.”

“You heard them,” he says. “This is just… I mean, if this is what we’ve been dealt—”

“No. No, no, no, no. Grant. I’m—”

The tear breaks and shines down her face.

“I can’t watch this,” she whispers. “I’m watching my kindness disappear.”

“Batty—”

“No,” she says, suddenly fervent. “I—I fell in love with you because you demanded an impossible, infuriating choice. A Maekyonite choice. And if you deny that to your homeworld, there’s a piece of yourself you’re killing. I thought—I thought I could watch it happen. I thought it had to happen. I thought—I wasn’t—I don’t know what I thought. But I can’t let it.”

“Batty,” He leans into her. “What are you saying to me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how, I—I don’t know. But it can’t happen like this. I don’t want to be accountable. Not for this. If we are doomed, then let’s be doomed some other way. We have to find another way. We can’t let things turn like this for your people.” She’s on her feet now, silhouetted in front of the projector’s teal catastrophe. “We have to save them.”

Her tail lashes. He looks up into her fierce eyes. “Save them from what?”

“The Empire,” she says.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...ity-report
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