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

[Mamorien]

A double-dose of The Greenfield Family to finish it off (probably not before time for a lot've yez).

Day 3 of the Gathering is the day we've all been waiting for. It's the big final blowout, everyone all together for one big hurrah, the culmination of everything that has happened until now.

And you'll just have to see for yourself what the epilogue contains.

If you've been following the story to the end, I hope you've enjoyed the ride. And remember that if you're dying for more stories of the Greenfield family, the paid version on ZBookStore still has bonus chapters not available in the free version.

If you want to read the wrap-up in chronological order, it goes something like this:
https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/51
https://zbookstore.com/bookshelf.php?id=...ext54xhtml
https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/52

Princess of the Void.

”Ladies of the Glory Banner,” Narika says. “Ladies of the Black Pike. We come now together in a convocation of our own making. In a sisterhood that has not been seen since the cycles of the earliest expansions, when the first Princesses braved the great undiscovered Void. In that spirit, we—ow. Ow. What are you doing, girl? No pulling.” She tugs the lock of her hair from Rory’s fist.

“Wah,” Rory protests. Her flash flickers behind her big round eyes.

Narika holds her further out as her tiny legs kick. “What does she want, Sykora?”

“I really don’t know,” Sykora says. “She hardly ever does that. Just keep holding her and she’ll stop.”

“She does that when she’s hungry.” Grant fishes into his baby bag and pulls out a bottle of Sykora’s milk. “C’mere, you little tulaberry. Stop torturing your aunt.”

“Grantyde, I was enjoying that.” Sykora pouts. “You have not a single bone of skullduggery in your body.”

“Thank you, Grantyde. Where was I?” Narika blows out a raspberry. “Well, whatever. You understand the import. We are midwifing the new Empire. Five days left and we make contact. Let us discuss how the day is saved.”

Despite what the names would suggest, the Glory Banner is far blacker than the Black Pike.

Grant offers Rory her bottle. As his daughter greedily drinks he settles into the seat that Narika’s people found him. He took for granted the Pike’s extended supply of comfortable chairs sized for a Maekyonite; here in the Glory Banner sector upon the ship of the same name his hindquarters are bearing the indignity of a narrow, Taiikari man-sized seat whose armrests are squeezing his waist.

The Glory Banner’s floor plan is ninety percent identical to the Black Pike’s. This threw Grant off at first, though it makes a certain sense. Both are, of course, ZKZs. But it’s a woozy feeling of displacement whenever he turns down a hallway and encounters a replica of his and his wife’s ship, just… different.

He could swear it was dimmer, for one thing, although that might have a lot to do with Narika’s primary color being black. Despite what the names would suggest, the Glory Banner is far blacker than the Black Pike. Onyx everywhere, with swirling marble patterns or geometrical textures in threaded gold to keep the visual clarity from dissolving into murky dungeonesque. The milieu reminds Grant of a severely upscale bank.

In Grant’s brief time among the larger crew of the Glory Banner—primarily the path from the hangar to the command deck—he’s gotten brief looks at the Banner’s crew, who returned his scrutiny with jaws agape, forgetting even Taiikari deference in their eagerness to get a look at the Prince of the Pike. Despite their tepid demeanor toward the visitors and the color inversion of their outfits, the crew navigate the ship with the same casual camaraderie that the crew of the Pike display. No crawling privateers have lurked forth from the Banner’s shadowed corners to lick Narika’s boots.

Although they are not alone.

Specialist-Gefreiter Axyna of Taiikar perches in the corner of the room, her omnipresent leer like a gargoyle’s if a gargoyle hummed to itself and kicked its legs occasionally. And kept waving at Grant’s kids. Grant does not like that.

“You’re all mad, you know,” she says now, as the image of Maekyon appears over Narika’s command table. “Mad and with big old pairs of horns. How Zithra didn’t execute you for dropping a relic of a policy on her desk I’ll never—”

“Quiet,” Narika says, with stentorian flatness, and Axyna is quiet, immediately. “Sit still until you are called upon.”

Axyna’s legs freeze mid-kick, one in front of the other. She leers bigger in a see how good I’m being? way. Narika scoffs.

“As she so often is, your pet harlequin is right and wrong,” Narika’s majordomo says. She keeps introducing herself to Grant and he keeps forgetting her name. “It was a pretty piece of historicity. I’ve read the document; truly astounding work from Mme. Lomanza.”

Whatever loquaciousness Lomanza built aboard the Black Pike has been smothered by the command group’s about-face on annexation, and finished off by the austere new surroundings she now finds herself in. She smiles queasily and nods. Grant would say she needed a hug if he didn’t know that she’d react to it in the manner one might welcome a gas can and a lit match.

“We can forget anything useful from the actual Mandate, though,” her counterpart from Glory Banner continues. “Impossible to reproduce its efficiencies here, not when we don’t even have a global body to sign it that would cover every Maekyonite—”

“Let’s strike impossible from the lexicon,” Sykora interrupts. “It’ll be hard goddamn work, which we will dedicate ourselves to doing. Two full command groups. We can make it happen.”

“Artfully said, Sykora.” Narika folds her arms. “I will remind you that it was my Majordomo you said it to. But artful all the same.”

Grant really wishes she’d said the name out loud.

“If you’d prefer, sister, you can take over the meeting entirely,” Sykora says, with a spraycoating of artificial sweetener on her tongue. “But my understanding is we are co-leads.”

“No, no,” Narika adopts Sykora’s forced obsequiousness. “It was merely an observation. A laudatory one. You did well, Majesty.”

“Well, good. I am glad you approve, Majesty.”

“I do, though I wonder about your tone, Majesty.”

Axyna’s leg is trembling where she’s holding it up in frozen mid-kick.

“I wonder about your tone, dear sister,” Sykora says.

“I don’t have a tone,” Narika says, tonefully.

“If I may interject, ladies.” Grant clears his throat. “We’re co-co-leads, in fact. I’m number three. And I’d like to steer us back toward a point. There’s plenty of nations we could present the mandate to, but whoever we select would be a statement that’d piss off basically everyone else.”

“And the more rulers to whom we present terms, the more refusals we can expect, to add their bitterness to the brew,” Hyax says.

Grant sets his baby back on the table. She starts playing with her toes. “So what if we went the other way?”

Narika stares at her giggly little niece and visibly tries to keep the adoration from her face. Mostly she succeeds, but her tail’s wagging. “What’s the other way?”

“Ignoring the nations entirely,” Grant says. “Rory, do you know who that is? Who’s that right there? Can you say Narika?”

“Nekka,” Aurora says.

Narika’s lips twitch. “Well done, Lady Aurora.”

“We provide the Mandate to everyone, everywhere, immediately.” Grant gives Aurora an encouraging push and she sets off at a determined crawl toward her aunt. “Enshrining it as a universal right on Maekyon. That’s more or less what Sykora and I told the Empress.”

“Bold.” Narika retrieves Aurora and returns her to her erstwhile place in her arms. “If I understand you correctly, every Maekyonite would hold their own fate in their hands—whether to remain in their nation of birth or to become an Imperial citizen.”

That’s imp—” Vora casts a guilty look Sykora’s way. “That’s a tall order, from the research I’ve done on Maekyonite geopolitics. Setting aside the attitudes of serfdom and indenturement that would make this impossible in many locales of the world, the sheer population drain might cause major infrastructural problems.”

“If we start sucking up enough people to make a serious dent, surely that’s a Maekyonite vote of confidence in us,” Waian says. “If that’s our biggest problem then we’re doing great. Just because they’d be Imperial citizens doesn’t mean we’re automatically robbing Maekyon of their manpower. It might be a great thing to organize Maekyonite working groups and unions on their own planet to get the public works stuff done.”

“I question whether that’s our place,” Narika’s Majordomo says. “Then again, I questioned whether this vessel was Lady Aurora’s place, and Narika threatened me with court martial.”

Narika frowns as her tail tuft plays keepaway with the baby. “I wish you hadn’t told them that.”

“You guys have corporations and markets and shit, right?” Waian interjects.

“Very famously so,” Grant says.

“There ya go.” Waian tilts further back in her seat. Her boots are on the table; the Glory Banner Majordomo is chewing her lip to ruin with the effort not to comment. “We put some Taiikari firms up in there to make up for the manpower they lose.”

“Surely Maekyonite firms wouldn’t be able to compete,” Narika says. “Not at our tech level.”

Waian’s arm servos click with her thumbs-up. “That’s when we sell ‘em our tech.”

“At what point does this approach become an annexation by some other name?” Brigadier Malus asks.

Every time Grant hears Narika’s Brigadier speak it gives him whiplash, and then makes him guilty about it. He’s gone so Taiikari that it’s odd to hear a man besides himself speak at these meetings.

But a man is exactly what Malus is. It caught Grant by surprise. For all of Sykora’s accusations of holier-than-thou, Narika has never pled her case with the male in her command group. Grant didn’t realize it was possible or permissible; he understood it wasn’t, in fact. But then again he’s Sykora’s husband—in the summation of things, this is perhaps the lesser heterodoxy.

“The more interventionist pressure we allow our baronesses to exert on the Maekyonite markets, the harder it will be to enforce the planet’s independence.” Malus’s voice coarse and heavy as gravel. “And then there’s the matter of protecting the people to whom we give citizenship. Who can say whether they won’t be targeted en masse and moved against as traitors to their own kind?”

Grant longs to countermand that assessment, but he can’t. “Maybe we forget the idea of keeping them on Maekyon. Maybe if someone wants to run away from the planet they’re from, we help them do it.”

Narika purses her lips. “And do what with them? Scatter Maekyonites across the cosmos?”

Waian chuckles. “Majesty, this might not ring true with you thanks to that K-wort you’re on, but most worlds in the cosmos would be pretty goddamn thrilled to have a Maekyonite diaspora come its way.”

“Something to put in their hands, perhaps,” Sykora says. “Whether, once they obtain their Imperial citizenship, they leave or stay.”

“Either way, it’s a messy business. We spend force-of-arms to extract them from their rulers and bring them offworld or into our embassy city, or we spend it protecting them once they’ve stayed put.” Malus removes his anticomps. “Even with the permission we’ve been given, this begins years of violence.”

“I know,” Grant says, trying not to stare as the Brigadier unfolds a microfiber cloth and wipes his fly-eye goggles down. “I was preparing myself for it already; I’m no less prepared now. People will die.”

“Does it make it any better, that it’s those same people doing the killing?” Narika asks, and the probing expression on her face tells Grant this is a genuine question, not a rhetorical trick.

He gives his sister’s question the serious thought it deserves. “It does, in a way. Especially if it means we get to use all the Imperial might for something like goodness.”

“Even if there might ultimately be more deaths from this disruption than from a clean beheading takeover,” Narika’s Majordomo says.

It definitely started with a T. Or maybe a J?

“I disagree, Majordomo Tari,” Hyax says, and Grant sends a mental thank-you to her, partially for the ideological assist but mostly for the reminder. “There is no clean beheading for the people of Maekyon. The inquests I’ve done on their intraspecies wars—these people are brave unto viciousness.”

“We could sufficiently contain them,” Tari says.

“Not without wholesale cultural destruction.” Hyax’s eyes narrow. “Not without turning Maekyon into a global carceral state.”

“Yes; that is how we could contain them.” Tari’s carefully plucked eyebrows furrow. “Your Princess said to strike impossible from the lexicon. I’ve struck.”

“Grantyde’s people are tempestuous,” Vora says. “Their expressions of love are as dramatic as their hatred. Once the tide turns our way, it keeps turning. We need actuation force, that’s all. The initial friendly outreach will help.”

“As will our big ol’ asses,” Waian says, and when Hyax scoffs: “What? They will.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...ory-banner
EDIT: Scribble Hub pending https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2614184/