About 2 minutes ago

  The crowd presses and mills around Harok temple, watching rapt as the screen drones hovering above its spire broadcast the clashing songs echoing within it. Looks like that funky Imp priest guy is really wowing them.

  Sergeant Qiva-mek-Hvok of Knife Seven ain’t listening to all of that. She knows where she stands, and it’s right here with her girls and their guns. She’s got a song of sharpening playing on her in-ears instead; the Taiikari have this amazing sound isolation bullshit where her tunes cuts the temple music out but not conversation or ambient sounds.

  Qiva can’t understand her music’s words anymore, not with her implant, but she ain’t a lyrics type woman anyway, and the driving drumbeat is keeping her the right amount of wary and watchful. The whole knife has it synced up; the private nearest her is tapping her steel-shod toe to the bass drum.

  Qiva surreptitiously opens the back of her helmet and gives her dorsal fringe a scratch. You’re supposed to stay sealed up on duty unless you’re a Taiikari woman who needs her eyes showing. Qiva assumes that’s also them worrying about their hairstyles. Imp girls like to preen. She supposes if she was a cute little plush sexdoll who made all the rules like they did, she’d make an exception too.

  An Eqtoran marine in full HAK is easily a half-head taller than a civilian; the woman who approaches Qiva now is a fellow giantess on this backwater world that’s becoming smaller and smaller. “You ever wish you still spoke it?”

  Qiva glances at Corporal Shan and shakes her head. “Never cared much about the words anyway. It’s about the beat.”

  “Talem’s feeling it.” Shan giggles. “Look at his tail.”

  Lance Corporal Talem, the cute little Imp bunk warmer Qiva and her knife pass around, is standing a few paces away, near the barricade. His tail flicks in time to the music coming from the knife’s caster.

  “What a dork,” Shan says, with a lovesick sigh.

  An Eqtoran with a camera throws a question across the waist-high metal barricade separating her from the marines. Talem grinds out a reply in Eqtorish.

  “Listen to him,” Qiva says. “Getting into his guttural voice.”

  “He sounds like he’s got a little fishbone stuck in his throat,” Shan says.

  “Shut up,” Qiva says. “I’m using that.”

  When her pet Taiikari is being this cute, it makes Qiva want to bully him, so she wanders over, bumps him with her hip, and knocks him a tailspan or so to one side.

  “You speak Eqtorish like you got a fishbone stuck in your throat,” she says.

  “Dude.” His tail swats at her as he returns to his post. “I speak more than you do at this point.”

  Qiva’s smirk grows. Her little pet Imp. She loves when he gets sassy with her. That big mouth has earned him a quick fuck in the shuttle bathroom on the ride home, she decides.

  “You can learn, y’know,” he says, blithely unaware of his sergeant’s explicit intentions. “I know you don’t have shit going on for ninthdays. The classes are free.”

  “Ninthdays are when Dangerous Horizons is on,” Qiva says. “They just put an Eqtoran on the main cast.”

  Shan’s followed her over. “That show is 90 percent trash.”

  “You’re on probation, Shanny,” Talem says. “You watch your mouth. Arbonek is a dreamboat.”

  “Well yeah,” Shan says. “Of course Arbonek’s a dreamboat. He’s the ten percent that’s not trash.”

  “Suspicious mover,” Talem says, suddenly tense. “Mover at thirty forward. You see him?”

  Qiva looks to the locus of his agitation. A pale-blue Eqtoran man, shouldering his way to the front of the barricade. She couches the end of her rifle in her armpit. “Yeah.”

  Talem steps in front of her. “Can’t believe I’m the talker. Eqtorish is easy.”

  “You’re easy.”

  Talem snorts.

  Pale-blue rests a hand on the metal bar of the barricade. Qiva’s grin droops. Surely he’s not gonna—

  The man vaults the barricade.

  Talem holds up a hand and barks out a pair of syllables that Qiva remembers mean something like stop there.

  The man does not stop. An expression of self-abnegation and divine purpose is paralytically plastered across his face. From his coat, a canteen-sized cylinder emerges.

  Grenade. Qiva thinks it and maybe yells it at the same time; she isn’t sure. He rears back and begins to throw. Talem brings his rifle up. Qiva-mek-Hvok brings hers up faster.

  Her helmet’s seals act immediately as the trigger depresses; her rifle’s roar deepens and blurs into an undersea rumble, like a leviathan stirring.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  The man staggers and begins to fall, his ripped-open coat already darkening with blood. A discordant chorus of screaming as he tips forward. His throw falters; the grenade leaves his hand and flies only a few feet. It hits the ground, skitters on the cobbles—

  Qiva dives, catches it, and realizes that between the panicking crowd, the scattering marines, and the sexy temple that her sexy new Prince is inside, there is nowhere to put this. Nowhere that won’t hurt or kill someone.

  This is how her boat comes in. No time to wish it wasn’t.

  She drops to the ground and curls herself on top of the grenade. “Qiva!” Talem screams, and she realizes she’s in love with him. Well, shit. That would have been nice to know earlier.

  What happens next hurts a lot.

  Light, sound, heat. Qiva is blown onto her back.

  She blinks and stares at the sky and the pain arrives, rolls across her in a brain-squeezing pulse. She concludes with a certain amount of disbelief that she is still on the sunlit shore. Breathing is not easy but it’s still happening. Her vision is full of red—as the world pieces itself back together she realizes it’s her helmet’s HUD, flashing a dozen critical warnings at every edge of her facemask.

  Surely she’s dying. Surely she has seconds left. She cranes her head and looks down at herself, ready for the gore and ruined innards.

  Her chest piece is a melted, smoking mess of ablated plate, studded with twisted metal fragments. None of them penetrated.

  The fucking HAK suit. She leapt on a live Eqtoran grenade and these fucking Imps’ HAK suit saved her.

  “Fucking imps,” she croaks, and tries to clamber to her feet. A hot follow-up splash of pain across her brain and she falls onto her back again.

  “Qiva,” Talem cries again, and skids to his knees next to her. All around them is chaos; marines yelling, civvies screaming, shoving, running. “Oh God. Oh, Gods of Harok.”

  Qiva looks critically at her arm—the hand that was holding the grenade. Her brow furrows.

  She remembers having a lot more arm than this.

  The temple is swarming with marines. They stampede into the pews, taking cover behind the emptied windowframes. They kneel in doorways. They halfway tackle Grant to the ground, swarming him like a colony protecting its queen.

  A petite marine—a Lieutenant Numia, by her tag and cape insignia—yells something to him.

  “What?” he yells back.

  Numia repeats herself and this time he hears her over the cavernous ringing of his ears. “Are you hurt, Majesty?”

  “No,” he says. “No, I’m fine. Please get off me.”

  Gradually they allow him to his feet, though an armored gauntlet on his back insistently keeps him hunkered behind the altar. The ringing recedes further.

  Ipqen is sitting next to him, dazed and blinking. Ruaq is tugged into her arms, locked in her bulky grip. The bigger woman's sleeve is torn open; dark blood drips down her bicep. “What the fuck happened?” she grunts.

  “We are trying to ascertain, Lady Ipqen,” the Lieutenant says. “There was a shooting outside. An explosive device.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Tymar says. Grant rubbernecks to the cleric, who meets his nonplussed gaze. “I used that right, yes?”

  “You did.” Grant tries to stand. The marine at his shoulder pushes him insistently back down and he reluctantly stays put. “Someone needs to raise my wife. Get me a communicator with her on the other end. Has she been alerted?”

  “We’re hailing the Pike now, Majesty.” Numia says.

  Grant points stridently at a soldier with his commlink unhooked. “Tell whoever picks up that I’m all right. Lead with that. Make sure Sykora knows I’m all right before she blows the fucking planet up.”

  Ipqen’s trying to nudge herself away from the medtech at her shoulder. “I’m fine. I’m really fine.”

  “Let the man work, Ipqen,” Grant says, and realizes by the widening of her amber eyes how loud he snapped. He catches the sorry and tugs it back down his throat, replacing it with a “Please.”

  “Eqt’s tits.” Ruaq crouches by the medtech, biting her nails. “What got you?”

  “Some glass, I think.” Ipqen grins ruefully. “What happens if you wait too long between temple visits, maybe. My ass is always getting injured when I hang out with you, Majesty.”

  Grant pats Ipqen’s uninjured arm. “I’m standing the rest of the way up now,” he announces, and the Eqtoran marine sticking to him hesitantly releases him.

  “Please remain inside the temple, Majesty,” he says, in stilted Taiikari. Grant gives him a reassuring salute.

  “I have to go out there. I have to help.” Tymar is in a heated confrontation at the temple entrance. “Let me through.”

  The marine at the door shakes his head. “We can’t do that, Brother. Not until we know it’s safe.”

  “Please,” Tymar says. “If there’s people hurt, I can’t just—”

  “Tyme. No.” Grant hurries to his side. “We have to stay here. This might have been meant to flush us out, and there’s someone out there waiting. Right?”

  “That is our fear, Majesty,” the marine says.

  “Just a few minutes.” Grant rests his hand on Tymar’s shivering shoulder. “Okay?”

  Tymar sighs heavily and nods. “But we need to get a Song of Resilience on the public address. Loud as we can. The crowd’ll need it. Talk with the rector. They’ll know what to play.”

  “We can do that.” Grant looks around the room at the huddled Eqtoran congregation, sparing a glance to Ecclesiast Multraq, who’s in the middle of a knot of furiously whispering disciples. “Numia,” he calls, and the Lieutenant snaps a crisp salute. “Get a translator and get to the rector. We need a, uh—”

  “Song of Resilience,” Tymar repeats.

  “That.”

  Numia salutes and hurries toward the administration wing of the temple, her boots crunching across the glass-strewn floor.

  Tymar’s shoulders slump. “I’ve been such a fool, Grantyde. Such a fool.”

  “This isn’t your fault.”

  “No. Not this. But this…” Tymar sweeps his arm around the room. “This is what I was supposed to be doing. You need me. They need me. I should have already been here. I told myself that remaining on Indrik was prudence or proper Omnidivine humility. Now I wonder if it was cowardice. Refusing the call. If I had been here before, if I’d been able to help…” He exhales a worried laugh. “Well, perhaps I shouldn’t abandon humility entirely. But I belong here. I see that.”

  Cerik takes his beloved’s hand and holds it tight.

  “Will you forgive me?” Tymar asks. “For my dithering?”

  “Nothing to forgive,” Grant says.

  “I’m asking anyway.”

  Grant smiles at his brother-in-law. “Then yes. I do.”

  Tymar folds him into a tight, brief hug, then returns to the ebony altar. He doesn’t don the golden robe again, but he’s back in speechifying mode, arms wide. The skittish Eqtorans in the pews have turned to his beseeching voice. Multraq beams a glare across the room, but remains silent.

  Grant pulls his translation pane up; a massive crack runs down its length. The text fizzes and glitches. It’s been wrecked.

  A petulant annoyance catches him and then the sheer improbability of it all softens the blow. These words Tymar is speaking—Grant was never meant to ever hear this language, to ever speak Taiikari.

  “I need a casualty report.”

  “One fatality confirmed,” Numia says. “The attacker. A half-score confirmed injuries so far—uhm.” She looks to Ipqen who winces as a medtech runs a wound wand across her trapezius. “Eleven, I should say.”

  “Anyone critically injured?”

  Numia hesitates. “Our techs are very good, Majesty.”

  Grant frowns. “I need you to answer my questions, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, Majesty.” Her eyes flit away from his, to the broken glass on the floor. “One marine.”