Deep in extraterritorial space, Timni matches velocity and exchanges approach codes with another vessel, feeling apprehensively sick.
Timni’s little dirty-carbon coloured freight wagon has all of the clean lines and swooping architectural grace of a sausage roll, dwarfed beside the unnecessarily sleek sunfish mass of a privately-owned leisure yacht. It is clean and bright, painted titanium white and lapis blue and sunflower gold, and its painted good-luck eyes are each as large as the landing pads that Timni’s ship class uses. One stares blandly at her on the forward view, the benevolent gaze of something which considers you neither food nor foe, and so may not even be noticing you at all; just a speck in its vision.
“Your Effulgence,” she says, hands sweating on the ship’s controls. “I’ve done all I can to verify that we are in the correct place, treating with the correct people; but they won’t take hails from me or allow docking approach, and nor do I trust them, without further verification. They’re waiting to know it’s you, Effulgence.” She hesitates, swallows. “There’s less than nothing I can do if this is a trap, Effulgence.”
“I require access to communications,” the Empress says.
“You have it, Effulgence,” Timni says awkwardly. “This isn’t a battleship, nor a secure transport intended for the Imperial person, Effulgence; what would happen on a scow like this, if you started locking people out of the radio? Everyone aboard is presumed competent to make a distress call, should it come to it. Same as the helm, same as — everything.” She glances sideways in time to see the Empress frowning around the bridge, as if seeing it anew. “If you didn’t realise, Effulgence, I’m — I didn’t keep it from you, I only thought you’d know, or pick it up — I’m no more necessary to the ship than to. Anything.” She peters outs, chest tight, as the Empress turns the frown on her. “Else.”
The Empress is silent, thunderous. Timni bends over the console, pretending the necessity of some trim corrections; eyes the flicker of the comms bandwidth meter as the Empress silently, internally commandeers the ship-to-ship connection — then the vertical jump to 100% as the head-in-exile of the Empire singlehandedly saturates the link.
Nothing Timni need know. Nothing Timni need lose a second of worry over.
She swallows sour apprehension.
The airlock opens onto a moment of watchful stillness on both sides — the Empress standing in the centre of the lock as though she owns it, Timni only very reluctantly in it at all, well back and to the side, face turned deferentially down; and, on the spacious and opulent side of the pressure door, a welcoming party. Two uniformed lackeys Timni immediately thinks are private security henries; a well-dressed man who, like Timni, is back and to the side, but only a step, and with far more of an air to him that he belongs in such a meeting, some kind of majordomo; and a wide-hipped, grey-stippled woman of regal carriage, draped in noble house colours and tasteful jewellery.
The Empress makes a faint noise, something that on a lesser might be a sigh of relief.
“Your Effulgence,” the woman says. She dips, as though to curtsey. “Apotheosis of Command.” No; she continues, to her knee — to her knees. “Glory’s Own Raiment.” Bends further, down and down, graceful in every inch of it, face low to the floor. “My own and rightful Empress.”
Timni’s jaw is, unbidden and without her permission, slack. She is herself as lowly as the deck-filth embedded in the treads of the Empress’ gun-henry boots, and in a single greeting she is exposed as so vilely tawdry that she cannot even grovel competently to befit an Empress.
“Rise, friend,” the Empress says, easy and even, perhaps, faintly warm.
“Friendship, alas, may be all I’m worth,” the noble lady says, rising with the same effortless elegance. Timni is fairly sure that she couldn’t do the same from that posture without grunting and straining like a gymnasium showoff risking injury to catch eyes. “The usurpers and their pet pretender fear you, Empress, even in their triumph; they see your revenge hanging over them in every shadow, behind every turn of their backs. Those they think loyal are under such scrutiny you can scarcely imagine.”
The Empress smiles then, unaccustomed and vicious.
“More than enough,” she says, “to relate to me that the running dogs cower at even the memory of my name.”
“Allow us to show you hospitality,” the lady says, and extends a beseeching hand. “And let us discuss how best to give them more to fear than that.”
The Empress steps forward, radiating satisfaction. This is how things should be; this is the environment of veneration she belongs to.
“Captain Timni?” the lady says, gaze skimming over the Empress’ shoulder to the back of the airlock. It takes a long moment for Timni to even process what she’s said, for the blood to perceptibly fall out of her face and pool in whichever part of her generates terror.
She chokes out a noise. The Empress’ advance hitches, shoulders taking on a belligerently interrogative set. Everybody else is looking at Timni, now.
“Lady,” she manages, “I’m not — the next time I’m pulled into a checkpoint or stopped at a harbourmaster’s office, for being the low sort I am in the low places I exist, I’m not Her Effulgence in a body for war, or an untouchable noble in a fine dress. If they break my fingers so I’ll talk, I’ll tell them something, so I can’t hear any of this. I really can’t.”
Terrible as judgement, inexorable as orbital mechanics, the Empress begins to turn on the spot, and Timni cannot endure, she cannot.
“Effulgence,” she says, voice as ragged and wretched as she feels within, and toggles the airlock door closed before the Empress’ flashing eyes can flay her; cycles back through into her own familiar squalor; collapses onto her bunk, shaking and clutching her arms around herself.
