Marikesh gazed down at the wreckage from a ropeway basket. The old lava flow had become pockmarked with fresh craters over the last several months, and now they had added a new one. The test article was nowhere to be seen after the blast, but Marikesh was glad to see that some of the other equipment had been shielded by the pile of rubble heaped up next to the test stand. At least they had managed to make some more rubble to add to it. As the inspection ropeway slowly brought her over the plant, though, her optimism faded. The copper distillation stills hadn't been blown up or knocked over, but they had been pierced by small bits of flying debris. Her nose wrinkled as she caught the acrid, soap-like stench rising from an enormous puddle of foam at the foot of the storage tanks. The new coating hadn't worked, apparently, and the fuel was dissolving the wooden staves.

At least a patch job was better than a new crater, Marikesh thought. She selected a signal flag and clipped it to a pole, and stuck the pole out of the basket's window. She waived it around until the ropeway began to slow and bounce as the crew stopped and reset the mechanism. After a moment she began to move back to the blockhouse.

"There won't be a tin cup left anywhere in Ange," grumbled the quartermaster when she told him about the damage to the stills. It was still better than rebuilding the plant.

"This came over the wire about an hour ago," the elderly Ri man rumbled, handing her a telegram card. She caught a whiff of tea and brandy wafting out from under his grizzled beard. The telegram was, of course, a notice for the design review meeting for the staggeringly expensive object that she had just turned into a crater. She leaned into the quartermaster's window and, sure enough, one of the range test officers was sitting at the little table inside drinking tea. Marikesh pointed at him with the telegram card, and his crest fell a little bit as he realized he'd been caught shirking.

"I didn't see any hazards at the test stand," she called to him, stuffing the telegram card into her pocket. "Send word to the range crew to see if they can find any bits we could analyze. And tell them to keep away from the distillers until the spill evaporates." Marikesh flopped onto one of the chairs at the transit ropeway to wait for the range crew and scribble her observations in her notebook, and in a short time, two of the crew dragged over a pallet with the larger fragments of the test article. They rolled their eyes dramatically as she reminded them to wash up properly, but obeyed. Everyone at the range complained about her "damned Talebi mothering" since the project began, but the fact that nobody had gotten seriously hurt had not gone unnoticed, especially by the range crews. The complaints were more a matter of Ange pride than actual insubordination.

With the pallet of twisted bronze secured in the transit basket, Marikesh gritted her teeth and faced the unpleasant business before her.

The Angesetti naval test range was about a half-day sail from Ange harbor by cutter, on a cape formed from a long tongue of old black lava that lolled from the three crater complexes on the island. The city of Ange was both lucky and unlucky to share the island with a shield volcano. Or, perhaps a couple of shield volcanoes -- counting them was more a matter of semantics than geology. Eruptions here produced lava flows that a healthy person could usually outrun, rather than the sudden detonations that could bring death to entire cities that, like Taleb, shared an island with a stratovolcano. On the other hand, shield volcanoes erupted almost constantly. Thus, there was a logic to the Angesetti disdain for roads. Instead, they put up a horrible tangle of ever-changing suspended skyways, which came in two varieties : basket ropeways, which Marikesh found to be terrifying in an ordinary way, and kettle chainways to cross active lava flows, which she considered absolutely insane. She took the coastal cutter whenever time permitted.

Time did not permit, and so she once again submitted herself to being hauled and bounced pell-mell over the rope and chainways. As usual, she lost her breakfast over the side, this time into the branches of a bluefruit orchard. The farmer had shouted angrily up at her as she bounced away, too miserable to do more than waive an apology. She was left with the image of him brandishing his clippers at her, and then throwing his straw hat onto the fertile black soil in impotent anger.

Winter was well underway, and the hot stones placed in the basket for the long trip up and around the back of the mountain to the observatory had gone cold before the halfway point. Marikesh was rumpled, sleepy and angry when she stumbled onto the platform, but she was pleasantly surprised to find Ieasu waiting for her. As the captain rubbed her wonderfully warm paws over Marikesh's numbed fingers, she caught a glimpse of an unhappy, distracted look in the Ri woman's eyes.

"What?" Marikesh croaked irritably at her... partner she supposed? Lover had a tawdry, dramatic ring to it that she did not care for. "Bihr, you're making a face. What is it?"

Ieasu made an effort to affect a jovial smile, but her sails seemed to crumple a bit at Marikesh's slurred hiss.

"Family, I'm afraid," she murmured. Then it seems as though the wind filled her sails again, and she continued briskly, "Nothing I'm not used to. We'll have a good laugh about it some other time. Now, let's get you warmed up." Marikesh was bustled into the vestibule where a charcoal brassier was sheltered from the biting wind. Ieasu selected some warmed stones from a canvas bag under the brassier and held one of them gently to the side of Marikesh's throat. The fogginess cleared almost instantly as warmed blood trickled into her brain, and Marikesh sighed appreciatively. Hot blooded Ri though she was, Ieasu was becoming quite knowledgeable about the needs of reptilian bodies. Marikesh aimed a quirked eyeridge, suspiciously. Ieasu leered at her, which made them both laugh.

"Is there... anything I can do to help?" Marikesh asked, edging back around to the delicate topic. In her youth, Ieasu had brazenly falsified her age to be taken on as a message runner aboard the 74 gun H.E.S. Resplendent, only for her captain to run her aground and burn the sagging old ship during the battle of the Burning Bay four weeks later. Marikesh's dashing captain was evasive about her life before that. Ieasu had been sworn before the mast at the age of nine, and so Marikesh felt that any dark secrets in the captain's childhood should be placed at the feet of whatever adults ought to have been looking out for her. Of course, she had the social connections and authority to learn whatever she wished about Ieasu, and over the last few chaotic months, that treacherous curiosity had wormed its way into her mind every now and then. She had grimly stamped it out. Her natural curiosity and cynical bluntness usually served Marikesh well, but they tended to make an explosive mixture when it came to love. Her caution had been bought with a barrel of tears poured over Wendel's thin shoulders.

Ieasu sat down on the vestibule bench next to her, holding the other stone in her paw. She gazed at it for a moment, and then seemed to come to a decision.

"I suppose you have a right to know, since it involves you," she said. "My father," she began. Marikesh was taken aback by the note of bitterness in her normally cheerful voice. "Has written a letter to the Admiralty requesting that I be reprimanded. I won't repeat the language he used, but there is, technically, an old naval ordinance forbidding... our relationship. It hasn't been enforced in generations. Normally this sort of thing would be laughed at, but he has influence with the old brass, and it's widely known that more than a few among them have similar leanings."

"I see," Marikesh said, taken aback. "May I ask, what kind of influence?" Ieasu nodded.

"I hope you are pleased to make the acquaintance of the bastard daughter of the Margrave of Cape Haliesen," Ieasu said. She gave an ironic bow at the waist, her smile twisted. It wasn't far off from what Marikesh had guessed.

"I don't care whose daughter you are, Birh," she said. The fierce words came out through chattering teeth, but a little line of tension almost hidden in the fur between Ieasu's eyes fell away. Marikesh made a stabbing gesture at the brassier. "Just tell me who I have to poke with a sword, or whatever Angesetti nonsense I'm supposed to do. We'll deal with it." The captain's brassy laugh filled the vestibule.

"What are you doing up here, anyway?" Marikesh asked. Ieasu looked around to make sure she wasn't overheard.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"I lost my junior navigator to a promotion this morning, so I thought I'd see if there are any lads in the tabulation office who'd like fresh air to go with their ink," she said, conspiratorially. Marikesh rapped the captain's foot with her walking stick.

"Don't poach my people," she said.

"Your people?" Ieasu said, amused. She gestured around herself with her paw. "This is the Ange Naval Observatory. I am a captain of the Ange Navy."

"My project, my people," Marikesh said mulishly. Ieasu held up her paws in surrender.

"The Wings of Justice is in line for a drydock refit. If I do manage to poach anyone, they'll still be here for months, at least."

Marikesh and Ieasu parted in the observatory's lobby, with Marikesh followed by an orderly pushing the test article on a wooden dolly. One of its wheels squeaked rhythmically as they made their way out of the cavernous lobby to the warren of conference rooms behind the telescopes.

When she arrived, she was surprised again to find an unexpected person waiting for her, though this meeting was more baffling than welcome. The Druj representative had finally arrived, bringing the review committee to its full complement of five, including Marikesh. He stood with his back to her as he gazed out the window, a hooded figure clad in dark, knotted, and strangely misshapen robes that obliterated the silhouette of his species. He could be any of the three, and she would be none the wiser. Even his gender was a guess, as Druj tended to select personal pronouns by whimsical means, like drawing lots or consulting the stars. The only personal details she had been able to learn were his calling, his title and name : Druj Diocese of the Exterior, Proctor Park Song.

In the busy months since the conversation of signal rockets at the Naval Academy dinner, Marikesh had tumbled into the center of what turned out to be an already frantic research effort. The initial mele of ideas and their proponent factions had produced perhaps a dozen major foci, each attempting to respond to the arrival of the Voyagers in different ways. The rocketry group had splittered almost immediately, producing two parallel programs. The larger project, led by the Ange Imperial Navy, viewed the problem in terms of ordinance manufacturing. Marikesh had pointed out that there was little point in a missile that couldn't be aimed, but the admiralty seemed to believe that was a problem that could be addressed by a sufficiently large warhead. And so, she left the group to focus on what she called, "The trajectory problem."

The Imperial Navy continued to fund her group, thanks to the support of Charles Birch, Rear Admiral of the Blue, who was perhaps the Navy's most experienced battery commander. Her fellow scholars of Taleb had also arrived in force, filling the pubs, coffee shops and seminar halls of Ange with the loud, colorful and often combative rhythm of Talebi argument. The boardwalks of Ange made for poor writing surfaces, but they were now covered in chalky scribblings. The University of Akritas, an institution older than Taleb itself, had crammed their entire engineering department, including students, equipment, and budget onto a pair of Talebi merchant barques. A significant chunk of the engineers had gotten interested in the trajectory problem, and appointed professor Rosario Oligata to represent the department in the committee. The Merchant Marine Navigators Guild had also claimed an interest in the project, on the somewhat dubious supposition that the international guild's authority over the certification of navigators on the seas should be extended to the sky. This assertion came in the person of guild forewoman Reng Foldweather, who brought with her the cooperation of hundreds of navigators and their trained mathematical minds.

The Druj had required their own inclusion in all major projects as a condition for allowing the participants to cross their territorial waters to and from Ange. Nearly every rock, atoll and reef in this part of the world was capped with a grim-looking Druj monastery bristling with quaint but deadly-accurate trebuchets. Thus, the review committee was formulated with a seat for a Druj proctor who had, until now, remained conveniently absent.

Now here he stood. Marikesh fussed about with the fragments of the test article while she gathered her thoughts, and then dismissed the pair of orderlies who had handled the cart. The two young men peered curiously at the proctor as they withdrew. She shot a glance at Reng, who gave a slight sideways jerk with her head when their eyes met. They had not yet spoken with the Druj.

"Proctor Park," Marikesh said with as much warmth as she could gather in the cold room. "I'm glad to make your acquaintance."

He turned from the window, causing the wooden toggles hanging from the knots of his robes to clatter softly. Deep within his hood, his face was covered by a rough burlap veil. He bowed slightly.

"I am. Likewise," he said, speaking in the Druj dialect, a raspy hiss proscribed to the vocalizations common to Ri, Valaat and Ithalos biology. He moved oddly, as though his body had fewer joints than it should have. They were probably splinted, so that his species would not be telegraphed by his gate. "I do not stand on ceremony," he rasped, gesturing at the cart. "Please proceed."

Marikesh hefted the pieces of the test articles onto the conference table, and quickly sketched the design on the chalkboard. It had been a stout bronze casting about the size and shape of a bugle, not including the stand and copper pipes attached to it. It was now in four mangled pieces.

Admiral Birch picked up one of the smaller chunks. He tilted the fractured edge of the casting up and down light from the window, squinting at it through a jeweler's loupe. He seemed to spot something he was expecting to see, and made a disappointed grunt.

"Another cold shot during casting," he said. "This is poor work. There was a batch of carronades that blew up like this during the Apricot War. A couple of armory captains were hanged for embezzling charcoal, I seem to recall. Though, in this case..." he picked up another fragment and tried to fit them together. They were deformed, so the fit was poor. "I think that we would have better luck sending this work to a civilian foundry. I think perhaps I overestimated the naval armory. Their experience is with large, simple investments, not small complicated ones."

He dropped the casting on the table with a clunk. Marikesh picked up the fragment he had been looking at. The ragged edge had a grainy look to it, but she wasn't sure what telltale signs he'd seen.

She pushed them roughly into their original shape. One of the valve flanges was missing completely. Three of the fractures seemed to meet where the missing flange had been. She looked at the diagram she'd sketched to confirm.

"It looks like it failed here," she said, tapping the point in the diagram. "Cold shot or not, we still don't have stable fuel flow. Something is causing the thrust to oscillate. I could hear it during the test." She copied a curious looking scribble onto the chalkboard from her notebook, where she'd tried to represent the evolutions of the sound of the motor as she'd listened from the bunker. "The cadence was about like this," tapping the lump of chalk against the board. "These parts here were big bursts of much louder noise."

"Ah." The four veteran committee members looked up in surprise at proctor Song. "A harmonic," he rasped. "Consult a brassier, or perhaps a luthier. They will find the flaw."

Marikesh dragged a stool out from underneath the room's lectern and dropped herself onto it. Thinking of the engine as a musical instrument was evocative, and her mind began racing through the implications. Different fluids, different pressures, but the same principles.

"Charles, do you have the engineering blueprints with you?" She asked. She spread out the unwieldy sheets on the floor, as in her schooldays, and fit an ink nib into her walking stick. The group began working out the volumes, pressures and velocities of gasses moving through the complex internal pathways, with Marikesh and Oligata whipping through the vector integrals while the naval gunner and the navigator followed up with quick numerical solutions. The Proctor Song mostly stood back and watched, offering a few surprisingly cutting insights into their overall process. After a few hours of work, they knew the natural resonances of each section of the engine.

"It's a wonder it worked at all," she said, looking at the table they'd compiled. There were matching harmonics everywhere. Marikesh dropped herself back on the stool.

"I'm going to see if someone will bring us more tea," Foldweather said. A few minutes later, she rushed back into the conference room empty-handed, breathing hard. The other four stood up in alarm.

"The Voyagers are changing orbits," she said between gasps. In the hallway, Marikesh heard a rising tide of pounding feet and barked orders. In the distance, the crack of a pistol split the air. In the harbor below, she saw knots of signal flags flying up the masts of warships, bursting out in coded complexity beneath Angesetti and Talebi battle ensigns. A moment later, the floor shook with the deep, mournful song of the observatory's dread bell. Across the city, the other dread bells began to peal, mustering the citizens and their visitors for the immediate and total evacuation of the Ange state.

Suddenly Ieasu was in the room, flanked by six wide-eyed officers. She pointed at the papers strewn around the room.

"I want all of this stowed in my cabin within the next three hundred seconds," she ordered, and they leapt to their task, snatching papers, scrolls and books into canvas sacks. She turned to Marikesh, and held out her paw. A little more gently she said, "That includes you." Two more officers appeared at the door, calling for Song and Oligata. Admiral Birch nodded to Foldweather.

"I will escort the Navigator to the Guild docks myself," he said to Ieasu and the officers at the door.

"I'll see you in a few days, Charles," Marikesh said to him as they headed in opposite directions at the door. The admiral's station was the coastal defense battery. He would share the fate of the city, whatever it turned out to be. He smiled warmly.

"Ad astra," he said to her.

"E terris via," she replied automatically, bringing her fist to her heart. The Angesetti admiral returned the Talebi salute, and they parted at a run.