"Mmm! Akira, why didn't you tell me you could make these!"

  Akira rolled her eyes, still holding the tray over her stomach subserviently. "You didn't ask, Madame President. You always have spring rolls with your tea."

  "W-Well, you could've suggested it!"

  Lin pinched the little packet of pea sprouts in her chopsticks and tucked it between her teeth, the seared smoky crust inviting her to a al dente pasta pouch indeterminate between greasy and moist. Of all the dumplings, nothing represented perfection like the little gyoza. Rather than the Sparrow and its five organs, there ought to be a chengyu praising the gyoza for being the best of both worlds: steamed AND fried.

  And, to enjoy it outdoors in an airy yukata among the pleasant squawking of birds, the crooning of frogs. She'd been working for so long, she'd been worried she'd never catch a break. Ancestors she was so close, she was going to cum—

  Something rumbled in the sky above the campsite. She looked up past the cloth palisade emblazoned with her family's kamon, a stylized twist of seaweed; intuitively, her body anticipated the feeling of raindrops on her cheeks, but the sky above the wetlands was cloudless and bright.

  An array of distinctive quad-contrails traced lazily above the skeletal, bouncing tar-pumps among the weeds. It was the wing of Geminis come back from the escort mission in the north.

  "...Diane operated within expected parameters." Akira approached Lin's throne and bowed her head slightly. "Of course, they'd have to be quite stupid to try something from that angle." She closed her eyes, her lips quivering slightly. "Heliotrope's science frigate pushed north into the storm and was uncontactable."

  "That class of frigate should be steady in those winds." Lin set her chopsticks down gently on the cover of her Trail. Her eyes narrowed. "I trust you were not seen watching."

  "No..." Akira curtsied in her domino dress. "The prototype craft handled flawlessly. Slipping it into the manifest was a marvelous play from yourself."

  "The Arrowhead mkII," Lin leaned back in her officers' chair and crossed her thighs, tasting the name. "They should call it something else, shouldn't they?"

  "I concur, Madame President: it's quite unique. I'm not convinced a disgusting meatbag such as yourself could realize its potential, at least without soiling the cradle with some foul discharge before 'blacking out'." The maid put air quotes on those two words and rolled her eyes distastefully.

  "Please forgive my fleshiness," Lin smiled, touching a hand to her breastbone. "This one's minor G-tolerance is a stain on her ancestors."

  She'd seen the engineers covering it with Ghillie tarp not far from the camp. It was an Arrowhead only in rough body plan, having been redesigned from the ground up by Double Bravery, a concern loyal to Tian Lung—the titular 'arrow' here intersected by a broad, pancake-like radome about the same width as the rest of the craft. It had been a challenge fueling and launching it without Francesca or the other Vestan engineers finding out, but it helped that they'd more or less built it in-House.

  If the worse came to worst, it had an easy matchup with the torches' Gemini, and fair odds against the rest. The trick might be figuring out how to mass produce it. They'd need bauxite, and that needed surveying satellites, and that...

  Well, she trusted her House-mates' judgment on this matter.

  The first amulet to show up for the meeting was Esther Ng. The girl was slightly repulsive in a way that was hard to pin down. It was the way that she dyed only the inside part of her bobbed hair a mawkish red, or the way that she'd feed a live panfish to anyone who failed to ingratiate themselves to her. That was... quite the issue.

  Well, as long as Lin didn't hear about it, it probably wasn't bad enough to matter.

  "Jiejie, your investment bears fruit."

  Esther had a toothy smirk on her face as she kneeled on the dirt unbecomingly, bearing a small roll of virgin PET plastic as if it were some kind of family heirloom.

  "...Very good. I shall make special note on your report card of your expertise in resource gathering and refinement."

  Lin wasn't sure what she was expected to do here. Eat the stuff? But it was impressive work nonetheless.

  Not too long after they'd landed, they'd found tar pits in some parts of the wetlands, and subterranean pitch in the drier areas to the west. With flare stacks burning into the sky above the wetlands, and hourglass cooling towers over the pipe-tangle of an expanding chemical refinery, all the benefits of hydrocarbons were now at the Academy's disposal. Plastics, fuel, munitions, bombs. It wasn't long before they could fuel up a set of conventional rockets and put satellites into orbit, illuminating the entire planet.

  And the Tian Lung cohort had control of it all.

  She'd bet on a windfall like this by stacking the Academy with equipment and skills instead of supplies, and it had paid off. They would have all the time they needed to find the second Regalia—which brought them to the second girl.

  In the labcoat, Mao Shufen. An anxious scholar-medic who gripped her elbow anxiously as she awaited Lin's judgment. She'd been instrumental in the emergency treatment effort after Tyumen, but in recent days sat fairly idle, with just a few cuts and bruises coming in over the course of the base construction carried out by her House-mates.

  "W... West of the landing site is the most promising region for the expedition, with potential crop marks identified in the dry regions past the oil wells. But we have no confirmed sites yet."

  Shufen stared at her loafers, her face a mask of guilt. The poor thing had even made sure to distribute that holo-drive of the archeology lecture to the Vestan classes, which was no doubt a thankless task.

  Guilt was a good motivator and Lin saw no reason to disabuse her of it yet. Shufen whimpered as Lin turned her head silently to the newcomer at the door.

  "Good afternoon, Alice... is there the slightest possibility that the expeditionary force has not been entirely forthcoming with their discoveries?"

  The lolita-clad Alice giggled and batted her face with a little fan. "I don't believe so," she said, picking her lacy petticoat clear of the mud as she made her entrance on high-heeled boots. For a second Lin thought she was carrying a walking stick, but it was just that awful selfie camera. "I collected a little footage of the airstrip they're building, if you fancy."

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  "I'm grateful. Kindly upload it." All with her duck-lipped face in the corner, no doubt.

  Alice Specter was their mole inside the largely Vestan expeditionary force. No, maybe mole wasn't the right word, but that girl's natural vanity and bloodlust put those fucking insane torches at ease and made them treat her like one of their own. The question was how she was coping without the Net; the Federalist comms blockade made it impossible to livestream or post pictures of her food.

  Her voice descended to a growl that didn't sound like it could come from such a doll-like face.

  "...that mechanic Francesca has quite the big mouth. I allow her to inspect my craft and the modifications I've made, and she spills all of her matriarch's secrets. If Vineta had a plan like that, then Chess isn't privy to it."

  Lin nodded slowly from her chair. She expected nothing less.

  The only problems then, were the issue of the uncontacted tribe—which some of the torches had taken to calling the Moiety—and of course, the bet Vineta had forced on her: reach the comms dish and contact the merchant navy when the window arrives, or else...?

  They had four months, give or take. Not a lot of time, but it wasn't nothing either.

  Lin had given Io Zebulon everything she needed and vetted all of her classmates: it was a fairly well rounded class with strong combat pilots in herself, Ema and Remy Meursault, and a multi-talented scientist in Fredda Nous. Their little Mica in particular was a killer asset. The branch family heiress had more logistics experience in her little finger than the entire Vestan cohort at St Light.

  Their marine captain Nouri Al-Kaf could be a Vestan mole—her parents had come to Lin prostrating for their daughter to be let on after apparently disgracing themselves by misplacing a Hardship about the size of Lady Patricia's Silver Needle, meaning Lin might not be the only one holding them by the balls—but she would be a problematic choice of spy. The girl was spoiled rotten and wouldn't have the spine to fight a Cairnbrae hand-to-hand.

  The game was afoot once again. And this time, Lin would not be playing by the book.

  What did the end of the world look like from the cockpit of a Gemini?

  It was the first time Chess had hung the bright red firefighting missiles from the pylons of Diane's ship. It was easy to tell there was liquid inside from how it affected the craft's dynamics: a worrying slush-slush at the end of every turn.

  Sweat pasted Diane's fringe to her forehead as the glow of the oil fires filtered through the small slot in the armor. It was warm in the cockpit; she'd accustomed herself to the opposite. Thick black plumes spat from scattered cracks in the midday desert, collecting near the cloud layer in a roiling blanket. Gentle drops of crude rained on the glass and streaked to either side; the tears of the earth.

  Diane banked with her formation and lined up an angle with one of the burning refineries, its starfish of pipelines dotted with small pyres. The whole formation loosed their missiles at once. The wave of red rockets burst into house-sized globs of foam, smothering the flames in a white mass that didn't seem to fit inside them.

  Those amulets should be prostrating themselves before her, kissing the ground she walked on. But it didn't feel right to say.

  She bid her class to pursue the attackers between the plumes. Diane picked out a group of small, boomerang-like jets clad in mismatched triangular plates, not unlike low-observable craft she'd seen in special operations groups, but of shoddy workmanship, panels vibrating in the wind. The head of each wing carried a banner of trailing red cloth. Her Gemini's throttle almost didn't go low enough to match speeds with them.

  Diane spoke into her radio set. "I can't get a lock on them. Have you ever seen such an accursed-looking low-RCS craft?"

  "It's possible in theory," Chess grumbled, her voice coming through clear from the base. "We don't think they have microchips or closed-loop controls; you'd need a death wish to strap into something that unstable."

  "Hold on," said Helen—one of the other Vestan class reps hauling the extinguisher pods; offensively ginger. "So far they've only targeted drones and unoccupied buildings. I feel like there's a reason for that, Di."

  Diane's mouth hung open like a fish. "Y... You're right. I wonder why that is."

  "What the hell do we do, then?" Chess barked, her irritation growing. "We spent half the extrusions on those oil rigs. Do you just roll over when someone comes into your house and shits in the fridge?"

  "Perhaps in this case it would not be our house—"

  She instinctively ducked as a wing of smaller fighters zoomed over her shoulder in single file; their thrust-vectoring nozzles twisting as they fanned into formation. The public channel buzzed with a demented laugh from Tian Lung's prodigy, Alice Specter.

  Diane had a bad feeling about that amulet.

  As someone who'd played Kriegspiel since she was a little girl, she'd acquired a rough feel for the objectives of open war. Territory, raw materials, sovereignty—with warmth in her heart, she pictured her old man's red, plump visage as he stayed her hand from moving a frigate across the board. He said the ideal case in all these scenarios was the surrender of the other side as well as the total consent of their people.

  It was easy to tell from the way she spoke that Alice was of no such upbringing. Her needs were baser.

  "That's good," Alice whispered. "That's just what we need."

  Diane's eyes narrowed and she grit her teeth suspiciously. "What are you plotting, Tian Lung?"

  "Why, diplomacy, of course. Clearly, the Moiety's non-violent posture indicates a willingness to negotiate."

  The Satori's engines flared as she pulled away from her classmates.

  "...Hang back, Nightshade. This one wishes to relay a message."

  Alice's vector took her towards a pair of enemies that had long broken away in the confusion, in contrast to the wings loitering around the flaming oil wells, occasionally dropping bombs on cargo spiders or pipelines.

  Diane gave her wing the same message and ordered them to form up with Helen. Before long, the black rain receded to nothing and blue returned to the sky as she and Alice left the oil fires far behind.

  The craft they were pursuing immediately sped up upon noticing their tail. They didn't break the sound barrier, but it was a noticeably brisker clip that indicated a panicked reaction.

  Alice climbed briefly before buzzing them from above like a magpie. This caused the Moiety to bank hard and seemingly enter the earth—which on another pass revealed itself to be a shallow ravine in the desert. Alice's engines tipped down into VTOL mode, allowing her to tail them with ease.

  Diane deployed her flaps and brought her Gemini to the lower limits of its handling. The air over the sponsons was turbulent, close to separating. The whole time, she furiously twisted the knobs on her radio, testing all of the older technologies for something that worked. AM, FM—anything that would allow them to really communicate instead of continuing this wretched dance.

  She'd gotten a bird's eye view of the terrain earlier and realized they were running out of ravine. Where is this going?

  The two Moiety entered a gash in the rock: a black cave with a roof of toothy stalactites. She'd never fit between them. The blood drained from Diane's face and she pulled back on the yoke, her heart thumping as she added power. Terrain. Pull up.

  Shit shit shit!

  The last of the ground slipped beneath the viewport. Her Gemini just barely cleared the lip of the ravine. Diane let out a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding. That was just reckless!

  But where the hell was that amulet? Had she crashed into the side of the cliff? Took that madwoman out of her hair, at least.

  No—curling back around, she saw the Satori slip harmlessly into the cave in pursuit of those bat-jets.

  Holy shit. Diane loitered above the ravine, unsure of what to do. It was a strange feeling, watching an aircraft go where it clearly wasn't supposed to. The flat, cracked earth felt like an impenetrable wall between the two of them.

  Eyelid twitching, she kept on adjusting her radio. She remembered how to bring up the power spectrum on her MFD and tuned it accordingly.

  Finally, the noise parted into kind of clear audio. Her headset filled with electronic chirrups that might've been some kind of rudimentary digital signal, punctuated by speech in a dialect so far removed from Huang that it had the quality of glossolalia. A man's voice, skinny and haggard.

  What should she say? "Diane Levenger, granddaughter of the esteemed Admiral Levenger—" These people were more ancient than any death portrait in her dacha. Did they have any reason to respect her?

  She heard a rumble from the ground beneath her. The voices rose to a panic before cutting off abruptly, the background static returning. The natural state of the airwaves.

  Diane gasped as new cracks spidered across the earth and a blast of fire tumbled from the cave entrance. The Satori zoomed out of the fireball, its pylons depleted of bombs.

  "Was... Was that their base?" Diane said, her mouth gaping with shock.

  "Even better," Alice chuckled. "That was their little shanty-town. I recorded all of it."

  Her voice squeaked with rapture. Practically orgasmic.

  "There were... older structures beneath the hovels. A bit of an anthill situation."

  She sounded noticeably less enthusiastic about their living arrangements—like looking at a bug she'd crushed underfoot.

  "Relay this to the President," Alice said. "I believe we have our first dig site."