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shake. None of them were exactly optimistic about how much they were going to be able to influence Kevin’s ‘peace at all costs’ policy.

FIVE
    The outer rings of the spaceport were easily breached, but Claire and her daughters had more difficulty getting through the high levels of security that protected the incoming and outgoing ships.
    Fortunately the fighting still taking place around the palace and the city around it meant that not even the authorities guarding the port seemed entirely certain who was in charge.
    Dropping the pretense of being a child, Claire lowered the servant’s hood that hid her distinctive length of glossy black hair and stood before the guards as the well-known figure of the woman who was so recently empress of Aremia.
    Even more important to her identity were the two princesses standing just behind her. Either their mother or their grandmother currently ruled the planets that made up the empire. The fact that a small revolution was spreading out from the empire’s core didn’t make Adaeze and Lillianne contain less of the all-important royal blood in their veins.
    Claire faced them down and in her naturally authoritative voice told them she wished to be escorted to the royal cruiser.  As she saw the Aremian guard who to each individual towered over her five foot four body glance at each other, she could only be glad they had none of the technological communications she would have found on Earth.
    Their ability to communicate to the palace for instructions was limited. They could talk telepathically with each  other, but only over limited distances. Even the most talented could get across only a few miles and the empress had nothing of her late son’s gift to speak across this planet and throughout space to the many worlds that had been under his command.
    “We wish to be escorted to the imperial cruiser immediately,” she ordered, and knowing the expression on her elder daughter’s face, guessed that the person closest to the throne after the cousin who now occupied it, was backing up her instructions.
    They were taken to the cruiser Princess Adaeze, so named after the birth of their first child. At the time she had protested that if they had other children, they might resent the name. Mathiah had laughed and said other things could be called after subsequent children and, of course, Lillianne had been honored in other ways.
    The armed cruiser, the latest in a line of such space vehicles since the one that had first departed Sanctuary with Claire on board as the young emperor’s prisoner, was a state of the art vessel and kept constantly staffed by an expert and, hopefully, loyal crew.
    They were given priority take off and soon were speeding beyond the planet’s atmosphere. She didn’t allow herself to breathe easier yet. Too many problems lay ahead of them.
    “Mom,” Lillianne complained. “I’m starving.”
    Her sister joined her in somewhat hysterical giggles. It was most unusual for either of the princesses to lose composure in front of others, but Claire supposed she had to forgive them. They had been through so much in the last few hours.
    She smiled at them. “Give instructions to the galley,” she told Adaeze, “that dinner is to be served.”
    She looked up at the ship’s captain, who was an old friend of her husband’s, a man of unquestioned loyalty to his family. “To Capron,” she told him.
    Dinner was served in the cabin Claire had so often shared with her husband. The first one she’d occupied as they traveled to Aremia had contained a secondary compartment, smaller in scale in both the room and the scaled down furniture meant for the emperor’s always accompanying blood-donor, a role she had served for Mathiah at that time.
    A well-defined part of Gare society, those had been dramatized and at the same time bemoaned as something slightly less than human, but never before had a Gare actually married so disgracefully.
    It was something that most members