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was likely to get lively. But that would mean moving what lay there now.
    I will not.
She glanced up at the screen. “Aidoann, hail the flagship. See that they have visual. I do not care if they return it.”
    Aidoann bent over her console, spoke to it softly. The screen at the front of the bridge remained dark, but the slight hiss of carrier was audible. “
Esemar
is listening,
khre’Riov,”
Aidoann said under her breath.
    Ael nodded. “Imperial vessels, stand away from Artaleirh and take yourselves out of the system immediately, on pain of destruction. Your intentions here are known, and will be prevented.”
    There was a long silence before an answer came back.
“Traitress,”
a voice said,
“you and yours will now pay the price of your perfidy. Speak to the Elements now; you’ll have no other chance. Then come out from where you hide and find your death. Else we will take its price from those you have deluded.”
    She grinned. “By the Sword and its Element, I tell you I know it will not happen so. Take yourselves away from here and live, or stay, and leave your Houses sonless, motherless, orphaned!”
    There was no reply, not that she expected one. “Now,” she said softly to Aidoann and Khiy and the others on the bridge, “they must make the first move, and so damn themselves.”
    “And if their move works,
khre’Riov?”
Aidoann’s voice was a little more testy than usual; the tension was working on her as well.
    “We will at least send some of them ahead of us to make plain to the Elements the need for proper revenge,” Ael said. She watched the curves outlining themselves on tactical: there was no change in them.
    “They’re going for the planet,” Aidoann said.
    “We have always thought they would at first,” Ael said. “It is a feint. They seek to draw the straw before the
dzeill,
as it were, but that will not help them. For the moment, the
dzeill
lies still.”
    The curves continued to draw in toward the planet, closer every second. The bridge filled up with the warnings that the Grand Fleet vessels were broadcasting on every available wavelength to the planet below them, blanketing the place.
“This is the Grand Fleet of the Rihannsu Star Empire. All cities and settlements of the Rihannsu Imperial subject worldArtaleirh are herewith placed under martial law. All manufacturing facilities will henceforth be managed and operated under direct control of Imperial officers. All civil vessels are to ground immediately and prepare to be boarded and either disarmed or inactivated. Gatherings of more than three people in any public place are now forbidden. Hostages…reparations…a new military government…”
    The recitation went on and on, a litany of such trammels to liberty as no free culture could possibly bear. Yet the Artaleirhin were expected to bear it. Their lives, which they had been allowed to run in various small ways as long as they fed goods and monies back to the homeworlds and obeyed the whims of their rulers, were now, if not forfeit, to be lived in cages, virtual or real, under the threat of the scourge or the blaster.
“Immediate acceptance of these terms is required. You may choose spokesmen to replace your political leaders, who will give themselves up to the authority of the Fleet to endure the rigors of Imperial justice. Your new spokesmen have one planet’s hour to signal acceptance. This is the Grand Fleet of the Rihannsu Star Empire—”
    Ael looked around the bridge at her crew. They were staring at one another, and at the speakers from which the sound came, with expressions of bitter distaste. “This is what we could have become, my children,” Ael said, “had we remained too thoughtlessly true to our old loyalty. I will wear the scorn of such as these with pride, as an ornament far surpassing any mere battle honor.”
    Aidoann looked over at Ael, then, and flipped a switch at her comm console. A voice spoke, a Rihanha’s voice, not amplified across multibands