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given to her queen as tribute. By avoiding too many costly battles, a princess could build her full army of ten thousand drones in five standard rotations.
    But to lay princess eggs meant that Sool Em was calling herself a queen. She must have stolen or bartered a drone from another commander and secreted hormones to turn it male so that she could lay princess eggs. And raising her own princesses was only the start. A princess was permitted ten thousand drones, a queen a hundred thousand. And specialized workers: scientists, miners, harvesters, engineers, lesser and greater battle drones. She could raise fifty princesses to serve beneath her, each with their own ten thousand. Each giving eggs as tribute.
    Under any circumstances, it was a breathtaking step for a princess to break from her queen, and usually resulted in the death of the aspirant at the talons of her enraged mother—Ak Ik in this case—or from other queens quick to pounce on the young queen ascendant.
    But given Sool Em’s loss in battle and the ragged state of her drones, laying these princess eggs was insanity. Why would she attempt such a thing? Had she taken an injury to the brain? Was there a flaw in her genetics that had somehow slipped past the computers meant to screen for such things? This was no aspirant queen. She was barely even a princess.
    Only the brightness of Sool Em’s plumage and the confident bob to her head made her mother pause. She believed, that much was real.
    “Very well,” Ak Ik said. “Show me. It is only a precursor to your death. I will make it humiliating and painful. And I will destroy your eggs. No trace of your genetic material will survive.”
    Sool Em squawked in response. It sounded a note of agreement, as well as confidence.
    Drones scurried out of the way as the queen and princess left the nesting chamber and entered the corridor outside. Ak Ik cocked her head to study the feathers shed by her daughter’s weakening drones. Then she clacked her beak impatiently.
    “I haven’t lost control,” Sool Em said. “My scent is weak because of what I have accomplished. It cost me strength to lay my egg in the human nest. This way, my queen.”
    Ak Ik followed, and the two birds waddled through the twisting tunnels that led deeper into the ship. “You use that metaphor without explaining what it is. Have you broken more of their communications? That is hardly a victory worth reporting. We own their subspace frequencies, we have their channels decoded.”
    “Nothing so trivial.” Sool Em flapped. “A true brood parasite, Queen Commander. You will see.”
    They entered the onboard lab. Technicians manipulated joysticks with their dexterous tongues and flipped switches with their claws. Others squawked voice commands to computers. Unlike the guards, the technicians still carried most of their plumage, with only a handful showing missing feathers. Sool Em’s status had not decayed so far here.
    The technicians stopped what they were doing and fluttered in alarm to see the queen in all her brilliant plumage. Their eyes stared and their tongues clicked nervously. Ak Ik flapped her wings to spread her scent, and they chittered when it reached their nostrils.
    How easy to end this charade. Let her dominant scent take its effect and turn these drones against their mother and toward their grandmother. Ak Ik would set them against each other and return to her own command ship, leaving Sool Em and her brood dead. She would give Sool Em’s remaining warships to another princess. Take her mining colonies and slave broods for her own.
    But something caught the queen commander’s eye before she could give this further thought: five bubbling tissue canisters on the far side of the chamber. She strode across the room to see. The first canister held the brain and nervous system of a Hroom, the second an Apex brain—a drone’s, naturally. Like many of Ak Ik’s daughters, Sool Em shared the Apex obsession with genetic manipulation of