“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

―G.K. Chesterton

“The true soldier fights because he is afraid of what is behind him more than what is in front of him. An aristocrat fights because it’s Monday.”

―Count Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov

(translated from Russian)

The sight that greeted the Princess as she finally reached the roof and clambered to her feet was as terrible as it was peculiar.

Tanaka and Ivanov were thoroughly occupied making black confetti out of the chornoi invaders, who were flying about like leaves in a tornado, empowered by solar reflection and rage. As usual, the two men were competing over who could display a wider array of killing techniques, though for whose sake this bloody competition was taking place, she still couldn’t tell. Perhaps in their mind, they were fighting each other through killing anything in sight except each other; which, as it happens, rather correctly reflected their respective Crowns’ foreign policies. Judging by the suicidal enthusiasm with which the chornoi attacked the terrestrial fighters, the aliens were aware of the danger posed by manned turrets and were desperate to somehow rid themselves of the troublesome newcomers. The Princess wondered how they knew. They seemed no more intelligent than black mold, but it was easy to underestimate someone as alien as a chornoi. Could they be working in cahoots with someone on the planetoid? Was it even possible for humans and chornoi to communicate? These were important questions, but not pressing ones.

There was another, more pressing, dimension to the affair—civilians. According to her late uncle, civilians were the streakers of the military world. Just as you had all your pieces in place and were about to start a fine war by all the rules, some people would run to the middle of the field and make a terrible mess of the whole event, spoiling it for all parties involved, but mostly for themselves. A space marine wore several million Comets worth of military hardware and had years of advanced training, while a civilian had a piece of cloth and vague desire not to be shot.

So now her mission was not only repelling an alien invasion and a human conspiracy, but also preserving a dozen bystanders, which made the former two tasks all the more difficult. However, it was the polite thing to do and regardless of the severity of the situation, a Princess ought to be polite. After all, it wouldn’t do to soil the name of the Old Brigade with innocent blood. That’s what the other brigades were for.

Presently, a handful of servants were cowering under the turret’s armored overhangings. Their (the people, that is, not the turrets) physical and mental condition appeared to be most lamentable, unlike the turrets, which could withstand a great deal of punishment before showing any real signs of wear.

Being servants of Von Schmidt, they all looked the same to the Princess, irrespective of their age and sex, and held themselves with the stoic dignity expected of their position, despite numerous cuts, bruises, and burns to their persons. All injuries appeared to be fresh, suggesting that until their rescuers had arrived, the servants had been perfectly safe.

“You there,” the Princess screamed to the most important looking of the servants crouching by the nearer of the two turrets. The man was hugging a child that was more scar tissue than human and didn’t seem to be moving at all. The Princess couldn’t determine the child’s sex and feared that the issue was already moot. A woman nearby was trying to make herself as small as possible by holding her knees to her chest and pressing against the impenetrable steel doors as if, with enough effort, she could produce an indentation to hide in. By the sorry state of her left foot, she wasn’t quite small enough to avoid the sunbeams. Nearby, a girl whose teeth showed through her cheek was shielding another girl, whispering something in German to soothe her. They looked like nesting dolls trying to reassemble on their own. The man looked at the Princess with a pained but respectful expression.

“Martin,” she said, assuming he was named like everyone else she’d met so far, “I need you and your family to clear the path for me so I can operate this turret and end our current predicament.”

“This less than a meter of steel and shadow is the only thing keeping us alive. If we move, we’ll be killed,” the man protested.

The Princess pointed to the sky, where chornoi fell like malevolent leaves in an autumn of extreme discontent. It seemed as if the depleted company on the roof was about to be reinforced by no less than two full sails, which could be too much even for Terra’s finest killers.

“When these oily starfish get reinforcement, all hope for any living creature on the planetoid will be lost. However, it now occurs to me that—”

Martin never learned what had occurred to the Princess. Noticing her delay, Tanaka aimed his left hand at Martin and fired from his sleeve a long needle that pierced the man through the eye and left him pinned against the wall. His hands went limp and the burnt child rolled to the floor. The woman tried to pull back the child by its foot. The child made a single agonized moan before a sunbeam from above hit it in the back. The child slumped to the ground, foul-smelling smoke rising from its back. The woman recoiled with a shriek, cradling her burned hand while hugging the girl with the other.

“Enough talk! Obey your superiors!” Tanaka barked, dodging another sunbeam and cutting the shooter in half with a prismatic blade produced by a smartblade. Ivanov, whose whip just finished a half circle that deprived two chornoi of one edge each, looked at Tanaka with disgust.

“Yeponskaja suka!”

“You murdering, brainless ape!” the Princess shouted. “Don’t you realize that if your weapons work, this means that my shield generator is operational as well? The built-in nanorepair system must have finished fixing the burned circuits while I climbed. I could just walk to the second turret. There was no need to hurt that poor man.”

Tanaka didn’t honor this with a reply. It was at this point that the Princess decided that his death should be gruesome, public, and humiliating enough that, should she ever become a queen, the sobriquet “the Terrible” would be rightly added to her name based on the treatment of this person alone, as she had no sadistic designs for any other person or alien in the universe. Many of whom had to die, of course, that is the cost of doing business, but you don’t have to be mean about it. In Tanaka’s case, however, it was absolutely necessary.

“Stay put,” she told the remaining Martinas. “I’ll be back in next to no time.” After a second the Princess also added, “We’re not all monsters.” She smiled at the younger girls, though the gesture was about as helpful as bandaging a severed hand.

The trip to the second turret, which only sheltered a single couple in a relatively hale condition, was brief but terrifying. Absorbing enormous amounts of light radiation, the field went from translucent to orange, then to yellow, then to blinding brightness of indeterminable color. The Princess felt as if she was sitting in a cool cell in the center of the sun and the cell was rapidly shrinking. When a steel overhang deformed by heat slowly crawled into her field, she knew she had reached the second turret.

Not wishing to endanger the current residents, she turned off the anti-kinetic field before approaching the door. One sunbeam hit her in the back, but was mostly deflected by her back plate, leaving her uncomfortably warm, but not injured. The second sunbeam was blocked by the turret’s overhang. “Beg your pardon,” the Princess said as she squeezed past the disheveled couple. Except for some bruises and lacerations, they looked in perfect working order.

“Mein fraulein,” the woman said and stood as tall as the small space allowed. The man was too dazed and ruffled for proper etiquette.

“Es werde Licht,” the Princess said, trying to sound like a pretentious miscreant to affect the correct pronunciation.

“Haben wir nicht genug?” the woman asked.

“What? Ah, no, it’s just the password for the—” The rest of the Princess’s explanation was made redundant by the door, which opened with a satisfyingly smooth motion accompanied by a pleasant greeting in German. The automatically activated anti-kinetic field of the turret caused all outside sounds to seem hollow and distant, and gave the scene a slightly blurry, dreamlike quality. This was just as well, because the memory of Martin’s death and the prospect of imminent demise made concentration difficult as it was.

The Princess stepped inside and took a seat at the controls. This shouldn’t be too hard, she thought. My army training didn’t prepare me for this, or for anything at all for that matter, but I played a lot of computer games as a girl and what is a modern war if not a computer game with a stricter dress code?