The elite raised his spear and the Midnighters pressed in, raising weapons. My goblins growled and raised cleavers and rifles. Redfang growled behind me. I could feel the heat pouring out of her mouth.

"Wait!" I shouted, raising the radio handset into the air. "One more step and I'll blow this ship right out of the water!"

The Midnighter general (admiral?) hesitated. His spear twitched back just a hair, but his soldiers noticed, and held their positions. "A… bluff… trick. We are… protected."

I grit my teeth and brought the handset down. "Eileen, you listening?"

"Loud and clear, boss!"

"The big ship on the left."

I held my hand against the sun as I looked out over the water. The spells from Habberport being slung outlined a thin blue half-shell over the ship. The barrier flared slightly where it intercepted individual spells. But suddenly, a line of fire appeared in the sky, connecting the deck of the ship with what I know was the C2 jet with its recently repaired railgun several thousand feet overhead. The entire barrier shone a brilliant, blinding blue before shattering. A great gout of steam and splinters erupted from the deck.

A few moments later, the supersonic shockwave reached us, along with the actual ocean waves kicked up. The deafening crack of the railgun forced every midnighter down in alarm, except for their leader, who stood as straight and unyielding as a granite column. When the rumble faded and the smoke cleared from the other ship's deck, I could see the panic as the warship began to take on water. The occupants scurried, scrambling to get the palanquin at the prow to safety. Onboard our ship, many of the Midnighter sailors stared in awe or horror and chittered amongst themselves.

"How'd it look, boss?" Eileen chirped on the radio.

"Bullseye," I reported. "Standby for the next shot."

"Uh, boss, I don—"

I twisted the power off on the radio handset and pointed it at the elite. "That gun kills null devils without using magic. No anti-magic defense can protect a ship from it. The attack, call it off, now."

The elite general practically steamed from the joints in his armor. He slammed the butt of his spear against the deck and ground it into the wood. "We… are… ALLIES! We… help you!"

I waved an open hand at the smoking city on the coast. "This!? This helps no-one! I had it sorted, until you dill-weeds came and mucked it all up."

An attendant that I recognized as being from the priestess servant caste from her robes rushed up, pushing her way through the crowd and whispering up to the general in their own clicking, chittering language. The elite leaned down and then stiffened. He struck his spear against the deck three times. "Stop… assault. Recall marines."

I knew he was speaking the common language for my benefit, but his soldiers still leapt to, running to a set of brass horns and flag-waving serfs to get the word spread to other ships in the fleet.

"Queen… wishes to see."

"Armstrong, with me," I said. I looked up at Dame Redfang. "Will you be alright out here?"

"Should they attack me, we'll not need another of your rockets. I'll blast a hole in this ship myself before they take me."

I paused. "That wasn't a rocket. It was a railgun."

"What is that?"

I struggled to simplify the technology in terms she could understand and eventually just settled on "It launches a solid projectile like a catapult or a ballista."

Redfang twisted her neck to look at me. "It set the air aflame!"

"It launches it really, really fast," I said, shrugging. "I'll be right back."

The elite general stood aside and gestured toward the steps leading below the flagship's deck, so I took his invitation. The Midnighters needed me alive. But they'd shown the lengths they would go to in order to keep me that way, and I didn't agree with their methods. I wished I had Sourtooth with me, or Rufus or Taquoho. Their knowledge of the lands and cultures of Rava had come in clutch on more than a few occasions. But they all seemed to be in agreement that the Midnight Queen led a powerful faction interested only in their own ends.

The interior of the ship was hot and cloying, so humid that steam was visible in the air. Attendants poured water onto heated rocks like one big dark sauna. I had to guess that the Midnighters had come from a tropical jungle climate as well, one even closer to this planet's equator than Lanclova. Serfs and attendants scurried through the halls, some in the silk robes like the servants I'd seen at Canaveral, and some in simple trousers or sashes where their bodies were more bug-like than hominid. I had to wonder what the relation between the creatures was. Were they all members of the same hive? Was it different species of insects who had evolved concurrently?

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The Midnighter general led me to a deep chamber in the ship, practically a vault with steel walls and a circular door. At a word in their chittering Midnighter language, two soldiers twisted it open and a swell of steam billowed out. Swallowing, I stepped over the rim and into the gloom.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. There was light in the room, from hundreds of sources—some of them moving. Plants and insects, I realized. All of them bioluminescent in some way. And moving among them, a bipedal form in voluminous robes. I had expected an enormous monstrosity, akin to the First among Daughters, crushed into the tent at the base of Canaveral. But when the Midnight queen leaned in toward one of the luminous plants, what I got was… completely different.

"A human?!" I asked, confused.

The woman illuminated by the light of glowing moths she tended looked like nothing so much as a ageless human woman, smooth-skinned but sharp featured and olive flesh—not carapace or chitin—that glistened in the humid vault.

She looked over at me and laughed. Then she flicked one of her sleeves back, extending a very long, sharp claw and clipped a small bud off of one of the trees with a short, scything motion..

"I can assure you, other-worlder, I am no more human than you are."

That's not much of a denial, I thought to myself. Then again, maybe they didn't know that my world had humans, too—or something as close as no matter to the Rava version.

"You're not what I expected. The First is…" I spread my hands apart.

The queen turned toward me, and for the first time I noticed her attendants working in the gloom, sweeping, watering, feeding, and otherwise managing the forest. Two tiny Midnighters buzzed behind her, holding up lengths of her long silk robes so that they didn't brush the floor. But what caught my eye most was the level System had put above her head. XX. Just like the First Daughter. Only unlike the corpulent worm-like priestess, I got the impression the Queen was just as dangerous physically as she was with any spell. Something in the way she moved suggested those claws weren't just for show.

"My birthing days are long behind me. I now take whichever form I wish. And I also did not expect…" she pointed a claw at me and drew a slow circle. "Now, tell me, why do you wave the threat of my death as though it were a flag of truce?"

"You don't think I could do it?" I asked.

The queen tsked me. "I know you could do it. Any being capable of saving a world must be equally capable of destroying it. It is much easier to tear down than to build, after all."

"Rich words coming from someone launching a massive attack on an unprepared city."

The queen continued circling, pruning, and occasionally catching individual bugs and popping them into her mouth. "We had seen their ships and their dragons launch across the sea before ever they decided to muster them. We saw the additional ships that would come. Habbe is preparing for war. We could not afford your tribe being wiped out, or even slowed to the point of failure, by ignorant humans."

I crossed my arms. "Your own ignorance is on display. I was in the middle of peace talks with them, which you just tried to sabotage. Or, I suppose, you couldn't have known that."

The queen hesitated a moment. "The prince would never make peace with goblins."

"You said would never, not will never. You're relying on your intuition and experience to make a judgement that consigns an entire city to death, but you can't see under Raphina's shadow any better than the rest of us. You haven't seen what happens here. You don't know what the outcome will be. Why not bring the prince into the fold? If the world is in danger, he's got a stake in seeing it saved as well. Why not tell him what you're trying to accomplish?"

"Humans can't fathom what's coming," the Midnighter Queen hissed. "The future is lost on their kind. Only we know the disaster that looms overhead. Only we have seen the feasting reflected from Raphina's night side. If these humans threaten your progress, they must be pruned as any branch for the good of the tree."

She clipped another twig with her claw, and the light of the stem on it dimmed as it fell to the deck, where two smaller servants quickly swept it away.

I shook my head. "I take it back. You're not just as blind as the rest of us. You're worse, because you've lost a whole sense and you're striking out in the dark without it. Well, here's something you didn't see. Habberport is under my protection. If you attack it, I'll consider it an attack against myself."

"But they would destroy you," she said. "You are one small tribe of goblins in a very large world. The prince would grind you beneath his heel. I have seen their ships, their warriors, and their dragon knights come in numbers not seen since their war with the last goblin king."

"Don't you get it?" I demanded. "It doesn't matter. We're already too far ahead. The technology from my world that I've leveraged… it doesn't matter that they have wizards. It doesn't matter that they have dragons, or thousands or even tens of thousands of soldiers. We're hundreds of years ahead of them in terms of progress. I was trying to stop this war not for the sake of Tribe Apollo, but to prevent the needless deaths of the humans that would be thrown against the meat-grinder. Now you're here doing it anyway."

"What is the loss of one country weighed against the risk that you are wrong?" asked the Queen. "They have interfered, continue to interfere. Stars bar they were able to stop you from saving this world."

I grit my teeth. "I won't save this world just so you can rule over the ashes." I pointed to the steel walls. "You want to help me? Don't give me death and destruction. Give me this. Iron, steel, sulfur, rubber, textiles, cadmium, oil, copper, and phosphates. Help me create instead of taking the easy road of destruction."

I crossed my arms. "Any queen capable of stewarding a future must also be capable of dooming it."

The queen hesitated at that, so I continued.

"Dismantle this fleet and let's turn these ships into more rockets. I need more materials if this mission is going to upsize from a lunar lander to a lunar super slam. Move it through Habberport where the dragons can vouch for me and out to the fields where my airships can haul it south. Habberport stands, and I need their infrastructure, their deep-water docks and roads to turn your raw materials into space-faring equipment."

The queen stroked one of her plants with a claw, scoffing. "Why would the landed dragons of Habbe ever vouch for you? They're prouder even than the humans."

I laughed. "Didn't your general tell you? I rode to your ship on the back of one."

The Midnight queen flinched, claw accidentally scything through a healthy branch. I watched it tumble to the floor with the rest of the discarded pruning.

"I must consult the stars. My position demands no less." Her eyes slid to me. "I wonder if the Queen of Queens would not have been better served with a more reasonable champion as we tried to call in past attempts. That it has placed you in such an intractable form…"

"I was intractable long before I had this form. System knew what it was doing," I said. "Better than you did, I dare say. Did you ever consider that maybe it hid me from your night sky on purpose?

That stopped the queen in her tracks. She folded her claws back into her robe. Without them, she was indistinguishable from a human. But how much did she think like one?

"A day," she said. "We will take one day to treat with the humans and read the stars before we render our judgment on Habberport. You must prove to me that the humans can be turned from their warpath. Now, leave my ship, other-worlder. And stand down your weapons. I've much to consider."

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