The throne room of the Luminous Ascendant was the size of a small moon's worth of empty space — all violet light and floating crystal lattices — and Empress Vaitharian Soul of the Ninth Dynasty hated every square meter of it.
She hated it more today than usual, because the bombardment klaxons had been screaming for the last six minutes, and the only person standing between her and whatever was about to come through that door was a human.
"Run," she said again, in the flat, final tone of someone repeating an order they could not believe needed repeating.
"Captain Reyes, that is an order. Take the escape pod. I release you from your post."
Captain Marcus Reyes did not run.
He walked instead to the three-meter blast door at the room's only entrance, put his palm against the control panel, and keyed in a twelve-digit override that the Imperial Guard had specifically told him, eight months ago, a human bodyguard would never be trusted with.
The door hissed. Sealed.
A soft chime confirmed full lockdown — the kind that took a warship's primary cutting array about four hours to get through.
Then he turned around, and he was grinning.
"Captain," Vaitharian said, in the voice she used on officers about to be demoted into asteroid mining, "did you just lock us in with the thing that is about to kill us?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Why?"
"Because it's not about to kill us. It's about to meet you."
He rolled his shoulders the way he did before sparring matches, and for the first time since she'd hired him, Vaitharian noticed that Marcus Reyes did not look afraid.
He looked delighted.
"And I figured, since I only get to watch this happen once, I'd rather have a good seat than a head start."
The Empress had purchased exactly one human in her life, on the advice of a trade consul who swore humans made unnervingly loyal bodyguards for a species with no psychic resistance and no exoskeleton to speak of.
She'd expected him to be decorative. A novelty. A curiosity from the quarantined blue world everyone had agreed, by treaty, to leave alone.
She had not expected this.
"Reyes," the ship shuddered. Something enormous had just made contact with the outer hull, and the lights flickered violet to black and back.
"There is a Kreth Ravager boarding party cutting through four decks of my flagship to specifically retrieve a human slave. You. That was the entire reason for this attack, and you have just locked us both inside the one room they are coming to."
"I know."
He checked the charge on the sidearm at his hip.
Not an Imperial weapon, she realized with a start. Something he must have smuggled aboard months ago, and she had simply never noticed — because why would she inventory her bodyguard's bodyguard?
"Here's the thing about the Kreth, Your Majesty. They've been raiding human colony outposts for three years now, taking people. Nobody's ever gotten one back to ask why."
"I'm aware. It's an ongoing diplomatic catastrophe."
"It's not diplomacy. It's recruitment."
He smiled wider.
"They don't want human slaves, ma'am. They want human soldiers. That's why they only ever take the ones who fight back the hardest. That's why every single person they've grabbed has had combat training. They're not harvesting labor. They're headhunting."
Vaitharian felt something cold settle into her chest that had nothing to do with the ship's failing climate regulators.
"And you know this how?"
"Because six months before I signed on with your trade consul, I turned down a very similar offer. From them."
He tapped his own chest.
"I said no. They don't take no very well. I've been expecting a second visit for a while now. Guess they finally tracked me to your flagship."
The door behind him groaned.
Something enormous on the other side had found the seam.
"So," the Empress said slowly, feeling several centuries of royal composure fighting a losing battle against sheer disbelief, "your plan is to let them in."
"My plan, Your Majesty, is to let them find out what happens when they try to recruit the one human who already said no — in a room with no other exits, guarding someone I actually give a damn about."
He drew the sidearm, checked it once more, and set his stance.
Loose. Easy. A man settling in to enjoy himself.
"You hired me to keep you alive. I'm very good at my job. I was hoping somebody would eventually test that."
The door buckled inward with a shriek of collapsing alloy, and through the gap came the acrid stink of plasma-cut metal, and the first armored shoulder of something seven feet tall and built like a slab of industrial machinery.
Vaitharian had seen Kreth Ravagers in tactical briefings.
She had never stood six meters from one while it pried a door apart with its bare hands like a man opening a particularly stubborn jar.
"Human."
The Ravager rumbled, voice modulated through a vocoder built for a throat shaped nothing like a human one.
Its translator lagged half a syllable behind the words, giving everything it said a strange, doubled echo.
"Captain Reyes. You said no to the Fifth Fleet. You will not say no to the First."
"I said no to the recruiter," Marcus said, and his voice had dropped into something quieter, harder — a register the Empress had genuinely never heard from him in eight months of polite deference.
"You want to know the actual reason I turned you down? It wasn't the job. I don't even mind the job. It's that you took me, walked into my sister's colony, grabbed four people off a loading dock, and figured we'd fall in line once we saw how big your guns were."
He didn't move toward the door.
He didn't need to.
The Ravager was already stepping through, filling the gap, its armor scraping sparks off the ruined frame — and three more shapes were visible in the smoke behind it.
"You misunderstand," the Ravager said. "This is an honor. Humans fight. We respect that which fights. We offer you a place among warriors, not—"
"You offered my sister a collar," Marcus said, "and then you offered me a body bag when I said no the first time — which, fun fact, is a weird sales pitch for a job interview."
The Ravager's vocoder produced something that might have been a laugh, low and grinding.
"Strength respects strength, small one. Today we settle it properly. You against our champion. You win—"
The massive head tilted toward the Empress.
"—we leave. Both of you. You lose, you come with us, and we take the Trade Consul's little empress as a consolation prize, since clearly humans are not the only species here worth collecting."
Something in the throne room's lighting seemed to dim at that, as though the ship itself had taken offense.
Marcus Reyes smiled the way a man smiles when someone has just made the one mistake he was actually hoping for.
"See, that's where you've got this backwards," he said, and rolled his neck, and settled his weight onto the balls of his feet.
"I locked that door so you three couldn't call for backup once this started going badly for you. I wasn't protecting an escape route. There wasn't going to be one. For you."
The lead Ravager hesitated.
Just slightly. Just a fraction of a degree in the set of its massive shoulders.
Because in three years of raiding, in a hundred boardings across a dozen systems, it had never once heard those words from prey.
"You should have taken my sister's no for an answer the first time," Marcus said.
"I'm about to make sure you remember mine."
He moved before the Ravager finished processing the sentence.
Not toward the door. Not away from it.
But straight in — low and fast, inside the reach of that enormous armored frame before its combat instincts had even finished loading.
The Empress of the Ninth Dynasty, who had survived two assassination attempts and a planetary coup and considered herself largely unshockable, found herself backing against her own throne as four hundred pounds of alien warrior went over backward with a crash that cracked the deck plating.
It was not, she would reflect later, a fair fight.
It was not supposed to be.
That had been the entire point.
By the time the second Ravager lunged, Marcus had already retrieved the first one's own weapon off the floor, and something in his expression — calm, focused, almost bored — told her this was not improvisation.
This was a man executing a plan he'd been quietly rehearsing in his head for six months, waiting with absurd patience for someone — anyone — to be stupid enough to walk through that door.
Three minutes later, the throne room was very quiet, the air thick with ozone and scorched metal, and Marcus Reyes stood in the wreckage of a boarding party that had, until recently, believed itself to be the hunters in this scenario.
He holstered the weapon, rolled his shoulders again, and looked for all the world like a man who had just finished a brisk and satisfying workout.
"Your Majesty," he said, offering a hand to help her up from where she'd braced against the throne's base.
"Apologies for the door thing. Figured you'd rather I handle this somewhere I controlled the exits."
Vaitharian Soul stared at her bodyguard.
At the unconscious mountain of alien muscle sprawled across her formerly pristine floor.
At the calm, faintly pleased expression on the face of a species her entire empire had spent decades carefully, nervously avoiding.
And felt the first genuine laugh she'd had in months bubble up somewhere behind her sternum.
"Remind me," she said, taking his hand, "to ask the trade consul for his contact information. I believe I'd like several more of you."
Marcus grinned.
"Ma'am, I don't think you understand how that's going to go. You ask for a dozen humans, you're going to get a dozen humans. And every single one of us is going to have a door they'd rather lock than open."
Outside, the Kreth flagship — watching its boarding party's vitals flatline one by one on the tactical display — began, very quietly, very quickly, to withdraw.