"There is a species known to us as the Elgos. We recently ran into them."

"Recently?" I asked, arching an eyebrow.

"Within the past forty years. Shortly after the current empress took the throne, and after she started an expansion into that part of the star charts to try and show how powerful she was."

I threw my head back and cackled with glee.

"I fail to see what's so funny about yet another force that has fought us to a standstill and even started pushing back into territory we rightly conquered. They aren't like you humans who are content to sit at your borders and conduct trade once you've made your borders clear at the point of a gun."

"No, they want to take the fight to you, don't they?" I said, amusement flowing from me to her through the link.

"I still fail to see what's so funny about this," Varis said with a frown. There definitely wasn't amusement coming from her.

"The first thing that's funny about it is you're getting a taste of your own medicine. Expand an empire too far and you're inevitably going to run up against somebody who doesn't like you trying to expend into where they live. And the second thing is that it's just so mundane."

"Mundane?" she asked.

"Well, yes?" I said. "You have a species expanding faster than is prudent, and eventually they run up against someone with the power and capability to fight back. That's why you aren't fighting humanity. Like that's the kind of basic bitch stuff that a science fiction author who doesn't have a very good grasp on the story they're trying to tell would come up with and think it was a neat plot point or something."

"But you just said yourself that an empire expanding to the point they run up against something that inevitably fights back against them is something that happens."

"Oh, yeah," I said, wiping a tear from my eye. "It's the kind of thing that happens all the time, or at least it happened all the time on Earth. At least until the British Empire rose."

"What is the British Empire?"

"They actually managed to conquer a good chunk of the world through a combination of military and economic power, but then a bunch of people who were late to the imperial game got all butthurt about that."

"Butthurt?" she asked, rolling the term around.

"Sure. Like they got a stick up their ass about being late to the whole imperial game, and that that upset things like Imperial Japan who…"

"William," Arvie said, "I am given to understand that the term of art 'butthurt' from humanity has very little to do with somebody having a stick up their ass, which is another turn of phrase humanity uses from time to time, and it has everything to do with a form of copulation that involves…"

"Yes, I get it, Arvie," I said, waving a hand to cut him off before he could get into any of the gory etymological details.

"Wait, what is he talking about?" Varis asked, leaning towards me. Her eyes were wide open, and clearly she was intrigued. Which had a part of my anatomy twitching and taking notice.

"It's really not important," I said.

"But it sounds like this word is quite fascinating," she said. "I want to know what you're trying to hide from me. We did say we weren't going to hide things from each other, didn't we?"

"Oh, fine," I said, rolling my eyes. "Go ahead and tell her, Arvie."

"I'm sorry. I didn't realize talking about the intricacies of human language would upset you."

"It's fine," I said. "It's just not polite language."

"I'm a general. I lead soldiers. What in the name of the empress's buck teeth would make you think I give a damn about humor that's less than savory?" she asked.

I blinked. "By the empress's buck teeth?"

"Yes," she said. "Is there a problem with that?"

"I mean, it's not very nice to make fun of people's buck teeth."

"Coming from a man who comes from a species who depicts her as one of your hairy beasts with buck teeth."

"Okay, I suppose that's a fair point," I said with a shrug.

"Anyway," Arvie continued, "Based on my research surfing the human Galactic Net, I believe it originates from a sexual act where the male puts his sex organ in the posterior of the female."

"You wanna be careful getting your human sex education from the Internet," I muttered.

"Well, we've done that before," Varis said, shaking her head and totally and utterly not getting what we were talking about. "What's the big deal?"

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"We haven't done that before," I said.

"But we have. Just a couple of nights ago I was looking out over Imperial Seat, bent over the bed while you…"

"No, General," Arvie said. "When I say posterior, I mean posterior."

There was a beat. I could feel the thoughts running through the link. I could see the exact moment she started to realize what we were talking about. The exact moment when the dawning realization hit her.

The link showed surprise, but there was also a blush that spread over her face.

"Oh," she said.

Then that blush deepened, and something else came through the link. Interest. Intrigue. A little bit of arousal. Not what I was expecting at all considering all the negotiating I had to do with ex-girlfriends to make that sort of thing happen. Color me interested and intrigued and slightly aroused right along with her.

"Oh," she said, and this time it was in the tone of somebody discovering something she might want to try.

"I'm surprised you've been around soldiers your whole life, and this is the first time you're hearing about that," I said, unable to resist poking at her just a little.

"And it won't be the last time I'm hearing about that either," she said, tracing a finger up and down my arm. "I think I know something we're going to try the next time we finish with sparring."

She paused, and then the embarrassment and the blush was back again. She looked up and the meaning was clear. She didn't want Arvie listening in on what she was about to talk about.

Then Arvie started in with the advice anyway. "Just make sure you go slowly and use lots of…"

"That's enough, Arvie," I said. I didn't need that kind of advice right now, as much as I appreciated him trying to wingman me on that. "Why don't we talk about these creatures we're fighting at the other end of the Livisk Ascendancy?"

"There's not much to tell about them," Varis said, that blush and that interest and the embarrassment at the computer catching her all swirling around inside her. "They are fierce warriors who have managed to fight us to a standstill."

"Do you know anything about them?" I asked.

"Not really," she said, shaking her head. "It's a conflict that's been going on for about forty years. Not nearly enough time to learn enough about your enemy to fight back properly like we do with you humans."

I held my tongue on that score. I wanted to say something about how the idea of taking forty years to learn how to fight your enemy was precisely why they lost every conflict they provoked with humanity, and some of the conflicts we provoked, despite the Terran Republic having fewer ships when the conflict started. Though our intel weenies thought we had parity with the Livisk Ascendancy and the Imperial Navy these days.

I was starting to think those intel pukes couldn't be farther from the truth now that I knew a little more about how the livisk system truly worked. How there were nobles who had entire fleets all their own that could be called into service on behalf of the empress.

It was starting to look like we hadn't even seen a fraction of the livisk forces. Maybe it was good they were fighting a war on another front against an enemy that actually put them on the back foot rather than being content to pull a Deep Space Nine and trade with their former enemies as long as they didn't get too frisky or threaten the Sisko.

Though I didn't think anybody would be able to threaten the Sisko in this day and age.

"Well, okay then," I said. "Are these assholes in any danger of actually collapsing your government and overthrowing the Livisk Ascendancy?"

"Not really," Varis said with a shake of her head. "Not at their current rate of attack."

"I figured that's what you were going to say considering they've been at it for forty years now."

"They have been a thorn in the empress's side that whole time, though. Another distraction she doesn't need when she's already having a difficult enough time maintaining loyalty among the noble houses and attempting to marshal support to fight another war against humanity."

That was an interesting bit of information. It was something that hit me like a laser blast from a battle cruiser that was hovering right over me, and she seemed to realize maybe she'd said a little too much as she looked at me and blushed again.

"The empress has been trying to marshal enough forces that she can take another shot at humanity?" I asked.

"It's something she's been going on about ever since she started her imperial reign," Varis said with a shrug. "If you look at any of her proclamations from when she first started out, it would be pretty clear. The problem is that she hasn't been able to actually marshal those forces or get enough nobles to agree."

I frowned. I hadn't been a part of the Terran Navy fifty years ago when the current empress took control of everything. I'd still been a kid back then.

Humanity was far longer-lived these days than we had been at any other point in history. Unless you believed all that stuff in the Bible about people living for nearly a thousand years back in the day, which most people didn't these days.

There were a lot of older people still kicking around from back then, though. The livisk were supposedly equally long-lived, though some of their statistics and averages got pulled down just a little bit because they were constantly trying to kill each other in honorable combat, which tended to skew the actuarial tables just a smidge.

"Well, that just gives me all the more reason to fight her. I don't think these alien assholes over on the other side of your territory is something for us to worry about."

"For now," she said.

"Yes, for now," I said. "Because I have other plans. I don't like the empress. I don't like anything she's doing. I don't know that the human system is necessarily better, but I'm serious when I say we need to figure out a way to do the whole interstellar civilization thing better."

Varis paused as she stared at me, then she looked up at Arvie. Finally, she looked back at me.

"Do you really think it's possible?" she asked.

I shrugged. "I don't know if it's possible. There are people who have done more with less than what we have. You're starting from a position of power here. You're head of one of the most powerful noble houses with one of the most powerful noble militaries in the entirety of the Livisk Ascendancy, after all."

Curiosity came trickling through the link this time around. I realized maybe I'd said a little too much.

"That's interesting," she said. "You know enough about the current political situation in the Livisk Ascendancy to know I'm one of the most powerful?"

I shrugged, trying to play it off. I wasn't sure I did a very good job of playing it off.

"I mean, you have one of the biggest towers and you have a personal army that serves you. I'm just guessing that you have one of the more powerful militaries that's beholden to a single noble."

The idea of a single noble with their own military beholden to them was so wild. For all that there were corporations with private contractor armies that could probably rival some of the minor houses in the Livisk Ascendancy.

It didn't make sense that they were still around after so long considering the way they were constantly infighting, but I also had to admit it bred a certain bit of toughness and resiliency into their civilization.

There were a lot of humans whose only contact with the harsh realities of combat was still bitching at each other on the Galactic Net a thousand years after people bitching on the Internet had almost turned into a Great Filter moment a few times over.

"Fine," Varis said, shaking her head. "So we're going to try and make things better. What exactly does that look like?"

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