Epilogue Three – Meeting the Parents

Highstation Prime, Phobos - Six Months Later

Aurora took a deep breath, then another. The ship she was in was... nice enough, she supposed. She had to take it from Mars to here, from Ivil's place. It was a luxury ferry, of sorts, booked in private and crewed by personnel that she was quite certain were all MINT agents in disguise. She was learning to pick up the tells.

In any case, the ship arrived close to Highstation Prime. It was one of the largest docking facilities around Phobos, and the space where she was destined to meet her parents and extended family.

She was not looking forward to it.

"Are you okay?" Twenty-Six asked.

"I'm well," Aurora said. She spared a smile to the young woman next to her.

Twenty-Six smiled right back, then pulled one of Aurora's hands over so that she could entwine their fingers together.

It had been a solid six months since they'd all started dating, and despite moments of intimacy, Aurora still felt strangely shy about public displays of affection.

She was getting used to it, of course. It was hard not to. Twenty-Six was still adorably clueless at times, but she was also a... what was the term Ivil had used... ah yes. A 'hug addict.' The Saturnian liked to cling onto them whenever she had a sufficiently plausible excuse for it. It wasn't uncommon to see Ivil giving her a piggie-back ride, or Pixie walk by tugging Twenty-Six along by the hand.

Aurora was the holdout. She couldn't honestly say that she didn't enjoy it, but she'd been raised by a more conservative family, and such easy displays of affection felt as alien to her as they felt warm and inviting.

Today was going to be especially challenging.

"Do you wish that Ivil was here?" Twenty-Six asked.

"Truthfully? No," Aurora said. "This is going to be a difficult enough thing without her being there from the start. You know how overbearing she can be at times."

Twenty-Six laughed. "She likes having things done her way, yeah."

The ship shifted as they connected to the dock. Aurora closed her eyes, then let herself feel the gravity of the moon. It was strange, such a little thing, but some part of her intimately recognized the gravity of Phobos as 'home.' It wasn't a terrible feeling.

Except that she knew the moment she stepped off the ship.

Her family was waiting for her.

There was her father, a tall, stately man in a well-pressed suit, and next to him her slightly shorter mother, whose darker skin and face Aurora had inherited, though she had her father's eyes and some of his height.

Beyond them, more family, a few aunts, some uncles, and a lot of members of the middle-nobility. More than she had expected to see.

Ah, she knew what this was, then. This was an event. She recognized a few spare members of the upper nobility as well, families that were peers or greater than her own, though they were off to one side, amongst their own with their own servants around.

It only took a moment's thought to realize what this was all about.

The League of Free Moons had had a bit of an upsurge in popularity and support after the Uranus incident. The Jovian fleet had arrived an hour too late to help in the combat, but they were there to support the Uranians in the cleanup work.

And then Aurora had been there too, very publicly placing herself as the representative of Phobos and Mars as a whole.

It meant that, for a fleeting moment, Phobos looked superior to Mars... in a small, reasonably easy to dismiss way that wouldn't have the sword-rattlers of Mars too angry. After all, Mars had come out of that situation smelling like roses.

Their Empress had shown up and kicked in the teeth of the big, evil, scheming Emperor of Earth and had saved hundreds of poor Uranians. Footage of the event was still the centre of memes and jokes, even half a year later, and the political ramifications hadn't yet finished playing themselves out.

So, she was maybe not central to one of the biggest political events of the decade, but she had been a step away from the centre and had used that to push Phobian interests further.

If nothing else, Aurora had secured her place as a quick-thinking, shrewd diplomat, and her subsequent meetings with some leaders of other moons that were part of the League had only made that more clear.

There was now a major trade going on between Uranus and Phobos that she had brokered. Phobos was buying the remains of the newer, more experimental Earth Alliance ships that Ivil had knocked around like toys. Phobos was grabbing them for a small fortune, and reselling them for a larger fortune to some Martian R&D companies who were salivating at the thought of gaining access to brand new Earth Alliance tech.

The deal meant billions of dollars trading hands, and she had been the one to broker it. It wasn't even the only deal she'd facilitated with various members of the League of Free Moons.

Basically, Aurora had done well. Far, far better than might have been expected of her.

Obviously, she cheated like a madwoman to do it, but that was very acceptable at this level of society. Expected, even.

And now she had to face the music.

Literally. A live band started to play off to one side. "Oh boy," she muttered.

"It'll be fine," Twenty-Six said. She stepped up and tugged Aurora along, a bit of a faux-pas, but Twenty-Six was good at trampling past those.

Aurora walked up, keeping up until she reached her parents, who of course had the honour of greeting her first.

"Aurora!" her mother said. She stepped up and gave Aurora the most perfunctory of hugs, made a little more awkward by Twenty-Six not catching the hint that she ought to let go and step back. "I'm so happy to see you."

"Likewise," Aurora said. "Are you well? Father as well? I heard that you took ill a few months ago, but you seem to have recovered."

"Oh, just a bit of stress making me take ill. I got better in no time," her mother replied. Left unsaid was that Aurora had likely caused said stress.

"It's good to see you, daughter," her father said as he stepped up. He smiled, looking rather proud. "Who is your companion here?"

"Ah, Mother, Father, this is my... this is my girlfriend, Twenty-Six, of Saturn."

"Hi!" Twenty-Six said. She hopped forwards and squeezed Aurora's mom in a tight hug, then while the woman was still reeling, she did the same to her dad. "Nice to meet you! I'm Twenty-Six, ah, but Aurora said that already. Hi!"

"Um, hello," Aurora's mother said. "Did you say you were dating this... fine young woman?"

The fact that Twenty-Six wasn't nobility was... kind of blindly obvious.

They'd all taken to dressing Twenty-Six up in better clothes than her old jumpsuits. There was... some amount of bullying going on in their weird little relationship. It was mostly everyone pushing Twenty-Six to dress in what they thought was cutest on her, and fortunately Twenty-Six took it well and didn't seem to mind being a living dress-up doll. Though she did return to her usual jumpsuits all the time.

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Aurora had her wearing a nice, rather loose-fitting dress, the kind of thing that a young woman that was part of the Phobian nobility might wear, and it was very cute, a bright, pastel yellow with a few bows in an orange-red that matched Twenty-Six's hair. She still managed to look a little awkward and gangly despite the well-tailored clothes though, and she didn't have that straight-backed posture that was indicative of a noble upbringing.

"Yes, Mother, I'm dating Twenty-Six," Aurora said. "We're very serious."

"So serious," Twenty-Six said unseriously. "Are you going to tell them about Pixie and Ivil?"

"I was going to get to it eventually," Aurora said.

Her mother cleared her throat. "Ah, but sweetie, we actually had the intention of allowing you to meet someone very interesting today. The second son of the Montresor family. He's a very handsome young man."

"Wow," Twenty-Six said.

"Meaning no offence," her mother said without an ounce of sincerity. "I'm certain you're a fine young woman. You said you were from Saturn?"

"Yeah," Twenty-Six said. She didn't seem too upset that Aurora's mother had just tried to upsell her to some young noble somebody.

Aurora cleared her throat. "You'll find that I'm quite happy with Twenty-Six, Mother, and my other girlfriends as well."

"Other girlfriends?" her father asked.

"Let's not make a scene," her mother said. "As I said, I'm sure young... Twenty-Six here has plenty of merits."

Twenty-Six nodded. "I do! I'm a spaceship mechanic."

"That's... nice," her mother said.

"And I'm a C-classer too! I've been picking up cores here and there as I go. But I'm taking my time about it. Our other girlfriend says that she regrets taking on so many at once, and it's safer to be slow and steady about it. Look!"

Twenty-Six pinched her tongue between her lips and summoned a small piece of metal over her hand. Then, with even greater focus, she set it to spinning slowly.

"Cool, huh?"

"Yes, quite," her father said. "Now... Did you mention Ivil? Someone named after the Empress?"

"Something like that," Aurora said.

Twenty-Six, perhaps sensing something the others didn't, turned. She pointed out of the huge windows looking out into space on the side of the docking facility. "Pixie's coming in now," she said.

Aurora turned as well, and that had her parents looking, which in turn led to several more dragging their attention out into the space just outside.

A tiny speck in the distance was growing larger, at a startling speed. The tiny vessel was racing in at a speed that was definitely breaking several laws.

People started to move away from the windows, as if that would save them in the occasion of a crash.

Then the tiny sliver of a ship spun around and executed a hard burn to slow down. Alarms rang, but... well, Pixie was good.

The Nightstalker slowed down with that burn at an insane rate until it came to a stop... right between the docking clamps that had been left free for her already.

"Yup, that's her," Twenty-Six said. Then, in a faux-whisper, she continued. "She's a very good pilot."

"That was the height of impropriety!" Aurora's mother said. "And is that a fighter craft? Aurora Sterlingworth, what kind of rabble have you been spending time with?"

Aurora closed her eyes. She loved her parents, most of the time... sometimes. But they were, on frequent occasions, a bit of a pain in the ass to deal with. This was one such occasion, where her mother took it upon herself to humiliate and degrade.

Aurora raised a hand, cutting off her mother mid-rant. It wasn't actually the hand that did it, of course, but a few copies of some cores that Sonic Spectre had been so kind as to allow Aurora to access.

"Mother, I won't have you disparaging my girlfriends," Aurora said. She hoped that the warning tone came through. Twenty-Six would laugh in the face of most insults, but Pixie always had something to prove and... Ivil didn't take insults that well, really.

Which actually made her think...

She turned towards Twenty-Six. "Do we know how she's coming?"

"Uh, she said she was taking a ship over. Something proper."

So, probably a Martian warship of some sort. There was a frigate that Ivil was uncommonly fond of, the Lucky Despot. Its captain didn't know what they did to enjoy the Empress' attention, which only made it funnier.

"Who is coming?" her father asked.

"My third girlfriend," Aurora said.

Her mother gasped. "Third? Sweetie, you can't. The Sterlingworth family appreciates what you did, but this kind of thing will spread rumours."

"I bet it will," Twenty-Six said.

Aurora was about to comment when there was a slight shiver that crossed the entire building. Expensive chandeliers above rattled in place, and a few of the more delicate nobles squeaked.

She frowned and turned her attention back to the world outside. Something was happening in space.

Lightning traveled across the void, and all of a sudden, all of the ships and transports flying across the skies of Phobos were rushing to get out of the way.

Then a rift opened. A hole through which a different smattering of stars could be seen. It wavered, then grew wider... and wider. If it wasn't for a few stray ships in the sky, she might have had a hard time seeing the scale of it.

That changed as soon as the prow of the first vessel came through, and continued to come through.

It was massive, taller, wider, larger, than just about any ship in the entire solar system. Smaller vessels moved around it, dwarfed by it, but those smaller vessels were heavy cruisers and Martian destroyers.

Even from this far away, Aurora could read the print on the ship's prow. Martian Humility.

Then another ship started to move out of the void, and another. Not one, but three Imperial Star Dreadnoughts. The Martian Humility, the Purgatorial Oblivion, and the No Warning Shot Required.

Aurora knew all three of their names because those ships, on their own, each represented enough firepower to kick the asses of most other fleets in the system, to say nothing of the supporting fleet that moved with them. Two of them had rarely ventured away from Mars itself, sitting in a far orbit like a raised sword, ready to strike at any that came close.

"Oh! They're so pretty!" Twenty-Six said. "Do you think Ivil will let me visit?"

"I'm sure," Aurora said. She turned towards her parents, who were staring rather gobsmacked. "Mother, Father, my third girlfriend, Ivil Antagonist, Empress of Mars and such, is about to arrive. Please make an effort not to embarrass me in front of her."

***

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