Moose

Hologold, Princess of Ajax system and of the Hesperides, sits in her throne room on the palace-battleship Burning Bough of Ardor, looking down at the image of Mars turning in lazy real-time projected by the floor. Scenes from her home system play on the walls: the forbidding karsts of the Great Continent, her royal palace on the hill overlooking Ilion lit with lamps of xenon and krypton, countryside towns built into the half-flooded overgrown pits of potassium mines, ice-laden waves crashing on the leaden shores of Ananke. Fighters swarm like fish around the mountainous bulk of her ship, white slopes studded with sensors, missile batteries and laser culverins. The Martian carrier Carmine Star drifts into view beneath her, a charcoal-colored octahedron wrapped in a toroid of launching bays, no doubt curious and likely somewhat alarmed about the fleet that has just exited nonspace in the middle of Sol system. Hologold sits back, amethysts and fluorites chiming among the branches of her rose gold crown, and waits to be hailed in the name of the Dawn Empress and the Phoenix Throne, the throne of lapis lazuli and aquamarine and tanzanite set deep into slabs of black bronze that she has come to claim by right of conquest.