Princess of the Void

Grant clears the dishes onto a silvery tray and sticks it into a dumbwaiter in the kitchenette's corner. Sykora’s finished with her face and has moved on to a sparkling starfield of jewelry. “Once I bring the assassin thing up,” she says, comparing bracelets, “Garuna will do all she can to project otherwise.”

“Why?”

“Bend down, dear. Let me do your collar.” He obeys and her dextrous little fingers smooth his stand collar straight. “She’s planetary governess of Ptolek and it’s been a very sensational few headlines,” she continues. “If the deaths are connected, I step in, and that’s another. An issue as grand as exo refinement is my jurisdiction. A gas giant governorship with a moon as habitable as Ptolek II is a prime posting. Puts a lot of pressure on her. If she can’t control her people, she might be replaced.”

“Are you the one who decides if she keeps it?”

“That’d be the Empress, my lovely alien, although as the void princess commanding her sector, I have influence.” She returns to her vanity and slots a percussion section’s worth of brass bangle onto her wrists. “I’d just as soon leave her in place, even if the killings are killings. She’s a bore and an airhead, but she’s got solid instincts. Though I have a theory I’m probing today that her mother does most of the ruling for her.”

A soft chime emits from the door. “That’s your coffee.” Sykora pushes the wall button again. “You may enter.”

A slender Taiikari male scurries into the room, with a brass tray of coffee and its accoutrements. Flour dusts the black parts of his uniform. His lined face is mostly bare; just a frosted pair of goggles to hide his eyes.

“Really, now, Kymai,” Sykora says. “You didn’t need to carry that all the way yourself.”

“I’m here to bring it back down if the Prince Consort doesn’t like it.” Kymai pours a mug. “Cream, milord? Sugar?”

“Just black is fine.”

“Ahh. Nothing to hide behind.” He runs a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair, transmogrifying it into salt-and-pepper-and-flour hair. “I must find a way to redeem myself. It’s a commoner’s drink. I’m sure—”

Grant lowers the mug from his lips. “That is some incredible fucking coffee.”

“Oh. Oh, thank God.” Kymai decompresses. “You flatter me overmuch, milord, I’m sure. But thank God it’s acceptable.”

“I’d order you on a vacation, Kymai, if I didn’t think your heart needed some kind of stress floor to keep beating.” Sykora gives him a nod. “Thank you as always, Quartermaster. You may go.”

Kymai bows himself out, tray tucked beneath his arm. Grant watches his departure. “The quartermaster. Is he free, or do you own him, too?”

Sykora frowns. “Of course he's free.”

“So not all of your men are mind-slaves.”

“God, Grantyde.” She pulls a face. “What a notion. No. You can’t compel a citizen against their will. And every Taiikari aboard this vessel is a citizen.”

Grant takes another bracing sip. “But not me.”

“Well.” She mirrors him. “I can’t compel you either.”

“But you won't free me.”

“Aliens aboard a ZKZ voidship must be someone’s property or prisoner,” she says. “It’s too priceless a weapon to let a non-Taiikari aboard otherwise. I can’t free you without removing you from the Pike. And I’d sooner remove my own leg.” She drums her fingers on the table. “Didn’t we call a truce on this for the morning?”

“Fine.” Grant holds up the mug. “You want to try some?”

“No, thank you. The smell is quite bracing enough on its own.” Sykora sprays herself with a little silver pump. Vanilla and something citrus-y. Lime, almost. “I know I said you’d accompany me everywhere, my dear, but this meeting has the potential to be a true bore. And you’d have to seem very obedient throughout. You needn’t subject yourself to it if you’d prefer. I could give you one of my command group as an escort.”

“I’m game for boring,” he says. “I took my old job because I was looking for boring.”

She quirks a carefully lined brow. “Why ever would you look for boring?”

“I, eh.” He shrugs. “When I was a kid, I had a rough crowd around me. I had a brother and a father who used to get in trouble a lot, boosting cars and things like that. And I used to have to get them out. I moved away, my brother passed, I moved back, my father passed, and I’d messed my life up enough at that point that it was go into what they were into, or find a legitimate job that most people don’t like to do. Those are all dirty, dangerous, or boring, and boring felt like the best option. My brother’s life was exciting as hell, and short as a song.”

“What’s boosting cars?”

“Stealing them.”

“Ooh.” Her other brow raises to join its twin. “My captor-turned-husband, the principled scion of a bandit king. How vivid.”

“Only thing he was king of was the trailer park,” Grant says. “But he held court.”

“Well, his son has had quite the up-jump.” She steps into her shoes and executes a brief turn that sweetly jangles the jewelry in her sizable ears. “What do we think?”

She is, as always, the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. The tyrant who thinks she owns him is the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.

You can’t want her. You cannot let yourself want her.

“Good to go,” he says.

Through the lush halls and brass balustrades of the Black Pike, Grant follows the Princess. Every crewmate they cross gives her a bow from the waist and gives him glances of barely disguised fascination and confusion. Sykora dismisses the pilot when they arrive at her shuttle. It’s a sleek runner, finned and graceful and striped in red and black like a tropical fish.

“Arn is a fine pilot, but I’d like some privacy,” she explains, as they buckle themselves into the cockpit. “And to show off my flying.”

“No spiral dives,” he says.

She bats her painted lashes. “I’ll behave.”

They lift from the gilded platform and into the dark, and the silky silence of the vessel surprises him again. The shuttle moves in jerky degrees of motion once it’s out of the hangar; he watches the view yaw as they depart.

The great rusty sphere of Ptolek dominates the starscape. Faintly visible in its low orbit is a ring around its equator. Antlike dots glide along and past it. Ships, he realizes, as they swing their nose toward the blue marble of Ptolek’s habitable moon. That ring is man-made; those are ships.

“Grantyde.” Sykora taps his hand, and he turns to her. “I’ve been thinking. And I want to give you another chance here to bow out. We can re-dock and you can find some other way to pass your day.”

“Why would I do that?”

“There will be…” Her tail paints a nervous figure-eight through the hole in her seat designed to accommodate it. “There will be attention on you. On us.”

“I can manage that.”

“They’re going to be curious. They’re going to test us.”

“Test us how?”

“A proper royal Taiikari marriage follows tradition.” Sykora fidgets with her rings. “There are couples, especially on the frontier, whose union is progressive, and equitable, and there is no compulsion, no obedience. But I am a Princess of the Imperial Family. I am expected to keep to our ways, to project poise and strength and, uh. Control.”

It dawns on him what she’s asking. “You’re going to pretend to compel me. You need me to play along.”

She places her hand on his. “Grantyde, you must. If not for my sake, then for the sake of your species.”

“What does that mean?”

“A male who can’t be compelled is a galactic fascination,” she says. “Maekyon is a speck of dust on the imperial ledger. It’s nowhere. Before I wound up on it, I barely even knew its name. The empire’s protocol for such a planet is to ignore it completely, until its people have either bombed themselves to glowing dirt, or advanced enough to colonize its solar system. But this secret changes that. Rips it to shreds.”

Her thumb is kneading the valley between two of his knuckles. “You’re a wonder of the firmament. And the Taiikari Empire hoards wonders. Cages them and studies them and takes them apart and rebuilds them as faithful little clockworks. A race of beautiful, strong giants, with a unique power like this? They would uplift you instantly. They’d sweep onto your world and colonize it. They’d rip your people from the soil by the roots and plant them in their pretty gardens. Or in great rows of harvest.”

He sees Drake’s eyes again. Sees the light leave them as they roll into his skull.

“I can’t stop you,” Sykora says. “You’re the only man I’ve ever known who I truly can’t stop. But I can plead with you, and I will if I must. I swear on my Empress’s sword I won’t compel any more than is absolutely necessary to keep your secret. We must pretend. At least until we can figure out an ironclad way to present you to the Empress herself.”

He sighs, but nods. “I can do that.”

She lets out a relieved breath and pats his palm. “Thank you, Grantyde.”

He cranes his neck to look back at the vessel they’re departing. She perks up. “You want a better look at the voidship, darling?”

“Sure,” he says, and she pirouettes them in the firmament.

The Black Pike fills their viewscreen. Its shape is apropos, he realizes, to its name. A jutting, graceful spire, a mile at least, arcs from a thick, blade-shaped protrusion, its span glowing with engine light.

Sykora hums contentedly as she beholds it. “Home.” She nudges his elbow. “Our home. And the home of seven hundred faithful souls.”

He gazes at the Pike as it slides superimposed across another of Ptolek’s moons. “It’s gorgeous,” he says.

“I’d love to show it to you with its sails out,” she says. “To catch the tides and ride the sweep. They’re beautiful. Massive and iridescent.”

“Sails?” He blinks. “Why do you need sails?”

“To get anywhere that’s anywhere, my dear,” she says. “They pass into a dimension where distance is a much looser concept. And they pull us with them. We call it the sweep. It’s exhilarating. You’ll see.” Her eyes dance at the thought. “I never grew up with a sunrise. Born in the void, just like the Pike. But I’ve never missed it.”

“So it’s like warping?”

“Warping.” She giggles. “Is that what the Maekyonites call it?”

“Only in our movies,” he says. “We have nothing like this. Getting to our moon was a huge deal for us. You’re first contact, if you hadn’t realized.”

“I had a hunch when your ass hole masters spent fifteen cycles poking and measuring me.” She turns them around and refocuses their prow on Ptolek II. “Did I use that right? Ass hole?”

“That’s about right.” He laughs at the careful way she says it. “How long is fifteen cycles, anyway? How do Taiikari measure time? Do your days have twenty-four hours?”

“Twenty-six,” she says. “If I lost two, I don’t know how the hell I’d manage. There’s tendays and cycles. A tenday is… well, a tenday’s obvious, I’d think, if your translator is working. And a cycle is a pair of tendays.”

“So fifteen cycles…” Grant does some quick calculation. “You were down in the dark for ten months?”

She smiles sadly. “Mustn’t dwell. Much to do. And besides. It’s how I met my husband.” She lifts his hand and plants a kiss on his knuckle.

The little spot of wet warmth she placed on his hand cools quickly in the chilly air-conditioned shuttle.

He never used to mind the cold. But as his wife’s heat dissipates, he—

Don’t call her that. This woman isn’t your wife and you’re not her husband. You’re her prisoner. Don’t forget.

He sighs and refocuses on the gas giant looming in front of her. He hasn’t forgotten. But the insolent defiance in his heart is turning into something else as his captor hums and wags her tail.

Something like longing.