Princess of the Void

The Marquis Consort’s mind ventilates out the side of his skull in a chunky mist of red and pink.

Paxea shrieks like a banshee and leaps for Grant’s outstretched gun. Grant swings it around too slow. Her tail lashes around his arm and pinions it straight, bashing his elbow again and again into the floor and sending gray numbness into his gripping fingers. He thrashes his head to avoid her bared fangs. They slide around his Adam’s Apple and tighten. She is about to rip his throat out.

A sky-blue missile spear-tackles into Paxea, sending her spinning off of Grant with such vicious speed and motion that it takes a moment for Grant to realize that’s not Sykora, it’s Narika. Her arm locks around Paxea’s neck, wrenching and twisting to keep the Marquess’ teeth from tearing her open. Their tails twirl and bind.

“Narika!” Sykora’s pried the shotgun from Thror’s dead grip. “Down!”

Narika shoves Paxea away and dives to the floor. Paxea staggers back and stares into the blued steel barrel that’s about to end her life.

“By the Empress’s authority I strip your title, render you noncitizen, and sentence you to death.” Sykora says. “May the Gods of Ptolek have mercy on you.”

Paxea’s face is a mask of rage and grief. “Your whore Empress will burn with her empire.”

“You burn first,” Sykora says, and the room fills with sound and light. A fist-sized hole opens in Paxea’s chest. Violet blood fans across the wall. The Marquess stumbles backward, then blinks and takes a shaky step toward Sykora. A metallic chak as Sykora pumps the shotgun. The second shot blows half of Paxea’s head off. Pale bone gleams in the indigo remnants of her face. She collapses twitching to the floor. Her twitching heel raps twice on the hardwood then goes still.

Sykora cycles the shotgun again. A steaming shell clatters to the floor. The barrel jerks a few feet to the left and zeroes in on the Princess of the Glory Banner.

Narika’s started to stand. She freezes on one knee.

“Was it you, Narika? Did you inject me with Compound Seventy?” Sykora is unblinking. “Did you put me on Maekyon?”

“I suppose the Prince Consort knows about Compound Seventy, then.” Narika glances at Grant. “And I suppose I know about the Prince Consort.” She gets the rest of the way to her feet. “It wasn’t me, Sykora.”

“You might as well be honest with me, sister.” Sykora’s gun has followed Narika’s ascent. Her grip on the pump is white-knuckled. “It won’t change what’s about to happen.”

“There’s no truth that will satisfy you.” Narika shakes her head. “It wasn’t me. There is so much that I would eagerly take from you. But not your freedom.”

Sykora sneers. “You’ll have to beg more prettily than that.”

“I’m not begging.” Narika folds her arms. “Do whatever you think you have to, Princess. Put me in the ground. It changes nothing. It wasn’t me. I swear on Kiar’s soul.”

“Sykora. Honey.” Grant’s hand hovers by Sykora’s shoulder. “You can’t.”

Sykora doesn’t break eye contact with Narika. “She can’t live, dove. Not after what she saw.”

“Couldn’t we just give her some Compound Seventy?”

“I don’t just carry blacksite drugs around all the time.” Sykora forces her hands steady on the shotgun. “Besides. I have a foolproof solution right here.”

“I’ll tell nobody,” Narika says.

“How am I supposed to believe that?”

“I’ll tell nobody because I know who it’ll hurt. It won’t hurt you, Sykora. You can act like you didn’t know, that he deceived you, and you can annul your marriage and discard him. You can counterplay me, and it’ll damage you, but it won’t sink you. The one I’d truly be hurting is Prince Consort Grantyde and his people. He’s done nothing to be my enemy, and I know what they’d do to Maekyon if they knew. Do you think I want that on my conscience?”

“Always such a saintess,” Sykora says. “You’ve never fooled me.”

“If you pull that trigger, understand who you’re murdering me for.” Narika’s head is high. “Yourself, alone.”

“Preaching to the bitch pointing the gun at your face. Only you could be so goddamn holier-than-thou.” Sykora glares. “I’d be doing the firmament a fucking favor.”

Grant wishes, almost, that he was as supsicious of Narika as his wife was. Wishes he knew anything about her. But he doesn’t, not really. Nothing except for her enmity with Sykora and the suspicion that was proven false.

“Sykora,” he says. “I’m challenging you. Like you told me to. If I’m really your kindness, you’ll lower the gun.”

“She’s lying.” Sykora’s attempt to keep the shake out of her voice is failing. “She’ll ruin us with this. She’ll own us both forever, Grant. If I let her go, we’re through.”

“I will keep Grant’s secret, Sykora,” Narika says. “He saved my life.”

“Don’t fucking call him that,” Sykora says. “Only I get to call him that.”

Narika presses on. “For all the wounds we’ve inflicted on one another, how often have we truly lied to each other? About the important things, Kora?”

“You don’t want this, Sykora,” Grant says. “I know you don’t. You don’t want her to be family but she is. There’s cutting off and there’s pulling a trigger.”

“Gods of the fucking Inferno.” Sykora blinks. Then she barks a from-the-diaphragm “Fuck!” and shoves the shotgun into Grant’s hands. He gingerly places it on the dining room table. Sykora stabs a vicious finger toward her sister. “If you are lying to me about the Prince Consort, Narika, if you reveal his secret, I will not annul my marriage. I will not discard him. I will not care about what the coterie thinks. Because I will dedicate the rest of my assuredly brief existence to killing you.”

“Terms accepted, you crooked maniac.” Narika exhales and shakes the tension from her neck. “I suppose I didn’t quite give your marriage its proper deference. It’s more real than I realized.”

“You’ve always expected the worst of me,” Sykora says.

“You nearly killed me just now.”

“The worst would have been killing you. Did I kill you?”

“I see in the Prince Consort some kind of redemption for you, sister,” Narika says. “Perhaps in a kilocycle or two he’ll make you bearable.”

“We are leaving, Narika. Do what you like. Plot your doomed protestation.” Sykora gives Paxea’s corpse a light kick as she stalks from the room. “I just shot the Comet Queen’s face off. Good luck.”

“Prince Consort.” Narika holds a hand up as Grant goes to follow Sykora.

He turns to her.

“I owe you my life,” Narika says. “I won’t forget it. Thank you.”

He puts his hands in his vac suit pockets. “Uh. You’re welcome.”

“You are a good man. I hope you’ll make my sister a good woman. Or however close you can get.” She grins wanly. “Perhaps one day we can properly call one another friends.”

“Stop trying to steal my wife’s shit, Majesty,” Grant says, “and we can talk about friendship.”

He leaves the bungalow.

They pass the crumpled corpse of Narika’s guard as they return to Paxea’s shuttle. There’s a ligature mark in his neck deep enough that it cut the skin. Grant doesn’t let himself look at the dead man’s stricken expression. Just another horror stacked onto the day.

The trunk is open. Food wrappers blow from it into Ptolek II’s purple evening. Sykora slaps it shut and climbs into the shuttle, keying the radio on. “Indus Red to the Black Pike. This is Indus Red on an unsecured line. Are you there, Vora?”

A few seconds of hissing static, and then: “This is Vora, Majesty.”

“We’re coming home,” Sykora says. “We’ll be flying up in Marquess Paxea’s shuttle. It’s a purple Rinari-3. I’ll send through my codes.”

“Understood.” Vora’s voice implies anything but understanding. “Er—are we hosting the Marquess?”

Sykora barks a short, harsh laugh. “We are not. I’ll explain everything when Grantyde and I are back aboard. I’m sending you coordinates to a dwelling on Ptolek II. There are corpses there to be retrieved. Send a team.” Her finger taps the dashboard. “And send another to secure the home of Countess Wenzai. I don’t want her or her family going anywhere. Don’t scare them too badly, but ensure they stay put.”

The honed edge of anxiety cuts through Vora’s reply. “As you wish, Majesty.”

Sykora snaps the connection off. The shuttle growls into the air.

“Do you think they had something to do with it?” Grant asks. “Wen and Tik?”

“I have no idea,” Sykora says. “I don’t trust myself any longer. My instincts are in worse shape than I thought.”

The propulsive oppression of atmospheric departure wears off as the thinning skies of Ptolek II surrender to the firmament. Grant looks over at Sykora, whose gaze is nailed to the flight map.

He remembers Thror. Remembers the way he dropped like a marionette. Remembers the color of the Amadari’s brains.

“Who’s Kiar?” he asks.

“What?”

“Narika swore to Kiar. Who’s that?”

Sykora licks her lips. She comes to a decision. “I told you about my litter? Me, Narika, and Tymar, our cleric brother. You remember?”

“I remember.”

I said there were three and I lied,” Sykora says. “There was a fourth. The Empire didn’t have a place for him.”

He waits for Sykora to continue; he realizes she won’t.

“I can steer us,” he says.

“It’s all right.”

“Sykora.” He puts his hands on her shoulders. “Let me. Come here.”

She shakes her head—but when he unbuckles her seatbelt, she lets him lift her.

The artificial gravity is on, but she’s still so light as he pulls her from her seat and lays her in his lap. She turns around so that she’s straddling him, and lays her face against his heart.

The first sob racks her. He closes his hands across her back. Silently he’s grateful for this. Tending his wife’s sorrow is a distraction from replaying Thror’s death in his head, over and over.

His chest grows damp with her tears. “She was my friend,” she whispers. “I thought I had a friend.”

“You do.” He reaches past her and takes hold of the yoke to adjust their passage. “You have the Count and Countess, maybe. And if you don’t have them you still have the command group. And you have me.” He kisses her hair. “You’ll always have me.”

“What about Narika? What about what she knows?”

“I believe her.” Grant takes a hand off the yoke to cradle her closer. “As big a bag of dicks as she is, she convinced me.”

Sykora sputters a damp laugh. “A bag of dicks?”

“I hadn’t used that one yet?” Grant grins. “I love that one.”

His wife is coming back to herself. “What other ones?”

He chuckles. The headshot tape loop recedes into the darkness at the back of his skull. “I have more. A lot of bag ones. Dirtbag.”

“Ooh. Earthy.”

The Pike is visible on the magnifier cam. He feels the tangle in his heart begin to unknit at its familiar shape. “Douchebag.”

“Douche bag. Maekyonites are such poets.” She’s still crying, his wife, but she’s laughing now, too.

“How—“ He pauses. Should he bring this up now, while they’re still processing the rest of it? He decides he must. The kick against his shoulder. The spreading mist. The sound of the fall. “How do you get over it? Killing someone. I’d like to get over it.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve done it enough times that I’ve become inoculated to it.”

“I guess I’ll have to get there, too.”

“No.” Sykora sits upright and puts her hands on his shoulders. It always surprises him, how steely her grip can be. “No, Grantyde. That was the first and last life you’ll ever take. I will ensure it. I’ll never put you in that position again. Not ever. I will keep you safe.” She strokes his beard. “I swear to you. I swear by the Empress and our love and I swear on Kiar’s soul, too, if that’s coming into fashion. I see how it’s shaken you. I know these eyes and I see it in them. It won’t happen again while I’m around to stop it.”

“I’m okay,” he says.

But it’s Sykora’s turn, now, to see through him.

“You’re not,” she says. “It’ll come back to you, sometimes. Its echo. And for a time, you won’t be okay. But that’s all right, because I’m here. I’m here because of it. So when it aches again, touch me.” She puts his hand over her heart. He feels its beat. “Touch me and remember that.”

“Kiss me,” he says, and she kisses him.

He feels the scaffold of his soul shake as her tongue slides into his mouth. His breath tightens and his body shivers with the logic-proof loathing of what he did in that bungalow. Sykora must sense it because she squeezes him tighter, kisses him deeper. The fluff of her tail tuft is warm against the back of his neck.

They drift away from the blood-scarlet gas giant, and back toward the Pike. Its distant hangar is a bright hanging coin of gold in the black of the void.

Grant clings to his wife and lets the dead Comet Queen’s shuttle take them home.