Volume 3: Eqtora

Grant Hyde—Grantyde, Prince Consort of the Black Pike, as the Taiikari call him—kneels before the Princess of the Black Pike. His kneepad plants on the arena floor, within the painted circle where he saw his warrior wife fight like a valkyrie.

Now it’s his turn to stand across from her.

He knew he’d have to learn this, eventually. He can’t stay innocent forever. The Imperial coterie in which he’s found himself will eat him alive otherwise.

These are the things he tells himself, but a part of him wishes this lesson wasn’t necessary.

Void Princess Sykora, his kidnapper and commanding officer and the love of his life, surveys him critically, her chin high and imperious. Her tail switches back and forth from the back of her baggy joggers. Today she wears little bronze bangles along its length; they glint in the clinical light of the arena. “Other leg, dove,” she says.

“Shit.” He swaps knees. “I’m used to leading from the right.”

“It’s my right. Remember? So that’s floor position.” She oversees his shuffling correction. “Good.” She taps her tail against the floor; it makes a musical chime. “Low position.”

He stands and puts his left hand on his hip. “This one’s the little teapot, right?”

She chuckles. “If you say so, Maekyonite. High position.”

He braces his legs, extends his knees, and steadies himself in a half-crouch. He tries to make it look as graceful as he remembers it being on the gallery floor. “Why do they call this one high position if I’m getting lower?”

“I’m the one going high, dove. You’re the base.” She couches her forearm in the crook of her elbow and pulls it across her body in a trapezius stretch. Grant admires the soft crescent of cleavage the movement forms on her chest.

He needs to focus. His wife is teaching him how to dance.

“You’re going to do wonderfully,” she says. “The genuine effort is mostly on my part. The lady demonstrates her painstaking training. The gentleman demonstrates obedience.”

“That’s me,” he says. “Obedient to a fault.”

She smirks and bends down to touch her toes. Her tail wags from the snap-fastened opening in her joggers. Its bangles chime.

“We’re going to start with a simple routine.” She stands up, and bounces on the balls of her feet. “Just make the changes when I call them out, and then do the stand bridge when I say so. Show me the stand bridge?”

He obediently extends his arms.

“Lovely. Okay.” Her tail thumps the ground. “Floor position to start.” She raises a red-switched box and clicks a button on it. An arpeggio-heavy string orchestra begins, its tune a beguiling interplay between organic and synthetic.

“First step, lady approaches.” Sykora takes three winding steps toward him, her hips swaying gracefully with her approach. “I extend my hand, and if you want to accept the dance, you just…”

He takes her palm.

“Ooh. The bachelor accepts.” Sykora licks her lips. “Maybe I have a chance to get my bed warmed tonight.”

“Maybe.” He winks. “Play your cards right.”

She winks back. “Floor position.”

He drops to one knee—the correct knee, this time. She walks a slow circle around him. Her tail lingers on his waist. “One two three, two two three, three two and low position.”

Grant stands up. His little wife’s tail goes rigid and her feet leave the floor with him. She twirls into his arms and dips perilously backward until she’s on the verge of going upside down. She laughs. “You are so damn tall, dove.”

Her foot hooks into the crook of his arm and she slips through, executing a graceful half-spin. Her butt rubs against his side as she twists herself right side up again. He watches her sinuous passage across his body with no small awe.

Her tail thwacks the floor twice. Ding, ding.

“Five two three, six two three, floor two three—”

He drops back down to one knee. She flickers around him to the front again and executes a neat standing turn atop his bent thigh. Her dark, waist-length hair flips like a silk scarf across his face. “You’d be doing a tail thing with me at this point. Don’t worry about it. We’re going low position into bridge soon, right? One, two, three, up—”

He stands, and she spins into his body, her thighs snapping around his waist, her arms on his shoulders. She splays herself across his outstretched arms like a lounge singer across a grand piano. Her eyes sparkle. “And now turn with me, turn turn turn, good. High position.”

She slithers up and across his shoulder. Her body slips off his. He gasps a “Shit” and grabs her.

“Oh, dove.” she laughs. “It’s okay. I’m bracing on the floor with my tail. You just have to… uh…”

In grabbing her, his palm has landed right between her legs. His fingers press against her crotch. Her lithe legs close around his forearm.

“Um,” she says. “Floor position.”

“Babe,” Grant says. “We need a dance instructor.”

Sykora pouts. “Am I not explaining it right?”

“You are,” he says. “But when we’re alone, we end up fucking instead of dancing.”

She whines as he eases out and off of her. “But that’s my favorite part.”

He sits up, the arena floor chilly on his butt, and ties the condom off. Sykora was put out when he started carrying these around, but considering the varied locations in which they give into temptation, it’s become necessary. His wife commands a mile-long voidship with seven hundred subjects aboard. He’s not about to leave his DNA all over it. Sykora assures him that there most of the Black Pike’s janitorial staff are automatons, and he’s seen the humming little cleaner bots making their rounds. But he put his foot down (especially once he found out how enjoyably unobtrusive Taiikari rubbers are).

“It's my favorite part, too,” he says. “But it’s not educational. I think we already get enough practice at this. Someone’s gotta keep us on-task.”

She giggles. “Perhaps you have a point.”

“I’d love to dance with you one-on-one more.” He kisses her clavicle. “But I gotta figure out what the hell I’m doing first.”

Sykora wiggles her plump blue butt back into her joggers. “I’ll ask the majordomo. She’s fabulous at this stuff. And she’ll tolerate a modicum of handsiness.”

***

“Floor position,” Vora says. She pushes her glasses up her nose. “Prince Consort. Your foot needs to be planted. Her Majesty needs a stable platform.”

“Oh, it was stable enough,” Sykora says.

Vora shakes her head. “Your heel slipped.”

Sykora tucks a loose billow of her tank top back in. “You, uh, you imagined that.”

Grant scoots his foot back. Majordomo Vorakaia is a much more stringent teacher than Sykora. He wants to complain, but he’s improving much quicker under her unsparing tutelage.

“All right.” Vora claps. “We’ll run it from the top. Oryn and I will do it with you.” She looks over her shoulder and her eyes light up with the compulsion flash. “Let’s dance, Ory.”

Vora’s husband, a stout, barrel-chested Taiikari man with little corkscrew horns and a genial smile, steps to her side. He’s one of the shipboard psychologists. A proud nepotism case, he told Grant. Perks of a powerful spouse.

Before his initiation into the world of the Taiikari, Grant would have looked at Vora’s mind-controlling flash to her husband with horror. Without anticompel glass over their eyes, Taiikari males are powerless to resist any command that accompanies the natural compulsion the female of their species are capable of. All men are powerless. All men but human men, apparently.

And okay—it’s still messed up. Of course it is. But the usually compulsion-proof Grant has experienced it, since. He’s felt how it is, to be compelled by someone who’s in love with you.

He doesn’t intend to feel it again. But he sees the smile on Oryn’s lips as he takes Vora’s hand, the little rub of his thumb on her knuckle.

“God, I’m sweating.” Oryn fans his stomach with his shirt as he takes floor position. “You’re exposing how behind I am on conditioning.”

Vora glances at Sykora. “Pretend you didn’t hear that, Majesty.” She removes her glasses and places them in Oryn's shirt pocket. Her hand goes to his arm.

Sykora mirrors her Majordomo’s movements. Her palm is warm and humid on Grant's bicep.

Vora clicks the music on. Her tail taps to the darkwave groove. “First sequence. Four, five, six…”

Grant can’t say whether Oryn’s position as a shrink is nepotism or not, but when it comes to cutting a rug, the guy’s qualifications are absolutely unimpeachable. He and the majordomo move like poetry, like flowing water. Oryn is more than a pillar—he’s the wind bearing his wife like a balletic bird, catching and releasing Vora as she spins and slithers around him. They are in flawless sync with one another.

For as close and compatible as Grant feels with Sykora, he looks at Oryn and Vora’s surefooted interdependence and feels a pang of jealousy at how effortlessly they fit together. Oryn’s tail loops and stabilizes around Vora on the riskier moves. Grant and his wife are doing their best, but these dances were made for two Taiikari. And he’ll never be Taiikari.

Then Sykora’s calf wraps around his arm, and her chest smushes into his face. And he isn’t sure how he could ever be jealous of any other man in history.

***

An unimaginable distance from the Princess and her husband, on the unlit rim of a remote system that gilds the farthest frontier of the Black Pike sector, a Taiikari researcher warms her hands on a steaming teacup and sighs as she adjusts the signal on her wireless, sharpening the unintelligible language broadcast through it. The linguists will transcribe and translate whatever it is these people are saying. She’s just here to focus the signal and monitor the instruments. And freeze her tail off.

Her coworkers have been whispering—is it coming? The moment they're all here awaiting? The voices, the intercepted broadcasts, the infrequent spy drones they risk sending. Everything is pointing to another attempt. A promising one. She has her doubts. There have been too many false alarms, too many breathless demonstrations that have come to nil. Decacycles shacked up in this listening post, and the one diode that would change everything has stayed unlit. She turns to it now, out of idle curiosity.

The emerald glow burns into her crimson eyes.

Her steaming teacup tips from her hand and shatters on the floor.

The Eqtorans have discovered the Sweep.

The time has come for conquest.