Princess of the Void

“People of the Eqtoran Republic.”

The voice from beyond the stars cuts through the Rivenland’s bridge vox. It’s grammatically perfect and smooth, and unmistakably alien. There’s no grit to its vowels, an uncanny softness to its trills. And there’s no music under it. No war drums, no pomp, no nothing. Ynaqi pops the hatch on her gunnery station. Tennek has frozen at his controls.

“An offer has been made for peace between our people. A place is kept for you as citizens of the Taiikari Empire. The Council of Two Hundred has refused both and instructed you, the populace under its supposed protection, to attack the Zek Kan Zek Kei’na Terokai.”

Ynaqi’s fringe curls as she climbs into the cockpit and reorients herself so Tennek’s on the floor instead of the wall. “Fuck’s a Kei’na Terokai?”

Tennek squints out the window. “Reckon it’s the bigass alien warship you’ve been shooting all our slugs at, Gunner.”

“Despite the aggression that met our call for sisterhood, we remain eager to welcome you into the wider firmament. But our patience and our mercy have limits, and we are prepared to return in kind the violence—”

The voice of the Lacrimal’s comms officer cuts urgently through the broadcast. “All vessels, emergency encoded channel. Switch now.”

“I swear to the gods if I stay up there counting the warheads and listening to my focus music, I’m gonna drive myself deepdweller.” Suqen’s lithe form emerges from the missile pod. “Should we—”

“Shh.” Tennek holds up a hand. “In a moment.”

Their petite missile tech squeezes in between the two bigger crewmates.

“Hey, hon,” she whispers to Ynaqi. It’s been a few weeks since she started calling Ynaqi hon. The gunner still isn’t sure what that means. Probably nothing. She calls Tennek hon, too. Suqen’s not the sort of woman to be careful with her words or withhold her affections.

“Hey, Qen.” Ynaqi makes room for their crewmate. Somehow, Suqen’s slender thigh still ends up nudging against her hip. The absurd impulse rises in Ynaqi to rest her hand on it, to whisper into the keeper’s ear the secret, illicit hope she’s been sitting on all this time.

It’s just three of you. A man, a woman, a keeper, all alone in a leaky boat at the edge of a great civilizational nightmare. One of the oldest songs there is. If not now, when?

“You all right?” she asks instead.

“Right as I can be.” Suqen gestures to the vast alien obelisk hovering on their horizon. “With the apocalypse and such.”

“Starting immediately after this broadcast, a countdown of four hundred and forty-six turnings will begin,” the droning voice continues, dry and tuneless. “If no agreement to commence annexation has been reached at its conclusion, the Kei’na Terokai will open fire upon the world of Taiqan, destroying every living being and structure on its surface and rendering it uninhabitable. To those on Taiqan—we urge you to evacuate the planet as soon as possible. Our vessel will take no offensive action against you until the countdown ends. A demonstration of the destructive power of this warship will now begin.”

The silence hangs heavily across the bridge.

“We oughta switch to the emergency encode,” Ynaqi murmurs.

“Uh huh.” Tennek flicks the radio and the military chatter blooms back into the room.

They listen to the chatter between the fleet ships. “You think any of this stuff’s gonna do anything?” Suqen asks. “I sorta reckon not. I mean, how much ordnance did we just sink into that big bitch?”

Tennek shrugs.

“Could put some tunes on instead,” Ynaqi says. “Get one last go of Tooth and Tail in before they nuke the armada station.”

“If they try to nuke 88.80, I’ll fly us into the warhead on some Book of Thorns shit,” Tennek says.

The cabin breaks into fevered laughter.

“If I hear Tooth and Tail, I’mma mutiny and nuke them myself,” Suqen says. “When we’re all radioactive dust, that song’ll survive like an ice slug.”

“C’mon,” Tennek says. “With the way that chorus hits?”

“That’s why it sucks,” Suqen says. “I turn on the radio, I’m not trying to suddenly get all misty-eyed about the service. I already fuckin’ joined, didn’t I?”

Ynaqi chuckles and reaches for the handhold near her, to pluck herself out of the cramped command module and back to her station. Suqen’s leg shifts.

Their missile tech has never been the sort to say one word when ten will do, preferably at a volume you can hear from across a feast hall. So when her calf hooks around Ynaqi’s to keep her where she is, and when she quietly and simply asks “Will you stay, Naq?” it boosts the gunner’s heart into her throat.

Suqen’s eyes flit to the captain. Ynaqi glances in his direction. Tennek glances back. Suqen’s hand is in his.

Ynaqi stays.

The three of them hang in the weightless cabin, linked by the most tenuous of touches, as the blinding beam of violet light lances from the alien vessel to the surface of the moon.

***

Grant’s been struck, at times, by the casual cheer aboard the ZKZ Black Pike’s bridge. When a bandit opens fire on them, or an asteroid pings off them like an oversized billiard, it’s often accompanied by a spirited choral ooh and a smattering of applause.

As the Pike carves Taiqan’s moon, there’s nothing but blinking silence. Perhaps they’re picking up on the royal couple and their command group, who watch the bombardment with taciturn anxiety.

The Eqtoran armada has finally caught up with their short swept jaunt, taking hours to reach what the Pike arrived at in mere minutes on a quarter-burn. Sykora held the ultimatum and the plasma cutter until the orbital lanes around Taiqan were thick with the battlegroups of two worlds. They’ve been holding their fire in eerie stalemate; with the flaring plasma cannons and the lunar bombardment, the assault has begun again.

Through the crackle and glow of the membrane, the great pale marble of Taiqan’s moon boils beneath the Pike’s guns. Thick clouds of combustion and dust are dimming the equator where the mark is being made, but the signet shape is still visible.

The armada’s efforts to halt the branding disfigurement of their moon are as useless here as they were above Eqtora. Even more useless, if anything—without the atmospheric interference, Waian’s recalibration protocols are enough to keep them protected indefinitely. The Chief Engineer returned to the deck in stony, professional silence, but she’s warming up again little by little.

“Majesty.” Her tail nudges Grant’s leg. “Is it my imagination or are those hafts uneven?”

Grant peers at the moon. “Maybe a little? On the left?”

“Hear that?” Waian prods Hyax. “Your gunnery team’s being asymmetrical, Brigadier.”

Hyax frowns. “We’re not exactly using a grease pencil here, Chief Engineer. Orbital bombardment isn’t usually the realm of the fine arts.”

“Not in the way you’re doing it.” Waian points at the monitor. “Just round it off down there. By that canyon.”

“It’s fine,” Hyax says.

“If we don’t glass this world, these people are gonna be looking at your handiwork every lunar month from now on, y’know,” Waian says. “Fine, if you wanna settle for fine.”

Hyax scoffs, but surreptitiously unhooks her communicator. “Hyax to Gunnery. Extend that left-hand haft further down the southern hemisphere.”

Beneath Grant’s bolstering palm, Sykora’s shoulder blades loosen as the Chief Engineer natters with the Brigadier. His touch is light on the brocade version of the same sigil they’re carving in massive magnification.

“We’re gonna have something in common with the folks down there,” he says. “We fall asleep with the halberds on a tapestry over us. They’ll have it on the moon.”

“If the world’s still inhabitable in a cycle,” Sykora says.

A polite ahem from the approaching majordomo shoots a spark of tension back through them.

“Uh, Majesties. Is this a bad time to make a strategic suggestion?” Vora’s tail swishes on the hardwood command deck.

Sykora slaps a smile on. “Never a bad time if it’s from you, Majordomo.”

Vora shuffles closer and lowers her voice. “I hope this won’t come across as viciousness. But I wonder if we’re erring in our care around their religion. To hear the councilors tell it, their gods are diametrically opposed to Imperial annexation. We may do more harm than good in accommodating it. Perhaps we ought to pull it out from the root. We’ve done it before.”

Grant crouches to join the huddle. “Have you ever done it with a theocracy?”

Vora pushes her glasses up her nose. “Not to my knowledge.”

Grant sucks air through his teeth. “I have to imagine if we pull this root, it’ll take a whole heap of their civilization with it.”

“Grantyde’s right,” Sykora says. “We’d be advancing past our remit. The goal is to preserve as much of Eqtora as we can in their transition to Imperial citizenship.”

“It’s just—” Vora spares a look toward the planetary horizon before them. “I have a foreboding feeling that it’s going to interfere with the complete evacuation of Taiqan, Majesties.”

“Religion is fine in the high times, Vora, but I’m blowing their moon open.” Sykora steps forward. Her silhouette frames in the blazing light of the Black Pike’s plasma battery. “Eventually, their material reality will lead to a doctrinal shift. The hour will come and the gods will be silent, and they’ll realize the need for less-than-divine salvation.”

Vora chews her tablet’s stylus. “I hope you’re right. I’ve been studying their texts, some. The Library Sacrosanct, it’s called. And there’s this one book, the Book of Thorns. It’s about martyrdom, Majesty. Religious martyrdom. I’ve taken the liberty of noting it down as a keyword for our media broadcast monitors. In the hours since our ultimatum, it’s cropped up again and again on the collective airwaves of public access news and entertainment. Across ideological lines. This was a minor entry in the canon. It, uh… it’s growing.”

Sykora’s mouth twists. “These are not unreasonable people, Majordomo.”

“Not yet, Majesty. But we’re cornering them.”

“They’re about to have a full cycle of futile effort,” Sykora says. “Do I believe they’re ready to sacrifice themselves for a valiant cause? Certainly. But I can’t believe they’d be eager to toss their lives away for mythology.”

Grant remembers his conversation with Hyax. Her frowning inability to understand the willingness to die for a doomed cause. Maybe the rest of the command group can’t imagine it. But Grant grew up watching documentaries about poisoned Kool Aid and purple shrouded bodies. And maybe the Eqtorans are more like Maekyonites than Taiikari.

“This Library Sacrosanct,” Grant says. “It’s machine translated? Do you have a copy?”

“I do.” Vora holds her tablet up.

“Can you look up a word in there for me?”

Vora’s pen hovers above the tablet’s surface. “Certainly, Majesty.”

“Tamuraq,” Grant says.

She blinks. “How do you spell that?”

“I have no idea.”

Vora chews the edge of her pen. “What does it mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Grant says. “Some apocalypse myth, I think.”

“Er, well, Majesty.” Vora fiddles with the tablet’s interface. “I haven’t seen much in the way of apocalypse stories, but it may have been swept into some odd translation, or not translated at all. Surely something exists along those lines. It’s such a common theme in mythological texts. I imagine the researchers at the listening post would know more.”

“Can I talk to them?”

“We’re trying to minimize communications.” Sykora cuts in. “The Eqtoran capacity for interception isn’t fully known. The one vulnerability we have in the system, the one place they can hurt us, is the listening post. Its membrane is much weaker than the Pike’s. Weak enough that Eqtoran weapons can harm it. I don’t want the blood of those people on my hands. We need to do what we can to ensure that it stays hidden.”

Grant squeezes the end of Sykora’s tail. “Would you pardon us for a moment, Majordomo?”

“As you wish, Majesties.” Vora has mastered the art of genuflection while backing away.

“Batty.” Grant gets on his knees and lowers his voice. “I have this pit of dread in my stomach. That feels like inevitability. I think this won’t work, this ultimatum. Or if it does, it’ll be flawed and incomplete, and we’ll kill a lot of people.”

Sykora tucks his hair behind his ear. “This is proven doctrine, dove. It works.”

“It’s not proven on Eqtora. It usually works.” Grant rubs his stubble. Hyax is looking over at them; he drops into an urgent whisper. “How many theocracies has the Empire annexed? How many have been strong and disciplined enough to unify their system?”

“This is so new to you, Grantyde. I completely understand why you’d feel this way.” Sykora glances at the chiseling moon. “But—”

“It’s new to you, too, isn’t it? Have you ever desolated a world before? You threatened to do it with mine, I know, but was that bluster?”

“I, uh—” She clears her throat. “Yes. It was.”

Pieces are falling into place behind his eyes. A slow-rolling idea he’s been building since the day he learned about the Eqtorans.

He rests his hands on her shoulders. “Do you trust me?”

She tilts her head to nuzzle his knuckle. “With my life, dove.”

“I think,” Grant says. “I think I have another way.”