Princess of the Void-3.10. Majesty

“If you ask me, she was catastrophizing.” Sykora nudges Grant’s arm as they dismount from the shuttle, back into the opulent halls of the Pike. “Those people looked more than reasonable to me.”

“Hope you’re right.” Grant nervously sidesteps a pair of stardock workers, who take a moment from their jogging guidance of an exo hose to bow low to him. Word must be spreading about Sykora’s intention to make him a full-fledged Prince. The bows are inescapable now.

Sykora’s tail brushes his leg. She’s watching him close, a concerned look on her face. “Do you need an ear, dove? Is it about the Eqtorans?”

“No. Not really.” Grant looks to the rest of the command group, who are holding murmured conversation as the party relocates to the deck for their debrief, followed by a train of young ensigns rattling off dozens of preparations and contingencies. “Can I—is there any way I could steal a moment somewhere private?”

“Of course.” Sykora turns to the assembly. “Get set up on the deck without me, everyone. Grantyde and I will be along shortly.”

They bow. More bowing. Grant’s fingers itch.

“Majesty, if I could borrow your eyes for a moment?” An engineer falls into step with Sykora. “The decoy probe is almost ready, but there’s a disagreement about the—”

Sykora holds a hand up. “Is this a tech hiccup or a tactics one?”

“Tech, majesty.”

“Whatever Waian says goes. Thank you, Specialist.”

The engineer bows and peels off. Sykora leads Grant at last to a pocket of quiet in the hubbub, in an unoccupied muster room off the hangar level hallway. She locks the door with her tail and hops up on the hexagonal dais in the room’s center so they’re eye to eye. She pats her leg. “Come here.”

He walks over and leans into his wife’s furnace chest. She scratches the top of his head. “Take as long as you need in here, yes?” she murmurs. “It’s been a long, troublesome day.”

“Okay.” Grant breathes her scent in, and lets it suffuse him. He didn’t realize the tight fist of anxiety in his chest until the warmth of the Princess, her perfume and her sweet sweat intermingled, begins to unclench it.

She plays with his hair. “This is getting a little shaggy,” she says. “Do you want a hair cut?”

“Do you think I should?”

She shakes her head. “However long you want it, you can have it. No navy regulations for royalty.”

“Do you like it long?”

“I like it however you like it. But I do sort of miss the prickly sides.” She scritches behind his ear. “I forget sometimes you don’t purr.”

He imitates her throaty cat noise and makes her giggle.

“Talk to me, dove,” she says. “Tell me what’s getting to you. If you don’t mind.”

Grant hesitates. But if she can tell there’s something on his mind, he can’t lie to her. “It’s the bowing,” he says.

“Ah. Yes.” Sykora sighs. “The bowing.”

“Is there any way we could get people to cut back on that, when it comes to me?”

“I had intended to have this conversation with you. I despise having to upset you, but the bowing is required. I wish it wasn’t.”

“What, always?”

“Always,” Sykora says. “Yes. It was all right when you were a Prince Consort, Grantyde. But you’re royalty now. Officially. For the Navy enlisted, a salute is permissible, but for the civilians and Specialists, the bow is compulsory. Especially aboard a ZKZ. If they neglect to, you’re within your rights to throw them in the brig.”

“I’d never do that.”

“I wouldn’t either, dove. And I’d never expect it of you, in the unlikely situation they forget or refuse. But you cannot discourage it. You need to practice the way you receive a bow. You can’t keep asking people not to, or making that face when they do it.”

“What face?”

“That uncomfortable face.”

“Well—It makes me uncomfortable.”

“I know it does. You’ll get used to it, I promise. Until then, you need to pretend. It’s necessary, Grantyde.”

“To remind them of their place?”

“To comfort them, dove,” Sykora says. “This might be foreign to you, from what you told me about Maekyonite behavior. But these people are a full sector away from safety and family. They want someone in charge. Someone who has a plan to keep them safe, who has a use for them. They want a ruler who will recognize their love, accept it, and reward it.”

“Like you and the Empress.”

“Yes,” she says. “And, in a way, like me and you, Grantyde.” Her hand finds his, and binds around his fingers. “When I give myself to your strength, and I know you won’t hurt me. That is the faith in submission that my kind looks for our entire lives. It’s the way a Taiikari feels safe.”

He strokes the webbing of her thumb.

“I could give a shit about the bow, honestly, from people whose loyalty I already trust,” she continues. “It is annoying, sometimes, watching everyone dip like a rocking fountain before you can hold a conversation with them. But you have to witness it, and seem to let it please you. It’s part of the job. Make them feel as though you have seen their fidelity, felt it. Do you value them? Are you grateful for their loyalty to you?”

“Yes.”

“Then let them show it,” she says. “Let them bow to you, dove, and hold your head high when they do. Please. I know it makes you feel strange. But accept it with grace. Accept the burden they place on you. Don’t act as though you don’t deserve it. That won’t comfort them. It’ll dismay them.”

“I hate to feel that I’m at a remove from them.”

She hums a sympathetic noise. “But you are at a remove from them, Grant. They need you to be. You can be their friend. I’m glad you want to be. But they won’t forget what you are, or what their duty is to you. You can’t forget it, either.” She taps his chest. “You can express your humbleness in other ways, once they’re more comfortable with you. Just not with the bow. The bow is important. You can’t spurn it. This discomfort you feel is the tradeoff for the life they allow us to live. The luxury. This is our side of the deal.”

He sighs and sits at the edge of the muster room table. “Okay. I’ll adjust. It just seems like a lonely way to live.”

“It was.” She nuzzles her cheek against his knuckles. “It was so lonely. I cried myself to sleep, sometimes. But that was before you.”

She guides his hand to her mouth and kisses each of his fingerpads as she speaks.

“I won’t bow to you.” His pinky. “And you won’t bow to me.” His ring finger. “And you and I will be equal.” Middle finger. “Truly and always.” Pointer. She pops his thumb into her mouth and nibbles on it. “Right?” she asks around it.

He chuckles. “Right.”

“Thank you.” She tilts her head forward so that his vision fills with her scarlet eyes. “My Prince.”

He gently tilts her head, and opens the way to her concord-grape lips.

Sykora nudges his shoulder a few seconds into their kiss. “Debriefing, dove,” she whispers. “We’ll fool around after, okay?”

His hand slips up the silky hem of his wife’s dress and squeezes a soft, generous handful of her butt as he lifts her off the dais and back to the floor. “Okay.”

***

But when they arrive at the scarlet-slatted command deck, a debriefing isn’t what awaits them.

Sykora’s brow furrows as she sees the yellow light over the door. They step through and suddenly there’s a muffling silence, like they’ve entered a noise-proofed room. The Princess ahems. “Why is there a dampener on in here? What is this?” She squints at the scratchy feed that her command group has pulled up on the monitor. “Are we not debriefing?”

“Majesty. We’re borrowing the listening post’s long-range equipment for this call.” Vora hurries over and skittishly repositions Sykora to a point on the floor. “There’s a situation that’s come up. In the Prelate system.”

“The—” Sykora’s pupils dilate. “Maeykon’s system?”

“Black Pike.” There’s a hissing, compressed voice from the screen. “This is Sarnath Yellow Six, hailing the Black Pike. Do we have connection?”

“This is Void Princess Sykora of the Black Pike.” The Princess stands up straight and adjusts the silver diadem in her dark hair. “What is this? What’s the situation?”

The image resolves into an anticompelled marine, in tactical black carapace. His comrade’s helmet camera reflects in his visor. “Majesty.” He salutes. “This is Gefreiter Durec of the Prelate System Defense Matrix. Your humble servants have intercepted a slavetaker runabout departing Maekyon.”

A shiver goes through Grant, from the base of his spine to the ends of his synapses. The camera sweeps around to reveal a dark industrial hallway, like a boiler room’s guts.

“A slavetaker?” Sykora wets her dry lips. “You’ve ended them, I trust?”

“We have, Majesty. Five kills. The vessel has been swept.” From off camera, a strangled cry of jumbled nonsense syllables. Grant’s frontal lobe itches. “But, uh—they’d taken stock. A Maekyonite male.”

Sykora’s face is a frozen mask of command. “Show me.”

“Majesty, he’s armed.” The marine glances offscreen. “He took a pistol with armor-piercers from one of the dead, and he’s brandishing it at anyone who comes near.”

“Give me a visual on that Maekyonite,” Sykora barks, and the marine moves immediately. The camera goes snowy as it shifts, and the command deck witnesses the soldier whose helmet they were stuck on. They spin as they’re screwed onto something—some kind of gyroscoped Taiikari selfie stick.

This is carefully stuck around the chipped, darkened corner. Grant’s breath sticks in his throat.

A fawn-colored Maekyonite, his dirty blonde hair matted and streaked with dried blood from a cut on his forehead, is huddled in the corner of a brutalist, boiler-room looking ship chamber. He’s wearing a pair of wrangler jeans and a sweat-stained henley, both crusted with dirt. Two tracked tear marks descend from his red-rimmed eyes through the soot on his face. He points a compact Taiikari submachine gun, held one-handed, toward the protruding camera. A panicky babble comes from his mouth. “Iywonnagohoamyuehirmi?” His hand shakes. “Iymchustafuckncashirniywonnagohoam.”

The camera sweeps and—oh wow let’s avert our eyes please—Grant gets his first look at Taiikari dong. One soldier has stepped from his suit, like Majordomo Vora did once during a spear duel. He’s removing his gauntlets and anticomps.

The screen fills once more with the gefreiter’s face. “We believe he was taken from the same geographical region as the Prince Consort. Someone paid out the nose for a Prince Consort of their own. We have a team preparing to go translucent and subdue him, with an implant ready. Once he understands Taiikari, he’ll be compellable.”

“You will not put that implant in his head, soldier,” Grant barks.

There’s a clear delay of about a second before the marine reacts. “It should— Who said that?”

“The Prince of the Black Pike said that.” Grant takes a step forward. “You will return that man to Maekyon, do you hear me?”

“He’s seen us. If he returns without being wiped, if word spreads—”

“A dozen Maekyonites a day claim they’ve been abducted by aliens,” Grant says. “It’s our most enduring myth. Nobody’ll believe him.”

“Prince Consort—”

“Majesty,” Grant says. “You will refer to me properly.”

“Forgive my error, Majesty.”

The marine’s head tilts to Sykora. She nods. “You heard my husband, soldier. Your objective is to bring him home. No implant.”

“That weapon he has is live, Majesty. Live and armor-piercing. If we’re going to put him back we need to know where. We are going to need his cooperation, and he can’t understand us.”

“Can you project me?” Grant asks. “Could he see me? Maybe seeing another human will help.”

A brief discussion between the soldiers. “We can do that, Majesty.”

The camera telescopes around the corner. The filthy, terrified human appears again. He yelps and hoists the gun toward the camera—then his face shifts into confused awe as the visual from the Pike’s deck is projected.

Grant points at himself. “Grant,” he says. “Grant Hyde.”

The man unleashes a stream of panicky English. Grant points at his ears and shakes his head. “Grant.” He points at himself again. He points out.

The man’s incomprehensible pleas stutter to a halt. His own hand raises shakily to point at himself. “Stephen.”

“Grantyde.” Sykora’s rubbing a worried mark into the dimple of her chin as she stares at the screen. “Is there any way you can communicate with uh, with Steefen? Is there any English left in you? Tell him we’re getting him home.”

Grant racks his brain, looking for any last scraps of his native tongue. No. No, it’s all gone. His throat thickens. Even the bits and pieces he had when the implant was new have gone. The last scraps of it, blown away. Suddenly he feels how Ipqen must. Impossibly far from home, unfathomably lonely. A pressure builds behind his eyes.

I’m so lonesome I could cry.

“Oh my God,” Grant says.

Sykora’s brows furrow. “Dove?”

He bolts to his feet. “I am going to be right back. None of you make a move until I’m back, okay?”

Grant holds up a hand to the terrified Maekyonite. He watches the screen glitch and chop as Stephen’s mouth opens in confusion. He does the same.

Grant raises his finger in what he prays will translate as a one minute gesture. “Don’t let them do a thing until I’m back, hon,” he says. “Please.”

“I won’t,” Sykora says. “I swear it. Where are you going?”

“I’m getting my goddamn guitar,” Grant says, and sprints for the lift.