Princess of the Void: An Alien Abduction Romance

"It's too big a coincidence." Grant's stressful pacing scatters some of the debris that spilled out of the training arena.

"I know, dove." Sykora sits cross-legged at the center of a practice-target massacre. Shredded and perforated heavy bags spill their straw innards from faux-leather skins in a ring around her. She spent the last five minutes in a screaming spear rampage, tearing them apart one by one. She sits now in post-rage meditation, eyes closed, sweat ringing the neckline of her workout tank.

"Whoever sent that timed it," Grant says. "They want us off the hunt and chasing Inadama instead, because we're getting too close."

"I know, dove."

"We don't know for sure that woman's employment history. Whether she was working for Inadama at the time."

"I know, dove."

"I'm not being helpful. I'll shut up."

"I—No, dove" She opens her eyes. "It helps. If only just to hear your voice." She stands up and stretches her back. "And you're right. Of course you are. That recording was a yank on our reins. I have no intention of slowing for it."

She steps over a whirring auto-janitor that putters across the arena floor, hoovering up the flotsam she left in her wake.

"Whatever the case, my strategy for Inadama is avoidance for now." She clacks her spear into a magnetized sconce on the practice room wall. "No engagement, no tipping her off. Not yet."

"Is it time to go to the Empress with this?"

Sykora is silent. She doesn't turn from the wall.

"Kora?"

"Not yet," Sykora says. "Not half-cocked. There's too much going on. Too much I still have to understand. We need a clear picture of what's happening. And if the answer is some kind of Core worlder treason…" She turns around. "If that's what's happening, I need to know it and understand it before we contact the Empress again. And if it isn't what's happening, then what is?"

"Wouldn't we know by now?" he asks. "Wouldn't she have sent someone or tried another method?"

"For all we know, she might be preparing to," Sykora says. "But the quickest, cleanest, most doctrinal way is the kill phrase. That would be her first tool, and then she'd explore alternatives. And she'd take her time, find the least intrusive and intensive way, and prepare a political defense for my destruction. Nobody is supposed to have those codes. Someone's been lying. Someone's been lied to. There is something going on. Something with the Empress. The Empress and Inadama and this daemon."

"How do you figure?"

"Inadama said it herself," Sykora says. "This whole mess, how it started. She was allowed to do this. The Empress signed off on Inadama's gambit, knowing the Pike would be taken from me, and the extent I'd try to prevent it. Knowing, I think, what would be asked of me."

"How do we know Inadama was telling the truth about that?"

"We don't," she says. "Am I being tested? Am I being set up? Am I to be disposed of? And this daemon has something to do with it. And that's putting aside this recording, and I don't even know who sent it. If I appeal to the Empress right now, I'll sound like a flailing idiot, not a Princess. And I…" Her throat closes. "I can't… I can't say it."

"You don't trust her," Grant says. "The Empress."

Sykora's head shakes like a fly landed on her nose. "Not her," she says. "But Inadama. I knew her to be canny. But if her machinations are this brazen, it goes beyond what I understood. Far enough to compromise the Imperial seat. And that is not an accusation to be made lightly."

"We'll land on Chassak," he says. "We'll investigate that office. We move fast, we keep our hands on the levers we can reach. We stick with what we do know, and what we can do. And we stay reactive and ready for what's next."

Sykora nods. "And once we find the daemon, we discover its secrets and hold it in pawn for our answers from the Marquess."

"And from the Empress."

She hesitates, then nods.

"Solid plan," he says.

"Hmm." She fans her shiny face with the lip of her top. "We'll see how solid it'll be, when we're creeping back to the Core. Back to the harpy nest." She shuffles into his airspace and hugs him tightly around the waist. "You'll keep me levelheaded?"

"Always." He kneels and returns her embrace.

She sighs with gratitude as he rubs his palm into her back. "Little higher."

"Here?" He kneads between her shoulder blades. She groans in affirmation and tightens her hug.

"Before we were together, I had a reputation." She traces the contours of his ear. "For a certain—hotheadedness. It used to get the better of me on occasion. It was a weakness you solved. You temper my temper. Get your fingernails involved?"

"Mmhmm." He scratches, and she tilts her head back with a low purr. He places himself consciously in time, counting his breaths, reminding himself the value of these moments of peace, of just holding his wife, scritching her back, and feeling her vibrate with feline sound.

"All right," she murmurs. "I'm collected. I'm calm. Or at least I'm in a place I can pretend to be." With a parting peck on the tip of his nose, she steps out of his arms. "Let's sweep to the Core and find a clerk whose head I can bite off."

Chassak's got a heat that permeates you. That clings and suffuses. The jaundiced vegetation, the low haze on the balmy fens. The Palatine Governess of Chassak was not eager to host a full squadron of marines, and the command group successfully talked Sykora down from the explosive argument she was prepared to have. So there's four of them approaching the squat, colonnaded concrete bunker of the Central Campus, the brutalist heart of the College. They walk across a platform of baking concrete erected over the sluggish flow of body-temperature water.

The medtechs intercepted Grant before he left the vessel and told him that it's the sort of temperature and humidity which annoys Taiikari and gives Maekyonites heatstroke. So he's got a battery-powered fan in his hand, and a ridiculous broad-brimmed hat on his head that makes him feel like a dude from Mortal Kombat.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Sykora keeps close. Her ears are trapped in big, blocky earmuffs, bright red in construction yard chic. As is her usual practice when she's hit mute on the world, she stays in close orbit to Grant and Vora.

"What do you think, majordomo?" Grant holds his fan close to his moisture-beaded face. In this suffocating swelter, the sleeveless Black Pike uniform is godsent. "Is it a good idea, keeping this internal?"

"It's the best of a gradient of bad ideas," Vora says. "The strictly loyal thing would be to contact the Empress immediately with what we've found, but…"

She sighs. He sees the same tight conflict on her face he saw on Sykora's. Doubt in the Empress, fear of her intentions, manifesting with the same queasiness as stomach pain.

"Just about the only thing we can conclude is that the Imperial Seat is compromised," she says. "Once we understand how, and who, and how much, we'll surely be of more use to the Empress than bringing her these shadows."

Grant lets Vora off the hook for now. "Do you think we're being set up by Inadama somehow, and that recording was a warning from an anonymous benefactor?"

Vora adjusts her glasses. "I won't dismiss the possibility. But finding a benefactor who wishes to remain anonymous in the coterie is like finding a trench-shark who wishes to remain vegetarian."

"I take it they're carnivorous."

"Uh, yes." Vora chuckles. "You know, Majesty, you're twice my height and your face is covered in fur and I keep forgetting you're not Taiikari."

Grant cocks a hip. "Pretend I just bapped you with my tail."

"I can't believe it's only been a decacycle," Vora says. "So hard to picture the Pike or the Princess without you." The snowy paintbrush at the end of her tail executes the real bap that Grant pantomimed onto Sykora, who flicks a retaliation.

"She says she had a temper," Grant says.

Vora laughs. "Oh, yes. Quite a temper, sometimes. You're much better at calming it than I ever was."

"I had a conversation with Narika." Grant is thankful momentarily for the earmuffs Sykora's wearing. "She told me I've weakened Sykora. That I've made her less vicious."

"That is an extremely Narika thing to say."

"Do you share Sykora's low opinion of her, then?"

"My opinion of Narika of the Glory Banner…" Vora hums in contemplation. "My opinion is unimportant, I suppose I'd say. She is another Void Princess, and she's within striking reach of my Void Princess. That makes thwarting her part of my job." She slaps a gem-colored bug off her forearm. It chirrs angrily away. "But for the record, I do find her cutthroat, egotistical, and avaricious."

"I think you could say that about anyone who'd call themselves a Princess."

"Well, yes. Of course." Vora nudges Sykora affectionately. "Thank goodness you and I serve the only good one."

Ajax lags behind them in the muted black-and-red uniform of a house servant. He's chosen the chunkiest and most protective anticomps he can, in a big wraparound ski-goggle form factor with a thick panel of glass to separate him from the world.

Grant looks over his shoulder. "How's it going, sergeant?"

"Good, besides the fuckin' planet." Ajax kicks a pebble of concrete into the sulfurous split-pea water beneath them. "Should have given us a skybridge with some goddamn air conditioning."

Grant points his fan in the sergeant's direction. "Heard the word from Meena?"

Ajax grunts and nods.

"Feeling okay about it?"

"Feeling a lot of things. Just sorta… absorbing." Ajax rubs the skin beneath his goggles. Their gasket beads with sweat. "In a good way."

"You ready?"

Ajax scoffs.

"Is that a yes, or…"

"Meena's had the exact plan for the first hectocycle of our childrens' life laid out since the first date I took her on," Ajax says. "She's got a binder for each of them and a binder for me. With little glitter hearts on it and review quizzes after each chapter."

Grant opens his mouth and shuts it. He's not quite sure what to say.

"How'd you do on the quizzes?" Vora asks.

"Pretty good."

"How many are you having? Have you decided?"

"Two to start."

"Three for me and Sykora," Grant says. "That'd be a basketball team between us if you weren't all shrimps."

"I'll take your word for it," Ajax says.

Vora tilts her head and looks out across the swamp. "Everyone's having babies. It's enough to make a lady feel left out."

"We can't all have kids at once, majordomo," Grant says. "There'd be nobody to fly the interstellar warship. Gotta get a rotation going."

"Meena'd be on that," Ajax says. "If you're serious."

"Oh, no," Vora says. "I'm fine, really. Our boy is giving us plenty of guff as it is."

In the claggy shimmer of the middle distance, a pair of glass doors studded into the front of the campus glitter a promise of central air.

"Anyway, if there were scheduling to be done, I'd be the one to do it," Vora adds.

The Princess of the Black Pike and her retinue troop to the wraparound desk in the building's lobby. Their boots throw echoes off of the intricately interlocking floor tiles, into the cinquefoil-arched corners and the fern-laden sconces. Grant put his anticomps on at the entrance, and everything has a murky, candlelit tinge to it.

The exterior of the college was an ugly stub of concrete. The interior allows itself much more ostentation. Grant's learned to spot lab-grown wood by now; Waian taught him to identify the places where the lattices guided the growth. The paneling aboard the Pike is all from tightly spiraled hydropons; the wood of the reception clerk's desk is a solid chunk of natural old-growth.

The clerk at the desk is a dawn-colored woman with cropped black hair. Her hexagonal platinum glasses are secured behind her big pointy ears with a chain. She peers through them along the line of visitors. Her neck gradually ratchets upward with the rise in height until it reaches parity with the Maekyonite. "You are the alien Prince."

"Yes, I am," Grant says. The desk is comically low before him, barely rising to mid-thigh.

The clerk peers at Sykora, who's trying her best to look imperious from between two thick orange earshells. "And this the Void Princess turned Margrave."

"Yes, she is."

"The loopholed lovers." The clerk taps manicured fingers against the circular keyboard set into the desk before her. "Quite the topic of conversation at the College. None of us are sure how this happened. You've pried open ironclad precedents that have acted as faithful foundations for long kilocycles. Consternation."

"With respect, ma'am." Vora rests her elbows on the counter. "Their Majesties are not here for edification, for themselves or for your colleagues. We're here on important Black Pike sector business. We have a meeting with Senior Clerk Askaro. On the subject of a petition, and the recent death of the Princess of the Cloud Gate. The request form was Sureph forty-four nine nine Kai."

"Hmmm." The clerk peers at her screen.

"We hope that you'll furnish a room where a signal baffler and infrascope painter might be set up for our interview," Vora says. "We've brought both."

"And I suppose there is a reason for this—muffling."

"There was an incident," Vora says. "You can read the details in our meeting request."

"I'm sure Askaro has." The clerk taps another few keys. "Hmmm. I'm afraid your meeting has been postponed."

Grant removes his stupid hat. "Pardon me?"

"Senior Clerk Askaro is occupied with a different appointment," the clerk says. "He hopes to be with you as soon as possible, but there's no estimated time he can meet."

"That's not going to work for us," Vora says.

"If you'd care to leave a contact number, we're happy to comm you." The clerk doesn't look up at him. She points with a ringed finger. "Or you're welcome to wait here. There is complimentary water available."

"Have you made Askaro aware we're here?" Vora asks.

"Mmhmm."

"So he is cognizant of the insult," Vora says.

"The Princess Margrave may adopt the title." The clerk's tone is breezy and unbothered as she indicates Sykora, whose frown suggests she's detected the ambient displeasure of her comrades. "The Empress has permitted it. Far be it from me to prevent it. But with a shining new title and a brand new remit, there must come knowledge as well. And an understanding of how your role in the Imperial Core is different. It is quite clear that you have come to us from the Void. In the Void, the Princess's authority is absolute. This leads, I'm afraid, to certain misunderstandings when you arrive in the more structured sectors of civilization."

Grant bends at the waist, looming over the clerk. "Do Princes and Princesses not outrank clerks, here in the Imperial Core?"

She eases back in her swivel chair, returning his icy look with her own. "Of course you do. But I suggest caution when you're—"

"Thank you for your suggestion." Grant straightens. "Find us a room and bring us Askaro, please. This was the agreed-upon time. He'll have to cancel whatever that conflict was."

The clerk's hands hover uncertainly above the keyboard. She stares blankly at her alien intruder.

"That is an order, in case it wasn't clear," Grant says.