Princess of the Void ch 24 - Life

Home again.

Grant lies in bed. Sykora curls on his chest like a cat. He’s still in his suit, though he had to fold his jacket in front of his crotch the whole way from the shuttle to the cabin. These pants are going to need some heavy-duty laundering. The Princess is wearing her choker, her stockings, and a smug grin, and that’s it. Prismatic light from the sweep to Aodok paints her in shifting jewel-tones.

“A construction worker,” Grant says. “Or a veterinarian. Or a… there was a Maekyonite word we used for spacefarers.” He remembers. “An astronaut.”

She giggles. “Rather indecisive of you.”

“Well, I grew up and worked on the oil sands, and went to space, and married a weird alien gremlin with a tail. In a way, I’ve done it all.”

“A gremlin.” Sykora’s heel gives his shin a play-fight kick. “I’m royalty, boy.”

“What about you?” he asks. “What did you want to be, if you hadn’t been a Void Princess?”

“Ballerina,” she says. “Ballerina or cybersurgeon. Something requiring precision. Oh!” She snaps her fingers. “Or pilot. So I suppose I’ve managed a piece of my list, too. But that was always idle fancy. They began work on the Pike as soon as they discovered I’d been born, you know. They took me from Inadama and gave me the finest instructors in the Empire. By the time I was two hectocycles old, it was finished and waiting for me. We were always destined for each other.”

“Would you tell me if I asked?”

“You want to know why,” she says. “Why I was born and why I ended up here.”

He nods. “I was an accident, y’know. I’m not ashamed of it.”

“There’s no way to have an accidental Taiikari. My siblings and I were an indiscretion. A secret my stupid, arrogant mother thought she could hide from the Empire. But there’s no hiding from the Empire.”

The steely contempt in her voice puts a shiver in Grant’s spine. “So she had you and Narika at the same time?”

“Uh-huh. We have litters. I’m one of three. Three too many. Marquess Palatine Inadama begged the Empress to spare me, and the Empress, in her wisdom, showed mercy. My brother Tymar took the cloth. My sister and I were made Void Princesses.” Sykora wriggles closer. “And here I am. And you shivered, dove.”

“What we’re doing, Batty,” he says. “We’re hiding from the Empire.”

“Not for long,” she says. “I told you, dearheart. We just need to time it right, and the Empress will free you.”

“What if she doesn’t?”

Sykora shakes her head. “She will, Grant. I know she will. I’m not just boy-crazy. You’re a man of quality. You deserve your freedom for so many reasons beyond that little abstinence competition we had. I’ll make sure she sees that.”

He’s still not sure how to talk to her about this. There’s this feeling in his gut. A bittersweetness he can’t identify.

He changes the subject. “What do you mean there’s no accidental Taiikari?”

“Have you ever wondered why I have these fangs, Grantyde?”

“To kill people who try to shoot me?”

She laughs and licks her lips. “Well, yes. But they don’t just kill. There’s something Taiikari do, when they’re ready. The breeding bite, it’s called. There’s a substance Taiikari women’s fangs can secrete. Something that helps their mates. To ensure they’re properly knocked up.”

Grant remembers what Drake told him. “The guys called it a neurotoxin. They thought maybe you sucked blood.”

“A neurotoxin.” She turns the word over. “So unromantic. I guess it is, if you want to be clinical. We don’t call it that.”

“What do you call it?”

She huddles her back against him. “Nectar.”

“And do you suck blood?”

“We do, but only during the breeding bite. And not for sustenance. It’s a very… Maekyonites have pair-bonds, yes? Marriage? That’s a familiar concept?”

“It is. It was a real shock, just showing up aboard and being told I was your husband out of nowhere. We have a lot more ceremony about it. A big party, rings and vows being exchanged… I think it’s a translator thing, probably. Husband and wife having different connotations.”

“Oh, Grantyde. I didn’t know that.” She strokes the hand he’s resting on her. “We can do all of that, if you’d like. It’s not orthodox, but so little about us is.”

“What’s the Taiikari equivalent?”

She displays her fangs. “The bite. Tradition says the first time, you make sure to let it scar. You should keep an eye on the necks of Taiikari couples, next time we’re around them. Some of them have the breedmate mark on them. Husbands mark wives, too, sometimes, or wives mark each other. Not that it does the same thing.”

“Breedmate, like…” He traces the line of her abdominals.

She quivers under his touch, and nods.

“You have kids by biting?”

She laughs. “We have kids the usual way, dummy. But the breeding bite is how you tell your body it’s time. The blood into you, the nectar into your breedmate. The blood quickens your womb. The nectar makes your mate, uh, enthusiastic. And energetic. You’re meant to set the night aside for it. And the whole day after, too, for recovery and… little things. Ceremonial things. To make it stick, and to rest. And to be together.”

“We’d do it the whole night?” Grant’s knees bump the back of Sykora’s legs. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“That’s what the nectar’s for,” she says. “It’s very visceral. Compulsion barely works in the nectar heat. Even on Taiikari. Of course, with you and I, there would be no conception, but it’s still, uh, sacred. Sacred and crucial. A breedmate goes beyond husbands and wives. If…” Her voice goes small and shaky. “If you’d like to try it with me. I’ve heard it’s quite transcendent.”

“Do you want to?”

Her legs lace into his. “I’ve dreamt of being your breedmate since I met you, Grantyde. Of seeing my mark on your neck every morning. Of mine bearing yours, even.” Her hand strays to her belly. “I’ve dreamt—”

She falls silent. His heartbeat trips over itself.

When she speaks again it’s with a carefully constructed lightness of tone. “The days are so packed, right now, and I can’t take one for myself. But when things are settled. We can’t, uh. We can’t have children, of course. But we could have the bite and the night, at least.”

He’s about to tell her he doesn’t mind that. That he’s never even thought about kids. But he strokes the hand the Princess is holding over her tight little stomach, and the words won’t come.

Why do his eyes sting? He’s never wanted kids. He’s not dad material. He doesn’t even like kids.

You don’t like Maekyonite kids. You’ve never met a Taiikari one.

You’ve never met Sykora’s. And you never will.

“I’d like that,” he says. “We could have the night.” He folds her further into his arms and unhooks the choker from her throat. She makes a little satisfied humming noise as he strokes her newly freed neck.

“Are you religious?” he asks.

“How do you mean?”

“You said you prayed for me, and you talk about God and gods. On my world, we say stuff like that even if we don’t believe, a lot of us.”

“The Taiikari are the same way.”

“How about you, then?” He smooths the soft fur on the end of her tail. “Do you believe in them?

“I think I do.” Her foot nudges into the space between his knees. “I’m not observant, not much. The ship has a priory, but I’m hardly ever there, and my tithe is just some auto debit on a form somewhere. But when I’m with you, I feel it. I don’t know what to call it. God? I don’t know. But I sense a design at work.” Her tail drapes on his side. “Out of all the untold masses on all the infinite worlds in the firmament, we were brought together, Grantyde. You were given to me. And then I was given to you. It isn’t a coincidence. I can’t believe it is. It was too unlikely. And it means too much. When you’re inside me, it…” She searches for her words.

“It’s right.” He knows what she’s talking about. “It feels right.”

“Yes.” Her voice is thick with emotion. “Yes, exactly.” Her hips swivel as she burrows further into the sheets and up against him. “That can’t be how it always feels, can it?”

“Okay.” He props himself up on his arm. “You dodged it last time, Batty. But the way you keep talking. It’s okay either way, I swear it is. But were you a virgin when we met?”

“I—um.” She buries her reddening face into the crook of his elbow. “I was."

His stomach drops. He's been throwing this little blue maiden around like a goddamn caveman.

Sykora glances up from her face's shelter in his arm. "It isn’t obvious, is it? I did a lot of studying.”

“No. God, no. You’re incredible.” He pulls her closer, and feels a surge of love tighten his body around hers. "I would have been so much gentler, if I'd known."

She snickers the tension out. "Then I'm glad I didn't tell you."

Tradition never really mattered to Grant on Maekyon. He never stressed about body counts or old-school courtship-type stuff. Never attached that sort of value to it. He lost his virginity in a Prius parked a block from a Raising Cane’s and never gave it a second thought.

But it adds another log to this weird possessive bonfire in him, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. He’s the Princess’s first. Her only, if he’s the kind of husband he hopes to be. He’s the only person to have held her like this. The only one who’s felt the astonishing things she can do. That night they both lost control was already the best and most important of his life, but it’s becoming something even graver to him now. He remembers the desperation she had, trying to give him something she’d never given anyone else.

You're my last, she told him.

“What kept you from it?” he asks.

“I’m a Void Princess,” she says. “There are many expectations and few opportunities. And I don’t know. Before I saw you, it was a point of pride in me, my ability to stay uncoupled. It never felt… essential.” She squeezes his arm. “I suppose I had a Maekyonite fetish, and I didn’t realize it till I saw one. It wasn’t your first time, was it?” She looks over her shoulder.

He shakes his head. “I’ve been with people. But it’s never felt like this. Never anything close, even.” He strokes the tuft of her tail. “Nothing prepared me for you, that’s for sure.”

“I think everything did.” She’s hushed and serious. “That’s what I’m trying to say. I think all we’ve done was leading us to each other. The imprisonments, the fighting, it all had a reason. I think this—” She tucks his palm under her head and lays across it. “I think it means something. I don’t know what, yet. But I do.”

“I think you might be right.” He rubs her ear with his thumb and listens to the feline sound it draws out of her. “Now, if I recall correctly, you owe me a bunch of yapping about interceptors.”

Her throaty purr cuts off. “Oooh. I certainly do.” She perks up and tugs her stockings off. “So: the sim you grew so familiar with is patterned off the ZX-6. That’s most of our fleet. I learned on a 4. The ZX-5, actually, most of the frontier skipped on, the Pike included. I hear it’s still used in the Imperial Core, but it had these ghastly inefficiencies in effective range that made it a bad fit for service on a ZKZ. It was the first model with a double-chamber manifold for its membrane, you see, and it’s actually so fascinating how they addressed it for the 6…”

Grant caresses the curve of his wife’s hip and listens to her cheerful chatter, and he lets her warm skin and her smoky voice send his thoughts of sinister nobles and exo conspiracies and impossible children drifting away through the dark of the firmament.

***

“I’ve killed your corvette, Prince Consort.” Vora apologetically slides her voidship into place.

“What?” Grant squints at the board. “What did—oh, shit. The crossfire rule.”

“My least favorite.” Vora picks up Grant’s piece and slips it into the capture pile. “But you have to grasp every advantage you can.”

Good & Gathered is on the agro floor, that same stretch of artificial outdoors that he first discovered on the lift, alone and wary. Now that he’s anticomped and unafraid, Grant loves it here. Three-story vertical stacks of hydroponic crops on the walls, genetically enhanced rapid-gen fruits. A constant, comfy mist clings to the air here, condenses on the sweeping windows of the establishment like fog. It smells like sauteed aromatics and freshly turned earth.

The Pike picks up plenty of its provisions from Sykora’s tributary worlds, Vora told him, but if they ever needed to, they could survive for hectocycles off the food here. G&G serves almost exclusively void grown crops. If there’s a difference, he can’t taste it. His favorite is this sweet crunchy helix-shaped thing that his translator calls a radish but which he happily eats raw and crispy, like jicama.

He chews on one now as he fiddles with his capital ship. “Gravitas is hard.” He glances at the pair of coveralled girls two booths down from them, who have been monitoring the game as covertly as possible. “Do one of you want to sub in?”

The closest of them nearly jumps out of her skin at the direct address. “No no uh no thank you Prince Consort.” She plugs her mouth with a stuffed mushroom.

Grant turns his attention back to Vora. “Can I concede?”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that. You can bribe my center zone and take all these ships from me.” She takes a bite of her root veggie wrap and gestures to his tokens. “You’ve barely used half of your tribute.”

“I keep forgetting I have them. Could we start over?”

She hums as she wipes the sauce from her fingers. “Okay. Don’t be afraid to spend them this time. They should be mostly gone by the middle game.” She sets the board back up into its starting phase.

The best way Grant has managed to understand Gravitas is that it’s like chess but every piece starts on the same side. You build your army through an early-game series of bribes, threats, and conversions that he still barely understands, but he’s picking up enough to realize how incredibly Vora plays. She always knows the perfect time to switch her phases and start blasting Grant’s piddling army out of the sky.

“It’s based on the dynastic era,” she explains, as she clacks the pieces back into place. “Before the Empire. This was how the old lords did war. It’s at least a hundred kilocycles old, this game. Your wife is going to be so pleased you’re learning it.”

“I didn’t realize she was such a fan.”

“Oh, she isn’t. Not really. But she’ll be thrilled to have an opponent she can beat.”

“When I first saw you,” Grant says, “I thought I’d finally met a demure, courteous Taiikari woman. I should have known it was a pipe dream.”

Vora chuckles. “The Princess doesn’t want demure in her command group, I’m afraid. Or in her marriage, it seems.”

Grant’s communicator chirps. He checks it while Vora considers her response to his piss-poor first move.

grantyde!!!! just got out of a meeting with my intel analyst group and they said the data leech worked PERFECTLY

I’ve got them looking over nav logs, recordings, correspondence… if something is fishy with lorimare we’ll nail her to the wall. you did SO WELL my love mwah mwah mwah mwah

are you having fun with Vorakaia? is she thrashing you?

tell her to go easy on my man. that’s a command from her Princess

He grins and texts her back. Several people now have tried to teach him how to use this keyboard. All have had limited success.

she bit myass

she BIT your ASS? that’s not her ass to bite.

imeann beat

ohh. well that’s to be expected. she’s evil. where are you? i wanna steal you >:)

g+g. but ican meet u wehrever

cabin. now please

“Majesty. Madam.” Sukro is standing by their table. Grant’s glad he was in today—he’s the only server here who never gave him that mystified panicky look every Taiikari first has when they see themselves reflected in his anticomp goggles. He gestures to the linen-lined baskets their food came in. “Can I take these? And are we looking for anything else for game two? Another round?”

“Have to bow out, folks.” Grant holds up his communicator. “Duty calls. We’ll rain check my humiliating defeat, majordomo.”

Sukro bows himself away with the baskets as Vora packs the game up. “You really will get better, you know,” she says. “And it’s a useful game. Many of the nobles you and Sykora joust with have played it. They think in Gravitas terms. It’s worth putting in the time.”

“As soon as I get any time, I will.” Grant gives the majordomo a quarter bow and slings his crescent bag over his shoulder. “Thanks, Vora.”

“Tell her Majesty hello from me,” Vora says. “And that Oryn and I would love to host the two of you for some amrita and a movie, or something. Any time she wants to emerge from her love nest.”

“We’ll get it out of our systems by the cloudsprint. Promise.” He gives her a salute as he departs for the lift.

He hits the boost on his way up, and chases the butterflies in his stomach back to their cabin. He presses the seal and strolls inside.

“Hey, hon. Vora says—uh.” He looks around.

Empty room. He steps into the center.

“Sykora?” he tries.

Thin air slaps his butt. He squawks as his leg is snatched into the air and his boot is shucked from it.

“Shoes off, big boy.” The voice comes from his shoulder and then laughs musically as it scurries away from him.

Grant hops out of his other boot. “Okay. Shoes off. Where are you?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.” A curtain billows.

“All right, Batty. Very funn—”

His last syllable turns into a gasp as a small, warm, invisible projectile lands cackling on his chest. He loses his footing and falls backward into bed. A sudden weight presses on his legs. His belt undoes itself.

A syrupy giggle in his ear. He lunges for it and Sykora lets out an eep as he catches her around the middle and rolls on top of her.

Her skin ripples back into the visible spectrum. She’s naked in his arms. “Hi, dove,” she says.

“Hi,” he says.

“Wanna fuck your wife?”

“Yes I do,” he says.

Her tail wraps around his midsection. With a sudden jerk it yanks him to one side, and she cackles as she kips up to her feet and ripples back into invisibility. “Catch me then, Maekyonite.”

He catches her, after a ridiculous chase that ends with her face-down on the kitchen table, her slim waist immobilized under his grip. He turns his wife’s impish laugh into a startled yelp, then an indulgent groan, then his name, repeated with increasing urgency for the next several minutes.

This is how they’ve been, for the past few days. It’s a little under a week before the cloudsprint, and they fill their days with their new life together. Sykora takes meetings and resolves minor disputes and keeps the Pike running. Grant familiarizes himself with the ship and gets back up to speed on his new guitar and learns what he can from the command group and the meetings he drops in on.

And then, the moment they’re alone, they tear each other's clothes off.

Grant has had more sex in the past week than in the previous three years. Now that the floodgates are open, he’s as desperate for the Princess as she’s been for him. Urgent, clutching quickies in closets and empty conference rooms, his hand clamped over her mouth, her tail lashing like a living thing. Giddy tussles like the one they just had, winding up with her pinned to the floor beneath him or riding him in the bath or squished up against the window, her sturdy little body framed by the dazzling firmament. Slow and sensuous lovemaking in their nested bed, staring awe-struck and infatuated into each other’s eyes, hearts beating against one another, fingers interlaced.

And every night, they lie together naked in the afterglow, talking about their lives and their love, their pasts and their dreams for the future, the Maekyonites who Grant used to know and the Taiikari who Sykora wrangles. And then Grant makes a cute face, or Sykora shifts in a way that makes the light fall sweetly along her chest, and the spark reignites, and they fuck again, into cuddling, loose-limbed exhaustion. She falls asleep curled in his arms, and he always knows when she starts dreaming because she does this cute little twitch.

And every morning, he wakes up to the sensation of her grainy tongue, or the arching grind of her hips, or her hands guiding his fingers to their warm, tight home between her thighs.

And every time, Grant waits to see if Sykora will take over once they start, and be as dominant as she claimed she can be. And every time, she eagerly goes pliant and submissive at the first assertive touch. She’s happy to go on top, to show him more of the breathtaking tricks she trained herself to do, but it’s always at his request—and he’s learning that the more he makes that request sound like an order, the happier it makes her.

It’s not what he expected, after the way this marriage began. And outside of the bedroom, she’s as commanding a figure as ever, expecting—and receiving—immediate obedience from her crew. It’s so at odds with the giggly little imp he shares a cabin with, whose orders, when they come, are only to rile him up until he seizes her and bends her roughly over the nearest surface. He never thought of himself as a dominant person. But he never thought of himself as a Prince Consort aboard an alien spaceship, either. He’s learning how to be flexible with these definitions.

He’s not very good at dirty talk, but the nice thing about Princess is that beyond being kinky, it’s a simple statement of fact. He’s gotten her to agree not to call him master or sir, anyway. That skeeves him out. And he loves the way she says his name.

They finish in the kitchenette and bathe in each other’s arms. Sykora slips from the tub and brings a stack of scout reports with her to their nest, where she pulls on a set of silk PJs and perches a pair of reading glasses on her nose. She flips through packet after packet, occasionally pausing to tell him about some noteworthy planet or another that her surveyors have discovered. Grant stays in the suds a while longer, getting soggy marks on one of his father’s paperbacks, which they’ve stowed in a corner of the cabin along with Grant’s old go-bag.

“This has to be a typo. I refuse to believe there are this many crabs on Akmai-77.” Sykora turns the page. “Fucking hell. There are.” She holds up a planetary capture and taps a blob of orange on it. “That’s crabs, Grantyde.”

“Yum.”

“You eat them?”

“That’s right.” He underlines a word in his book. “Let’s honeymoon on Crab Planet.”

They use a lot of paper on the Pike. Grant appreciates it. He has a notepad next to him right now, upon which he’s carefully writing and arranging the symbols from one of his father’s old paperbacks. The upward arrow with the line through it. That’s a capital A. Like on guitar.

“What are you doing over there?” Sykora peers over her glasses.

“I’m trying to write the alphabet.” Grant puts the zigzag one at the end. “The English one. There were 26 letters. I remember that.” 27? No, 26 for sure.

“Don’t do too much of that, dove. Not until your new pathways are all-the-way carved. Otherwise, it could cause glitches. You don’t want cerebrolinguistic tangling.”

“Oh.” He fidgets his pen shut. “That does sound terrible.”

“We’ll hold onto them,” Sykora says. “Eventually, you’ll be able to teach yourself English again. Maybe we could learn it together.”

“You want to?”

“Sure. I got quite far last time. I’m fluent, basically.”

“Wanna give me a lesson?”

She gives him a smug nod. She points to the guitar. “Guitar.” She holds her palm up. “Hand.”

“Incredible.” Grant sets his pen and paper aside to give her a round of applause. “It’s like I never left.”

“I can do sentences, too. Watch this.” She sets her papers to one side. Her eyes flash. “Grantyde hand Batty.”

Grant grins and sloshes to his feet. He towels off as much as he can on the journey from the tub to the bed and flops down heavily next to his wife, who's starting to take her glasses off. He holds her hand in place and slips them back on with his forefinger.

She blinks coquettishly through the big owlish lenses. “You want me to keep them on?”

“Uh huh.” He slips his touch up her silk-sheathed body. “You look adorable right now, you know that?”

“What if they jostle off?”

“I won’t jostle you. I promise.” He hooks his thumb into her waistband and peels her pjs down her thick blue thighs. “Just gonna eat you out real quick.”

“Grant.” There’s urgency in his name.

He props himself up. “Yeah?”

“It’s okay, right? That I’m not…” Sykora bites her lip. “That I’m like this. When we’re together.”

“Like what?”

“Like…” She chews a nail. “Like how I always put you in charge.”

“Of course.” He goes up the line of her pajama top, unbuttoning to expand the beautiful cerulean crescent of skin. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

She squirms. “It’s not the way I was taught. That’s all. I’m supposed to compel and take the lead. The girl orders, the boy obeys. I’m meant to extract obedience and reward it with pleasure. But you tell me to do things. You tell me.” Her voice becomes gentle and quiet, like she’s telling a secret. “And it’s like I’m being compelled. I have that warmth when I do them. But that’s not… usual.”

“We’re not usual.”

Her horns are all the way out. “I don’t want to be a pillow princess. I can be more dominant. Really.”

“You don’t have to be, Sykora. You’re a badass, all right? I know you are. You can sub in bed. It’s fine.”

She blushes furiously. “I’m not a sub.”

He laughs. “Yes, you are.”

“I’m not!” Her little leg flails at him in a flustered kick. He catches it and tugs her across the bed. She lets out a sharp sigh as he lifts her hips into his lap. Her toes knead into the fabric of his uniform. “You said you wouldn’t jostle me. Traitor.”

“Okay,” he says. He places her back on the bed. “You’re not a sub.”

“That’s right.” She crosses her arms. “Pick me back up, though.”

“Yes, Majesty.” He slides her halfway into his lap again. “You keep taking care of me out there, and I’ll keep taking care of you in here. No labels required. Okay?”

“But you don’t think I’m a pillow princess, right?”

“Batty. I think you’re incredible. That thing you do? With your, uh.” He caresses her stomach. “With your muscles. Inside.”

She smiles and flexes. “You like that?”

He kisses her belly button. “I fucking love it.”

“And you don’t mind? That we’re—ah” She squeaks as his kisses trail lower. “That we’re unnatural?”

“Does it feel unnatural?”

“No. Not at all.” She swallows. “It feels perfect.”

“Good.” He gives her thigh a playful little nip and listens to that squeak, his favorite noise in the firmament. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna get back to what I was doing before my wife distracted me.”

She folds her legs around the sides of his head. Her voice is muffled by the squishy squeeze of her thighs. “What’s that?”

He takes a deep, fragrant breath. Linen and citrus and Sykora. “Spelling the alphabet.”