Princess of the Void ch 18 - Pirates

“Princess on deck.” Brigadier Hyax’s rough bark echoes across the trading-floor hubbub of the Black Pike’s bridge and brings it to a moment’s stillness as the crew unanimously turn to the opening lift and put fist to chest in salute.

Sykora returns the gesture with the hand that isn’t tight in Grant’s. “Thank you, Brigadier. Good morning, bridge crew.” They step off the lift, onto the familiar command deck where he first met Sykora’s advisors. On the edges, the deck’s telescoped into a pair of stairs leading down. In the ceiling above them is a wide slot where the deck used to sit. Looks like the whole thing can be lifted and lowered to create a private meeting space on the floor above, or an elevated platform over the bridge.

It’s been winched down to this latter position now, and overlooks a glow-lit crowd of well-trained Taiikari a dozen feet below them. Sykora saunters to the edge of the command deck and leans against the obsidian-and-gold balustrade. “You all ready to petrify some pirates?”

A chorus of yes, Majesty greets her. She returns a wide, pointy grin.

She turns with a sweep of her topcoat tails (and her fleshy one) and drapes herself across the ornamented captain’s chair. “Sweep countdown on the main screen, please, Navigatrix.”

“Countdown forty five seconds,” trills a nasal voice from the pit, and the glyphs appear, ticking down.

Grant stands next to his wife and leans forward as they watch the timer. “I thought you said they were five times longer.”

“These are nautical seconds. Wouldn’t expect a landlubber like you to understand.” Her tail bats his arm. “Chief Engineer Waian, could we get that Maekyonite-sized chair back up on the command deck, if you please? With a cushion this time.”

“That’s Vora’s department.” Waian’s staring at a wireframe cross section of the Black Pike’s cannon deck. “The power draw on this broadside is going to blow our dynamos, Majesty.”

“We won’t fire the broadside, Waian. We’ll flaunt it. And if we do need ballistics, a half-barrage is more than enough to slag a pirate corvette. Majordomo Vora, chair for my husband, please. After this sortie.”

“Yes, Majesty.”

“He couldn’t just perch on your shoulder?” Hyax gives Grant a dim look. “Or should we replace him with Vora’s kindek, if we’re all bringing our companions up here?”

“Maybe I’ll perch on his, Brigadier. And you’ll have to lean aaaalll the way back to turn up your nose at me.” Sykora demonstrates the gesture. Waian snorts.

The Navigatrix’s piping countdown: “Five. Four. Three. Two…”

One thing you get used to on the night shifts Grant used to staff is the moment all the auto-shutoff machines—the displays, the HVAC, the fluorescents—deactivate. They take with them all that fuzz and hum you heard throughout the day, and in the sudden silence, whatever you were doing adopts a queer profundity. When he was guarding at the Potterfield, whatever he was doing was usually a sudoku or a fantasy novel from the 70’s.

When the sweep-hum dies, and the kaleidoscope slides back into firmament, he’s holding his wife’s hand while he stares at a green-and-gold alien world, hanging like a jewel in the firmament.

Probably has sudoku beat, profundity-wise.

“All that yellow is sabsum.” Sykora is playing with his fingers, bending and unbending the joints. “The grandest deposits on the frontier. On planet-level you can smell it wherever you go.”

“What’s sabsum?” Grant asks.

“Maekyon doesn’t have sabsum?” She clutches his pinky. “Oh, Grant, you are going to love it down there.”

“What’s it smell like?”

“Well, I mist it on myself in the mornings.” She grins. “So: me.”

“Oh.” Grant’s fingers stray further into hers, knitting them together. “I think I’d like to go there.”

Her tail draws slow, contended circles. “I’ll take you. After we deal with the brigands.”

Grant feels the scopaesthesian shiver of someone watching him and glances past the burnished edge of Sykora’s captain chair. Hyax is gazing at him, chewing the inside of her lip.

Her eyes dart down to his hand, where the Princess is rubbing little circles around his knuckle, then back up to his face. She gives him a barely perceptible nod. He returns it.

“Intruders located, Majesty. Two corvettes. Modified ZKPs.”

“Let’s get them on-screen, Monitor.” Sykora elbows her husband. “Ready to see your first pirates, dove?”

Dove. Grant feels a hot-cocoa warmth in his stomach. “I’ll brace myself.”

The main screen telescopes outward into the firmament, and picks out two mosquito-dot vessels in Ramex’s far orbit. The image zooms until two spidery vessels are in focus, their bodies pockmarked and studded with jagged metal.

“The Queen’s really desecrated those damn ZKPs. Taste revolts.” Sykora straightens in her seat. “Wide band, please, comms. Video and audio. Let’s make sure our guests catch it. And whatever spooked civilians happen to be listening in.”

“Wide band, Majesty. Broadcasting in three, two…”

Sykora squares her shoulders. “Attention, noncitizen corvettes. This is Princess Sykora of the ZKZ Black Pike. Your armed presence within a lunar span of an Imperial tributary lane is in breach of Imperial law and the Frontier Nonaggression Protocol. You have one minute to disperse. Acknowledge.”

A tense silence.

“One minute, noncitizens. Consider your families.” Sykora taps a button on her armrest and relaxes back. “Let’s get a minute on the board, please, Monitor.”

“One minute, Majesty.”

“Grantyde. Over there.” Sykora points to the holographic display that’s floating in the air in front of Waian, whose prosthetic arm is plugged into her console at the wrist. The Chief Engineer’s eyes are glassy and unseeing. “Infrascope view, please, Wai.”

Waian doesn’t speak or move beyond a twitch of her ear. The display shifts into a purple-and-red view of the pirate corvettes.

“See those little streaks on the infrascope? That’s point communication.” Waian’s mouth isn’t moving, Grant realizes, while she’s saying this. The voice is coming from the console. “They’ve heard us. Now they’re talking about what to do.”

A yellow flare paints across the ships. “They’ve gotten their heat signatures up,” Sykora says. “Powering the engines.”

Grant watches the glow flicker through the diagrams. “That’s what those are? The thin things?”

Sykora squints and frowns. “No. Those aren’t the engines.”

“Majesty?” A tentative call from the pit. “They’ve moved power to rail.”

“To rail?” Sykora reacts to this as though someone had told her Bigfoot was requesting permission to come aboard. “PD Membrane focus to fore. Cut gravity on the bridge. Grab my hand, dear. Are you positive, Ensign?”

“Yes, Maj—”

A lance of molten light rips from the firmament. It splashes like a firework finale against the Black Pike, and kicks whirling nimbuses of energy in mad fractals across the bridge window. Grant staggers backward and loses his grip on his wife’s hand; his stomach turns over as his feet leave the ground.

A chorus of oohs, shouts, and a whistle or two. “Nice try, ladies,” one of the bridge crew calls, to scattered laughs.

“They are.” His perplexed wife stares out the bridge window. “Good God.” Her tail whips out and wraps around Grant’s leg. She tugs him into her lap and holds him across it, Pietà-style.

“Don’t worry, dove.” She kisses his cheek. “We’re quite safe. Helmsman, turn us about for a quarter broadside starboard and then hold.”

“One quarter starboard, Majesty.” A goggled, horned officer at the center of an eye-wateringly complex horseshoe control board twists a sizable two-handed yoke.

Hyax points at the starmap. “If we splash them now, we’ll get shrapnel in Ramex’s orbit, Majesty. And the tributary lane.”

“Yes, Brigadier, but for all I know, they’re going to try ramming next. What in hellfire are they up to?” Sykora steps off the throne and folds her arms. Her tail deposits Grant into the seat she just abandoned. “Let’s prep a drone cloud, Chief Engineer. We’ll pursue them through the sweep and find a nice deep-void spot to pulverize them.”

“Aye, Majesty.” Waian detaches her hand from the console with a static snap. She pushes off the balustrade and floats to the bridge floor, where she enters hurried conversation with a pair of male Taiikari huddled around a holographic dot-matrix.

Sykora turns to the other members of her command group and removes her tricorne. Her dark hair haloes out around her. “Does anyone have a guess why those people out there just committed suicide-by-Princess?”

“Faulty information, perhaps, Majesty,” Vora offers. “Some promised wonder-rail that could damage a ZKZ membrane, or the false idea that we’ll pursue without drones.”

“Taking and holding attention,” Hyax says. “They mean to keep us distracted.”

“Interesting theories. Degravitize decks two through six and reroute the power to sensors. Let’s make sure we aren’t missing anything.” Sykora glances to her husband. “We really are safe, dear. I wouldn’t have you up here otherwise. Click your ankles twice for me.”

Grant clicks, and his boots whir and slap magnetically onto the deck. “Oh. Groovy.”

Vora’s calling into an intercom. “Decks two through six, prepare for zero grav. Decks two through six, zero grav in thirty seconds.”

Sykora squeezes her majordomo’s shoulder as she passes her. “Let’s see if we can’t take one of these corvettes alive, yes? A breach pod’s worth of marines, Brigadier, if you please.”

“Aye, Majesty.” Hyax snaps a salute as she unholsters a boxy communicator.

Another scorching beam burns through the firmament into the Pike. Now that Grant’s feet are back on the ground he feels the rumble. Sykora returns to him from her circuit around the command deck. She gives his shoulder a light squeeze as she stands by him and watches the firmament. He tries to keep calm. “Is this my first space fight?”

“They won’t breach the PD.” Sykora chuckles and shakes her head. “The Black Pike takes part in space fights in the way your shoe takes part in ant fights, my dear. They don’t have a prayer in a shootout.”

Grant watches the magnified ships spread torn and tattered rainbow wings. “So they’re luring us into chasing them?”

“If that’s the plan, they’re wasting their time. We’re not following them anywhere. The sweep drones are. And when they run out of exo to burn, we’ll overtake them and obliterate them.” Her shoes clack in a stomping gait as she steps to the edge of the command deck. “I do hope that won’t upset you, Grantyde.”

“They shot at us, first,” he says. “Obliterate those assholes.”

Sykora’s grin, in response to her husband’s pronouncement, exposes her vampiric fangs. She kicks off from the balustrade and bumps up against him, hair and topcoat tails drifting like she’s an underwater siren, and gives him a quick, nipping kiss. “Stay here for a moment, handsome. Zero-G movement can be a bastard. We can practice yours when we get a moment. I have to see a lady about a drone swarm.”

“All right,” Grant says. “You want a boost?”

She straightens her tricorne. “Boost me, baby.”

He pushes Sykora toward the balustrade. She hooks into it with her tail and redirects herself downward to Waian.

Another broadside blast from the corvettes, another jovial ohh from the crew. Now the corvettes have turned all the way around, their sails aligned, engines cherry-glowing.

Hyax’s magnetic boots clomp up to his side. “You’re flinchy today, Prince Consort.”

“I’m not used to being shot at.”

“There is absolutely nothing those pirates can do to harm us. The only guns that can harm you aboard the Pike are the guns aboard the Pike.”

“Do you agree with Sykora, then?” He watches his wife on the bridge floor, poring over a dot-matrix display with the Chief Engineer. “That this ship is indestructible?”

“She didn’t say that.” Hyax checks her communicator and pushes a few buttons on its circular keyboard. “She said no ship could destroy it, which is not a matter of opinion. There is no known ship-based weapon that can penetrate the PD membrane of a ZKZ-class voidship.”

“Not even another ZKZ?”

“That wouldn’t happen,” Hyax says. “But if it did, which it wouldn’t, it would be a stalemate, yes. Ballistics, atomics, directed energy. We’ve thrown small moons at them. Nothing has so much as brought the membrane level below ninety percent. Perhaps there is a way of getting through, some gravitational physics-defying dimensional superweapon thing. The Empire hasn’t devised it, and to hear Waian tell it, they probably never will. Not in our lifetimes.” Hyax steps to the edge of the command deck and watches the sails expand on the two junky corvettes. “I can’t imagine the Yellow Comets have. As long as you are aboard the Black Pike, you will never truly be in a ‘space fight,’ as you call it. They simply don’t happen when a ZKZ is on the field. You will be in plenty of space routs and space massacres. No space fights.”

“I had a membrane on my interceptor and I blew up a hundred times.”

“Hundred, eh?” She pats him on the back. “Not a bad clearance time, Maekyonite. Finally flying and fucking. We’ll make a firmament bravo of you yet. But that was just an interceptor you flew. Tiny envelope. The larger the membrane, the stronger the membrane. Wrap one around a corvette or a fighter, you’ve got adequate protection against ballistics and energy projectors, but certainly nothing that could stop a railgun. Wrap a mile-long ZKZ in one, and you are impenetrable.”

“How does that work?”

“Couldn’t tell you. Gravitational whatsit. The membrane’s juiced by the same generator that powers our artificial gravity.”

“Is that why we’ve shut it off? To free up power?”

“Correct. It gives that much more strength to the membrane—not that one our size needs it, but it’s what the regs say to do, and it’s what we’re all used to.” Hyax releases her boots and reattaches them to the balustrade, looking up at him from the wall. “And it saves using the stairs.”

“So there’s no way?”

“There are ways. If you can force one into a stratosphere, it’ll destroy itself. A voidship is built, maintained, and stays forever within the void. A sufficiently massive gravity well, with plenty of particulates to overload the sectional shielding, rips it apart. So if that aforementioned small moon came from that way—” she points, up for her and behind for him ”—it could transfer enough kinetic energy into us to knock us into Ramex. And we’d die. Or the surface of Ramex could launch an orbital dragnet and reel us in, if it had one, which it doesn’t.”

“They catch a ship in a fucking net?”

“A net the size of a city, yes.”

“Has that ever happened?”

“No. It’s been tested and proven viable on dummy vessels but not on a real voidship. How could it? The Empire makes the ships and the nets. And we have enough firepower to render a planet uninhabitable before it pulls us all the way in.”

He remembers Sykora’s words on the night she abducted him. I permitted your world’s backwater biosphere to remain intact, rather than cracking its crust. He’d thought, then, she was trying to scare him. She wasn’t. He’s on a Death Star full of tiny blue space-tyrants.

“No, there’s one real way to destroy a ZKZ,” Hyax continues. “The only one that’s ever worked. In the centuries since the membrane was discovered and implemented, it’s happened twice, and both times it was internal sabotage. The Tarum Factor was destroyed by a bomb planted on its hab deck that split it in two. The Abyss Blossom’s membrane was tampered with and deactivated, and an interceptor destroyed it.”

“One little interceptor?”

“The void’s an evil, murderous place,” Hyax says. “Velocity and vacuum. Once cohesion breaks, that’s all it takes. The voidship is the Empire in miniature. The genuine threats are all inside it.”

“Are you trying to scare the Prince Consort?” Vora drifts over, her long sleeves fanning out like a fish’s fins.

“He was already scared,” Hyax says. “I simply reoriented it toward the proper vectors.”

“I’m all right, Majordomo Vora. Thank you.” Grant self-consciously smooths down his floating tunic. “It’s a comfort, I suppose, to know how ineffectual those guns are. They looked terrifying.”

“Oh, I know.” Vora squints out at the pirate ships. “The first time I stood under fire, I nearly peed. You get used to it quickly.”

Hyax crosses her arms. “Just don’t let it make you feel invulnerable. Remember what I said, Prince Consort. Vigilance.”

Vora catches Grant’s attention and gives him a reassuring little roll of her eyes. She inches closer to him and drops her voice. “I wanted to say thank you, Prince Consort. For giving your marriage with Sykora a, uh. Chance.”

“Sykora’s been keeping you abreast, huh?”

Vora titters and nods. “Oh, but it’s very sweet, though, Prince Consort.”

Grant smiles. He watches the Princess giving out orders at a smooth, confident clip.

“She wasn’t doing well when she returned,” Vora says. “She had her bravado. And she was trying to act as though nothing had changed. But she was… brittle.” She watches the Princess with him. “And now my friend is all the way back. And I’d missed her very much. So. Thank you, Prince Consort.”

“You’re very welcome, majordomo.”

“They’re sweeping.” The call comes from the bridge with seconds to spare. Grant looks to the main screen in time to see the corvettes fuzz over with strange, bismuth geometries, and disappear.

A rapid-fire chatter vibrates the deck. A beehive swarm of drones spits from the Pike and tear their own holes in the dimension as they sweep after the departing corvettes.

“Probe view on the main screen.” Sykora gracefully flips back onto the command deck. “Let’s have a look at these bold corpses.”

Their view fills with the glow of the sweep. Dozens of perspectives stitch themselves together into a panoramic view. A bright chirp sounds as the corvettes are reacquired and once again magnified. Their scrapyard sails flutter in the dimensional pull.

“The distance is increasing.” Sykora chews her lip. “This is uncommon speed. Is that a double-burn I’m seeing, Helm? From a noncitizen ship?”

“Yes, Majesty.”

Sykora’s riveted to the screen. “Match them.”

Grant lightly winds his hand through Sykora’s tail. “What’s wrong?”

“A non-Imperial corvette should not have this quantity of exo aboard.” Sykora looks over the balustrade. “Waian. Triple-burn if we’re about to lose them.”

“The drones are almost dry, Majesty.” Waian looks like she can barely believe what she’s saying. “They’re gonna outrange us.”

The casual air of the bridge has chilled. Conversations halt as the crew behold what’s happening with guarded disbelief.

“Cut bait, Majesty.” Hyax edges close to her Princess. “We can’t risk pursuit with the Pike. Who knows where they intend to reposition us?”

Sykora sighs. “Well advised, Brigadier. Let’s get gravity back on in here. The show’s over and my poor husband’s guitar picks are floating away.”

“Oh—shoot.” Grant palms the pick that’s drifting past his ear.

“After-action reports, everyone.” Sykora calls over the rustle of dozens of bodies and their accoutrements returning to gravity’s embrace. The drone views are blinking out one-by-one as they run out of exo and drop from the sweep. “Ensign Akama, I’d like the monitor team to package what just happened by 1100 for command group review.”

The Monitor Ensign, a rangy woman (for a Taiikari) salutes and bows. “Shall I send it through to the Core liaison, Majesty?”

Sykora’s tail swishes across the floor. “No,” she says, carefully. “No, I don’t think so. Let’s let this one percolate a while. Keep the sitrep open. Thank you, everyone. Stand easy.”

“Majesty.” A strident voice from the bridge. “A datacrypted message just came through, with a key. It was left by the corvettes before the jump.”

Sykora’s eyes flare as she gazes down into the dark. “Have we scanned it, Specialist?”

“Aye, Majesty. It’s clean.”

“Send it to my console.”

Sykora stalks to her throne; Grant follows. A holographic projector has lit up on the plush armrest. It casts ochre glyphs across the still air:

you are all my subjects now

Sykora scoffs. She turns on her heel and strides toward the console at the edge of the command deck, thrusting the lever upward to begin its rise. Her chief officers fall in with her. Grant tarries a few feet away while Sykora mutters with Vora in a walking huddle past Waian’s chaotic multiscreen display. He gently intercepts her once the majordomo’s path diverges. “You okay?”

“I think so. Just… perturbed. We’ve a mystery in front of us, Grantyde. Our official records of the Comet Queen puts her total exo stock at a third of what one of those corvettes surely just burned through in front of us. Her clan has gotten a preposterous amount of exo, very quickly, far beyond what the loss reports I’ve seen suggest they could have obtained.” She returns a final salute from the bridge crew as they raise out of their vision. “The exo supply is one of the Empire’s most essential controls. Horrifically expensive and difficult to obtain for any but the Empress’s servants. It’s the key to our control over the firmament. Nobody ought to outrange our drones. Certainly not those scrapyard ticks.”

“Do you think—” He bends down. He’s getting good at walking bent. “Do you think this has anything to do with the Trimond assassinations?”

Sykora scratches her husband’s scruff in pensive concentration. “It’s my strong suspicion, dear husband, that it very much fucking does.”