Princess of the Void ch 4 - the Black Pike

Tonight is the night. Grant’s more grateful than ever for his guitar to keep his hands from fidgeting and picking the threads out of his coveralls.

No motion on the cameras. He waits for Batty to wake up and show herself. He’s already coming up with how he’ll describe the plan.

“Grant.”

Grant looks up from his guitar.

Drake is in the doorway. Grant didn’t hear him come in. “You mind putting that away for me?”

“Sure.” Grant leans the guitar against the desk. “What’s up?”

“You’re watching an empty room, Grant.”

“I do that every night.”

“Tonight you are watching an empty room, Grant.” Drake’s face is as unmoving as concrete. “Batty’s not in there.”

“Oh.” He sounds hollow. Like he’s listening to a tinny recording of himself bombing a performance. “Where is she?”

“We don’t know, Grant.” Drake’s eyes are ice. “We’re wondering if you might.”

“No. Of course not.”

Drake stares in silence at him for ten seconds. A curtain of sweat is rolling down his back.

“Come with me,” Drake finally says. “Let’s take a quick walk.”

“I shouldn’t be leaving my post.”

Drake folds his hands in front of him. This is the same man who watched him sign that NDA. “Stand up.”

Grant stands up. His legs don’t give out beneath him, which is a minor victory.

Drake stands aside. “After you.”

“I’m not sure where we’re going.”

“We’re going left.” And Drake stares at him until he leaves the room, and goes left.

Drake follows him, occasionally ordering him down one side of a junction and once through a door. Grant has never been in this part of the facility. He realizes belatedly he should have been memorizing the way back.

“You had a very simple job, Grant,” Drake says. “Very hard to mess this job up. Next left.”

“What’s going on, Drake?”

Drake just shakes his head. They stop by a crash-bar door that Drake props open.

Beyond is a tiled room with a folding table in the middle.

“Do you recognize that?” Drake asks.

On the folding table is the go-bag that was in his trunk. The changes of clothes. The flashlights and batteries and food. The maps, the books. The sleeping bags, one adult-sized and one kid-size. The gun.

“Would you like to tell me why these things were in your car?”

“I was.” Grant needs to swallow the taste of bile out of his throat. “Gonna go camping.”

“Step inside, please.” Drake’s hands are on his belt. One thumb’s hooked into the buckle. The other settles near his pistol. “Let’s go through this stuff. And talk.”

He looks at the gun on Drake’s belt. The palm pressed on the holster.

He looks at the room beyond. There’s a drain in its floor.

He bolts.

“Stop. Stop.” Boots stamp the laminate flooring. He hears Drake unhook his radio. “He’s running. He’s— right.”

Grant twists round a corner into a straight break. He’s turned around. He’s lost.

“Stop or I will shoot.”

Grant feels as though he’s dreaming as he stumbles to a halt. Like his legs aren’t obeying him anymore. He glances back and stares down the barrel of Drake’s Glock.

“Hands on your head.”

He obeys. The gun pushes into his back and marches him back to the room with the table and the bag and the drain.

Drake pushes him inside. “Couldn’t hack it after all,” he says. “Couldn’t hack it. Sorry, kid.”

“Drake.” Grant searches the man’s face. For anything he can reach. “Let’s— let’s talk at least. Like you said. Let’s talk.”

Drake shakes his head. “Turn away.”

“Please, man. Please.”

Drake seizes his shoulder and twists his body. “Turn the fuck away.”

“No,” he screams. “No no no no”

A heavy thump behind him and an earsplitting bang. He sprawls forward. Something hot and wet beads on his neck and for an absurd moment he thinks this is it, I’ve been shot, this is how it feels. Then he hears the scream.

He turns around. Batty is clinging to Drake’s back and sinking her teeth into his throat. Her little hand is clamped down on his wrist, twisting the gun to one side. Plaster rains on them from a hole he blasted into the ceiling. Drake’s cry rises an octave amid a raw flood of terror and pain, and then Batty’s head jerks and yanks and a fountain of bright blood gushes from his ruined neck.

Grant watches Drake’s eyes roll into his skull, his jaw slacken. He crumples. Batty rides his shoulders to the floor.

She rummages on the body. She tugs the gun from its hand and stands up. Her mouth, her arms, her whole front are covered in arterial crimson. She gazes at him. Her pupils are so massive that her eyes appear entirely black, like a shark’s.

“Grantyde,” she says.

“Oh Christ,” he whispers. “Ohhh Christ.”

The reds of her irises wink back into view at the edges. They’re so bright it’s like they’re glowing. “Grantyde. Taiikari.”

“Wait. Wait. We need, uh—” Grant crouches at the corpse. His hands are shaking so violently he has trouble getting into its pocket, but he comes back out with Drake’s wallet and ID card. Batty’s brows furrow as he retrieves them. “For the locks.”

She stares at him as he straightens up. He has no idea, her expression. He doesn’t know what’s going on up there, he realizes. Drake was right about that.

She reaches her hand out, the one not holding the gun. “Hand,” she says.

Grant numbly passes her the dead man’s ID.

She moves to the door. When he starts to follow, she pauses. “Batty up. Grantyde here. Yes?” Her eyes flash.

“Yes. Okay. Just—you’ll come back, right?”

“Come back.” She nods. She blinks invisible. The ID and the gun bob in midair. Bloody footprints trace her passage.

He stands with Drake’s body. It’s been a little over a year since he sat in a room with a dead body, and it sure as shit wasn’t like this. He beats back the wave of nausea.

He packs his go-bag again. Fuck it, why not?

Should he bring his guitar? That would be stupid. Too bulky. He’s going to need to move. But should he? Batty loves that thing.

He’s on the verge of returning to the office to grab it when he hears the muffled gunshots. An automatic taktaktaktak. That’s not Batty’s gun. It freezes him in his tracks.

The lights turn red. A trilling siren starts in the office, echoing through the hall to him. He bites his knuckle hard. He feels like such a useless asshole down here. Is she okay? Is she dead? If she is, then at least he’s next. No time to grieve.

Minutes tick down. How long has it been?

“Grantyde.”

He leaps out of his skin. Batty’s standing in front of him; he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing for a moment and thinks there’s a chunk blown out of her side. But she’s got her invisibility on, he realizes. She’s just covered—covered—in blood.

“Come,” the gory wraith says, and pads from the room. He follows her.

She has a tangle of wires in one hand now. That’s his phone. She’s gutted it and reconfigured it into… something.

They make it to the elevator before Grant’s legs fail and he has to sit on the floor. He sees Drake’s eyes rolling back. He thinks he might faint.

“Grantyde.” She crouches next to him. “Grantyde, home.”

He nods, not trusting himself to open his eyes.

Over the coasting sound of the elevator, she sings, in surprisingly passable English.

The silence of a falling star

Lights up a purple sky

And as I wonder where you are

I'm so lonesome I could cry

The elevator doors open on the main floor. Batty takes his hand and pulls him to his feet. Together they step over the second corpse.

Batty leads Grant through a massacre. A half dozen people in tactical black. A poor shmuck with a cheap button-down and a handgun. Some shot, some torn open like Drake was. The reception desk is empty. The checkpoints are empty. In the scarlet light of the alarm, the blood smeared on the floors and walls looks black.

Batty doesn’t hurry. She’s alert but not alarmed. She’s killed everyone, he realizes. Everyone here.

They reach the front door. The parking lot is deserted.

“Wait. Wait. Before we go out.” Grant unslings his go-bag. He pulls a shearling coat out and hands it to Batty. “It’s, uh. Cold.”

She takes the coat. Her face is wary now when she looks at him.

They step into the night. “That’s my car.” He points to his civic in its pool of amber. Its trunk is popped. “It’s faster than on foot.” He mimics an engine noise.

“No car.” She shakes her head.

“We’re not gonna get anywhere walking, Batty. We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“You come.” She points at the sky. “I take Grantyde. Home.”

His voice fails him.

Her eyes glow red at the edge of the dark. “Come, Grantyde.” She strides into the field that surrounds Archer West. Her bare feet crunch on the dry grass.

He catches up with her as she babbles into his phone. The screen isn’t on, but the flashlight is, and it’s flickering in a seemingly random pattern. A few hundred feet away from the facility, she halts and places the phone on the ground, flashlight up. She jogs away, back to Grant, and tugs at the edge of his coveralls to pull him further from the blinking light.

The terrifying thing isn’t the noise. It’s the absence of it. The silvery shape that detaches from the night and descends should be making some kind of roaring engine noise, and it isn’t. It slips into the field like a darting fish, and its skids crackling and hissing across the dirt is the loudest part.

A space ship has landed in the field beyond Archer West.

It’s not a big ship. Just three times the size of his civic, or so. A hatch unfolds in its side, and a rose-colored light illuminates a humanoid silhouette. An armored alien, about five feet tall with a face hidden behind a dome of frosted glass, emerges from the ship, pointing a long, boxy thing at Grant. Its function seems lethal and obvious.

“Kiam,” the alien says, its voice modulated by its all-over armor. “Kiam’kvae.”

“Kiam’ni,” snaps Batty, and shoves the gun’s nose to the dirt.

The figure drops immediately to one knee. “Mayi’ Sykora. Tutheam’nakaewaiaem.”

Grant stares in panicky awe at the sleek vessel in front of them. It’s so dark that it seems to bend the light around it. More of them are coming out of the hatch. Most are taller than Batty by a head or so. The last off is closer to her size, and maskless. Another of Batty’s kind, and another woman, he thinks. She steps to Batty’s bat-ear and murmurs into it. Batty responds clipped and uncompromising, still staring into Grant’s eyes.

Drake was going to kill him. Drake is dead. He has no future here that doesn’t end at a black site or staring down a barrel. And here’s this weird little alien who’s saved his life, who’s been—

Who’s been what? What is she?

“Lonesome Grantyde.” She beckons to him.

He reaches out and takes her hand. She squeezes his fingers tight.

“Up.” She caresses his palm. Her eyes glow. “Come up. Falling star.”

He climbs into Batty’s space ship.

The descent was silent. The ascent is loud. Grant’s been strapped into a memory-foam seat that’s barely big enough for him. The buckles across his chest and stomach leave him barely any clearance to breathe. The G-forces are muted, somehow, by the structure of the thing, but they’re still hellacious enough to shove him into his seat and keep his arms pinned heavy to the wall behind him.

Batty has never stopped holding his hand since they climbed in. He’s used to seeing photos and videos of astronauts looking ridiculous and pancaked as they take off, but Batty still looks beautiful as they ascend (he thinks—there’s no window). Her face is a portrait of hope and awe.

And when the blast is cut off, and the unearthly weightlessness sets in, she screams with joy. She unbuckles herself and throws herself across his lap and gazes wild and giddy into his face. “Home,” she gasps. “Home home home home home.”

And then, in front of a half dozen silent armored sentinels, she pulls his face forward and kisses him.

Her tongue is rough and textured on its surface as it quests into his mouth. She rakes her fingers through his hair and twists her legs around his waist and clings to him in the zero-G. The shock has levered his mouth open, kept him stock-still, but after a moment he animates, and his arms wrap around her, around the shearling coat that serves as her only clothing. He squeezes her into his chest, and as his tongue meets hers, she lets out a shivery moan of encouragement into his mouth. And it’s terrifying and he has no clue what his life is about to become, where they’re going, he doesn’t even speak a word of her language and he’s seen her reduce an office building to meat, and for a wet, blissful moment that feels like an eternity none of it matters. Nothing matters but for the blue bombshell squirming beneath his fingers and the inviting plumpness of her lips and her body, and then he tastes copper and he realizes he’s tasting Drake’s blood. Drake’s, and who knows who else from that abattoir.

She feels him falter, and falters too. She pulls back, and her face is becoming strange again as she beholds him. She glances to one side, issues a flowing order to the other woman in the cabin, and pushes off from Grant, landing in the seat next to him and buckling herself back in.

Her hand is back on his. The grip is firm and more distant, somehow, more controlling.

“Ganeamak, Grantyde,” she whispers.

“What?” he asks, and then there’s a sharp sting on the side of his head and he grits his teeth against the pain of it.

His ears stop working. They still transmit sound, but it’s just this hellacious mishmash of misfiring signals. His vision darkens as the sensory overload rolls over him and he makes a strangled choking noise or he thinks he does, he can’t even tell, he might be screaming for all he knows, and he squeezes his eyes shut and when they open the hatch is wide, and Batty’s compatriots are piling out. Did he pass out?

They’ve unbuckled him. He stands, shakily. The gravity’s back. He climbs out of the hatch, bowing his head to fit beneath its low lip.

He emerges onto a platform plated with a hard, scarlet-colored wood. Gold metallic bannisters and guardrails pen him and his landing party in. They’re several dozen feet above a hangar, full of similarly sleek craft. His eyes wander across the fleet and out into a massive, open hangar door. How is he breathing air right now? It looks like they’re open to vacuum. There must be some kind of membrane across the view.

The view of Earth. His home planet dominates the sky. They’re in orbit.

Batty is standing at the center of the platform, surrounded by crew. A soldier drapes a scarlet robe around her shoulders. Her posture is straighter, her shoulders squared.

She sees him emerge and hurries over to him, bare feet slapping on the deck. She speaks in rapid-fire mellifluous chatter. Something buzzes and snaps in his head, like a static shock on the inside of his skull.

“Laekanae’amastand me?”

He blinks rapidly, trying to clear the sudden black dots at the edge of his vision.

“Can you understand me?” Batty repeats. Her words don’t match the shapes her lips are forming, like an old Shaw Brothers kung fu dub.

“Yes,” he says, or tries to say. His vocal chords, his mouth. They form some other syllable instead. Like he’s having a stroke. “What is this? What’s going on?” Still, the sickly separation between intent and action. The verbal equivalent of seeking a phantom final stair in a dark staircase.

Her eyes are wet. Her hand squeezes his. “We’re home, Grantyde,” she says. “We’re safe.”

She moves away, leaving him dizzy and lightheaded, speaking to one of the masked minions. “You’re new.”

“Yes, Majesty. On my fifth cycle aboard.”

“Your name, soldier?”

“First Corporal Tyvan, Majesty.”

“Did Hyax select you? She’s still brigadier, yes?”

“She is, Majesty. She signed my commendation.”

“Then you’re welcome, Tyvan, and your service will honor me, I’m sure.” She inclines her head. “Clean my husband and find him something presentable to wear. Then bring him to my cabin. Are you hungry?”

Grant is staring at the yawning gap through which the starscape spreads. Earth’s slow turn. He watches a storm twist over the Atlantic. He sees the lights of the East Coast like a gossamer spider’s web.

“Grantyde,” Batty prompts. “Are you hungry, darling?”

“Uh. Yeah.” He blinks. Darling. Husband? “It’s just Grant. Please—what’s happening?”

“Now you speak Taiikari, and I can make it triply clear.” She shrugs her robe the rest of the way on and belts it. “To me, and to your new life, you are Grantyde.” She follows his gaze to the planetscape before them. “Bid Maekyon farewell. Your time on that world is finished. You are now wed to Princess Sykora of the Black Pike. Sergeant Ajax.”

The other soldier snaps to attention. “Yes, Majesty.”

“Send word to the majordomo that I’ve returned and need her council at her earliest convenience. I intend to make a ship-wide address. Do you suppose I ought to keep the blood on for it?”

“I don’t know, Majesty.”

She clicks her tongue. “Does it make me look like a dread warrior returned, or like a rabid animal? Answer without fear.”

“Both, Majesty.”

“A bath then, I think. Gefreiter Agra.”

The woman soldier snaps to attention. “Yes, Majesty.”

“I remember that right—you’re Agra?”

“I am indeed, Majesty.”

“Hello again, Agra. Is Quartermaster Kymai still aboard?”

“He is, Majesty.”

“Outstanding. Give him my compliments, beg him again from me not to quit, and have him send two tureens of reedweaver curry to my quarters. One oversized.”

“Wait. Please wait.” Grant takes a step forward and is immediately checked in his tracks by one of the black-clad soldiers. “I’m the husband? Of Princess Sykora of— uh—”

“Of the Black Pike.” She sweeps her hand out around the cavernous chamber. “This is the ZKZ Black Pike.” The gesture finishes with her palm against her chest. “And I am Princess Sykora.”

She approaches him. That same graceful step, the slinky tilt of her hip. It looked dancerly to him before. Now it looks lethal, panther-like. Her gaze traces him. Her arm raises. He feels her touch light on his stomach. “And you are mine now, Grantyde,” she says.

He sees the old Batty in there, in the openness of the smile that spreads across her face. Just a moment of it.

Before his stunned mind can put a response together, she’s turned on her heel and strode away, flanked by two of her soldiers.