Princess of the Void

Grant releases his javelin. It flies from their balconied booth, shivers pitifully in the air and sinks shallowly into the turf, just inside the widest pale ring chalked into the scarlet grass. “It’s the spin,” he says. “I have to figure out how to make it spin.”

“It’s all in the release off the fingers, sire,” Tikani says.

“Sergeant, I can tell you’re vibrating under that visor.” Grant wipes his palms on his tunic. “Thank you for your forebearance.”

Ajax salutes. “Sire.”

“Ajax here has been lovely company,” Tikani says. “Taciturn but tactful.”

“Y’know he guarded me first. I like to think I was good training wheels.”

Ajax inclines his head. “You were all right, sire.”

“Just all right?”

“The Count makes coffee.”

“Where’s the loyalty, man?” Grant scoffs. “I’m telling Sykora.”

“Okay, sire.”

“Unless you take a turn on the range.” Grant indicates the expanse of hillside they’ve been lancing javelins into.

“That’s all right, sire. You can tell the Princess.”

“Throw one. Just one. C’mon.”

Ajax shakes his head. “I’m on the clock, sire.”

Grant scratches his beard. “What if I order you, then? Can I order you now that I’m free?”

“You can, sire.”

“Shit. This is my first order, I think. Okay, Sergeant Ajax.” Grant steps to one side. “Show the effete alien husbands how it’s done. That’s an order.”

Tikani applauds. “Excellent ordering, Prince Consort. You’re a natural.”

Ajax cracks his knuckles. “All right, then. Who am I throwing for?”

Grant holds out his blue striped javelin. “We’re team Black Pike.”

Ajax slips it from Grant’s hand. He steps up to the first line. “Check this shit out.”

He moves like an olympian, his arms fluid and whipcord as they rocket-launch the javelin. Its whistling spin carries it as straight and true as a cruise missile directly into the center ring.

“Holy shit, Ajax!” Grant squints at the distant landing. “Can all marines throw like that?”

Ajax has returned to his straight-backed formality. “The ones who take their throwing seriously can, sire.”

“You’re going to teach me this when we’re back on the Pike,” Grant decides. “This is something I have to get good at.”

“Yes, sire.” Ajax bows. “As long as you take more breaks than the flight simulator, sire.”

“It took a whole cycle of badgering to see that,” Tikani says. “But it was worth it.”

“Jax.” Grant hesitates. “Can I ask you—this is awkward.”

Ajax waits patiently.

“Could you give the Count and I a second? Maybe go grab the javelins?”

“Dismissing your subjects isn’t awkward, sire.”

“It is for me.”

“Call this practice then.” Ajax delivers a brief salute. “Be back, milords.”

He crosses the second line. A trilling klaxon sounds and the light over the quiver flicks red. The javelins magnetically lock in place.

Grant waits until he’s sure Ajax is out of earshot. Then he asks it:

“What do you think of the Empress, Count Tikani?”

Tikani stiffens.

“Not the Empire,” Grant continues. “I think I know already that you don’t much care for it, and I don’t either. I’m talking about the one specific woman. The one on top.”

Tikani looks carefully at him. He sees his uncertain face reflected in the Count's amber anticomps. “Why do you ask?”

“I guess I’m trying to develop a, uh, a framework up here.” Grant taps his forehead. “About what morality means in the firmament. And normally I’d talk it out with my wife, but this is the only thing I’m hesitant to bring up with her. She loves the hell out of the Empress. And sometimes I wonder—I don’t know.”

They watch the marine dutifully pluck the javelins from the ground.

“Go on.” Tikani’s voice is soft.

“I guess I wonder, if she had to choose, who she’d choose. Is that unfair?”

“I don’t know how fair it is, Grantyde. But it’s understandable. Wen’s not as much of an Empress devotee as your wife, I’m sure. But I’ve had a version of that same doubt, from time to time.”

“You can just call me Grant, if you like,” Grant says.

“Is that a nickname?”

Grant chuckles. “It’s my real name, actually. Grantyde is the Taiikarization.”

“All right. Grant.” Tikani smiles. “Mine’s a Taiikarization, too, you know.”

“What’s the original?”

“Tikan’iakkinak!!Ri?eknaitti,” Tikani says.

“Maybe I’m sticking to Tikani.”

“How about Tik?”

“Tik’s good,” Grant says. “Don’t try and change the subject, though. What do you think of her?”

“Prince Consort.” Tikani fidgets. “This is the sort of inquiry that makes a fellow nervous.”

“Tik. It’s me asking. Me, exclusively. And it is an ask. I won’t order you to tell me, because I think you might be my closest friend outside of the Pike. Or getting there, anyway.”

“Can I just leave it at it’s complicated?”

“How about this? You tell me your secret and I’ll tell you mine.” Grant isn’t even sure what secret he’d be telling. But the words are already out of him. “What’s wrong with the Empress?”

“It’s not anything wrong with the Empress. The Empress is good. The Empress…” Tikani smacks his lips and sighs. “I suppose the issue is she’s too good.”

“What does that mean?”

“All the reforms she’s done,” Tikani says. “She’s done them savvy. She cuts deals, and when she can’t cut deals she isolates and whittles away. She’s been very smart. She’s made alliances and provisions and she’s done all this stuff to get what she wants. She’s taken even more power for herself than any of her predecessors, and she did it without any reign of terror. Without any purges. And I think, perhaps, she should have.”

“Should have what?”

“If she had really wanted to remold the Empire, what she ought to have done is taken the people who created and enshrined all those policies she took apart—the hardliners, the misandrists, the tyrant nobles—and killed them.”

Grant blinks at this hardline pronouncement from the gentle Kovikan.

“Plenty of Empresses have done just that in the past. Cleaned up house when they came in. She didn’t. Instead she’s got this careful stasis.” Tikani laces his fingers. “This web she’s got them all trapped in. But she’s just one woman. With one mind. That’s not enough to manage the entire Empire. How could it be? And what happens when she dies?”

“I’d been trying not to think about that question,” Grant admits.

“There are people—powerful people—who want us to be slaves, Grant. You and me. Who want to strip the anticomps from our faces and make us chattel. There are people who call my species inferior, my children abominations. She holds them at bay. Will the next Empress do that?” The tendrils along Tikani’s crown have contracted a few inches. “How do we know that whoever is next can play the game she played? Can feed the hounds enough red meat to keep their fangs slaked? She delegates and she manages, but her grip is absolute. She’s made herself the central pillar of her Empire, and it works because it’s her. What about when it’s not her anymore? Who can take her place?”

“Well, does she have children? Do we know who’s next?”

Tikani shakes his head. “No children. Not one. She intends to hand-pick her successor, and she refuses to give out a by-blood claim they can use to subvert whoever it is, once she’s gone. That’s one reason she’s made so many Void Princesses. To ensure the choice remains hers. But the choice is everything.” He gazes across the turf. But he’s looking further out, at something Grant can’t see. “The choice decides what my kids’ lives become,” he murmurs.

Grant feels a lesser version of that same miasmatic foreboding. He doesn’t have children; he and Sykora aren’t allowed them. But he has a wife with a bomb in her head, a bomb that only the Empress can set off. Who gets the keys to that?

Tikani snaps out of it first. “And that, I suppose, is what I think of the Empress.”

Grant reaches out and pats Tikani’s shoulder. It’s less awkward a gesture than he feared it might be. “You’ve thought hard about this. I’m grateful you shared.”

Tikani taps his hand gratefully and steps back. “I wish I was content. I truly do. Wen thinks I’m a catastrophist and I pray to the Gods of the Firmament she’s right.”

Out in the field, Ajax yanks the final javelin from the turf.

“What’s your secret?” Tikani prompts.

“My secret.” Grant scratches his nose. “My secret is that I got where I am with a celibacy strike.”

Tikani grins. “Seriously?”

“Don’t tell Kora I told you. But yeah. The reason she freed me in the first place was I refused to sleep with her until she did. It took a whole cycle.”

“And she didn’t compel you?”

“That’s part two of the secret, I guess. The Void Princess is a big softie.” Grant waves at Ajax as he jogs up the hill, his arms full of clattering javelins. “Don’t tell the sector or it’ll burn itself down.”

***

“Okay.” Vora swallows her bite of lemon loaf. “Eqtoran sexual trimorphism: an introduction. Pass the chutney, please, Prince Consort. Thank you.”

The Black Pike command group is sharing a working dinner as their vessel cuts through the sweep, to the distant frontier. Waian watches Grant shuttle the stoneware bowl of innok-leaf chutney across the table. “We can just ask Grantyde to pass everything. Long-ass arms.”

“How about you ask me,” Sykora says. “And I ask the Prince Consort.”

Waian shakes her head. “Overstuffed Imperial bureaucracy. Classic pitfall.”

“The most remarkable feature of the Eqtoran physiology—compared to ours—is their sexual reproduction.” Vora clicks a button at the lip of the table and cycles her presentation forward. Two hulking, powerlifter forms appear on it. “The bigger one’s an Eqtoran female, and here’s an Eqtoran male.”

Hyax surreptitiously scoots the dip out from under the Eqtoran male’s holographic crotch.

Vora clicks again. “Here’s an Eqtoran ymeq.”

A third silhouette appears before the other two, much shorter and slimmer than the powerful frames behind it. It’s sleek and willowy, flat-chested up top and gracefully curved below, and about five feet tall.

“Ymeq best translates as keeper,

The command group watches the ovipositor extrude.

“Goodness,” says Sykora. “That’s extruded.”

Vora blushes as she advances the holoprojector and the three figures disappear.

Waian munches a flatbread. “So in coarse terms, guy fucks keeper, keeper grows dong, keeper fucks girl.”

“In coarse terms, Chief Engineer—” Vora clears her throat. “Yes. Sort of.”

Waian nudges Hyax. “Sounds like it’s fun to be a keeper.”

“This is the most common adult family unit.” Vora soldiers on. “It’s one male, one female, and the keeper they both share a sexual relationship with. The traditional marriage casts the male and female as partners, but not lovers. In modern Eqtoran society, that taboo has fallen away, and the triad is more of an equitable throuple.”

“So everyone fucks everyone,” Waian says.

“The females, being the largest and strongest, have traditionally been the warriors and leaders.” Vora gamely ignores the Chief Engineer. “The males kept the hearths, raised the families, and made art, chiefly music—there is an extensive musical tradition among the Eqtorans. The keepers are objects of desire and possessiveness among both other genders, commonly stereotyped and sexualized. Throughout Eqtoran history they’ve also made up the majority of Eqtora’s clerical class; and while these roles have grown more fluid, the church is still overwhelmingly led by keepers. As a theocratic republic, Eqtora’s government is still majority-female, but with a large and relatively new contingent of keepers.”

“What about the dudes?” Grant asks. “And could you—” he gestures to a tray of lacy biscuits by her elbow.

“Uh, well.” Vora slides him the tray. “They have equal rights, if that’s any mollification, Prince Consort.”

Grant exhales. “Figures.”

“It’s a shame there aren’t more patriarchal cultures out in the firmament,” Hyax muses. “You run into one of those, you can just compel them to hand the keys over.” She glances at Grant’s expression. “What? You can.”

Sykora’s tail gives her Brigadier a light thwack. “Are keepers affected by compulsion, majordomo?”

“Unfortunately not,” Vora says. “Which means they have a comparably small population of compellable persons.”

Hyax clicks her tongue. “Another reason this is going to be a tough nut. As if we needed one.”

“When we arrive in-system, we’re going to rendezvous with the listening post on the edge of their solar orbit,” Vora says. She sits back down and picks up a serrated knife to portion out the slab of steak on her plate. “We’ll be meeting with the science team and taking a tour of the captive colony to help us get our boots on the ground.”

Grant pauses the sip of amrita he was about to take. “Captive colony?”

“Standard procedure with soon-to-be-uplifted civilizations,” Vora says. “We gather a small population to interview and monitor.”

Grant places his glass back on the table. “You kidnap them?”

Vora nervously divides her bite-sized bit of steak even smaller. “We, uh—”

Sykora cuts in. “We do. We select for a representative slice of the culture. Harvest the lower class from the rural places and frontiers where they won’t be missed, and the experts and scientists with bogus grants and research trips that we set up in order to lure them and ensure a lack of suspicion for the duration of their departure. Once we make our approach, we release them back to their civilization. It’s how we gain exposure and experience with a species before making an official approach.”

Vora stutters. “I don’t know if I’d call it kidnapping, Majesty—”

“I’m adopting a no-sugarcoating policy for my husband’s first conquest, majordomo.” Sykora snaps an authoritative hunk of bread off a crusty loaf. “He deserves to make his own appraisals.”

Grant glances at the look of determination on his wife’s face. “How long have you been holding them?”

“We’ll have to ask the science team,” Vora says. “Likely a few cycles.”

Grant purses his lips. “I’m going to save my judgments until I see the way they’re living. I don’t love it on its face. But my early days were pretty tricky, too.”

“I wasn’t aware we were awaiting your judgment, Prince Consort,” Hyax says.

“We aren’t waiting for it.” Sykora’s hand finds his under the table and squeezes it tight. “But we aren’t ignoring it.”

“I’m glad you’re willing to be open-minded, Prince Consort,” Vora says. “Because I was going to suggest to you and her Majesty a certain… prominence.”

Grant sinks into his seat. “A prominence?”

“The Eqtorans are used to a degree of brawniness in their leaders,” Vora says. “A brawniness the rest of the rulers of the Black Pike don’t have.”

“And music.” Sykora rubs her chin in thought. “They have an extensive musical tradition.”

“And if we present a high-ranking alien male, it’ll downplay fears of matriarchy or xenochauvinism,” Hyax says.

“And he’s hot,” Waian says. “Hot people get treated better.”

They’re tying lead weights to his stomach with every concurring pronouncement.

“How would you feel,” Vora asks, “about being the Prince of the Black Pike?”