Princess of the Void

2.15. Sabotage

“Pit crews are going to be down here soon. So we gotta work quick.” Waian leads Grant through a dazzling multicolored reef of skimmers, lit by the lustrous red sky of Ptolek on the other side of the hangar. The roaring wind, even muted by the hangar membrane, intermingles with the creak of the dark metal floor into a dull industrial roar. Compared to the balmy air of the pleasure yachts above, it’s starkly cold here.

Each bubble cockpit is decked out with stabilizing fins and garish paint jobs. They’re smaller than Grant expected. Take off the wings and they’d be no bigger than a Formula One car. “The clans splash their names on these,” Waian says. “Look for Trimond.”

They find Azkaii’s skimmer near the front of the flock. Its sharp, angular body and its stripes of gold and maroon put Grant in mind of a metallic wasp.

Waian lays under the chassis while Grant surveys it from above. “What should I be looking for?” he asks.

“Anything out-of-place. Could be a defect or an aftermarket addition. Don’t be shy. Shout it out.”

Grant squints and tries not to feel desperately out of his depth. He has no clue what’s out-of-place on a cloudskimmer. “There’s, uh, this line of rivets right here, maybe? One’s pushed out a bit, and the paint around it’s scraped. Is that anything at all?”

“Let me see.” Waian pops up and stands next to him. “Oh, shit. That’s something.” Her prosthetic hand rotates to an impossible angle and folds into her arm. It re-emerges with a heavy cylinder replacing her middle finger, which she ratchets around the protruding rivet. A whirring whine sounds as the cylinder heats and spins, and Waian gives a firm tug. The rivet pulls out along with an ugly metal spike on the end, wrapped in a rat’s nest of wire.

“Fuckin’ hellfire.” She grins and holds the contraption up. “You know what this is?”

“Tell me.”

“This is an EMP spike. Looks like it’s triggered to a voltage delay. When the juice runs through whatever it’s drilled into, it does a countdown and then fries the thing. It’d wreck Azkaii’s steering, blow her engine, and drop her ass like a rock.” She draws a thumb across her neck. “Boom. Another dead Trimond. Look at you, Prince Consort. Good shit. Wanna hold it?”

He holds his hand out, and Waian drops the bolt into his palm. “So this is proof, right?” He feels the weight. “Of the assassinations.”

“All of them, I dunno. But this is more than enough for your wife to take the investigation over. Goddamn, Grantyde. Good eye.” She slaps his back and takes the spike. “You know, first time I saw you, I thought: look at this poor trembly crane. But you’re all right.”

He grins. “I’m glad I graduated from trembly crane.”

“Yes sir. You keep this up, I might even let you date my Princess.”

“Gosh. That would be—”

“Excuse me. Hey.” A fuchsia woman with a shock of platinum hair and a helmet under her arm is storming across the hangar toward them. “What the fuck are you doing with my fucking skimmer?”

Waian spins round and hides the spike and her drill-bit hand behind her back. “Just, uh, just some last-minute checkovers. Official cloudsprint business, madam.”

“I don’t know you. I don’t even know what the fuck that one is.” Azkaii scowls at Grant as she digs a communicator out from her flight jacket. Her eyes flash. “Stay right there. Both of you.”

“Sire,” Waian whispers. Her tail prods his calf. “Grab her.”

“What?”

“Fucking grab her, man.”

Grant moves before his brain can slow the rest of him down, charging across the hangar deck. Azkaii lets out a sharp gasp. He seizes the pilot and boosts her into the air, restraining her arms.

“What the fuck,” she snarls, and he remembers the teeth just in time, snapping his arm behind her head instead of in front of it and saving his forearm from losing a chunk.

Azkaii’s tail snaps around his neck and squeezes tight. He grunts as his airway constricts. He tries to yell Waian. But nothing comes out.

The Chief Engineer sprints to his side. Her prosthetic arm inverts; the hand slides into a groove that opens in the forearm and slides back out with a syringe stuck to its forefinger. She wrenches Azkaii’s head upward and slams the syringe into her neck. She gets in close to Azkaii’s ear. “Release him.” Her eyes flash.

Azkaii’s tail drops from Grant’s neck. Her eyes marble over. Her mouth droops open. “What—”

Another flash. “Stand still and don’t speak.” Waian looks at Grant, who’s coughing and rubbing his red-marked neck. “You can let go of her.”

Grant drops Azkaii to the floor. She lands lightly and stands stock-still. Her face is frozen in shock.

“What the fuck,” Grant says, “was that.”

Waian’s hand flips through her forearm again and comes back sans syringe.

“Did you just—”

“Prince Consort.” Waian makes laser-sharp eye contact with him. “No talking right now.” She looks back to Azkaii. Flash. “Come with us.”

Azkaii follows them in a slump-shouldered gait. Waian leads them out of the hangar and into a dingy corridor. She pulls her communicator out as she goes. “Boss,” she murmurs into it. “We have Azkaii. What’s the move? Sire, watch your head.”

Grant narrowly avoids thwacking his forehead on the entrance to a sweltering room that smells like ozone, dominated by a pyramidal wireframe pylon, its cables disappearing into the walls. Waian pulls open a panel on its widest strut to reveal a console keyboard, which she furtively starts tak-tak-takking on.

Grant peers into Azkaii’s filmy eyes. “How the fuck are you compelling her?”

“There are things that members of the Imperial family and their command groups know about, which the rest of the firmament doesn’t, and aren’t ready to. A husband like you is one of those things. This is another.” Waian rapidly mashes a red button. “So zip it, Prince Consort. All right?”

“What are you doing?”

“Corrupting the camera log for the hangar,” she says. “Azkaii.” The dazed woman’s gaze shifts to Waian and catches the flash. “Do you have the keys to your skimmer?”

“Yes,” Azkaii mumbles.

Waian stretches her hand out. “Give those to me.”

Grant crouches and looks into Azkaii’s vacant eyes. “Couldn’t we just have explained what it is we’re doing?”

Waian’s tapping on her communicator keyboard. “Check your messages, man.”

Grant pulls it from his pocket. He barely noticed its chirp.

UNKNOWN CONTACT

Boss. We have Azkaii. What’s the move? Sire, watch your head.

MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE

lock her down somewhere. on my way to hangar

were taking her with us

whats wrong with my husbands head?????

UNKNOWN CONTACT

nothing he;s just tall

MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE

ah. he really is. be there soon

hi hubby!! ;*

“This was the plan,” he realizes.

“Yep. Sykora sent her down here on a pretense. She throws, we catch.” Waian flashes Azkaii again. “Stand there and do nothing unless ordered to.”

“You told me we were here looking for sabotage.”

“We were. And you found it. You did good.” Waian cracks the door and looks into the hallway. She slaps it shut again and locks it. “We were also here for Azkaii. Wasn't how I was hoping we'd do it, but it is what it is. And if she knows something, we have to know it, too. And if she doesn’t, we have a Trimond, now, and we can exchange her for a conversation with someone who does.” Waian snaps the console shut and steps in front of Azkaii. “Take your pilot uniform off.”

“Okay,” Azkaii sing-songs, and unzips her flight jacket.

Waian takes each proffered article of clothing. She turns invisible and Grant watches her clothes lose their silhouette and drop to the floor, replaced by Azkaii’s flight suit.

Azkaii starts to lift her tank top off. Waian’s head slips back into view and flashes her again. “Keep your bottom layer on. You’re gonna scandalize the Prince Consort.” A pair of pants wiggle themselves onto an invisible rump. “Can you stay with her, sire? I’ll send Sykora your way.”

Grant blinks his sweat away. “Where are you going?”

Waian’s skin, now sequestered in Azkaii’s uniform, filters back to its grayish blue visibility. “Someone needs to fly that thing, or everyone’ll be clued in that Azkaii’s missing. We don’t want that until she’s secure on the Pike.” She zips the jacket up. “Tell the truth, I always wanted to do a cloudsprint. Don’t tell Kora I said that.”

As she tugs her driving gloves on, Waian looks every inch a badass. Grant is reminded, by the way she fills out Azkaii's uniform, of the unlikely beauty every Taiikari seems to possess. The flinty chief engineer, now that she's zipped into a hugging leather flight suit, might talk like a brassy old grease monkey, and age might have given her some eye bags and gray at the temples. But she's as gracefully hewn as the younger members of the command group.

“What if they have a backup plan?" Grant asks. "Shooters, or something?”

Waian buckles her helmet on. “Then I’ll avoid them.”

“Are you ready for a death race?”

She pauses her prep. “Who taught you to fly, boss?”

“Sykora.”

“I taught Sykora.” Waian winks, and then clacks her visor down. Her face is totally hidden. “Be right back. Lock the door behind me, all right?”

She hurries from the room, leaving Grant alone with a humming pylon and a zonked-out Trimond heiress.

They stare at each other. Azkaii’s forehead and face muscles twitch as whatever psychic war is happening in her brain rages. Grant turns away. He can’t look at this.

A rapid knock on the door. Sykora’s voice: “Grantyde? Are you in there?”

He unlocks the door, and Sykora hurries inside, folding him into a quick embrace. “Well done, dove. Excellently done.” She looks up at him. “Oh God, Grant. Your neck.”

“I’m fine,” he says.

Sykora shoots a glare Azkaii’s way. “Is Waian off to replace her?”

“She is.”

Sykora rolls her eyes. “She insisted on it. For operational security, she said. Ridiculous woman.”

“Was it her idea to keep me in the dark? About what I was here to do?”

Sykora looks close at Grant for the first time since she arrived. She sees the tension in him, the fists his hands have balled into. “Um.” Her posture tightens and shrinks. “No. It was mine.”

He crosses his arms.

“We have to move.” Sykora turns to Azkaii and bathes her brain in the compulsion flash. “Turn invisible, undress the rest of the way, and follow us.”

Grant and Sykora maneuver through the party, the invisible Trimond close to their heels. The partygoers they pass occasionally glance or shift with surprise when the phantom touch of an unseen foot or tail brushes them. Grant’s pulse remains drumming in his throat until they reach the unpopulated skybridge to the shuttles.

“You and Waian should have told me,” he whispers, as the crowd thins out.

“I—” Sykora grits her teeth. “I should have. Yes. I feared you’d want answers and an explanation before you agreed to help, and we were improvising with a ticking clock. It was wrong of me.”

“Is it okay for us to just take her?”

“We’ll release her, eventually. But Clan Trimond owes me answers.” Her shoulders stiffen. “The Comet Queen hit another route this morning. The same corvettes we chased, all the way across the sector. They boarded a barge and left it floating empty. Empty but for five corpses. Fifty kilos of rhodium and five broken families. All day the magnates have been peppering me with questions about what I’m doing about this. This is my answer.”

“But what if she hasn’t done anything?”

“I’m not taking her because she’s done anything. I’m taking her as leverage.” They pass close by a conversation circle of revelers and Sykora silences. She resumes once they break into the skybridge to the boxes. “This isn’t an arrest. Not unless we’re caught and I have to drum up charges.”

“We’re kidnapping her.”

Her thumb kneads his wrist. “We can talk about this when we’re back on the Pike, all right?”

“But—that thing Waian put in her. Was that—”

“I wish I could answer all of your questions now. As soon as we’re securely aboard the Pike again, I will. I promise, love.”

His knuckles go white in her hand. “Would that stuff work on me?”

She stiffens like she wants to tell him to be quiet, then exhales the thought out. “I don’t know,” she whispers. “I don’t want to know. Please, Grant. Later.”

She opens the shuttle door. The air rustles as their invisible hostage passes between them. She flashes her eyes at the air. “Azkaii. Turn visible again.”

Azkaii of clan Trimond shimmers back into reality. Grant turns his head from her bare body.

“There are cuffs in the back seat console.” Sykora points. “Take them out and secure yourself to the zero-g rail.”

The metallic click of the cuffs closing.

“Forget everything that happened in the past ten minutes,” Sykora says. “Sleep.” The Trimond heiress crumples into unconsciousness. Sykora pulls the shuttle door closed. “Shall we find our seats, Grantyde?”

She reaches for his hand again. He hesitates before he takes it.

They return to the thinning party and navigate to their skybox in tense silence. Sykora’s smile is hollow as she greets Paxea and gives her the customary double-kiss on the cheeks. “All’s well with the goro bean shipment, I hope? Have we gotten it moving?”

“Still stuck in drydock, I’m afraid,” Paxea says. She’s picking absently at the ribbon tie accentuating her slender neck. Judging by the threadbare edge she’s been doing this a lot. “It’s the Comet Queen. Everyone’s shaky about issuing release permits on shipments that might get hit. There’s a mandate for escorts off Amadar right now, and not enough security to watch more than a trickle of exports. But at least they’ll keep.”

Sykora pats her shoulder. “I’ll see about getting that inspection prioritized, yes? And an escort. Just kick a couple of kilos back my way. My quartermaster makes the most incredible goro dumplings. We’ll send you some.”

“Oh, now I must.” Paxea clinks her glass against Sykora’s. “If I have the opportunity for a Kymai confection, I’ll take it every time.”

They find their seats. The skybox has filled up with perhaps a half dozen other Imperial pairs. Curious, covetous looks follow them to their seats up front.

Sykora’s fingers are laced together, her arms tight by her sides. Her eyes dart to his and then flicker back to their view of Waian. She’s afraid he’s angry with her. Perhaps he ought to be.

He leans into her ear. “You know what I just realized?”

“What?”

“Saving her life, then kidnapping her?” He nudges his wife.

“Grant, shush,” she hisses.

“I know how you flirt. Someone’s got a crush.”

Her lips twitch. “Grantyde.”

“You sure you’re not trying to pick up another consort or two?”

“Oh my God, dove, be quiet.” But there’s a little quake of laughter along with it, and her shoulders are losing their tension. “Insufferable Maekyonite.”

Sykora warned him she’d do wicked things for her Empress. Kidnapping this woman surely qualifies as one. But the sight of the Princess relaxing into his touch, her smile becoming genuine again, satisfies him far more than the abduction of the Trimond heiress upsets him. His wife's smile banishes the memory of that twitching, furious confusion in Azkaii's eyes.

Should that concern him? Or is this how he ought to be, now, in this new life? She’s experimenting with Maekyonite ethics. Maybe he should adopt some Taiikari wickedness. Maybe there’s a cozy little place for them in the middle.

The tidal-wave roar of the crowd and a blaring horn. From the hulking carrier, a roaring rainbow of skimmers stream into the sky. Sixty women, taking their lives into their own hands. Death-defying firmament bravos, gritty veteran racers, brash royal daughters. And somewhere in the flock, the Chief Engineer of the Black Pike.

The cloudsprint has begun.