Princess of the Void

2.16. Cloudsprint

The twin eruptions of the engines and the crowd intermingle for only a moment as the skimmers streak away across the coral sky. Then a dozen dueling soundtracks kick back in from the raucous underclass celebrations. The upper half of the skybox window has become a readout of progress and positions, with a rotating view of the skimmers as they tear through the clouds, darting around one another and the derelict industrial exo rings through which they fly.

A rippling chorus of oohs as a skimmer flies so close to an rusty cargo bay wall it leaves a rent in the flaking paint. He hears his wife’s voice in the choir and grins at her. “You hated this, I thought.”

“I do,” she says. “It’s an extravagant waste of life.”

His toe prods hers. “But you love when ships go fast.”

Sykora flushes. “Silence, Maekyonite.” She taps a few buttons on her armrest and pulls up a smaller holographic display by their seats, a dedicated nose-cam feed. There’s a cockpit view, too. Grant thinks he recognizes the frosted-glass helmet within, the figure beneath it stiff with concentration.

“That’s our girl?” he asks.

Sykora nods. “She’s only doing the half-race. That’s five laps. It’s where most of the noble scions drop out, except for the real daredevils. Which she has assured me she isn’t.”

Marquess Paxea takes her seat in the row behind them. “You haven’t seen my husband, have you? He’s getting us a round of those krittan spritzes that everyone’s drinking.”

“There was a line,” Sykora says. “Well worth the wait, I assure you.”

Grant gets Sykora’s attention and her ear. “She should look for him in the pit crew. He and Lady Lakai were ogling each other.”

“That’s Lady Lakai for you.” Sykora rolls her eyes. “I used to find her flagrant xenophilia a touch overmuch, but I suppose I don’t have the room to judge her anymore.”

“Sykora.” He hesitates. “You and me are nme’zkai, right?”

“I, uh.” Her brows furrow. “I had intended us to be exclusive, yes. But that is a mutual decision, now.”

He blows a relieved exhale. “Yes,” he says. “We are.”

Her face breaks into a gratified grin. Her thumb kneads his knuckle. “You spooked me there for a moment, dove.”

“Never considered otherwise. You hit the jackpot the first time, you cash out and enjoy your winnings.”

Her giggle rests across Grant like a sunbeam. “Still so smug about winning our little contest. Big jerk.” She shifts in her seat so she can stretch one of her legs onto his. She slips a shoe off with her opposite toe cap and rests her bare foot on top of his boot, so it nudges his calf. “I’m going to hazard a guess that you’ve been talking to Wenzai’s husband.”

“You guess right.” Grant waves at Tikani over her shoulder. “Apparently, you should expect a proposition from the Countess.”

Sykora pulls a face. “I’m getting used to it. At the gallery I wished I had my fencing spear, the way I was fending off barter offers. The tradeoff of a man like you on my arm.”

“How common is the, uh, barter system?”

“These days?” Sykora rubs her chin. “I’d say about half of all couples you’ll see do some bartering now and again. It used to be that it was expected, or you were a tightwad and a prude. But that’s gone away, mostly. Credit to Lakai, she took took the turndown with grace.”

“She…?”

“Uh huh. Propositioned us at the gallery. Like I said: flagrant xenophile.” She switches the screen to Lakai’s view. The Lady is weaving between two jockeying opponents. A skimmer ahead cants and its fin kicks out sparks as it bumps Lakai’s.

The cockpit camera captures Lakai angrily slapping her dash and shooting a horns gesture out to the skimmer she scraped. Her tinny voice through the compressed mic: “Fucking dumbfuck!”

“I’ve thought, now and then, about inviting the Lady to be a pilot on the Pike. It would be a way for her to improve her station.” Sykora shakes her head. “She’s just cruising the firmament on her house’s funds right now. A sad waste of a talented pilot.”

Grant replicates the horns gesture. “What’s this mean?”

“Oh Grant don’t—” Sykora giggles and pushes his hand down. “Don’t go flashing that one around unprovoked, dove.”

“You two watching Lakai?” Tikani’s brushing past with a fresh cocktail and his wife on his arm, returning to their seats. “I had to turn hers off. Too nerve-wracking.”

Wenzai’s wearing her sleepy grin. “Tik’s got such a shine for the Lady. Well, who doesn’t, right?” She pokes her husband’s side. “I might have to challenge her to a duel over you, mister.”

Grant lets that concern him for a moment until he remembers what duelist is slang for among the Taiikari.

“We’re hoping, Majesty, to host you and the Prince Consort to our estate at Korak,” Wenzai says. “I hear you’re a pilot. We’ve got some truly prime kilometers for flying. And some skimmers that are much safer than these.”

“Nothing like a skim,” Tikani adds. “The turbulence makes it so much more visceral than zero-G.”

“And I can try and bribe you,” Wenzai says. “I’ve been looking to bribe you for quite some time now.”

Sykora favors them with a laugh at fifty percent sincerity. “A thoughtful and tempting offer, Countess. My schedule is packed at the moment. But as soon as there’s time.”

“As you say, Majesty.” Wenzai kisses her wrist and withdraws.

“Was that the proposition, do you think?” Grant sips his drink.

“I doubt it.” Sykora tilts his arm lower and takes her own pull from his glass. “I think she just wants to bribe me.”

A surge of cheering draws Grant’s attention to the main monitor. The leading skimmers are careening toward the lap marker. They scream past to roars and stomps of approval from the civilian craft and genteel applause from the skyboxes, some of whose residents resort to golf claps so as not to disturb the brightly-colored drinks in their hands.

“How are they, the other alien gentlemen?” Sykora murmurs. “I know Paxea and Thror well enough, but those two are new to me. Countess Wenzai only recently inherited her position from her mother. Her and the Count are hard-partying, I hear, but the helium and the water flow well enough from Korak.”

“They’re friendly. I think they’re eager to get to know me, considering who my wife is.”

“You’ll get used to that. You can’t get too hung up on why your friendships develop, when you have what everyone wants. Looks, money, influence. It’s all transactional, at least a little. Eventually, you get a sense of how much is pretense, and who actually enjoys you.”

They flit through the racer perspectives offered by their seat-embedded holograms, and Sykora tells him what she knows of them. For a self-professed hater of the Cloudsprint, she seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge. “Know your enemy, Grantyde,” she tells him, when he points this out.

“That’d be Baroness-in-waiting Vandya. She’s here to scare the hell out of her parents, but you can tell she’s intimidated, too. Look how carefully she takes her corners.”

“That’s Torina of clan Rinnok there, in the purple-and-green. A brute. Nobody’s getting near her because of how eager she is to lock fins with you.”

“Second place right now is Zimia Kaikam. Dishonorably discharged interceptor ace. I loved watching her footage growing up. Then she got blackout drunk on amrita and blew up a satellite over Ramex on a dare.”

The fourth lap is when it happens. A great hue and cry from the barges and the stereos are pumped into an upbeat song played in raucous unison. The communal displays they watch the race on all flicker to a loop that ends in a brilliant ball of fire.

Sykora grunts and turns her head away. “First fatality,” she says. “That song’s an upbeat version of a traditional funeral dirge.”

The rest of the skybox have gathered around one of the seat displays. A Taiikari man shakes his glass-masked head. “It’s Torina,” he says. “Picked a fight with Kaikam down the cargo straight and got clipped by a radar array.”

“The mad bitch.” Sykora sighs. “That was always going to happen, eventually.” She stands up. “I’ll be right back, dove. You want another of these?” She plucks his empty glass from the holder on his armrest.

“Sure.” Seated, he’s at the perfect height to exchange a quick kiss with the Princess. His hand lingers on the small of her back.

He feels her touch on his ring finger. He wiggles it.

“No getting into trouble while I’m gone, yes?” Sykora’s eyes flash. She winks.

He returns it.

Outside, the festivity is leveling off again. Paxea leans over and taps Grant’s shoulder. “If it was one of us who’d gone down, they’d still be celebrating,” she says. “They love to see a noblewoman explode. You see that woman down there, the one with the refiners? The one looking up at us. Blue sash.”

Grant follows her pointing finger to a still island in the sea of frivolity. A Taiikari woman in a refiner’s jumpsuit underneath a braided blue sash, her dark chestnut hair bleached in uneven, sandy highlights, a bright safety helmet under her arm, stands and stares up at the grandly appointed skyship in which they sit. Her expression is as cold and remote as a mountain peak.

“That’s a refinery unionist,” Paxea says. “They’re always recruiting at places like this.”

The sashed woman’s gaze slides to him and the Marquess, pulling them into eye contact with her. An unkind smile crosses her face. Across the wide patch of raceway sky, she throws the horns.

Grant chews his lip. He tries to gauge Paxea’s expression. “What do you think of her? Of people like her?”

The look Paxea gives Grant strikes him as equally appraising. “I think,” she says, “that your wife is a clever woman. And Ptolek could use some clever women working at its cures.”

“I worked in energy refining,” Grant says. He isn’t sure why. “A place on Maekyon called Alberta, in its icy north. We weren’t floating above a gas giant, but it still felt like another planet up there. Nothing around for many miles. You’d get the feeling sometimes that you’d been stuck up there so the world wouldn’t have to think about you.”

“It’s difficult, I think,” Paxea says. “To look at them in the face and remember the lives we’ve imposed on them. Difficult for many of us. I’m glad you’re here.” She chuckles. “A refiner Sykora certainly doesn’t want to turn away from.”

“I don’t know if I qualify any longer.”

“Perhaps not. But you don’t forget how it is, working in places like that. Being somewhere like down there. Looking up at somewhere like here.”

“Do you speak from experience?”

“Me? No, no. I’m as lacy-collared as anyone else in this skybox. But Thror. He wasn’t a refinery worker, exactly.” Paxea has a wistful smile on his face. “He was a farmer. Worked alongside the harvest crawlers. I used to sneak out of my family’s compound after hours to be with him.” She leans further into his airspace like she’s telling a secret. “You wonder why he’s a Marquis Consort and Tikani’s a Count?”

“I did.”

“My family refused him their title, is why,” she says. “In their eyes he’ll never be truly a nobleman. Never truly my husband. The titles and rights that ought to be his aren’t. An alien farmboy stole their little Marquess-in-waiting. I was nearly disowned.”

“I’m—” No sorries, Grant. “That’s troubling to me.”

“To me, too.” Paxea settles back. “Though I forget myself, Prince Consort. I shouldn’t be spinning his sob story to you. He has his freedom, at least.”

Grant weighs whether he should say this, but it seems Paxea might be a friend. “So many people I’ve talked to see this as wrong, this husband-of-the-void thing. And yet nobody seems to be in a hurry to change it. It’s just a fact of life. Like the rain or hangovers.”

“Well, you have three mistaken suppositions at play.” Paxea holds up three fingers. “The first is that the people you talk to see it as wrong. They say it is, to you. See and say, that’s two different things.” She drops a finger. “The second is the idea that nobody is doing anything to change it.”

“Is there some kind of groundswell I’m not privy to?”

Paxea drops the next. “You might be surprised.”

Grant eyes her third uplifted digit. “What’s the third one?”

“That hangovers are a fact of life. We’ve got a pill for that now, you know. Ask your wife about it.”

“I would,” Grant says. “But none of these Taiikari drinks seem to give me more than a buzz.”

“The tragedy of your height, I suppose.”

“That and the doors, milady.”

The first few skimmers on the fifth lap go rocketing past, some of them trailing exhaust or bearing the marks of their hard-fought first half. As the pilots flying the full race continue their mad dashes, about a third of the field are coasting in. Pit crews come sprinting across the closed skybridges on either side of the vast track, bundled in parkas and re-breathers, opening hatches to the sulfurous Ptolek atmosphere to let in the conservative-minded pilots.

This is where most of the noblewomen get out, his wife said, and the parallel reactions bear that out. Aboard the luxury liners, the reception is enthusiastic and euphoric. On the refiner side, jeers and epithets ring out to the racers.

Sykora slips into the row as the pilots emerge onto the skybridges, basking in the adulation side of the equation. “Hi, hubby. Miss me?”

“Terribly.”

She drops a refreshed glass into his cupholder and kisses his cheek. She whispers: “Sixty degrees starboard. You see her?”

Grant looks past his wife’s big bat ear and sees one pilot with her helmet still on, waving out at the crowd. “In one piece still.”

“Mmhmm.” She shimmies back into her seat. “Thank the Gods of Ptolek.”

“I had an interesting conversation with Paxea,” he murmurs, hand resting on her thigh. “I’ll fill you in.” He glances over at the Marquess and sees the vacant seat still next to her. “Thror’s still not back. Did you see him?”

She frowns. “No, I didn’t. The line was long, but not that long.”

As if their conversation summoned him, Grant sees the Marquis Consort stepping into the skybox, by Sykora’s shoulder. The Amadari walks past their row and keeps walking.

Grant waves. “Thror. Over here, man. Hey.”

Thror glances toward him and keeps going.

Grant blinks. “Thror?”

His pulse skips. He realizes what’s wrong as Thror arrives at the front balustrade.

The Marquis Consort doesn’t have any anticomps on. He doesn’t have any drinks in his hands, either.

And Grant sees what Thror does have, gleaming as it emerges into the red light of the Ptolek sky.

Before he has a moment to think he’s on his feet, yanking his wife from her seat and twisting her behind his body. He charges, his forgotten drink spraying into the sky. The gun’s barrel zeroes in on Waian of the Black Pike.