Princess of the Void

2.19. Bump

“I’ve got Waian’s team examining the gun and the spike for any hints at manufacture. No high hopes for the piece, but the EMP? That’s specialized equipment, and it looks quite jury-rigged. You and Waian have my undying appreciation for finding it.” Sykora's returned to the proud stride she always carries herself with aboard the Pike. She takes a proffered tablet from a bowing engineer who's waiting for them at the exit from the shuttle bay. “Let’s double check that route with the navigatrix, shall we, Ensign? New lanes just opened up by Corwan. I don’t want to cause a pile-up.”

“Right away, Majesty.” The engineer scurries off.

“Azkaii I have in your old cell,” Sykora continues. “Doubtless she’s going to wake up and wonder why the bed is so high, but we didn’t have time to refit. After this command group debrief, I’d like you with me when we visit her. The only experience she’s had of you is as muscle, and I want your reputation as my kindness to keep growing. Just be your friendly self with her, yes?”

“I can do that,” Grant says. The lift chimes gently as they arrive on the command group floor. “Gives me a chance to banish some of this guilt, maybe.”

“She’s got a reputation as a brat.” Sykora pats his thigh. “So try not to get too righteously upset if she’s haughty at you. I know you can get.”

“What? How can I get?” He follows her out.

“You have a rebellious streak when you’re talked down to,” she says. “I imagine she’ll test it.”

“Hey, now,” he says. “I’m only rebellious to the people in charge of me.”

She laughs. “Don’t I know it.”

“What about the Lorimare thing?” he asks. “Has the leech chip—”

A loud metallic CLONK. A dull throb. Grant has just brained himself on the command deck door. He staggers backward, clapping his hand to his forehead. “Fucking hell.”

“Oh God. Oh my God, Grantyde.” The Princess is immediately at his side, pulling on the hem of his shirt. There’s raw panic in her voice. “Darling. Let me look.”

Grant grunts out a laugh around the ache and kneels. “This was inevitable, I guess. I was ducking every time on that one.” He moves his hand out of the way.

Sykora issues a horrified gasp. “Grant, it’s swollen.”

Grant gives his forehead an experimental poke and immediately feels a tender twinge. “Ooh, yeah. That’s gonna be a goose egg.”

“I’m taking you to the medtech.” She tugs his arm. “We’re getting that looked at.”

“Majesty, it’s fine. Just a bonk on the head.”

“You don’t know that. We’re going.”

“The command group’s gonna be here in five minutes.”

“They can wait.”

“I’m honestly—”

“Grantyde, we are going to the medtech. Now.” Her eyes flash. She gasps and covers them. “Oh, no, I just rage-compelled. Oh, God.”

“That’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t.” Her teary eye peeks out between her fingers. “Accidental compulsion, like I’m a goddamn toddler.”

“Baby. Baby.” He tries not to laugh—this morning he helped this woman kidnap someone and witnessed her terrify half the Ptolek court into submission, and now she’s tearful over a bump on his noggin. “It’s really fine. It doesn’t even work on me, remember?”

She nods.

He takes her hand. “Let’s go to the medtech, right?”

“Okay.” His wife executes a thunderous sniff as she tries to get her emotions under control. “I’m being a baby. I know I am.”

“We ought to go anyway to get my longevity… what did you call them? Spinal doo-dads?”

“Yes.” She laughs wetly at that. “Let’s get your doo-dads.”

Technician Malo snaps the pen light off. It leaves a blob in Grant’s vision that asserts itself over the poster on the clinic wall of healthy Taiikari physiology. There’s a brightly colored maglev train game whizzing in the office's corner, for pediatric patients, which makes the whole thing feel even more infantilizing. “Simple hematoma,” Malo says. “Just some blood under the skin of the forehead. Nothing that won’t go away on its own.”

“There, you see?” Grant smiles at Sykora. “We’re fine. Thanks, Malo.”

The fastidiously dressed Taiikari tech nods and polishes the telescopic lens on his minimalist chrome anticomps. “I’ll prescribe something to make the swelling go down faster.”

Sykora’s got her sleeve up in front of her face. “I feel like such a dumb overreactive idiot.”

“It was good that you came, Majesty. These things can be deceptively damaging.” Malo hands Grant a velcro’d black cuff. “And it gives me the chance to draw some blood from your husband. Hold that on your biceps, please, Prince Consort.”

Grant obeys. “What do you need my blood for?”

“Three reasons.” Malo steps behind him and straps the cuff shut. “The first is so we can replicate it and have it on-hand in case you ever need a transfusion.”

“You can do that?”

“We can. And the second is we’d like to make sure there won’t be any adverse reactions to the longevity serum or the panacea.”

“And the third?”

“Check-up, Prince Consort.” Malo gives him a squeeze on the forearm. “We’ll run a full panel. Make sure there’s nothing affecting you adversely in the Pike’s environment.”

“Surely we’d know by now.” Sykora’s fingers are tight around Grant’s wrist. “Wouldn’t we?”

“I doubt there’s anything to fear, Majesty. His physiology is strikingly similar to ours.”

Grant sits back on the plastic-lined examination chair. “Why is that?”

“One for the philosophers, Prince Consort.” Malo slips a tube into the cuff. “Perhaps it’s just what works.”

Grant nods. “Like the crab planet.”

“If you say so, sire.” Malo flips a switch on a nearby console. The tube turns red. Grant’s brow furrows.

“Is that my blood?”

“Yes, sire.”

“I didn’t feel a thing.”

“That’s the phlebotomy tube’s job, sire.” Malo unstraps the cuff. The only evidence that anything happened beneath it is a tiny freckle of dried blood on Grant’s arm. “We’ll have a liquid longevity suite ready in a tenday or two. We’ll follow up on the panacea then. Start him on a low dose to ease him in. He’ll probably need some replacement injections after his next kilocycle.”

“That’s fine, Technician Malo.” Sykora’s recovered her regal bearing. “Thank you.”

“A Kilocycle?” Grant counts in his head. “That’s what, fifty or sixty years. I’ll be a senior citizen at that point.”

“No, you won’t.” Sykora lays her hand across his on the armrest. “You’re on a longevity program now, remember?”

Grant glances at Malo. “How long are we talking, here?”

“If your physiology adapts to the implants like your indicators are showing, sire, I’d wager you’ll have parity with the average Taiikari. Roughly five kilocycles, discounting any additional advances that emerge in the interim.”

“Five kilocycles…” Grant’s head gives a plaintive throb as he tries to add this all up. “Jesus, I’m gonna live to three hundred?””

Malo shrugs. “If you say so.”

Sykora’s head leans on his arm. “We have so much ahead of us, dove. A whole firmament to explore and a whole life to share. I just got you. Nothing’s allowed to happen to you. Okay?”

He rests his chin on her scalp. “Okay.”

“I took the liberty of giving your implants a quick scan as well, Majesty.” Malo taps the console as Grant and Sykora stand. “All looks well, but you might have cause to go to the Imperial core in a hectocycle or two to get your cranial detonator serviced. We don’t want any of those threads detaching.”

“Excuse me.” Grant pauses at the clinic exit. “Her cranial what?”

“ThankYouMaloThatWillBeAll.” Sykora practically drags Grant out the clinic door.

They return along the wide thoroughfare of the topmost hab level, which is a strange combination of cozy small town main street with sleek space station. Ivy spills from silvery holders, framing nebular views of the deep firmament. A fragrant-scented bakery abuts the spacesuit depot. There has to be some kind of gravitational weirdness happening, because the view of the firmament is across the ceiling and there’s a perceptible downward curve. The level must be ring-shaped; they’re walking along the wall.

““I’m getting all the doors raised. Every single one. We’ll go floor by floor.” Sykora cringes as she eyeballs the low overhang at the lift door. “It was a dereliction of me to delay it. My poor man.”

“Sykora.” Grant halts as she tries to pull him into the lift. “I need you to tell me what your cranial detonator is. Tell me that’s not what it sounds like.”

“It’s—” Sykora takes a deep breath. “You will not like this. But it is really very truly nothing. All right? Come into the lift, please. We’re going back to the command deck.”

Grant steps inside and feels a pulling flutter as they rise and gravity reorients itself. “Go on.”

“I have a little implant right here.” Sykora taps the back of her head. “The Empress, and the Empress alone, knows a phrase that, if she were to say it to me, would cause it to…” She bites her lip as she hunts for a way to say it.

“Detonate,” Grant says.

Sykora nods. “Quick and painless.”

“Your Empress put a fucking bomb in your head.”

“Our Empress.” Her eyes flare. “I didn’t mean to sound sharp. But she is. She’s your Empress, too, Grantyde. She was your Empress before you even knew what the Taiikari were. Next one, comrade, please.” This she says to a gobsmacked functionary who’s standing before the slid-open lift door.

“Yes Majesty of course Majesty I regret delaying you Majesty.” The poor woman genuflects so rigorously Grant wonders if she’s the next head trauma case.

The lift slides shut and resumes its rise. Sykora leans on the door close button.

“You were right.” Grant folds his arms. “I don’t like it.”

“I am in charge of a world-killer, Grantyde.” Sykora gestures out the lift window as they pass a deck full of towering piers, each containing racks of cannon. “Of a ship that cannot be destroyed. This needs to be in place, for every Void Princess. It would be far too dangerous to give the voidships to us with no safeguard.”

“There have to be better answers than this,” he says. “Better ways. Everything I learn about how you became a Void Princess—it feels so unjust.”

“Grantyde.” Sykora puts on a hardline voice. She isn’t turning her full commander high-beams on him, but he hears a thread of that steel. “I’m a royal bastard. My existence was a direct threat to the Imperial line. A grave insult and mistake from Marquess Inadama. Her reputation has only begun to recover from it. I shouldn’t be alive. I should have been disposed of. And instead I am one of the most powerful women on the frontier. And that is thanks to the Empress.” The lift coasts to a stop. Sykora keeps the button held and the doors stay shut while she finishes. “She legitimized me. She gave me a life I wasn’t supposed to have. Her having the power to take it back is correct.” She releases the button and the lift doors hiss open.

“I’m trying hard to temper my reaction to this.” Grant follows her out. “But you know how you felt when I bumped my head? I just found out there’s a goddamn bomb in yours.”

“I—” She sighs and halts in the carpeted hallway. “Yes. I understand. It’s not as though I’m thrilled about it. But it’s the trade I made for the Pike, and I’d willingly do it again. And nothing will ever come of it, because it’s for emergencies, for Void Princesses who go mad, who try to destroy Imperial worlds or overthrow the Empress. And I will never do that, because I am loyal, and she rewards loyalty with benevolence. Come down here, okay?”

She tugs at his shirt, and he takes a knee. She embraces him, and after a moment of hesitation, he holds her back, tight.

“Let’s both of us just take a moment and breathe, all right?” She strokes the downy hairs on the back of his neck. “You’re fine and I’m fine. No concussions, no explosions. We’re fine. And we are going to have a long, beautiful life together, you and me.”

Grant wants to argue more. Wants to say that a bump on the head is nowhere near same thing. Instead, he takes a deep breath with her and vents it out across her back.

“Retirement age is late sixties back on Maekyon, you know,” he says. “Guess that’s not in the cards.”

“You can declare yourself retired whenever you want, dove.” She scratches his hair. “My entire ambition for you was to have you lounge around and look pretty. Remember? Everything else has been above and beyond.”

“When I’m two hundred, maybe,” he says. “I’ll buy some motorcycles, get into fly-fishing. That sort of thing.”

He feels her giggle along her back. “Motorcycles are cool. What’s fly-fishing? Does it involve interceptors?”

He hums. “Maybe it will, how we do it.”

He returns to his feet and holds his wife’s hand, light but sure, as she leads him to the command deck. His hand strays to give a shallow scritch to the back of her head, where below her long, silky hair, her Empress’s unrealized wrath sleeps.