Princess of the Void ch 6.30 - Short and Lonely Years (Patreon)

“I use it as a liquor cabinet,” Malus says.

“It’s your document storage.” Hyax watches him pour a finger of brandy and replace the crystal bottle in his office’s stash locker; it slides back beneath its seamless floor hatch. “It’s fireproof.”

“If my office is firebombed, there are bigger problems than documentation loss. And this Ytarkaz reserve deserves to be passed down to my next-of-kin.” He holds up a glass. “Pour you one?”

“Thank you, no,” Hyax says. It’s technically after her hours, but she wants to remain entirely alert as long as she’s on the Glory Banner. Its black appointments disconcert her. They’re like shadows. She wishes they were conducting this interrogation on the Pike, but the chance exists however slim that the venue is somehow part of a Penitent-hatched plot, and the Banner has never been interfered with by their masked adversary.

“Brigadiers.” The intercom on Malus’s onyx-slab desk lights up in amber. “The shuttle has arrived. Sweep of the captive revealed subdermal Taiikari technology; it’s been removed.”

”Well spotted, marine.” Malus throws back the sliver of brandy he poured, stands, and stretches the webbing of his bodyglove’s upper arms. “Inbound now.” He shuts the intercom off and plucks his horned, amber-visored helmet from beside it. “I’ll give her the mean mug for you.”

“From beneath a helmet?”

“They can hear it in your voice, I find.” He clicks it into place. “Anyway it’s as fierce a visage as any. Did you read the psych report that they aren’t as afraid of people they find attractive?”

“I didn’t, but it explains a thing or two about the Prince Margrave.” Hyax stands. “I suppose I’m off as well. Where’s your medicine cabinet?”

“False panel behind the handgun rack,” Malus says. “You use it, then?”

“When we must.” Hyax’s eyes narrow. “Do you not?”

“Not nearly as often as I think we should,” he says. Hyax’s muted surprise reflects back to her in his inexpressive faceplate. “Her Majesty Narika detests it.”

“And you don’t?”

“Why should I?” he says. “I was born with mine. It’s in my veins. As far as I’m concerned it’s nothing but an evening of the field. Everyone should know how it feels.”

“Fair enough.”

“Have you done it?”

“If I’m submitting to someone I prefer it to be one of my girlfriends, in a chokehold,” Hyax says. “I’m an old-fashioned bitch that way. Though if either of them had the compulsion I’d consider it.”

“You’re with the Eqtorans, then?”

“Mmhmm.”

“How’d you get them onboard?”

“The same way I imagine Narika got herself a man as a Brigadier,” Hyax says. “We annoyed the wall down.”

A radio-amplified chuckle. “Here we are trying to out-progressive each other.”

“Male Brigadier might win.”

“Boy power.” Malus pumps his fist. “You cloaking your way there?”

“I’d prefer to.”

“Fine. Just make sure you use a mission smock. Got one in the uniform closet.”

“You’ve got one sized for a woman?”

He shrugs. “You never know.”

Hyax refrains from suggesting that a man who stows liquor in his document stash might also sneak his invisible wife into the office for some tactical spear concealment. For his relative looseness, Brigadier Malus seems competent enough. And Hyax can’t imagine how the Banner crew feels about the horny old kindek the Pike calls a chief engineer.

The gold-laced sliding door hisses shut after Malus and Hyax is alone in the Glory Banner Brigadier’s office. How often has she fantasized about counterintelligence opportunities this juicy, and her hands are tied by this cold peace.

She hits the release on her uniform and lets it fall away from her. She finds the mission smock, with its day-glo yellow coloration and its front-slung components pocket, and shuts the closet, and sees herself in naked, powder-blue vulnerability. The mission needs her invisible, she knows, and Gottlieb’s on the move. But she takes a slow moment by herself, and watches with perverse intrigue as a rosy blush blooms on her face.

She’s not used to lingering like this in her own nudity. It’s new, seeing this scarred, lean body as an object of someone’s desire. She rests a hand on her breast and remembers the first time Ipqen saw it, the holy fuck the Eqtoran had whispered, almost angrily, as if in reproach at the firmament for birthing her on a different planet from Hyax’s nakedness, at the spatial conspiracy that had tried and failed to keep this moment from them.

She does a quarter turn and scoffs in peevish disbelief. There’s a goddamn bite mark on her ass. And another bigger one on her shoulder.

“Ridiculous,” she murmurs, getting a better look at her gently mauled derrière. These damnable shark women don’t know how to behave.

She meets her reflection’s eyes and jolts to realize she’s been involuntarily smiling.

She plasters that dependable Brigadier frown back onto her scar-wrought mug. She fades from view, her platinum pixie cut’s feathery edge the last snatch of visibility after she’s all-the-way vanished.

A desk drawer opens and a mission smock in eye-agitating Pike scarlet unfolds itself. An unmarked plastic canister slides into its front pocket. The Brigadier’s crossed-axe glyph blazoned on its front.

Through the hallways of the Banner she goes, feet tap-tapping on the metal paths of the barrack wing, then the polished obsidian of the pedestrian thoroughfare, then the sable carpet of the lift. The Glory Banner crew are as casually curious and full of chatter as the Pike’s, at least when their rival crew isn’t watching. That’s a comfort to Hyax, who had always harbored a dark suspicion that, between the sisters, Sykora’s was the grabass ship.

In fact, by her estimation the Pike does a far better job of making its internment area look frightening—more glass panels out to the forbidding void to remind prisoners just how close they are to infinite vacuum. Chalk that up to Narika’s bleeding heart, maybe.

The door to the interrogation room is ajar. How’s that for operational security? Hyax starts for an entrance with a reprimand on her lips, reconsiders, and quietly removes her smock. She slides through the gap in the doorway to behold a sparse setup—a heavy slab desk, two heavy chairs behind it, and an insubstantial Maekoynite-sized seat facing them. Three perches and only one is being used. Sykora sits in her husband’s lap, giggling and playfighting as she tries to reclaim the locks of her hair that Grantyde is braiding. “Grant, stop. I can’t intimidate this harridan with a shitty braid in.”

“What about an excellent braid in?”

“If you see someone who can do me one, point them my way.”

“Hey. I’m so much better than I used to be, though. I need to learn how to be a girl dad.”

“Agh. Don’t pull.”

“Not even a little?”

Hyax clears her throat. Sykora halfway falls out of her husband’s lap. “Hellfire.” She lowers the pistol her tail snapped out of its holster. “Announce yourself sooner, Brigadier, for God’s sake. I could’ve killed you.”

Hyax steps lightly to the side. “You’d’ve missed.”

It’s not true—Sykora’s aim is as flawless as ever, the barrel ready to stamp a hole between Hyax’s eyes—but the Brigadier has taken it upon herself to convince the Princess of the Pike to practice the combat drills she regularly puts aside in favor of doting on her family. No need to give the girl an inflated head.

“They’re bringing her in, Majesties,” Hyax says. “Malus’s people found a liquidation bug on her and removed it. They are scanning her for any nasty surprises the Penitent left for us. Just make sure you’re on your guard for anything we don’t know about.”

Sykora tosses her hair out of His Majesty’s unfortunate attempt at a braid, and carefully replaces the diadem that was knocked askew. “Thank you, Brigadier. One presumes that first implant was the Penitent’s cheeky little how do you do. Let’s make sure there’s not another.”

”Yes, Majesty. Malus seems competent enough, though he was drinking before he departed.”

Sykora raises a brow. “Drinking like how Waian used to or like how Waian does now?”

“Modern Waian.”

“That’s all right, then. And I look suitably merciless?”

“Deadly, Majesty,” Hyax says.

“Truly tyrannical,” Grantyde agrees.

“Lovely, thank you.” Sykora cinches her belt back on; Hyax had not realized it was undone. “I don’t like the shade of black on this ship. It clashes with our black. I feel vaguely ridiculous.”

Grantyde squints. “Hmm.”

“You don’t see it?”

“I’m trying to.”

“It’s onyx black,” Sykora says. “We’re jet black.”

“I am genuinely taking your word for it.”

”And when it’s not metallic, her gold is ugly.”

“Okay that’s true,” Grantyde says. “Looks like mustard.”

Hyax remembers she’s invisible and allows herself to smirk. “I will await your cue, then, Majesty?”

“Yes, Hyax, thank you.” Sykora pulls her service weapon out again and offers its handle to the thin air near Hyax. Its diode flashes set-up green. “Key my gun, just in case you need to use it, won’t you.”

“I won’t,” Hyax says, but does so anyway. The gun chirps and registers her as a temporary backup.

“Aerosolized c70,” Sykora says. “That’s my guess as to the horrendous bullshit the Penitent’s waiting to spring on us. If Helen breaks wind, consider me compromised and shoot her.”

“I will interpret your orders with prudence, Majesty.” Hyax slips from the room, retrieves her own compound 70 (to be prescribed with a needle, not flatulence) and folds the door shut behind her with a flick of her tail. She finds an unobtrusive corner and waits for the incoming knock.

There it is. The heavy thunk thunk of a HAK gautlet. “Enter,” Sykora calls, game face firmly on. Grantyde affixes his, which has become genuinely icy. Much better than it used to be. Back when he was gabbing about freedom at Hyax he looked like he was trying to pass a kidney stone.

The interrogation room door opens. Helen Gottlieb stands flanked by a pair of Black Pike marines. “Such well-armed guards you have,” she says. “I’m sure a human would look quite imposing in one of these suits.”

“Hello, Mr. Hyde.” Helen smiles, her cats-eye glasses catching the vertical strips of halogen light. “I know it’s a bit late in your employment for your first performance review, but I’m so glad we’ve finally found the time. Don’t worry. It’s all positive news.”

“In,” Ajax says, roughly, and prods Helen through the door with the stock of his rifle. They slam it behind her, and Helen is—to her knowledge—alone with the Prince and Princess. She takes a seat before them, lounging on her injection-molded plastic chair like it’s an executive model.

Grantyde’s eyes are dull with contempt. “Hello, Ms. Gottlieb.”

“May I take a guess before we begin?” Helen offers. “You’ve got a jungle gym and a glass cell for me.”

“We’d like to understand why you’re here, first,” Grantyde says. “Why you voluntarily surrendered yourself to us.”

“If I hadn’t, would you have simply forgotten me?” Helen rests a forefinger on her chin. “Simply let bygones be bygones?”

“I kept myself alive in that cell imagining the things that I would do to you. But do you know?” Sykora tilts her head. “I quite forgot about you, Helen Gottlieb. I had moved on to far more urgent adversaries. Your message surprised me, because it reminded me you existed. I found it quaint. And now you sit before me, smirking, imagining yourself prepared to perform some grand sacrifice.”

Her English, to Hyax’s untrained ears, has come in great leaps and bounds. The Brigadier is still far from comfortable with the language, even with an hour of immersion sims a day. It’s like a faulty motor starting, in her estimation, or a bucking automatic. Too choppy.

“But you have nothing to offer,” Sykora continues. “Nothing to sacrifice beyond one feeble life. You are nothing.”

That’s the kind of chill Hyax hasn’t heard since Sykora became a mother. Hones her horns to hear it.

“You will not be punished by the Taiikari Empire,” Sykora says. ”Because you will not be acknowledged by the Taiikari Empire. I condemn the Helen Gottlieb that could have been a Taiikari citizen to its metaphorical execution. Of all the humans in existence, you will be the only one to whom the door to the firmament is closed. We will offer humanity’s lowest criminals the chance to subject themselves to Imperial judgment, and serve their sentences in Imperial custody. Not you, Helen. Not even that. None of our technologies will be available to you. No door of ours will open to you. Your planet will be as transparent a cell from which to watch your species rise into the stars as my glass enclosure ever was. For however many short and lonely years you have left.”

“Lonely, hmm? I see you haven’t made the acquaintance of Felis Catus yet.” Helen chuckles at her own joke. “The appeal of your Empire is not lost on me. But if you’re waiting for me to beg to be let in like a sad little pet, you wait in vain. Let me wither. Fine. This mandate and what becomes of it is my legacy.”

“You won’t have a legacy, Helen Gottlieb,” Sykora says. “Before long, they won’t even know your name.”

“Your husband didn’t either, when I hired him.” Helen acts interested in the threads that protrude from her tweed skirt. “Not everyone needs something named after them and their sigil carved on the moon. I don’t need public praise. I never have.” She finally deigns to look them in the eyes, the Prince and Princess of the Black Pike. “Everything you are, you owe to me.”

“We owe you nothing but contempt,” Grant says.

“I did what I did,” Helen says. “Because I knew that when they came, a human sitting in the chair you’re sitting in would be the only faint hope we had. And here you are. And it’s a very nice chair. But you know, I do believe you’re wrong that I have nothing to offer.”

She leans forward. Her nails drum the chair beside her.

“I believe, in fact, that I have information you very much desire,” she says. “Information that I am told you attempted to glean from the United Nations, and they stonewalled you.”

“I believe that, too,” Grantyde says. “But that’s about the only thing you’ve told me that I do believe. I do not trust you, Helen Gottlieb. And I am not interested in negotiation with a woman who did what you did to my wife.”

Helen rolls her eyes. “Then what’s the point of this meeting? Did you just bring me here to gloat and send me home again? Surely you’re beyond the simian assumption that torture will be any use.”

“You weren’t.” Sykora’s steely level tips off-kilter for a moment to reveal the corked-up rage beneath.

“We weren’t, no,” Helen says. “We’re a backwater with a heavy scoop of brutal idiots running our governments, and you rule the firmament. If it would bring you some base satisfaction, torture away, I suppose. It’ll change the tenor of my answers, but not the content.”

“We didn’t bring you here to torture you, Helen,” Grant says. “Or to gloat.”

“Why did you bring me here, then?”

“We brought you here,” Sykora says, “for this.”

That’s Hyax’s cue.

She slices out of invisibility directly behind Helen Gottlieb, Compound 70 applicator clutched in her fist like a dagger.