Princess of the Void-2.4. Comet Queen

“I had a membrane on my interceptor and I blew up a hundred times.”

“Hundred, eh?” She pats him on the back. “Not a bad clearance time, Maekyonite. Finally flying and fucking. We’ll make a firmament bravo of you yet. But that was just an interceptor you flew. Tiny envelope. The larger the membrane, the stronger the membrane. Wrap one around a corvette or a fighter, you’ve got adequate protection against ballistics and energy projectors, but certainly nothing that could stop a railgun. Wrap a mile-long ZKZ in one, and you are impenetrable.”

“How does that work?”

“Couldn’t tell you. Gravitational whatsit. The membrane’s juiced by the same generator that powers our artificial gravity.”

“Is that why we’ve shut it off? To free up power?”

“Correct. It gives that much more strength to the membrane—not that one our size needs it, but it’s what the regs say to do, and it’s what we’re all used to.” Hyax releases her boots and reattaches them to the balustrade, looking up at him from the wall. “And it saves using the stairs.”

“So there’s no way?”

“There are ways. If you can force one into a stratosphere, it’ll destroy itself. A voidship is built, maintained, and stays forever within the void. A sufficiently massive gravity well, with plenty of particulates to overload the sectional shielding, rips it apart. So if that aforementioned small moon came from that way—” she points, up for her and behind for him ”—it could transfer enough kinetic energy into us to knock us into Ramex. And we’d die. Or the surface of Ramex could launch an orbital dragnet and reel us in, if it had one, which it doesn’t.”

“They catch a ship in a fucking net?”

“A net the size of a city, yes.”

“Has that ever happened?”

“No. It’s been tested and proven viable on dummy vessels but not on a real voidship. How could it? The Empire makes the ships and the nets. And we have enough firepower to render a planet uninhabitable before it pulls us all the way in.”

He remembers Sykora’s words on the night she abducted him. I permitted your world’s backwater biosphere to remain intact, rather than cracking its crust. He’d thought, then, she was trying to scare him. She wasn’t. He’s on a Death Star full of tiny blue space-tyrants.

“No, there’s one real way to destroy a ZKZ,” Hyax continues. “The only one that’s ever worked. In the centuries since the membrane was discovered and implemented, it’s happened twice, and both times it was internal sabotage. The Tarum Factor was destroyed by a bomb planted on its hab deck that split it in two. The Abyss Blossom’s membrane was tampered with and deactivated, and an interceptor destroyed it.”

“One little interceptor?”

“The void’s an evil, murderous place,” Hyax says. “Velocity and vacuum. Once cohesion breaks, that’s all it takes. The voidship is the Empire in miniature. The genuine threats are all inside it.”

“Are you trying to scare the Prince Consort?” Vora drifts over, her long sleeves fanning out like a fish’s fins.

“He was already scared,” Hyax says. “I simply reoriented it toward the proper vectors.”

“I’m all right, Majordomo Vora. Thank you.” Grant self-consciously smooths down his floating tunic. “It’s a comfort, I suppose, to know how ineffectual those guns are. They looked terrifying.”

“Oh, I know.” Vora squints out at the pirate ships. “The first time I stood under fire, I nearly peed. You get used to it quickly.”

Hyax crosses her arms. “Just don’t let it make you feel invulnerable. Remember what I said, Prince Consort. Vigilance.”

Vora catches Grant’s attention and gives him a reassuring little roll of her eyes. She inches closer to him and drops her voice. “I wanted to say thank you, Prince Consort. For giving your marriage with Sykora a, uh. Chance.”

“Sykora’s been keeping you abreast, huh?”

Vora titters and nods. “Oh, but it’s very sweet, though, Prince Consort.”

Grant smiles. He watches the Princess giving out orders at a smooth, confident clip.

“She wasn’t doing well when she returned,” Vora says. “She had her bravado. And she was trying to act as though nothing had changed. But she was… brittle.” She watches the Princess with him. “And now my friend is all the way back. And I’d missed her very much. So. Thank you, Prince Consort.”

“You’re very welcome, majordomo.”

“They’re sweeping.” The call comes from the bridge with seconds to spare. Grant looks to the main screen in time to see the corvettes fuzz over with strange, bismuth geometries, and disappear.

A rapid-fire chatter vibrates the deck. A beehive swarm of drones spits from the Pike and tear their own holes in the dimension as they sweep after the departing corvettes.

“Probe view on the main screen.” Sykora gracefully flips back onto the command deck. “Let’s have a look at these bold corpses.”

Their view fills with the glow of the sweep. Dozens of perspectives stitch themselves together into a panoramic view. A bright chirp sounds as the corvettes are reacquired and once again magnified. Their scrapyard sails flutter in the dimensional pull.

“The distance is increasing.” Sykora chews her lip. “This is uncommon speed. Is that a double-burn I’m seeing, Helm? From a noncitizen ship?”

“Yes, Majesty.”

Sykora’s riveted to the screen. “Match them.”

Grant lightly winds his hand through Sykora’s tail. “What’s wrong?”

“A non-Imperial corvette should not have this quantity of exo aboard.” Sykora looks over the balustrade. “Waian. Triple-burn if we’re about to lose them.”

“The drones are almost dry, Majesty.” Waian looks like she can barely believe what she’s saying. “They’re gonna outrange us.”

“Cut bait, Majesty.” Hyax edges close to her Princess. “We can’t risk pursuit with the Pike. Who knows where they intend to reposition us?”

Sykora sighs. “Well advised, Brigadier. Let’s get gravity back on in here. The show’s over and my poor husband’s guitar picks are floating away.”

“Oh—shoot.” Grant palms the pick that’s drifting past his ear.

“After-action reports, everyone.” Sykora calls over the rustle of dozens of bodies and their accoutrements returning to gravity’s embrace. The drone views are blinking out one-by-one as they run out of exo and drop from the sweep. “Ensign Akama, I’d like the monitor team to package what just happened by 1100 for command group review.”

The Monitor Ensign, a rangy woman (for a Taiikari) salutes and bows. “Shall I send it through to the Core liaison, Majesty?”

Sykora’s tail swishes across the floor. “No,” she says, carefully. “No, I don’t think so. Let’s let this one percolate a while. Keep the sitrep open. Thank you, everyone. Stand easy.”

“Majesty.” A strident voice from the bridge. “A datacrypted message just came through, with a key. The corvettes left it on a slow beam before the jump.”

Sykora’s eyes flare as she gazes down into the dark. “Have we scanned it, Specialist?”

“Aye, Majesty. It’s clean. The key decrypts.”

“Send it to my console.”

Sykora stalks to her throne; Grant follows. A holographic projector has lit up on the plush armrest. It casts glyphs in sabsum-yellow across the still air:

you are all my subjects now

Sykora scoffs. She turns on her heel and strides toward the console at the edge of the command deck, thrusting the lever upward to begin its rise. Her chief officers fall in with her. Grant tarries a few feet away while Sykora mutters with Vora in a walking huddle past Waian’s chaotic multiscreen display. He gently intercepts her once the majordomo’s path diverges. “You okay?”

“I think so. Just… perturbed. We’ve a mystery in front of us, Grantyde. Our official records of the Comet Queen puts her total exo stock at a third of what one of those corvettes surely just burned through in front of us. Her clan has gotten a preposterous amount of exo, very quickly, far beyond what the loss reports I’ve seen suggest they could have obtained.” She returns a final salute from the bridge crew as they raise out of their vision. “The exo supply is one of the Empire’s most essential controls. Horrifically expensive and difficult to obtain for any but the Empress’s servants. It’s the key to our control over the firmament. Nobody ought to outrange our drones. Certainly not those scrapyard ticks.”

“Do you think—” He bends down. He’s getting good at walking bent. “Do you think this has anything to do with the Trimond assassinations?”

Sykora scratches her husband’s scruff in pensive concentration. “It’s my strong suspicion, Prince Consort, that it very much fucking does.”