Ipqen thumbs a xhurr leaf under her tongue and tips her head back as she chews. She idly rubs the spiky silver hair of the drooling marine draped across her stomach.
So soft, her stomach. The layer of blubber and smooth skin over the thick muscle. Hyax wants to lie here for the rest of her life. How did she live for so long without this?
Ruaq lies next to her fiancée, humming melodically as she strokes the tuft of the Brigadier’s tail. Her voice slides perfectly from note to note like a tuned synthesizer. “It’s so silky,” she says. “Do you brush it?”
Hyax’s toes twitch. She does, but she must have screamed her entire night’s supply of yeses into Ipqen’s vast, soft chest, because all she can say in reply is “guh.”
“So will there be Maekyonites on the Pike?” Ipqen asks, picking up the conversation they’d been having as if she hadn’t stopped in the middle to strip the Brigadier down and mount her like a trophy.
“Well, besides the Maekyonite,” Ruaq adds. Ipqen does not react.
Hyax raises her face from the patch of drool it’s making on Ipqen’s abdominals. “Whuh. Umm. Maybe.” Across the liquefied sea of her vigorously dommed brain, the regulation she’s supposed to stick to drifts back to her. “We’re not supposed to have aliens onboard.”
Ruaq gestures to her crotch. “You just sat on an alien miqa, Guppy.”
Hyax laughs dryly and turns onto her back, laying belly-up in Ipqen’s lap like a kindek. “We called that an ovipositor in the briefing about you.”
Ruaq makes a face. “Gross-sounding word.”
“For a beautiful thing.” Hyax’s tail gives Ruaq’s miqa an affectionate touch that makes the keeper giggle and kick her away.
Ipqen holds a twist of xhurr out to Ruaq. “Tell the truth, I just call it a dick half the time.”
“That’s less gross.” Ruaq pops the leaf into her mouth. “But more sacrilegious.”
“I suspect our ridiculous exceptions will continue,” Hyax says.
Beneath Hyax’s calves, Ruaq’s tail thumps softly to the slow, sensual music. “To what?”
“To the alien rule,” Hyax says. “Your miqa I’ll call whatever you like.”
“Ohh. Right.” Ruaq gives Hyax a playful, xhurr-scented lick on her ear. Hyax has learned that Eqtorans do a lot of licking. “Good Guppy.”
“If Their Majesties can gallivant around breaking regulations to fill the Pike with trysts and lovechildren, I can have a Maekyonite marine or two, I hope,” Hyax says. “I have been desperate to command some.”
“Are they holding their own in the sims?” Ruaq asks.
“Oh, no.” Hyax allows Ruaq to take up one of her feet and play with her toes. Her new Eqtoran girlfriends are fascinated by them, with their lack of webbing. Like foot fingers. How bizarre. “No, we’re obliterating them. But that’s not because of any inherent Maekyonite weakness, no more than it was with the Eqtorans. With proper Pike training and gear, I daresay they’ll rival an Eqtoran Knife in field effect.”
“Rival.” Ipqen chuckles around her chewleaf. “Don’t give those knife bitches any mean ideas, now. They’ll eat those primates up.”
“You’ve seen how big they can get in their movies,” Hyax says. “We’re far from experiencing the apex of the Maekyonite warfighter, with no disrespect to Prince Grantyde.”
Her voice falters on the tyde as she remembers herself and Ipqen’s languid smile disappears. The days she spends in the mek-Taqas’ cabin, lounging in their full-blast air conditioning and wrapped in warm Eqtoran, have made her more relaxed than she can ever remember being. Too relaxed, sometimes. She forgot one of the only rules of this place—an unwritten one, in fairness.
“Oh, come on, Qen.” Ruaq rolls her eyes. “You can’t—”
“It’s my fault,” Hyax says.
“No it’s not.” Ruaq’s arm tightens around Hyax’s waist. “You can’t get huffy every time someone says his name, babe.”
“Not huffy,” Ipqen huffs, and crawls out from beneath her two smaller lovers. “It’s his boat. Far be it for me to rock it.”
Hyax sits the rest of the way up. “If you’re about to say anything untoward about their Majesties I really have to go.”
“I’m not,” Ipqen says. “I just said I wasn’t. He can do whatever the fuck he wants. Eqt knows he already does.”
“I don’t understand,” Hyax says.
Ipqen scratches her big round butt as she bends down and opens the fridge. “I know you don’t.”
The dismissal in Ipqen’s voice stills Hyax, but only briefly. “What happened?” she demands.
Ipqen slaps the fridge shut. “Nothing.”
“Qen,” Ruaq warns.
Ipqen wheels around to Ruaq. “Can we drop it, please?”
“You were one of Grantyde’s most trusted friends,” Hyax says. “He loves you, Ipqen. I know he does.”
“What I am asking is that you drop it, Gup,” Ipqen says. “I don’t want to think about him in here. Just give that in here, and I’ll behave everywhere else.”
“He’s my sovereign, Ipqen. I—I mean, I can try, but—”
“Qen,” Ruaq says, gently. “We’re not being fair.”
Ipqen rolls her eyes and slides a heavy wooden chair from the table in the middle of the room. It bumps the stack of books they’ve piled beneath each table leg to give Ipqen more clearance. “No,” she says. “No, it’s fine. Just another Taiikari-ism to get used to.”
The more Ipqen says fine the less Hyax believes it. “I just want to understand what’s changed.”
“What changed is he fucking shot me and he lied about why,” Ipqen says. “If he needed to keep the foam churning over the secret, fine. But he jerked me around. And he fucking shot me. To keep up a story.”
He didn’t. Hyax knows he didn’t, and it makes her want to let out a primal scream that she can’t tell why.
“That’s what the Empire has to do, whatever.” Ipqen pops her beer cap with her tooth. “Hurt people to keep their story in line. But fuck me, ‘cause I thought Grantyde was different. I thought he’d earned my trust and wasn’t just telling me to. Fuck it, whatever. Imps will be imps.”
Ipqen’s loyalty is cracking. She’s being truant. Hyax can’t watch this. Not when she’s finally found her people.
“He was compelled.”
“What do you mean?” Ipqen squints over her beer’s opening. “He said he was immune.”
“I—well, he—uh.” Why did you say that, why did you say that, why did you say that. “Forget it.”
She feels the span of her scars. That’s how she knows she’s blushing. Ipqen squints at Hyax and the heat in her face rises higher. “Hyax, what’s going on?”
“I can’t tell you,” Hyax says, and she really means for that to be that, but then something swings shut on Ipqen’s face and she hastily adds, “It’s not something I am permitted to share. Not even—Vora hasn’t even shared it with her husband, for God’s sake.”
Now Ruaq is sitting all the way up, the imported furs drawn across her nakedness. “Vora knows?”
“Stop. No. Yes.” Hyax rakes her fingers through her silvery hair. “Please understand, I’m—”
“I understand,” Ipqen says.
“Then why are you looking at me like that?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Hyax wants to stomp her foot. Why has this ridiculous infatuation turned her into such a baby? “If you’re freezing me out because of this—I would like you to tell me. That is all. I deserve the opportunity to repair it.”
“Repair it.” Ipqen shakes her sleek head. “How, if you’re not gonna tell me the truth?”
“I, uh.” Hyax falters. “I was thinking perhaps a lavish gift of some kind.”
“Like another cake with my name on it?”
Ruaq’s fringe raises in protest. “The last one had my name on it.”
“I’m not trying to—I hate to be this kind of asshole. It’s just…” Ipqen sits heavily at the kitchen table, legs unabashedly spread despite remaining in the buff. “Hyax of the Black Pike, you are not talking to a Taiikari fuckin’ marine right now, girl. You are talking to an Eqtoran science officer. I can’t wire myself to just carry on serving a dude who shot me when the reason I knew is gone.” Her broad finger taps her temple. “And I can’t forget what you said. You already said it. I can be as loyal as anyone else on this ship, but not without trust.”
Hyax runs her hands down her face. Stupid, stupid woman. You’ve fucked it again. With such care you brought these women into your life and now they’re about to disappear from it again. Ipqen saved this ship. Or she thought she did. Now you’ve planted this doubt in her mind, this—disloyalty. And if you let it stay there and fester you’ll doom her. You’ll doom both of them. They could have been loyal. They should have been loyal. You utter moron.
“I can’t,” she whispers.
“I get it.” Ipqen folds her hands into her lap. “But I can’t, either.”
She takes a deep breath. Whatever she’s about to say will break something delicate and beautiful, and Hyax breaks first.
“There’s a weapon,” she says.
“What?”
“There’s a—”
She hiccups. She tastes her dinner. She forces it back down. “Security override,” she says, aloud. “By my command. Absolution Fifteen Axiom Green.”
Something small and unobtrusive lets out a small, unobtrusive chirp as it powers off. Ipqen’s eyes dart to the corner of the cabin. The Eqtorans know as well as any that they’re monitored; but the Taiikari don’t search for the bug so obviously.
“What I am about to tell you,” Hyax says, “cannot be repeated to anybody.”
“Never,” Ipqen says.
“Not until it’s common knowledge,” Hyax says. “If it is discovered that I divulged this to you, we will, all three of us, be killed. Her Majesty will be unable to save us. Swear to me you will keep this.”
“I swear.” Ipqen raises her open palm perpendicular to her chest. “On the fathomless depths of Apqar’s sunken harpoon, I swear it.”
Ruaq drags her blanket with her and perches on Ipqen’s knee. “We both do.”
“I am a stupid hornchoked fool.” Hyax clambers out of bed and halfway into her uniform. “The base little thing you’ve turned me into. The me of a decacycle ago would execute me on the spot.”
“The you of a decacycle ago was really sad almost always,” Ruaq says.
“There is a tool,” Hyax says. “A weapon, of a sorts. It’s called Compound Seventy. It’s an injection that permits instantaneous compulsion of anyone. Anyone—woman, keeper, Maekyonite. His Majesty was attacked and under its thrall when he hurt you, Ipqen.”
“Eqt’s tits,” Ipqen murmurs.
“Nobody knows about this,” Hyax says. “Nobody. Only the Royal Family and their most trusted, dedicated servants.”
Really? And that’s what you are? Traitor?
Ruaq’s fringe colors at the edges as she speaks. She’s whispered in Hyax’s ear some nights how she’s wished for it, how badly she longs to feel what it’s like to be loved the way the Taiikari love. “You could compel me?”
Ipqen does not share Ruaq’s wonder. “I thought we were safe.”
“You are safe. I will keep you safe. I’ll—”
And how will you do that, Hyax, you imbecile? You’ve signed and sealed their deaths. You are no protector. What is wrong with you? You are no servant. You are a traitor. A rank traitor. Traitor. Traitor—
Another hiccup. She rises shakily to her feet.
Ipqen reaches for her. “Guppy, where are you—”
Hyax staggers into the bathroom, slams the door, hauls the toilet’s seat upright, and loses her dinner into the sterile water.
Ruaq’s high, agitated voice: “Eqt’s tits.”
A wave of nausea hits Hyax; she crumples to the floor. The tile is so cold and unyielding against her knees.
Why did she do that? How could she have gone so destructively far from the service she is meant to owe? What mental illness has taken hold of her and twisted the loyalty from her hand like a disarmed pistol?
“Hyax.” The door muffles Ruaq’s anxious voice. “Baby. Are you okay?”
Hyax croaks a weak affirmative “uh huh,” and stands up and crosses to the sink. She washes her face and swishes water in her mouth. She catches herself in the mirror. The scars that slash across her face. The stark badges of service. She earned these. These meant something to her. What do they mean now?
She’s like Shoskia. Or Paxea. Or the Penitent. She’s bent from her proper shape. There is no slotting her back into the firmament. No more comfort. The Empress would despise her for this. Despise her forever.
She gags again and barely fights it down. She creaks the door open into the focus of two sets of deeply concerned amber eyes.
Ipqen’s on a knee. “Guppy—”
Hyax staggers from her beseeching palm. “Don’t touch me. Don’t. Don’t. I—”
She rakes her fingers through her hair.
“I’m—” Ipqen stands up and backs away. “I’m so fucking sorry, Hyax. I shouldn’t have pushed you. I’m a stupid bitch. Are you okay?”
“I’ve lost it,” Hyax mumbles. “I don’t understand. I am loyal.”
“I know you are,” Ipqen says. "We'll shut the fuck up forever, I promise we will. I—"
“No. You don’t—a Taiikari marine does not betray her Empress. Not like this. I’m malfunctioning. I, I, I don’t understand why I did that.”
“Because we pressured you.”
“No,” Hyax says. “No, that can’t be it. I love you, I know I do, but you can’t have replaced the Empress. You can’t have. The hierarchy is all wrong. I—”
She reaches for the tether in her brain, the one to Zithra XIX, and when she tugs, it’s still tight. But it’s attached to—
Gods of the fucking Firmament. She realizes what’s happened.
What Sykora wants is for her to be in love. And happy. What Sykora prizes is not secrecy but trust. This insanity that has gripped her—it isn’t disloyalty. She sits heavily on the floor. She didn’t even notice until it was too late.
Kora’s stolen her.
A look of such thorough shock is on Ipqen’s face it’s as if she’s been shot all over again. “What did you just say?”
Hyax glances her way as she fastens her belt. “It can’t be that you’ve replaced the Empress. You’re not in the right spot in the hierarchy. It’s a Taiikari mental, uh—mental structural thing. I have to go, I—”
“Not that,” Ruaq says, softly.
Oh, right. Hyax’s mind is so on fire that this red-hot realization barely registers “I love you, I think.” She straps her boots on and stumbles for the door. “I—”
I’ll be back, she wants to say. But she doesn’t know that. If she tells them, they might try to stop her. “I need a medtech.”
Before either of them can speak she’s out of the cabin. Its polar climate is banished by the rolling warmth of the hab level.
She strides toward the lift with such singleminded urgency she nearly forgets to return a salute to a passing Sergeant. She stomps into the lift and presses her tail against the sensor. The top row of buttons lights up; she presses Royal Cabin and swats the turbo function.
The gravity falls away. Hyax’s sweat crystallizes into scintillating gems around her face. She lets her feet depart the ground, and floats in the void for the few seconds of silence she has remaining.
“You are loyal,” she whispers. “You are a loyal soldier. You are loyal to your Princess.”
The lift doors open. Hyax’s boots tap the floor again. She departs the lift, salutes the marines on guard outside its door, and strides down the carpeted hallway toward Sykora’s suite, to turn herself in.