”Save Earth from the Empire?” Grantyde lets out a confused laugh. “So what, we cancel the invasion?” His eyes narrow at the defiant fold of Sykora’s arms, then widen. “We—Batty, are you serious?”
Sykora nods.
“We can’t,” he says.
“There’s precedent.”
“No, I mean—it—they’ll fucking kill us.” He seems to catch up with what she’s saying. “There’s precedent?”
“The Mandate,” Sykora says.
Her pause for effect is ineffectual on her husband, who tilts his head in confusion. Of course he would—when would he have heard of the Mandate systems? This guilty chapter in the Taiikari history books is rarely flipped to.
“Before we’d developed the ZKZs, when Taiikari conquest wasn’t a simple game of waiting and warheads, the most dangerous annexations cost millions of warriors,” she explains. “There were territories we judged too dangerous to conquer. When the Empire concluded that a war for annexation would unacceptably deadly for its citizens. These aliens were permitted stewardship over their own local systems, though any who meant to travel beyond their own star had to become Imperial citizens first.”
“So a truce, basically?”
“A treaty,” she says. “They remained sovereign over themselves and left the firmament to us. Until they were ready. But it was their call.”
“What happened to them when the ZKZs came along?”
“By then, the Mandate systems had been almost entirely absorbed,” Sykora says. “There’s only so long that a world can refuse the advances the Empire offers. But they’d been given a choice.”
“And now that’s all gone away.”
“Of course it has. Resistance to the Empire is no longer a question. There hasn’t been a single Mandate issued in kilos and kilos. How could there be, when no world can resist us? And even when it was an option, it was saved for planets which had a hope of damaging us. Doing it to Maekyon, to a world that’s barely discovered the sweep, would be far beyond any Mandate in Taiikari history.”
“So it’s unthinkable.”
“It is,” Sykora says. “But I’m thinking it.”
She hops onto the table and stands defiantly within the wireframe of Maekyon.
“If the Empress insists that the Maekyonites are already her subjects, then they are as under her protection as anyone,” she says. “We must judge their losses with the same scrutiny we’d use to judge the loss of Taiikari lives. And by this metric I judge the contest too destructive. And I must offer the Mandate to Maekyon.”
He gawks. He’s reacting to this heresy with such sense. Like a Taiikari would. “How?”
“I’m a Princess Margrave,” she insists. “We do it by me doing it, and damn the consequences.”
“We can’t just damn the consequences. They’ll—”
“They’ll circle me and snap at me,” she says. “They’ll rip me apart, if they can, I’m sure. The Mandates were the nearest the Empire ever came to surrender. Offering one to Maekyon? They’d think me mad. And God help me, I may be. I must be. But I don’t care. I survived for a decacycle of deprivation at the hands of your species and returned and claimed my throne again. I am the first Princess Margrave of the void sectors. The first wife to a free husband, the first mother to children of Maekyonite and Taiikari blood. I am Sykora of the Black Pike. I am not afraid of them.”
“The Peerage isn’t what scares me. The Empress.”
“The Empress?” She laughs, to hide the anxiety. “The Empress likes me.”
“She’s testing you. All the time, she’s testing. It’s the game, isn’t it? The one that determines the successor. If you don’t—if this doesn’t happen, if we do this, you’re out, surely. I think you’re out of the running.”
“So what?” she demands, and when he can furnish no response but an agog stare she presses on: “So what if I’m not Empress? So what if I lose this silly little competition?”
“Sykora.” Grantyde stands to get face-to-face with her. He’s wearing his anticomps, still. He hasn’t stopped wearing them, even after the reveal. She doesn’t understand why. She loves his eyes. “What happens once she dies? This Empire. It’s… if whoever is next isn’t like her, doesn’t think like she does, like you do, it’s a fucking nightmare. A nightmare within our lifetimes. That our children endure for centuries.”
“Grantyde, I haven’t told this to you because—” She steels herself to banish that juvenile teeter from her voice. She is a Princess Margrave. “Because I feared that when I did it would break your heart. You have such faith in me. Such ambition. But I am incapable of being Empress. I cannot do it.”
“You’re not incapable,” he says. “You’re the greatest Princess I know. You’d be incredible. There’s so many things we thought we couldn’t do, and we’ve done them.”
“We have. And it’s been so wonderful. I’ve had so many dreams for myself that I’ve put aside into this unlit place of the unthinkable, and you’ve found them and brought into the light. But this has never been one of them. Never ever.” Her compressing insides allow her a tight laugh. “My lovely man. Have you ever once heard me desire it? I don’t want to be the Empress. I’ve never wanted to be Empress.”
“If it’s a question of Taiikari loyalty—”
“It is,” she says. “But not in the way you mean, I don’t think. The Empress must be loyal to the Empire above all things. The Empress must place the Empire in front of everything. Everything. And I can’t do it.”
She extends her hand. Obediently he steps forward, and she nests her touch along his jaw.
“You or the Pike? If I had to choose. Do you remember?”
He nods.
“That was the hardest question of my life,” she says. “And I thank every God in the grand vault of the firmament that I didn’t have to answer it. But this? You or the Imperial seat? This isn’t hard at all, dove.”
She smiles, though her stomach is turning itself upside down over finally saying the words that she’s kept inside so long.
“I need my people. I need my Pike. I need to rule my sector and run my voidship and pop out a Staff Clash team’s worth of Maekyonite-blooded babies. That wasteland we saw in the Empress’s daemon, that misery, that lack of love. I can’t live that. Yours and Vora’s and Waian’s and Hyax’s and the children—my God, the children, I can feel it from them already. They can’t even say my name and there’s so much love. I wouldn’t trade it for a hundred Empires. I’ve become such a creature of love. I swim in it. If I’m taken out, I’ll die. I will never be Empress. If it was offered, I would turn it down, and if it was forced upon me I would seek escape with the same desperation I fled from my last prison.”
Her hand shivers. Her palm is damp with sweat.
“I will not allow you to change into whatever was required to conquer Maekyon,” she says. “I will not allow Grant Hyde to disappear in that way. I will not lose you. I will take the Mandate as my starting line, and I will find another path. I will burn all my capital with the Empress. I will convince her again, just as I have before, of the exceptionalism Maekyon presents. And if the Empress will not allow it—”
Then what, Sykora of the Black Pike? What will you do? What can you do? Can you even imagine?
Grantyde abrogates whatever dark conclusion she might have reached by sweeping her off her feet and into his arms.
“I’m sorry.” He lays kiss after scratchy kiss on her face. “I’m sorry, Batty. I never—I won’t disappear. I didn’t know. I’m so goddamn sorry.”
“Grant, no.” But her throat is leaping, giddy at the crumpling-up and throwing-away of the careful Taiikari norm. “Grant, you can’t say that—”
“Whatever,” he grunts, and boosts her higher, kissing her neck, her chest. “In English, then. I’m sorry. I love you.”
He takes hold of the sheer leggings she’s wearing under her uniform, nails digging into the thin fabric at the tail hole; she yelps with the crackling sound as he shreds them open. The chilly air stings the exposed skin of her rear momentarily before his giant, warm hands clamp tightly on her and squeeze. His palms were as covered in nervous sweat as hers; but the shaking’s stopped.
He slides her gasping onto the table and it’s all she can do to unclasp her uniform before her brute of a husband rips that from her, too. He kisses her exposed stomach, the tightening peaks of her breasts, her trembling lips. She fumbles with the catch of his belt. She tugs insistently on his anticomps and he gets the message, helps her tear them from his face. His big beautiful brown eyes shine with tears.
“Thank you,” he whispers into her ear, which quirks straight at the shivery sensation his dusty voice sends down her spine. “You pulled me back. I’m back. Thank you so fucking much.”
“Grant,” she pants. “Grant, wait—”
His hands were journeying south from her ass, ready to flip her thighs up into their favorite place. They freeze.
“Oh, no,” she says. “Not really.”
He laughs and raises her hips until the small of her back is in the air and her tail is dangling.
“Engage door lock,” she remembers to cry, and the affirmative beep comes just in time because then her beautiful monster splits her in fucking half, right there on the command deck.
She was trained for this. Exhaustively. She was supposed to dominate him. To tease and test and command. But how? How, when all he has to do is wrap his hands around her waist and lift her into the air and use her like a little blue stress ball? Every time he gets his hands on her she tries at first to remember, to use her Princess tricks and her Taiikari guile, and then he fucks all of it out of her, all the cleverness and the training. All the plotting, the restraint, the guile, the worries or cares. Until there’s no thinking at all; toys don’t have to think.
All the ways he makes her body his. The sweat dripping onto her. The fingers digging into her skin. The burning stretch as her insides take his shape. The bulge he raises in her belly, straining the useless waistband of her torn leggings. The fleshy shockwaves rippling across her thighs and her stomach and her breasts. The sounds he summons from her.
God, the sounds. Wet and rhythmic and shameless. Her own squealing submissive pleas, the nonsense mishmash of feigned resistance and begging for more, flowing out of her before she can snatch them back. Her jostling mind lost in the haze of his scent, her insides aching and shivering and throbbing with every brain-melting impact. Her cheeks burn. What has he turned her into? What has his love done to her?
With every clap of his hips she feels the jiggle, all the places she’s thickened since he fucked his family into her. How stubbornly she pretended to own him. How imperiously she once insisted that his name was forever Grantyde, and now she sobs “Grant” over and over as her husband’s Maekyonite cock reams her, shoving and stretching and scraping and claiming every sweltering centimeter of her it can reach. Her eyes roll into her head; in the dark of her mind she sees herself splintered in time. The leering, imperious tyrant, smash-cutting to this drooling, submissive plaything.
I admire this rebellion in you, she’d said. This fire. It has a hypnotism to it, as fires do. I’m quite content to watch it burn low and flicker out.
I’ll have you, and have you, and have you.
“Grant,” she wails, as his glorious weight crushes the phantasm from her brain. “Take me!”
He’s haloed in the wireframe globe of his homeworld. Her would-be conquest. He hoists her into the air and locks his arms around her and an observer would barely be able to see her, she’s so engulfed, so small in his massive embrace, only perhaps her tiny uselessly kicking feet and her tail wrapping round his arms and her horns rising from the hair cascading from between his fingers as the rest of her is crushed into him and she screams into his chest.
I lose, she realizes, and a delirious giggle shoves through the overwhelm. I lose. He wins. The finest warrior of the Taiikari, and he defeated me. I lose. A bright bubbling clutching jolt hits her, sends a quiver through her calves. She urges it forward with perverse glee. I lose. Another tweak. I lose. Her toes curl. I lose.
And every ramming stretching shove makes her lose harder, and harder, I lose, I lose, IloseIloseI— until she’s losing her mind, too, and he erupts inside her, and sends that perfect boiling heat into every fold and ridge, and she screams her Earthling master’s name, and the firmament is knocked out of place, crashes from its cupola to the floor and is permanently twisted into some new, unforeseen shape. Reality is even more upside-down than it seemed. The conquest of Maekyon hasn’t just been canceled. Here, in the throne room of her mighty, invincible warship, a human has conquered a Princess of the Taiikari.
An undignified, husky grunt is tugged from her as his cock withdraws, leaving her blushing cunt loose and twitching as her exhausted body eases back into its former shape. She lies there, whimpering and used, her skin tingling with the flush of blood all through her, crumpled and stretched out and dripping with his seed like a discarded tissue. The places he clutched her as he came in her still tingle. Like his fingerprints have sunk in and been made into permanent brands. His cum pools between her legs, and his sweat shines intermingled with hers across her heaving stomach, gleaming turquoise in the light of the holographic map of Maekyon.
He lets her lie there for a moment—long enough to feel the illicit thrill of having been defeated and fucked and tossed aside—before suddenly it’s back, the heat and warmth and pressure of her husband’s vast and heavy love. She moans into his encircling arms, and he kisses her horns as they recede slowly into the silk of her hair. And of course she hasn’t lost. As lurid as her subby fantasies had been when he was inside her. What loss could ever feel this way?
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you,” he says back.
“You’ve ruined my tights. Beast.”
He slides his hands beneath the fabric to caress her thighs. Maybe, she muses, once she saves his planet, she’ll broach the subject of letting her call him master while they fuck.
“What if you knocked me up again?” she asks. “We could fill the peerage with big beautiful Taiikari-Maekyonite hybrids.”
His deep laugh is ambrosia poured into her heart. “Yeah. We could.”
“Did I do well? Having your babies?”
He chuckles at the absurdity of the question, but he answers it anyway, because he knows she needs to hear it, bless him. “You did fucking incredible, Majesty.”
“I could give you more,” she says. “I could give you scores.”
“Let’s get these ones further along, and we’ll give them some siblings.”
“Okay,” she says. “But I miss being pregnant.”
“I think you’ve got a kink, Batty.”
“I don’t have a kink.” She sticks out her lower lip. “I just want to be chained to a wall like a war trophy and used as a broodmare by my massive Maekyonite husband over and over until our hybrid babies make up the majority of the Pike’s crew. That’s not a kink.”
“Sure.”
“That’s what sex is for, you know,” Sykora says, with stuffy didacticism. “Biologically.”
“I thought the dudes got chained to the wall,” Grant says.
“We could both be chained. I’m rich. I can afford two sets of chains. And two sets of babies.” She cozies into him.
“You’re getting cum on me,” he says.
“Face the consequences of your actions, ruffian.”
“There’s robes of office in here somewhere, right? Maybe we, like, slip into those and then do a quick run-of-shame to the lift.”
“You can run-of-shame.” She sits up. “I feel like strutting.”
They clean up as best they can—the janitor droid will get the rest, she always tells Grantyde, but this is a bit of aftercare for him, and she can’t begrudge it. They return to the cabin shrouded in their fancy brocaded robes, tittering with each other at the absurdity. They shed the badges of office and the love-damaged uniforms and step into the shower together.
“I can still barely picture it,” he murmurs, as the steam rises. “The Empire surrendering to Earth?”
“I surrendered to you, Grant Hyde,” she says. “When I had everything and you had nothing. In defiance of everything I’d been taught and every picometer of common sense in my head. I surrendered and it has led me to a life so beautiful I couldn’t even have dreamt of it.”
This earns her a lift into the air and a kiss beneath the flowing water.
“And anyway, a Mandate isn’t really surrender,” she adds, when he allows her use of her mouth again. “It’s just… it’s a partnership. A break from these pretenses and games of who is dominating who. Hierarchy, hierarchy, hierarchy.” She shakes her head, sending droplets flying. “Even a Taiikari can get sick of it now and then, you know?”
“That reminds me,” he says. “The Loyalty Misalignment Hyax was talking about.”
She tuts. “Poor Hyax.”
“Waian said something to me. I think it’s spread. Vora, I don’t know about, but I mean—she’s like our stepdaughter or something at this point. I think she’s in.”
The existential bewilderment she ought to feel is barely present, or perhaps she simply can’t see it beside the massive breach she’s willingly torn open in her own identity. “Well, good. We have to move fast.”
“I thought this was all leading up to you getting a run at the throne.” He rubs shampoo into her scalp. “I never imagined it’d be this, instead.”
“Oh, dove.” She tilts her head to give his scrubbing access to behind her ears. “Don’t sound so disappointed.”
“I’m not. I was—you’re right. I was turning into someone else. It’s better this way.”
“It’s infinitely better.”
“I mean, I’m scared.”
“I am, too,” she says. She laughs abruptly. “I’m terrified.”
He joins in. “Why are we laughing?”
“I don’t know!” She swipes the curtain of her hair back. “I guess I—I feel like us again. Terrified and together.”
He holds her by the shoulders. His thumb brushes the dark mark it left on her neck downstairs. “Terrified and together.”
“We’ll bring this to the command group,” she says. “They’ll panic, but they’ll get on board. Then I’ll talk to Lomanza about it, and thoroughly confuse her, and I daresay she’ll leak it to her Coreworld contacts, but she’s my majordomo, and despite herself she loves a challenge as mad as this one is. We have scarcely a tenday to bring this forth. Less, even, before we must present it to the Empress.”
“And you really think there’s a chance?”
“It’s impossible. Completely impossible.” She turns around and tugs him into a crouch. “So was this.”
She kisses her impossible husband, on the first night of their impossible plan, and for the first time in a cycle she feels an impossible hope.