Princess of the Void-5.19. Lovely Lie [Sykora PoV]

Princess of the Void-5.19. Lovely Lie [Sykora PoV]

Sykora watches her chief engineer dimly as the violet woman uncorks her flask and takes a long draw, adding more shake to her already unsteady stride. She marches herself onto the command deck and gives a perfunctory bow and a surly “Majesty.”
“Chief engineer.” Sykora returns it with a terse nod from her oversized throne. She feels like a dumb little doll when she sits atop this. “Thank you for attending.”
“Yeah, sure.” Waian wipes her mouth. “What do you want? Where’s your little toady with the tablet?”
“Majordomo Vora is not present. I wished to speak with you alone.”
“Uh huh.” Waian sticks her thumb in a belt loop. “You get tired of me yet? Gonna have me reassigned?”
“I have been… chilly with you,” Sykora says. “But a Void Princess ought to be, with a new and unruly subject. Yes?”
“Whatever you say, Majesty.”
“But I have given you no cause for offense.”
Waian shrugs. “Not really.”
Sykora folds her hands in her lap. “Then I would know why you hate me.”
Waian’s flask freezes halfway on its journey to a followup sip.
“I am not—I am unpracticed. I know I am. And I’m failing to be all that I am supposed to be. I recognize that.” Sykora takes a deep, determined breath and tries to keep her spine straight. “I was warned that I must adjust to a world where marks and grades no longer exist to inform me how well I am doing. I was trained to take my cues from my underlings. I was—efforts were made to prepare me. And I understand that I—”
Her hands ball into fists to stop her fingers trembling.
Do not cry. Do
not
cry. Why are you shaking? Don’t be a baby. Don’t cry.
“I am not a schoolchild anymore. But I can’t. I—” She pauses in an attempt to force the trembling down, but the more she focuses on it the worse it gets. “I can’t understand why you hate me,” she says. “I don’t know what I did. I don’t—I just want to know what I did wrong.” It’s spread to her shoulders. Waian’s eyes widen.
Idiot girl. Idiot, idiot girl. Stop crying. Stop now
.
“What did I
do
?” she asks, and her voice breaks with the asking, worthless little infant that she is. “Why do you hate me?”
“Shit,” Waian mutters. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“You hate me, and Brigadier Jalak is keeping me under her thumb.” Tears roll down Sykora’s nose. “And the majordomo and all my servants are waiting for my orders, but I open my mouth and—and I am so
unsure
, and I shouldn’t be, and by the time I have something to say, Jalak is already saying it. I shouldn’t need anyone to tell me anything, but I don’t… I can’t…”
She hides her face behind her hands and sobs. Oh, she’s ruined it all. Barely a cycle aboard and she’s already failed completely.
“Okay. Kid.” Waian puts her flask aside. “Hey. Hey. Look at me.”
“And you stop calling me
kid
,” Sykora fumes, her face snapping up from her sodden palms. “I am
your Majesty
.”
“Okay. God, whatever. Your Majesty. I don’t hate you.”
Sykora swallows her tears and juts her chin out. “So why then? Why are you so mean to me?” And she tries to sound demanding, but the question is so puny that she flinches.
“I’m… I’m a mean old bitch, is why,” Waian says. “It’s nothing you did. It’s just my own shit, and I’m putting it on you. I guess…” She scratches her chin. “I guess I don’t like kids much. And I was kinda hoping that you’d fire me, so I could get back to drinking my sorry ass to death.”
Sykora’s nose wrinkles. “You swear so much.”
“You’ll get there someday.” Waian approaches the throne and crouches. “How old are you?”
“Two hectos and two decas.”
Waian leans in. Sykora shrinks back. “Listen to me now,” the chief engineer says. “You’re a child.”
“I’m
not
a—”
“Yes, you are. You are a child. And despite what you’re feeling, and what you’ve been told, there’s
nothing
wrong with that. Okay? My personal feelings about children aside. You’re doing badly for a Princess, but for a child you are doing
amazing
.”
Sykora’s lonely little heart flutters. “I am? How?”
“Well, for starters, you are 100 percent right about the Brigadier,” Waian says. “The coldhearted bitches who put you in that chair have decided the right way to make a Void Princess is by shoving you into your seat too early, because they want you to get popped in the nose a few times and learn some lessons about humility. They aren’t actually giving you power. How you feel right now is how they want you to feel.”
“Why?”
“They’re cockbreaths, is why.”
Before she can smother it, a giggle escapes Sykora’s throat. Her mental castigation lasts only a moment, though, because Waian smiles, and it is the loveliest smile Sykora has ever seen.
“Now I’m about as pitiful a friend as you can ask for,” Waian says, and drops the smile like a littered wrapper. “But lucky for both of us, you’ve never had one to compare me to. So what do you say?”
“You said you don’t like kids,” Sykora says.
“I don’t like anyone. But you’re the only person on this hunk of metal as miserable as I am. So you’re gonna call me Waian, and I’m gonna call you Sykora or boss. I don’t like Majesty.” Waian extends her metal hand. “Deal?”
Sykora hesitantly takes the artificial hand and shakes it. “What now, then?”
“Well,” Waian says. “I figure now we do something about the hardhorned bitches in the way of the throne.” She taps the oversized armrest of Sykora’s seat. “The metaphorical one, that is.”
“You mean the Brigadier?”
“The Brigadier and the folks she’s in cahoots with,” Waian says. “Plenty of broads out there in your sector have a vested interest in keeping you a weepy little figurehead. This is the first test of a Void Princess. The first
true
test. They’re gonna keep the Pike from you until you steal it, boss.” Waian’s finger taps her forehead. “So I’m gonna teach you how to steal.”
“It was a connector failure.” Wenzai points to the center of the observation station’s floor, at the floating three-dimensional display in holographic teal. A starfield of debris tumbles in the Qarnaq wind. “One of the condenser stacks broke halfway off and its weight bore a piece of the ring down with it when it went. We have two full condenser stacks down in layer two, turbines and all. And nine workers.”
In the shale gray light that filters through the long from Qarnaq’s thunderheads, Grantyde’s jaw sets. “We’ve lost people?”
“Not yet, Majesty.” One of Wenzai’s employees, a short male with curled horns and angular anticomp sunglasses, raises his voice from the folding table they’ve covered with monitors and comms equipment to turn into a shotgun situation room. “Antigrav worked for all of them, and the gear too. They’re floating. They’re freezing and flailing, but they’re floating. We’ve raised each on comms. They’re responsive, and they’re not seriously injured. So for a given definition, they’re okay.”
Lady Lakai tugs her flight glove on the rest of the way with her teeth and shoulders her duffel. “I’ve got ‘em.”
“Lakai’s taking down an emergency skiff to save the workers, and we’ve got Boro on the other one to haul up what gear we can.” Wenzai waves to a solid slab of pilot with his hair in a punk fauxhawk caged between two long, blunt horns.
He salutes. “Majesty.”
A sharp rejoinder is on Sykora’s tongue—
you are a civilian pilot, citizen, you must bow and not salute to my husband
—but she swallows it down as Grant salutes back.
Boro opens the hatch in the floor and clambers down the ladder beyond. Wenzai’s tail squeezes Lakai’s as the lithe noblewoman passes them. “We’ll need to take another trip for the second stack,” the Countess says. “With any luck it won’t be too damaged by then to—”
“No need,” Grantyde says. “We flew in on a shuttle. That’s better for saving the workers, anyway. Should fit all nine. Put Lakai in the shuttle and I’ll take the second skiff.”
Lakai freezes in her tracks. Wenzai’s worrying her hair out of their twin space buns. “Majesty—”
“I’ve passed the trainee certification for ZKV interceptors and I’ve flown a firmament combat mission in an off-spec troop carrier,” Grantyde says. “Do those skiffs have Type Z-6 controls?”
“Yes, Majesty.”
“I can fly it. Put an expert behind the stick to save people, but I’m not afraid to fly gear back.”
Sykora chews her nail. “Grantyde…”
Her husband kneels in front of her. His big warm palm couches both hers in its circumference. “I need to help.”
She grimaces.
“If it’s not safe, I won’t go,” he says. “But you know I can fly.”
“All right.” She kisses his cheek. “Go.”
“Okay, but
Boro
is taking the shuttle.” Lakai falls into step with Grantyde. “Big fat thing. I’m a skiff girlie.”
Then the gallants climb down, leaving the station to its stewing anxiety and the muttering strategizing of Wenzai’s responders.
“She’ll behave,” Wenzai says. “She’s gotten a lot better.”
Sykora nods and looks out the window at the pilots jogging to the membraned takeoff pads. “How did this happen, Countess?”
“We’re not sure yet,” Wenzai says. “The stack that fell had been hooked up for an hour. When it went, there was a cascade. As soon as we’ve gotten the gear back up on the ring, we’ll look at it and figure out what’s happened, whether it was an equipment malfunction or, uh... whatever it was.”
Unspoken in that pause is the tensile nervousness that Sykora feels a trace of, too. Was it Wenzai’s people at fault? Was it an oversight on her part? Or was it the gear that Sykora herself sourced from the Ptolek coterie?
Wenzai’s cheerful demeanor is buried under an ashy carpet of fear.
Pax never looked at me like that
, Sykora thinks, dumbly, because
Pax tried to kill you, Sykora. Remember? Pax was a lovely lie.
Sykora tries to tap into the satisfaction she used to feel when a subject looked at her with that kind of fear and finds the spring dry. If Grantyde were here, he’d be putting his big soft hand on the Countess’s shoulder and comforting her in that warm-leather voice of his.
It’ll be okay; we’ll figure it out together; they’ll be all right, and that’s what matters
.
Can Sykora do that?
Before she has cause to try, Wenzai bows very low indeed. “Whatever it was, Majesty, I take responsibility,” she says. “Again, I’ve disrupted your important work with these disasters. I can only beg for your patience and promise you I will spend all the strength I have to prevent a third.”
There we are. Sykora might not be able to do Grantyde’s gentle giant thing, but
imperiously merciful
is a well-used mask. “I don’t doubt it,” she says. “It’ll be all right, Wen. They’ll be all right anyway, and that’s what matters.”
Oh, those words did
not
sound like the Grantyde in her head. She’s been letting him out in her words more often; she’s still not used to it. But the little spark of hope it kindles on the Countess’s face satisfies Sykora.
Better she stew on her crisis than on my wrath.
“Hey. Wen. Please pardon the interruption, folks.” From the entrance into the station, Count Tikani—
[Threat level:
Nil]
[Control Vector:
Tikani and Wenzai are devoted to their children and one another. Place one member of the family under threat and the rest will quickly capitulate.]
[Contingency:
Kovikans are slight but capable in a grapple. Quickly subdue with blows to the sensitive tendrils on the side of the face and then disable by repeatedly striking the nerve cluster at the rear ridge of the skull below the mantle.]
—gives a nervous wave. “The kids are, uh—they’re wondering if their mom is okay.” His three children with the Countess peek anxiously out from behind his legs.
Wenzai flinches and looks at Sykora with a nascent entreaty on her face. Sykora nods, and Wenzai steps away from the huddle. “Hi, Big Green.” She hugs Tikani around the waist, then crouches into the nervous throng of their kids, gathering them into her arms. “Hey, gals. I’ve just gotta handle this, okay? And then we’ll all get lunch at the cantina.”
“Are you in trouble?” her son Orlo asks.
“You always think your mom’s in trouble. Sheesh.” Wenzai ruffles an unmollified Orlo’s hair. “Let’s save our worries for the fellas who fell, kiddo.”
Tikani touches his son’s shoulder. “Let’s give them some space.”
“Hold on.” Wenzai holds her hand out to her daughter Mavakai, the Countess-in-Waiting. “C’mere, Mav. Stay quiet and watch everything. Right?”
Mavakai bows and hops into her mother’s arms.
“And you.” Wenzai tugs Tikani into a crouch. Sykora is close enough to hear her whisper, “Love you, Tikky
.
”
One of Tikani’s face tendrils brushes Wenzai’s departing lips. “Nua!tki ni, Wen.”
“Hell of a day to pick for a take-the-kids-to-work thing,” Wenzai remarks as she returns to the situation room and passes Sykora.
Sykora allows this a humored exhalation of air from her nose.
They watch the transponder dots depart the station, tunneling through cloud cover toward the trapped workers and their gear. Three cockpit cameras ring the main map. Sykora’s eyes stay glued to Grantyde as he scans the endless sky.
By the comms officer, Wenzai is murmuring to Mavakai. “One hour. And we stay on the line the whole time. Why do you think that is?”
The Countess-in-Waiting prods her tongue against one of her fangs. “To keep them from getting too scared?”
“Good, Mava.” Wenzai rubs her daughter’s head. “That’s part of it. But we also want to gauge their alertness. The suits are made to keep them safe on the ring, but with how far they fell into the gas giant, the cold will hurt them, especially if their suits were damaged in the accident. If they lose consciousness, we need to know.”
“Hey Majesty.” Lakai’s voice bounces a waveform by her video portrait. “Mister Majesty, that is.”
Grantyde’s steely concentration does not break. “Yeah?”
“You fly pretty good, but have you ever raced?”
“I have not, Lady Lakai.”
“You wanna?”
“The last race I watched included fatalities,” Grantyde says. “I’ll pass.”
Lakai scoffs and retrieves an errant lock of her scarlet hair, tucking it back under her aviatrix cap. “The Cloudsprint was through an industrial park. This is through clouds.”
Sykora leans past a responder and mashes his intercom button. “I will skin you and make an invisible hat out of you if my husband is returned with a single hair out of place, Lakai of Kyin.”
“What use is an invisible hat?”
“I’d
find
one.” Sykora releases the button.
On the holodisplay, the fliers approach the flotsam. If they
do
race, it looks enough on the tactical view like a rapid-but-orderly emergency flight Sykora doesn’t feel the urge to send for a set of milliner’s tools.
Wenzai lets Mavakai down and moves to stand next to Sykora. “Once they get those people and refiner stacks back here,” she says, “we’ll conduct a thorough investigation of the equipment. Full cooperation, Majesty. If you want your chief engineer down here, she’ll have whatever tools and access she wants the moment our fliers touch down. I’d be grateful for her expertise.”
“I’ve already sent for her,” Sykora says. She peers at Wenzai’s determined expression. “You have a suspicion of what happened here, Countess.”
Wenzai nods. “The start of one.” She holds up a boxy, hardshell tablet. “The shift changed forty-two minutes before the first stack fell. This was the roll of workers. I’ve been looking into the union members who crewed the install.”
“And you found someone?” Sykora looks over Wenzai’s shoulder, at the roster on the tablet. The last people to touch the condenser stack before it plunged off the exo ring and brought a half-score of workers tumbling with it.
Wenzai reads them off as her finger descends the list. “Shift manager: Corporal-Emeritus Prolia Manika. Work crew: Citizen Royak of Magon. Specialist-Emeritus Tarro Luxihai. Citizen Bokan of Dair.” She stops at the last entry. “Indentured Noncitizen Aokan of Lilek.”

5.19. Lovely Lie [Sykora PoV]