Princess of the Void ch 99 - The Penitent

Grant sidesteps the panicky medtechs on his way out of the clinic. A quick retinal scan and an ice pack are foisted on him before he manages to escape in Ajax’s train.

Out of the humming neon lift and a parting salute to Ajax—then he’s onto the crimson floorboards of the command deck, under its dome of stars. The command group are spread across their stations; Hyax and Vora in a murmuring huddle, Waian hunched over her console, and Sykora pacing, her ears encased in earmuffs again.

She looks up from her fretful perambulation and sees Grant entering. Her face lights up and for a moment she lurches toward him; then her steps halt and worried wariness appears on her face.

Grant crosses to her and boosts her into his arms. She makes a joyful little squeak and moves to take her earmuffs off. He gives her a quizzical look.

“Just let me take them off for a second,” Sykora says. “Just a second.” She tugs them free. “Hi,” she whispers.

He nuzzles his cheek against hers. “Hi.”

“My wounded warrior.” She kisses his scruff. “You didn’t need to come back so soon.”

“I’m good,” he whispers. “I’m up again. Not all the way, but most of the way. You’re using your earmuffs up here?”

“I’ll let Waian explain,” Sykora says. “She’s in one of her moods, and I’ve little choice but to humor her. It’s about the datawafer you brought back. Say my name one last time before I have to put these back on.”

“Batty,” he says. Vora gives them a wry glance.

Sykora’s face heats up. “In public, Grantyde. Really.”

He kisses her forehead. “That’s right.”

She scoffs. “You’re insufferable, you know. Pass me that.” She points to her tablet.

He lifts the tablet from the table. Written across it is a log of every word they’ve been exchanging. “Clever.”

“It’ll do. I just want to hear you again without worrying about my brain exploding.” She takes the tablet and secures her earmuffs back on her head. “Keep carrying me.”

Grant walks over to Waian with his wife in the crook of his arm. He’s able to carry his wife around even more easily than he used to, these days. His body’s been firming up further in the Pike’s heavy gravity.

“What was on that datawafer?” he asks. “What’d we get?”

Waian glances up over her shoulder, blinking the eyestrain of her console away. “Huh?”

“The data wafer,” Grant says. “Anything useful?”

Waian blows air out through her lips. “Datawafer’s in there.” She points at a boxy console on the command deck table. “I panicked. Tugged it out of the Black Pike systems as soon as we found out you’d been attacked. But it was in there for nearly ten minutes. So I gotta sweep every system, isolate every daemon.”

“There’s daemons aboard?”

Waian nods grimly. “About a half-score in total. I’ve got them siloed off and I’ve reset all of them. They shouldn’t be able to access any of the systems we’d gotten them hooked up to. The datawafer is in its own instance now, loaded into a totally offline console. I’ve been pulling what I can from it.”

“It’s the same one I took in, right? You’d be able to tell if it had been replaced.”

“I could, and it is,” Waian says. “But you remember how I said to put it in the console for five seconds?

“Yeah.”

“Did you put it in for five?”

“I did.”

“Well, the connection log says it was in for ninety,” Waian says.

Grant shudders. Again that woozy feeling of violation. Sykora’s tail wraps consolingly around his waist.

“I tried to get access to the cameras,” Waian says. “The one in 7-Thule was never on. So now we have a roster of clerks and visitors to 7-Thule, but we can’t know whether it’s been tampered with, or how much. Or what other kind of poison’s been poured on.”

“Are we safe?” Sykora asks, a little loud.

Waian rubs her face with her artificial hand. “I don’t know. I’d say yes, but if you asked me whether the massacre on Myak coulda happened, I’d have told you no. And I have to use my meat on this instead of my silicon on this, cause I’m not gonna plug myself into the Pike till I know it’s clean. So, no distractions, please. I’m gonna keep looking.”

“I never had any weird ideas about the chip,” Grant says. “Just about blowing the manifold up.”

“Still.” Waian’s ears twitch and she turns back to her console. “No distractions.”

Grant and Sykora exchange glances. She gives him a microscopic shake of her head. “I’ll stay with her,” she murmurs. He steps away from the frowning chief engineer as the readouts shine across her face. Sykora slips from his arms and hops to the floor.

Grant turns to see Hyax watching him from across the deck. She ahems and raises her voice. “A moment, Majesty?”

He crosses to her and pulls a seat up from the command table. It’s a women’s, so it’s boosted like a bar stool, but it puts them on slightly more equal footing, at least.

Hyax takes a clanking step forward and bows so low she takes a knee. “I wish to offer an apology on behalf of the Black Pike security corps,” she says. “We made assumptions I now recognize as foolhardy. Of course, a foe with knowledge of the kill phrases would also have access to Compound 70. I was a fool to ignore the possibility.”

“This entire mission has been a parade of nasty surprises, Brigadier.” Grant taps a knuckle against Hyax’s pauldron. “Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

“I won’t.” Hyax stands. “I’ve apologized. My conscience is now clear.”

He snorts. “Oh, good.”

“But from now on, you’ll be engaging in decompulsion protocol.”

“What’s that?”

“On any outing or mission a male attends during which he isn’t in HAK, he has to check in with a female officer and submit to a compulsion that removes all previous ones,” Hyax says. “It’s standard procedure for the Taiikari men aboard.”

“I didn’t realize,” Grant says.

“Typically the Husband of the Void’s decompulsion is performed by the Princess. Nobody else may compel him.”

Grant remembers Meena’s raw panic in the manifold chamber. “I seem to recall being asked to fetch some tea,” he says. “First day I met you.”

Hyax’s narrowing eyes can’t distract from the blush that glows along her face. “That was an emergent situation. And I credit myself with discovering your immunity.”

“Sure.”

“That’s the reason Sykora hasn’t bothered with the protocol,” Hyax says. “But from now on, I’m afraid I must insist. I’ve been unpleasantly reminded that for all my training in spotting compelled males, prudence trumps perceptiveness.”

“Is it normally more obvious, then?”

Hyax nods. “You fooled everyone on the command group. Whoever attacked you was a master.”

“I didn’t know it was something that had to be mastered,” Grant says. “Thought there was no way to break out of it.”

“Compulsion training isn’t for strength,” Hyax says, “but for subtlety and complexity. To give you such a complicated command, wipe your memory of it while keeping it in your subconscious, and have us miss it. That is an intimidating ability. One that takes discipline and practice. A novice needs to babble on and on, come up with edge cases, be exact. An expert can transmit so much of her intent through simple words that it doesn’t matter. She can leave the details to her target.”

The skin crawls on Grant’s neck. “I guess it’s kind of consolation,” he says. “Knowing this was the work of a real expert.”

“I don’t mean to sound as though I am impressed.” Hyax’s fists flex. “I would dearly love to get my hands on whoever did this and watch the light flicker out behind their eyes.”

“Jeez, Brigadier,” Grant says.

“Pardon my upset, Majesty.” Hyax juts her chin out. “I won’t let something like this happen to you again. Not for as long as I can draw breath to prevent it. I swear on my spear.”

Grant leans forward on his red-upholstered seat. “How do you feel about compulsion, Hyax?”

Hyax tilts her head. “That is a hard question to consider, Majesty. It’s so fundamental to the way Taiikari are. A keystone of our Empire. I have trouble imagining my life without it.”

“But you don’t use it much.”

“I have no need for it, unless I’m on-mission,” she says. “Most of the men I know are my marines. Their loyalty is stronger than any compulsion could be.”

“So it’s not something you’ve put much thought into?”

“Everyone’s put thought into it,” Hyax says. “Across all the firmament it’s our unique gift. Or curse. There are other camouflaging species. Compulsion is unique. How I feel about it…” She purses her lips. “I suppose my answer varies, day-by-day. Today, I despise it.”

“Majesties.” Vora waves her tablet in the air. “I think I have something for you. Sykora. Over here.”

“Thanks, Hyax,” Grant says, and returns the Brigadier’s salute as he finishes his circuit of the command deck at Vora’s position by the holoprojector. Sykora gives a final whisper of encouragement to Waian and joins him.

“The data forensics team and I have been prodding around in the caged instance she made for us,” Vora says. “Seeking patterns or inordinate events.”

“Is it safe to rattle that cage?” Sykora asks.

“It must be,” Vora says. “There’s no outbound connections from that terminal.” She slips her finger along her tablet and slides her notes onto the projector. “One thing we’ve looked at is repeated visitor logs. We’ve cross-referenced the name of the clerk who was supposedly active in 7-Thule at the time of the transmission. And every time he has been in the office, we’ve received an uptick in visits and communications from… here.”

Vora tilts a topographic map of Chassak onto the display, rotating it away from the college of clerks by a few kilometers.

“The closest settlement to the college,” she says. “It’s a temple-town. Formed around the Sisterhood of the Omnidivine Temple at Chassak.”

“I wasn’t aware there was an Omnidivine Temple at Chassak,” Sykora says.

“It’s a quiet mission.” Vora zooms in to an unremarkable, brutalist structure with a jutting hexagonal steeple like an industrial smokestack. “Something of a punishment duty, I gather. A lot of its people transferred in after disciplinary records elsewhere or post-scandal. I’ve gone through the roster. On a hunch, I suppose. It’s not so large. But I looked up specifically any sister who hasn’t been in residence of late. And you’ll never guess who we found.”

A face appears, floating above Chassak’s holographic topology. A woman in the corded robe of an Omnidivine cleric, her hair plaited in a three-part braid, her face stern. Grant squints at it for a moment, trying to place the woman.

“This is Sister Sifka of Chassak,” Vora says. “Former cleric of the Omnidivine. Decidedly former. Look familiar?”

Grant realizes why she doesn’t look familiar to him. Last time he saw her, her head was shaved. And there was a bullet drilling between her eyes.

Sykora’s tail lashes. “That’s the whore who poisoned me.”

Grant squints into Sifka’s post-mortem glower. “Why would a nun be the whore who poisoned you?”

“I need to know everything about this temple, majordomo.” Sykora picks at the bright red sleeve encasing her tablet. “Fire up our orbit repulsors and put us above it.”

“Aye, Majesty.” Vora scurries to her workstation and unhooks her intercom.

“Something is still not connecting to me,” he says.

Sykora looks up from his words glowing on her tablet. “What’s that?”

“Whoever it was, they tried to blow our manifold,” he says. “That doesn’t kill a ZKZ on its own, right? They needed something on the outside to get rid of us. We’d detect a ship. Are there ground-to-air weapons that could reach us?”

“There can’t be,” Sykora says. “Not on Chassak.”

Grant runs his fingers through his hair. “So why did they send me to the manifold?”

“Because it’s on the other side of the ship, and I needed a long enough diversion.”

A woman is sitting on Sykora’s throne.

Her face is concealed by a black metal mask, inset with seven circular panes of glass, arranged in an upward parabola along her hidden eyes and forehead. She wears a glittering black rhinestone gown, its sleeves puffed up and geometrically structured like armored pauldrons.

A projection, Grant realizes, as the woman flickers like a fixture. The command deck table is casting her out of light.

The command group has frozen. Hyax’s service weapon is drawn uselessly toward the phantom. Waian has a look of pallid shock.

“It’s an honor to finally meet you, Princess Margrave Sykora.” The hologram crosses her legs; they’re encased in steep black stiletto boots. “You might as well put that tablet aside and remove your earmuffs. You have my word that you’ll be safe from the kill phrase. And your life is quite inescapably in my hands regardless.”

Sykora’s scowling face rises from the tablet. “The earmuffs stay on. Who are you?”

“Call me the Penitent.” The woman stands and couches her hands at the small of her back. She strolls toward Sykora. “You’ve forced my hand prematurely. You have my compliments. Your friend—Waian, right?—is very good. A quick thinker.” She nods toward Waian’s stricken face. “But I’m afraid I have friends who think in seconds what you think in days.”

The Princess stubbornly stands and stares their holographic intruder down as she approaches.

“Don’t be hard on yourself.” The Penitent reaches Sykora and steps right through her like a ghost. “You came quite close. Too close.” She settles at the balustrade, gazing out into the firmament. “But your husband, I’m afraid, is your weakness. And you’ve lost. The Black Pike is mine.”

The ground drops from Grant’s feet. The command deck is sliding downward, and leaving them behind. When did the gravity turn off? His stomach was so occupied by the swooning suddenness of the woman’s appearance that he didn’t even notice the zero-G toggle. He hastily clicks his heels and magnetizes to the floor.

Sykora glares with horrified rage at the projection as it paces to the balustrade. “What do you want?”

“What I want,” the Penitent says, “is to be civil. What I have heard is that you have become an increasingly civil woman. Would you be civil with me?”

The bridge comes into view.

“Their safety depends on it, I fear,” the Penitent says.

Crew and accoutrements float in flurried confusion, caught offguard by the sudden loss of gravity. Ribbons of tea spill through the still air. A navigatrix’s papers have lifted from an unsecured clipboard; she scrambles to retrieve them.

Waian is staring at the projection like it’s a vengeful ghost. “No,” she whispers. “Not this time. Not again.”

“Bridge of the Black Pike,” the projection calls. “Your vessel’s systems are compromised, and your lives are at risk.”

A non-holographic version of the mask is plastered across the bridge screen, three stories tall, speaking back to them in concert with the projection. The text readout next to her image, the one that normally displays subtitles or nameplates or text alerts, overflows across her visage. The same writing, on every readout. On Waian’s console, on Vora’s tablet, on Sykora’s transcriber.

HAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESSHAILTHENEWEMPRESS

Sykora tears her earmuffs off. They flutter to one side. Grant’s lungs are valved too tightly shut to protest.

“The Black Pike has begun its final voyage,” the Penitent says. “It’s bound for Chassak’s atmosphere. In ten minutes’ time, the vessel will descend to an altitude it cannot survive. You have the opportunity to slow its terminal descent. The entire bridge team, including the command group, must move to the brig level, whereupon I’ll disable your lifts and you’ll remain there. This will stave off atmospheric destruction for half an hour. The Princess and Prince of the Black Pike must depart the Black Pike and descend to Chassak. This will earn you another half hour. If any individuals besides the Prince and Princess attempt to leave the vessel, the Black Pike’s guns will acquire and destroy them.”

The projection turns back to the command group. The featureless metal mask tilts imperiously upward.

“You came here looking for a daemon, Sykora of the Black Pike,” she says. “I have it.”

An image resolves on the monitor. A temple chamber, the light of Chassak coming through the window. A daemon’s statuette, wooden and portraying a familiar sea captain, sits on an altar.

“I will treat with you for it,” the Penitent says. “We have a great deal to discuss. I wait for you at the temple. Your shuttle will have the exact coordinates. Bring your husband.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” Sykora says. “Neither of us do.”

“Remain aboard your ship, then, and die in the skies over Chassak.” The Penitent shrugs evenly. “It would be a shame, I think. For a Princess of the Void to lose her life in an Imperial Core atmosphere. So close to the home of the Empire. So far from yours. Spare yourself and your crew. Come to me.”

She disappears.

“Talk, majordomo.”

Sykora approaches the glass cell that houses Majordomo Niminoa of the Cloud Gate.

“Whatever you can give me now, I need,” she says. “Your obstinacy ends here, or we’re dead.”

Niminoa sits at the end of her cot. Her sullen stare sweeps across the assembled command group. Through the door into the private cell they hear conversation on the edge of panic. The entire bridge crew fits on this level, but only just.

“I know that you’re bound by your oath to Kanori,” Sykora says. “I know you loved her. If you’re blaming me for her death, you blame in error. The woman who killed Kanori awaits us on Chassak. If you want revenge against her, I’m your vector.”

Niminoa points at Grant and the command group. “Get them out.”

Sykora shakes her head. “That’s not how I do it. I told that to Kanori.”

Niminoa sighs percussively and rests her face in her hands. She slides her grip down, stretching her bottom eyelids.

“I didn’t swear my oath of secrecy just to Kanori,” she says. “I swore it at the foot of the Empress.”

“The Empress’s dominion is under dire threat,” Sykora says. “You see that now.”

“I do.” Niminoa sighs. “All right. The daemon is the Empress.”

Sykora’s breath fogs the glass. “What?”

“The daemon is the Empress,” Niminoa says. “A copy. The daemon is the Empress in a box.”

A few seconds of silence among the command group.

“What’s the one thing that can break the Empire?” Niminoa prompts. “The one threat that keeps it from security? The one thing that prevents Zithra XIX’s plans from being perfect?”

She spreads her palms.

“Mortality,” she says.

“Gods of the Firmament,” Hyax says.

“Zithra has been hunting for an heiress for many years,” Niminoa says. “Many frustrating failed years. There’s a—a game. A competition. A splinter of the peerage is playing it. You’re playing it now, though you haven’t been aware. Approximately twelve hectocycles ago, she despaired of it. Concluded there was no capable replacement. She attempted a… regrettable solution. The New Empress is the result.”

“That’s a stupid goddamn idea,” Waian says.

“She came to agree.” Niminoa stands up from the cell cot and steps to the window, where the sickly wart of Chassak is growing on the firmament’s face. “So the resulting simulacrum was hidden.”

“Why wasn’t it destroyed?” Grant asks.

“It is a perfect copy of the Empress. An abomination, maybe. But killing it is an abomination, too.” Niminoa shrugs. “And a suitable heiress still eludes us, after all.”

Grant leans forward. “I was told repeatedly that daemons aren’t people.”

“This is different. Nothing was redacted. This is an unblemished copy. The intent was that it would act as a perfect advisor to an imperfect heiress.”

“That’s insanity,” Grant says.

“Questioning the Empress is not your place, Maekyonite.”

Sykora snaps out of the daze this revelation put her in. “Do not talk to my husband that way.”

“It’s not yours either, Majesty. Nor is it mine, nor was it Kanori’s.” Niminoa puts her hands in her pockets. “Our place is obedience. For a very long time, now, the Empress’s daemon has danced across the firmament in a series of innocuous housings, moved every time its secret was threatened. Kanori was the latest agent placed in charge of its safekeeping.”

“Kanori killed the Argosy True, then,” Sykora says. “Didn’t she? To keep the secret. And then this Penitent destroyed Myak and stole it. That’s how the Penitent is doing these impossible daemonic takeovers. They’ve all kept their loyalty to the Empress. She has an Empress. The kill codes. She’s been fed them.”

“That is how it appears.” Niminoa returns to her bed and stares at the floor.

“Kanori was a flawed woman,” Sykora says. “With flawed methods. But she didn’t deserve to die that way. The death of a traitor.”

She steps from the cell. She holds her hand up to Grant.

“Let’s see what kind of justice we can find down there,” she says. “Will you go with me?”

He puts his hand in hers. “Anywhere.”

The bridge crew parts for the command group as they move through the brig level. A fluid wave of bows accompanies their passage. Sykora’s expression is stony and sure, projecting the strength Grant wishes he felt. Every footstep feels like a wobbly stake set into treacherous ground.

They summon the lift. The button doesn’t light up, but the Penitent presumably will allow them to ride it to the hangar bay, anyway. Waian taps Sykora’s shoulder while they wait for it to coast through the Pike.

“Kora,” she murmurs. “C’mere, kiddo. Listen up.”

Sykora’s steely posture falters only briefly as she leans into the chief engineer’s embrace. Waian holds Sykora tight. She whispers something in her ear and kisses her forehead.

“All right,” she says. “Watch her back, Grantyde.”

He bows. “I will.”

The lift arrives with the deep hum of foreboding prophecy.

One of the hangar docks is lit and warmed up, with a shuttle already waiting for them inside it. Grant follows Sykora into the cockpit. She toggles the flight computer, and they watch the preordained path etch through the orbital map onto Chassak’s surface.

As the shuttle slips into the firmament, its controls light his wife’s enigmatic smile.

Grant scoots to the edge of the divider and rests a hand on Sykora’s far hip. “What’s that face?”

“She never betrayed me,” Sykora says. “And I never betrayed her. I’m not dross. I’m not trash. I’m loyal to her. She’s loyal to me.”

“She made a digital monster out of herself.”

“Well, yes.” Sykora’s brow quirks. “Everyone has off days. The important thing is that she’s relying on me to fix it. I’m not here against her will. I’m here enforcing it.” She rests back in her seat. “That comforts me. I wish it comforted you. But I’m not afraid anymore.”

He manages to smile at her. “Then neither am I.”

“We have to assume our host is listening.” Sykora draws him down to her lips. “There’s only so much I can say.” She changes to English. “Do you love me?”

“I do,” he says.

“Do you trust me?”

“My sword is yours,” he says.

“Then trust I have a way out,” she whispers, in Taiikari again. “And be ready.”