“I’ve killed your corvette, Prince Consort.” Vora apologetically slides her voidship into place.
“What?” Grant squints at the board. “What did—oh, shit. The crossfire rule.”
“My least favorite.” Vora picks up Grant’s piece and slips it into the capture pile. “But you have to grasp every advantage you can.”
Good & Gathered is on the agro floor, that sa stretch of artificial outdoors that he first discovered on the lift, alone and wary. Now that he’s anticomped and unafraid, Grant loves it here. Three-story vertical stacks of hydroponic crops on the walls, genetically enhanced rapid-gen fruits. A constant, comfy mist clings to the air here, condenses on the sweeping windows of the establishnt like fog. It slls like sauteed aromatics and freshly turned earth.
The Pike picks up plenty of its provisions from Sykora’s tributary worlds, Vora told him, but if they ever needed to, they could survive for hectocycles off the food here. G&G serves almost exclusively void grown crops. If there’s a difference, he can’t taste it. His favorite is this sweet crunchy helix-shaped thing that his translator calls a radish but which he happily eats raw and crispy, like jicama.
He chews on one now as he fiddles with his capital ship. “Gravitas is hard.” He glances at the pair of coveralled girls two booths down from them, who have been monitoring the ga as covertly as possible. “Do one of you want to sub in?”
The closest of them nearly jumps out of her skin at the direct address. “No no uh no thank you Prince Consort.” She plugs her mouth with a stuffed mushroom.
Grant turns his attention back to Vora. “Can I concede?”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that. You can bribe my center zone and take all these ships from .” She takes a bite of her root veggie wrap and gestures to his tokens. “You’ve barely used half of your tribute.”
“I keep forgetting I have them. Could we start over?”
She hums as she wipes the sauce from her fingers. “Okay. Don’t be afraid to spend them this ti. They should be mostly gone by the middle ga.” She sets the board back up into its starting phase.
The best way Grant has managed to understand Gravitas is that it’s like chess but every piece starts on the sa side. You build your army through an early-ga series of bribes, threats, and conversions that he still barely understands, but he’s picking up enough to realize how incredibly Vora plays. She always knows the perfect ti to switch her phases and start blasting Grant’s piddling army out of the sky.
“It’s based on the dynastic era,” she explains, as she clacks the pieces back into place. “Before the Empire. This was how the old lords did war. It’s at least a hundred kilocycles old, this ga. Your wife is going to be so pleased you’re learning it.”
“I didn’t realize she was such a fan.”
“Oh, she isn’t. Not really. But she’ll be thrilled to have an opponent she can beat.”
“When I first saw you,” Grant says, “I thought I’d finally t a demure, courteous Taiikari woman. I should have known it was a pipe dream.”
Vora chuckles. “The Princess doesn’t want demure in her command group, I’m afraid. Or in her marriage, it seems.”
Grant’s communicator chirps. He checks it while Vora considers her response to his piss-poor first move.
grantyde!!!! just got out of a eting with my intel analyst group and they said the data leech worked PERFECTLY
I’ve got them looking over nav logs, recordings, correspondence… if sothing is fishy with lorimare we’ll nail her to the wall. you did SO WELL my love mwah mwah mwah mwah
are you having fun with Vorakaia? is she thrashing you?
tell her to go easy on my man. that’s a command from her Princess
He grins and texts her back. Several people now have tried to teach him how to use this keyboard. All have had limited success.
she bit myass
she BIT your ASS?
that’s not her ass to bite.
iann beat
ohh. well that’s to be expected. she’s evil.
where are you? i wanna steal you >:)
g g. but ican et u wehrever
cabin
now please
“Sire. Madam.” Sukro is standing by their table. Grant’s glad he was in today—he’s the only server here who never gave him that mystified panicky look every Taiikari first has when they see themselves reflected in his anticomp goggles. He gestures to the linen-lined baskets their food ca in. “Can I take these? And are we looking for anything else for ga two? Another round?”
“Have to bow out, folks.” Grant holds up his communicator. “Duty calls. We’ll rain check my humiliating defeat, majordomo.”
Sukro bows himself away with the baskets as Vora packs the ga up. “You really will get better, you know,” she says. “And it’s a useful ga. Many of the nobles you and Sykora joust with have played it. They think in Gravitas terms. It’s worth putting in the ti.”
“As soon as I get any ti, I will.” Grant gives the majordomo a quarter bow and slings his crescent bag over his shoulder. “Thanks, Vora.”
“Tell her Majesty hello from ,” Vora says. “And that Oryn and I would love to host the two of you for so amrita and a movie, or sothing. Any ti she wants to erge from her love nest.”
“We’ll get it out of our systems by the cloudsprint. Promise.” He gives her a salute as he departs for the lift.
He hits the boost on his way up, and chases the butterflies in his stomach back to their cabin. He presses the seal and strolls inside.
“Hey, hon. Vora says—uh.” He looks around.
Empty room. He steps into the center.
“Sykora?” he tries.
Thin air slaps his butt. He squawks as his leg is snatched into the air and his boot is shucked from it.
“Shoes off, big boy.” The voice cos from his shoulder and then laughs musically as it scurries away from him.
Grant hops out of his other boot. “Okay. Shoes off. Where are you?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.” A curtain billows.
“All right, Batty. Very funn—”
His last syllable turns into a gasp as a small, warm, invisible projectile lands cackling on his chest. He loses his footing and falls backward into bed. A sudden weight presses on his legs. His belt undoes itself.
A syrupy giggle in his ear. He lunges for it and Sykora lets out an eep as he catches her around the middle and rolls on top of her.
Her skin ripples back into the visible spectrum. She’s naked in his arms. “Hi, dove,” she says.
“Hi,” he says.
“Wanna fuck your wife?”
“Yes I do,” he says.
Her tail wraps around his midsection. With a sudden jerk it yanks him to one side, and she cackles as she kips up to her feet and ripples back into invisibility. “Catch then, Maekyonite.”
He catches her, after a ridiculous chase that ends with her face-down on the kitchen table, her slim waist immobilized under his grip. He turns his wife’s impish laugh into a startled yelp, then an indulgent groan, then his na, repeated with increasing urgency for the next several minutes.
This is how they’ve been, for the past few days. It’s a little under a week before the cloudsprint, and they fill their days with their new life together. Sykora takes etings and resolves minor disputes and keeps the Pike running. It's been a lot of Cot Queen, lately. Cot sightings fretted across the firmant. Mostly it's Governors jumping at shadows, but there have been a handful of tis that a sighting has necessitated a hasty sweep across the sector. Grant familiarizes himself with the ship and gets back up to speed on his new guitar and learns what he can from the command group and the etings he drops in on.
And then, the mont they’re alone, they tear each other's clothes off.
Grant has had more sex in the past week than in the previous three years. Now that the floodgates are open, he’s as desperate for the Princess as she’s been for him. Urgent, clutching quickies in closets and empty conference rooms, his hand clamped over her mouth, her tail lashing like a living thing. Giddy tussles like the one they just had, winding up with her pinned to the floor beneath him or riding him in the bath or squished up against the window, her sturdy little body frad by the dazzling firmant. Slow and sensuous lovemaking in their nested bed, staring awe-struck and infatuated into each other’s eyes, hearts beating against one another, fingers interlaced.
And every night, they lie together naked in the afterglow, talking about their lives and their love, their pasts and their dreams for the future, the Maekyonites who Grant used to know and the Taiikari who Sykora wrangles. And then Grant makes a cute face, or Sykora shifts in a way that makes the light fall sweetly along her chest, and the spark reignites, and they fuck again, into cuddling, loose-limbed exhaustion. She falls asleep curled in his arms, and he always knows when she starts dreaming because she does this cute little twitch.
And every morning, he wakes up to the sensation of her grainy tongue, or the arching grind of her hips, or her hands guiding his fingers to their warm, tight ho between her thighs.
And every ti, Grant waits to see if Sykora will take over once they start, and be as dominant as she claid she can be. And every ti, she eagerly goes pliant and submissive at the first assertive touch. She’s happy to go on top, to show him more of the breathtaking tricks she trained herself to do, but it’s always at his request—and he’s learning that the more he makes that request sound like an order, the happier it makes her.
It’s not what he expected, after the way this marriage began. And outside of the bedroom, she’s as commanding a figure as ever, expecting—and receiving—imdiate obedience from her crew. It’s so at odds with the giggly little imp he shares a cabin with, whose orders, when they co, are only to rile him up until he seizes her and bends her roughly over the nearest surface. He never thought of himself as a dominant person. But he never thought of himself as a Prince Consort aboard an alien spaceship, either. He’s learning how to be flexible with these definitions.
He’s not very good at dirty talk, but the nice thing about Princess is that beyond being kinky, it’s a simple statent of fact. He’s gotten her to agree not to call him master or sir, anyway. That skeeves him out. And he loves the way she says his na.
They finish in the kitchenette and bathe in each other’s arms. Sykora slips from the tub and brings a stack of papers with her to their nest, where she pulls on a set of silk PJs and perches a pair of reading glasses on her nose.
"That's not more Cot Queen stuff, is it?" Grant asks.
"Uh-uh. No thinking about that accursed woman for the rest of the day." She holds up a satellite photo of a barren planetoid. "These are survey reports from my frontier. The scouting corps sends them in every tenday."
She flips through packet after packet, occasionally pausing to tell him about so noteworthy planet or another that her surveyors have discovered. Grant stays in the suds a while longer, getting soggy marks on one of his father’s paperbacks, which they’ve stowed in a corner of the cabin along with Grant’s old go-bag.
“This has to be a typo. I refuse to believe there are this many crabs on Akmai-77.” Sykora turns the page. “Fucking hell. There are.” She holds up a planetary capture and taps a blob of orange on it. “That’s crabs, Grantyde.”
“Yum.”
“You eat them?”
“That’s right.” He underlines a word in his book. “Let’s honeymoon on Crab Planet.”
They use a lot of paper on the Pike. Grant appreciates it. He has a notepad next to him right now, upon which he’s carefully writing and arranging the symbols from one of his father’s old paperbacks. The upward arrow with the line through it. That’s a capital A. Like on guitar.
“What are you doing over there?” Sykora peers over her glasses.
“I’m trying to write the alphabet.” Grant puts the zigzag one at the end. “The English one. There were 26 letters. I rember that.” 27? No, 26 for sure.
“Don’t do too much of that, dove. Not until your new pathways are all-the-way carved. Otherwise, it could cause glitches. You don’t want cerebrolinguistic tangling.”
“Oh.” He fidgets his pen shut. “That does sound terrible.”
“We’ll hold onto them,” Sykora says. “Eventually, you’ll be able to teach yourself English again. Maybe we could learn it together.”
“You want to?”
“Sure. I got quite far last ti. I’m fluent, basically.”
“Wanna give a lesson?”
She gives him a smug nod. She points to the guitar. “Guitar.” She holds her palm up. “Hand.”
“Incredible.” Grant sets his pen and paper aside to give her a round of applause. “It’s like I never left.”
“I can do sentences, too. Watch this.” She sets her papers to one side. Her eyes flash. “Grantyde hand Batty.”
Grant grins and sloshes to his feet. He towels off as much as he can on the journey from the tub to the bed and flops down heavily next to his wife, who's starting to take her glasses off. He holds her hand in place and slips them back on with his forefinger.
She blinks coquettishly through the big owlish lenses. “You want to keep them on?”
“Uh huh.” He slips his touch up her silk-sheathed body. “You look adorable right now, you know that?”
“What if they jostle off?”
“I won’t jostle you. I promise.” He hooks his thumb into her waistband and peels her pjs down her thick blue thighs. “Just gonna eat you out real quick.”
“Grant.” There’s urgency in his na.
He props himself up. “Yeah?”
“It’s okay, right? That I’m not…” Sykora bites her lip. “That I’m like this. When we’re together.”
“Like what?”
“Like…” She chews a nail. “Like how I always put you in charge.”
“Of course.” He goes up the line of her pajama top, unbuttoning to expand the beautiful cerulean crescent of skin. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
She squirms. “It’s not the way I was taught. That’s all. I’m supposed to compel and take the lead. The girl orders, the boy obeys. I’m ant to extract obedience and reward it with pleasure. But you tell to do things. You tell .” Her voice becos gentle and quiet, like she’s telling a secret. “And it’s like I’m being compelled. I have that warmth when I do them. But that’s not… usual.”
“We’re not usual.”
Her horns are all the way out. “I don’t want to be a wet marionette. I can be more dominant. Really.”
He coughs a laugh. "A wet marionette?"
"Soone who just lies there." She titters at his expression. "I gather they aren't called that on Maekyon."
"We call those pillow princesses."
"Oh, shit." She hugs a lacy pillow to her chest. "I'm absolutely a pillow princess."
“You're absolutely not. You’re a badass, all right? I know you are. You can sub in bed. It’s fine.”
She blushes furiously. “I’m not a sub.”
He laughs. “Yes, you are.”
“I’m not!” Her little leg flails at him in a flustered kick. He catches it and tugs her across the bed. She lets out a sharp sigh as he lifts her hips into his lap. Her toes knead into the fabric of his uniform. “You said you wouldn’t jostle . Traitor.”
“Okay,” he says. He places her back on the bed. “You’re not a sub.”
“That’s right.” She crosses her arms. “Pick back up, though.”
“Yes, Majesty.” He slides her halfway into his lap again. “You keep taking care of out there, and I’ll keep taking care of you in here. No labels required. Okay?”
“But you don’t think I’m a pillow princess, right?”
“Batty. I think you’re incredible. That thing you do? With your, uh.” He caresses her stomach. “With your muscles. Inside.”
She giggles and flexes. “You like that?”
He kisses her belly button. “I fucking love it.”
“And you don’t mind? That we’re—ah” She squeaks as his kisses trail lower. “That we’re unnatural?”
“Does it feel unnatural?”
“No. Not at all.” She swallows. “It feels perfect.”
“Good.” He gives her thigh a playful little nip and listens to that squeak, his favorite noise in the firmant. “Now if you’ll excuse , I’m gonna get back to what I was doing before my wife distracted .”
She folds her legs around the sides of his head. He hears her giggle, muffled by the squishy squeeze of her thighs. “What’s that?”
He takes a deep, fragrant breath. Linen and citrus and Sykora. “Spelling the alphabet.”
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