Princess of the Void ch 5.6 - I Know How You Can Get

Sykora struts into the cabin and drops a tablet onto the table. “And look at that. Your machinery, dove. Just had to yank some tails and shake some hands. Half from the public funds, a quarter from Marquess Shoskia at wholesaler prices on a favors-for-favors, the rest sourced from a half-score baronesses for a sweetheart deal. We’re going to need to sign some autographs and attend some functions but we are coming in under budget on these turbines.”

“Uh huh.” Grant sets his guitar aside.

“And of course you did wonderfully as well, dove. I don’t mean to brag unduly. Excellent work with those unionists.” Sykora shimmies to kitchen to the beat of the track he was playing along to, shaking her can as she opens the fridge and peers through it. “Divide and conquer. That’s the English phrase, yes? We really managed it. I’d like to see all those noblewomen who thought they’d need to babysit you in their proposals.”

She turns from the washed-out fridge light with a plate of leftover dumplings and a big fanged grin, which falters as she sees his face.

“You’re satisfied, yes?”

He tries to summon a smile. “Uh—yes. Yeah.”

“What’s happening, dove? What’s got you preoccupied?”

He taps the cabin's remote and turns the music off. “I guess I’m not over the re-ed place.”

“You’re not still hung up on your first sip of nootch juice, are you?” She chuckles. “It’s an acquired taste, I know. And the commissary doesn’t have all the flavors you can get, of course. There’s a tulaberry one that’s actually quite tasty.”

“It’s not the nootch,” he says. “Or not just that. It’s everything.”

“This—hold on. I didn’t realize how much this upset you.” She glances at the kitchen table, where his guitar case has taken residence. “Will you—I just need a place to put this damnable—” He shuffles his sheet music into the case and tugs it to the floor. “There we go. Thank you.” She sets the dumplings atop the kitchen table and perches on its lip.

“That place disturbed me,” Grant says. “I mean it really got to me.”

“Right.” Sykora inhales through her teeth. “I should have assumed it might. I know how you can get.”

His brows knit. “How I can get?”

“About freedom, I mean.”

He sits at one of her elegantly carved kitchen chairs, close enough she can rest her socked feet on his knees. “I’m not gonna sit here and complain about prisons. It’s not like I love them, but Maekyonites have prisons.”

“I know you do,” Sykora says. “I was in one, remember?”

“That wasn’t—I mean the compulsion stuff, in particular. That’s what got to me.”

“The reflection room.”

“Whatever you want to call it, it—”

“I want to call it the reflection room.” She’s got some of that Princess metal in her voice. “And it’s a very important part of our correctional system for many kilocycles. Weren’t you going to pick and choose what you were Maekyonite moralist about?”

“This is me picking and choosing.” He frowns. “What’s gotten into you?”

She frowns back. “What do you mean what’s gotten into me?”

“You’re being—Princess-y at me.”

“I’m not the one who brought up the problem,” Sykora says. “I was over here celebrating a really wonderful success. You heard me, yes? That I managed to get what you wanted?”

“What we wanted? Yeah.” A defensive canopy is unfolding across his forebrain. He’s had conversations like this before, but never with Sykora. “And I’m grateful. Really I am.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Sykora says. “Because you haven’t thanked me.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He thinks perhaps he should leave it there. But this is his wife; he’s never been afraid to have this kind of conversation with her. “I’m hung up on this, Sykora. They’re being tortured. It’s psychological torture.”

“They are feeling the effects of their own crimes,” Sykora says. “It’s enforced empathy, not torture. If it hurts them, it’s because they hurt others first.”

“I think it’s a rotten idea to—”

“They’re criminals, Grantyde.” She leans forward with an expression of unfamiliar fervency. “They have offended against the Empress, and their fellow citizens, and against me and you. They preyed on our subjects and violated our laws. They must understand the harm they caused. Their comfort must come second to their correction.”

“I think it’s a rotten idea to let the victims influence the punishment like how place does,” Grant says. “Justice should be impartial.”

“This is the standardized practice of incarceration across the Empire, Grantyde. If I were to disagree with it and introduce reforms, I would have to present them to the Empress and the Palatine Council and explain myself.”

“We’ve already gotten so much from them,” he says. “We can—”

“But I don’t disagree with it.” Sykora’s feet depart him. She scoots further back onto the table. “Those people have endangered this sector and its prosperity. Out of ignorance or malice. And if they’re ignorant, they need education, and if they are malicious, they need punishment. Perhaps this is another Maekyon versus Taiikari thing. Perhaps you just don’t understand.”

“I don’t think that’s true anymore,” Grant says. “Not at this point. I understand them, I command them, I’m going to be the father of three of them, for God’s sake. Maybe I have more to learn but I’m sure about this one. I thought adverse compulsion was inexcusable.”

“Against citizens, it isn’t,” Sykora says. “But those men’s citizenships have been confiscated, because they abused their fellow citizens, and proven they cannot be trusted. Not before they’re rectified. It’s not a universal punishment. We save it for serious but amenable offenses. We are careful with it.”

“What about the innocent?”

“Don't be naïve, Grantyde.”

“I'm not being naïve. What the hell? What if we falsely—”

Her voice raises. “You’re asking what if I make a mistake?”

“Yeah, I—well, not you, necessarily, but your servants.”

“If a servant of mine makes a mistake, then that is my mistake, Grantyde. I put them there. That is the burden I have accepted in exchange for the power to mete out justice. It’s not something I relish.”

“That’s not what you told me. You said you’re proud of your cruelty to your enemies.”

“I am proud of my cruelty to my enemies,” she says.

“So you’re proud of what’s being done down there?”

“Those people aren’t my enemies, Grantyde.” Sykora’s volume is up. Her pupils dilate. “And that isn’t cruelty. It’s reform. It’s much-needed reform. The inmates of Shakami were deficient in empathy and prudence and they are being corrected. And I gladly allowed you to let one go free—”

“He’s not free, he’s indentured. And wait—”

Sykora stands up atop the table. “Oh, really, Grantyde.”

“Wait. Allowed me? What happened to us being equal partners on this?”

She folds her arms. “If you’re going to be this petulant, perhaps that’s a mistake. And you must have seen the way Aokan and Ondai were looking at each other. That man is no more indentured than—”

“Than what?” he demands. “Than I was?”

“Than Ruaq is,” Sykora says.

“She asked for that.”

“So did he.”

“Because the alternative is psychological agony.”

“He made his choice,” she says. “The alternative was upstanding citizenship in a secure sector.”

“Batty, come on—”

“Do you disagree?” She’s sharpening even further. “Are you about to harp on me about the Trimond incident like all these exo baronesses? Because—”

“I was absolutely not going to do that,” he says. “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

She raises an accusatory finger. “You were just putting words in my mouth.”

“You didn’t even answer my question,” he says. “Do we even know what the false conviction rate is in this Empire? This sector, even? Has anyone even bothered to keep track?”

“If an innocent were somehow to find himself in re-education, then its effects would compensate,” Sykora says. “The innocent mind has no reason to reprimand itself.”

“That’s not how compulsion works, Sykora. You know that. I heard those commands.”

“Perhaps there are some overzealous reflection officers, but—”

“If someone tells me to feel like shit, I’m gonna feel like shit, no matter whether I deserve it.”

“How would you even know that, Grantyde?”

“I tried to blow myself up a cycle ago, Sykora!”

He pauses. He shuts his eyes and reopens them. He takes a deep breath and is surprised at how difficult it is to do the full inhale, at how shallowly he’d been breathing.

“Forgive me,” Sykora says. “I’m—that was beastly of me. I wasn’t thinking. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”

He takes his anticomps off; he’s been forgetting to remove them lately, when he’s alone with Sykora or the command group and there’s no need to pretend. Outside their amber hue he sees the deep blush that’s come across her face.

“It is messing with me,” he says, “that the people who devised and run this process are a bunch of uncompellable women who came up with it and decided it was right, when they’ve never even felt it.”

“You’re right.” Sykora hops off the table and sheepishly places her plate back in the fridge. “On that score, you’re right. God. I didn’t even think about—I’m such an idiot.”

Grant sighs. “It’s okay. We’re just—”

“No, Grant.” She whirls around. “It’s not okay.”

“Sykora.” His jaw is tight. “I’m trying to be nice.”

“You cannot tolerate this kind of negligence. This—I have disrespected you, Grantyde. Horribly. We are nobility. Our station must be respected. And if it isn’t, we can’t be afraid of punishment.”

His hands ball into fists at the resumption of hostilities. “If we need to resort to this kind of punishment to maintain it, we don’t deserve it.”

“That’s why we deserve it, Grant. We are given power and expected to wield it. I need to trust that you’ll do that. It’s our job. And the coterie is going to peck you to death if you’re always this afraid of exercising discipline.”

“Discipline to who? You’re my wife.”

“I have been just awful to you.” She stomps to his side of the table. “I’m being a misandrist harpy. And you’re just letting me?”

“What, I’m supposed to just bend you over my knee and spank you instead of talking this out?”

“Maybe you should,” she snaps.

“Maybe I will,” he snaps.

They stare at each other, fists and lungs tight.

He notices, for the first time, that her horns are all the way out.

He seizes her and yanks her onto the chair with him, butt in the air, head dangling off his lap.

“You little gremlin.” He holds her kicking legs roughly in place. “Is this what you’ve been angling for? Is this why you’re being such a hellion?”

She gasps as he flips her skirt up. Her back arches. Her tail is wagging furiously.

“Oh my God, it is.” He feels her hips grinding against his lap. “Isn’t it? You were riling me up.”

She shakes her head. “That’s—”

“And now you’re trying to get out of this argument by being kinky.”

“Don’t—don’t be ridiculous,” she stutters.

He hooks his fingers into the band of her panties. “Stop moving.”

Her legs squirm. He catches her and holds her fast.

“I said stop.” He yanks her panties down her thighs, so they’re binding her legs together. “This is exactly what you wanted, isn’t it?”

Her breath hitches. “Uh huh,” she says, her throat tight and breathy.

He squeezes her ass as she sinuously gyrates it at him. “You ready for what you just earned yourself?”

She snickers. “You don’t have the horns to lay a finger on me.”

His palm slaps into her asscheek, sending a shockwave across the plump blue pillows in his lap. She yelps.

“Insufferable Maekyonite!” She thrashes. “Get your lowborn hands off me.”

Smack. Another spank and she lets out a throttled gasp. Her toes curl. Her tail is wagging like a mad windmill. He grunts as its tuft thwacks him in the face. He bites his laugh back. “Get—” He grabs for it. “Get your goddamn tail out the way.”

“I can’t just—it doesn’t always do what I OH—”

She’s cut off as his teeth close around her tail.

“You vandal,” she gasps. “You—”

Another springy smack across her ass sends her into a toe-curling groan.

“Barbarian,” she cries. “How fucking dare you—”

Smack.

She’s panting and gasping like she’s barely getting her head above water. “Brute,” she whimpers. “You’re a brute.”

Smack. Smack. Smack.

He shifts her and sees the viscous stain her pussy has drooled onto his lap. “Are you wet?”

Her sodden reply sounds like a no that got left out in the sun.

“You are.” He shoves his fingers between her legs. She lets out a husky, desperate grunt. “You’re soaked.”

“In—insufferable Maekyonite.” Her act is flagging. “Insubordinate peasant.”

“Peasant? That’s a new one.” He digs deeper and finds a spot that makes her keen like a cat in heat. Another spank and her throat opens further into a yowl. Her face kneads against the fabric of his pants.

“Look at you,” he says. “How am I even supposed to properly punish a little masochist like you?”

Her hips buck. He feels her muscles squeeze and unclench and squeeze again in a desperate rhythm around his digits. “Please,” she whines. Her trembling hand unbuttons his pants and tugs beseechingly at his zipper. “Grant. Please.”

He removes his fingers and wipes a shiny trail on the raw, flushed skin of her ass. “Just Grant? Run outta names to call me?”

She’s run out of every word, it seems. All she can summon in reply is a wheedling moan as he tugs her panties the rest of the way off.

He unzips his pants the rest of the way. “Maybe you’ll think of one while I’m fucking you,” he says.

He lifts her off his lap. There’s something he wants to try with his bendy little bride. Something he's been saving for a moment like this. His arms scoop under her thighs, then tuck upward, folding her legs up around her ears and squeezing her shoulders into place. His hands knit together behind her head.

“Grant—” Her voice shakes as she wriggles in his grip and realizes how immobilized she’s become. “What—”

He slams his trussed-up, half-dressed space goblin bride onto his cock.

“Whaaat theee fuuuck,” she wails, every syllable drawn out and rattled by his brutal fucking. bangles and earrings clatter like a hailstorm. His teeth grit. Her tiny hands clutch his arms, and he flexes them, and she moans with lustful awe and he feels like some kind of caveman sex god. He loves fucking this woman. Loves how she feels and how she smells. Healthy and gripping and so beautifully blue. His anger is melting.

She’s told him before how risque doggy style feels, how Taiikari sex without face-to-face contact has a thrill to it. The way he’s taking her now must be throwing that into overdrive. With his hands on the back of her head shoving her down and forward, she couldn’t compel him even if she wanted to, even if he was vulnerable to it.

She flexes against his grip, but she’s helpless like this, outmatched by the sheer physical force of a husband twice her size, a little mewling toy, immobile and incapable of doing a thing except pant and writhe and stare down at the dripping place where they meet, the bulge in her stomach pumping below her skin as her hulking alien groom jerks himself off with her—and then her tail wraps around the back of his neck and dispels that illusion, and he becomes vaguely aware that no, the Princess of the Pike could absolutely still kill him in a matter of seconds, even when he’s knotted her into a pretzel and using her like one of Lieutenant-Gefreiter Axyna’s ridiculous cum-catchers.

Fortunately she seems disinterested in murder at the moment; she’s too busy cumming her brains out. The hungry, silky pull intensifies into a frenzy; the alien musculature below his wife’s pastel skin hardens and binds.

The pressure valve in his stomach is tipping into the red. Arms out from behind her head and he lowers her to the floor, stretches her across the carpet, up and on top of her, and he pushes her prone and breaks the act for just a second, long enough to tug a pillow from the bed and shove it under her hips, to tilt her winking pussy up and snug against him, and to whisper “Good?” and to lighten his grip on the back of her head just enough to let her nod, and when she does, rapturously, he shoves her face-down against the floor and slamfucks her into it, sprinting for the finish, listening to her muffled cries in symphony with the obscene sounds he draws from her pulsing, pliant cunt.

She’s saying something. The hand in her hair balls into a fist and tugs her face up to hear.

“On me,” she pleads. “On me. Not in me. Let me feel it.”

“Say please.”

“Please!”

He pulls out and shoves up between the rosy globes of her ass, the head of his cock prodding the velvety root of her tail, and yanks her further, into a balletic arch, and her cheeks flex, the taut little ring of muscle between them twitching against his cock, and that finishes him off, wrings him out, and she sings his name triumphantly, in her high and gorgeously fractured voice, as he defaces the work of art in front of him, as he paints her, glazing her ass, pooling in the grooves of her muscular trapezius and the heart-shaped small of her back, matting her sleek black hair, and she whimpers and kneads her toes against the floor and caresses his chest with her quivering tail.

And that’s how that argument ends.

***

“Grant Hyde of Maekyon,” Sykora says, when he’s drawn them a bath and she’s remembered how to talk. “What the fuck was that knot you tied me into?”

“That was the, uh.” He wanders through his reconfigured language pathways. “That’s called a Full Nelson, I think.”

“What’s a Nelson?”

“A Maekyonite name.”

“Well. When we conquer your planet, we need to find Mr. or Ms. Nelson and present them with some sort of award in recognition of their contribution to sexology.” She pants a laugh. “You’re such a fucking stud. You’ve gotten so strong. Every time I look at you.” She traces the line of his bicep. “What a lucky little devil I am.”

He examines himself under the cooing touch of his well-fucked wife. “Huh,” he says. He flexes experimentally. It’s been happening so slow that he hasn’t had cause to really take it in. But at some point in his life aboard the Black Pike, between his lessons with Ajax and his time in the weight room and the fortified meals, Grant Hyde has officially gotten sorta yoked.

Sykora sticks her butt up above the surface of the water and peers over her shoulder, across the cabin at her vanity mirror. “You could have gone harder. Barely even rosy.”

“I didn’t want you to have trouble sitting or anything.”

“That’s not how a nobleman ought to spank.”

“Nice try.” He lathers shampoo in his palms and brushes them through her hair. “Not falling for this bit again.”

“Hellfire.”

“When did you switch from actually fighting me to gassing me up?”

“Uh. I don’t remember.” Her tail curls abashedly. “Probably after I was a total bastard about compulsion." She sighs. "I’m…” She takes a deep breath and forces the word out. “Sorry, dove. I really am.”

“We were both out of line,” he says. He reaches to the edge of the tub, where the plate of dumplings is balanced, and takes a bite of one. “Maybe we were just hangry or something.”

She shakes her sudsy head. “Taiikari pregnancy can, uh… it can sort of send you out of whack, emotionally.”

“Oh, shit. I didn’t even think of that.” He wraps an arm around her, palm to bellybutton, and slides her closer. “That happens to Maekyonites, too.”

“I didn’t think of it either,” she says. “I’ll remember to take a breath next time.”

He holds a dumpling up to her. “Now I feel like an idiot.”

She opens her lips and lets him pop it into her mouth. She sits cross-legged in his lap as she chews. “The dispute was genuine enough, even if the hormones kicked it higher.”

Grant sighs. “Yeah.”

“Can you just—go back and imagine I made all my points with far less venom?”

“Maybe we just table it for now.”

Her face grows eager. “Yes, please. If that’s an option.”

He smiles in spite of himself. “Okay. It’s tabled.”

“It’s not something I’m capable of changing, anyway, the re-ed facilities,” she says. “Not without a cruiserload of effort and time that I just don’t have at the moment. And I hate arguing with you, sexual consequences aside.”

“Just one thing,” Grant says. “Can I ask a question? And offer a compromise?”

Her mouth twists, but she nods her assent.

“This Compound 71 we’re charged to make,” he says. “The injectable anticompulsion. When it’s ready, what’s the plan with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“And Compound 70. Are they going to be revealed simultaneously?”

“Dove, I really don’t know. I wish I did.”

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he says. “I will shut up about this. For a while, anyway. I hate it, but I hated how prison worked in my country on Maekyon, too, so it’s not like I’ve got a suitable alternative. But I can’t be the guy who sends people there. Not quite yet. If it comes to it, I need you to blow the whistle and lock whoever it is up.”

She lifts his hand to her lips and kisses the tip of his thumb. “I’ll do that for you.”

“But here’s my compromise,” he says, as she works her way along the line. “When Compound 70 becomes public knowledge—”

Sykora pauses on the finger with his wedding ring. “If.”

“It’s coming out,” Grant says. “Maekyonites are about to break everyone’s brains and introduce a totally uncompellable population of hunks, right?”

She hums pensively. “I suppose that’s true.”

“If I’m the Empress, that’s when I rip the bandage off. Pretend it was just discovered, and use it to grease the wheels on the Maekyon annexation.”

“That’s rather coldly calculated of you, Grantyde.”

He shrugs. “I’m just being realistic.”

“If it does happen,” she says, “we will be militant about its regulation. You and me.”

“And we won’t fight about those calls?”

“We won’t.” Her voice is firm. “We’ll debate, perhaps, but we’re good at that. And I won’t be on this hormonal rollercoaster any longer.” She sloshes her foot out of the water and levers herself off the wall of the tub, snugger against him. “You were saying about your compromise?”

“When the Empire at large finds out about Compound 70, the people who decide about these reeducation places, and the people responsible for flashing the inmates, they all need to take it and see what it is they’re inflicting,” he says. “And we can pick this conversation up again, with everyone understanding.”

She sighs and rests his hand on her breast. “You have a deal, Prince Grantyde.”

He gives her a companionable squeeze.

“Where will we take them first?” she asks.

“Who?”

“Our babies,” she says. “When their father’s planet is ready to receive them, what’s the first thing we’ll show them?”

He cups a handful of steamy water and lets it cascade down her inky locks.

“Penguins,” he decides. “I’m gonna show you guys the penguins.”