Book 6: Chapter 3: Immune |
Dylan runs a hand through his hair—which starts further up than Grant remembers, but he makes it work. He was a real ladykiller in college, always apologetic about how often Grant returned to the double to find the prototypical sock hanging on the dorm room knob.
Grant wasn’t Dylan’s best friend. He knew that. They got along well together, and they were good roommates, but a lot of that was because they respected each other’s privacy. It had been a somber moment, going over the history of his life on Earth and recognizing that, after the deaths and the breakups, this was the closest relationship he’d had left. How curious it was to remember the isolated, introverted person he’d been on Maekyon, and how he’d convinced himself he preferred it that way.
“This is a moon,” Dylan says. “Like the size’ve our moon?”
“A bit smaller,” Grant says. “Closer to Europa, over by Jupiter.”
Dylan lets out a huff of air. Then another that curls his mouth into a grin, then he’s laughing out of control, hand pressed to his forehead. Grant’s anchoring hold on Sykora tightens. “Should we leave him alone for a while?” she whispers, in Taiikari.
“Over by.” Dylan wipes a tear from his eye. “Like it’s a cupplblocks. Like we could just—like—there was a shark in here.”
Grant nods. “An Eqtoran. That’s whose moon this is.”
“And now every day they see this. It’s visible from Eqtora. You did this.”
“Every night,” Sykora corrects.
Dylan’s eyes are still fixed to the lunar image on the tablet. “The worse what gets?”
“The Empire,” Sykora says. “The reaction, the fate of Maekyon. It is made to force— what’s the term. Damn.” She speaks Taiikari into the translator panel. “Capitulation.”
The word blinks onto it. Dylan blinks back.
“Grantyde and I will be guardians of Earth,” Sykora continues. “We are favored by the Empress and she knows this planet is special. But there are many ways this can go horribly wrong.”
“I need your help, Dylan,” Grant says. “I’m Taiikari now. I’m far in. You have only just met them. If we’re to merge, I need humans I trust.”
“That’s… I’ll try, man. But I’m just a guy. Like I work at a kolsenter.”
It takes Grant a moment to remember what that means. Call center.
“Just a guy is all I need you to be,” he says. “Just yourself. Talk to them, live alongside them. Treat this like a paid vacation. If you can’t, we’ll return you to Earth, and try to keep you safe. But I don’t know how they’ll react if you spread this around. I fear for you.”
Dylan takes his time to reply. “I’m saying yes. Because I want to trust you, and if you’re being truthful with me and this is a paid vacation it’s paying a fuktun. And because I wanna see the look on Professor Austin’s face when the two bullshit stoners he tried to throw out of his Film Nwar class are the guys who saved the world. Or doomed it. Whatever.”
“Thank you, Dylan,” Sykora says. “You honor us.”
“We’re going to be depending on you and your fellow guests to workshop our initial approach.” Grant finds the last tula berry in the bowl, cracks it, and hands it to Kiar’s sticky little fingers. “But what do you think? First impressions.”
“Of what?”
“This. The Taiikari. The…” Conquest is the right word, but there has to be a better one. “The whole situation.”
“I think… no thank you, buddy.” Dylan chuckles as Kiar holds out a sticky handful of tula pulp.
Sykora’s tail loops around her son’s middle and scoots him backward, off the table and into her lap. “Go on, Mister Thorogood.”
“I think as far as alien invasion scenarios go, things could be a lot worse. I mean, they seem reasonable, you can understand them, you can read human emotions into them accurately, they, uh… they can interbreed with us, somehow…”
“And they’re cute,” Grant adds. “Yes?”
Dylan laughs his tension partway out. “They’re crazy cute. Why is that? Did they do something to my brain? Are they some kinda brain-controlling sykoaktiv slug?”
Sykora looks aghast. “What is a slug?”
“That’s just how they are,” Grant says. “If they were… what did you call them?”
“Psychoactive. Like if the cuteness was an illusion.”
“The cuteness is real. It might be what saves this entire effort. And they think the same thing about us, by the way.”
“What do you mean?”
“As pleasing as you find us,” Sykora says. “That is how we look at you.”
Dylan lapses into open-mouthed pensiveness. Grant taps his shoulder. “Let’s go find Xam.”
The royals lead their newest guest from the conference room. Sykora holds Rory; Grant carries Ziavra in the crook of his arm, Kiar clinging like a monkey to his shoulder. The first time he did this, Grant was terrified his son would fall, but it’s his favorite place to ride and nobody, not even the Pike’s professional caregivers, has expressed any concern with the eager climbing and scurrying his children have engaged in.
The newest member of the Black Pike command group, Majordomo Lomanza, waits outside the room, scribbling something in her notebook. Unlike Vora, who in her time as majordomo always carried a tablet, Lomanza seems content and functional with a paper and pen. She looks up and bows. “Majesties. Shall we?”
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Grant nods and gets a peek into Lomanza’s notebook, where a delicately cross-hatched drawing of a ship—an Eqtoran Samaqaj shuttle, Grant’s pretty sure—is rendered with mathematical exactitude. “Damn, Lomanza. That’s fantastic.”
The tips of Lomanza’s ears turn pink. She stows her notebook in her carefully organized messenger bag. “Just a foible, Majesty.” She gives a brief bow—more like a nod, as is appropriate to one of lower rank—to Dylan. “Greetinks.”
Grant is 99% sure that Lomanza speaks English much better than she outwardly represents, but she already has little enough energy for interpersonal stuff with her own species. Grant doesn’t begrudge her pretending that she’s still rudimentary.
They move along the wide torus of the station’s main body. Dylan tarries in places, staring as Grant once did at the confluence of regal grandeur out of Earth’s antiquity and hypertechnology pulled from Earth’s daydreams. Scarlet carpet, silk drapery, with a tank-treaded cleaner bot puttering about vacuuming the dust. Tables of brass and burnished wood where, now and then, they pass another shell-shocked human adjusting to the same impossibilities, faces lit by a strip of dazzling stars out the glow-striped windows.
Xamika is off the main torus in a sleek kitchen, sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring at Booger while his tongue goes schlorp schlorp schlorp in a bowl of water.
“He is so freaking cute I wanna vent myself into space,” she says to an equally hypnotized woman who’s waiting for her mak-yam noodles to reconstitute in the gel cooker. “And on top of that, his dog is—”
Grant clears his throat, and both women snap to attention.
“Hello again, Dylan.” Xamika seamlessly returns to her professional receptionist smile and her smooth English; Grant tries not to be jealous of how natural she sounds. “This is Specialist Lukni, my colleague.”
“很高兴见到你,” Lukni says.
Xamika dips back into Taiikari. “This one is American, Lukni.”
“Ohh. 抱歉.”
“Now that you’re finished speaking with His Majesty, perhaps you’d like to tour the station, Dylan.” Xamika gets to her feet and picks up Booger’s braided leash. “I could introduce you to your fellow guests.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Dylan pats his thigh. “C’mere, Boog.”
Booger tilts his head, but does not stand up. Xamika gives his leash a light shake and he’s on his feet, hopping from the table with his tail wagging.
Dylan scoffs. “Traitor.”
“See to his needs, Gefreiter,” Grant says (in Taiikari; he doesn’t need Dylan hearing this part). “This is an important guy. Keep him comfortable, keep him safe, keep him happy. I’m counting on you.”
Xamika salutes. “I won’t fail you, Majesty.” With a quick bow and a gentle tug on Booger’s leash, she hurries after her human charge.
Lomanza tuts as subject and observer depart around a corner. “That young woman had better find an appropriate hat or figure out how to keep those horns under control,” she says. “Before your friend finds out what they mean.”
“I don’t mind that,” Grant says. “It’s almost the point, really.”
Lomanza unclicks her pen and tucks it into its waiting loop in her bag alongside its color-coordinated fellows. “You’re playing matchmaker with them?”
“Not exactly, but not exactly not.” Grant shrugs. Kiar takes a handful of hair to steady himself. “Why do you think most of our liaisons are unmarried? We need to seize on every advantage we can. And the Taiikari-Maekyonite attraction might be our biggest. We need to study it as much as we need to study anything else. I need to make sure it’s not just me who finds your species so attractive.”
Sykora squints. “There was doubt?”
“Well, I mean…” Grant tucks Ziavra further into the crook of his elbow. “You gals are pretty short.”
Sykora sticks her tongue out. “Excuse you. What we are is delightfully compact.”
Ziavra reaches her tiny hands out. “Pah,” she says, which means she wants to play with his rings. He offers her a pointer and she fumbles with a ruby set in a platinum band, puzzled determination on her face. One day she’s gonna figure out how to get this thing off. “If Dylan ends up with a Taiikari, then good for him. Guy deserves it.”
“I see,” Lomanza says. “I suppose I wish them both luck, then.”
“Have you ever fallen for anyone, Lomanza?”
“Just my husband,” Lomanza says.
“You have a husband?” Grant straightens his shoulders in surprise.
“Yes. He lives in the Core.”
“I thought you didn’t have time for such things,” Sykora says.
“It is a low-commitment relationship by our shared agreement,” Lomanza says. “We write each other every fourthday.”
“We could fetch him, you know.”
“Oh, no thank you, Majesty. We prefer not to live with one another.”
“Are you separated?” Grant asks,
“Only physically. I haven’t seen him since we were wed.”
Sykora laughs faintly. “You are a unique individual, Lomanza.”
“I don’t try to be. But his penmanship is superb and the financial benefits are excellent.” Lomanza pulls a gold-etched pocketwatch fron her hip and clicks it open. “We are fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, Majesties, but the shuttle is primed to return us to the Pike at your leisure.”
Grant lets out a long, wary sigh, getting enough air that Ziavra lifts slightly up and back down again at his chest.
“We don’t have to do it right away, dove,” Sykora says. “You’ve already had such a day.”
“No, no. I need to rip the bandage on it. The researchers are already halfway to panic.” Grant strokes his thumb across Ziavra’s cheek and looks into her big staring red eyes. This is your daughter. These are your people. This is your life. You belong here, with the Taiikari.
No matter what they say to you next.
“Prince and Princess on deck,” Hyax barks, as Grant and Sykora emerge from the lift onto the Pike’s voluminous bridge. “Princess-in-Waiting, you are relieved.”
“I certainly am.” Viscountess Vorakaia, Princess-in-Waiting of the Black Pike, beams at her adoptive family. “Welcome back, Majesties.”
Sykora scurries into Vora’s offered hug, and kisses her cheek. “Anything erupt while we were out?”
“Nothing major,” Vora says. “Lomanza will have my minutes shortly.”
Waian swivels her swooping, ergonomic seat away from her console. “Where’s the kids?”
“Sleeping in the cabin,” Grant says. “They’re conked out after all the new stuff on the station.”
Waian chuckles. “New stuff everywhere for ‘em. I’m jealous.” Her smile shrinks as she gets a better look at Grant. “Everything okay, kiddo?”
“Yeah.” Grant tugs the hem of his tunic down to give his perspiring hands something to do. “Just… dealing with it all. I knew we’d get to this point, but it didn’t feel real until I saw them.”
“The other Maekyonites?”
He sights along the holographic lines of the wireframe displayed on the command deck’s holotable. Maekyon, its once-familiar continents and oceans. “Yeah.”
Waian clicks her tongue sympathetically. “We’ll come through for them, you’ll see. And for you.”
“A tower is insurmountable from without, Grantyde,” Vora says. “It’s only when we’re through the door we see the stairs. And then it’s one step at a time.”
“I could surmount a tower from without quite easily, you know,” Sykora says.
Vora squints wryly over the ruby rim of her glasses. “Oh, I know, Kora.”
“What’s that mean, Vora?”
“You’re not exactly subtle.”
Sykora giggles. “What can I say? I like the view.”
“So hornchoked.”
“You started it. Pest.”
“Strumpet.”
Down in the cyan-and-amber dusk of the Black Pike’s bridge pit, members of the crew rubberneck at this volley. Grant doesn’t blame them. Within the web of Taiikari mores it’s permissible for an heiress to speak to her Princess this way, but it’s very new, even to him.
Now that Vora’s the Princess-in-Waiting, the former majordomo is suddenly unafraid to take the piss in public. What’s more surprising is how easily Sykora takes it and gives it right back. Grant supposes this unfearful sisterhood is how they’ve felt about one another for some time. He’s seen snatches of it in private when they’ve dueled with spears or game pieces. But Vora’s new title has finally allowed them to let it into the light.
The crew will move on from it quickly, he’s sure. Compared to what he’s about to tell them, it’s small potatoes.
“Okay,” he says. “Patch me through to the crew, please. Full vessel. I have an announcement to make.”
The tittering and tailtugging halts. An undisguised look of concern settles on Vora. “Do you have it written down anywhere? Would you like another set of eyes?”
Grant shakes his head. “I think I’m just gonna get it started. Wish me luck.”
Vora hugs him around the waist. “Good luck, Grant.”
A hush falls across the deck as he moves to the banister. The camera blinks blue in the dim. Its maximum height has been raised to accommodate his height.
“Crew of the Black Pike. This is your Prince speaking.”
Breathe in on a four-count, and out on a four-count. They care about you, Grant. You care about them. Give them honesty, give them love, let them give it back.
“By now,” he says, “I imagine word is spreading among you of the uniqueness of my people. You have many questions. I am here to answer the chiefest one. And the answer is yes.”
Behind his back his right fist wraps around his left thumb, and squeezes hard to keep from shaking.
“I am immune to compulsion,” he says.