Princess of the Void

5.44. Quartermaster

Kymai takes another bite of the knockfish pâté-filled seaweed puff, and gasps softly as the flakes coat his tongue. Past the briny initial kick, the sugars melt and mingle. His breath shortens.

God, it’s good. He thinks of the millennia of care that went into this bite. Of the gnarled, salt-dried hands that stretched and seasoned the seaweed, that painstakingly flaked the fish. Of the uncomprehending life lifted from its peaceful, icy darkness and cut suddenly short. All the sacrifice and the work that went into delivering this craft to his unworthy tastebuds. Art, science, commerce, creativity, death, life. Food.

He wills his racing mind to stillness, the better to honor every atom of intent and care upon its irreversible journey across the gradient of taste. The enzymes breaking down; the textures pulverized between his teeth. How much food has he wasted on preparations infinitely inferior to this? How many living things have given their lives to anything less than excellence? How has he never thought to use seaweed in this way? What went wrong in his education? How can he call himself a professional chef when he’s so unadventurous?

He flips his notepad open and scribbles a few lines. Palkar will look at him as though he’s lost his mind when he asks for yet another varietal of seaweed, but the muqa kelp they’ve got in storage right now will never do. It’s bland. Bland and inoffensive to the Taiikari palate. He must be bolder. He mustn’t be such a coward.

He’s partway through the mental exercise of how to bring those sugars out when he remembers to alert His Majesty that the seaweed clusters are safe to eat. He glances at the bathroom door that Prince Grantyde recently went through. His brows lower. He swallows his bite.

Muffled thump. Shadow moving below doorjamb.

A man steps around the corner. Cautious gait. Hand in the right pocket. Old scar on his lip.

The toe of his boot nestles in a black-and-scarlet uniform where it lies on the floor, next to a discarded notepad and a pastry with a single bite taken from it. The breath he held whooshes out.

He’s pulling his piece. Balance shifts. Hasty over-torque on his muscle actuation. Now.

The man’s arm cranes backward and comes cracking down onto an unseen knee that snaps tendon and misplaces bone. He tries to scream and nothing comes out but a compressed hhhk; the skin on his neck flushes and pinches under an invisible forearm. He crumples to the floor.

The gun he’d tried to bring to bear slips from his senseless fingers and floats into the air. The magazine moseys out and drops to the ground along with the bullet in the chamber. The discarded spectacle anticomps ghost up from the floor, unfold their arms, and remain hovering in place for a moment—then at the thud of approaching feet, they dart like a diving shrike into the sound’s source, spinning him against the wall and pinioning his arm to his back.

“Kymai,” the new man grunts. “Kymai—”

The quartermaster’s brutal programming hits an exception and freezes. “Gods of the Firmament,” he whispers, and lets Ajax of the Black Pike off the wall. “Master Sergeant. What in hellfire are you doing here?”

“Same as you, man.” Ajax kneels next to the fallen body. “You kill him?”

“Unconscious.”

“His Majesty told you to spare these pricks, then?”

Kymai gives Ajax’s sleeve a tug toward the bathroom. “His Majesty is in there. We’re not to intervene yet, he says, not unless he screams.”

“They could compel him not to scream.”

“I know that, Ajax. You think I’m not fretting already? Help me stow this one.”

The gunman’s legs jerk into the air as if he’s executing some kind of calisthenic stretch. Ajax takes him by his armpits, and the two men of the Pike stuff their victim into the bathroom’s nearby janitorial closet. Ajax wipes his hands on his tunic. “How many?”

“I don’t know. Two gentlemen in, two out. The bandits must have gone in camouflaged.”

“Gear pre-stashed in the bathroom, you reckon?”

“That is how I would run it, yes.”

Ajax thumbs his piece active. Its blue light blinks beneath his print. “Wish I had my fuckin’ HAK.”

“He warned me to await this possibility,” Kymai says, as they move the man’s boots into the closet. “I wasn’t aware you were present as well.”

“Yeah, well. He paid for our tickets, and the boys are big enough to travel.” Ajax pulls a sealing spike from his belt pouch. He clicks its cap, and its other end goes red hot. He presses it to the end of the doorjamb and gives it a couple of firm slaps to sink it into the wall. “Meena took some convincing, but there’s only so much pottery a guy can try before he has to conclude he sucks at it and should just go back to what he does right.” He zipties the sunken spike and the knob together. “Which is supposed to be killing pussywillows like this, but that’s His Majesty for you.”

“His Majesty says they intend to take him alive as a hostage.”

“Dumbass,” mutters Ajax, oblivious to the sharp gasp of disapproval Kymai reacts with. “Using himself as bait. No clue how Her Majesty’d say yes to that.”

“Perhaps he didn’t tell her,” Kymai says. “It’s not our place to wonder. You know the plan, yes?”

Ajax nods. “You already message the Brigadier?”

“You’ll have to. I’m staying camouflaged.”

He indicates Kymai’s discarded uniform. “What’ll you do with this stuff, then?”

“I’d hoped you might bring them, Master Sergeant.”

Ajax snorts but obediently folds the cloth into his shoulder-sling bag. “There’s painters near the boxes and the main docks.”

“They won’t bring him that way. They won’t want anyone from House Korak to see him, and one presumes they have camouflaged movers of their own accompanying him.”

“Is—”

The door handle clicks and turns.

“Back,” Kymai hisses. “They’re coming out.”

His Majesty emerges from the bathroom, expression vague. He blinks a few times as he pivots on the balls of his feet. Then he sets off toward the vestibule.

Ten seconds later, a Taiikari man in a loose tunic slips from the men’s room. Another follows, sporting a fresh shiner and a scowl. Appears His Majesty didn’t go peacefully. The decked man joins his compatriot at the threshold in a whispered conversation, glancing over each other's shoulders.

Kymai gets as close as he dares.

“—on his communicator. No response.”

“Can’t worry about it yet. We return to the ship and deal with it there. Let’s move.”

Off they go toward the crowd. Kymai loosens the camouflage tension on his keratin sheaths, enough to flicker his hair and tail-tuft visible, and gestures Ajax out of hiding. The Master Sergeant steps to his side.

“Hey,” Ajax whispers. He holds his fist out. “Pike’s up.”

“Pike’s up.” Kymai’s invisible knuckles bump his. “Welcome back, Master Sergeant.”

“I’m not back yet.” Ajax adjusts his anticomps and tucks his tunic over his handgun. “I’m on paternity.”

He strolls into the vestibule, thumb tucked into his belt. Kymai follows. “They have at least one camouflaged,” he whispers. “The compeller.”

Ajax nods like he’s bobbing his head to the music.

A woman in an opaquely visored HAK suit, its pauldron a blue-and-white private consortium logo, steps from the secure door to the regency boxes and falls in with the Master Sergeant. “Stupidity reigns,” she grunts. “Here we go.”

“Ma’am.” Ajax brushes his knuckles to his chest in a low-key salute. “Quartermaster’s right behind us.”

“Afternoon, gentlemen.” Hyax’s armored tail flaps a greeting to the invisible quartermaster in her train. “I hoped His Majesty was wrong and Shoskia wasn’t this desperate or idiotic. But here we are. I am glad to have you both as parties to this shitshow, at least.”

Ajax smirks. “Try not to sound too excited, ma’am.”

“Excitement is loud. Today, we’re quiet. Step aside, please. Coming through. Security business. Luaq minuaniq.” Hyax swaps briefly to Eqtoran to shoulder her way through an excited crush of North Ocean teenagers. “If we do our jobs right, we take the extraction vehicle and its crew, and no word reaches the Marquess until it’s too late.”

Grantyde’s passage across the skybarge is slowed by a constant deluge of well-wishers and glad-handers. He excuses himself from their attention with brief expressions of thanks and courtesy; his eyes continuously flit away from his conversation partners and toward the private vessel bays.

Hyax huffs. “Good acting, at least.”

“He’s not acting,” Ajax says. “He’s compelled.”

“Uh.” Hyax blinks. “Yes, right.”

“Why’s he doing this, anyway?” Ajax murmurs. “What’d this Marquess do?”

“I suppose this is what happens when someone finally makes His Majesty hate them,” Hyax says.

Grantyde disappears through the private vessel bay door, stooping to get through its non-Maekyonized (or Eqtoranized, for that matter) height. His two trailing captors saunter through next.

“You first,” Hyax mutters, and Ajax is through. Kymai jukes past a waiter to join him. He glimpses Hyax tugging a cordon from a servants’ passage toward the bay door.

The three warriors of the Pike emerge into a long hall, its ceiling cavernously high and rimmed with service catwalks. His Majesty’s kidnappers disappear around the corner into the crew entrance that stands next to Berth Nine. Hyax unclips her handgun. Her HAK boots hiss and adjust into skirmish configuration as she approaches the berth.

Ajax hurries to her flank. “Wait here,” he whispers. “They’ve got a man missing. They’ll send someone before they take off.”

Hyax nods and flattens herself against the wall. “Still with us, Kymai?”

“Yes, Brigadier.”

“Whoever comes out, get his anticomps off and I’ll neutralize him.”

“What if it’s a woman?” Ajax asks.

“Then we kill her.” Hyax’s fingers flex on her pistol stock. “I’ll take responsibility.”

That brings a coiled-spring conclusion to their talk.

Kymai tucks his tongue hard into his upper left fang and thinks of his trigger memory—a sweat-soaked evening at the Institute, the head chef screaming in his face over a broken sauce—until he feels the familiar tingling rush of his adrenals activating. Ajax is doing the same thing stacked up on the other side of the exit, mouthing some brief mantra to himself.

Most marines love the suite once they get used to it. The hyperfocus it brings. When Kymai was younger, his fellow recruits would dare one another to send the cocktail through their blood on wild shore leave nights. Kymai does not like its effect on him. When it’s not properly steered it just washes him into a spiral of frantic recipe ideas, modifications, reproachments... he feels the feedback loop begin for a gut-churning moment, and then, thank the Gods of the Firmament, the man emerges from Berth Nine, and Kymai’s scattered mind sharpens to a shiv point.

Headbutt to the epigastrium to burst the breath. Double-leg takedown. Tail around dominant arm. Lock left arm to throat. Remove anticomps. Kymai has never understood the premium others place on his combat abilities. Achieving a uniform small dice on a kontiri-kan spring onion is significantly harder, and more likely to make you cry.

He twists the gasping face and bulging eyes to Hyax, whose eyes flare. “Still and silent. On your knees, hands behind your head.”

Kymai releases his foe. The man instantly adopts the folded flash-hostage posture. Ajax tugs him out of the doorway. It’s like moving a statue, the joints are so locked.

Hyax’s foot catches the autodoor sensor and beckons it open again; the entire action finished before it had time to hiss shut.

“Quickly now,” she whispers.

The three Black Pike warriors creep down the gangplank. At its end is a civilian shuttle, a tri-door sport model in anonymous black with its serials blocked off by Peerage privacy plates. Hyax holds up a hand and raises two fingers. A set of short, stabbing gestures program the next few seconds into her men. She raises a palm open to the sky. Camouflaged, check inand confirm.

He taps her shoulder twice.

She closes her fist: go.