Princess of the Void

Grant freezes. His heart turns over in his chest. His wife stares up at him, red-faced and tearful, her hands twisting into the silk sheets of her bed. Their bed.

“Fine.” Sykora sounds manic. “You’re free. Fine. Take it, for all the good it’ll do. It’s nothing. I don’t care. I free you.”

He plants his knees on either side of her. His shadow engulfs her, with room to spare. “Swear to me.”

“It’s a trifle. It’s meaningless. You still serve me.” She points a trembling finger between his eyes as he lowers back onto her. “I’m still your Princess.”

“Sykora.” He fills his palm with her breast and squeezes. She gasps like she’s been stabbed. Her nipple is hard under his thumb. His cock nestles against her. Her pussy is so rosy with need that it’s turning indigo. “Swear it.”

She’s burning hot. She squirms helplessly. “I swear, Grantyde,” she wails. “I swear it. I free you. You win, you fucking demon, you win, you’re free. Fuck me. Fuck me right now. Fuck me fuck me fuck—”

Her last me melts into a keening cry of shock as he pushes into her.

With such a compact and inexperienced partner, he expected difficulty, impossibility, even. But what little resistance there is in the Princess’s fever-hot flesh only clings for a tight, gratifying moment before she opens for him. Sykora’s graceful body makes a decidedly graceless squelching sound and gives way with such sticky eagerness it's as if she's pulling him inside.

His lungs vent out as his hips bump hers. His cock is all the way in, sheathed to the root in the Princess of the Black Pike.

It fits like she was made for him.

Her spine arches. She stares up at him in dizzy disbelief as her overwhelmed cry empties her voice and her breath from her. Her mouth stays open wide, in a silent scream.

Her muscles suck and cling as he draws back, like a seal around his cock. Like her body’s trying to keep him inside. He watches her folds grip him, deep dusky blue against his pink. Her throat makes a guh noise, trying to summon up his name, but her chest is still billowing and trembling and it’s as though she’s forgotten how to speak. He has, too.

He pushes in. Another wet, shameless noise accompanied by her strangled intake of breath, like she’s drowning. He wraps himself in his wife.

“Oh God oh GOD oh Grant!” Her head thrashes backward into the bed. She clamps her palms to her mouth to muffle the rest of her scream. She’s soft and clutching and dripping. The velvety skin of her ass kisses his groin. How is this tiny woman taking him so flawlessly? Jesus Christ, he sees it. Sees the shallow bulge his cock is making in her belly, where it’s encased in her quivering insides. She’s looking at it too, the place where they’ve become one, eyes staring huge between her fingers, her hips twitching and bucking involuntarily on his impaling length.

“You—” The Princess is short-circuiting. She raises a trembling hand toward him. A bright tear drifts down her cheek. “You're—”

He’s losing his mind. He’s melting into her. He knows now with crystal certainty that if he’d given in, if he'd succumbed even for a moment, he’d have lost, the instant he felt this. He’d have begged to be her slave. He’d have joyfully locked the shackle around his own neck. He’d have traded his freedom a hundred times for this sensation. The terrified, elated realization fills him: she was right when she told him about Taiikari girls. She was so right. This is irreversible. He can never go back.

More tears spring from Sykora’s eyes and carry her shadowy makeup down her cheeks. Her hand curls into his chest hair. She clings to Grant like she can’t believe that he’s real, that this is happening to her. She finally manages to speak: “You’re home.”

Her shaking lungs release an overheated laugh. “You’re home.”

He is.

He props himself onto his elbows and lets more of his weight onto her. He wants to be slow for her—for what might be her first time—but her musical cries and her gripping body are making him lose self-control. He’s so tired of holding himself back. Her breasts move in time with him as he speeds up. Slow and hypnotic at first, then faster, and faster, until he can't resist anymore and closes his hand around one, squeezes the pliable round handful of soft blue flesh and watches the other bounce. Her long, sonorous moans become tight and breathy. Her sweat-slippery thighs ripple rhythmically with the impact of his hips. His control over himself ebbs away, further and further, until he’s hammering his conquered Princess into the bed. Sykora clings to his shoulders like he’s the cliff edge over a bottomless fall.

“Grant,” she sobs his name. His real name. “Grant it's so fucking good.”

He lifts her legs up into the air, folding her in half, and pounds into the minuscule tyrant who once haughtily proclaimed him her property. He listens to that arrogant alto voice go high and scratchy, wailing his name as he deflowers her with a foggy, bestial lust.

He forces himself to a halt, buried deep.

He rasps into her ear with what air he can spare. “Still waiting for me to flicker out, your Majesty?”

“No.” She writhes on his cock. “No, I—please, Grant. Don't stop.”

His fingers sink into the squish of her ample thighs. “You told Vora you were gonna enjoy taming me. You don't want me tame?”

“No. No no no I’m yours. You smug bastard. I’m yours.” Her nails scrape against his chest. “You win, I'm yours, you fucking win, fuck me please please please!”

She cries out in frantic triumph as he resumes his merciless pace. He covers her completely. An exterior observer would see nothing of her underneath him but for a twitching tail and her little legs flailing for purchase across his back. The height difference is so severe he has to contort to kiss her. Her eyes screw shut against the overwhelming sensation. Her tail winds around his waist. It flexes in time to his movements to pull him deeper.

“You’re breaking me.” Her ankles finally meet and cross at his back. “You’re gonna break me—”

He wrestles control back from his caveman brainstem. “Should we stop? Do you need a second?”

A snarl rises from her throat. Her shadow-stained eyes snap open and flash on instinct. “Don’t you fucking dare!”

He halts, halfway in. His brows lower. “Did you just try to compel me, Princess?”

A look of shock, of fear, even, crosses her shining face. It’s quickly elbowed off by a wicked grin. The delicate span of her neck extends as she leans her head back imperiously. Her eyes flash again. “Kneel,” she commands. “Know your place, Maekyonite.”

He slides out of her, dripping her honey across the sheets. He lifts her kicking into the air and spills her onto her stomach. The voluptuous jiggle as she lands lances another burst of lust through his brain. He slips behind her and tugs her by her hips up to all fours, watches her plush butt flatten into a heart shape as it’s smushed against him. “Know yours, Taiikari.” 

A syrupy giggle pours from her lips. Her spine arches, fluid and catlike, and her glistening folds slide up and down him, teasing him back toward her blushing entrance. Her toes dig into the bedspread. The black-velvet curtain of her hair flows down her back. She looks impishly over her shoulder and wags her tail in his face. “Put me there.” 

He anchors his grip on her shoulders and pushes roughly back into her. Her groaning “yessss” drags out as his weight squishes her further into her nest of candy-colored pillows.

She’s small, and she’s light, but it’s clear, now, how far she is from fragile. Her face stays buried in the bed as she hikes her ass up, meeting his thrusts with sinewy gyrations of her own. His gentleness is fleeing him by the second as her sturdy thighs clap against his, joining the lascivious, lapping symphony of their bodies' connection. “Graaant.” She sings it, husky and breathless. Her tail thrashes and wraps around his forearm. “Pull it.”

He lets her tug his hand to the fleshy base of her tail, where it’s as firm and sinewy as her bicep. He caresses it. “From here?”

She nods vigorously into the pillows. He tightens his fist on it and pulls, tugging her hips further into the air and loosing a smothered yelp from her. He slaps her ass again and relishes the rocking of her cushioned body and the scandalized squeak she utters.

“Did you just fucking spank me?” She twists her head. “I’m your Princess.”

“I’ve wanted to do this—” He spanks her other cheek, harder. “For a long time, Princess.”

She cries out and grinds against him. His implant is messing up, glitching as it tries to translate the nonsense noises he’s coaxing from her melting mind. He’s pretty sure she didn’t just say beeswax for no reason.

His lustful vision skids along the shapely feast of his wife's back, from the round lusciousness of her ass, now bearing his rosy handprint, to the sculpted muscles bunching and flexing under her summer-sky skin, and lands on the crown of her head, where her horns are so far extended that they’re curving at the ends like a goat’s, flushed with gathered blood. “Your horns, Majesty.” He lays a hand on the back of her neck. “I didn’t know they could get this big.”

“Nooo,” she keens. “Don’t—don’t look at them.”

“So sharp. I might poke my eye out.” He slides his palm into her hair. “You told me you knew how to control these.”

“I can’t—it—it’s not my fault.” She buries her burning face in her pillows. “I said don’t look.”

He brushes her horn and brings out a full-body shiver. Her pussy flutters around him. “Grantyde,” she gasps. “Oh God. We don’t—we don’t touch them like that—”

“Who’s we? Taiikari?” He closes his fists on her horns. They're more like thick antennae, he realizes. Velvety and slightly pliable. “I’m not Taiikari.”

He yanks her head up from her pillows and thrusts into her like he’s trying to split her in half, gripping her horns like handlebars. Her spine arches. She screams his name, turning the aa in Grant to a full-throated howl.

He releases her. She slumps forward and slides halfway off him, curling and trembling. Her eyes are glassy. For a moment he’s terrified—are they even more sensitive than he realized? Did he hurt her?

Then he feels the grasping throb, and sees her pussy wink, and Sykora squeaks out a high, goofy ohhh? like someone’s told her a fascinating fact at a party. The warmth trickles down his thigh. The totalitarian ruler of the Black Pike sector has just squirted all over him.

He coughs out a laugh and shoves back in. He folds her thin neck into his elbow and lifts her upper half from the bed, hitches her higher, until her back is pinned against his chest. She’s slick with sweat. Her head bobs and tilts backward as his punishing pace bounces her up and down.

“You. You brute.” He feels the muscles in her back twitch. Her eyes are unfocused and enraptured as she stares up at him. “You beast. I’m a—I’m royalty. I’m a Princess. How dare you—” Her voice cracks and dissolves into a luxurious moan that jostles with his motion. He puts a hand over her mouth. Her tongue curls around his thumb.

He tips backward and lies supine, pulling her with him. He adjusts his pace, slow but forceful, pushing to the hilt and lingering there to explore the uncharted territory of Sykora’s body, closing his arms around her and squeezing her in place. Deep and languid and loving. Her slick skin flattens against his, and the air forces out between them in a raspberry gust that brings a grin to his lips and a giggle to hers. Her stubby little sky-colored legs barely reach his knees. Her tail climbs up him, raking through his hair, rubbing his stubbly beard.

“I’m dreaming,” she mumbles, hazy and entranced. “I’m in a dream of you. I’m gonna wake up alone.”

“No,” he says. “Never again.” And he captures her pouty little mouth in an unhurried kiss. He feels her insides tweak and tighten again. Another high, breathless whine. His wife makes the cutest noises.

His hand rests on her stomach. He feels the churning stretch under his palm whenever he fills her. His fingers slide lower, between her legs, and she whimpers into his lips, and squirms, and scratches her nails helplessly along his binding forearms as he teases the firm little button of her clit. “Grant,” she gasps. “Oh my fucking God Grant Grant!”

He’s been with people who made those artificial porn star sounds. The noise Sykora makes as her second climax takes her is not that. There’s nothing performative about it. It’s not for his benefit. It’s a yowling, primal thing, a feral feline screech trailing into a husky, broken grunt. She thrashes and jerks once, twice, and then her legs shake and give out and she droops on him, spent, lying limp atop him like a quivering pillow as he pistons into her.

Her liquid groans resolve into words on the edge of incoherence. “Stop. You win. Put.” Her lids are heavy. Underneath them, her pupils flash. “Put me down.”

He aches for release, but he slows, and with a sigh, he’s out. He drapes her across the bed and stares in lustful wonder as the glistening entrance he stretched open tightens back to its original shape. No wonder he fit. His bride is springy.

“You didn’t—” she looks confused. “Do Maekyonites not cum?”

“We do,” he says. “But you said stop.”

She pouts. “I didn’t think you’d do it. You didn’t listen to me about the horns.”

“That one was obvious.” He grins. “And they’re so fucking cute.”

She thwacks his chest. “Don’t be weird.”

He chuckles at the blush that's spread across her face and her chest. “Do I pick you back up?”

“Yes.” She makes grabby hands at him. “And don’t put me down until you cum in me.”

“Okay. Let’s—” He sits up and lifts her into his lap. He eases himself onto his elbows until they’re just about face to face. “How’s this? You want a turn in charge?”

She nods. “This.” she touches his stomach. “This is so wrong. Good wrong. Fucking a man you can’t control.”

“We really need a safeword,” he says.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a word you say when it’s time for me to actually obey you.”

She thinks about it. A giggle brings a shine to her eye that has nothing to do with compulsion.

“Lonesome,” she says, in English.

And in that moment, the longing, loving girl from the underground cell appears again in his lap, and doesn’t fade away, but melds with the imperious noblewoman who stole him away. And as he lifts Batty up, and kisses her, and slides back inside, it’s like reuniting with a long-lost friend.

Her little hands push him down onto his back. She leans herself away from him, giving him an unrestricted and incredibly explicit view of her as she slides forward and back, in and out. “I told you.” Her feet flex on his thighs. “I knew it. What a fine seat you make, husband.”

She crosses her legs. His vision goes blank as her snug walls squeeze like a vise. She’s coiling inside, somehow. Tensing and tugging. Her tail loops under her calf and raises it high into the air, and now he’s in her at an impossible gymnast angle. The view she’s showing him is the most unapologetically erotic thing he’s ever witnessed. He sees everything. Her pert, sapphire-blue asshole. The trim core muscles standing out under her stomach, shining with sweat. Her gripping cunt, making him glide and glisten as she works him.

“Feel that?” Her voice is low and full of smoky desire. “That’s what Princess pussy feels like, Maekyonite. I have tricks I’ve waited an eternity to try.” Her eyes flash. “Put your hands on me. Lonesome.”

He sits further up and closes his grip around her waist. At the narrowest point his fingers almost touch. She’s serpentine and seductive under his hands, like a belly dancer. Her hips swirl as they rise and fall. “This is how I keep you. I’ll ruin the firmament for you. I’ll imprison you inside me. Nobody will make you feel like I can. You’ll have no choice but to choose me.”

He tugs her chest against his and feels her little heart hammering. “Do you take me now?” Her smoky whisper dripping into his ear. “Now that you can choose, do you choose me?”

No need to hesitate. Not anymore. “Yes,” he says.

“Say it.” And the supple muscles in her thighs stand out as she pauses, right at the apex of their motion, just the twitching head of his cock still sealed in her airtight body. “Say I am your husband.”

“I am your husband.” His voice sticks and cracks with emotion. He’s never acknowledged it, he realizes. It’s the first time he’s ever said it.

Sykora’s tears have started again. One rolls to the delicate tip of her nose. She tries and fails to keep her words steady. “Say you are my wife.”

His thumb nests against her belly button. “You are my wife.”

She hiccups as she begins to cry in earnest. “Say I’m yours forever.”

He cups the back of her neck. “You’re mine forever.”

She sputters a laugh through the tears. “Insufferable Maekyonite.” 

She slides down his cock to the hilt.

One overwhelmed exhalation between the two of them, and then she’s grinding against him, barely letting an inch of him out a time. The shaped pubic hair on her cute little mound scrapes sweetly across him. He feels the wetness of her happy tears on his chest. The svelte muscles in her abdomen go taut against his stomach and there’s that impossible sucking feeling again, like there’s a stroking fist inside her guts. He shivers and grunts as the first jolt takes him, the gleaming crest of a massive, monstrous climax breaching up from deep in his core.

She pulls his head to her level. Her shiny lips open next to his ear and fill his skull with her scratchy, tremulous moans. “Mark me,” she whispers. “Deep as you can. Inside, where nobody else can see. I’ll keep your secret. Claim me.”

He bearhugs her. He stifles his groan against her neck. They’re both so slick with sweat it’s like they’ve been swimming and his fingers slide down her back and clamp down on her butt and hold her beautiful blue hips in place and she whines into his ear as he takes over, no technique now, just heavy, humid breath and feral, animalistic thrusting as they sprint to the finish, her ass rippling under his clutching hands with every slapping impact of their bodies, and the pressure is so great that he’s all one solid block of it, one raw strained nerve, and she says “Grant” again, says it with awe, like it’s the most gorgeous word she’s ever heard, says it like a prayer to the God of Love, and something snaps and his mind exits his body through his cock.

The Princess’s core tightens into a gleaming, graceful six pack and that miracle muscle inside her milks him into her depths, and she says his name again in a breathy musical croon, sings Graaant as the first eruptive jet boils into her and she isn’t stopping, gyrating and panting and vivid red and blue and beautiful as more and more and more pulses out and he’s going to pass out, he can’t draw another breath, and his entire existence was a preamble to this moment, and every year he spent without Sykora was nothing, was sleepwalking, and he’s holding onto anything he can so he doesn’t float away, her toned shoulders her slim waist her perfect ass, and another burning gush and now he’s spilling out of her, he’s dripping down her thick, smooth thighs, he’s intermingled with her. She gives an encouraging whine as yet another white-out pulse racks him. The scrape of her tongue along his clavicle makes him shiver.

“Yours,” she whispers, and that’s enough to get one last grunting push from him, all the way in, and now he’s collapsed. He’s through. A tiny blue succubus has milked every drop of his soul from him and now he’s a husk. Goodbye, Black Pike. Goodbye, firmament. Grant is gone. Bury him in his wife.

Her weight asserts itself against his chest. Her teeth poke lightly against his neck. Enough to feel the pin-pricks of her fangs.

“Finally,” she sighs. “Finally.”

He doesn’t have it in him to form words yet. He just grunts. His head lolls to one side, and he fills his vision with the Princess’s face. Her glowing red eyes, staring back, brimming with joy and relief. How long they lie there together, he doesn’t know. The low lustrous light of the firmament passes across her body and they hold each other and just breathe.

After a minute, or perhaps an eternity, Sykora squirms and readjusts. She rises halfway off him and glides on the copious lubrication he’s pumped into her. “Fucking hellfire, boy. I thought I was pent up.”

His hand drops heavily onto her rump. The sweat still coating them amplifies the sound. They share an exhausted laugh.

“That,” he says, “was worth the wait.”

“You’ve waited a tenday or two, dummy.” Her thumbs trace the trail of hair along his stomach. “I’ve waited so long.” She kisses his collarbone. “But yes. Yes, it was.”

“Sykora.” His hand knits into her silky hair. “Am I your first?”

Her tail slides behind his head and bends it forward, so his forehead is touching hers. “You’re my last,” she says, and kisses him.

Then she hops out of his lap. “Be right back, beloved. Some miscreant went and got all this cum in me.”

She pads to the bathroom. Its clinical light flashes her silhouette to him for a moment before the door closes. Grant flops onto his back. In his wife’s bed. In their bed.

He’s picked most of the pieces of his mind back up by the time the bathroom door reopens. Sykora’s brushing her teeth. “Fu you wonk to fall if fuv gow?”

“What?”

She spits into the sink. “Do you want to fall in love now?”

He fluffs one of her downy pillows and props himself up. “Right now?”

“Now’s as good a time as any.” She fills a water glass and curls it in her tail while she fills another. She returns and hands him one. “The only thing that was stopping me was not knowing how the ride was. Now I know you’re an absolute lion, I believe I’m just about ready to hop off the cliff. If you are.”

“Is it something you choose?”

“Sure it is.” She quirks one shapely, dark brow. “You don’t mean to tell me you ripped your freedom out of my hands just to let your heart decide for you?”

He drains the glass and puts it on the lip of the bed-pit. “I guess not.”

“I’ve decided for myself, anyway. I intend to fall the rest of the way in love with you over the course of the next tenday. I hope that schedule will suffice.” She snuggles into his shoulder. “If you’re interested.”

“Hmm.” He rests his hand on her rump and scoots her across him. “I’ll need to review my itinerary.”

“An exhaustingly oversexed tenday.” Her tail tickles his jaw. “Well, eight days. That’s how many until the next cycle, and I’d prefer to begin the next cycle madly in love with you.”

He kisses the top of her head. “Let’s give it a soft yes. And pencil it in.”

“Splendid. Something to look forward to.” She climbs the rest of the way on top of him. He reaches down and pulls her downy comforter over them. He scratches her ear, and that’s when he discovers something about the species among whom he’s going to spend the rest of his life:

Taiikari women purr. Literally. His wife is lying on his chest and purring.

She opens an eye as he chuckles incredulously. “What?”

“You’re purring.”

She squints. “You’re scratching my ear.”

“It’s just you sound like a cat.”

“What’s a cat?”

“It, uh—it’s a pet. That purrs when you scratch it.”

“A wise creature.” She nudges her head into his hand. “Keep going.”

He obeys, and feels the vibration as she starts up again. He laughs gently and kisses her forehead. Her sweat is oddly sweet, compared to a Maekyonite’s.

“You,” she murmurs. “And only you, and never in front of anyone. I think I’d like it if sometimes, sometimes, you called me Batty.”

He strokes her spine. “Keep calling me Grant sometimes, and it’s a deal.”

“Grant,” she whispers. “I have waited hectocycles for you. Without even knowing who it was I was waiting for.”

“Batty. I think I have, too.” His curiosity gets the better of him. “Do the Taiikari… I don’t mean to overstep.”

“Step wherever,” she says. “Step on me. It’s fine.”

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Worried you’re robbing a cradle?” She hums. “I’m a hair over seven hectocycles.”

He runs the numbers. Seven hundred cycles, two tendays to a cycle, don’t forget the two-hour day difference… “You’re forty?”

“Forty Maekyon years? That seems about right.” Her ears perk up. “You sound surprised.”

“That’s middle-aged for a Maekyonite.”

“That’s middle-aged?” Sykora’s brow furrows. “Maekyonites live eighty years?”

“Just about.”

She tuts and shakes her head. “Not enough. We’ll set you up with a physical next tenday for your longevity program, and I’ll expect you to hew to it.” She rubs his beard. “After the days of pining you put me through, I’m getting my investment’s worth. You are not dying a moment before I am.”

“What’s a longevity program entail?”

“Dietary guidance. Supplements. A few surgeries and enhancements, though I suspect we’ll need to Maekyonize them.”

“Hold on, now.” Now it’s his turn to sound agog. “Like cyborg stuff?”

“Does that upset you?” She flattens her palm against his chest. “You can tell me no, husband. You’re free now.”

“Do you have it?”

“Sure.” She taps her skull. “Little chip on my brain for diagnostics. Some spinal doo-dads. Nothing invasive.”

He eases himself back down. “Let’s, uh. Let’s triple-check the Maekyonization. But I’m willing. I’m willing to do a lot more, now that I’m free.”

A shiver works across her whole body. “Free. My free husband.” The tip of her tail strokes a line along his happy trail. “I never considered I’d have that, as a Void Princess. It’s… thrilling. In a cliff-diving way.”

“We’ll make it work. I promise we will.” He rubs the base of her tail, where she asked him to pull earlier. That gets a satisfying sigh from her.

“We have to be smart, Grantyde. Smart in the face of a thousand years of empire. Aboard the Pike, none will question us. You have the anticomps. They’ll stare and whisper; let them. I trust their allegiance, even if they don’t understand.” She crosses her arms on his chest and rests her chin on her wrists. “But there will be times and places outside it, when you are with me, that you must seem obedient. There are people who are not loyal to me, who are seeking any means to destroy me. A willful husband, an equal husband, is one of those ways. Can you do this?”

He grins. “Depends on how far you push it.”

“I won’t push it.” She kisses his nose. “We’ll discuss my conduct before every appearance. The things I pretend to demand of you with no argument brooked, the places I seem to drag you. All agreed to beforehand. Or whenever we get a private moment.”

He nods his assent.

“And I promise you—the moment we are back aboard the Pike, and alone, I will make every moment of feigned ownership up to you. In any way you ask. Or—” She swallows. “In any way you demand.” The nubs of her horns are poking through her hair.

He traces their roots with his fingers. “I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

Her hand rests on his; her fingers poke through the gaps between his knuckles. “The Empire won’t know what this means. What we have. What your infuriating sexual rebellion bought you. But we will.” Her head fits so perfectly into the crook of his neck. “My savior. My husband.”

He kisses the tip of a horn. “My wife.”

“Grant.” She flinches. “Those are sensitive, you know.”

He tilts her chin up. “I know.”

The sweet air of her scoffing laugh tingles his lips. “Insufferable.” Her eyes drift shut as her lips drift open. He takes the invitation.

A blue light switches on in the darkness of their cabin. The intercom beeps. A frustrated noise comes from Sykora as she pulls back. “Shoot. I have to get that.” She raises her voice. “Speakerphone. No video.”

Vora’s voice filters into the cabin. “Majesty? We’re all standing by. You weren’t—” Her voice gets closer and quieter. “You didn’t pick up on your communicator or the interceptor. But the deck crew said you’d come back.”

“Yes, majordomo.” Sykora’s fingers knead against Grant’s stomach. “Safe and ensconced.”

“Did you and Grantyde—”

“Vora, dear, let’s put a cork in that, please, and we can pick it up after the sweep, yes?” Sykora glances at her husband’s smirk and whaps her tail against his calf. “Are we ready?”

“Yes, Princess. Half-exo as requested. A nine hour sweep to Ramex.”

“Splendid. Pass my regards to the navigatrix and prime for my engage.” She slips off Grant’s chest and lies on her side next to him. He takes her cue and rolls over to big-spoon her. Her tail tucks between her legs to accommodate him. “Your first sweep,” she whispers, and wiggles her butt further into the hollow of his body. “You’re going to just love this.”

“Majesty.” Chief Engineer Waian’s stentorian voice sounds from the background of Vora’s call. “We’re primed.”

Sykora guides Grant’s chin past her neck so that their faces are laying side-by-side. “Engage.”

The artificial lights flicker. A deep-toned hum rises, reverberating in Grant’s teeth. A rainbow glow forms at the edges of their starfield vista as the sails unfold. A smooth pulse in perfect-fifth harmony joins the hum. The bottom falls out of his stomach, like the perfect floating moment of a rollercoaster stretched wide and gentle. The stars nova into rainbow tessellations. The gas giant Ptolek refracts into a dazzling warm-tone kaleidoscope and then smears past them. Grantyde and Sykora are bathed in a floor-to-ceiling technicolor phantasmagoria.

“Holy shit.” Grant drapes his arm across the Princess as he gazes into the sweep. “How fast are we going?”

“Half as fast as we could be,” Sykora says. “But I like to fall asleep to the sweep. It’s always been a comfort. Like someone singing to me.” Her hair tickles him. “We’re exiting on the other end of the Black Pike sector. Lovely little world called Ramex. I’ll take you there if there’s time.” Her ear flicks as she remembers what she’s given him. “And, uh, if you’d like me to.”

“I would.” He strokes the edge of her ear and feels her leg stretch and shake in happy indulgence. “I’d like that very much. Are we going to be busy?”

“The Pike won’t be. We’re only there to look scary next to a shipping lane. But you and me.” Her tail rests across his middle. Her leg stretches back and nests between his. “We are going to be very busy.”

He laughs into his wife’s hair. “Eight days, right?”

He cups her breast and feels the bud of her nipple hardening again beneath his touch. She nuzzles the scruff of his beard. Her dextrous little fingers slip between them and find him, ready and rigid for her. The horns growing back out of her head nudge his chin. As she guides him back to the warm softness of his new life, she twists her head so her lips are right below his ear. “Can I tell you a secret?”

He nods.

“I don’t need eight days, Grant,” she whispers. “I love you.”

And with a swiveling push of her hips, Grantyde of the Black Pike is home again.

The Pike rides the rainbow sweep, singing its passage across the dazzling firmament.

End of Volume 1