NOVPUBTwo minutes later, Grant is sprinting back to the command deck, his guitar letting out a hollow clack as his uniform’s tunic fastener clips it. Sykora sees him coming. The look of skeptical disbelief crashes into her regard for him and snaps into determined action. She grabs his chair from its place next to her throne. She tugs it into place before the video feed.
“What in hellfire,” Hyax mutters.
“Uh. Majesty?” Vora blinks. “What are you doing?”
Grant’s hands tremble as he hastily tunes the guitar. No reason to have perfect pitch, he supposes, but it helps get the shakes out. “This man came from near where I was, right? That’s what you said? Same country?”
“That’s English he’s speaking,” Sykora says. “I’m sure of it.”
“Then I have a way to talk to him.”
Waian chuckles. “Fuck it. Godspeed, Majesty.”
“Hey,” Grant calls to the viewscreen. He holds his guitar up. “Stephen. Hey. Look here.”
Stephen the Maekyonite breathes a disbelieving sound, halfway between a laugh and a sob. “hoalishidihszthaddamuthrfckn guitar?”
“Yes!” Grant hears the one word he still understands. “Guitar. That’s right. And, uh—God, I hope this works.” He points to his ear. “Stephen. Listen to this, okay? You know it. You have to.”
He plays.
The words come haltingly to his lips. It’s all nonsense now. Just syllabic sounds. But there are some depths of the mind that are coded so deeply to the metal that not even alien technology can reach them. Grant is a Prince, now, of an empire larger than he’d ever thought possible. But he was born in a trailer park and he dropped out of college and he worked on an oil field and at this moment he is proud of it all. Everything that he was once ashamed of. Because he may not remember his language, but he’s a redneck, god dammit. A redneck with a guitar.
And even the might of the Taiikari Empire couldn’t erase this song from his brain.
The first verse, Grant knows he’s butchering. But to be fair, “Shenandoah River” is the kind of name that even Maekyonites can mispronounce.
The man’s face crumples in perplexity as Grant plays. Then it unfolds, still desperate and confused, but elated, too. He joins in, with off-key amateurishness.
Across infinite space, the two Maekyonites sing it together. There’s a time lag that puts the other guy almost a line apart and his voice is shaky and out-of-tune but it’s working. Grant laughs with triumphant relief as they go into the chorus, and every word clicks in perfectly. Of course he knows them. He’s never set foot in West Virginia, and the place he belongs now is right where he is, standing next to his wife as stunned delight spreads a smile across her face. But he knows them. Every Maekyonite—every human who’s ever gotten drunk enough to whip the six-string out at a bonfire knows them.
The last lines of the chorus tumble slapdash from Grant’s mouth. Tears cut through the grime on the man’s face. Grant slaps his palm against the strings to still their vibration. “Do you get me?” He points at the screen. “These people are gonna, uh—taeekmi hom kontri rode.”
The man lets out a long, desperate babble of syllables, nodding furiously.
“Put the gun down, okay?” Grant demonstrates with his guitar, lowering it to the floor. “Gun down and then we’ll take you home.”
He steps back from the guitar on the floor. He points to it. Stephen’s red-rimmed eyes blink rapidly. He lowers to one knee and puts the gun on the floor.
The soldier with the camera surges forward with his comrades and the screen blurs into a choppy, pixelated mess. Stephen cries out as his arms are wrenched around to his back.
“Hey. Hey. Stop,” Grant barks. “Let him cooperate, damn it.”
The soldiers loosen their grip on Stephen, who staggers back to his feet. Their commander appears on the cam again. “What’s your order, Majesty?”
“Get out a topographical map of Maekyon,” Grant says. “Have him point to it. Just do it yourself first and he’ll get the drift. Wherever he indicates, you fly him there and put him down as close to a Maekyonite settlement as you can get. Did he have a communicator with him?”
“One of these?” The squad leader digs through his satchel and pulls a battered smartphone from it. “We found it in his belongings.”
“Return it to him with the rest of his stuff. He’ll be able to find his way home.”
“Majesty, there’s a camera on it. What if he captures film of us as we depart?”
Grant smirks. “I’m telling you people. I’ve seen probably over a hundred pieces of footage of aliens flying around. Even if he films your takeoff in HD, nothing will come of it. I will bet my planet’s future on that.”
“Understood, Majesty.” The marine salutes. “We’ll see it done.”
Grant heaves a shaky sigh. “Thank you, Gefreiter. I’ll trust you.”
The camera points to the floor. “Terminating connectio—”
The feed dies.
“Fuckin’ hell.” Waian laughs. “Whatever that was, Majesty, it was genius.”
“Grantyde.” Sykora is pulling desperately at his sleeve. “Grant, look at me. Look at my lips.”
He does, of course.
The Princess speaks slowly and deliberately. “Are my lips matching what I am saying?”
His eyes widen. “They are. Holy hellfire, they are.”
It happened so slowly he didn’t even realize. The implant isn’t translating anymore. He knows Taiikari. My brain is permanently altered, he thinks, it’s done, and he interrogates his internal monologue and yes. It’s Taiikari. He’s thinking in Taiikari.
“Dove!” Sykora squeals with joy and leaps into his arms. “You’re baked in! Your paths are done. Do you know what that means?”
It means that it’s all gone. Grant tries to put the same kind of smile on that Sykora has, despite the existential wound opening in his heart. “Tell me.”
“It means that we can start putting it back.” Sykora snakes out of his arms and grabs his hand. “Come on. Come with me. I have something for you.”
Vora’s tail waves. “Majesty, we ought to—”
“Half an hour, majordomo. Just give me half an hour’s recess and I’ll be back.” Sykora is tugging Grant toward the command deck door. “Stand down for now, everyone. Thank you.”
A round of confused bows as Sykora practically drags Grant from the room. As Waian straightens, she catches Grant’s eye and winks.
Sykora is practically vibrating on the lift. It’s only two floors but she hits the zero-G turbo anyway. “I’ve been waiting for this,” she says. “I’ve—well, you’ll see.”
Grant lets himself chuckle. “You’re keyed up.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” Sykora says. “But yes, husband. Yes I am.”
The lift lets them out at the munitions level. Grant looks confusedly at the storage racks they pass. The technicians and engineers shuttling gear to and fro look confusedly right back. Sykora pulls him into a low-ceilinged room full of neat rows of tagged and stacked boxes. Among the stacks, a pair of Taiikari men in anticompel goggles take inventory. They stop what they’re doing with nervous haste to bow.
“Good day, specialists.” Sykora forces a patient formalism into her voice. “I’m looking for the unassigned scriptomorphs. Are those in this wing?”
“Yes, Majesty.” One of the men points the way. “Just through that door.”
“Splendid. Thank you. Thank you, thank you.” Sykora throws the indicated door open. “Grantyde come here. I—it’s in here somewhere.”
Grant follows his giddy wife into the cramped storage room beyond the wing. She’s pulling heavy-looking crates out of their racks and yanking them open, murmuring as she seeks.
“Do you need help?” he asks. “What are we looking for?”
“We are looking for… this.” Sykora triumphantly tugs a hardcase from one of her pell-mell crates. She clicks the catch and opens the case, which blooms with bubble wrap. “I assigned a team of linguists,” she says. “They’ve been intercepting radio transmissions and analyzing them, and I let them borrow one of your books for a while—"
"You lent them a book?"
"They’ve already returned it. I’ve got it right here, see?” She pulls a his yellowed paperback from the box, one of his father’s John Carters. She digs further into the bubble wrap. “And they used it to make this.” She tugs free a glass pane set into a frame of black metal, about the size of a sheet of letter paper. There’s a button on the outside edge. “This is a scriptomorph pane. It’s one of the ways our diplomats quickly learn other languages.” She hands it to him. “Okay. Take this and let’s try it.”
She opens the book to somewhere in the middle and lays it flat on the crate’s askew lid. Grant squints at the characters upon it. So strange, how he used to read left-to-right and not up-to-down, or out-to-in.
“Look through the scriptomorph,” Sykora says, “and hit the button there on the side.”
Grant presses the button. The words on the page blur and shift. In the span of a few breaths, the book lays in front of him in Taiikari. He moves the frame out of the way. Back to Maekyonite letters.
His breath catches.
“And then with this bit right here—” Sykora flips a switch. A calm, tinny voice emerges from the pane, reading the text aloud and highlighting each word as it comes in a blue glow. “And you can shift them both around independently. So it can read aloud in English and show you the Taiikari, or the other way around, and it should work on all of your father’s books, and I hope so badly it helps, because it’s been one of my greatest regrets, taking English from you, I’ve felt so guilty about it, and I know we can’t reverse it, but I made one for me, too, and I thought we could learn it together, you and me, for a half hour or so every night, and maybe—”
She yelps as he seizes her and yanks her into the air. They spin twice and clatter against a storage room wall. He kisses her with frantic urgency.
“I fucking love you,” he says. “I love you so much, Sykora.”
“I love you, but Grant.” She laughs breathlessly as his kisses slip down her neck. “Grant. Wait. We have to get back to the command deck.”
His foot nudges the storage room door shut. “Does that lock?”
“Yes, but I told them—”
He pivots their makeout so that he has her pressed up against the door. He reaches past her hip and clicks the lock. “You told them half an hour.”
“Dove, there are people just outside.” Sykora’s babbling her objections, but her horns are out and sharp, and she knows the word to say if she actually wants him to stop. “They’ll hear—”
“Not if we’re quiet.” His forefinger presses lightly on her lips. “Will you be quiet for me, Majesty?”
Her inhale rattles. “Uh huh.” Her stomach is hot as a little oven where her arching spine pushes it against him.
“Are you grateful for my loyalty to you?” he whispers.
She nods vigorously.
He hits the catch on her uniform. She squeaks in shock as its fasteners demagnetize and fall away. “Then let me show it.” He grabs her communicator before it lands on the floor. He checks its dial. “It’s been four minutes. We can get dressed and back to the deck in two.”
He steps out of his boots. She clings tighter to him as the motion bobs her up and down. The fabric is falling away from her. His grip sinks into the bold curves of her hips. Her nipples are tight and pebbled against him. His hand slides up her back and pauses on the nape of her neck. His lungs squeeze with a jolt of realization.
The choker he put on her. The one from their first party together. She’s wearing it. It was hidden under the high cuff of her uniform.
“Batty.” His hand trembles as he traces its silky edge. “What’s this?”
“I—” Her face is dark with her furious blush. “I knew today would be a trial. And it just—it grounds me. To remember.”
Her embrace tightens. Her arms are too small to fit all the way around his back.
“To remember who I belong to,” she whispers.
His heart gallops. He kisses the Princess’s gloriously exposed chest, right below the little birthmark on her teardrop breast. He slides a storage crate out of its shelf and plops her on top of it. Her toes curl and her ribcage swells and she’s perfect. She’s the most perfect thing he’s ever seen.
Her wide, lovely eyes dance across his hands as they tug her uniform the rest of the way off. “What are you doing?”
“I’m seeing how many times my wife can cum in twenty-three and a half minutes,” he says.
