Kink, Love, and Galactic Domination

No working system cores meant no printers for food or other essentials, and no maintenance for the terraformed biomes.

Regardless of how much water, grain, and toilet paper they received to get them through from one day to the next, all of the worlds were now within months of total atmospheric collapse. That was one of the reasons the unification treaty had been so popular in the area. Once the Litani and Parusan government were one, the disputed worlds would obviously, collectively, belong to them.

In theory, the responsibility for their next doleum shipment should have become uncontroversial from the moment Leora and Trisque signed their marriage certificate.

Instead, they had been told to wait yet again, while the Litani-Parusan government got its space legs. And, apparently, tacked on enough monstrous caveats to the paperwork.

While Tammy stayed aboard the Compassion, preparing the supplies to be moved, Leora walked to the civic administration building in the shadow of the silent core, hoping that there was still anyone working there who might be able to plan the distribution.

She had made it only halfway across the thirty-meter stretch of sand when the air pressed down over her, announcing the arrival of a second ship.

"Fuck off, I'm working on it!" Leora shouted, whipping around and fully expecting to find Kevina or Flissom or Cordic descending to stick the nose of a personal ship intimidatingly in her face.

It took her a few seconds to register the expensive but compact ship in front of her as a Litani design.

The ship turned a hundred and eighty degrees in the air as it landed, and opened its small rear cargo hold in front of her before it had even finished setting its weight down on its skids.

Chunks of doleum twice the size of Leora's head glowed with their red-orange radiance. There was enough of it, crammed ceiling-high, to run every system core in disputed space for the next five years.

"What's up, wifey?" Trisque called, stepping down out of the cockpit. "Know somewhere I can unload these?"

Leora hurried to crush the wide-eyed awe out of her demeanor as Trisque jogged up to her. Whenever she'd felt awe at an apparent gift before, it usually meant her uncle was about to tell her the catch.

"Where did you get all this?" she asked.

"I stole it!" Trisque scrunched his hands together in front of him and bounced up and down on his feet with nervous pride in this confession. "I never stole anything this big before, and I was not a fan." The goofy smile on his face remained there. "Okay, that's not true at all. Once the panic sweats stopped, and I realized there was no one following me, it was awesome. I think I might be a little bit of a klepto, actually. I'm mildly concerned."

"You stole them from the Palace Ship's emergency supplies?" Leora picked out the relevant information.

"Yeah! There's no way they won't fast-track replacing that, so no one's going to get hurt. Meanwhile, this batch gets to go toward an actual emergency."

Leora swallowed a wave of approval for his logic.

"How did you pull it off?" she asked.

"Just walked in and out with a transport dolly like I owned the place, which I guess technically, I do. We do. But the supply cache was one of the Litani contributions, so I guess they never considered not giving me executive access."

"If the Parusan representatives had constructed it, they would never have given me...."

Leora trailed off, as she realized she was not so much calling out an inconsistency in his story as she was sharing far too much of her own.

Pity visibly dampened Trisque's enthusiasm, if only for a matter of seconds.

"Well, uh, now we can be banned from the bunker together, after this." He slapped the nearest of the glowing stones. "Seriously, where do we put it all?"

#

Trisque held the controls of his ship tighter than the short, smooth flights from each burnt out core to the next required.

At his request, Leora had taken the seat beside him for the ride. Her friend in the other supply ship certainly hadn't been in the mood to argue. She'd jumped up and down clapping when she saw the doleum and practically pushed Leora into the cockpit.

Leora had not yet spoken since she'd been there, however.

She sat there, gripping the handhold on the door beside her, face unreadable.

"So, I know grand romantic gestures are dicey at best," Trisque started. "But I swear, I wasn't even thinking about how this could look like one of those until I was halfway here. I know you don't owe me anything for this. It's not even about you. I just couldn't stop thinking about there being actual real people, under our protection, pleading for enough water to live to see their atmospheres abandon them. And since you...."

He stopped to search for the right words, and Leora supplied them.

"Since I took away your Plan A?"

"Yeah, since that," Trisque agreed. "Piracy was the only option I could think of."

This was not the conversation-starter it might have been.

"Look, I agree with you, believe it or not," he sighed. "I want things to be better. I want them to be fair. A lot of Litani feel that way. A lot of Litani men do."

Leora scoffed.

Trisque scoffed back. "Yeah, you wouldn't know it from the ones I have to work with, I know. We... we haven't gotten to where we need to be. But you know what?" He braced himself to step onto very thin ice. "Neither have the Parusans. You're what, the second woman to have any formal leadership over your side of space at all?"

Leora folded her arms. "The third."

"Third. Okay. So, yeah, you're a little ahead of us in that way. But have you ever wondered why? It's because it's a lot harder to leave women out of things, the factories, the laboratories, the banks, and yes, eventually even the government, when all of your men are soldiers, and most of them are dead."

Leora's eyes flashed dangerously, and Trisque wondered how many of the dead ones she had known so far. But he was committed now.

"I want to live in an egalitarian galaxy," he went on, wringing the cushioned curves of his steering apparatus. "I do. But I'm not willing to stick a torch to the whole concept of checks and balances to get us a few superficial baby steps closer to gender parity. I want my daughters to have access to every opportunity, and for my sons to never need to throw a punch! And, you know, vice-versa, but that tends to go more without saying. Can you tell me the Parusan way will give them that?"

Leora took a while to answer.

"If you're not willing to fight for what you believe is right," she said with a sad, unsteady voice, "the kinds of people who write those bills get to win by default."

"Yeah, I'm getting that," said Trisque. "And I know that just refueling the planets off the book is a temporary solution. It'll stop my team from pressuring us into a rushed decision using this particular urgent death threat. But they'll keep trying stuff like that. And if it hadn't been for you, they would have succeeded on the first try."

Leora tossed her hands in the air, as if this were both obvious and nonsense, and she'd had enough of both. "I don't know what you're saying."

"I'm saying that I think we're two uniquely qualified and situated people to build something better than what either of us is used to. I think we have a lot to teach each other, and that our visions of a 'better' galaxy probably have more in common with each other than with the people who brought us this far." He sighed as he listened to it come out. "And yes, I realize that's exactly what an enemy operative attempting to gain your trust for manipulative purposes would say."

"It is," Leora confirmed.

Trisque drummed his fingers on the controls.

"Well, if you have any ideas for a way you could trust me, I'm all ears."

Leora tightened her fists in the pockets of her jacket. Something clinked between her fingers, and he wondered if she'd felt the need to be armed in order to fly with him. That hurt, especially considering the vulnerability of some of the positions he'd let her put him in already.

"How about we start small, like, with you choosing the sex next time?" he half-joked, reaching for that intimate lightness that had so pleasantly surprised him about certain moments of her company.

"Choosing the sex?" Leora repeated, with an eyebrow slightly raised.

"Yeah, you know, assuming you want us to make up in that way." Trisque swallowed a lump that rose in his throat at this uncertainty. "You decide the when, the where, the how. Trust me with those details, like I have with you, and you can do whatever you want with me."

He smiled, hoping this sounded half as enticing to her as it did to him.

"I bet you have a wicked collection of toys around somewhere," he said.

This was apparently the wrong selling point.

Leora's hands retreated from her pockets as if something there had bitten her, and flew to her face instead.

For the rest of the flight, no matter how Trisque asked, Leora refused to acknowledge that she was crying, much less tell him why.

#

"What the hell did you think you were doing?" Flissom was doing the yelling, so far, but Dagget had decided to join this meeting in person, and was staring at Leora, barely blinking, probably saving his voice for the most cutting possible moment.

"Undermining Litani bureaucracy," Leora answered. "Just like I promised I would."

"Oh, is that who you were undermining?" Flissom's voice oozed sarcasm.

#

"A relief mission?" Aidrom scoffed. "I sent you in there to get a fucking signature, and you let her talk you into stealing from your own people to fund an unsanctioned, pansy-brained relief mission? Don't you come crying to me when the coffers are empty and she has you rescuing puppies in a pretty pink tutu, asking me where it all went wrong!"

"You fucked up," Trisque informed him, with the numb vacancy that came almost naturally to him now, whenever Aidrom started getting worked up.

"Oh, I fucked up? Do tell."

"Your whole strategy for the disputed planets was founded on faulty intel," said Trisque. "Your profile on Leora was fundamentally flawed. You assumed that motivating her was as easy as threatening a few lives. You were wrong."

"Controlling the princess is your responsib—"

"But I salvaged your mess," Trisque went on. "I adapted and made it work, regardless of how shitty your support was, just like you were about to tell me I'm supposed to. You were about to say that, weren't you?"

"By what stretch of the imagination was throwing our leverage away like a used condom 'making it work'?" Aidrom demanded.

"I told you, you never had the leverage to pass that bill," said Trisque. "Passing it wasn't an option. But proposing it in the first place did put me in a great position to look like a hero, and way more importantly, to look like I'm on the outs with you."

Aidrom paused for a rare moment of visible thought. "Look like?" he asked, with a skeptical lift of his thick right eyebrow.

"The only way Leora is ever going to listen to a single word I say, is if it looks genuinely plausible that I have less loyalty to anyone else than I do to her. You just gave me the exact optics I needed, and assuming you live long enough to write your declassified memoirs, you're more than welcome to tell everyone you did it on purpose."

#

"Your uncle made it very clear that the disputed planets could wait until you completed your primary mission," said Flissom. "You were supposed to bring the prince under your benevolent guidance, and instead, you let him see you spit on his government and run off like a spoiled child."

"You heard what he did for me afterward, right?" said Leora. "Maybe he likes spoiled."

"This—"

"Maybe he does," Dagget chose his moment to speak in his usual even tone, cutting off Flissom's response and summoning every eye in the room to himself. "That remains to be seen. All I am interested in hearing," he tented his fingers in front of him, "is what you are doing to press this advantage now, if indeed it is one."

Leora's voice abandoned her, as it still so often did in her uncle's presence. All her declarations of "I'm the empress, who the fuck are you?" evaporated in her throat, before they could make her look like even more of a child than he already thought her to be.

"Has he made any further sexual overtures since your little Robin Hood adventure together?" Dagget persisted. "Have you?"

#

"It wasn't the worst gambit to get her to cozy up to you, I'll give you that," said Aidrom. "There's just one teeny tiny giant whopping flaw in it."

"Yeah? And what's that?" asked Trisque.

"I honestly don't know," said Aidrom. "But there must be one, because you've got the look of a man who's been sleeping on the couch."

"It's been one night!" said Trisque. "Things got heavy and weird! I think I'm doing okay for being on, like, a fourth date with my cross-cosmic ancestral foe!"

#

"I realize you're new to leadership," said Dagget. "And I'm sure procrastination and double-talk feel like the height of sophistication to you at the moment. But I really don't have time for them. It comes down to this. If you want my continued support, you will have the prince under lock and key by the end of the week. If not, I will be forced to reconsider my political position."

He seemed to take Leora's silence as compliance. To be fair to him, it had worked that way so many, many times in the past.

Her jaw remained cemented shut with fear of exactly how much loyalty Dagget still commanded in Parusan space, and what it would be like to have it aimed against her.

Still, somewhere deep in her chest, an invisible smile bloomed. In this one case, the compliant thing to do would have been to speak up, to confess that she had thrown that creepy chastity guillotine in the trash the moment she got home to the Palace Ship, so that she could be given a new one.

Instead, the silence, the one thing Leora could count on herself for in her uncle's presence, crept rebelliously onward.

#

Trisque: Bed, 8pm, let me surprise you?

Leora: I'd like that.

Leora lay naked under the covers, focusing on the soft material on her skin and waiting for Trisque to come home to the royal suite.

The twenty-four hours or so that had passed since they'd delivered the doleum had been... not cold, exactly, and not angry, but awkward to the core.

They had walked around each other and eaten together in something adjacent to silence, broken by strictly functional exchanges of words.

Trisque kept looking at her as if he wanted to hear something specific, but all Leora had been able to think about while looking at him was what she'd almost done to him. And when she wasn't looking at him, all she could think about was how she hadn't done it.

Over a decade of training and preparation, so much of it aimed at making sure she wouldn't let Trisque usurp her old allies in her mind, and in less than a week, she'd gone and done exactly that.

It would almost serve her right, she thought, if he did turn out to be the total fraud of a spouse that she was supposed to be.

But as long as she was betting on him, she might as well throw herself in all the way, and try to make this evening a fresh honeymoon start.

The broad, goofy smile on Trisque's face when he walked in softened the knot in her stomach. His eyes traced her bare shoulders and collarbone with savoring delight.

"Wait there," he said, holding out a hand to stop her when she started to sit up and lower the blankets.

Teasingly slowly, to the beat of music that only he could hear, Trisque undid the buttons of his shirt, subtly flexing each arm behind him as he pulled it out of its sleeve.

He drew the process out still longer with his pants, zipping and unzipping three times before pulling them down, along with his boxers, to reveal a glimmering flash of titanium.

All the air left Leora's lungs.

"I found it in your wastebasket," Trisque said proudly, breaking his stripper swagger enough for a more private smile. "I wasn't snooping, I promise. I was just emptying it. Big hunk of metal kind of stood out against tissues and protein bar wrappers. First time I've been glad to live somewhere where you need a security clearance to take out the trash. Hey, it's okay."

He sat down on the end of the bed and squeezed her ankle, obviously registering the horror on her face.

"I know I freaked you out when I asked you to show me what you like in bed. But you didn't need to try to get rid of it. I don't think it's weird or anything. No weirder than my stuff. And it doesn't make you any less of an advocate for justice. We don't get to choose our kinks. Believe me, I know." He pulled himself up onto all fours and licked his lips. "So. Wifey. What do I need to do to earn my freedom?"

Leora scrambled out of bed, grabbed her personal tablet, and tapped the link Kevina had sent her for the device. The app took an agonizing minute to download.

"Leora?" Trisque asked, with the first notes of doubt in his voice. "Is this part of it?"

When the app finally opened, Leora was not at all surprised to find the "full unlock" button disabled. She tapped it anyway, bringing up the same error message five times before giving up.

This function requires master-level access. Please contact the master keyholder, or choose from the approved caretaker-level options below.

The top right corner of the screen showed an unread message waiting in the keyholders' chat window. She tapped it.

Dagget: I'm so proud of you, Princess.

***

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