What fresh hell is this? Nate Arturi couldn’t help but wonder, as he turned away from the hazy swirl of crusher space in the Camelot’s viewport, thoroughly flummoxed.
“She wants to do what now?” Jaeger asked, before Nate could open his mouth.
“Uh, pick… asteroids?” Over at the bridge entrance, Snuffy scrunched his face up, like he was questioning the accuracy of his own report. “She wants to go pick some asteroids. Sir. Demands it, actually.” He dropped Jaeger’s gaze to frown at his feet instead. “She called me an Yggdrasian slum monkey. I don’t even know what that means.”
Neither did Nate, exactly. Even if the general sentiment was easy enough to intuit. Either way, though, that pretty much settled it: He was never escorting Eldari royalty again.
So long as good Master Priatus doesn’t yank the leash and MAKE us, Ex muttered in Nate’s head. Which, much as he would’ve liked to argue, was probably more than fair, considering just how much he was starting to feel like the shiniest lapdog in the Alliance Council’s yipping menagerie.
“We’re not stopping,” Jaeger said, before kicking his feet off the control consoles and shooting a surly frown Nate’s way across the bridge like he’d forgotten whose ship this was.
“We’re not stopping,” Nate confirmed.
“That’s what I told her,” Snuffy said. “Tried to tell her, I mean. It’s just that—”
“Just that your blubbering slum monkey fails to understand that this is not some whimsical request,” came the elegantly frosty orator’s tone of Princess Elsavataryllianna Priatus as she strode in for a grand entrance behind Snuffy, shadowed as always by the two Eldari merchants of death that were her bodyguards. She’d changed outfits. Again. Though, to her credit, this one seemed at least marginally functional—either some kind of base layer or maybe even a survivable space suit in its own right. Nate couldn’t tell. Like everything else she wore, it was still plenty shiny, and probably worth more than pretty much anything else aboard, save for Ex and Cammy themselves.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d stop calling my crew monkeys,” Nate said.
“As would I, if only I could do so honestly.”
Nate just happened to meet Tessa’s eyes in time to catch the full quirky payload of the pilot’s reaction. He suppressed a grin. Just over a year holding the fort in Alliance space, waiting to be called up to the Big Leagues culling Synth protoswarms on the outer rims, and yet here they remained, pampering hoity-toity royalty like a bunch of interstellar chauffeurs.
At least they still had their humor.
“I require a sample of that celestial belt,” the princess said, with just slightly less acid. She shifted in her glitzy space suit, looking almost vulnerable for a moment. Almost. “It is of great personal importance, and I will likely not be passing through this system again anytime soon.”
It wasn’t exactly an apology, but something about her tone sparked a tiny bit of empathy in Nate. Personally, he would’ve sooner dived into the nearest star than be betrothed to Prince Phaldissus Kelkarin, and in what limited interactions he’d had with their royal passenger, he kind of got the impression the princess might’ve felt the same way. But still…
“Be that as it may,” he said, gesturing to the golden-armored Hurch and Lurch behind her in a gentle appeal for some backup, “I think all of us here can probably agree that stopping anywhere short of Vanaheim is an unnecessary risk to your safety, your highness.”
“We exist to serve her royal highness,” growled the Hurch of the pair, in a way that made it clear he would’ve gladly thrown down with Nate for his insolent tone alone, Excalibur Knight or not, had his lady willed it.
“Fine. I agree it’s an unnecessary risk,” Nate amended. “And—”
“And doth my brave Knight truly doubt his ability to protect me?” The princess’ demeanor was positively vampish as she leaned in, all arched brows and pouty golden lips, slender neck angled just so, and—
Keep your squishy human hormones to yourself, will you?
Nate hoped his irritated grunt was quiet enough to go unnoticed. Judging by the looks around the bridge, it wasn’t, but most of them—the old hands of the 501st Space Aggressor Squadron, at least—were fairly used to him making odd noises at the voice in his head by now. If any of the “new” crew hands—those few Council reps and Terran specialists he hadn’t managed to refuse outright—had anything to say about his Knightly quirks, they’d kept it to themselves.
“I doubt the wisdom of willingly stepping into a situation where anyone needs protecting,” he said, carefully slipping his composure back on. “Accidents do happen, even to brave Knights.”
In truth, stopping for some impromptu asteroid mining was probably about as risky as trusting Cammy with the toaster—or to not scare the crap out of a new crew member in the bathroom at some point, either literally or metaphorically. It was more just that he didn’t want to stop. Didn’t want to drag out this “mission” any longer than necessary. On some level, he supposed some part of him just wanted to see their royal Princess Elsa not get her way, for once.
Or so he thought, as he began, “And seeing as we’re aboard my ship…” only to find himself trailing off at the look in those damned puppy dog princess eyes and shifting to a reluctant, “How long would you need to… pick your rocks?”
He should have known better by now.
“Celestial bodies,” she corrected evenly, that soft vulnerability evaporating from her eyes with disturbing speed, replaced by some predatory pleasure—like he’d given her everything she really wanted just by simply confirming she was indeed still the master of her own little galaxy, and of all the poor peons roaming within. “And what does it matter, what time I require? My father bade you—”
“Your father asked me to see you to Vanaheim unmolested,” Nate shot back, insides curling at the smug look on her face, and at the memory of the Supreme Chancellor’s exact choice of words. “He didn’t say a thing about stopping for souvenirs.”
He was being petty, he knew, and almost certainly inviting more long-term headaches than this was worth. But dammit, he was tired of being yanked around like a freaking prize pony. Tired of being nothing but a shiny errand boy while his fellow Knights—if they’d even allow him the use of such a level word as fellow—were out there doing their duty. Doing something, anything, that actually mattered.
“Maybe once you’re Queen, you can send a nice armada of cargo haulers out here to cart the whole damn asteroid belt back to you on Vanaheim,” he continued, earning himself a fresh layer of serpentine ice from those royal golden eyes. Hurch and Lurch actually reached for their lances. Nate didn’t give a shit. “But until then, I’ll ask you to kindly return to your quarters and—Oh, what the shit…”
The words were still leaving his mouth as the raw data came pouring into his head from Cammy’s sensors, shaping answers to the still-forming questions rattling up his nerve endings from underfoot, where the Camelot’s decks had just shuddered like…
Like they’d fallen out of crusher space. Yanked clear by—
“Pirates,” Tessa said, just as Nate felt the ship register on Cammy’s sensors. An ID-scrambling corvette slinking around out in the belt coverage, waiting to see what booty fell into the grav traps they’d apparently sprinkled across the system.
“Goddammit,” Nate muttered.
“Oh, protect me, Ser Knight,” the princess cooed, her face deadpan, practically bored half to death as she turned to glide off the bridge. “I shall return to my quarters and await news of your pending heroics like a good girl. My poor heart simply cannot handle the trepidation.”
They watched her go in silence, Hurch and Lurch backing off the bridge at her flanks as if they expected one of them might actually open fire or something. And that could’ve been that, if her royal highness hadn’t insisted on pausing just long enough to add over her shoulder, turning to show Nate the upturned razor’s edge of her devilish smile: “Do my father proud, Ser Knight.”
She glid off down the corridor in all her Eldari grace, not bothering to look back and gauge Nate’s reaction. Instead, that honor was left to all the other sets of eyes on the Camelot’s bridge. He let out a slow, calming breath, trying to play his quick, customary round of What Would Iveera Do?
Well, I doubt even an Eldari princess would dare to show Ser Katanaga such flagrant disrespect, Ex pointed out, in a tone that suggested he was genuinely trying to be helpful. Somehow, it only made the point burn that much deeper.
“I need a new job,” Nate muttered. Then, just to get the bridge moving again: “Can someone please shoot them, by the way? I mean, not them,” he added, glancing after the princess and her bodyguards, then back to the others. “You know. The pirates.”
“Why not both?” Tessa murmured, still frowning in the general direction of Princess Elsa’s royal departure as her fingers began to dance across the Camelot’s controls. At an unimpressed frown from Jaeger, she shrugged and turned back to her task.
“You know the drill, people,” Jaeger said, slipping easily into his usual role as battle commander. “Slag the engines. Cue the stern warning message. Yada yada.”
“Love to, Boss,” called Ramirez over at one of the gunners’ bays, “but—
“They’re being coy out there,” Tessa finished for him. “All up on that belt. Pilot knows what they’re doing.”
Nate sighed, calling his armor down from Ex’s e-dim stores. “I’ll go say hi, then.”
“Wait.” Jaeger caught him by the shoulder. “Something’s off.”
Nate looked at the hand on his shoulder, maybe a tad more aggressively than intended. “What’s off?”
Jaeger frowned at the displays, shook his head, and focused back on Nate. “Could be more ships drifting dark out there. I’m not sure. Maybe we just blow the traps and get a move on.”
It sounded much less like an order—much more like a suggestion—than it would have a year ago, when they’d just been getting their start as the Council’s prolific errand squad, post Avalon shit storm. Nate shook his head anyway. “They’ll just try again later. It’s not like it’s any secret where we’re headed. You remember what happened back at Triton?”
“Ah, Triton,” sighed Snuffy, who’d just so happened to have found himself locked planetside during that particular mishap, passing the time with their three Atlantean charges in what he’d later called “life-changing sexcapades.” The frazzled mechanic returned from his fond memory to realize they were all staring. “What a shit show, right?” he added, quickly pretending to busy himself on his tablet.
The rest of the present bridge crew—namely, the two UN science officers who’d returned from Earth with the first Atlantean outreach a few months ago—looked a lot less certain about all of this, but no one spoke up.
“So, let’s just put the old fear of god in ’em here and be done with it, right?” Nate concluded.
Hear, hear, Ex chimed.
Jaeger didn’t quite look convinced, but Nate didn’t dwell on it. The grumpy old bastard never looked convinced anymore. And much as Nate knew Jaeger was probably just doing his best to help him along, he still couldn’t help but get a touch more annoyed each time the colonel second-guessed his every decision. He was the Knight here, after all.
So, he phased his way smoothly through the Camelot’s hull, gunned his gravitonics, and set out across the vast blackness of space to go show them.
