The first impact had already thrown her into a bulkhead before the second one arrived. Padmé caught the ribbed plating with a gloved palm, felt the Munificent's whole spine flex under her boots, and kept moving anyway. Red battle-strips ran the length of the midship corridor in a stuttering pulse. The air tasted like scorched insulation and recycled cold. Somewhere forward, the prow guns were still answering the Republic line with that deep, ugly cough a Banking Clan frigate made when it stopped pretending to be a bank.
She had the compact. That was the only clean fact she still owned.
The clan cylinder-copy sat in the right hip pouch, a hard little rectangle against her thigh every time she ran. It was still talking to the ship's closed hyperwave; she could feel the faint heat of the port through the white fabric, as if the file itself were sweating. Off this hull it became evidence. On this hull it was a beacon with a delay she could not see.
The white jumpsuit was already marked from the last sealed junction: dust at the knees, a dark scuff along the geometric chest panels, the high collar damp at her throat. No layer under it. The fact had not mattered when she boarded. It mattered now only as a private, useless piece of knowledge while she cut through a service bend and listened for the clatter of B1s on the main spine.
Her own ship was out there. Not docked. Not close enough to touch. A dark shape holding a lane off the Munificent's shadowed flank while the rest of the task force tried to crack the screen. She had come in through a collar that no longer existed as an exit. Combat posture had eaten it. Vulture racks had eaten the rest.
The earpiece whispered against her hair.
"Senator Amidala, I feel I must stress—" C-3PO's voice jumped as another tremor rolled through the frigate. "—that the captain's extraction window is deteriorating at a frankly indecent rate. If you are not off that vessel in eleven minutes, I calculate a seventy-two percent likelihood they will be forced to break off or be destroyed with you still aboard."
She killed the mic with her thumb and left the channel open. The droid did not need her breathing. He needed to keep counting.
Eleven. He would be wrong. He was often wrong when he was frightened. Captains held. Captains also died being stubborn. She did not have the luxury of finding out which kind she had.
A blast door tried to finish its cycle in her face. She slapped the manual override and got a red denial for her trouble. Officer country was sealed in layers. The lower courier bay — the only slip that would launch a noncombat clan runner instead of a fighter the whole sky would shoot — sat decks away down a route that no longer answered a stolen senatorial code. She had already tried two public terminals. Both had informed her, in the bland language of a ship at war, that hangar authority was restricted to authorized signers.
Authorized signers.
She had come here expecting a Muun.
The corridor ahead narrowed into the credit-suite approach: paler lighting, Banking Clan striping along the ribs, the faint ozone of hyperwave gear behind locked panels. Dooku would not be here. Dooku was up-spine, on a command deck that smelled like confidence. This was the bank's slice of a warship, the part that moved money while the guns moved ships.
Footsteps. Not droid. Too even. Too unhurried for a hull that was taking fire.
Padmé stopped hard enough that the pouch slapped her hip. Her hand found the hold-out without drawing it.
Rush Clovis came out of the cross-passage as if the alarm were an inconvenience arranged for other people.
He was in black. Senate cut, clan severe, the kind of coat that still had a place on Coruscant if no one looked too long at where it had been this afternoon. Hair in place. Gloves off. A faint crease at his mouth that might have been concentration and might have been pleasure. He was taller than the last time she had refused him in a hallway outside a committee room, or he only seemed it because the corridor was built for droids and the ship was trying to throw her off her feet. One meter ninety-two of banker who did not belong in a combat zone and had boarded one anyway.
He saw her and did not reach for a weapon. That was worse.
"Padmé." Her name, not her title. He said it the way he had always said it: like a door he intended to keep knocking on. Then his eyes went over the white suit, the scuffed knees, the bound hair coming loose at her temple, and something in his face settled. "Of course. I should have known the Republic would send a thief in clean clothes."
"You're in the wrong navy," she said.
"I'm in the only navy that still pays its notes." He glanced past her, toward the sealed junction she had come from, then back, unhurried. "You picked a remarkable hour to visit a credit frigate."
Another hit walked through the deck. The strips flared. Far off, something collapsed with the sound of a magazine cage tearing. Padmé rode the roll in her knees and did not give him the satisfaction of reaching for the wall.
"I need the lower courier bay," she said. "Clan transponder. A route that isn't the gun spine. Your cylinder still works or you wouldn't be strolling."
Clovis's smile was small and almost courteous.
"It works."
"Then open the doors."
"No."
The word landed without heat. He might have been declining a third cup of wine.
She could draw. The hold-out was a clean weight against her palm under the pouch flap. One stun, if the setting held. One body on the deck. She had thought about it before he finished coming down the cross-passage.
She also knew what a live signer key did when the pulse under it stopped. She had watched enough Banking Clan hardware in committee to remember the ugly part: proximity, voice, willingness. A cylinder that died if you turned its owner into luggage. Droids in this section would not pass a woman in white dragging a senator. The bay would not take a clan signature from a stick that no longer felt him.
He saw the calculation move through her face. He had always been good at that. It was one of the reasons she had stopped accepting his invitations before they became a pattern she would have to explain.
"If you take it off my neck," Clovis said mildly, "you will own a very expensive piece of dead metal, and you will still be on the wrong side of four sealed frames. The lower slip is clan-space. It wants me standing. It wants me speaking. It wants me in a mood to authorize a launch." He tipped his head toward the shuddering overhead. "Dooku will want me back on the command deck before that mood lasts. So. You have a problem with a short life, and I have the only door that still behaves."
"Name the price."
She hated that she said it first. It saved time.
Clovis looked at her for a long second, and the courtesy in him thinned without disappearing. This close she could smell the command suite on him: dry air, expensive soap, the faint metallic ghost of whoever kept Dooku's rooms too cold.
"You make me come," he said. "Then I walk you through officer country, I open what I can open, and I put a clan signature on a courier that might survive the crossing. How you manage it is your affair. I won't invent work for you."
The hold-out stayed where it was.
"That's finished," Padmé said. "Find another joke."
"It isn't a joke." He said it almost gently. "You have asked me for dinners you wouldn't eat, corridors you wouldn't pause in, a box at the opera you treated like a trap. I have been extremely patient. I am done being patient on a ship that is currently on fire." His gaze flicked to her ear. "And you have a voice in your head counting the minutes. Don't look surprised. You keep touching the cuff."
Threepio, as if summoned by the observation, burst back into the channel.
"Senator, forgive the interruption — the captain has just taken another fighter pass along the port batteries. I have revised my estimate. Nine minutes before they must withdraw or risk a full broadside they cannot answer. Please do hurry. I am becoming quite unwell."
Nine. Still a droid's number. Still a blade.
Padmé looked at the sealed frame behind Clovis, then at the cross-passage that led nowhere she needed. The compact burned against her thigh. Dooku was decks away, and the other signer on his filthy agreement was standing in front of her with his hands empty and his price already in the air.
She could refuse and die with a clean mouth. She could pay and leave with the file.
It was not a moral problem. It was a clock.
"A room," she said. The words came out flat. "Not the corridor."
Clovis's eyes warmed, not kindly.
"There." He nodded to a hatch she had taken for another dead panel: a storage locker tucked between two credit conduits, too small to be on any proper map. "Unless you would prefer to negotiate in front of the next patrol."
She moved first. That mattered to her, even now.
The locker accepted his cylinder with a soft, expensive click the public doors had refused her. Inside was what the ship did not bother to pretty: close walls, a single sick-white fixture, metal shelving bolted through a skin of vibration, a crate stamped in faded Aurebesh, the smell of solvent and cold dust. The hatch sealed at her back and cut the corridor's red pulse down to a throb through the deck. The battle became a series of incoming fists instead of a landscape.
There was no space to stand at a civilized distance. There was barely space to hate him properly.
Padmé's back found a shelf edge. The white suit pulled across her chest when she breathed. She could feel her own skin inside it, the lack of anything between the fabric and her, and she filed that under later with all the other things she did not want.
"If you stall," she said, "I walk. If you touch me before I say so, I walk. You get what I give you. Then you do your part."
"I didn't ask to conduct you," Clovis said. "I asked to finish." He was already working the closure of his trousers with the same unhurried precision he brought to a vote. "You may begin whenever your conscience and your droid can share a minute."
The next impact hit while his hands were still busy. The locker rang. A crate-latch jumped. Padmé's boot slipped half an inch on plating that had never been meant for a person to linger on. When the hull steadied, he was open to her, and there was nothing left to pretend about the shape of the payment.
She had known, in the abstract, that men came in different sizes. She had not known Clovis would look like a problem that belonged on a different species.
It hung heavy out of the black cloth, already thickening in the cold air, the head dark and blunt, the shaft thick enough that her first stupid, automatic measurement was her own face. If she set her cheek against it, it would not be a clever comparison. It would be a fact. Length that did not belong in a bargain measured in minutes. Weight that would need both hands. A vein standing along the underside as the thing filled, rising toward his belly and then out, toward her, as if it had been waiting in that coat through every refusal she had ever given him.
Padmé's throat worked. She did not step back. There was nowhere to step.
"Stars," she said, and hated the sound of it.
"Yes," Clovis said, almost conversational. "That generally precedes the rest."
She could still leave. The hatch was behind her. Nine minutes were becoming eight in a droid's frightened arithmetic. The compact was still in the pouch. The live key was still around the only man who could walk her out of officer country without the droids cutting her down.
Padmé's knees took the deck because standing in front of it felt like a waste of a spine.
Cold shot up through the white fabric into her kneecaps. The plating was ridged and filthy with a film of ship-dust. Another tremor walked through her bones and made her catch herself on his hip before she meant to touch him at all. His coat was warm. The rest of him, this close, was a heat that did not match the locker.
She reached up with both hands because one would have been a joke.
Her fingers did not meet around him. That was the first practical discovery. Skin over a density that made her think of the word impossible and then of the word later. He flexed in her grip, a slow kick of blood, and a bead of clear fluid welled at the slit and ran over the crown in a lazy line toward her thumb.
Padmé stared at it as if it were another kind of contract.
Then she began to work him with her hands, tight and unpretty, the way a person disarmed a charge: no ceremony, no looking up for approval, wrists turning on a cock that made her palms look like a child's. The locker light put a cheap gleam along the wetness she was spreading. Her bound hair brushed her own knuckles when the ship shook and she had to follow his length to keep from losing it.
Clovis made a sound above her that was not yet a finish and was not nothing. His hand went to the shelf, not to her head.
"That's a start," he said quietly. "Don't confuse it with an ending."
She did not answer him. In her ear, C-3PO was drawing breath to revise the world again, and Padmé put her mouth where her hands had already admitted they were not enough, because the clock had not stopped just because the door had closed.
Her mouth opened on the thought, not on courage.
The head was a weight against her lower lip before she had a strategy for it. Salt and clean skin and the faint bitterness of that first bead. Padmé's jaw had to change shape around the crown alone. She felt the stretch in the hinges of her face, a dull, undignified pull, and then she had a problem that was only going to get worse if she tried to be neat about it.
She took what she could and stopped when her teeth threatened him. Her lips sealed behind the ridge. Her tongue, trapped, pressed up because there was nowhere else for it to go. He was already too much for the polite version of this. The rest of him waited outside her mouth in a thick, hanging line that her fists could not fully hide, heat radiating off it into the cold locker air, the underside vein ticking against her fingers.
A tremor went through the Munificent like a dragged chain.
The deck punched her knees. Her nose bumped the flat of his belly. For a sick instant she thought she would clip him with her teeth, and she made a sound around him that was only panic, muffled and wet. Spit slipped out at the corner of her mouth and ran her chin in a thin, shining string. She caught herself on his hip again, white cuff shoved back, bare wrist against black cloth, and held still until the hull remembered how to be a floor.
Clovis did not thrust. He did not need to. He stood with one hand braced on the shelf and looked down the length of himself at a senator on her knees in a storage locker, mouth full, eyes watering from the angle and the size and the simple fact of the act.
"Breathe through it," he said. "You always did insist on doing difficult things the correct way."
She pulled off him with a sound she would not have allowed in any other room. A thread of spit connected her lower lip to the wet head of him and then broke on her tongue. Padmé wiped it with the back of her wrist because leaving it there felt like an admission, and the admission was already happening whether she wiped or not.
Her hands went back to work while her jaw recovered. Two-fisted, stacked, twisting on the slick he was making and the slick she had added. The skin moved over the iron underneath in a slow, ugly glide. She watched, against her better judgment, the way the head flared darker each time her top fist came up over it and squeezed. A fresh bead gathered, thicker. She smeared it down with her thumb and used it.
The jumpsuit was a second skin from throat to boot. Kneeling pulled it tight across her chest until the panels bit. With no layer under it her breasts sat against the white in a way the cut had never intended for a credit-suite infiltration: heavy, obvious, nipples dragged into points by cold and motion and the rawness of having this in her hands. The pouch with the compact knocked her thigh when the ship rolled. Evidence and payment, same hip.
She put her mouth on him again because her palms were not changing the shape of his breathing fast enough.
This time she tried for rhythm. Down until her limit met his thickness, a stall, a wet slide back to the ridge, tongue working the slit as if a man could be solved there. Her bound hair brushed her knuckles. A loose strand stuck to her spit-shined cheek. She could smell him this close, clean soap failing under the sharper smell of a cock that had been hard since she said the word room.
It filled her world. That was not poetry. It was geometry. When she lined her face beside it to find an angle that would let her take more, the comparison she had tried not to make arrived without language: the thing was a column against her head, longer than the distance from her chin to her hairline, thick enough that her features looked small and wrongly delicate next to it. She turned back and opened for the head again before that picture could sit.
Spit ran. There was no version of this that stayed dry. It gathered along her stacked fists and made her grip louder, a slick, obscene sound under the alarm-throb in the walls. She pumped what she could not swallow. She sucked what she could not pump. When she went too deep the crown shoved her soft palate and her throat closed on a gag she swallowed down into a cough that still had him in it. Her eyes filmed. She did not stop long enough to be seen blinking it away.
The ship hit them again, harder.
Metal shelving screamed on its bolts. The sick-white fixture flickered to a brown pulse and back. Padmé's mouth came off him with a gasp that tasted like him. She stayed on her knees because standing would have been a retreat she had already spent. Her hand kept moving by reflex, wrist tight, smearing her own spit in a shining coat from base to head until he looked filthy in a way his coat refused to be.
"Senator." Threepio's voice jumped in her ear, thin as wire. "I regret to report the captain is taking fire along the extraction lane. My previous figure was optimistic. You have seven minutes, and that assumes the courier can launch at all. I do wish you would answer."
Seven. A droid's terror. A useful one.
She put him back in her mouth.
Clovis's breath had changed. Not broken. Interested. The muscle in his thigh was a hard line under her bracing hand. Above her, his voice stayed almost kind, which made it worse.
"You look as if you're trying to file a motion," he said. "It isn't going to pass."
She dragged her lips up him, slow, and let him see she had heard. Then she went down and made herself sloppy on purpose. If he wanted a performance he could choke on the lack of one. What he got was work: tongue flattened, cheeks hollowed, fists pumping the wet length she could not house, spit pattering to the deck between her knees in dark little marks on white fabric. Her jaw ached in a bright, specific way. The corners of her mouth burned. She tasted copper where she had caught the inside of her lip on him during the last jolt.
He thickened further, which she would have called impossible if she had not been holding the proof. The head that had already been too much became a blunt, glazed fist against her tongue. When she pulled off to breathe, it shone under the locker light, a string of her spit hanging from the slit to her open mouth until she licked it away because leaving it hanging felt like theater.
"Clovis." Her voice was wrecked at the edges. She hated that too. "Stop talking and finish."
"I could," he said.
Her hands stilled on him, slick and shaking from more than the ship.
He looked down at her with the same expression he had worn in hallways when she walked away from him: patient, offended, certain he had time. He did not have time. He was stealing hers anyway.
"I could," he repeated, softer. "Not with you. Not like this. You may suck until your voice is gone. You may take it down until you cry. I am not going to spend myself in your mouth so you can stand up, wipe your chin, and tell yourself you never let me have you." His cock kicked once in her fists, rude and alive. "The hangar opens when I'm in you. That is the collection. You refused every other version of me for years. You don't get to refuse this one with your hands."
The locker held the words after he stopped speaking. An impact rolled through, smaller, a distant battery finding a shield. Padmé's knees throbbed on the ridged plate. Cold had climbed her thighs inside the suit. She could feel how wet she had gotten against the seam of it, an unwanted heat that had nothing to do with liking him and everything to do with a mouth used hard, a body running, a clock, and the animal fact of what she was kneeling under.
She could stand and shove the jumpsuit down. She could put that size where he wanted it and hate him while she did the arithmetic with her cunt instead of her jaw. Or she could stay on the floor and lose the lane, the file, the ship, and the rest of her name on a Confederate hull while Dooku called for his banker.
Padmé let go of him.
He stayed obscenely upright without her, wet to the base with her spit, a gleam of her lipstick if she had been wearing any. She was not. That shine was only her.
She rose on stiff knees. The white fabric at her shins was marked with dust and a few translucent spots that would not pass for water. Her mouth felt used. Her hands, empty, still knew his thickness.
"Turn around," she said, and then, because he had not earned instructions, she turned herself.
The shelf edge found her palms. The jumpsuit's belt came apart under fingers that were not as steady as she wanted. She shoved the white down over her hips in one hard motion. Cold locker air hit bare skin. No cloth under the suit, nothing to peel but her. The fabric jammed at mid-thigh and locked her stance into something narrow and graceless. Boots planted. Ass bare. The pouch and the dead hold-out dragged the bunched suit against her leg.
She reached back, found him by heat, and fitted that blunt, spit-slick head between her thighs until it rested against her. Too thick. Too hot. Wrong against a place that had never taken him, had never taken anything like him.
In her ear, the droid was gathering another number.
Padmé set her jaw, set the head where it had to go, and started to push.
The head did not go in.
It found her, broad and slick from her mouth, and her body did the oldest, stupidest thing a body could do: it tried to stay a closed door. Padmé felt herself yield a little and then stop, a bright, stretching burn around a shape that had no interest in her timetable. She was wet. That helped the way a rumor helped a vote. It did not pass the thing.
She adjusted her boots a finger's width on the ridged plate. The bunched jumpsuit made even that small. Her stance was a trap of her own white fabric, thighs bound together enough that she could not open for him like a problem with an easy angle. She had to tip her hips, reach back with one sticky hand, and hold that blunt crown exactly on her.
"Stay," she said, and it was not tenderness. It was instruction to a wall.
Clovis stayed. Coat, breath, the heavy line of him in her fist. The shelf creaked under his other hand when the frigate took a glancing hit and the locker tried to throw her forward off the point of him.
She pushed.
The head sprang her open in a slow, thick pop she felt all the way up into her belly. Not a slide. A theft. Her mouth opened on a sound she cut in half because the room was small and the hatch was thin. She was around him by only that much — the flared ridge caught inside her — and already she was shaking as if she had run another corridor.
Too wide. That was the whole report. She could feel the stretch as a ring of heat, a burn that was not injury and was not pleasure with a name she wanted. Her cunt worked around the intrusion in little helpless pulls, trying to understand a circumference her mouth had already failed. Wet ran out past the seal of him and cooled on her bare skin.
Padmé held there. One palm white-knuckled on the shelf. The other still behind her, fingers spread on the part of him that had not gone in, which was most of him.
Another pulse of the battle-strips leaked under the hatch as a pink throb on the floor.
She breathed in through her nose, out through her teeth, and gave him another centimeter.
It arrived like a second argument. Her knees wanted to buckle. The jumpsuit band chewed her thighs. She could feel every increment of him as a moving bruise from the inside, a slow plow that made her stomach jump. The spit she had left on him was a thin mercy. Her own wet was a thicker one. Neither made him smaller.
"Look at you," Clovis said above her, voice low, almost wondering. "All those years of no, and this is the first honest thing you've given me."
"Talk less."
She rocked back and took more because stopping would have been a vote for the droid in her ear.
The third push seated him enough that her wrist at her back had less cock to hold. She let go of him and grabbed the shelf with both hands. The loss of that control scared her more than the stretch. He was in her now without her fist to aim him, a thick, living peg she could only keep by the angle of her hips. If she stood up straight he would slip. If she folded too far he would go where she was not ready.
Padmé found a shallow rock. Back. Forward. Back again. Each return asked her for a depth she had not authorized. Her breasts swung inside the still-closed top and dragged nipples across white panels. Sweat had gathered in the suit along her spine. A drop ran down between her shoulders and vanished into fabric.
The Munificent slammed them.
Not a tremor. A hit. The locker rang like a struck can. Her boots skated. The shelf bit her hands, and her body, traitor to every plan she had made on the floor, went back onto him in a single uncounted shove that ate two of the inches she had been rationing.
She made a raw noise. Her forehead dropped toward her knuckles. He was suddenly a pressure high and huge, a fullness that shoved the air out of her and left a stunned, open ache. Her cunt fluttered around the invasion in a panic that felt obscene. Wet audibly kissed the shaft when she tried to ease off and could not quite, the suit and the angle and the size conspiring to keep her stuck on him.
Clovis hissed once through his teeth. He still did not thrust. She felt him throb, a thick kick inside the stretch, and that was all.
"That," he said, rough now, "is more like a payment."
Padmé dragged herself forward until the burn lessened to something she could stand, then pushed back onto him on purpose, because if the ship was going to do the work she would at least own the next stroke. Her rhythm was ugly. Short. Wet. The slap of her hips against him was small and filthy in the close air. She could hear herself — the slick take, the caught breath, the tiny broken sound when the head dragged her inner walls on the way out and then opened her again on the way in.
She was not deep enough. She knew it the way she had known it with her mouth. He was inside her and he was not going to finish on a polite fraction.
Threepio found his courage at the worst time.
"Senator Amidala, I must insist you are out of minutes I can honestly defend. Five, if the lane holds. Four, if it does not. I am standing by the airlock with your cloak and I am, I confess, wringing my hands."
She could not answer him. The mic was dead. Her mouth was busy staying shut.
Padmé reached back anyway, found the wet base of Clovis with her fingers, and measured what she had refused. Still a thick handful. Still too much. She set her boots, dropped her shoulders, and started taking it in counts.
One. The stretch went from burn to a wide, stunned throb.
Two. Her belly felt him. A blunt insistence under muscle that had no business being occupied.
Three. She had to stop and shake, forehead on her arm, cunt clenched so hard around him it hurt both ways.
He filled her until thought had to go around him. That was not a metaphor she would have used in a report. It was the physical truth of a banker standing still while she impaled herself on the one part of him she had never agreed to know.
She worked.
Hips back, thighs trembling in the white bind, ass pushed up because he was taller and the geometry would not forgive her pride. The crate to her left ticked against the wall with every roll of the ship. Solvent smell. His coat. The hot, animal smell of the place they were joined. Her own wet had gone from a help to a mess; it painted him on every withdrawal and spotted the inside of her knees when a stroke went too long.
Clovis's hand stayed on the shelf. The other she caught, once, when a yaw of the hull nearly pulled him out of her — her fingers around his wrist, planting that hand on cold metal, not on her. He understood. He let her use him as architecture.
"That's it," he murmured. "You wanted a method. This is the one that works."
"Shut—" She lost the rest on a stroke that seated him deeper than the last. Her voice frayed. "Shut up."
She fucked herself on him until the burn changed temperature.
Not gone. Worse and better in the same nerve. The ring of her body learned his ridge and then had to learn it again every time she gave him the thickest part. Sweat stung her eyes. Hair came down her cheek in a dark hook. The earpiece wire itched. She kept her eyes on the shelf bolt in front of her because looking at nothing was the only way to keep her face from doing something she would remember.
A droid patrol went past the hatch. Metal feet. A burst of tinny comm-chatter. Padmé froze with him half in her, dripping, pulse hammering where they joined. Clovis did not move. The patrol moved on. She shoved back onto him as if the interruption had cost her a vote.
Deeper. She wanted it over. Over required depth. Depth required she stop pretending a shallow rock would milk a man who had already told her the terms.
Padmé let her knees bend and took him until her ass met the open edge of his clothes.
Root. That was the word, and she felt it as a stunned, packed silence inside her. No more cock to take. Her body tried to climb off it and failed. She was standing on her own boots, stuffed full of Rush Clovis, the white suit a ruined ring at her thighs, and he was so deep she could feel the throb of him like a second heart against a place that made her vision thin at the edges.
She moved anyway.
Short, grinding circles when the long strokes threatened to pull him out. Then the long strokes again because circles were not going to finish a man this stubborn. The wet sound became shameless. Her cunt clung and slid, clung and slid. Each time she bottomed out a small, punched noise left her. She bit her lip and tasted the earlier copper and him under it.
Clovis's breathing had finally gone uneven. Still no thrust. A wall with a pulse. She could feel him swelling — a thought that should not have been possible and was — thickening against walls that had no more room to give. The head of him was a lodged, heavy stone high in her.
"Padmé." Her name, scraped. "Don't you stop."
"Then come," she got out. "Come and open the damn—"
The ship lurched. She went down on him hard, all the way, and the words broke into a sound that was not language. Her arms shook. A raw, unwanted peak threatened from the stretch alone, from the grinding, from the ugly fact of being used by her own urgency. She fought it like a bad amendment and felt it crest anyway, a tight, humiliating clutch around his cock that wrung a curse out of him and a wet rush out of her that only made the next stroke louder.
She did not stop. The clock had not stopped.
She drove herself back onto him through the aftershakes, sloppy now, thighs slick, the white fabric at her legs darkened with more than dust. Clovis's fingers went white on the shelf. He still did not take her hips. He spent the last of his restraint on standing there and letting the woman who had refused him do the labor of getting him off.
"In you," he said, and it was not a question, and she did not have time to make it one.
He came with a thick, helpless kick that she felt as heat first and weight second. Pulse after pulse, deep, dirty, a wet filling that had no place in a mission report. Padmé kept him there because pulling off would have lost half of it to the floor and she needed him finished, not picturesque. Her cunt milled the last of it out of him in small, involuntary pulls. She felt herself overflow around the shaft, hot, unmistakable, running down the inside of one thigh toward the prison of the jumpsuit.
Clovis's breath shuddered out of him. For a moment the polished voice was gone and there was only a man emptying into a body he had been denied.
Then the politician came back, thin at first.
"There," he said. "There. That's the rate."
Padmé pulled forward.
He left her in a long, slick retreat that made her bite the inside of her cheek. The loss was a gape she could feel. What he had put in her followed him, thick, spilling down to the white bunched at her thighs, a visible argument she could not wipe away with dignity.
She yanked the jumpsuit up.
It caught on wet skin. She fought it into place anyway, belt shoved to an approximation of closed, the compact pouch slapping down over a hip that still trembled. The fabric clung where she was messy. It would show if anyone looked long enough. She did not intend to let them.
When she turned, Clovis was already putting himself away with hands that were not entirely steady. His eyes, however, were. They went to the dark mark she could feel cooling on the inside of the suit, then to her mouth, then to her face.
He took the cylinder from inside his coat.
"Officer country first," he said, as if they had just signed a document. "You walk at my shoulder. You do not run until I tell you the last frame is open. If a droid stops us, you are a clan problem I am removing from a secure deck. You are not Senator Amidala. You are not a hero. You are with me."
In her ear, Threepio made a noise like a kettle.
Padmé opened the hatch on a corridor still pulsing red, and the smell of the locker went out with her into the war.
The corridor had not improved for being paid.
Red strips still chewed the length of the midship spine. The air was hotter now, a cooked-metal taste riding the recyclers, and a fine grit of burned insulation hung under the lights like dirty snow that would not fall. Padmé stepped out of the locker on legs that did not entirely belong to her. The jumpsuit was closed. That was a technical truth. It sat wrong at the crotch, a cold, clinging map of what she had just done, and every stride smeared it.
Clovis sealed the hatch behind them as if he were leaving a meeting.
"Shoulder," he said.
She took the place at his right because the left would have put her closer to the open spine, where B1s were clattering in a bad imitation of purpose. His cylinder was already in his hand, a dark clan stick with a living pulse-light along the edge. When he lifted it, the next blast frame thought about refusing and then thought better.
The door went up with a hydraulic cough.
Padmé walked. That was the work now. Not thinking about the thick, cooling leak that had reached the inside of her thigh and stopped against bunched white. Not thinking about the ache he had left, a stretched, used throb that made her gait a fraction too careful. Not thinking about Dooku decks above them, calling sooner or later for the man whose spend she was carrying through a Confederate warship.
A pair of B1s rounded the junction with their rifles at a lazy ready.
"Halt. This section is restricted to—"
"Delegate Clovis," he said, and the name did what her title would have gotten her shot for. "Clear the frame. I'm moving a security problem off a clan deck."
The droids' heads ticked toward her. White suit. Human. Female. Scuffed. Hair coming down. One of them lingered on the dark mark she could feel and hoped was only shadow.
"Identification—"
"Is my cylinder," Clovis said. "Scan it and get out of the lift path before I have you recycled for wasting a signer's time."
They scanned. The stick flared green. The rifles dipped.
"Roger, roger."
Padmé did not look at them as she passed. Looking would have made her a person. She was, for the length of this hallway, a clan problem with a wet seam.
The lift he wanted was a narrow service cage behind a credit-conduit bulkhead, not the main officer stack. It smelled like grease and old ozone. When the grate closed, the ship's next hit turned the cage into a rattled bucket. Her shoulder bumped his arm. Heat came off him, polite cloth over a body that had just finished inside her. She put a centimeter back between them and felt the compact knock her hip, still faintly warm, still dirty with the shipnet's attention.
Clovis watched the deck numbers instead of her face.
"You can hate the walk," he said quietly. "Hate it efficiently. If you limp they will look longer."
"I'm not limping."
She was holding herself as if she were not.
The cage opened on a lower artery painted in clan green and war-blue at once, the frigate's two religions sharing a wall. Alarms were thinner here, a distant howl instead of a scream. That was not safety. That was distance from the guns and proximity to money. Padmé's boots found a grating that wanted to turn an ankle. She did not give it the satisfaction.
Another frame. Another kiss of his cylinder. A human officer in Separatist gray appeared at the far end of the passage, saw Clovis, saw the woman in white, and decided his own survival lived in not asking. He went through a side hatch as if he had always meant to.
Padmé's earpiece crackled.
"Senator — I have the captain in the next compartment and he is using language I will not repeat. He will hold the lane for one more pass. After that I am instructed to inform you that we must jump or burn. I do not know which figure to give you. I am holding your cloak and I am extremely afraid."
One pass. Not a number. Worse.
"Faster," she said.
Clovis did not run. Running on a signed deck looked like guilt. He lengthened his stride until she had to match him with that careful, furious walk, the suit pulling where she was slick, the unused hold-out knocking her other hip like a joke that had arrived too late.
They crossed a short gallery above a hangar that was not hers. Vulture droids hung in racks like a butcher's idea of birds. Below, deck crews — living ones, a pair of Skakoans in pressure gear, a clutch of B1s — swarmed a damaged fighter. No one looked up. The war had given them better things to die under.
"Lower slip is the next frame and a ladder," Clovis said. "I open it. I do not go down with you. If I step into that bay Dooku's board will show a signer in a launch and he will ask me why a courier is leaving his ship in the middle of an engagement. You can survive that question. I prefer not to answer it."
"How noble."
"How employed."
The last door was a heavy clan seal with a wheel and a reader. Clovis set the cylinder to it and spoke a short string of numbers that were not meant for her. The wheel spun itself. Cold air came through the crack, hangar-cold, fuel-cold, the smell of a place that launched things and did not care what they carried.
He stopped on the near side of the threshold.
Padmé stopped too, because the bargain had been doors and a route, and this was the end of both. For a moment they were only two people in a red-lit throat of a warship, and the fact of him was still in her, leaking, undeniable.
Clovis held the cylinder out.
"Transponder is preloaded on the courier in slip three. Clan civilian tag. Do not change it, do not hail anyone until you are off my hull, and do not thank me." His mouth twitched. "You didn't, the last ten years. It would be strange to start now."
She took the stick. It was warm from his hand.
"If this dies on me—"
"It will hold until you clear the bay. After that it is a piece of jewelry." He glanced past her, down the ladder well. "Go, Padmé. Your droid is about to have a crisis that will outlive both of us."
She went.
The ladder was ice in her palms. Descending pulled the jumpsuit tight in a way that made her breath catch; gravity found the mess he had left and moved it. She bit the sound in half and dropped the last two rungs into a narrow courier deck that looked forgotten on purpose: one slot empty, one slot a burned shell, slip three holding a squat Banking Clan runner with its boarding hatch already cracked, as if someone like him had always kept an exit warm.
No droids. That was the gift.
Padmé hit the hatch running. The cabin was a cheap four-seat box with a clan-green console and a viewport still shuttered. She dropped into the pilot couch because there was no one else to do it, slapped the civilian tag live, and felt the ship answer in a language of banks instead of navies. The cylinder flared once against the console and went inert, a dead weight she shoved into the pouch next to the compact.
Behind her, up the ladder well, the seal-wheel began to spin closed.
She did not look to see if he was watching.
The runner's drives woke with a thin, expensive whine. Clamps popped. The bay doors ahead peeled on a slice of battle that was all light and wreckage and the dark, holding shape of a Republic ship hanging in a lane it had no good reason to still occupy.
Padmé shoved the courier through the slot.
The Munificent fell away behind her like a knife being withdrawn. For a second there was only the black and the incoming fire-lines, and the white suit glued to her with sweat and him, and Threepio bursting into her ear with a sob of protocol.
"Oh—oh, thank the maker, I have your signature on approach. Please do not die in the next forty seconds, Senator, I have only just folded your cloak."
She aimed for the lane.
The first near-miss painted the shutter-crack gold. The courier was not a fighter. It did not want to be brave. It wanted to be a ledger with engines. Padmé held the tag and the line and the pain between her legs and did not let any of them become a story she would tell.
The Republic ship grew from a threat into a wall, then into a docking collar ringed in friendly light that still had the right to refuse her if a gunner got nervous.
She did not hail until the collar magnets grabbed the runner and made the choice for everyone.
The hatch behind her would open on her own deck, on a droid with a cloak, on questions she could answer with a stolen file and a voice that still sounded like a senator. None of those questions would be the right ones. The right ones were cooling inside the white fabric, and they belonged to a locker she had already left.
Padmé shut the viewport. Her hands were steady enough to look like someone else's.
The collar sealed with a thump that was almost peace.
The collar magnets held. For a moment that was the only fact in the cabin that did not leak.
Padmé sat in the courier's cheap couch with her palms on her knees and watched the hatch light cycle from hostile amber to Republic green. The runner ticked as it cooled. Somewhere in the walls a clan regulator was still trying to be a bank on the wrong side of a war. She shut it off with two fingers and felt the compact in her pouch like a second pulse, harder and cleaner than the one between her legs.
The hatch opened on her own air.
It smelled like polish, blaster oil, and the faint sweetness of a living ship that had not been cooking its own insulation. A short docking throat. White-and-red deck paint. A young officer who started to salute and then did not know what he was saluting: a senator in a ruined white field suit, hair down one side of her neck, mouth faintly swollen, eyes too bright.
"Senator Amidala—"
"The courier is clan-tagged," she said. Her voice came out serviceable. That was a victory. "Have it locked, not stripped, until I say otherwise. No one transmits from it. No one copies its board."
"Yes, Senator."
C-3PO filled the throat behind him in a clatter of gold and apology, cloak folded over both arms as if cloth were a diplomatic solution.
"Senator! Oh, thank the maker. I have been calculating your demise in four separate models and none of them were at all comforting. The captain is on the bridge. He wishes a word. I told him you would prefer a word that did not involve dying. I took the liberty of warming your cloak, although I see now that you are—oh. Oh, my."
His photoreceptors dipped, helpless, to the state of her.
The jumpsuit had been white when she boarded the Munificent. It was still white in the way a lie was still a sentence. Dust mapped her knees. A dark line had dried at mid-thigh where she had yanked the fabric up over wet skin and made it stay. The geometric panels across her chest were creased from the shelf. She looked like a woman who had crawled through a war. She also looked, if anyone had the eyes and the bad luck to know what they were seeing, like a woman who had not only crawled.
"The cloak," Padmé said.
Threepio fluttered it around her shoulders. Heavy cloth cut off the worst of the silhouette. She pulled it closed until the collar of the jumpsuit disappeared and the pouch became only a lump at her hip. The leak he could not see was a cooling, thick reminder when she took the first step onto honest decking. Her gait wanted to confess. She did not let it.
"Captain can wait," she said. "I want a sealed cabin. Water. A dead comm. Then I'll give him his compact."
"His—yes. Of course. I have prepared Cabin Four on the theory that you would not wish to be congratulated in a corridor. I find congratulations after explosions to be in very poor taste."
He led. She followed. Crew flattened themselves against bulkheads with the particular Republic courtesy reserved for people who came back from places they should not have been. A petty officer started to ask if she needed medical. Padmé gave her a look that ended the sentence in the woman's mouth.
Cabin Four was small and kind in the way military kindness always was: a bunk, a basin, a shuttered port, a lock that answered her palm. Threepio hovered on the threshold until she took the cloak off and put it in his arms again.
"No visitors," she said. "If the captain comes himself, he can stand in the hall. If anyone from Intelligence wants the file, they can want it for ten more minutes."
"Yes, Senator. Shall I—" He lowered his voice, which did nothing to the volume. "Shall I send for a medic? You appear to have been through a most uncivil series of events."
"I appear to have gotten off a Separatist frigate with what I came for. That's the report." She held his gaze, such as it was. "No medic."
"As you say. I shall go and be unwell in the corridor."
The hatch sealed.
Padmé stood in the quiet and listened to a ship that was not trying to kill her. Her ears rang anyway. Under the ring was the ghost of a locker fixture, a shelf bolt, a man telling her the rate.
She stripped the belt with hands that had stopped pretending to be ceremonial. The pouch came off first. Compact on the bunk, cylinder beside it, dead as promised. Hold-out last, unused, a moral she did not want. Then the jumpsuit.
It peeled from her like a confession.
Cold cabin air hit sweat and skin. The white fabric left her with a map she could no longer hide from herself: reddened knees from ridged plating, a tremor in her thighs, the swollen, used look of a cunt that had taken something it was not built to take and then been filled for the privilege. What he had left in her had not finished leaving. It had dried in places and not in others. When she moved, a slow, late spill answered gravity and ran. She caught it with a washcloth from the basin because the alternative was her own bunk.
The water was tepid. It still felt like luxury. Padmé washed her mouth first, then her hands, then the rest with a competence that bordered on violence. The ache inside her did not wash. It sat, deep and specific, a blunt memory that flared when she bent. She cleaned until the cloth came away less ruined and her skin smelled like ship soap instead of him. It was not the same as undoing it.
She dressed because remaining bare in a Republic cabin felt like leaving the locker door open.
A spare field set from the locker drawer: dark trousers, a wrap top, boots that had not knelt on Confederate steel. Hair bound again, tighter than before, as if tightness could persuade a face. In the small metal mirror she looked like Padmé Amidala, slightly under-slept. The mirror did not know about the stretch that still lived in her when she sat.
She sat anyway.
The compact waited on the bunk like a well-behaved crime. She turned it once in her fingers. The port was cool now. Off the Munificent's closed net it had stopped being a beacon and started being a document. Dooku's authority. A clan countersign. Enough to stand up in committee if the committee wanted to stand.
Clovis's name would be in it.
That was the joke the war had paid for in full. She had stolen the other signer's work and then paid the other signer with the one thing she had never put on a ledger. He was still on that frigate, walking back toward a Count who would ask where he had been. She hoped the question was inconvenient. She refused to hope it was fatal. Fatal would have made her something she was not prepared to name at a basin.
A knock.
"Senator." The captain's voice, muffled, professionally tired. "We're preparing to jump. Intelligence is climbing the walls. I need to know if what you brought is going to start another war or merely continue this one."
Padmé looked at the closed hatch. She could still feel, when she shifted, a ghost of thickness that was only memory and sore muscle. The file in her hand was dry. She was not, not completely, not yet.
"It continues this one," she called. "With better footnotes. Give me two minutes."
Silence as he accepted the kind of answer captains accepted from senators.
She put the compact into a clean case, sealed it, and stood. The inner ache stood with her, a private limp she would not show the hall. In two minutes she would be a woman with evidence again. In the jump she would be a passenger. In committee she would say Banking Clan and Dooku and wartime credit and she would not say locker, or knees, or the way a live cylinder had felt in her palm after it had felt like a price.
Padmé opened the hatch on her own ship's light.
Threepio popped up from an anxious hover.
"Two minutes exactly, Senator. I timed them. The captain is attempting patience. He is not gifted at it."
"Good." She settled the case under her arm. "Patience is a clan specialty."
She walked toward the bridge with a straight back and a stride she had chosen, cloakless now, clean clothes over a body that still knew the truth. Behind her, in a locked cabin, a ruined white jumpsuit waited in a basin like the only honest record of the crossing.
The ship began to sing the first note of the jump. The lane, the Munificent, the red strips, the man in black — all of it dropped toward a past she could file.
She did not look out a port to watch it go.