5: A-sailing we shall go

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Things seemed to be going well. The waves were low and gentle even as the shore disappeared behind us, and the call of the nest grew stronger and stronger as I rowed. There had been a couple of reasons why I’d split up the teams as I had, putting the drakes with myself and the atil with Charlie. The main reason was that I thought Charlie and Kerlin were the least likely to be able to take the strain of the oars for long, so they made obvious choices for the rudder, but there was also the fact that I still didn’t entirely trust the drakes. I wouldn’t put it past them to sabotage us and pull us off-course. I wanted aljik in both shifts.

Besides, only we aljik could hear the nest call. It sounded so close, as if I should be able to turn around and see it, but there was nothing out there. The water must carry the sound really well. Who knew how far we’d have to row?

Harlen was starting to flag on her oar. “Shift change,” I called. I prodded Kisa – the boat was cramped, and the off shift were sleeping under our feet. As atil tended to do, she was up immediately, and took the oar from me.

Humans wake slower. Charlie groaned and pushed Kerlin away. He prodded her again and she sat up wearily, blinking and… panting? How long had she been panting? Was that normal for humans?

“Are you alright, Charlie?” I asked.

“Yeah, probably. Let’s do this.” She crawled into place and braced herself against the rudder. “Let’s go, girls. Let’s chase that sunrise.”

——————-

We’d been rowing all night.

Well, I hadn’t been rowing. I’d been on the rudder. So I didn’t have it as bad as some of the team. And I hadn’t been there all night; the shifts were determined by rower endurance and seemed to be about an hour long. Ever tried to do on-and-off hour-long shifts for a whole day? We weren’t moving very fast, either; aljik don’t have the endurance of humans, no matter how much physical power they had, and drakes are even worse. After a few shifts, everyone was too tired to really go fast.

I say that as if I was doing any better. I wasn’t. One hour isn’t enough time to get any useful amount of sleep. I wouldn’t be able to do this for more than a few days; I was already worn out just on the rudder. I couldn’t focus, could barely see, and didn’t seem to be able to get enough air.

It was as the sun was rising, when Kit asked if I was okay, that it occurred to me that that was a bit strange. I’d never been so tired I felt like I was suffocating before. But Harlen had said the water was fine, right? Probably. Best she could tell. With her very limited equipment.

Fuck.

I tried to look like I was fine. I had no idea what I was breathing in, but it hadn’t killed me yet, and turning back to wander the desert would eventually mean death. Besides, we were probably more than halfway across the ocean. Who knew?

If Glath were properly with us, he could probably fly over and find out. But he was still a useless bag of barely-coherent spiders.

I felt vaguely sick. It was a familiar kind of sick. Like I wasn’t getting enough air. Maybe there wasn’t enough oxygen? I squinted at my own fingernails, trying to tell in the early light whether the nail beds were bluish. It was impossible to tell.

“Charlie,” Harlen said, “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” I lied. “Just tired.” My head hurt. “You know humans work best with long stretches of sleep.”

“Will it kill you?” Kit asked.

“Not in the short term, no. If we’re out here a week or so I’m gonna need to sleep properly.”

Kit wasn’t buying it. “Harlen, what’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know! I told, you everything I could detect in the water should be fine. If it’s doing something to the air then it’s reacting with something I don’t know about.”

“Well, what should be in the air?”

“Just standard oxygen atmosphere chemicals! Oxygen, carbon dioxide…”

“Wait,” I said. The breathing, the drowsiness… I’d read about this. “How much carbon dioxide?”

“About four parts in five hundred.”

That was high. WAY too high. Deadly? No idea. Maybe not. I wasn’t dead yet.

“Yeah,” I said as confidently as I could, trying not to slur my hand gestures. “I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t lie about this,” Kit snapped. “You’re indispensible.”

“Well, what do you think we should do about it?”

“Turn back,” Harlen said immediately.

“If we don’t make it to the nest – ”

“I think we’re more than halfway,” Kerlin said. “The waves are mostly moving the other way.”

“Wind might have changed,” Harlen mumbled. “Are you keeping track of it? I wasn’t.”

“We press on,” Kit said. “Charlie, can you – ”

“I’m a little drowsy, I can still steer a damn boat,” I snapped, gripping the rudder.

“Very well. Wake us when you have to.”

The other shift settled down to sleep. We’d been blown a little off-course during our conversation; I turned us back to face the sun. The rudder felt stiff and unresponsive in my hand – I was even weaker than I’d thought. The atil, still a bit weak from their own lack of rest, did their best to make headway, but we were moving slower than we had the previous day.

The carbon dioxide wouldn’t kill me, at least not directly, but looking back, I think it had a pretty big impact on events. If I wasn’t so tired, maybe I would’ve remembered that aljik sleep schedules don’t work like human ones, and the atil shouldn’t be having quite so much trouble at the oars as they seemed to be having. If I wasn’t feeling weak, maybe I would’ve paid a lot more attention to the resistance of the oar, instead of blaming my own muscles. Maybe I would’ve realised that something was wrong before it was too late.

Oh, what a different world that would be.

——————————

The Rainbow Destroyer’s last battle had been against the Stardancer, flagship of the Rogue Princess. The Rainbow Destroyer had successfully cut the Stardancer in half and victory had seemed assured but somehow, through some combination of luck, surprise and frankly absurd tactics, the Stardancer had prevailed, and the surviving crew of the Rainbow Destroyer brought aboard the Stardancer and executed.

All except one. Nelan, engineer of the Rainbow Destroyer, had survived by hiding away until the Rainbow Destroyer was set adrift. He had used his skills to keep the ruined husk of the ship limping along, tailing the Stardancer to mark its location until reinforcements could arrive, constantly risking notice and immediate destruction.

So he was not particularly happy to be summoned aboard the ruined husk of the Stardancer.

The Stardancer was barely recognisable as even the ruins of a ship any more. It must have been a chore even to get the wreckage into the hold without completely destroying it. The green dash had simply evaporated most of the ship, and even the part protected by the remaining shields was burned and torn to jagged shreds. With imagination, the skeleton of the ship was sort of discernible, but identifying most of the remaining scrap came down to looking at the blueprints and guessing. A few fragments of what might be bone or chitin were the only unusual things in the wreckage.

“Why… why am I here, my Queen?” Nelan asked nervously.

Queen Tatik strode forward, a twitch of a wing carapace signalling her guardian tahl to remain in position. She bent to match her eyes with Nelan’s.

“Because you were there,” she said simply. “I have had dozens of engineers look over this, but they don’t have your context. You saw the ship before the dash; you followed it for crests, you had a far better idea of its layout than anybody in the battle.”

“They have the blueprints – ”

“Of a complete ship, yes. But you saw it in operation, as it was before the battle. You may have insight. I need to find my sister, Nelan. I need to find the remains of the rogue Princess.”

“Either there are remains or there are not, Majesty. I saw some remains that might be aljik, but if she was in the control ring…”

“There must be remains!” Queen Tatik flared her wings and reared. Nelan shrank back. “If there are remains, it is imperative that we find them, do you understand? There should be something, there should be… there will be something.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Majesty. The metal of the hull couldn’t withstand the dash. Mere flesh stood no chance.”

“I have no interest in flesh!”

“But… you said you wanted…”

“I need to know exactly where she perished. That is enough.”

“It would… it would help if I knew what I was looking for, Majesty.”

Tatik hesitated. She flicked a forelimb, and the tahl left the room, leaving Nelan and Tatik alone in the vast hold.

“I suppose,” she said quietly, “with the rogue dead, it is no longer a problem. Nevertheless, you are sworn to secrecy, on pain of exile in life and death, understand?”

“I understand, Majesty.”

So she told him.

Without protest, he searched the whole wreckage again, harder this time.

He found nothing.

——————–

The shore was in sight!

I shook off my drowsiness as best I could and shook the next shift awake. “Kit, Kerlin, Harlen – get up! We’re almost there!”

Kit sprang into action and stared over the water. “Yes! A few more shifts and we’ll be there! To the oars, Harlen!” He grabbed an oar.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m awake,” Harlen grumbled, grabbing her own.

I laid back on the uneven bottom of our boat, trying to will myself to sleep. The drowsiness helped, but I just couldn’t seem to tamp down the excitement of seeing the shore. Soon, we’d be off this awful boat, off having to ration our water, off breathing caustic air over a caustic sea. Soon, I could walk with sand under my feet again. Get back to my crew again. Take stock, see who was alive and who wasn’t. Make a plan to get back up in space again, and then… something.

But for the moment, something wet was burning my cheek and eye. I sat up.

“Guys, is the boat leaking?”

It was leaking. The small puddle of water in the bottom of the boat started slowly to deepen. Cuts and scratches on my hands burned as I ran them over the boat, trying to identify where the leak was. Harlen and Lln had much less sensitive digits than I did, but tried to help, while Kerlin kept control of the rudder, and Kit and Kisa bailed with empty water containers. We kept getting in each others’ way, but there was no time to organise.

It wasn’t good news. The first leak I found was far too small to be responsible for the water we were taking on, so I kept looking. We found another. And another. The boat was basically a sieve, and as we searched, we started taking on water faster.

Harlen and Kit took to the oars while the atil and I shifted to bailing. The exertion and the air together were making me feel woozy, but there was no time to get my bearings. I knew we couldn’t make it; there was no way we could keep up the pace until we got to shore. It was too far. There was something… muzzy… in my head. No; a sound. A deep sound, on the very edge of my hearing, like a strange new pressure against my brain. I tried to ignore it.

The water, I realised, wasn’t nearly as clear as it had looked when we began our journey. There was some kind of green scum in it. Algae or something. Or an alien life form a lot like it, anyway. It clung to my fingers as I bailed water. But… but if a large volume of water looked clear, then a much smaller volume should…

I looked over the side. The bottom of the boat was thickly coated in a green, living carpet. The algae leaking into the boat coated not just me, but the drakes and the inside of the boat itself. The aljiks’ joints were collecting their own colonies of algae. Harlen had stopped rowing to look at her own tails with interest.

“Harlen!” Kit snapped. “Focus!”

“It’s the jellyfish skins!” she said as she grabbed the oar again. “They’re eating them, I think. Or destroying them, anyway.”

We’d coated our exposed flesh in jellyfish skins as extra protection before taking to the ocean, and I’d used them to waterproof the boat. If they were stripping our waterproofing away…

“We’re not going to make it,” I said, shaking my head.

“Do you have a better plan?” Kit snapped.

“If I did, I would’ve shared it by now!”

“Then keep bailing!”

With our protection being eaten away, the water became more painful. Scrapes and rashes on my legs that I’d forgotten about burned anew in the acidic water. The boat jolted; something in its structure – I couldn’t see what – gave way.

The boat broke in half.

I fell into the water, gasping for breath. With the carbon dioxide levels so high, I had no idea whether I was actually drowning or not; I couldn’t tell how much oxygen I needed. The wooziness made it difficult to keep my bearings and my entire body burned. I flailed about until my hand struck a piece of wreckage, gripped it, and dragged myself out of the water. Moments later I lay, gasping, on a ruined piece of escape pod hull. It was upside down, by which I mean it was the right way up.

Okay, I explained that poorly. The piece of hull was like a big bowl. When it was part of an escape pod, the curved part had faced upward; when it was part of a boat, the curved part had obviously faced downward. Now it was back to facing upward, with me lying on the curved top. The only thing keeping it afloat was a large bubble of air trapped under the dome; if that leaked out, my liferaft would sink far faster than I could do anything about it. So I had to be careful not to rock or tip it in a way that would let that happen.

Staying as still as I could, I glanced around. My crewmates were struggling up onto their own pieces of wreckage, but none of us had oars and we were too spread out to effectively communicate. I looked around but found nothing I could steer the liferaft with. Either the wind and waves would get us to shore before we died, or it wouldn’t.

Keeping as still and well-balanced on my makeshift raft as I could, I let the weariness overwhelm me. I was dizzy with the pain of the acidic water and the hot sun, weary from the sudden life-or-death struggle and several days of barely any sleep, woozy from the air and quite probably dehydration. There was nothing else that any of us could do but wait.

We were at the mercy of the tides.

———————————–

I wish that I could tell you of my garden, void.

Truly, I do. I would tell you of the comings and goings of all of my little subjects, of the patterns they made in their behaviour, of the ways they thought… but I cannot. My time tending my garden was fascinating, but I cannot pin down any fascinating thing to tell you about it.

This is the way of us, is it not? We see that we cannot measure the universe and so we go out to be awed by it, thinking ourselves oh so wise in our acceptance of its vast unreadability. We go out and we tell each other that it was amazing and majestic and awe-inspiring and if anybody asks, specifically, what that is supposed to mean, we chastise their foolish, unenlightened ways.

Perhaps the fool in the Parable of the Child is not the student, who believes that they can measure the universe. Perhaps it is not even the teacher, who believes their own perspective to be some kind of impartial arbitration. Perhaps it is the listener, who passively listens to a story that reinforces their own view, and unthinkingly calls it wisdom.

We are so afraid to have a wrong or unsupportable perspective, that we grow to fear having a perspective at all. We are so afraid to observe a pattern and write a biased narrative, that we write no narrative; we observe everything as disconnected, random events and call ourselves unbiased, and therefore wise. We find intelligence to be imperfect, so we turn our backs on it altogether

That is not enlightenment. It is cowardice.

What frustrating beings we must be. What useless cowards, to see that something is impossible, and somehow make the logical leap that it therefore should not be tried. The impossibility of understanding should not be an excuse – after all, that impossibility is, in itself, unprovable. Only its negative could be provable, so why do we take it as read? And why should it matter? Since when has something being impossible been a reason not to do it? With an attitude like that, no new skill would be learned at all!

I look back on my time tending my garden, void, and I do not see the awe-inspiring experience that I wish to see. I see a colossal waste of time. What did I do, other than provide some minor material benefit and save everybody’s lives every now and then? What did I do that was actually important? What did I learn? I cannot tell you of my garden, void, so it may as well have never existed.

We go out to have an experience, we are inspired, we leave our experiences behind forever, and we tuck those memories away where they cannot be tainted by something as crass as actual thought or analysis. It is all self-congratulatory nonsense.

I will tell you of my garden, void. I will tell you of it in such amazing detail that you will be able to recreate it in your probably-nonexistent mind.

But first I need to go and find it, so that I know what to tell you.

———————

I jerked awake to burning lungs and skin. My eyes flew open and immediately started burning as well. I tried to scream, breathed in water, panicked.

I wish that I could tell you that I had the wherewithal to save myself; that I calmly conserved what oxygen I had, used the light on my eyelids to determine which way was up, and kicked towards the surface. Turns out, that sort of thing doesn’t happen when you suddenly jerk awake while drowning in acid. Hell, when I wake up under normal circumstances it takes me a bit of time to remember not to walk into walls. What saved me was an aljik claw pulling on my hair, dragging me out of the water and onto the sand.

I coughed, threw up, and screamed a bit, but I didn’t have the energy for a proper freakout. I blinked furiously, trying to clear my eyes; my head was tipped back and clean water poured over them. I struggled against this treatment, and managed to pull away – my rescuer was as exhausted as I was – but once I realised what was going on, I stopped fighting.

After a minute, I could see. Kit stood over me, looking haggard and concerned, or as haggard and concerned as a dohl can look. Expressions for someone covered mostly in chitin and facial gems are kind of a whole-body thing, and I could mostly see a mass of gelatinous eyes. The eyes themselves could have looked better.

“Are you alright?” I asked him, wincing at the pain in my muscles and throat as I spoke.

“I will probably survive. You?”

“Yeah, same.” I stood up and stubbornly refused to fall over. The maddening deep sound was still on the edge of my hearing. The fresh air was comfortable in my lungs for the first time in days, and it was helping me think much more clearly. I didn’t think I was that badly hurt. It was impossible to be sure, but my skin all seemed to be there – it looked like the water had burned my multiple grazes and rashes without doing any obvious damage. It was probably in my blood or something for all I knew (I didn’t know how that sort of thing worked), but if that was going to kill me it probably already would have. I guessed. Man, I missed my textbooks. My vision wasn’t completely clear, but my eyes should heal. The gelatinous covering on human eyes is pretty good at doing that, and I felt like if anything else had been damaged it would be pretty obvious. If not, I guessed I’d find out soon enough. My lungs… well, nothing to be done about that. If they were damaged, they’d heal or they wouldn’t. I didn’t think they’d get any worse, and they were supporting me just fine for the moment.

I felt like my insides were made of broken toothpicks and jelly, of course, but that was probably just all the exhaustion and nearly drowning.

Kit looked, at first glance, pretty much intact except for some eye damage. This meant absolutely nothing, since most of what was visible of him was near-indestructible chitin. I was pretty worried about his eyes; a big red one had popped and was dribbling goo down the side of his face, his shiny compound eyes were looking far less shiny than they normally did, and several of the blobby gelatinous ones looked pitted. But he had been able to see well enough to save me, so he clearly wasn’t blind.

His stance suggested more than just eye damage. I already knew he was weak, and he seemed to be trembling a little, having trouble holding himself up. Aljik usually kept their wings tucked away beneath their protective carapaces, only fluttering them every few minutes or so, but Kit’s wing carapaces were raised, exposing the delicate membranes within to the air. He moved them slowly. Normally, a fluttering of the dozens of fine gossamer layers produced a golden haze, but Kit’s were torn, ragged and in some cases stuck together. Moving them at all was obviously agonizing.

“Where are the others?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The nest is that way.” He pointed Northeast.

The sand beneath our feet was not the gritty red affair we’d spent so long wandering over. It was chalky, and full of large, grey fragments of rock. It rose at a gentle incline for about half a day’s walk before stopping abruptly; a hill. Or mountain. I wasn’t sure how big a hill had to be before it became a mountain.

“How far to the nest itself?”

“Hard to say. Half a day, perhaps? I can’t account for terrain changes.” He handed me a small container of water. “There is no further need to ration this. Drink. We will rest to regain enough strength for the journey, then head out.”

I nodded and drank. Already I was feeling stronger; my several unconscious hours on the acid sea had done me good, apparently. In terms of exhaustion, at least. Everything still hurt, but my muscles felt better able to support my weight with every step as I paced back and forth, carefully sipping water.

The buzz in my ears wouldn’t fade, but my vision was clearing moment by moment. I cast an eye down the beach. It was midmorning, and the sun seemed painfully bright, glaring off the water and the chalky white sand. The beach wasn’t as straight on this side as it had been on the other; to both the left and the right, it twisted out of view behind hills quite quickly.

My little liferaft bobbed on the waves not too far away. As soon as I laid eyes on it, a horrible thought occurred to me. I pulled my makeshift bag off my shoulders, noticing that even to my still-trembling muscles, it seemed unnaturally light. There was no bulk to it. I opened it.

Four very wet spiders lay at the bottom of the bag, still as death.

“Glath!” I screamed, charging back toward the water. But Kit was too fast for me; suddenly I was on the ground, pinned against the uncomfortably pointy rocks by the full body weight of an injured dohl.

“Are you trying to die?!” he snapped.

“Glath fell out of his bag,” I gasped. “I just need… I’ll make another boat, I’ll…”

“How? How exactly do you plan on doing anything out there without getting yourself killed, Charlie? When will you get it into your head that your are not dispensable? The nest needs you here and now! Gth’s gone! Move on!”

He was right; I couldn’t venture back onto the ocean without getting myself killed. Feeling like an idiot, I stopped struggling. Kit let me up.

“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.” I shook my head, trying to free it of the persistent buzz that seemed to be coming from all around, and squinted at the ground, overturning small surface rocks with my toe.

“Now what are you doing?” Kit asked.

“Looking for Glath,” I explained patiently, moving along the shore a couple of paces.

“The nest is in the other direction,” Kit pointed out.

“Which means I’ll be able to cover that territory when we go there, but I don’t know if we’ll be back here again. Go on without me.”

“Charlie, this is irrational.”

“No, it isn’t. I had barely a fraction of him last time. There’s still plenty left. I don’t need to find the same spiders; I can find new spiders, and when I have enough – ”

“We are a very long way from your crash site. What makes you think any of him got this far?”

“What makes you think he didn’t? Stuff can get blown around a lot. There might be enough here. Do you think the others would’ve landed closer or father from the nest than us?”

“What? It doesn’t matter. They can hear the call of the nest. If Gth got blown out here, he will be mostly in the ocean. He will already be dead.”

“His spiders can survive the ocean,” I pointed out. “Remember? I fished some of them out of it on the other side. And we know they survived, because they’re the ones who gave him enough mass to start moving about. Also, the drakes can’t hear the nest.”

“The drakes are smart, they can take care of themselves. It’s been days since you fished those spiders out. Just because they managed to survive that long doesn’t mean any of them are still alive out there. Besides, you have no way to collect them.”

“One problem at a time. Shore first. Then I’ll think of something.”

“And if you do collect that many again, so what? Do you think a sorry clawspan of spiders will bring Gth back?”

“I’ll think of something! He can… he can grow back! Recover!”

“An ambassador colony’s mind is in the connections between its members,” Kit pointed out. “Even if you collected that may, even if you led them breed up to full size, you wouldn’t have Gth back. You’d have somebody with such extensive brain damage and memory loss that they’d be a whole new ambassador, even if they recovered at all. I don’t know if they can recover from damage that extensive. Just how big a fraction of him do you realistically expect to find?”

“What is wrong with you?!” I snapped. “Do you have any idea how fucking creepy your practicality is? Everyone’s just an asset to you, aren’t they? It’s all a fucking numbers game. That’s why you pulled me out of the water but don’t seem to give a shit about the drakes or the atil; I’m just too fucking valuable to the nest and they’re replaceable. Do you seriously not give a shit about anybody but yourself?”

“I am trying to get some fragment of this nest off this planet alive!” he growled. “And to be honest, I have absolutely no idea how to fucking do that! I can barely breathe, I don’t know what condition the nest is in, if the Queen gets any hint we might still be alive she’ll destroy us from space, we have no materials to work with, and the closest thing we have to an engineer is from a non-spacefaring planet! Yes, I’m being practical! And if any of us are going to survive, you should, too! The past can’t help or hurt us, but the future sure can!”

“I won’t give up on my friends!” I growled. “Including Glath!”

“You’re not the only one who loved him, Charlie! We were closer than I’d ever been with anyone in my life, until you stole him!”

We were both silent for several seconds.

“That wasn’t fair,” I said, more calmly than I felt.

“I know,” Kit said, equally calmly. “I apologise. Glath’s decisions were his own. They’re not your fault. But you barely knew him, and I knew him all my life. We grew up together, we became who we are together. I followed him to the Stardancer and the Rogue Princess. If you think it’s hard for you to let him go, try to imagine how I feel.”

More silence.

“I thought… I thought he followed you out here,” I said weakly.

Kit flicked a mandible in the aljik equivalent of a headshake. “He wanted to go,” he said. “The Princess was… her plan did not inspire confidence in the smarter castes. We knew better than to throw away our comfortable futures under the steady, sensible rule of Tatik to follow a reckless element like Ha – like the Princess. But you could see in Gth’s every movement, clear as day, that he couldn’t stand hanging around Court any more. The Princess was offering something he desperately needed, but we all knew – we dohl, that is, or at least the handful of us that Gth used as templates – that there was no way he’d go out there alone. I didn’t have a particularly strong opinion on the politics of the matter, so I went with the rogue, and he followed me. I uprooted my entire life and marched off to near-certain death to give him the opportunity to do the same. He found what he was looking for in you, I suppose.”

I looked away. “I don’t… I never wanted to come between you two.”

“You never did. He’ll always be one of my best friends, and if there was the slightest fragment of hope that he might be alive, I’d be putting my whole being into rescuing him. But he’s gone, and we have far more people to worry about than an ambassador colony, a pair of atil and a couple of alien traitors.”

I shook my head. “No, we don’t. They’re ours, and I’m going to find them.”

“You know, for an engineer, you are dangerously irrational.”

“I’m a big, unpredictable, dangerous human. Gotta keep up the stereotype!”

“Of what, grounding the flagships of our rulers and getting untold numbers of aljik killed? I think the drakes beat you to that one, but if we get everyone up in the sky again you’ll have another shot. Come on, nest is this way.”

I shook my head. “I’m going to search, while we’re out here. We can search the beach on the way to the nest later.”

“We cannot afford to – ”

“To what, Kit? Find and potentially rescue our crewmates? You think life is oh-so-hard for you, Kit? How the fuck do you think I feel? You have a choice to go on this stupid death adventure! You were asked, and you and your best friend took the risk, and you’re still among your own kind – fuck, you just can’t wait to get back to them! I was never asked, Kit. I woke up one morning on a fucking spaceship full of actual fucking aliens, which by the way I’d never even believed existed! Somewhat of a shock, I can tell you. You’re dreaming of a successful revolution, of putting your Princess on the throne and your universe going back to normal – well, I don’t have that fucking luxury. Even if we get off this planet, I’m still trapped. Forever. Assuming I’m not executed the moment I’m no longer vital, which is actually pretty likely if the rest of the Empire is as shitscared of my kind as you lot were at first. The best case scenario of me is still permanent exile from anything I’ve ever known or loved. The only thing I have left of home, the only scrap of my old life, is this!” I pulled my broken phone out of my toolbelt. Seawater dripped out of it.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like for a human to be alone, Kit? Probably the same as a dohl being alone, I’d imagine. We’re not as structured as you lot but we’re a very social species. And the only people around are the people who fucking abducted me in the first place. You think I’ve forgiven you guys for that? You think that’s just water under the bridge? Well, you know what, Kit? It is! I had to! I had no choice; it was the only way to fucking survive! I would’ve liked the opportunity to have some kind of personal boundaries or standard in the way I was gonna let people treat me, but no; you’re all I have, so that was taken away from me! Fuck, it took everything in my power just to make you bastards even see me as a person! But hey, humans are good at this. We’re so fucking socially ADAPTABLE!”

My own heavy breathing was making me lightheaded. I forced myself to slow down.

“So I did everything in my fucking power to survive,” I said, more slowly. “I gave myself little goals. Little projects. ‘Be valuable enough to stay alive.’ ‘Try to get the crew to acknowledge you as an actual person.’ ‘Find a way to communicate.’ Day by day, I survived, I built new relationships and a new social system with the people who, if there was any justice in the fucking universe, I should be free to hate with every cell in my fucking body. And then they kept. Fucking. Dying. All of my friends keep being torn from my life, and I have to build new relationships all over again, and it… it makes it feel like nothing is real, you know? All I’m ever doing is playing social catch-up, trying to keep ahead of the wall of death. Nobody was closer to me than Glath and Tyzyth, and now they’re both… they’re both… and do you know what good friends I have left from my time on the Stardancer? Lln and Kerlin, who are probably drowned by now, and who you seem to think aren’t worth a fucking rescue if they’re not. If I were you, Kit, I’d be looking warily over my shoulder a lot, or whatever aljik do instead of that. We’ve had too many friendly conversations recently, I bet a meteor is gonna drop out of the fucking sky and kill you any second.

“So no, I will not let go. I will not accept the inevitable, I will not be practical. I am going to walk down this beach and look for survivors, and I am going to inspect the ground for spiders as I go, and every spider I find is going into the fucking spider bag. The rest of the crew is just going to have to fucking wait for me, because I refuse to accept this kind of bullshit from the universe. This goes no further. These friends I have, these total arseholes, this is where everything stops. I will not fucking give up on a single one of them until I see an actual corpse. Or millions of corpses, in Glath’s case. You go on ahead, I’ll meet you at the nest later.”

I plodded down the beach. Kit followed. I looked at him in surprise.

“You can’t find the nest without me,” he pointed out.

“You already told me which direction it is. My sense of direction isn’t that bad.”

“Fair enough. Still, you only have two eyes.”

“What does that have to do with – ”

“I might be able to see some spiders that you miss,” he said, fixing his gaze to the ground.

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