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We found an unconscious Kerlin not too far from where Kit had dragged me out of the water. He was lying half in the water, but through some miracle, his face wasn’t submerged. I dashed over and put a hand to his side to check if he was breathing.

Scaly skin under my hand slid free of his body. I shrank away. After a few moments of panic, I realised that there was no blood and reached out to touch him again. Under the broken, slipping skin was fresh skin – I’d forgotten that male aljik shed their skin.

I gripped him under the wings and tried to drag him out of the water. Kit loaned his strength to the effort, and we were able to pull him up onto the bank.

“Is he okay?” Harlen asked, walking up the beach toward us with Lln in tow.

“I can’t tell,” I admitted. “He’s breathing. Where’s Kisa?”

“No idea. We’ve walked up from way down South and didn’t see her.”

“Let’s head back up North, then,” Kit suggested. “Can anyone wake Kerlin?”

I slapped Kerlin in the face as hard as I could. Nothing happened, except that I hurt my hand. I shrugged.

“I’ll wait with him,” Harlen said. “You guys should go on to the nest.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Kit said quickly.

“Kisa might need your help further up the beach,” Harlen pointed out.

Kit hesitated. I looked between the pair, then at Lln, who avoided my gaze.

“I’ll go ahead with Lln,” I announced. “You guys can catch us up when you decide what you’re doing.” I strode off without waiting for a response. Lln matched my pace.

Once we were out of sight and the others wouldn’t be able to read my gestures, I said, “Lln, what the fuck is going on?”

“Well, we are nearing the nest and soon we will be able to see – ”

“Not that. The… aljik and drake tension thing. I swear we all trusted each other a lot more on the Stardancer. Now everyone’s suddenly at each other’s throats, calling traitor. I get that everyone’s jumpy that one of the aljik pilots brought us here, but come on, Harlen’s not even a pilot.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know about any of that,” Lln said coyly. “I’ll just be relieved to get back to the nest. You’d want to ask Kit or Ain or the Princess about that sort of thing.”

I glanced about to confirm that we were alone. “Lln, we’re friends, right?”

“Of course.”

“Then just with each other, while we’re alone, can we cut the bullshit? I’m running out of friends. They keep dying. I’d like to get some of them, and myself for that matter, through all this alive. I’m not an idiot – I know you’re not as naive as you make out. You asked me what side I was on once. You go all over the ship, or nest I guess, and see everything, and I know you have a good memory.”

“Charlie, I’m flattered by your faith in me, but I mostly just follow orders.”

I took a couple of breaths, considered the situation, and decided, ‘fuck it’. “I’m sure you do, but I don’t for a second believe that you don’t know what’s going on at all times. It’s the opposite of me. I never have a clue what the fuck is going on. People expect me to be a genius engineer, but the truth is, without my textbooks you’re probably a better engineer than I am. People expect me to use my vital skills to be a big political player but I don’t have any context for the politics in place and nobody will explain them to me. And soon we’re both going to be back under the wise, restrained, and not-at-all-suicidally-crazy leadership of Captain Nemo, and before that happens I would very much like to figure out what the fuck is going on so I have a better grip on what kind of pointless and potentially fatal bullshit we’re gonna be thrown into next. Any tips?”

Lln hesitated. She glanced down the beach, checking that the others hadn’t come back into sight. “The problem is the drakes.”

“No fucking shit. What’s wrong with the drakes?”

“They’re not going to want to leave.”

I blinked. “What? Leaving is the point. Somehow I don’t think they’re going to want to be trapped on this planet for the rest of their lives any more than we do.”

“No, they do. That is the point. It’s the issue of the exchange we made with them. It’s all very complicated.”

“Complicated?”

“The situation aboard the Stardancer is… was… very tenuous. Non-aljik who serve a Court are generally bound by an exchange of goods or services to… set the value of their loyalty. Gth’s presence among us allowed a lot of cooperation with non-aljik, even before you taught us to speak to each other, but the loyalties were not always concrete. You refused your exchange, and the Princess kept you around anyway out of desperation. Technically, you’re a rogue element, or you were before the taking of our flesh. The ketestri couldn’t be offered an exchange as we couldn’t communicate, the Kohrir were simply never woken up after we took the ship… the only parties actually bound by exchange on the ship were the haltig, who are probably dead, and the drakes.”

“Okay, the drakes are hired crew,” I said, nodding. “So what’s the problem, Captain Nemo behind on her payments?”

“Not really. It is more the nature of the exchange and some… disagreement over certain terms. I’m not sure of the details, but I believe that the general intent of the agreement is that the drakes would serve the rogue Princess until certain conditions were met, and in exchange she would find and ferry them to a suitable planet for colonisation.”

“They’re colonists.”

“Yes. Their intent was always to find a livable planet, plant new core trees, and establish their species on it. This was supposed to happen after their service to the Stardancer ended, but certain conditions took far longer to meet than expected. The drakes were starting to get very restless; they felt that the Princess was exploiting them and hadn’t played fair. The Court felt that the drakes had agreed to very explicit terms and were trying to cheat by leaving early. And now…”

“Now they’ve taken the plunge and violated their contract to bring us all to this nice little coloniseable planet,” I finished.

“Yes. And I do not think that we will be able to leave without them, so this decision effectively dooms the nest unless we can change their minds.”

Well, fuck. Apparently my little impulse decision to take the Stardancer out here had created a political problem that I’d been completely unaware of. The whole thing was my decision, it had nothing to do with their internal politics, but it was easy to see how the aljik – even the other drakes, probably – would assume that us ending up here was effectively a declaration of mutiny from the drakes, and only Kerlin and I knew…

Kerlin, who had stood at those controls and seen me intentionally lie about the Princess’ orders. Kerlin, who had been in control of the ship while the perfect opportunity to get his people out of a bad deal had stood in front of him in the form of countless aljik warships and one stupid human. There had been a mutiny, hadn’t there? Kerlin knew I’d been lying about the Princess’ orders. He’d taken an opportunity and went for it, not necessarily because he trusted me, but because it was for his own benefit. Would he have done something like this even if I hadn’t been there? He certainly seemed to plan everything out very quickly.

I had of course given him the perfect scapegoat, if he were caught. If he were caught, he could simply say, ‘I don’t know what you mean, Princess; Charlie translated your order and told me to take us to the nearest planet with a breathable atmosphere. It’s all a big misunderstanding based on some obscure human plan.’ Was that the plan? Would he sell me out?

No, of course not. No need to get paranoid. I could trust my friends. Our goals had aligned and we’d worked together to reach them; nothing weird about that. Happens all the time. I’d lied to him and taken the ship here for my own reasons; it wasn’t fair for me to be mad at him for essentially the same thing.

I needed to focus on the situation as it was in the present.

“So,” I said, “the aljik want to go and the drakes probably want to stay. Everyone is pissed because the drakes dragged us to this planet and got a shitload of people killed, but we need their help to have any chance of getting back into space. Yet there’s basically no way to convince them to go back up since this is what they wanted in the first place, so the aljik have to try to get them to honour their contract, and this is why Kit’s all nervous about Harlen and Kerlin and why they’re super reluctant to come to the nest.”

“Probably,” Lln said. “I only know what Kit says. Perhaps things are different at the nest, and everyone is getting along very well.”

“Uh-huh. And maybe they’ll have a shiny new spaceship all built and ready to fly when we get there, and an all-you-can-eat sundae bar.”

—————————–

I admit to some relief when the human strode up to the nest with an atil in tow. I had been getting worried.

I sent Ain to get a report from the pair. The numbers were promising. One of our precious engineers was dead, but we still had the other. That would have to be enough. The loss of Gth would have been far more devastating had the ship not developed a system of interspecies communication before the crash. The best news was of course the survival of Kit. Two dohl. That might be survivable. Not ideal, but we’d been working with just Ain, Kit and Gth for quite some time. It could be done.

We had plenty of atil, of course, and enough tahl for our current situation, although the low number would drastically limit our options once we were back in space and plotting to make it back to the heart planet. Charlie and Lln immediately headed for a rest chamber to sleep, and soon after, Kit arrived with two drakes. I sent Ain to debrief them, too, in case there were any discrepancies in their reports. There weren’t.

It seemed that our nest was as together as it was going to get. I left some callers on the lookout tower to keep broadcasting the nest signal, but we couldn’t wait for stragglers forever. Something had to be done to bring the drakes back in line, and we needed to build a ship; two seemingly impossible tasks. It was time to stop dithering and build a strategy. I would need to figure out how to leverage Kerlin and Harlen to get the others. Perhaps one of them might know which drake had betrayed us; if we were to find and execute the traitor, then surely the others would fall back into line. I was their Princess and their captain. I merely had to find and destroy the one who sought to replace me, and they would have no reason not to return to the nest. I wasn’t worried. My caste had been doing this forever.

Of course, my caste had also been dying in that exact manner forever. But I was stronger and smarter than some mere drake. It was almost a relief to be against a drake, and not my sister for once. Queen Tatik had been my singular fear for over half of my lifetime, an unstoppable force out to destroy me above all else, her fleets vast and her power unfathomable. I’d had one shot to face her again, one chance to possibly win the empire, and a treacherous navigator had taken it from me. But perhaps they had done me a favour – the plan had been extremely dangerous, we’d been in a desperate situation already, and at least here we had space. Space to breathe, to plan, to rebuild forces. Being stranded was a serious problem, but for the first time since I’d entered the regency arena, we had one thing going for us – the empire thought we were dead. My sister thought I was dead.

For as long as that remained true, we had some measure of safety.

——————-

“So the Crown Jewel is really destroyed, then?” Queen Tatik asked.

Nelan hesitated. It was true that he had found absolutely no trace of the Princess or the Crown Jewel in the ruins of the ship. Logically speaking, the clearest conclusion was the obvious – they had been destroyed in an attempted flight from battle. This he already knew. This everyone already knew. But there was something that didn’t make sense, and he couldn’t quite figure out what. Something was wrong with the ruin.

Something was wrong with the Queen, too.

There were two ways to tell a Queen from a Princess, other than the obvious way of extrapolating from age. A Queen might be laying, in which case the egg sac attached to her underbelly would be a pretty obvious indicator, but even an active Queen only laid about ten per cent of the time. A more reliable indicator was her facial adornments; a Princess covered her face with a multitude of jewels of all sorts of colours, but when she took control of a nest, she carefully removed her facial jewellery and replaced it with pure black onyx. Of course, a Queen of the Out-Western Aljik Empire still retained a single ruby – the Crown Jewel – but changed the rest.

Queen Tatik had been, in effect, ruling the empire since her sister’s flight with the Stardancer, and she’d been laying for the Empire almost as long – the needs of an interplanetary nest did not wait for an extended regency fight. The situation had been uneasy and unconventional, but everybody had ignored the pretension because it was necessary for the nest and the empire’s survival. (Supplying the aljik troops to support an interplanetary empire was a difficult enough matter for a single Queen at the best of times, let alone vital issues of government.) She had not, as a matter of propriety, altered her facial adornments; even though she had allowed people to use her name and title her as Queen, she had been working behind the face of a Princess. An acknowledgment that the Empire had not yet been hers.

But now, her position was completely undisputed, her situation secure. She was the true and legitimate Queen of the Out-Western Aljik Empire. And yet she still had not altered her facial adornments. She still looked at him from amidst the glittering, colourful jewels of a Princess.

She shifted nervously as she asked. She spoke with uncertainty and disappointment.

All the evidence suggested that the entire crew of the Stardancer, including the Princess and the Jewel, were dead. There was no other sensible conclusion to draw. But Queen Tatik was acting as if she was still out there, needing to be tracked down. And Tatik knew the Rogue better than anyone.

So Nelan answered her question very carefully. “I have not yet found any evidence that the Crown Jewel still exists, my Queen. I’ve found no trace of it on the ship.”

“So it doesn’t exist any more?” she pressed.

“That is the most likely conclusion,” he said.

“You’re not sure.”

Nelan hesitated. He wasn’t really sure how to answer that. He could say ‘That’s right,’ and then she’d say, ‘Why not? What do you see?’, and he’d have to admit that he had no idea. But she knew the Rogue Princess better than anyone, and she sensed something amiss. Nelan knew spaceships very well, and he sensed something amiss. It might be paranoia, but between the two of them…

Finally he said, “I’m sure of very few things in this world, ma’am.”

Tatik looked at the ruin. She looked back at Nelan. “Keep looking, then,” she said. “Wherever you think it might be. Keep looking.”

“For how long, ma’am?”

“Until you’re convinced it doesn’t exist.”

A life of chasing a shadow. There were worse jobs. “Yes, ma’am.”

————-

I woke up underground, feeling like a human-shaped bag of sand.

The deep droning of the nest signal was all through my head. The pitch was still just barely on the edge of my hearing, but it had been getting louder and louder as we climbed over a couple of little hills on the way to the nest. It made my whole body feel a little numb, which was frankly a blessing; all my little cuts and rashes still burned from their exposure to the sea. My feet had several fresh new cuts, courtesy of the sharp grey rocks scattered through the sand. I’d wrapped them in scraps of my space suit before going to sleep; it probably wouldn’t do much, but I should at least make some effort to avoiding infection. I had very little actual suit left.

I made myself sit up. My muscles, predictably, screamed. I opened my eyes. This did not provide me with much new information, as the room was quite dark, but I already knew where I was – a little side chamber just inside the massive nest that the aljik had constructed from sand, stone, woven twigs and dried mucous. I’d been too tired to ask where they’d gotten the sticks from. Or what the mucous was.

The smell in the nest was familiar. It took me a little while to realise why. It smelled like the aljik ring, back on the Stardancer; a sharp, swampy smell. The aljik ring had looked nothing like the nest, but to be fair I’d never seen much of it except the area around the door, and it had been misty and thick with reeds. Perhaps there’d been a small nest further back. Or perhaps there hadn’t been space to build one.

Lln moved into my field of view, a sudden patch of brightness. She had something luminous smeared on her forelimbs, which glowed a pale green. As a light source, it wasn’t great, but it showed where the walls near her were. “You’re awake!” she said.

“Unfortunately,” I grumbled. “Anything new shown up to try to kill us yet?”

“Don’t worry. We’ll be safe in the nest.”

“In my limited experience as a shanghaied pre-spaceflight individual who has nearly died in space several times and is now stranded on a mysterious planet, I’ve learned that nowhere is safe, and the safer you feel the more fucked you probably are,” I replied. “Is there any food or water?”

“There should be processing and storage chambers further in. There was no engineer to help design the nest, so it should have the basic, standard layout. We always build them pretty much the same, depending on environment and materials, unless an engineer plans something better. Come on.”

“Glad that wasn’t my job, I know fuck all about aljik nests.” I dragged myself to my feet and followed Lln out into a round tunnel. “Did the others show up?”

“Kit brought the two drakes. We don’t know where Kisa is yet.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know. I imagine that Kit is probably with the Princess. The drakes would be deep in the nest, where they can be… protected as necessary.”

“Hmm.” The tunnel opened into a tiny chamber on one side, about as big as the tunnel itself, then narrowed again. We passed several more such chambers before it opened into a proper. Larger chamber, several metres wide. Nothing seemed to be happening inside it. Several tunnels lead off from this chamber; Lln didn’t hesitate in leading us to one. I knew fuck all about aljik nests, but I knew one thing – if I were alone, I would immediately get hopelessly lost.

A few twisty tunnels and confusing forks later, we arrived at another chamber. This one was quite small and oval in shape; the far wall was only about four metres away, but it was about ten metres long. In the faint glow of Lln’s forelimbs, I could see several shelves built into the walls, made of the same stick-and-mucous combination as the rest of the nest.

This room seemed to interest Lln. She stopped here and carefully paced it out, then started inspecting the walls. I followed her. Whatever she was interested in, I couldn’t see it.

“What is it?” I asked.

“What’s what?”

“What are you looking for?”

“Oh, nothing. Let’s continue.”

“Nothing? We’re going to start bullshitting each other now, are we?”

Lln hesitated. “I’m trying to deduce the plan,” she admitted.

“The plan?”

“Getting off this planet will be difficult. This room suggests that my sisters are as sure of that as I am. I am interested in knowing what the nest’s strategy is, but I don’t really have enough information to work with here. I will have to talk to people.”

“Back up. What strategy? What can you learn here?”

“Well, it’s the [unknown aljik term] chamber,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“The… what chamber?”

“The… where the small ones come from eggs.”

“Oh, like an incubation chamber,” I said. Using the English word. “Show me the word again?”

She did. I copied it, trying to memorise it.

“Okay,” I said, “so why does it matter? Remember, I’m kind of in the dark here.”

“Well, it’s usable.”

“… Good?”

“I mean, it’s usable, but only just. It is very small.”

“Okay, Lln, I know you think you’re being informative but – ”

“We always build nests on the same general plan unless we have another plan to work from. Without an engineer, we don’t. So it is not surprising for an incubation chamber to be here; this is where it goes. Understand?”

“I suppose.”

“The Princess wishes to leave this planet. The will of the nest is to leave this planet. This chamber has nothing to do with that; it would exist because it is in the plan, but it does not actually have to take up this much space. It was built deliberately to be of a size that can actually incubate eggs. You understand?”

“… Oh. So even though we want to leave, this is built on the assumption that we might not be able to?”

“A good conjecture, but the issue is a bit deeper than that. This chamber is small. Small enough that somebody who is not an atil might indeed think that this is the minimum size. They would walk through here and not be concerned. The Princess would walk through here and notice that she has room to lay eggs, but would not see any indication that this is anybody’s decision but her own. See?”

“Oh. The atil are going out of the way not to… spook her, I suppose. But giving her options.”

“Yes. This suggests a general consensus that we will need a new generation, here, on this planet, and that the nest is encouraging the Princess to create that generation as soon as possible.”

“Is… is that good or bad?”

“Difficult to tell. It may be that my sisters, who presumably have a better scope of the lay of the land and our resources than I do, anticipate a semi-permanent or even permanent setup on this planet. They may have given up any hope of leaving, and intend for us to quietly colonise this and develop space travel all over again several generations hence, and simply hope that we are not found by Queen Tatik’s descendants out here. I hope this is not the case.”

“Yeah, fuck that. I’m not dying on this planet.”

“It could also mean the opposite. It could mean that we want to increase our numbers in preparation for our return to space, and want to get started on that as quickly as possible. We will need more engineers and more tahl if we are to take on Queen Tatik. We will need some shyr, too. This could take some time. Queens only lay female eggs, and the caste is determined by incubation conditions. Dohl and engineers are the children of ahlda, so to get engineers, we need to raise at least one ahlda to maturity from the Princess’ eggs, then wait for her to lay engineers, and raise and train those. The chamber conditions determine the ratio of female castes, which would tell me more about what the plan is. If we want to fight the drakes, for example, there should be a lot of space for tahl eggs; if we want to get into space faster, there should be some for ahlda so that they can produce engineers, and also some shyr – we were badly lacking shyr. There’ll be space for at least one egg to develop into a Princess, of course; a nest without any backup rulers is unacceptably vulnerable. I’d like to know how many Princesses my sisters plan to incubate, though.”

I was a couple of sentences behind on this explanation. “Hang on, I don’t know anything about ahlda or shyr,” I cut in.

“Ahlda lay males and tend to travel a lot. They’re annoying. Shyr are a very stealthy warrior caste. We want a lot of them if we intend to take on the Queen. The details don’t matter.”

“Okay, okay.” I tried to get my head around all the information. “So… what are the chamber conditions like? What kind of nest population are we going for?”

“I don’t know. This room is unfinished; the temperature and humidity hasn’t been altered yet.”

“Well, the nest is still being built,” I shrugged. “I guess they’ll get round to it eventually.”

“That is certainly the sort of conclusion an engineer might draw,” Lln said evasively.

“You think it’s something more dramatic than that?” I guessed.

Lln flicked a mandible in the aljik equivalent of a shrug. “I still have very little information about what’s been going on.”

“Come on, Lln.”

Lln hesitated. After a moment she ventured, “Your conclusion is the sort of conclusion a Princess might draw, too.”

Oh.

They had built a chamber that was small enough to not make the Princess suspicious, but big enough to use when she inevitably realised that she would need to lay more aljik. Anticipating the need without her realising it. They had left it without the variety of conditions that would encourage different castes to develop, and this, too, was something that the Princess would not find suspicious, but that Lln evidently did. The reason was pretty obvious, when considered from an atil’s point of view.

They didn’t want the Princess to know in advance what the caste ratio was going to be. They wanted to decide what it would be, and apparently their decision wasn’t something that they thought the Princess would like.

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