7: Best-laid plans

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It was two days later when I looked up from a complicated pile of twigs to see Ain walking past on his way to the surface.

“Hey! Ain!” I jogged over.

Ain shrank back at the sight of a human yelling and running toward him. I adopted a less threatening pace. It had taken several days of relying on each other for mutual survival for Kit to stop being jumpy around me, too. Dohl were smart, and a healthy level of caution towards a nightmare being of legend hanging around their nest was probably reasonable.

He caught himself, though, and I pretended not to notice. “What is it?” he asked.

“I need to talk to Kerlin,” I said as casually as I could. “Seen him around anywhere?”

“The drakes are busy,” he said quickly.

“Whelp, I can’t be busy until I talk to Kerlin. Captain Nemo wants me to look over the design of the nest and work my genius engineer magic to make it as great as it can be. She gave me this map.” I pointed.

“I am aware. What does that have to do with the drakes?”

“This map, I’m sure you’ve noticed, is a giant pile of tangled twigs.”

“Yes?”

“I can’t read this. ‘Complicated twig pile’ is not a format of documentation that my people are literate in. It’s useless to me without a translator. Normally Tyzyth would help, but he’s super dead, and Glath is… missing in action.”

“And you think that Kerlin could teach you better than an aljik?” he asked, not even trying to hide his suspicion.

“Kerlin was teaching me how to use the Stardancer’s computer systems before we crashed,” I said patiently. “We spent a lot of time on it. He’s used to translating things into terms I can understand. So, yes, if you want me to work my fancy engineer magic on this warren – and the Princess does want that – I need to work with Kerlin.”

“How very convenient,” he said slowly.

“I know you haven’t had much chance to use the shared language, what with this being an all-aljik base for awhile, but that’s definitely not the meaning of ‘convenient’. Convenient would be a two-dimensional pictorial map with a proper scale, like a sensible civilisation would use.”

“… Very well. I will guide you.”

“If you’re busy, I can get Lln to take me. The atil.”

“If you like.” He rushed off on whatever very important mission I’d distracted him from. I carried my ridiculous stick tangle map to the main storage room and just waited for Lln to get hungry and drop in for a snack.

I’d spent the past few days learning how aljik nests worked, in between my various engineering duties (which were generally light and easy; everyone already knew what they were doing and there weren’t enough resources or people to need to calculate complicated distribution networks). I had, for instance, asked about the small chambers I’d noticed on my way between the resting chamber I’d gone to sleep in after we first arrived, and the incubation chamber. They were guard alcoves, each just big enough for a tahl to stand in with no room for them to be flanked. They could pour in behind invaders from such a position. There were twelve such alcoves in the chambers surrounding the incubation chamber, and four more on each of the two nest entrances. This told me two very important things – first, the atil considered the incubation chamber to be important enough to guard more heavily than the majority of the nest itself, so they definitely had plans for a rapid population increase. Second, whatever population makeup they were going for included at least twenty tahl for guarding duties – presumably more, if they were needed for patrolling or actively removing threats.

This wasn’t a great sign. We hadn’t encountered any major threats, which lead me to believe that they were probably planning for a war against the drakes. I wasn’t entirely sure why. They couldn’t be in preparation for battle against the Queen; we wouldn’t be taking the physical structure of the nest into space.

Not that I knew how we were going to get into space.

Come to think of it, those sentry positions suggested not only that we were going to have a lot of tahl, but that the atil expected us to be planetside for a good long time after they were mature. How many generations did they expect us to be grounded? How long was an aljik generation?

If they wanted males, that meant at least two generations – the Princess had to lay ahlda, and those ahlda had to lay males. We were short on both engineers and dohl, the two male castes, but I didn’t see how laying more would help. The engineers would have to be taught their trade to be useful spaceship builders, and there was nobody to teach them. I knew jack, the rest of the aljik knew even less, and the drakes weren’t likely to help us any time soon, even if they could, which I doubted. The dohl situation was even more pointless. I wasn’t sure exactly how aljik genetics worked (I couldn’t tell if the aljik had no concept of genetics or if finding a common language to talk about it was just really difficult for some reason), but the simple facts were that any aljik born on-planet would be the descendants of three people – the Princess, Kit and Ain. Producing more mates for the Princess wasn’t exactly useful if all they could do was cycle the genes of herself and her existing mates back to her. If we were trapped permanently on-planet, there’d be no choice but to use an incestuous line of descent for the nest – there simply weren’t any other genetic sources available – but that was an unacceptable situation. I refused to be trapped on-planet for the rest of my life. (This had never felt unacceptably limiting on Earth, but then, on Earth I had other humans, and the internet, and an environment I had actually evolved to deal with. None of this too-red sun and acid sea bullshit.)

Lln eventually did drift by, and I flagged her over. “Hey, can you show me where Kerlin is? I get super lost in here.”

She hesitated. “I can’t without – ”

“Ain wants me to talk to him about an engineering thing.”

“Oh. Well, this way, then.” She turned and led me down a corridor.

The aljik were pretty deep in the nest. This was an impractical political necessity. Technically, they were allies, not prisoners; they had voluntarily approached the nest and the Princess had no reason to suspect that they had ever betrayed her. They were ‘good’ drakes. Besides, putting guards on them would be a waste of aljik resources.

But everyone knew that they could very easily ferret information to the rebel drakes if they were to just wander around. It was pretty clear, although unspoken as far as I was aware, that leaving the nest would get them suspected of spying and have them thrown back down with guards as fast as said guards could be summoned. So everybody was sort of pretending that they were hanging around in the lower levels because they wanted to.

Lln showed me into a chamber where the two drakes were pacing. Kerlin glared at me as I approached. “What do you want?”

“Help reading a map,” I said. “Thanks for showing me down, Lln. Sorry, I interrupted you when you were getting a meal, didn’t I?”

“It’s no problem,” she said. “I can wait.”

“You shouldn’t have to, your health is important. Why don’t you go eat and come back for me later? I can’t find my way out on my own but this’ll probably take a while. It looks complicated.”

Lln looked between me and the drakes. “… Alright. I’ll be back later.”

“Thanks.” I waited until she was out of sight before continuing. “Are you two okay? What’s going on?”

“We’re fine,” Kerlin said sarcastically. “Back home with the nest. Couldn’t be better.”

“We’re mostly healed from the journey,” Harlen said. “The resource acquisition for the nest is… delicate, but stable if we’re careful.”

I nodded. “That’s why I was sent down here. I’m supposed to use my amazing engineering skills to make sure the nest is as efficient as it can be. Ain let me down here so that you could teach me this map format.” I gestured to by twig ball. “He clearly has no idea how long that’ll take, so we have time, but I don’t know when Lln will come back, and we need to plan where aljik won’t overhear us, so we should try to work quick.”

“Plan what?” Kerlin asked. “Why?”

“We’re planning how to adjust this design to include an unguarded tunnel that can get you out of here. There’s a forest to the East where a lot of drakes have gathered and built some sort of territory. I’m guessing the aljik didn’t tell you that, but if we can get you to the trees without being spotted…”

“Wait a minute,” Harlen said, “aren’t you on the aljik’s side?”

“I’m going to find a way off this planet, if that’s what you mean,” I said, “but no. I’m not on anyone’s side. I’m on the ‘let’s all stop being dicks to each other’ side. We’re few in number and we lose every time, but I have faith that someday, somehow, we will all be able to stop being dicks to each other for five fucking minutes. Now are you going to help me help you escape, or what?”

————–

Aljik maps were a nightmare, no matter how you looked at it. In the end it was easier for Kerlin to just explain features to me than it was to teach me how to read it myself.

I had a rough idea of the aboveground layout already. The single observation tower was in the Northern end of the nest, the important end. Not far further North than that, the landscape abruptly dropped off at a cliff, and at the bottom of the cliff was just smoke and shadow that was impossible to see through. The network of Western tunnels went to the sea we’d crossed to the Southwest; they didn’t surface there, but ran close enough to the water that moisture filtered through the sand and could be processed to make it drinkable. South of the nest was a long stretch of sand and stone, identical to the ocean shore. The land wasn’t flat; it rose and fell in what could be considered large hills or small mountains, depending on your point of view.

Where we wanted to go was East, into the thick forest that apparently contained, somewhere within it, the drake rebel camp. But there was simply no way I was going to be able to convince anyone to dig further in that direction. We were going to have to get out somewhere else, and sneak around. Which meant either South or North. Out into the mountains… or off a cliff and into the mysterious darkness below.

The vote was unanimous for mountains.

“What are you going to tell them to convince them to dig out there?” Harlen asked.

I shrugged. “Some bullshit I guess. I’m the engineer, I don’t think they’ll ask too many questions. I wish I still had my books with me. They made everything so much easier.”

“You can get it done, though?”

“Yeah. I can’t give you any guarantees on time, but I don’t think anyone’s leaving this planet fast, so…”

“Hi, Lln!” Kerlin exclaimed. I turned. Lln was, indeed, returning.

“Hi, Kerlin! Isn’t this nest great? It’s a bit rough since we don’t have real supplies, but it’s so much better than the metal walls of the Stardancer, yeah?”

“Uh… yeah.”

“You done, Charlie?”

“For now,” I said, picking up my map. “I’ll get to work and come back if I need more information, guys.”

“Looking forward to it,” Kerlin said. Harlen flicked a tailspur in acknowledgment.

“So do you know how to read the maps now?” Lln asked as we made our way back down the corridor.

“Enough for now. We’ll have to see if it’s enough.”

“I am sure you’ll be fine. The basic design is serving fine for now. You probably won’t need to make too many very dramatic adjustments.”

Which was the problem. How was I going to convince them to make dramatic adjustments?

How, in the midst of a struggle for survival and a brewing war, was I going to convince them to build an escape tunnel for their own prisoners?

————————

The core tree grew strong. We all shed our skins on it, and two of our number had shed their last and had started growing their female fangs. They moved deeper into the forest, searching for the perfect place to plant their own core seeds when the time came. Their seeds grew within them, and our tree grew stronger and taller, and the little white buds of gestation pods began to form. We could bear any hardship, any trial that the planet would throw at us. The Princess’ whole court could bear down on us and we would stand fast.

We had something to fight for.

————————

“I suppose,” Queen Tatik said sternly, “that you are going to explain why one of my scout ships appears to be mostly molten slag?”

Nelan glanced over at the sorry mess heaped next to the remains of the Stardancer without any guilt. The Queen was exaggerating; several ship systems were still perfectly distinguishable, although a bit deformed. He looked back to the model of the Stardancer in his claws. “So this is what the Rogue Princess’ ship looked like when it was a prison ship,” he explained.

“It’s the ugliest ship I’ve ever seen,” she admitted. “I’m surprised the Rogue didn’t go insane on such a thing.

“I think she was already insane,” Nelan ventured, earning a rare giggle from the Queen. “The point is, they have dash shielding at both ends, right? And the shields overlap in the middle to properly shield the whole ship.”

“If you say so,” the Queen said.

“I do say so. The thing is, it’s not great shielding. This isn’t a military vessel. it’s not supposed to dash at all, and even if it needs to, there’s not supposed to be anybody important aboard aside from a few guards. So there’s no reinforcing and not much in the way of backups, like in our ships. To blue dash at all, the Princess must have had it modified. The end shields are all there are, and you need both of them to shield the ship. The Rainbow Destroyer cut the ship in half, about… here.” He showed her on the diagram. “This removes one shield, and the other isn’t strong enough to shield much more than the very end of the ship by itself. They’re not designed to work alone, see.”

“As you keep repeating,” the Queen said. “What’s your point? We know that the shielding failed during the blue dash; that is why we have so little left.”

“Well, yes, but we shouldn’t have this little left.”

“What do you mean?”

Nelan strode over to the wreck of the Stardancer. “This is where the escape pods attach to the ship,” he explained, showing the ruined clamps. “There were definitely still some escape pods attached after the fight with the Rainbow Destroyer, but as you can see, there’s nothing there now. At first I figured they were burned away when the shielding failed, but then I took a closer look at the clamps, and ran some experiments. Look at the difference between the clamps here, and here.” He indicated an escape shuttle clamp that was worn beyond functionality, and one almost completely melted away.

Then he strode over to the scout ship he’d used for his experiments. “I modified the shielding and clamp design to be as similar as I could get it to the Stardancer. I ran it through a green dash with some escape pods still in place – as you can see, the wreckage of the pods is still there.”

Queen Tatik poked at the ruin. “Hardly survivable, though.”

“Actually they were still functional – although barely – after the green dash. The ruin is from later testing.”

“Later testing?”

“I’ll get to that in a bit. Look at the clamps, here.” He indicated an area where there were once presumably clamps. “Pretty similar to the Stardancer clamps that are completely ruined, although there’s a bit more damage on our ship. I think the Stardancer crew pulled some kind of shield-strengthening trick I’m not aware of. Anyway, I removed the escape pod from here before the tests – this is what happens to exposed clamps. But here, look at these clamps.” He indicated a second set of escape pod docking clamps. These ones were damaged beyond functionality, but still recongiseable as clamps. “Much less damaged, see? Like the other set I showed you on the Stardancer.”

“Where is this going?” the Queen asked.

“I had an escape pod here for the green dash,” he explained. “The pod took a lot of damage, but shielded the clamps.”

“What you’re saying,” Queen Tatik said slowly, “is that there were escape pods attached during the dash, but there is no evidence of their ruins now, yes? But the area was searched for escapees. There was nothing. Are you sure their shield didn’t just weaken earlier than your test one, and vaporise the pods?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Nelan said. “But no. Here’s the cool part, and this took a while to figure out, believe me.” He reached into the ruin of his test ship and poked something. With a squeak of grating metal, the ruins of an escape pod dropped free.

“Watch the drop,” Nelan said, too late, as the Queen flinched back. “Look here. This is what the clamps look like under an escape pod. Barely any damage at all.”

“Then what did you do to get the clamps similar to the ones on the Stardancer?”

Nelan looked around and leaned close, as if sharing a great secret. “I put it through a blue dash with failing shielding,” he said triumphantly.

“Why a blue dash?”

“After the green. I put this ship through a green dash with some exposed clamps.” He indicated the completely ruined clamps. “Then I dropped off an escape pod, which exposed mostly intact clamps. Then I put it through a blue dash to bring it home. This is the result.”

“The ship was in the location it arrived in after a green dash, though,” the Queen pointed out.

“Exactly! It’s the perfect plot. Well, not completely perfect, since it left the clamps. The Stardancer green dashes to a location, blue dashes to a nearby location, drops off escape pods – thus exposing new clamps – and then blue dashes back, leaving a lifeless ruin too burned to inspect for the military to find.”

“So there were survivors,” the Queen said carefully.

“I think so.”

“How sure are you?”

“Hard to put a number on it. It’s the only theory I have. But there might be other things that could cause this kind of thing, things I haven’t thought of yet.”

“Keep thinking, then. I want as much information as you can give me, based on the assumption that there were survivors.”

“And if they weren’t?”

“I have a whole empire of people out there who think my sister is dead. We can afford to have you be the alternate contingency. If she exists, find her.”

“How?”

“You’re the engineer, Nelan. But first step… figure out how far they could have jumped to, and back from, in the time available after the green dash and before our forces arrived. That gives us a search radius. Now please excuse me; I need to get every scout ship in the area to the green dash site.”

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