8: Dream Team

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“It’s the carbon dioxide,” I lied. “It’ll suffocate us all if we’re not careful.” I pointed at the part of my tangled twig map that, according to Harlen, was supposed to represent the tunnels near the water we’d crossed. Water would seep through the sand and be collected and further purified.

The gathered atil dutifully looked at the map, then back to me.

“I noticed in when we were sailing over,” I explained, with a small nod to Lln. “The carbon dioxide level is really high over the water. I’m more sensitive to it than you guys, so you might not pick it up yet, but when you do, it’ll be too late. We can’t afford to poison the nest.” I tried to look more confident than I felt. I actually had no idea if carbon dioxide was bad for aljik, or what concentrations they could stand, and my audience might know. If they called me on it…

“How do we fix it?” one of them piped up. I relaxed.

“A tunnel, here.” I indicated the part of the map that Harlen had told me would lead out into the mountains. “We can vent the gas out this way. We need to channel it from near the center of the nest.”

“That’ll be a security risk,” someone said. “If the drakes could sneak into the centre of our nest…”

“It’ll be fine,” said someone else. “It’s a gas venting tunnel, no people will need to go through it. There won’t be anyone going in and out to give away its location. We can make it really narrow and conceal the opening.” The atil crowded around the map; I let them have it. It was in their hands now. Their claws. Their little digging claws, that were gonna tunnel a way out for Kerlin and Harlen, and then… everything would be fine, probably?

No, we’d still be stuck on this planet, in conflict with the drakes. Which seemed pointless, really, since we didn’t even have a way off the planet yet. The whole stupid thing was being run on hope and denial, and if the aljik would just accept that we were all stuck here anyway…

No. I couldn’t start thinking like that. We had to plan for getting off the planet, because we had to get off the planet. I was not going to spend the rest of my life on Sanctuary. I’d die first.

Well, logically, if I did then I would have spent the rest of my life on… it wasn’t important.

‘Where are you going to spend the rest of your life?’ asked a little voice in the back of my mind. I’d had a chance to shoot for Earth and blown it. I’d turned my back on it, for… well, stupid reasons. They were stupid reasons, right? I’d had some idea that as soon as humanity became aware of aliens they’d reach for the stars, and the aliens would react badly because of that thing with the old aljik Queen’s ship and all the death, and there’d be a war or something and… yeah, that was probably right, but what was I going to do about it? I was out here, trying to change humanity’s reputation by… what, being an outlaw? Getting stuck on a planet as some hopeless, sarcastic engineer, and doing things that the alji would most definitely view as betrayal if they ever found out? Yeah, I was doing great. Great plan, Charlie.

Not that it would matter, since nothing I did would influence interplanetary culture at large. We’d all die on Sanctuary, and if we didn’t we’d still be executed as outlaws eventually. Everyone expected Captain Nemo to pull some insane plan out of her carapace and take over the empire, or at least, they hoped she would. They’d expected it when they joined the crew, anyway. At this point their faith was mandatory, because nobody had anywhere else to go. But even if she did… well, great for the survivors I guess, but that wouldn’t help my mission at all, would it? Human Involved In Galactic Overthrow.

At best, I would come out of that story as a dangerous secret weapon. That wasn’t what we needed. We needed Star Trek. We needed an enlightened and compassionate humanity who turned to peace and exploration first, and fighting as a last resort. That was the reputation I needed to spread, and I had no game plan for that whatsoever. It had seemed so simple in the escape pod. ‘Be compassionate. Be the best of humanity.’ That meant nothing while we were fugitives presumed dead, scraping out an existence on an acidic, near-lifeless dirtball.

And the other side of the equation was humans maturing, growing into the people we dreamed of being when we wrote science fiction. I had no plan for that. My whole thought process had been ‘we’re not ready to meet these kinds of aliens yet; don’t drag them into our solar system’. Humans needed to grow a bit more, become a bit more enlightened, become a species ready to meet other sapient species.

Bullshit.

Human nature didn’t become better over time. Humans were human; our nature was a chaotic mix of all kinds of impulses, some good and some evil, and most oscillating between those states depending on local conditions. Oh, sure, if you sliced out bits of history you could see general upward trends in them in terms of decent behaviour, but this was more a matter of acquiring information and decent living conditions than any change to our natures. And it was also mostly an illusion. People had been cruel and kind and everything in between before we invented agriculture, and we were those things in different ways after agriculture and in different ways again after the industrial revolution, as our population density and living conditions and ways of organising ourselves changed. Human nature wasn’t getting better or worse over time. My great and noble sacrifice of aborting my plan and pulling the Stardancer away from our solar system didn’t mean that the humans who met the aljik in the future would be any more sensible towards them than humans today would be.

It just meant that they’d have time to make much bigger guns.

God, I was such a fuck-up.

I felt a little bit better knowing that my plan would’ve failed anyway. Presumably, Kerlin would never have sent us to Earth. He probably would’ve done basically what I’d told him to regardless, right? Unless he feared I’d slaughter all the drakes in retaliation or something? How much did Kerlin still fear me? How well could he predict my actions?

It didn’t really matter anyway. The facts were: my plan was stupid, and we were stuck on Sanctuary. I had a pretty dream that I could phrase in an inspiring way and absolutely no way to bring any part of it into reality.

Which kind of put me on par with everyone else on Sanctuary, I supposed. A bunch of dumbfucks with big dreams and no ability to make them happen.

The Dream Team.

————–

The shyr clearly wanted to be seen. If she hadn’t, Queen Tatik would never have been able to see her.

The slim greyish figure, all thin limbs and sharp points, wore no facial adornments, making her difficult to distinguish from others of her kind. Her claws were held casually, without any deliberate aggression, and didn’t appear to be coated with poisons of any kind, relying only on the shyr’s natural venom – that was about as respectful and non-confrontational as a shyr usually got. Despite all shyr looking basically the same, Queen Tatik had a pretty good idea of who this was. There were two shyr who might ever have reason to talk to her, and this wasn’t the spymaster here to warn her of an assassin.

This had to be Hatta, and her being visible was a message in itself. She didn’t need to say anything. She would only be here if Project Sapphire, the project to which Queen Tatik had absolutely not put anyone and had never directly spoken about because word of such an action would have her entire court defect to her rogue sister immediately, had had a development.

Queen Tatik fought to stay calm, to keep her wings still, keep walking. She flicked an arm in acknowledgment as she passed the shyr, waiting for her to melt back into the shadows in her wake.

“Majesty,” Hatta said as she passed.

Queen Tatik froze. Hatta was good at her job; she wouldn’t waste words on something that didn’t need explanation. Maybe this wasn’t a good development, maybe something had gone wrong.

“Would you be happy? With success?”

Indignation at her orders being questioned swelled in Queen Tatik’s wings, and she fought the urge to visibly bristle. It was a truly reckless plan. And Hatta was doing the fair thing, giving her a last chance to back out. The fact that Hatta had come, but there was apparently still time to back out, meant that Queen Tatik could pinpoint exactly how far Project Sapphire was progressing, and they were moving faster and further than she’d expected. Shutting down the project now would be the smart thing. Would be the sensible thing.

But maybe there was a bit more of Anta in Tatik than she’d ever known, or maybe chasing her sister across the Empire for so long had made her reckless. Because she said, “I would be overjoyed with success,” and moved on.

The project couldn’t be all that dangerous. Her sister had pulled it off.

———————————-

Time passed. Tunnels were dug. My eye healed up again, which was nice. I read somewhere once that fighter pilots who undergo heavy G forces sometimes lose sight in an eye because of it, that sometimes it heals and sometimes it doesn’t, and once it’s happened once it’s more likely to happen again. I don’t know how many more space adventures my eye can handle. Bright side of being trapped on a planet, I suppose – unless we can find a way back up into space, the question probably won’t come up.

The creation of the ventilation tunnel was a slow, slow process, given its length. The tunnel itself was narrow, and feelings on it were mixed.

“This is a security risk,” I saw a Tahl telling Kit one day, waving her huge fighting claws in agitation. “It’s too narrow for the Princess to get through, so it’s not an effective escape route, but the drakes could use it to infiltrate the nest.”

“And enter the nest in single file, to be killed off one by one?” Kit asked. “They’re keeping to themselves out in the forest. Besides, they don’t even know where it is.”

“They will if the two in the nest tell them.”

“Those two haven’t left the nest.”

“They’re a security risk.”

“They’ve done nothing to indicate that they’re traitors. What do you want to do, execute them anyway?”

“If we have to.”

“Calm down, Gekt. The vent is easily guarded, and far too narrow and long for a drake army to get through even if they could find it. They’d have to leave their forest and crawl through it single file and probably suffocate inside. If anything, its main danger would be getting blocked by drake corpses.”

“I don’t like it. We should kill the drakes, and make the engineer find a different way to vent the nest.”

“You’re paranoid.”

“I’m security- minded. It’s my job.”

As soon as I plausibly could, I found a reason to meet with the drakes and tell them that the tunnel is finished. “Don’t tell me when you’re going, don’t involve me in the plan at all. This is all I can do for you.”

“If we escape,” Kerlin said, “they’ll surely be suspicious of you. The tunnel was your idea.”

“I doubt it. I’ll stay well away from any escape and I should stay well away from any blame. They need an engineer too much.”

“Come with us,” Harlen said.

“I can’t. You guys are settling the planet, right? I’m not giving up and spending the rest of my life here. I have kids to get back to.”

“How? The Princess has no spaceship and no way to make one. The population of the nest is too low to survive long-term. They’re going to die here in a dead-end nest, looking at a sky they’ll never reach. We are building a future. Come with us. You’ll be safe.”

I shook my head. “I can’t give up. Sorry. Goodbye. And good luck.”

Five days later, the drakes disappeared from under everyone’s mandibles.

——————————

The problem, void, is that my garden is not in the void. Well, it is, in the sense that all matter is within the void, but it is currently under air pressure in a moderate gravity well, a place that I have no interest in being. Collecting it once more will be somewhat of a puzzle. A very tricky puzzle.

How fun!

First, I will need to find the right materials.

——————————-

“So, do we know what’s in the mysterious, dark shadowy place over the cliff?” I asked Kit one morning while we wandered around the nest trying to keep busy. (Captain Nemo won’t let either of us stray too far from the nest; we’re too valuable. But once the place is set up, there’s a limited amount of work that can be done inside it.)

“No. It’s too dangerous to scout down there, the Princess says.” He did this weight shifting thing that he does when he’s in disagreement about one of her decisions and won’t admit it.

“So we’re just gonna leave it as a big mysterious unexplored place?”

“It’s not currently posing a danger to the nest, and going down there might lose valuable warriors or even stir up danger. I’m more concerned about food.”

I glanced at an atil, strolling past with a bundle of thick vines on her back. I wasn’t sure how those vines were turned into food and I didn’t care, but the bundles came in smaller every day. “Pickings on the edge of the forest are getting thin, huh?”

“And wandering further in risks the atil encountering drakes. We don’t have enough tahl to protect them all, and the Princess won’t let us dohl out to help.”

“So we need an alternate source of food.” The jellyfish pools over the clear ocean weren’t present around the nest. “The mountains are barren, the forest is full of drakes… there might be something over the cliff.”

“The Princess seems to think that that area might be more dangerous than the forest.”

I raised an eyebrow, which wasn’t a signal that a dohl was likely to see in the low light of the nest let alone understand, so I replicated the dohl version with a flick of my arms. “We know that the drakes are a threat. We haven’t seen any indication of threat over the cliff. In fact, we haven’t found any deliberately dangerous natural wildlife at all.” The jellyfish had been toxic if not prepared properly and algae had nearly gotten us killed in the water, but that was more an environmental hazard.

Kit flicked his own mandibles in a neutral sort of gesture. He didn’t want to disagree with his Princess.

Which, fair. It’s not like I knew what I was doing any better than she did.

——————————

Panic is for larvae. It would be unbecoming in any grown Princess, and inexcusable in me, trying to do the job of a Queen with my dwindling Court. My job was to lead, to make good decisions, to know what to do. But I was beginning to think that I hadn’t made a good decision since the moment I’d stepped into my sister’s Regency fight.

It had seemed clever at the time. Be like Queen Anta, think outside the tunnels. Do the radical thing and build something new. It had seemed such an obvious plan; swipe the Crown Jewel and flee the fight, giving myself insurance against her simply blasting me out of the sky and destroying the jewel along with me. Make some trouble far out in the Empire, draw her forces out of the centre, then rush back in to the less-defended Heart of the Empire and use the control of machines there granted to me by the Crown Jewel to overwhelm the home guard and establish my base. Once my sister was dead and the Heart was mine, everyone would take formation under me.

But our current position suggested that my plans hadn’t been all that clever. If I was clever, we wouldn’t have ended up here. More of my Court would be alive. They’d believed in me, they’d followed me, and here we were. And I could blame the drakes for their betrayal, but whose jobs was it to keep an eye on that, when I had no shyr at my disposal? My job. I’d been wired into the computer at the time. I should have anticipated the betrayal, seen it, prevented it. Made sure we got to the Heart of the Empire.

And even if we had. Would it have worked? Would it work if I somehow accomplished it now? Even with most of her forces outside the Heart, the heart itself would still have had security. There would be tahl, there would be shyr. There would be computer systems that the Faceless Queen had set up to use without the Crown Jewel, since she didn’t have it; one had to assume that most of the defensive systems would have been rebuilt to be immune to the Jewel, since she knew that I did have it. Had this ever been a good plan?

Had I been a brilliant tactician, a forward-thinker, a beacon of a new future for the Empire, when I’d left? Or had I merely been a coward, unwilling to die to her sister’s jaws or strike out alone properly?

No matter. Here we were, with a dwindling Court and no way off-planet, and no matter my past decisions, I had to start making good ones. I had to find some way to persevere in this hopeless situation. I could not panic.

This wasn’t about me any more. This Court had put their faith in me to lead them. And I was going to build it back up, somehow. I had to find a way.

I had to.

———————

Being half of myself was difficult.

There were large gaps in my memory. There must be, because this wasn’t the Stardancer, and I didn’t know how I got here. I didn’t know where my Princess was, where my Court was. I didn’t know where my Template was. Something catastrophic must have happened; I was still finding pieces of myself, and many of them weren’t in good condition. Many of them were picked up, their information absorbed, and their bodies, too damaged to be of use, digested by the rest. I was in a race against time to find as many pieces of myself as I could while their information was still salvageable, and slowed down by having to hatch new pieces to create enough mass and coherence to continue.

I needed to find my Court. I needed to find Charlie.

I needed to find myself.

I kept moving.

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