9: Danger above, danger below

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. [Glossary] ………. Next>

One day, as Captain Nemo was almost ready to lay her first batch of eggs, an atil on scavenger duty wandered too far from the guards and went missing. She reappeared the next morning, slightly battered but intact, and with a message from the drakes.

The drakes had built a telescope. Recently, they had started detecting ships, multiple ships, in orbit around the planet. It was hard to be certain at such a distance, but they looked aljik.

Captain Nemo gathered her dohl to discuss the issue and, to my surprise, me. “We will need to redesign the nest in response to this,” she said. “Your input might be needed.”

“If there are aljik our there, why would the drakes warn us?” I asked as we gathered in the Princess’ chamber deep in the heart of the nest.

“Because they’re here for the Princess,” Ain said, “and we’re very close to the drake forest. They can’t move; they’ll have planted core seeds by now. If the rogue Queen’s forces bombard us from orbit, they’ll get the drake, too. Majesty, do we trust the drake to be telling the truth?”

“No.” She shifted her weight. I hadn’t had as much of a chance to learn our dear captain’s body language as I had for the other aljik castes, but she seemed uncertain. Worried. “It’s almost certainly a trick to interfere with our nest building. But, we can’t afford to assume that. If there’s any chance that Tatik has tracked us here, we need to take it completely seriously. They’ll be scanning the whole planet looking for us; that’s going to take a lot of time, and how much of that time passes before they get to this area is entirely dependent on luck. We don’t know how long we have. We need to make this nest invisible from space; take down all external structures, move the entrance somewhere invisible, travel only in areas with a lot of cover.”

“You want to take down the watchtower?” Kit asked. “With the drake threat so nearby?”

“We have no choice.”

“That’s probably what they want.”

“Probably, yes. Nevertheless.”

“I don’t think the drake will attack us,” I cut in. “They have no reason to, unless we invade their forest. They’re probably putting all their effort into growing and defending their core trees; attacking the nest would cost them too many people. If they wanted outright war, they’d be attacking the scavengers on the edge of the forest and starving us out. They’d lose people to the guards out there, but not nearly as many as they would attacking the nest. I don’t think the watchtower is a big deal, but moving the nest entrance is. If we want to make sure we can never be seen from space, we don’t have a whole lot of options. We can’t dig into the ocean. It’s flat and open to the mountains, and I’m pretty sure aljik in the mountains themselves could be seen from space, although it might buy us time. Our only place with decent cover and a stable food source is the forest, and they’re barely tolerating us scavenging on the edge. There’s no way they’d tolerate the nest entrance being deep enough in there for cover, even if that didn’t come with the risk of calling an orbital bombardment down on them.”

“The forest is not viable,” the Princess agreed. “Which leaves us with only one single option.”

“That cliff.”

“Yes. I didn’t want to go down there, but it’s looking like we have no choice. If there is some sort of food source down there, under the darkness…”

“We don’t know what’s hiding the ground down there,” I said. “Something suspended in the air. It might be toxic.”

“Can you work around that if it is?”

“Maybe? I mean, it’s clearly heavier than air, since it’s all gathered down there. If we dig ventilation shafts above the dust level, and then an exit tunnel down into the dust, maybe with some kind of an airlock or something? I don’t know. We’d need some kind of breathing protection whenever we went outside…” ugh, this would be so much easier with the drakes. They were great with fabrics and membranes; they could probably make us filters for whatever was down there. Maybe I shouldn’t have helped Harlen and Kerlin escape after all.

“We will need to scout the area,” the Princess said. “I don’t have the dohl to spare for this.”

“We’ll be careful,” Ain said.

“I cannot afford to lose you.”

“You’re ready to lay,” Kit said. “Things will be tight, but it won’t doom the nest to lose – ”

“I cannot lose you.” She fluttered her wings, agitated. “We will send tahl with you. One of you – Ain will stay here. We will send all of the tahl. And Charlie, to look at this dust and learn what is needed for nest design. And a couple of atil, to scout for new food sources. And you will come back safe. If there is any danger at all, retreat. We can try again later.”

“There might not be a later,” Kit pointed out. “If we can’t hide from the ships – ”

“You will not take risks. That is an order.”

“Yes, Majesty.”

“Good. Organise the party and see it done. Ain, to me.” She left, Ain in her wake. Kit and I looked at each other.

“Well,” I said. “That’s that.”

“Indeed. We’ll leave in the morning, at sunrise. We may not have any time to waste.”

And so the next morning, we gathered at the nest entrance.

There was me, with a crude face mask I’d made out of some roughly woven cloth – it’s impossible to spend as much time with drakes as I had and not pick up a few things. Kit, of course. Lln and Hen were the two atil accompanying us; Lln I knew fairly well, of course, but I hadn’t had much to do with Hen. I wondered if Kit had chosen Lln because the three of us had worked together before, traveling here from our crash site, or if her presence was random chance. It might be. Most aljik treated all atil as essentially interchangeable.

And three tahl, towering over us with their huge red claws. Gekt and Tak, who had been in the nest since before the rest of us had stumbled our way here, and Pek, who had showed up shortly after. I knew we had a fourth tahl who had shown up with Pek, named Demm. She wasn’t here, despite the Princess telling Kit to take all the tahl with us. Was that important? I made a note of it.

Our party of seven – an attendant, an engineer, two general servants and three huge warriors – left the nest and made our way to the nearby cliff edge.

The cliff itself was surprisingly straight, like something had cut the land with a knife. The sides looked craggy enough to climb (I hoped), but if I had a map, the cliff would look like an almost completely straight line on it. The land dropped off to a dark pit of dust and shadow, the ground below completely obscured and who-knows-how-far down. Here and there, narrow towers of rock jutted up out of the darkness like stones in a black stream. They looked to be made of the same rock as the ground we stood on.

Some distance away, I saw another cliff, straight and parallel to the one we stood on and about the same height. It looked like the ground dropped off just as sharply on that side, forming a deep, canyon. I knew less about geology than I wished – canyons meant rivers, right? Was there water down there? Maybe. But nothing else here behaved like it would on Earth, so it might be dangerous to assume.

I had brought some rope to climb with, roughly spun stuff made by the atil for watchtower building and structural support inside the nest. I wasn’t keen to trust my life to it. Luckily, I didn’t have to; without a word, Gekt carefully picked me up and held me against her… chest?… with one huge claw while she followed Kit down the cliff. The aljik seemed perfectly at home climbing the cliffs, so I focused on holding onto Gekt.

We descended further, towards the dust. It occurred to me suddenly just how many types of dust are a really, really bad idea to breathe in. That could be powdered lead down there. That could be asbestos. Maybe this wasn’t such a fantastic plan after all.

We stopped, some distance above the dust. “Hen,” Kit said, and the little atil dutifully climbed down to be swallowed by darkness.

Less than thirty seconds later, she was scrambling back up, wings fluttering frantically as if struggling to actually take flight. Black dust covered her body and settled between the layers of beating wings. Lln immediately dashed over to help her up.

“It’s not safe,” Lln told us, as if that wasn’t obvious from Hen’s sluggish, clumsy movements. “Something’s wrong with the air down there.”

“Well then,” Kit said, “I suppose we’ll have to abort the mission. Sorry for wasting everyone’s time.”

I glanced at Hen. Would she be okay? Kit didn’t seem worried, but aljik rarely worried all that much about individual atil. Lln did seem worried, fussing over her sister atil as they made their slow way back up the cliff. “At least,” I said, “we didn’t run into any big hostile monsters for the tahl to – ”

And that, of course, was the moment that the monsters came for us.

They weren’t big. They didn’t come from the darkness below. Instead, tiny crablike beings coloured and patterned like the rock we clung to crawled out of cracks in the cliff and started nipping at us. They seemed more interested in the aljik than me, swarming over them to gather in their soft joints and try to get under their wing cases, but I received my share of nips, too, little scissor-cuts that sliced a few millimetres into my hands and arms and face. More importantly, they got into Gekt’s arm joints, causing her to reflexively drop me.

As my blood-slicked hands scrabbled uselessly for purchase on her smooth carapace, it occurred to me that obviously I should’ve used my rope to tie myself to Gekt. Obviously. I’m planetside for a bit and suddenly I forget to use tethers? Stupid.

I dropped out of reach of Gekt and instead reach for the cliff, fingers scraping against but ultimately managing to grip at a slight outcropping just a couple of metres above the thick dust below. Crab things nipped at my wrists (why attack now, all at once? Did we do something to set them off?), but I was far more worried about the drop than them. My limited experience with the aljik had thus far suggested that they were more tolerant of strange gases than I was; if whatever was down there messed up Hen that badly in half a minute, I likely wouldn’t stand a chance against it. And that was if I magically survived the actual fall from the cliff.

A crab thing nipped at my inner wrist, cutting alarmingly close to the muscles and tendons holding me up and keeping me alive. It occurred to me, wildly, hilariously, that my weak right shoulder was the safest moving joint in my body right now – those crabs wouldn’t be able to cut through the prosthetic as easily as they could my flesh. I maintained my grip, looking frantically for something else to grab, to start climbing. Gekt was making moves to come and get me, but was hampered by her own crab things.

And then, because of fucking course it did, the darkness itself reached up to drag me under. An actual tendril of actual shadow stretched up out of the darkness beneath and wrapped around my leg.

“Oh, come on!” I whined, but as it wrapped around me, it felt surprisingly solid. Not solid-solid, it was a moving cloud of darkness, but the particles were large, and they moved with intentionality. They flowed up, up, over me.

An army of tiny, winged, alien spiders.

“Glath,” I breathed, as my friend poured himself up my arms, fighting off every crab thing in his path. He formed over my arms, across my shoulders and, most critically, over my hands, becoming long, clawed fingers that can grip the cliff face. His fingers found purchase, he took the weight in my elbows and shoulders, and together, we climbed up the cliff and away from the darkness below.

We reached Gekt, or she reached us, and Glath poured over her, ridding her of crabs as she scooped me up and headed back up the cliff. The others were significantly higher up the cliff, not having had to take a detour to pick up any stray humans, and we gathered at the top of the cliff where aljik and spiders quickly dispatched of any crabs that didn’t retreat in time.

Glath regrouped, human-shaped. I was used to him towering over me, but he stood a good head shorter than me, his overall build a lot thinner. He had maybe two thirds of the mass I was used to seeing him with. He looked around at all of us, remembering to turn his head, although he didn’t need to to see.

In aljik, he said, “I know you.”

“Yes,” Kit said. “Are you alright?”

“There are… gaps. In my memory.” He looked at me, then at his own hands, then back at me. “Template.”

“I guess,” I said in our shared language.

“Kit?”

“No.”

“I’m Kit,” Kit said.

“Kit!” Glath reached a hand up and brushed it along Kit’s face, leaving a trail of spiders that rushed to catch back up. He looked back at me. “Charlie.”

“That’s right.”

“Let’s get you home,” Kit said. “Back to the nest.”

“The Princess?”

“She’s here.”

“Good. We need the Princess.” He hovered as a sort of vague blob for a moment, then reconstituted his human shape. “I don’t remember how we got here.”

“That’s okay. She’ll just be glad that you’re home. Everyone will.” To the group, Kit added, “It looks like our mission here was largely a dead end, but at least we got another member of our nest out of it. Let’s get home and get our wounds dealt with.”

—————————–

The way out through the ventilation shaft was tough. The shaft was barely wide enough for a drake body to fit, and I think I lost some skin pushing through. I can only hope that no suspicion fell on Charlie. She should have come with us, but there was nothing to do but respect her choice.

With my skin hanging in rags and Harlen just about ready to lay, making our way to the forest was slow and dangerous. It was Harlen’s keen mother-nose, seeking out the perfect soil, that acted as our guide until we were close enough to smell the existing core trees and find the labyrinths woven from vines and branches to protect them. They were tiny trees, baby trees. But they were a start.

Harlen laid her tree on the East side of the existing labyrinth, putting the other trees between her and the aljik nest, and got to work extending the labyrinth around it. We all helped, of course; it was a true joy to finally be weaving real forests into real labyrinths rather than building artificial nonsense on the spaceship, even if these plants were alien and didn’t weave entirely correctly. Nothing wove entirely correctly, every forest was alien. That’s what we’d signed up for, like generations of colonists before us – spread to new planets and plant there.

And now this one, but for the untrustworthy aljik contamination, was ours.

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. [Glossary] ………. Next>