10: Friends and Foes

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“Ask me something,” Glath demanded as I paced the edge of the cliff, looking down into the fog below. It had been a few days since our investigation and the shallow bites of the crabs were healing well, but I was never going to forget their sting and the threat of losing my grip and falling to my death below.

“It’s okay if you don’t remember things,” I told him. “Nobody expect you to – ”

“I want to remember. And I want to relearn what I can’t.”

“Okay, okay. Uh… tell me about the different aljik castes.”

“Queens,” he said immediately. “One adult Queen per nest. Queens lay the female eggs in a nest. When a young Princess reaches maturity, her presence in the nest becomes less and less welcome until she gathers an entourage of her own and heads out to start a new nest. Alternately, she may challenge her mother to a regency fight, a one-on-one combat where nobody else is allowed to interfere. The one who survives the fight controls the hive. In the case of a reigning Queen’s death, any Princess in the nest mature enough to take command does so. If there isn’t one, the hive must hurriedly raise a new Queen and hope to hold together until she can take over, or hope that a Queen seeking to establish her own nest finds them. It is a precarious position for a hive to be in.”

“And if there’s more than one mature Princess when the Queen dies?”

“Then those who want to establish their own hives leave to do so, and anybody else has a regency fight.”

“Like our Captain Nemo and her sister.”

“Yes.”

“Great. What other castes?”

“Dohl. The fertile male caste. We’re attendants to our Queen, seeing to her needs, and managing situations too small or varied or distant for her to oversee directly. The majority of males are dohl.

“Kel. The other male caste. Look like dohl, but aren’t fertile. Instead of being natural leaders and empathic attendants, they’re natural engineers. They build, maintain and design things for the nest.

“Tahl. Warriors. Big and strong, and defenders of the hive. When they’re not guarding or fighting, tahl are also good at helping to move and build heavy things.

“Shyr. The other warrior caste.”

Shyr. Did I know about those ones? The word kind of sounded familiar. “I don’t think I know those ones. We don’t have any, do we?”

“Almost certainly not.”

“Almost certainly?!”

“Shyr are tiny and stealthy. They make little sound, have no scent, and have a powerful venom. They’re often used as scouts and spies; it’s not always possible to know just how many shyr are around, especially if they might be spying for a neighbouring nest. But since we never saw any on the Stardancer and we fell down here from space in an evacuation, I think we can be pretty confident that there aren’t any in this hive. It’s hard to go that long without being noticed on a spaceship, let alone in an escape pod.”

“Unless the ships above drop some down on us.”

“We’d notice their landing vehicles. They’re excellent at hiding underground, but there’s not a lot you can do to hide a spaceship falling out of the sky.”

“Great. What else?”

“Atil. The worker caste. Industrious, and very useful, but not very bright. Generally need overseeing by dohl or kel if they need to make or do anything new. The most numerous caste in any functioning hive.”

“Right. And that’s all of them?”

“No. There’s the ahlda.”

I’d heard about the ahlda, but never seen one. “Tell me about the ahlda.”

“Travellers. Ahlda don’t belong to a nest and aren’t usually loyal to any particular Queen. Their main job is to get away from their home nest. They travel to other nests and lay eggs in them.”

“Eggs?”

“Male eggs. Dohl and Kel. Queens can’t lay males, and they’ve got to come from somewhere.”

That was in line with what I knew. “I’ve never seen them. I guess they wouldn’t want to be cooped up on a spaceship for years at a time.”

“They’re beautiful. Large, multicoloured wings and wonderful singing voices. They’re very rare in the Empire. Apparently there used to be more, generations ago.”

“Rare? Why?”

“I don’t know. Did I get all the castes right?”

I shrugged. “Everything you said is in line with what I know, and you covered all the ones I know about. But I know a lot less about the aljik than everyone else here.”

“Right, because you’re the Princess. No… no, a kel.”

“A human,” I reminded him.

“Human. Yes. Which is… not a caste.”

“That’s right.”

“And what are you doing?”

“Trying to figure out how to keep everyone alive. I know you survived that fog down there, but it hurt Hen pretty badly, so I don’t think it’s safe for the aljik or for me.”

“And we need to be able to forage out of sight of the ships above.”

“Yes.”

“And not in the forest, because of the drakes.”

“Yes.”

He rubbed his thumb over his chin thoughtfully, an imitation of one of my gestures that was somewhat disconcerting to see performed by a big pile of alien spiders. “River?”

“The water’s caustic, and nobody here can breathe underwater anyway.”

“Hmm.”

“Yeah, it’s a tricky one.” I sat down. “So why the regency fight?”

“What?”

“Between our illustrious Captain and her sister. The Empire needed a ruler, and they went into a regency fight and then she fled halfway through, right? So now her sister’s hunting her down to finish the fight?”

“Yes.”

“But if she had’ve just departed to set up her own nest, then we wouldn’t be getting chased around the galaxy, would we? She’d be able to set up somewhere in peace?”

“She would have had to travel very, very far to get out of the Faceless Queen’s territory.”

“Which would still be easier and safer than this, right? So why have the regency fight at all if she was going to flee?”

“Well, she didn’t want to give up her claim to the Empire.”

“Why not? I know the aljik have war; she could come back for it later. She’s going to have to kill her sister and reconquer it one way or another; wouldn’t that be easier if she could build an army in peace first instead of getting hunted down like this?”

“Perhaps, but without the regency fight then the Cr – are you supposed to know about the Crown Jewel?”

I looked Glath over. I could’ve probably said ‘yes’. In his distracted, confused condition, I probably could have convinced him that I was supposed to know about this Crown Jewel, and convinced him to test his memory by telling me all about it.

All I’d have to do was exploit my friend’s moment of weakness, and break his trust in me forever.

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think I’m supposed to know about that.” (I didn’t need more royal secrets, anyway. I’d had a hard enough time convincing the Princess I wasn’t a threat already; the last thing I should do is learn a bunch of sensitive information about her that I’m not supposed to have.)

“Oh,” he said. “Well. I’m sure she had a good reason for the fight.”

“Yeah,” I sigh. “I’m sure you’re right.”

——————————–

Wow, Void! Things have certainly grown wild in my absence!

My garden is growing upon a stone, which is somewhere that I cannot go. Somewhat disappointing, I must say, and perhaps I should take this as a sign that I should move on. But as you know, Void, (although of course you do not know anything,) signs and symbols are for children.

Perhaps there is a way for me to lure them back up, past this shell of other life collecting about the stone like so much detritus, and back into the universe. I will have to think on it.

—————————–

“So I have two questions I need answers to,” I say to Kit, deep in the nest.

“This is about Glath, I presume?”

“Huh? No, actually.”

“… Oh. Well then. What are your questions?”

“Can aljik eat the animals we ran into on the cliff?”

“You think they could be a potential food source.”

“Well, yeah. We need one.”

“We have plenty of food sources. We can search the river, the forest. The issue is potential detection from space, and those things are in a cliff that would be perfectly visible above the fog.”

“Right, right, exactly. And those things live inside the cliff. We can dig towards the cliff and hunt them underground. They seemed more than eager to come out to get us on the cliff, so I have no doubt they’d come into the tunnels just as eagerly. Glath was under the fog for a while and he says that they live down there too, and from what he says and what we saw of their behaviour I suspect – although I can’t be certain – that if this cliff is depleted of them, more will start to move up. If the aljik can eat them, it’s one food source that can be gathered completely undetected from above.”

“And like you said, they had no hesitation in coming out and attacking us. What if digging into their territory floods the nest with them? What if they pour in, an endless pest problem constantly replenished from below, until the nest is uninhabitable?”

“That brings me to my second question – can they swim?”

“Can they swim?”

“Yeah. We humans have a thing called a water trap. You guys probably have the same thing, since you live in tunnels and all, but I don’t know what you call it. A water trap is a tunnel in air that dips down and then up again, and you fill the dip with water. It needs to be deep enough that there’s a whole section of the tunnel that’s completely submerged, so nothing, not even air, can pass through from one end to the other without going into the water.”

“I’m familiar with the concept. And if they can’t swim…”

“Then a water trap between the nest proper and the cliff should handle any pest invasion issues. It’d have to be pretty far back from the cliff, since I don’t know if they burrow; if we put it basically in their nest then they’ll burrow around it. But if we can pull it off…”

“It won’t feed the nest alone, but it will definitely help. I’ll talk to the Princess and arrange a mission to go and capture some of these beasts at once. We must learn how they behave, whether they burrow, and most importantly, whether they can swim through a submerged tunnel.”

“Great. Hey, by the way. I was talking to Glath and he says that there aren’t as many ahlda in the Empire as there used to be?”

“Hm? Oh, yes. I don’t know how things have been since the Princess’ regency fight, but until then there had been a dip.”

“How big a dip?”

“I don’t know. It’s a big Empire, I rarely had time to sit about the heart planet listening to the pretty voices of visitors. The Out-Western Empire is very successful; it is far, far larger than most, and has less dohl.”

“Less dohl? So there were less ahlda coming to lay male eggs even before you were born?”

“Possibly? Is this important?”

“Probably not.” Honestly, it was Kit’s lack of interest in the topic that bothered me the most. Sureley this kind of information was pretty important for a space empire whose entire population was funnelled through being laid by a single Queen (or in the case of males, through ahlda laid by neighbouring empire’s Queens). It seemed to me like it should be the most important resource to monitor, and the total lack of concern over it was baffling. If humans had this kind of setup, the immigration of ahdla and dohl would be a primary factor at the heart of all trade and diplomacy. But the aljik don’t think like humans, and I couldn’t figure out if I was the one missing something here. Presumably, their instincts and thought patterns worked for them, so what they were and weren’t concerned about was a better indication of issues than whatever I worried about. But they also tended to miss things that seemed pretty obvious to me.

Or maybe it was just that this sort of thing wasn’t a concern for engineers, so it didn’t come up in conversation with me. Maybe Kit was knowledgeable on the topic and was just trying to give me information that an engineer would want to know, and couldn’t find any. It wasn’t always easy to tell with aljik.

——————————–

As soon as the Queen entered her chambers, she knew that the shyr was there. As usual, that was a good sign – it meant that the shyr wanted to be seen, and probably wasn’t there to kill her. “Report.”

She fluttered and dipped her wings. “My Queen.”

“A matter still in some contention.”

“Nonsense. To flee is to forfeit. You act as if your command of this Empire is in question, Queen Tatik, but I have seen the people, and none consider your claim anything less than legitimate. Your sister lost her regency fight in the minds and hearts of everybody; her survival is immaterial. And now that she’s properly dead, the ruins of her ship in your possession…”

“Yes?”

“Well, that’s some extra security, isn’t it?”

“Indeed. It is a relief for everything to truly be over.”

“So I am sure that the secret forces gathering in great numbers around several planets in the same sector of space as the final battle are unimportant.”

“They’re seeking valuable resources on that planet. Nothing more.”

“They must be incredibly valuable, to send so many highly trained soldiers so secretly.”

“They’re not your concern, Hatta.”

“I’m sure they’re not. Gemstones, perhaps? Or one very particular gemstone, that maybe secretly went missing some time ago?”

This rambling is very uncharactaristic of a shyr, Queen Tatik can’t help but notice. “Have you come to see me for a reason?”

“Yes, my Queen, of course. Forgive my rambling. In fact I have terrible news.”

“Terrible news.”

“The sapphires.”

The sapphires. Terrible news. Oh, no. “Damage?”

“Negligible. A couple of minor work ships.”

“How were collected?”

“Three.”

“And how many do you have now?”

“None.”

They lost all three. Negligible immediate damage. Not great, but it could be far worse.

“Well, then it seems like a self-solving problem, doesn’t it? If anything comes of it, nobody can say you were involved. And we most likely don’t need them now, after that decisive battle.”

“‘Most likely’? Then those planets – ”

“I misspoke. We absolutely don’t need them now.”

“Of course. To clarify, you don’t think it would be wise to attempt recovery?”

“I think the Empire is safest if we don’t get involved. Let whoever ends up with those goods be cursed to deal with them. Bringing something so dangerous into the Empire… honestly, it sounds like something my sister would do. Certainly nothing involving me, or the Empire.”

“Of course, my Queen.”

———————————

I knew, of course, that bringing aboard one of the Singers of Light was incredibly dangerous. I knew that I would need to be wary. But desperation digs deep, and it was dig down to the bedrock or die.

I had expected danger. But I hadn’t expected this kind of danger.

The human has helped my nest, has saved us. She has also wormed her way in and moved things about and changed us, with her new kinds of words and her Game of Lies. My aljik speak to each other differently now. I don’t think they expect me to notice, but I do; I know what happens in my nest. And they speak to her, listen to her, in ways that they never spoke to or listened to the drakes; at least, they didn’t before she arrived.

She is designing and building. But she is not behaving like the engineer that she was brought on to be. My nest has no engineer – instead we have…

She took my interpreter for her own early on, which is hardly a surprise; his kind are malleable by nature, and he never liked me all that much. But now Kit heeds her as an equal. And that’s dangerous. Because her loyalty to this nest is beyond suspect; it was never assumed to exist. She took no trade for her service, holds no natural loyalty to a Queen, and has no reason to help beyond personal interest.

And there is something in her, something evident from the beginning despite any difference in anatomy or body language. A sheer, steely determination, equal to that of a Queen. Sometimes I think her determination outstrips my own, and that scares me, because I have no idea what her goal is. What could she be fixated on that’s more important than the ruling of an empire?

I’m worried. Because I’ve let this go on far, far too long. Awhile ago, up in space, I could have ordered her execution and solved the problem. But now? After everything she has done, all the ways she has wrapped my nest around herself? No. I am, all things told, still only a Princess, at least until the conclusion of my regency fight with my sister. And said sister’s forces threaten us from above, and the whole nest down here knows that to stay is a slow death and should I fall, being re-absorbed back into Tatik’s empire is a better way forward for each of them, personally. I can’t afford any more unpopular, brash, strange decisions. I can’t afford to lose more faith, to let anybody think that I won’t pull them through to victory and safety and happiness in the end.

But I can’t afford for this situation to continue, either.

The only way forward, I think, is the proper way. The ancient, traditional way to deal with this kind of threat, the way that the next will accept under any circumstance.

I’m going to have to strip away her pretension of being an engineer, and face her as what she truly is.

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