12: Fight Or Flight

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“I’m an engineer,” I pointed out.

“You are no kel,” the Princess said.

“W-well, okay, I mean, I’m not aljik. I’m definitely no Princess. It’s like the drakes – they worked for you without being a caste, right?”

“Drakes do the duties of atil, until they plant their core seeds and become Princesses. Which they have betrayed us by dragging us here to do.”

Operating a ship’s computers and water and air filters and stuff was considered atil work? Fascinating. If only I had the luxury of pressing for details.

“And you, little lightsinger Princess, have been digging tunnels into my nest since you arrived. You took no exchange for your services, no binding of loyalty to the hive. You pretended to be an engineer, but you run about, changing things, making alliances, poking and studying the social web of the nest. Princess duties. Did you think I would not notice?”

I wanted to point out that I was just doing my job. I wanted to point out how much I’d done to save this nest. I wanted to point out that I didn’t ‘arrive’ at all, that they abducted me, and that in the circumstances I think I’d been pretty fucking accommodating, thank you very much.

I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to provoke a fight here. If there’s one thing I know about regency fights, it’s that once they start, they go to the death. This Princess violating that rule with her sister was the entire reason that we’re being pursued across the galaxy by the Out-Western Empire in the first place.

And I didn’t have a chance of taking down an enormous bug several times my size that’s covered in natural armour and has spears for hands. I just didn’t. A one-on-one fight to the death, no weapons, in a big empty room? That’s a fight to my death, no question.

Fortunately, this nest’s history had also taught me one other critical fact about regency fights, which is that they’re optional. If a fight happens, it’s to the death, but it doesn’t have to happen. A Princess has the option of instead leaving the nest to start her own. If I was to walk away, then by tradition, our good old Captain Nemo would have to let me leave. And while she is notoriously not one for tradition, I didn’t think the nest would stand for her killing me if I retreat in such a fashion. I mean, there has to be a reason she called this fight instead of just ordering one of the tahl to kill me, right? She must have known that the nest was hanging on by a thread, that their loyalty to her could only take so many blows. That was probably why she suddenly decided I was a threat in the first place.

I was going to have to leave. I was going to die if I didn’t.

I looked around at all the aljik – no help, of course. Just waiting to see which of us would survive. I wondered who they were hoping for.

I stepped backwards, towards the tunnel I’d come in through. I certainly wasn’t going to step forwards.

“You’re making a mistake,” I said.

“I am not. You are a threat to my nest, and it can no longer tolerate your presence.”

“A threat?! The amount of times I’ve saved your crew – ”

“In space. Now we are here.”

I tried to wrap my mind around that logic. An aljik Princess, I supposed, would grow up among her sisters of other castes, part of her nest and contributing to it, until she was old enough to fight or leave. And then, when it became a matter of who the Queen would be, things were different.

“And here,” I pointed out. “I’m trying to keep you guys alive.”

“Ah, yes. It was your tunnel design that let those drakes escape, was it not?”

Well shit.

“And now you want us digging into the homes of those vicious bugs, inviting them to invade our tunnels.”

“For food! If we’re seen from space – ”

“Then my sister’s forces destroying us would also destroy the drake forest. So it would be to the advantage of a drake ally to make sure we’re all dead before that can happen.”

“I’m sorry, are you accusing me of trying to take your place or trying to kill everyone? Because those are two very different accusations, and you seem to be confused about which one you’re using.”

“Either of those things are unacceptable. Now, fight.”

“No.” I stepped back again, practically into the tunnel. “I’ll leave. But you’re making a mistake.”

Captain Nemo dropped out of her terrifying fighting pose, to my immense relief. “Then go.”

“I’m going, I’m going.” I didn’t want to. How was I ever going to get off the planet without the aljik?

Several of the aljik looked uncertain. Kit next to me glanced from the Princess to me; a couple of tahl made to move. Lln and a few of her atil friends stepped forward, hesitantly. It took me a second to realise what was happening – a Princess leaving a nest to start her own is entitled to bring whatever aljik she can convince to come with her. Can’t start a nest without workers.

“I’m leaving alone,” I said firmly. “You’re all needed here.” I didn’t want to be alone, dear god, I didn’t. But what was I going to do with an aljik retinue? I didn’t know how to be a Princess. And there were barely enough aljik here to make one nest; me taking some of them away wouldn’t help anything.

I glanced at Glath. Him, I could take; the nest could run fine without him, with nobody to interpret for, and he’d certainly do a lot better with me than any aljik would. But when I glanced over, I saw no uncertainty or hesitation in his bearing at all. He was very firmly on the side of the aljik nest.

I tried not to feel too hurt by that. I mean, sure, I’d been the one to believe in him when everyone had given him up for dead, I’d been the one to painstakingly work to gather as many of his spiders as I could, I’d certainly saved his life. But whatever.

It was hard to be too angry at him, though. Of course somebody in his position, as uncertain and amnesiac as he was, would want to cling to any familiarity he could find, and he’d been around aljik for far longer than he’d been around me.

But still.

Nobody stopped me from leaving. A few looked like they wanted to follow, but they honoured my declaration that I’d be leaving alone and stayed where they were. Lengthy goodbyes weren’t done, I supposed, for departing aljik.

It was simply… decided. I’d said I’d leave instead of fighting, and then I was leaving. A few minutes before I’d been discussing potential food sources with Kit, and then that simply wasn’t my problem any more.

I’d been through a lot of very sudden, unexpected changes since that night I’d gone out to take photos of the sky. All sorts of abductions and explosions and alien attacks. This one somehow felt the most sudden, because it didn’t feel like it should be; if I were leaving a human community, there would be goodbyes and supplies and probably a party. But to the aljik, it was simply time for me to leave.

I didn’t have anything important to pack, anyway. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to take anything, and I didn’t want to push my luck by asking.

So I just walked out of that nest, and away from the people I’d relied on since leaving Earth.

And straight toward the other people I’d relied on since leaving Earth. Because I wasn’t going to go wandering aimlessly around an alien planet by myself, I’m no idiot. The drakes were right there.

The forest was visible from the nest. Once inside, I found the edge of the drakes’ territory easily.

I did not find the drakes themselves easily.

Leaves and branches and vines were woven together making a vast, intricate maze. The complex passages would have been difficult to navigate in the best of circumstances, and the fact that the maze was three dimensional, with some passages rising up into the trees over other paths or dipping into trenches in the ground that I had to crawl through, didn’t help. I’d been living in tunnels for a while now with the aljik, but these had been built to be as compact and winding and confusing as possible on purpose; a place not to live, but to disorient. I became hopelessly lost almost immediately. There were all kinds of forks and turns and multiple narrow, winding tunnels that just led to dead ends and required turning around to backtrack, only to reveal multiple passages that were angled so that they’d gone unnoticed on the way in, and on the way back I couldn’t figure out which way I’d come from. At the fifth dead end I ran into, I discovered that it wasn’t a dead end at all; a false wall of vines and branches could be ducked around to reveal yet more passage. I had no idea whether the previous four dead ends had been real or not.

Okay, you know what? Fuck this.

There’s more than one way to get through a maze, and this one was far too complicated for the ‘left hand on the wall’ trick. The drakes weren’t playing fair. Which left me with the second foolproof way of solving a maze – break shit until you attract the attention of security and they show up to escort you through.

The point of this maze was defense, right? So it was probably like a spider’s web, with alarms of some kind woven into the design so that an enemy busting through would attention. It probably doubled as a snare for prey, even. It might very well be booby trapped, so I’d have to be careful, but logically, breaking shit should bring the drakes running.

Running over to deal with an enemy attack, sure, but I could worry about that when they got there.

I wandered about for a bit longer, taking note of the twisted, turns and dips where I, and therefore a hypothetical approaching hostile force, was most tempted to just smash my way through. Comparing these spots, I noticed a recurring pattern – more than half of them had fine vines dangling down from the treetops, woven in to support the structures. They’d look completely natural, like the weavers were just taking advantage of what happened to be hanging down in the area, except that they only seemed to show up at such locations.

So. Alarm or booby trap?

Only one way to find out.

I grabbed the longest stick I could find (sticks were in short supply, most of them having been used to weave the labyrinth) and, from as far away as I could manage, attacked a wall until it gave way. The wall fell, vines snapped, and several long wooden spears dropped straight down from the trees above, landing on the wall, around it… and further back. One thunked into the ground right next to my foot.

Ah. Hmm. Best to be careful, then.

The spears were just long, strong, sharpened sticks, the ends darkened with something that I assumed to be poison. They were better than my stick, so I grabbed one and continued on to the next bit of booby trapped wall.

Okay, was there a better way to do this? One that didn’t involve being speared? My eyes followed the vines upward into the treetops.

Hmm. The drakes didn’t strike me as gifted climbers, but they’d managed to set this up. So what was I, a fucking monkey, doing crawling along the ground like an idiot?

My bad shoulder made climbing more difficult than it needed to be, bit with the help of my new spear I managed to drag my stupid body up off the ground and into a position where the bulk of a branch above should protect me from any falling spears. Then I reached out with my spear and attacked the vines directly.

The falling spears were no danger. The vines were another matter. As they came free, some of them wrapped tightly around the spear in my hands like a snare and yanked it viciously from my grip. Had I been working with my hands, they would’ve yanked me high up into the trees to god-knows-what fate.

Okay, fine. So the defensive death labyrinth built by the Guys Who Build Defensive Death Labyrinths was a little bit more sophisticated than I’d been expecting. Fine.

Fortunately, I was saved from making any more genius decisions likely to get me killed by the arrival of a drake. He came up through a tunnel I hadn’t seen onto the path below me, and I let myself feel smug fro a moment, because if I was an enemy then I, from my superior position up in the tree, could have stabbed him. Haha, didn’t see that coming, did you, death labyrinth builders?

I mean, I couldn’t, because I didn’t have a spear any more. But he didn’t know that. Hypothetically, I could’ve had more than one spear. So the point stands.

“Hey there,” I called, after making sure I’m out of striking distance of his tails. He jumped and whirled around to face me. He was a stranger, I was pretty sure, or at least I didn’t recognise him on sight.

“The aljik have sent you? Why?”(His pidgin was pretty good, I realised. So if I didn’t recognise him, he must’ve spent a lot of time talking to the aljik instead. Did he have aljik friends? How did he feel about all this?)

“They didn’t. I’m not… I’m not with the aljik any more.”

He cocked his head. “You helped Harlen and Kerlin.”

“Uh, yeah. Yes, I did.”

“Wait here.” He disappeared again.

Okay, well. That went well, right? Things were going well. That was definitely a ‘let me get the manager’ kind of reaction, not a ‘we will destroy you, invader scum’ kind of reaction.

I should probably get out of the tree.

The wait wasn’t long – I was barely on the ground again when Kerlin himself appeared out of nowhere. “Charlie!”

“Hi, Kerlin. How’s it going?”

A stupid questions, probably. I knew how it was going. He was missing a wing and had only three functional legs and he was trying to colonise a planet under the constant threat of being bombarded from space as collateral damage the instant the forces above found his aljik neighbours, whom he hated. Nobody was in a great position. But he seemed in decent cheer, and dashed over to throw his wing over me in the drake equivalent of a hug.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Your prosthetic needs recalibrating.”

“Yeah, I can’t get the hang of all the fiddly little wires. Makes it hell to climb a tree.”

“Did the aljik eject you for helping us?”

“No. I mean, not wholly. Captain Nemo has gotten it into her head that I’m a rival Princess.”

“She what?!”

“Yeah, I don’t get it either. But if they don’t want my help, there’s not much I can do about it.”

“Come, come in to the core. We’ll help you with that shoulder.”

More walking through the endless maze. Hooray!

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