13: Maze Invaders

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I knew we were getting near the centre of the labyrinth when the trees started to thin out. And I mean that literally – there weren’t less trees, they were just noticeably thinner, the thick bark black and peeling and clearly rotten underneath, the branches dead and broken, letting the bright sunlight touch the mouldering litter beneath our feet. There were clear lines of unnatural damage on their trunks, some kind of deep scoring that didn’t resemble the work of any saw or axe I’d ever seen, but from where the rot seemed to originate. We’d passed quite a few such trees before I realised what I was looking at – the tree trunks had been repeatedly slashed, and presumably poisoned, by drake tailspurs.

“They will feed Tehan’s core tree,” Kerlin explained when he noticed my interest. “They will enrich the soil over the years for the tree’s roots, that it may grow strong and bear many children.”

“And will the trees grow back?”

“I assume so. Things generally grow back eventually. Or something else grows where they were. Either way, there’s plenty of land on the planet that should be able to support new core trees when this area is depleted, so it doesn’t matter very much.”

Huh. Potentially concerning attitude, but also, not my problem. My main concern related to the planet was finding a way off it.

And then we reached the core tree.

It was still very small, of course, but much larger than an Earth tree of similar age would be. It reached almost up to my shoulder, and calling it a ‘tree’ was somewhat of a stretch. Bone-white and jagged like a crystal, it shot up out of the ground and then splintered at the top into dozens of shards that looked dangerous to touch, like grasping them would break the ‘branch’ off in your hand and fill your flesh with tiny splinters. It grew chaotically, pale and twisted, with no sign of bark or leaves or flowers. No moss or other life grew on it, and I wasn’t sure if it just hadn’t had time yet or if it never would. The bottom didn’t seem to spread out into roots like an Earth tree, though I knew roots were down there somewhere; it looked jammed into the ground like a giant had just plunged it in like a dagger.

The trees nearest it were very definitely dead and actively rotting away to give it space.

Nothing about the tree invited me to get any closer, and that wasn’t even considering the drake woman lying at its base, who met my eyes and bared long, dripping, needle teeth at me. Tehan, I presumed.

“So this is what you’re all protecting in here,” I said shakily.

“One of them,” Kerlin said. “Tehan’s tree is the youngest. There are older ones further in. Morin’s is already bearing fruit.”

His bearing made it clear that this was a source of great pride, so I said, “Congratulations.”

“It’s still a bit young to be producing, but I’m glad somebody took the initiative. We need children before we run out of men.”

“Yeah, I think the aljik are having a similar problem.” At least the drakes were genetically diverse enough that they weren’t going to need an outside source of men. Presumably. I mean, they’d come out here specifically to colonise a planet, right? So I assumed they were.

News of my arrival had clearly spread, because soon others were showing up, asking me how I was, and fussing over my shoulder. Despite Tehan’s glaring at me for being too close to her tree (which I told myself not to take personally), I began to relax. The drakes seemed to have things sorted out.

Perhaps here, I could relax.

————————-

“Oh, stop sulking,” the Princess said, amused, as Kit cleaned her back and throat. “She couldn’t have run an aljik colony anyway.

“She had a lot of good ideas,” Kit said. “Useful ideas.”

“She was gaining social control of the nest. She would have challenged me soon enough.”

That was true, he had to admit. Now that the Princess had pointed out Charlie’s behaviour, it was obvious that she was a Princess. She had that way of communicating across castes – across species, in her case – and pulling people to her, of getting them to work effectively toward a common goal. The Nameless Princess and, before her, Queen Anta, had been gifted enough at such things to wrangle even non-aljik to their cause, had learned to deal in exchange and buy temporary loyalty to bring other species into the nest, with only occasional slip-ups like this drake disaster. Charlie had done the same easily, as if it was no remarkable skill at all, as if it were natural to her.

“She would have taken over,” the Princess says, “and everybody would have died down here.”

“Can you get us off the planet?”

“I’m not sure. If we can lure a ship down here, perhaps.”

“That might be possible. You have something that your sister wouldn’t want to destroy by bombarding it from orbit.”

“Perhaps. At this stage, she might risk it. How did we let those drakes corner us like this? We had it! We were moments from victory! If we’d dashed to the heart, I could’ve pulled us through, taken control, and saved the Empire!”

“Well, hey. Even if we die down here, maybe your sister will save the Empire.”

“My sister is a traditionalist who mistakes normalcy for safety. She’s chasing a stability that she won’t find. Because we don’t understand why the ahlda aren’t coming, she expects that there is nothing to understand, that the situation is random and will therefore resolve itself as soon as we chaotic elements are dealt with. But that won’t work; we need to be proactive, need to expand further and prove our prosperity and attract the attention of neighbouring nests. We are too far out to rely on natural traffic; we need to be a beacon of this section of the galaxy, we need to earn attention and flaunt it. Or we die.”

“Or we fight the neighbouring nests.”

“Or we do that. I hope it doesn’t come to that, though. I think we’ve all had enough fighting.”

“Yeah. Yeah, we’ve all had enough fighting.”

————————

If I’d thought that Tehan’s core tree looked imposing, I was not prepared for Morin’s.

The forest around it had rotted away significantly, leaving a patch of sunlight to illuminate the stark white construction. Like Tehan’s, it looked like a shard of some strange and toxic crystal had been thrust into the ground by an angry god; unlike Tehan’s, it was taller than me, and the mass of splintery branches forming an umbrella that looked like delicate cobwebs from a distance and old shattered bone up close. From an even greater distance, had the surrounding labyrinth allowed it, I imagined that it would have looked like a giant mushroom, with a stark white stalk and matching cap littered with bright red spots.

Oh, yes. The bright red spots.

The ‘fruit’ on the core tree were, of course, how baby drakes were born. I’d known that, but I don’t think I’d been quite prepared for how they’d looked. I’d expected some kind of eggs or pods or something, maybe something like a giant durian that a baby drake could claw its way out of. I had not expected… well. The only way to describe the fruits would be… amniotic sacs.

Cradled among the branches sat huge balloons of bright red fluid. The skins of the balloons were transparent, the drake embryos clearly visible within. I wasn’t sure what a drake looked like when it was ready to be born, but even to me, it was obvious that these were nowhere near ready, all spines and nubs f future limbs. It was also clear that some were more developed than others, a few being recognisable as embryos and most of them being fluid with a tube leading to some kind of mass.

Morin was twice as protective as Tehan. Not only would she not let me anywhere near the tree, she kept a close eye on any men who approached and would only allow them near it one at a time.

“The women are very protective,” Kerlin explained. “She needs to make sure that none of the men will kill her babies.”

“Is that likely?” I asked, shocked.

“Oh, no; not here, Nobody here would dare do such a thing, when we need children. But instincts are strong. It can be a problem on more densely populated planets. A tree only has so much energy to give embryos at once, see? So if a man can kill some of the embryos when he fertilises the tree, it means more energy for his children. It’s incredibly uncivilised behaviour, of course.”

“Of course.” Maybe I’d gotten in over my head with the drakes.

“The telescope’s over there,” Kerlin added, indicating something with a tail. I had to squint to see it – off in the trees, the glint of light on the top of something metal. Made of parts salvaged from the escape pods, probably. Taking a closer look would mean navigating more of the fucking labyrinth, so I decided I didn’t care.

I settled in with the drakes surprisingly quickly. Their colony was, of course, full of gifted weavers and chemists, so they helped me build a sturdy little shelter out in the labyrinth and find a food source I could purify from the forest. They had a half-decent water distillery up and running, but it was limited in size and the area had already been picked clean of escape pod debris, giving us no option to expand it. So there was a lot of talk of water collection and chemical purification.

They taught me how to navigate the labyrinth without dying, but it was a chore at the best of times so I moved about as little as possible, spending most of my time at my shelter and occasionally straying towards a core tree to talk to the drakes. We set up the Game of Lies again as entertainment and discussed staying alive while the Empire searched for Captain Nemo and put us all in danger.

It was, in effect, extremely similar to life aboard the stardancer.

And then, after a while, Harlen came to use with some disturbing news.

“Something is digging under the forest,” she said. “It’ll get into the roots of my core tree soon.”

“Native?” Kerlin asked. “Some animal in the forest we didn’t know about? Is it a danger to the trees?”

“I don’t think it’s native; or if it is, it’s been gone from this area a really, really long time. The tunnels are huge and they’re digging through packed earth and long-established tree roots. It might be native life immigrating to a new area, but why here and now when these roots have clearly been undisturbed for so very, very long? I think it’s an aljik invasion.”

“That doesn’t sound likely,” I said. “They don’t have the time or the forces for that.”

“It’s also the wrong direction,” Kerlin said. “Their nest is on the other side of the forest.”

“They might be looking for food,” I mused. “They were digging towards the cliff for the life that lives there… maybe if they found a long fissure or something in the ground, and followed it around, and it ends out there? That’s the only way I can see them moving so far, so quickly.”

“That, or their digging disturbed things that live underground and pushed those things into the forest to endanger our core trees,” Kerlin says. “Either way, we cannot allow this to stand. We need to see what’s going on. Harlen, if you suspect the aljik, I’m guessing that the tunnels are wide enough to move through?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll organise an expedition with some of the other men, then.”

“I’ll come,” I said. “If it is the aljik, I might be able to talk them down. Neither you nor them can afford a huge fight right now.”

“You think you can talk them down? Didn’t they throw you out?”

“That was some… caste confusion and somewhat narrow thinking. Many of the individual aljik are reasonable. And if it is them, it’s worth a shot, right?”

“indeed. I’ll get a group together and we can go.”

So me, Kerlin, and three drakes I didn’t recognise headed through an investigative tunnel that Harlen had dug, down underground.

In my right hand, a primitive wooden spear tipped with drake venom. In my left, an electric light salvaged from an escape pod. Ahead, the shoddiest, most cramped tunnel I’d ever been in.

“Okay, yeah, the aljik didn’t build this,” I said, inspecting the walls. The tunnel was too small for a tahl to fit through, which seemed weird for an investigative tunnel being dug so close to a known enemy like the drakes. One could think it just for the atil to harvest resources from the roots, but it was too wide for that; wide enough for kel or dohl to navigate, which would be a waste of work for an atil-only tunnel. More importantly, it just… wasn’t dug how atil dug tunnels. I’d been in the nest long enough to recognise their smooth, careful work, tunnels dug as evenly as the ground allowed with shored-up corners and distributed for the best air flow. Here, the loose dirt of the tunnel ceiling threatened to collapse on us at any moment, held up only by the tenuous grip of ancient roots that had been recklessly slashed and torn to make way. If I had a core tree, I certainly wouldn’t want whatever made this anywhere near its roots. “Yeah, this is… I don’t know what this is. But the aljik wouldn’t dig something like this out so recklessly.”

“What if they were in a hurry?”

“Then that’s all the more reason to do it properly. This could collapse at any moment and ruin a lot of work and waste a lot of time. I don’t know why anyone would dig something like this.”

“Look,” one of the men I didn’t know said, indicating something pale and strange caught in the roots with his tail-spur. I brought the light closer. It was a fragment of something about the size of my hand, and seemed safe enough; I pulled it out.

A fragment of an atil’s claw, apparently torn off in the roots.

“Huh,” I said. “Okay, I’m very, very confused.”

“Me, too,” Kerlin said. “Why would they – ”

Then, from behind us, the clicking of aljik speech. I couldn’t recognise what was being said, but I recognised it as the aljik equivalent of shouting. And then… something… lumbered into view.

I dropped the light immediately in shock. It didn’t break, and the harsh low angle of the illumination just made everything look more horrifying.

It took up the entire tunnel. It was aljik, or at least, all of its body parts were. Those were definitely atil legs and feelers under a big piece of tahl armour plating. They weren’t arranged right; too many leg segments, bits of chest exoskeleton used to shore up the arms, just a hodgepodge of aljik body parts all melded together into a strange shape that was capable, just barely, of walking and digging and, I had to assume, of killing.

And as difficult as it was to read the body language of a random mixture of alien body parts, everything about its bearing suggested that it intended to do just that as it lumbered towards us.

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