14: Spectre

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“What the fuck is that?!” I exclaimed, in English, which of course nobody understood. The amalgamation screeched and clicked back in what I was pretty sure was aljik, which I didn’t understand. And to complete the trio, the drakes started making a lot of very emphatic sounds and gestures that I couldn’t begin to follow. To their credit, they didn’t attack the thing until it swung a messy limb, with obvious aggression, at one of them; at that point, all bets were off and the drakes surged forward as a unit to start, well, disassembling the attacker.

I wasn’t nearly so quick on the uptake. I was still trying to process what I was seeing as their tails whipped forward, barbs sinking into the unprotected joints, cutting it off at elbow and knee and, uh, whatever one would call all the other random hinges in the limbs.

Which did absolutely nothing. The monster barely seemed to notice the attacks. The drakes hesitated, puzzled, but without another plan, went back in to meet it once more as it swung again.

It screamed in aljik the whole time, the sounds not seeming to be affected by the presence or absence of any particular mouth parts at any particular moment. Bizarrely, I recognised one aljik word, which was getting repeated a lot in its neverending diatribe; a word I’d heard rather a lot in the nest recently.

The word was ‘food’.

That… cleared up very little. I readied my spear and charged into the fray just as an armoured limb crushed a drake’s wing against the wall of the tunnel with a sickening crunch, but my spear did no more damage than the drake’s spurs. One thing that it did give me, being a long penetrating weapon, was information that the drakes probably lacked. There was no resistance underneath the exoskeleton.

This thing was hollow.

I pulled back in shock, trying to figure out what the fuck was happening. Then stabbed again, because I was cornered and what else was I going to do, and something tiny and quick ran up my spear and sank teeth or claws or pincers or something into my arm, forcing me to drop the weapon and stumble back. Reflexively, I crushed it against my arm, but not before I’d gotten a good look at it in the harsh glow of the dropped light. I’d only seen it for a second, but that was enough. I was far too familiar with these tiny, spider-like beasts not to recognise it at a glance.

“It’s an ambassador colony!” I yelled to the drakes, stumbling further backwards (this fight was not my proudest moment, in terms of valour). “There’s an ambassador colony in there!”

“There’s a what?” Kerlin asked, clearly as confused as I was. Which made sense because what the fuck was it imitating? Was there some kind of nightmare creature here that butchered their prey and puppetted their skeletons around underground tunnels? Could those cliff crabs do this, maybe? But in that case, why was it speaking aljik?

We all retreated a little, not really sure how to fight off a colony of flying spiders clad in the bones of our dead former allies. It advanced. Soon, the ambassador was between us and the dropped light and I was looking up at its dark silhouette and suddenly everything made sharp, clear, perfect, painful sense.

Oh, no. Oh no, no, no.

There weren’t enough spiders, was the problem. It didn’t have the mass to make an aljik body, so it had scrounged for parts to mimic the appearance. And the parts on hand were dead atil and a couple of tahl, so that’s what it had to use, even though that wasn’t the shape it was going for. With the actual pieces obscured, with the overall form visible in silhouette, it was suddenly obvious what this colony was trying to be. It was a handful of spiders doing its best to imitate the overall shape and movement of a dohl.

“Glath?” I asked.

He didn’t seem to recognise the name, at least not the way I said it. Maybe if I could speak aljik perfectly and I’d called him Facsimile Of A Perfect Ceramic Bowl With A Fine White Rim, maybe he would’ve recognised that name. Or maybe not. Who knows?

He clearly didn’t recognise me. He screamed about food again (of course, he needed to eat and grow and make more spiders, make a bigger colony that was capable of being a dohl), and leapt for us again.

“I know where the rest of you is!” I shouted at him. “I can take you there, to the aljik nest, you can be whole again!”

But of course he couldn’t understand me. A limb made of atil exoskeleton segments swung for my head and one of the drakes shoved me to the ground just in time for it to slam instead into a loose bit of tree root, showering me in soil. (Being buried alive was almost as big a danger as Gla– as the monst – as this rogue ambassador population.) A few spiders also shook free, and before I could really think about it I was crushing them.

Glath’s spiders died all the time. I’d killed some of them myself, by accident. It was fine.. it was just… this was just…

They were just spiders.

He pulled back, and in silhouette lit by the dropped light behind him, the movement looked so, so familiar.

I scrambled to my feet before he could attack again, but I needn’t have worried. Now that everyone knew what we were fighting, the fight was easy; it was a matter of peeling the armour away or shaking the spiders out, and crushing them. He’d had barely enough spiders to puppet the exoskeleton, so with each loss he lost coordination and speed. Had he had enough spiders to think clearly, had he been smart, he could have taken us all down easily; ditch the armour, spread out into the roots and the walls of the tunnel, surround us and attack from anywhere we weren’t looking. But that didn’t seem to occur to him. As we stripped more and more of his population away, he invested all of his energy into doing everything he could to hold onto the appearance of a dohl.

Which made it very, very easy.

“Alright,” Kerlin said when we were done. “Let’s get back aboveground before this tunnel collapses on us.”

“If I could’ve made him understand,” I said as we abandoned the pile of exoskeleton limbs and crushed spiders for the surface, “I could’ve helped him. Glath’s with the aljik; these spiders could’ve reunited with him. If I’d brought some, some bag or something, some way to trap them, I could’ve…”

“They were a threat to the core trees,” Kerlin said, like that was all that mattered.

“They didn’t have to be. If I’d been more prepared…”

“They were, though. ‘Have to be’ has nothing to do with it.”

“I guess.” As we climbed back up into the sunlight, one thought stuck with me – when we’d landed, I’d done my best to gather Glath’s spiders, to form a pocket big enough to move and think and remember and be Glath again. Had my efforts been the nucleus of the Glath who’d remembered me and saved me on the cliff and rejoined the aljik? Had I saved my friend?

Or had I instead created that monster?

————————

I was repairing parts of the labyrinth near Charlie’s home when I came upon her having one of her fits of emotion.

I’d seen this before, on the Stardancer, many times. If you surprised her in her room, or sometimes during the Game of Lies when she’d get up and abruptly leave, you could find her hunched over, convulsing, while fluid leaked from her face. She’d always insisted that it was ‘nothing to worry about’, but it still looked alarming. As usual, when saw me, she did her best to stop.

“Kerlin! Do you need help with something?”

“No. I’m just doing repairs. What’s wrong? Are you injured?” (Pain sometimes caused these convulsions.)

“No, I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s nothing.” She took a deep breath and blew out a lot of air; one if her inscrutable human expressions. “Kerlin, if… if I’d sent the ship to my solar system…”

“I would’ve stopped you,” I said. “It would be far too dangerous for us to colonise a planet that close to the Singers in Light.”

“Good. Good.” She did the breath thing again. “It’s good to know that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.”

That wasn’t completely true. A lot had been happening at the point that we took the Stardancer here. It was completely possible that nobody could’ve reacted in time to stop her from taking the ship to her solar system. But this didn’t seem like a great thing to bring up to her.

“Kerlin,” she said as I turned to leave, “what happens to the babies when they’re born? Do you raise them?”

“Those that survive the hatching and are strong enough to survive will fly far and wide, mapping the area and looking for new places to go. On a populated planet, they’d take note of the locations of nearby core trees to try to reach when they’re mature, but in this case many of them will probably either set up coreless societies until some of them mature into women, or come back here to these core trees. But they’ll spend a while exploring and growing first.” The truth is, the babies being made right now probably wouldn’t be strong enough to fly very far. Morin’s core tree is absurdly young and was forced to grow far too fast; on a properly populated planet, it could be decades before a core tree started producing, and even on a newly colonised planet like this it should be several years. The rogue Princess keeping us in space so long and forcing us into a maturity bottleneck had created a bit of a crisis, and to get a proper spread of maturity in the population we were simply having to accept the fact that we’d be making weak, feeble children for a while. But we were nothing if not adaptable.

“They’re born and fly off? Their mothers don’t look after them?”

“Well, they’ll help them hatch, and feed them for a little while until they learn to fly properly. Usually anyone who isn’t strong enough to fly relatively soon is killed, but I suspect we’ll have to be a lot more tolerant of feeble children until the core trees are mature enough to produce strong ones. So yes, their mothers probably will look after them for a while.”

“But that’s not standard.”

“No, not really.”

“Who teaches them their skills, then? How to weave and use computers and things?”

“The communities they settle in when they mature, usually. In this case, because there are no other core trees to go to, that’ll probably still be us. Some of them might go off and form their own bands and have to rely on their instincts and discover everything from first principles.”

“That sounds… fractured. But then, the aljik’s reliance on central authority doesn’t seem to be doing them any favours, so whatever.”

“You are upset.”

“It’s nothing. I’ll find a way off this planet and it’ll be fine.” She looked up at the sky. “Do you ever do something that you know is the right decision, but you regret making the choice anyway?”

“Is his about killing the ambassador colony that was endangering the core trees?”

“What? Uh, yeah, sure. If you like.” She stood up and brushed her hands together. “Show me how to do these repairs. I’m not doing anything else, I might as well help.”

————————————

“Any sign of the rogue Princess down there?”

“There’s some spots that might be escape pod debris, but it’s difficult to be sure through the atmosphere. It if is debris then there’s a good chance that we have the right planet, at least. No sign of a nest yet.”

“Well, if she’s alive down there, eventually we’ll find it.”

“And if she’s dead already?”

“Then we’ll be scouring this planet for a really long time, I suspect. Oh, hey; look out there!”

“Is that a ketestri? Wow! They’re supposed to be good luck.”

“They sure are. But it’s unusual for them to get this close to planets. I wonder if there’s something wrong with it.”

“Maybe it’s just curious? I’ve heard they can be pretty curious – wait, is it coming over here?”

“It’s coming for us! Why? What – ”

“Hit the alarm! Battle stations! Everyone to battle stations!”

“The fuel line! It’s got – ”

“Aaaaargh! Aaaaaargh!”

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