16: Fight For Flight

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

Most of the nest had taken defensive positions underground, and the few atil that were aboveground were on lookout at the shore, hiding themselves under little mounds of sand with their eyes on the water awaiting the approaching army. Without the soldiers to spare for proper patrols, looking out for any roundabout approaches from other angles was left to me, with my ability to fly and easily hide. So I was of course the one to spot Charlie.

She was alone, approaching from the aljik forest, and she made a terrifying figure. The determination in her bearing brought to mind the old stories of the Singers in Light, and she wore the nest’s dead on her body, declaring her kinship with them despite having left. It was hard not to read that as an accusation, a challenge to the Princess who had failed to keep these aljik alive. You failed them, and now they are mine. I can honour them when you cannot.

Whatever she wanted, this was truly awful timing. Holding our own against the Queen’s forces would be hard enough without also dodging the wrath of Charlie. But she’d come here openly, so maybe she was after something simple? I pulled myself into a human shape and went to meet her.

“Charlie.”

“Glath. Is the Princess around?”

“Preparing for invasion.”

“I won’t take up too much of your time, then. Please inform her that I’ve changed my mind. I’m happy to challenge her to a regency fight.”

I almost lost my shape for a moment. “It doesn’t work like that. You decided to leave. What you’re talking about is an invasion.”

The smile on her face wasn’t one I remembered. “Oh, I’m happy to have an invasion, if that’s preferred. She can send soldiers out here to try to kill me if she wants. But it seems like you’re already preparing for another invasion; how many soldiers can your nest afford to lose to a Singer in Light right now?”

“Well…”

“Besides which, I’m sure you noticed how many people were considering leaving with me before I told them no. Captain Nemo has the loyalty of the aljik when she’s the only Princess around, but she made somewhat of a mistake in deciding I was one. Several of your nest were ready to go with me even before that ship out there landed – how do you think the nest will react when given the choice between us, knowing that that ship and its allies in obit won’t stop until Captain Nemo is dead? Those ships very likely have no idea that I’m alive. Which nest do you think your compatriots would prefer now that invasion of Nemo’s is on the horizon; hers or mine?” The smile widened. I didn’t like this smile, I decided. “if she wants to do this as a war, nest to nest, you’re not going to have enough soldiers left to fight the Queen’s soldiers. A regency fight, me and her, is better for everyone, don’t you think? We all now that the Princess has no problem bending the rules of regency fights.”

“I will… I will pass on your message.”

“Thank you, Glath.” She sat down. “I’ll wait here. It’ll be nice to get this over and done with.”

“Yes.” I headed back to the nest.

I couldn’t wait to get away from that smile.

————————

Captain Nemo agreed to my proposal, as I’d expected, and sent Glath back to escort me into the nest. I’d have preferred a larger guard – the more of the nest knew what was going on, the less likely I was to be walking into a secret ambush – but I could understand the logic of not sending any aljik. The landed ship meant that the Queen’s forces knew of the nest’s location and were very likely watching us from space. The less information we gave them, the better.

I wondered what they’d think of the strange native creature I was pretending to be going into the aljik nest. Well, that was a later problem. If I lived until later.

I needn’t have worried about ambush. As soon as we got into the nest, it was evident that absolutely everybody had learned what was happening – the tunnels around us were crowded, though we had no trouble moving through them as aljik clambered over each other to get out of our way. The storeroom had apparently left empty since the previous regency challenge, and once again, aljik who were able to secure a good view stood around the walls and tunnel entrances, giving us space to fight.

As I entered, eyes on the Princess in her challenging pose, the tunnel behind me filled with aljik. I knew that this time, it wouldn’t clear until the fight was over.

I did my best to turn my thoughts to anything other than a repeating litany of oh god oh god oh god I am going to die within the next three minutes. I’d done dumber stuff than this. I’d jumped out of a spaceship and onto another spaceship once, to mess with their weapons so that our spaceship could flee. That had been ridiculous, and I’d survived. I’d done it because it had to be done. The same as this

The watching aljik stared at my chitin armour. Probably disgusted that I’d dishonoured their dead in sch a way. Well, dealing with the social ramifications of that was a later problem, because right now, oh god oh god oh god, I was going to die within the next three minutes.

Captain Nemo raised herself to her full height, wings beating furiously in the still air of the tunnel. Those lancelike arms sure looked dangerous when aimed to strike. Fuck it – I put my hands to my belt and activated my last resort weapon. When you have only one resort it is, by definition, your last resort.

The nearby forest had many weird and wonderful alien plants that Kate would have loved to study, if she’d been stranded here instead of me. (She was going to kill me for coming back home without samples.) Among them were vines covered in fine needles filled with a viscous goo that was probably toxic or painful to local wildlife, although it hadn’t done anything to me. The needles themselves were fragile and broke easily in the flesh; little more than annoying splinters to one immune to the venom, which crumbled and left a numb rough patch on the body until said body dealt with the debris.

It had been relatively easy to harvest some needles and hide them in my belt and armour. I had no idea whether the venom in them would do anything to an aljik, but that didn’t matter – I wasn’t planning to use it on the aljik. Not only would getting the fragile needles into the flesh of the heavily armoured princess be so difficult that basically any other weapon would be better, but if I violated the rules of the regency fight in here, I’d be an invader, not an internal challenger; the other aljik would probably just kill me before the fight was over.

The needles on my person had been drained of goo, except for a small plug left in the ends, and instead filled with drake venom.

And we’d all had very clear demonstrations of what drake venom does to a human body.

The needles broke off in my hips and forearms, under the belt and armour. We stared at each other for several long, tense seconds.

And the Princess darted forward and struck.

She was so fast! I barely got an arm up to block the blow, which cracked my armour as it bounced off, and it was sharply clear that only sheer luck had put my arm at an angle that sent her arm skating past mere centimetres from my face. A slightly different angle, and she would’ve plowed right through my forearm and chest. I was numb to the shoulder and thrown to the floor on my back; as soon as my shoulders hit dirt, I rolled sideways and barely missed the other lance sinking into the floor where my head used to be.

One thing was clear: dying in three minutes had been a massive overestimation.

The drake venom worked fast. I already felt faster, stronger, sharper, and worryingly, less afraid. My heart rate, already sky high through terror, climbed higher as the venom took it over.

I couldn’t stay in front of her like this. I was going to die. I needed to get somewhere that she couldn’t use such a powerful weapon.

I threw myself at her back leg and, heedless of any damage to my arm (the fingers all moved correctly, so it probably wasn’t broken), started climbing her body. With venomous speed, with the prosthetic on my shoulder taking more weight than the old muscle would have been able to, with sheer heedless desperation, I clambered up.

Because here’s what I know about aljik. Princesses and Queens are never alone. They might retreat to a private chamber, but they do so within a populated nest or spaceship. When they leave to find a new home, they take the biggest court that they can muster with them. Queens, as a rule, never really have to fight – with the exception of a clever assassin, any foe that reaches one has already disposed of the rest of the nest to get there. And Princesses only fight other Princesses.

And Princesses are huge, and don’t have hands specialised for climbing.

And my aljik standards, I am tiny. And I’m an ape. My whole body is specialised for climbing.

Captain Nemo’s remarkable turning speed and powerful thrusting attacks are not designed to handle something small and squishy jumping on top of her. Under ormal circumstances, a dohl or an atil or whoever else was about could dispose of me easily as I climbed up, but they weren’t allowed to interfere. Nemo tried to jab at me as I climbed, and I still had to take care to avoid her – a slow-moving spear is still a spear – but she couldn’t get any real power behind her attacks.

She could probably stretch her leg out and twist her body enough to bite me, if I wasn’t fast enough. As I clambered over her highest leg joint (so, so close to her back now), I was prepared for that.

I wasn’t prepared for her to shake.

The Princess closed her wings and shook her whole body vigorously, snapping my head back and nearly causing me to lose my grip on her leg. Thing in my neck clicked and dizziness overwhelmed me, but I managed to tuck my chin to me chest, neck muscles streaming, and koala-hug her leg until the shaking stopped. (How long had the fight been happening? Three seconds? Ten?) As soon as it stopped, I got back to climbing, desperate to reach higher ground before it happened again. Above me, insect wings fluttered furiously as I struggled up to her ‘hip’, where leg met body; then those wings slammed down under chitin again and that was my quarter-second warning to hold on tight and do my best to survive another bout of intense shaking.

My body wasn’t made for this. My mouth was filling with blood (had I bitten my tongue?), my vision was hazy, and I had no sense of balance. The lack of said balance meant that it wasn’t until the wings came out again that I realised the shaking had stopped.

I wondered about that as I tried with numb, clumsy hands to find a way to pull myself up onto Nemo’s body. Why did the alik even have wings? They were certainly far too heavy to fly. I knew what their native gravity and air pressure was like from being on the Stardancer, and they couldn’t possibly get themselves aloft in it. I’d assumed that the wings were for signalling, maybe; a visual or audible communication signal. They fluttered them in brief bursts and did so far more often when they were agitated or active. I’d never seen them flutter them as much as Nemo was going in the fight, fluttering them so much that she was even pausing in her shaking to do it. My own heat thundered in my chest as I gasped for air and pulled myself up and I –

Oh. Huh.

Insects, by which I mean Earth insects, don’t have lungs. They absorb oxygen through their bodies. That’s why they’re so small; you can only get so much oxygen doing that. In the distant past, when the oxygen concentration in Earth’s atmosphere was much higher, they used to be a lot larger. But the oxygen levels dropped, putting a limit on their size and ability to use energy.

Aljik were enormous, and strong, and fast. And their native atmosphere and mine were close enough in oxygen levels that we can survive each others’ atmospheres. And I didn’t think they breathed either. So what was up with that? Maybe their internal chemistry was different, more oxygen-efficient somehow, but there were limits. They had to have some way of absorbing extra oxygen, like my lungs.

Above me, layer upon layer of thin membranes beat frantically in the still tunnel air like my own gasping breath.

The aljik didn’t have wings. They had lungs on their backs.

I reached up and jammed my right hand into the beating membranes.

With an aljik scream, the Princess slammed down the protective chitin over them, trapping my arm; my armour split under the force. She thrashed, trying to shake me off, but I was held in place by the very arm that she was holding trapped, and she seemed to be too confused and in too much pain to realise quite what was happening on her back. She dashed for the wall of the storeroom, aljik scattering to get out of our way, and tried to slam me into it, but I’d already dropped down under her belly, scrabbling for grip with my free arm and legs while she slammed herself and my trapped arm into the wall, cracking the bones in my forearm this time. I screamed, but I don’t think she noticed. She slammed again, and again, and a fourth time, each movement moving about my trapped hand and damaging her lungs further.

Then she dropped right down, belly to the floor, and I swung out of the way, but she didn’t seem to be trying to hurt me. She drove her lancelike arms into the floor and lay still.

And just… kept laying still.

After a long silence, Glath spoke. “The Captain has conceded the fight,” he explained to me, with a level of disbelief in his voice that I’d remember to be offended by later. “It is time to kill her.”

“Can she let my arm go first?” I asked, and after Glath translated my request, she did.

The arm was a mess. Swollen, bruised and bleeding flesh, with both radius and ulna cracked in half and bent at an odd angle. The instant the drake venom wore off, that was going to be the most painful thing I’d ever felt in my life, I was certain of it. It needed treatment and it needed treatment right now, so I’d need to be quick.

I needed to finish this fight.

I walked around to the Princess’ head, bowed to the dirt, offering me a clean strike to her neck to give her an instant death. I didn’t have the arms needed to do that, being a soft and tiny human, but I was sure I’d be able to find some way to kill her, especially since she wasn’t moving. Here she was; the source of all of my problems. The one who’d ripped me away from my family and dragged me through space and nearly gotten me killed again and again with her stupid power play for some distant alien Empire that wouldn’t even talk to my species because their stupid, insular, high-and-mighty culture had decided that us defending ourselves made us the problem. Every fresh injury on my body and mind was her fault. Every day that my boys had to live believing that their mother was dead was her fault. I’d needed her alive for my own survival until now; I’d had to swallow my rage and cooperate until now. But now… now I could have my revenge. I could have my revenge with no consequence – no; a revenge that was expected and encouraged. The aljik watching from all around us were waiting for me to kill her.

I let myself revel in the fantasy for several long, delicious seconds, then reluctantly brought myself back to reality.

“I’m not going to kill you, Nemo,” I said. “I’m going to win this fight, but I’m not going to kill you.”

The reaction, from bot the Princess in front of me and the aljik around the cavern, was confusion.

“You have to kill her to conclude the fight,” Kit said.

“Why?” I asked. “She’s conceded, right? This is my nest, right? She’s a critical resource for the nest. Are we really in a position to be wasting critical resources?” I looked to the Princess. “You are familiar with the Game of Lies, right?”

She indicated feebly that she was.

“Great. Well, let me show you a new game.” I sat down in the dirt beside her, trying not to jar my mangled arm. “I’m going to tell you a story that’s totally true, not a lie to be found. But I’m only going to tell you the start of it. Your job is to tell me how it ends.”

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