17: A Game of Truth

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I needed immediate medical attention. Our darling captain needed it more. But neither of us would be getting it right now, because first I had to convince everyone not to kill her, including herself.

This would be the hardest story I’d ever told in the Game of Lies, largely because it was all true. This wasn’t deception; this was the complete opposite.

I wasn’t sure how good I was at that.

“Once upon a time, in the out-Western aljik Empire, there were two Princesses. One day, their mother the Queen died, and their lives were suddenly interrupted by the need for a new one. Neither backed down and left, so in the tradition of aljik nests since the beginning of time, they had a regency fight – to the winner, the empire; to the loser, death.

“But one of the Princesses gad a secret, cunning plan. She had recruited followers of her own, and during the fight, she neither won nor lost, but fled, taking her followers and a single ship and heading for the far reaches of the empire. Had she left before the fight, there would be no issue – to be honest, I’m still pretty confused about why she didn’t – but leaving mid-regency fight caused problems. The remaining Princess’ claim to Queenhood was not solid until one of them died – the death of the fleeing Princess was now necessary, and top priority.

“And so the rogue princess and her small force went into hiding, always staying one leap ahead of the empire’s forces. But over time, their own forces dwindled. Her own grandmother had invented the idea of enlisting the help of other species directly under aljik law, and they bolstered their numbers through an agreement with some drakes, who traded their assistance until they found a new planet to settle in exchange for being safely taken to such a planet. They took over a prison ship, and made use of some of the prisoners. And when they were truly desperate, they went to Earth, and abducted a Singer in Light.

“The empire’s forces were everywhere, and skirmishes were impossible to avoid. Space is large and communication is difficult, but word would get back to the rogue’s sister eventually, and eventually, it indeed did. Soon, the rogue’s forces faced an assault that they could not defeat, and the only option was to flee using a dangerous gambit that would fake all their deaths and allow the rogue Princess and her aljik to continue to move in secret, the target finally off their backs.

“But something went wrong. The drakes, growing increasingly frustrated with the rogue’s delay in finding them a planet and increasingly desperate as they reached the age where it would become impossible to colonise one, took advantage of this gambit to take themselves (and, incidentally, the rest of the ship) to a suitable planet and begin colonisation. This left the aljik stranded, putting them in a rather similar position to the one the drakes had just escaped when it came to reproductive viability. Even worse, their death-faking gambit seemed to have failed – it bought time, but soon enough, the empire’s forces were in their sky, searching for the rogue Princess. And soon enough, they found her nest, and landed a ship.

“And soon enough, the rogue Princess got herself into a regency fight with the very Singer in Light that she had abducted to save her people in the past. And she lost. So, tell me, dear captain – how does this story end?

“A traditional aljik Princess, one who does not have Queen Anta’s spirit and wit, one for whom such decisions are merely a matter of tradition regardless of circumstance, would have a fairly straightforward answer, wouldn’t she? She would say that the loser of a regency fight dies; that the rogue’s story ends here, and the nest would be under the command of their new Queen who, let’s be frank, is not aljik and does not know how to manage such a thing. Expecting me to be able to manage the dohl and regulate the nest just because you’ve decided that I can do some duties of a Queen is like expecting the drakes to be able to build tunnels and tend eggs just because they can do some of the duties of an atil. They might be good weavers and doctors and computer users, but you wouldn’t replace all of the atil in a nest with drakes, would you? No; you need real aljik. And you also need me, if you have any hope against the encroaching forces.

“So it’s a good thing that neither of us are traditional aljik Princesses, isn’t it? Because I don’t see a whole lot of promise in following tradition here. There’s another possible ending to this story.

“Members of the nest, living and dead, are its strength.” I licked some of the captain’s blood off my hand, trying not to shudder in pain too obviously. “But it seems such a waste to kill you, when you are so much more useful to my nest alive, and we are not in a position where we can afford to waste resources right now. So perhaps this story should end with you getting up, and assisting me and the nest by doing the management that I can’t, and then maybe we’ll all have a chance of getting off this planet alive.”

“The loser of a regency fight dies!” someone shouts from the edge of the room.

“Why?” I turn to face the speaker, and everyone else retreats from my glare, revealing a timid atil who pressed herself into the wall as I approach. “I won, and her life is mine, right? Why can’t I choose not to waste it? If you were that much of a stickler for tradition, you wouldn’t have followed her out here when she fled her previous fight.”

“How can we trust her?” someone else asked.

I laughed. “You’re asking that now? Everything that’s happened up until this point has been fine, but now you’re wondering whether to trust her?” But I understood the hesitancy. As much as her fleeing the fight had left it unofficial, to the aljik of this nest, the captain was for all intents and purposes their Queen. And now she wasn’t. I’d won, so I was the Queen (although breaking this regency fight tradition seemed to be a step too far for them in terms of unprotesting obedience), so what could she be? If she wasn’t a part of the nest, she couldn’t be trusted. If she wasn’t…

Hmm…

I spun back around to face the captain, the movement nearly making me vomit at the pain in my ruined arm. She was still in that surrender position, waiting for execution.

“What’s your price?” I asked her.

“What?”

“Your price. What will you accept in exchange for your services to this nest?”

“Save the Out-Western Aljik Empire.”

That gave me pause. “What?”

“The Empire. It will soon collapse. Save it. That is my price.”

I laughed. “Wow, you don’t price yourself cheaply, do you? Fine. I agree to your terms.”

She got up, finally, to look at me closely. “Really?”

“Of course,” I lied. “I’ll save the Empire. And you’ll continue to serve this nest as long as you live.”

Of course I couldn’t save an Empire. Who did she think I was? Besides, the Out-Western Aljik Empire wasn’t my problem. My kids were my problem. Finding a way to get back home that wouldn’t introduce humanity to the existence of aliens or call the wrath of an alien empire upon us was my problem. These people had abducted me and dragged me out here; I owed them nothing.

I was already saving her life. What more did she want from me? Save an empire? No.

“I agree to this exchange,” the captain said.

“Fantastic,” I said. I didn’t look to the rest of the aljik. I didn’t invite further protests. I’d entertained two, and I wasn’t about to set a precedent – I was Queen here. If I behaved like my word was law, then it would be.

Hopefully.

“Now then,” I said. “Can we get some medical attention in here?”

————————————

Apparently the delicate layers that make up an aljik’s lungs ‘regenerate’, so long as the aljik remains alive long enough for that to happen. Human arms, of course, do not. An x-ray machine and a human surgeon could probably have fixed my arm up, but all the lajik could do was help me get all the bones in the right place and immobilise it. I had no idea how well it would heal, or how much function I’d regain. At least, with everything immobilised and covered, it didn’t hurt nearly as much.

I’d prefer it not to hurt at all, but we can’t have everything.

The presence of our dear ex-Princess caused a lot of tension in the nest. Her being liked certainly helped; these people had all trusted and respected her as a leader, for reasons that I still didn’t understand, and were clearly happier to have her alive and helping than dead, but the structure of an aljik nest doesn’t really have much of a place for a deposed leader. The others seemed to treat her as something halfway between a dohl and a Princess, flipflopping constantly, and were generally tense and confused about it.

I wasn’t really sure what to do about that. I wasn’t sure how possible it was to subvert the aljik caste system. Plenty of human societies in the past had had very strict caste systems, but those were mostly sociological; humans were, fundamentally, all nearly identical to each other, and such differences were learned and socially enforced, not a fundamental aspect of our biology. I didn’t think that that was the case for the aljik. Given how revolutionary the idea of a multi-species empire had been to Queen Anta (something that was pretty obvious to humans, even all the ones on Earth who hadn’t met aliens yet), and the awkward way they’d shoehorned me and the drakes into specific castes even when it had created this whole regency problem and nearly destroyed the nest, I was pretty sure that their castes were not only biologically determined but also fundamental to the way they conceived of people, maybe of a level too intrinsic to be unlearned. If it wasn’t, there would be exceptions; clever dohl who want to work as engineers instead, dutiful tahl who want to do the jobs of atil as well as they can at their size. Probably not exceptions in our little nest, statistically, but a history of them, stories of them. But even in the Game of Lies, I’d never heard of any such thing, or any hint that the aljik conceived of such a thing. If their caste system was mentally assailable, it would have been mentally assailed. It hadn’t, which was bad news for our captain, a Princess who was no longer a Princess.

Of course, it was also possible that this little group were some ultra-traditionalist group of aljik who had an unusually strong conception of caste roles that wasn’t mentally intrinsic, but given their history, that seemed really unlikely. And even if they were, that wasn’t any better news for the captain.

Complex social dynamics could wait, though. Hopefully, they could wait until I was home and this was no longer my problem – maybe then, the captain could slide back onto the role of Princess-acting-as-Queen despite our regency fight, if only for lack of other options, and run off to save her empire or whatever. For the moment, we had the impending attack to worry about, and the nest could, I hoped, hold things together long enough to survive that.

“We need to know what we’re dealing with,” I told my War Council, pacing back and forth. Well, it was really just my various dohl – Kit, the captain trying to find some stability in her nebulous status, and Glath, who was spending most of his time looking human but everyone was ignoring that because nobody wanted more complications right now. But War Council sounded cooler. Anyway, I generally tried to find a way to have Lln the atil and Gekt the tahl in the room, just in case someone from another caste could provide insight even if they weren’t officially part of the group. So. A cooler name than just ‘my dohl’ was warranted.

“They landed in the ocean,” Kit reminded me. “We can’t exactly send a scouting party out there. Even if it were possible, they’d be seen coming, and you remember how difficult sailing across that water was.”

I did remember. Even if we found a way to build better boats that wouldn’t fall apart, the carbon dioxide coming off the water was a very difficult complicating factor.

“I can do it,” Glath said.

“Merely building a boat – ”

“I don’t need a boat.” He dissolved his form and hovered in the air, a cloud of spiders, to prove his point. “I was created to travel through a wide variety of environments in search of a template. Carbon dioxide is no problem, and flying long distances with no rest is no problem. I can be nearly invisible at a distance, especially over water. I can scout the force and get back undetected far faster than we can come up with some new boat and hope for the best.”

“It wouldn’t be safe,” I protested. “You should stay here, and we can find some way to – ”

“Is staying here safe? No. There’s no time. I’ll go.”

I looked at my friends, and tried not to think about crushing spiders in that underground tunnel with the drakes. “You could get hurt. You could die.”

“We are all very likely to die when the attack comes.”

He was right; of course he was right. And we needed to know what we were facing as soon as possible, so that we could defend against it. I was already trying to come up with ways to hide under the fog off the side of the cliff, some method where we could breathe down there invisible to our enemies; I hadn’t come up with any such way yet, but knowing the attacking force could only help. And whatever we came up with, we needed time to implement, which meant that scouting was time critical.

But I couldn’t stand the thought of losing Glath again.

“No,” I say firmly. “We’ll find another way.”

Glath moves to protest, but the others do the aljik version of glaring him into silence. The decision has been made.

I am their Queen, after all.

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