18: Investigation

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The thing about humans is that they need to sleep a lot. That made it very easy to wait until Charlie was asleep and then, very carefully and quietly, head off to my mission.

There wasn’t really all that much need for secrecy – anybody who would see me exiting the nest would just assume I was on some sanctioned errand. They certainly wouldn’t assume that I was disobeying orders. That I was a traitor. They’d worked with me for a long time; they knew me better than that. But then, aren’t we all traitors, when you get down to it? Didn’t we all follow our previous Princess out of the Heart, knowing she was running from a regency fight? Why was that any different than what I was doing; could we really say that any treachery was our Princess’ fault and not ours, when it was still our decision to obey her instead of Tatik?

Aljik can be such simplistic thinkers.

I don’t have my full size yet, and I’ll never have all of my old memories. I lost too many spiders in the descent. But the truth that I’m staring to accept is that that’s normal for my kind. Becoming something is an act of curation, an act of deleting the things that you are not. Sure, most Ambassadors probably don’t burn up a quarter of themselves and scatter the rest across the surface of a planet, but a slower deletion of old, unused thoughts and habits as their spiders forget how to make those connections and are slowly replaced by those who never knew is just as much of a loss. A colony that learns to be a freely flowing river will, over time, forget what it’s like to be anything else. My forgetting was just a lot more efficient.

That’s what I’ve been telling myself, anyway. And trying not to think about how little control I had over what is kept and lost, about how I almost certainly lost things that were important and precious, about how who I am now is so very heavily dependent on which fragments of me happened to be close enough to the rest of me to recollect. It’s fine. I’ll get over it. I’ll live with it.

I have no choice.

I didn’t see any boats or anything on my way out to the landing site, no sign of any armies headed for the nest. At first, I wondered if I’d gotten lost and passed by the ship. But no – there it was, something alien floating on the water. A large mass of white.

It didn’t look a whole lot like a ship. I consolidated my form as well as I would while flying, getting all of my constituents as close together as possible to best trade information and thus sharpen my senses. A big blob of white, out on the water.

Hmm.

I spread out as much as I could again and approached. No signs of life – well, no signs of aljik. There were things living in the water below me, but they were native and unimportant. The mass of white was an enormous sheet of fabric – a parachute, presumably, to aid in descent. It sat half-sunk in the ocean, half-above the water ballooned with trapped air and presumably, somewhere under there, was the ship.

I landed on the fabric, and recognised its texture. The thing about space is that things are very rarely unique on a large scale; some secretion made by some bug on one planet is probably identical to the sap of some plant on the other side of the galaxy. So even knowing exactly what was under all my feet, I couldn’t draw any absolutely certain conclusions. It might be a coincidence.

It was very, very unlikely to be a coincidence.

The parachute was made by a ketestri.

I stood still and listened hard, feeling for any vibration through the fabric. There was a lot, of course, the cloth moving about with the wind and the water. Crawling about a bit, listening at various areas, I could tell where the heavy mass of the ship was below.

No aljik feet moving around in there. Maybe I couldn’t feel something so subtle through the thick hull and under the pliable fabric. Or maybe they’d all left for the nest, leaving no guards behind, and were travelling in some method that I couldn’t detect. Or maybe…

I collected myself and prepared to slip under the parachute. This wasn’t as easy as one might think; there was no easy way under without going into the water, and I didn’t really want to do that. My kind can swim, of course, but the way Charlie tells it, my last encounter with the water hadn’t gone great. How ridiculous would it be for me to come all the way out here and dissolve again? The nest would never know what had happened.

I gathered my courage and my constituents into a solid mass, and snaked my way under.

The ship was floating. Most ships with planetary landing capabilities have some method of floating; water landings are the easiest landings, after all. I molded myself a hand and pressed it against the hull, then immediately spread my constituents out for better coverage, so I guess making the hand was a waste of time. Against the solid mass of the ship, the little sounds within – the hum of electronic devices, the clacking of things swaying back and forth with the movement of the ship on the water – were far, far easier to hear than through the fabric.

No footsteps. No voices.

Well. I was still on the other side of quite a lot of insulation.

The door was closed, but that was no problem for someone like me. I got an emergency hatch open and poured in, and there was someone! A kel. Quite young, I think.

It was hard to be sure, since his body had been crushed out of shape. Blood was smeared across the floor.

There, a pair of tahl; there, some atil. The full complement looked to be aboard. All of them dead, mostly due to being crushed or torn apart by… something.

How had their attacker even gotten in? The ship was sealed! And why? And most importantly, was it still here?

I wasn’t afraid for myself. Something that crushes and tears like that isn’t all that much of a threat to something like me. But it was occurring to me that if this ship didn’t have a crew, then not only was that a great relief so far as defending the nest went, but escaping the planet would be a whole lot easier. Unless whatever had done this was still here, eager to do the same to our nest.

I scoured the ship until I found something, pinched in the claws of a dead tahl. A fragment of flesh. Not aljik flest. A small piece of snipped-off ketestri tentacle.

A ketestri attached this ship, killed the entire crew and then, probably because there was nobody to initiate a safe descent, attached a parachute to it and dropped it on the planet.

Why?

Perhaps the nest would figure it out, when they got out here. But while the absence of an enemy was definitely a good thing, it didn’t solve the issue of how to get them to the ship. Building a boat or a fleet capable of safely carrying everyone would be a massive undertaking. I supposed that we’d only need a small boat to start with, to send out the closest thing we had to engineered to check that the ship had fuel and could still launch, but if it could then we’d need to get everyone out eventually. Soon, in fact.

I collected on the hull of the ship, pulling myself up into my human form. The canvas of the parachute lay heavy across my back.

Well, you know what they say. If you can’t take the nest to the resource, take the resource to the nest.

—————–

“Do we have any idea what happened yet?” Murr asked her commander. She’d never really got the hang of space battles. Fighting should be done on or in the ground, where claw could meet claw and the biggest environmental danger was a flood or a storm or a cave-in. The idea that whole units could just vanish because their vehicle broke was madness. A successful strategist minimised their enemy’s power and leverage, so why were they always surrounding themselves with the enemy of space?

“I don’t think we’ll ever get more than we already have,” Hin replied. His wings fluttered nervously (not nervous because of her, of course; he, like, her, just had a general dislike of unknowns). “A ketestri showed up, destroyed seven of our ships for no obvious reason, and was chased away when the rest of the fleet came to bear on it. The ships were thrown about everywhere; a couple fell towards the planet, the others out to space. No distress calls or communications from any of them; the two that were still close enough to be worth chasing down for their resources had their crews completely slaughtered.”

Murr clicked her claws. Going into space was a mistake. “We’re not going after the other ships?”

“We’ve been ordered to hold to mission unless the ketestri comes back. We don’t have many ships here now until we can get reinforcements, and if the rogue is here, we absolutely must find her. It’s not worth breaking patrol to chase down scrap metal and corpses.”

“Do you think we’ll find her?”

“Mission parameters – ”

“I wasn’t asking about the parameters.”

Hin hesitated. “Honestly? No. If she even survived, which I doubt, she could have gone to any of several planets that we have forces checking; it’s unlikely that our ship happens to be assigned to the right one. And even if it is the right one, they probably all died on it already. And even if they didn’t, planets are really, really big and we don’t know anything about what the native life on this one’s supposed to look like, so us seeing the nest is still really, really unlikely.”

“Then why are we here?”

“Well, it’s important tat the rogue Princess – ”

“Important that she can’t be a threat any more, right? And she’s either dead, or trapped on a planet forever. Right? So isn’t this a waste of our forces?”

“Queen Tatik has commanded that if it’s at all feasible, we should bring her sister home alive. If it isn’t feasible, we should make every effort to recover her corpse, at any expense.”

“What? Why?!”

“No idea. My guess is, she wants to finish the Regency fight.”

“Why? If the other one’s dead, there’s no need for a fight, right? Why use all these forces for something that doesn’t matter?”

“It matters a great deal to Queens.”

Murr shook her wings. She didn’t understand politics.

—————————–

The giant white blob rapidly approaching from over the ocean caused the nest, shall we say, some slight alarm. The atil on lookout brought me the news, I immediately sent a tahl to get a better description than “giant white blob thing,” didn’t receive one, and ordered everyone into the nest. Whatever it was, if this huge ocean-going blob could move on land, it probably wouldn’t be able to squeeze itself through the tunnels, and if it could (its shape might be malleable), it certainly wouldn’t move very quickly through the maze and we could escape through alternate entrances.

Then Glath showed up, and explained what was going on, and everyone calmed down.

“Everyone’s dead on the ship?” Kit asked. “The whole crew?”

“Everyone,” Glath confirmed.

“Because of a ketestri?” I asked. “Is this normal for ketestri?”

“Ketestri behaviour is incredibly unpredictable, but I’ve never heard of one being this violent for no reason, no.”

I rubbed my chin with my working hand. The ketestri on the Stardance had always been very helpful, and seemed to enjoy playing games with me. But how would it have found us? There’s no way it could have showed up, searched the planet for us, and then attacked the fleet keeping watch. The ships hadn’t found us, but it had? Fast enough that the ships didn’t chase it off? Unlikely.

There were other options. If I were searching an entire planet for a small band of runaway pirates, I’d use bait. Find the one thing that they really, really needed (a way off the planet), drop it all around likely spots for them to be dressed up to look as unsuspicious and inviting as possible, and wait to see which one is picked up. Track it back to the nest, then bombard the area until everything’s dead. Done.

That was a real possibility. Glath may have doomed us all by sailing the ship back. But it’s not like that mattered; not having a ship was a death as certain as having a trapped one, just slower. We couldn’t protect ourselves against that kind of trap, and we couldn’t stay on the planet forever, so the only option was to forge ahead regardless.

“Okay,” I said. I went to rub my hands together, realised how painful that would be, and stopped. “Glath, anchor the ship as close to the shore as you can without risking damage to it. Gekt, get some of your sisters together and do a full security sweep of the ship just in case there are any sneaky forces still lingering about that managed to hide from Glath. Kit, find me whoever we’ve got who has the knowledge to assess the ship and let me know if it can fly and, if not, whether we can do anything about that. Captain, find out if you can pilot the ship and get together whatever crew you need to do it; if you can’t, try to find me someone who can. Lln, go calm everyone down; make sure everyone in the nest knows what’s going on and that we’re not being attacked by either Tatik’s forces or any giant white blobs.”

With various little acknowledgement gestures and echoes of ‘yes, Princess’ and ‘yes, Queen’ (the nest was having trouble deciding which one I qualified as, having definitely won my regency fight and running a nest but the regency fight was against a rogue in the first place), my War Council rushed off to their duties. I couldn’t stop grinning.

Our one shot to get back into space. It was so, so close.

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