19: Pilot Program

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“A trained engineer would be able to give a better assessment,” Kit explained, “but the Captain and some atil looked over the ship and it’s in remarkably good condition. It’s a – ” he gave some aljik word, some complicated series of clicks and whistles that I couldn’t begin to follow – “which are designed for rough landings and planetary takeoffs. And it has the fuel to get back into space.”

“Why did they even bring ships like that?” I asked. “Why not just bombard us from space?”

There was the slightest hesitation before Kit’s answer. “I don’t know.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, but this probably wasn’t the best time to press the matter. If he was still keeping things from me, his Queen, then there might be some other layer of aljik politics at play that I didn’t understand, and the last time I’d gone blundering about careless of aljik politics, I’d been driven from the nest by a sudden regency challenge.

“You’re sure it can get back in the air?” I asked.

“Yes. So far as we can tell, the outer shielding is still intact, but even if there are small problems that we’ve missed, there’s inner shielding around critical rooms that we can confine ourselves to during launch. So – ”

“How did the ketestri get in?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a spaceship, right? It was in the vacuum of space. All sealed up and holding air inside. But a ketestri tore up everyone with its tentacles, right? And I assume it wasn’t already inside the ship. So if it didn’t break its way in, if the ship’s still all sealed up and able to fly, how did the ketestri get inside?”

“Because it’s a ketestri,” Kit said, as if this explained anything.

“So?”

“So it can move like a ketestri. They can do that sort of thing.”

“They can do that sort of thing?”

“Yes.”

“We’re talking about the integrity of a ship that we’re all going to entrust our lives to. A ship that apparently is a secure, unpenetrated vessel, even though a ketestri somehow got its tentacles inside from outside. Which should be impossible, right, if the ship’s integrity is all intact? But that doesn’t ring any alarms? Because it can just do that sort of thing?”

“Yes.”

“… Right.” I made a mental note to ask some other people about this. I didn’t see how the ketestri could’ve crushed everyone without putting any holes in the ship to get in. Sure, they were giant mysterious space squid, but they still had to obey the laws of physics, didn’t they?

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, so we just need to see if we’ve got anyone who can fly the damned thing.”

“And avoid being shot down by Queen Tatik’s forces when we launch.”

“Yeah. That too.”

“Any plans on how to do that?”

“Not a fucking clue.”

————————————

I stared out at the ship over the water, good hand on my hip. Glath had anchored it as close as he safely could, but it was still difficult to make out with all the white fabric removed. (And repurposed. We had a couple of little boats coated in the tough fabric to keep sea life off them, and I had a couple of new outfits, which was fantastic because the clothes I’d been wearing were in, shall we say, incredibly poor condition. Little tears and mudstains add up and it’s lucky that neither drakes nor aljik react all that strongly to human body odour, is all I’ll say. We still had a lot of ketestri fabric in reserve, so I’d felt comfortable getting myself some new outfits made from the stash, although the stitchwork of atil wasn’t nearly as good as what I was used to from the drakes.) The spaceship was about the size of a cruise ship, but little more than a dark speck far out on the shimmering water. The slope of the seafloor was gradual, and the water surprisingly shallow for quite some distance into the ocean.

“So,” I said. “We can’t fly it.”

“No,” said the Captain, next to me. She fluttered her wings briefly for air; something she had to do more than usual since I’d jammed my hand in there. (They would regenerate, apparently, but it took time.) “It doesn’t have the direct interface of the Stardancer, I can’t use it. It needs an attendant kel and some atil.”

“We have atil,” I point out. “Let me guess. None of them are trained in this.”

“Drakes make superior bridge staff. So we didn’t need atil to do it on the Stardancer.”

“Surely you had atil piloting a ship like this when you fled the Empire?”

“That was a long time ago. That ship… no longer exists. That is why we needed to take the Stardancer.”

“And the pilots went down with it?”

The Captain was silent, which told me everything.

“Okay,” I said. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay. I need to talk to Kit and Ain.”

——————————

“We’re not kel,” Ain said uncomfortably.

“No, but you’re the closest thing we’ve got. You’re as smart as a kel, right? So far as I can tell, dohl and kel are very similar.” They looked identical, at least to me, and seemed to behave very similarly. Privately, I’d sort of assumed that all aljik males were basically one caste, and the fertile ones were trained as attendants and generals while the infertile ones were trained as engineers. I’d never suggested so aloud; I didn’t think it would be taken well.

“Kel are kel,” Kit said, puzzled. “And dohl are dohl.”

“I understand that,” I said, “but I don’t think it makes you incapable of the job I’m asking of you. I wasn’t a kel and I handled the work just fine. The drakes aren’t atil and they handled the computers just fine. The two of you are the only dohl in this nest and you’ve been doing an exceptional job coordinating it; I’m sure that with the rest of the nest behind you, you’d do an admirable job with the spaceship.”

“And if we can’t do it?” Ain asked. “We’re not kel.”

“If you can’t do it, we all die. Either on this planet, when the Queen’s forces find us, or in deep space when something goes wrong on the ship. You’ll have me and the Captain and Glath for backup, but without any proper kel, you’re our best option.”

The two looked at each other.

“This is pointless without atil trained to fly,” Kit said.

“Oh, don’t worry. I have a solution to that.”

“What solution? We can’t get new atil out of nowhere.”

“No, we can’t. But we can train the ones we have.”

“How? There’s no other atil to train them.”

“There are plenty of trainers nearby. In the drake forest. I’ll go talk to them.”

Both dohl stepped back, shocked.

“You can’t!” Kit said.

“You should send a messenger,” Ain said. “Some atil, perhaps with a tahl – ”

“That won’t work, they don’t trust any of you. But they’ll see me.”

“They’ll kill you,” Kit said. “They hate the nest! We can’t send our Queen!”

I took a moment to try to wrap my head around the aljik logic. I supposed that, to them, the nest was the nest, even if the people making decisions within it changed. The drakes had problems with this nest and considered themselves cheated and betrayed by the previous ruler, so interaction with this nest would be difficult, and sending the ruler to negotiate would be seen as offensive and aggressive.

But that, of course, was aljik logic. The drakes were far more individualistic. Their relationships seemed largely temporary and based on mutual benefit, any sense of permanence invoked only by the stationary nature of their core trees; I didn’t fully understand the details of drake society, but I did know that nothing about it (or at least, nothing about the drake society in the nearby forest) resembled a nest. The drakes might be wary of the aljik cheating them again, but I knew they had only goodwill towards me, at the moment.

They’d hear me out. There was no way they’d hear an atil out, especially not if I sent her with a tahl guard into their forest. It had to be me.

“It’s alright,” I said. “I can get them to listen to me.”

“My Queen, if you die the nest is doomed!”

“No. It isn’t. What happens when a Queen dies, if there’s only one Princess in the nest? She takes over, right?” Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to remind everyone that the Captain was a Princess and could take over again if I died – for all I knew, she might try to get me killed or something to gain her nest back. But she’d been remarkably cooperative since I’d promised to save the Empire, and reminding them that a backup existed did seem to calm the dohl down.

“The nest isn’t doomed if I die,” I said, “it’s doomed if we can’t get off this planet. We need to save the Empire, right? We can’t do that down here. And getting back out there is going to take risks.”

I did feel a little bad about that last part. I didn’t give a shit about their Empire. But it wasn’t technically a lie – even if I intended to find some way to get myself home, if everyone else wanted to save the Empire, they’d need to be in space to do it. So I was still helping them with that goal, really.

———————

“Kerlin!” the scout shouted, bursting through the trees and startling me. She was a young female, not yet ready to plant a core seed – all the scouts were, with the tree-tending women and those of us who were still men being too valuable to risk. “Kerlin! Charlie’s back!”

“What? She survived? Are you sure?”

“It’s kind of hard to mistake her for anyone else.”

No way. I mean, I knew she was formidable, and I set her up for the battle, but… no way.

And yet, there she was, waiting for me in the labyrinth. Not in great physical condition, so far as I could tell – she was scratched up, limping, one arm was immobilised, and her clothing was so badly sewn together that it looked like a bunch of rags that managed to cover her by accident – but alive.

“Charlie!”

“Hi, Kerlin,” she said in barely comprehensible pidgin. (Humans really do not have enough limbs. I mean, I was missing a wing and had one leg that didn’t work right, but I still had enough to communicate with. I can compensate. It takes four limbs, four tails and two wings to communicate properly, and Charlie was trying to do it with one arm.) “Surprised to see me?”

“What? No. Of course I knew you’d survive. So did you kill her? Or manage to talk her out of the fight?”

“Yeah, we avoided the fight and then I crushed my arm for fun,” she replied, which I recognised from her manner to be one of her miniature Games of Lies – not a full story, but a statement designed to highlight a truth by pretending the opposite and highlighting said opposite’s absurdity. “We’ve secured the ship to get off-planet.”

I must have misunderstood her clumsy one-armed speech. “You defeated the army? Already? And they didn’t get into the forest at all?”

“No. It’s complicated. We can leave. But we can’t fly the ship. Only drakes can.”

I raised my tails. “Charlie…”

She raised her good palm, a gesture of peace. “I’m not asking you to come. We’ll leave, this will be your planet. I’m asking you to train some atil to fly it.”

I relaxed. Slightly. “No tricks.”

“Have I ever tried to trick you?”

Charlie had only ever helped me, but… “You trick a lot of people. You just haven’t needed to trick me yet.”

“Fair. No tricks. You think I want to trick you back in space? You think I want my ship flown by people who hate me and want to go back to their planet? Queen Anta and our former rogue Princess both found out how bad an idea that was. Just teach the atil. Then we’ll go, and the Queen’s forces will go, and you can colonise this planet in peace. Help me with this one last thing, and you’ll never have to see an aljik or get on a spaceship again.”

How could I refuse an offer like that?

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