21: Fair Trade

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It still hurts to breathe, of course. I try to ignore that. But the only other thing to focus on is the inherent helplessness of being inside a spacecraft performing such a critical manoeuvre, and not being wired in. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been in a spaceship that I didn’t fly myself.

There’s a sort of helplessness to it. Whatever happens now, there’s almost nothing I can do about it directly. That hasn’t bothered me all that much in the past; as a child, I didn’t fly much, and when I did, there was always a dohl in charge to handle things. As an adult, on ships before the Stardancer, my nest was an extension of me. Aside from reaction time, what difference did it make if I did something with my own body or told someone else to do it? But this, here and now, is an uncomfortable sort of middle ground. This is Charlie’s nest; I’m a part of it, but not its de facto Queen. And yet, this launch is still firmly my responsibility. It this how it feels to be a dohl?

We launch at my command, and the restraints holding me to the safety rail strain a little as we rise. The roar of engines echoes through the floor and through my feet. There’s no view of the outside of the ship, but I can see on the pilot displays our altitude climbing, climbing, climbing.

A planet is big. For a moment, I entertain the possibility that we’ll fly by and out and away without detection. But I know my sister’s forces too well to believe that. Finding someone on the varied surface of an unknown planet is very hard; detecting new objects in the largely empty space above a planet is very easy.

And we did, indeed, detect a ship above as we rose above the clouds. Glath didn’t need reminding of his orders; he immediately sent a distress message using standard communication codes, in a perfect imitation of Tup’s voice. He goes through our agreed-upon story, not a game of lies but a true deception – many of the crew survived the attack, we just got our communication and propulsion systems back in order, what is the state of the search, how bad were the losses, is the ketestri still a danger? He requests as much information as possible – not only is more information handy, but the more they’re telling us, the less they’re asking us.

We need to fool them long enough to get up in the air and get away. And start to power up for the dash and… somehow avoid getting shot. If we could keep them fooled long enough to resume orbit, and power up when we were in a part of our orbit that put us out of sight of everyone else…

But no. We’d almost reached the right height when a second ship came into range. And a third.

And they started asking Glath for identity confirmation codes.

As Queen Charlie would say, “Fuck.”

Glath makes his best guesses, but it’s just a matter of time, and we’re not going to be able to buy enough of it. I don’t even notice the first shot fired at us. On the Stardancer, wired into the ship’s systems, I’d feel it immediately, register the damage to the outer ship as it was happening. Here, I’m just… in the ship.

The reports coming through on the screens speak for themselves, though. Secondary engine disabled. No damage to core systems. With three ships full of trained personnel against our one in the control of new, half-trained pilots, they could destroy us easily. But they’re not doing that. Either because they still think we might be the original crew, or because…

No. I know why.

I look at my Queen, eyes screwed shut against the force of the launch. I look at my nest, the fragment of it that remains, some of us waiting out the launch helplessly, some of us frantically wresting the controls, trying to save everyone. My sister won’t listen to a thing I’ve got to say; conquering the Empire is the only way to save it. But with these ships ready to capture us, we won’t be able to save it.

Good thing that we have a Queen who can. I’ve seen her do too many impossible things not to believe that. Queen Charlie can do anything.

But she can’t get us out of this. She doesn’t know the language, she barely knows the ship’s instruments, and she’s certainly in no physical condition to leap out of the airlock and try the ship-disabling tricks that she’s used before. This time, it’s my turn to do something drastic.

“Turn all communications off,” I command the crew. “Go silent. Begin powering for the dash as soon as you possibly can, and initiate the dash as soon as it’s ready. Do NOT wait for my confirmation, dash straight away. I’m going down to the engines to see if I can pull some tricks and help us avoid further attacks.”

The crew didn’t ask for clarification; they got straight to work.

And so did I.

———————————

I am not built for spaceflight.

You’d think, that with all the launching and falling and jumping and flinging myself into and out of spaceships I’d done, I’d be really good at it by now. You’d think that it’d become easier. But it just becomes harder every time. Maybe I’m doing some kind of permanent damage to myself, something that makes each jolt worse. I don’t know.

Whatever’s going on, the launch was harder on my body than I’d expected. Although, to be fair, a lot of that was the distracting pain in my arm. Jesus Christ, my arm did not want to experience higher than normal gravity. I screwed my eyes shut and clenched my teeth and concentrated on not throwing up until I felt weightless, and then I opened my blurry eyes and fumbled for my restraints.

“Going into dash,” someone announced in aljik.

I stopped fumbling for my restraints.

The manoeuvre we were trying was called a jump shake, which was just a series of incredibly messy jumps designed to make one’s path as difficult to trace as possible. We’d green dash to a random location, perform a series of random blue dashes, then green dash again to another random location. And that should, in theory, lose us in space.

It was going to really, really suck.

I had time to marvel at how lucky we were, able to dash away without any enemies firing at us, before I very suddenly had time to wish that we weren’t so lucky and that the Empire’s forces had blown us to bits. I won’t describe the dash experience in detail. I never want to think about it again. But eventually, the pain in my arm subsided enough for me to once again notice the ship around me. We weren’t moving.

I fumbled with my restraints and got, shakily, to my feet. Then I realised that getting to my feet was impossible without gravity, and I’d just launched myself up toward the ceiling, and I had to grab at a restraint to pull myself back down. I reached for my toolbelt and clipped it on.

Hang on, one of the pouches was open. Had I left that open for the launch? That was absurdly dangerous! I needed to be a lot more careful, if we were going to be in zero gravity a lot. Nothing had fallen out, had it?

It was my jewel pouch, with Kakrt and Tyzyth’s emeralds still inside. And also… something else? A smaller stone, a chip of diamond. (Well, of something transparent. Could be quartz. Could be glass, for all I know. What am I, a jeweller?) It was a shard about as long as my finger, carefully cut, and when I held it near one of the ship’s lights, rainbows danced within. Where had that come from?

The ship was abuzz with activity. I put the gemstone away to think about later, making sure that the pouch was firmly closed this time.

“Status?” I asked.

“Most systems are intact,” Kit reported. “We lost two secondary engines and some shielding, as well as an escape pod, when under enemy fire.”

So there had been enemy fire. Okay. “Great.” I looked around. “Where’s Captain Nemo?”

“She went down to do something with the engines. She had some plan to use them to help us escape.”

“Alright. Someone do a sweep and make sure that everyone’s okay. That nobody injured themselves slamming into a wall or something during all of that.” I drifted across the room to Glath, who seemed more at home than anyone else in zero gravity. (Made sense. He was used to flying.) He was in a human shape, poised to stare at the communications system. “Everything alright?” I asked him.

Glath turned to look at me, his human expression unreadable – not because of the expression itself, but because his features were completely obscured by spiders crawling over him in frantic distress. “I disobeyed her,” he said.

“What?”

“She siad to shut communications down before the jump. But I was suspicious. I… I couldn’t see how messing with the engines would help.” He looked back down at the system. “I listened in.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I heard the communication between the escape pod and the Empire ships. Should… should I have tried to stop her?”

“Glath. Glath!” I shook his shoulder. “Glath, where is the captain?!”

————————-

Queen Tatik had to listen to the message several times to be sure it was real. “You’re certain? You have her body?”

“Alive, my Queen. Should we kill her?”

“Not if you can avoid it. Dead is better than escaped, but alive is better than dead. How?”

“She surrendered, my Queen. She was probably afraid to die in space if we destroyed the ship.”

That made sense. The rogue Princess had always been a coward. Who but a coward would initiate a regency fight, only to run away before it was complete? Still, this had to be a trick.

“Should we bring her home to the Heartland, my Queen?”

“No.” No; it was a trick. Some way in to… to destroy everything she could, try to take the Empire down with her. That was the sort of thing that Tatik’s sister might do. “No; I’ll meet you at the tertiary base.”

And if the rogue Princess was still alive when they got there… well, then. Then, they could finally end this.

——————-

Thank you for reading Charlie MacNamara: Intrepid Explorer! Next week we will start the third and final book in this series, Charlie MacNamara Saves the Princess.

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