1: Questions

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Hello, Void.

My garden is so small now! I guess this is what happens when you don’t take care of them. I cannot fit inside their vessel this time; there wasn’t one big enough to give them. But that’s alright. I can observe from outside, and seeing the patterns will allows me to later fit into them more thoughtfully.

In the meantime, perhaps a period of adjustment is in order.

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“She did what?” I asked Glath. “Why? Why would she give herself up to them, after everything?”

“My guess is that she traded the only thing that she had to trade, in order to see to the safety of the ship. They wanted her alive, and had no use for us.”

“So? She’s sacrificed countless crew to avoid capture before! In situations that seemed hopeless! Why change now?”

“We didn’t have a Queen then. And she was the closest thing we had to one. Now, we have a Queen who it was her duty to protect.”

“She would’ve sacrificed me in a heartbeat in any conflict before this one.”

“You weren’t Queen then.”

“So what? Her sister’s Queen, right? A proper Queen, or at least she should be, if our dear Captain herself hadn’t fled and screwed things up. So by that logic, if she was oh so interested in making sure there’s a Queen to protect the nest, this random fragment of nest wouldn’t even exist. She wouldn’t have come out here in the first place. Or she certainly would have surrendered quicker. She didn’t do this over a title.”

“Not a title. A role.”

“What?”

“Queen Tatik isn’t saving the Empire. You took on that duty from our Princess, in trade for her service.”

She sacrificed herself to give the rest of us a chance at saving her Empire. Because she believed my promise. I felt a bit guilty about that.

“Okay. Fine. Where the fuck are we?”

“Ain is calculating that right now.”

“My Queen,” one of the atil called from the ship controls. “Something’s approaching.”

I made my way over as quickly as I safely could in zero gravity, miscalculated the grab for a safety bar, bounced off the controls and drifted about ten metres back before I was able to collect myself and grab another safety bar. Then, pretending that hadn’t happened, I made my way over as quickly as I safely could in zero gravity and peered at the screen. “Empire ship?” I asked, but before the atil could reply, the external cameras answered my question. It wasn’t a ship. It was a large squid-like beast, drifting through the vacuum of space. A ketestri.

“Why am I not surprised,” I sighed in English. To the atil, I asked, “Do we have any way of communicating with it?”

“Uh, no. The one on the Stardancer, we could communicate with well enough to get it to make fabric for us, but there’s no way to talk to a ketestri out in space.”

Maybe we could come up with something involving flashing lights, or something. “I daresay this is probably the same ketestri. Unless there’s some reason for a second, unknown ketestri to be getting us off-planet and following us around.” Why had it done that? Just helping out the crew? I’d taken risks to help this crew before, why not the ketestri? Or maybe it had liked playing games with me. I hoped that that wasn’t it. My goal was to go and land on a planet and stay there – a mysterious space alien that wanted me to stay in space and play chess with it would be a problem.

But it was a later problem. I made a mental note to find out whether my escape was going to involve me bringing along an alien squid that might chuck stuff at me from Earth orbit and somewhat startlingly reveal alien life to humans after I figured out everything else on my very, very long list of tasks.

“Let me know,” I announced to the bridge crew at large, “if the ketestri or anyone else tries to kill us. I need to… go and think.” I needed to go and lie down somewhere. Zero gravity was not agreeing with me, and my arm was somehow hurting worse than it had planetside. Maybe the launch had jolted something. I checked the fingertips for blood flow and sensation (all seemed to be working correctly), and made my way out of the room into the corridor.

Aside from the floating and the safety rail to facilitate floating, the corridor had a strange similarity to an aljik nest tunnel, albeit one rendered in metal and ceramics. It was also mostly unlit, but for the glow of safety lights near the rails so faint that I couldn’t even see them until my eyes had adjusted to the darkness.

I had no hope of memorising the entire ship. I’d memorised the area immediately around the bridge, which was near the centre, and claimed a nearby room for myself.

Good hand on the rail, I drifted towards my room. I rounded a couple of corners, then stopped.

It was dead silent, but I just knew that someone was in the tunnel with me.

I panicked about that for a moment, then felt stupid for panicking. The ship was full of aljik who might have business moving through this tunnel. And silence was no reason for suspicion – there was no gravity. I wouldn’t hear people walking around. I turned to face them.

And then felt stupid for relaxing. Because even in the incredibly dim light of the tunnel, I could tell that this was not one of my aljik.

It was an aljik, probably. It had the same general body plan. (That wasn’t confirmation; maybe there were other species out in space that looked a lot like aljik, for all I knew. But the aljik castes I’d seen all looked similar in the same kind of way that all primates look similar.) Same winglike lungs, same number of legs with the same number of joints in them. It was about half my size, which is extremely small for an aljik, and I couldn’t tell what colour it was in the dark but it certainly wasn’t anything bright. No gems were visible on the parts of its carapace that I could see, either.

I noticed, dimly, that my arm wasn’t hurting. I couldn’t feel it at all. Or my other arm. Or my legs, for that matter.

I tried to pull myself along the safety rail, and didn’t move. I couldn’t move my arms or legs, either.

Yeah. Yeah, panicking had definitely been the right call. There were two aljik castes I wasn’t familiar with, two types of aljik that this stranger could be – the flamboyant travelling ahlda, or the stealthy spies and assassins, the shyr. And since this one had snuck up on me in the dark and paralysed me, I could make a guess as to which one she was.

She drifted motionless in the dark, watching me. To see what I’d do, maybe? I could still breathe. I could probably scream, but that seemed like a bad idea. Either the stranger wanted me to scream and draw attention, in which case, why would I go along with that, or she’d shut me up the moment I tried. Which might mean paralysing my breathing muscles and suffocating me.

I wasn’t dead yet. She’d paralysed me and made herself known and not killed me. So that was good, right? This invader who’d attacked me on my ship wasn’t as bad as she could be. Great!

“You will tell nobody that I was here,” she said, in the ship’s shared language, which was… interesting. She’d been watching us long enough to pick up the language. She was also telling me to keep quiet, which meant that I’d be walking away from this meeting alive. So that was a plus.

“Who are you?” I asked, in English, because with my limbs paralysed it was the only language I could use.

Predictably, the shyr did not seem to understand the question. She gently pushed me further down the tunnel, around a final corner, and into the light pouring from the room I’d claimed for myself, which was brightly lit out of consideration for my human eyes. In the light, it was much easier to make out her gestures; she lurked in the corner, at the edge of the light and ready to dash back into the dark.

She was grey, it turned out. Her sharp arms glistened wetly with something (paralytic venom?), and she was, indeed, devoid of gems.

She said, “I have information that you will require, human, Princess, should you wish to save our Empires.”

Empires, plural? Aljik and human? That couldn’t be good.

“There are others out here. Other humans, off your homeworld. We were able to interrogate them briefly, but we lost track of them, as seems to be the norm with humans.”

Okay, so there’d been survivors from the initial Singer in Light abduction. And this was my problem why, exactly?

“They harbour great resentment towards the aljik. They may take exception to you trying to save us. Be on the lookout; if they hear of your mission, they may try to stop you.”

Yeah, well, I wasn’t going to save the aljik, so. Not really my problem.

“When we interrogated them, they expressed a strong desire to track you down. Work carefully.”

Ah. So they knew about me. That wasn’t… necessarily negative. Maybe they wanted to track me down to help me. If they were descendants of abductees, they might have had sympathy for my situation, once the rumour had gotten around that the rogue Princess had stolen a human. (How far had that spread, if humans in hiding out in space knew about it? Where else was I being gossiped about?)

“They also expressed a strong desire to return to Earth.”

Oh. That might be a problem. If they showed up on Earth in an alien spaceship… they might not intend to be as secretive as I did. Maybe I should try to track them down, have a chat. Hell if I knew how to find them, though.

Then, if they wanted to help, and wanted to go to Earth, and knew how to fly a spaceship… that might be better than heading home by myself.

“Be careful, young Queen. I wish you the best in saving our Empires.” The shyr darted forward, touched me briefly, and darted away down the corridor.

And I could move again.

What the fuck? What the fuck?

Okay. Humans. Wanting to go home, looking for me. Unclear why, hopefully for good reasons. Hated the aljik Empire. Not surprising. Humans. In space. Okay. Unless the shyr was lying to me, which was very possible.

Shyr. On my ship. Could come out of nowhere and paralyse me. Could probably kill me very, very easily. Definitely not part of my nest. Not that I’d put it past Captain Nemo to have had a shyr around the whole time and just never told me, but if this one had been capturing and interrogating space humans who knew about me, that meant she’d been doing it after I was in space, which meant she hadn’t been one of Captain Nemo’s people. Queen Tatik’s assassin-spy had snuck onto our ship, somehow, and had warned me not to tell anyone she was here. So. I wouldn’t be telling anyone. She’d been watching us long enough to learn our pidgin, there was no way I could be sure of being able to secretly tell the crew. Nope. She could be anywhere. She could paralyse me. She could kill me at any time.

Calm down, Charlie.

Shyr on my ship. Queen Tatik’s shyr, but she seemed to want to help me save the Empire. So. Not an enemy… while she thought I was going to save the Empire.

She’d probably kill me if I ran away for Earth, wouldn’t she.

Shit.

A ketestri outside. A small but loyal nest relying on me, who didn’t know how to be a Queen, to fix everything. And this shyr.

What was I supposed to do now?

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