2: More Questions

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I gathered the War Council. Although without the captain, and with the fact that we probably weren’t at war for the moment since Tatik had what she wanted and had no reason to expect aggression from us, it probably didn’t count as a War Council any more. But whatever.

“Okay,” I said. “So what exactly is the problem that we need to save the Empire from?”

I spoke in English, leaving Glath to translate. I suspected that this conversation was going to involve a lot of stuff that we didn’t have words for in our common language.

“The ahlda are dying out,” Ain said.

“The ahlda are dying out? What? How? Can’t Queen Tatik just lay more?”

“They’re not dying out, they’re just not coming to the heart planet,” Kit said. “We’re not attracting enough to the Empire.”

“They are dying!” Gekt insisted. “The Out-Western Aljik empire is the grandest nest in the galaxy! Ahlda would be flocking to us if they could!”

“And right here you see the problem,” Lln said mildly, but before I could ask her what she meant by that, Ain spoke up again.

“Whatever the reason, the numbers of ahlda visitors have been declining since shortly after Queen Anta’s death. Since long before any of us were born. You can’t see the drop year to year, but if you look at the records, it’s been going down ever since then. And if there aren’t enough ahlda…”

It was our problem trapped on the planet, writ large. A lack of ahlda meant a lack of men in the hive. Not enough attendants or engineers to keep things running. And while those problems could be addressed by retaining ahlda laid in the hive, a lack of outside ahlda meant genetic isolation. The hive could die fast, when the eggs stopped being hatched, or slow, through generations of repeated incest. Not a particularly grand end for an empire.

“The rogue Princess,” Kit said, “was firmly of the opinion that the ahlda had simply stopped coming. So was her sister. Their mother, Queen Elis, was hatching and dispersing as many ahdla as ever, and it there were some issue affecting ahlda everywhere, it should have affected hers, too. Ahlda usually choose the most interesting or most prosperous or most comfortable nests to lay in; a lot of dohl is a sign of a good Queen, because it means they’re running a nest that’s good enough to be attractive for ahdla to lay in.”

“Queen Elis,” Ain added, “took her daughters’ accusation that she wasn’t attracting enough ahlda personally. She said that the numbers of ahlda went up and down naturally over time, and thought that their concern was a challenge to her regency. She saw it as a rumour that they were spreading in preparation to depose her. So they had to keep as quiet as they could, until their mother died; and that would mean that they couldn’t work together.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because one of them would die in the regency fight or be exiled to start a new nest,” Lln said, like it was obvious. Right. The stupid regency rules.

“It’s very difficult to start a new nest,” Kit said. “The one who left would very likely die, and even if she didn’t, it would be a very long time before she was in a position to send shyr back to the Empire to coordinate. Besides, both Princesses had very different ideas on how to save the Empire, and they each needed the Empire’s resources for their plan.”

“When there aren’t enough ahlda laying in a nest, the usual response is to improve the nest,” Ain said. “To make it a more attractive destination for them. This has worked for all of our history. Strong, safe, well-governed nests attract ahlda from their neighbours and become stronger; weak, unstable nests are avoided and collapse, either when their members leave for better nests or when the ahlda stop coming. Queen Tatik is a wise and clever Queen. She could make the heart planet grander and more prosperous than Queen Anta could ever have dreamed of.”

“But that wasn’t the problem,’ Kit said. “At least, the Faceless Princess didn’t think so. After all, the nest had been prosperous all throughout their childhood, and yet there were less and less ahlda. She wanted to concentrate the Empire’s resources on finding out why. She wanted to command a lot of shyr, have them investigate other nests in the area, try to see what the problem was. Which would have to be done carefully, as it could provoke conflict with other nests, and shyr can be…”

“Complicated,” Gekt said.

I remembered floating half-paralysed in the corridor while our dear visitor warned me not to tell anybody that she was aboard. Yeah, I could believe that.

“This might be a stupid question,” I said, “but did anybody ask the ahlda why they were avoiding the Empire?”

“Ahlda are… not good conversationalists,” Kit said. “They are distractible by nature. The ones who came to the Empire were mostly confused by the question – they weren’t avoiding us, after all. We tried to get them to ask other ahdla when they left, in the hope that the answers would get back to us with yet more ahlda, but they do not make good messengers.”

“It was going to come down to the shyr,” Ain said. “That’s how gathering information from other nests usually goes. And whoever is Queen commands the shyr.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. The shyr on our ship was presumably Queen Tatik’s, if she’d been running around the Empire interrogating rogue humans and soforth, and I didn’t think that Queen Tatik wanted me and the remnants of her rogue sister’s merry band to involve ourselves in saving the Empire.

“So they had a regency fight,” I said. “And our rogue, what, realised she was losing halfway through and ran away?”

The dohl looked at each other.

“It is very hard to decide to flee a regency fight without a lot of planning,” Ain said. “It would be easier to win the fight than to run under those conditions. She had planned her flight in advance; gathered her allies in saving the Empire, had us all ready to get her out and run.”

“Then why not leave without a fight, if she wasn’t going to finish it anyway?”

They looked at each other gain.

“We were ordered to secrecy,” Kit said. “But you are our Queen now…”

“Tell me,” I said.

He looked at Gekt and Lln.

“Tell them, too.”

“She did it to steal the Crown Jewel.”

Gekt and Lln looked shocked at this information.

“That sounds familiar. Glath, you’ve mentioned that before, haven’t you?”

“Probably,” Glath said, first in English and then aljik, to keep the others in the conversation. “It was a gift made for Queen Anta, by the Jupiterians. It is the most valuable artefact of the Empire. It is a computer disguised as a facial adornment, a shard of diamond, worn by the Queen of the Out-Western Aljik Empire.”

I looped my thumb into my toolbelt, resting my fingers on a pouch and surreptitiously counting the objects inside. All three gems were still there. Two emeralds, one from the engineer I was abducted to replace and one from the engineer I’d worked alongside. And the shard of diamond that had appeared when Captain Nemo had given herself up to give us a chance to escape.

“A computer?” I asked. “What does it do?”

“It allows direct control to all of the computer systems of the Voiddancer. The Voiddancer was originally Queen Anta’s flagship, but it has expanded significantly since the humans crashed it into the heartworld. It forms the heart of Queen Tatik’s nest. The Crown Jewel interfaces with the Queen’s mind through her carapace and allows her full clearance to all systems.”

“Interfaces with her mind? Like those wire things that let her control the Stardancer?”

“Sort of like those, yes.”

Probably not compatible with human biology, then. Pity. Access to all of their home base’s security systems would’ve been really, really useful.

“I’m sure Queen Tatik has gotten to work replacing the security systems after the Faceless Princess stole the Jewel,” Ain said, “but she won’t have had time to do them all. Especially since there is no way that she’s let her people at large know that she didn’t have the jewel. Anything she’d worked to alter, she would’ve had to do so very secretly, with very trusted kel.”

“It’s academic, now,” Kit said. “While I’m sure she would’ve also loved to finish their regency fight properly, the main reason that Tatik wanted the Faceless intact had to have been to recover the Jewel. She’ll have it back on her own face by now.”

No, she doesn’t have it, I wanted to tell them. We do. But I said nothing. That shyr had to be listening to this meeting, if only to be sure I wouldn’t tell everyone about her. Was she working for Tatik? Against Tatik? On some other mission entirely, to which this whole thing was tangential? If she didn’t already know that I had the Crown Jewel, then I sure as hell didn’t want to tell her. Not without knowing a lot more than I did.

“And engaging in the regency fight let her steal it?”

“Yes,” Ain said. “The Queen’s body was at the fight, the jewel ready to be claimed by the winner. Once the fight was over, the new Queen could claim it, and the nest would eat the bodies of the loser and Queen Elis. But we caused a distraction and allowed her to snatch the jewel without being seen, and flee the fight. We all fled into space together.”

“Why?” I asked. “The whole point was to make her Queen, right? So that she could use the Empire’s resources to solve the ahlda problem? I know that a regency fight is really dangerous, but she’d need to kill her sister, right? How does risking her life in deep space for ages and then having to fight her way back to the heart of the Empire make that any easier?”

“Through stealth. We knew that Queen Tatik would keep the theft of the Crown Jewel as secret as possible. Meaning that most of the Empire would be unaware of how vulnerable the heart planet was. Tatik would grow more desperate and the empire as a whole more complacent over time. If, over a long period of agitation, we could press her to pull enough forces away from the centre of the Empire, then we might have an opening to dash back in and take the nest by surprise. Presumably the security forces at home would be informed of the situation, but if we were quick…”

And then we’d fucked it up. Me and the drakes. We’d hijacked that final dash to victory and thrown us on a planet instead.

I should probably feel bad about that, but like. It wasn’t as if our dear captain hadn’t had that one coming.

“Hey,” I said. “Hang on a minute.” I frowned at Glath. “Something’s been bothering me for awhile. You guys grabbed me from Earth, even after all the Singers in Light stuff. You needed an engineer, and you went to Earth and grabbed a random human? Even though you thought we were incredibly dangerous, and you knew we didn’t have space travel and I wouldn’t be familiar with any of the systems. You could’ve grabbed a Jupiterian. You could’ve held onto one of the prisoners on the Stardancer. You could’ve let Tyzyth work alone, rather than drag a dangerous human into space. I’ve been wondering – why me?”

Glath looked uncomfortable. I frowned harder.

“Glath. Was my abduction a fucking publicity stunt?”

“We needed to agitate her!” Glath said. “She knew we had the Crown Jewel; it’s not difficult to anticipate our plan. The Faceless Princess needed to look erratic and dangerous. We needed to be something that couldn’t be ignored, and that she should put as much effort as possible towards addressing. We had to make the biggest, most dramatic move possible, or she never would have given us the opening that we needed! And that move was – ”

“Violating the embargo that the Empire’s all-species rule was created to enforce,” I sighed. “Well, that part worked.” And now, here we were. Me in space. Empire-stealing stealth plan failed. Rogue Princess captured, probably dead by now.

Ahlda still not coming to the Empire. Security key to their home base that I couldn’t use in my belt. Alien jellyfish outside the ship, alien assassin-spy inside the ship, and somewhere out there, humans. No ideas, yet, on how to escape all of this and get home.

What a fucking mess.

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