5: A big enough arrow

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Sil froze in panic as the emergency alerts blared, but it didn’t matter; his crew knew what to do. By the time he’d gotten his bearings verified that being thrown into the wall by the impact hadn’t broken any limbs, all of the tahl on the bridge had left, atil swarming in to take their place at their consoles. The Red Four had two kel, who immediately fell into their tandem roles; Safin read damage reports from the bridge while Egil took some atil to handle critical repairs.

“Damage?” Sil asked, dazed. “Are we okay?”

“They hit just ahead of the engines,” Safin replied. “Tore straight through the hull. Minimal casualties; they didn’t hit a populated area and the internal safety doors all responded. We have no engine power and we’re leaking fuel into space.”

“Is that dangerous?”

“Not unless we also leak oxygen into it. But we might not have enough to finish the patrol. We’ll need to dash home after we’ve made critical repairs.”

Sil had no idea how the Lancer had picked up enough speed so quickly to puncture a patrol ship’s shielded hull like that. Lancers were light and manoeuvrable, but there were limits. The fragile ship would’ve torn itself to pieces on the Red Four’s tough exterior shielding; the fact that any of the wreckage could penetrate all the way to sever the fuel lines was the unlucky shot of the century.

But it had, and now Sil was going to have to limp home halfway through his first patrol and admit to his Queen that he’d screwed up such a basic task. And with how ruined the wreck of the Lancer would be, there wasn’t a hope of even finding out what the hell had happened. Why had the Lancer crew done that? Had they been trying to flee and made some kind of mistake? They did seem to be powering up to dash; had something gone wrong with the dash? If they’d wanted to hide against the star while fleeing then they’d have to drive right at the Red Four; if some strange dash failure had happened, then… maybe…

“Captain,” Skep called. “Look.”

Sil looked, and it immediately became apparent that the situation was much, much worse than he’d assumed.

Skep was checking the external cameras, analysing the hull breach and the Lancer wreckage. Except that the Lancer wasn’t wreckage – well, it was, but far, far less wrecked than it should be. The front of the lightweight vehicle seemed to have been reinforced with some kind of… to call it shielding would be inaccurate, because its primary purpose was clearly not protection. The front of the ship had been reinforced into a long point, like the arm of a shyr or a Princess. The Lancer had been turned into a giant spear, and thrown at them.

“Where’s the crew?” Sil asked. The relative masses of their ships had meant that while the jolt of the impact had been disorienting at a little dangerous for those on the Red Four, it would have been instantly fatal to the crew of the Lancer, no matter how intact the ship was. “Was there a second ship that we missed, that they could have escaped to after setting this up?”

“No second ship,” Skep said. “We would’ve seen them come out of dash.”

Unless they had been lying in wait, hiding and cold, before the Red Four arrived… but no. If they were going to do that, they would’ve hidden the Lancer in the same way.

“Escape pod,” he said. “Can we get a camera view of the escape pod?”

Lancer class ships came equipped with a single escape pod and, as Sil had suspected, it was missing. The crew had jumped into an escape pod and hurled their ship at the Red Four.

Why? What was the point? They were nowhere near a planet or a station or any other ships; there was nowhere to escape to. If they wanted to flee, they’d have had a much easier time doing it in the Lancer. In a Lancer class escape pod out in open space, they were as good as dead unless somebody picked them up. Were they expecting that? An escape pod would be practically impossible for the Red Four to find at such a distance if they kept powered down; space was big. Jet off in a random direction while sending the Lancer toward the Red Four, kill all engines and let momentum carry them… impossible to find until they wanted to be found, when an ally came to pick them up.

But, again, if that was the plan, they simply could have avoided encountering the Red Four in the first place. And then they wouldn’t have had to sacrifice their ship to do it.

The attack had to me worth sacrificing their ship for. Why…?

“Incoming,” Skep reported. “High speed, decelerating.”

“What is it?”

“Something very small, burning heavy engines. I can’t get a read on it, the engines are too bright and hot and it’s not transmitting a signal.”

The only thing it could be was the escape pod, but why would –

Oh, no.

“Somebody confirm where Tryk went,” Sil commanded. “Are her tahl camped around the breach site?”

“They went to clear critical heavy rubble and assist any injured – ”

“Tell her to get all combatants combat ready, at the breach site! Now!”

On the cameras, the escape pod confirmed Sil’s fears, and re-docked with the Lancer. A crew couldn’t survive the rapid deceleration of the Lancer hitting the Red Four, but a decelerating escape pod… that was doable.

Patrol ships weren’t designed for heavy combat, but they were more than adequate at handling the small skirmishes that they might be expected to encounter on their routes. The Red Four was designed with the expectation of space combat in mind; its shielding and weaponry could stand up to most non-military vehicles. It was also designed to forcibly board other ships without too much difficulty, able to grapple and marry external airlocks to others, and was in itself protected against forced boarding in the same way that a nest was; the rooms and corridors of the ship were designed such that the entrances were easy to defend with tahl, if an enemy boarder ever got that far.

Patrol ships were not designed to expect enemy boarding parties entering the middle of the ship, where wide and numerous corridors ran to efficiently carry large cargo to the engines and storage areas. There were no entrances anywhere near that part of the ship.

So the Lancer crew, it seemed, had made one.

“Why go back to the ship?” Skep asked, puzzled. “Did they leave something behind?”

“No,” Sil said. “No, I think they’ve got everything where they want it.”

————————

I had to get the Jupiterians involved.

That was the best way to get back to the boys. I could get the ship close enough to Earth if I could find some way to convince the crew that the Jupiterians could help with their ahlda crisis. Then I could take an escape pod home and… well, Jupiter was pretty far from Earth still; I’d need to find some way to get the ship closer, or get another ship or something… and I’d need to be sure that the crew wouldn’t follow me. I was pretty sure that they’d go back to their own Empire, but not certain. Aljik laid down their lives for their Queen and thought nothing of it; would they put everything into retrieving me instead? Maybe if I faked my death somehow…

“Is there any reason we can’t physically go to the neighbouring nests and ask about their ahlda directly?” I asked the War Council, having Glath translate between us. It was the last thing I wanted to do, since travelling around a lot introduced the complication of refuelling and I wasn’t really sure how to go about that. There must be ways to refuel discreetly, or the Stardancer wouldn’t have stayed in operation so long, but whatever they were I was just sure that it would be a whole bunch of extra bullshit.

But staying still used resources, too. Food supplies weren’t infinite, there were losses in water filtration, and we were all on biological clocks, slowly growing older and quite probably accruing damage from prolonged zero gravity. (Except Glath, possibly. I don’t think ambassador colonies really age. They just reach a point where they feel like they’ve gathered a certain amount of life experience and then it’s time to go fall into their creators’ black hole so that data can be gathered from their remains. Which sounds a lot scarier and more fucked up than normal ageing to me, but what do I know.) So we couldn’t sit around doing nothing. If I wanted to get home while still leaving the crew enough resources to go home themselves, I needed to invent a reason to need the Jupiterians, and for that, I needed data.

“You mean, can we integrate into a neighbouring empire?” Ain asked. “I don’t want to. We came this far to save the Out-Western Empire.”

“No,” I said, “not integrate into their empire. Go there and ask around. Maybe we could pose as, I don’t know, traders?”

“Traders wouldn’t go into a neighbouring Empire very far; they’d meet – ”

“Ambassadors brokering a trade deal, then. Or just show up and be honest. ‘Hey, guys, something’s fucked up with the ahlda, do you guys have the same problem’?”

“We don’t have any shyr to do that,” Kit pointed out.

I rubbed my temple. The incredibly rigid biological caste system was starting to strike me as a serious drawback of aljik society. “You’re a dohl,” I said. “Communicating with Queens is what you’re great at, right? Couldn’t you go there and ask their Queen? Or even ask local dohl, ‘hey, how are your numbers these days’? Surely this sort of thing should be known between the Empires, right? On Earth, if there was a steep decline in a really important type of worker, all the nations would be fucking aware of it.” Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure if that was true. If China had a critical shortage of doctors, would anyone in other nations notice, except for doctors keeping an eye on their career options? Surely we would. There had to be people who tracked that kind of thing. Processes for it. I imagine.

“Well, shyr would spy and report this kind of thing, usually, but the Queen’s mother and the current Queen…”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. The Queens don’t talk at all?”

The whole War Council looked shocked.

“They’d kill each other,” Gekt said. “Adult Queens couldn’t be around each other, they’d kill each other at the slightest disagreement or power challenge.”

“Like how our rogue Princess had to challenge you when she saw you gaining loyalty in our nest,” Ain said. “Two Queens close together, either physically or socially by messaging each other, would be horribly unstable. You’d end up with two nests in one, people switching allegiance constantly and unpredictably… it’d be chaos.”

“And the instant they disagreed and tried to kill each other outside a Regency fight,” Kit said, “there’d be war in the nest, and nobody could be sure who their allies or enemies are. It can’t be done.”

Trying to think like an aljik was giving me a headache. I had to stop thinking of the nests like human societies and think of them like… areas of influences centred around a Queen. The strength of the influence was determined by her charisma and her perceived competence, as well as the perceived prosperity of her nest. And, of course, by social proximity to her influence; meeting with her people, hearing from her, getting news about how great her nest was doing. Direct communication between nests was therefore dangerous, as it invited the influence of a foreign force into the heart of your own home.

That was why when Princesses reached maturity, they were driven to either take over the nest, or gather their portion of it and leave while they were still powerless enough not to threaten its stability by doing so. You couldn’t have more than one powerful point of influence in one nest; it was too unstable. Other aljik were loyal to their Queens to the end; their whole psychology, so far as I’d been able to make out, seemed centred around it. They were individuals with their own lives and their own thoughts, but those lives were centred around their Queen, and every one of them would die in a moment without hesitation to protect her. I’d talked to them about independence before and they didn’t seem to really grasp the idea of not having a Queen; if the Queen died, you integrated into a new nest immediately, and had a Queen again.

And yet, switching Queens was something they did. Young Princesses took the loyalty of those in their mother’s nest before venturing out on their own. Aljik in failing nests could and did leave them to integrate into more prosperous nests, and serve those Queens with just as much loyalty as the ones they’d abandoned. Loyalty to a Queen was stable, but loyalty to the same Queen was stable only so long as she remained the dominant influence.

And they weren’t blind followers, either; the division between Queen Tatik’s forces and our dear Captain’s forces had been political, a disagreement on how to solve the ahlda problem, and even while not being part of the Out-Western Empire, our Captain and her forces were primarily interested in saving it and returning. Hell, the crew still were, even without her – I had no doubt that the aljik in my crew would die without hesitation to protect me, and also no doubt that if they caught me running away from my promise to save the Empire, they’d stop me. It was all very… inhuman.

“The shyr are different,” I said slowly. “Aren’t they?”

The War Council all looked at each other awkwardly.

“Shyr are dangerous,” Lln said. “And confusing. They’ll live in a nest for years and then walk right up to their Queen and kill her.”

“Do they really, though?” I’d been thinking about this whole ‘assassin’ thing, and if the shyr that had talked to me was any indication, then if they really were a mysterious regicidal force then there simply wouldn’t be any Queens left. They all would’ve been assassinated by the shyr of neighbouring nests who wanted their resources.

“It happened to Queen Anta’s sister,” Lln said.

So, it happened at least once, four generations ago. This was a Singers In Light kind of threat. Shyr probably assassinated Queens very occasionally, I’d guess, which raised a really interesting question: “Why isn’t every aljik war ended immediately by a Queen sending a shyr to assassinate her rival?”

“They’re not very good at following orders,” Gekt said. “They’re unpredictable. Like ahlda, except very smart and very deadly.”

“They don’t think properly,” Ain said. “Ahlda or shyr. They’re really unpredictable, and can’t stay focused long term.”

The shyr that had spoken to me did not strike me as someone who couldn’t stay focused. She’d watched us, hidden, long enough to learn our shared language. Could they not stay focused on orders, or did they routinely choose to disobey them?

Ugh, alien politics were impossible. Nobody in the galaxy was having a more confusing and distressing time than me right now.

—————————

Sil stared at the screen over Safin’s shoulder, doing his best to think straight through the chaos. “What the fuck is going on?!”

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