6: Repeat Offenders

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“Kerlin, you’re not going to fucking believe this.”

Kerlin squinted at Yinna. Things had been quiet in the brief period since the aljik had left. She’d finally shed her last skin and started thinking about a place to lay her own core seed when the time came, which was great timing; with the nest gone and the empire’s forces departed from the sky, the drakes could focus entirely on colonising their planet.

At least, that was what Kerlin had assumed. Until right this moment.

“What is it? What’s happened?”

“Aljik.”

“More survivors? Well, it sucks to be them; the others have gone, they’re Queenless now.” The drakes had made sure of it, clearing the abandoned nest of every egg after the rocket had launched.

“No. In orbit.”

“Why?!”

“I don’t know, but it can’t be good.”

—————————–

“I can’t believe you’re seriously doing this,” the rogue said. “You have to see what a waste of time it is.”

“It wouldn’t be a waste of time if you’d just tell me where it is,” Tatik replied testily.

“I will, once the shyr come back with their answers.”

“That’s going to take a while, assuming they can even be trusted to fulfil the mission. You might have just had me give away half f my shyr to my neighbours.”

“This is going to take even longer.”

“Well, if I don’t keep busy, I’ll just end up ripping you to pieces before I have the answer from you anyway. So it’s constructive for that reason, if no other.” She strode out of her sister’s cell, taking care to lock the three doors behind her. Only her closest and most dedicated people were allowed on this mission, only those who could be trusted with the knowledge of Ima’s survival and the missing Crown Jewel, but even then, she didn’t want anybody spending too much time with her. Too much risk. Even a disgraced and failed Princess was a potential threat while still alive.

They had the launch trajectory of the stolen ship that Ima had attempted to escape the planet in. That meant that they knew the launch site. And near the launch site would be the nest. And the Crown Jewel would almost certainly be somewhere in there somewhere, hidden in a wall of a tunnel or cavern deep within the labyrinth. The second safest place to keep such a treasure would be in the nest.

The safest was on the personage of the Queen, and Ima had already been searched thoroughly. It had to be in the nest.

—————————

I’ve got it. I know how to convince the crew that we need to go to Jupiter.

I don’t have a Jupiter-to-Earth game plan yet, so I’m not ready to pull the trigger on the whole thing, but when I do have a plan for that part, I’ll be ready. It’s all very simple, actually. I’ll be like “Oh, I could go to a neighbouring Empire and ask about the ahlda thing”. And the crew would be like “No, you’re a Queen, the other Queen would kill you” and I’d be like “No, see, they won’t know I’m a Queen, will they? I did the job of an engineer just fine aboard the Stardancer for a really long time, before Captain Nemo decided to challenge me to a Regency fight. I won’t ask any of you to come, I know how dangerous this is for you, but I’ll be fine.” And then I’ll make up some reason that Glath can’t come, and then someone on the War Council would be like “hang on, you can’t talk to anyone in the neighbouring Empires; they don’t know our shared language”, and I’d be like “oh, darn, you’re right; I guess we can’t find out how to save the empire so quickly and easily. Oh, wait – in that Singers in Light story, didn’t the Jupiterians give implants to the aljik they captured, so that they could use them as interpreters? And didn’t they later do the same things to humans? If they have the data for communicating with both of those species, might they be able to make something that allows humans to communicate with aljik? We could at least go and ask them.” And then everyone would be like “Yes! That’s a brilliant idea! Let’s go to Jupiter!”

Perfect plan.

And then someone would be like, “Hang on, that sounds way riskier than whatever reason you had for not letting Glath come. Besides, there’s no way we’d let our Queen go into foreign territory alone like that, even if the other aljik wouldn’t recognise her as a Queen; that would be absurdly dangerous, you don’t have a service arrangement with the neighbouring empire and even if you did, our kind aren’t well known for respecting the lives and autonomy of other species. You should go in with Glath, or not at all.”

And then someone else would say, “Also, the neighbouring empires have probably also heard the Singers in Light story. It’s very possible that someone there might recognise a human, in which case they’d probably panic and kill you right away. There’s absolutely no way that it’s safe to send you on a mission like that. Couldn’t we just send Glath, our resident multilingual shapeshifter?”

And then we wouldn’t go to Jupiter. Goddamnit.

There had to be some way to do this.

——————————-

On the bridge of a broken ship sitting in a cloud of Lancer debris, Sil wondered how the fuck they’d gotten to this point.

The fight had gone bad from the start. The Lancer’s impact site had been chosen to bisect as many corridors as possible, and while the safety airlocks on all breached corridors had engaged properly and kept a breathable atmosphere inside, the six tahl aboard simply were not enough to cover all entrances. Their attackers had reentered their own ship from their docked escape pod and then, presumably, exited through their own external airlock which was well inside the Red Four and therefore not in view of the ship’s external cameras, so until they actually entered the ship, Sil and his crew couldn’t tell how many they were. That had made planning basically impossible.

They’d done their best. When their attackers had started entering activating four of the emergency airlocks, revealing their entry points, Tryk had redeployed her meagre forces appropriately, using the precious airlock cycling time to get the soldiers into space suits. (Sil, realising that of course a Lancer class ship from his own empire would know the default access codes for the airlocks, had ordered them changed, but changed his mind at the last moment when Tryk explained that if their attackers couldn’t cycle the airlocks, they’d probably just blow their way in with explosives and put everyone in a lot more danger.)

Supported by as many atil as the ship could spare, their fighting force of six tahl had spread themselves as best they could around the four entry points as the airlocks opened and the internal cameras picked up the invading force for the first time.

Eight shyr. It had been eight shyr. Two per airlock. How had a tiny Lancer supported such a crew? How hat they all fit into the airlock? Eight?!

The two opposing forces had floated unmoving in the corridor, staring at each other, for a long time. Sizing each other up.

“They’re in space suits,” Tryk had told her troops reassuringly. “That negates most of their natural advantages. We can take them.” She had darted forward, grabbing one of the shyr and ripping her in half.

The shyr had exploded in her claws, sending shards of scrap metal everywhere, bouncing off the walls, piercing Tryk’s suit. Sil hadn’t been able to figure it out, and clearly, neither had Tryk, until Safin had explained.

“The suit was overpressurised,” he said, sounding frustrated. “No shyr in there, just a model made of scraps.”

“An improvised bomb.”

“Yeah. And now the corridor’s filled with shrapnel, so that’s a problem.”

“The ship is surrounded by shrapnel,” Sil had pointed out, indicating the view from the external cameras and the various parts of Lancer debris drifting about out there, but Safin hadn’t been concerned about that.

“Debris outside the ship is fine. Debris inside a zero gravity ship is potentially fatal or damaging to equipment the second we accelerate. The air pressure inside would’ve blown most debris outside when we were hit, but this is just more shit that we’re going to have to track down before we can safely go anywhere. Tryk, be careful.”

Tryk had known the score. “it’s probably just one or two real shyr, playing dummy amongst the bombs. We need to make them move without penetrating the suits. Soldiers, put them back in the airlocks. Keep an eye out for any movement. Safin, can we open the outer airlock door without cycling the airlock?”

“You want to blow them out into space?”

“It’d kill a shyr, wouldn’t it?” She had sounded smug, probably knowing that the shyr were very likely hearing our communictaions.

“It almost definitely would. And yes, we can do that.”

“Captain?”

“Go for it.” Sil had felt bad about giving the order. But they were being attacked.

They had been halfway through stuffing the shyr back into the airlocks (none of them moving yet) when another of the emergency airlocks started cycling. They hadn’t wanted to abandon their current tasks in case one of the dummies really was a shyr, but when a moving shyr came through the airlock, Tryk had taken everyone she could spare to intercept her.

And now here they were. Pressurised dummies being blown into space, Safin staring hard at the cameras. “Aren’t those movements a bit too repetitive, do you think, Captain?”

“Movements?”

“The legs. They’re not really responding to the shyr’s position. Just wriggling very regularly.”

“So you think…?”

“Another dummy. With moving parts.”

“What the fuck is going on?”

“I wish I knew.”

Tryk seemed to think that something was wrong, too; as her soldiers amassed behind her, she stared at the shyr, motionless but not responsive, drifting towards them.

“Fall back,” she commanded. “Find the next emergency airlock and seal it manually. If it’s another dummy, it won’t be able to open it.”

Sil briefly checked that there were crew monitoring the other airlock activity and various cameras in case of any further surprise intrusions, then focused on the new dummy. What was the point? A distraction, or an attempt to winnow down the Red Four’s forces? It couldn’t be hugely effective at either; their only casualty had been Tryk’s space suit, and monitoring the dummies didn’t stop the crew from remotely monitoring other entry points. It had concentrated their forces, but only temporarily; Tryk was already ordering soldiers to disperse to protect against losing the whole force in an area attack of some kind. If their goal had been death and destruction, they could have rigged the dummies with real explosives, blown the airlocks, or pumped the Red Four’s leaking fuel into the ship. They were being careful and, in the process, not achieving a whole lot except wasting everybody’s time. Were they buying time for some grand entrance, assembling for a big attack? Then why not prepare all that before attacking at all?

Sil should be giving orders. He should be evacuating noncombatants to a safe area, but he didn’t know what area was safer than where they were already hunkered down. Would gathering everyone on the bridge help, or just get them killed when it turned out that the goal was to herd everyone to the bridge and blow it up? He should be giving repair and monitoring priorities to the kel and the atil, but he didn’t know what those priorities were. What was he supposed to be doing?

And then a new alarm sounded, as several simultaneous small explosives detonated in various places on the Red Four’s hull.

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