7: Ownership

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Sil was not used to zero gravity conflict. Safin’s reports echoed in his ears as he pulled himself away from the wall and got his bearings again. “Hull integrity: as intact as it was prior to the incident. External dash shielding: destroyed. External weapons: about 50% of them destroyed. Communications system: partly functional.”

“Partly?” Sil asked, still trying to figure out what had just happened.

“We can receive messages. We can’t transmit.”

“They made sure we can’t call for help.”

“That’s quite likely to be the reason, Captain, yes.”

“How? And how are the soldiers? Any more breaches?”

“This last shyr’s a dummy,” Tryk reported. “It can’t open the airlock. It’s just bouncing off the walls in there.”

“No further attempts to use airlocks or any evidence of attempts to breach the hull,” Safin said.

“So they weren’t planning on coming aboard at all. They wanted to distract us while they disabled our exterior systems, somehow. How’d they even do that? Some custom weapon? Lancer class ships shouldn’t be able to do that.”

“Given how deep the Lancer is in our ship, they wouldn’t have had the angle to shoot at most of the things they disabled,” Safin said.

“I know what they did,” Skep said.

Sil privately doubted that an atil, of all people, would be the first to figure out their enemy’s gambit, but he said, “what’s the theory, Skep?”

“Small explosives, planted by hand. Look.” He pointed at a random piece of ship debris floating past an external camera. “Should it be moving like that?”

Sil watched. The piece of debris, one among many, was a large piece of the Lancer’s heat shielding, a slightly curved piece of ceramic whose concave face happened to be facing away from the ship. It would easily be big enough to hide a shyr saboteur from camera view. It was also floating towards the Lancer, not away from it.

“Can we get it with our exterior weaponry?” Sil asked.

“No.”

“Hmm. Probably for the best.” The Lancer crew had to have done something to prevent their ship from being taken over; no attacker this devious would let that happen. Which meant that killing the crew was meaningless. Unable to go anywhere or call for help, the Red Four’s only alternative to slowly starving to death in deep space was to have the help of that crew.

Besides, they hadn’t killed any of his people. Seemed unfair to kill one out of spite after the battle was already decided. It wouldn’t change the outcome.

Sil had figured out what they wanted.

“It seems to me,” he said conversationally to Safin, “that we are, despite Tryk’s assurances, getting robbed.”

“Stupid move on their part,” Safin replied. “There’s nothing on a patrol ship that’s worth the risk of fighting one. Look, they’ve wrecked our ship and theirs to get this far. What’ve we got to steal that’s worth more than the damage to the Lancer?”

“In terms of cargo or important information, you might be right,” Sil said, “but the value of goods is conditional. If their nest is anything like ours right now, or likely in worse shape considering how prosperous our nest is, then there is one thing that a patrol ship is guaranteed to have that could have considerable value.”

“Which is? They wrecked most of our good tech.”

“A dohl,” Sil said, “and two kel.”

————————-

Tehan circled her tree, agitated. “What are they doing?”

“I don’t know,” Yinna said. “The telescope doesn’t point at the ground. Three ships descended over the ocean; that’s all I can tell you.”

“Why are they here, though?” Harlen asked. “What could they want? If the Princess has pulled a fast one and she’s still hiding out down here…”

“That’s very unlikely,” Kerlin said. “There’s no reason for her to trap herself on a planet like that. A miracle gave them one chance of the planet; she wouldn’t stay down here and wait for another one. Besides, we cleared out that nest.”

“Are they building a nest, maybe?” Harlen asked. “Maybe Tatik has a daughter who left the nest young?”

“And came here? Very unlikely.”

“They’d better stay over there,” Tehan said. “If they try to come in the labyrinth, we’ll kill them.”

“I was hoping to avoid a war with any aljik,” Kerlin groaned. But she was right. It might be inevitable. Their colony depended on the survival of the fruits of the core trees; they were all too old to pick up and start somewhere else. If the aljik were a threat to the colony, they would simply have to die.

——————————-

Aljik nests, being nests, don’t tend to have a lot of doors. Aljik spaceships, bowing to the necessities of space, do. The artificial cavern that I’d claimed for myself, small and sadly deplete of human conveniences (I never thought I’d miss my ring aboard the Stardancer), had a door, which I closed behind me, attempted to slump against, and was once again made a fool of by the lack of gravity. You can’t really slump when you’re weightless. You just kind of float miserably.

“Good.”

“What the fuck?” I tried to turn to face the voice, but again, zero g. It took me several awkward seconds to remember to reach for a safety rail and turn myself that way.

The shyr sat on the ceiling, upside down. (Well, I guess to her, I was upside down. Orientation is a matter of opinion.)

“You can keep a secret,” she said, now that I was facing her and could see the gestures. “Good.”

“Yeah, well, you were pretty emphatic. Thanks for not attacking me this time, by the way.”

She cocked her grey armoured head and stared at me for several long, silent second. Eventually she said, “I had to be cautious.”

“Cautious? You snuck onto my ship.”

“You stole my ship.” She cocked her head the other way. “Well, that’s untrue. This ship was never mine. But if we are going to quibble about such things then I think we can agree that me, or any of my nest-mates, have more of a claim to it than you do, so perhaps we should table the question of territory and focus on more important issues.”

Her nest-mates. “You are Queen Tatik’s, then.”

“Of course.”

“But I don’t think you’re here on her orders.”

“Her job would be very exhausting if she had to keep track of every little situation that every member of the Empire got into.”

I didn’t bother saying anything stupid like ‘are you going to kill me?’ or ‘are you here to take my crew back to the Empire?’ If either of those things were the case, they would’ve happened already. Besides, I already knew what she wanted.

“If you’re here for an update on saving your Empire, I still have no fucking clue. I don’t know what’s up with the ahlda and I’m not in a position that’ll let me find out. I don’t suppose that you have any tips?”

“Correlation.”

“Correlation?”

“We can pinpoint, to within a generation, when the decline started. We can expect that whatever is causing it probably started either in Queen Anta’s day or her daughter’s. Do you know the one big change that Queen Anta made, the thing that she did to establish the Empire? Do you remember why?”

“My knowledge of your history is very, very limited. I was told it was because of the Singers in Light fiasco, but – ”

“Exactly!”

“I’m sorry, you think that a bunch of humans crashing Anta’s ship into a planet somehow affected the egg laying of ahlda for generations afterward? That doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

“If it were as simple as that, previous Queens would have found out what was dissuading them and changed it. Besides, my friends have observed similar birth rates of dohl and kel in other nests. No, no; you’re missing the important part. It’s the Empire that’s the problem. Specifically, you.”

“Me?”

“Aliens! The egg laying rates dropped off when the Empire was established and Queen Anta extended her jurisdiction over, and started trading and consorting with, non-aljik. It changed us, turned us into something that the ahlda cannot abide. I don’t know how, or what specific thing the problem is, but the correlation is obvious. Our neighbours followed Queen Anta and established their own empires, and they have the same problem, getting worse over time. I have travelled to isolated nests outside of the borders of the Empires, and they do not have this problem. Only the empires. And do you know what the empires have in common?”

“They try to claim jurisdiction over, and trade with, non-aljik?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t want to say it to the creepy assassin’s face, but that sounded stupid. There was simply no way that ‘interacts with other species sometimes’ was the problem here. That just didn’t make logical sense.

Unless it was a toxin, from things traded with an alien species? A virus native to another species, that affects ahlda fertility? Or even… oh! Ahlda laid their eggs in nests that impressed them, right? What if there was another alien species out there that they just liked more, and any ahlda who encountered them tended to go to their homes instead? Like ostriches guarding beach balls instead of their own eggs. The ahlda who hadn’t been seduced away would have no idea that there was even a problem.

Maybe the ahlda were just a whole caste of monsterfuckers. Maybe that was it.

“I’d like to interview one,” I said. “An ahlda. I simply have to get some understanding about how they think to make any progress on this, and the crew are surprisingly unhelpful on the matter.”

“I can’t help you with that.”

“Well, can I ask you about being a shyr?”

The head cocked the other way again. “Why? Looking for information to kill me with, Lightsinger?”

“What? Listen, you creep, you attacked me when we first met. I haven’t laid a finger on you.”

“You haven’t had the chance to, yet. Just save the Empire that you are sworn to save, and we need not ever see with each other again.”

Those aren’t comforting words, coming from a shyr. Another reason to ignore the ahlda thing and get home – I didn’t want to outlive my usefulness to this one.

“Well,” I said, “if another species is the problem, do you have any idea which one?”

“Which one?” I wasn’t completely solid on shyr body language, but judging by the aljik I did know, she looked puzzled. “Why would that matter?”

——————————-

“Will the captain of the patrol ship report to the bridge of the Lightdancer at his earliest convenience?”

The request was precise and robotic. As synthetic as the Lancer ship’s autoresponses. Sil, in a brief moment of disoriented panic, wondered if maybe there was nobody aboard the attacking ship at all; but no, that wasn’t possible. The ship’s combat behaviour was too sophisticated for machinery, and even if a neighbouring nest did have some state-of-the-art mechanical combat system, they wouldn’t have needed to pull the escape pod trick or the thing with the debris; those were manouevres designed to protect bulky, delicate living bodies.

“Dancer,” Skep said. “Lightdancer. That’s a Queen’s flagship? That thing?”

“No, they’re trying to psyche us out,” Safin said. “Scare us. They’re lying about the name to put us on edge.”

Sil didn’t see the point in that. The battle was over, after all. “I’d best get going.”

“Be careful,” Tryk said.

“Why? They’ll want me and the kel alive, for certain. Probably everyone, since they could’ve been a lot more fatal if they’d wanted to. We’ve got to be valuable enough to bargain for everyone else to be integrated instead of slaughtered, at any rate.”

“You’re making a lot of assumptions about what they want from us.”

“Hey, you’re the one who said it. There’s generally no profit in attacking a patrol ship. There’s only one possibility.”

“I don’t like it. That fight wasn’t normal. These people aren’t normal.”

“Do you have any suggestions?”

“… No.”

“Well, then. See you soon.” Looking as brave and dignified as he could manage, Sil left the bridge. He suited up. He exited the ship.

This was a truly stellar first mission. Absolutely perfect. If his new Queen had any taste, she’d reject him after learning how badly he’d bungled this. Whelp, maybe this would earn him a cushy place inside his new nest, far away from any deep space missions. There was a bright side.

He entered the airlock of the Lancer class ship (he absolutely refused to think of it as the “Lightdancer”), which accepted him without any problems, as he knew it would. He didn’t remove his space suit. This tiny ship had just slammed into his ship at full speed; he didn’t trust the hull integrity.

Then he entered the ship. And his enemy was waiting to receive him. And Sil nearly passed out from shock and fear.

Every single one of his assumptions about the situation was dead wrong.

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