9: Encounter

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“You had those beasts down there hide it in their labyrinth, didn’t you?” Queen Tatik asked.

Her sister flicked her arms in a dismissive gesture. “Feel free to ask them. But I’d be careful, if I were you. You wouldn’t want to destroy it accidentally with heavy weaponry, meaning that if you end up in a physical conflict… well, a labyrinth isn’t a good place to fight drakes.”

Tatik doubted that that would be a problem. Small hand weapons would surely be enough to give them an edge over the drakes, who had to lack both numbers and access to endless troves of modern weaponry. “We could set the forest ablaze, if it came to it.”

“You think that a species that depends on building vast labyrinths in thick forests and caring for trees in them to survive doesn’t have any defense against fire? Either way, be careful. You wouldn’t want to destroy the Jewel.”

“I’m sure it could handle a little fire.”

“Are you sure? Are you really sure?”

So it wasn’t with the drakes, then, or her sister wouldn’t be trying to goad her into wasting time with them. Unless that was a double bluff. She’d have to await more information.

Every tunnel and cavern of the pitiful little nest below had been excavated, every wall scraped and examined and the dirt sifted. Tatik was beginning to wonder I the Crown Jewel was down there at all, but it definitely wasn’t on her sister or in the ruins of the Stardancer, and there simply wasn’t anywhere else that she could have put it. Even she wouldn’t have been so wildly irresponsible as to leave it with the Queenless dregs she’d escaped the planet with; they would turn it over to whatever Queen they could find to pledge loyalty to, which would either be Tatik herself or give one of the Empire’s neighbours a secret weapon, should they wish to invade.

There was the obvious, option, of course. The Crown Jewel wasn’t invulnerable, and the rogue had gone through a lot with it. It could have been broken so easily, at so many points.

Tatik turned to her sister, ready to threaten her with the worst thing that she could think of if the Jewel couldn’t be recovered. But they both knew that she was rather stuck there. After all, this would already end with her execution. What more could Tatik do to her, other than choose how painful it would be?

The rogue cocked her head. “Problem, dear sister?”

————————

“It’s not responding to lights, either?” I asked Kit.

“Not to lights, not to comms, not to any ship movements that we’ve tried.”

I frowned at the space squid on the screen. It floated there, not doing anything in particular. As always. “What the fuck does it want?”

“What do ketestri ever want? They are inscrutible.”

“To you. I will scrute it.” Our shared language didn’t translate ‘scrute’ all that well, the way of turning words into verbs in the aljik language being a little fiddly, but whatever. It had hung around on the prison ship and placidly made space suits for everyone without complaint, even though it could apparently magically teleport or phase or something I didn’t understand. I wasn’t sure what crime it had committed to even get onto the prison ship, or if it understood it to be a crime, given that the aljik were so gung-ho about enforcing their ‘law’ on everyone within their Empire when they could barely communicate cross-species. It had vanished in the Stardancer’s final jump sequence, then showed up to wreak havoc on a bunch of Empire ships to help us, specifically, leave the planet, then vanished again and not helped at all in the actual launch, meaning we’d lost Captain Nemo getting out alive. And now it was here. Just… following us. Hanging out. Making no attempt to communicate, or respond to our communications, or do anything, really.

“What the fuck do you want?” I asked the image on the screen. Briefly, I entertained the idea of trying to convince the crew that we needed to go to Jupiter to surgically implant it with one of their translators, like they’d done to their aljik invaders and human captives. But not even the crew would buy that reasoning. How would the Jupiterians even know how to do it, without any ketestri test subjects? And how would we restrain something like that for surgery? Also, something like that would probably make the ketestri feel a lot less helpful towards us and, after what it’d done to the previous owners of our ship, that wouldn’t be ideal. Yeah… that excuse wouldn’t fly, so far as reasons to get close to Earth.

Besides, I’d broken through this thing’s disinterest and unresponsiveness before. I could do it again.

“We need a game,” I said.

“A game?”

“It likes playing games. That’s how I got it to come out of its shell the first time.”

“Ketestri do not have shells.”

“I mean, that’s how I got it communicating. We need to come up with a game that it can play with us. That’ll get it interacting, I’m sure of it.”

“Okay. How?”

“… I have no idea.”

———————-

“There’s nothing here,” Sil told the alien. Again. But he knew he wouldn’t be listened to. It didn’t matter how much he explained that Queen Tatik had taken the wreck of the Stardancer, that any debris had had plenty of time to drift too far away from the site to be easily spotted on any of their equipment, that nothing would be intact after being irradiated in space for so long. It didn’t matter.

“Scan again,” the alien said, the one who actually talked to them. “There has to be something.”

“It’s been so long; out here, it – ”

“There has to be something! We didn’t come out here to find nothing! There’s something here, and we’re staying until we find it.”

“I’ll relay the order,” Sil said, wearily.

——————————-

We really did need to move.

I wasn’t sure where we should move, or what it could accomplish, but I was playing Queen for a very restless band of aljik who were looking at me to save their empire and shyr agent of unknown loyalties who was pretending to want the same thing, so I had to at least look like I was following a plan. Unfortunately, nobody in my crew seemed to know much about where anything actually was, and our little ship did not have the navigation abilities of the Stardancer, so unless I wanted to go to the planet we’d so recently escaped from (I didn’t) or the heart planet (I definitely didn’t), even finding a destination was a difficult prospect.

“Can we recover information from the Stardancer?”

“The wreck would’ve almost certainly been recovered by Queen Tatik,” Kit explained to me. “Unless you want to execute a raid on the heart planet…”

“She might have missed something. We could check.”

“It won’t hurt to check the area. But any debris would’ve travelled pretty far away by now.”

Good. Perfect. We could spend some time scanning for it while I come up with a way to get home. “Let’s have a look.”

So we made preparations, and jumped to the area where we’d dumped the Stardancer. To another field of deep, peaceful, empty space.

It wasn’t empty.

————————

“Captain?” Skep called. “Something’s on the scans.”

A while ago, Sil might have responded to such news with excitement. He might’ve thought, ‘oh, good, it might be whatever we’re looking for! We’ve succeeded!’ He might have experienced a brief moment of happiness before learning the truth.

He was too experienced for that now. The fear was immediate. “What is it?”

“Ship, entering the system. Aljik… Out-Western Empire! Clean codes, all normal. It’s one of ours! Moon class! Called the Oval Nine.”

Moon class? They were orbit-specialist ships, not long distance patrol vehicles. What was it doing all the way out here? Was the Empire so bad off for ships that they were sending Moon ships as lookouts to important sites? (And the fact that they were keeping watch here at all… did that mean that something important actually was still out here?)

“We’ll have to bluff them,” Sil said. “If they ask any complicated questions, direct them straight to me.”

“Bluff? But sir, this is our rescue! They could – ”

Seriously, atil could be dense sometimes. “What do you think happened to the previous crew of that Lancer ship that the alien destroyed to take ours? They didn’t bring any aboard.”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Me neither. Which raises some interesting questions, doesn’t it? Most pressingly, if they decide they want the Oval Nine and force the Red Four into a conflict, what’s going to happen to us? If we let that ship know that anything’s amiss, either they’re going to attack us to recover what crew they can, or our aliens are going to attack them to keep them quiet. And one ship’s going to come out of that battle. I don’t know about you, but so far as I’m concerned, the death of this crew or of that crew are both bad outcomes. So bluff, send them through to me as soon as their questions get tricky, and hope to the heart that our aliens don’t decide they like the look of that ship better than ours.”

——————

“There’s a ship,” an atil at the controls told me, as if I couldn’t see it for myself on the screen. “Out-Western Empire, obviously. Patrol class… the Red Four.”

“Well, fuck.” Queen Tatik had the place under surveillance. Of course she did. She had to know that we had the Crown Jewel by now, since Nemo didn’t and there was no one else she could’ve handed it off to. She was probably keeping an eye on any location that she thought there was any chance we might return to, though what she could’ve thought we wanted here, I had no idea. I’d just come here to try to buy some time.

“If we jump away, they can follow us, right?”

“Yes. It would take some time, but… ”

“But we aren’t in a position to begin an endless chase. They have backup ships and fuel supplies and we don’t.” Shit. Fuck. We’d never gotten through a firefight without some serious slicing up, and I wasn’t sure how much slicing up this little ship could take. Especially since we had no engineers.

“What happens now?” I asked. “Can we bluff our way out of this?”

“Perhaps,” Kit said, coming up next to me. “They might be here for some reason unrelated to us, perhaps searching for more wreckage or something. They might not have heard that this is a captured ship. They might not know who we are.”

My reading of aljik body language gets better every day. I could tell that he didn’t believe it.

——————

“Any communication?” Sil asked. He could hear the aliens coming up the ship tunnel, hands thundering clumsily against grab rails like they were new to space travel. Maybe they were.

“Nothing. They might be expecting us to make contact, if they think we’re on patrol.”

Possibly. The crew of the Oval Nine very likely wouldn’t know the border patrol routes. “Greet them as if we are, but don’t outright claim we’re on a route. Maybe they won’t ask questions and we can pass each other by without incident.” The aliens were entering the room behind him; reluctantly, Sil turned to face them, hoping he wouldn’t have to talk them down from a battle.

——————-

“They generally aren’t suspicious of us,” Kit says, sounding surprised. “Or if they are, they’re playing dumb. They’re sending standard greetings and queries, no demand to power down or prepare for boarding.”

“You’re saying we just happened to run into a patrol?”

“Looks like it. Unlikely, but – ”

“Um,” Lln cuts in from the engineering console. “I think I’m using this right, uh…”

“What is it, Lln?”

“The heat signatures on the Red Four. They’re very low.”

“What does that mean?” I look to Kit. He looks baffled.

“Um,” Lln says again. “The main engines? They’re, uh. Pretty cold. Jump drives, too.”

“The ship’s been stationary for a while,” Kit says, understanding. “That’s weird for a patrol ship, unless they’re laying in wait for someone.”

“So they are just playing dumb,” I said.

“Unless there’s coincidentally somebody else that they’re expecting to come through here, yes.”

“Well, we can play dumb, too. What’s some reason that a ship like ours would be here?”

“This is a Moon class ship. It’s better for orbital work. I suppose that it could be used if there was more wreckage that Queen Tatik wanted collected out here. It’s not a perfect choice for it, but if the fleet was stretched thin…”

“Good enough. If they ask, pretend that.”

—————–

Sil explained to the aliens what the Oval Nine was doing. Only one of the aliens ever spoke to the aljik directly, but he’d seen them talk to each other enough to pick up swearing. And they were doing a lot of swearing.

“Could it be that Queen Tatik is looking for the same thing that you’re looking for?” he summoned the courage to ask.

“No way to know,” was the eventual response. “But if what we want out here is out here, we can’t let her find it.”

Great. He was probably going to die in a battle over something that probably wasn’t even out here, and he didn’t even know what it was. He moved to a console to subtly alert the tahl: prepare for possible battle.

—————–

“They’re asking a lot of details about what we want,” Kit reported. “Probably trying to catch us outright in a lie or something.”

“Fuck. Why? If they know who we are, why not just get on with things? Why all the pressing first?”

“I don’t know. If they’re here for us, they have the authority to just attack. Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Well, it’s not always efficient to report everything to a Queen directly. If they’re not supposed to be here, and came out here to ambush us, they might need the pretext before attacking.”

“Why would they do that? There’s no reason for them to be here unless Queen Tatik is covering every possible location looking for us. They couldn’t know we’d be here. We didn’t know we’d be here.”

“I don’t know,” Kit said. “I just don’t know.”

I frowned at the screen. What the fuck was going on?

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