12: Face to face

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We docked. The shuttle door opened. And there they were.

Three humans, wearing space suits that looked rather more like human space suits than the ones the ketestri had made for me. One adult, two children. I drifted out of the pod, and both of my sons crashed straight into me, wrapping their arms around me.

“Mum!”

“”Boys! It’s okay now, it’s okay.” I wanted so much to touch them, but I couldn’t feel them through the rigid suits.

“What happened to you? You’re hurt!”

“I’m fine!”

“Arm!”

Oh, that. “It’s alright, Derek, I’ve got another one.”

“You look like shit, Champers,” Kate chimed in.

“Well, fuck you too, Kate.”

Kieth, my youngest, reached up to take his helmet off, only for Kate to snap, “Suits on outside our quarters!”

“But Mum’s not wearing one!”

“Your mother is an adult and if she wants to possibly poison her lungs breathing random alien atmospheres then that’s her business, but you have good strong lungs and blood that should stay that way as long as possible, thank you very much.”

“Your aunt’s probably right,” I agreed. “The air pressure out here is a bit low, and I have no idea what the machines or aliens or whatever might be giving off.”

“Why aren’t you in a space suit, then?”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve had a space suit that I’d trust to be airtight.”

“Ah!” Kieth squealed, pushing away from me and across the room. He pointed behind me. “Monster!”

Shit! The shyr! I spun around, ready to fight, but there was nobody there except Glath, climbing out of the escape pod. I turned back to from at Kieth quizzically. “Sweetie?”

“Spider monster!”

Oh. Right. “This is Glath. He’s a friend.”

“Glath,” Kate said.

“Yeah. I mean, he’s name’s actually longer than that, but humans can’t pronounce it.”

Glath stepped forward (almost realistically appearing to be walking under gravity, which I guess is something that you can do when you’re a bunch of flying spiders) and offered his hand to Kate. “Pleased to meet you.”

After a brief moment of hesitation, Kate shook his hand. “Uh, likewise.” She let go very quickly.

“Go and talk with your family,” Glath said to me. “I’ll make sure that nobody tries anything… rash.”

I noticed, for the first time, that there were a lot of aljik staring at us. A man, either a dohl or a ket, I’d never been able to tell them apart, and some atil. And a lot of tahl. Big, imposing tahl. Staring.

Ah. We were in serious trouble if they actually decided to do anything, weren’t we.

“We haven’t told them what planet we’re from,” Kate said as we headed down the corridor towards their quarters. “We didn’t want to give them more reasons to attack us.”

“Invading their ship wasn’t enough of a reason?”

“They’ve been worried that we have dangerous tricks up our sleeves, and that attacking us would get everyone killed. But if they think we’re a danger to their Empire, I don’t think that’ll matter very much.”

Their quarters turned out to be, well, a room. The main difference between it and the room I’d claimed on my ship was that theirs was chock full of stuff. Alien electronics, some weirdly shaped space suits that looked like they were probably for some sort of aljik although it was hard to know which caste when they were just piled into a corner, and a huge transparent tub full of what looked like cottage cheese. As son as Kate had the door closed, the boys started pulling their space suits off.

They’d grown. A lot. How old were they now? How long had we been apart? I dashed forward to sweep them up in a hug, and Derek turned to look at me. And I froze.

I stared at his face, not entirely sure of what I was looking at. Only certain that I was going to kill that shyr, and Queen Tatik, and everybody else involved in the chain of command that had kidnapped my family and done this to my son.

—————————————–

Kerlin’s head hurt. She opened her eyes to the sight of the smooth wall of the inside of a spaceship.

Fuck.

“Good.”

The word was unfamiliar, but Kerlin grasped the meaning. No, not unfamiliar – the sounds were similar to something she’d heard before, a background chatter she’d known for a long time. Aljik. Of course.

Sluggishly, she struggled to her feet and turned to face the speaker. A Princess, flanked by a couple of tahl guards, but not the one who’d cheated Kerlin and her fellow explorers. This had to be Tatik, so a Queen, then. Kerlin was even less inclined to care about the difference than she would’ve been under normal circumstances.

“We were hoping you’d just fuck off,” she said.

“Believe me, little drake, we’d love to. Unfortunately, my dear sister left something incredibly precious on that planet of yours, and I intend to find it.”

“She didn’t leave anything with us,” Kerlin said. There was something wrong with her speech. Something off with how her mouth shaped the syllables, how she automatically tried to move her body to express herself. Probably an effect of whatever they’d drugged her with.

Her head hurt.

“Hmm, yes, I suspected as much. And it’d be very difficult for you to lie to me right now, I think. But you and your friends are going to help me find it.”

“Or what? You’ll kill us?”

“If necessary. I don’t think it would be all that hard to do so. But I’d really rather avoid potentially damaging it. So it’s probably a lot easier to do this the traditional way.” She cocked her head. “Let’s talk about what you’ll accept in exchange for your services.”

——————————————-

Derek was missing a big patch of hair on the right side of his head. He was also missing a big patch of head. A patch of metal a few centimetres in diameter gleamed above his brow, skin growing over the edges of it. It was impossible to tell how far the metal extended below the skin.

He had turned to look at me, in the sense of gauging where my body was in relation to his. He made no attempt to meet my eyes.

“Sweetheart? What did they do to you?” I looked to Kate, pulling her own helmet off to reveal sweaty, tangled hair and deeply shadowed eyes. “What did they do to him?”

“It’s some sort of translator chip, to let him talk with the aljik.”

“The Jupiterians did this.”

She seemed surprised that I knew that much. “Uh, yeah.”

I pulled him into a hug, and Kieth, who looked like he was about to cry again. “Oh, sweetie. We’ll fix this.” The chips were removable, I knew that; in the Singers in Light story, they’d been removed from most of the captured humans. But then, those had been chips designed to talk human-to-Jupiterian, and the Jupiterians weren’t naturally any better at interspecies communication than the aljik; if they were, they wouldn’t have had to capture and experiment on countless aljik soldiers to establish communication in the first place. Would a Jupiterian-made human-to-aljik device work as smoothly? Even if it did, the story didn’t specify what shape the humans were in afterwards; even I could see that a lot of skull had been removed for the implant. The implant couldn’t be that big, could it? Which suggested that the surgeons hadn’t been all that concerned about peripheral damage. How much damage had they done to my baby’s head?

The humans in the story had been competent and functional, event he one who kept the implant. Derek, although I was now realising that he was a lot less chatty than his usual self, was clearly aware and functional, able to talk and negotiate with the aljik, able to take his own space suit off and knowing when he was in an environment where that was a good thing to do; he knew who I was. He was probably fine, there was no reason to think he wasn’t fine.

Just a big piece of metal in his head, and no attempt to look me in the eyes.

I let go of my boys and reached instead for his chin, tilting his face up to look at mine. He didn’t avoid my gaze in any way, he just looked at my face as if it were a painting. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly and that, for some reason, seemed to gain his attention, but instead of looking to my chest at the sound, he looked to my shoulders. I lowered my arm, and his eyes were on my fingertips.

And I realised that I recognised this sort of behaviour. I was looked at like this every single day, by aljik.

He was looking for aljik body language cues and expressions, not human ones.

“Champers,” Kate said.

“Mm?”

“You’re absolutely covered in scars and your arm is totally fucked up.”

“Mm? Yeah. I got into a fight.”

“A fight?”

“Well, multiple fights. Only one that permanently fucked up the arm, though.” I thought about that. “Okay, technically two that permanently fucked up the arm, but the later one rendered the former one irrelevant. It’s not important.” I looked Kieth over carefully, but found no signs of invasive alien brain surgery on him.

“And now you’re the captain of that other ship?”

“Yes.”

“Can you trust them not to betray you and shoot us down while you’re here?”

“Absolutely. I’m their Queen.”

“You’re… what? How? Don’t they have a strict biological caste system?”

“A lot of people made several desperate decisions in a row and this is just kind of where we are now. That doesn’t matter; what I want to know is, how the hell did you guys end up out here? I could’ve been anyone, but eight billion people on Earth and they happened to grab my family? No way.”

“Location,” Kate said. “Apparently they wanted members of your ‘nest’, so they looked for people in the same location. They got the specific area you were picked up in from the Jupiterians, and it wasn’t exactly overpopulated.”

“It was out in the fucking desert. It wasn’t populated at all. What were you guys doing out there?”

“Is that a trick question? My sister goes missing, presumed dead, off in the desert, and you want to know why I was hanging around her last known location? I didn’t usually bring the boys; clearly, I should’ve left them behind this ti – ”

“We wanted to go,” Kieth said quietly into my waist, his arms wrapped around me in the strongest hug he could manage. “We made her take us.”

“And I’d started giving in. We’d been going together for a bit, and I guess we were the only people who ever went to that part of the desert. You were right, by the way; the stars really are much more beautiful from out there.”

“I know, right? I would have aced that photography assignment.”

—————————-

I had not spent much time on Moon class ships. My duties, like many of my kind, took place mostly on the heart planet or on destinations reached on our Lancers. I had, of course, taken great care to familiarise myself with the operations of a Moon class ship as quickly as possible after infiltration.

Like most Empire ships, the Oval Nine was built on a standard design that had later been modified for its purpose. It possessed an array of basic defensive weaponry, not unlike the nearby patrol ship, all of which was wired through one of several safety switches designed to lock down the weapons against remote access. This wiring had been added before the construction of the hull, relatively early in the construction process, and currently every switch was activated and guarded by enough people that it would be impossible to activate any attached weaponry without raising an alarm.

This system is part of an old design, favoured in Queen Anta’s day, when remote attack was more reasonable. Modern digital security systems make unauthorised remote control of weaponry a lot more difficult, and as such, it is no longer considered as vital as it once was. A vestigial legacy mechanism still preserved within the designs of our ships. It actually predates the creation of Moon class ships.

Which means that Moon class modifications added to the ship after hull construction are not necessarily built into the system. When the large planet-facing weapons designed for orbital bombardment were added to the Moon class design, they weren’t wired through that system.

And these pirates, these ship thieves, know nothing about the ship they have taken.

It’s not a fast or delicate weapon. In a normal firefight, it would have little utility, unable to keep up with the maneuvring of a spaceship. But a surprise attack, one ‘weaponless’ down ship to another? If I am careful, I can eliminate the human threat to the Empire in one single shot.

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