14: Blind Spot

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There was a knock on the door which, given the nature of spaceships, would have been quite a heavy thump on the other side. My family’s little cabin had an airlock in the outside corridor, so they didn’t suit up before Glath opened said door and peeked into the room.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but Charlie, we got her.”

“Alive or dead?” I asked.

“Presumably alive. They made sure she got inside the gun before disconnecting it, so…”

“She went for the gun, then?” Of all our little traps, that was the most disheartening one for the shyr to fall for. That meant that she had indeed been trying to kill us all, along with the crew of the Red Four. Filling the ship with shyr-traps hadn’t been easy; the other aljik spoke of shyr like they were hyperintelligent all-seeing masters of stealth, and given how she’d somehow managed to sneak onto my ship in open space, it wasn’t hard to believe it. But my family had outsmarted her once before, and no matter how smart or how stealthy she was, she could only be in one place at once. Have enough plans in effect at the same time, some of them traps and most of them important advances that she’d want to know about, and she can only follow so much.

“They haven’t had a chance to interrogate her,” Glath pointed out. “Maybe she was in the gun for some non-violent reason.”

“What nonviolent reason could there be?”

Glath didn’t have an answer for that.

“Will she be alright if we leave here there for a bit?”

“Yes. Even without power, the passive heat systems will hold up for a long time, and there’s plenty of air in there for a single shyr. We can, as you say, deal with her later.”

“Good. Have the crew sweep the entire ship, every nook and cranny, for any destructive little surprises that she might have left behind. I wouldn’t put it past her to have somehow rigged the ship to blow up if she isn’t on board to stop it.”

“I’ll relay the command.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Kate cut in, “but are you… how do I put this… are you a big swarm of alien spiders?”

“It’s obviously a big swarm of alien spiders!” Keith shrieked from well over the other side of the room. “Look at it!”

“We can’t assume that,” Kate said. “He may be some other being who happens to be completely covered in alien spiders.”

“No, I am a big swarm of spiders,” Glath said.

“Fascinating.”

Oh, no; I recognised that look in Kate’s eyes. That was the look she got before telling someone about slime molds for an hour. The Biologist Look.

Clearly torn between curiosity and the desire not to be rude, she drifted forward. She reached a hand out and laid it on Glath’s shoulder. Her earlier handshake had been flinching and reluctant, but now that she seemed to have decided that I was okay and Glath wasn’t a threat, her eyes burned with curiosity. Obligingly, Glath let a few spiders crawl onto her hand; she pulled her hand away to look at them closer. Once her hand was a couple of feet away from the main swarm the spiders stopped behaving in their normal orderly, structured fashion and started crawling about in a panic; she moved her hand closer to Glath, and they behaved themselves again.

“Fascinating,” she whispered.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” I groaned. This was going to take a while.

———————————–

Sil was confident that if he was patient enough, and alert at once, there would be a magical moment where somebody would plainly and straightforwardly explain to him what the fuck was going on on his own ship.

With that in mind, it was a considerable relief when the second escape-pod-turned-docking-pod docked with the Red Four, and the people who stepped out of it were a) aljik (he’d been beginning to wonder whether the ship even had an aljik crew or it was all some sort of elaborate ruse), and b) contained a dohl.

“Captain,” he said, with a respectful head-tilt that made Sil feel sane for the first time since encountering their alien hijackers. “Permission to come aboard?”

“Granted,” Sil said, perhaps a little too quickly and eagerly to be properly dignified. The much older dohl accompanied by a rudimentary honour guard of two beat-up looking tahl and no kel at all, stepped onto the Red Four.

“Captain Sil,” Sil introduced himself, although it still felt strange and unfamiliar to call himself captain, especially to a clearly more senior and experienced one.

“Ain,” said the other dohl. Not ‘Captain Ain’. So the captain must still be aboard the Oval Nine. Sil wondered how many —

Wait. He vaguely recalled that name. From before his time, of course, but still.

“The rogue?” Sil automatically shrank back.

“Of course,” Ain said placidly. “Who else would I be?”

So some of the rogue Princess’ crew had survived her final battle, and since the Oval Nine was very definitely one of Tatik’s ships, must have been reintegrated into the nest instead of executed. That made sense; they wouldn’t have been able to make it to another nest and find another Queen in whatever escape pods they managed to flee the Stardancer in. In fact, that was the only thing that made any sense – why else would they have the alien that Sil’s aliens had been tracking the rogue Princess to find?

“Is this your first patrol, kid?” Ain asked.

Sil wilted a little. It was that obvious, huh? But he couldn’t exactly lie. “… Yes.”

“Well, you’ve sure picked an interesting scenario to drive a patrol into. Don’t worry. We’ll keep you safe.”

Sil just flicked his wings miserably. The idea that he’d picked this situation to drive into was utterly ridiculous. Nobody in their right minds would choose to be here.

———————-

“I’m so glad we chose to come out here,” Kate said, turning one of Glath’s ‘hands’ over in her own. “Imagine never seeing any of this.”

“Also, you found me,” I felt the need to cut in, looking up from the boys who hadn’t left my embrace for the past ten minutes.

“Yes, that too, thank goodness you’re safe,” she said, eyes not leaving Glath’s hand. “It’s so detailed! Look at how they move… but you don’t need that structure and musculature, right? Isn’t it actually harder to do this than just be a swarm of spiders?”

“It is difficult to just be a swarm of spiders,” Glath explained. “We imitate. It is what we are designed to do. It’s much easier to have my components follow a pattern set by something I have observed and learned to understand rather than create a pattern of their own from nothing, even if the latter is more physically efficient.”

“Fascinating! I’m missing a lot of details here, because on the surface, that doesn’t seem evolutionarily stable.”

“I am not the product of evolution. I mean, not directly. I was created for purpose, although I have to assume that my creators evolved.”

“For purpose?”

“To imitate, and understand.” Glath launched into an explanation of his origins while she continued to inspect him. After a while, Derek mustered the courage to drift over for a closer look too, though he didn’t touch Glath.

“And the aljik?” Kate asked Glath and me once she’d been filled in on Glath’s life story. “If we’re going to save them, I need to understand what the problem is, and I’d rather have a basis of information before I go and talk with them. We haven’t had a chance to learn very much, at least not safely.”

“The aljik,” I said, “are weird as fuck. Did the shyr who grabbed you trade you anything for your help?”

Keith tapped the big glass thing of weird cheese. “This thing. It makes human food.”

“She traded you food? She threatened to starve you if you didn’t help?” Maybe I should just leave her to suffocate in space after all.

“It would be one way to ensure acceptance of the contract,” Glath said. “You refused your trade, and caused a lot of complications.”

“Only for the aljik. On our side, it’s a fucking terrible idea. If you coerce cooperation from someone by threatening them with death, you have absolutely no reason to expect them not to turn on you. If Nemo’s approach with me had been ‘help us or starve’, I sure as hell wouldn’t have helped for one second longer than I had to. How could that shyr possibly be surprised that they took her ship? Awful trade!” But a very aljik one. It wasn’t that unlike the trade that Nemo had made with the drakes, really.

“Fascinating, isn’t it?” Kate asked. “It really makes you wonder how stupid we are.”

“… What?”

“I mean, the aljik are a spacefaring race. One that’s vastly technologically superior to our own. I’m not sure how long it took them to get to space, or even if the speed of technological development could be considered a valid measure of intelligence, but they are a highly intelligent, highly competent species. And yet any human can look at anything to do with their approach to interspecies interaction and see that it’s massively flawed in ways that they don’t seem to notice or understand. Makes you wonder what we don’t notice or understand about the way we do things. I wonder if, if you took an aljik to Earth, they’d say ‘what do you mean you’re having difficulty with climate change?’ and come up with a feasible and actionable solution within three minutes.”

“I think that’s a bit different than something as simple as social — ”

“Is it? How would we know? Relativity is far, far simpler than basic social interactions, yet humans train for years to understand relativity and often use stories of imaginary social interactions to comprehend it, because social relationships come naturally to us. Put a baby in any group of people and as it grows up it’ll teach itself about them. We took many centuries to develop complex math, let alone physics, despite how much simpler they are.”

“I guess,” I said. I wasn’t sure I really understood what Kate was on about, nor did I particularly care. I was more worried about the promise I’d made to my boys. I was already regretting it; why the fuck had I agreed to let them walk into more danger, to keep getting entangled with this nightmare of an aljik situation?

I already knew the answer to that, though. I wasn’t certain I’d be able to stop them. Breaking my promise to my crew and trying to sneak us all safely home would require the cooperation of all four of us, and I wasn’t sure how much Derek would be able to deceive the aljik even if he wanted to. It didn’t matter that Kate would back up my decision to take them home; if Derek and Kieth got it into their heads to run away and save an alien kingdom or whatever, they’d be in a lot more danger than if I went with them.

Besides, I hadn’t seen them for so long. I didn’t even know who they were now, and they didn’t know who I was now; we’d have to get to know each other all over again. I didn’t have the heart for the first thing I did to them to be forbidding them from something to big.

“So,” Kate said. “Tell me about the aljik.”

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