15: Overview

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“They have strict biological castes,” I explained. “Like ants or bees. Everyone has their own job, very little crossover.”

“So not really like ants and bees,” Kate said. “Ants have castes that are naturally better equipped for certain jobs, but they’ll all do what needs doing. If you grow ants in a farm with nobody to fight or guard against, the soldiers and the extra queens (assuming they’re not the kind that kills extra queens who won’t leave) will do the same work as the workers. And workers, of course, will guard and fight if there are no stronger soldiers to protect them. And bees don’t really have castes except for having a breeding queen. Male and female bees are different but the non-queen girls do everything.”

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Not like ants or bees. The aljik are pretty entrenched in their roles, in my experience. It took me forever to convince my dohl that they could do the jobs of kel since we didn’t have any kel.”

“Tell me about the castes.”

“Right. First up, there’s the atil. The most numerous caste, those little pale guys with flint on their faces. They do cleaning and maintenance and hauling stuff, and a lot of engineering and piloting tasks, although they insist they don’t do engineering.”

“Probably a translation issue,” Kate said. “I’m sure that Glath here had to approximate as best he could when choosing English terms for aljik ones. Presumably, whatever range of tasks they have a word for that can only really be translated to ‘engineering’ doesn’t overlap exactly with our conception of engineering. Right, Glath?”

“I don’t know a lot about human culture,” Glath said apologetically. “I only had the dictionaries to work with.”

“Atil tend to be sweethearts, in my experience.”

“Sweethearts?”

“Yeah. Non-confrontational. Accommodating. Go out of their way to help people. Then you’ve got the tahl; the big red ones. They’re soldiers. I haven’t seen them do very much except fight, guard and haul stuff. They’re the strongest, except for probably the Princesses, so they carry a lot of — ”

“The Princesses?” Keith asked. “What’s their aljik name?”

“They – huh. Actually, I have no idea. It’s just never come up, somehow?”

“Salia,” Derek said, staring at a wall.

“Salia. Huh. How about that. What about Queens? Everyone refers to them differently, so I assume they have a different name.”

“Salinova.”

“Huh. Anyway, the tahl are probably the strongest except for them. I don’t know a whole lot about them, to be honest, which is weird because I did work with them a fair bit when we were stranded on that planet.”

“You were stranded on a planet?”

“Yeah. It was a whole thing, I’ll tell you about it later. Anyway, they’re both female castes, although I have no idea how the aljik know that since they’re sterile and look nothing like Princesses and the aljik don’t seem all that familiar with surgery, Jupiterian help notwithstanding. But then they do eat their dead so I guess they’ve dissected a lot of bodies.”

“How common are the soldiers?” Kate asked. “What proportion of the population?”

“I have no idea. I was on a rebel starship, I don’t think the populations were representative.” I looked to Glath.

“Between five and twenty per cent, perhaps,” Glath said. “It varies with need.”

“Need?”

“The incubation conditions determine which female caste an egg laid by a Queen will develop into.”

“That’s how they’re sure they’re female, then,” Kate said thoughtfully, more to herself than to me, and I felt like an idiot. I knew that; Lln had explained it to me on the planet. A Queen’s eggs can become any female caste, and an ahlda’s eggs were male; dohl if fertile, kel if not. I was making myself look like an idiot in front of my family.

“A-anyway,” I said, “there are two male castes — dohl and kel. They look exactly the same to me. They’re not laid by Queens, but by another caste, ahlda, who I’ll get into in a moment. Dohl are fertile; they act as generals and attendants and high status ones mate with the queen. The captain of this ship is a dohl.”

“Our dear Captain Sil,” Kate said. “Good to know.”

“Kel are engineers. They build things and maintain and repair the ships, at least the parts of the ships that the atil don’t. And the thing about these four castes – the atil, the tahl, the dohl and the kel – is that they’re all bound to a Queen. It’s something deep in their psyche. They’ll obey whoever’s in charge of their nest, and if they don’t like her, they’ll leave and find a new nest, or leave with a Princess to establish a new one. The idea of these aljik acting independently of a Queen long-term, without the intention of finding one, is something that none of them seem interested in or even able to really envision. That’s what lead to our current situation – without the rogue Princess in the picture (and following her was already a somewhat radical deviation from the norm), my crew’s only options were to go back to Tatik and hope she accepted them instead of executing them, or to fly off to another nest, neither of which would’ve helped solve the problem they left to solve in the first place. Our Princess had already declared me a Princess and there was some – well, it’s really complicated, but basically I’m the closest thing to a Queen that’s available and socially I’m close enough, for now. I have no idea how to hold the crew together long-term, though. I don’t actually know how to be an aljik Queen.”

“Tell me about the Queens,” Kate said.

“They’re born Princesses – salia, I guess – in the nest, from eggs laid by a Queen the same as any female aljik. I know that several can be born at a time, because Tatik and the rogue Princess grew up together. They grow up practicing their social skills and management skills and all that; I don’t know whether Princesses actually do any work in a nest or not. I assume so? But a nest can’t handle multiple mature Queens. Because of the psychology of the other aljik, the way they have full loyalty to a single Queen but it can turn into full loyalty to a different Queen with enough proximity and charisma, having multiple Queens in one nest would just be way too unstable. So when the Princesses mature, they either need to take over the nest entirely, or sway what aljik they can to their side and leave with them to start a new nest.”

“Surely taking over the nest would be massively destructive?” Kate asked. “A civil war every generation?”

“They have a special ritual for it. The Regency fight.”

“This is the thing that the rogue cheated in.”

“You know about that.”

“The shyr who abducted us had very strong opinions about it.”

“All the aljik seem to. The ritual is incredibly sacred. When a Queen declared a Regency fight, they have a specified fight in a specified arena to the death, with no interference from other aljik. That way, they can resolve the nest ownership question without decimating the population in a civil war.”

“And no other aljik kill Queens?”

“Of the castes we’ve talked about so far, I don’t think they’d be able to. No foreign aljik would be able to get that close to an unguarded Queen; with the length of time it would take to infiltrate a nest to that degree, spending that long that close to a Queen and her attendants, they’d definitely fall under the Queen’s power. But the other two castes, the shyr and the ahlda, are different. My crew call the shyr spies and assassins, they talk of them like they kill Queens. But I don’t think that that actually happens very often, because if it did, there wouldn’t be any Queens left.” A shyr had somehow snuck onto my ship in open space and paralysed me in a corridor before I’d even noticed it. If they were out there trying to kill Queens, they’d be succeeding at killing Queens.

“And they wouldn’t fall under their influence? The shyr that abducted us was very definitely loyal to Tatik.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know a whole lot about them. But the way my crew talks about them… I think they’re more… able to act independently? I mean, I might be wrong. Queens send them on missions and stuff, and they do those missions, so maybe they are the same as the other aljik, but the other aljik don’t seem to understand how their loyalty works, which makes me think it’s different.”

“And what about the ahlda?”

“I don’t know shit about the ahlda. I’ve never spoken to one, and my crew can’t seem to explain what they’re like all that well.”

“Ahlda are flighty and easily distracted,” Glath said. “I’m not sure how accurate Charlie’s theory about shy loyalty is, but the ahlda truly have no nest loyalty. They flit between nests based on whims that are difficult to understand, tending towards more prosperous and impressive nests.”

“A whole caste of tourists,” Kate said drily.

“The ahdla are the problem that the aljik are facing,” Glath said. “The numbers of ahlda arriving at Tatik’s nest, as well as neighbouring nests, has been declining for generations. The same amount are being born, so nobody’s sure what’s happening. But if the population of ahlda visitors falls enough, then the aljik will die out.”

“Because the ahlda are where the men come from,’ I explain before Kate can ask. “They lay male eggs in the nests they stay in. Kel and dohl.”

“Oh!” Keith said. “Like pollen!”

I frowned at him, a little bundle of wide-eyed enthusiasm that wouldn’t leave my side. “Pollen?”

“Yeah! You know, like how a flower makes pollen? Like if the nest is a bush or a tree or something. It can’t make seeds by itself because the seeds need dads. So pollen gets carried by bees or blown on the wind or whatever from one tree to the next so it can make seeds.”

“Then aren’t the ahlda like the bees or the wind?” Derek asked, frowning at his little brother.

“Like pollen,” Kate said thoughtfully. “Hmm.”

“I know that face,” I said. “That’s your Figuring Stuff Out face. You’ve figured something out.”

“Maybe. I need to talk to the aljik first. I need to understand better how this all works, and how their empires work. Because with what I know so far, the Out-Western Aljik Empire simply does not make any biological sense.”

————————————-

“Fertilisers?” Queen Tatik asked, staring at the drake. In exchange for the most important artefact in the Empire, it wanted… fertilisers?

“The planet is serviceable,” the drake explained, “but we are on a razor’s edge so far as the timing is concerned. Our colony would be much better set up for success with large volumes of some very specific nutrients to strengthen and nurture our core trees and to amend the soil in strategic nearby locations for our children’s labyrinths. We need — ”

“Yes, yes,” she said, “that’s very likely doable. I will bring in a specialist to ask what specifically you need and how much and figure out if we have it. There’ll be a token exchange to confirm your services, and you’ll get the bulk of it after you bring me the artefact.” Then she turned abruptly and left to find a dohl to track down the right kel who might know some atil farmers who would know about fertilisers. Oh, she couldn’t wait to tell her sister about this. She was going to unravel the rogue’s plans and get her Crown Jewel back and finally destroy this persistent threat to her regency with fertiliser.

But for some reason, every time she made any advancement with the drakes, her sister just looked more smug.

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