18: Royally Stubborn

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“I mean,” Kate said, “there are multiple potential solutions. The problem is finding one that we have any ability to enact. The obvious method, and a method that might be within our power, is to help the Empire establish a trade route with some smaller, distant nests and directly import dohl, and if that’s stable then we can try to spread the method to neighbouring Empires. Obviously, we’re not going to even attempt that. Not only would it be a stopgap measure that depends on the ability for the Empire to maintain stable inter-nest trade routes, something that they have not yet demonstrated that they can do, but it should go without saying that any solution that boils down to literal sex trafficking can be dismissed immediately. If that’s what it takes to maintain this nest then this nest would be better dissolved. So we’ll have to look at other solutions.”

“That wouldn’t have to be sex trafficking,” I pointed out. “I mean, if they just bring in dohl, voluntarily, to work — ”

“‘Voluntarily’ ordered by their Queen to migrate somewhere different and work in proximity with another Queen and what happens, happens? Given the specifics of aljik biology, I’m not sure it’s all that cut and dried. We simply do not know enough to be sure either way, but my instincts are that that might be running into the aljik version of that shyr offering us access to food and water in exchange for our cooperation and calling it a fair trade. We do have a few dohl on hand, of course, so we could always just ask them, but frankly I’m not willing to hang the question of ‘are we technically starting a sex trafficking ring or not?’ on the opinion of two rebel pirates and a wet-behind-the-ears patrol captain. We should take Operation Dohl Trade completely off the table unless and until we have pretty clear evidence that it wouldn’t be what it looks like to humans. Fortunately, there are some other options. The question is whether they are achievable options.”

“Such as?”

“Disbanding the Empire.”

“Oh. Yeah, sure; we’ll just disband a fucking empire.”

“It’s not as big a deal as it sounds. Remember, this isn’t so much an ‘empire’ as a single nest with an impossibly large territory. There’s simply no way that they’re getting the prosperity out of a territory like this to make holding so much empty space worth the effort. If we speak to some other species and secure some clever trade deals, we can probably convince them to shrink it down; then it’s a matter of bringing in other, unrelated Queens to establish nests throughout the empty space. Again, given how much danger young Queens face in conquering or establishing a nest of their own, that should be doable, especially if we aim far enough outside the Empire borders that nobody there has a culture of massively overreacting to the ‘danger’ posed by humans. Simply offering them safe passage and some resources to help them set up on an uncontested planet would probably bring in quite a few Queens with nowhere else to go. The main issue, aside from getting Tatik’s compliance, would be disseminating the message; since the nests don’t seem tot alk to each other — ”

“Queen Tatik’s compliance is not some minor problem,” I cut in. “She’s not going to agree to anything like this. Even if we pretend the idea comes from somebody else and humans aren’t involved. I haven’t met Queen Tatik, but I can guarantee that she won’t dissolve the Empire and invite other Queens closer.”

“Why not? I know they’re territorial, but we’re still talking about entire stars between nests. It’s not like we’re suggesting close quarters and tight borders.”

I pulled the Crown Jewel out of my pocket, and held it up to the light. “Do you know what this is?”

Kate’s eyes grew wide. “Wow, that’s a massive diamond! Or possibly an unimpressively sized piece of clear quartz. I don’t know rocks.”

“This,” I explained, “is a computer. It was a gift given by the Jupiterians to Queen Anta, and like everything from that horrible planet seems to be, it’s a brain implant. Cemented to a Queen’s face, it interfaces with her brain. It’s essentially a passkey; it’s keyed in to allow remote access to all of the ship systems on the Voiddancer. Which, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is planetbound now; after the Singers in Light crashed the damned thing into the Heart Planet, it became the central nexus for Queen Anta’s nest. This is the reason that the Rogue Princess went rogue; she could’ve simply left peacefully to start her own nest, but by declaring a Regency fight and fleeing mid-combat, she was able to steal this off her mother’s corpse which was ceremonially ‘overseeing’ the fight. Queen Tatik, of course, knew that it was missing, but I’ve been given the general impression that its absence is a state secret within her nest.”

“If you’re planning on infiltrating Tatik’s nest with that, there’s simply no way that a device designed fro an aljik Queen’s brain will work on your — ”

“Yes, of course, obviously. That’s not the point I’m making. My point is this: put yourself in Tatik’s shoes. Your sister’s just done this. What do you do?”

“Well… given the little I know about aljik society… I’d imagine that my sister running out on a sacred battle like that is tantamount to heresy. This is a slam dunk in terms of public perception. I probably wouldn’t keep the theft a secret, either; it might be worth keeping it a secret, if it’s such an important artefact, but on balance I think the risk of being caught lying about it and the effort of keeping it secret wouldn’t be worth it. I’d include that in showing how much of a traitor she is to make it impossible for her to ever return and cause trouble. Presumably she’s taken everyone loyal to her with her, so my job would be to shore up public sentiment against her and make my nest socially impenetrable, because the fact that she’s stolen an all-access keycard means that she definitely plans to come back and take the nest; why else take it? And make the nest physically impenetrable, too, of course. Presumably all the computers and soforth on the ship worked fine before the Crown Jewel existed; I’d revert the systems back to those systems, or at least the most modern updated versions of those systems we have, if technology has marched onward. He making a move so obviously against common decency probably works out better than if she’d left normally, because I’d get to keep more of my nest and socially make sure she could never return to threaten it like she obviously plans.”

“Yeah, I’d probably do something similar. I certainly wouldn’t waste time and manpower sending my military to look for her on the fringes of my empire in the hopes of finishing the regency fight ‘properly’ and hopefully retrieving my fancy computer passkey, knowing full well that she has to be planning to invade the heart planet at some point. And if I was the rogue Princess and my sister was had stopped escalating the search, I wouldn’t regain her attention by abducting somebody from the one planet my entire empire was built around isolating because they were so dangerous; I’d probably take the lack f interest as a good time to settle my own nest somewhere. And if I were Tatik and my sister did abduct someone from such a planet, I wouldn’t respond by escalating further and creating more dangerous uncontrollable variables far from the heart planet I needed to protect by abducting – look, you get the point. There’s a pattern that I’ve observed with the aljik. Tatik, and Nemo, and the crew under me, and that shyr who tried to kill us all earlier. They pick a strategy and they lock in. If it doesn’t seem to be working, they can be convinced to mitigate problems or to escalate by adding new things, but they don’t reverse course except under the most devastating of circumstances, and when they do, they go all the way and lock into that new pattern. If they can’t mitigate problems, they’ll just ignore them unless they’re big enough to cause a dramatic move and full reversal. They’re not good at revising, is what I’m trying to say, and I don’t know if that’s part of their inherent psychology or if it’s due to this specific environment; maybe most nests are fine and it’s being part of an empire that does it. I mean, if I was part of a system developed through trial and error by my ancestors that mostly seemed to work fine but nobody really seemed to understand the details of how, I’d probably be reluctant to fuck around unnecessarily, too.

“But Anta, and the Empire… those are baked deep, deep into everything that this nest knows. There’s scar tissue in there that you can’t cut out without removing several major organs. Tatik needs the Crown Jewel because that’s what it means to head the empire, because that’s part of the trade made with the Jupiterians and trades for cooperation are fundamental to the system, as are the Jupiterians. Without the Jupiterians you don’t have the concept of interspecies relationships, and you don’t have the Singers in Light, and without the Singers you don’t have the impetus for expanding law over other species in the area, you don’t have the Empire. And without the Empire you don’t have the interrelations and the trade and you don’t have the quarantine of Earth, and the quarantine of Earth is really important because humans have to be really dangerous because the Singers in Light incident has to be fundamentally important, see? You need every rung or the building comes down, in their way of thinking. Castes have roles and nests have structures and aliens and diplomacy have roles and structures too and sometimes you have to adapt them, sometimes your nest engineer caste has to be trained in spaceship maintenance and design, sometimes the trade you make for a bunch of drakes’ service backfires when they have a different idea of fair trade than you, sometimes it’s not perfect, but you’ve got to either alter what you’ve got now or live with the consequences of imperfection. You’ve got to hope the structure holds and shore up what you can because it’ll collapse if you go pulling stuff out. That’s how they seem to me, anyway. If we have to try to get Tatik to do anything, it’s got to build on top of the system they have, because there’s no way in hell we’re going to convince her to remove anything.”

“Well,” Kate said, “we’ll have to find some way to convince her. Or to force her hand.” She bit her lip. “We should ask the boys for ideas.”

“They’re children.”

“Very creative children. Do you think I came up with the idea of using our ship as a torpedo to infiltrate another ship?”

“That was insane!”

“Hey, it worked. And I’m sure you’ve not done anything so reckless out here, have you.”

“All of my decisions have been measured and sensible.”

“… Uh-huh.”

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