20: Action

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Bringing my rogue sister back to the Heart Planet is a very dangerous decision. Is it the wrong one? It might be. But I can’t risk killing her before I know which Queen her pack of traitors has taken the Crown Jewel to, I can’t stay away from the Heart Planet any longer knowing that war could break out any time (besides, the Princesses are getting older and impertinent and have probably filled my nest with eggs by now; if I don’t get back soon I could find that one of them has gained an inconvenient amount of influence while I was distracted), and I certainly can’t send her somewhere else. Out of my sight, she’d use her charisma on whatever guards I left and I’d just be dealing with another pirate ship.

So I’m going to have to bring her home. And keep her a secret from all but my most trusted, like now.

It’s not a good plan.

“Problem?” the rogue asked when I came to see her.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Is there?”

“You just seem stressed.”

“I wonder why.”

“I’d like to make another deal with you. For more information.”

“No.”

“Really? You don’t want to know why nobody’s declared war on you yet? Or why none of your shyr who went to the other Empires came back and told you that any of them had the Crown Jewel?”

“I assume that whoever they went to is keeping it secret. She’ll do so until it benefits her to declare war. Maybe it never will.”

“You might be right.”

I stared at her. She looked back at me blankly.

“What do you know?” I asked.

“I know something about why they might not have dashed straight for a border. Something very important for predicting their movements.”

“Which is?”

She said nothing.

“Fine? What do you want for it?”

“Whatever you were offering the drakes for their cooperation in finding the Crown Jewel.”

It took me a moment to comprehend that. “… What?”

“You heard me.”

“You want fertiliser?”

“Oh, is that what they asked for? No; I want you to give them fertiliser. Or whatever you were going to trade with them. Me telling you what I did with it cuts them out of their deal. That doesn’t seem fair.”

“… Fair? What?” I stared at her.

She stared back.

“Oh, I see. There’s an occupied nest down there, isn’t there? You laid a daughter and she has a deal with the drakes and — ”

“Tatik, please. You know I had neither the time nor the resources for any of that. But the cost of the fertiliser is nothing to you, right? It’s very easy for you to still give it to them.”

“But why?”

“Why not?”

“Why?!”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“It’s… something that somebody I net on my journey would have done. I think. And she was doing very well for herself. So maybe it will be a good idea, somehow.”

“And if it’s not?”

“Then it costs a little fertiliser. In exchange for some important information. A very good deal for you. And for me, a bit of an experiment.”

“Experiments cost us the Voiddancer.”

“And gained us the knowledge of trade and empire in the first place.”

“… Fine. Agreed. The fertiliser for your information, and it had better be good information.”

“They won’t have gone straight for a border,” the rogue said, “because they have a Queen on the ship.”

“What?! You did lay a daughter!”

“No.”

“Then you found a nest on the plan — ”

“No. The human engineer I abducted. She was no engineer. She was a Queen.”

“A human Queen? There’s a human Queen out there with the Crown Jewel and a small force, ready to conquer the Empire? This is the most treacherous thing you could have done!”

“Listen, I’ve done a lot of treacherous things, I don’t – ”

“She’s going to finish the work of the first Singers in Light! She’s going to conquer the Empire!”

“Calm down. If she was going to do that, she would’ve done it already. And that’s not the sort of thing she does, I don’t think.”

“You don’t think?!”

“Did it occur to you that perhaps the reason for the Singers in Light disaster was because they didn’t have a Queen?”

“I don’t know! Was it? What is she going to do?”

“I have no idea.”

“You have no idea?!”

“I didn’t give her my forces intentionally! She beat me in a Regency fight, I — ?”

“You ran away from a second Regency fight?”

“No! I lost properly this time!”

“You obviously didn’t, because you’re still alive.”

“Yes. I’m… also a bit confused about that. It’s all very complicated.”

“Is anything you do not complicated?!”

“No.”

I had to get back to the Heart Planet. We had to prepare for a second attack from the Singers of Light. And I had to either kill this dangerous wild card right now, or take her with me.

“It’s one human with a handful of rogue aljik on a single stolen ship,” she said. “She’s not going to crash another flagship into the nest. The Singers of Light only did so much damage the first time because they took Anta by surprise; one human isn’t going to destroy the Empire.”

“There are four humans,” I admitted.

“… There are what?”

“I had three more abducted and they got away.”

“Why would you do that?!”

“I had to do something! You brought the most dangerous possible weapon into this conflict and I had to protect the Empire from you! I needed enough to make sure they could out-influence her and sway her loyalty back; I didn’t realise you’d kidnapped their Queen!”

“I hadn’t meant to! Anyway, I’m pretty sure she was only a Princess at the time, looking at her behaviour on the ship.”

“Oh, because that’s so much better!”

“Well, yes, isn’t it?”

How did this keep turning into more and more of a mess?

“Why did you do it?” I asked her.

“You’re going to have to be a lot more specific.”

“Why call the Regency fight? You could’ve taken your followers and left. Started a nest of your own.”

“After travelling the full breadth of two Empires, minimum.”

“You would’ve made it. Nobody would’ve stopped you if you made it clear that you weren’t going to settle in their territory. Even if another nest tried to hurt you, you’d find a way around it. It would’ve been a lot safer than what you did.”

“Safety isn’t the issue. If I had’ve just left and started a new nest, I’d be so far away from the Empire. It wouldn’t matter when I found the ahlda solution; the chances of getting the information back, the chances of you actually listening to me, were too low. My new nest would be fine, but Anta’s Empire would dwindle to nothing. I couldn’t beat you in single combat and I wouldn’t be able to conquer the nest without an edge like the Crown Jewel, so I needed to be in a position to steal it.”

“And it didn’t occur to you that maybe I would’ve saved the Empire by now if I didn’t have to constantly defend it from you?”

“Your strategy won’t work. It’s not about impressiveness. The data from the other Empires proves that.”

“Maybe all the Empires have become less impressive.”

“Ugh, why are you always like this?”

“You’re the one who’s always like this!”

I left my sister, locking the cell and having the extremely loyal guards change with a new set of extremely loyal guards. Everyone who knew of the rogue’s survival had a palpable disdain for her and was more likely to be tempted to kill her than to switch loyalties, but I’d been surprised by her too many times not to take every precaution.

I was so distracted that I almost walked right over the atil rushing to give me a message.

“My Queen!”

“Yes?” Urgent news, it had to be, with how panicked the atil looked.

“There’s a message, critical priority, coded. From the Red Four.”

“Red Four?” That was a patrol ship designation. I didn’t have any particular memories of that particular ship, though. They must have found something on patrol – if the humans were about to attack…

I rushed for the bridge, the atil struggling to keep up.

“Who’s calling?” I asked her. I didn’t know who the captain or the kel were on that ship.

“Uh, a shyr called Hatta?”

“Hatta? From a patrol ship?”

“Um, yes?”

What the fuck was going on?

——————————

“Message sent,” Safin reported.

“Good,” the shyr said. Hatta, Sil recalled her name was, though it was never possible to be sure when a shyr was lying. “Prepare for dash. Return to previous location.”

“Why? Aren’t we going home?” Sil asked, forgetting for a moment to be terrified. As she trained those large, empty eyes on him, he remembered terror again. Extremely clearly.

“No,” she said, “we are not going home. We need to intercept that pirate ship before it can reach the border, or else the Empire is going to war. Fortunately, we have better dash drive engines than they do, so the issue should be trivial but only if we don’t waste time checking in at irrelevant locations.”

“We need to call for backup,” Sil said. “If this is so critical, we can’t afford to be defeated.” His ship was better for fighting in space, but he had vivid memories of the encounter with the lancer. Firepower and engine design wasn’t everything.

“I just did,” Hatta said. “From somebody with even better engines than us. We don’t need to fight any harder than what it takes to disable their engines; we just need to get to the Oval Nine and keep our ID systems unshielded so that our allies can come to our location. Don’t waste any more time. Prepare for dash, now. We have a pirate to track.”

“How will they catch up with us?” Sil heard Safin mutter to Egil. “Who has better dash engines than a patrol ship? The fucking Queen?”

Sil gave up trying to understand. He prepared to dash.

—————————–

Queen Tatik went over the report a second time. And then a third.

Hatta had tracked the rogue’s forces, including the human, from their escape from the planet. They’d convened with the Project Sapphire humans, who had commandeered one of her patrol ships (the one from which Hatta was transmitting), and all four were now together, with the Crown Jewel, and with a plan to conquer the Empire; the worst of all possible news.

But they’d made one fatal mistake: attempting to enlist Hatta’s help. Apparently, they’d thought that their Queen’s threats and influence could sway her. She’d played along long enough to convince them to give her one of the ships, then immediately dashed close enough to the Heart Planet to make her report. She has also, through long observation of everyone involved and careful social manipulation during her own interrogations, managed to learn several key pieces of information about the humans.

They were fiercely loyal to one another. Even the Queen considered her human servants indispensable. A potentially exploitable weakness.

They were headed for the In-Western Aljik Empire, with the goal of bargaining with its Queen in exchange for the Crown Jewel and everything they knew about Tatik’s own empire. They were aiming to avenge the original Singers in Light bu conquering the Out-Western Aljik Empire and using it as a base for the humans that they were planning to bring into space. The very Empire designed to contain them would be the basis of their violent overwhelming of the galaxy.

They had attempted to gain information from Hatta on the best empire to approach; she had tried to steer them towards the Eastern Empire, who dealt as little as possible with aliens and would be far more difficult to to approach, but they had instead trusted the advice of those traitorous pirate aljik willing to sell out the galaxy to their new foreign Queen, and headed for the In-Wester Empire instead. It was a longer route that would require them to come in closer proximity to the Heart Planet, but not close enough to actually threaten the planet, unless they dramatically changed their plants and decided to attack it (something that they simply did not have the forces to do without a foreign Empire’s resources, especially since they almost certainly assumed, like Hatta assumed judging by the tone of her message, that Tatik was there). They would need the ships and the soldiers and the technology of the neighbouring Queen. Which they would by with the Jewel, and with information,a nd with promises of an expanded Empire, and then they would betray her and take the Out-Western Aljik Empire for themselves.

A frightening prospect, but in Hatta’s assessment, they were very unlikely to succeed. They were likely to provoke war and cause strife for both aljik empires involved, but Hatta gave them even odds on successfully conquering the Empire depending on how convincing they could be to the foreign Queen (it would not be easy to provoke such a war on the word of an alien, especially one known throughout all of the Empires to be so devious and dangerous), and almost no chance at all that they would successfully wrest the Heart Planet from the invading Queen even if they won. Because Hatta had learned two very important facts in her observations that she was pretty sure that the humans didn’t know that she knew.

The first was that the human Queen’s influence over her aljik troops was shaky. It would not be difficult for any remotely charismatic Queen with a strong, stable nest to wrest their loyalty back from her. Merely making contact with the next empire’s Queen could lose the human Queen the fealty of all of her troops except the other humans.

The second was a blind spot. Relating with other aliens had taught the aljik that most of them were simply not as generally competent as aljik. They always had strange blind spots, things that they couldn’t do or think through. And one thing that Hatta had managed to tease out of the humans was that humans, even their Queens, were simply not capable of intentionally killing other Queens.

Which explained why her sister, after losing a regency fight, was still somehow alive.

Whatever plan the humans had for wresting the Heart Planet away from its conqueror wouldn’t work, because they couldn’t be a threat to her. And they didn’t seem to realise that it wouldn’t work; they planned to dash straight for the border. Still, Tatik couldn’t sit about and ignore the problem; her empire being attacked and possibly conquered by a neighbour was in itself a massive problem, even if the humans couldn’t pull off their whole plan. But human weaknesses to a foreign Queen were also human weaknesses to her.

If she could intercept the stolen ship before it left Empire space, it was all over. She would have the pirates at her mercy, they would bring the Crown Jewel with them, and the humans couldn’t fire on her ship and risk killing her. A neat and easy solution. Hatta was pursuing them so that she could mark the humans’ location and, if absolutely necessary, delay them if they got too close to the border. But that wouldn’t me necessary. Tatik could depart almost immediately, and catch up with them well within her own territory.

Finally, it would be over.

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