21: Last Stand

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I didn’t have to check the hull to know that it wasn’t doing great. Which is good, because I wouldn’t have been able to check it anyway; most of our external sensors were gone, burned away into space, except the ones we’d removed and taken inside for safekeeping. It was hot out there. Very, very hot. And possibly very radioactive.

Some of it was unavoidable. Moon class ships have both blue and green dash capabilities, but they’re not designed to do it constantly. We’d had to leave the ship with the better dash to the shyr, because if she couldn’t catch us, she wouldn’t chase us, and everything would’ve fallen apart. But we couldn’t let her catch us too quickly, so we were dashing as quickly as possible, barely coming to rest in real space before heading off again in a slightly different direction for a slightly different distance (so that the patrol ship would have to track us exactly, dashing to where we dashed; if we moved in a straight line, the patrol ship could simply take longer dashes and lie in wait once it got ahead of us).

The drives and the shields were heating up, and we weren’t giving them time to cool down.

Some of the damage was avoidable. Or more like, it would have been avoidable if we were actually trying to reach the next empire over. Some of it was because our dash shields were damaged. We’d needed parts of it to construct something else, and besides, we wanted to leave a noisy signature. A perfectly shielded ship is really hard to trace through dashes. We wanted to be traced.

Not too quickly, though.

“Prepare for the dash,” Kit said, which was unnecessary. We were all constantly prepared for the dash. We never exited preparation for the dash. Besides, there’s not really much one can do to prepare for a dash, except tie oneself to something if one is worried about falling over.

I just grabbed the nearest safety rail with my one good arm and hoped that this one wouldn’t burn away anything else.

“Do you think the shyr fell for it?” Kate asked me for the hundredth time.

I answered her for the hundredth time. “I think so. I’m pretty good at lying to aljik. But then shyr are supposed to be super stealthy spy assassins, so maybe not. Maybe we’re in trouble.”

“And if we are?”

“Then the aljik empires are fucked, I guess? And we just have to get the boys back to Earth. But hey, even if she didn’t fall for it, we might still get lucky and win. Or maybe she did fall for it but Tatik doesn’t take the bait and goes home to shore up the heart planet. And we might still get lucky and win.”

“And yet, you’re really nervous.” That wasn’t something she was saying for the hundredth time. I frowned at her.

“I am a picture of composure and calm.”

“Come on, sis.”

I sighed. “I’m worried that the ship is going to get blown up. The boys will be safe, but the ship is going to be crewed. If the shyr decides not to wait for Tatik and gets trigger happy, or if we overplayed our threat and Queen Tatik decides that negotiating for the Crown Jewel isn’t worth it and she’d rather just blow up the ship to kill the human threat even if it takes the Crown Jewel with it… I don’t think she will, but I can’t predict everything. The aljik who are going along with this, who are trusting us to save them, will die.”

“They’re trusting us to save their empire, not to save them.”

“And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Because if we weren’t doing this, they would be fine. They could’ve surrendered to Tatik ages ago and they might’ve been brought back into the Empire just fine, especially if I’d given them the Crown Jewel. But people are probably going to die out here, on my order.” I’d seen a lot of people die before. It wasn’t usually on my order.

Kate shrugged. “And? They know all that. They made this choice and kept making it long before either of us were in the picture. If they didn’t want to be here, they wouldn’t be.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “I guess it doesn’t fucking matter now, anyway. It’s far too late to change plans.”

“Do you want to change plans?”

“No. No; this is the best path forward. Provided we only fuck up a few things and not everything.”

“Fucking up nothing isn’t on the table?”

“Let’s be realistic.”

——————

Chasing the Oval Nine across the Empire hadn’t been easy. The little patrol ship I’d been given after successfully convincing the humans that I’d betray the Empire for them wasn’t designed to make journeys like this, but the Oval Nine was even less suited to them, so that was alright. They’d burn out before we did. The crew was reasonably experienced, except for the very timid Captain Sil who’d put up no protest at all t me commandeering his ship (thankfully), but it was clear that none of them had done covert work before. Very few people did, except for shyr.

I had to trust that Queen Tatik would be behind me, using my position to locate the traitors. I knew her well enough to be very confident that she would follow. She’d be more eager than anybody to get the Crown Jewel back, absorb or execute the last of the traitors, and put this whole messy thing behind us. And this incident effectively highlighted the danger of humans, too, so there shouldn’t be any more reckless abductions from a planet that was supposed to be under permanent quarantine.

It was clear that the humans had realised that there was some chance that I wouldn’t betray my Queen for them, because they’d taken pains not to be tracked. Many of their dashes were slightly shorter than their full dash range by a random amount, and they didn’t travel in a straight line, taking each dash at a slight angle, so I couldn’t predict exactly where they’d end up and had to track them dash by dash, rendering the Red Four’s longer dash distance meaningless. But the Red Four could also go from dash to dash with a much smaller pause in between than the Oval Nine could, and they had no way to compensate for that.

We caught them easily, long before they were anywhere near the border. The Oval Nine was a sorry sight, the hull charred, most of the externals melted. Crippled in space, it looked like; the shielding hadn’t protected the engines well enough. It wasn’t designed to dash so much.

Some of the externals looked fine. It looked like they’d removed them for the journey, then found themselves crippled in space and put them back on to make a final stand. I didn’t like the fact that they’d had the time to do that. They might have had the time for other things, and while I knew that they couldn’t deliberately kill Queen Tatik, they could accidentally kill her in some trap initially set for me.

“Should we attack?” Sil asked uncertainly.

“No,” I said. “Given how these beings managed to take your ship once already, I’m surprised that you’re not more cautious. Don’t you see anything wrong with that ship?”

Sil looked closer. “The gun. The orbit-to-ground gun is missing.”

“Indeed it is.” That might mean nothing; that thing had been inexpertly detached and reattached before, it’s possible that it had been torn off during the punishing dash schedule. But there was another change that couldn’t be ignored. “And the escape pods. A Moon class ship comes with three escape pods, and one of them was used to send me over to this ship. So where are the other two?”

“Comms, check the area for large objects,” Sil commanded, then looked to me for approval, which I gave. “Any large debris is significant; that’s how they got us last time.”

We were worryingly close to a star. Not dangerously so; the star wasn’t dangerous in any way, except as an impediment to visibility, but we were close enough to expect some small stones or radiation interference. We weren’t in the orbit of a planet or near an asteroid field or anything, though, so large debris was unlikely; anything big enough to hide an infiltrator, or even a usefully sized explosive, could be assumed to be from the Oval Nine.

“Captain,” one of the kel called, causing both me and Sil to turn. “We’ve got something between us and the star.”

“That same trick again?” Sil asked. “What is it?”

“Checking.”

It was unlikely to be the same trick they’d used on the Red Four previously, because they would’ve had to position it before our arrival, and they had no way to be certain specifically where we’d come out of dash. They could guess, and we had arrived at a pretty likely spot, but if whatever it was was critical to their plans, they wouldn’t rely on a guess. The debris had to be coincidence, or unimportant.

“Can we reposition ourselves to get it out of the line of the star without losing sight of the Oval Nine?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then do it.”

The ship moved, and the debris became clear on-screen. It was the gun. The orbit-to-ground gun, floating disconnected in space. It looked to be tumbling randomly, with no clear path or target, and no sign of power. It might have been torn off as they came out of the final dash that had crippled their ship. Or it might have been released on purpose.

“Check it for any attached thrusters, power source, anything like that,” I commanded. “And obviously, keep the ship out of its firing line. If it randomly spins to face us, move.”

“Yes, Captain.”

The Red Four hadn’t opened communications. Should we? No. They’d naturally try to bargain for their lives using the Crown Jewel, and that negotiation could put the Crown Jewel at risk. They thought we were at a stalemate. They had no reason to suspect that Queen Tatik would be coming to strip the loyalty of the traitors from the humans and have them bring the Crown Jewel home, with the humans helpless to stop her, unable to raise their hand against a Queen. Because they didn’t know that I’d figured out that they couldn’t hurt a Queen, or just how shaky their pretender Queen’s grip over her aljik was. They’d probably make contact eventually if we sat here and faced each other long enough, but there was no reason for me to hasten that along. Best to spend our time checking for traps and tricks, making sure that the area was safe while we waited for Queen Tatik to join us.

I really, really hoped that Queen Tatik would join us.

———————

Bringing my rogue sister along to reclaim the Crown Jewel was, of course, far too dangerous.

Leaving her under guard somewhere else was too dangerous – I trusted my closest tahl, but my sister was clever and charismatic and desperate, and without me nearby to impose my will there was always a chance that she’d find a crack. Leaving her under the guard of aliens was even more dangerous – she’d proven her ability to bargain with aliens already, and I certainly had no aliens that I trusted nearly as much as my own guards. Simply letting her escape was, of course, unthinkable; though for a lone Princess in the depths of space without any escort at all, death was a forgone conclusion, I’d thought death a foregone conclusion for her several times in the past and had always been proven wrong. But none of those things were a fraction as dangerous as bringing her in close proximity to her own loyal court, who were harbouring the very artefact she’d stolen from me. She was locked away with no outside method of communication, her people had no idea she was even alive, but still. My sister had a way of making moves that I’d not even considered possible. If she could steal the Jewel and escape in the middle of a Regency fight, what else might she get it into her head to do? What other path forward was obvious to her, and her Anta-like mind, that I had not even considered?

There was only one logical path forward. And as I entered her cell in the last few minutes before the dash, we both knew what it was.

I raised my arms to strike. She didn’t even move to defend herself. Just looked at me.

I lowered my arms.

She cocked her head. Questioning.

“I can’t wait to be able to kill you,” I said.

“I don’t see what’s stopping you.”

“Basic protocol, dear sister. Rules. Honour. The structures that a functioning nest uses to survive. But you, of course, don’t value such things. I am the fool for hesitating, I suppose, long enough to learn that I don’t currently have that right.”

“No?”

“Of course not. After all, you never technically lost our Regency fight, and while under normal circumstances I’d love to finish it here and claim a proper, legitimate victory, the sad fact is that you have lost a Regency fight to another Queen. Much as I hate to concede such a thing to her, since she is my enemy, your life is hers to take.” I raised my arms again in a threat display. “Of course, dead Queens have no rights. So after this final confrontation, there will be nobody left whose claim to your life supecedes mine. And then, dear sister… then, we can finish this.”

I stalked out of the room and hurried to prepare for the dash.

Soon, one way or another, we’d be finishing everything. And the nest could finally heal and move on.

There was no way out of it, now.

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