22: Engagement

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The Firedancer was beautiful.

Queen Tatik had never really acknowledged it as her flagship, not while the remnants of the Stardancer still existed as the heart of our nest, but necessity had demanded some sort of vessel fit for a Queen to travel her empire when needed, and she had conceded to giving it the -dancer epithet, so everybody knew that, in reality, it was the flagship. And it looked the part: pulling out of dash with no more than a whisper of light despite the distance with the most advanced dash engines and shielding that the Out-Western Aljik Empire could produce, its surface untouched by any sign of damage from the journey, it dwarfed both my Red Four and the pathetic remains of the Oval Nine, a gleaming centre of command, of order, amongst the chaos. It was not in the nature of my caste to be overly awed by order or command, but we all respected it, and we all, ultimately, served it, in the end. Without the order of nests, we would have no margins to operate in.

The crew of the Red Four had clearly never seen the Firedancer before, and I hadn’t bothered to warn them that Queen Tatik was coming. Most of them stood paralysed by awe, useless, though the comm staff had the presence of mind to initiate contact and warn the Firedancer about the stray gun. I could see, looking at the various diagnostics of our own ship, that the crew not on the bridge weren’t yet aware of the Firedancer’s presence; I could see this, because they were still working, pulling our ship back into shape after our own series of dashes. The last f the weapons being realigned and recalibrated, the last of the hot gases being vented to cool down a ship that had been put through more dashes more quickly than it reasonably should. If there were any crew outside, fixing any random peripherals, then they probably saw the ship and would take longer than they should to get back to work, but that was immaterial at this point. Our ship had been more than capable of taking on what remained of the Oval Nine even before we’d begun servicing, and we were nearly back into normal condition (well, as ‘normal’ condition as a ship can be in when the middle of it is a mass of ad-hoc repairs from being rammed by a lancer class ship). And now, the Firedancer was here. The Queen was here.

And the human Queen didn’t know that I knew, didn’t know that Tatik knew, her critical weaknesses. She had no idea what she was in for.

————————–

“Well,” Kate said. “Here we are. Do or die.”

“Please don’t phrase it like that,” I begged.

————————–

There seemed no point in hiding who I was. Even if the humans weren’t expecting me, their aljik crew would probably be able to intuit who was on a ship as impressive as the Firedancer, especially since I hadn’t bothered to conceal the name from its ID information. Besides, if the human Queen couldn’t intentionally harm another Queen, then she should know about me before she attempted to attack the ship, rather than after. Not that the Oval Nine looked to be in much of a shape for attacking anything.

“Level weapons,” I commanded, completely unnecessarily – my crew knew their jobs. “Hold fire.” I needed to recover the Crown Jewel and, preferably, some of the crew. They were probably too unstable to reintegrate back into the nest – nobody who would follow my sister’s mad plan and then flee me to serve a human Queen was going to be a constructive member of the Empire – but I could get information from them first, and if there was one thing I was sorely lacking, it was information. About, well, everything.

I glanced at the camera feed to my sister’s cell. She was still in there, not doing anything.

After exchanging vitals with the Red Four (still under the command of Hatta, good), I had contact initiated with the other ship. “Oval Nine. This is Queen Tatik. Power down all weapons and surrender unconditionally. Now.”

And… they did.

Well, they didn’t give any indication of surrender, but they did immediately power down all external weapons. The engines were cold, powered down before we’d even arrived; probably broken. No response on the comms. I tried to imagine what was happening inside. Had the crew broken at the sound of my voice, and turned on the pretender Queen? Probably. Hatta had emphasised how shaky her control was. Perhaps they had turned on her even before I’d gotten there, once the engines broke down and stranded them in space; maybe they’d killed her, or locked her away, and waited to be caught by Hatta. Maybe they were celebrating my appearance.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Hatta’s report had included an explanation for the severe damage to the Red Four. Any species that would use their own ship as a projectile like that in order to board another ship wasn’t one that I could trust my surface readings of so easily. It might be some sort of sneaky trap, something I wouldn’t consider. It was impossible to ignore the fact that the Oval Nine had no escape pods left, meaning that to take the crew, we would have to send a boarding party; that might be deliberate. And I had no intention of sending a boarding party without knowing what was going on inside.

If it wasn’t for the Crown Jewel, I could simply blow the ship up and be done with it. But then, if it wasn’t for the Crown Jewel, I wouldn’t have to be here.

“Human Queen,” I said. “Do you surrender?”

The response sounded how I expected it to. A high, harsh voice in the background speaking words that I didn’t understand; a second voice, a slow monotone, speaking into the microphone. Hatta had reported that she’d managed to outfit one of the Emeralds with a Jupiterian translator before losing them. So the harsher voice, I supposed, was the Queen.

“Charlie,” she said (or at least the translator did). “I am Queen Charlie. A pleasure to finally meet you, Queen Tatik. And no, I don’t think I should surrender – we, after all, have a lot of business to discuss first.”

The declaration sent a shiver through my wings. Not because of the voice. Not because of the words.

But because the communication wasn’t coming from the Oval Nine. It was coming from the Red Four.

——————————-

Our ship. The message was sent from our ship.

Not from the bridge; I was on the bridge, as was Sil and the usual bridge crew. The humans were replacing our signal somehow. I would’ve thought that they’d sent it from their ship and done some trickery to fake the origin, except that the kel were already checking and, yes, even our equipment was saying that our equipment had sent the message.

“Shut off everything that receives a wireless comm signal on the ship, except for the actual comms,” I commanded. “Apart from hearing the other ships talk to us, I don’t want anything on this ship to be taking orders that weren’t sent through physical wires.”

“Uh, Captain,” Sil said, “our ship was almost cut in half a while ago. Some of the rear systems don’t have wires running from – ”

“They have local manual control, don’t they? Anything that doesn’t have a wire, put someone in physical control of it. If there’s anything that doesn’t have wires and doesn’t have local manual control, we’ll have to do without it. They’re in our systems, do you understand? We want to give them as few weapons as possible to turn against us.”

I left the crew to figure out the details and turned my attention to the real issue: Queen Tatik.

“Hatta?” she asked. “Sil?”

“Here,” I said.

“H-here, my Queen,” Sil said.

“No evidence of hostiles on the bridge. We’re sweeping the ship now,” I added. (The tahl were already doing that, not needing an explicit order.)

“Acknowledged,” the Queen said.

A moment of silence. One real advantage, I’ve always found, with working directly with Queen Tatik is that Queens are smart. They don’t think quite like shyr, being too nest-focused to think flexibly, but they’re a lot cleverer than tahl or dohl, whose help is often an exercise in patience. Had I been speaking to, say, Sil, there would be an entire conversation that would need to happen that, with Tatik, was unnecessary. We both knew the situation.

From Queen Tatik’s position, either the crew of the Red Four was compromised, or it was not. We had been in the human Queen’s company for a little while before she’d arrived – indeed, from her perspective, it could be possible that I’d been working with the human Queen since before sending my message to her, rendering absolutely everything I’d told her suspect. What if Queen Charlie was competent and influential, able to sway the hearts and minds of aljik easily? What if what I’d said about her not being able to kill Queens was a lie? Was this a trap for Queen Tatik?

I had various assurance codes that I could send her to verify my words, but they could only confirm my identity and that I wasn’t transmitting against my own will. They did nothing to assure loyalty. It is in the nature of Queens to be mistrustful of shyr; they do not like strong-minded people who can’t be easily influenced. Part of their limited, nest-focused thinking, I think. There was no point in sending any such codes; openly transmitting them would simply render them useless in the future. A waste of codes. I could instead send video footage of the bridge to show that the humans weren’t there, but if we were compromised that would prove nothing; we could simply hide them.

That was the first thing that occurred to me, and would have occurred to Tatik, the moment the humans transmitted from our equipment – I might be compromised, and there was no remote way to assure otherwise.

The second thing that occurred to me, and presumably to her, was that that was ridiculous, because if I and the Red Four crew were traitors, it would be very disadvantageous for Queen Charlie to reveal that. Unless she was attempting some wildly impractical double bluff (not out of character, so far as I knew), that wasn’t the point of this.

Queen Charlie wanted us to know that she could hack our communication systems. Why?

“Queen Charlie,” Queen Tatik said, “for propriety, could you perhaps speak from your own ship?”

“You offer me grace I don’t deserve, Queen Tatik, to imply that the Oval Nine is my ship, when all present know that it’s rightfully yours, as much as the Red Four is. Therefore I would argue that any ship involved in this conversation is the same amount of ‘my ship’, so I fail to see how where I’m speaking from makes any difference.”

I checked with the bridge crew. All wireless systems except the actual communication transmission had been disabled, meaning that she must be using the actual communication system somehow. Unless she’d done something to the Red Four itself, messed with the wires or added new wireless capabilities? Impossible; she hadn’t had a chance to sneak about to —

She didn’t need to.

Queen Charlie had had access to this ship while I’d been imprisoned on the Oval Nine. The other humans, the ones I’d brought to space, had had it for even longer. They could have – must have – done something then. Meaning that they’d planned this confrontation before releasing me. They’d planned for me to not turn on my Queen. All of the information in my report was unreliable.

Queen Tatik was in serious danger.

I leaned over the atil on the comms and opened a channel myself. “My Queen! You must retreat; this is – ”

I didn’t bother finishing the message. I could see that it wasn’t going out, no matter how many times I hit the switch. “Crew of the Firedancer, respond. Calling the Firedancer. Respond.”

Nothing. Whatever the humans had done to our ship, they’d given themselves the ability to block our outgoing messages.

I couldn’t warn her.

Shit.

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