23: Outmanoeuvre

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The human wasn’t wrong. All three of the ships here were mine, part of my Empire; was it really more of a violation to transmit from the Red Four than to have stolen the Oval Nine? But I did need confirmation that she was indeed hacking the signal somehow. It was possible, albeit unlikely, that she’d captured the Red Four and compromised the crew there, including Hatta, and was merely pretending to be hacking the signal to hide the fact that she was on the Red Four instead of the Oval Nine. I needed to confirm that she could transmit from both ships.

“Nevertheless,” I said, “if you could transmit from the ship that you’re actually on, that would be helpful.”

The reply did come, to my relief, from the Oval Nine. So she could transmit from both ships. The wording of the reply was less promising. “But I’m not on either ship.”

I ordered an immediate security sweep of the Firedancer, of course. There was no possible way that a boarding party could’ve gotten aboard, but I was taking no chances with humans. On the video feed, my sister was still safely in her cell; I prompted the guards in the room with her to send a visual signal so that I could be sure that the footage was live and not looped footage of a now-empty room. They signalled me on cue. It was live.

No escapes, no sign of human infiltration. I reminded myself that no matter what was at play here, the humans couldn’t hurt me. They couldn’t intentionally hurt a Queen. My sister’s survival in their Regency fight proved the accuracy of that information.

“Hatta,” I transmitted. “Check in.”

No response.

“We don’t need her,” Queen Charlie said. “This is a matter between Queens.”

I hated to exhibit uncertainty, but. “Where are you?”

“Where would I have to be, to have access to such priority controls as the ability to hack communications like this?”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly. She’d have to be nearby… but we were in clear space, nowhere to hide. Meaning she was hiding behind one of the ships? Or in that discarded gun?

“I’m not within your firing range, Tatik. I’m using the communication systems in the Heart Planet.”

No.

“Impossible,” I said. “We are well out of range of the Voiddancer’s comms systems. Unless you had time to set up signal relays, which I’m fairly certain you didn’t – ”

“What do you think I am? I’m a fucking Singer in Light!” She was transmitting from the Red Four again. “Do you think our communications mastery extends only to electromagnetic communications? We may not have space travel, but communications is one area where your technology lacks sadly behind. You know I have the means to control the Heart Planet, Tatik. I just had to get you away from it first. Fortunately for you, I don’t have any use for an empire… so. Should we make an exchange?”

Impossible. Humans were clever, I knew that, but there was simply no way that she could’ve broached the security of the Heart Planet. The Crown Jewel only worked at very close range, and nothing that looked alien would ever be able to get close enough. If she had hidden in some sort of cargo crate, and… no. No, our systems were far too solid to let a human down there.

She was somewhere else, hacking…

Actually, I should probably confirm that, too.

“Hack my signal, then. Transmit from the Firedancer.”

“Now, the security of your ship is – ”

“Being downgraded as we speak. Can I get confirmation… yes. If you can hack the Red Four’s communication systems, you should be able to hack the Firedancer’s. Transmission only, obviously; I’m not an idiot. Can you transmit from here?”

Silence.

Well, then. Something else was at play.

————————

“Ah, fuck,” I groaned, before remembering that I shouldn’t swear in front of my kids. “She got us.”

“We knew she probably wouldn’t believe that we were on the Heart Planet,” Kate said. “It’s no great loss.”

“If she thinks we’re on the Oval Nine, she’s not going to believe that the Heart Planet’s in danger, and she might fire on the Oval Nine. This is a big problem.”

“She won’t fire on the Oval Nine if she thinks we’re there, because she’ll also think the Crown Jewel is there. We can still work with this. We knew that some things would fail, right?”

“It makes things harder.”

“Your crew is clever. They can handle it.”

————————-

“So, then,” I said, trying to sound simply dignified and not triumphant. “You’re not on the Heart Planet. You’re certainly not on my ship. You might be on the Red Four with Hatta, or more likely on the Oval Nine, but I don’t think that you would stay on a crippled ship unless you had no choice. Which raises the real question: is this a clever plan of yours, or some last-ditch attempt to prevent me from blowing you out of the sky while you cower on the crippled Oval Nine, out of options? Oh, and I’m going to destroy that detached gun now. I don’t like rogue elements in our negotiations. If there’s any reason I shouldn’t, you should say so now.”

No response. I was pretty sure that she’d have to warn me if destroying it was dangerous. I had it blown up, and it was reduced to shrapnel without complications.

“Excellent. Now, let’s talk about the surrender of the Crown Jewel, and what I’m willing to offer you in exchange.”

———————–

“Calm down,” Kate said. “We’re going to win this.”

“We already won,” I pointed out, trying and failing for the thousandth time to pace in zero gravity. “We won before this confrontation even started. The question is, are we going to be able to convince her that we’ve won without taking any losses? Because if she starts killing, I’m not putting the boys at risk by sticking around, and if we’re not here to actually negotiate then winning this little skirmish is kind of meaningless, isn’t it?”

“You’re calling the conquering of an alien empire a little skirmish?”

“The conquering of the empire is kind of irrelevant if we don’t also win this little skirmish, isn’t it? And our side doesn’t have any useful or relevant weapons.”

“Except the ones we always have.”

“Yeah. A lethal combination of truth and bullshit.”

———————–

“We are, of course, open to trade,” Queen Charlie said, still broadcasting from the Red Four. “What do you think that you have that’s worth the Crown Jewel?”

“Your lives, of course. On the condition that you leave Empire space forever. Honestly I’d rather just kill you and remove the security risk forever, but that jewel is very valuable to me, and you can always go and terrorise some neighbouring Empire instead. Without the Crown Jewel and access to our space, you’re not really a threat.”

“How do you know I won’t conquer a neighbouring Empire and come back with a massive army to conquer yours?”

Because your command over your aljik is incredibly shaky, according to Hatta, and if you do by some miracle manage to establish yourself in a foreign empire then you’ll have a lot more to worry about than trying to find a way back to harass me, is what I didn’t say. It was a risk, but it was one that I needed to take, a perfect path forward. A way to solve everything.

“Because we will very carefully word the terms of our exchange,” is what I said instead. “And I have something else to add to the table, if your own lives aren’t enough.”

“Do tell.”

“I believe that you, like me, are labouring under a very unusual burden – an inconclusive Regency fight. I can also return the rogue Princess to your custody.”

—————————-

“Holy shit,” I said, once again forgetting the Don’t Swear In Front Of Kids thing. “She’s alive? She’s still fucking alive?”

“That does seem unusual,” Kate frowned. “Why wouldn’t Tatik have killed her? Maybe I don’t understand aljik society very well.”

“No, she definitely should’ve killed her. I guess we’ll get a chance to ask Nemo after all this. If she is indeed alive. And if she’s still alive when this is over.”

——————————

“A very tempting offer,” Queen Charlie replied after quite a long pause, probably discussing the situation with her attendants. “With one minor flaw. I can’t make such a trade, because I don’t have the Crown Jewel.”

I almost commanded the destruction of the Oval Nine right then, in the hopes that she was aboard and it would kill her, but she was either lying or, more worryingly, she was telling the truth and I desperately needed information. Had she managed to pass it off to the Queen of a foreign empire already? When? How? That simply wasn’t physically possible; she hadn’t made it anywhere near a border, she –

“Sadly, I can’t actually use the Crown Jewel. It was created for aljik neurology. So I had to send somebody else to use it, somebody more capable of walking around without suspicion and who knows the layout of the nest and what systems are where. This little grandstand was simply to ensure that you wouldn’t be on the Heart Planet to stop her.”

Somebody else? Another Queen? But a foreign Queen shouldn’t be able to – one of my daughters. One of the young Princesses had betrayed me while I’d been away from the Heart Planet, dealing with my stupid rogue sister and her stupid distraction on that stupid other planet in the middle of nowhere. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that anyone at home would ally with humans against the Empire. It was unbelievable. It made no sense. How could Charlie have turned one of them? How could she even have contacted them?

“My daughters,” I said. “How?”

“Daughters? Oh, no. I gave the Crown Jewel to your sister.”

I glanced at the cameras. Ima was still in her cell. I asked for a gesture confirmation from the guards, got one, debated sending someone to check in case this was some elaborate ruse to get me to open the cell, lost the debate with myself, and sent someone to check. She was in there. Doing nothing. And, having had her searched multiple times, I knew that she definitely didn’t have the Crown Jewel.

“Impossible,” I said. “My sister doesn’t have anything, and certainly isn’t in a position to use it if she did.”

“Oh, Tatik. Do you think you only have one sister?”

————————–

It was strange, to be home again after so long. Strange in a good way.

Lln had been very nervous about this plan. She hadn’t been sure that she would be able to use the Crown Jewel at all; after all, it was made for Queens, and she was just a lowly atil. But the human Kate had said that there was a pretty good chance that any aljik could do it, and it had bonded to her properly and passed all the tests. Still, she’d been a bit nervous, getting into the escape pod with the two very serious-looking tahl guards, and she wasn’t nervous about the patched-together dash shielding (that had been put together very very well, because they wanted to be sure that when they took off close to the Heart Planet that their path would be almost invisible so that the Red four wouldn’t notice and would keep following the much brighter, messier path of the Oval Nine) or the dash drive itself having been built for a Lancer class ship and smuggled out piece by piece with the humans’ personal effects when they left the Red Four for the last time. She trusted the engines; she hadn’t trusted the Jewel. Would it really work on the actual computers? Wouldn’t the nest realise, somehow, what she was, and that something like her had no business messing with something as important as security passcodes and protocols that affected the whole nest?

Also, painting it to look like flint had to affect it, right? It transmitted fine in tests, but this was the Crown Jewel. It shouldn’t be testable, like a normal computer. It was important. Sacred.

But it had worked, and walking through the nest of her birth, Lln was no longer nervous. It had been a long, long time since she’d walked these halls, but they were still more familiar to her than the spinning paths of the Stardancer, than the rich earth and stone of Sanctuary, than the simple and confined spaces of the Oval Nine. She knew where she was at all times, knew where she was going, knew what to expect.

Part of that might have been the compute chip in her brain that gave her total control over most of the vital systems in and extended from the old Queens flagship that formed the heart of the nest, of course.

She had done as she’d been asked to. Changed all of the security passcodes and permissions that she could find; not right away, but all set up to change at the same time on her command, or on a timer, in case she died. And now she was moving about, cleaning the nest, checking tunnel humidity, interacting with old friends, other atil whom she’d known so long ago. Nobody except atil recognised her or cared to; other castes don’t tend to pay a whole lot of attention to atil. And her old friend greeted her with joy and no suspicion, not questioning just how she’d managed to leave the rogue Princess and reintegrate into her home nest. They were just happy that she was home.

Why wouldn’t they be? Atil didn’t invade foreign nests.

—————————–

“I don’t think the wordplay works,” Kate said. “It’s based on a translation error. I mean, by our standards, that’s what the word ‘sister’ means, but in the aljik language the word that’s being translated that way very clearly only refers to – ”

“Yeah, well, I thought it sounded clever,” I said.

——————————

“By now,” Queen Charlie said, “my agent would’ve changed all of your access codes to some specific ones that I provided, codes that are too long for her to remember, and would’ve erased her own records of said codes. I’m the only one who can tell you what they are. We’re not negotiating for the Crown Jewel, Queen Tatik – we are negotiating for the Heart Planet.”

“A bold claim to make, with no way for me to verify it. I suppose I’m supposed to rush off home in a panic and let you escape to a neighbouring Empire with the Crown Jewel you claim you’re not carrying?”

“Not at all.” A brief pause. “I’ve commanded my forces on the Oval Nine to surrender unconditionally. Send a boarding party and do with them what you will. I’d recommend keeping them alive, if only because this is all going to go a lot faster if you have some testimonies to rely on that aren’t mine. I’m sure you can work your magic and win their loyalty back easily.”

An exchange was needed, I felt. “If you’re telling the truth and this all bears out honestly. I will give you the rogue Princess in exchange.”

“Appreciated. Take your ships. Take the Red four, if you’re worried about me taking that in your absence, though we both know that if I was planning to take that ship and run for the border I would’ve done so before you arrived. Verify my claims, and then we can talk.”

“Unnecessary,” I said. “The Firedancer is not some broken down patrol or surveillance vessel. I have my own on-board scout vessels that I can send to verify this without the Firedancer or the Red Four leaving the area. If this was some plan to escape my pursuit, I’m afraid it’s in vain.”

—————————

“Huh,” I said, “that makes things way easier. Kind of makes a lot of what we did here feel like overkill now, if she can just send a scout.”

“In our defence,” Kate said, “nothing that’s happened so far suggested that we should plan for the opposition to be competent.”

—————————

“How long will that take?” Queen Charlie asked.

“About a day.” The dash capabilities of the little scouts aren’t nearly as strong as the Firedancer’s, since such good dash engines are larger than the little scouts themselves, but they were far superior to the Red Four or the Oval Nine. “In the meantime, assuming that your claims are true, I should warn you that there is far more to conquering an Empire than taking even the Heart Planet. My people will not stand for this; you will find them impossible to control. The Out-Western Aljik Empire will rise up against you even stronger than – ”

“Yeah, obviously. I think we can all agree that one thing I’d be absolutely terrible at is even trying to rule an aljik Empire. Also, I don’t want to. This is a negotiation, remember?”

“So what is it that you want, in exchange for the heart of the oldest and most important aljik empire in the universe?”

“What do I want, in exchange for you saving your empire from me? I want to save your empire from you. Should we meet up and talk?”

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