24: Negotiation

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. [Glossary] ………. Next>

“That’s our cue,” Kate said. “‘Should we meet up and talk’.”

I glanced at the boys. “This isn’t safe.”

“It was never going to be safe. This is as safe as it was ever going to be. This is as harmless as we can make ourselves and as much incentive as we can give her not to try to kill us.”

“It’s boring,” Keith said.

“Were you hoping to soot some bug aliens with a laser gun?” I asked.

“Yeah, actually. Except I wouldn’t want to kill anyone for real, so.”

“So we get this instead.” I stood up (or more unfolded myself, because zero gravity), and stretched out in the confined space of the escape pod. I was glad it wasn’t my job to pilot it back to the Oval Nine; not only was I not a pilot, but the Oval Nine’s dash drive and shielding, hurriedly bolted to it in case Queen Tatik had decided to blow up the Oval Nine that we were hiding behind and we’d had to make a dash for Earth before she noticed us among the debris, made the whole thing clunky and off-centre. But that was the remote pilot aboard the Oval Nine’s problem. “Let’s re-dock, and get to work on the most important and exciting part of interstellar conflict… trade negotiations!”

The groans of the boys in the background were like the sound of victory trumpets to me.

—————————

Being pulled into a service contract far longer than expected due to sneaky wording and bad faith on behalf of the Rogue Princess, and therefore being pushed to the edge of viability before being able to colonise a planet, had been rude. Being kidnapped from by labyrinth and implanted with a Jupiterian translation chip in order to get pulled into looking for some gemstone I didn’t care about had been doubly rude. But then suddenly being told that it was no longer relevant and not getting to look for the gemstone, thus missing out on the sorely needed planetary soil remediations that we’d been promised in return? Triply rude.

So when I was grabbed from sentry duty by some busybody tahl yet again for some random bullshit, I wasn’t in the best mood. Until a dohl showed up to tell me that he needed to talk to me to organise a ‘gift’, which turned out to be the full complement of fertilisers we’d asked for on the off-chance we’d actually find the stupid jewel.

“Why?’ I asked. “What’s the trick?”

“I’m just in charge of delivery,” he said. “Whatever deal you made with the Queen is nothing to do with me.”

“But we didn’t fulfil our end! A gift? Since when do you guys do gifts?” They didn’t even have a word for ‘gift’. The phrase they were using was closer to ‘unreciprocated exchange’.

“I’m just in charge of delivery. Oh, but I am supposed to give you a message.”

“From who?”

“Not sure. Somebody called ‘Nee-moe’. They say, ‘let this erase any lingering debts between us’.”

“… Huh. Okay. Okay, yeah. That’s alright, then.”

————————-

The Firedancer was fancy. Certainly fancier than any of the other ships I’d been on. Her surfaces gleamed, new and clean; her furniture, though it looked uncomfortable for a human, looked like the height of luxury for an aljik. Also, the gravity was on all the time, which was probably also a nice luxury, though not one that the body I’d been dragging through space in zero G for so long was appreciating. The boys had been warned not to run around touching things, but I could see that they really, really wanted to.

And Queen Tatik was huge, and proud, and more intimidating than Nemo had ever been, probably because she had an empire at her command and wasn’t exhausted and covered in random small injuries.

“Let me make sure I understand,” she said (and Derek translated). “In exchange for returning the heart of the Empire and accepting banishment from its territories to never cause problems here again, you want… a single solar system on the edge of our territory, a tiny amount of resources to build a space station and small travel fleet, and ongoing trade agreements to keep the station supplied and operational into the far future?”

“And the labour and tech to build the station and ships,” I said. “And of course we’ll need to see and approve the specific system, there’ll probably be some talk over the specific supplies, all that. But essentially, yes.”

“And you want the ships to be able to travel into our territory, without you on them.”

“Non-military ships. An Empire military escort is acceptable. But yeah.”

She cocked her head. “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble for a paltry deal.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not the ones who kept escalating this,” I said, only for Kate to admonish me to be diplomatic.

“And you will take my sister,” Queen Tatik said, and I prepared myself to have to fight for that concession, because there was simply no way that Tatik would want to take any risks with Nemo ever again. I was surprised she hadn’t killed her in the time it took us to board. But to my surprise she sounded… hopeful?

“Yes,” I said. “We need her. We need an aljik who can manage other aljik labour on-site and who can advise us on aljik in general, and you, obviously, have an Empire to run.”

I half-expected her to offer me the help of one of her daughters instead and insist on killing Nemo, but she just said, “Understandable. She is yours, your aljik forces are mine. Though if I’m loaning you aljik labour for this station, I’m sure that many of them would volunteer.”

Given how I’d just dragged them halfway across the Empire and put all their lives in danger, I still wasn’t so sure about that.

“I want to register my objection to this deal once again, my Queen,” came Hatta’s voice through the comm system, and Kate and I exchanged a look. I mentally added ‘hurry up and demonstrate value of travel system before that paranoid shyr tries to blow it up’ to my list of tasks. Once we were attracting ahlda and taking them to the nests they wanted to go to, once the value of the system was undeniable, I was sure we’d have nothing to worry about; the shyr would probably go out of their way to protect us. But until then, we’d need to be on extra alert.

“Noted,” Queen Tatik said, in an openly dismissive tone. “Anything else, Hatta?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Oh?”

“Humans. What was the point of the gun?”

“The gun?” I asked. What gun?

“The gun that you disconnected from the Oval Nine! I do not believe that it coincidentally happened to fall off out here!”

“Oh, that gun! Yeah, that was a distraction.”

“A distraction.”

“we’re in open space. There’s almost no debris around here, and since we’d used debris against that ship before, we knew you’d be on the lookout for it. We needed something big and threatening for you to look at or else you might pay attention to small flecks, and if you did that, it would’ve been impossible to smuggle the Ambassador aboard.”

“The Amb – ? Ah!”

There were multiple shouts of alarm from the Red Four. No visual feed of their bridge, but I could picture what must be happening; a bridge crew recoiling from communication panels as a wave of tiny alien spiders poured forth from them to reconstitute into a human shape.

“It is very, very hard to sneak aboard a ship through gas expulsion channels during post-dash maintenance,” Glath said conversationally. “Fortunately, my kind are literally designed to travel through open space and a very wide variety of pressures and temperatures.”

“You did a fantastic job by the way, Glath,” I said. “You really are a born imitator. Sounded exactly like me through the whole negotiation.”

“And me,” Derek added.

I made a mental note to also compliment the bridge crew on the Oval Nine, when I got a chance. They’d had a pretty limited range of prerecorded messages from me and Derek to work with, to play off with Glath and give the impression that we could hack and speak from both ships while we just sat in the last remaining escape pod and hid. Great work all around.

“I’m just glad that we got through that without me needing to forcibly take control of a spaceship all by myself,” Glath said. “That would have been a task and a half.”

“You would not have been able to wrest control of this ship from us,” Hatta said angrily.

“Agree to disagree,” Glath said, in a tone that sounded quite a bit like me for a moment. Then Glath and Hatta both stopped transmitting, probably because they were getting caught up in some secondary drama that had been happening in the background of their transmissions. An extremely furious-sounding Sil, backed up by what sounded like various bridge crew, were yelling about not having been warned that they were fighting humans.

That sounded like Hatta’s problem. Me, I had an empire to save.

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. [Glossary] ………. Next>