3: Even more questions

Queen Tatik glared down at her sister, arms raised threateningly. The rogue Princess had clearly been through a lot, and the scuffs and scars on her body were unsettling. Several of her old gems were missing, one of her legs had a large knot where some sort of damage hadn’t been scabbed over evenly, and she was still shedding dead wing tissue from some recently healed event that Tatik didn’t want to know the details of.

Tatik herself hadn’t fought since the regency fight – Queens rarely needed to. She rarely left the comfort and safety of the heart planet. In fact, she rarely left the comfort and safety of the Voiddancer. The universe was a dangerous place, outside the nest.

The rogue was restrained, weighed down by ties that no single aljik would have the strength to break. And four of Queen Tatik’s most trusted tahl, her personal guard, stood ready in case anything happened. But still, she looked up at the Queen with confidence and placidity, as if all of this was irrelevant. As if in every way that really mattered, she was winning.

“Where is it?” Tatik asked.

“Where’s what?”

“Don’t play stupid games with me. Do you have any idea how much danger you’re put the Empire in? The In-Western Empire grows on our flank by the day, and you decided to create political unrest by fleeing a regency fight and harassing us from the border!”

“Are the In-Western Empire a threat to yours? Are you looking at war?”

“We will be, once they realise that the Crown Jewel is missing! Do you realise how easy it would be for them to get assassins in here? This is the largest and most glorious empire of all time; every nest on our border will be vying for our lands the moment they realise they can take them! There are internal threats, too. The strongest Princess in this nest is Shaia; she’s ambitious and small-minded and would beat the others in a regency fight very easily. She’s not wise enough to rule this Empire and I cannot afford to show weakness where she can exploit it until she is. We’re not politically stable enough for me to have her killed without the other two Princesses ganging up to take me down, and while they’re both better than her, neither of them could handle the Empire yet, either, not until they’re more mature and experienced. So do not think I will hesitate to do what needs to be done to hold this nest together. Where is the Crown Jewel?”

“Are you sure you are capable of ruling this Empire, Queen Tatik? Most nests do just fine without a Crown Jewel. Its absence can’t be responsible for all these problems you’re having with your daughters.”

“You are responsible! Your survival has made legitimising my claim impossible! But that is a problem that will be rectified very, very soon.”

“Are you sure? Our mother had these problems with us, too. Maybe she and you just aren’t very – ”

“Where is the Crown Jewel?!”

“Oh, that.” The rogue Princess thought for a moment. “I lost it.”

“Liar! Not even you would lose track of something so valuable.”

“True enough. I hid it.”

“Where?”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be hidden, would it?”

“When did you become so obnoxious? You weren’t half this obnoxious when you left.”

“I learned the skill from a master in the art who I met on my travels.”

“Hmph. Here’s what’s going to happen. My guard Ezil here is going to cut one of your legs off. Then I will ask my question again. And we will keep going until I have my answer.”

“Really? You’re going to throw away your leverage that easily?”

Queen Tatik raised an arm to halt Ezil, who had stepped forward to carry out her command. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m dying at the end of this. That’s a given. So I don’t have all that much use for these legs. But you… you have a very limited number of limbs that you can cut off my body. Once they’re all gone and I still haven’t told you where the Crown Jewel is, what are you going to do then? Kill me without knowing the answer?”

“You’re awfully cocky for someone who’s about to die.”

“Another skill that I learned from a master in the art. Having nothing to lose leaves few reasons to be cautious. But you, dear sister, have something to gain. So why don’t we stop with all of this posturing, and get to the negotiation – in exchange for the location of the Crown Jewel, here’s what you are going to do for me.”

--------------------------------

The problem, I was pretty sure, wasn’t about attracting ahlda. How did I know that? Because the shyr stowing away on my ship had talked about saving ‘our empires’. At the time, I’d assumed that she’d meant the Out-western Aljik Empire and Earth, but now I wasn’t so sure.

The language I’d hacked together to communicate with the aljik and the drakes had been mostly based on the language I was used to, English, and just trying to communicate things that could be communicated in English but in ways that they’d find familiar. I’d just gone in with the mindset of ‘what are the aljik and drake words for this word? What compromise between them can I find?’ which, now that I’d spent so much more time with them, I was beginning to see was a fundamentally flawed approach. For one thing, there was probably all kinds of alien nuance that was getting lost in translation, because it was ridiculous to assume that the languages were that equivalent. More relevant to this specific situation, it meant that our shared language didn’t have separate words for ‘our (you and me)’ and ‘our (me and people who aren’t you)’. Which meant that ‘our Empires’ could mean the shyr’s empire and mine (which probably meant Earth, in contexts; I doubted that this shyr knew any more Earth politics than my aljik did). Or it could mean the aljik empires. All of them, however many there were. Given that there were more direct ways to communicate a danger to the Out-Western Aljik Empire and Earth, the second interpretation made more sense.

Everywhere was experiencing a slow reduction in ahlda laying male eggs in their nests. If the Out-Western Aljik empire was anything to go by, the same amount of ahlda seemed to be being born, at least in Tatik’s mother’s day. And presumably she would have noticed if they were dying young, before leaving the nest. So something was happening to them after that.

I wished that my sister were with me. Kate was a biologist, she’d solve this so quickly. But of course, if she was here then my boys would be with strangers, so that would be pretty bad.

There could be a variety of things causing the problem. Some sickness that affected ahlda after they reached adulthood; one that they either picked up young and presented later, or one that they picked up travelling. Something that affected their ability to find other nests, like how light pollution confused animals on Earth; maybe some new development in space, some new technology or something, affected something that most people didn’t think about or notice but that ahlda used to navigate. When had blue and green dashing been invented? Could that have some kind of… confusing emission, some kind of interstellar contrail beyond my ability to sense, that could confuse ahlda? It might be simpler than that, even – there might be some other species that had recently spread into the area that hunted ahlda, for food or useful materials or some political misunderstanding. The aljik weren’t great at thinking about other species; they might miss something like that.

Or it might be a fertility thing. Were there less ahlda coming by in general, or just less choosing to lay eggs in the nest? I should ask. If something was affecting ahlda fertility, that might explain it.

Okay. Lots of questions. One time critical one, though.

“Would Captain Nemo still be alive?” I asked Kit, while we watched the ketestri through the external camera feed (it wasn’t doing anything).

“No,” he said. “Queen Tatik would need two things from her. Most importantly, the Crown Jewel. And less importantly, to kill her in person and finish the regency fight. Once Queen Tatik has met up with her, which she certainly would have by now, there’s no reason to keep her alive and every reason to kill her before she can cause more problems.”

What if she doesn’t have the Crown Jewel, though? I wanted to ask, but that might be too dangerous a question to raise while the shyr was still about and unaccounted for. Come to think of it, I had no reason to believe that there was only one shyr. There could be multiple spies aboard. And that was a problem, actually, because if Queen Tatik was after the Crown Jewel and her sister didn’t have it, then she had every reason to believe that our little ship of random aljik who had escaped into space did. Why else would the aljik have left instead of reintegrating into the Empire? They were Queenless, so far as she knew. She had to warn someone on the ship, but if Tatik didn’t know then until she could be certain who that Shyr –

Oh. Duh. Of course she could tell someone on the ship.

It was so obvious.

-------------------------

“What you’re asking is impossible,” Tatik said. She was a powerful, towering force, one that would’ve struck terror into the Captain’s joints even if she wasn’t injured and restrained and surrounded by guards ready and willing to kill her.

But such things didn’t matter here. There was success, and there was failure, and since there was only one way forward, things like risk and strength were irrelevant. So she was not afraid. She just cocked her head. “It is not. I’m sure you have some shyr under your command.”

“They are busy making sure I don’t get assassinated. And making sure that this place is stable enough to attract ahlda.”

“You don’t even know what the problem is; you don’t know how to make sure you can attrac – ”

“There’s only one way to attract them, Ima! You know how this works, how it’s worked since the beginning of time! The neighbouring empires must have gotten more stable and more prosperous, forming a wall of pore attractive nests around us; we need to out-compete them by – ”

“That’s not my name, Tatik. We don’t have names while our status is uncertain because the regency fight isn’t over, you know that. Even if you decided to illegally use your own – ”

“You’re a corpse that hasn’t stopped moving yet,” Queen Tatik snapped. “Corpses have names. And thew whole nest seems to agree that you running off mid-fight forfeits the kingdom to me. Nothing illegal about it. Ima.”

“I can’t be a corpse until you get your Crown Jewel back, can I? So I suggest you meet my demands.”

“Six. I can spare six shyr. Two per neighbouring Empire. To go and see what’s happening with their ahlda.”

“Not very many.”

“More than this fool errand deserves, and more than I can really spare. This nest is significantly more vulnerable without the Crown Jewel. You do see the little flaw in your theory, don’t you?”

“Flaw? The Empire was as grand in our granmother and mother’s days as in Anta’s; there’s no internal reason for the decline of ahlda, which means – ”

“That the neighboruing Empires got grander and more impressive faster than ours did, and we need to be catching up, not wasting resources on this. Because shyr move, Ima, and they spy. You realise that, yes? My orders or not, if there was some widespread ahlda problem, the shyr would already know what it is, and would have already warned all the nests. The fact that we don’t already know means that we’re being deliberately excluded and targeted for extinction, which gives us a much bigger problem to worry about… or that there’s nothing to warn us of.”

Which could mean that there is no problem, the Captain thought. Or it could mean that something’s going on that’s beyond the shyr’s ability to comprehend.

“So. The Crown Jewel?”

“I hid it on that planet I took refuge on.”

“Yes, obviously. I’m going to need something a bit more specific.”

“And you’ll get it, once you’re actually sent those shyr. You’re welcome to search the area yourself instead, if you prefer, but since the Crown Jewel will be inactive until it’s actually on your face, it might be a little difficult to find. Especially if you don’t want to risk telling your people what they’re actually searching for.”

“Why would I search myself? It would be easier to simply kill you. When what’s left of your supporters hear that you’re dead and they’re Queenless, they’ll come home and reintegrate into the hive, and one of them will tell me.”

“What makes you think they know? And what makes you think they’ll come here? They knew what would happen to me here, so why do you think they left, instead of coming back home themselves?”

Queen Tatik stared at her. “You sent them to a neighbouring Empire. To integrate into one of our rivals’ nests when you died.”

“So you’d better hope that none of them know where the Crown Jewel is. Because if they do… I’d hurry up with sending out those shyr, if I were you.”