If you’d rather wait for me to get over myself and actually finish editing things, then you probably wanna wait to read this. But hey, if you just wanna know who the hell all these weird aliens I keep talking about are… here you go.
As it is currently, the Vincam are currently in colony collapse. They were once the predominant colony upon Home (Crelea IV), and their aggressive expansionist policies lead to the Great Colony Wars that wound up devastating the planet. That’s a whole big thing I can tell you more about if you are interested. Currently, the colonies all live in flotillas of ships that wander the universe and the only ones present on Home are those in the Hatcheries, since those are ancient underground structures that survived the war. (The exception to this is the Tanercam colonies, who rather than taking to the stars went deeper underground. They’ve gone a little strange.)
My current novel project is set several hundred years after the Great Colony Wars. The Vincam Mother, Siel, recognized that her colony was beginning to collapse and came to realize that her previous war mongering had likely doomed them to genetic stunting and death as they no longer had contact with nor the cooperation of any of the other colonies. She had only one Daughter, Ula, and a single Daughter egg remaining, her Consorts long since dead. After a lot of effort and peaceful overtures, she managed to make contact with the Rocam colony, and when a pair of twin nobles hatched on the same night that they accepted her communications, she saw it as a sign. The twin nobles were entrusted with the Caretaking of the final Daughter egg and Siel began negotiations for a Flight for Ula — which would involve her taking a Rocam Consort, and then the two nobles and the Daughter egg would join the Rocam colony in exchange. This negotiation takes… a very long time, during which the twins grow up and grow used to power. They find that they do not wish to share it. And they certainly do not wish to join another colony.
Working with an extremist group, they are able to ruin Daughter Ula’s Flight, killing nearly everyone present, including the Daughter herself. However, the egg disappears… Mother Siel locks herself into her chambers in despair and mourning and the twins become Viceroys and rule over the colony in her place.
Elder Kajj, one of Mother’s guards, is my main OC for that side of the story. One by one, the members of the Motherguard, Mother’s household/warren begin to die off. First, it’s the Shield, Kajj’s brother. And then its Saea, Mother’s personal Assistant. And then its Healer Yhinn, her personal doctor… and so on and so on until one day Kajj enters the Mother’s chambers to find that she, too, is gone. Kajj is going slowly insane as he loses more and more of his family, and eventually he begins to figure out exactly what is happening and who is responsible… but he cannot act against the Viceroys for several reasons.
One, he’s Defective. He got his leg slammed in an airlock door as a hatchling, leaving him permanently disabled, though he does his best to hide it. This is considered a worthy reason to discard him and he should have been — except that Mother did not wish to lose him. His injury was covered up, and its a secret that he works very hard to hide.
Two, Mother is dead. The rest of the colony does not know this, but the Elders do. As guarding Mother is Kajj’s entire purpose, should the rest of the colony find out he is not only a failure, he is out of a job and no longer has any station of power.
And three, his Assistant, Keir, whom he loves very much. And the Viceroys have made it very clear that if he steps out of line they will kill her.
And so Kajj follows his orders and the Viceroys use him as a puppet and an attack dog, knowing that he’s very strong but also very much under their heel. This situation continues for several decades, with Kajj’s resentment growing with every year and his physical and mental health in fairly rapid decline, despite Keir’s best efforts.
The turning point in his story comes during a fight with the Resistance, who work mostly in trying to get people out of the way of the Vincam flotilla and to reduce harm wherever they can. The Viceroys set him against one of their installations, and he sees a very strange recruit there — Teema.
Teema was a foundling, raised by the scrapper/scavver Yilda, who Teema thinks found her. (In reality, Yilda was given the egg by Yennith, who was escaping the extremist cult that destroyed Daughter Ula’s Flight.) Yilda lost their child and spouse to the war, as they were former members of the Resistance. They had once been a member themself, but left when it took everything…
Teema’s early life was mostly uneventful. She learned how to navigate zero g environments and how to find the best scrap, but she was never able to make any true friends due to the fact that they never stayed in one place for very long… and because of her appearance. With her green chitin, horned face, and antennae, most who see her assume that she is one of the Vincam who have been devastating the galaxy for generations. But she’s not! For one things, she’s got a second pair of arms that none of the other Vincam seem to have. And for another, she has wings! She’s clearly of a different species altogether, though her Mom is never able to tell her exactly what it is that she is. But that’s fine. She’s knows what she is. She’s Teema, the scavver, and the child of Yilda.
Things are pretty good for her, until Yilda begins to slow down. They’re coughing a lot, wheezing for breath… and though they insist it is only a cold, Teema eventually convinces them to see a proper doctor. And the news is not good. Decades of scavenging among abandoned starships has left Yilda with some severely damaged lungs, and they are going to need more than a bottle of antibiotics to get through things. The problem being… they don’t have the kind of money that the treatment entails. And all the best doctors, well… they certainly aren’t going to help someone who associates with anyone who looks like Teema.
But there is one group of people who are said to take in anyone who is willing to work. Anyone who is willing to give it all up for the cause of helping others, and bettering the galaxy as much as they can. The crew of the Audacia, the generation ship that houses what most folks simply refer to as the Resistance. Teema brings up the idea to Yilda and is surprised to find that Yilda is staunchly against it. But Teema cannot stand to watch her mother fall into decline and so… she runs away. And she begins the process to join the Resistance and get Yilda the help that they so desperately need.
By the time she finishes training and gets Yilda into treatment, Teema becomes attached to the cause and to her squad — the Thistles. She begins to go on aid missions with the others, helping refugees to escape and providing meals where they can, but its not as safe as it might sound. The Vincam are not exactly known for their mercy, nor do they tolerate those who get in the way of what they want… so its not uncommon for the Audacia to find itself within the flotilla’s crosshairs. The swarm of the drone army is more than terrifying on its own, but the recruits whisper tales in the night of a particularly massive and vicious Vincam who haunts the front lines of the war… the Reaper.
No one in her squad has ever seen the Reaper, of course, and so its easy enough to dismiss it all as the kind of horrible fairy tales that people make up after decades of long combat. And maybe Teema denied it a little harder than most of the others, considering things… like the fact that her own size was one of the many reasons she clung to for believing that she was not a member of the Vincam colony.
A reason that would crumble to dust the moment she came face to face with the monster himself upon the battlefield.
Kajj knows what she is, of course. How could he not? One of the final tasks entrusted to him by the Mother was to find that lost Daughter egg… though he had long since lost hope of finding her. But there she was, standing there and staring at him with terrified eyes. He couldn’t blame her, knowing what he had become. But in her, he found hope that he had not felt for over a century. Hope, and a way forward for his people.
Teema raised her gun but he raised his hands, asking to parlay with the Commander of the Audacia instead. He thought that they could make a deal together, a favor for a favor. And there would no longer need to be any kind of bloodshed between their people. His words were rejected as crazy nonsense and a trap, but he called off the attack, leaving the Resistance to pick up the pieces and wonder over what had occurred.
It kept Kajj up at night, sending him pacing. He had to find some way to convince them, someway to get closer to the Daughter. Stealing her certainly wasn’t an option, as taking her back to the colony would certainly mean her death. But nor could he abandon his post for fear that his own adopted daughter, Keir, would be killed. Eventually, he got the opportunity he needed when the Viceroys ordered him to attack a facility that the Commander was staying at… and he took Keir along with him for the ride.
This time, his demands for parlay were answered, and he turned over to the Resistance the most precious thing in the world to him, the leash by which the Viceroys controlled his moves — Keir, offered up as hostage collateral for their cooperation. It was a tense deal, hastily negotiated, but it was one that he was able to make.
And with Keir safe, Kajj was able to move much more freely.
And he would make the Empire pay for their crimes.
With the majority of his leash gone, Kajj begins to make allies amongst the other Elders, feeling out who among them he can trust — a difficult task considering he has kept himself forcibly apart from the majority of them for several decades at this point. Hiir is his first true ally, made after Kajj breaks up a fight between him and Dinn over a hatch being sent out to war far too soon. Kajj speaks up against the council, and manages to swing the vote in Hiir’s favor, as the hatch his his responsibility as the Hatchmaster. No one is able to make the determination of readiness but Hiir.
With Hiir in his pocket, Kajj begins to work with Sear, at first trying to appeal to the Shipmaster with his care and protection of the drones — which turns out to be the wrong approach, as Sear finds it rather insulting and infantilizing. The two clash, until finally Kajj begins to realize that what Sear demands is respect and not protection (a lesson his Assistant, Keir, would have liked him to learn a little earlier.) Slowly, the two of them bond over repairing the Targe, the late Shield’s old ship. Eventually, Kajj is able to bring up the subject of the Viceroys, and gain their support.
Elder Eftee comes to him, confronting him in his own quarters about the fact that he has been snooping around. They’ve had their agents watching him and know that he seems to be making social visits and alliances with the other Elders. Very suspicious, given his up to this point highly isolated nature. At first, Kajj is afraid that they mean to turn him over to the Viceroys, but the truth of the matter is that Eftee sees the writing on the walls… and they want in. They are willing to reveal what they know about Daughter Ula’s Flight in order to secure for themself a place of power within the new Empire.
Powerful allies in place, Kajj secures one final piece of the puzzle — a batch of yhotame, the wingfruit, which will allow him to transition to a Consort and therefore outrank the Viceroys. But it seems they are not entirely ignorant of his plans…
Back on the Audacia, the tides are shifting as well. The Resistance is faced with the fact that there is a Vincam within their brig, one that is sullen, angry, and no one is entirely certain of the reason for her presence. Its clear that she means something to the Reaper — but what? A friend? An enemy? A child? His child…? The fact that she refuses to speak to anyone is certainly not helping anyone’s comfort with her presence, though Commander Osa does put her to work in various areas around the ship, attempting to find a use for her. The different squads switch off whose duty it is to keep watch on her, and when its the Thistle’s turn, Teema can’t help but feel uncomfortable with the way that the drone is looking at her. And looking at the drone, listening to her sing and watching the ways that she moves… Teema is confronted with uncomfortable ideas that she has been trying to run away from for all of her life.
One day, the Audacia gets in a shipment of weapons, and its a literal godsend to the group. They have always been understaffed and severely undergunned, but this shipment would mean being able to form up nearly a dozen more combat squads and increase their combat potential. It’s all hands on deck getting them all unloaded, which includes their Vincam prisoner. When the drone gets her hands on one of the boxes however, she brings the operation to a halt when she speaks Galcom to them for a first time to inform them that they were unloading a massive trap. These were Vincam weapons, subtly sabotaged to explode after firing a certain number of shots.
Keir is hauled before Commander Osa and made to prove her statement, and subsequently reveal her knowledge of weapons engineering to the Resistance crew. She winds up gaining their trust by systematically fixing all of the weapons, after receiving promises that none of them would be aimed at their “Reaper.” Little by little, Keir gains her freedom aboard the Audacia. She’s able to eat lunch in the mess hall with the other Recruits, to use the bathing facilities outside of the brig, and finally to have her own quarters under only the most cursory of watches. It was then that she was able to get Teema alone and to reveal the truth that Teema had already begun to realize —
Teema was, in fact, Vincam. An important one. And one who could change the entire course of the war if she was only brave enough to seize her destiny.
Teema brings this knowledge back to her squad, and it slowly leaks throughout the rest of the crew, who begin to treat Teema differently. Its like her first days of being a recruit again, with everyone staring at her with narrow-eyed suspicion… even while Keir is being treated with far more kindness. Eventually, Teema asks to speak with Commander Osa and tells her what Keir had told her. She and the Commander have a long, quiet conversation about birthrights and responsibilities, but Osa informs her that in the end, it is her choice to make.
Teema is about to speak, when there’s an interruption. The Reaper, it seems, is on the comms. And he’s coming in hot, his gunnership bursting through the subspace tunnels a smoking wreck, his systems failing… He needs their asylum, and he needs it now.
Kajj is beat to crap when he arrives and very near death. Most of the Resistance is of the mind that they should simply allow the monster to die, but Keir is able to convince them to help him. Kajj gets nursed back to health, babbling incoherently about failing to prepare the way for the Daughter, which he explains far more coherently when he gets put back together.
Kajj has a meeting with Osa, and explains with the help of Keir just who and what Teema is as well as who he is. Kajj explains that he has been working to unseat the Viceroys in order to prepare the colony for Teema to take over, but his machinations were discovered and the Viceroys ordered him dead. He just barely managed to escape using his gunnership’s illegal punchdrive, taking him to the relative safety of the Audacia. The plan was to depose the Viceroys by consuming the wingfruit, which would allow Kajj to transition from a potal to an alate Consort, allowing him to outrank them. The Viceroys would then be disposed of and the care and command of the colony given over to Teema, the lost Daughter. Unfortunately, the takeover would now have to be more violent, and he was going to need their military backing.
The Resistance do not want to give it. As much as they hate the Vincam empire, they are an aid organization, not a true military force. And yet, there comes a time when words simply are not enough anymore, and that the actions of a few may benefit the universe as a whole. Osa dismisses Kajj and the rest of the squad to speak to the senior officers alone and to decide what must be done. And Teema is left wondering when she had lost the ability to choose.
Keir, Teema, and Kajj all have a heart to heart, where Kajj apologizes for placing this on her shoulders at such a late stage. He explains that he has been searching for her all this time, and that he is sorry she had to grow up away from the colony. Teema, however, is not at all sorry. She loves her Mom and she hates the Vincam. She wants to know why she should even accept this responsibility in the first place, and why it has to be her. Things get heated, and they go their separate ways.
Keir talks to Teema about how the Empire that she hates isn’t really the people within it. Keir tells her about all the drones who keep it running, and the lives that they live and the shows that they enjoy… and all the other little stories that she has told her during her time on the Audacia. Slowly, Teema is persuaded to accept the responsibility she was born into, knowing that she could end the war if they managed to do this right. And that was worth more than almost anything. She laments the loss of her life and her freedom, but accepts the chains of command.
Around the same time, Osa announces the plan to the crew of the Audacia, giving everyone a choice to go or to stay. Osa has chosen to go, and to end the war once and for all. One by one, the majority of the crew pledge their support, though several opt to stay behind for medical or personal reasons. Those who do not wish to fight are found communities to stay in, and the remaining crew buckles up for a battle. Kajj eats the fruit, and leads the charge.
While the Audacia keeps the majority of the flotilla busy, Kajj uses the punchdrive of the Rapier one final time to burst through the hull of the Star-bloom and lead Teema into the heart of the colony. It’s utter chaos inside, with the Soldier drones having no idea who to fight and the Viceroys screaming for control. In Kajj’s absense, Mother’s death has been revealed and he has been branded a traitor. But he has returned with a Daughter in tow, which none of the Soldiers are able to find within themselves to attack.
But once faced with the chaos and confusion, the true realization that she is surrounded by people sets in for Teema. When confronted with the Viceroys, she is unable to order them to die as Kajj asks her. They are people, just like she is. And so Kajj plays the monster one more time taking down the twins that he had once considered his family, bloodying his hands to protect the things that he loves and believes in.
Kajj collapses once the Viceroys are down, succumbing to the fever. And Teema is left standing alone in a crowd of drones who slowly move to bow and salute her, leaving her feeling more alone than she’s ever been. She orders the fighting to stop, and the colony obeys. She orders Kajj to be given medical care, and the colony obeys.
The novel ends with Commander Osa, a former ruler herself, placing a hand on Teema’s shoulder and Keir wrapping her in a hug while the poor girl begins to cry.