After they eat, Mia and Kemia offer to give them a tour of the hive. Smon politely declines, claiming that she must rest. Tyk knows that Smon must be burning with curiosity about the hive, but also understands her dilemma; Smon doesn’t want to get caught up in any conversations in a language she hardly speaks with people whose mores and manners she barely understands, who think she’s a god....
2025-07-22 23:30:02 +0000 UTC View PostWe should build a train,” Kieth said.
We’d found them on the bridge, having finished their tour, laughing and applauding as Glath turned into various aliens and objects for their entertainment. I’d checked that the shyr was still imprisoned (she was, but maybe we should switch over to the other ship, just in case?), answered some of Kate’s questions when she glanced at the externa...
2025-07-19 23:34:35 +0000 UTC View Post“What’s your read on Mia?” Smon asks. “Fairly nervous, if I’m reading her body language correctly?”
“Well, she’s very young. And she and Kemia are in charge of looking after a god, so far as they know. It’s natural to be afraid.”
“You were never afraid of me.”
“Many of the Redstone River Hive were.”
“Not you, though.”
“I saw a clum...
2025-07-15 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post“I mean,” Kate said, “there are multiple potential solutions. The problem is finding one that we have any ability to enact. The obvious method, and a method that might be within our power, is to help the Empire establish a trade route with some smaller, distant nests and directly import dohl, and if that’s stable then we can try to spread the method to neighbouring Empires. Obviously, w...
2025-07-12 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post“The plan,” Smon explains, “is to build a Rayjo Tau, which is our version of a communication tower, on the Northern side of the mountain range, overlooking the ocean.”
“That won’t work,” one of the men, who had introduced himself as Keton, protests. “Not only will the mountain range block your communication, but the wingsong stream is dead on that side, anyway. You could p...
2025-07-08 23:30:02 +0000 UTC View PostWhat should the next story be? To read about the options, see the previous post.
2025-07-07 13:03:59 +0000 UTC View PostAfter Wandering Star and Charlie MacNamara are both complete, the next Derin story will be... one of these! Patreon members, vote for your favourites in the poll!
Holy Light
Nobody really noticed when the Rapture took place. In retrospect, the sudden uptick of missing person’s cases might have been visible in the data had the data still existed by the time anyone ...
2025-07-07 13:02:23 +0000 UTC View Post“So the main important factor is that the Out-Western Aljik Empire is not, in fact, an empire,” Kate explained. “I’m sure that Glath did as best he could translating from a stack of dictionaries with no knowledge of human culture, but to call this nest an ‘empire’, in the sense that we human English-speakers understand the term, is woefully misleading.”
“Okay,” I said. W...
2025-07-05 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostThe first group from Glittergem that they run into are fully expecting them, meaning that they must not have seen whoever initially spotted them and told the hive. It’s a group of three men, all looking very concerned and confused at the lack of an adult escort.
“So the wingsong stream isn’t up again yet?” Tyk asks after everyone does all the formal greetings and soforth and she...
2025-07-01 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostWhile my sister, with the help of Glath and Derek, interviewed the aljik, I had a shyr to deal with.
Loathe as I was to leave the boys, I wasn’t taking either of them back onto my ship while the shyr was still a threat. I left Keith with the others and headed back by myself.
It would be so, so easy to just leave the shyr to die. Safer, too, probably. Every time I saw the metal on ...
2025-06-28 23:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post“This is where we leave you,” Saima says in the morning, as the neima take one last look over the farm to make sure it’s all in order and load Tyk up with so much food that she wonders if she’ll need to forage again at all before reaching Glittergem.
“Can’t we go a bit further?” Tama asks. “Those of us who aren’t exiles could escort them all the way up to – ”
...
2025-06-24 23:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post“They have strict biological castes,” I explained. “Like ants or bees. Everyone has their own job, very little crossover.”
“So not really like ants and bees,” Kate said. “Ants have castes that are naturally better equipped for certain jobs, but they’ll all do what needs doing. If you grow ants in a farm with nobody to fight or guard against, the soldiers and the extra quee...
2025-06-21 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostTyk comes away from the encounter with the nedorm with one particular worry on her mind, and she’d like to talk to Saima privately about it, but their pattern of movement makes that somewhat difficult. She isn’t willing to leave Smon to go foraging, and Smon isn’t willing to leave the farm, so the only one of the neima she can easily get alone is Samet, pulling the cart. Well, Samet will ...
2025-06-17 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostThere was a knock on the door which, given the nature of spaceships, would have been quite a heavy thump on the other side. My family’s little cabin had an airlock in the outside corridor, so they didn’t suit up before Glath opened said door and peeked into the room.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but Charlie, we got her.”
“Alive or dead?” I asked.
“Presumab...
2025-06-16 17:45:33 +0000 UTC View Post“So you’re queen-captain of an alien starship?” Keith asked. “That’s super cool! Derek, we can be astronauts on Mum’s crew!”
Derek twitched his shoulders and bobbed his head in an aljik gesture of enthusiastic assent.
“What?” I said. “Oh, no. No, no, no. Space is dangerous. We’re going home.”
“You didn’t manage to get home before now,” Kate pointe...
2025-06-14 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostTyk had forgotten how strange an experience it was to see a sky person for the first time. The soft being swathed in silks and looking like the front half of an enormous baby raises its mandibles tipped with fleshy tentacles and speaks in the disjointed voices of multiple strangers, and the nedorm stare.
“I am Smon,” she repeats. “I mean no harm.”
The nedorm stare some more....
2025-06-10 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostWe docked. The shuttle door opened. And there they were.
Three humans, wearing space suits that looked rather more like human space suits than the ones the ketestri had made for me. One adult, two children. I drifted out of the pod, and both of my sons crashed straight into me, wrapping their arms around me.
“Mum!”
“”Boys! It’s okay now, it’s okay.” I wanted so m...
2025-06-07 23:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post“Did they see Smon?” Saima asks.
“Hard to say. She travels under the farm cover sometimes, so they may not have. I don’t know when they spotted us. They were already heading back and their scout wasn’t surprised to see me, so far as I could tell, so they could’ve seen us at any time.”
“You could tell a lack of surprise at that distance?” Samet asks.
“Kemask...
2025-06-03 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostWhat should this month's bonus be?
2025-06-03 09:02:04 +0000 UTC View PostBehind me, the crew were panicking. They didn’t understand what I was saying or who I was talking to. Glath was talking a lot; probably explaining the situation. I ignored them all. Nobody was pulling me away from the comms, and that was all that mattered.
“Derek! Are you alright, love? What’s going on? Do you need help?”
“Mum!” He started crying. “I was scared you wer...
2025-05-31 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostDespite Smon’s rush to contact the Northern sky people as quickly as possible and Tyk’s eagerness to get Ketyk to a hive as quickly as possible, their remaining days at the little burrow seem to pass in no time at all. By the end of it, Smon looks thicker in body, with less tears in her skin, and has a slightly improved farm and new undamaged foot coverings courtesy of the other sky people....
2025-05-27 23:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post“In a firefight, which ship is better?” the alien spokesperson asked.
Sil had been dreading that question. He didn’t want to kill the crew of the Oval Nine, and he wanted his own crew dead even less. If it came to a choice between them though, the facts were fortunately on his side.
“A battle would be dangerous for both ships,” he explained, “but ours would have the adva...
2025-05-24 23:30:02 +0000 UTC View PostTyk is getting pretty good, she thinks, at the Hiveless methods of foraging. She’s nowhere near as efficient as them, but she is only just learning the basics.
They harvest more thoroughly than hives would, taking more from each plant or animal colony, and then leaving them alone for a full year or more to grow back up to size. “It takes patience,” Saima says while out with Tyk and ...
2025-05-20 23:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post“You had those beasts down there hide it in their labyrinth, didn’t you?” Queen Tatik asked.
Her sister flicked her arms in a dismissive gesture. “Feel free to ask them. But I’d be careful, if I were you. You wouldn’t want to destroy it accidentally with heavy weaponry, meaning that if you end up in a physical conflict… well, a labyrinth isn’t a good place to fight drakes....
2025-05-17 23:25:27 +0000 UTC View PostThe next day, Tyk’s stomach ache hasn’t gone away, and the day after that, when the rain stops, it’s sharp and insistent. She’s starting to worry that something serious is wrong with her as she climbs out into the tunnel in the morning to see the women clearing the entrance, letting the early morning sunlight pour in.
“That was close,” Saima remarks as she approaches. “I was...
2025-05-13 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostTheir attackers weren’t aljik.
Sil wasn’t sure exactly what they were, crowded in what remained of their ship and clad in space suits. They had four limbs – two arms and two legs, it looked like, although it was hard to be certain since they, like he, were floating – with dextrous claws and fairly small heads, hidden behind bubble helmets. Everything about them was fairly small. I...
2025-05-10 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostTyk, diplomatically, does her best not to look horrified by whatever that could possibly mean. She has trouble picturing what a ‘lightning river’ could be, but it definitely doesn’t sound good. Dem spots her expression, says ‘wait’, and seems to think very hard for a moment before trying again. This sentence, unlike the lightning river one, is constructed from echoes of voices that Ty...
2025-05-06 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View PostSil was not used to zero gravity conflict. Safin’s reports echoed in his ears as he pulled himself away from the wall and got his bearings again. “Hull integrity: as intact as it was prior to the incident. External dash shielding: destroyed. External weapons: about 50% of them destroyed. Communications system: partly functional.”
“Partly?” Sil asked, still trying to figure out w...
2025-05-03 23:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post