“Well,” Nita said, “that’s good.” She smiled, a little ruefully. “I guess it’s a nice change of pace to be dealing with common crooks.”
“But all this is driving me crazy,” Sker’ret said. “We have to get back to Rashah! The others—”
“Yes,” Carmela’s voice said, “the others.” She came ambling over from the other side of the command console, and the various Rirhait she passed all reared up in that respect gesture. She smiled. “When do we go?”
Nita looked around her, and then back at Sker’ret. “I don’t know about ‘we,’” she said after a moment. “Sker’, what’s the local situation? Have you got things running again?”
“It’s going to take a while,” Sker’ret said. “The defense systems still aren’t secure enough to make me happy. I want to make sure we’re not vulnerable to a second strike. And there’s a lot of gating that ought to be passing through here routinely that hasn’t been. Then there’s the emergency traffic—”
Nita was becoming more expert at reading Sker’ret’s expressions and body language, and right now he looked as if he felt like tearing a few of his eyes out by the roots. “What about your ancestor?” she said a little more quietly.
“We don’t know,” Sker’ret said. He held still for a moment, and that, too, struck Nita as something of a danger sign: it was rare for there not to be something about Sker’ret that was moving. “When the aliens took him and my sibs prisoner in the initial attack, they shoved them all onto a pad and sent them to a portable gate target somewhere in the Greater Magellanic. The first storming team that went to that planet looking for them didn’t find anything. The target had been dismantled and taken somewhere else, possibly through another gate. The law-enforcement people are looking into that, too.”
Nita sighed. “Sker’, you can’t just leave all this and go back to what we were doing. This is where you’re needed.”
Sker’ret sighed out of all his spiracles, and sagged a little where he stood. “If even just a few of my sibs were here,” he said softly.
“But they’re not,” Carmela said, getting down beside him and rubbing the top of his head segment. “I don’t think you have any choice.”
“And there are plenty of us working on you-know-what,” Nita said.
“Ooh, mystery,” Carmela said. “This is more fun every minute.”
Sker’ret looked troubled. “I dislike letting the others down—”
“You’re not,” Nita said. “What you have to do now is not let this whole part of the galaxy down! You can’t walk away from this.”
“Even though I’ve been trying to for so long,” Sker’ret said, and gave Nita a wry look out of several eyes.
The ironic tone that had come back into his voice reassured Nita. “Well, things are different now,” Nita said, “but it looks like when you walked away that last time, that was a good idea. If you’d stayed here then, whatever happened to your ancestor and all your sibs could have happened to you, too.”
Sker’ret sighed. “We can’t ever be sure,” he said. “Anyway, here I stay. In the meantime, I can gate the two of you back quickly enough. You’ll want to warn Ronan that you’re incoming.”
He and his partner know, the peridexis said in the back of Nita’s mind as Carmela got up to stand beside her. The One’s Champion left a stealth routine in place. You can safely direct-gate straight in.
“They’ve got it handled,” Nita said. “All we have to do is go.”
“Take the closest gate there,” Sker’ret said. “I’ll send you out.”
He turned, then, looking with all his eyes at the bluesteel racking of the Stationmaster’s control area. All around, the Rirhait who had been taking Sker’ret’s orders drew back a little and watched. “It was just a little hut, once,” Sker’ret aid. “A little hut outside a cave.”
“It’s a lot more than that now,” Nita said. “And it’s all yours.”
Sker’ret shivered in a shiny ripple that ran right down his body, and then he poured himself into the heart of the cubicle and up onto its racking, draping himself across the control structures. He turned his attention to one of the consoles. “The main pad on the far side,” Sker’ret said. He looked at Nita and Carmela just briefly with every eye. “Call if you need anything.”
“We will,” Nita said. “Hold the fort, Sker’.”
He wreathed his eyes at her. “And, cousin, dai stihó.”
“You go well, too,” Nita said. “‘Mela—”
Carmela reached up and tugged at one of Sker’ret’s eyes. “Make me proud,” she said.
“And as for you, try not to blow up anything that doesn’t need it,” Sker’ret said.
“Me?” Carmela said, in a tone of dignified but wounded innocence. “When would I ever do that?”
Nita took Carmela by the elbow and steered her over to the pad. “Stand in the middle,” she said. “If you ever lose your balance in one of these things, you want to make sure you do it inside.”
“I would never lose my balance,” Carmela said. “I am a paragon of grace and stability.”
“Oh, yeah. Who said that?”
“Roshaun.”
Nita grinned as they positioned themselves in the middle of the pad. “Just wait till Dairine hears,” she said.
The de facto Master of the Crossings raised a few forelegs to them. Nita raised a hand. Carmela got out her curling iron and touched a pattern of spots on its side, upon which it started to make a soft and very businesslike humming sound.
Nita threw her a look. Carmela simply smiled. “You never can tell,” she said.
They vanished.
***
Back in the cavern on Rashah, out of their mochteroofs again, a very confused and troubled group of wizards sat down under the floating spell-lights to eat something and try to make sense of what had happened.
“It doesn’t know why we’re here,” Ronan said, shaking his head. “It actually doesn’t know!”
Will we be able to keep it that way? Filif said.
“If we’re careful, maybe,” said Kit.
“It was really strange,” Dairine said. She had broken out another trail-mix bar, one that didn’t have cranberries in it—Roshaun was eating the last of those, while wearing one of his more brooding expressions—and she paused to take a drink of one of Nita’s favorite lemon sodas, which she’d stolen. “It really did sound as if it was running on automatic. The King may be an avatar of the Lone One, like all Its other people, but You-Know-Who wasn’t completely there.”
“I felt that, too,” Kit said. “But did you feel It sort of… sucking at you? Trying to make you willing to do whatever It said? I did.”
And I, said Filif, all his branches and fronds rustling in a shudder.
“As did I,” Roshaun said. “Disgusting.” He, too, shuddered all over and looked at Kit with a sort of troubled admiration. “Doubtless that is the source of some of Its power over the hive. I wondered that you could find such self-mastery, to stare It in the eye and not flinch.”
“Oh, I was flinching, all right,” Kit said. “But sometimes you just have to cope. Besides, you were all there. It’s different when you have so much backup.”
I didn’t feel anything, Ponch said. Wagging his tail idly, he came ambling along past Kit, having just finished his own dinner, and put his head over Kit’s shoulder. Kit, not missing a beat, moved the bag of pretzels he was eating out from under Ponch’s nose and into his other hand. And there’s only one person who can make me do what he says.
Kit rolled his eyes. “Oh, really? Who would that be?”
Ponch barked and started to bounce around Kit, wagging his tail harder. Kit sighed and gave him a pretzel.
Dairine shook her head. “I can’t get past the fact that the King knew what we were … and then let us walk away. How come?”
“Perhaps because the situation is exactly as Kit extrapolated it,” Roshaun said. “And because this is not a complete avatar of the Isolate. Possibly t
he species’ rigid structure militates against that. Or the Lone One’s attention, as Kit also suggested, is elsewhere. Besides which”—Roshaun glanced at Ronan—”we have protection.”
It isn’t easy to divert such a creature’s attention from the truth of what’s going on right in front of it, the Champion said, but it can be done. Still, even with just a partial avatar to deal with, and in my present circumstances, I’m finding it … challenging.
When she heard that, Dairine’s mouth felt suddenly dry. “Which brings us to our next problem,” she said. “The Hesper…”
“That was indeed the one we seek?” Roshaun said to Ronan.
Ronan nodded. “It was,” he said. “Ponch”—and he reached out to ruffle the dog’s ears—”has done effing brilliant work.”
Thank you. Got a dog biscuit? Ponch said.
Ronan gave Kit a look. Kit headed for his pup tent, reached inside its door, and came back with the dog biscuit box. He handed Ronan a biscuit, and Ronan gave it to Ponch; loud crunching noises ensued. “Now all we have to do is find out how to make contact with the Hesper,” Ronan said. “Assuming we can get to her without raising the alarm.”
Spot popped his screen up. “I’ve been processing the mapping information I stored while we were there,” he said, “and coordinating it with the markings on the tunnel walls. Some of them, rather than being mottoes and propaganda, are labels.”
On his screen, and in the middle of the rough circle in which they were all sitting, appeared a three-dimensional map of part of the Yaldiv city-hive. “This is incomplete,” Spot said, “but it’s possible to extrapolate a lot of structures we didn’t actually examine from the tunnel openings we passed, and the road signs on the walls.” A small pulsing light appeared in front of one chamber in the diagram. “Here’s where you saw the Hesper,” Spot said.
Dairine leaned down to look at the label that was flashing on the diagram on Spot’s screen. “‘Grubbery’?”
“Possibly we would say ‘nursery,’” Filif said. “A place where the younger and more fragile members of the species are kept or reared.”
“It looks like they reproduce sort of backward from the way hive insects work on Earth,” Dairine said, bringing up another display on Spot’s screen and scrolling down it, while the main map display remained rotating gently in the air in the midst of them. “Instead of a female with a lot of male mates, they have a ‘king’ male who visits a sort of harem and fertilizes chosen females. Then they go off to the nurseries, and—”
“Oh, please,” Kit said. “Sex stuff.” He hid his eyes briefly with one hand. “Aren’t we supposed to be protected from this kind of thing?”
“You’re getting kind of old for that now,” Dairine said, unconcerned. “If standard operating procedure’s actually operating that way at the moment. Anyway, where other species are involved, I think as soon as we’re old enough to ask, we’re old enough to find out.” She gave Kit a slightly cockeyed look, then glanced away again. There were things she herself was still finding uncomfortable about this particular species’ take on reproduction… particularly what happened to the females after the many eggs they bore were fertilized. It brought to mind a particularly vivid sequence from a nature movie she’d seen on one of the educational channels last year—a wasp laying its egg inside some hapless caterpillar, which then went about its business until the day the egg hatched, and the wasp grub started eating its way out. That times a hundred, Dairine thought. Or a thousand. More workers, more warriors for the king. And as for the poor handmaiden, or what’s left of her—
Kit turned to Ronan. “You think you can cover for us again when we go back in?”
The way things are at the moment, I don’t see any problem with that, the Champion said.
“Then let’s do it in the morning,” Dairine said. “The handmaidens don’t go out of the hive with the workers and warriors; there’ll be a lot fewer Yaldiv to avoid if we want to have a chat with her.”
“The question being,” Filif said, “what do we say to her, exactly? ‘Go well, Hesper, and would you kindly now rise up and save the universe?’”
“Don’t ask me,” Dairine said, getting up and stretching. “Improvisation seems to be the order of the day, so I’m gonna wing it. Or better still,” she said, ambling over to look at her mochteroof, “wait for one of you older-and-wiser types to think of something.” She threw what was intended to be an annoying look at Roshaun, and turned away.
A few moments later, he came up behind her and looked over her shoulder, pretending to flick a speck of dust off the gleam of the mochteroof‘s skin. “You are somewhat on edge, are you not?” Roshaun said under his breath.
“Now why would I admit to a thing like that?” Dairine said softly, meeting his reflection’s eye. “But since you ask, I haven’t been so freaked since we were talking to your dad back on Wellakh. I forget what he said, but you gave him this really dirty look and your stone changed color. I thought maybe you were getting ready to blast him or something and then blame it on my unhealthy alien influence.”
Roshaun stared at her. “You saw the Sunstone do what?”
Dairine looked at him curiously. “It got clear. While you were talking to your father. You weren’t going to blast him? I’m glad.”
He looked perturbed. “It wouldn’t be that I wasn’t in something of two minds,” he said, “but all the same—”
She turned away. “Tell me about it,” she said. “He was getting on my nerves, too.”
From behind them Filif said, “This has been a taxing day. We should all root, or rest, or whatever. Tomorrow will almost certainly be more challenging still.”
Dairine sighed. “My favorite leafy green vegetable has a point,” she said. “I’m gonna turn in.”
“And just who are you calling a vegetable?”
“‘Whom,’” Dairine said. “Spot, you coming?”
Stalked sensor-eyes swiveled to follow Dairine. “Shortly. I have a little more analysis to do.”
“Okay. Get me up as soon as anything starts to happen. ‘Night, guys.”
Dairine went into Nita’s pup tent and got as comfortable as she could in the sleeping bag—the couch was far too lumpy for her. She left just a thin glow of wizard-light outlining the door of the pup-tent interface, spent a few moments punching her sleeping bag’s pillow into the right shape, and gratefully lay down and closed her eyes.
But it took her a long time to stop her mind going around and around over the same piece of mental ground. What do we do next? Is it going to be enough? What if it’s not? What’s going on at home? And where the hell is Neets? She should be back by now. Whenever “now” is…
And the next thing she knew, she heard a voice saying from outside, “It does not understand. It does not know.”
Dairine sat bolt upright in the sleeping bag, her eyes wide. The voice had been quiet, almost trembling; there had been as much wonder in it as fear. And it had also not been human. Well, these days that was hardly a big deal. But it also hadn’t been Sker’ret, or Roshaun, or—
She was out of the pup tent about three seconds later, standing on the warm, gritty stone of the cavern floor and feeling grotty and half conscious in the rumpled clothes she hadn’t bothered to take off before bed. Everyone else was standing there looking much the same, give or take a few items of clothing … and also staring in astonishment at an eight-foot-high Yaldiv that was presently walking delicately and a little uncertainly around the mochteroofs, feeling them with long slender scenting palps. Wandering around after her was Ponch, wagging his tail and sniffing the back end of her long abdominal shell in a curious way.
“Ponch!” Kit said. He was standing there in pajama bottoms and a beat-up, plaid flannel bathrobe, looking bleary, astonished, and annoyed. “Cut that out!”
Ponch lolloped over to Kit, plainly far too pleased to be troubled by his annoyance. I found her. Can we keep her?
Kit rubbed his eyes. “My dog brings home strays,” he said in
Ronan’s general direction. “I should have mentioned. You think It noticed?”
Difficult to tell, but I think perhaps not, the One’s Champion said from inside Ronan. Otherwise, I should have noticed. Ponch’s way of getting places doesn’t seem to register as a transit.
“I guess we should be relieved,” Kit said. “Ponch, promise me you won’t go off like that again without telling me first!”
Ponch stood up on his hind legs, putting his feet on Kit’s chest. I didn’t do anything bad! he said, sounding worried and a little perturbed. You all wanted to see her! And I wanted to see if she smelled like I thought she should have smelled, Ponch said. And she did!
“Yeah, but we also wanted to give her a chance to get used to us—”
I gave her a chance to get used to me! I smelled her, and she smelled me. And then we started talking.
Dairine stifled her laughter. Roshaun, who had come out of his pup tent shortly after Dairine, caught her eye. You said you were planning to improvise? he said. You are going to have to move much faster in the future.
Dairine turned her attention to the Yaldiv handmaiden. She came around the back of the mochteroofs and paused to look at the members of the group one after another, taking them in: a tree with glowing berries, a tall humanoid with flowing blond hair, a tall dark humanoid, a smaller one, and another smaller still; a little machine, a strange creature that wagged at one end and panted at the other. The Yaldiv’s scenting palps moved uncertainly.
Somebody really ought to say hello to her, Dairine said. But then the question came up: what did you say to a creature that might never have heard of errantry, or might think it was evil? Yet, buried somewhere inside this creature was the hope of a tremendous power for good. You had to let that power know it was safe to express itself.
Dairine opened her mouth. But the Yaldiv beat her to it, raising her foreclaws in the deferential gesture they’d seen used out on the path the afternoon before. Then the Yaldiv let them fall, as if she couldn’t use the normal ceremonial response, and thus the gesture was invalid as well.
“This one saw these,” the Yaldiv said. Those weird pronouns again, Dairine thought. “When they walked in the tunnel, near Grubbery Fourteen. Though they were not Yaldiv, they had a Yaldiv seeming. They wore it strangely, like a shell during molt, but not-like, as if the shell could be seen through. Their shapes were strange. Their shapes were these shapes—” She pointed one claw at each of them in turn.