I didn’t know what he meant, but I could see something had gone wrong.
“It’s okay.” I waved him closer. “Sit down.”
He did, but still his body trembled. I sat down in front of him, and took one of his hands. I could feel it shaking.
“Nix how are you alive? Where have you been?”
Behind the serene glow of his saucer eyes the main mass of his brain shifted, pushing the smaller one underneath back deeper.
“I’ve been on the ship.”
“No,” I said. “You couldn’t have been. I looked back through the gate, and I saw you get caught in the fire.”
“When I began to burn, I was gated back to the ship,” he said. “The interior of the structure contains an advanced form of perfluorocarbon, an oxygen-rich liquid which we breathe while inside.”
I remembered, after gating back with Sillith’s remains, waking up to the blackness inside the ship. I remembered the terror I’d felt when I first drew the cold fluid into my lungs.
“I very nearly died, but it kept me alive until I could regenerate,” he said, his voice box flickering in the dark.
“You told me they’d exiled you, because you didn’t kill me like they wanted. You said they’d kill you.”
“I believed they would. However, when they examined my memories and saw the true extent of my newfound individuality, they decided to study me, rather than send me back to the vats.”
“Study you? Why?”
“We aren’t like you,” he said. “We are much closer to what you might describe as a hive society. We share all info, all concerns, burdens, and workloads. I am a deviation from a long-established norm. Your influence has changed me in a way they hoped, I think, might be used as a bridge between our species. I cannot be certain, but I think they even considered me for the position of female.”
“But you said…” I trailed off as what he’d said registered. “Wait. What?”
“When our population reaches a certain threshold, we divide the populace into two distinct regions, and create a new female for the new group,” he said. “We’ve never reached that point on your planet, and so you have only ever witnessed a single female. Typically the need is anticipated and the female is grown, but any male can take the role of female, once the right trigger is administered.”
I ran my fingers through my hair, wondering how the day could get any weirder. “I don’t think I can get my head around you being a female,” I said.
“If they ever truly considered it, then they decided against it.”
“So then they let you go?”
“No,” he said. “She kept me in stasis for a time, until they could reach a consensus regarding how to handle me.”
“Who did?”
“The current haan female, Ava, and—”
“Ava?” That surprised me. “But she helped you. She helped all of us when Sillith came.”
“It is not personal,” he said. “When I didn’t cooperate, it constituted a significant breach in our way of doing things. I presented her with a difficult challenge.”
“I guess.” I watched him shake. The thin stream of terror that still bubbled over through the cluster told me that personal or not, he’d been shaken bad. Even when Hwong had tortured him, I’d never felt anything like it. “She seems different, now, I guess. Even on TV.”
“Ava had not, at the time, taken her place as the new haan female. Once Sillith died, she did. She has merged, since then. Her perceptions are not what they once were.”
“Merged? Merged with what?”
“She has all of the memories of every haan female to precede her. They are present in her consciousness as virtual personality sums.”
“Even Sillith?”
“Every female. She is, but is not, the Ava you knew. The benefit of so much history and experience comes at a cost. She is well aware now of all the evils both men and haan alike have done. She knows what Sillith and Hwong tried to do, that they conspired to wipe out the Pan-Slav Emirates. It colors her perception of your race.”
“Then she knows what Sillith did, too, before she died.”
I wondered if he would deny it. He paused, and I watched his brains shift in their soup as he struggled with it for a bit.
“Yes,” he said. “She knows. She knows that humans are being converted.”
“Nix, tell me—was that the plan all along?”
“No.”
“Sillith had to have been working on that for ages. You’re telling me no one else knew?”
“What Sillith did was not part of some greater plan,” he insisted. “She acted alone.”
I looked at him warily. He seemed to be telling the truth, but he’d lied to me before.
“We do not intend to change you,” Nix said. “We would never try to make you something other than what you are.”
“I wonder sometimes if you know what that is, Nix,” I said.
“You have the potential to change us more so than we do you,” he said. “When the time came, Ava did not package my memories for distribution throughout the hive, but they were shared among a select group. When they realized my bond with the humans had altered my perception, they decided to explore my memories in greater detail.”
“Explore them?”
“By extracting them, and, most likely, growing clones to run simulations on—”
“So they did plan to kill you?”
“Eventually. I knew I had to escape, if I was to avoid that.”
“I thought none of you was afraid to die,” I said.
“As I said, my perceptions have been altered. When I felt my life begin to slip away, I discovered that I was afraid. I didn’t know what to do. I panicked, and killed the scientists in charge of my handling. I killed… many more as I fled the ship.”
As he recounted the story, I could sense a renewed surge of anxiety from him. Anxiety and guilt bled through, flaring up through an undercurrent of misery.
“Hey… it’s okay, Nix.”
He reached out and touched my arm, and when he did I jumped.
“Let me see,” he said, gesturing at my left arm. He’d spotted the bond tattoo there.
“Wake up Alexei.”
“Not yet. Let me see.”
I let him take my arm, and felt the warmth coming off of him as he scooted closer, until our legs were touching. I held it out next to my right where the bond bands for Dragan, Vamp, and Alexei ringed my biceps. He compared the band on the left side to them, tracing the name with one long finger.
“That’s my name,” he said.
I pulled my arm back and looked at him, crossing my arm over my knees and resting my chin there.
“I didn’t intend to get attached to you,” he said, “but I did.”
“Me, too.” In spite of it all, I realized that I’d missed him. He stared back at me, shivering in the summer heat. “Wake up Alexei.”
“I have to tell you something,” he said. “I know what you’re planning to do.”
“How can you know—”
“One of Sillith’s creations, what you call the haanyo ng, has learned. In tracking you down, I obtained the information via a scalefly-transmitted memory payload.”
I felt my eyes go wide. “Do all of the haan know?”
“No,” he said. “Not yet. The new haan still retain their human identities, at least for a while. They often don’t understand how to forge a symbiosis with the scaleflies at first. Those that do, however, have the potential to receive these memories. They will learn who you are, and what you intend to do.”
“And what about what the haan intend to do?” I asked.
“My people are aware of what Sillith started, and what will happen if it is found out before we can stop it.”
“Can you stop it?”
“We will try—”
“But you don’t know if you can.”