"Despiccable," said Dupaynil, edging farther away from the dance of those powerful feet. Then a bell-like voice rang out, its source unidentifiable.
"Sassinak friend?"
Dupaynil tried to control his start of surprise, and glanced around. The Bronthin looked half-asleep which is the way Bronthins usually looked and the Ryxi had begun grooming its feathers with jerky strokes of its beak. The two Lethi were still stuck to each other and the slab of sulfur.
"Do not look… in the tank." He managed to stare at the blank space above the Bronthin, while the voice continued and his own mind shivered away from it. He had never liked descriptions of telepathy and he liked the reality less. "Sassinak friend you are. We greet you. We are more and less than we seem."
Of course. Ssli. So Ssli larvae could communicate! He could not 'feel' anything in his mind when the voice fell silent, but that didn't mean it, or they, were not reading him.
"No time to investigate your dark secrets. We must plan."
They were reading his surface thoughts, at least, to have picked up that distaste for internal snooping. He recognized the irony of that, someone whose profession was snooping on others, now being turned inside out by aliens. He tried to organize his thoughts, make a clear message.
"You stare at wall for a reason?" the Ryxi asked, its feathers now sleeked down.
Dupaynil could have strangled the Ryxi for breaking his concentration, and then he did feel a featherlight touch, soothing, and a bubble of amusement.
"I'm very tired," he said honestly. "I need to rest."
With that, he found a clear space of floor, between wall and the Ssli tank, and curled up, helmet in his arms. The Ryxi sniffed, then tucked its head back over its shoulders into the back feathers. Dupaynil closed his eyes and projected against the screen of his eyelids.
"What can you do?"
"Nothing alone. We hoped they would bring a human. We are not both Ssli."
The voice said nothing more and Dupaynil thought about it. If they were reading his thoughts, they were welcome. Not both Ssli? Another alien marine race? iddenly he realized what it had to be and almost laughed aloud.
"A Weft?"
"Seemed safer this way. Seti hate Wefts enough to them before the coup. But with this form come certain… limitations."
"Which humans don't have?"
"Precisely."
"Sorry, but I don't think they'll let me push that Etank to wherever they keep the escape pods. Assuming they have any."
"Not the plan. May we share?" It seemed an odd question from beings who could force mental intimacy, and already had, but Dupaynil was in the mood to accept any courtesy offered.
"Go ahead."
He tensed, bracing himself for some unimaginable sensation, and felt nothing. Only information began to knit itself into his existing cognitive matrix, as if he were learning it so fast that it was safely in long-term memory before it passed his eyes. The Bronthin, he learned, had been hired by the Seti to provide them with mathematical expertise. On the basis of its calculations and models, they had defined the best time to attempt the coup.
And the Bronthin had had no way to warn the Federation. Bronthins could not manipulate Seti communications equipment, were not telepathic, and suffered severe depression when kept isolated from their social herds. As for the Ssli, it had been delivered, in its tank, after it had been stolen from a Fleet recruit depot. The Weft, a Fleet guard at the depot, had been shot in the burglary and survived only by shapechanging into the Ssli tank in a larval form. The thieves had not known the difference between Weft and Ssli larvae and had apparently supposed that two or more larvae were in each tank, in case one died.
"But what can we do?" Dupaynil asked.
"You can talk to the Bronthin, and find out more of what it knows about this fleet. It had the information to make models with. It must know. It's depressed. That's why it won't talk. Later, when we drop out of FTL, you can see the viewscreen. We have no such eyes. But the Ssli can link with other Ssli on a Fleet vessel, and that Ssli has a biolink to the captain."
Cheering up the Bronthin took all of Dupaym's considerable charm. It turned away at first, muttering number series, but the offer of another bowl of water helped. He watered the Ryxi, too, automatically, and this time the feathered alien handed the bowl back rather than dropping it. But it took many bowls of water, and a couple of sessions of picking the burrs from the dry grass the Seti tossed in for its feed, before the alien showed much response.
Finally it scrubbed its heavy head up and down his arm, took his hands in its muscular lips, and said,
"I… will try to speak Standard… in thanks for your kindness…"
"Inaccurate as Standard is, and unsuited to your genius, would it be possible to recall how many ships this size the Seti have with them?"
The Bronthin flopped a long upper lip, and sighed.
"The ratio of such ships to those next smaller to those next smaller to the smallest is 1.2:3.4:5.6:5:4. An interesting ratio, chosen by the Seti for its ragged harmony, if I understood them." It shook its long head. "Alas… never again to roll in the green sweet fields of home or be granted the tail's whisk across the sands in the company of my peers."
"Such courage in loneliness," Dupaynil murmured. In his experience, praising the timid for courage sometimes produced a momentary flare of it. "And the total to which such a ratio applies?"
With something akin to a snort, the Bronthin's lovely periwinkle eyes opened completely., "Ah! You understand that the ratio is theoretical. The fleet itself made up of actual ships, of which at any time some fraction is out of service for maintenance and the like. Of those actually here, in the sense that here has any meaning… are you at all femiliar with Sere-kleth-vladin's transformational series and its application to hyperspace flux variations?"
"Alas, no," said Dupaynil, who didn't know such things existed - whatever they were.
"Unhhh… one hundred four. Eight similar to this, which would of course make you expect 22.6,37.3, 35.9 ships of the other classes, but fractional ships are non-functional. Twenty-three of the next class, then thirty-seven, then thirty-six. And since it would be the logical next question," the Bronthin went on, its eyes beginning to sparkle, "I will explain that the passive defenses of the Federation Central System, if not tampered with, could be expected to destroy at least 82% of the total. Those remaining would be unlikely to succeed at reducing the planets or disrupting the Grand Council. But the Seti count on tampering, which will reduce the efficiency of the distant passive scans by 41%, and on specific aid whose nature I do not know, to disable additional defenses. This incursion is timed to coincide with the meeting of the Grand Council and the Winter Assizes, at which the presence of many ships could well cause confusion."
"They expect no resistance from Fleet?" The Bronthin opened its mouth wide, revealing the square grinding teeth of a herbivore, and gave a long sound somewhat between a moo and a bray. "My apologies," it said then. "Our long misunderstanding of the nature of humans; our votes have long gone to reducing appropriations for what we saw as a means of territorial aggrandizement. These Seti expect that any Fleet vessels in Federation Central Systems space will be neutralized. And once again, we aided this, voting to require that all Fleet vessels disarm lest they overpower the Grand Council."
"A most natural error for any lover of peace," Dupaynil murmured soothingly.
Sassinak would be there with the Zaid-Dayan. Would she have disarmed completely, trusting in the disarmament of others to keep her ship safe? Somehow he doubted it. But with surveillance by the FSP local government, she wouldn't be able to have all the ship's scans on… and without warning… he realized he had no idea how fast the Zaid-Dayan could get into action.