They’d reached the moon’s surface with its dun soil. Stars blazed overhead, and a glorious globular cluster, their brilliance undimmed due to the thin atmosphere. Jedao, who’d spent most of his unlife trapped on space stations or in warmoths, gazed in sheer wonder at the raw sky.
{We’re almost there,} Cheris said, shaking his shoulder. She pointed toward a slender triangular silhouette on the horizon: a needlemoth. {Can you get us the rest of the way?}
He hesitated.
{You can do it again.}
There you are! the Harmony called out.
Jedao flattened himself against the ground, opening up whole new vistas of agony, as the needlemoth shot toward them. It back-winged neatly just short of him and Cheris, landing like a smug cat. Cheris was laughing incredulously; he couldn’t hear her, but her eyes were alight.
{That’s what you’ve been talking to?}
{Yes,} Jedao snapped.
Up close, the needlemoth’s matte carapace was adorned with glossy designs, so it resembled a sculpture wrought from shadow and silver filigree. At any moment it would dissolve into its component pieces, leaving him shackled by iron and surrounded by a darkness more absolute even than that of space. He didn’t want to return to the black cradle—
Cousin? the Harmony said quizzically at the same time Cheris said, {The airlock’s open.}
Jedao dragged himself after Cheris, wondering when having a body had become so complicated.
CHERIS’S FIRST CONCERN when she boarded the needlemoth was making contact with 1491625. She had called out to it when the needlemoth tilted and launched itself toward the sky. She hadn’t done any preflight checks; hell, she wasn’t even in the cockpit.
“You might as well strap in,” Jedao said. He had taken off his cracked helmet, limped over to one of the supply closets, and was rummaging for a replacement. “The moth’s piloting itself.”
“But that’s what the harnesses are—” Cheris stopped. Except the needlemoth had been damaged. The membrane and foam still sealed the carapace breach, but their fragility made her nervous. She wanted that remedied as soon as possible.
More importantly, assuming Jedao wasn’t delusional, the moth had talked to him through some heretofore unknown channel. Which meant it was sentient. It might have its own ideas about what it wanted to do with its life.
Cheris’s legs folded underneath her. She caught herself against the wall and staggered to a bunk to sit. She’d taken voidmoth transportation for granted her whole life. Even as a child, before she’d ever set foot on one, she’d assumed that the moths were like flitters or hoverers, mere vehicles for traveling between two points, except in space rather than on a planet or in a starbase.
The Kel swarms, with all their warmoths, from the massive cindermoths to the bannermoths, from the boxmoth transports to the scoutmoths: she’d never given them a second thought. Even though she’d had some dim awareness that the Nirai used biological components to build them, she’d never suspected them of being people. People with opinions of their own, like the servitors, or herself.
“You can talk to them?” Cheris asked Jedao.
He had located a helmet and was checking it over. “I think so,” he said. He met her eyes squarely. {I miscalculated. It’s like playing jeng-zai only to discover that the cards are intelligent—and they’ve been playing me all along.}
She stared wildly around her, then scrambled to her feet. “1491625!”
To her relief, the servitor emerged from the hold. Aside from some dents in its carapace, it looked intact. “Our ride’s a rogue,” it flashed at her in glum blues. “And congratulations, the regenerating menace from outer space knows about servitors now, doesn’t he?”
Jedao signed back, in Simplified Machine Universal, “I’ve known for a while now.”
Cheris stared at him. How long had he—? “It’s time for everyone to show their hands,” she said. “As long as we’re going with card game metaphors.”
1491625’s lights flickered a distinctly hostile red-orange.
“Yes,” Jedao said, unsmiling.
“I’ll start,” Cheris said. “First of all, the year is 1263...”
HEXARCH SHUOS MIKODEZ’S day had started well, with a meditation, an unexpectedly optimistic meeting with Financial, and a delightful new type of hawthorn candy. He’d carved out some time amid all the meetings to pet Jedao the Calico Cat, who had matured from a typically scatterbrained, over-energetic nuisance of a kitten to a lazy ball of fur whose ambition in life was to be a throw pillow. Mikodez still didn’t like cats that much, but petting their cats put him in the good graces of his assistant Zehun.
He’d gone to bed, marveling at the possibility of a rare full night’s sleep, only to be woken in the middle of the night by a Code Red Nine. Swearing, Mikodez scrambled out of bed and to the terminal in the adjacent office. “What is it now?” he demanded.
Zehun’s image blazed to life. One of their two black cats—Mikodez couldn’t tell which—was draped over their shoulders. “The fishing expedition succeeded,” Zehun said. “You’d better have a listen. This is not like the time with the foxforsaken hours of incoherent screaming. Listen to it—under lockdown.”
Mikodez raised his eyebrows.
Zehun shook their head and, to Mikodez’s frustration, signed off.
Still, Mikodez trusted Zehun enough to put his office on full lockdown, as if the Citadel had been compromised and he expected imminent attack on his person.
By “fishing expedition” Zehun meant the elaborate scheme both of them had cooked up to shoo Jedao out of the Citadel. Over the past two years, it had become increasingly clear that Jedao was hiding something that explained why Kujen’s command moth, crewed by Kel no less, had deserted at the Battle of Terebeg, instead of surrendering with the rest of the swarm. The only other escapee from that moth, Commander Kel Talaw, had been badly poisoned, and had proven unable to offer an explanation due to damage to their memory. And Jedao showed no inclination to talk.
So Mikodez and Zehun had, in fine Shuos tradition, given Jedao a length of rope and watched to see how he hanged himself with it.
One of the precautions Mikodez had taken when Jedao first came into his care was to have him fitted with transmitters. Multiple transmitters, state of the art technology, and hideously expensive. But it had paid off. Jedao had only discovered and ditched one of the transmitters. The rest remained intact, especially the ones threaded into his augment. Why Jedao hadn’t had his augment removed out of paranoia was an interesting question, and one Mikodez was going to have to resolve later.
The transmitter brought up a distorted Jedao’s-eye view of the conversation that Zehun wanted him to listen in on. Mikodez assessed the surroundings: a small moth whose carapace breach was messily mended with sealant. He hoped they planned on a more permanent fix soon.
There was a single woman in the moth, Kel Cheris or Dzannis Paral or whatever she was calling herself these days. A servitor, who flashed lights at intervals. And of course there was Jedao himself.