Anywhere near the access shafts infested by the colony, Kadath Station’s passages reeked of tove—ammoniac, sulfurous. The stench infiltrated the edges of Irizarry’s mask as he lifted his face to a ventilation duct. Wincing in anticipation, he broke the seal on the rebreather and pulled it away from his face on the stiff elastic straps, careful not to lose his grip. A broken nose would not improve his day.
A cultist engineer skittered past on sucker-tipped limbs, her four snake-arms coiled tight beside her for the narrow corridor. She had a pretty smile, for a Christian.
Mongoose was too intent on her prey to be shy. The size of the tove colony might make her nervous, but Mongoose loved the smell—like a good dinner heating, Irizarry imagined. She unfolded herself around his head like a tendriled hood, tentacles outreached, body flaring as she stretched towards the ventilation fan. He felt her lean, her barbels shivering, and turned to face the way her wedge-shaped head twisted.
He almost tipped backwards when he found himself face to face with someone he hadn’t even known was there. A woman, average height, average weight, brown hair drawn back in a smooth club; her skin was space-pale and faintly reddened across the cheeks, as if the IR filters on a suit hadn’t quite protected her. She wore a sleek space-black uniform with dull silver epaulets and four pewter-colored bands at each wrist. An insignia with a stylized sun and Earth-Moon dyad clung over her heart.
The political officer, who was obviously unconcerned by Mongoose’s ostentatious display of sensory equipment.
Mongoose absorbed her tendrils in like a startled anemone, pressing the warm underside of her head to Irizarry’s scalp where the hair was thinning. He was surprised she didn’t vanish down his shirt, because he felt her trembling against his neck.
The political officer didn’t extend her hand. “Mr. Irizarry? You’re a hard man to find. I’m Intelligence Colonel Sadhi Sanderson. I’d like to ask you a few quick questions, please.”
“I’m, uh, a little busy right now,” Irizarry said, and added uneasily, “Ma’am.” The last thing he wanted was to offend her.
Sanderson looked up at Mongoose. “Yes, you would appear to be hunting,” she said, her voice dry as scouring powder. “That’s one of the things I want to talk about.”
Oh shit. He had kept out of the political officer’s way for a day and a half, and really that was a pretty good run, given the obvious tensions between Lee and Sanderson, and the things he’d heard in the Transient Barracks: the gillies were all terrified of Sanderson, and nobody seemed to have a good word for Lee. Even the Christians, mouths thinned primly, could say of Lee only that she didn’t actively persecute them. Irizarry had been stuck on a steelship with a Christian congregation for nearly half a year once, and he knew their eagerness to speak well of everyone; he didn’t know whether that was actually part of their faith, or just a survival tactic, but when Elder Dawson said, “She does not trouble us,” he understood quite precisely what that meant.
Of Sanderson, they said even less, but Irizarry understood that, too. There was no love lost between the extremist cults and the government. But he’d heard plenty from the ice miners and dock workers and particularly from the crew of an impounded steelship who were profanely eloquent on the subject. Upshot: Colonel Sanderson was new in town, cleaning house, and profoundly not a woman you wanted to fuck with.
“I’d be happy to come to your office in an hour, maybe two?” he said. “It’s just that—”
Mongoose’s grip on his scalp tightened, sudden and sharp enough that he yelped; he realized that her head had moved back toward the duct while he fenced weakly with Colonel Sanderson, and now it was nearly in the duct, at the end of a foot and a half of iridescent neck.
“Mr. Irizarry?”
He held a hand up, because really this wasn’t a good time, and yelped again when Mongoose reached down and grabbed it. He knew better than to forget how fluid her body was, that it was really no more than a compromise with the dimension he could sense her in, but sometimes it surprised him anyway.
And then Mongoose said, Nagina, and if Colonel Sanderson hadn’t been standing right there, her eyebrows indicating that he was already at the very end of the slack she was willing to cut, he would have cursed aloud. Short of a bandersnatch—and that could still be along any time now, don’t forget, Irizarry—a breeding rath was the worst news they could have.
“Your cheshire seems unsettled,” Sanderson said, not sounding in the least alarmed. “Is there a problem?”
“She’s eager to eat. And, er. She doesn’t like strangers.” It was as true as anything you could say about Mongoose, and the violent colors cycling down her tendrils gave him an idea what her chromatophores were doing behind his head.
“I can see that,” Sanderson said. “Cobalt and yellow, in that stippled pattern—and flickering in and out of phase—she’s acting aggressive, but that’s fear, isn’t it?”
Whatever Irizarry had been about to say, her observation stopped him short. He blinked at her—like a gilly, he thought uncharitably—and only realized he’d taken yet another step back when the warmth of the bulkhead pressed his coveralls to his spine.
“You know,” Sanderson said mock-confidentially, “this entire corridor reeks of toves. So let me guess: it’s not just toves anymore.”
Irizarry was still stuck at her being able to read Mongoose’s colors. “What do you know about cheshires?” he said.
She smiled at him as if at a slow student. “Rather a lot. I was on the Jenny Lind as an ensign—there was a cheshire on board, and I saw . . . It’s not the sort of thing you forget, Mr. Irizarry, having been there once.” Something complicated crossed her face—there for a flash and then gone.
“The cheshire that died on the Jenny Lind was called Demon,” Irizarry said, carefully. “Her partner was Long Mike Spider. You knew them?”
“Spider John,” Sanderson said, looking down at the backs of her hands. She picked a cuticle with the opposite thumbnail. “He went by Spider John. You have the cheshire’s name right, though.”
When she looked back up, the arch of her carefully shaped brow told him he hadn’t been fooling anyone.
“Right,” Irizarry said. “Spider John.”
“They were friends of mine.” She shook her head. “I was just a pup. First billet, and I was assigned as Demon’s liaison. Spider John liked to say he and I had the same job. But I couldn’t make the captain believe him when he tried to tell her how bad it was.”
“How’d you make it off after the bandersnatch got through?” Irizarry asked. He wasn’t foolish enough to think that her confidences were anything other than a means of demonstrating to him why he could trust her, but the frustration and tired sadness sounded sincere.
“It went for Spider John first—it must have known he was a threat. And Demon—she threw herself at it, never mind it was five times her size. She bought us time to get to the panic pod and Captain Golovnina time to get to the core overrides.” She paused. “I saw it, you know. Just a glimpse. Wriggling through this . . . this rip in the air, like a big gaunt hound ripping through a hole in a blanket with knotty paws. I spent years wondering if it got my scent. Once they scent prey, you know, they never stop . . .”