Jedao shivered at the prickle of circulation returning to his arms, his legs, the taut ache running from shoulders through spine to the juncture between his legs. “Do you have some unnatural fondness for aliens?” he asked.
Dhanneth’s calm expression didn’t alter. “Is that something you want getting around?”
“It can hardly be a secret after I got shot up in the command center and failed to die.”
“There are so many legends about you that no one is quite sure what to make of you.”
“I imagine so.” Jedao admired the tattoo on Dhanneth’s back as the other man washed himself clean. Instead of a bird of any type, which he would have expected of a Kel, it depicted a tiger rampant.
Dhanneth looked back over his shoulder. “Oh, that,” he said. “I got it as a much younger man. I was married, once. My spouse wanted me to get it removed, but I was stubborn about it. It was a stupid thing to quarrel over.”
Jedao remembered the notation in Dhanneth’s profile. He’d once been married to an alt diplomat. One adult child. He’d never mentioned either, for understandable reasons. “Do you miss them?” he asked.
“This is my life now,” Dhanneth said.
Jedao accepted the non-answer for the rebuke it was. Everyone from the past was inaccessible, not just Ruo, dust-words in too many histories to read. But he wasn’t the only one thus severed. All the Kel in his swarm had been torn from their comrades, families, friends. What they had left was each other.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHERIS’S NEEDLEMOTH CAUGHT up with Kujen’s swarm by dint of it stopping for provisioning and upgrades. The first view that Hemiola had of it was through the lightest feather-touch that 1491625 could wrangle out of the needlemoth’s scan suite. The moths had docked at an immense facility and had upgrade vessels crawling over them like maggots. (It had seen maggots in the last drama it had watched, and Cheris had had to explain to it why humans reacted to them with such disgust.) It didn’t escape Hemiola’s notice that the vessels’ crews included larger industrial servitors like the one it had met at Ayong Primary, who appeared to be mostly, but not solely, responsible for the work in vacuum.
1491625 had mated the needlemoth to Kujen’s command moth, whatever it was called. Hemiola had fretted all through the approach, even though it knew by now that 1491625 was an excellent pilot. Fortunately, 1491625 didn’t take offense at Hemiola’s obvious nerves.
“The good thing is they show every sign of being parked here for a bit,” Cheris remarked. At the moment she was in the cargo hold checking over their burrower eggs. “We’ve only got one batch of these, and there won’t be any margin for foul-ups.”
Hemiola hadn’t known what to expect of the eggs. They were large, ovoid, and leathery black in appearance. A single egg was the size of Cheris’s torso, although much denser than human flesh. A batch consisted of a mere four eggs. Each one was marked with a quality control/lineage code and, amusingly, a colorful yellow butterfly-in-circle logo that indicated the facility that had bred them. Still, Hemiola didn’t like the way they pulsed faintly on scan.
“None of them seems to have been stillborn,” Cheris said, “or whatever the correct term is for eggs.” Her eyes softened. “Jedao should have known, but he grew up speaking a completely different language. I don’t know how much of that old Shparoi farm terminology transfers into the modern high language.”
Hemiola blinked its lights inquiringly. “Farm?” It had an unsettling vision of Jedao hoeing a row of plants from which tiny voidmoths budded.
“He was raised on an agricultural research facility,” Cheris said. “His mother ran it. Spent his childhood looking in on vicious geese and running around the countryside and learning how to use a gun, the usual.”
Hemiola had seen some dramas about Jedao, but none of them had made use of this interesting morsel of background. Spurred by curiosity, it asked, “What are we going to do with the burrower after it’s done its work?”
“What do you mean?” Cheris said.
“They’re alive, aren’t they?”
Cheris considered that. “I suppose they are, but they don’t have a long life cycle. They hatch, they gorge as they gnaw their way through whatever you want to breach, they go into hibernation. I don’t think they’re sentient in any meaningful sense of the word.”
“Where do they come from, anyway?” Hemiola had consulted the records it had received from Ayong Primary, but most of those didn’t deal with engineering matters.
“An offshoot of the moth breeding program,” 1491625 replied. “To be more precise, burrowers are descended from moth parasites.”
“You’re full of the most interesting facts,” Cheris said.
“There’s nothing to do on layovers but talk to Nirai servitors,” 1491625 said. “I met one once that was all too willing to discuss the maintenance it was doing and learned a lot from it in exchange for my helping it with its work.”
Cheris arched an eyebrow as she carefully laid the last of the eggs back after her inspection. “And what work were you supposed to be doing instead?”
“Weapons inventory,” 1491625 said, “which I’d finished early. In case you were wondering.”
Hemiola resisted the urge to flutter its lights. Stay calm, it told itself. It would just have to trust that Cheris knew what she was about. “It feels like such a long wait,” it said.
“The waiting’s never fun,” Cheris agreed. “And I don’t like the upgrades, even if I can’t figure out what they are exactly. It’s the principle of the thing. It does give us time to gather information, even if we daren’t use scan at full capacity.”
“Don’t say things like that,” Hemiola said faintly. It imagined alerting the entire swarm and being blown up in short order by angry warmoths. Or, alternately, being boarded by large, angry Kel soldiers. Cheris might be convinced that she could waltz through a moth full of heavily armed Kel, and Hemiola had no doubt that she could, but Hemiola itself expected to go down easily.
“You’ll do fine,” Cheris said. “Are you ready for more drill?”
Rationally, Hemiola knew that no one on Kujen’s command moth could hear or see them speaking inside the needlemoth. In practice, it wished Cheris would speak more softly. “Ready,” it said.
EIGHTEEN DAYS AFTER the needlemoth attached itself to the command moth, whose name appeared to be Revenant, the swarm set out. By then, Hemiola had memorized what the three of them had been able to deduce of the command moth’s layout. Cheris had explained to Hemiola that she’d especially need its help due to the complication of variable layout. “Infiltrating things was much easier before the Nirai invented that,” she’d said wistfully.
“People like you make ordinary citizens clutch their pillows at night,” 1491625 said snidely.
Hemiola thought that the situation would improve once they were underway. Instead, it only became more jittery. Servitors didn’t sleep, but it found itself obsessively tracing maps and layouts and movement patterns in its mind. 1491625 paid it little heed, caught up in its own duties.
However, Hemiola couldn’t fool Cheris for long. She took it aside a few days after that. “I know I’m asking a hard thing of you,” she said. “I appreciate it very much. But I can’t carry out the mission without you. We have to do this together.”