FOUR

“Derstu, you are needed in the mind cavern.”

The cool, artificial voice repeated twice before Thuk finally stirred in his den. His body was cold, owing in no small measure to the fact his skin was still too tender from molting for clothing or blankets. He’d turned the den’s heat setting up as high as it went before his fugue cycle, but it was never enough.

“Derstu…”

“I take the path,” Thuk said to the ceiling. And he would, but first he needed to stretch and align his limbs. As soon as he stood, Thuk could feel he’d lain on one of his legs wrong. With effort, he managed to straighten it out using the surface of his den’s waste receptacle. Another day of this and his new shell would be rigid enough that he wouldn’t need to worry until his next molt. He’d gone an entire cycle once with a misaligned plate on his left midarm. It was a maddening experience every Xre had a maximum of once, because they were certain never to repeat it.

Thuk took a moment to regard himself in the stillwater mounted to the wall of his den. His shell was still pale and soft. He looked like an oversized larva, which matched the way he felt.

Assigned as derstu, on his first expedition. Of all the rotten luck …

Thuk stretched all six of his limbs, trying to pull the wrinkles out of his new shell and set his joints properly, but something hadn’t felt right since his last fugue. An itch in the middle of his back, down near his thorax junction. He contorted his abdomen, trying to get an angle on his back in the stillwater. Sure enough, right at the bottom of his abdominal segment, one of his old plates hadn’t come free during the molt.

“Cru,” he swore as he grabbed a scratch pole with a midarm. Trying to guide the scratch pole in the reversed image of the stillwater threw him off, but after three attempts, he got a claw under the slightly curled lip of the errant plate and pulled it free with a Slurpt.

He held the last vestige of his old shell in his primehands, turning it over several times as if inspecting a forgotten toy from his larvahood, then dropped it unceremoniously in the waste receptacle and flushed it into the ship’s reclamation system.

“New molt, new me,” Thuk said, trying hard to believe it. He grabbed a couple of cozzi out of their tank and popped the heads off and into the waste receptacle. Even decapitated, the little snacks wriggled until he crunched them between his mandibles and ground them up between his saw plates.

The small meal sated Thuk’s hunger for the moment, but it wouldn’t last. Xre were always ravenous in the aftermath of a molt as their bodies rushed to replace lost nutrients and minerals drained away by building a new shell.

“Den,” he called to the ceiling.

“Yes, Derstu?”

“Please have a plate sent to the mind cavern. I’m famished.”

“Do you have a preference of dish?”

“Something hot and crunchy.”

“It will be waiting for you when you arrive, Derstu.”

“Thank you.” Normally, eating in the mind cavern was against decorum, but allowances were made for a derstu coming out of molt. He needed to be sharp of thought to understand and properly implement the orders of the rest of the ship’s harmony, after all. His shell was still tender, but less so than it had been before the night’s fugue. He decided the discomfort of a uniform was worth it to hold back the chills.

The garments, especially the seams, rubbed against the soft folds of his elbow and shoulder joints, and the sensory cilia on his arms and back. He would endure. He still looked like a larva, or a sun-bleached corpse, but at least some warmth returned to his core. The ascender was just down the hall, just fourteen paces. It felt good to stretch all of his leg segments. It was important to maintain a full range of motion while the new plates hardened.

A short ascent later and the mind cavern doors opened before him. Several members of the harmony sat in their alcoves, busy with their assignments, monitoring the grand ship’s myriad of systems.

“Derstu.” Dulac Kivits stood from his seat at the husk-monitoring alcove. Or as much as a member of his caste ever stood. The morphology of the different Xre castes was significant. Where Thuk’s body was slim, featured four arms and two legs, and was optimized for moving through the tight confines and labyrinthine tunnels of a mound, Kivits’s body was stout, had four legs and two arms, and a flattened upper thorax. His body plan was ideal for gathering food and materials on the rolling plains on the surface and carrying them long distances back to feed and expand the mounds. Before the time of the Grand Symphony, Kivits’s caste was considered laborers at best, beasts of burden at worst.

Of course, those days were centuries in the past. But old prejudices were a hard thing for any people to shake completely.

“Dulac,” Thuk answered with the formal title, as Kivits had done. He looked around the mind chamber. “Where’s Garesh?”

“She has begun her molt.”

“Naturally,” Thuk said. It was inevitable; the longer members of a harmony spent in close proximity, the more their molt cycles aligned. It was a problem that remained unsolved even after centuries spent in the dark ocean. “The harmony needs my assistance? Is it about our husk in the inner system?”

“Indeed, yes. Come…” Kivits beckoned for the derstu to join him in the husk alcove. Before he’d gone into fugue, the harmony had taken up position at the bright line across the dark ocean and launched an armed husk toward the inner planets to hunt. Of course, it wasn’t the only husk they’d launched. It had taken weeks, but the harmony had arranged their own sphere of sniffer husks at the treaty line looking inward at everything that moved inside the system.

Long-range scans had already confirmed the presence of a CCDF cruiser in orbit of the third planet, an Ansari type if their eyes were any good. The Grand Symphony had sent their harmony here to scout out the system and test the human’s capabilities against Xre’s newest generation of husks, sensors, and their newest warship itself.

It was a bold, unusually aggressive move. The treaty between Xre and the human infesters had been stable for decades. It had kept the peace along their spinward border, allowing the Grand Symphony to continue their expansion hubward and counter-spinward without wasteful expenditure on making war against an enemy that proved itself shockingly resilient and resourceful.

Thuk questioned the Symphony’s wisdom of sticking a claw back in the human’s mound, but only within the confines of his skullplates. It wasn’t a derstu’s or a harmony’s duty to second-guess the Symphony’s pronouncements, only to bring them to life.

The husk they’d launched more than a moon ago had already gone beyond expectations, having detected, stalked, and killed two of the human’s most advanced “recon drones.” But now, looking at the readouts in Kivits’s alcove, Thuk knew their brave little husk had run out of luck.

“When did we lose it?”

“A quarter dayslice ago, while you were in fugue,” Kivits said.

“Why wasn’t I called then?”

“You needed rest, and we always assumed we’d lose the husk eventually. We were fortunate to take down two drones in the first place. It was on loaned time as it was.”

“What changed?”

“The human ship, we’re almost certain it is the Ansari itself. Not just type, but the launch. There’s enough sniffer recordings in the core to be very confident of that.”

“So we’ve named the ship. What else?”

“It’s acting … strangely,” Kivits said.

“Continue.”

Kivits expanded the display to the surrounding walls of the mind cavern until a panoramic surround of the sensor environment filled the space.

“Within an eighth dayslice of their second drone falling, the humans entered a seedpod and jumped in. They quickly launched more husks to search out—”

“More?” Thuk interrupted. “How many more?”

“Twelve.”

“How did they recover husks so quickly?”

Kivits wiggled his midarms. “They didn’t. These were still in their nests onboard.”

Thuk clicked his mandibles once. The Ansari wasn’t exactly a new type. Other harmonies on other ships had managed to get good, reliable scans of them over the years. Its capacities and capabilities were well-established with a high degree of confidence.

“Then it’s carrying too many husks. A new subtype, or a rebuild?”

“Possibly. Or newer, smaller husks doubling up in the nests.”

Thuk thought through the implications. Double the husks meant double the sniffer density, fewer gaps, more overlap, or control of a greater effective volume of dark ocean for each of the human cruisers in service. Sneaking around on the edge of what they’d anticipated was outside the cruiser’s detection threshold as they were, it wasn’t a pleasant thought.

“This merits closer inspection. We’ll want to get confirmation of this new capacity for the Symphony.”

“Yes, Derstu, but that’s not the strange part. After a quarter dayslice, the humans sniffed out our husk as it tried to sulk away silently. They destroyed it with a javelin shortly thereafter, but then…” Kivits focused in on a part of the treaty line closest to the fallen drone. “… they entered a seedpod again and jumped right up to the treaty line at this location. They’ve been there ever since, and have launched even four more drones traveling down the line in either direction along the eclectic.”

“Smart,” Thuk said admiringly.

“But they’re nowhere near our true location?”

“There’s no way for them to know that.” He pointed at the human ship and drew a line back to the dead husk. “This is the shortest distance between where they knew our husk to be and the treaty line. Where is the ideal place to be controlling a husk from? Where you get the least lightlag, right? The humans know this as well as we do, so they jumped to the most likely place we might be hiding, then started their search. Run it backward for a moment.” Kivits obliged. “Stop there. Good, now resume. Take notice of the timeflow when our husk falls. Now, look at the time it takes them to jump. If we really had been there, the Ansari would’ve jumped inside light-spear range before we’d even known our husk had fallen.”

“Ah, yes. I see now.”

Thuk itched at a seam in his uniform. “I’m impressed. These humans are clever, aggressive, and willing to take risks.”

“A gamble that wouldn’t have turned out in their favor even if they had been right,” Kivits said dismissively. “A cruiser is no match for the Chusexx, no matter how many extra drones it carries.”

“Yes, yes, our proud new warship and its clever new weapon has never lost a simulated battle. But they would have had a free hand to open the fight, and we’ve underestimated human ships before to our doom,” Thuk chided. “Besides, we’re not here to fight, just stir their mound a little and see what happens. That’s what the Symphony requested.”

“I have not forgotten, Derstu,” Kivits said. “But I hope you will not forget that our first duty is to protect our harmony.”

Thuk wiggled his primehands. “It won’t come to that, not this time at least. Their drones are shouting out into the dark ocean, their echoes are bouncing off each other. We’ll remain a while longer and learn as much as we can, but as soon as Chusexx is within double the detection range of those drones, we’re seed-podding out of here. There’s no sense risking becoming the hunted. And speaking of hunting, where’s my plate?” As he said it, one of the mind cavern’s doors irised open and disgorged a young runner holding a crescent-shaped tray wriggling with food. “Ah, just as I was about to eat a midarm.”

“Sorry, Derstu,” the runner said as he, she, er … they panted with exertion. They were very young, five, maybe six molts. It would be another molt at least before their gender became apparent, even to them. All four of their arms strained under the weight of the tray. A whole nest of gims crawled through a pile of purple and red jewel fronds. The little eight-legged creatures bulged at the seams of their shells, yet still munched away, oblivious to their impending fate.

“Mmm. Thank you, runner. Return to your duties.”

“The harmony sings.” They bowed and retreated as suddenly as they’d appeared. Holding the crescent with his midarms, Thuk picked out a particularly fat gim with a primehand and popped it into his mandibles. It made a very satisfying crunch in its death throes as the nutty protein of its shell and pollen-fed flavor of its flesh mixed in his mouth. As much trouble as being selected derstu could be, Thuk had to admit the food was quite a perk.

“Delicious,” he said as he sunk into his chair and picked another gim. “Would you care for one, Kivits? They’re perfectly ripened.”

“It would be rude to refuse, wouldn’t it?” Kivits snatched up a modestly sized gim from the tray and bit it in half. “Mm. Yes, the farm has churned out a good batch today.”

“Did you know, Kivits, that humans prefer their meat dead?”

Kivits shuffled his mandibles in disgust. “Yes, they store it cold, then warm it back up to simulate life. Revolting practice.”

“Yes,” Thuk agreed. “That’s what I thought as well. Indeed, when we first learned about their culinary habits before the Intersection War, many of our wisest scholars preached that since humans were unwilling to kill their food themselves, it naturally followed that they would be too squeamish to take lives in battle.” Thuk crunched down on another gim. “That prediction proved overly optimistic.”

“Is there a lesson you’re trying to share in this, Derstu?”

“A musing only. A curious bit of history I’ve always found … ‘humorous’ is the wrong word. ‘Paradoxical,’ perhaps.”

“Well, if our scholars were as omniscient as they seem to believe, we wouldn’t need the Grand Symphony. We could just go back to the infallible leadership of divine queens.”

“That is true enough,” Thuk said. “But the prejudice was hardly limited to scholars. Indeed, as silly as it seems today, the belief was common throughout the Symphony that—” Something nagging at the back of Thuk’s skullplates jumped and waved its arms for attention.

“Is something wrong, Derstu?” Kivits asked, concern playing across his face and limbs.

“No, it’s just … Are our rings warm? How much lead time do we need to spin a seedpod?”

“Our rings have been on standby since we took up position, you know that. And their drones are still more than an eighth dayslice away from having any chance of—”

The shriek of proximity alarms cut through their conversation like a blood-claw. All around them, the mind cavern blossomed with light. Sniffer readouts, tactical assessments, warnings, all sprang to life and competed for attention. The other members of the harmony who had been listening to the back-and-forth between their derstu and dulac with practiced indifference suddenly came to life in their alcoves and began barking updates.

“Situation!” Thuk shouted above the din as his forgotten tray clattered against the floor. Liberated gim scurried for cover in every direction.

“It’s the Ansari, Derstu,” someone shouted back. “They’ve peeled their seedpod.”

“How far?” Thuk demanded.

The sniffer-reader blanched, frozen in place. Kivits pushed the hesitating member to the side of their alcove to read the sniffer data for himself. His face turned to Thuk, the bravado suffusing their earlier conversation forgotten. “Twenty-three hundred markers. Derstu, we’re already in range of their light-spears. Their claws are around our throats!”

Thuk grinned. Bold humans. Foolhardy humans. They had no idea what kind of predator’s den they’d just jumped into. But that was the thing about them. Even if they did, they’d probably jump in anyway.

“Well, the humans would never—” was the first half of a sentence that had gotten a lot of very experienced, very capable harmonies killed in the last war.

“How did they see us?” Kivits shrieked. “We’re hundreds of thousands of markers outside their husk’s eyes.”

“Obviously we need to revisit our estimates,” Thuk said dryly. “Or did you think the humans were in a fugue since the war?”

Kivits stared at him. “You asked about our rings. How did you know?”

“I didn’t. Just—had a strange itch was all.”

“They’re singing to us!” the recorder alcove’s attendant shouted.

“Put it to the mouths,” Thuk ordered.

“Unidentified [Xre] warship,” a human voice crackled over the mind cavern’s mouths—female, if his ear was attuned. A translation played out in text on the panoramic displays. “This [Derstu] Susan Kamala CCDF cruiser Ansari. We corner and destroy one your [predator husks]. You violation treaty. Surrender instant and we will—”

Thuk cut the connection from his seat’s controls. “Eject three decoys. Now. Burn them hard to our sides and vent.”

“And us, Derstu?” Kivits asked.

“Forward, Dulac,” Thuk said with as much calm as he could force. “We burn straight forward.”