SIX

Quath made her way cautiously through murky warrens.

After the buoyant vault of space, these tunnels and cramped corridors weighed heavily on her, their air clotted and musky. Around her surged the endless parade of working podia, bound on their relentless missions, clattering and banging against one another in their haste. Lesser beings of russet scabrous shells scampered underfoot, bound on their menial tasks. They had been hatched in the bodies of native animals, to save the Hive’s resources. Genetically programmed, they worked with fanatic purpose, as though they knew their own short lifespans.

Quath, though, went slowly. The presence inside her throbbed. The Nought kicked and fought, its puny jabs an irritant impossible to ignore. Her ceramic sensors saw it as a burning tangle of infrared deep in her guts.

But it was not this small nettling that bothered Quath. She knew what lay ahead of her, and so dawdled, picking at her cilia as though grooming herself. Some tiny hatchlings approached and Quath let them police her carapace. They caught microparasites, which were the inevitable inconvenience of strange worlds: native mites who had already learned to feast on the leaky joint sleeves and porous sheaths of the podia.

Soon, too soon, the great glowing cavern of the Tukar’ramin opened before her. Its murky mouth seemed to swallow all the certainties of her life.

*You have done well,* the Tukar’ramin greeted her from high in the glistening webs.

Quath preened at this ruby-flavored compliment, until she saw that Beq’qdahl had entered simultaneously from another of the innumerable tunnels that gave onto the Tukar’ramin’s underbowl. Beq’qdahl did an artful dance with her many legs, accepting the Tukar’ramin’s words as if they were directed at her alone.

<We did little more than your wiseness instructed,> Quath said, using the collective noun first for formality. Then, to irritate Beq’qdahl, she shifted to first person. <And I have captured one of the pernicious Noughts who infested the station.>

*What breed of Nought is this?*

<A soft-skinned, bilegged thing. Crafty for its size.>

*Doubtless so, for it engaged that station and co-opted the mechs there. I had understood that we had total control there. Yet these Noughts infested with humiliating ease.*

There was no doubt, from the grammatically past-imperative hormonal inflections, that Quath and Beq’qdahl were among those humiliated.

Quath suppressed the impulse to cock her pods into a gesture of total apology and mercy-plead. Instead, she quickly transmitted a set of images and sensory details of the thing. These were taken after she had stripped it of its suit and weapons, back inside their ship.

<Observe, please, from your lofty perspective,> Quath said reverently. <This thing displays obvious signs of recent evolution. Note the hair—atop its head and at the genitals only. The former for protection from sunlight, I believe. The latter—perhaps some primitive way of gathering attractive musk about the area it would most like to have revered by others?>

*Doubtless some such business. Absence of a pelt does suggest a highly sensory life, serving as it does to expose the surface nerves optimally.*

<Filthy creatures!> Beq’qdahl hissed severely.

<But effective.> Quath seized the chance to appear more shrewd. <I believe it had taken the shuttle ship to the vicinity of the Syphon in order to study it.>

<Nonsense!> Beq’qdahl jeered. <I directed that shuttle to leave the station, as soon as its inboard systems showed presence of Noughts. To harvest a sample.>

*We cannot be too careful here,* the Tukar’ramin said slowly. *This Nought may have intelligence and mastery beyond its apparent mawkishness.*

<I agree.> Quath ventured to release a scent of confidence, edged with dangling, frayed filigrees of mature concern. She was about to add that she had kept the sample Nought for further study, when the Tukar’ramin continued thoughtfully, plainly without registering Quath’s words.

*Well that you disposed of them all, then. They are oddly able. Even one might cause hindrance to us.*

Both Quath and Beq’qdahl fell silent. Quath struggled to find a way to agree and yet not divulge the truth, so she was glad when Beq’qdahl said, <They scattered before us like grains of dust! We chased them relentlessly into the upper atmosphere, where they flamed into oblivion.>

The fierceness of this declaration could not cover the underlying sweet cut of self-doubt that Beq’qdahl leaked from her unruly hind glands.

*Reentry fires, you mean?*

<Most, yes. I could not count them all.>

Quath bristled at Beq’qdahl’s use of I when they had both done the searching. She quickly felt better, though, when the Tukar’ramin said forcefully, *You should have savaged them all!*

Beq’qdahl choked with mortification and farted a foul cloud of orange fear. She managed to get out, <I, that is, we—>

*You were senior, Beq’qdahl. Can you assure me that these Noughts, who may even have the power to voyage between stars, are vanquished?*

<Such assurances are surely impossible, savant of my life.>

This was a deft diplomatic sally, mingled with pious fogs of humble oil, Quath thought. But it brought Beq’qdahl no credit.

*Then set about making sure of your task.*

<Of course. Is this to be our task or mine alone?>

*You are senior in experience. You both now sport six legs. Quath seems to be gathering her wits quite ably. I suppose you may call upon her for assistance. She acquitted herself well—perhaps better than you.*

Burnt-yellow splashes of barely suppressed anger/anxiety shot up and down Beq’qdahl’s thorax, but her voice remained crustily formal. Pleased, Quath glimpsed a tinge of bluegreen envy betraying Beq’qdahl in her milky proboscis hairs.

<I assume I may continue my fruitful mining explorations, while seeing to this minor problem?> Beq’qdahl asked.

*What? What?*

Quath saw at once that Beq’qdahl had miscalculated. Waves of an unknown emotion jetted down from the Tukar’ramin. *Pursue these Noughts! Drop your mining. I have received word that the Illuminates themselves have taken notice of these events.*

The very mention of these august entities stilled the chilly air of the great rock cavern.

*Beq’qdahl, do not seek to vainly augment yourself when a vital mission awaits.*

<I assure you, revered one, I did not—>

*You can begin with a task of some risk, since your errors precipitated this trouble. Witness—*

Into Quath came a picture of the station. Beside it, now clamped firmly by crosshatched stays, was the Nought ship.

Beq’qdahl began, <We can—>

Chords of vexed concern sounded through the unfilled spaces of the image, sucking Quath along with the Tukar’ramin’s

*This little vessel is their conveyance. You ignored it. Perhaps some still cower within. Your task is to cleanse this craft. Inspect, analyze! Find its inner minds. Flay them open for my inspection.*

Startled beneath this torrent of stench-commands and acrid air-cuts. Beq’qdahl tried to protest. <I, we, cannot master all the craft necessary to—>

*Go! Now!*

The sudden spitting-green anger of the Tukar’ramin startled Quath. She was grateful that Beq’qdahl caught the force of it, a yellow-white jet that scoured through Quath’s senso- rium. Beq’qdahl, in the full stream, backed away with trembling legs.

The Tukar’ramin did not dismiss them, in fact took no further notice of the two scurrying forms. They scrambled away as the Tukar’ramin’s bulk tugged itself up glistening damp strands into lofty darkness.

Quath felt Beq’qdahl’s jittery, addled state as the two scuttled away. On a subchannel Beq’qdahl sent her preliminary thoughts about logistics, search patterns, weapons—assembled impressively quickly, considering the blistering she had received.

Quath’s thoughts submerged beneath a rising distress. She broke away from Beq’qdahl and fled down a narrow shaft, letting herself fall in the hushed cool air until the depths of the warren rushed past. Somehow her petrifying fear of heights did not occur in the cramped chute. Heights in the open—or, far worse, flying—terrified her race. Beq’qdahl had overcome this, another reason to despise her.

Her magnetic brakes pulsed. A passing food-cloud brought stinging encrustations to her eyes—yet it was as though she ambled in a dream.

She registered nothing, consumed by the unspoken lie that she now carried within. The Tukar’ramin and Beq’qdahl and all the podia assumed that she had snuffed out the Nought after taking samples from it. They would expect immediate scrapes of skin and nuggets of brain, to better understand the pests.

But the Nought rapped against her inner steel partitions. It thrashed and jerked and emitted foul odors. Perhaps the thing had even excreted inside Quath. What a risk to incur, all for Nought!

Quath’s levered arms began to pry open her innermost carrypouch to pluck out the Nought—but she slowed, tugged by flickering doubt…and stopped.

This puny thing was indeed the same breed of Nought which she had slaughtered with valor in defense of Beq’qdahl. In the moments after her victory she had studied the carcass of such a Nought. That had helped her to cast off her fear of death.

So for this one last Nought she felt an odd sense of connection. She had told herself at first, on the way down from orbit, that keeping the Nought alive was simply a way to be sure her samples were fresh. But once in the smoky, constricted warrens, she had begun to feel vague musings, strange lacings of sensation, canted views of her world.

It was the Nought. At this intimate range, her probings of it had overlapped the Nought’s own surprisingly complex sensorium—which felt to Quath like a spherical coil of brightly colored threads, writhing like languid serpents.

Try as she might, she could not penetrate the knot. A small, oily pocket of exotic zest now seeped into Quath’s mind. She could not give it up. Not yet.

The thing inside interlaced with Quath’s electro-aura, giving forth images and undefinable tangs. They led her down into a labyrinth of airless corridors, lit by scattershot, smoky fogs, brooding silences, lurid accelerations down unseen gradients. This small creature dwelled in a slanted universe blurred by currents, hormones, scents.

Something in this tilted world caught in Quath. Blunt wedges of pinched obstruction bloomed bony-hard inside her. Her pale certainties splintered. The already shifty terrain of her oblique interior landscape warped and canted.

But she had no choice, Quath thought. She must. The Tukar’ramin would banish Quath forever if she knew, cast her into a starved life of ragged foraging in the ruined lands beyond the Hive….

Worse, she could not merely yield it forth, no—too late for that. Quath had to slaughter the unfolding thing within her. Hide it. Mash the body into paste, pack it into porous walls where it could never be found, or recognized, or understood.

Could she? Quath teetered on the brink.