Ukiah surrendered the menu. "What did you order us?"
"A beef turnover; shrimp; and a rice dish with shrimp, scallops . . . chicken and sausage and probably some stuff I've forgotten. Atty loves it; you should like it too."
Ukiah sighed, leaning his head against the wall behind him, eyes closed. "We don't have time for this."
"You're not up to anything but this," Atticus snapped.
After a long delay, Ukiah grunted, acknowledging it. He considered his bloodstained fingers. "I should wash. I have Ping's blood on my hands."
"I'll go with you—I need to go," Ru lied, probably guessing that in his condition, Ukiah would have a difficult time finding his way through the restaurant to the bathroom and back.
Atticus took advantage of their absence to fix Kyle with his gaze. "Kyle, I'm sorry about Indigo—but we've talked about this before."
"Yeah, yeah, I know. Someday I'll meet the girl of my dreams. Just got to keep looking. Blah blah blah." Kyle seized one of the hot buns and angrily tore small pieces from it. "It's not fair. The hot chicks are always already taken or they never even look at me. All you have to do—all your brother has to do—is walk into a room and they watch you."
Kyle jerked his head toward Ukiah, following Ru to the bathroom. Indeed, every woman who noticed his passing continued to, follow him with her eyes. Atticus had always been somewhat aware of the attention he received, but this time, being separate from the focus, he saw how profound the effect was. Ukiah seemed completely oblivious.
"You know it's nothing we can control. You just have to deal with it."
"Doesn't mean I have to like it." Kyle sighed. "You don't know how lucky you are to have Ru."
Across the room, Ru paused at the bathroom door and glanced back to the table. When their eyes met, Ru smiled.
"No," Atticus said. "I know exactly how lucky I am."
***
"If Ping is dead," Ukiah said once he and Ru returned to the table, "we're back to square one in finding the Ae."
"What about this word that Ping wrote onto the wall?" Ru asked.
Ukiah shrugged. "I think it's zaeta,which roughly means 'transmitter,' but that wouldn't make sense. She must have gotten the word wrong."
"Why?" Atticus asked.
"The zaetaworks on a quantum level to achieve instant communication between star systems. It was developed by a race that had achieved three colonies in nearby star systems."
"Cool." Kyle's pout slipped away in the face of far-flung alien civilizations. "Why doesn't 'transmitter' make sense? E.T. phone home." This got a blank look from Ukiah. "They're sending messages back to the home world."
Ukiah shook his head. "No. You don't understand the Ontongard."
"Pretend we know nothing," Atticus said. "That shouldn't be much of a stretch."
"The Ontongard can't stay on one planet," Ukiah said. "Eventually they wipe out the ecology by becoming the ecology, and cannibalism follows. So they gear all the planet's industries toward building seed ships. They build thousands, until the planet's resources are depleted, and then they leave, each ship traveling on a different vector. It's completely blind. One ship might travel one light year to the next star system, and the next ship could travel thousands."
"So the transmitters are used to keep the scattered colonies connected," Kyle guessed.
"No." Ukiah shook his head. "There is no home world. There is no plan. This isn't an effort to build a civilization to span the universe. The Ontongard is just one organism, reproducing mindlessly. After they find a suitable planet, they pull their ship into orbit and dismantle it, parachuting everything down to the surface in an all-or-nothing try to take over. If they succeed, they reproduce until they wipe out all life on that planet and then leave. If they fail, who cares?"
"The ones that die." Atticus felt the need to poke holes in Ukiah's theory. He found his brother's knowledge annoying in the face of his own ignorance. "It might be a long shot, but the ones here on Earth might be desperate enough to take it. Why not send out a message saying there's a perfect planet here, waiting to be plundered, if another ship was so inclined to head in this direction?"
Ukiah gave him a lost look, uncertain.
"These translations the cult had you do." Ru gave Ukiah a nudge like he would if they were questioning a witness. "They never mentioned the transmitter?"
Ukiah closed his eyes and sat still for a minute. Atticus sensed that he was flicking back over hours of spoken conversation. "A lot of the same equipment goes to building a lot of things: computer controls, monitors, switches, gauges. They could be building anything—but they areall things found in a transmitter. The Ontongard would have needed years to bring everything together, and I listened only to a few months of recordings."
"They're still building it, or they wouldn't be talking about parts," Kyle guessed. "Any indication how close to finished they are?"
Ukiah made a face. "It could be done now and still be useless."
"Huh?"
"Well, these things are more like cell phones than radios, if I understand human technology right. The transmitter isn't like a radio tower, where it broadcasts out and anyone out there with a radio can pick it up. It's like a cell phone, where there's two-way communication set up. There's what Max calls 'the handshake' going on—signals that go from sender to receiver and back."
"What's the protocol?" Kyle got a blank look. "How do they initiate a message?"
"They would have to . . ." Ukiah said slowly, grinding through the process, ". . . detect another transmitter first, which might take years . . . unless they know something that the Pack doesn't—like the Ontongard on the last world or two decided to set one up at a certain location, or knew of one they were going to take over."
Atticus blew out his breath in exasperation. It sounded like lots of unknowns, maybes, and dependings. He wasn't even sure why they were talking about it, since only finding the Ae mattered.
Kyle, however, was intrigued. "Let's just assume they are building this transmitter. How do we find it? What does it look like? Is it bigger than a bread box?"
"It's massive. The housing for the containment field would be, like, thirty feet tall, and waveguides are very long and straight. It's not something they'll be able to hide."
"When you say very long, what measurements are you talking here?"
Ukiah thought for a minute, translating out the measurements. "They would have to be nearly half a mile in length."
"And how thick around is the waveguide?"
Ukiah measured it off with his hands. "But there would have to be, like, twenty-five feet of earth acting as a buffer from outside interference."
"How do you know all this stuff?" Atticus asked him.
"I have Rennie's memories."
"What does that have to do with it?"
"He's Coyote's Get, who was Prime's only Get." He saw Atticus's blank look. "Ontongard store their memories in their genetics because in essence, each cell is an individual, but they function as one vast creature. The Ontongard pass mice back and forth all the time to keep all of themselves on the same page. They all remember back for thousands of years."
"But what does that have to do with you and Rennie?"
"Pack is just like the Ontongard, only completely different," Ukiah said.
"Well, that's completely clear."
"Have you ever seen the movie Blade Runner?"
"Can we have a straightforward conversation? One without all these weird jumps?"