She spoke once more as Outreach, addressing Chinchee in his own language—scraping her throat raw in the process. Then the hivebinder's gestalt urged the scavengers away from the dead strangers, understanding suddenly that the renewed fighting was not a rejection of a kindness but a defense of a deep integrity.
As the platform reached treetop level Jindigar stood behind her, one long-fingered hand draped over her shoulder. //Now.// She felt a shifting, rending, straining realignment, the strange yet familiar compartmentalizing as when Jindigar loosened the duad or made it dormant. Only this time it was a pit-of-the-stomach bereavement, a needle-sharp shock, a wail that screeched along the nerves and made her hair stand on end and her teeth ache.
She gasped as the seven of them began to move and breathe in disconnected patterns. She hadn't noticed, before, how they had synchronized—even little things like blinking. Now it felt suddenly as if her other eyes blinked in spasmodic twitches that shattered her nerves.
Jindigar turned to each of them singly, making eye contact, somehow adjusting everything to ease. She thought she sensed him being critical of how roughly he performed this adjournment. At last he said to Cy, rather wistfully, "Consider us adjourned for the moment, though we may have trouble maintaining that."
Cy frowned at Storm, and then they both nodded agreement. Storm passed the word to the Outriders squeezed onto the platform with them: "Adjourned, then, but watch for sudden changes."
Below, people who had been fighting vermin off the bodies of the dead now stared after the retreating creatures. Some troopers began assembling the scattered bodies into neat rows. But Krinata noticed how they placed armored troopers beside settlers, making no distinctions.
As the Oliat platform passed overhead, aiming to land at the Dushau compound, troopers with their helmets off, settlers with their wounds bandaged, all stopped to gaze up at them. They'd been bound into the hive linkage. What did they think had happened? Would they keep the peace among themselves now?
She had barely thought the question when it was answered. In a single voice the people below raised a cheer that rang off the cliff and startled the busy scavengers into stillness.
Again the cheer, and again. Cy took Krinata's hand and raised it in a gesture of victory. Storm stepped to the forward railing and raised Jindigar's hand.
Trooper and settler together, at least five species, cheered louder and clearer, until she made out then– words, "Krinata and Jindigar! Krinata and Jindigar!"
"But we didn't do it alone!" she protested, pulling her hand from Cy's.
Jindigar pulled his hand out of Storm's grasp and hugged the Lehiroh, though his voice was distant, distracted by the Oliat threads he still held. "No, we didn't. How could they have come by such an impression?"
Storm said, "Terab's been talking, I'll bet. And Shorwh. Even Viradel. They all went down hours ago."
Something caught Krinata's eye in the east, the sun clearing the horizon accompanied by a slice of new moon. "Look!" She pointed.
Above the rushing of the wind and the chanting cheer below she heard Darllanyu whisper, "Darllanyu again, but a good omen this time."
The Cassrian Commander, standing in the pilot's dock, bent over his instruments. "Good omen? For whom?"
"What do you mean?" asked Storm, craning his neck to see, but Cy pointed at the horizon again.
"A ship!"
"Can you identify it?" asked Krinata tensely, knowing Jindigar's wish that he hadn't adjourned them.
"I'm trying," answered the Cassrian working intently. "It's a lander—large one. Could be that privateer. This colony may be a short-lived one."
"Can you make voice contact at least?" asked Krinata.
The distant rumble finally attracted the attention of everyone on the ground, and cheering subsided as they scanned the sky. The silver-white dot grew as its impellers strained to dump velocity.
"Can the Oliat identify it?" asked the Commander, frustrated.
"We're adjourned," answered Jindigar, as if it were only of academic importance, yet she could feel his anxiety. "Can't dip in and out of Oliat as easily as a duad."
She remembered how much more difficult it was to assemble and adjourn a triad and realized that if she were pulled back into that deep seven-way contact again right now, she'd probably go into a screaming fit and drive them all beyond the ends of sanity. She shuddered. Don't let it be necessary!
The Commander announced, "It's going to land at the clay dig!"
Jindigar pulled the microphone for the platform's address system out and shoved it into Krinata's hand. "Tell them." Then he gently replaced the Commander at the controls, saying, "Let me see what I can do."
His fourteen long fingers danced over the controls as he spoke into the pickup in Dushauni. In moments he had an image on the tiny screen, an indigo face, and a voice came tinnily through the miniature amplifier. Krinata recognized the Dushau woman, exclaiming, "Ambassador Trinarvil!" Then she explained to everyone, "The Dushau Ambassador to the Emperor's Court!" Her voice boomed out over the crowd below, and she added, "It's a Dushau ship!"
Another cheer and everyone was running toward the clay dig to greet them.
Trinarvil was a small woman, stately, darker than Jindigar's deep indigo. Her voice was high and pleasant, and her face now unmarked by the intense anxiety Krinata had last seen there the night before Dushaun withdrew its embassy from the Allegiancy, breaking diplomatic relations. "Jindigar!" sang the Ambassador with obvious joy. "I should have known you'd get here before I could, but when we saw the Squadron leaving, we feared we'd find nothing here but pulverized ground. It looks like that from the air, you know, and your signal is being generated by Imperial equipment."
"Where's the Squadron?" asked Jindigar.
"That's the curious thing. They took one look at us and detimed." Trinarvil added to Jindigar, "I brought The Organizer, an unarmed passenger ship. Ripped out bulkheads so we've got three hundred aboard, with about fifty ephemerals. A good bit of cargo too. Couldn't have run from them as Truth could."
"They've gone for reinforcements," predicted Jindigar with that detached air, but he was gradually beginning to seem himself again.
The Cassrian Commander said, "I don't think so. They left expecting the stampede to wipe us and the settlement out. Our—objective—had been accomplished."
Trinarvil's eye had traveled over the armor with the neutrality of a trained diplomat, and Jindigar told her, "We both have long stories to tell. Can you land by the clay dig?"
"Jindigar," she answered with good-humored asperity,
"I've been piloting since before you were born. I could land in that dig if I had to."
They all laughed, and Krinata glanced down. They were over the dig now, and the small lake that had gathered in the center. The settlement was already experimenting with farming fish in the pond, and Krinata was unsurprised to see a piol waddling out of the water with a wriggling catch in his mouth.
Then she saw his destination—a mud-and-straw nest halfway up the slope. "Jindigar, look!"
Cy leaned over the forward rail, peering below. "Piol cubs! How many?"
Jindigar was working with the screens and brought a close-up onto the weapons target. "Four," he counted. He flashed an intimate, private grin to Krinata, then warned Trinarvil, "You'd better not land in the pond. The colony has begun to establish itself!"