“I’m waiting.”
“Wasp art.”
I looked at her.
“This wasp was destroyed mid-replication,” Wendigo continued. “While it was giving birth. Evidently the image has some poignancy for them. How I’d put it in human terms I don’t know…”
“Don’t even think about it.”
I followed her across the marbled terrazzo that floored the chamber. Arched porticos surrounded it, each of which held a single dead wasp, their body designs covering a hundred generations of evolution. If Wendigo was right, I supposed these dead wasps were the equivalent of venerated old ancestors peering from oil paintings. But I wasn’t convinced just yet.
“You knew this place existed?”
She nodded. “Or else we’d be dead. The wasps back in the Royalist stronghold told us we could seek sanctuary here, if home turned against us.”
“And the wasps—what? Own this place?”
“And hundreds like it, although the others are already far beyond the Swirl, on their way out to the halo. Since the wasps came to consciousness, most of the splinters flung out of the Swirl have been infiltrated. Shrewd of them—all along, we’ve never suspected that the splinters are anything other than cosmic trash.”
“Nice décor, anyway.”
“Florentine,” Wendigo said, nodding. “The frescos are in the style of a painter called Masaccio; one of Brunelleschi’s disciples. Remember, the wasps had access to all the cultural data we brought with us from GE—every byte of it. That’s how they work, I think—by constructing things according to arbitrary existing templates.”
“And there’s a point to all this?”
“I’ve been here precisely one day longer than you, Spirey.”
“But you said you had friends here, people who could help Yarrow.”
“They’re here all right,” Wendigo said, shaking her head. “Just hope you’re ready for them.”
On some unspoken cue they emerged, spilling from a door which until then I’d mistaken for one of the surrounding porticos. I flinched, acting on years of training. Although wasps have never intentionally harmed a human being—even the enemy’s wasps—they’re nonetheless powerful, dangerous machines. There were twelve of them, divided equally between Standardist and Royalist units. Six-legged, their two-meter-long, segmented alloy bodies sprouted weapons, sensors, and specialized manipulators. So far so familiar, except that the way the wasps moved was subtly wrong. It was as if the machines choreographed themselves, their bodies defining the extremities of a much larger form, which I sensed more than saw.
The twelve whisked across the floor.
“They are—or rather it is—a queen,” Wendigo said. “From what I’ve gathered, there’s one queen for every splinter. Splinterqueens, I call them.”
The swarm partially surrounded us now—but retained the brooding sense of oneness.
“She told you all this?”
“Her demons did, yes.” Wendigo tapped the side of her head. “I got a dose after our ship crashed. You got one after we hit your ship. It was a standard sporehead from our arsenal, but the Splinterqueen loaded it with her own demons. For the moment that’s how she speaks to us—via symbols woven by demons.”
“Take your word for it.”
Wendigo shrugged. “No need to.”
And suddenly I knew. It was like eavesdropping a topologist’s fever dream—only much stranger. The burst of Queen’s speech couldn’t have lasted more than a tenth of a second, but its afterimages seemed to persist much longer, and I had the start of a migraine before it had ended. But like Wendigo had implied before, I sensed planning—that every thought was merely a step toward some distant goal, the way each statement in a mathematical proof implies some final QED.
Something big indeed.
“You deal with that shit?”
“My chimeric parts must filter a lot.”
“And she understands you?”
“We get by.”
“Good,” I said. “Then ask her about Yarrow.”
Wendigo nodded and closed both eyes, entering intense rapport with the Queen. What followed happened quickly: six of her components detached from the extended form and swarmed into the train we had just exited. A moment later they emerged with Yarrow, elevated on a loom formed from dozens of wasp manipulators.
“What happens now?”
“They’ll establish a physical connection to her neural demons,” Wendigo said. “So that they can map the damage.”
One of the six reared up and gently positioned its blunt, anvil-shaped “head” directly above Yarrow’s frost-mottled scalp. Then the wasp made eight nodding movements, so quickly that the motion was only a series of punctuated blurs. Looking down, I saw eight bloodless puncture marks on Yarrow’s head. Another wasp replaced the driller and repeated the procedure, executing its own blurlike nods. This time, glistening fibers trailed from Yarrow’s eight puncture points into the wasp, which looked as if it was sucking spaghetti from my compatriot’s skull.
Long minutes of silence followed, while I waited for some kind of report.
“It isn’t good,” Wendigo said eventually.
“Show me.”
And I got a jolt of Queen’s speech, feeling myself inside Yarrow’s hermetically sealed head, feeling the chill that had embraced her brain core, despite her pilot augs. I sensed the two intermingled looms of native and foreign demons, webbing the shattered matrix of her consciousness.
I also sensed—what? Doubt?
“She’s pretty far gone, Spirey.”
“Tell the Queen to do what she can.”
“Oh, she will. Now that she’s glimpsed Yarrow’s mind, she’ll do all she can not to lose it. Minds mean a lot to her—particularly in view of what the Splinterqueens have in mind for the future. But don’t expect miracles.”
“Why not? We seem to be standing in one.”
“Then you’re prepared to believe some of what I’ve said?”
“What it means,” I started to say—
But I didn’t finish the sentence. As I was speaking the whole chamber shook violently, almost dashing us off our feet.
“What was that?”
Wendigo’s eyes glazed again, briefly.
“Your ship,” she said. “It just self-destructed.”
“What?”
A picture of what remained of Mouser formed in my head: a dulling nebula, embedding the splinter. “The order to self-destruct came from Tiger’s Eye,” Wendigo said. “It cut straight to the ship’s quackdrive subsystems, at a level the demons couldn’t rescind. I imagine they were rather hoping you’d have landed by the time the order arrived. The blast would have destroyed the splinter.”
“You’re saying home just tried to kill us?”
“Put it like this,” Wendigo said. “Now might not be a bad time to rethink your loyalties.”
Tiger’s Eye had failed this time—but they wouldn’t stop there. In three hours they’d learn of their mistake, and three or more hours after that we would learn of their countermove, whatever it happened to be.
“She’ll do something, won’t she? I mean, the wasps wouldn’t go to the trouble of building this place only to have Tiger’s Eye wipe it out.”
“Not much she can do,” Wendigo said, after communing with the Queen. “If home chooses to use kinetics against us—and they’re the only weapon which could hit us from so far—then there really is no possible defense. And remember there are a hundred other worlds like this, in or on their way to the halo. Losing one would make very little difference.”
Something in me snapped. “Do you have to sound so damned indifferent to it all? Here we are talking about how we’re likely to be dead in a few hours and you’re acting like it’s only a minor inconvenience.” I fought to keep the edge of hysteria out of my voice. “How do you know so much anyway? You’re mighty well informed for someone who’s only been here a day, Wendigo.”