Their class had been injected with a general-purpose phobia of vermin. The instructor had told them to take up First Formation. First Formation existed for the purpose of finding out which cadets were fit to be Kel and which could not be assimilated. Cheris had been determined to be fit, and equally determined not to vibrate so annoyingly.
Once they were in formation – a square with projections from each flank, like horns – the instructor summoned the vermin.
They weren’t actually vermin. They were miniature servitors in the shapes of snake and stingfly and spider. Still, the resemblance was good enough for the phobia. Even Cheris, who had made friends with servitors since childhood, was unable to stop her reaction.
They tasted her skin and prodded the crevices of her taut hands. At one point her face was heavy with clinging servitors and their cold weight. She tried not to blink when silver antennae waved right in front of her eyes. She was gripped by the fancy that it was going to insert an antenna into her pupil and force it open, wider, wider, crawl in through her optic nerve and take up residence in the crenellations of her brain, lay eggs in the secret nodes of nerve and fatty tissue.
The formation required that they hold fast. Cheris held fast. She thought at first that the strange frozen calm was the phobia, but realized it was the formation. She was taking succor from her massed comrades, just as they did from her. Even when a spiderform paused at the corner of her mouth, even when she was shaking with the effort of not swatting it aside, she would have done anything to avoid breaking formation.
Three cadets broke. Damningly, the servitors didn’t pursue them. They only harassed people who belonged.
Ordinarily Cheris had a good sense of passing time, but the phobia trumped it. When the instructor was satisfied that no one else was going to break and called off the servitors, she remarked that they had only been standing there for twenty-four minutes. It had felt much longer.
Even after the technicians removed the phobia, Cheris dreamt of small scuttling things eager to crawl through her veins to live in her heart. But she had the tremulous comfort of knowing she wasn’t alone.
TWO OF HERON Company’s servitors, whom the humans knew as Sparrow 2 and Sparrow 11, were having a chat. They were at leisure until the mothgrid received instructions for the remnants of the company, and neither the grid nor the Kel humans monitored servitor-specific communications channels because they didn’t consider it worth listening in on tedious technical discussions. A number of the moth servitors cultivated long-winded arguments on machining tolerances and pseudorandom number generators to regurgitate whenever the humans got bored enough to try.
Sparrow 2 was arguing that they should have warned Cheris that she was a pawn in a Shuos game.
Sparrow 11, which was repairing one of its limbs, differed. She wasn’t just going into a Shuos game. She was also going into the hands of the Nirai hexarch and the Immolation Fox. If the hexarchs knew the depth of her contacts with their kind, it would endanger her, and it would endanger all the servitors, who relied on the humans thinking of them as well-trained furniture.
The servitors considered themselves lucky that the Nirai hexarch, who had grown up before machine sentience was achieved, found it difficult to think of humans as people, let alone machines. The Immolation Fox was a threat to the hexarchate, but not specifically to servitors, so he was less of a concern. Since they were Kel servitors, however, the two Sparrows had the obligatory prejudices against him.
Sparrow 2 expressed its discomfort with the situation. It remembered how much it had liked talking about number theory with Cheris, and the stories she had had about the ravens in her home city. Couldn’t something be done?
Sparrow 11 thought to itself that Sparrow 2 was very young. It reminded Sparrow 2 that Cheris was a terrible liar. The only way she was going to get through her first encounter with the black cradle was if she genuinely had no idea what she was in for. Otherwise the Nirai hexarch would suspect something and destroy her.
They went back and forth a little more, but Sparrow 2 eventually conceded the correctness of Sparrow 11’s views. At least the servitor grapevine would keep it informed of further developments if Cheris managed to escape the hexarch’s grasp. And there would be servitors on whatever warmoth Cheris ended up on; the question was whether she would ever think to call on them for more than casual conversation. Servitor policy was never to offer, but they didn’t mind being asked by an ally, even one in such a precarious position, as long as the request was polite.
THE BOXMOTH’S EXECUTIVE officer showed up at Cheris’s door not long after the meeting and explained that she would have to be drugged for her journey. “There’s no other way, Captain,” he said. “They’d have to pull out your spatial memory and scour it clean otherwise.” He didn’t say what they both knew, that the entire boxmoth would be subject to scouring after it transferred her. “The technicians at your destination will give you more details.”
Cheris didn’t like the thought of being under for the trip, but at least he hadn’t said it was a full sedation lock. “I could prepare more adequately if I were given some of the details now, sir,” Cheris said, not because she expected him to tell her more, but because he would report her objection to their superiors.
“I’m sure you could, Captain,” the executive officer said, but that was all.
Cheris reported to Medical and didn’t even remember reaching the door due to the retroactive effect. Much later she recovered a few impressions: a smell like mint and smoke and sedge blossoms, a heartbeat too slow to be her own, the world tilting and curving. Water the color of sleep, or sleep the color of water.
She woke up afterward. Her augment told her she had been transferred off the Burning Leaf. In fact, she was on a station, not a moth, probably the facility the black cradle was housed in. In a moment of confusion she waited for the heat-pulses in her left arm, but nothing came. The pulses were only used by infantry anyway, not moth Kel, and she probably wasn’t considered infantry anymore.
The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was a dazzlement of glittering planes and angles. She was in a strange six-sided room like the heart of a mirror. Her skin was cold and her breath scarcely misted the chill air. But as she stirred, slowly and stiffly, she felt the blood coursing in her veins and knew she was not dead.
There was something wrong with the inside of her skull, as if someone had rewritten all her nerves in a foreign alphabet. She could barely form coherent thoughts.
Someone had dressed her in an inoffensive tan shift covered by a heated outer robe. She stretched carefully, feeling unaccountably awkward, then let the robe’s warmth soothe her aching muscles. After looking around, she located one of her uniforms and started to put it on. All her limbs seemed to be the wrong length.
Then she caught sight of her shadow. Froze.
The shadow wouldn’t have looked like her own even if it weren’t for the eyes. Not only were proportions wrong, there were nine eyes, unblinking and candle-yellow, arranged in three triangles. As she watched, the eyes moved to form a perfect line bisecting the shadow. They might have been growing larger; they might have been coming closer.
She didn’t feel hazy anymore. Something curdled in her throat. She thought, I am not going to scream. Except the thought wasn’t in her voice. She heard it in an unfamiliar man’s voice all the way inside her skull. She couldn’t make it stop, she couldn’t get it out, she couldn’t get her voice back. Every time she had a thought, she heard it in the stranger’s voice, and under other circumstances she would have found it pleasant, a low drawl, but –