I thought about skimming through the K’Kavoran net, grateful I had the vespis code language stuck in my head, but then it occurred to me that there might be some other way to find it. I dug through the on-board files, trying to find one that had been recently added.
“Stop!” Askavor’s presence pulled me back to the implant. “Any files they have will be in arach. You don’t have it, and they will be defended. Here is the data on the settlement.”
Stars help them, I thought, going over the statistics, and I surfaced to ask.
“Did the second shuttle launch?”
Askavor did not shift.
“I will check,” he said.
“And I need to do a head count on what’s in that shuttle.”
That caught the queen’s attention.
“You think there could be more than twenty?”
“Yes. They need to take the settlement on the first strike. Twenty arach is not enough for a town of three thousand—not if they want to keep them alive for feeding.”
“Askavor, take the controls.”
I watched Askavor’s forelimbs move, and then the spider replied.
“I have them.”
“Change of plans. You are to steal the shuttle, and get to the ship. I will bring a force to deal with the arach on the ground.” She tilted one multi-faceted eye towards me. “You need to jam the drop-ship’s communications. If there are two, you need to jam both. I will activate broader jamming once the shuttle takes off, to take out any other communications they might have.”
“But the settlers…” one of the other vespis began, and the queen clattered her mandibles.
He subsided.
“I will be as swift as I can, but twenty would have been a challenge. More is not a battle we can win.”
I was mortified, because I hadn’t confirmed the numbers, and she wasn’t waiting. Even as I opened my mouth the say something, she flared her wings and let go of the grab rail.
“Your majesty!” I protested, but she did not come back, Lifting out of the flitter’s slip-stream, and banking sharply away. She answered me nonetheless.
“There are two shuttles. You need to get to the ship.”
By shuttle, I knew she meant drop-ships, which meant they’d either dropped at the same time, or Tens had been too far gone to warn me of the second one—that, and I might have locked him out of my skull before he could. Yeah… Whatever. There were two, and the vespis couldn’t take them both, so we were going to land out of sight of the township, and steal the drop-ship once the arach had started their attack.
Part of me wanted to protest the action, to say just how very wrong that was, but the other part of me grabbed it by the throat and told it we could cry later. If Mack and the crew were to survive, we had to get to the ship, before the raid was done. Whether we tried to stop the attack or not, would make no difference. Two drop-ships, forty arach—not something the small force of vespis and weaver were able to take. Heading to the ship was better than adding to the casualty list.
I slipped into the drop-ship’s computer, once more, but this time, beyond checking the thing was still on course, my only goal was to take a look at how many of their people they’d squeezed inside it. Infiltrating the security feed wasn’t a problem, but my heart almost stopped when I saw exactly how many they’d brought with them.
“That’s about half the force they would have brought aboard the ship,” Askavor whispered, and he sounded as mortified as any spider I’d ever heard.
Not hard, really—given he was the only non-arach spider that had ever really talked to me.
I thought about checking the numbers in the other shuttle, if only so the queen had some idea of just how many warriors she would need to bring, but Askavor’s voice brought me back to the flitter.
“We’re almost there. Get ready.”
I surfaced in time to feel the flitter descending. As though reading my mind, Askavor lifted his foot off my midriff so I could turn myself around. Who was I kidding? The damn spider was in my head. Of course, he could read my mind. Damnit!
I pulled myself up off the floor, and was just in time to absorb the light jolt of landing through my feet. It was the first time I’d been able to see the whole craft I’d been riding on. I’d been right; it was a flitter of some kind.
Askavor’s bulk had stopped me from seeing how the console had tapered into a low wall furnished with a grab rail to which two more wasps clung. The queen had also blocked the sight of another three wasps. Behind me, beyond the low partition I had noticed, were another four wasps, although I got the impression there’d been at least two more.
“Our queen never flies alone,” said a new voice, and I wondered just how many of the creatures around me had access to my mind.
“All of us,” came as an unwelcome chorus.
Well, fuck me!
And several of them started back in surprise.
Askavor sounded very much like he was laughing as he explained.
“It’s a profanity,” he said. “A profanity, not a suggestion. Most certainly not an invitation.”
I buried my face in my hands, and felt my skin blaze with embarrassment.
Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn.
Damn.
“Are you done?” The same, new, voice, and it didn’t sound amused.
I nodded, took a deep breath, and took my hands away from my face.
“Let’s do this.”
9—Boarding the Marie
Now that I was out of it and could see it properly, the vespis flitter looked more like an open hover-sled, which made sense, when you considered their wings. The sled was fairly light, too, because the half dozen vespis remaining with us, lifted it by the
