“I had to make sure the arach had enough cover to take its shot. They were going for the queen. We needed something to draw it out before she hit the podium.”
Mack had returned, but I wasn’t angry anymore; I was just tired. I pulled on the underwear, and the combat suit, and wondered where the fuck my gear had disappeared to, this time.
“Your gear’s back in the colony armory. We figured it was the safest place.”
I wanted to argue with that, but it made sense—and, at least it had meant everything had been returned.
“Why?” I asked, and we both knew I wasn’t asking about my gear. I sat on the chair beside my bed, and pulled on my boots.
Mack came all the way into the room, letting the door shut behind him. He stopped a few steps in front of the chair, and looked down at me.
“Because he was disguised as one of the settlement’s pilots, and we ran into an ambush at the last site. We needed to smoke him out before we went out, again.”
“How long was I out?”
“We gave you eighteen hours. Doc wanted to take two weeks, but the queen wanted you on the next run, and Odyssey need the inter-species interaction to go smoothly. Things are…delicate.”
“You hit me with nans, again?”
“And some high-speed rejuvenation shit that Odyssey have been keeping to themselves.”
“Cool.”
“Not really. You’re going right back in the tank when this assignment is over. Doc’s orders.”
Doc gave orders?
“Not often, but, when he does, I tend to listen. Way he calls it, and I quote: you’re running on ‘a time-limited self-rejuvenating stim pack made of nans, and Odyssey should keep that shit locked up and out of reach of more civilized folk, who either can’t say no, or don’t have the sense to’.”
Wow. I stared at him. Doc had said all that, and said Mack had no sense?
“Doc was just a little bit pissed off at the time, so I let it slide.”
I snickered. He let it slide? Sure he did.
“Shut it, Cutter.”
I glared at him, and he raised an eyebrow, smirked, and headed for the door. I figured I should probably follow. For someone revved up on nans, I didn’t feel particularly hyped.
“Where are we head…ed?”
Well, I hadn’t been expecting that.
Mack stopped, and looked back—and, for once, he hadn’t said a thing.
My room was in the colony, all right… just not exactly where in the colony I’d thought it was.
“I thought we’d be in Taraquil.”
“We are in Taraquil.”
I walked to the edge of the corridor, and took a look out the window.
“We’re so high up.”
“Vespis prefer to fly.” He started walking along the corridor, letting me follow and adjust to the idea of being inside a vespis building.
My heart gave an extra thump, and the world around me sharpened. I tried to channel the sudden surge of alertness into satisfying my curiosity.
“How did they put it up so fast?”
“You never heard of pre-fabs?”
Well, yeah, I had… but wasps? And prefabricated wasp nests? My mind batted the idea around a bit, as Mack answered the question.
“Don’t knock it, girl. I’m kinda liking the set-up.”
“How does it work for integration?”
“Slowly, girl. It works slowly.”
He sighed. I sensed a world of politics behind that sigh, and figured we were well enough out of it.
“You wish.”
“What?”
“You, girl, are right in the middle of it.”
I was? And how the fuck had I managed that?
Again, my heart quickened and my mind started to spin.
And, of course, that was the comment Mack chose not to explain.
“Queen’s waiting,” he said. “We’re heading back out to the river, checking on the weaver settlements. It’s two pronged: first, we’re making sure they’re okay, and then giving them assistance, if they need it; and, second, we’re introducing the human elements they can contact, if they want to accept human settlers.”
“That’s quick.”
“The arach are coming. Reunion needs to expedited, if K’Kavor is to have a chance at survival.”
“What does Odyssey think?”
We wound round the inside of a central column, and then back out, and I felt energy shimmer across my skin. This time the views showed links to the second and third floors of human habitations, with more walkways being built.
“They’re serious about integration,” Mack said, “but they’re careful, too.”
He pointed.
“That building is Odyssey’s, and that one belongs to the new repair company, Iron Hands.”
His hand swung to indicate a third building in the arc, one still under construction.
“That’s the first building of the new academy. Security will be tight, but not even this area will be exclusive to the vespis. The queen has commanded it—and the vespis have been planning Reunion for a very long time.”
Mack stopped outside a door not far from the corridor junction.
“We’re here.”
29—Poster Girl
I learnt a lot more about Reunion and how the vespis intended to integrate the human, weaver and vespis settlements into a single planetary identity than I’d ever wanted to know. I also learnt more about their history than I’d ever thought I’d need to know. Given it had been the humans who had tried turning the vespis into cattle when they arrived, and then persisted in the attempt even when they’d learnt the wasps were sentient, I didn’t know how they’d been given a chance.
“Because they were divided,” the queen said, picking that thought out of my head—and I remembered the vespis were psi, and that I was pretty much an open book.
Damn.
“Be glad,” she said, and then returned to the question. “Many of the colonists refused to go along with the plan to domesticate us. They helped us prevail when the arach attacked, and that is why we let them stay, when they would have been prosecuted for colonizing a sentient world. The price was that they helped us interact with the non-arach star-farers of the universe.”
“But you kept them separate,” I said… and stopped as I saw the expressions
