Wizards At War

Ronan gave Kit a look. Kit headed for his pup tent, reached inside its door, and came back with the dog biscuit box. He handed Ronan a biscuit, and Ronan gave it to Ponch; loud crunching noises ensued. “Now all we have to do is find out how to make contact with the Hesper,” Ronan said. “Assuming we can get to her without raising the alarm.”

Spot popped his screen up. “I’ve been processing the mapping information I stored while we were there,” he said, “and coordinating it with the markings on the tunnel walls. Some of them, rather than being mottoes and propaganda, are labels.”

On his screen, and in the middle of the rough circle in which they were all sitting, appeared a three-dimensional map of part of the Yaldiv city-hive. “This is incomplete,” Spot said, “but it’s possible to extrapolate a lot of structures we didn’t actually examine from the tunnel openings we passed, and the road signs on the walls.” A small pulsing light appeared in front of one chamber in the diagram. “Here’s where you saw the Hesper,” Spot said.

Dairine leaned down to look at the label that was flashing on the diagram on Spot’s screen. “‘Grubbery’?”

“Possibly we would say ‘nursery,’” Filif said. “A place where the younger and more fragile members of the species are kept or reared.”

“It looks like they reproduce sort of backward from the way hive insects work on Earth,” Dairine said, bringing up another display on Spot’s screen and scrolling down it, while the main map display remained rotating gently in the air in the midst of them. “Instead of a female with a lot of male mates, they have a ‘king’ male who visits a sort of harem and fertilizes chosen females. Then they go off to the nurseries, and—”

“Oh, please,” Kit said. “Sex stuff.” He hid his eyes briefly with one hand. “Aren’t we supposed to be protected from this kind of thing?”

“You’re getting kind of old for that now,” Dairine said, unconcerned. “If standard operating procedure’s actually operating that way at the moment. Anyway, where other species are involved, I think as soon as we’re old enough to ask, we’re old enough to find out.” She gave Kit a slightly cockeyed look, then glanced away again. There were things she herself was still finding uncomfortable about this particular species’ take on reproduction… particularly what happened to the females after the many eggs they bore were fertilized. It brought to mind a particularly vivid sequence from a nature movie she’d seen on one of the educational channels last year—a wasp laying its egg inside some hapless caterpillar, which then went about its business until the day the egg hatched, and the wasp grub started eating its way out. That times a hundred, Dairine thought. Or a thousand. More workers, more warriors for the king. And as for the poor handmaiden, or what’s left of her—

Kit turned to Ronan. “You think you can cover for us again when we go back in?”

The way things are at the moment, I don’t see any problem with that, the Champion said.

“Then let’s do it in the morning,” Dairine said. “The handmaidens don’t go out of the hive with the workers and warriors; there’ll be a lot fewer Yaldiv to avoid if we want to have a chat with her.”

“The question being,” Filif said, “what do we say to her, exactly? ‘Go well, Hesper, and would you kindly now rise up and save the universe?’”

“Don’t ask me,” Dairine said, getting up and stretching. “Improvisation seems to be the order of the day, so I’m gonna wing it. Or better still,” she said, ambling over to look at her mochteroof, “wait for one of you older-and-wiser types to think of something.” She threw what was intended to be an annoying look at Roshaun, and turned away.

A few moments later, he came up behind her and looked over her shoulder, pretending to flick a speck of dust off the gleam of the mochteroof‘s skin. “You are somewhat on edge, are you not?” Roshaun said under his breath.

“Now why would I admit to a thing like that?” Dairine said softly, meeting his reflection’s eye. “But since you ask, I haven’t been so freaked since we were talking to your dad back on Wellakh. I forget what he said, but you gave him this really dirty look and your stone changed color. I thought maybe you were getting ready to blast him or something and then blame it on my unhealthy alien influence.”

Roshaun stared at her. “You saw the Sunstone do what?”

Dairine looked at him curiously. “It got clear. While you were talking to your father. You weren’t going to blast him? I’m glad.”

He looked perturbed. “It wouldn’t be that I wasn’t in something of two minds,” he said, “but all the same—”

She turned away. “Tell me about it,” she said. “He was getting on my nerves, too.”