Mirror Space - Marianne de Pierres [88]
She got to her knees and then her feet.
‘Take Wanton,’ said Wanton.
Mira nodded to both of them. She picked up the Extro and forced her legs to walk her along the strata, denying their desire to rest. Collecting two tubes of berry pulp from the pantry, she continued on to the buccal.
With a sense of relief, she stepped through the pucker into the safest place she knew - the vaguely meaty smell, the thick, moist walls, the odd visual disparity between the biozoon’s animal inner cheek and the humanesque fixtures. Home.
She placed Wanton on the floor inside the pucker and sank into Primo. As the vein engulfed her body and mind, she carried a question with her. Insignia’s inner skin was untouched in the buccal, unlike the still-healing cuts along the strata corridors. What happened? What caused those wounds?
The Post-Species use aggressive probes. It entered when I joined with Medium.
I don’t understand.
Insignia projected image after image into her mind. Mira watched a spinning object enter Insignia, slicing and sampling everything it touched. She saw Josef and Rast and the others in a space - not a room but an area surrounded by swirling sounds. She listened to their conversation and their efforts to leave the space.
I still don’t understand. What is it? Where?
This group of Post-Species refers to it as Medium. It is, in simple terms, a large resonator. Their consciousness is based in sound - vibration; an ingenious evolution of the principles behind res-shift.
That was not the case on the planet. They were parasitic.
Yes. They were different.
Why did you go there?
I needed to locate you. I took samples from their internal ‘casts. Then I left.
Y-you left the others behind?
I preferred to be without them.
Mira gasped. Though she had no enduring loyalty to Rast or any of them, her humanesque sensibilities contracted with fear for her own kind. But you abandoned them.
You are overly dramatic, Innate. They were not mine to abandon.
Can we get them back?
Insignia didn’t answer immediately, and Mira was unable to fight off the desire to sleep as Primo’s receptors primped and probed and replenished her.
She awoke, startled, a short time later. The baby had kicked. She felt both relief and apprehension. Wanton had not been in the least enlightening about the changes to her child.
It may be possible to negotiate with Medium for their return, said Insignia, as if there had been no time lapse in their conversation.
Then I would wish to do that, Mira thought quickly.
If, Insignia emphasised in the annoyed fashion of someone who’d been interrupted, Medium was still in local space.
Where is it?
It has shifted to the Leah system.
To Araldis?
Yes.
But that’s not possible. The Saqr have control of Dowl.
Impossible is a ridiculous humanesque concept. Medium would be able to shift to Dowl if it were welcome.
Mira’s muscles tightened involuntarily against the vein’s gentle massage. Of course. So many things made sense now: the Saqr on the Hosts’ planet, the invasion. The Post-Species wanted Araldis. But why? For the quixite? Or was there something else?
She fell deep into thoughts of Vito and the korm and Cass Mulravey. Had Cass given up hope of her return? Were they even alive still? What had transpired in the time that she’d been gone? What was about to?
What do you wish to do, Mira? It is not safe for us here now that I have intruded on the Post-Species worlds. Already I am being monitored with suspicion. If they were not in the process of mobilisation, I would be pursued. Only the situation protects us.
Mobilisation?
Insignia flooded her mind with more images, these ones filtered by the biozoon’s peculiar corduroy view of space. She saw the familiar brilliant markers of shift-space; a huge spinning drum-shaped object queuing to enter the final layer of the sphere, flashing as brightly as a supernova and then disappearing. Then Insignia’s perspective altered, cutting across to observe the outermost ring of shift-space. The dazzling turquoise of the largest ring was circled by a thick, opaque band.