104 -Target Deenay Detected

In the Sunrise Loggia, a cloud of floaters drifted in the window of Mariush’s room, mostly stopped by the filter curtains.  One or two made it through them and the mist wall as well, following the new strand of the most Radiant One’s deenay.

Mariush was awake, nursing and soothing the baby, who’d woken up fussy.  “Shhh.  Shhh, Homa... shhh.” A faint buzz as drones from the Great Hive flew through, admitted by the defenses.  They were bright red, leaf and security drones and landed to be swarmed and cleaned by Mariush’s ants.

In the dim light, the floaters were sparkles in the air, little more than dust, sinking toward the floor with little wind in the room to keep them aloft.  A data burst from one before a drone intercepted its filament and brought it to the floor where the mordant ants took it to pieces.

Data transmission: floater 801,588 target deenay detected. Replic—the information flow stopped as it was taken apart. 

The final floater clinked as it touched the floor and scuttled into a crack between two tiles, where a bit of grout had worn away.  It had no materials to replicate itself.  It went dormant, its instructions precise.  If it gained enough silica to replicate itself it would reactivate.

**

The fog of floaters surrounded the caravan still, the wind beginning to fall, leaving the bugs spread over everything, almost blinding in the sun as everything glittered.  The whole caravan moved through storm of glare, their motion kicking up clouds of glass bugs as they went, shaking feathers and wings, trying to dislodge the little pests. People began to slap their coatings off with gloved hands.   

“Don’t you get floater fogs?  I never saw one in Milar,” Ky said.  “When I first saw snow, I thought it was glass bugs.”

“No,  The air is too damp around people’s valleys.  It makes them too heavy to float,” Werfas said.  He managed to shake his veil clear of pests, but he swore and stopped himself from rubbing beside his mouth.  “Bloody ancestors that itches!”  The body fuzz and wing fragments and leg fragments of the insects often caused people to break out in blisters.  A splash of tiny blood blisters rose on his face already.

“Keep your veil up until we’re out of the field of glass, lad,” Elemfias said, dropping back to hand him a wrapped packet. “Once we’re out, you wipe your face with that.  And don’t scratch,” she warned, as his hand went back up toward his face.

Target deenay confirmed, protections version 8.  Protections—The swarm that had settled on Kyrus and Ilax’s birds began crumbling and falling off like bits of snow.  Kyrus’s deenay was all over his own equipment and clothing, all over Ilax’s things as well, but the surdeniliarch’s own mandery burned off any threat in tiny micro bursts of heat. 

One floater hacked through the warrior defenses, to Kyrus himself, crawling under his mouth veil, but only raised a blood blister on the skin under his chin before it fell apart.

The only other source of target deenay had fewer and less potent protections.  The floaters on Ky’s bird clung longer, transmitted more information.  They couldn’t reach his skin however.  He had his father’s protections on him, and Ilax’s and the other Zon’s flies were zipping around to begin to clear the air around them all. The only successful attacks were on the leather of the bird harness, in the cracks where mere shaking could not dislodge them and slapping just passed them by.

The deenay on the surface of the leather was broken down immediately and then the leather under it as well, as floaters pulled apart the silicate strands in moa leather.  The bridle flaps and springs and reins grew hollow, and brittle, even as the bird paced peacefully on with the rest of its flock.

“Ky,” his father called him up and he goaded his bird forward.  The glass bug frosting on the landscape was already lessened as the floaters found new dirt to burrow into.  “Now would be a good time for you to practice putting together a machine to help us clear out the last of the bugs.”

“Aw, da...”

“Don’t ‘aw da’ me, young man.  Even if the world is going to perdition, you are not neglecting your lessons.”

“Yes, da.”

Transmission: Most Shining Deenay discovered. Biological replication, maternal deenay pattern filed. Sent. Acknowledge.

The leather grew more and more frail, the moa more and more restive as floaters tested the living moa skin and sweat for possible degradation.