62 - I'll Sting Them Straight

I feel more smooth and warm and boneless after the massage and sex and everything, than I had in a long time.  We all lay, on our cushions, watching the orchids nod in the breeze from the fan.  Mother Thriti is both impressive and funny as she lies there with her shoes off and her pipe, with two of her students working on her feet.

There’s a dozen people here in this room, everyone is relaxed and able to breathe easily.  Everyone has enough water. Shashi lies on her back with her baby on her chest, drawing fancy shapes in the air over her head with her black butterflies.  Mariush and her baby aren’t here.  She was startled speechless when stepapa said she was ‘The Radiance’ while he was gone to prevent war.  “I’m just the Regent for the baby,” she said.  And he said ‘I am appointing you as Radiance in my place.  Let any of the Hive Lords come whining to me and I’ll sting them straight.”

So Mariush is in the Sunrise Loggia, doing all the administrative things that stepapa swore was turning his hair white, even in the past few weeks.

Zon Amardad... Dee Amardad if I use the Lainz name... she has aerial snakes as code connectors and they are floating above her, tails hanging down, waving like grass in the wind. Mother Thriti clears her throat.

“Young women,” she says.  “And young men.  We are now ready to proceed with the work that His Radiance left us.”

I blink and sit up slowly.  “Don’t tighten up now, Milar,” Amardad says.  There’s a squeak and a scuffling noise at the bottom of the door and a number of small animals push in through the pet filter curtain a dozen rats with pale cream heads or black spots bound in, with two or three or four ferrets, it is hard to tell since they’re rolling around each other like a ball of weasel, and the occasional tiny dog.

The elder Nasera Basserus’s sleeve dog yips at me before curling up in her lap.  Tizrav, who I thought had gone with the boys jumps up, settles on my shoulder and puts one paw on my ear.

“To all of you who have worked together, you already know that we use our predators here to hack into security programs.  Siwion...” 

I interrupt Thriti again. “Just Hara, please. Yes, I didn’t know that you had the animals help you.  I thought it was just—“I waved at everyone’s glittering arrays of insects.  “Bugs.”

“The ferrets and terriers are the best at, well, ferreting out ways into and out of code.” She smiles, showing even white teeth, even at her age.  “Earthan cats do not deign to hunt in code for us.”

It was like I could hear a buzz... as if the Hive were talking to me.  I Tizrav! The ferret starts bouncing from my lap to my shoulder.  “Stop that, Tizzy.”

Dee Amardad, who has a tiny, fluffy dog the colour of apricots, with a white face, AND a black and white ferret boy, speaks up.  “The code that you all pulled out, when His Radiance and everyone was caught, has given us a handful of possible routes into Prime’s country.  The problem is that we’ve also found echoes of another node. It’s nothing like what we’re used to.”  I can’t help but think of the instant in the code when I stared into the man on the moon’s startled face. “We need to hide from that new source of owner code, whoever they are, and renew our own protective codes, before we start unravelling all the information His Radiance and everyone else gleaned at such cost.”

“Pardon me for asking but what kind of protections do you have from... above,” I ask.  “I mean they can fly, can’t they?  If that’s the case how haven’t they seen this gaudy city of yours? No offence intended.”

“None taken.” I like Amardad.  She’s not as abrasive as Elemfias.

Shashi speaks up.  “There’s a number of buttes in the badlands and all along the canyon that are natural formations.  If you could look down on Lainz, you’d see that the streets are not regular, but run like spiral cracks... the Loggia... as they are built, are carefully considered to seem natural.  It was one of the things His Radiance and the zardukar considered, every time someone requested one.”

“But if someone takes a close look it’s kind of obvious.”

“Indeed.”  That was Thriti again.  “That’s where the ferrets come in.  They go after the owner’s spies... in the sky... and transmit substitute data, or errors, or natural phenomena.  One reason the roads are so often underground is that we don’t have to disguise them.”

Shashi picks up the thread of answer again.  “And right now we have a LOT of campfires to make look like glittercliffs or phosphor spreads, or a colony of butt-lighters.”

“Oh.  I hadn’t thought of that!  You must have someone always covering, because you never know when or if Prime is going to look.”

“We have good, long-established covers, but things have changed so much since the old Radiance died that we need to check our covers and either re-inforce things or make new ones.”

“Um... we Milari haven’t been concealing ourselves.  This could be a problem.”  It could be a disaster.

“Your part of this continent is listed as ‘wild-seeding terraformation arrid biosphere, heavy metals package, Biocorp version 3.4.4.1’.  The original code for this whole part of the planet was... odd.  We’ve been fixing it, but it’s hard without the original, prime codes.”

“The first Empress’s codes should work if we can find them... and the Nadumon say they have ‘official’ standing so should get everything they want, because they aren’t hiding out from Prime.”

“They are lucky that Prime hasn’t bothered to look.  He seems to believe that he killed everyone, and if their code survived and is making his planet more like home then it is a bonus for him.”

“Ownershit,” I mutter and all the zardukar laugh.

“It’s only as good as everyone else’s shit.  Valuable because it makes dirt,” Shashi says, grinning.