Eyes of the Void (9780316705882) by Tchaikovsky Adrian

Author:Tchaikovsky, Adrian [TCHAIKOVSKY, ADRIAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group USA
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

They went with the Parthenon’s slightly conflicted blessing, therefore, and with the Aspirat’s picket ship Mhairi. It was the latest from the shipyards, with a complement of Myrmidons and a clutch of accelerators that could be converted to a mass hammer if need be, more armament than a ship that size should have been able to brandish.

They went with a solemn farewell from Trine, too, and a set of credentials as though they were on official diplomatic business for the Hiver Assembly should they need it. By that time, Solace was wondering if Trine’s longstanding reluctance to re-integrate with the Assembly was because of the way they threw their rather nebulous authority around at the slightest provocation.

With all this, they set out, following the path in the message. It cast them down a net of Throughway points out of Partheni-controlled space, past the edge of the Colonies to worlds claimed and settled by the Hannilambra, Kit’s species. Specifically, to a dry world his translator could best render as Ittring.

They timed their arrival so that the Mhairi got there first, with a piece of spurious business to account for her presence, and no overt connection to the Vulture God. Not that the deception would fool anyone looking to put the pieces together.

“So we wait until a, what is it, Minister calls us? Those are your go-betweens, right, your fixers?” Olli asked. “I mean, message didn’t give us an address, just a world. So they’ll have to pick us out of traffic when we come in.”

“Ministers are not the thing,” Kittering said. “Residence is the purpose of Ittring. Business will be entrusted to a supervisor. There will be disapproval.”

The others side-eyed him at this, but he obviously didn’t feel inclined to explain the intricacy of Hanni society. To Solace’s admittedly untrained eye, he seemed ill at ease, legs not still for a moment as he crouched on his stool in the command pod.

She had the God’s rebooting system bring up some planetary details. Ittring was another sealess world, no surface water but extensive subterranean aquifers. There was a thriving biosphere that existed almost entirely underground, save for the mile-wide sand-coloured plates that were the photosynthetic organs of a kind of gigantic lichen. Or possibly coral, or another of those human approximations that always missed the mark with alien life. There was also a colonial species of something that looked like a man-size slug but lived more like ants, and apparently zipped about on a natural super-frictionless slime at speeds of up to fifty klicks an hour, which must be something to see. As well as exporting the slime, the large population of Hanni had semi-domesticated the slugs, or at least gene-hacked them to do tasks. The Hanni resided exclusively in the upper reaches of the towering mounds the slugs built. And there, they… lived. Solace’s experience of Hannilambra had only been where they rubbed up against other species, acting as traders, fixers, go-betweens and specialists. But of course there were plenty of worlds they’d spread to and colonized.

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