Arron was silent.
Lareet's ear swiveled sideways toward him. “What are you not saying, Scholar Arron?”
“I am not saying how it is a fine thing that the Confederation prevents my sisters from launching an attack until they are certain who the target should be. It avoids waste of life and anger.”
Lareet laughed once, hard. “Your humor is grim and strange, Scholar Arron.”
“I was not joking. Consider: the Queens-of-All know that we could attack at any moment and destroy the Confederation and all hope of saving their daughters from the plague. The Humans will not stay if there is a war. If the Sisters-Chosen-to-Lead confront the Queens, the Queens will have to negotiate some kind of satisfaction. The life debt will be paid, and no new dead will be created.”
“You make it sound idyllic, Scholar Arron.”
He shrugged, and waved his hands. “As long as it is understood that the Families and the Others must work together to save their sisters’ children, it is possible. There is no reason for it not to be.”
Lareet's ears sagged briefly. “No reason except them and us.”
The buildings opened up to make space for the busy quay with its long docks protruding out into the boat-choked harbor. Blocky battlements stood sentry on the shore. One broad aisle in the water remained clear. This was the pass-through for the military. As Arron watched, a midsize transport pulled away from its dock and headed out toward the harbor mouth, maybe on its way to investigate the attack, maybe to make sure the attackers had no allies.
“You can find your way from here?” asked Lareet. “The sister-ferriers will take you? I need to get back to Umat.”
“I told you, I'm fine, Lareet.” He disentangled her arm from his and squeezed it.
She dipped her ears. “Then I will see you back at our home.”
Lareet retreated up an alleyway and Arron headed down to the docks. The harbor ferry was in its slip, and the sister copilots were aboard. Because they had no other passengers they were willing to take him out to the Human island immediately. It wasn't that they minded, they had assured him a thousand times, but some sisters, and mothers particularly, worried about the Human poison.
Arron's pack bumped against his back as he stepped off the ferry and onto the creaky wooden dock. Human Island was really little more than a sandbar at the harbor mouth. Where it wasn't sand and silt, it was rocky, weed-scummed, and moss-coated. Fish washed up in its tidal pools to finish dying. The wind brought in the smells of salt, smog, fish, and burning petroleum. It was not a vacation spot, but it was a decent distance away from anything populated. If anything happened to the ventilation system, or if the outpost got hit in a skirmish, chances were no one would get hurt from exposure to Humans.
The outpost was a service station for the indigent Human population of the Hundred Isles. Corpers and embassites had their amenities provided for them. Over the years, the leftovers—freelancers, curiosity traders, and academics on thread-thin grants, like Arron—had banded together and set up their own sites.
Arron walked down the path they had cleared when the outpost bunker was built. Like the dock, it was getting moss-grown. Riotous orange fungi sprouted on the moss's back.
Time to call a cleanup day, thought Arron automatically. Then, he winced at the thought of his colleagues saying, “Why bother?”
A set of sponge-cement stairs led down into the heart of the island. The micropores in the cement's cell structure siphoned off the water and kept the stairs clean and dry. At the bottom waited a thick metal door that always made Arron think of the entrance to some ancient dungeon.
He stood in front of the door's mirror, and said, “Outpost entry for Arron Hagopian.” There was a brief hum while he was scanned. The door cycled open with a huge whomp! of air from the ventilator's indraft.
Arron stepped into the foyer. It was a locker room with packages of fresh clean-suits and recyclers for the used ones, along with cubicles for changing and showering. The sign over the inner door read STRIP, FRIEND, AND ENTER.
Arron pulled a clean set of clothing out of his locker, stepped into one of the shower stalls, and unsealed his helmet with a feeling of relief. He stripped off his gloves, shirt, and trousers and tossed them into a pile. He disconnected what the suit-makers euphemistically called the “relief options,” the one portion of the clean-suit he'd never really gotten used to, and dropped those into a separate pile. Then, he began the wiggling shuffle needed to peel off the skintight layer of transparent organic that covered him from neck to toe. The organic had another day's worth of use in it, but he did not want to have to soak and scrub it to clean off the stains, so he dropped that in a pile with the other used clothing.