Past the standing Sentinels, still mired in the exaltations of humanites and calls of her colony, Skthveraachk saw the Solovyova outside the tent. Slanted. Stooped. Joints, first crooked, stiffening as Hathan called out to her; paired eyes which had been fixated upon the flask she carried snapping up as antenna-like graspers ceased their consideration of its lid.

Single note. The humanite still ensuring her focus was kept on the other of her kind, with only the occasional drift taking it past the Queen or her supporting entourage.

Unsung thoughts flashed and danced above the Colonel’s head. Skthveraachk tried to ensure her own focus, though found gazing through the eyes of those children carrying her far easier than using her own. Like her body was floating, bouncing along an ocean only she could feel or touch. The silence was stark in its comparison to the noise beyond, and the Hathan’s shifting of gaze with Solovyova’s downward look spurred Skthveraachk to the beginnings of song.

“Your assistance was invaluable. Your information, your scans, the critical beat by which my colony-“

An arpeggio which tumbled off the cliff at its peak. Solovyova sliced the response as an unsheathed scythe, the cruel tone rescinding only at the sight of Skthveraachk’s visible recoil. Hathan furrowed the folds of flesh above his eyes, but said nothing as the female continued. Menders quizzically tried to send searching touches to her, finding only a wall of solid hardstone and mental brick their welcome. The Queen retained the connection to the thinkers, and sung back with emotions she disallowed herself to feel.

“I receive, Solovyova-LieutenantColonel.” The flags and banners around the encampment seemed brighter, the cup upon them radiating its golden glow on background of crimson and void. The false-light projectors enhanced, perhaps, to blinding degrees. “Should we enter?”

Some decision reached, gloved feelers finally latched and spun at the cap of the flask. An action which, almost as soon as it was begun, cut itself short with trembling finality. Solovyova was no longer looking upon them, but down the gradual slope. To where cheering had become hisses, guttural ‘ooo’ing from puckered lip-meat, and a darker shade of celebration. Uniforms of the Palamedes’ crew, led by the Lieutenant Miroslava, surrounding as four the central Coalition soldier. Officer. General. Still in his own colors of yellow and blue, still walking tall as though he were among his own kind yet. The troops of the Sovereignty were disciplined enough to keep their distance from the captured foe. Not quite so disciplined as to be stopped from throwing gestures, and vitriolic looks the color of a dying sister towards the male. Miroslava saluted as the group reached the ambers, were permitted through. Hathan was midway through returning it when Solovyova shoved her container of calming fluids away within the folds of her shell, and with a straightness of formality Skthveraachk could not recall ever seeing from the female before, saluted in return. Not to the ambers. Not to the Lieutenant. Prescott had kept his gaze fixed ahead, but at the sight of the scarred woman’s regard, hands bound together by band and hardstone rose to gently smiling face, and returned the gesture. Miroslava was turning red again.

General’s hand lowered, and the Colonel did not reply until both had completed their exchange of formality. Then, the reply came as the ice on shattered lake’s surface.

Devries sounded as drained as the Queen felt. Not tired, not disinterested, but like a breath that had been held for bars, and only now was able to be released.

And now it was the Queen to feel as drained as Devries sounded as the Colonel and Lieutenant dissented. Distrusted. The smaller female sputtering while the larger loomed. Prescott said not a word, looking between each with a sense of familiarity, she felt. Like he had seen this scene a thousand times before. And it bit at Skthveraachk, to think of their frenzied foe, defeated or not, to see the Sovereignty descend to his level.

“Thanks is not required. Service is expected. It is delivered.” She did not need gratitude. As much as Solovyova, she did not want it at this moment. All her battered body wanted, despite the floaty weightlessness experienced as she lay atop the drones, was to be done with it, and rest. The Hathan, Composer praise his purpose, saw beneath the shell of her song immediately.

Unmusical. A hard crash from rubato into measured tempo once more. The Lieutenant wished to continue the discord. Her obligation to the Commander, as always, outweighed the desire.

Prescott made not a sound as his eyes followed the lines of the music between them; the Hathan’s mild slouch, and the Lieutenant’s rigid propriety.

Was it? Or had the Hathan peered through the goldboughs to notice how Solovyova was already preparing to belittle the Lieutenant’s decision once more? Skthveraachk did not know the Commander to be a male who ignored the memories, the ‘rules’, of his colony.

Miroslava cracked her salute, spared a look for the Colonel, and departed. Had the guards been Ambers, her lifting attendants may have begun to grow disquiet. To her mild, hazy surprise, they acknowledged the presence of the guarded Coalition soldier as the Lieutenant disappeared within the tent, but reacted as if it were their own colony surrounding him. The Palamedes’ soldiers, only faintly bearing scent traces of their pap, treated still as though they were extensions of Skthveraachk herself. And so, it was another surprise as to how they curled their claws and more fully sheathed themselves when Hathan, too, offered the humanite’s formal salute to the Prescott. Once the Lieutenant was out of view. This one, despite bound grasper-hands, was returned.

Solovyova tried to keep her gaze steady as their former enemy spoke. Her mouth, set. Perhaps it succeeded, under a humanite’s inspection. Perhaps not, under the way the Prescott looked upon her. More focused and quizzical than he had been even when staring upon an alien life.

She tried for a smile, the Queen felt. It came out wrong, and the smile the Prescott returned bore a thinness. A weight. The lines, scars humanites called them, where their sealant and flesh had melded improperly, contorted as meat around the outline of the Solovyova’s bones.

His hardstone cuffs clinked together.

The admission of near-frenzy sent a shiver down Skthveraachk’s numb legs, vanishing before it reached her claws. Hathan raised a hand towards her, but dropped it behind him before it reached her shell.

Both smiled, and both smiles were lies. Worn as unnaturally as the synthetic shells their species clad themselves in. th myself, only a few measures before Dracan declared its independence. I never asked how you knew what was coming; never got a chance to ask why you decided to leave instead of staying here, fighting, if you truly believed in what the Sovereignty stood for.”>

Her breath came out in a slight fog.

Hathan turned. The attendants naturally flowed around him, away from his step, so as not to obstruct his view of the Lieutenant poking from the tent.

Though Solovyova seemed to wish to say more, Prescott was as quick as the Hathan to turn from her. To meet one another’s gazes, as equal as situation would allow.

Rather than point with finger, the humanite pointed with the bottom tip of his skull. Hathan’s hairy ridges condensed, but Skthveraachk again clicked and tapped her jaws at both the accusation and misnomer.

“The Herald places gravest and grandest importance on your life. Your survival is assured. Your cooperation, suggested. You are the price I pay for the safety of a world’s inhabitants. The Hathan-Commander wishes only to assure you act in a manner which will not lead to physical harm.”

“I do not wear the shells of your species, is this meant to be comparative?”

Extending a hand in indication, the Hathan’s posture went taut even before entering, guiding the soldiers first along with the Prescott. One gave an unpleasant shove to the male’s shoulder, but the frenzied humanite barely seemed to register it.

Shaking his head out, pulling higher, he prepared to follow. And paused, only to flash a final, small smile to the former Major. Solovyova opened her mouth to speak again, but the Brigadier-General had already disappeared within. Skthveraachk caught a final look of the female hurriedly pulling out, drinking from, the hidden flask after the Prescott’s entry. Returning it within her layered shell by the time she, as the Queen and meager ten-some attendants crawled through the seal. Into the tent spaced wide around central false-light table, on which she had first seen the face of her foe. The representative of hostile colony, she had thought then. Among the more senior blues, equally spaced ambers, thinkers and queens of their forces and of course the Herald himself, she perhaps expected to see the General shrink, alone amidst the conquering enemy. But as he took a place at the end of the table, bound and defeated as he was, he could have passed for the Commander himself with how firmly he carried his form. How he met, without hesitation, the song which flowed from the Aadarsh’s lips as the Queen’s entourage was prompted by her tender and soft-drooping hairs into standstill, back from the proper gathering.

Golden eyes flickered into a wider grin, that still ensured bones remain covered.

“It was deemed an acceptable level of risk for the projected outcome.”

White shell, elongated, like the Pod would wear on the Palamedes. The female who had spoke did so from behind the Herald, her tap-pad out while a face obscured by wrapping black glass turned up from the work.

Answer came before she had a chance to speak.

“You sing with rightness. Your mender has my thanks, which shall be made with doubled intensity if she is available for questions when such is permissible. I am curious of these treatments I have been given. It is an…unusual, sensation.” An understandable platitude, the Herald had given. Generic, but it colored her core a vibrant green even to hear such recognizable tones. The Doctor, the ‘Mahleekha’, tipped her head, and though it made pain shoot up the Queen’s first joint, she returned the motion.

An interjection was given from the Commander, his Lieutenant, formerly whispering to the Doctor, now moving to better take place at his side.

The female shifted her attention to the Herald.

Across the room, to the Prescott. The Prescott who, though silent, watched the Herald with eyes made thin as a tightened laying tube. Neither moving, nor deviating his look, even when their mender, Doctor, pointedly ruptured the flesh beneath his neck with a slender tube. Crimson flowing through to the ampule. ‘Should she be more guarded? Less? Numbness was beginning to shift into a soreness, and she sucked a breath of the thinner air. Feeling the pangs of emotion trying once more to break through the shield of thinkers’ data Skthveraachk had prioritized.

“A condition was made for his peaceful surrender. It included allowing the remainder of his soldiers free departure.” More guarded. An attendant beneath her, regulating its breathing, shifted abruptly as the Hathan moved a hand towards it. Her. Subtly shaking it back and forth, in warning. “Such soldiers were deemed unnecessary and irrelevant to the task. I accepted the terms.” The Herald’s eyes…clicked? Made a whirring sort of noise, the blackness in their centers widening by hundreds of a length before focusing back in. When his hand came up, it swatted the air as though to dislodge pest.

Hathan’s cautioning limb lowered as the Herald turned his interest to the true prize. The General, Magistrate, Frenzied, roles upon roles, meeting the golden look while Doctor slotted his blood into her larger pad. Aadarsh smirked. Prescott stared. And though there were no acoustics to speak of in the tent of metallic fabric amidst churning machine displays and rocks of power, the voice which returned was as aged and firm as the canyons of the Queen’s mountainous home.

Nearest amber tensed, waited for a command to punish the lack of proper title. The Herald, though, was far too absorbed in consideration of what had just been said. Skthveraachk kept the eyes of the Queen upon the pair, but slowly guided those beneath her in a search of the ten and ten more within the tent. There was no recognition, from any.

It was a laugh, and an acknowledgement both.

Odd statement. She might have overlooked it, if not for the current priority listings. Thinkers filed it away for later.

Next to her, more respectable a distance than Hathan’s, her children saw the Lieutenant’s brows raise as the herald made the correction.

This time, the Prescott did smile. An unpleasant sort of twisted meat. The Herald did not dignify the accusation with response. Did not rebuff it? No, suspicion was unwarranted. Brigadier-General had been a valiant enemy to survive as long as he had, but he was the enemy. The Aadarsh had never been proven to lie before.

Her heart pulsed, her stomachs clenched within her core as gaster dripped. She should not have told him.

Twice now. She did not know this designation, this title, the Herald used, but it was not of military. Not of regard. And it was deliberate.

The fearlessness of the frenzied. Queen had counted upon the male’s desire for self-preservation in her plan, relied upon it, but everything he did not? He knew the risks, yet acted without care for them.

Bindings clattered as both arms raised, pressed to the side of the shell the General wore. He threw a look to the Doctor, to the terminal at which the female worked with her pad. Aadarsh did not follow the eyes, focusing instead upon the Commander, who cleared his throat.

His words came quicker, for some reason, his eyes back to the Herald. Ambers stepped nearer, but Aadarsh-Who-Had-Been-Blessed gestured them away with black-gloved hand. The General withdrawing the closed pad from his clothing. Old mass drooled from her feeding tube as her stomachs flattened to nothing, the Queen’s heartbeat like the pounding of a hundred thousand claws outside. This was not expected. This was not the plan. The Aadarsh laughed, but all Skthveraachk could see was the dark silhouette of the humanites.

“Violence against humanites would be insanity.” Her song was colder than the nights of the frozen season on this dead world. “I ensured your safety, your survival. You would repay this with hostility, claims of secret insincerity? Of lies? You are frenzied!” Her scythes began to slip from her legs. “Skthveraachk-Colony fights for Kaayhaitch, for the Sovereignty. You fight against the Sovereignty! You are the bringers of disharmony and contention; you will not sing such wrongness in my presence!” It flung from her, the indignation. Thinkers shouted against the cadence, walled off the descent into feeling and fault. Skthveraachk was forcefully collected, before the Aadarsh had chance to respond. Prescott never even looked at her.

A soldier, a blue, nodded. Ambers, nearer the General now, brought him closer the table, hooked the closed stick-like tube into the side by thread of black cord. It took not but a beat for the room to fill with the false-light. The images, familiar, as seen from on high as her children flooded the Caldera. Breached defensive line, surrounded, and slaughtered in what was now their home and nest.

The male paused.

The image flickered, briefly. She could make out Skthveraachk soldier, ascending the cliffs as they gave chase to elevated outpost.

He pointed, with both hands, to a scentcrafter surrounded by soldiers. Within the Caldera, in the trenches before Guir, images cycling through conflict after conflict. The image faded. Replaced, by the road to Tarasque. The Queen, shining, armored, floating amidst the glory of her host. Prescott tapped again.

Shot. Death. Shot. Death. It was a horror, watching the lobotomization of her colony once again as beams lanced from rocks and crevices and hiding-places containing the cloaked and hidden Coalition foe. Until it at last, was stopped. Until the bivouacs formed, hiding, obfuscating, disguising true targets with fake and milling them together.

She knew now. The Prescott tightened his mouth, gave another look to the Doctor and her console, spoke with ever more rushed and racing pace.

Another angle. A repeated showing. The humanites watched, some murmured, but it was only the Prescott who held such an expression of hurt. Of fear. Of hate. Bivouacs were colored, made to stand out. Not just on the road, but the battles which followed. The fights. The failures.

Better. Better? A tremble ran through the colony outside, listening through the rock as the music turned strange. Hostile. Fearful. Not as Coalition against Sovereignty. As a humanite, against her kind.

Gone again. Light once more on a dark field of rock, on a glowing sky beneath twin moons, on twenty and more images of her soldiers. And of the menial-warriors, arranged and displayed. Fighting with jaw and claw and spear and shield. Another image. The frail drones, arranged in a line, shield to shield, guarding as a mender secured the oozing of a fallen soldier.

There was no hesitation, or waiting for a signal this time. The blow which came was solid, sure, striking the back of the General’s legs. A small gratitude, a rightness, was felt within the Queen’s core. Until, even as the man sagged down, he turned and beat the plate of his skull into the helm of the amber which had struck, knocking the soldier back. Weapons were brought up, but the Herald this time was quicker to wave them off. His smile, gone. A picture was brought to the forefront. And even Skthveraachk, for a beat, did not comprehend. The drone within held a spear, certainly, and had reared onto four legs in preparation to throw, taken only measures ago at the battle for the hills. But rather than grip the weapon by the palmidia-hardened haft, the drone clutched in its grasper a bone. A humanite bone, one of the elongated leg ones, hollowed out in its center to form a groove. It was different. New. Strange. She sent a request for information, and by the time the drone in the picture was located, the Prescott had already continued.

Yes. A thinker had been ruminating. ‘Give me a lever long enough, and I shall move the world’. It wished to try the principle on a spear, and recruited five, six drones to test the design in combat. The amused exchanges did not cease. The rock of computation, bleeping, as the Doctor leant in, oblivious to the world. But the Herald watched. The Herald listened. And the Prescott pressed ever forward. The Herald looked on, met with those impossible gold portals the faded eyes of the frenzied male. The frenzied male who spoke of the unreasonable, the impossible. Spoke of it like he feared it could truly occur.

The Doctor attempted to intercede, but the Herald was focused. The Prescott, in the throes of his soliloquy. The aria of purported damnation.

The Aadarsh’s face darkened in the recesses of its fleshy contortion, but already the smirk was returning. Crueller, now. The final in the series of images, static, and animated. Soundless, but each noise was etched into the silk records of the colony’s minds forever regardless.

The Herald did not see the pale shell. Did not see the whiteness of her previously browned face, the way she had latched to the console while turning to regard the General.

And finally, he was looking at her again. A look like she had received only a few times before, behind the thass of her holding cell. Perhaps, more primally, upon the faces of the Coalition as she delighted in their removal. Curiosity. Fear. And hate. Hate for what she was.

Interruptions were costly, sometimes lethal. The Doctor risked it, knowingly, and the Herald realized as the Queen too the depth of the importance for such a thing to occur. Prescott’s lips twitched, his emotions drained, his music, spent. He looked to the pale shell’s console, as did the Herald, and the exhale he released contained the weight of a lifetime.

If the air had been cold before, it became so thick with emotion now that Skthveraachk feared she would drown in them. The Herald froze. Turned himself, fully, towards the General. Now, it was the Prescott who smirked. Tired, aged, emptied. And somehow, triumphant.

An explosion could have been set off where the humanite stood, and it would not have provoked a stronger response. His guards stepped back, as though they feared his very touch, and put an entire lance’s length between themselves and him as the weapons raised. Even the Miroslava, even the Hathan, even the Solovyova; all took a step back, uncaring that several bumped against the very chitin of her attendant’s bodies.

Solovyova spoke beneath her song, words meant for the self more than the air. The Aadarsh was far less gentle. Many within the tent marked themselves as the black-suited body contorted, lurched forward, clenched graspers to solid balls.

Unclenched, only to clutch and pull a device from the inside of the worn shell. A lance, for certain, but small enough for a single hand. Hand which leveled the thing unflinchingly, though not untremblingly, for the Prescott’s wearily smiling head.

There was no fear in the frenzied male’s tone. Almost a lightness to the way he looked up, around. Gazed as though fresh at the tent’s interior. His head shook in time to the Herald’s grip. Some of the occupants were marking themselves with the sign of the Sovereignty, as though it could ward of the presence.

The pitch was wrong for the Blessed humanite. The sound, screeching, like claws on briny rock.

Beams charged. The Herald, throwing himself forward, advanced until the end of his weapon was against the frenzied male’s head. Skthveraachk did not understand. Skthveraachk could not understand. All Skthveraachk understood, all she felt as the cracks in the wall of her shielding began to spread and the frantic screaming of the colony threatened to overwhelm, was that the Prescott was in danger. And that any who sought to aid him would face the same. And so, when Solovyova began to step forward again, her eyes red around the sockets and beginning to seep fluids, fear of damage was weighed against fear of death and found wanting. Still heavy and numb, the Queen curled her claws until they were sore, and held firm a grasper to each of the Colonel’s shoulders. Drawing her back, and away, even as she shook and gave tugs in wordless protest.

She saw the weapon charge. Saw the heat from within it grow. The herald yelled. Solovyova was yelling. But it was the Queen’s own voice that filled the space.

“Herald! Aadarsh-Who-Has-Been-Blessed! I have fulfilled my promise, I have delivered the humanite! You must remember your pledge, you must-“

Something sizzled. Tendrils rose from the flesh upon the humanite’s head. And his smile was of bone, and of flesh, and of surety. A rushing hiss. A wet popping, like a squashed phidite. Heated interior at odds with the cold outside as the beam burnt clear through bone, brain, meat, metal, and out the side of the tent. The Prescott fell without further sound, save a squelching as the folds of muscle and fat condensed what had once been a man into a ball of unprocessed mass on the floor. And then, the Aadarsh put another six beams into the body. Again, and again, and again. None within the tent dared be the first to speak. Even Solovyova could do little more than shudder, make quiet, animal-like noises. Then, the Herald was upon them. Focused, unnaturally, in his advance for the Commander.

Miroslava paled. Straightened, as she tried to walk forward to meet the male.

Cut off. Cut short. Lieutenant pushed aside as Commander advanced with hands clasped and head raised.

Quaking, now, instead of shaking. Miroslava looked between the Commander, the Herald. To the Queen herself, without hint of remorse or disgust. A look that pleaded and begged louder than any cry.

Incorrect. Lie. The Lieutenant had erred, and the Commander had informed of the failing. Why did the Herald lash? Why did he condemn?

For a moment, there was an inability to register. She saw how the Hathan turned aside, how the crimson vitae spattered across the already soaked floor as blood flowed freely from half-cauterized wounds the corpse bore. Saw the split in his lip and sign of impact. Only when she saw the blood too upon the weapon clutched in the frantic Blessed’s fingers did it parse. Did comprehension come. Did the cracks flake and split within. She heard the weapon charging again. Saw, through own eyes and attendants’, the heat grow and the Hathan stand just as the Prescott had stood. Commander in danger. Commander in danger. Commander was of the colony. Colony in danger. The walls broke. Rationality replaced by instinct. She saw the Hathan’s eyes close. Saw the beam reach critical. And heard, through jaws and lungs and vents, a hiss.

A small thing. A bad thing. A response any would have should threat be leveled upon the colony. Her attendants beneath, those soldiers nearest the tent’s exterior, and the Queen’s own body. Hairs rose, rattled in their display, and the hiss of air they all exhaled threatened those which threatened them. Threatened the Hathan-Commander. Threatened the Herald. No more than ten breaths worth, but for those ten breaths, the Herald was not Blessed. Not a representative of the Emperor. He was a humanite, and the Queen towering above him felt her head lower as curved jaws chittered and clacked together, clicking a warning. It took the fullness of the ten breaths for her walls to be rebuilt, for the thinkers to stream their information through the links, to grip and tear the song back to reason. Ten seconds for her to realize how the Aadarsh had stepped back. How the Hathan looked more fearful now than he had facing his own death. And how every lance present in the room, perhaps even behind those fabric walls, was now pointed, squarely, upon her.