Kris waited for Olli to go on the attack again, exploiting the breach. But the drone specialist had sagged back in her capsule, looking unhappy. ‘Listen, there will be a war between us, some day, maybe even when I’m alive to see it. Your side don’t want it, Hugh sure as fuck doesn’t want it, but it’ll happen.’
‘There won’t—’ Solace started, but Olli just rolled over her words.
‘A war,’ she repeated. ‘And you’ll win, probably. You have the best ships. But we Colonials, we’re awkward buggers, we won’t just behave ourselves. So you’ll have to make us better people, won’t you? Just like your Parthenon is full of better people than us. And you know what better people means? It means that people who aren’t like you don’t have a future, if you win. So the Parthenon doesn’t get this box.’
Solace took a deep breath. ‘That wouldn’t happen. We don’t want to change people.’
‘You said yourself, we hate you,’ Olli told her quietly. ‘That’s a real grand high horse. You can look down from on high, knowing that you’re hated by dumb, regular, inferior humans. Gives you the moral right to do all sorts of things for the greater good. You going to straight up swear to me that there’s no chance, none at all, it’d go like that?’
There was quite a silence, after that. Probably Solace should have been advancing all sorts of guarantees about the future intentions of her government. But Kris reckoned she was a fundamentally honest person.
‘I am actually starting to hope these things are fake,’ Idris dropped in, when the quiet had become unbearable.
‘Overwhelming possibility,’ agreed Kit. Kris watched the tilt of his mandibles as they whittled against one another. There was a language to the angles there: you could tell something of his mood – not Hanni moods in general but Kittering in particular. Because he’d been around humans for years and had taken something of them into himself. Right now he was unhappy, plain enough.
‘Then let’s focus on that. If we have the real deal or not,’ Solace suggested.
‘Oh, right, I’ll get my artefact verification tools out, shall I?’ Olli snapped, then looked away. ‘Fine. Okay. Not constructive.’
‘It’s all right.’ Solace pressed her hands to her face, briefly. Then she was abruptly bright, businesslike, everything else pushed away. ‘If you do want to check their veracity first, I have a suggestion. And it’s not, “Take them to a Partheni assessor,” before you ask. Idris, do you remember Trine?’
Idris twitched at his name, then frowned. ‘Do I . . .? Wait . . . you mean the research hive? That Trine?’
Kris looked from one to the other as Solace nodded, sensing the submerged weight of their unspoken memories.
‘But they . . . can’t still be around. They’d have gone back to the Assembly, surely. Whatever Trine is now . . .’ Idris stuttered to a halt.
‘The longest-instanced Hiver consciousness, ever. Almost as old as we are,’ Solace said drily.
‘How . . .?’
‘An expert’s an expert. I was sent to consult with them, years back. They’ve been working on dig sites across multiple jurisdictions ever since the war. I can find out where they are now. We can go there . . . If that’s what people want.’
‘Explain,’ Olli pressed.
‘This was—’
‘Back in the war, sure,’ Olli agreed. ‘Who or what is Trine? A Hiver?’
‘After Lycos, studying Originators became top priority,’ Idris explained. ‘They set up a whole war department to find out how their relics repelled the Architects. Needless to say, that’s not something anyone ever found out. Then there was Karis, when we realized we knew even less than we thought. They flew a team from one site to the next, gathering data, late on in the war. Partheni ships, because they could get out of trouble best; Int pilots, because we cut corners fastest. I hadn’t thought any of those guys were still around but . . . Trine was a Hiver. Or, back then, Trine was just an asset of the archaeology team, because Hivers weren’t people. But they talked like a person. They curated all the data for the others, which meant they basically knew more than anyone. I . . . it’s hard to believe that instance of them is still around, honestly.’
‘I think Trine intends to go on until the work’s done,’ Solace said. ‘Which could well be forever.’
‘And they can tell us if these things are real?’ Olli pressed.