The skirl drew close to Rhodane's right sandal, so she peered down at it and said, "Hello, little fellow, how does the sand taste today?"

The skirl froze, so she tapped her fingers against her upper leg, knowing the creature would pick up the vibration through its highly sensitive feet. The skirl raised the central visual section of its head, its two blue eyes revealed at first slitted, then opening wide. It spread its pearly wing cases as it turned, flicked out its sand-scoop wings and they blurred into motion. Emitting the sound after which it was named, it skated off down the dune, spraying Rhodane with sand as it went and causing her to close her nictitating membranes in reflex. Rhodane leapt to her feet and ran after it—trying in her own small way to understand why other children found this game so fascinating. After fifty yards she could feel sweat growing slick on her body. After a hundred yards the creature disappeared from sight.

Rhodane crouched by the hole into which the creature had disappeared and brushed sand away around it, revealing the curve of the underground nest. Calculating from the exposed curve by eye she estimated the spherical nest to be about eight feet in diameter—home then to about a hundred skirls, their own separate segments of the nest filled with their young. Skirls were a strange mix of the social and the independent. When they reached Rhodane's present age, many of the females drew together to weave a communal nest with fibres extruded from their spinnerets. This task took them many years, but once the nest was completed they emitted certain hormones into the air to attract males. Rhodane now mentally reviewed the molecular structure of that same hormone. When the males arrived, a mating frenzy ensued, the males dying in the process. The females then partitioned the nest and laid their own eggs each in their own designated areas. Thereafter began the long process of raising the young, feeding them with a protein soup refined from the skirls' own microscopic diet. Fascinating…at least for a little while.

Rhodane stood up and moved away, scanning around for something else to interest her. But she knew this whole area, and its ecology and biology, so very well now. She would therefore return home, study the new disks Utrain had obtained from the library, and thus try to stave off the hollow blackness awaiting in her mind. Utrain had promised to take them to the Ruberne Institute tomorrow, so perhaps something there would help her to feel that all her choices were not yet exhausted.

Tigger

This endless watching since the end of the War was enough to drive a drone to distraction. Corisanthe Main had developed a strange paranoiac society, as if the Worm were some alien splinter inside the body of humanity here, and all those living aboard the station were the crusty resultant mess of humanity's immune reaction to it. This malaise also seemed to be reflected upon the planet below, with increasing proportions of its population ending up in either asylums or cultist churches. Though maybe the reverse applied, and Corisanthe Main's weird culture merely reflected what was occurring below it. Since the end of the War, the proportion of the population suffering mental illness at some point in their lives had grown to three out of four, and one in four of them ended up permanently committed to an asylum. One manifestation of such illness was the common hallucination of some dark menacing figure who had grown in popular culture into the Shadowman. Since the publication of Uskaron's book, these illnesses had been put down to 'societal guilt' and the Shadowman was described as the Sudorian conscience. It was a worrying phenomenon that Tigger had studied closely, but drawn no conclusions from.

The technologies being constantly developed aboard Corisanthe Main, and quickly applied there, made his scanning difficult, and trying to scan the Worm itself was like trying to shine a torch through a brick. Watching the human dramas played out aboard offered some entertainment, but even with the distinctly odd Director Oberon Gneiss running the station, even that began to pall. So, without asking Geronamid, since he knew what the AI's answer would be, Tigger often went to find entertainment elsewhere, and not necessarily down on Sudoria.

On the surface of Brumal the drone was deep-geoscanning some recent developments in one growing hive city when Consul Assessor David McCrooger arrived. At last things were starting to get interesting.

David McCrooger…Tigger pondered that. The newcomer having been a long-time resident of Spatterjay was interesting enough but, damn it, he was also an Old Captain! Admittedly the man had captained a sailing ship there for only a short time, but he was still on a par with legendary names like Captains Ambel, Drum and Ron, who were all now entering the second millennium of their long lives. So, what might one expect from such a character? To begin with he would be unreasonably strong and durable—such men were reputed to possess greater physical strength than Golem androids, and they could easily withstand injuries that would instantly kill other humans. He might also be incredibly knowledgeable and wise. Though that was not a given, even for someone who lived so long, many of them were, and Geronamid would never have employed anyone stupid for such a task.

Moving on, from geoscanning the living Brumallian hive city to the mountains created by the hilldiggers and those mass graves that lay underneath them, Tigger applied only half his mind to the depressing task—the other half perpetually scanning Fleet coms. His other half warned him of activity amidst those ships above, and the news that the Consul Assessor would be coming to Brumal first, so Tigger decided to hang around. After the missile launched, Tigger flew fast to its launch site, and there observed a covert Fleet military unit moving away from the missile launcher—probably one confiscated at the end of the War—about which Brumallian corpses had been neatly laid out. The covert team was well away before a laser strike from a hilldigger positioned far above. Just enough evidence would be left to fully implicate the Brumallians.

Tigger separated completely now, his chrome Bengal tiger form peeling away from the sphere and sending the latter up into space, via which he observed the ship in flames as it plunged towards the planet. Continuing to listen in on com traffic, he discovered McCrooger was aboard none of the escape-pods now spreading out into space. Belatedly he detected one single pod splashing down in the ocean, and realised it had been cut out of the communication system. Tigger sent his tiger body bounding in that direction, accelerating to just below the speed of sound and occasionally grav-planing tens of miles above the landscape. Then out over the ocean, neutrally buoyant, paws slapping the waves and jaws grinning a joyful grin.

Rhodane—in adolescence

"Happy Assumption Day," said Rhodane wryly.

Peering back at her from the flimsy screen, Harald—clad in the foamite uniform of a chief engineer in Fleet—replied, "Ah, so all four of us are responsible adults now. Words cannot express the extent of my indifference."

Rhodane studied her brother, noting how much he had changed in the six months since they last spoke. Back then he wore his blonde hair in the customary Fleet queue. Now he allowed his hair to grow long all over his head, and wore it tied back. His acerbic features were thinner, if anything, and his mouth was constrained in a strict line that failed to conceal his protruding canines. His pale blue eyes, however, seemed as cold as ever.

"It's all right for you, but then you escaped the net—as did Yishna," Rhodane told him.