Civilian Trade Station 1039: “Infinity Awaits”
“That’s a dangerous itinerary your ship has logged, cousin.”
Shipmaster Kttrvk spun at being addressed so familiarly by a stranger.
The stranger was a Rrrrtktktkp’ch, standing nonchalantly next to an advertising hoarding on the station’s docking ring, which was helpfully mocking the shipmaster by advertising life insurance. There was something slightly familiar about the Cousin’s facial structure, but the markings were totally unknown to him.
“My itinerary? I don’t have an itinerary. Excuse me.” He turned to leave.
“1047-6533-26972.” the Cousin said, reeling off Kttrvk’s assigned route and stopping the Shipmaster in his tracks. He looked faintly smug when Kttrvk turned to give him a disbelieving stare.
“How did you…?”
“I have my ways,” the stranger said, making it clear that those ways were not for Kttrvk to know. “That’s a dangerous route right now. A lot of Hunter strikes.”
“Well, your information is obsolete,–” Kttrvk said, firmly. “I’m not doing that run.”
“Long Stars Shipping seem to think you are.”
“Long Stars Shipping can choke on their feed!” Kttrvk exclaimed, then moderated his tone when a few nearby beings glanced at him. “I will NOT orphan my children nor put them in harm’s way just because the corporation is too greedy to listen to my pleas.”
“You’ll go to debtor’s prison…”
“An acceptable price for the lives of my offspring, my mate and our unborn.” Kttrvk snapped.
He was not expecting the expression of admiration and approval that spread across the Cousin’s face. “Good for you!” he exclaimed. “But I am here to offer you a third way.”
“And what way would that be?” Kttrvk challenged him.
The stranger looked around and stepped in a little closer. “I represent an organisation that wants to trial some new military hardware.” he said. “Simulations and training runs are all well and good, but there is no substitute for the real thing, and the Hunter problem in this area will only claim more lives unless something is done…but they’re too canny to come out and fight just anything. We need…well, we need to entice them into attacking something.”
“That something being my freighter.”
“You’re quick.” the Cousin said. From a Rrrrrtktktkp’ch to a Vzk’tk like himself, that was a serious compliment.
“My freighter with my family on board.” Kttrvk pointed out.
“My organisation would not offer to use you this way unless we were completely certain of your safety under our care, I promise you that.”
“And your organisation is…?” Kttrvk pressed.
The Cousin paused. “Let’s just say that this technology would impress and awe even the humans.” he said, and made a small conspiratorial gesture that only Kttrvk could see.
Enlightenment dawned. Of COURSE! Everybody knew that it was only a matter of time before the humans got loose from their prison, it only made sense that there would be…organisations…looking to prepare to meet the deathworlders in battle and win.
And anything which could give the humans a pause would surely go through Hunters effortlessly.
Still, Kttrvk would not have become a merchant shipmaster without some guile and caution.
“All of your assurances aside, I would still be risking everything dear to me.” he said.
“If you are pressing for payment, then to assuage your fears and buy your lifelong silence about this experiment, I am authorised to release fifty Dominion Development Credits.”
Fifty DDCs.
It was a vast sum. Enough to upgrade the Nkvcqtz with Corti engines that would hopefully give her the speed to not only slip past Hunter ambushes, but also to trade in high-value perishables. Sensibly invested on the other hand, it would provide a very healthy retirement plan for Kttrvk and Ikkzziki, as well as upmarket gene-resequencing for their children to enhance their intellect and buy them prospects that Kttrvk had never had.
But a career merchant’s instincts swung into place. Never accept the first offer.
“A hundred.” He counter-proposed. “We are risking a horrible death here.”
“Seventy. I understand your concerns, but you are in the safest possible hands. And yours is not the only ship that Long Stars is ordering on this suicidal run. You will merely be the first to leave.”
”…Done.”
Cimbrean
“Well, even if you pass the baton first chance you get, you’re still technically in charge of every civilian aspect of this colony for the time being.” Powell said. He snatched a clipboard from where it was hanging on a tent post and consulted it.
“Let’s see…There’s a list of stuff they’d like you to do. Nothing major: name the colonial capitol, identify any existing human citizens, living or dead…we’ve got real-time two-way communications with Earth but a pretty small data budget of what we can send and receive: more like telegraph than anything. To be honest, there’s not much for you to do. Anything on this list you DO do will be taken under advisement by the civilian experts and contractors we bring in once this place is secure and the camp’s up and running smoothly.”
“That doesn’t sound like it’ll take a whole month.” Jen said.
“We’ve got a lot of tech to deploy, a perimeter to establish, scouting to do, maybe an FOB or two to set up..”
“FOB?”
“Forward Operating Base. Somewhere small and camouflaged where if this place is bombed off the map…again…there’ll be a couple of guys left behind to report mission failure.”
“Sounds boring.” Jen complained.
“We’ll find stuff for you to do.” Powell promised. “And I mean USEFUL stuff, now.”
“Thanks.”
“So? Any ideas as to the colonial capitol’s name?”
“A…few. I’ll sleep on that one.”
“Fair enough. Okay…have you met any other humans out here? Besides Darragh Houston, that is. Actually, where IS he?” Powell grabbed a different clipboard and leafed through it.
“Feck knows. The last I saw of him he was on his way back here, but I did some looking around while I was filling up my bath, and didn’t find any sign of him.”
“Okay, he’s an unknown then…” Powell stopped looking at the page he’d turned to. “Any others?”
“Is that a list of abductees?”
“Every unaccounted-for human outside of Sol, in theory. Don’t ask me how they got it, I don’t know.”
“Okay, uh…a few. Adr…um, actually let’s start with, uh, Margarita. I can’t remember her surname, she was a dwarf, Spanish.”
“Was?”
“Yeah. She um…well, the honest truth is that an invisible death robot cut her open.”
“Invis…? O…kay. I think you’re going to need to brief us on those things.”
“I will.” Jen promised.
“Right.” Powell ticked something on his list. “Here she is. Deceased. At least we’ll be able to let her family know. Any others?”
“Cameron White. Very deceased and good fucking riddance.”
Powell blinked, then flicked through his list. “Oh. Shit. Fookin’ hell, what were they thinking stealing a crazy wanker like that?” he ticked. “Good fookin’ riddance, aye.”
“And uh…Adrian Saunders. Australian Defence Force…” she forced herself not to give in to the temptation to look down, whisper and cry. “…Deceased.”
“Wow. You’ve had a bad time of it…” Powell sighed, flipping through,his document, then ticked off against, presumably, Adrian’s name. “Deceased. Guess his wife and kid will have closure at least…”
Planet 16 Cyg B b, 16 Cygni trinary system.
Hunter supply station
+<contempt; disgust; snap> Report!+
The Omega did so, cowering appropriately as the Beta of the Brood-that-Flays swaggered into the information node chamber.
+<Statement> There have been no transports of the specified size along the prey-route within the last Diurnal, Beta.+
+<Disdain; command> Continue to monitor the traffic. The prey are stupid and stubborn, there will be a few more before their patrols arrive. And they are yet to send our tribute.+
+<Statement> I comply, Beta.+
Any brood above a certain size soon developed a small population of Omegas: They were an unfortunate necessity, as some tasks were too menial to insult the Deltas with, but too important to be entrusted to a meat-slave. This one, however, was especially vile in the eyes of its Brood.
It would have been a source of immense surprise to every other species in the galaxy that the concept of “creepy” was one that Hunters understood. But in fact, it was a central one to their mindset: the Hunters were the Predators, and everything else was the Prey. Predators behaved a certain way, and Prey behaved a certain way. Any deviation from this natural order was creepy.
Hence the Great Hunt. The worm programs that the Hunters had long ago infiltrated into the Prey’s data networks, that lurked invisible and silent, watching, collating and reconnoitering everything that the Prey chattered about, had gathered a great wealth of their speculations on the motive behind the Great Hunt: Opinion was mostly split into two camps, the first being that the Hunters were afraid of the human race, and the other being that the Hunters were jealous.
Both theories were equally amusing, by the peculiar standards of Hunter humour. The humans were a non-Hunter species that were Predators, and which was inspiring the Prey to behave in unPreylike ways. This was disruption of the natural order, a creepy intrusion into the Way Things Were Meant To Be. Their eradication was as obviously necessary as, for example, the correction of a fatal structural flaw that would cause a building to collapse under its own weight.
This particular Omega was only one wrong step away from demanding such action, itself. Its existence was barely tolerated, barely tolerable; it lived forever on a delicate knife-edge where its meat might be harvested and fed to the breeding pools should it deviate further from acceptable Hunter normalcy.
This was not because it behaved in an unHunterlike way. Quite the contrary, it did so very carefully, unfailingly and meticulously. What made it creepy was that it did not appear to do so naturally. Its thought-broadcasts were simple statements, queries, respectful requests. There was never any emotional content. When it joined the hunt-cry, it did so almost dutifully and by rote, rather than with real enthusiasm.
Thus, even the other Omegas, which usually banded together out of bottom-of-the-heap solidarity, tended to view this particular one as an opportunity to claw back an anemic parody of the authority that other Hunters held over them. The fact that it didn’t seem to mind—displayed no discernible emotions at all, whether resentment, resignation, complacency or contentment with its lot—only added to the bottom-feeder’s abnormality. It simply followed instructions, diligently, swiftly, competently, and to the full extent of their spirit and intent, often even going above and beyond.
This hinted at the other aberration: The Strange One clearly had a sharp and calculating mind. It saw patterns with ease that other Hunters would overlook. On the few occasions where it had dared to venture an opinion, none of those opinions had yet been wrong. It grasped new tasks within moments, and performed them as well as an experienced expert after only a few days. For a creature so clearly talented to be apparently disinterested in its own stature or reputation was therefore wrong, strange, creepy.
The Beta bared its fangs at the Strange One and then threw itself into the throne traditionally occupied by the ranking Brood member present in the information chamber, pointedly ignoring the inferior specimen and instead stared out of the large gallery windows around the ceiling of the chamber, enjoying th e view.
The fact that Hunters had any notion of beauty or aesthetics at all would have been similarly shocking to most of the prey-species. But in fact, the Hunters were in their twisted way highly spiritual and artistic beings. Most of their understanding of beauty was, perhaps predictably, a sanguine and violent one, revolving around the flavour of well-stressed meat, the patterns made by blood and organs and violent dismemberment, and the panic, fear and horror of the Prey.
Lurking underneath that, however, was an innate appreciation for the universe as a hierarchy of interconnecting parts, all in their place and tied by common threads. To the Hunters, the sense of How Things Should Be was a profound one. Predators fed on Prey, bound together by Nature. Alphas commanded and Omegas obeyed, bound by the common thread of the Brood. Moons orbited planets orbited stars, all subordinate to Gravity.
The planet known to humans as 16 Cyg B b was a particularly spectacular example of this last concept: a gas giant, two thirds again as massive as Jupiter, towing with it a coterie of moons, a vast garland ring and a shotgun blast of stray asteroids, captured comets and rocky dust, and it was into one of these asteroids that the Hunters had carved out their forward base, close enough to the spacelanes to easily intercept any choice prey that might use them, but far enough away to be a practical escape and hidden refuge. Bathed in the light of three suns, the view was stunning.
The Beta became aware that the Strange One was inspecting something on its screen with greater than usual scrutiny.
+<impatience; tolerance; command> Report, Omega+
+<Statement> Beta, a Prey-ship has passed through our sensor cordon at abnormally high speed. <Observation> A ship that fast can only be powered by the grey-skinned Prey’s secret engines and a very large power source.+
+<Interest; Query> Can it be intercepted?+
+<Statement> It cannot, Beta. It simply attracted my attention: I apologise for intruding upon your time.+
The Beta grudgingly accepted the benighted creature’s apology. The day was just beginning to seem as if it would be a slow one without quarry, when the Strange One expressed the one emotion it had ever been known to show.
+<Satisfaction; statement> Beta, a message from the Prey. The Herd of the Long Stars have honoured their arrangement and are sacrificing a vessel as we stipulated. A bulk freighter, High One. Of a configuration likely to contain many long-necks and their young.+
The Beta allowed itself the luxury of a wide-mawed smile. While actually deigning to communicate with the prey was a task so wretched that even the Omegas were only required to stoop to it it because the meat-slaves could not be entrusted with the task, little “arrangements” with the so-called “corporations” that made the greatest use of the shipping lanes was a mutually beneficial arrangement: The Brood had neglected a rich hunting ground over the arrangement with the Long Stars herd, allowing the Prey to grow rich and fat off the easy pickings there.
The growth and prosperity of the Herd only served to fatten the meal and make the hunting that much better in the long-run. Proper cultivation of the meat was important, hence the willingness of the Broods to accept what might be alternatively interpreted as demeaning bribery, as if the Predators should be bought by the prey. Naturally, a high price was only appropriate. The meat itself was an excellent start, of course, but a bulk freighter was a large vessel that could be recycled into many Swarm-ships, and would hold younglings, ripe to become meat-slave breeding stock. The tribute was entirely acceptable.
+<Jubilation; Command> A fine quarry! Alert the Alpha: we hunt. Meat to the Maw!+
+<Statement> I comply, Beta. Meat to the Maw.+
The Beta snarled as it departed for its ship, mood somewhat spoiled by the Omega’s muted, unenthusiastic echo of a response. The Omega would receive only scraps from this prize for its lack of vigor.
Behind it, the Strange One ran an algorithm of its own programming and loaded it into the sensor console. The appearance of that abnormally fast ship was an anomaly, and in its experience, anomalies usually led to interesting data. Data that its true masters would undoubtedly appreciate.
Cimbrean
“Wife and kid?” Jen kept the question light, while in her head there were explosions and lightning bolts and screaming.
“Yep. Sandra Saunders née Perry. Lives in Brisbane with her daughter Jessica.”
“He never mentioned having a wife and kid.”
“Well, the sprog’s birthday is about seven months after his estimated date of abduction, so he probably didn’t know. As for the wife, well, wow. That might have something to do with these arrest warrants…” Powell said, looking at something that was clearly impressing him.
“Warrants?”
“Yyyep. Wanted for counts of Grievous Bodily Harm, Assault with Intent, theft of a motor vehicle, driving while intoxicated, dangerous driving, reckless endangerment of the public, arson, vandalism…” Powell turned a page. “…and littering.”
His attempt to maintain a deadpan expression at that last one failed, leaving the smile straining at the corners of his eyes and mouth.
“He…” Jen paused mid outraged defense, and ran through her immediate reactions. “He didn’t. I knew Adrian, he wouldn’t…not to his wife!”
“Doesn’t say she was the victim.” Powell pointed out.
“Well it must have been somebody who hurt her or, or…He definitely wouldn’t do something like that to somebody he loved.” She protested aloud, mouth rushing off ahead of her thoughts.
Except to protect her. Old Jen reminded herself internally, flashing up the memory of Adrian’s inexorably strong arm clamped tight around her throat.
Her objections faltered. “…yeah. I guess that sounds like Adrian.” she admitted.
“Sounds like my kind of crazy bastard.” Powell said, admiringly. “You sure he’s dead?”
“He was unconscious, and they were venting the atmosphere, trying to kill us. If I’d tried to drag him to the escape pod, we’d have both died.” Jen asserted, though her old self hated to sound so…coldly practical. Again, though, there was that understanding, nonjudgmental look in Powell’s eye, and it occurred to her that maybe she had some things in common with the special forces captain that neither of them really wanted to have in common with anybody.
Powell looked up as somebody knocked on crate next to his office tent and stuck his head through the flap. “What’s up, Brewer?”
The man who had knocked jerked his head towards something. “Solar array’s about ready, captain.”
“Nice. Come on, Miss Delaney, you might like this.”
Jen followed him out of the tent. “You can call me Jen.” she said.
“I’ll do that, then.”
In the middle of the lawn, one of the trucks was parked next to an object about the size and shape of an oil drum. Jump leads trailed from the device and into the truck’s engine, and a couple of men were gathered round hooking up some extra equipment to it.
“So what’s this solar array?” she asked.
“You know solar panels?”
“Yeah.”
“Turns out force fields can do the same job. All you need is a little jump to get them started, and then they power themselves and give you a bit of surplus to spend on things like water heaters, computers and that.”
“Water heaters?”
“Aye. Should make your baths a bit easier in future.” Powell gave her a winning smile, apparently immune to the scowl that answered him. Jen wasn’t quite so confident as to be perfectly happy about her inadvertent exhibitionism, but the SBS Captain seemed to cheerfully give no fucks at all about trivial things like accidental public nudity.
They watched as the array was powered up, with a snap as something sparked inside the truck’s engine. A ghostly orange dome of energy sprawled overhead, then faded to almost invisibility as the system figured out how much power it needed to draw and settled itself into equilibrium.
“Right. Look, I’m sending a patrol out in a few minutes, why not go with? It’ll take your mind off things and besides: we could use somebody who knows the land, and you know it better than we do.”
“I’m not exactly a soldier…” Jen hesitated.
“Trust me, you won’t hold them back. Besides, I’m not too worried that there’s anything on this world that’d make you tagging along a bad idea. They’ll only be gone a few hours, just long enough to scout the area.”
“That sounds…good, actually.” Jen allowed. She had become so used to walking that it almost felt uncomfortable just sitting around. Her body practically ached to be moving.
“Thought it might.” Powell shouted at one of the nearby soldiers. “Oi! Legsy! Get Jen here a rifle and a sidearm and teach her how to use them, she’s on your patrol!”
He turned back to her. “You wait and see, by the time you’re back, you won’t recognise this place, and I’ll have your message from home ready for you to watch in private.”
Freighter Nkvcqtz
For all the Cousin’s reassurances, Shipmaster Kttrvk had not been so encouraged as to take the step of leaving station with his mate and children aboard. They had been left behind, staying at a hotel paid for several (months) in advance through the expenditure of just one of the twenty DDCs that the Cousin had agreed to pay in advance, with the other fifty to be delivered upon completion of the mission.
The ship felt empty without them, and he had never felt more alone and jittery. Neither had his crew, all of whom knew that staying on was an enormous risk, but the company’s hazard bonuses—and threats—were sufficient to have persuaded most to remain, though all showed serious signs of stress and fear.
It was almost a perverse release therefore to hear the warning chime from the navigation system before they hit the edge of the gravity spike and the ALV drive’s field collapsed, dumping them back to the world of the sub-luminal.
The sensors immediately identified four Swarm Craft, and large ones, each capable of holding upwards of twenty Hunters. Every crewman onboard, Kttrvk included, promptly grabbed and armed their pulse pistols.
This was not for the purposes of fighting off the Hunters, though it was to be hoped that they could take a few down before being overrun. The pistols were for themselves: if you could help it, you didn’t let the Hunters take you alive. Better to die instantly than to be slaughtered while still conscious.
They waited as the Swarm-ships closed around them and the largest of them settled in to its approach vector, lining up the fusion-ended boarding tube that would violate their hull and inject terrible death onto their decks.
He was beginning to fear just how terrible his mistake had been when the local space sensors alerted him to the arrival—via jump drive somehow, despite the apparent absence of any jump beacons in the area—of five ships of unknown type, configuration and origin.
“Edda Wing: Edda Actual—Weapons free. Til Valhall!!”
“OORAH!!”
+<Alarm; Alert> Beta! Unknown warships have appeared via displacement!+
The alert came at the worst possible time. The Alpha’s ship had just lined up and was extending its boarding proboscis to pierce the Prey’s hull. It was at its most vulnerable, its slowest, its shields lowered to get close to the prey.
Already it was moving, abandoning the force-dock maneuver and trying to gain distance enough to raise its shields and accelerate, but it was too late. Exactly what kind of weapon it was that tore the Alpha’s vessel apart was unclear, but the side evaporated in a cloud of pulverised armour and metal scraps, and air pressure did the rest, bursting the ship and practically ripping it in half. Thirty-four Hunters, including the Alpha itself, briefly broadcast their dismay and fear across the brood network before fading.
The Beta—now the new Alpha—hooked its neural implants directly into its ship’s controls and analysed the situation. There were five of them. The craft were of a strange size, somewhat larger than a fighter or shuttle, but smaller than the next largest conventional class of military vessel. And they were fast, apparently blessed with a generous ratio of thrust to mass.
They were also alarmingly difficult to get a target lock on. Active sensors seemed to slide off their hulls like water off a greasy metal plate, and the ships themselves were small and agile, a combination which made securing a solid fix on their exact location at any given time as much a matter of luck and guesswork as of letting the sensors work. All were clearly being flown by experienced and exceptional pilots—their transversal velocity was high and their movements were coordinated so that if one of the remaining Hunter ships maneuvered to minimise its vulnerability to one attacker, another would be perfectly placed to rake it as it turned.
+<Statement; concern> These are not the tactics of Prey…+
As if to confirm that sentiment, three of the craft converged on another of the remaining swarm-ships as it executed an ill-advised turn in response to a feint. The new Alpha paid close attention to the weaponry they used, probing the space around the attacking craft for signs of what manner of violence was being unleashed. It detected only the burnt by-products of explosive compounds, and a hail of high-speed flechettes.
With its shields up, the second Swarm-ship survived the assault, but was badly mauled, losing a thruster and the coilguns along its larboard flank before the aggressors had swept past, banking and accelerating, keeping their transversal high. The sustained G-forces involved in that maneuver must have been ferocious, and yet the ships showed no sign that their pilots were in distress. A dreadful suspicion started to settle in the Alpha’s mind.
+<Command; urgency> Meet aggression with aggression! We are not Prey! Form up and fight as Predators!+
The Swarm-craft fell in around their wounded comrade, and as one the pack turned, seeking a target. One of the attackers was isolated from its wing, its evasive options whittled down by shepherding volleys of coilgun fire, and there was a stab of triumph from the Alpha’s gunner as it fired a perfect solution that would surely obliterate the offending vessel, turning the tide.
The Alpha had to replay the sensor logs to determine what happened next. In the tiny fraction of an instant it took for the coilgun rounds to cross the intervening distance between muzzle and mark, their target displaced, blinking two hundred kilometers across the sphere of engagement and re-entering the fight unscathed.
Then the entire hostile wing imitated the move. Suddenly, all of the Swarm-ships were flying in the worst possible direction, and their guns were pointed completely the wrong way.
A storm of accurate firepower ablated the shielding around their sterns in seconds.
+<Panic; Command> Disengage! Flee! Fl-+
A 30mm depleted Uranium armor-piercing incendiary round penetrated through all of the ship’s comparatively flimsy internal bulkheads, disintegrating as it went. It arrived in the command deck as a dense knot of incandescent heavy metal that reduced the Alpha to a smear of liquified matter when it passed directly through the command chair before embedding itself in the forward wall. The explosive force of its arrival crushed the other five Hunters on the deck almost simultaneously.
Perforated by hundreds of similar rounds, the rear third of the ship decompressed spectacularly, evaporating into an intricate dancing halo of flashing metallic and ceramic shards, mixed here and there with the odd disembodied piece of Hunter. The handful that were unfortunate enough to survive in the forward compartments did not do so for long—power failed instantly, and with it went the emergency air-retaining forcefields.
From the moment Edda wing arrived on the field to the second the final Hunter ship lost power and fell apart, less than three minutes had elapsed. Not one of the TS-101s had expended even half of their capacitor reserves or ammunition.
Freighter Nkvcqtz
“What. Just. Happened?”
Kttrvk came back to reality. He had done nothing but stare dumbfounded at the swirling battle on the sensors throughout its brief but intense duration. He looked around at his crew, all of whom were wearing identical expressions of utter awe.
He gathered himself.
“We survived, that’s what. Get the FTL repaired and let’s be gone!”
Planet 16 Cyg B b, 16 Cygni trinary system
Hunter supply station
The Strange One considered the recording it had made, all of the sensor data it had intercepted from the destroyed swarm-ships.
That the aggressors were human vessels was obvious, and a fact which exonerated the Long Stars herd of treachery. Incomplete and all-but-useless as the data was, that much could be gleaned effortlessly. That it should forward the data to its true masters was equally obvious.
But what of its “fellow” Hunters? The information would be of precious little use to them. It contained no hint at all of how the ships had been able to jump across the sphere of engagement without the use of jump beacons, what kind of weaponry they used, nor how the pilots could possibly react swiftly enough to blink-jump out of harm’s way as that first one had. The Strange One knew enough about humans via its true masters to know that even their impressive reflexes were not so sharp as that.
Probably useless as the information might be, the Alpha-of-Alphas especially was dangerously intelligent. If the Hunters were somehow able to glean whatever secrets the humans had unlocked, they would become an even worse blight than they already were. The Hunters were useful, keeping the masses nervous and distracted, but should they gain too much and too quickly…
The decision was obvious. It ran another program, placing a call that it made only rarely, when certain it would not be caught. Right now, with the whole Brood in upheaval over the death of both Alpha and Beta, for the Strange One to continue calmly working at its terminal would be taken as just another symptom of its strangeness and the content of that work would be ignored.
+I have potentially valuable information on the Sol situation+
The reply was instant: +Ready to receive.+
The Strange One promptly transferred all of its files. There was a pause of some minutes, which it used to update its archived mind-state. Now was one of the few occasions it had been able to safely do so.
Eventually, the reply came:
+You have done well, Twenty. The Hierarchy can make use of this information.+