In the Black, стр. 13

 FOUR

“Derstu, you are needed in the mind cavern.”

The cool, artificial voice repeated twice before Thuk finally stirred in his den. His body was cold, owing in no small measure to the fact his skin was still too tender from molting for clothing or blankets. He’d turned the den’s heat setting up as high as it went before his fugue cycle, but it was never enough.

“Derstu…”

“I take the path,” Thuk said to the ceiling. And he would, but first he needed to stretch and align his limbs. As soon as he stood, Thuk could feel he’d lain on one of his legs wrong. With effort, he managed to straighten it out using the surface of his den’s waste receptacle. Another day of this and his new shell would be rigid enough that he wouldn’t need to worry until his next molt. He’d gone an entire cycle once with a misaligned plate on his left midarm. It was a maddening experience every Xre had a maximum of once, because they were certain never to repeat it.

Thuk took a moment to regard himself in the stillwater mounted to the wall of his den. His shell was still pale and soft. He looked like an oversized larva, which matched the way he felt.

Assigned as derstu, on his first expedition. Of all the rotten luck …

Thuk stretched all six of his limbs, trying to pull the wrinkles out of his new shell and set his joints properly, but something hadn’t felt right since his last fugue. An itch in the middle of his back, down near his thorax junction. He contorted his abdomen, trying to get an angle on his back in the stillwater. Sure enough, right at the bottom of his abdominal segment, one of his old plates hadn’t come free during the molt.

“Cru,” he swore as he grabbed a scratch pole with a midarm. Trying to guide the scratch pole in the reversed image of the stillwater threw him off, but after three attempts, he got a claw under the slightly curled lip of the errant plate and pulled it free with a Slurpt.

He held the last vestige of his old shell in his primehands, turning it over several times as if inspecting a forgotten toy from his larvahood, then dropped it unceremoniously in the waste receptacle and flushed it into the ship’s reclamation system.

“New molt, new me,” Thuk said, trying hard to believe it. He grabbed a couple of cozzi out of their tank and popped the heads off and into the waste receptacle. Even decapitated, the little snacks wriggled until he crunched them between his mandibles and ground them up between his saw plates.

The small meal sated Thuk’s hunger for the moment, but it wouldn’t last. Xre were always ravenous in the aftermath of a molt as their bodies rushed to replace lost nutrients and minerals drained away by building a new shell.

“Den,” he called to the ceiling.

“Yes, Derstu?”

“Please have a plate sent to the mind cavern. I’m famished.”

“Do you have a preference of dish?”

“Something hot and crunchy.”

“It will be waiting for you when you arrive, Derstu.”

“Thank you.” Normally, eating in the mind cavern was against decorum, but allowances were made for a derstu coming out of molt. He needed to be sharp of thought to understand and properly implement the orders of the rest of the ship’s harmony, after all. His shell was still tender, but less so than it had been before the night’s fugue. He decided the discomfort of a uniform was worth it to hold back the chills.

The garments, especially the seams, rubbed against the soft folds of his elbow and shoulder joints, and the sensory cilia on his arms and back. He would endure. He still looked like a larva, or a sun-bleached corpse, but at least some warmth returned to his core. The ascender was just down the hall, just fourteen paces. It felt good to stretch all of his leg segments. It was important to maintain a full range of motion while the new plates hardened.

A short ascent later and the mind cavern doors opened before him. Several members of the harmony sat in their alcoves, busy with their assignments, monitoring the grand ship’s myriad of systems.

“Derstu.” Dulac Kivits stood from his seat at the husk-monitoring alcove. Or as much as a member of his caste ever stood. The morphology of the different Xre castes was significant. Where Thuk’s body was slim, featured four arms and two legs, and was optimized for moving through the tight confines and labyrinthine tunnels of a mound, Kivits’s body was stout, had four legs and two arms, and a flattened upper thorax. His body plan was ideal for gathering food and materials on the rolling plains on the surface and carrying them long distances back to feed and expand the mounds. Before the time of the Grand Symphony, Kivits’s caste was considered laborers at best, beasts of burden at worst.

Of course, those days were centuries in the past. But old prejudices were a hard thing for any people to shake completely.

“Dulac,” Thuk answered with the formal title, as Kivits had done. He looked around the mind chamber. “Where’s Garesh?”

“She has begun her molt.”

“Naturally,” Thuk said. It was inevitable; the longer members of a harmony spent in close proximity, the more their molt cycles aligned. It was a problem that remained unsolved even after centuries spent in the dark ocean. “The harmony needs my assistance? Is it about our husk in the inner system?”

“Indeed, yes. Come…” Kivits beckoned for the derstu to join him in the husk alcove. Before he’d gone into fugue, the harmony had taken up position at the bright line across the dark ocean and launched an armed husk toward the inner planets to