There were no lights but the groundcar’s, and the ribbon of stars above the road, thick and bright this far from an actual city. She should have thought to bring a hand light, but it hadn’t occurred to her until now. “Danach?” she called. “Danach, are you there?” No answer. She girded up her skirts and stepped carefully off the road, into mud—a good thing she’d worn shoes for this. She reached out and put one hand on the two-meter-high mech and took one slow step toward its front end. If this mech was like others Ingray had seen, it would be about three meters long, not including the massive shovel on the front, which could swing in nearly any direction and dig from whatever angle the pilot liked. Somewhere toward the front there would be handholds that would let a pilot climb up on top, and while there wasn’t an actual seat, there would be room to sit. Danach would probably have been sitting there when the mech went off the road—she couldn’t imagine him walking this far in the dark, when he could ride an excavation mech, just like in children’s entertainments.
She stepped very slowly, wary of tripping or putting a foot wrong in the dark. The mech was silent, and cold against her hand. The shapes of trees began to resolve themselves out of the black, Ingray’s eyes adjusting now that she’d come a little away from the groundcar’s lights. “Danach, are you all right?” No answer. Suddenly she was truly afraid—what if he’d been injured when the mech slid off the road? What if he was unconscious, or dead? She reached the front end of the mech, put a hand on the folded-down shovel. “Danach?”
Danach’s voice, out of the dark, just above and behind her. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Angry.
She looked up and back. Saw Danach sitting on top of the mech, only a shadow in the starlight and what light reached here from the groundcar. “I’d ask you the same thing but I already know the answer.” Relieved, but she said nothing about that.
“I suppose it’s a good thing you’re here,” said Danach, from atop the mech. “Now you can tell me where the vestiges are, once I get this fucking mech back on the road, and I won’t have to dig randomly and hope I guess right.”
“They aren’t here,” she said. “They aren’t in the parkland. They never were.”
“Nice try.” Danach’s voice was contemptuous. “If you don’t help me find those vestiges, I’ll spill the whole story to Mama.”
“Go right ahead,” said Ingray. “If you don’t come down from there and come back home with me, I’m calling Planetary Safety.” It was a threat she knew she had to be willing to make good. She knew that Planetary Safety getting involved in this would likely be a disaster for her, but she’d had time on her way here to think about what choices she had, and what Danach was likely to do, and what she might do in response.
“No,” Danach said. “You’re not calling Planetary Safety.” With a groan the mech’s shovel unfolded and rose high and swung, just missing Ingray’s head. She stepped back in alarm, tripped, and fell sprawling. Danach swore, and the shovel swung back the other way and slammed into something—it must have been a tree. The tree cracked and groaned as the shovel pushed against it, and the mech seemed to tip toward Ingray and then steady, and the shovel swept back toward Ingray again, lower this time, she could feel the breeze as it passed.
She rolled over and crawled toward the road. “You think this is going to keep Planetary Safety away?” she gasped, and got a mouthful of muddy strands of hair.
“It doesn’t matter.” There was a crack as the shovel slammed into the tree again. “By the time anyone gets here I’ll be kilometers away, and there are at least a dozen people who’ll swear I was home all …” Danach’s words turned into a strangled cry.
And then a whispery, whistling voice said, “The brother Danach is not a good brother.”
Ingray stopped crawling. “Tic?” And then realized that what Tic had said had sounded much more like the ambassador—he was still in character. Of course he was. “Ambassador?” Realized, too, as she got to her feet and walked cautiously toward the now-still mech, that the Geck ambassador assaulting humans had to be some sort of treaty violation. Good thing that wasn’t actually what was happening. “I thought you stayed with Pahlad.”
“Bad brother Danach,” repeated the spider mech. “Will you kill the brother Danach, Ingray Human? It tried to kill you.”
“I wasn’t going to kill her!” Danach’s voice, hoarse and terrified. “Fucking ascended saints! Ingray! What kind of person do you think I am?” In the starlight Ingray could see a looming, hunched shadow atop the mech.
“You are the kind of person who tries to kill their clutchmate,” said the spider mech. “Your mother may eat you if she finds you too young, but your clutchmates you rely on from the moment you hatch until age takes you. I am sorry I cannot kill this bad brother, Ingray Human. It would be a violation of the treaty. But if the brother Danach fell in front of this machine it might roll over him.”
Ingray found the set of rungs and climbed up the side of the excavation mech. “No! Ambassador, don’t!” She didn’t think Tic would really kill Danach, but even through the mech, even with its strange whistling voice, he managed to sound menacing. “And you almost did kill me, Danach.” Or at least almost injured her very badly.
“You were going to call Planetary Safety! That wouldn’t have just been bad for me, it would have been bad for the whole family!”
The spider mech had wrapped several legs around him and held him down flat against the top of the excavation mech. One claw gripped Danach’s hair, pulling his head back. Another claw hovered over his throat. Still clinging to the side of the mech, Ingray said, “I had to stop you somehow. I’m telling you the truth, the Budrakim vestiges aren’t in the parkland.”
Still tight in the spider mech’s grip, Danach closed his eyes. “Then where are they?”
“Where they’ve always been,” said Ingray. “Pahlad never stole them. The prolocutor made that up because Pahlad discovered they were forgeries to begin with. Prolocutor Budrakim didn’t want that to come out, so instead he made up a story about the real ones being stolen and replaced with fakes.”
Danach’s eyes opened. “What? That’s fantastic!” He tried to sit up, but the spider mech still held him down. He made an exasperated noise. “Have you told Mama?”
“No, because I just found out today. And Pahlad has every intention of going public with the story emself, if e can get around the objections of the prolocutor, who’s going to do everything in his power to prevent the news services from saying anything at all about it.”
“We can take it to one of the local independent services,” Danach suggested. “Talk it up, get it passed around. It might take a while for it to build up to where the planetary services can’t ignore it anymore, but that’s just a matter of some work. Nuncle Lak could do it easy. Hell, even you could do it, Ingray.”
Ingray said nothing, only waited.
“No,” Danach said after a moment. As though she had said something. “Nobody knows I’m the person who rented this excavation mech, I used a fake ID. So we’ll just leave it here and go home.”
Still, Ingray waited. The silence stretched out.
“Okay, so I wouldn’t have found anything. But nobody would ever have known it was me, so I don’t see what difference it makes.”
“How do you think I found you, Danach?” asked Ingray. “Next time you want a false identity you really should come to me. Whoever did this one was more or less competent, but it didn’t stand up to a really determined search.”
A silence. Then, “Oh, fuck.”
“Bad brother Danach,” said the spider mech. “Ingray sister has been very generous to you although you do not deserve it.”
“Let him go, Ambassador,” said Ingray. “You know you can’t hurt him without causing some kind of diplomatic incident. You really shouldn’t be holding on to him like this.”