Chapter 33: Forty Lengths

Khrr had written the passage east narrows at forty lengths, and Khrr had been eight bodies travelling light.

Sacha sent the smallest first, exactly as instructed, and got her back four hours later with a report that took him a while to fully accept: the narrowing was not a narrowing.

It was a fold, a place where two slabs had settled against each other over decades, and the gap through it ran for seven body-lengths at a width that a full-grown Carapace could not pass at all.

He went and looked himself, because he was not going to make this decision off a report.

She was right. He got two-thirds of the way in on his own frame — smaller than a Carapace, larger than a scout — and felt the stone close on his back with the specific patience of something that had been settling since before he was born, and had to reverse out backwards for six lengths in the dark because there was nowhere to turn.

Seven lengths.

Perhaps forty of his sixty-one could make it.

The nine young could make it easily, and could not make it alone.

The four largest Carapace could not make it at any width he could find.

He came out of the fold shaking in a way that had nothing to do with effort, and made himself sit at the entrance until it stopped before he let anyone see him.

The colony was watching.

Sixty bodies in a chamber behind him, the nine young in the middle of them, and a passage ahead that a third of them could not physically enter.

Whatever he did next, he was going to do it in front of an audience that had already been split into quarters once for reasons nobody explained.

Write down what makes you stop, he thought.

He wrote it down.

Not on the wall — in himself, deliberately, in words:

If the water runs out before the passage opens, we go back to the cistern and I find another way, and I do not get one more day, and I do not get to argue with myself about it.

Then he spent the rest of that day on the alternatives, and there were three, and he made himself cost all of them out properly before allowing himself a preference.

Go back.

Four days to the cistern chamber, then west, then — nowhere.

There was no west.

West was a building coming down.

Go around.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Thresh's map had a smear here and nothing else; the fold might be bypassable in a hundred lengths or a thousand, and finding out meant scouting parties out of a stationary column with a fixed quantity of water behind them.

Or widen it.

That third one sat in front of him for most of an hour before he took it seriously, because it was absurd.

Roaches do not quarry.

A colony of sixty-one insects does not reshape settled concrete.

Except that somebody had.

There were tool-marks on a cistern lip four days behind him, cut by mandibles the same size as his own.

They did not cut that lip in a day, Thresh sent, when he raised it. You have four days of water.

I know.

And the fold is not a lip. It is two slabs holding each other up. The beetle worked its bad side against the wall, uncomfortable in the narrow chamber. If you take material out of the wrong place, it stops being a passage you cannot fit through and becomes a passage that is not there, with your people inside it.

I know that too.

Then what are you asking me.

I'm asking whether four days is enough time to find out whether I'm right, Sacha sent, from someone who has watched a god be wrong about a passage before.

Thresh went still.

That is the first time you have used my colony against me on purpose, it sent, without heat. Do it more. It is more useful than the way you have been handling me.

What they found, once Sacha stopped looking at the fold as an obstacle and started reading it as a structure, changed the problem entirely — and he only found it because the smallest Cerci had mentioned, offhandedly in her first report, that the floor of the gap was smooth.

He went back in and read the floor with his antennae rather than his eyes, seven lengths of it, and the smoothness was not water-wear.

It was a track.

The same worn channel he had seen between seep and cistern, deeper here, running the entire length of the fold.

Something had used this passage.

Regularly.

For a very long time.

And at the fold's tightest point, where the two slabs came closest, there was a section of the lower slab's edge that had been taken down — a shallow scallop, hand-cut, perhaps two-thirds of a body-width, in exactly the place where a body would otherwise catch.

Somebody had already widened it.

Once, carefully, in the one place widening it would help and would not bring the ceiling down.

Sacha lay in the dark with his back against a slab, reading a repair made by people who had been dead longer than he had been alive, and understood that he was not solving this problem.

He was inheriting a solution.

The scallop was old and had silted up, and clearing it was four days of the worst labour the colony had ever done — relays of two working at a time in a space where a third could not fit, hauling grit back seven lengths in the dark, while the seep filled behind them and the water clock ran.

They lost nobody.

Two of the four largest Carapace still could not pass and had to go stripped, shedding the loose plate they had grown in the duct months earlier, arriving on the far side smaller and softer than they had been in a year.

Sacha watched them come through and made a note he would keep for a long time:

the lineage that made them strong nearly killed them in a crack.

Nothing his species had was free.

Every specialisation was a bet on an environment, and he had been placing those bets for three months on ground he no longer owned.

The stripping was worse than he had made it sound to them.

A Carapace that sheds plate does not simply regrow it; the plate was the accumulated product of a dozen molts under load, and the two who came through the fold soft were going to be soft for a long time, in a colony about to arrive somewhere with no defences and no allies.

He asked them.

That was the only part of it he was able to feel good about afterward — he did not order it, he laid the situation in scent, both options and both costs, and let them decide.

They both went through.

He was not certain, standing there watching them scrape their own armour off against the stone, whether they had understood the choice or had simply understood that the god had asked and that asking meant something.

He suspected it was the second one, and that the difference between those two things was going to matter more and more the longer he did this.