Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

And Korchow, for his own devious and cynical motives, had decided to avert the disaster…or at least that was what he seemed to want to make Arkady think at this move in the game.

“Why couldn’t you have told me all this before?” Arkady asked.

“I’m sorry, Arkady. I couldn’t risk it. I had to get you past Moshe. I had to get you to Earth. I told you what I thought you needed to know to accomplish that. And the rest…well, I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”

“But are you telling me the truth, or just the next lie?”

Korchow grinned in genuine amusement. “So there is something behind the pretty face after all,” he said. “Arkasha always said there was.”

“I want to talk to him.”

“You will.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“When?”

There was something fundamentally uncategorizable about Korchow. For weeks, even months, Arkady would think of him as a chimera who had become more human than construct by the constant stress and abrasion of living with humans. But then, just when he had decided that he knew what Korchow was, the spy’s artifices would slough away to reveal the rigid scaffolding of ideology that everything else hung upon.

“You will speak to Arkasha,” Korchow told him in a voice that wasn’t even remotely human, “when I believe it is in both of your best interests to speak to each other. Which is to say when it is in the best interest of the Syndicates. Unless you no longer believe that those two things are one and the same?”

“No. Of course not. I didn’t mean to…forgive me.”

“That Arkasha continues to defy me is one thing. I expect it of him. But you, Arkady. You disappoint me. Back on Gilead I decided you were ready to do your part and make the necessary sacrifices. Don’t make me wonder if I was wrong about you.”

“I just—”

Korchow held up a hand. “Don’t. If what you’ve already seen of humans—the misery right outside this window, for God’s sake—hasn’t convinced you of how important it is that the Syndicates survive and thrive, then we have nothing else to say to each other.”

Back at the house on Abulafia Street, Osnat took charge of Arkady as seamlessly as a relay runner taking the baton from a teammate. Twenty minutes later, Arkady was sitting in the helicopter, buffeted by wind and noise, while Osnat slept in the seat across from him as comfortably as if she were safe on the ground and tucked into her bed.

Arkady’s brain spun feverishly, turning over every word Korchow had spoken, inspecting every nuance and inflection as if he were reading tea leaves. Any way he looked at it he reached the same conclusion:

Arkasha was alive. Arkasha was alive and not cooperating, whatever Korchow meant by that. And if Arkasha wasn’t cooperating, then Arkasha was still himself.

And that single fact changed everything.

Could Osnat be trusted? He looked at her face, grimy with sweat and khamsin dust. Everything he knew of her said no…but he’d seen something in her face when she looked at him, something harder and more honest than pity, that whispered yes.

He would ask her. He would ask her the next time she brought his food. He’d beg if he had to.

Because if Arkasha really was alive and unbroken, then Arkady would run any risk and suffer any humiliation to save him.

The Big Wood: 6:00 A.M., third day postlandfall.

Sunbeams sliced through the forest canopy a hundred meters overhead and slanted toward Arkady through the green haze of quivering leaf edges and fluttering insect wings. There was still a predawn, underwater cast to the forest light, but the night’s deep-sea shadows were fast giving way to the midmorning glow of shallow surf under sunlight.

Arkady had found a dacetine, one of the Beautiful Ants, and she was on the hunt.

She’d spied a springtail grazing on the waterlogged edge of a fallen leaf. Arkady watched her stalk her prey, her finely sculpted legs lifting and arcing with the graceful precision of the huntress she was. He knew what would happen, but, no matter how many times he watched it, the hunt retained its otherworldly magic.

The dacetine would approach the springtail, her movements growing slower and more deliberate with every step, until she stood so close that it was grazing literally between the razor-toothed prongs of her widespread mandibles. She would let the fine hairs between her mandibles, so delicate that they were invisible except under a microscope, brush across the oblivious springtail’s thorax. And then, twenty times faster than the blink of an eye, her mandibles would snap closed with enough force to cut the poor springtail in two.

Arkady shivered, wondering what it would be like to have the last thing you felt in life be the fine tickling of those intramandibular hairs on your neck. He had a sudden disturbing vision of the survey team as springtails, innocently sampling and measuring and mapping Novalis’s bewildering diversity while the razor-sharp mandibles closed in on them.

And yet…and yet there was nothing concrete, no real problem that he could point to to justify the feeling. The initial disputes among the crew had died down, quelled by the insane pace at which they’d all been working since planetfall. Meanwhile the survey progressed so spectacularly that so far it had largely consoled him for the mission’s more personal disappointments.

By the end of the first week afield, Arkady had documented five major nest complexes. Dozens upon dozens of the massive, man-high, aboveground nests constructed by the European wood ant, dotted in military formation across the woodland clearings, with their southern slopes precisely canted to maximize winter solar gain. A vast underground complex of leaf-cutter ants, which he suspected and would later confirm, had been artificially adapted to the temperate climate of the main continent. And in the warm open pastures, the exotic pyramids of the Cataglyphis, Herodotus’s legendary gold-digging ants, its surface dotted with precisely distributed specks of glittering gray schist.