[Yes. We agree. The cubes must have learned a great deal about us. We have to consider them a threat, even if we don’t yet know where Galiana was when they found her. But there is a glimmer of hope, wouldn’t you say?]
Skade failed to see what that glimmer could possibly be. Humanity had been searching for an unambiguous alien intelligence for centuries. All they had found so far had been tantalising leads—the Pattern Jugglers, the Shrouders, the archaeological remains of another eight or nine dead cultures. They had never encountered another extant machine-using intelligence, nothing to measure themselves against.
Until now.
And what this machine-using intelligence did, so it seemed, was stalk, infiltrate and slaughter, and then invade skulls.
It was not, Skade conceded, the most fruitful of first encounters.
Hope? Are you serious?
[Yes, Skade, because we don’t know that the cubes were ever able to transmit that knowledge back to whatever it was that sent them. Galiana’s ship made it back home, after all. She must have steered it here, and she would not have done that if she thought there was any danger of leading the enemy back to us. Clavain would be proud, I think. She was still thinking of us; still thinking of the Mother Nest.]
But she ran the risk . . .
The voice of the Night Council cut her off sharply. [The ship is a warning, Skade. That is what Galiana intended and that is how we must read it.]
A warning?
[That we must be ready. They are still out there, and one way or another we will meet them again.]
You almost sound as if you were expecting them to arrive.
But the Night Council said nothing.
By then the servitors had done about all they were able. They had secured large volumes of the ship, spraying diamond-fibred epoxy over the ruins of the alien machines, and they had DNA-sampled most of the corpses in the explored zones.