Two weeks later, a few hours before the squad was to ship out for Anktan on the next scheduled shuttle, Heyoka decided to make a final visit to the laka village. He meant to slip off and speak to either Fourth or Ninth Translator alone, but Mitsu trailed after him.
Several flek looked up, as the two emerged from the rain forest's depths. Mitsu stared, then slipped closer and jogged Heyoka's elbow. "Look at their chitin," she whispered.
He narrowed his eyes, then saw what she meant. "They're pink!"
"Like the laka," she said. "Ninth Translator once told me their coloration was by choice, but I'd forgotten. They must dye themselves somehow."
Fashion-conscious flek, he thought. Now he truly had seen everything.
The village seethed with life, no longer the quiet place Confederation anthropologists had once found it. The vegetable patches and fruit arbors were again carefully tended. Most of the damaged huts had been repaired. Lines of laka and flek bustled back and forth, as though there were no difference between them at all.
"I was here yesterday," Mitsu said offhandedly. "I would have asked you along, if I'd known you wanted to come back." She covered her eyes and stared up at the amber sun. "They aren't going to put their drones down anymore, you know."
He stopped. "What?"
"Their drones." She met his startled gaze. "They always put them down—euthanize them—as soon as they breed. It's called the Feast of Leavetaking. They couldn't think of any other way to preserve the peace. Once breeding has triggered hormonal surges, they start remembering things the laka would rather forget. You didn't know?"
"No," he said numbly.
"At any rate, some of them are natural techs, so now they can help maintain the grid and show us how to operate the remaining machinery in the flek city," she said. "Most of the rest carry warrior DNA, so they're not wanted here on Oleaaka, but Dennehy thinks we might be able to train them to fight for us. They don't care about politics or sides, but they sure do love a good fight. Command is even thinking of coating them with that stuff the transfer-tech dreamed up so lasers just bounce off."
"Well, they can count me out on that training assignment," he said fervently.
"Me, too," she said, then waved at a pale-green laka coming toward them. "Ninth Translator!"
The laka stopped before them, her elegant neck bowed, her eyes calm. "I have been practicing your language," she said, slowly and distinctly, "though it seems strange that your two species speak but a single dialect between them. Your forms are otherwise so divergent." She hesitated. "I have a new designation, Translator-to-Aliens. My descendents shall serve in this capacity as well, and perhaps even leave Oleaaka to travel with your kind and render assistance."
He glanced at her side, but the once-fractured carapace was smooth again. "You have recovered."
"You would not give me leave to die," she said, "so I did not."
"Kika had something to do with that too," Mitsu said.
"Both of the furred ones did," said Ninth. "Such a thing is unheard of among the laka, returning from the certain path to death. We are still trying to sort out the meaning of this event. For years, we fled contact with all other species, thinking them as violent and destructive as our forebearers. We valued the peace of our own hearts above all else, even our young."
"Humans can be violent," Heyoka said, "when the situation calls for it, and certainly hrinn can as well. Unfortunately, war is sometimes the price of survival."
"The gray one, Kika, spoke to me of a `pattern,' " Ninth said, "something large and complex that has now reached out to include the laka too, but I do not yet understand what she meant."
"You aren't the only one," Heyoka said. "Don't let it worry you."
"We came to say good-by," Mitsu said. "We're leaving soon."
Ninth blinked. "All of you?"
"No, the laka have planted the seeds of a very powerful weapon here," he said. "I'm afraid the Confederation is going to remain on Oleaaka a long time, whether you want us or not, trying to puzzle out how to do what you already know. For years, humanity has been trying to exterminate the flek, or Makers, just as the Makers once tried to exterminate you, and it doesn't work. Pound for pound, they're incredibly effective fighters. The war has been essentially at stalemate for a long time."
He gazed around the village at the newly pink-and-green-and-blue tinted flek learning how to put their wartime skills to work in this agrarian setting and social organization, a bit like hitching cobras to plows. "The key lies in persuading the Makers to eliminate the aggressive castes, as you laka did, so that at some point coexistence between our species becomes possible."
"Our way was not without flaws," Translator-to-Aliens said. "We were forced to make difficult sacrifices."
"But you were on the right track," he said. "We want to record your song, study and refine it, then broadcast it whenever we come up against the Makers, compel them to listen to us too."
He looked up at the green-blue sky above and felt the immense blackness of space that lay hidden beyond. His fellow soldiers were fighting and dying on countless worlds out there this very minute, and the struggle would continue, the flek spreading across this quadrant with a speed and ruthlessness other species could never hope to match.
It had taken humans, hrinn, and laka to prevail in the flek city, many divergent voices coming together to sing one unique song. None of them could have done it alone. There was a sobering lesson here. It was time to combine strengths.
Settling back in the shade of the luminary tree, he watched Translator-to-Aliens practice her Standard on Mitsu, while, all around them, transformed flek assisted lowly gleaners and builders with their humble tasks, as unassuming in their new roles as old dogs.
Tiny orange insects buzzed around his muzzle. He could smell newly harvested melons being piled a few yards away, their scent a bit like astringent lemon spiked with vanilla. His eyelids sagged, then, overhead, tree limbs shifted in the breeze. The sun blazed through them and flashed as though reflecting off a mirrored surface. He blinked.
Just for a second, something had seemed to shimmer in the midday sun, a sinuous, wide-sweeping curve weaving through the village, linking laka and flek, human and hrinn, vast, complicated, as irresistible as a roaring river in flood, all leading back to him.
Something/in/motion.
He shivered. Blasted hrinn. Now they had him doing it too.
It was time to round up his troops and move on. After all, they still had a war to fight.