‘We do,’ she said. ‘We offer me.’

‘You?’ He leaned his shelled torso back, and thought. ‘You speak Klip. You understand other customs. You’re … you’re their Speaker.’

Speaker warmed with the quiet joy of being understood. ‘Exactly.’

‘You can get access to things others can’t. Go into shops where they might get turned away, or …’

‘Help them finish the formwork to get an official pilot’s licence. Get a bunch of seedlings from the nursery that didn’t understand what they wanted. Track down a medical specialist for something particular. Set up a standing order with a fuel depot. Buy groceries for someone who’s too nervous to go to a big market stop.’

‘Are these imaginary examples, or …?’

‘My last five jobs.’

‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘That’s fascinating.’ He returned to the panel, twisting a wire here, loosening a clip there. ‘Right, let’s try that.’ He went once more to the interface panel and rebooted the system. ‘You still haven’t answered my question, though.’

‘Sorry, which?’

‘What does Tracker do?’

Again, Speaker gathered all the components this answer required, and tried to filter them down to the most necessary. ‘So: a ship is a family, and a ship is autonomous. We’re not an instinctively hierarchal species, like many of you are. We do best in groups, but each group is an entity unto itself. We don’t have any sort of larger government, or ship registry, or anything like that. We don’t log flight plans, we don’t submit travel routes. We just go where we need to, as we want to. That freedom is very important to us, but it also means—’

‘You’re hard to find.’

‘Right. But that’s also by design.’ She paused. ‘If I explain this, you have to understand it’s not intended as an insult.’

‘Now I’m dying to know what it is.’ His face was stone, but his voice was kind. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t take it personally.’

She continued, carefully. ‘Most Akarak ships go to great lengths to not show up on anybody else’s wake scan. Both in a navigational sense and a technological sense. We mask our ships’ signals. We make flight plans that look nonsensical to outsiders. By and large, we avoid contact with other species as much as possible, but the side effect of that is it’s hard for us to find each other as well. And that’s what Tracker does. When we take on a task for someone else, we know roundabout where they’re headed, and we know their data wake signature, but we don’t often make a hard and fast rendezvous plan. Plans change. Circumstances are unpredictable. And a ship that really wants to stay off the map might not even feel comfortable sharing their flight plan with us, beyond what system they’ll be in. That’s where Tracker comes in. Her speciality is tracking untrackable ships.’

‘How?’

‘You would have to ask her. I don’t understand it at all.’ Tracker had tried to explain, of course, many times, but Speaker had had as much luck understanding Tracker’s monitors filled with nav charts as Tracker had made purchase with syntax.

‘Well, hopefully, if we get this thing working, I’ll be able to say hello, at least.’ Roveg glanced at the monitor, watching the reboot progress. ‘That must be extraordinary difficult, treasure-hunting your peers across the galaxy.’

‘Depends on who it is and how seriously they take their privacy. Some ships don’t care at all. Aversion to other species isn’t a universal rule – we’re not all the same, obviously. But most of us prefer to travel incognito. And that’s because …’ She paused. ‘Again, please don’t take offence at this.’

‘You don’t trust the rest of us,’ Roveg said simply. ‘I understand that completely, and I don’t take offence.’ He gestured at himself. ‘My species’ reputation hardly makes me one to judge on that front.’

‘It’s … not quite the same.’

‘Isn’t it? Sure, we’re talking xenophobia on very different scales, but fear of outsiders is fear of outsiders all the same.’

Speaker disliked that categorisation, but in keeping with her own request, did not take it personally. ‘I’m not sure I’d call it xenophobia in our case. It’s just … experience.’

‘Hmm.’ Roveg considered that. ‘Yes, perhaps I’m not viewing it in the proper context. My peers would argue your situation and ours boil down to the same principle, but then, they’re wrong about most things.’

Now it was Speaker’s turn to be curious about delicate matters. She hesitated, not sure how he’d take this question, but the ease of the conversation made her feel bold. ‘May I ask why the Quelin Protectorate … why it is like it is?’

All the holes along Roveg’s abdomen pulsed air at once. ‘We could sit here for days discussing that. Do you know anything about our history? What happened after contact?’

‘I know there was war, but not the specifics.’

‘Right.’ He idly rubbed one of his eyes with a toe as he thought. ‘When we first made contact with other sapients, there was an inevitable explosion of cultural evolution, as there always is. Technology, philosophy, art, all of it in flux. You know how it goes. And as is sadly common during periods of rapid change, things that had been simmering for my species for a long time came to a boil. There was war. You can read about it, if you must, but all you need to know is that it was horrific. Cloned soldiers became one of the weapons of choice, suffice it to say, and it was a hideous mess. People died, treaties were drawn, and so on and so forth, and when it came time to cast blame, the fact that we could point to people who weren’t even from our planet was deliciously convenient. It was their influence that had caused the fractures among us, you see, not centuries of our own inanity. It was their tech that fuelled our genetic wars, their ideas that had corrupted the sanctity of true Quelin civilisation.’