“There’s always a loophole. But now we’re dealing with an acquisitive species, we’ve thrown a wrench in their plans and if they react emotively then—”

“I agree, we have to play this carefully but we do have a chance we didn’t have before.”

“Who put you in charge?” Saori said, then glared at Victor and Steve as if they might admit they had.

“I don’t see you putting forward any solutions,” said Iona, “you’re just complaining everything’s more difficult now.”

“What I’m saying is”—and here Saori lowered her voice even more—“the decider is going to make a decision about us. And if it’s not good . . . we might have to take action.”

Steve nodded. “So do we wait for it to make the decision, or—”

“Attack it first?” said Iona.

“It’s weak at the moment,” said Saori. The decider was receiving medical attention, though the humans didn’t yet know why.

“But the figures aren’t and you saw how they reacted to it—they’d tear us to bloody pieces.”

“We might not get a choice—”

“Wait wait wait,” said Victor. “Alyssa told me this is what the Poramutantur did on all those other colonies. Got in people’s heads and made them see threats and told them get them first before they get you. If we escape from it and then do the same thing, what was the point of it all?”

Nobody said much for a while. Saori glared at Victor occasionally and Iona thought she was going to take him to task for drawing the comparison. But she didn’t.

When the decider finally came to see them it was a relief, even if Iona hadn’t been looking forward to it.

It came to the doorway of the communal area, flanked by three figures. Iona couldn’t be sure but she thought it likely they were the three who had been monitoring their dome when they’d been released. Certainly one of them held the same recording/display device and pointed it at the humans.

In the moments before the decider’s arrival, Saori and Steve had been pacing the room anxiously; Iona and Victor had been sitting at the table. Victor stood reflexively, defensively perhaps. Iona stayed where she was.

The decider looked back at Iona. Was it expecting her to stand? Iona stuck to her guns—before the decider came in she had concluded that a nonconfrontational attitude would be the best approach and sitting down struck her as nonconfrontational. Unless it was expecting her to stand. In that case it might well seem confrontational. But she couldn’t help how the decider interpreted her actions.

After a while the decider spoke, using the same language they had heard the figures use. But it didn’t speak to the figures. It addressed the humans, who couldn’t understand what it was saying.

Once the decider had finished speaking the figure with the recording device addressed them in English: “Have you been treated well?”

This was unexpected. It was the first time any of the figures had asked them a question, for instance. That alone told them the words had not originated with the figure: these were the decider’s words, translated.