I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I’d always assumed when my people came for me, they would come for me—after all, what was the point of being a spacefaring race solely for the sake of divesting planets of their resources? There were cheaper, easier ways to synthesize almost everything a world could need. Clearly, the spies mattered. But there were so many more of us than I’d ever expected, and we didn’t matter individually. They could afford to lose a few. They’d still be able to win their war.

The ground continued to shake as Tahlia and I moved away from the edge of the pit. Jeff swore softly under his breath and followed, hauling the senator along with him. Even having started moving as quickly as we had, we were barely clear when the pit’s edge crumbled, falling down into the crater. My foot hit a rock and twisted, sending me toppling, taking Tahlia down with me.

I rolled onto my back, watching in awe as the scout ship pulled free. It was roughly spherical, more like a tumbleweed or a thorn briar than a ball bearing: it looked organic and impenetrable at the same time, like it could stand up to anything. Long, woody vines extended from points all over the exterior, creating a web of tendrils that it used to move. As I watched, it flipped over, reorienting itself. The number and distribution of the tendrils meant it could never be knocked over or off-balance.

There were large, circular patches of material that looked like the dragonfly-wing petals of the breeding flowers distributed around the exterior, each one flanked by a pair of tendrils, sometimes more. They glittered, shifting as they focused on us.

“My God,” breathed the senator. He staggered unsteadily to his feet, eyes locked on the sphere hovering above us. “It’s alive.”

“All of their technology is alive,” said Jeff. He sounded as awed as the senator. This was the moment he’d been dreaming of all his life. This was when they came to get us, to take us home to a world where we would make sense. Where we wouldn’t be outcasts because of the things we couldn’t stop ourselves from saying.

I was starting to question why, if our people loved us and wanted us so much, they had dropped us here with a compulsion in our heads that was almost guaranteed to turn us into freaks by the local standards, whether those standards were set on Earth or on whatever strange jungle had sprouted Second. Why, if they could make us blend in so well with the locals, they would announce their approach with a signal that would only serve to isolate us further, shucking our defenses away and turning us into targets.

Targets. That was what they had been grooming us to be all along. The only question now was why.