Moments later, an answer of a sort arrived. But it was not like any of the automatons Dev or his companions had encountered previously when wandering the vessel’s corridors. At its appearance, a nervous murmur arose from the assembled A'jeii. Vantolos cursed in several wholly unfamiliar languages. Crouching, the Kaijank looked to conceal themselves behind the A'jeii. They failed.

From out of the main corridor a massive machine came toward them, gliding silently atop an invisible force that raised it no more than half a centimeter above the deck. Dev’s breath caught in his throat. Reed’s hand drifted toward his concealed knife, though what the big man thought he could do against such a mechanized colossus only he and his trainers knew. The Zimmers looked on in silence, hand in hand, waiting.

Slabs of what might have been gray armor encased a metal body whose flanks barely cleared the walls of the corridor. The curved, rounded base was likewise armored. Clusters of small cones pointed forward from the base while larger ones of more elaborate design jutted from the torso. Atop the cube-shape that constituted the bulk of the machine’s mass, a squarish head gazed down at them out of thick, horizontal, narrow lenses. Depressions and projections on the head gave the breathtakingly martial device an aspect of barely repressed ferocity.

It halted, the head swiveling slowly as if to take the measure of each of the assembled in turn. When it started forward again, advancing in preternatural silence, it came not toward the waiting Syrenii or any of the other A'jeii. Tiptoeing on their tentacles, Vantolos and his fellow Olone skittered prudently clear of its path.

Reed took a wary step backward while Dev sidled sideways to place himself between the leviathan and the elderly Zimmers. It was an entirely unconscious and instinctive gesture of which his parents would have been unutterably proud.

Halting, the machine inclined its armored skull toward the trio. In a voice that was as smooth as it was synthetic it uttered a string of sounds. What followed was a response as startling as it was unexpected.

“I—can understand it.” There was wonder in Jakob Zimmer’s voice.

“So can I.” Chiasa Katou-Zimmer was shaking her head slowly in amazement. “Not well. Certainly not as clearly as Jakob. Everything sounds slightly different than it should. But it’s still comprehensible.”

“That’s crazy.” Reed’s fingers tightened around his useless, concealed knife. “You’re both gone crazy.” Behind the humans, the sudden chatter of the assembled A'jeii suggested that they agreed with the big man.