The ship, their ship, was descending slowly—as impossible now as it had been when she first saw it. It kept coming, and she kept having to re-evaluate how big it was. She had no idea what force was keeping it airborne, save that there was no downrush of air, no howl of jet engines, just a thousand-ton arthropod drifting ghost-like against the flat, silvery early morning sky.

“What can it think of us?” Lee wondered, almost mournfully.

“I understand the situation has some precedent, for them,” Auruthmer said, as casually as if it was nothing. “Do you think they haven’t met others, on their journey?”

“You mean—out there?”

The Nissa woman raised her shaggy eyebrows, inscrutable.

A cradle of limbs descended from the trilobite, which was thirty feet above them, blotting out the sky. The mode of ascension was still somewhat unnerving, but Lee found she could look on it and think, It’s our monster. It’s one of us.

II

Having travelled freight on the way in, Lucas was relieved to see that the monster had manufactured an entire suite of rooms for its human cargo overnight. Better than sitting in a modified swim bladder or whatever the hell the thing had found for unexpected passengers. The downside was sharing the space with everyone else—and nobody was exactly fond of Lucas or his boss.

“How long’s the journey?” he asked the Neanderthal woman who spoke the best English. He was told she didn’t know, because nobody had ever made this trip before. Less than reassuring.

Khan straight up hated the pair of them now she was out from under Rove’s thumb, and apparently the rat-thing translator was an entity in and of itself, which was news to Lucas. It had retained some of Dr. Rat’s research too, which Rove wasn’t happy about because it devalued his own offerings. Too late, Lucas suspected, for the cyborg bastard to have an accident. Thankfully the cavemen didn’t seem to care, or at least weren’t going to let a grudge get in the way of any help that might be on offer.

This was, in Lucas’s personal opinion, a mistake. Not that he was going to turn down useful naivety in his enemies, but if he’d been in their shoes, he would have fed Rove to the closest woolly mammoth or let the giant trilobite shit them out into space. Rove was definitely not someone who’d happily play as part of someone else’s team. He called the shots, or he dismantled the hierarchy until he was the highest part of what remained. Lucas guessed his boss was already applying his mind to the task.