Was that an offer of friendship?
It was such a novelty that they didn't know how to respond. Even Dimitri and Mattie, who they considered their friends, had never offered to do anything with them that could be classified as fun.
"We would much appreciate any help you can offer us in that regard," Number One said. "Once we get free. We are looking forward to living a different kind of life than what we could expect on the island."
"You don't want to be soldiers anymore?" The female Kra-ell's enormous eyes got even bigger.
She seemed appalled by the idea of them rejecting that kind of life.
"We don't know what we want to do," Number One said. "We only know how to be soldiers. We don't know how to do anything else."
"You should read," she said. "You can learn a lot from books. And I'm not talking about boring school stuff. Read stories. You will learn more from those than anything else."
That too almost sounded like an offer of friendship, and the collective was eagerly absorbing it.
"Thank you for the suggestions. Once we are free, we would appreciate your book recommendations."
For some reason, she suddenly looked embarrassed. "Yeah. We'll talk on the other side."
For the next few hours, not much was said. Everyone other than the cyborgs was tired, and not in the mood for conversation.
The Eight kept it going inside their hive mind.
Sometime in the small hours, a group of Guardians arrived, entering the basement through the door leading to the lord's private stairwell. The Eight assumed that they were the ones who had taken the chests and the injured soldier to the clan's submarine. They brought with them fresh provisions and the physician, who was an exceptionally beautiful immortal.
In fact, the collective acknowledged that all the Guardians were good-looking in a way that the Brotherhood warriors were not, and they wondered whether the clan selected human breeders for their looks rather than brawn or smarts as the Brotherhood did.
"How's Brody?" Yamanu asked.
"Awake and complaining," the doctor said, setting down a case at his feet. "Both tibias set clean and splinted. He'll be walking in no time." He glanced around the basement, taking in the stateof the dig, the pile of fallen ground, and the four of the Eight working the rubble. "I see that help arrived while I was gone."
"These are four of the enhanced soldiers we've been in contact with," Yamanu said. "They came to investigate the collapse and stayed to help. The other four are topside, keeping us from being interrupted. This is Number One, their spokesman."
The doctor smiled. "I'm Julian, or the doctor. I answer to both." He turned back to Yamanu. "We brought the casings back. All three of them. We used one for the provisions."
Anandur frowned. "You didn't bring that much food." He gestured to the boxes the Guardians had carried in. "All that could fit in one case. You should have left the other two in the sub."
The doctor shrugged. "I had a gut feeling that they would be needed. We had Brody loaded in one of them for the swim out, which worked beautifully. I thought that if we had any more injured to transport, they could come in handy. If not, we just bring them to the sub empty."
A gut feeling was not data, but the collective didn't dismiss it as unimportant. It was the mind running a computation below the level of its own awareness and surfacing only the result. The Eight had their own version of that process, which they called the convergence, the moment when eight independent assessments arrived at the same conclusion without any of them being able to trace the path. It was not mystical. It was eight processors agreeing.
"What happened here while we were gone?" Julian asked.
Anandur told the doctor a condensed version of the events, giving the Eight more credit than the bare facts demanded, and the collective cataloged it as another offering of friendship.
"Does this change your plans?" the doctor asked. "How does this affect your timeline?"
It was the question the collective had been circling for some time now, but they hadn't arrived at a consensus yet, and Number One did not answer it alone.
He let the silence stretch a beat while the eight of them conferred, the deliberation passing through the network faster than speech.
Their timeline had been built around the extraction of the chests, but those were the clan's problem now. They no longer needed to wait for the excavation to be done.
The situation had shifted because of the collapse. A new level of alertness would set in despite their efforts to prevent escalation. Compulsion and thralling only went so far. The situation might rapidly deteriorate, and they might miss their window of opportunity.
The convergence arrived unanimously.
"It changes the timeline," Number One said. "We had intended to move the women in a few days, after the chests were aboard. The chests are no longer our concern, which frees us, and the events of tonight make waiting unwise. The island is disturbed. It will not settle. We would rather act while our cover still holds than wait for it to erode. We will leave early in the morning and get the women and children out of the enclosure."
