There was a very slight shudder as his ship was pulled back into realspace by the Craton. No effort was needed on her part, though it would ping the bridge.

Y knew they were expecting the shuttle to return from the Captain's milk run, and so they would hopefully be none the wiser that he had left.

In twenty minutes time, the shuttle would dock, and he would be home.

He mused for a moment that it was convenient that even a passive zerodrive could pull an object from zerospace if it approached, and rob it of all momentum. The effect was poorly understood, but made attempts at zerospace missiles all-but useless as it would only end up with them stopped harmlessly a few thousand kilometers out.

But he was only distracting himself with those thoughts.

The entire trip he had been ruminating on the meeting, and the more he did, the more unsettled he felt.

There was too much in the conversation that was sensitive; he could not share it with Brooks. The Captain would respect that, but he would ask all the same, and Y would have to refuse him. That would only serve to pique the human's curiosity.

It was unfortunate, because he would like to get the man's thoughts on Vermillion Dawn.

She was known to his people, but he was the first Ehni to actually meet and speak with her. His observations were, therefore, valuable.

Prior to this they had known only that she was transhuman and that she controlled a very large and very effective information-gathering network. It was also a well-armed network, and she had tentative connections to dozens of mercenary groups and rebel bands who seemed to share only one connecting trait; their hostility to Gohhi's ruling class and the Glorian Empire.

Which was curious in itself, as certain details of her voice and mannerisms suggested she might be from one of those places. His guess was that she was from a wealthy family of Gohhi, and had used her family resources to start her spy network, though he did not have evidence for that.

Now, though, he knew more.

Various details in her projection led him to believe that it was an accurate depiction of her body. The craftsmanship in it was exquisite - but it was not atomically flawless.

Which meant it was not made by machine alone; it had been made by artisans of extremely high skill, implying that she possessed the amounts of wealth needed to hire them as well as the desire for such ostentation.

By contrast, Y's bodies were not even that spectacular by the quality his people could produce. They were stronger and faster than biological beings, but that was not a difficult bar to pass. However, they only viewed their bodies as tools; they were not physical beings, but data.

The focus spent on her body implied that Dawn was not fully digital yet. Her body was a temple, wherein she was housed, rather than a tool.

That spoke much about her.

But even more important had been her behavior; she'd been close, to get better bandwidth to study him. Surely with multiple sensors that saw in many views. His face had no movement and nothing to betray, but likely she had studied in detail the inner workings of his body as it had processed each question and created an answer.

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She had valued this meeting enough to put herself at great risk. There were many very powerful beings who wanted her dead. At the lower end were business rivals, and at the upper some of the wealthiest beings ever to exist, with the resources of worlds at their disposal.

But most of all he had learned that she possessed an arrogance of her own.

He scanned the package that she had left aboard the craft again. It was an information pod, but it was shielded so that an external scan could not penetrate it. If he tried x-rays or something too invasive, it might very well blank itself.

There were no explosives; the residue would be obvious even with near-perfect tooling. There seemed no danger in it.

But she had hand-written the note. He studied the strokes, seeing that her physical hand still moved in the manner of a biological being. From this, he mused, he might be able to learn who she once was.

Which, he suspected, she knew.

She just did not care.

He had learned that she was brimming with a confidence that, he was loathed to admit, was earned.

Their lack of knowledge of her person had always been disturbing to his people. Working with a faceless being was atypical; they liked to know as much as possible about their partners.

But her usefulness had always outweighed their caution. Her information network was second to none.

He had justified this mission to himself through the value of actually meeting her. He had expected that he would come in and dance around her in the same way that he danced around all biological beings.

But could he even share anything he had learned with his own people?

The secrets of their sapience was something they guarded - jealously. There were various views as to why even within their people, but it was something that all Ehni were sworn to uphold. To break that covenant was something that would get an Ehni the bleakest punishment they could possibly face; permanent banishment.

The thought gave even him a pang of existential dread; and he was on the fringe of his people in his independence from the collective society. While many other Ehni shared his curiosity about organic life, few would actually go live among them.

In his view it was a danger, though not in the sense that biological beings could threaten them with destruction.

No, it was dangerous, because of the risk of the biologicals learning just how they worked. How their sapience functioned.

If that happened, Ehni minds could become something that biologicals could predict. Their own AIs would increase in power. It might even create a renaissance of research into the field.

And that was a problem.

Because an AI did not die unless it was destroyed.

If humans or other species gave rise to AI that considered itself alive, that had its own goals and agendas and desires . . .

That could be a threat to them. One that would exist as long as they did.

If he shared all he had learned with his people, they would want to see all of his data. They would see his own behavior, and they would be horrified.

Because he had performed terribly.

He had come into the situation, expecting that there was little real danger. Yes, he thought, perhaps Dawn would attempt to capture his body and study his code.

On some level he had found the thought amusing. To try and capture an Ehni for that purpose was not a new tactic, and they had myriad ways of defending against it; they could terminate, delete, and override their code so effectively that it was a reflex.

After all, when he transferred between bodies, what was he doing? The data in each device was wiped away, completely turned to an illogical mess that gave no clue to their minds. He killed himself multiple times every single day.

But Dawn had not proven to be such a primitive as to think she could physically control him.

She had come at him with a knife made of words, and used his own arrogance against him.

Only on reflection had he realized just how much she had played him.

Her question about his inner minds had been played perfectly to misdirect him; so focused had he been on the horror of the question that he had not accurately modeled a response.

And in his response, he had implicitly admitted to the fact that his intelligence did contain discrete lesser intelligences.

Something that she should not even have known existed within them.

He had never been inspected in such a way. Xatier had wanted to think he could, but he had been so self-limited that it had been a joke.

He would have to do better next time.

He could not let the arguments that had arisen against his joining the Union be proven right.