“Ah!” Galiel ducked behind a workstation as the containment chamber shattered, spraying toughened glass shards everywhere. The little xenotech device, completely unharmed, immediately skittered towards the air ducts.
“Sanitizing.” The gout of flame from a sentry servitor freed its machine spirit from the torment of blasphemy.
“Well…” She sent a Noospheric rite of activation to the auto-scribe servitor. “Sonic weapons seem to have no discernible effect. Though I may have found a structurally fatal resonance in standard-make containment equipment, so… that’s nice, I guess. Something the Divisio Fabricator might be interested in.”
“Would you like me to auto-edit for formal reporting standard Primus-22, Enginseer?”
She sighed. There was no utility in holding a conversation with the servitors. “Yes, please. Thank you.”
“This unit desires only to serve. It is unworthy of your gratitude. Report appended successfully. Returning to standby.” The scribe’s systems fell silent once more.
Here, deep in the bellies of the Ark, the laboratoriums were cramped, shadowy cells, separated by scores of bulkheads, sanitization systems, and guarded checkpoints from their closest peers. Electronics were kept to a minimum, Noospheric systems were quarantined, and all servitors and automata were hardcoded with destruction precepts, to be triggered if they ever left the sub-datasphere of these levels. Even the menials who served here would never leave. They had been provided with their own isolated habitation blocks where they, their children, and their children’s children would spend their entire lives. Only specially cleared Skitarii and, of course, Techpriests, could come and go as they pleased, subject to meme-coded secrecy.
It was here that the most secret and sensitive of projects were undertaken: those that needed to be hidden from the roving eyes of Inquisitorial agents or hidden Malateks, or those that could endanger entire populations if allowed to escape. Digital tags were sparse, hallways were unmarked, numbering systems were unusable, and even the walls of living metal sloughed off layers every few minutes to remove any marks or scratches. No one could navigate down here. Not unless they knew exactly where to go.
For now, Galiel was one of those chosen few. Her own hi-sec cell, formally marked Work Area 221, was playing host to every collected specimen of the xenotech device from the Hulk, save the few held by the ship’s Xenologis temple archives and Magos Hekaton. Artisan Ouden had stayed with her for the first few hours, but now she was alone, save the servitors and a few servo-automata. Alone sucked.
“Schedule that chamber for replacement and bring up the next specimen.”
She had nicknamed the things ‘spinehuggers’, both for easy reference and because the thirty-two-character long identi-tag assigned by the archives did not exactly roll off the vox-caster. Some of the older Magi, bless their iron hearts, could really do with learning that not everyone had racks of cogitation matrices falling out of their ears.
Spinehugger. She felt the phantom touch of fingers crawling up her load-bearing augmetics. The chill of coolant-infused breath on her neck. Almost absently, her fingers found the offending interface mechadendrite, toying with the ring wrapped around it. It had not even been that long, and she already missed him. If only Val could be down here, cracking his jokes, or even continuing their argument from earlier. He would not understand a word of her research, of course; the Myrmidon meatheads seldom did. But it would be better than talking to the walls.
“Would you like me to contact Enginseer Valacon?” The utility servitor chimed pleasantly.
“What? No! No. He does not have clearance for this research. And do not monitor thoughts without broadcast tags.”
“Understood. Downcycling Manifold linkage depth.”
She sighed and plugged another wire into her graft-port complex, interfacing with the new containment system. The effector systems within came to life. Articulated limbs bristling with tiny pincers, drills, lasers, and other implements extended hesitantly as the machine spirits began to acclimatize to her command code-stacks.
“We’ll try physical disassembly again. This time, keep away from the inertial dampeners. Those things definitely have hardcoded disassembly routines. We’ll try to go around the central processor, avoiding the NOT gates, and…”
Her self-reassuring talk faded away as the work absorbed her full attention. Parts of her consciousness fractured off, manning subsidiary systems or sensors that relayed important data to the guidance systems. She perceived their flows, dimly, at the edge of the data-scape. But the project took precedence, expanding in her allocation graphs until it was a towering edifice of processing allocation and high-priority designations. Even sensory feeds from her auspex arrays fell away, diverted into integrated data-cubes for later viewing. Freed cogitation was reassigned to calculations for the precise incisions required to efficiently breach the armoured carapace.
Absorbed as she was, the indistinct sounds stimulating her auditory apparatus took some processing cycles to register in her conscious cogitation.
“Hey. Hey. Hey.”
Tactile feedback. Sharp, regularly spaced micro-trauma on lateral abdominal muscles. Someone was poking her.
Someone who did not have the bare minimum of respect necessary to not interrupt a scientist at work. In other words, someone who did not belong there.
Without saying a word, Galiel initiated the most disruptive ejection protocols she could use without blowing out a cogitator somewhere. Even as her consciousness suffused her body once more, restoring physical function, she was already in motion: a nest of snapping mechadendrites descended upon the intruder, prognostication algorithms trying to track all probable locations. With a muffled sound of whirling robes and tapping feet, the attack vectors returned negative hit Booleans.
“Come on. If I wanted to kill you, I would’ve done it while you were jerking off to the little bug.” The sing-song female voice was oddly stilted, as if unused to speaking Low Gothic.
Once her auspex arrays refocused on the intruder’s form, draped leisurely over the top of the containment cell, she understood why. With a binharic curse, she grabbed her Omnissian axe from its perch against the wall, the touch activating its power fields.
“Xeno witch.”
“Please, I prefer the term ‘Rillietan’.” The grinning bronzed mask with its long nose did little to ameliorate the coiled energy within the alien’s form, like a cat ready to spring on a mouse.
Her lexical libraries parsed the filthy Aeldari tongue. “Harlequin.”
“What gave it away? The fabulous, form-fitting robes? The mask?”
“Your sunny disposition,” Galiel snapped. She had dealt with its kind before, during her apprenticeship under a Stygian Magos. Their friendly nature was only outdone by their tendency to backstab. Only the most confident of Xenarites dealt with the Harlequins, and only the wiliest among them survived to tell the tale.
The clown disengaged the seals on her mask, revealing an angular yet girlish face contorted into a pout. Disgusting mounds of xeno flesh arrayed in an equally disgusting formation. “Now what did I do to deserve that? I only wanted to say hello.”
“Your kind aren’t allowed down here. Leave now.” She turned to one of the security servitors, switching to binharic. “And what’s wrong with you? Take her out!”
The servitor’s augmitters engaged with a guttural rumble. “Blessed maker, auto-senses are unable to identify eligible targets. Please designate manually.”
“What— She’s right there!” Her staccato screech made even the harlequin wince.
“I don’t understand that beep-boop of yours, woman, but that doesn’t mean I can’t go deaf from it! Calm down! Your marvellous lobotomized slaves won’t attack me.”
“And why is that?”
“Well, for one, Aldren cleared me for this level ages ago. Plus, I nicked one of these on the way down.” She held up a Cog Obscurus.
“Hey! Give me that!” She swiped it from the alien’s grip and checked the encoded ownership tags. It belonged to one of the Skitarii Marshals in charge of the teleportariums that led to the Scientia Purgatus Laboratoriums. These Laboratoriums. “Why would the Archmagos let… something like you down here?”
“Would you rather I be chained up in one of these cells?”
“Yes,” she replied without hesitation. The alien was proscribed. This was common knowledge.
“Gee. Well, sorry to disappoint you.” In an admittedly graceful flip, she flew off the chamber and landed next to her. “But I’ll have you know that I’ve helped your little factory planet more times than you’d ever know, little girl. I’m not detecting the appropriate respect.”
Galiel backed away, transmitting null-codes to the servitors over her Manifold link to counteract the Obscurus. Immediately, their detection routines flared, but she suppressed them. Better to not let the xeno know that she had regained the advantage. “You didn’t answer the question. And how dare you call him by his name?”
“Who, Aldren?”
She sent another jolt of power through the axe, letting threatening energy arcs run over the blade. “Archmagos Dominus Aldren Nevis to you.”
She ran her hands over her bodysuit, swaying her hips suggestively. “Well, he obviously allowed me in because of my smoking good looks.”
“That is a lie. His holy form has abandoned all frailties of the flesh.”
“My god, it’s like only the slaves get jokes on this gods-forsaken ship. And they get them for all of two seconds before the radiation kills them.”
“That is a slanderous assertion, witch. The average survival times for menials on the Omnissiah’s Wrath stands higher than the galactic standard at—”
“Okay, okay, shut up.” It rubbed its forehead in a disingenuously human expression of exasperation. “Shut up before I strap a bomb to my belt and start sprinting towards the reactor room. Cegorach, this is probably the only place I’ve been where middle management is more fun than the workers. Alright, since you want to talk business, let’s talk business.”
“What business can I have with you?”
The xeno took a deep bow. “My name is Yvranuel, Rilletann of the Masque of Weeping Blades and liaison to your Archmagos. I have my quarters down here, in the bowels of the ship, to avoid the attention of your more… puritanical brethren.”
“Weeping Blades… So you’re the ones I’ve been hearing about lately. You appear out of nowhere to help out our Skitarii in an ambush or warn an Explorator about a trap, and then run away just as quickly.”
“Like now, though my presence here is a fair bit more permanent. Not a lot of places to run to in the void of space, after all.”
“Nuisance is all you are. Nuisance and vermin.”
“Come, now. These vermin have saved more campaigns for you than your ruling robes would like to admit. Why all the hate? Margorach kill your brother or something?”
“I don’t hate! Hate is a flesh-vice!”
The harlequin only cocked an eyebrow in response.
“Okay, I do hate you. But it’s not that alone! I know you harlequin types. There’s no such thing as friendship with you. You’re always looking for the next opportunity for a, in your own fleshling terms, ‘hilarious’ betrayal.”
“Had some run-ins with dark troupes, I see. Well, lucky for you, I am a light trouper.” She absently pirouetted on the spot, knocking over a variety of sensitive instruments. “What your kind would call a kind-hearted and gentle heroine, I suppose.”
“Oh, that clears it right up! I don’t know why I ever doubted you!” Galiel spread her arms in a mock embrace.
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Either the xeno did not understand human sarcasm, or was ignorant out of spite, because it actually sprang up and hugged her in a vice grip. Her taut muscles were almost as hard as some of the plasteel in her augmetics. “See? I told you we’d be best friends.”
Galiel could only respond with a huff of indignant static as she replaced her axe in its perch. At least for the immediate future, she did not seem to be a threat. “Why are you here… Yvranuel?”
“Glad you asked. Aldren knows we black library types are real nerds, so when he heard that the research was running into some bottlenecks, he asked me if I could take a look. Being the benevolent queen I am, I agreed.”
“He asked you?”
“Okay, he showed me a report in passing and I took it upon myself to help.”
“He showed you?”
“Okay, fine, I skimmed it off an unguarded terminal while the adept wasn’t looking and sent him an offer to help.”
“And?”
“He hasn’t responded to it yet. Or seen it, for that matter. You Techpriests have a real ghosting problem.” She crossed her arms and huffed. “Look, if you’re such a great detective, how come you haven’t made a breakthrough yet?”
“I was merely asking non-deductive questions, but I will accept your praise all the same.” She gestured at the half-disassembled spinehugger in containment. “Well, if you’re really here to help, what do you think?”
“Oooh!” She pressed her face against the class, peering at the still-twitching insectoid legs. “Looks like a bug.”
“An astute observation. Perhaps something less… superficial?”
“You want to call me stupid, just say it. But these designs are similar to what I’ve read of some Necron equipment.”
Galiel stormed to her side. “So these are not human?”
“Oh, no, definitely human. Crypteks don’t do work this sloppy—err, unoptimized.”
“Excuse me?”
“Point being that it’s only similar. Your… spinehuggers are a lot like their mindshackle scarabs in their shape and operation. But these work through suggestion rather than outright subjugation.”
“So you suggest Necron influence?”
“Or…” She rolled her fingers. “Convergent design paths.”
“Why would holy, Omnissiah-sanctioned engineering cross paths with unholy xenotech?”
“Why would a Techpriest collaborate willingly with a Necron? Both are strange, though one more than the other, and yet both have happened.”
Galiel’s vestigial eyebrow muscles registered an impulse to rise. Maybe the xeno was, indeed, smarter than she let on.
“Interesting trivia, but what use is it to me?”
“The use, little lady, is that you ought to be gentler with the dissection. Much, much, much gentler. Necron-derived security systems are sensitive in the same way oceans are puddles.” Yvranuel hit the manual override control for the chamber’s effector arrays and set to work. Her fine motor skills rivalled those of the finest Genetor micro-implantation specialists. Slender fingers danced across the controls to some unknowable rhythm as lasers and pincers avoided all traps effortlessly. Perhaps unbeknownst to even herself, she had initiated the humming of some sort of musical arrangement: its sonic patterns were rich and complex, beyond the capabilities of all but the most well-trained flesh-voices among humans.
Her own vox synthesizer, of course, could perfectly recreate any sound wave added to its library. No flesh, let alone impure alien flesh, could overcome the indisputable perfection of the machine. Despite that, she found herself in some sort of trance as she observed her fluid movements. Digi-render engines in her neuro-processors came to life, mapping the harlequin’s hands and parsing the input for haptic optimization algorithms. The efficiency and purpose was apparent behind every twitch. Truly fascinating. Though it pained her to admit it, Galiel could not reject data and knowledge where she found it.
The Sixth Mystery. Understanding is the True Path to Comprehension.
“Sorry, darling, not desperate enough to bone mon’keigh just yet.” The xeno had not taken her eyes off the control panel.
“What?”
“You were staring.”
“I was analysing.”
“Call it what you will. I prefer ‘ogling’, personally.”
“I was not— I will not waste my processing cycles on argument with the alien. Have your ministrations yielded results, or do you only look like you know what you are doing?”
“So I look like I know what I’m doing.” She fiddled with another control interface, guiding a fine manipulator arm down towards the newly extracted processing core of the spinehugger. “There you go, one intact data-core. Ready for your praise. Any time now…”
If her teeth had not been augmented with grinding plates, Galiel would have worn them down to stubs in the last few minutes. “Satisfactory work, xeno.”
“You know what? I’ll take it.” She led the micro-tendrils on the arm to lift the processor and deposit it in the outlet slot with surprising gentleness. “And let it never be said that the Weeping Blades didn’t do enough to win the hearts and minds of their friends.”
“Before you stab them in both and guzzle the soup through our ears.” Galiel whispered an admonishment to ward against xeno tech-sorcery as she scooped the small cogitation matrix up in one of her manipulators and deposited it in the room’s invasive augury complex: an armoured chamber lit in threatening orange floodlights and surrounded by all sides by sophisticated sensorium arrays, pict-capture devices, and augurs tuned to every spectrum imaginable.
“Well, what do you know? The Techpriest can make a joke.”
Hair-thin wires descended from unseen slots in the machine, undergoing conformational changes to interface the core’s systems with banks of analysis cogitators in the bowels of the ship. Over the next few standard chrono-units, its high-powered diagnostics wetware would glean everything she could ever need to know about the device. And where it failed, the uplink with Xenologis analysis clades would succeed.
“You have delivered a great deal of sacred data into my hands, xeno. The Omnissiah is doubtlessly pleased with your service. Maybe after your mercifully quick death, you will find deliverance in his embrace and be reincarnated in the blessed human form.”
“Right. How about I take you up on that offer a little later? More importantly…” Yvranuel pointed at the other specimens, safely sequestered in their cells. “Are they supposed to be doing that?”
“I do not see what is amiss—”
Her optical arrays picked up the faintest of deviations. The cells were vibrating: imperceptibly for now, but at a rate that was growing exponentially. Inside, the spinehuggers, chattering and attacking the walls of their confinement mere minutes ago, were completely silent and still. As if concentrating.
Galiel frowned. “They have never done that before.”
“Gathered as much from your shocked expression. Well, whatever’s left of an expression under all that metal. Should I smash ‘em with a mallet? You got a mallet?”
“No, the containment chamber will hold. It is of no concern.”
“It isn’t?”
“This material was built to contain far greater threats. These things cannot muster enough force to cause a structural breakdown. No permutation of data allows for it.”
The harlequin extended a nonchalant finger towards the captive specimens. “Right, so those cracks are not a problem.”
Cracks. Rapidly spreading stress fractures all over the surfaces, distorting the transparent view of the interior. The cells were vibrating more and more insistently, now visibly shaking in place. Fastening mechanisms strained to break free from the vault supports.
Vibrations. Sonic weaponry. Containment breach.
Galiel fed power to her augmitter, letting her voice go as high as it would as she switched to binharic. “All armed servitors, enact—”
With a terrible sound, the glass shattered. Shards flew everywhere: some embedded themselves in the walls, some tore right through instruments, and others bounced off edges with ominous tinkling. Yvranuel was gone in a blink, hiding from the onslaught under one of the many sturdy metal tables. Galiel activated her lone protectiva, letting the shrapnel bounce off. It would require recharge later. If only she had the regenerative impact libraries from the Technicus Clearance Secundus data-dump. Curse her Tertius-Tertius peasantry.
“Enact sanitization protocols,” she intoned, letting the binharic undertones suffuse the servitors with life.
They immediately opened fire on the harlequin. The xeno yelped as she dodged the hellscape of bullets, shimmering like a desert mirage between firing arcs while cursing in what she could only assume was the xeno’s native tongue.
“No!” Galiel cast her consciousness out, overriding their IFF routines to mark her a conditional friendly. “The spinehuggers! Not her, the spinehuggers!”
“This unit does not parse ‘spinehugger’,” one of the gun platforms chimed, its auto-senses roving for targets. “Please advise.”
It would have been simple to just issue a general sanitization command again. She devoted her vox-grille to a steadily complicated string of curses, simultaneously constructing a Noospheric tag containing the revised targeting data along with a name-association request.
“Those spinehuggers! Shoot, for the Machine God’s sake!”
“Acknowledged.” With a roar, the guns started again, this time mercifully targeting the scores of critters crawling towards any open orifice they could detect.
A utility servitor chimed in the corner, boosting its augmitters to be heard above the din. “Blessed one, for future reference, might this unit suggest a general sanitization command?”
“Yeah, sure, rub it in, you useless tin can.” She swiped at one of the bugs with her axe. The few armed mechadendrites she had were doing most of the work anyway.
“Apologies for any offence caused.” As disgustingly saccharine as ever. She would have to downregulate the formality controls on these servitors.
More of the las and bullets went stray, demolishing painstakingly crafted equipment. The augury chamber slammed its shutters down. It would be fine, but the Purgatus requisition officer would suffer a million buffer overflows when she sent in the paperwork for the rest. Nevertheless, the escaped spinehuggers were slowly but surely wiped with extreme prejudice, until her auspexes showed no xenotech signatures active.
The servitors slumped against the wall, cryo-shunts hissing as they struggled to vent waste heat from combat acceleration rites. Ammunition feeder-tubes snaked down from ceiling-mounted shrines, slotting into ports to refill magazines and capacitors alike. Small automata crawled over their body, closing stress injuries and injecting supplements.
Yvranuel finally peeked out from under the table, wincing as a shattered piece of equipment hit the ground with a ping. The sound was disturbingly similar to that of a spent bolter shell. “Is it over?”
“No thanks to you.” Galiel leaned against her former workstation, letting garbage-collection djinns remove waste data from the inefficient battle-engine code execution.
“How does Val tolerate this much corruption in his data-cubes day in and day out?”
Well, he was never much for neatness to begin with. She still remembered the first time he had let her clean out his machinator array. The smell alone was permanently burned into her sensor history. Getting him to his current point of not-a-grease-monkey alone was a legitimate miracle.
“I was cheering you on!” She mimicked a traditional pose adopted by professional cheering squads in some sporting events. “G-A-L-E-A-L! Galiel!”
“That… That isn’t even the correct spelling.” Abbreviations in speech. Great. The supervisors would have her head at the next dissertation.
“It’s the thought that counts.”
The door to the Laboratorium opened with a hiss of environmental controls. What crouched through the doorway towered to a size beyond that of Archmagos Cawl’s new angels: stacked slabs of gene-bulked flesh bound by armour-like skin that perturbed bolter rounds. Augmented flesh intersected with sanctified steel: armour plating, sensoriums, integrated weaponry, mechadendrites. All micro-etched with runes of warding and devotional litanies. Purity seals with potent blessings were affixed on all graft-ports, interfaces, and system peripherals, proclaiming the Machine God’s glory. Hundreds of tiny optics swivelled across the room, taking in the scenery. Invisible electric arcs ran across the cool metal of its shaved head, improved auditory ports, and electoo iconography: an integrated voltagheist field. How the Archmagos had managed to pry that from the jealous Electropriests, she could only speculate.
Galiel recognized this beast, of course. Omega-31111, or rather, one of his six bodies. The storied Skitarii Praetorian who was in charge of the Dominus’ security. Logis Cythidon’s crowning gift to his master, colleague, and, the rumours would have it, close friend. The giant’s grip tightened on his massive archeotech rifle. No one was quite sure of what it did; any who had seen him fire it were either sworn to secrecy or dead.
Despite his implacable expression, he must have been appropriately bemused, because he elected to use a deep synthesized flesh-voice, rather than bleed or private vox. “Archmagos, I think you should see this.”
The suitably intricate void-form of his master charged through the doorway, initially not noticing the carnage. “I do not appreciate this tardiness, Omega. In any case, Enginseer Galiel Tunakha, I require—”
He stopped dead. “I— I demand an—” Legends stated that the last time this deep a sigh was heard from him was during the infamous Manufactorum 91XA chain explosion incident. “Okay, I’ll bite. Just what the fuck is this now?”
“Told you,” Omega-31111 rumbled.
His eyes fell on the harlequin. “Yvranuel?”
The Eldar bounced on the heels of her feet, swinging her arms in an unconvincing display of nonchalance. “Oh, um… I was making out with the Techpriest and we knocked everything over!”
Galiel turned with so much violence that static discharge ran across her mechadendrites. “What?”
She shrugged. “Would have been easier to explain.”
The Archmagos sighed. “Alright, that’s it. Omega, deboard her, please.”
“My pleasure, lord.” The Praetorian lumbered forward. “Alright, to the airlock with you, waste of space.”
“No, wait!” She danced away from the deceptively quick arms of the Skitarius. “Something really weird happened!”
“Really? And what’s that?”
“Uh, it’s… really important, I promise.” She somersaulted behind Galiel, pushing her forward. “Your Enginseer here will explain.”
“Right.” She sighed. “The spinehuggers, Archmagos. They just demonstrated adaptive capabilities. Physical and epistemological. They utilized a zero-day vulnerability I just discovered in the containment chambers to breach their quarantine. These things are not as pre-programmed as previously hypothesized. The aptitude for machine learning borders on… on…”
“Abominable intelligence. Has this vulnerability been corrected?”
“I have dispatched a report to the fabricators, my lord. The next generation will be free of this embarrassing fault. However, we seem to have run out of specimens.”
“Oh, that will not be a problem for long, Enginseer.”
She snapped her optical shutters open and shut. “Sir?”
“A cursory glance at this scene tells me you lack any real combat experience. You see only with your sensors, and neglect your bare optics feed.”
“I do not—”
“Of course you do not understand.” The Archmagos walked over to a corner of the room and pointed with a manipulator at the ground. A thin glowing trail of green led into the air vent. “You yourself have arrived at the hypothesis, now approaching a theory, that these xenotech devices—”
“Spinehuggers.”
“Clarify.”
“Their informal designation, sir.”
Another sigh. “These spinehuggers learn from their environments. And since a certain someone” —his optics glanced for a moment at Yvranuel—“is behind a missing Cog Obscurus and may have possibly brought it into this room, as the Noospheric trails augur, is it really too big a leap of logic that this little one fooled your auspexes?”
Shit.
“Then—”
“Then, Enginseer Tunakha, you have just unleashed a ‘spinehugger’ into the Purgatus menial quarters. I have already given orders to quarantine the habitats, but if this thing is not found…”
“I accept all responsibility, Archmagos.”
“Yes, a lot of good that will do us. In either case, finish your report and immediately communicate it to the Adepts Majoris servers. I will call a meeting, and I expect your input there. Do not be late. Other matters demand my attention for now. Go in the Omnissiah’s light, Galiel Tunakha, while you still walk within it.”
Then the venerable war-priest turned his attention away, her existence already forgotten. Like a planet dipping into an eclipse, she stood like a statue, starved of life-giving favour. Her organs felt like they had been hit by a graviton weapon, sinking ever-deeper into the recesses of her guilt.
A lithe hand squeezed her shoulder.
“We’ll find it, don’t worry,” Yvranuel breathed directly into her auditory sensors.
But her attentions were elsewhere. Starved for one look, a single acknowledgement, from the god who had finally seen fit to appear before her. Only to denounce her for blasphemy.
For now, the Archmagos only had one thing to say. Not to her, but to his vox.
“What is the orkoid assault situation? Then, my dear brother in the Machine God’s light, speed up the damned landings!”