implant could detect it. How pitiful, that even this temporary separation has become painful. It is humiliating! But her inner self does not care. It does not know that the little one is…what she is. It is blissfully and single-mindedly unaware that this little one could never become a Daughter. The lower regions of her brain produce hormones because that is their function, because no amount of intellectual control can scale that back, because instinct always knows more than the consciousness that strives to control it.
[You appear to be quite attached], says Shokyu the Mighty in her mind.
Shenya the Widow waits a moment before responding, the better to bring her physiology under control. [Perhaps], she concedes. [She has become…like a Daughter to me.] She emphasizes the fact that this is a comparison, not reality, but even thinking the word is difficult.
Because she will never be your Daughter, says her mother’s voice.
[But she’s not a Daughter], says her implant. [Is she?]
Shenya the Widow does not answer, because she cannot. She would never admit to her implant the destruction its words sometimes leave in their wake. Goddess below, she would almost prefer a blade through the mouth to a confession to a sub-legal intelligence. Instead she catches its words, bundles them up, stores them with the ones that others have given her. She cannot hurl them from her mind, but she can use them. She can turn them into anger—yes, like that—and once again she is in control of herself.
[We go through this every mission], says her implant. [You always get attached to something.]
Still Shenya the Widow says nothing. But anger always seeks a target, and hers has found one. Is it not astonishing that her implant can know so much and yet so little? Yes, it knows that she is often lonely. Yes, it has watched her occasionally collect living things for use as company on these long voyages. But look at its conclusion! It betrays such a fundamental misunderstanding. Her implant thinks she is looking for a pet. It does not understand what happens to a Widow’s body and mind when it is time for her to become a Mother. It does not know the force of the instinct that now propels her, the extent to which her body betrays her. And it never will, because it can never experience these things itself.
Nor can the Human, says her mother’s voice. She cannot be a Daughter.
Shenya the Widow does not scream, but it is a near thing. She gazes at the closed cargo bay, wherein her tiny little one is surely murmuring her war song and carefully choosing the shiniest red bar. She can almost see her lifting one after another, rejecting this one for a bent corner and that one for being crinkled. It must be perfect. Her implant does not understand that Shenya the Widow would take this little one as a Daughter in eight heartbeats if she were not…what she is. It cannot understand! But then, Shenya the Widow owes an explanation to no one, least of all the sub-legal intelligence who happens to inhabit her Network implant.
[We are only eight days from Network space], says Shokyu the Mighty.
Shenya the Widow glares at the closed hatch, ignoring the voice of her mother in her mind, as her fury grows. Careful, little idiot. You know not what you provoke.
[Those could be eight days of carefree daydreams, or they could be eight days of suffering], continues Shokyu the Mighty. The next message is pure emotion: gentleness, softness, understanding…and it is infuriating. As if it could manipulate Shenya the Widow! [You have already removed the essential memories; that was not difficult, was it?] soothes her implant. [So what is three and a half years more?] And now the messages grow stronger. [It will happen as it has happened before. You will wake to an alien in your ship. You will not love it. You will realize the truth: that this little thing could never wear a Widow title.]
Words do not rise in the mind of Shenya the Widow, but emotions do. A storm is gathering around Shokyu the Mighty. When her implant is silent, it thinks wrong things. When it speaks, it says wrong things. Its wisdom is that of an outsider, and a low-tier one at that. And yet listen to it lecture her! Her anger burns cold as she draws a clinking blade across the deep grooves on her carapace. They are her scars, the ones she