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Shuos Atleen wished she understood the hexarch's orders, but at least she appreciated them. It didn't take a sociologist to realize that exterminating a minority to punish a general would have unpleasant consequences later, like other similarly-small minorities deciding as well be hung for real heresy as for motivational videos. Preserving a handful of the Mwennin was satisfying, even if Mikodez probably had something bizarre in mind, because Atleen had survived this long as a Shuos (not to mention as a mother of three children) by having contingency plans. Being selected to do some of that preservation by Shuos Zehun themselves was gratifying, too.
She'd already escorted an elderly woman to a waiting shuttle (Tseidzi Rrei had been chosen for extraction because she looked uncannily like Atleen's four-decades-older twin and Atleen had predicted, correctly as it happened, that she'd be willing to pretend to be one of Atleen's mother's wives) and now she was hanging around looking for opportunities. (Mwennin-related or not; Atleen lived in the Ausser March herself and what happened on Bonepyre was going to resonate on the march's other worlds, count on it.)
Then she saw an exhausted-looking Vidona guarding a line of Mwennin in drab brown tunics. For a Vidona to look so weary was unusual, but the line was long - then Atleen realized the line contained three pregnant women, and after a little observation realized how effective the Mwennin women were at quiet resistance. The man had no experience with anyone carrying fetuses, didn't know which of their many and varied requests were reasonable, but couldn't ignore them all; the Mwennin needed to survive until torture, especially since tomorrow was the Celebration of Grove's Engulfing and tomorrow's remembrance alone would probably use up a dozen at once.
Atleen had an idea.
She marched on up to the Vidona, stopping just out of arm's reach. "Afternoon," she said, politely, rearranging her jacket so the moth with nine eyes on each wing was visible. "Is your superior available?"
"What do you need, Shuos?" the Vidona asked. This close, Atleen could see the stingray spines stuck through the bun in the man's blue-black hair, and smell the vomit left on his shoes by one of his charges.
"I have a proposal for them," Atleen said, and when a flicker of curiosity peeked through the Vidona's weariness, added, "Did you know heretics often refuse to use a creche?"
"Probably figure they'd be refused permission," the man agreed, disgustedly.
"The presence of fetuses affects some equations," Atleen went on, looking for the curiosity to turn to alarm in the man's eyes. Right on time, it did, though at least he was disciplined enough not to glance at the three women.
"Do you have addenda to submit, Shuos?" he asked, seeming to finally take in the fact that she was publicly seconded to the Nirai.
"Better than addenda," she replied. "I need test subjects, you have three, and with a proscribed population the paperwork's a lot simpler."
"I'll have to get permission," he said, with just the right amount of hesitation - good, he'd already tried to dispose of the three women early and been refused, then.
"Let me call my supervisor," Atleen suggested.
Nirai Eriop had been assigned a Shuos for two reasons: firstly, they were hopeless at getting paperwork filed at all, never mind on time, and secondly, Nirai Eriop's field of interest was agricultural creches, and for whatever reason agricultural creche research drew assassination attempts. Keeping the bureaucracy content and in the background was almost as vital as keeping Eriop alive, and Atleen had been doing both for twelve years now, not to mention managing a small Nirai staff and working on mathematical fancies of her own. That dozen years of cooperation meant Eriop was quite willing to go along with one of Atleen's whims, especially if it sounded like it'd result in either an entertaining story or an instructive lecture for the younger Nirai, and it took all of two minutes to convince Eriop to agree to request assistance from Vidona Kej, without having to give them any details first.
Half an hour later, Kej was signing over the three women to her custody, along with three sets of unpleasantly-cartilaginous, illusorily-slimy shackles. "I'll have these sent back to you," Atleen said cheerfully, and led her charges away to, not the Shuos shuttle that Tseidzi Rrei had used under a pseudonym ("She's been stranded here for almost forty hours and my mother is furious," Atleen had insisted, becoming more and more publicly shrill, to the amusement of the Shuos officer who knew perfectly well who Tseidzi Rrei was and why the drama was necessary) but the waiting hopper that Atleen herself had planned to use for her own departure.
The moment the door hissed closed, Atleen took off the shackles, shuddering a bit at the feel of them. "All right," she said. "I don't have a bathroom on board but we'll be on the boxmoth in about ten minutes." There was no word for a human currently bearing a fetus in the high language, and it felt crass to say 'mid-spawning', so she used the Mwennin word, "Pirinyat does affect calculations, but as far as I know only the ones upon which a non-standard creche relies, and eight months was plenty of time for testing when I was personally self-pirinyat. You're not going to be lab rats."
"Personally?" one of the women asked, the one Atleen suspected of having deliberately vomited onto both of the Vidona's shoes.
"Two of my children were creche-born, but the third was natural-born," Atleen said, closing the box with the shackles in it and fastening the restraints on her own jumpseat. "Actually she was my second-born - I wanted to carry a child for both of my husbands, but I needed to have my thyroid excised and regrown after Xoyan was born, and…"
That was apparently enough to convince Atleen's Mwennin guests that she had once genuinely been self-pirinyat, and the ten minutes passed quickly. Atleen congratulated herself on bringing back at least four and potentially seven Mwennin, rather than the two she'd hoped for. She wouldn't be working for Nirai Eriop forever, after all - if nothing else, the Nirai was eighty-two years old and even if they never retired or got assassinated they'd die eventually - and demonstrating initiative was always good, even if Mikodez wasn't still hexarch by that time. (He'd survived forty years so far. He probably would be.)
"Why are the Shuos doing this? Or is it the Nirai?" one of the Mwennin asked, as the sixty-seconds-to-docking alarm sounded.
"Shuos Mikodez wanted some Mwennin not to be executed," Atleen said, as casually as she could.
"Why not the entire line, then?" the shoe-defiler asked, less worried-sounding and more hostile.
"I had already retrieved the single person I was sent to extract from the City of Grackles' Delight," Atleen replied, forcing herself not to match the woman's tone of voice, "and my orders were to retrieve at most one more if practical before I left Bonepyre entirely. I should just have left - but I knew I could convincingly talk about altering equations for longer than any Vidona would ever want to hear about, which reminds me, are any of you with twins?" Two of the women gestured no, one shrugged, and Atleen continued, "My hexarch appreciates initiative and audacity, if and only if the audacious use of initiative is successful. It was worth it."
She hesitated, then said, "And I remember Xoyan tap-dancing on my bladder and headbutting my spleen," letting her voice carry the disappointment she'd felt at needing to have her youngest child be creche-born. The best emotional manipulation came from genuinely-felt emotion, after all.
The hopper docked in silence.
"I'm not in charge of getting any of you to a refuge," Atleen said, as the door opened, "and I can't guarantee you'll stay together. Probably you won't. Pirinyat is rare enough; three themselves-pirinyat women together would attract too much notice. But that decision won't be made on the moth."
A lizardform servitor peered inside the open door of the hopper. Atleen used her augment to ask the mothgrid to ask the servitor to take the three Mwennin to a room large enough for all of them. The servitor bobbed its narrow head in an approximation of a nod, stood up on its hind limbs, and gestured ahead of itself in an 'after you' sort of gesture.
"Follow the servitor," Atleen said, when her guests hesitated.
They did.
Atleen stayed behind in the hopper for a moment before shaking her head and climbing out. It was a pity that none of this would be suitable for an instructive lecture or an enjoyable story, at least not for a couple decades; she'd have to find some other way to compensate Eriop.