"That," said Olli, "was just about the most ######-up thing I ever saw."

Kittering, at her back on the swaying howdah they were travelling on, made a brief ticking sound that was probably agreement.  His translator was currently trying to wrestle with a new software patch that let him speak to certain local species in their own language about two times out of three.  His ability to chat in Colvul had degraded commensurately.

"I mean, is this a regular occurrence, in this gig?"  Olli went on.  She was strapped into her walking frame, which was clinging to the howdah's soft, organic floor with most of its legs, but she spared one to prod the woman beside her.  As always, jabbing a Tothiat felt more like poking a wall than a person.  Heremon didn't say anything, and neither did the segmented lobster-thing that ran down her spine and was, apparently, also Heremon.  The whole Tothiat entity gave Olli the creeps, but right now she was on a very alien world within a very alien polity, and at least Heremon looked human and could do normal speech and expressions and so on.

She'd half expected to be offered the Tothiat treatment herself, when they'd come here to the world of Desecrat.  She was currently amongst the favourites of an Essiel crime lord and/or fallen angel, depending on exactly how you translated the Hegemonic concepts to a human level.  And being a Tothiat was apparently a living hell of constant and formative pain that also made you the next best thing to immortal.  Which was what Aklu the Unspeakable, the Razor and the Hook, looked for in its lieutenants.  Olli had met three of them so far, two of whom had not (she considered smugly) survived the experience.  Admittedly in one case she'd had nothing whatsoever to do with it, but right now she was in a strange and hostile place and she'd take her confidence boosters where she could.

But nobody had offered to graft an alien lobster-wasp onto her to make her immortal, and she wasn't sure whether to be relieved or insulted by that. Given she'd been born without most of the standard human complement of limbs, she also wasn't sure what the symbiont would have made of her.  Probably, the thing would have considered the business a bit of a raw deal, she thought sourly.  Plus its intrusion would doubtless have robbed her of her knack of getting inside drones and other remotes, which was what actually made her useful to anyone.  So overall she should come down heavily on the "relieved" side of the equation, but it was still a bit galling not to be asked.