Ekur of the cohort Tkalal, senior subjugator-librarian for the sixteenth dactyl of the third limb, oversees a Carryx expedition to subjugate Ayayeh. Initial intelligence describes the local hexapods, the Eelie, as a simple, pack-based species living amid a planetwide “world-song,” and the dactyl begins its standard conquest and cull.

Once forces land, the operation collapses into confusion: multiple assault groups suffer catastrophic losses or vanish outright. The subjugator-prime reports a shocking discovery—captured “Eelie” are not native at all but manufactured organisms designed to mimic an indigenous species. Ekur-Tkalal orders an immediate withdrawal while the drone grid exterminates what remains on the surface, recognizing the invasion as a trap meant to fix the Carryx in place.

Ekur-Tkalal searches the system and finds three rifts opening in space. Thirty enemy ships emerge, matching prior hostile contacts with a few new signatures, and the dactyl prepares for a prolonged void battle without guidance from higher command. Ekur-Tkalal sends a message casing to the third limb by overwriting a low-status Sinen with a strategic half-mind, knowing help will be slow or nonexistent.

Over the next three weeks, the fighting turns grinding and costly. A Carryx ship is destroyed in close combat as seemingly “deathless” enemy boarders flow through its corridors, but the explosion drives hundreds of enemy into escape pods that the Carryx capture with void tendrils and magnetic nets. Enemy ships try to erase their own survivors rather than allow subjugation, and engagements continue with mines, ambushes, and mutual losses as Ekur-Tkalal records behavioral patterns.

When a message finally arrives bearing authority from the empire’s center, Ekur-Tkalal receives new orders: stop trying to win locally and instead provoke, observe, and preserve data for the larger war. Ekur-Tkalal directs the prime to distribute soldiers and animals to sacrificial actions, while Ekur-Tkalal departs with minimal crew and the captured enemy, leaving the rest of the dactyl to continue fighting—or die—so the empire can learn.