Hunted

1 GOING TO A PARTY

The first day of the flight, I was so happy to be heading home that I went to Willow’s cafeteria for supper with the crew… and it seemed as if every woman on the starship wanted me to try the Angoddi mushrooms, or did I listen to razzah poetry, or would I like a look at the engine-room service tunnels when the next shift was over?

I’d forgotten how bored folks get on long tours of duty. Bored with their jobs, bored with each other. One glimpse of a new face, and people go into feeding frenzy. Or breeding frenzy. Maybe I should have been flattered, but all that eager attention sort of got me terrified — I’d been stuck on a three-person moonbase for twenty whole years, so I felt way out of my depth when a dozen women wanted to make conversation with me.

"You’re so cute for an Explorer!"

"And you don’t smell bad!"

"Do you have a funny voice? I bet you have a funny voice. Say something."

"Um," I said. "Um."

"Look, he’s shy!" One of the women giggled. "Can they stick you in the Explorer Corps just because you’re shy? With a guy this built, I could cure his shyness real fast. Overnight!"

"He must be one of the new Explorers," another woman said. "The volunteers. The ones who don’t have anything wrong with them."

"Anyone who volunteers to be an Explorer has something wrong with them. Him. Whatever." A bald-headed woman laid both hands on my wrist and stared straight into my eyes. "Come on, handsome, you can be honest with us. You’re an Explorer, and Explorers are never normal. What’s wrong with you?"

I took a deep breath and told them all, "I’m stupid, okay? I’m stupid." Then I went back to my cabin and locked myself in.

The whole next day I kept getting comm-messages saying, "Sorry," or "We were just teasing," or "That invitation is still on for getting together in the service tunnels." Three women actually came to apologize at my door… and later, a man who said, "The women here are such bitches, aren’t they? Forget ’em. Why don’t you come down to my cabin for some sudsy VR?" I said thanks anyway, but maybe another time. After that, when somebody knocked I pretended I wasn’t home.

Just before noon on the third day, I got another visitor… and the peep-monitor showed it was a woman wearing an admiral’s gray uniform. I couldn’t very well keep an admiral shut out, so I ran my fingers through my hair, then told the door to open.

The admiral woman was short and brown and young, with a big purply blotch on her cheek; I couldn’t tell what the blotch was, and didn’t know if I was supposed to compliment it or pretend it didn’t exist. My twin sister Samantha used to yell at me, "Edward, when you see a woman has done something special with her face, for God’s sake say she looks pretty." It was easy to tell Sam she looked pretty, because she was always as beautiful as sunshine on a lake. With other women though, either I sat there tongue-tied, or I’d try a compliment and the woman would just stare at me… like maybe I was trying to be funny or something. I sure didn’t want an admiral to think I was making fun of her face; so I just ignored her blotchy cheek and gave her my best salute.

It’s hard to go wrong saluting. Especially with an admiral. The woman at my door introduced herself as Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos, and said I had to come to the party. "What party?" I asked. Back when Samantha and I had been on active duty, I couldn’t remember navy starships ever having parties. At least, none that I’d been invited to.

"We’re crossing the line in fifteen minutes," the admiral woman said. "You should be there."

I didn’t know what she meant, crossing the line; I was pretty sure there were no lines in outer space. When I said that, she laughed and pinched my cheek. "You’re an angel." Then she took me by the arm and leaned against me all warm and a bit perfumed while she led me to the Willow’s recreation lounge.

The perfume was in her hair.

I wasn’t so used to having perfumey women take me by the arm. Part of it was just being away from human things for so long — what with escorting Samantha on her big diplomatic mission, then the long awful time after, it’d been a whole thirty-five years since I’d gone out in human company. (That made me middle-aged, I guess: fifty-seven… though with YouthBoost treatments, I hadn’t changed a whit since my twenties.)

But even when I was a teenager on New Earth, I didn’t spend much time with women. My father didn’t like me being seen by anyone off our estate. Dad was rich and important — Alexander York, Admiral of the Gold in the Outward Fleet — and he treated me like a big smeary stain on his personal reputation. Even though it wasn’t my fault.

Back before I was born, Dad paid a doctor lots of money to make my sister and me more perfect than perfect: athletic and dazzling and smart, smart, smart. It didn’t matter that gene engineering was illegal in the Technocracy — my father went to an independent world where the laws were different… or where the police were cheaper to buy off.

The gene-splicing worked real well for Samantha, but with me it only did part of the job. I can do hundreds of push-ups without stopping, and Sam always called me devilishly handsome, but my brain chemistry didn’t come out so good. Too much of some things, too little of others. So Dad kept me at home for fear his "retarded idiot son" would embarrass him in public.

I didn’t mind so much. He kept Samantha at home too, with all kinds of private tutors. Sam became my private tutor, so it worked out pretty well. She taught me to be polite and brave and honest, and to think really hard about being good to people. Later, when we were teenagers, she’d take me on pretend-dates so I wouldn’t feel left out: to the gazebo on the south lawn near the reflecting pool, where we’d dance and dance and dance.

Sometimes I wished I had someone else to dance with — someone who liked me, who wasn’t my twin sister. But I never said that to Sam; I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

On our way to the party, the perfumey admiral woman explained that "crossing the line" meant leaving the Troyen star system for interstellar space. It was a big moment in any starship flight, the point where you cross out of your starting system… because the League of Peoples has a law, if you’ve been a bad person, you aren’t allowed to go from one star system to another. If you try it, they kill you. Not messily or anything like that — you just die the second you leave the system where you did the bad things. It’s like magic; except that there is no magic, just superadvanced science from races millions of years older than us humans. To the League, we were as stupid as worms on a plate, and no matter how smart we thought we were, the League was a billion times smarter. No one ever fooled them.

Samantha told me the same thing years ago. "Edward, if you ever do something really awful, you’d better stay put after that. Don’t go running off into space, thinking you can just sneak away without anyone knowing; because the League always knows. Always." I’d followed my sister’s advice ever since… till now.

Now I was headed for a party to celebrate leaving the Troyen system. If it weren’t for the admiral pulling me along with her, I might have gone back to my cabin and tried not to cry.

The lounge was decked out like one of those old masquerade carnivals in Venice or Rome — all the walls set to starry night, with fountains and cobblestones and fancy bridges over canals that stretched far back into the distance. Now and then, the moving pictures showed people in masks and patchwork costumes, running through the streets with torches or gathering in courtyards for medieval dances.

Very pretty and classical. Unlike the real party.

Nearly everybody in Willow’s crew was there… and they sure weren’t acting like sober navy personnel. Only the woman and I were in uniform, her in admiral’s gray, me in Explorer Corps black. The rest were all costumed up, either in strange clothes or body paints or holo-surrounds. I couldn’t tell what half of them were supposed to be — like the man just inside the door, wearing pink-silk pajamas and a big putty nose. He gave me a sloppy wet kiss on the cheek, and said, "Ooo, aren’t you the fetching whelp!"… in a high voice with an odd accent, like he was imitating a character on some broadcast. The woman on my arm laughed, and glanced to see if I’d laugh too; but it’d been so long since I’d seen any shows, I didn’t know why this was supposed to be funny.

After a moment, the admiral woman gave my arm a squeeze, and said, "Come on, angel, relax, okay? You want to dance?"

I hadn’t even realized there was music playing. It was soft as rainfall but tinkly-jangly, with no beat I could make out. "I don’t know how to dance to this," I said. It wasn’t anything like the music Sam and I listened to, back in the darkened gazebo.

"This is just Coy-Grip," the admiral woman told me. "You don’t have to do anything special." Which wasn’t true at all. Apparently, she and I had to wrap our arms tight together in something like a chin na submission hold I’d learned once. (Over the years, Dad’s security guards gave me a heap of free martial-arts training.) I ended up hunched over like a bear, while the woman was practically on tiptoe; but she told me we fitted together perfectly, my shoulders touching hers, our arms all twined around each other, holding hands, our faces very close.

The woman murmured I could move my feet any way I wanted — the dance was the position, not the steps. She started an inch-by-inch shuffle and I followed along, doing my best to match her every motion; I was terrified if I went the wrong direction, I might accidentally snap her thin little wrists. After a few seconds, she gave a twittery laugh and whispered, "Relax, angel, relax. You look like you’re at a funeral."

She gave me a quick kiss on the nose. I could smell wine on her breath: really strong. She must have been partying a fair while before she fetched me from my cabin.

In fact, everyone on the dance floor seemed tipsy. We kept getting bumped by a wobbly slobbery man wearing the holo of an alien species I didn’t recognize — something brown and cockroachy with six of everything, legs, arms, eyes. The man was too drunk to care about staying inside his hologram "costume"… so I could see bare human legs kicking out from the edges of the cockroach image, and once, a hairy human rump.

Yes, it was that kind of party: where people went naked under their holos. Here and there, I could see couples squashed together against the wall. Right in front of me, a larger-than-life holo of a Roman soldier had his breastplate buried in the face of a holo-alien who looked like a walking thistle bush. The two holograms broke into jagged interference patterns where they overlapped each other, so now and then I could see through to the people underneath. It was a nude woman and a nude man; she had her legs scissored around his waist.

In the middle of the day. On a navy ship. And they all had to be crew members, because I was the only passenger.

"Is something wrong here?" I whispered to the woman Coy-Gripping my arms.

"Nothing’s wrong, angel. You’re fucking gorgeous. Relax." She pressed herself harder against me. It had to be hurting her wrists, but she didn’t seem to care.

Maybe she’d been taking more than just wine.

The music stopped. I got ready to untangle myself, but the woman held on tight. "Wait," she whispered. "Wait. It’s time."

"Time for what?"

Before she could answer, a gong sounded over the ship’s speaker system: like a clock bell tolling the hour in some fairy tale. The woman whispered, "It’ll strike thirteen… melodramatic bastards. We cross the line on the last stroke. Hold me till then, angel, would you? Please?"

All around the room, lots of other people were pairing off too — the drunk in the cockroach hologram stumbled up against the man in pink pajamas and they grabbed each other in a tight hug, the drunk’s arms reaching out of the roach’s chest, the pajama man’s head disappearing through the roach’s mandibles. He must have been leaning in to rest his cheek on the drunk’s shoulder.

Gong.

Four seconds of silence.

Gong.

Everyone had stopped talking, but I could hear somebody sniffling back tears. And somebody else praying. And somebody whispering, "Please, please, please…"

Gong.

Then I gasped as someone new came through the door: someone wearing the holo of a Mandasar hive-queen, sulphur yellow, four meters long, built like a four-clawed lobster with a huge brain-hump on her back. Her venom glands were fat and inflamed — days past the time she should have been milked. Even though I could tell it was only a holo, the sight still made me flinch.

Remembering what happened to Samantha.

The man in silk pajamas saw the queen and screamed. He wasn’t the only one: people shouted and wailed all over the room, till a voice inside the queen said, "At ease, damn it, it’s only me."

"Christ Almighty!" the man in pajamas said, pressing a hand against his chest. "You nearly gave us a heart attack, Captain."

"He should have worn something different," whispered the woman in my arms. "He’s the captain; he should know better."

Gong.

"What’s the count?" she asked suddenly.

"I don’t know." My mind had shut down for a moment when I saw the hive-queen. I might have missed a gong or two.

"What’s the count?" my admiral called to the room.

No one answered. Faces looked wildly at each other, some of them going pale… as if no one had kept track of the tolling.

Gong.

"Shit," the woman muttered to no one in particular. Then she looked up into my eyes, and said, "Kiss me. Now."

"What?"

She didn’t answer; she just bent her elbows, twisting my wrists so I was levered down close to her. Pushing up hard on tiptoe, she jammed her mouth against mine. Open. And her tongue swept inside urgently, moving fast, her eyes closed tight.

I closed my eyes too. Feeling strange and fizzy, as if I’d been drinking myself: the taste of the woman who tasted like wine, the touch of her pressing against me. I knew this wasn’t a love kiss, or even a sex kiss — it was fear, pure fear, some awful terror that made her want to be holding someone as tight as her arms and heart could squeeze. Like a little girl who felt better for hugging her brother, when the lightning and thunder rattled outside. I held the woman and let her kiss me as desperately as she wanted, while the clock continued toward thirteen.

Gong.

Gong.

Gong.

Gong.

The woman’s tongue stopped. Her grip on my arms loosened and her lips eased back. When I opened my eyes, I saw her head loll to one side. A string of saliva trailed across the purple-red splotch on her cheek.

Her eyes hadn’t opened.

As I unwrapped myself from the Coy-Grip position, the woman’s weight slumped away from me. Trying to hold her up, I called to the rest of the room, "Can somebody help here? I think…"

But by then, I’d had time to look around.

The man in pink pajamas had fallen on his face. The drunk he’d been holding was on the floor too, lying half-in/half-out of his hologram. The hologram was tilted at an odd angle.

Over against the wall, the soldier and the thistle bush had sagged straight down, still connected to each other. Their holos had gone askew, so that the head of the longest thistle stuck out of the Roman’s back like the hilt of a sword.

People all around the room sprawled limply over the furniture or spread-eagled on the carpet. Even the captain. One of his hands lay on the ground, poking out through the edge of the hive-queen’s shell.

Silence. No more gongs.

We had crossed the line, and the whole crew was dead. Even the woman who called me angel.

It made my eyes sting: that she died kissing a complete stranger.

I laid her body onto the floor as gently as I could. "I’m sorry," I said. "If the League of Peoples wanted to kill someone for being bad…" I looked around the room at the corpses. "Sorry," I told them all. "I thought it would be me."

2 INSPECTING MY COMMAND

I couldn’t think of what to do next, so I just sat down on the floor beside the admiral woman. People look so helpless when they’re dead — like they’re expecting you to make it all better. Any other time, I might have tried CPR to start the woman’s heart again; but it wouldn’t work now. When the League of Peoples kills you, you stay dead.

Dead forever, the woman who kissed me. And everyone else. So quiet: the music had stopped when the gonging began, and now there was no one to tell the sound system, "Resume play." The lounge walls continued to show Italian masqueraders laughing and dancing in feathered masks, but they were just silent pictures. No sound.

No breathing.

You don’t know how much you miss the sound of breathing till it’s not there.

In all that silence, I desperately wanted to do something. Help these poor people. But all I could think of was wiping the little saliva string from the admiral woman’s cheek. So that’s the useless stupid thing I did.

When I looked at my finger, some of the purple splotch had come off on my skin. I rubbed the woman’s face again; the splotch was a waxy sort of makeup she must have put on for the party. Was it the popular fashion now to wear big garish blobs? Or was the admiral woman like the man in pink pajamas, dressed up to imitate somebody I didn’t know?

The woman might not be an admiral at all. Maybe this was just another costume.

I wanted to wash her face: scrub off the gunk so she’d look like herself. Underneath, she might have been pretty. But when people died, you weren’t supposed to touch them. Contact Security and leave the site undisturbed — that’s what they always said in VR stories when things went terribly wrong.

"Ship-soul, attend," I called out… hoping that was still the phrase you used when you wanted to talk to a starship’s central computer. "Can you please call the security officer who’s on watch?"

A sexless metallic voice answered from the ceiling: "There are no security officers available."

Uh-oh.

"Ship-soul," I said, "please connect me with…" Who? The captain? No, he was dead inside the hive-queen. (I avoided looking that direction; even if the queen was just a hologram, she still gave me the jitters.) "Please connect me with the ship’s commanding officer."

"The commanding officer is Explorer Second Class Edward York."

"Me?"

"You are the highest-ranking officer aboard Willow."

I swallowed. "Is anyone else alive at all?"

"No, Captain. Awaiting your instructions."

Nobody had ever put me in charge of anything before. That was fine with me; I knew I wasn’t captain material.

If you want the honest truth, I wasn’t Explorer material either. When Samantha joined the navy’s Diplomatic Corps, she absolutely insisted I go with her on her first assignment. She wanted me for her bodyguard — the only person in the universe she could trust one hundred percent. I figured Dad would make a big fuss, but he gave in almost immediately; Sam knew all the ways to make him say yes, and he never found a single way to tell her no.

Being an admiral and all, Dad pulled strings to slip me around the entrance qualification board and straight into the navy. He didn’t want me going Diplomatic like Sam — Dad had been a diplomat himself before becoming an admiral, and he refused to let me "sully" the Diplomacy Corps’s gold uniform. For a while he was set on me being a Security officer, since the Security Corps was officially in charge of protecting Outward Fleet dignitaries… but that fell through when the senior Security admiral got pissy about Dad forcing "a totally inadequate imbecile" into her command. (The Security admiral had never set eyes on me; I guess she’d heard Dad bad-mouth me for so long, she pictured someone all gibbering and drooling.) Dad tried three more service corps without any luck, then he finally just made me an Explorer. I never went to Explorer Academy — you can’t get past the door there unless you have real brains — but Dad said I’d still fit in just fine with the other Explorers. "None of them are normal either."

I wondered if my father might possibly feel proud of me now, seeing as I’d become a sort of a kind of a captain. No. Not likely. From the day Sam and I were born, she was the precious jewel and me the steaming mound of dog turd. Just look at what happened when things fell apart on Troyen, with the riots and war and all. The surviving diplomats got evacuated all the way back to New Earth, but I only made it as far as a stifling little observation post on Troyen’s larger moon.

Twenty whole years Dad left me stuck there; dumped into exile and isolation. Twenty years without a break, while the other observers got rotated off in six-month shifts. Dad left me on that moonbase like something stuffed into the far back corner of the attic, something he couldn’t get rid of but never wanted to see again.

Because of what had happened to Sam.

Because I hadn’t been a good enough bodyguard.

If Dad found out I’d become acting captain of Willow, he’d probably say, "Get that moron out of there before he wrecks the ship."

It took me a while to learn anything helpful from the ship-soul. I didn’t know which questions to ask, or the keywords real captains used when they wanted a status report. Eventually though, I found out this much: Willow was locked on autopilot, heading toward a navy base near the free planet Celestia. Regulations wouldn’t let the ship dock unless we had a competent human pilot at the helm; but we could hang off at a distance till the base sent over someone who knew how to drive. Barring accidents or breakdowns, I’d be sitting in port within a week.

That wasn’t so bad — nothing for me to do but wait and stay out of trouble.

I decided my one and only order would be to have the ship-soul lower the temperature in the lounge: make it a big walk-in refrigerator. There were dozens of dead people lying around, and I didn’t want them starting to rot.

My first inclination was to sit out the week in my cabin… but soon I couldn’t stand moping there, wallowing all morose. The crazy thing was, I wasn’t really mourning; I was feeling bad for not feeling worse. All those people dead people who’d talked with me and flirted with me, and even one who’d kissed me — but now that they were out of sight, I felt more alone than sad. Pitying my live healthy self rather than all those blank corpses.

What was wrong with me? Shouldn’t I be crying and grieving and all? But the most I could do was touch my lips over and over, like maybe if I remembered the kiss exactly, I would melt into some decent sorrow, the way a normal person would feel.

No. I just felt dull. Deadened and distant and dumb.

After a while, I decided this was no way for a captain to act. A good captain doesn’t hang about sulking, trying to prod himself into emotion; a good captain looks after his ship. Maybe when the crew members died, one of them had left the water running, or a pressure pot boiling up coffee. In my years at the Troyen moonbase, it’d been my job to watch for things like that. So I decided to walk around Willow, every square centimeter, hoping maybe I’d find something productive to do instead of brooding all by myself.

That’s how I found the hive-queen. A real one. Except she was just as dead as the crew.

The venom sacs on the queen were inflamed bright green, just like the holo I’d seen in the lounge. I guess that’s where the hologram came from — the captain had taken a picture of the queen as she sat in the ship’s hold.

From the look of the hold, the queen had done more than just sit there: she’d tried to rip straight through the walls with her claws. You wouldn’t think a creature of flesh and blood would be strong enough to gouge out whole chunks of steel-plast… but the far bulkhead was ribboned with huge ragged furrows, so deep I could stick my hand in up to the wrist.

If the walls looked bad, the queen’s claws looked worse. With all that smashing and bashing, her claws had got their points hammered down blunt and their armor plate fractured like peanut brittle. Sticky brown blood was still oozing up through the cracks in her shell.

It made me go sick in the stomach to see a queen all damaged and smashed. Injured. Broken. But it was a good thing she’d hurt herself too much to keep whacking on the walls; otherwise, she would have bashed through the hull and let hard vacuum into the ship.

Why was Willow transporting her here on her own, without attendants? Queens go mad if they aren’t milked every day. Her poor venom sacs were like two swollen balloons bulging up where her tail met her torso: both sacs had turned grass green against her yellow body, so you couldn’t possibly miss how full they were. Queen Verity once told me it hurt like daggers to go unmilked for even a few hours past ripeness, and this queen…

This queen wasn’t Queen Verity. And at the moment, I didn’t want to think about Verity, not with one of her royal sisters lying dead in front of me. Which one was this, I wondered. Queen Fortitude? Clemency? Honor? Or one of the queens-in-waiting who escaped from deep freeze while Troyen was spinning into civil war?

Me, I couldn’t tell; Verity was the only queen I really knew. The palace’s chief of protocol claimed that Verity would feel grossly insulted if I ever set eyes on another queen.

High Queen Verity had been fiercely, deeply jealous about me… but then, she’d been fiercely, deeply jealous about all her husbands. 3 WATCHING THE QUEEN

That night I had bad dreams: a woman dying in my arms, but I couldn’t tell whether she was the blotchy-faced admiral or Samantha. Her death left something black and oily on my hands — everything I touched got smudged all over with the grease. I looked up, and floating overhead was a mirror showing that the stuff covered my face too, smeared thick everywhere… till suddenly, the oily gunk went one way and I went the other, so there were two of us standing side by side. Me, and then a second me made of sludge.

The sludge — me screamed and screamed and screamed.

Then a different dream: being chased by a queen in venom-frenzy, down the long promenade that swept along the side of Verity’s palace. All kinds of people cluttered the pavement, humans, Mandasars, Fasskisters, Divians, everyone hanging about, getting in the way; and I had to dodge around them or knock them over, which drove me frantic with frustration even though the queen never seemed to close the gap behind me. She ran like she could catch me anytime, but was toying with me, letting me tire myself out. Now and then she’d aim her stingers at me, and they’d spray me down with venom, like fire hoses. Eventually, the promenade got so slimy with bright green poison, I slipped and fell down hard. Before I could get up again, the queen was bending over me… only it wasn’t a real queen, but Samantha, with her head on a queen’s body…

I woke in the darkness, all prickled with sweat. Alone in my cabin. Alone on the ship. Trembling with cold night terrors.

That’s when it finally hit home: just how alone I really was. Nobody else on Willow but corpses. Maybe no living thing within light-years.

As alone as a human could get.

The realization spooked me. Gave me the rabid creeps. I suddenly got the idea that any second I’d hear a scratch at the door: the dead woman wanting another kiss, except now she was some withered skeletal thing, moaning with hunger. Or maybe it would be the queen with her blood-cracked claws, trying to break down the door and stab me with her stingers, just to ease the pain in her venom sacs.

I held my breath, waiting for the scratching noise. Scared stiff to move for fear something outside would hear me. But nothing happened. The dead don’t really get up and walk… even when you panic yourself into thinking it’s possible.

After a while, I thought of turning on a light. I did it fast, before I had a chance to get the creeps about that too. With the light on, it wasn’t so hard to get out of bed and get dressed; maybe it would be a good idea to go to the cafeteria for something to drink. Not alcohol — I was acting captain. But in stories, people talk about warm milk making you feel better. I couldn’t remember ever drinking warm milk, but I thought why not give it a try.

The corridors were quiet. And empty. And dimmed down to twilight because this was Willow’s sleep shift. I could have ordered the ship-soul to power everything to daytime brightness or to play bouncy music wherever I went, but that wouldn’t fool me. The manuals pretend that night and day are just arbitrary conventions on a starship, that you can flip them back to front and no one will know the difference. Me, I felt the difference. Deep in my bones, I felt pure night smothering all around me — like it’d been waiting for years and years to catch me alone, and finally had its chance to grab me by the throat.

Samantha would have slapped me for imagining those kind of things. She used to roll her eyes and laugh: "You’re such a child, Edward." Usually I’d laugh too and say she was the child — younger than me by a whole ten minutes.

But I knew I was acting like a kid, letting myself get scared of nothing. Fifty-seven years old; I should know better. Halfway to the cafeteria, I turned around and headed for the captain’s quarters instead. I was supposed to be master and commander, not some puss-puppy trying to make it all better with warm milk. As of now, I’d devote myself to captainly things instead of hiding back in my cabin.

Besides, it’d be harder to have bad dreams in a captain’s bunk, wouldn’t it? Captains don’t let themselves get carried away by imagination.

"Ship-soul, attend," I called out loudly as I entered the captain’s room. "Vidscreen on, forward view."

The room had a nice big monitor, filling up a whole half of one wall. The screen flicked on, showing a calm empty starscape. Nothing out there but nothingness.

"Aft view," I said.

More stars in the infinite black. No nightmares chasing us.

I took a breath. "Interior view, recreation lounge."

The screen changed to show the lounge and all the bodies, still exactly where they’d fallen. Most of the holograms were gone: their battery power had run down. Instead of the Roman soldier and the alien thistle bush, an ordinary man and woman lay crumpled against each other, both of them naked except for the harnesses that held their holo-projectors.

The dead people looked so sad and pointless. Even the admiral woman, lying where I’d set her down… she wasn’t going to turn into a kiss-hungry demon who came slobbering at my door. She was just going to lie there and lie there and lie there, never getting up again.

"Interior view," I told the ship-soul, trying not to let my voice crack. "The hold with the Mandasar queen."

The image on the screen shifted to show the hold… and nothing had changed there either. The queen lay dead, her claws smashed bloody, her stingers dangling limp, her venom sacs…

Her venom sacs…

They weren’t bulging quite so full. They had a tiny sag to them now. And their grass green color had faded a bit.

That wasn’t right.

"Ship-soul," I said, walking up to the screen, "can you zoom in on this area here?" I pointed to the closest sac.

The image expanded, so big I had to step back from the screen to see it properly: a huge looming close-up of the sac, and even as I watched I could see the outer membrane deflate a bit more.

What was going on?

On Troyen, one of Verity’s attendants told me queens kept making venom for two days after death… like hair and fingernails growing on human corpses. The sacs on the screen should be swelling even larger, not shrinking. I guess one of the sacs might have built up so much pressure it sprang a leak; but both sacs? Anyway, the magnified view didn’t show any spills on the floor or the queen’s body.

For a second, I had another nudge of the cold creeps. Something was happening, something I didn’t understand… and whatever it was, I had to deal with it on my own. No one would warn me if I was about to do something so brainlessly stupid any normal person would laugh out loud.

"Just move," I said to myself. "Just get moving."

I forced my feet toward the door; and soon after that I was running for the hold.

There was no one there; of course there wasn’t. The hold had looked empty on the ship’s cameras, and it looked empty when I entered in person. But just in the time I took to sprint down from the captain’s quarters, the queen’s venom sacs had sagged another few millimeters.

I approached as cautious as a mouse, keeping my eyes on the floor — if venom was spilling down, I didn’t want to step in it. For all I knew, it might eat a hole straight through my boot. Not that venom is usually acidic, but you can never tell for sure.

It’s strange, dangerous stuff, queen’s venom, especially to humans. Sometimes a teeny droplet on your skin is enough to kill you… like when it contains nerve toxins that garble up signals going to and from your brain. Your heart stops beating because it isn’t getting the right instructions anymore. Other times, though, venom isn’t lethal after all; it just gives you hallucinations… or a rash… or a crusty patch on your wrist, at which point the doctors cut off your whole arm.

(That happened once to a human maid at the palace. Queen Verity said the spill was just a terrible accident.)

The thing about venom is it runs through a cycle, over a full Troyen year. Queens are milked every day, and each batch has slightly different properties. The local biochemists have filled up dozens of confidential databases, keeping track of what you get at each point in the cycle, not to mention what happens if you milk a few hours early or late. It’s all gigantically complicated, and the scientists were always struggling over the fine details; during my time as consort, they were constantly finding new trace chemicals that turned up for maybe half a day in the cycle, then vanished for the rest of year. But everyone on Troyen understood the basic principle of what venom did: it made queens.

If a Mandasar female of six years old started suckling on a queen during the right week in spring — and if she was allowed to suckle whenever she wanted, day or night, big sips or small, throughout the year — by the next spring the little girl lobster would be a junior queen. The constantly changing mix of chemicals mutated her body; one day’s feeding multiplied her brain cells, the next day stimulated a gland, the next made her muscles grow. Soon she’d be bigger, smarter, stronger, and lots more regal than other girls her age. (Provided she didn’t die or go mad. Things like that happened now and then. There’s a reason it’s called venom.)

So walking across Willow’s hold, where there might be venom on the floor, I watched my step real carefully. But even when I got close to the queen’s carcass, I couldn’t see any leaks — not a drop on her lobstery tail, no wetness on the sacs themselves, no dribbles down her carapace or puddles on the steel-plast beneath her. Still, the sacs kept shrinking: very very slowly, but over the course of a minute, I could definitely see the difference.

So where was the stuff going? Seeping back into her corpse? I guess she had to have ducts or tubes connecting the sacs to the inside part of her body. Maybe the tubes got damaged as the queen tried to bash her way through the hull. Or maybe, when the League of Peoples wanted the queen to die, they’d just broken open a valve and let the venom slop back into her insides. Maybe that was considered poetic justice, having the queen poisoned by her own juices.

The League folks were aliens. Who knew how their minds worked?

As gingerly as a feather, I reached toward the nearest sac… and just before my hand touched the surface tissue, I felt a funny sort of fuzzy sensation on my palm.

Fuzz? There shouldn’t be any fuzz. The outside of the sac was as smooth as a balloon.

Then the truth struck me. "Ship-soul," I yelled, "nano scan! Here, now, centered on my hand."

Two seconds later, a rackety choir of alarms started wailing their brains out.

Lucky for me I’d left the hatch open. I dived out the door just before the automatic computer defenses slammed it shut with a great whacking clang. That didn’t mean I was safe, but at least I wouldn’t be locked in the hold when a full-scale nanotech war broke out. I rolled to my feet and wondered if I had time to get back to the captain’s quarters. No — a black cloud was already roaring down the corridor toward me, like a dust devil whirling on the desert wind. I dropped to the deck again, squeezing my eyes shut, covering my mouth and nose with my left hand while holding my right far out from my body. That was the hand that had touched the venom sac; that was the hand that needed to be sanitized.

The cloud swept over me like a tornado. Each tiny black-dust particle was a microscopic robot, a hunter-killer built to destroy the equally small nanites that had been buzzing about the queen. Yes — the fuzz I’d felt had been little machines, the size of bacteria or maybe even viruses; and they’d been crowding around the venom sacs so thick I could actually detect them with my fingers.

Fuzzy air.

There was only one thing the nanites could be doing: sneaking their microscopic way through the membrane of the venom sac, scooping up minidrops of venom like bees sipping nectar, then crawling out again. That’s why the venom sacs had been deflating — weeny little robots were draining them in a miniscule bucket brigade.

And now Willow had sent a cloud of its own nanites to wipe out the intruders.

I could feel the defense nano scouring my skin — not just the hand that had touched the enemy, but everywhere: my face, my scalp, all under my clothes. The defenders would rip apart everything they found… even natural skin bacteria, because the people who built nano invaders often tried to disguise the tiny little monsters as ordinary microbes. When something is the same shape and size as an everyday bread mold, it’s easier to sneak past an antinano scan.

Every ship in the navy was constantly running defense scans. When crew members came aboard, they all got the once-over. So did cargo and supplies and equipment. The ship-soul also took down-to-the-atom audits of selected cubic centimeters of air, checking out every microscopic thingy to make sure it wasn’t a nanite in paramecium’s clothing. Even so, with all those precautions, a camouflaged swarm of invaders could usually avoid being noticed unless the computerized detectors knew exactly where to look. Most times you didn’t know you’d been boarded till the nanites actually attacked.

The only good news was that the League of Peoples killed bad nanotech the same way they killed bad humans: instant death as soon as the host ship crossed the line. So those of us in the Outward Fleet didn’t have to worry much about lethal attacks to ourselves or essential life-support systems. Microrobot invaders could be programmed for vandalism, like cracking ship security or gumming up fuel lines, but they were never allowed to out-and-out kill you.

They could, however, steal stuff. Valuable stuff. Like hive-queen venom.

Willow’s defense cloud chafed me hard for twenty seconds. Then it swept away, heading for the hold and the bigger battle. I was left on the deck, feeling as if a whole layer of my skin had been chewed clean off.

It had. My right hand was covered with stinging pinpricks of blood, like I’d scraped it full strength against rough concrete. As for my clothes… well, the little hunter-killers had ripped furiously into the fabric, chewing it to tatters wherever they found the least little microbe lurking in the weave. Natural microbes or otherwise. Considering how many microbes there are everywhere, I scarcely had an intact stitch left on my body.

Good thing there was no one on board to see me.

I hurried back to my cabin for new clothes. And to wash off my blood-specked hand. While I was dressing, I asked the ship-soul what was happening down in the hold.

"Our defenses are engaging the enemy," the ship-soul answered. "There is ongoing opposition."

"So the nanites are fighting back?"

"Some are providing cover while their fellows retreat. Our defenses have numerical superiority, but are encountering difficulties." "Show me."

The vidscreen in my cabin wasn’t nearly as big as the captain’s, but it still gave a decent view of the hold. Not that I had much to see: the black cloud of Willow’s defenders were bunched up close to the door and trying to push farther into the room. Something unseen was pushing back, bottling up the cloud in a pocket around the hatch.

Our forces and the enemy, fighting nano-a-nano.

"Can you magnify the shot?" I asked the ship-soul. "I want to see what they’re actually doing."

The picture switched to microscopic resolution: four black hunter-killers, each with a blobby body, a whiplike tail, and a jaggedy pincer claw, had surrounded a much smaller enemy. The enemy looked like it was made from jelly, and shaped like a ripped-out eyeball — a juice-filled balloon with a little bulge on the front and a stringy tail out the back. The tail was for propulsion, so the little beastie could swim through air like a tadpole through pond water; the bulgy bit up top probably held the nanite’s tiny brain. As for the main balloon body, it was full of grass green fluid… Mandasar venom, stolen from the dead queen.

The hunter-killers closed in fast, whipping their own tails and driving forward till the enemy was within pincer range. They all grabbed on at the same second: four claws scissoring into the enemy’s jelly body and slicing right through. The eyeball didn’t try to defend itself… and it didn’t have to. As soon as its body got cut open, venom splooged out onto all four attackers, beading up on their claws and slopping back onto their bodies. The hunter-killers suddenly started jerking their tails as if they were having fits, two of them flying right off the screen while the other pair jittered like crazy till their claws broke off.

That venom was wicked stuff. Especially against hunter-killers who weren’t built for chemical warfare.

I sat back from the vidscreen and chewed a bit on one of my knuckles. Our hunter-killers were programmed to attack four-on-one, I knew that much… so for each enemy eyeball destroyed, four of our guys would be taken out by the venom spill. Not such a great ratio for our side. We’d still win in the end, by sheer force of numbers — Willow carried at least three full defense clouds, and could manufacture more pretty quick — but by the time we fought through the nanites who were trying to delay us, the other invaders would have retreated to other parts of the ship. Finding them would be a real needle-in-the-haystack.

Of course, the computers would handle the search. Nothing for me but to sit back wondering what it all meant.

Who in the world could smuggle nano onto a navy ship? Who knew the queen would be on Willow? And who would ever want to steal queen’s venom?

Drug pirates? Supposedly the big crime lords were always looking for new chemicals that did strange things to people. So were legitimate drug companies. Those databases on Troyen, the ones that listed the ingredients of venom at each point in the cycle… they were locked up top-secret, passworded and encrypted. Samantha once called the databanks "the high queen’s golden trust fund" — formulas that could be sold for tons of money if Verity ever needed the cash.

Of course, Verity was dead now. Maybe all the people who knew the passwords were dead too. Troyen’s civil war had been going on for twenty years.

I wondered if one of the rebel factions on Troyen might want to steal venom to manufacture a whole bunch of new queens. But that was crazy — even if they milked this dead queen dry, they’d only get juice from one point in the yearlong cycle. You couldn’t use that on some poor little girl. Today’s venom might kick a gland into high gear, and tomorrow’s shut it off again. If you gave a girl one day’s dose without giving her the next day’s too, you’d completely throw off her body’s chemical balance. Like the gene treatments that were supposed to make Sam and me extra special, you might end up with someone better than average… but you might also make the little girl "a hopeless retarded idiot."

Would anyone take such an awful risk with a child? Well, yes — who knew that better than me? But it still didn’t make sense. Sending nano onto a navy ship would make the Admiralty as mad as a swarm of hornets. There had to be easier ways to get a sip of venom than taking on the entire Outward Fleet.

So why did someone do it?

For a second, I wished there was a special venom to make humans smarter. I knew I’d never be smart-smart; but I hated the way so many things went straight over my head.

If Samantha were here, she’d know what was going on.

4 SHIVERING A LOT

The pinpricks on my hand kept stinging. I soaked the sore parts in cold water and thought about going to sick bay for ointment… but the doctors were dead, and I wouldn’t know what to look for on my own. Instead, I headed for the captain’s quarters again, to keep tabs on the search for the nanites.

An hour later, the computer reported the hold was clean. That didn’t mean we’d killed the intruders — they’d just managed to get away to other parts of the ship. The ship-soul had found a teeny hole chewed through one of the lock hatches in the vent shafts between the hold and hydroponics next door. No surprise there; even if most of the nanites were miniature tankers loading up venom, they’d have an escort of sappers for digging in and out of wherever they wanted to go.

By now, the nanites might be spread like dust through the whole of Willow, or hiding in little bunches, tucked into crawl spaces where no one would notice them. The ship’s scans might trip over a few invaders, but a Security officer once told me such scans missed at least 95 percent of the bugs that were out there. It’s just monumentally difficult to search every particle of air for something the size of a virus, especially when the things you’re trying to find are programmed to avoid being caught.

The best I could do was tell the ship-soul to station a defense cloud around the queen’s venom sacs in case the invaders came back. I didn’t expect the cloud would have any luck — the rotten little thieves knew we were onto them. But you have to do something, don’t you?

I fell asleep in front of the captain’s vidscreen, just as ship’s day was dawning. When I woke again, my right hand really hurt — the pinprick marks were redder than before, and turning hot. So I went to sick bay after all, where I spent half an hour holding up one medicine after another and asking the ship-soul, "What does this do?" (It’s no good reading the packages; they’re all written in doctorese. Big complicated words that are intentionally invented so people can’t understand them.)

Eventually I found something to smear on: an anti-inflammatory, the ship-soul said, and that sounded like just what I wanted. By then, I was worried the swelling might be more than a simple infection; there might be eyeball nanites under my skin, or hunter-killers that had got carried away when they were cleaning me off. Supposedly the hunter-killers knew enough not to chop up human tissue… but if they noticed an eyeball burrowing its way into me, they might decide to claw in after it.

That’s not something you want to think about too long.

The infection got worse over the next day. My hand swelled up; I tried icing it, but after a while I couldn’t stand the pain of anything touching my skin. The red flush of inflammation started creeping past my wrist and slowly up my arm. I wondered if I should put on a tourniquet or something… but that seemed like a lot of work, and I was deep-to-the-bone tired. No energy to care about stupid red flushes. I felt freezing cold, too — now and then I’d get so shivery, my teeth would chatter. Eventually I pulled myself over to the captain’s bed, dialed up the heat to maximum, and wondered why I still wasn’t warm enough.

Sick and dizzy, jumbled and confused. Sometimes I thought I was back on Troyen again, where I’d spent a year in and out of my head with a disease called the Coughing Jaundice. My sister had come by every day — wasting time on me when she should have been solving the little crises that were piling up into one big disaster. For years after, I wondered if I was the one to blame for the civil war: keeping Sam from her work, because I’d caught some alien flu. Me, lying in a special royal infirmary, woozy and out of touch, while the streets filled up with mutineers…

I tried to keep my mind off the bad times. Soon, I couldn’t think of anything else.

Every so often, I’d hallucinate there was someone else in the captain’s cabin, trying to talk to me. For a while it sounded like Samantha and Queen Verity, asking why I hadn’t saved them. Then it turned into a male voice I didn’t recognize, telling me it was time to wake up, that I’d slept long enough and people would suffer if I didn’t come to my senses soon. I decided it must be the ship-soul trying to snap me out of the shivers… except for one little snippet of pleading that must have been completely inside my head.

"Please, Edward. Innocence needs us. Both of us."

That’s what the voice said. And it wasn’t the ship-soul speaking, because Willow’s computer couldn’t possibly know about Innocence. Nobody did, except me and Verity and a few other people who were bloodily murdered twenty years ago. So it must have been my own brain talking, babbling all mixed-up and bleary.

Well… yes and no.

Two days of that, all spinning and confused. Then I woke and it was over. My head clear. My shivers gone. Even a bit of energy and appetite.

But I’d sure made a mess of the captain’s bed.

While I cleaned up the sheets, the ship-soul gave me an official report on the status of Willow. Most of the words just bounced off my brain — there was a big long recitation of statistics, fuel, battery power, and what all, which I guess the captain was supposed to listen to every few days. The ship-soul absolutely refused to talk about anything else till I’d heard the whole checklist.

I nodded and said, "Oh, is that right?" now and then, the way my sister taught me when I didn’t understand much of what someone was saying. You’d be surprised how seldom you get into trouble that way. Most times, when people go on and on, they aren’t talking about things you have to do anything with, they’re just emptying their heads.

After the ship-soul finished its spiel, I wanted to say, "How much of that is normal, and is there anything that’s really broken?" But if something was broken I wouldn’t know how to fix it, so there wasn’t much point in asking. Samantha always claimed it was a golden rule of diplomacy, Never ask a question when you don’t want to hear the answer.

So instead I got the ship-soul to tell me about the search for invader nano. In the three days since the fight in the hold, our defense clouds had apparently destroyed 143 definites, 587 probables. Those were pathetic numbers, even if the probables were all real nanites, which they likely weren’t — just unidentified bacteria that the hunter-killers ripped apart on the theory of better-safe-than-sorry. Seeing as there must have been millions of nanites in that fuzz I’d felt, Willow’s defenses were doing a pretty lousy job.

Maybe if there’d been a real captain running the search, we would have found the invaders by now. Of course, I’d been sick with that infection…

I stopped, and thought about that. Had it really been an infection? No — now that I wasn’t dizzy or delirious, my head was clear enough to understand what had happened. There’d been a whole bunch of eyeball nanites on my hand: nanites filled with venom. The hunter-killers had ripped those nanites apart, spilling venom droplets all over me. Even worse, the hunter-killers had clawed up my skin pretty good during the fight. The pinpricks they’d chewed into me had given the venom a way into my bloodstream.

What I’d thought was infection had actually been a microscopic dose of venom poisoning. I figured it was a good thing I’d only absorbed a tiny bit of the stuff — anything more might have killed me.

But I was all right now. Wasn’t I?

5 ARRIVING AT STARBASE IRIS

Three days later, Willow reached the Celestia system. I’d spent most of that time wandering around the ship, hoping I’d find something useful to do. It wasn’t much fun walking through the lounge and the hold, or the bridge either, where there were three more corpses: people who’d stayed on duty instead of going to the party. But I went through every room anyway, because I was the captain. I even asked the ship-soul if there were logs I should be keeping, or paperwork or something. But the computers handled stuff like that automatically, so they didn’t need me getting in the way. A few times I checked over computer files, just to see if there was stuff I ought to be taking care of. Mission stuff… you know. But every database I tried to look at, records and logs and all, turned out to be passworded or encrypted or just plain inaccessible to lowly Explorers Second Class, even if they’d become acting captain. Maybe that was normal; keeping everything locked away just on general principles. Then again, maybe Willow had been doing something extra-specially secret, and outsiders like me were supposed to mind our own business.

I found out there was only one thing I absolutely had to do as captain of Willow. Apparently, captains are supposed to get at least half an hour of exercise every day, to keep themselves fit for command. So my only mandatory duty was going down to the gym when the ship-soul told me, and working up a sweat.

Weights. Jogging. Bagwork. It made me laugh, that my one compulsory chore was the only thing I’d ever been good at. I went to the gym twice a day and stayed a lot longer than just half an hour — thinking maybe I’d turn out to be captain material after all.

I made a point of being on the bridge as we drew near Celestia. Not that I actually sat in the captain’s command chair — there was a sweet-looking red-haired woman slumped dead in it, and I didn’t want to disturb her. (She seemed too young to be officer of the watch. Nineteen or twenty, tops. All the senior officers must have wanted to go to the party, so they’d given the bridge to the most junior lieutenant-cadet on board. Poor kid: I wondered what she could have done that was so bad the League needed to kill her.)

"Starbase Iris is hailing us," the ship-soul announced.

"Okay," I said. My breath came out steamy — I’d asked for the bridge to be cooled like the lounge so the bodies didn’t go bad. "Do I just talk or what?"

"Connecting now."

The vidscreen on the command chair lit up with a young man who started to say, "Greetings, Willow, this is—" Then he broke off and gawped at his own screen, staring at the face of the dead woman in the chair.

I should have thought of that. Now I’d gone and scared the poor boy on the other end of the line.

"Sorry," I said, as I nudged the woman aside and pushed my own head in front of the vidscrfeen. "I didn’t mean to startle you," I told the boy, "but we’ve got a problem up here."

"Is she…" The boy stopped himself, gave his head a shake, and went all professional. "State your problem, Willow."

I told him about everybody being dead. Then I told the same thing to his commanding officer. Then I told the base’s Commander of Security. After that I spoke to a doctor who kept talking like the people on Willow had died of a disease. To me that was just plain foolish — if several dozen humans and a hive-queen die in the same second while crossing the line, you don’t need to be a genius to figure out why. But next thing I knew, everyone at the base had latched onto the disease idea, and they told me I’d have to stay quarantined where I was till the Admiralty could fly in an Outbreak Team. Whenever I tried to point out what really happened, the base personnel cut me off, saying maybe I was delirious with the plague myself.

"No," I told a Security captain, "I was delirious for a while but now I’m better."

"What do you mean you were delirious?" she snapped in surprise. Then suddenly, she said, "Oh. Right. You were delirious. Thank you, Explorer York, that confirms our disease hypothesis. Thank you." She gave me a relieved smile before she cut the connection.

After chewing my knuckle a bit, I figured out why she’d acted that way. People at the base wanted to pretend there’d been an outbreak, because otherwise they’d have to admit the truth: a whole navy ship had done something so horribly bad, the League decided to execute everybody. And when I’d talked about getting delirious myself, the Security captain thought I was helpfully playing along.

It was so strange. Something important had happened, and the whole starbase staff just wanted to hide their heads in the sand.

I wasn’t too happy being part of the lie, but Samantha used to tell me, "If everyone else is denying an obvious truth, you go along with them, Edward, okay? Because the Admiralty sometimes plays games, and if you spoil the game, they’ll be mad at you."

I didn’t want anyone mad at me. Even if this particular game seemed stupid. And dishonest. And cowardly.

Maybe it all made sense if you had the big picture.

While I waited for the Outbreak Team to arrive from some other starbase, I used the captain’s vidscreen to watch outside the ship. I didn’t see much — nothing came or went at Starbase Iris, not even in-system shuttles. Once I noticed a merchant vessel passing within range of Willow’s hull cameras, but it didn’t come very close; it was aiming for the planet Celestia, a light-minute nearer the local sun.

After two more days of waiting, another navy ship popped into view with that gorgeous FTL effect: the ship appears without warning and then you see a streak trail out behind it. That’s light from where the ship used to be, catching up with where the ship is.

Through a nearby speaker, my ship-soul announced, "Heavy cruiser Jacaranda of the Outward Fleet."

"Is it hailing us?" I asked.

"No. It’s communicating privately with the starbase."

Jacaranda chatted with Starbase Iris for half an hour… and according to my ship-soul, they were using higher-than-normal levels of encryption to keep anyone from eavesdropping. I wondered if they were worried about being overheard by civilians on Celestia, or if they were just keeping secrets from me. Maybe both.

So I sat and stewed, staring at the Jacaranda as it floated in the blackness. The ship was shaped like a long baton, with a big round knob on the front end; that was where they kept the Sperm-tail generator. The tail itself rippled all milky around the ship’s hull and far back into space until it dwindled away to nothing. Mostly the free end of the tail just drifted… but every now and then it gave a flick, the way a fish in a quiet river sometimes comes awake for a second to dart at something too small to see.

My sister once told me the Sperm-field created a separate little universe around the ship, and the little universe could slide through the big outside universe faster than light, without worrying about inertial effects of acceleration. I got lost when she tried to explain how it worked. Samantha was usually pretty good at avoiding subjects that confused me, but sometimes she got extra fired-up like she was absolutely certain she could make everything clear, no matter how slow I was. "I’m a communicator, Edward," she would say. "It’s my gift. If I can communicate with alien races, I can damned well communicate with you."

Well… sometimes it didn’t work with me; and I thought to myself, There at the end, it didn’t work with the aliens either.

At last I got a call from Jacaranda’s captain, a woman named Prope. In all the days to come, she never let on whether that was her first or last name. Maybe she came from one of those colonies where people only have one name, because they think it sounds more dramatic.

Prope certainly was the dramatic type. Whenever you talked to her, she always made you think she was half listening for something that was really worth her attention — like assassins sneaking up behind her back, or a Mayday from a luxury liner struck by a meteorite. Now and then she’d suddenly pause, as if she’d thought of some important point that went over the head of everybody else in the room… except she never told us what these great insights were, and after a while, I wondered if maybe she was just playacting.

As my sister’s bodyguard, I’d met a lot of diplomats. I’d seen tons of playacting.

So Prope’s face appeared on my vidscreen. She was lit from only one side, which meant the left part of her face was swallowed up in deep dark shadow — the captain’s attempt at dazzling me with a dramatic first impression. As far as I knew, the only way she could get that effect was turning off the lights on one whole side of her ship’s bridge.

"Captain Prope of the Jacaranda, calling for Acting Captain Edward York of Willow. Are you Explorer York?"

"Yes, Captain." I couldn’t help noticing how fast I got switched from acting captain to Explorer. Maybe Prope didn’t like treating me anywhere close to an equal.

"How are you feeling, Explorer?" the captain asked. "No ill effects from the disease?"

"I’m okay," I said. "Are you going to send someone to help dock this ship?"

"Sorry, not yet. Because of the risk of contagion, standard operating procedure says we start by sending an Explorer team to assess the situation."

"There’s not much risk of contagion," I answered. "Really."

"Even so, you can never go wrong following the proper protocols. Don’t you agree?"

"Um." In my years with the Outward Fleet, I’d seen things go wrong all over the place, protocols or no. "So after your Explorers check things out," I said, "then can I go home?"

"One thing at a time," Prope replied. "Please go to your transport bay and let my people in through the main airlock. They should be there in fifteen minutes."

She nodded a vague good-bye and waved her hand in the general neighborhood of her forehead. Ship captains are supposed to exchange full salutes after talking to each other… even if one of you is only a lowly acting captain. I guess Prope couldn’t bring herself to give me a real salute, seeing as I was only an Explorer.

Lots of regular navy people are embarrassed by Explorers. Or scared of them. Even fake Explorers like me. Everybody knows Explorers aren’t normal.

Before I could show Prope what a real salute looked like, she cut her end of the connection. I saluted anyway, to the blank screen. As long as I was sort of a kind of a captain, I wanted to do the right thing.

6 MEETING THE EXPLORERS

Fifteen minutes later I sat at the transport bay’s control console, watching two Explorers float weightless outside the ship. These were real Explorers, not just fakes like me. Their suits were as glinty white as washed stucco, with cords of black piping along the sleeves and pant legs. As they drew close to Willow, little jets puffed out from their hips and shoulders to slow their approach.

From my point of view, the two people looked like they were completely upside down: flying along with their feet poking up in the air, because that was the angle they’d happened to come in on. But as soon as they touched the ship’s hull, they grabbed the handbar railings that surrounded the airlock entrance and pulled themselves right way up. I’d already told the ship-soul to open the outer hatch, so they slipped straight inside.

It took a minute for the airlock to cycle — and that minute felt like forever, I was so eager to see people again. These two were both humans, I could tell that from the shape of their outfits… but looking at their tinted visors and their lumpy tightsuits (with pockets and pouches and electronic attachments front and back) I couldn’t tell if the Explorers were young or old, male or female, bulky or slim. They hadn’t talked to me by radio either; there’d been no need, and Explorers aren’t the sort to chat for the sake of chatting. Not to strangers, anyway.

Finally, the inside airlock door opened and the two Explorers stepped out. A big thick observation window separated me from the transport bay, but I banged on the glass and waved. After a few seconds staring at me, both Explorers waved back. Pretty halfhearted waves, if you ask me.

"York?" a growly man’s voice asked. The Explorers had patched their helmet radios into Willow’s speaker system. "The name’s Tobit — Phylar Tobit." One of the white-suited figures gave a slight bow. "And my know-nothing greenhorn partner is Benny Dade." "Benjamin!" the other snapped in a peevish high-pitched voice. "But everybody just calls me Dade."

Tobit gave a loud snort. "Dade? Who the hell calls you Dade? Everyone I know calls you the Sissy-boy Whiner… but I thought I’d be polite in front of company."

Dade (or Benny or Benjamin) gave a hissy sniff that may or may not have been good-natured. I tried to keep a straight face. Explorers make a point of never addressing each other by title — it’s tradition. But without titles to go by, the young cadets sometimes get hung up on what they should or shouldn’t be called. Carefully I said, "Hello, Tobit. And, um, Benjamin. Welcome aboard the Willow."

"Yeah, yeah, swell," Tobit answered, waving his arm dismissively. I tried to lock down in my head which Explorer was which, but knew I’d get mixed up as soon as they started moving. The two tightsuits looked exactly like each other on the outside, no names or insignia or anything.

"So what do you want to do first?" I called down. "Would you like a tour?"

"We’re supposed to follow a specific search pattern," Benjamin replied, still a bit miffed and huffy. "You’re an Explorer, aren’t you, York? You should know there are procedures for this sort of thing."

His voice sounded as young as wet paint. All full-fledged Explorers had to be at least twenty-two, but I didn’t think the boy could possibly be that old. It made me feel dry-dust ancient, the way I kept coming across recruits who were practically babies. "All right," I told him, "you do what you have to do. I’ll tag along and watch."

"Yeah," Tobit muttered, "we love spectators." The tint on his visor had started to fade now that he was inside the ship; I could see his eyes, puffy and a little bloodshot. He stared at me a moment longer, then said, "Oh all right, you can come along. Professional courtesy to a fellow Explorer. Although if I were you, I’d just mix myself a drink and let other people do the work. You’ve been sick, haven’t you?"

"I’m fine now," I told him. Then I whispered, "You know there isn’t really a disease, right? Everyone at the starbase is just pretending."

He made a phlegmy noise in his throat, then said, "If everyone else is pretending, pal, I wouldn’t want to be the odd man out. The Admiralty High Council are rabid old bastards on the subject of solidarity."

Benjamin looked at him in surprise. Before the boy could speak, Tobit went on quickly, "Okay, time to get our asses in gear. We got some damned important standard procedures to follow." He belched loudly, then headed for the door.

It was too bad the Explorers couldn’t take off their tight-suits. As it was, I still felt kind of alone, even with them walking right beside me. They were all bundled up so I couldn’t see more than their eyes, and their voices came from the ship’s overhead speakers instead of from the people themselves.

Not that they talked to me much; Explorers really focus on their jobs. From the moment they left the transport bay, Tobit and Benjamin were so busy giving their home ship a running commentary of what they saw, they scarcely tossed a word in my direction. I tagged behind like baggage, through machinery rooms with automatic systems doing automatic things… till we got to the hold.

When Benjamin saw the queen he nearly jumped out of his suit. "Shit!" he squeaked. "I mean, shoot! Look at the size of that thing! I had no idea they were that big!"

Tobit didn’t take his eyes off the queen’s corpse, but he gave a deep sigh. "Benny. Buddy. My dear bright spark. Didn’t you study the goddamned Mandasar castes in Explorer Academy?"

"Yeah, sure," Benjamin answered, "but it’s one thing to watch them on chip and another to see one up close."

"Christ on a crutch," Tobit muttered. "If you don’t have enough imagination to learn from normal pictures, run yourself a VR sim. The first time you meet a real alien in the flesh, I don’t want my partner gibbering, ‘Mercy me, look at the size of that thing!’ "

Benjamin mumbled something I couldn’t make out. If Tobit had belonged to any other branch of the navy, he’d yell, "What was that, mister?" then shout in the boy’s face for ten minutes about subordinates keeping their mouths to themselves. But Explorers hated acting authoritarian, especially if it meant browbeating their partners. Instead, Tobit turned to me. "What’s with the defense clouds around the venom sacs?"

"Oh those. Um." I dropped my gaze. "The ship had uninvited nanites show up a few days ago…"

"What?" Tobit snapped. "No one told us about nanites."

"The folks at Starbase Iris never let me get that far," I answered. "As soon as I reported the whole crew dying, they just stopped talking to me. When I tried to tell them other stuff, they cut me off sharp."

"Bloody hell. Those morons at Iris have their heads up their candy-coated asses." Tobit took a deep breath. "All right, York, we’re listening now. Tell us everything. The truth, not what you think we want to hear."

So I went through the story, right from the start — which shocked young Benjamin, let me tell you. He couldn’t believe the kind of party Willow held for crossing the line. Tobit told him not to be naive. "Just goes to show," he said, "the crew knew they’d pissed off the League. They were all in on it, they were all guilty… and they were all whacked out with fear as they came up to crossing the line. In a way, you have to admire these bastards; most Vacheads would just sit around moaning if they knew they were going to die. At least this group had the good taste to hold an orgy." He sighed, then glanced at me. "I don’t suppose you know what gruesome deed they’d done?"

I shook my head. "No one told me anything."

"You were just a passenger. Getting rotated back to New Earth, right?"

"Right. I was stationed on the moonbase near Troyen, but it was getting too dangerous to stay. You know Troyen’s having a big civil war? Most of the time they just fight among themselves, but a few weeks ago someone took a potshot at us — a missile came close to landing on top of our station. The blast disrupted our outer dome field and nearly knocked down the inner one… so our base commander decided we had to evacuate. The other personnel got away in a two-person scoutship, but I was assigned to stay behind till everything shut down properly."

"They left you on your own?" Benjamin said. "While Mandasars were shooting missiles at your base?"

"There was only the one missile," I told him, "and I volunteered to stay. Somebody had to make sure the computers finished locking everything down. Anyway, Willow came to get me, so it was all right."

Tobit asked, "When did Willow show up in the Troyen system?"

"Right after the others left in the scoutship. Willow’s name just appeared on the base’s list of in-system ships. They hung around for five days, then picked me up to go home."

"Sounds like they were on a secret mission," Benjamin said with sudden interest. "The way they didn’t come out till everyone else had gone. Orbiting the planet five days even when they might get shot at. Not telling you what they were up to…"

"Of course, they were on a secret mission, toad-breath!" Tobit rolled his eyes. "For one thing, they were ferrying this queen from Troyen to Celestia… which was probably what got the poor buggers killed. The League takes a dim view of folks transporting dangerous non-sentients from one star system to another. And I’ll lay you good odds this queen qualified as non-sentient — ready and willing to commit murder. You said Troyen’s been at war for twenty years?"

I nodded.

"Well then," Tobit went on, "she’d have her own army, wouldn’t she?" He patted the queen’s chitinous flank. "How long d’you think this old gal could play warlord and still keep her mandibles clean… never taking a single wee life except in direct self-defense?" He snorted. "When I studied hive-queens at the academy, no one ever described them as saints."

"So," I said, "the League killed the queen because she’d killed other people. And they killed Willow’s crew for trying to transport a dangerous creature to another world?"

Tobit nodded. "It’s the League’s own version of disease control: never let uncivilized organisms leave their home system. This queen must have claimed to be a perfect angel, and Willow’s crew gambled she was telling the truth. They lost the bet."

It made me feel bad, how I’d been puzzling over things for more than a week without getting anywhere, then someone like Tobit could walk in, take one look, and explain why everybody died. "So," I said, worried this would be obvious too, "who sent the nanites? What did they want?"

"Fucked if I know," Tobit answered. "What good is stolen venom? And how did the nanites get smuggled onto the ship? Who knew Willow would be transporting a hive-queen? Someone on Troyen? Or maybe someone on Celestia?"

"Why Celestia?" Benjamin asked.

"Jesus, boy," Tobit groaned, "didn’t you learn anything at the Academy? Celestia has a Mandasar population too — ten million children were evacuated just before the shit hit the fan on Troyen. Everyone thought it was only a temporary measure; a happy-sappy field trip. But the war’s dragged on for two decades, and the brats have all grown up."

He turned suddenly toward the queen’s corpse and stared for a few seconds. "Hey… when the Outward Fleet shipped the kids to Celestia, I don’t remember the Admiralty including any queens."

"They didn’t," I said. "My sister belonged to the Diplomacy Corps back then; the High Council wanted her to check with all the queens to see if any wanted to evacuate with the children. Samantha just laughed — a queen would never abandon her home territory to baby-sit a bunch of kids. It wouldn’t be regal."

"So Celestia has ten million junior Mandasars," Tobit murmured, "and nary a queen. Then again, who gives a shit? The lower castes are as smart as humans. They can take care of themselves."

"But they have all these instincts," I said. "They want guidance. They need to be ruled by a proper queen."

Tobit made a face. "I bet a queen told you that. The poor dear peasants couldn’t possibly survive without kissing my royal heinie." He grunted. "But whether or not it’s true, some of the damned lobsters probably believe it. Especially on Celestia, where they don’t remember life under a queen’s thumb. If they arrived as kids, what are they now, in their twenties? There’s bound to be some who think their lives are fucked up — at that age, you’re supposed to think your life is fucked up — keep your trap shut, Benny — so it wouldn’t surprise me if a chunk of the population thought a queen would make everything better. Somehow they persuaded the Admiralty to bring them one… or else the Admiralty is running a scam of its own and wanted a queen to whip the baby lobsters into line."

"The Admiralty doesn’t run scams anymore," Benjamin protested. "They cleaned house three years ago."

Tobit reached out and pretended to whack the boy on the helmet. "Every time you say pig-ignorant things like that," Tobit said, "I dock another point off your performance evaluation." He turned to me and rolled his eyes. "Fucking useless cadets."

7 GETTING WARNED ABOUT MY FUTURE

We kept poking our way forward through the ship. The closer we came to the lounge, the more nervous I got that the Explorers would think I was a terrible captain for not cleaning up. The refrigeration had stopped people from rotting too much, but they’d still messed themselves when all their muscles went limp; the place smelled like a toilet no one had scoured for a long time. I kept apologizing in advance, saying I’d wanted to tidy up but knew I wasn’t supposed to touch anything no matter how bad it got. Just as we went through the door, it finally occurred to me Tobit and Benjamin wouldn’t smell a thing — they were closed up in their suits, with their own air and all, so I was the only one who had to hold his nose.

Even so, young Benjamin went stone quiet when he saw dead people lying around — a lot of them naked and none nice to look at anymore. Tobit seemed okay till he caught sight of the admiral woman who’d kissed me; then he stormed straight to the corpse and stared down at it.

"What’s wrong?" I asked. "Do you know her?"

"I know the original," Tobit answered, "and I guess there’s a slight resemblance. Explains why Ms. Deadmeat here thought it would be a good costume for the party. But it’s not the real Admiral Ramos. Just some chippie dressed up." He turned away quickly. "Do me a favor, York, and scrub that crap off her face."

"I can clean up now?"

"As if anyone ever cared. It’s not like there’s a question about cause of death. Right, Benny?"

Benjamin was staring at the Willow’s captain. The captain’s holo-surround had used up its battery power days ago, so you could see the man himself now. He was wearing his uniform shirt, but from the waist down, all he had on were white socks. It was a pretty undignified look for someone of his rank. If I were a captain and thought I might die, I’d aim at leaving a more presentable corpse.

"Benny," Tobit said. "Partner mine. Prospective pride of the Explorer Corps. Are you with us?"

"What? Oh. Sorry. Do you want to move on?"

"No," Tobit answered, "I want to go home for a bubble bath. We’ve wasted enough time on goddamned standard procedures." He glowered at the boy for a moment, then said, "For novelty’s sake, how ’bout I give you a direct order? Head back to the hold, cut off the queen’s venom sacs, and pack ’em for transport back to Jacaranda."

"What?" The boy’s voice sounded like a yelp. I felt kind of yelpy myself. Mutilate a queen? Even if she was dead, that was nigh-on sacrilege. "Why?" Benjamin asked.

"Because somewhere on Willow" Tobit replied, "there are nasty wee nanites who want to steal her venom. Christ knows why they want it, but I can’t imagine it’s for the blissful good of the universe. Besides, it pisses me off when people sneak nano onto a navy ship; just on general principle, I don’t want the bastards to get what they’re after. Best way to do that is haul the venom back to Jacaranda — empty the place so the nanites are shit out of luck." He held his hand up quickly, to stop me from saying anything. "And before you ask, we’ll have Jacaranda triple-check to make sure we aren’t carrying nanites ourselves. Our micro-defenses aren’t half-bad… on the rare occasions we’re willing to cool our heels six hours in quarantine getting a full nano scan."

Benjamin’s eyes were wide. "You really want me to hack the sacs off?"

"Not hack, you lunkhead. Perform a delicate surgical excision. With all due care and safety. Use a scalpel instead of a chainsaw. You know — finesse. Now get your scrawny butt moving."

The boy sounded sick but he started off. I called after him, "Be careful, okay? Venom is dangerous stuff."

"He’ll do fine," Tobit said. "Benny trained for Medical Corps before he transferred to exploring. He has great hands with a scalpel."

"Thank you," Benjamin called back over his shoulder. He could still hear Tobit’s words over the ship’s speaker system.

"But you’re a piss-awful Explorer!" Tobit shouted as the boy disappeared.

I think Benjamin gave Tobit the finger, but it’s hard to tell with a tightsuit’s bulgy gloves.

As soon as the boy was out of sight, Tobit popped off his helmet. That surprised me; Explorers are supposed to stay suited up whenever they’re on a mission, even if it’s just over to another navy ship. For another surprise, he reached up to the bulge on his throat — his communications implant — and gave it a double-tap. "There," he said. "I’m not transmitting anymore." He took a deep breath. "Christ, it reeks in here, doesn’t it?"

"Sorry."

"Not your fault, pal. You wanted to leave everything as is because you thought there’d be a real investigation. Which there won’t."

He gave me a long look as if trying to decide something. Me, I was just trying not to stare. Tobit’s face had a ravaged flush to it, pockmarked, red and veiny. An old soak’s face, though I couldn’t smell booze on him. Maybe he’d been an alcoholic but had lately gone on the wagon; or maybe he had some genetic condition that made him look like a lush. Sure, that had to be it — Explorers always had things wrong with them, whether they looked funny or smelled funny or sounded funny. Phylar Tobit’s problem was just a whiskey-ish face. The navy surely wouldn’t let drunks be Explorers.

"We don’t have much time," Tobit told me, "so just shut up and listen, okay? It turns out, York, you’re in a shitload of trouble."

"I’m sorry," I said. Apologizing was always a good first step, even if I didn’t understand what I’d done.

"Nothing to feel sorry about," Tobit replied. "This crap-fest isn’t your fault. But the Admiralty is plotting a cover-up, I positively guarantee it. They’ve lost an entire ship because navy personnel acted non-sentient: all of Willow’s crew, and maybe the admiral who gave them their orders. That’s the sort of thing the High Council dearly wants to keep secret. Makes the whole fleet look bad."

"I can keep secrets," I said.

He patted my shoulder. "Yeah. Sure. But the Admiralty won’t take the chance. They only trust certain types of people — assholes who want to be admirals themselves and will do anything to get into the inner circle. Our beloved Captain Prope is like that, and a lot of other folks on our ship. High Admiral Vincence has stacked Jacaranda with scumbags who don’t mind taking orders that would disturb normal navy personnel."

"Orders like what?" I asked.

"Like making you disappear, so you can’t spill the beans. Prope already has reassignment papers for you; I read them when I accidentally logged onto her computer and decrypted all her files. You’re headed for some godforsaken outpost in the back of beyond, where contact ships only show up once a decade. A one-man station. Jacaranda will take you straight there without a chance to talk to anyone, then they’ll fly away without looking back." Tobit gritted his teeth. "You won’t be the first person our shite of a captain has marooned."

For a second I didn’t say anything. You can’t imagine what it’s like, to be going home after twenty years-twenty years on a moon with nothing but vacuum outside, like a prison except no one has the decency to call it that — and just when you think it’s all over, that you’ll soon see grass and sky and lakes again, someone decides you’re going to be dumped on some new lonely dung heap. And why? Because a boneheaded admiral wants to hide you away from everyone else, for fear you’ll make him look bad. The story of my life.

"So what should I do?" I whispered to Tobit. Whispering because if I didn’t whisper, I’d scream. "I’m stuck out in space," I said. "I can’t run away."

"Yes, you can," Tobit answered, "but you have to make your move while you’re still acting captain of Willow. Hop into one of the evac modules and declare an immediate forced landing emergency. Use those exact words: immediate forced landing emergency. The ship-soul will launch all the escape pods straight toward Celestia, because it’s the optimal site for a forced landing right now: close by and habitable. You hit it lucky there, York — Celestia is a free planet, not part of the Technocracy. Once you touch down, the navy has no legal right to drag you back."

"But won’t Jacaranda stop me from getting away?"

"They’ll try. But they can only catch one pod at a time. Even if they’re lucky, they’ll only grab four of the eight pods before you reach Celestia’s atmosphere. You’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of making it to the ground."

"And a fifty-fifty chance of getting caught."

"So what?" Tobit asked. "The worst they can do is banish you to some asswipe of a planet, and they plan on doing that anyway." He gave me a yellow-toothed grin. "You have dick-all to lose, York. And Celestia is reportedly a cream-puff world: all tame and terraformed. If you lie low for a while, you can head back for the Technocracy eventually. Within six months, some new crisis will make the High Council forget all about you. Admirals have the attention span of lobotomized gnats."

Tobit obviously didn’t know who my father was… or he’d know Dad wouldn’t be so quick to forget. On the other hand, I figured my old man wouldn’t waste energy chasing me if I stayed out of his way — more than anything, he just wanted to pretend I didn’t exist.

I asked Tobit, "Will you get in trouble for telling me this?"

He shook his head. "Nah — they won’t have any evidence. I’m not transmitting back to Jacaranda, and you can erase Willow’s records of this conversation. You’re the captain; you have authority to wipe all the memory banks here if you feel like it." Tobit grinned. "I also have a friend in high places: the real Admiral Ramos. She was the one who drafted me for First Explorer on the Jacaranda… to counterbalance whatever shitwork Prope is up to. Eventually the council will find an excuse to get me reassigned; and Ramos will send another of her favorite Explorers to keep Jacaranda honest. Even a dirty-tricks ship needs Explorers. Otherwise, the lily-fingered crew members would be the ones marching into stink holes full of rotting corpses."

Tobit gave a sour look at the nearest dead bodies… and at that very moment, Willow’s alarm bells started blaring out RED ALERT.

8 WILLOW EVACUATING

The lounge’s vidscreen lit up on its own, showing the view through Willow’s hull cameras. "Danger status one," the ship-soul announced. "Awaiting captain’s orders." Its computer voice sounded sharper than usual. That wasn’t good — voice synthesizers don’t simulate emotion unless it’s really important for people to pay attention.

On the vidscreen, a new ship had popped up between the Jacaranda and Starbase Iris: a ship shaped exactly like Jacaranda itself but painted black with starlike speckles. The paint job looked prettier than the navy’s boring old white, but it sure wouldn’t work as camouflage… especially not at the moment, when the black ship was surrounded by the milky swim of a Sperm-field.

"What the hell’s going on?" Tobit asked. "Civilian vessels shouldn’t come anywhere near… holy shit!"

The strange black ship had just shot two missiles at Jacaranda.

The ships were less than a kilometer apart, so it didn’t take long for the missiles to cross the gap: two flashes of flame and vapor racing toward their target in less than a second. I caught my breath, wondering what would happen when the rockets struck home… but instead of banging straight into Jacaranda’s hull, they angled off to swish close by on either side.

The missiles missed the ship, but snagged Jacaranda’s Sperm-field.

Oh. Now I understood.

The missiles plowed on into empty space, and the Sperm-tail bagged out to stay with them, as if the milky field had got caught on the missiles’ noses. Probably, it had; I guessed that both missiles were using Sperm anchors to latch onto the field and drag it with them. They continued angling off in opposite directions, spreading Jacaranda’s sperm envelope wide, like two hands inside a plastic bag, pushing out hard to make the bag stretch.

At the last second, the milky color of the Sperm-field broke into an unstable glitter of green and blue and gold; then the field popped like a soap bubble, stressed beyond its limits.

The missiles continued on their courses, disappearing into the darkness of space.

So much for Jacaranda’s ability to go FTL. The crew would need twelve hours to generate a new field and get it aligned properly around the hull. That gave the black ship loads of time to do whatever it wanted and still escape without pursuit.

The stranger ship swiveled its nose toward Willow. "Uh-oh," Tobit and I said in unison.

Tobit slammed his helmet back onto his head. Even before he’d locked it in place, he was yelling into the radio, "Benny, evacuate the ship. Don’t ask questions. Now, now, now!" "Do you think they’re going to board us?" I asked.

"Maybe," he said. "Or they might take Willow in tow and run off with the whole damned ship."

Steal the ship? While I was acting captain? I didn’t want to think what Dad would say about that.

"No more lollygagging," Tobit shouted, grabbing my arm. "We have to get out of here."

He dragged me from the lounge and down the corridor to the nearest evac module. It wasn’t far — in a navy ship, you’re never more than ten seconds from an escape pod. "Get in," he said. "Next stop, Celestia."

"What about you?"

"As soon as you’re gone, I’ll jump out an emergency airlock. There’s one just…"

The floor heaved beneath our feet. I grabbed at something to keep my balance; the "something" was Tobit, who was grabbing me too. "No more time," he growled, shoving me toward the pod. "They’re grappling the ship with tractors."

"They’re really going to steal my ship?"

"York," he said, "it’s not your ship and it’s not your fault. You’re just caught in a High Council fuck-up. Bad enough that this whole crew died… but the Admiralty must have opened itself a whopping security hole that let all the wrong people hear about Willow. Someone smuggled nano aboard. Someone else heard there’s a crewless ship here, ripe for the taking. It’s a grade A extra large chrome-plated cluster fuck, but you aren’t the one responsible. You’ve stepped in someone else’s dog shit, York; scrape it off your shoe and just walk away."

"Can’t I do anything?"

The ship lurched again; I barely managed to stay on my feet. Tobit stumbled and went down on one knee, but scrambled up again fast.

"Yeah, one thing you can do," he said, pushing me all the way into the pod. "Ship-soul, attend," he called. "Captain is abandoning ship and invoking Captain’s Last Act."

The computer voice came over the speakers outside the pod. "Captain York confirms Captain’s Last Act?"

"Say ‘confirm,’ " Tobit whispered to me.

"Confirm," I said.

"Captain repeats confirmation?" the computer asked.

"Repeat confirmation," I said. "Confirm, confirm, confirm. And, umm… immediate forced landing emergency."

The corridor snapped completely black. I couldn’t even see Tobit in front of me in his bright white tightsuit.

"What did I just do?" I asked him.

"The ship-soul EMP’d itself," he replied. His voice wasn’t piped over the speakers now; it came out unamplified and muffled, straight from his tightsuit. "Every data storage on board just got fried with a massive electric pulse," he said. "As of now, Willow is a brainless chunk of scrap metal. The people stealing this baby won’t get any navy codes or records…"

Something went clang in front of me. The next second, lights came on inside the escape pod and I could see the hatch had slammed closed, shutting me off from Tobit back in the corridor. The pod had computers of its own, and I guess they’d detected the main ship-soul dropping off-line. The evac module had decided to go automatic.

"Ejecting in ten seconds," a computer voice announced.

There were no seats or controls. The interior of the pod was just a room-sized cube, five meters on each edge, with grab-bars stuck into the walls, the floor, and even the ceiling. You could jam all of Willow’s crew into a single one of the modules… and now that I thought of it, the whole crew was here. Me.

I dropped to the floor, wrapped my arms around the two nearest bars and tucked my feet under two more. "Five seconds," the computer voice said.

Overhead, a vidscreen turned on: it covered half the ceiling and showed the outside of the ship. The idea must have been to let people in the pod watch what was happening, rather than making them wait blindly in a closed capsule. That was fine if you wanted to see what was coming for you. Me, I was more inclined to close my eyes; but that would be uncaptainly, so I kept watching the screen.

The black ship had lined itself straight in front of Willow, shooting a snaky red beam back at the bulb on our prow. The beam was just starting to pull our ship forward, drawing us up toward the stranger’s long Sperm-tail. It wouldn’t take long to get us inside; once something starts entering a Sperm-field, it gets sucked in really fast.

Meanwhile, a few klicks away, Jacaranda was just beginning to move in our direction. The crew over there must have been caught totally off guard; they didn’t even have their real-space engines warmed up. Most ships don’t, not when they’re inside their Sperm envelope — no point burning fuel if you don’t have to. So Jacaranda was going to be slow, slow, slow for a few more minutes. By the time they got up to speed, Willow would probably be nabbed.

Even if Jacaranda got to us in time, I didn’t know what they could do. Navy ships don’t have weapons — the League of Peoples won’t let any ship in the galaxy sail around armed, not with the teeniest bit of killing power. Ships could carry nonlethal things like those missiles that ripped away the Sperm-field; but I doubted if Jacaranda had anything like that ready to hand.

At most, Jacaranda could latch onto us with its own tractors and try a tug-of-war… but even that was a waste of time till they got nearer. Tractor beams are strong close up but weak farther off. Seeing as the black ship had grabbed Willow at point-blank range, Jacaranda would have to get nearly that close before they had a chance of holding onto us.

Willow shuddered. Up ahead, I could see the open mouth of the stranger’s Sperm-tail, like a milky ghost-worm about to swallow us. Any second, we’d be slurped inside… The evac module blew straight up into space, strong as an explosion. My body was squashed hard against the floor, all my bones and muscles pressed down like something wanted to roll me flat. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t move a finger. My eyes were watering, but I could still see enough of the vidscreen to make out Willow, far away already. There was the black ship, there was Jacaranda lumbering up slowly, there were the seven other escape pods soaring all around me.

And there was something fuzzy pushing hard on my face.

Uh-oh.

Eyeball nano, here in the escape pod; that’s where the nanites had been hiding all along. Maybe the defense clouds didn’t search much inside the evac modules, because the modules weren’t critical to ship’s operation. Our defenders were busy watching Willow’s life support and engines and all; why worry about the escape pods, when they were hardly ever used?

Now I could feel the fuzz of little bugs, dragged down by the force of acceleration and squishing against my cheeks. Little jelly eyeballs pressed hard onto my skin. How much squish could a microscopic eyeball take before it mushed open?

My face felt damp. Was that hive-queen venom or just cold sweat? On my forehead. My lips. Around my eyes.

A computer voice said, "Confirm immediate forced landing emergency."

I didn’t want to open my mouth. But if I didn’t, the escape pod would never land on Celestia; it would just hang around the ejection site to make it easier for rescuers to find. Sooner or later I’d get picked up by the black ship… or Jacaranda… or just hang out in space forever, me, the nano, and the venom.

"Confirm," I said, keeping my lips closed as tight as I could and still let the word out. Even so, I didn’t want to think how many nanites got driven down my throat through my clenched teeth.

"Maximum acceleration in five seconds," the computer said. "Placing passenger cube into safety stasis." That meant the escape pod was going to freeze time for me, so I wouldn’t get mashed to pulp when the propulsion kicked in. It was the same principle as getting put into a Sperm-field’s pocket universe, except that a stasis field’s universe didn’t have a time dimension. It just sat there, a dumb old R3 with no ambition or progress.

"Five," the computer counted, "four, three, two, one…"

There was a soft sound, like a BINK. Then suddenly, the vidscreen showed a blue sky with stringy clouds wisping high above me. The escape module had completely stopped moving — nothing but an easy rocking, and the sound of water lapping at the outside of the pod.

"Time in stasis, forty-six minutes, twenty-one seconds," the computer voice said. "Successful forced landing."

Sure, successful. Except that I had a tinny pickly taste in my mouth. When I wiped my face with my shirt cuff, the sleeve came away green with venom.