Hunted

9 RETURNING TO SOLID GROUND

Venom on my face and in my mouth. It didn’t burn or sting, but it terrified me. How long till I started shivering again? How long before I went frothing crazy — sick with poison?

Maybe this time it’d be better; maybe I’d built up resistance. But it could just as easily go the other way, with me all weakened and sensitized from the last dose. The effect could hit me ten times harder than before.

You can never be sure with venom.

Out loud I said, "If I get sick, I get sick; there’s nothing I can do." Which sounded noble and stoic and all, but didn’t untie the knot of fear in my stomach. My mouth was still puckered with the pickly aftertaste of poison… and that was more real than any brave words.

I went to the exit hatch and hiked up the OPEN lever. That got me into the airlock, which had a peep-monitor showing the world outside the pod. I could see a stretch of water so muddy it looked like creamed coffee… but the shore was only a stone’s throw away, a low dirt bank supporting a scraggly line of trees. The trees looked shining wet, as if they’d just got doused with rain. Considering how blue clear the sky was, I figured all that drip-off had actually come from my module smacking the water. Escape pods make relatively gentle landings — they don’t come in like fireballs, and they always aim for water to avoid smushing houses or people — but even a soft landing splashes down like a kid doing a cannonball. A good slap. Much spillage.

Too bad I missed seeing it. I bet it would have been great.

When I looked again at those trees on shore, I noticed their leaves weren’t the nice chlorophyll green of New Earth and Troyen. Their colors ran a lot more funereal. Purply black. Bluish black. Orangey black. Yellow with black spottles. Gloss black on matte black with ebony accents.

But it’d take more than dark leaves to make me feel gloomy. After twenty years of living inside a lunar dome, never seeing a tree except in VR sims, I was kiss-the-ground happy to be this close to the real thing. I pushed the EXIT button; the interior airlock door closed, the door to the outside opened… and I jumped into the muddy water, doing a cannonball of my own. Okay. Maybe the water was bone-shaking cold. And I’d swum halfway to shore before it occurred to me Celestia might have its own types of piranha or anacondas, not to mention swarms of alien germs. But nothing sank its teeth into my leg, and a short swim was exactly what I needed to wash the venom off my face. I even considered taking a glug of water to rinse the venom out of my mouth; but there was all that mud, and maybe the water did have germs, and anyway, some of the venom must have already gone down my throat. Keeping my eyes and mouth closed, treading water, I ducked my head under a few times, then wiped off my face with my hands. At least that rinsed the venom from my skin… and it made me feel cleaner in general, even if I could still taste the stuff I’d swallowed.

When I clambered onto the bank, I was muddy, wet, and cold. It felt good. I found a spot where the sun shone through a gap in the trees and sat down to wring the damp from my uniform. While I squeezed out water, I looked around to take stock of my situation.

Escape pods try not to put you down in a desert or an icecap or the middle of an ocean. They pick a spot with nice weather and plenty of plant life, preferably with signs of intelligent civilization.

Me, I’d landed in a thirty-meter-wide canal. You could tell it wasn’t a natural river by how straight it ran, a perfect line in both directions. The water showed almost no current: the escape pod was floating free, but it’d barely budged since I’d left it. I wouldn’t have to worry about it drifting out of sight downstream anytime soon.

If need be, I could swim back out and ask the pod’s computer for food rations when I got hungry — I hadn’t noticed any storage bins, but it’d be a pathetic excuse for an evac module if it didn’t carry basic supplies. On the other hand, I didn’t think I’d have to settle for bland protein bars and squeeze tubes of fiber paste… because behind me were fields full of vegetables as far as the eye could see.

The canal ran along one edge of a valley whose soil was almost jet-black. That meant the dirt was as rich as gravy… and it was covered with crops planted in neat rows forming neat squares — a checkerboard in shades of green stretching from the canal all the way to some distant hills. The plants looked young, like this was only late spring or early summer, but I could already recognize onions and lettuce and carrots in the fields closest to me. Honest-to-goodness Earth food growing in a big gorgeous garden that smelled of humus and greenery.

A paved road ran close in front of me, parallel to the canal and separated from the water by the scrawny trees growing on the bank. Here and there along the road stood little environment domes in clusters of two or three — living spaces for the families who worked these farms. At the moment, I couldn’t see anyone out in the fields… but the strong orange sun was straight overhead, and toasty hot even with my clothes soaked to the skin, so I guessed everybody had gone inside for siesta.

I got up, brushed the worst-caked mud off my uniform, and started down the road toward the nearest domes. No one would want me showing up unannounced in the middle of lunch; but I’d wait till people went back out to work, and I’d say hello then. On a day like this, there was no need to hurry. It was heaven just to breathe real air, away from the nanites and the black ship and Troyen…

A doorway dilated in the side of the closest dome. Out stepped a Mandasar-warrior caste, big and red. The instant he caught sight of me, he screamed a battle cry and charged.

Mandasar warriors are only half as big as queens, but they’re still the size of Brahma bulls. They’ve got the basic lobsterish look, but bulked-up and stocky, from their flat wide faces to their strong blunt tails. If a warrior props his tail good and solid on the ground behind him, you can hit him with a truck and he won’t be knocked backward; in fact, once he gets his eight legs on solid footing, he can push that truck back the other way, over rough terrain, for hour after hour. Put a bunch of warriors together and you get a line of foot soldiers who can steamroll over anything in their path… except another line of Mandasars driving the opposite way.

Don’t get the idea warriors are slow-moving hulks; they can storm forward on those eight strong legs as fast as horse cavalry. When they’re running they look like old Greek centaurs, because the front part of their body is angled up vertically as tall as a human. Upright front, lobstery behind.

Like queens, every warrior has pincer claws, but only two of them, on stubby arms down at the waist. The claws are sharp and nasty enough to lop clean through a human’s leg, bones and all, if you’re careless enough to let your ankle come within reach. At shoulder level, warriors have another set of arms, called the Cheejreth or "clever twigs": spindly six-fingered things used for fine manipulation. Cheejreth are nearly as long as human arms, but skinny and fragile — so weak, a human five-year-old could wrist-wrestle a warrior ten wins out of ten. During a serious fight, the Cheejreth stay folded against the chest, tucked into arm-sized niches in the warrior’s carapace; those niches evolved to keep Cheejreth safely out of the way, rather than flopping around and getting snapped off.

Topping the body is a head like a cannonball, its carapace armor twice as thick as any other part of the warrior’s shell. The head has a few delicate parts — huge feathery ears like moth antennas, and cat-style whiskers around the snout to serve as extra scent receptors, waving about to catch odor molecules from the air — but the flimsy bits aren’t at all vital. If they break or get mangled during a fight, it scarcely hurts a bit. The warrior just can’t hear or smell as well for a few days, until the damaged part grows back.

The one indispensable part of a warrior’s face is the spike on his pointy snout. It’s sharp and bony, only as big as a human thumb, but perfect for use as a bayonet — in an emergency, the warrior can use his spike to stab an enemy in the eye. Of course, it has to be a big emergency. All Mandasar castes have a finicky sense of smell, and they absolutely hate the stink of someone’s blood gucking up the tip of their noses.

The warrior charging toward me had a shell so fiery red, I knew he had to be young, in his twenties — the color fades as warriors get older, not to mention that they learn not to attack people at first sight. You never know when you’ll meet someone who spent years on the Mandasar home-world, learning all kinds of tricks to show overeager youngsters that humans aren’t as soft as they look.

All the same, I didn’t want to hurt an impetuous kid just because he was short on common sense. Fast as I could, I crossed my hands over my chest in the high-court submission posture and hollered, "Naizo!"… short for Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo, which means I yield to your queen and her rightful hegemony over these, her duly apportioned lands. (A thousand years ago, old-time Mandasar warriors got their kicks by trying to recite the long form of the phrase before they got a pincer rammed through their guts. They did it as a test of nerve — to show how cool-headed they could be, speaking calm and slow while an opponent raced straight at them. The flowery words got collapsed to Naizo about the time firearms were invented, when it suddenly became important for surrenders to be short and snappy.)

Of course, if someone barrels down on you, either with guns or with pincers, there’s always a chance he won’t stop, even when you yell uncle. The warrior charging toward me didn’t slow a bit when I Naizo’d him — he pounded on like a thoroughbred stallion, intending to gallop down my throat at trampling speed.

I’d have been pee-in-the-pants scared if he were a real horse; horses have hammer-hard hooves, and real good instincts when it comes to kicking. Lucky for me, Mandasar warriors are built all wrong for horsy maneuvers like rearing up, and they can’t kick worth a darn unless they practice for years. Nature designed them for using their waist pincers and nose spikes; get around those, and they don’t have much left to throw at you.

I kept shouting, "Naizo!" as long as I could, in case the warrior was just putting on a show to impress the rest of his family — four other Mandasars, three workers and a gentle, had come out of the dome behind him and were watching his every move, all excited and worshipful. But when the warrior got so close I could see he really planned to run me over, I dropped the submission stance and faked a move to my left, as if I were dodging out of the way. The warrior swerved in the same direction… which showed he had zero training in actual fights. He spread his waist arms wide to prevent me from going around, and opened his claws to catch me; but I was already slipping back to the right, outside the reach of his pincers.

The warrior charged straight past me, with way too much momentum to stop. If he’d had any experience fighting humans, he would have kept going; but he dropped his lobstery tail as a brake, dragging it along the ground like Mandasars always do when they want to slow down fast. For sure, he intended to swing around and take another grab at me… but I was right behind him now and his tail was close in front of my feet.

So I ran up his tail and threw myself flat onto his back.

Mandasar warriors can jump, but not nearly as much as a bucking bronco. Like I said, they’re built wrong for horse tricks — eight legs just can’t hop as wildly as four. I held on just fine by wrapping my arm around his throat in a neck-bar… not tight enough to crush his windpipe, but every time he bounced, my arm dragged across the little sections of carapace that covered his neck. My combat instructors on Troyen said that applying pressure there made the plates of the outer shell grind into the soft flesh beneath, smushing it and pinching it. Apparently you dig into three nerves at once: major nerves that feel fierce stabbing pain but don’t suffer any real damage.

So I kept my hold jammed in strong while the rest of my body flopped about on the warrior’s back. I got bruises and bumps galore, but from the sound of it, I wasn’t suffering half as much as the kid I was squeezing. He screamed blue murder and scrabbled with his Cheejreth arms trying to pull me off, while his waist pincers clacked sharp and angry, not able to reach any part of me.

I could smell the battle musk rising thick off his skin: Battle Musk C, the one that smells like strong sweet caramel. It meant he was scared and starting to lose his head. The scent glands for Musk C only kick in when a warrior is feeling desperate — a signal telling his comrades-in-arms he needs help, even if he’s too stubborn to admit it. Lucky for me, there weren’t other warriors around… and the Mandasars back at the dome, the workers and the gentle, would never dream of joining the fight. It would be a horrible insult to this warrior’s honor, the tiniest suggestion that he’d need help from other castes in dealing with an unarmed human.

After ten seconds of trying to toss me off, the warrior settled down a bit: either trying to think of new tactics, or just not keen on scrunching up his throat anymore. While he considered his next move, I left my one arm in place around his neck, but reached out with the other hand and wrapped it around the end of his snout.

A Mandasar’s muscles for opening his mouth aren’t very strong — if you hook your thumb on his nose spike and your fingers under his jaw, you can easily hold his mouth shut. Work it right, and you can even press your palm up against his nostrils. You never get a perfect seal, but he still has serious trouble taking in air… especially when he’s panting from trying to buck you off. It’s a good way to impress a sparring partner that you’re in control, but not so life-threatening that he thinks you want to smother him dead.

Another few seconds of that and the kid under me stopped struggling. He said something out the side of his mouth, but with his jaw held shut, the words were too muffled to understand. I loosened my grip and let him try again.

"Give," he said.

"What?" I asked, letting go completely.

"Give up." He shook his head and snorted to clear his nose. "I." He shook his head again, then sneezed full force, spraying out a hurricane of spit and mucus. "Surrender, I. Yield, I. Grovel I, you stinky hume."

The warrior flapped one of his Cheejreth arms across the tip of his snout, like wiping his nose on his sleeve. "No fight wanted I but all, save you with nonwords made mock of me." He swung his head around till he could glare me full in the face with his beady black eyes. "What in hot hell means Naizo?"

10 SMELLING SOMETHING AWFUL

I slid off the warrior’s back, making sure to keep clear of his pincers. He didn’t even look in my direction — too busy cleaning his nose with his hands, fussing and blowing and sniffling.

"Naizo is a short form," I said, then waited for him to finish an especially liquidish round of snorting. "It stands for Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo. Have you ever heard that?"

His whiskers gave an angry flick; for a second I thought he was going to attack. I hopped back fast into a defense position, but he contented himself with a bristly glare. "Contemptible your accent. Twist the words sideways, almost to mockery… yet choose I to think it is mere hume ignorance."

"How would you say it then?"

The warrior stared at me a second more, then intoned his own version of Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo. He recited it in a deep reverent voice, like he might be saying a prayer… but his pronunciation was halfway between gutterspeak and baby talk. A Mandasar from Troyen would break up laughing at the very sound; either that, or slap the boy on the nose.

"Um," I said. Which obviously wasn’t the worshipful praise the warrior expected, so I added, "Interesting. Very interesting."

I shouldn’t have been surprised at the warrior’s horrible accent. The Mandasar children had come to Celestia a whole twenty years ago; back then, this warrior must have been a mere hatchling… baby talk only. On the other hand, a baby wouldn’t know big formal sentences like Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo. The warrior must have learned that later on — either from an older Mandasar kid, or from a human who’d picked up the words but not how to pronounce them properly.

Why didn’t the warrior have a better teacher for his own language? I knew the answer, and it didn’t reflect too well on my own family. If you want the honest truth, the evacuation had been my father’s idea — his pet project, planned and executed by him from start to finish.

No one had even considered the possibility of getting the kids out till Dad suggested it to Sam. I actually read the message he sent from New Earth. Sam was supposed to take credit for the notion, so she could win brownie points with grateful parents on Troyen… but it was Dad who organized the big navy airlift to ferry youngsters to the nearest safe planet.

"Just a temporary thing," Sam told me. I was sick in the palace infirmary by then, with a big isolation room all to myself. Humans weren’t supposed to visit unless they wore rubbery orange isolation suits, but Sam never followed the rules. She’d handpicked my doctors and nurses; they let her do whatever she wanted, almost as if she were an honorary queen. So she held my hand like she couldn’t possibly catch Coughing Jaundice herself, and she said, "The evacuation is only for a few weeks. Till I get the situation here back under control. Dad made a lot of important friends when he was a bright young diplomat on Troyen; now he’s keen to keep them happy. If a few Mandasar nobles want to send their kids to safety, Dad’s glad to arrange it."

Don’t ask me how helping a few friends turned into the full-scale removal of ten million young Mandasars; but things have a way of snowballing. When word gets out rich and powerful people want their kids offplanet, folks who aren’t so well heeled start clamoring for the same thing. Dad refused to take any adults — just a bare minimum of Mandasar nursemaids — but he found a place for every child who was brought to the transport depots.

When anyone asked who’d look after the kids, Dad promised he was sending "trained caregivers" to Celestia. "What a scam!" my sister had said, rolling her eyes. "People on Celestia will never know what hit them. The thing is, Edward, Celestia is an independent world sitting right in the path of Technocracy expansion. They’re undeveloped and underpopulated, not to mention their environment is nicely compatible with Terran life. Everyone knows the planet is a juicy prize the Technocracy wants to scoop up… and the Celestian government is sweating its tits off, trying to attract nonhuman immigrants to fill up all that inviting empty space."

Sam laughed. "At this very second, folks on Celestia are congratulating themselves how lucky they are to get ten million Mandasars. Warm bodies to add to the census so they can tell the Technocracy, ‘Hey, you can’t take us over, we’ve got a thriving population here.’ What the Celestians don’t understand is that the ten million kids are going to get twenty million humans to take care of them… courtesy of the High Council of Admirals. Celestia will find itself inundated with Homo sap guardians, and if anyone complains to the League, we’ll say we’re only acting from compassion for the poor wee lobsters."

"But," I said, "if the kids are only going to Celestia for a few weeks…"

"When the kids go home," Sam replied, "the baby-sitters will stay. What can Celestia do? It’s one thing to run off a few dozen squatters… but not twenty million. Especially not twenty million cranky pioneers who’ve been waiting impatiently for land of their own. This time next week, Celestia will be a de facto human settlement, answering only to Alexander York, Admiral of the Gold. Colonization by fait accompli."

So the people supposed to tend the kids weren’t trained caregivers at all; they were a bunch of get-rich-quickers who’d been waiting for colony homes to open up anywhere in frontier space. I guess they had visions of marching down to Celestia and owning the place within a year, while the current nonhuman inhabitants got shunted into reservations and scut jobs. Most of the would-be land-grabbers had no idea how hard they’d have to work to establish any kind of homestead… and they definitely didn’t have a clue how to raise Mandasar hatchlings.

That wouldn’t have mattered much if the children had really only stayed a few weeks. But then the war broke out full bloom back on Troyen and the Technocracy pronounced a quarantine: Troyen was off-limits, nobody in or out. The kids on Celestia couldn’t go home; they couldn’t even get teachers of their own species, except for the tiny number of Mandasars who’d been offplanet when Troyen fell under blockade.

I can imagine my dad cursing a blue streak about the situation. He’d taken responsibility for the kids, and now he had no choice but to raise them. Somehow. Even if it cut into the "colonization and settlement fees" he’d collected from those Celestia homesteaders. Worse than that, the Admiralty demanded he educate the Mandasar kids in their own history and geography and all; otherwise, civilians would go crazy, throwing around words like "imperialism" and "oppression" and "cultural genocide." Still cursing, my father put out a call for people who knew anything at all about Troyen, so they could teach Mandasar children about themselves.

Ten million kids need an awful lot of teachers. Dad couldn’t find nearly enough people who actually knew what they were talking about; up till the war, no one in the Technocracy paid much attention to Troyen. So the kids had had to get by with folks who didn’t know as much about hive culture as they pretended: who’d learned from books or ten-day tourist visits. Twenty years later, all that ignorance showed — I was no Troyen expert, but I’d spent fifteen years there with the diplomatic mission, plus another twenty years watching from the moonbase. I knew the difference between a decent accent, and one that sounded like a toddler with his mouth full of porridge.

"My name’s Edward," I said, deciding it was safer to speak English rather than Mandasar. "I don’t mean any trouble to you or your hive. It’s just…" I stopped and waved at the evac module, still floating calmly in the canal behind us. "There was trouble with my ship. Up in space. And the escape pod just happened to land here."

"Am Zeeleepull, I," the warrior answered. Zeeleepull was a Mandasar word meaning "dauntless" and "undefeated" and "stubborn"… a really popular birth name for warriors. He looked glumly at the escape pod for a few seconds, then asked, "More humes will come? Navy humes to find and reclaim you?"

"I guess so. Maybe."

The pod’s onboard computer was surely broadcasting "Come and get me" on the fleet’s emergency band. Jacaranda and Starbase Iris might have their hands full dealing with the black ship, but when they got free time they’d send someone to make a pickup. I wondered if they’d bother to search for me; none of Willow’s other evac modules had anyone inside, so the retrieval team might think this one had been empty too. Maybe the retrieval team would just load up the pod and leave, without asking anyone questions.

I could always hope.

So far, Zeeleepull and his hive-mates were the only ones who knew I was here. If I got out of sight before other people came out from siesta… and if I could persuade these Mandasar kids not to tell the navy they’d seen me… "Um," I said to Zeeleepull. "Could I maybe talk to your family a minute? Inside, in private somewhere?"

He gave me a mistrustful look. At least, I think that’s what it was; on Troyen, I’d got the hang of reading Mandasar facial expressions, but I was twenty years out of practice. Zeeleepull stared at me a few more seconds, his breathing all huffy and puffy. Then, he turned away and headed for home, muttering over his shoulder, "Come then, you stinky hume."

I followed behind him, wondering what he meant. Twice now, he’d called me "stinky"; was that just a sulky-kid insult, or did I really smell bad? Mandasars had tremendously more sensitive noses than humans, but they were also pretty broad-minded when it came to odors. A few things they hated, like the scent of their own race’s blood, but mostly they snuffled around, happy as dogs: interested in all sorts of smells, even ones humans thought were rude. Queen Verity once told me she thought Homo sapiens smelled "delicious"… which was kind of terrifying, coming from an alien the size of an elephant, but it definitely wasn’t "stinky."

The only stink I could think of was the corpses back on Willow. I’d walked through the lounge often enough; maybe the smell of folks rotting had soaked into my clothes.

As usual, I was wrong.

Zeeleepull’s hive-mates didn’t look happy to meet me, but at least they showed good manners. "Hello, good day, good afternoon, you’re wet."

Standoffish politeness was okay. I’d been afraid the Mandasars on Celestia might really be hostile toward humans; otherwise, why had Zeeleepull attacked me on sight? But as far as I could tell, these people just thought I was a nuisance — an unwanted stranger who’d dropped by at lunch.

Besides Zeeleepull, the hive had four other members: three white workers, Hib Nib Pib (all neuter, of course); and a brown gentle (female) named Counselor. At least that’s how she introduced herself… she must have had a hidden name, but she’d never reveal it to someone she’d just met. The only surprise was how she used an English word for her public title instead of something in her own language. Then again, maybe English was her own language — she spoke it a lot better than Zeeleepull, and immediately took over the conversation.

"You claim you’re with the navy?" she asked, looking hard at my uniform. It made me realize how bad I must look, all muddy and wet.

"I had to swim," I said, pointing back to the canal.

"No," she replied, her whiskers twitching. "You didn’t have to swim. You could have stayed in your capsule till someone came for you."

"Ahh," the three workers said in unison, as if they were tickled pink by Counselor’s logic. Workers tend to adore gentles the way grandparents adore grandchildren: fond and admiring, but along the lines of, "Oh how clever the little one is." In a hive like this, Hib Nib Pib would do just about anything Counselor asked, but always as if they were indulging the cute little whims of a five-year-old. "You want us to spend twelve hours in the blazing sun, digging up carrots? Well, dear, if that’s what you really think we should do, I guess we could manage." If I were a gentle, it would make me tired and sad and angry — all those people treating me like I was childish and just a bit crazy. But I guess that’s the way gentles expect things to be.

"I could have stayed in the escape pod," I told Counselor, "but I’ve been out in space for a long time and I felt like breathing fresh air."

"More air you need even now," Zeeleepull muttered. "Dirty stink on your fingers."

He made a great show of wiping his nose where I’d put my palm over his snout. All four of his hive-mates immediately poked their muzzles in to sniff me. Mandasars are like that: "You say it smells bad? Really, really bad? Really, really, really bad? Ooo, let me check." Hib and Pib aimed for my armpits while Nib took my crotch — I guess they knew the places where humans usually smelled strongest. Counselor, however, had paid attention to what Zeeleepull actually said; she pushed her nose toward my hands. One deep snort, then she jerked her head up and stepped back fast.

"What is that?" she demanded.

"Umm." I couldn’t help notice it was my right hand she’d been smelling. The same hand I put around Zeeleepull’s nose.

The same hand that’d got queen’s venom spilled on it. But the venom was only a tiny dose days ago. I’d taken plenty of showers since then… not to mention bathing in fever sweat while I was sick. Could Counselor really smell venom after all that? Or was it just dirty water and mud, maybe something I’d put my hand into without noticing as I pulled myself onto the canal bank?

One way to find out: I’d just had a lot fresher dose of venom squish onto my cheeks in the escape pod. "Um," I said, "do you, uhh, smell the same thing on my face?"

All five Mandasars leaned their muzzles toward me. Their whiskers quivered as they drew nearer, looking nervous and eager, both at once…

The workers jumped back like I’d whacked them in the snouts. Zeeleepull held his ground but whipped his head away, nearly gouging me with his nose spike by accident. As for Counselor, she just dropped in a dead faint, planting her face into the deep dark soil.

11 MEETING THE HIVE

Fast as I could, I knelt and lifted Counselor out of the dirt. Gentles are the smallest caste of Mandasars; they look frail and fragile in comparison to warriors or workers, but they still weigh as much as a hefty human adult. And they’re all floppy-awkward to pick up.

"Let’s get her inside," I said to her hive-mates. They didn’t answer. They were still all gaping in shock — fresh venom must pack quite a wallop to the Mandasar nose. Struggling on my own, I lugged Counselor through the door of the nearest environment dome, then set her on one of the lounging pallets around the dining-room table.

The communal water bowl was still half-full from lunch. I started to splash Counselor’s face and neck, mostly because I didn’t know a truly useful way to help her recover. When a gentle faints, it isn’t from shock or anything like that — it’s actually more of a trance, when she’s come up against something that needs a whole lot of thought. Her conscious mind shuts down so her unconscious can go into overdrive… kind of like a computer letting its external interface go blank so it can use all its processing power internally. Counselor would wake up when her brain had come to grips with the venom she smelled; but I still kept splashing, because I had to do something.

While I splashed, I had time to peek around the dome’s interior. More than anything, it looked like one of the "heritage chambers" at Queen Verity’s palace: a room where you stored stuff that was too historical to throw out, but too many centuries out of fashion to actually use. The dining table was a perfect example. Laminated on its surface was a glossy reproduction of a two-hundred-year-old Troyenese painting: the one of old Queen Wisdom rising from the sea after sporting with the first envoy from the League of Peoples. It’s as famous to Mandasars as the Mona Lisa is to humans… and that means it’s a great whopping cliche you’d never want to show in your home.

At least, that’s how people felt on Troyen. Things might be different on Celestia. I could imagine a hive buying the Queen Wisdom table as a joke, the way kids in their twenties get a kick out of kitschy old treasures; but maybe these kids didn’t know the Queen Wisdom painting was corny and old-fashioned. As one of the few works of Mandasar art known to the outside world, maybe they thought it was special and important — a connection to their lost home planet.

The same could go for the mish-mosh of other knick-knacks around the dome: a cheap little rain-stick from Queen Honor’s continent, Rupplish; a pair of sharp iron tips that bolted onto a warrior’s pincers… something no one on Troyen had used since preindustrial days; a little needlepoint sampler with words written in one of the ancient pictograph languages. I didn’t know which language, which continent, or how long ago these particular picto-graphs had been edged out by the unromantic efficiency of an alphabet.

The nobles back in Queen Verity’s palace would have flicked their whiskers at such a rummage of decorations clumped in one room. The stuff didn’t go together: antiquey things from a dozen different ages and regions, all dating back at least a hundred years. But the pieces weren’t real antiques; they weren’t even good fakes. Every hunk of bric-a-brac looked gleaming and modern, as if Celestia had a hundred factories knocking off shiny-bright copies of old Troyenese things… whatever artwork and gewgaws the outside world happened to have pictures of.

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for these kids, how they were ready to buy anything that was sort of a kind of a teeny bit like mementos from Troyen. They didn’t mind mixing stuff together from all three continents and heaven knows how many eras of history, so long as it brought back memories of their birth world.

So lonely. So homesick.

But as much as I felt sorry for them, I felt pretty proud too… the way they hung on, trying to stay connected to a planet they only half remembered. Big red Zeeleepull had never heard the word Naizo, even though it’d been standard for centuries… but he knew the longer phrase, the original, like some cherished hand-me-down from the medieval warriors who’d invented it.

The more I thought about it, the more I saw what was really going on: the Mandasars here weren’t just twenty-year-old kids, they were children. No matter how grownup their bodies had got, their house was like a tree fort filled with a hodgepodge of valuable junk they’d pulled out of trash heaps or bought for a penny. None of this was sad and pathetic, or even noble; it was just what youngsters did while they were rehearsing to own adult things.

Even if a Queen Wisdom table was still tacky, tacky, tacky.

The other four hive-mates trooped in from outside just as Counselor started to wake. From the looks on their faces, Zeeleepull and the workers had mumbled and grumbled about what to do with me but hadn’t come to any conclusion. All Mandasars can make decisions when they have to, but if there’s a gentle handy, the other castes give her the deciding vote. I don’t know if that’s instinct or just habit; the gentles all swear it’s biologically hardwired, how other castes defer to them… but warriors and workers claim they only do it because gentles whine when they don’t get their own way.

Counselor blinked and twitched her whiskers a few times, shaking off the water I’d splashed on her face. Suddenly, she sat bolt-upright, staring at me in horror. "You smell…"

She couldn’t finish the sentence. Zeeleepull muttered, "Stinky hume," while the workers crowded in to see if Counselor was okay. They did all the standard things worried Mandasar moms do with children: patting Counselor’s face to check for fever; examining the color of her fingertips; sniffing the tiny musk glands at the base of her tail to make sure she didn’t smell injured.

I looked down at those button-sized glands myself. If Counselor had become a queen when she was little, those glands would have ballooned into huge green sacs.

"The smell on my face," I said to them all. "It’s venom. From a Mandasar queen."

That sent the five of them into another bout of whisker-twitching shock. With Zeeleepull, the shock only took half a second to swoop into outrage. "Dare you to pretend—"

"I’m not pretending," I interrupted. "It’s the truth."

"Then worse!" Zeeleepull yelled. The burning-wood odor of Battle Musk B began to pour off him like smoke. Thirty seconds of that and he’d go berserk… especially in the dining room’s enclosed space, where his own musk would fill the air and whip him to frenzy. Counselor put her hand to his cheek, and whispered, "Calm, calm," but Zeeleepull just kept yelling.

"If a hume, dirty awful you, dares to wear sacred venom like… like perfume…"

Uh-oh. It’s too complicated to explain now, but one of the causes of Troyen’s civil war was snooty-pants aliens riling the populace by dousing themselves with Mandasar pheromones. Zeeleepull obviously knew that… and in his mind, he’d suddenly identified me with the troublemakers who drove Troyen over the edge.

The workers were snorting and trembling now, half-scared to death by the Musk B in the air. That particular type of musk always terrifies nonwarrior castes. A scent specifically evolved to stimulate the fear response, a Mandasar scientist once told me. Counselor hollered, "Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo," but Zeeleepull was too far gone for that to have an effect. The words only work when everyone’s cool-headed, not when a warrior desperately wants to run riot.

Any second, there was going to be a fight… and a real fight this time, not just a warrior feeling testy, deciding to drive off an unwanted visitor. Now Zeeleepull had a reason to really hurt me: because he thought I’d committed the deliberate sacrilege of wearing venom as cologne.

I had no room to maneuver inside the house. Even worse, the dome had closed and sealed itself shut after everyone came inside; I couldn’t find the door to get out. Zeeleepull would try to kill me, and the only way to prevent that was to hurt him… bash him unconscious or cripple him so badly he couldn’t pincer me in half. I didn’t want to do it; I didn’t even know if I could do it, because there was so little space for ducking and dodging.

Then… while I was thinking and worrying and trying to figure out what to do, my hands reached out of their own accord. I wasn’t moving them, I swear. I had no idea what they were going to do. But they grabbed Zeeleepull’s snout like I was as strong as a tiger, and dragged his nose around till it was a hair breadth from my face.

He tried to yank away, but couldn’t. I remember thinking, I shouldn’t be able to hold him. In a straight tug-of-war, he outweighs me three to one. But I wrestled him close so that all he could smell was the fresh venom on my face; and I heard my own voice saying, "I am Blood-Consort Edward York, last and rightful husband of Verity the Second, High Queen and Supreme Ruler of all those who tread the Blessed Land. If you fear her name, you will yield; if not, be named her enemy and pay the price of your folly."

The words came out in a dream. I couldn’t tell if I was talking English or Troyenese; I’d never said such things before, never once tried to bully people by using my position. For all I knew, these Mandasars had no idea Queen Verity ever married a human husband… and even if they’d heard the story, why would they believe I was that man?

But Zeeleepull’s nostrils were full of the odor of queen’s venom: the venom on my face, stronger than the scent of battle musk, or the aroma of fear rising from Counselor and the workers.

Slowly, the warrior crossed his Cheejreth over his chest and closed his eyes. When I let go of his snout, he lowered it to the ground till his whole body was flat on the floor.

"Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo," he whispered.

Counselor was already lying down. Hib Nib Pib dropped prostrate too, pressing their faces tight against the chipped-wood rug. For a second I was standing high above their heads… and I could feel an unfamiliar expression twisting up my face. I didn’t know how it looked, but it scared me. Something out of nowhere was making me act like a stranger.

I pushed and pushed, trying to shift my face, my arms, anything. Suddenly, everything holding me back let go and I was in control again, able to move my body however I wanted. I dropped to my knees and nearly blurted out, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it… but I stopped myself in time. Warriors are quick to recognize signs of weakness; if I started apologizing, we might head back where we started, Zeeleepull going berserk and no way to avoid an all-out bonecrushing.

"Um, rise," I said. Which didn’t sound very regal. I tried to remember how Queen Verity talked to her subjects when she held court. "Rise," I said again with my deepest, most gracious voice. "Rise and let us converse." Counselor was the first to perk up. She’d only caught a slight whiff of the venom… not like Zeeleepull, who’d practically had his nose rubbed in it while I held his snout to my face. No wonder he was slow getting up off the floor. The workers, of course, were busy being cowed — opening one eyelid for a quick peek at me, then closing the eye fast if they saw I was looking their way. You can never tell with workers whether they’re really as intimidated as they seem, or if they’re just putting on a show of being menial. Maybe the workers don’t know either.

"Were you really the high queen’s blood-consort?" Counselor asked in a hushed voice.

"Yes. I really was." For eight whole years, till Verity got killed and the war began… but I didn’t say that. I also didn’t mention she’d had six other consorts at the same time.

"What are you doing here?" Counselor asked.

"I told you: my escape pod landed in your canal."

"So you didn’t… seek us out?"

Counselor suddenly had a hopeful look on her face, enough to break my heart. I could imagine the kids on Celestia, cut off from their home for twenty years and looking to the sky every night, wondering if anyone would ever come to tell them, "We love you and want you back." They’d have a terrible time if they actually did go back to Troyen — with their gutter-baby accents and their attachment to dreadful fake antiques — but they didn’t know they’d be out of place. As out of place as they were now. "Things are still bad back home," I said. "When I left a week and a half ago, the war was as fierce as ever." Not that I paid much attention to the fighting… but the other observers on the moonbase would have told me if the war had ended.

"Yet you recently had contact with… a royal person," Counselor said. "The smell on your face is fresh."

"Yes," I nodded, "but that queen is dead now." When I realized how bad that sounded, I quickly added, "Someone else killed her. It’s really complicated. A ship was trying to bring her here, but things went wrong."

"So you’ve come in her stead?" Counselor asked, all shining eager. "To save us from the recruiters?"

"Um. Hmm."

Counselor sounded so beamingly hopeful, I didn’t want to ask, "What recruiters?" That would dash her down hard, like I’d come all this way, then didn’t know the first thing about her troubles. From the sound of her voice, I could tell she wanted me to be a great savior, fallen out of the sky to rescue her hive from danger. So I didn’t open my mouth till I’d picked my words carefully. "Talk to me about these recruiters," I said. "Tell me everything."

And she did.

Counselor started with something I already knew: despite all those human settlers twenty years ago, Celestia still didn’t belong to the Technocracy. Then she told me a secret: over the past two decades, Celestia had become one of the Technocracy’s most valuable assets, precisely because it’d never signed the Technocracy charter.

It turned out the humans Dad brought to Celestia weren’t interested in clearing a few grubby acres and trying to grow butternut squash. Instead, they wanted to grow huge acres of cash: for example, by establishing big secretive banks outside the Technocracy regulatory system. Places where wealthy Tech-citizens could store money without worrying about taxes or subpoenas. Celestia also became a meeting ground for folks making shady deals… especially under-the-table arrangements with alien species. One group of newly arrived entrepreneurs took up catering to tourists with tastes that would be illegal elsewhere; others built factories that spewed pollution or exploited workers in ways the Technocracy would never allow.

In other words, Counselor said, Celestia had become a place where big rich important people could do sneaky slimy things — all the things they couldn’t get away with inside the boring old Technocracy. (Of course, those big rich important people still lived in the Technocracy, where life was safe and civilized. What’s the point of being rich if you can’t milk the system, then avoid its inconveniences?)

So Celestia was a nice little planet, but also your basic swill hole. People and things got dumped here. The Mandasars were a prime example: brought in as a ruse for colonization, then kept here because the place didn’t have fuddy-duddy laws about raising kids properly. Folks in this star system wouldn’t demand you build "quality orphanages" or find teachers who knew what they were talking about.

The kids had grown up without a lot of attention… but that wasn’t so bad, Counselor said, when they were raised in big schools that crammed a lot of children into one place. Mandasars don’t mind being crammed. In fact, I knew it was good for them to be chucked in tight together, warriors and workers and gentles.

If you want the honest truth, they thrive on each other’s smell.

This is something I learned in Queen Verity’s palace: a crucial fact of Mandasar biology. They need to be surrounded by people of other castes. Every waking second, for instance, a warrior gives off a vinegary perfume (Musk A) that stimulates workers and gentles to be a bit… well, aggressive isn’t the right word. Sharp. Keen. Alert and ambitious.

It’s a pheromone that works directly on receptors in the Mandasar brain. It’s not psychological, it’s purely physical; for Mandasars, inhaling that aroma is like snorting a psychoactive drug. Only it’s more like absorbing a vitamin their brains need to work properly — without regular exposure to warrior musk, workers and gentles start to go funny in the head.

It’s the same for other castes. Workers give off a scent that keeps warriors and gentles more stable, more patient; and the fragrance of a gentle makes warriors and workers more thoughtful in both senses of the word — they reflect more on what they’re doing, and are more considerate about how their actions affect other people.

Separate the castes from each other, and their brain chemicals skitter out of balance. If you keep warriors stuck in barracks with other warriors day after day, the buildup of warrior musk keeps them hair-trigger ready for a fight… but they have no patience, and they don’t think much about what they’re asked to do. That’s great if you want bloodthirsty killing machines who don’t question their orders. In the long run, though, it doesn’t make for a smart dependable army. Or for productive law-abiding citizens.

The same with other castes. Make a segregated camp that only contains workers, and you get a drove of plodding drudges. Verity told me you could make them work long hours for zero pay, but they had no initiative and never used their wits to deal with unexpected problems.

Ditto for gentles. If they only hung around with other gentles, they ended up all brains and no common sense: ivory-tower types who were great at coming up with ideas, inventions and theories, but lousy at judging priorities. They’d be just as happy brainstorming new ways to kill people as they would be inventing medicines or things to make life better. Basically, they turned into amoral geniuses, ready to tackle any problem so long as it was interesting, and to hell with the long-term consequences.

Counselor said the kids on Celestia knew about pheromones too. They wouldn’t be whole people unless they lived in hives with all three castes in close quarters; it was the only way to keep every part of their brains wide-awake and functioning. But this bit of biology wasn’t common knowledge amongst outside races… not till those "trained human caregivers" on, Celestia began tending Mandasar children. That’s when the secret got out, and the human world started contemplating the possibilities.

Remember: Celestia had become home to sleazy profiteers. Even I could see how things might take a nasty turn.

Given a choice, the Mandasar children dearly loved to live in hives like this one: workers taking care of regular chores inside the house and around the farm; a warrior for heavy lifting and for protecting the others; a gentle to act as manager, to keep the books, to deal with customers and suppliers. They fit together as a family. The next time Counselor came into egg-heat, she and Zeeleepull would likely make a big happy clutch of hatchlings to carry on the tradition. (Egg-heat only happens once every nine years; the rest of the time, Mandasars are pretty mind-bogglingly platonic.)

But Counselor told me the sneaky slimy wheeler-dealers on Celestia didn’t care about Mandasars living balanced lives. Did warriors turn into mad dogs when you kept them apart from gentles and workers? Then they’d be perfect for guards at sweatshops and at factories that made illegal nano. Did workers turn into easy-to-control drones? That made them great for sixteen-hour shifts on assembly lines. Did gentles turn into brilliant intellectuals who didn’t fret about the effects of what they did? Then why not use them in disreputable think tanks or research institutes?

That’s what started the practice of "recruiting" on Celestia. According to Counselor, Mandasars were offered good money and benefits to sign on with various outfits, whereupon they’d be bundled off into single-caste units until their brains turned to one-track minds. The kids caught onto this pretty quick, and stopped signing up voluntarily. That’s when the recruitment process started to work more like old-time press-gangs: if you didn’t say yes to the soft sell, thugs would break into your house, gas the whole hive into unconsciousness, and take everyone away to "reorientation centers."

A month in isolation, Counselor said, and the poor Mandasars weren’t themselves anymore — the warriors would be spoiling for a fight, the workers would turn into zombies, and the gentles would be reduced to spoiled brats eager to show off how bright they were. Sure, they’d all remember the more balanced people they’d once been… but their pheromone-deprived brains just didn’t care. They were either too riled-up, too sluggish, or too giddy to be interested in changing back. Definitely, they’d never dream of complaining they were kidnapped and forced to become degenerate versions of their former selves.

In a way, they were like human adults who look back on childhood and say, "Sure, it was nice to be open and imaginative and alive, but we all have to grow up, don’t we?" Soon enough, the Mandasars stopped believing there’d ever been an alternative to their walled-up tunnel-vision lives.

But Counselor swore there were alternatives. This farming area, for instance, the Hollen Marsh: a big swath of reclaimed swampland, full of Mandasar kids living in small integrated hives. They watched out for each other with volunteer sentry patrols. The second that humans showed up, a militia of warriors would run off the intruders. That’s why Zeeleepull had charged me — he thought I was a recruiter, coming around with a bright smile and a pocketful of promises, but really spying out the territory for midnight press-gangs.

Counselor said there were other communities like theirs around Celestia: small-scale places where Mandasars could be themselves, farming or fishing or building useful things. But rumor had it that one by one, the communities were being wiped out… blitzed by recruitment gangs, families broken up and carted off to segregated isolation camps in wilderness parts of the planet. The local authorities were no help; a few took bribes from the recruiters, while the rest had been fooled by the stories Mandasars told after they’d been acclimatized: "Oh, it’s all a big fuss over nothing. We were stupid kids who wanted to live lazy unattached lives, but I feel so much better, now that I have a sense of purpose."

Well… Counselor had a sense of purpose too: to avoid the recruiters and live the way she wanted, with a healthy balanced brain. For a long time, the hive had been praying for someone to come and help them. They’d always pictured their savior as a grand and glorious queen, straight from Troyen… but maybe a blood-consort would do just as well.

Um.

12 TALKING OVER OUR PROBLEMS

When Counselor finished her story, all five of the kids sat smiling expectantly at me. Not human smiles, of course; Mandasars smile with their ears and whiskers, both sort of relaxing down in calm droops.

Pity I couldn’t smile too.

The truth is I’d never been so great as a blood-consort. Queen Verity said she married me mostly because of my delicious smell. Samantha claimed it was also a political thing, sending a message to Verity’s enemies that the queen was backed by my father and the full force of the Outward Fleet.

But once I became Verity’s husband, it turned out I didn’t have much to do. Smelling delicious doesn’t qualify you for being a general or cabinet minister or important jobs like that. Mostly I just hung around the palace being Verity’s bodyguard. (By then, sister Sam didn’t need me to be her bodyguard anymore. She’d assembled her own security team of warriors, humans, and even some Fasskisters. Anyway, she was getting busier and busier with secret diplomat stuff, "and it’s better, Edward, if you don’t know about that.")

As for me being Verity’s consort/husband/bodyguard, the queen once said, "You may not be a genius, Edward, but you’re the only honest creature I’ve ever known. I keep you around for inspiration. And curiosity value." It made me feel good when she talked like that… but being an inspiration doesn’t mean you’re good for much else. Definitely I wasn’t cut out for saving people.

(Memories of corpses flashed through my mind: Verity herself, head laid out on a platter. Samantha in a pool of blood. All the people on Willow, dressed up for their last party.)

But Counselor and the others still wore those big trusting smiles. Five minutes before, they had been cheering for Zeeleepull to snip me bloody. Now their black eyes gleamed as if I were topped off with a halo.

Or maybe, as if I were topped off with a crown. I’d been sitting in their midst, giving off the scent of queen’s venom, so why wouldn’t they start responding to me like royalty? If you smell like a queen, all their instincts tell them to treat you like you’re three-quarters divine. (Mandasars are a smart species, they really are, but they’re way too much at the mercy of their noses. Then again, they laugh at us humans and say we’re way too much at the mercy of our gonads… so maybe it balances out.)

"What do you think I can do?" I asked Counselor.

She looked at me in surprise, maybe wondering why I didn’t instantly have a plan to save all ten million kids on Celestia. "Do what is required," Counselor told me.

"Yes, but in the high queen’s court," I said, "Verity never started anything without consulting her privy council. Even a queen knows it’s smart to talk things over with people who’ve studied the situation."

Everyone smiled and nodded. Counselor went all bashful to be compared to a royal advisor, the workers beamed as if their darling grandchild had won a prize, and even Zeeleepull showed some real approval… like maybe I wasn’t just a stupid thug with queen-spill on my face.

"Well," said Counselor, "you’re with the navy, are you not? This is not a Technocracy world, but the fleet still wields great influence. If you summoned a dozen cruisers with tractor beams to stop ships from docking at our orbitals, the Celestian authorities would soon do whatever you asked. Even if the navy just took the name of everyone coming and going, there’d be great pressure on our government to remedy the situation immediately. Powerful people often don’t want it known when and why they come to this world. They value secrecy much more than they care about a few Mandasar employees."

She wiggled her whiskers the way gentles do when they’re pleased with themselves. I guess I was supposed to say, "Tremendous idea, I’ll do it." But the Admiralty wasn’t going to annoy influential people just on the request of a lowly Explorer Second Class — especially not an Explorer Second Class they intended to strand on some lonely outpost as soon as they caught him. Now that I thought about it, maybe it was kind of risky doing anything for these kids: if I attracted attention, people might come to snatch me in the middle of the night, and they wouldn’t just be recruiters for some factory that didn’t pay overtime.

On the other hand… when I’d married Queen Verity, I’d taken an oath to protect her people forever and ever. Verity’s reign was over, but "forever and ever" wasn’t.

"Sorry," I told Counselor, "we can’t look for help from the navy. So let’s think what else we can do…"

We kicked around ideas for an hour. Everyone got in on the act — even Hib Nib Pib. Usually workers just sit back and smile when other people are discussing plans, as if they already know the right answer and are just waiting for everyone else to reach the same conclusion… but maybe the smell of queen’s venom had stirred them enough that they just couldn’t keep quiet. All three workers actually got involved, tossing in suggestions and comments and nit-picks.

Too bad we never decided anything.

The ideas basically fell into two classes: big fancy schemes that would only work if I was a colossally important person (which I wasn’t); and small practical ways to resist the recruiters, which were already being done. For example, Hib suggested I should bring all the Mandasars together in a special shelter where they’d be safe from recruiters. But who would build the shelter? Me? The navy? The League? And who would protect us how, when we didn’t have money to pay for security guards or equipment? On the other hand, if we were talking about making our own special shelters, and protecting ourselves… weren’t the Mandasars doing that right now? There in the Hollen Marsh and elsewhere? They’d banded together all on their own, without needing me as a figurehead. What more could I do? If they were looking for a great military leader to improve their organization or tactics, I was the last person to put in charge.

Hib and the others didn’t understand that. No matter how much I told them I wasn’t generalissimo material, they thought I was just being modest.

So the talk went around and around, the kids thrashing through the pros and cons, while I listened… and listened… and kept on listening till it dawned on me I’d stopped taking anything in. I was watching the way their mouths moved as they spoke. The bobbing of their whiskers. The spike at the end of Zeeleepull’s snout as it swished through the air.

I’m dizzy, I thought. I’ve gone all dizzy. It was the kind of dizziness that seems absolutely fascinating, so you start rotating your neck slowly just to feel the world blur: to see exactly how much you can control the spaciness inside your skull…

Someone gave me a shake. Counselor was holding onto my shoulders with her upper arms and saying, "Are you all right?" — really loud as if she’d already asked the question a whole bunch of times.

"I’m sick," I said. "The little eyeballs poisoned me." Which struck me as funny, so I laughed and laughed… way too hard. The dizziness whooshed down over me like ice water, starting cold at the roots of my hair and draining bleak down my face. I remember thinking, This isn’t regal at all. Then, very unregally, I passed out.

It was hard to tell when I was awake and when I wasn’t. Sometimes I thought I was dreaming about a little Mandasar girl with her arms wrapped around my neck and both of us crying; but sometimes I had the idea maybe Counselor was the one holding me, and she was trying to keep me down on a bed pallet as I thrashed about half-crazy. It all blended together, so confused and light-headed that I couldn’t tell the borderline between dream and delirium.

Still… Counselor, the real Counselor, was a deep gentle brown. The little girl who came weeping into my hallucinations was a bright queenly yellow. "Oh Father Prince," she whispered, "wake and save us all — Please, please wake."

Which had to be Counselor talking, or one of her hive-mates. Someone so naive, she thought I was smart enough to save people.

When I woke for real, the dining room was dark and quiet. I just lay there woozy for a while, trying to collect my thoughts. The Mandasar kids had left me on my own… but probably they were lying close by in the next room. If I made the slightest noise, they’d come running to tend their "prince."

Not that I’d acted like a prince so far. All I’d done was rough up Zeeleepull, tell the others why I couldn’t help against the recruiters, then pass out on their dining-room floor. Pretty pathetically awful, even by my normal useless-dummy standards.

But at least the kids hadn’t tossed me out of the house. I was lying almost exactly where I’d fallen — they’d just shifted me onto a dining pallet. When I reached out, I could touch the table… with its big glossy picture of Queen Wisdom…

That reminded me of the water bowl, the one I’d used for splashing Counselor’s face. My mouth was dust-dry, probably because I’d been sweating buckets while I was unconscious. (You don’t want to know how soaked and sodden my clothes were.) I sat up and edged my way over to the table, hoping maybe the kids had left the bowl full overnight. On Troyen, a lot of families did that in case someone wanted a drink.

The bowl was still there, but flipped upside down. The glossy table surface had puddles everywhere, as if someone had knocked the bowl over and not bothered to mop up the wet.

Odd.

The room was almost coal-mine black, just a tiny bit of starshine coming through the ceiling; the kids had adjusted the environment dome so a wee patch of roof was transparent like a skylight. I could just barely see the outlines of things close up… nothing distinct, nothing that would tell me what was wrong.

"House-soul, attend," I whispered. "Can you give me some light?"

Nothing happened: the dome’s computer didn’t want to take commands from me. No big surprise; why would the kids reprogram their house so I could boss it around? But in a lot of homes, the computer lets anyone turn on the lights. Most house-souls have a set of instructions considered safe to obey, even from strangers. Flushing the toilet. Telling what time it is. Letting you wash your hands. But maybe the Mandasars were so worried about recruiters, they’d adjusted their system to "total noncooperation" mode.

I leaned against the table, wondering what to do. One thing about venom poisoning: both times after the delirium broke, I felt pretty good. Relatively speaking, anyway — I was thirsty and hungry, and not even Queen Verity would think I smelled delicious, but I was strong enough to stand without wobbling too much. After being unconscious so long, I felt wide-awake too. The polite thing might be to go back to bed till the Mandasars got up in the morning, but at the moment I wasn’t sleepy.

What to do? If I wandered around in the dark, I’d probably break something. On the other hand… I thought about that knocked-over water bowl. There must be plenty of harmless explanations, but it still made me edgy.

I was standing there, thinking hard and chewing my knuckle in the dark, when my wrist started squealing.

13 RUNNING AROUND IN THE DARK

It had been twenty years since I’d heard that squeal: a personal Mayday from someone close by. A navyish someone. When you joined the fleet, you got a tiny beeper embedded under the skin of your wrist, so if you got caught in some terrible disaster, you could call for help. The beeper sent out a radio beam that activated everyone else’s beeper within a few kilometers — a shrieky shrill signal that said, "Come running, shipmate in trouble."

The last time my beeper went off was on Troyen: Sam desperately trying to reach me.

I’d got there too late.

"Counselor!" I yelled into the darkness. "Sorry to disturb you, but this is important. Can you turn on the lights and open the door? Counselor? Counselor?"

No answer.

"Hey!" I shouted louder. "Hey!"

Nothing.

"Can anybody hear me? Anybody there?"

It was only a small dome: two rooms. And Mandasars are light sleepers. In fact, experts get into arguments whether Mandasars ever truly sleep, or just go into a resting doze where they’re always half-conscious. Either way, Counselor and the others would never snooze through me calling, let alone the squealing from my wrist.

That squeal was making me jumpy. I told the implant, "Shut off," and the beeper stopped its noise, leaving behind a thick stuffy silence. No sound of moving or breathing anywhere close by; I was all alone in the dome.

Why did that worry me? There’d been two other domes beside this one. The kids probably ate here, and slept next door. Nothing strange about that… but it was surprising they’d left me alone, me being sick and all. Before I’d passed out, they were giving me the royal treatment. Did they change their minds once I went delirious? Or had they been watching over me, till something big and important drew everybody away?

I could imagine Counselor dozing on a pallet beside me when suddenly some crisis struck. Maybe one of her hive-mates yelled from outside. Counselor ran to help, knocking over the water bowl and not even stopping to clean up.

But what could cause such a fuss? Recruiters on a raid?

I thought about my wrist beeper again… and suddenly, it all made sense. Someone had come from the navy. A recovery team had picked up the escape pod’s homing beacon and followed the signal here. Maybe they’d decided to look around a bit, to see if anyone had been inside the pod.

What would the Mandasars think when they spotted humans wandering about in the dark? Every warrior in the valley would come howling for blood, believing recruiters were on the march.

No wonder the poor navy people fired off a Mayday.

I blundered across the room and banged my fist against the wall. The dome field didn’t budge. "House-soul, attend!" I yelled. "Can you open a door? Please."

The house-soul ignored me. For all it knew, I could be a burglar trying to make a getaway. The computer would keep me locked in here, unable to help the navy folks till some recognized member of the hive came to let me out.

"House-soul!" I yelled again. "This is an emergency. The warriors might kill someone innocent."

No response. I took a breath, then drove my heel into the wall with a hard side-kick. The impact knocked me backward, but it didn’t make any impression on the dome. A typical dome field is strong enough to withstand a hurricane or lightning bolt; my strongest kick just wasn’t an irresistible force of nature.

"House-soul, come on! Listen to me! It’s a matter of life and death. Don’t you have any overrides for when sentient lives are threatened?"

Still nothing. I could be speaking a foreign language for all this computer cared about me…

Oh.

Three seconds later, the house-soul had popped open a door right in front of my face. Counselor must have authorized the computer to take orders from me. All I had to do was ask in Mandasar.

The weather had turned spring-night cool, with a starry sky and three yellow moons the size of confetti. I lifted my wrist, and whispered to the implant, "Find Mayday source." Then I held out my arm and turned in a slow circle till the implant gave a beep. At that second, my arm pointed up the road and along the canal, in the direction the escape pod had been floating when I left it.

That made sense. If the Mayday had come from a navy recovery team, the team would be close to the evac module.

I told my wrist implant to switch to silent mode, so it wouldn’t squeal no matter what. You don’t want your beeper going off when you’re trying to sneak around in the dark… especially not within earshot of Mandasar warriors, ready to gut any human they met.

For a second, I wondered if I was crazy to be out here at all. How did I think I could help? It was one thing to take on a single untrained warrior in full daylight; but if a navy recovery team was under attack by a whole militia of warriors, with every Mandasar believing the team was a desperate threat to their hives… it would take more than a few fighting tricks to get anyone out in one piece. Including me.

On top of that, these navy folks likely came from the Jacaranda. They may have been sent to capture me and drag me off to some awful place halfway across the galaxy. If they were as nasty as Tobit said, they might even have set off a fake Mayday to flush me out of hiding.

But… it was stupid to worry over what-ifs when there was only one right thing to do.

Help the best I could. Hope the rest worked out.

I started running up the road beside the silent dark waters of the canal.

The first thing I found was an unconscious worker. It could have been Hib, Nib, or Pib… but it could also have been any other worker in the valley. Even with the moonlight, it was too dark to make out the teeny facial features that distinguish one worker from another.

As far as I could tell, the worker wasn’t hurt, just unconscious. Breathing peacefully. That made me think it’d been shot by a hypersonic stunner — a standard navy-issue weapon, mostly used by Explorers who encounter unknown alien lifeforms. It’s handy to have a little pistol that knocks out attackers without killing them… especially when you’re on an unexplored planet and don’t know whether you’re shooting at a big dumb predator or a sentient being who’s just mad at you for trampling its sweet potatoes.

If the navy team had stunners, they might not be in such trouble… as long as the guns’ batteries held out. Stun-pistols were good for twenty shots or so. That wasn’t nearly enough to take down every Mandasar in the marsh, but it was better than nothing. I’d have to be careful myself. If the team was looking to capture me, one shot from a stunner could lay me out cold for six hours.

I left the worker where it was and moved forward again, this time keeping under the shadow of the trees between the road and canal. Soon after, I found an unconscious gentle, then an unconscious warrior. During our discussions that afternoon, Counselor had said all three castes took turns at sentry duty… and if an alert came in, the whole community fanned out over the marsh to find the intruders. Lucky for me, the searchers in this area had already got stunned; otherwise, they might be shouting, "He’s here, he’s here," and bringing the militia down on my head. That would be very bad.

Half a kilometer and six more unconscious bodies later, I came to the escape pod. It was still floating in the middle of the canal, barely moving on the slow current. A scatter of Mandasar bodies lay flumped unconscious at the edge of the water, all of them warriors… as if there’d been a pitched battle here, not just sentries caught off guard in the dark.

No human bodies in sight. So far, the navy folks were holding their own.

I used my wrist implant to take another direction reading on the Mayday. Now, the signal was coming from the far side of the canal. The recovery team must have decided it was crazy to go farther into the marsh; instead, they’d headed across the water, where the land wasn’t cleared for crops. Nothing over there but scruffy black forest, and the ground sloping upward into low hills. The navy people were obviously running for cover and getting the heck out of Hollen valley. Good, I thought, they’ll be okay now. The recovery folks were retreating, and they didn’t have far to go till they’d be safe; Counselor had said there was no Mandasar population once you got to higher ground. I could go back the way I’d come, without having to worry about the navy team… and I’d better do that fast, before I ran into someone who wanted to slice first and ask questions later.

When I turned around, the starlit marsh was alive with warriors galloping in my direction.

The Mandasars hadn’t seen me yet: I was standing in dark shadows under trees. One of the unconscious warriors lying in the mud must have got off a signal before he was stunned — it only made sense that someone would be carrying a radio. Now the whole militia was charging toward the battle site… and I wanted to be long gone before they arrived.

As quietly as I could, staying in shadow, I knelt and slipped into the canal. The water was just as cold as at lunchtime; just as muddy too, with the stagnant smell of algae right under my nose. I took a deep breath, then slipped beneath the surface, swimming with my eyes shut because I wouldn’t be able to see in the black muddiness anyway.

My plan was to reach the trees on the other bank and just hide in the woods. I wasn’t one of those stealthy stalker-types who could slip silently past a horde of warriors on the hunt. My only hope was that they wouldn’t bother to search the far side; none of their people lived over there, so the warriors would likely concentrate their efforts on patrolling the main valley rather than making forays across the canal.

I slid onto the opposite shore just before the first warriors arrived. When they saw the heaps of unconscious bodies, they broke into an angry chatter that covered any noise I made creeping into the woods. I kept going, crouched low and moving as fast as I could, trying to put distance between me and the Mandasars. Any second, I expected someone to shout, "Look over there!" But they were all too busy gabbling over their fallen comrades, and pointing toward the evac module bobbing quietly in the water.

As I moved, things squished softly under my feet. I didn’t know what they were: insects, or puffballs, or jellyish Celestian lifeforms, I couldn’t tell. Fleeing through the dark doesn’t give you much chance to appreciate alien ecologies. I just hoped I wouldn’t disturb any teeny critters with venomous bites. The Mandasars would’ve cleared out all larger predators — their race has no guilt about endangering species they don’t like — but they wouldn’t bother to deal with anything whose teeth were too small to go through carapace. Black widow spiders, for instance. The closest real black widow was surely forty light-years away, but I still managed to make myself nervous about them as I slunk through the pitch-dark forest.

Every now and then, a puff of breeze brought the burning-wood smell of Musk B. The warriors behind me were keyed up, just itching to fight something. If I were a worker or gentle, I’d be heading for home real fast — warriors would soon be swiping at trees just to work off their tension. It wouldn’t surprise me if they hauled the escape pod out of the canal and tin-snipped it to ribbons; with so much musk in the air, they’d be looking for anything to attack.

The land under my feet angled upward in fits and starts: a little slope, then a level patch, then another slanty climb. The sound of angry voices faded behind me. I was just thinking it might be safe to rest when I came across a heavy slash of damage to the forest’s undergrowth.

It looked like someone had driven a bulldozer through here, on a big swath leading backward to the canal and forward up the wooded hillslope. That could only mean one thing: a warrior had come to this side of the canal and was plowing his way after the navy team. He must have spotted them running away from the scene of the battle… and like a typical musk-mad lunatic, he’d charged after them on his own instead of waiting for reinforcements.

That was good news for the recovery team — if the warrior had stayed behind to tell the militia what was happening, the whole forest would be crawling with berserker Mandasars. As it was, the warrior probably got himself stunned cold as soon as he got close to the navy folks.

Still… I decided to follow the smashed-down trail. If nothing else, I could make better time taking the flattened path than trying to pick my way through the brush.

Three minutes later, I heard noises ahead of me. Crashing. Something going WHUMP. Branches breaking.

I ran forward without thinking. The noises got louder: grunts and the clack of pincers closing on empty air. A warrior had just missed grabbing hold of somebody.

My eye caught a silvery glint on the trail in front of me: a stun-pistol tossed away. Usually, the guns have a green light telling when there’s enough juice in their batteries for another shot… but as I sprinted past, the light didn’t show the tiniest flicker. The stunner was completely tapped out, while up ahead some poor unarmed someone was trying to fight an angry warrior bare-handed.

The trail broke into a level clearing; and that was where the unarmed someone had decided to make a stand. It wasn’t a full navy recovery team — there was only one person, ducking away from a warrior even bigger than Zeeleepull. In the dark I could only see silhouettes, but that was enough to tell me the target under attack was a woman. She moved fast and dodgy, as if she’d done a fair bit of martial arts. Still, general combat training doesn’t teach you the specific ways to take down a Mandasar warrior… and a fight to the death isn’t the best time to start experimenting.

The warrior hadn’t noticed me yet. Even better, he had his back to me; and that meant his tail pointed in my direction. Since it worked so well before, I launched myself forward with a run and a dive, landing on the warrior’s shell and cinching my arm around his neck.

My move took both the warrior and the woman by surprise. She gasped, then dived to one side, out of my field of vision. I hoped she was going to put some distance between herself and the Mandasar’s feet, because he started to buck and bounce like crazy; if the woman didn’t get clear, she’d be trampled to paste.

"Keep back," I told her, half-whispering for fear of being heard by someone back at the canal… which was crazy because the warrior was shouting his head off. "Don’t worry," I said to the woman, "it’ll be okay."

I hoped that was true. This ride was ten times worse than my scuffle with Zeeleepull; the warrior beneath me had worked himself into frothing battle frenzy, not to mention he thought I wanted to kidnap his family. His neck may have pinched as my arm rubbed up and down the shell plates on his throat, but it would take more than a little chafing to make him surrender.

As the warrior hopped and heaved, I did too: flopping about on his back, waiting for him to get tired enough to slow down. It took a long, long time; at least it felt long, though maybe it was only a minute. At last I could feel him weaken to the point where he might actually be using his brain to think of new tactics… so I leaned forward again like I did with Zeeleepull, held the warrior’s snout shut and pushed my palm to seal over his nose. Speaking in Mandasar, I whispered, "I am Blood-Consort Edward York, last and rightful husband of Verity the Second, High Queen and Supreme Ruler of all those who tread the Blessed Land. If you fear her name, you will yield; if not, be named her enemy and pay the price of your folly."

They were the same words that came out of my mouth earlier in the day. This time, though, I was just reciting from memory — it wasn’t like before, when I felt like something had possessed me. Still, if the speech worked once, it might work again… and with luck, the warrior would catch a faint whiff of queen’s venom on my hand.

Slowly, the Mandasar stopped struggling. I couldn’t tell if he was just tired, or if maybe my words and smell had cut through the battle rage. Whatever it was, he finally eased to a standstill. I kept my arm around his throat but let go of his nose so he could breathe. For a few seconds, both of us did nothing but suck in air.

Close by my side, a soft voice whispered, "Damn, it’s good to see that black uniform. Thank God there’s always an Explorer when you need one."

I turned my head… and nearly screamed. There in the shadows was the admiral woman who’d died kissing me — face splotch and all.

14 TAKING ON THE LARRY

The dead woman had come back, wrapped in thick midnight blackness — as if the only thing I could see was that smudge on her cheek. Terror jolted through me, and I hurled myself off the warrior onto the ground… anything to get away from some withered-up corpse who wanted to kiss me.

"What’s wrong?" the woman whispered.

I couldn’t answer — my whole body had clenched tight with fear. I might have just lain there, gibbering and quivering, if the warrior hadn’t given his pincers an angry clack. He heaved himself up to full height, giving the woman a sneer before turning toward me. I was the one who’d hurt him. The look in his eye said he wanted to hurt me back.

"Hold on," the woman told the warrior. "Stop fighting and let’s talk."

The warrior ignored her. "Bleed you, recruiter," he growled at me in English. "Suffer you, as our people have suffered."

One second I was sprawled on the ground, still trembling at the thought of ghosts; the next, I was on my feet, with my hands wrapped around the warrior’s nose-spike. The move wasn’t my doing — something had taken charge of my body again, making my legs leap forward without orders from my brain. My arms had gone all strong too, strong enough to drag the warrior’s nose toward me the way I’d dragged Zeeleepull… except that I pulled him toward my chest instead of my face. That was crazy. I’d never got venom on my chest. There was just my shirt, wet from my swim across the canal and sweaty from the hours of fever.

"You know who I am," my mouth said in Mandasar. "You know what I am. You know."

The warrior’s eyes narrowed, as if he was about to ram his snout forward — stab his nose-spike through my ribs. Then his whole face changed, opening wide with wonderment. "Teelu" he whispered.

Your Majesty.

If I’d had control over my body, I would have blurted out, "No, no, no." You never use the word Teelu for anyone but a Mandasar queen — Teelu is way too worshipful to waste on a mere consort. But the poor kid was so ignorant about his own culture, he didn’t know better.

The moment I let go of him, he dropped his body to the ground, pressing his nose into the dirt. "Teelu… Teelu… Teelu…"

Which was a whole lot better than trying to kill me. Maybe it wasn’t the best time to correct his vocabulary.

"I’m impressed," the admiral woman said.

Fright chilled me again, and I retreated a step — I was back in command of my body, and feeling a strong urge to bolt into the dark. But I swallowed hard and made myself say something half-intelligible. "Who are you?"

"Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos," she said. The same name she’d used before we crossed the line. "What’s your name?"

"Edward." Talking to an admiral, I should have been way more military: Explorer Second Class Edward York, reporting for duty! But my mouth was too dry with fear. "I saw you die," I said. "On the Willow."

The admiral shook her head. "I’ve never been on the Willow. And I’ve never died — I’d remember something like that." She stared at me a moment. "Was that your ship then? The Willow?"

I nodded.

"Why did you have to evacuate?"

"Someone was stealing it," I said. "I hated just to run, but Explorer Tobit told me—"

"Tobit?" the admiral interrupted "Phylar Tobit?"

"Yes."

"Which means Jacaranda is in this system?"

"It was for a while," I answered. "It might have gone chasing the black ship."

"Bloody hell," the admiral muttered, "I hate it when Prope’s in the neighborhood. She takes her orders from Admiral Vincence; and Vincence is the slipperiest schemer on the whole High Council."

Even in the dark, I could see the admiral make a face like she’d bitten into an apple and found a worm. Or maybe just the back half of a worm.

"You’ll have to tell me everything," she said, "like why Prope is chasing a black ship, and why you thought I was dead. But for now, let’s just get out of here. Give me a second to grab my Bumbler…"

She started across the clearing toward a shadowy blob lying in the grass. Bumblers were small machines with all kinds of data sensors — standard equipment for Explorers, though no one ever gave me one. Halfway to the Bumbler, the admiral stopped. "I’d better turn off my emergency signal," she muttered. "It just tells Prope where to find me." She lifted her wrist and told the implant, "Terminate Mayday." Lowering her wrist, she added, "For all I know, it might have told recruiters where to find me too."

"You know about the recruiters?" I asked.

"That’s why I’m on Celestia," she replied. "Trying to shut down the bastards. I was watching their main offices on the other side of the planet when I picked up your escape pod’s homing signal. Considering how tedious stakeouts are, I decided it would be more interesting to make sure you were okay."

"Well," I said, feeling all awkward, "thanks for coming. I’m sorry to drag an admiral so far from her…"

"Don’t apologize." She smiled, her teeth white in the dark. "And don’t think of me as an admiral. I may wear the gray, but I’m an Explorer, first, last, and always. So you have to call me Festina, all right? I don’t want to hear any more…"

She never finished her sentence. In the darkness, something started to laugh.

The sound was like a pack of hyenas, but breathier: piercing and whistly, echoing off the hillside. The noise seemed intentionally designed to carry long distances… and to scare the heebie-jeebies out of anyone who heard it. The crazy cackle never stopped for air, on and on, digging its fingernails into my nerves; and it was coming toward us.

"Holy shit," the admiral, Festina, whispered. "It’s a Laughing Larry."

She looked across at me, seeing if I knew what she meant. I nodded. In my years as a bodyguard, I worked real hard to read up on every weapon in human space… not to use the weapons myself, but to know how to defend against them if Sam or Verity ever came under attack.

The best way to defend against a Laughing Larry was to surround yourself with steel-plast walls. Not very likely in the middle of a forest.

I was trying to think of other defenses when something spun into the far side of the clearing. It was a golden metal ball, a meter wide: hovering a little way off the ground and rotating fast like a kid’s top. All around its outside, the thing had little slit openings that caught the air, making that whistle-ish laughing sound. Inside, I knew it had electric amplifiers to make the whistles louder — the person who invented this thing thought the cackly hyena laugh would be great for intimidation.

Absolutely right. I was shaking in my boots, hearing that sound chuckling in the darkness — and it didn’t help that I knew how Laughing Larries worked. Each of those whistly slit openings could shoot a hundred razor-sharp flechettes, tiny boomerang-shaped darts that could slice through skin like an ax through jelly. They could even pierce a Mandasar warrior’s carapace, spiking through the shell and deep into the flesh beneath. If this Larry opened fire, it would spray out a full 360 degrees of shrapnel, cutting us open like a hail of knives.

The golden ball whirled to the Bumbler where the little machine still lay in the grass. More hyena laughing. The Larry circled the Bumbler like a cat that’s found a dying mouse and wants to poke at it a bit. Or maybe it was more like a dog: a bloodhound that’s been following a trail and has sniffed out something that smells like prey.

Around and around the Larry hummed, prowling near the Bumbler as if trying to pick up someone’s scent.

"What is it?" a voice whispered. The warrior had lifted his head off the dirt and was staring at the spinning ball. His ear antennas had. flattened straight back against his skull; he didn’t like the hyena cackle either.

"It’s a weapon," I answered softly. "It shoots sharp things that can hurt even you."

"Run, Teelu" he said immediately. "Hold it I, whilst you escape."

"Stay still!" Festina snapped. "Maybe it’s looking for someone else."

At that moment, the thin whistly sound coming from the ball shaped itself into a single word.

"Ramoss… osss… osss… osss."

"Okay," Admiral Ramos muttered, "maybe it’s not looking for someone else."

"Ramoss… osss… osss… osss…"

The whispery sound whistled through the clearing as the ball continued to spin. Fifty revolutions a second… I remembered that was their top speed. Then again, that was twenty years ago; they were probably better now.

I held my breath for almost a minute… and still the Larry didn’t attack. "Maybe it’s just trying to scare you," I whispered to the admiral.

"Or maybe it isn’t sure who I am," she whispered back. "I’ll bet it was tracking my Mayday. Now that I’ve shut down the signal, it can’t identify me."

"I thought Laughing Larrys had visual sensors too."

"They do," the admiral replied, "but Larries aren’t smart, and it’s hard to recognize people in the dark. In the normal visual range we’re just black blobs; on IR, we’re still blobs, only brighter. So it’s straining its tiny computer brain, trying to figure out who we are. It doesn’t want to waste a thousand rounds of ammunition killing us if we aren’t its programmed target."

"Ramosss… osss… osss…"

The ghostly voice was getting on my nerves. "Why is it after you?" I whispered. There was no harm talking — when a Larry’s making noise, it can’t hear anything else.

"It must have been sent by the recruiters," Festina said. The warrior’s ears perked up and he turned, as if seeing her for the first time. "They know I’m investigating them," Festina continued, "and I’ve already had threats to stay out of their business. One of them must have followed me here… and decided this was the perfect time to take me out of the picture. All alone on Mandasar territory. If people find my body sliced to ribbons, they’ll blame it on local warriors, not the recruiters."

"Villains they," the warrior growled. "Black black villains…"

The smell of burning wood poured off his hide.

"Stay still," Festina warned. "It looks like Friend Larry is stuck in a decision loop. Let confused dogs lie."

"But if it’s confused," I said, "won’t it radio its controller for further instructions?"

Suddenly, the laughter increased to deafening volume and the Larry whizzed toward us.

All three of us jumped. Festina and I leapt toward the woods, hoping we could get behind a good solid tree trunk before the Larry opened fire. The only reason we succeeded was because the warrior jumped the other direction — straight on top of the golden ball, like throwing himself on a grenade.

The next two seconds weren’t pretty. It took that long for the barrage of flechettes to flense the carapace off him and slash his insides to pulp. The Larry’s laughter was overridden with a scream, then a gooey slurp of organs getting splattered in every direction. When I looked back, I couldn’t see the gold ball at all; just the warrior’s shell lying over the ball like a lid, and underneath, the whirling butcher-thing was still as loud as hyenas, spinning inside the warrior’s husk. The Larry had completely cored its way into the warrior’s belly… and soon enough, the occasional flechette was able to pierce out the warrior’s side, blowing away little chips of armor. I ducked my head behind my tree trunk just as the Larry giggled into view again, carving out through the last bits of shell like a buzz saw.

My heart was pounding as I listened to the Larry laughing just a few paces away. If it wanted to come after us, there was nothing to stop it from chopping the admiral and me to gobbets; Larries could fly upward of eighty kilometers an hour, way faster than a human could run. I decided if it started toward us, I’d hit my Mayday implant and take to my heels, hoping the signal would draw the Larry after me. It might give the admiral a chance to get away.

But when I looked over at Festina, propped up behind another tree, she had her fingers resting lightly on her own wrist implant. Planning exactly the same thing, to sacrifice herself for me.

I didn’t want to think what my dad would say if I let an admiral die in my place. When I was little, Dad called me "Jetsam," saying I’d be the first thing he threw out if he ever had to lighten his ship. It made me mad, how something like that flashed through my mind at a time like this. But I really had no choice — given the trade-off between Admiral Ramos and me, I had to trigger my Mayday first. So I did.

A high-pitched squeal filled the air: my Mayday sounding on the admiral’s implant. Except that my implant was squealing too — Festina must have set off her own Mayday at the same instant.

Both of us playing the self-sacrifice sweepstakes. It would have made me smile… if I wasn’t sure I was going to be sliced to ribbons.

But the Larry wasn’t moving. Maydays or not, it remained out in the clearing, spinning in place on top of the warrior’s pureed carcass. Why wasn’t it coming after our signals? Had it used all its ammunition digging out through the poor warrior’s body? Or was it confused because it had two separate Maydays, and didn’t know whether to come after Festina or me?

I held my breath and started to count the seconds. As I reached twenty-three, the Larry suddenly lifted into the air and swooshed away above the trees, heading back toward the canal. A trick to draw us out? I counted another thirty as the hyena laughter receded… and then only let myself move because the admiral called, "Edward, are you all right?"

"Sure."

We both turned off our Maydays and eased out of our hiding places — where we’d cowered while a brave warrior gave his life for people he didn’t know. Looking at the blood-spattered grass, I told myself the poor kid might have died happy, knowing it was a warrior’s most honorable death: killed in righteous battle, protecting others. In the last millisecond before he was shredded, he might have felt… what, fulfilled? Validated? Triumphant?

But he was still dead. And I’d never even learned his name.

Admiral Ramos walked stiffly into the clearing. She paused over the remains of her Bumbler… but the little machine looked like it had been whacked a thousand times with a meat cleaver. Another casualty of the flechette barrage. Festina nudged the mechanical remains with her toe, then ground the debris angrily under her heel.

Fragments of circuit boards went crunch. I didn’t like listening to the sound, so I asked, "Why did the Larry leave?"

The admiral shook her head in the darkness. "Who knows?" Slowly, she walked over scattered scraps of the warrior’s body and knelt beside the largest piece of carcass. "Thanks," she said, laying her hand lightly on the boy’s blood-drenched shell. "Thanks, whoever you were." Then in a soft gentle voice: "That’s what ‘expendable’ means."

It was a thing Explorers said to each other when somebody died — like a little prayer. I’d never heard an admiral use it before. Most of the admirals I’d met were the sort to say, "Good riddance."

Festina stood up again. "I’d better follow the Larry," she said. "See where it’s going. With luck, the bad guys will come to fetch it, and I can see who they are."

"Then let’s go," I told her.

She gave me a look. "This isn’t really your business, Edward…" She stopped. "You wouldn’t be Edward York, would you? The Explorer who married the Mandasar high queen?"

"Um. Yes. That’s me." I didn’t think the outside world had heard about that, but admirals must be pretty well informed.

Festina let her breath come out in a whoosh. "Sometime real soon, you’ll have to tell me how you’re mixed up in this… but for now, tag along with me. If I leave you alone, the wrong people might find you."

I wondered who she thought were the wrong people. Recruiters? Captain Prope? Battle-mad Mandasars? But I didn’t ask, and the admiral didn’t explain. She just waved for me to follow as she headed into the trees.

The Larry was no longer in sight, but the laughter still rattled through the forest, occasionally hitting a note that made the trees buzz with resonance. We plunged after the cackling as fast as we could, thrashing through the undergrowth on a general downhill slant, back toward the canal.

Soon we reached an area where the brush was trampled flat. A lot of warriors had stormed past this way — maybe the whole militia. They must have heard the Larry too; they’d swum across the water, then started to search the woods, trying to figure out what was making the howl.

I winced — the warriors’ trail led in the same direction as the Larry’s laughter. Were they following it, or was it following them?

With the undergrowth all squashed, Festina and I could move through the woods more quickly, angling downhill toward the Larry’s cackle. Laughter wasn’t the only thing on the night breeze; I could smell the crusty burning-wood whiff of Musk B as thick as the smoke from a forest fire. It was the odor of disaster waiting to happen — a whole pack of warriors aching to crush recruiter bones, and a single Laughing Larry that could hover high overhead, spraying down death.

Half a minute later, we were closing in on the hyena chatter… and also on the choking musk. Up ahead, a bright light suddenly beamed from the sky, reflecting crimson off the shells of two dozen warriors gathered in a marshy clearing. The warriors had drawn into a wide ring, circling the edge of the open area. In the middle stood a human man, and straight over his head the Laughing Larry hovered in the air like a gold-glinting sun. The light came from higher in the night sky where a skimmer floated, searchlights in its belly and a rope ladder dangling down to ground level.

Festina put her hand on my arm and held me back out of the light. No one in the clearing noticed us; the man in the center had his gaze glued on the warriors, and they were too busy eyeing the Larry. One of the Mandasars must have recognized the gold ball as a weapon and told the others to keep back.

"It’s a standoff," Festina whispered. "That man’s right in the Larry’s eye. You know about that?"

I nodded. Straight under a Larry’s spin-axis, there’s a spot that isn’t covered by any firing slits. Stand there, and it’s like the eye of a hurricane — things get destroyed all around you, but you’re safe. Larries are intentionally built that way; I’d once seen an underground advertisement showing a smug business exec walking down the street with a Larry over his head, while thugs fled out of his path. THE ULTIMATE IN PROTECTION, the ad said. SLAUGHTER EVERYTHING AROUND YOU FOR A 50-METER RADIUS, THEN WAIT FOR THE BLOOD TO STOP DRIPPING. Just one problem for the man in the middle: to escape with his skin intact, he had to climb the ladder up to the skimmer. The easiest way to do that was clambering past the Larry; but that meant leaving the safety of the eye. For a few seconds, he’d be smack in the Larry’s kill zone… and during those moments when he couldn’t let the Larry fire, the Mandasars would race forward and shake him off the ladder. He’d be dead by the time he hit the ground — not from the fall, but from dozens of claws lopping him into giblets.

I could see one other way for the man to try his escape: ordering the Larry to rise with him as he climbed, always keeping a meter or so above his head. Staying safe in the weapon’s eye, he wouldn’t have to worry about it shooting him… but there was still the problem of the Larry shooting the ladder. It was a skimmer’s standard emergency rope ladder, if the warriors charged forward and the man told the Larry to let loose, a razor storm of flechettes would slice clean through the rope. Once again, he’d fall straight into the warriors’ waiting claws.

As Festina said, it was a standoff: the militia holding back from the Larry’s death radius, the man unable to move from his only place of safety.

I squinted to see the man more clearly. With the search-beams coming from straight over his head, I couldn’t make out his face; but he was tall and thin, with a great ball of wispy-fine hair that caught the light like a halo. He wore no shirt, just a leather vest… and as my eyes adjusted to the brightness, I saw that the front of his body was transparent, like he’d had his skin peeled off and replaced with glass. You could see his ribs, stark and white, covering a shadowy lot of internal organs. I was too far away to make out his heart beating, but it was easy to watch his lungs expand and deflate with every breath.

He was breathing fast, like he was nervous. I’d be nervous too if I could look down and see my stomach churn.

Maybe if you came across a sight like this man at a museum, it would be an interesting way to learn about anatomy. Here in the dark night forest, it made my skin crawl. Whether Mr. Clear Chest was a recruiter or just someone wandering through the woods with illegal weapons, the guy was clearly a mean piece of work. He’d let the Larry kill that poor warrior… and he would have slaughtered Festina and me, except that he must have heard the militia thundering their way through the forest. That’s when he called the Larry off hunting us and brought it back to protect his own transparent hide. The little gold ball must have got to him just in time to keep the warriors at bay.

But it wouldn’t hold them off forever — not with so much Musk B rippling through the night. I could hear a dozen pincers clacking fiercely, blood-eager to rip into an enemy. Pretty soon, the kids would be so riled they wouldn’t care about getting shredded by razor ftechettes. Someone would do something stupid, and then they’d all rush in: charging into the slashing flurry, as if the Larry couldn’t kill them all.

Maybe it couldn’t. Maybe a few ragged survivors would make it to Mr. Clear Chest and tear him apart. That had to be why he hadn’t used the Larry already; he couldn’t be sure it would kill every warrior there. But it would spill a lot of blood… and I knew that at any second, the warriors just wouldn’t be able to hold themselves back any longer.

"What should we do?" I whispered to Festina.

"I don’t know," she answered. "If you’re a blood-consort, can you order the Mandasars to pull back? Tell them to let the guy go and fight another day?"

With so much musk in the air, I didn’t know whether anything could make the warriors retreat… certainly not some stinky-hume stranger they’d never seen before. But if this was the only chance to avoid a ton of carnage, I had to give it a try.

Swallowing my fear, I stepped out from the cover of the forest. "Hello," I called in a loud voice. Better to speak English than Troyenese — the warriors should understand, and so would Mr. Clear Chest. I didn’t want him panicking and ordering the Larry to fire… which he might, if he thought I was talking in Mandasar and giving the warriors a battle strategy.

"You don’t know me," I said as I walked toward the circle, "but you might know my name. I’m…" Edward York, I thought. But the words that came out of my mouth were, "Teeshpodin Ridd ha Wahlisteen." The Little Father Without Blame. Queen Verity had given me that title a long time ago; I hadn’t thought about it in years. But in the split second before I spoke the phrase, I’d lost control of my tongue again: back to being a helpless spectator while an unknown something walked around in my skin.

If you want the honest truth, getting possessed was a relief — I didn’t have a clue what I would have said next. Whichever spook or spirit kept slipping into my shoes, it was sure better at bossing around Mandasars than I was.

"Gentlemen," my mouth said, sounding all of a sudden more confident, breezy, and in control. "Pleasant though it would be to dance on a recruiter’s entrails, the price would be too high. At least for tonight. Don’t you agree?"

I glanced around the circle of warriors. The way they glared at me wasn’t much friendlier than their fury at Mr. Clear Chest; but they’d been too surprised to rip me apart in the first second, and now the spirit possessing me had momentum on his side.

Calmly, I stepped into the circle of the skimmer’s spotlights. The warriors looked back and forth between me and Mr. Clear Chest, their pincers whisking angrily. The threat didn’t faze the spirit possessing me; I kept walking forward, right up the tail of the nearest warrior until I was standing high on his back. The sheer nerve of doing that froze him in place — otherwise, he would have bucked me straight to the moon.

"There’ll be other nights and other recruiters," I told the Mandasars… but I kept my eye on the glass-chest man and his Larry. "If you all die now, who’ll protect your hives? No matter how much you want to spill this recruiter’s blood — and no matter how much he deserves it — as of this moment, you gentlemen are at war. War to save your homes, your hives, and your personal honor as warriors, keeping your heads clear to defend what is truly precious rather than becoming some recruiter’s brainwashed thugs."

The Mandasars growled at that. I took that as a good sign. "And when you’re at war," I said, "you don’t fight stupid battles. You pick your time and you pick your place, because you’re fighting for something that must not be lost. You act like true warriors serving an honorable cause, not fools who get into pointless brawls because you can’t control your tempers."

Off to my right, one of the Mandasars growled, "Fools? Fools we? Fools?"

Uh-oh, I thought. The spirit possessing me had gone too far. I could sense it in the face of every warrior there: fiery indignation at what had come out of my mouth. Musk surged up from the warrior beneath me, so thick I swear I could see it — a thin pheromone mist oozing out of his pores. It scared the willies out of me, but obviously not the spirit in command of my body. I could feel my head shaking sadly, as if I pitied the huge hulking warriors around me…

…then I ripped off my shirt and threw it in the face of the kid who didn’t want to be called a fool.

It surprised me as much as anyone else. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. Clear Chest tense up, but he didn’t tell the Larry to shoot; by now, he realized I was his best chance for getting out alive. His gaze flicked from me to the warrior with the shirt over his face. The youngster was snorting angrily, pawing at the fabric with his weak upper arms… but by the time he’d pulled his snout clear, he wasn’t snorting so much as sniffing.

Sniffing at my sweaty shirt.

I jumped lightly forward, straight in front of more warriors — within easy reach of their claws. Calmly, cockily, the spirit moving my legs made me walk bare-chested around the circle of Mandasars, passing before each one in turn. They were all sniffing me now, jutting out their snouts, almost touching me with their nose spikes. None of them tried to get a whiff of my face, where there might still be queen’s venom; they were snuffling at my body, as if it had some amazing perfume they’d never smelled before.

I couldn’t smell it myself. Just the burning-wood odor everywhere, covering the natural stink of the stagnant canal, the trees all around, even my own sweat.

Like taking a walk in the park, I went around the whole circle. Zeeleepull was part of the crowd, on the far side of the clearing where I hadn’t recognized him before. Even he seemed surprised by whatever he smelled on me; I couldn’t understand that, considering that he’d got a snootful of queen’s venom when it was several hours fresher. But the spirit possessing me didn’t think anything was unusual — I walked past Zeeleepull no faster or slower than any of the others, till I’d finished a complete circuit of the assembled militia.

"Now," I said to them all. "Back up and let this shit of a recruiter go. He’s not worth any of our lives. This is the first action in a war… and it’s our enemy who’s running with his tail in the air."

I looked at Mr. Clear Chest. With the light coming from straight over his head, I still had trouble making out his features… but I could tell he was glaring at me in hate. His heart jerked fast beneath his plastic skin; his lungs heaved tight against his ribs.

Let him huff and puff, I thought. As long as he realizes there’s only one way to get out alive.

"Back up," I said again to the warriors. "Let the bastard leave."

Eyes glittering fiercely in the searchlights, every warrior slowly pulled back out of the clearing. I retreated with them, feeling shaky relief once I’d been swallowed by the shadows of the forest.

We all watched the recruiter grab hold of the rope ladder and climb quickly to the waiting skimmer. The Larry held its position, hovering three meters above the clearing till the man was safely inside the vehicle. That was the moment that scared me most — when the recruiter might send the Larry swooshing at us for a strafing run, just as a parting shot.

But it didn’t happen. The Larry spun its way laughing up to the skimmer, and disappeared inside.

For another moment, the clear-chested man stood in the skimmer’s dark hatchway: a shadowy figure peering out from the blackness. In that instant I saw a pinpoint of crimson burning in his belly, like the tip of a ruby laser shining deep within his guts. I blinked, not believing my eyes… and when I looked again, the light was gone.

With a soft hiss of engines the skimmer zipped away, speeding off into the night.

All quiet in the forest — no sound but the night breeze rustling through the branches, starting to thin out the fumes of musk in the air. Then softly, in a whisper, one of the warriors murmured, "Teelu."

"Um," I said. Suddenly I was unpossessed again. Wondering how to tell a bunch of Mandasar kids they had the wrong idea what Teelu meant.

"Teelu," whispered someone else.

"Teelu." From the opposite side of the clearing.

"Teelu. Teelu. Teelu"

They were all chanting now, the whole militia, prostrate on the ground. "Teelu. Teelu. Teelu."

Getting louder. Getting stronger. "Teelu. Teelu. Teelu." Till they were roaring the word, fierce and proud, their voices ripping through the trees, echoing across the valley, rising to the hills.

"Teelu! Teelu! Teelu!"

Your Majesty. Your Majesty. Your Majesty.