Hunted

15 IDENTIFYING WIFTIM

The thing about chants is you need a signal when to stop. People want some leader to call out "Amen!" or a choir to start singing, or lights coming on, or curtains going down, or something. Otherwise, the chanters get to feeling awkward, and wondering when it would be polite to shut up, but not really comfortable just letting things dwindle and die off, because that takes away from the great uplifting solidarity. After three minutes of "Teelu, Teelu, Teelu," I could tell the warriors were trying to find a graceful way to give it up. They’d chanted enough; they wanted to move onto the next glorious thing, whatever it would be. I guess they expected me to wave my hands, call for quiet, then give some rousing speech that would channel their excitement into something useful. Trouble was, I didn’t have a clue what to say… and it would be horrible having two dozen kids waiting for me to speak when my mind was a total blank. They wouldn’t turn violent or anything; they’d just sit and stare, thinking, Well, he may be a blood-consort, but he can’t be very smart.

Desperately I peered into the darkness, hoping to catch sight of Admiral Ramos. It would be great if I could thank the warriors for their nice adulation, then turn everything over to Festina. She was an admiral; she had to be good at public speaking, even if she didn’t have a specific plan of action. While Festina talked I could stand back listening, all serene and placid… the way Queen Verity always posed on her silver dais as she let some cabinet minister read the latest speech from the throne.

But Admiral Ramos was nowhere to be seen. Either she’d left or was hiding, both of which were good ideas considering what the warriors might do if they noticed an unknown human lurking in the dark.

Without thinking, I lifted my hand to chew on my knuckle… and that’s all it took to stop the chanting dead silent. Shows you how eager the kids were to hear me pontificate. "Um," I said. "Well. Hi." Then I remembered a standard thing the protocol ministers had taught me to say years and years ago: in Troyenese, "Greetings to you all from the court of the high queen. You are valued; you are worthy. Just as you give your hearts to her service, so the queen gives her heart to you."

That brought on a big cheer… even though these kids had to realize the court of the high queen was twenty years dead. Maybe they thought the war was over: that Troyen had a new high queen who’d sent me to solve their problems. All of a sudden I got myself tongue-tied, worried I’d just given them false hopes and terrified I’d keep putting my foot in my mouth whatever I tried to say.

"Um. Don’t get all… I’m not…"

There were so many things I wasn’t, I didn’t know how to finish that sentence. I’m not what you think. I’m not what you need. "Okay," I said, taking a deep breath, "there’s a lot of stuff you don’t understand…"

That’s when the police skimmer buzzed in overhead and a loudspeaker blared, "Nobody move!"

The best way to get a Mandasar moving is to tell him, "Keep still." In a split second, the kids had scrambled to their feet and were gearing up for an outraged display of claws and shouts and stamping… but I yelled, "At ease! Parade rest!" and that got their attention. None of them had a clue how to stand at parade rest, but they all stiffened into postures that were unnatural enough to come across as military. I hissed to a few who looked outright hostile ("Close your claws!" "All feet on the ground!" "Why are you waving your hands over your head?") but it didn’t take long to get them settled into poses that wouldn’t scare the police too badly.

"You there!" blared the loudspeaker… and a searchlight stabbed down on me from the skimmer’s belly. "Are you in charge?"

"Yes!" shouted the whole militia. Thanks a lot, guys. "Are you Admiral Ramos?" the loudspeaker asked.

"No," I answered — thinking to myself these cops didn’t know much about the navy. Admirals wear gray; my uniform was black. Then again, after I’d swum the canal and run through the forest and hit the dirt I don’t know how many times, maybe it wasn’t so easy to tell. "I’m Explorer Second Class Edward York," I told the police. "Admiral Ramos is around someplace, but I’m not sure where."

"Here," Festina said, stepping out of the forest. I must have stared in her direction three or four times but never spotted her. She must know some really good tricks for hiding.

"Are you all right, Admiral?" the police asked.

"I’m fine," she replied, "but there’s been a murder. One of these warriors was killed in cold blood with a banned weapon."

There was a pause. I got the impression whoever was using the loudspeaker had turned off the microphone and was having a quick conference with other people in the skimmer. Finally, the speaker clicked on again, and a different voice, deep and male, said, "Are you sure it was murder?"

"I saw it myself," the admiral said, as I nodded too. All the warriors looked around the clearing, their expressions going grim. They must have been trying to figure out which one of them wasn’t there.

The policeman gave a heavy sigh, loud enough to carry over the loudspeaker. "All right," he said, "I want the Mandasars to return to their homes while Admiral Ramos and Explorer York stay to give us details. We’ll get statements from the rest of you later on, but for now, just disperse." Pause. "Please."

The warriors didn’t budge. They looked toward me, like they didn’t care a snifter for the police unless I said it was okay. "You can go," I said, "we’ll be fine."

But the warriors still seemed reluctant to head out… as if they didn’t trust the cops, or maybe they just wanted to hang around to see what happened next. Before anyone else could move, Zeeleepull stepped forward from the pack. He bulled his way up to me, then lowered himself till his head touched my foot. "Leave cannot I, Edward York," he said. "Sworn to protect, sworn to guard, sworn to defend."

"All right," I told him… and because every other warrior was a split second away from rushing forward to vow loyalty too, I held up my hands and waved the crowd back. "One bodyguard is all I need. It doesn’t look right for a consort to hide in the middle of an army."

Samantha had come up with that line for me, long ago when Verity wanted to assign a whole platoon of guards to keep me safe. The excuse had worked back then, and it worked now; warriors go all bashfully guylike when you suggest they’re undermining your honor.

Slowly, reluctantly, the militia slunk off into the woods till only three of us were left: Festina, Zeeleepull and I. We drew back to the edge of the clearing so the police had plenty of room to land. Despite that, their skimmer took its time… scanning its searchlights around the area, checking there weren’t big rocks on the landing site, and waiting till the warriors were really gone.

When the skimmer finally touched down, a gaggle of armored folks jumped out — most with truncheons but a few carrying rifles or pistols, and even a shotgun. You never saw police brandishing firearms on a Technocracy world… not unless they knew they were dealing with dangerous non-sentient criminals who had lethal weapons of their own. Then again, maybe this response team had heard about the Laughing Larry, in which case bringing out the big guns made perfect sense.

In the middle of the armored people, one hawk-nosed man stood out. He wore the same gear as the others, but on him it looked slapdash: his helmet was shifted way back on his head, with the visor dangling open; his bulletproof jacket was unfastened at the side seam; his boots weren’t strapped tight, so they slopped around his ankles as he walked. I couldn’t see any insignia on his uniform, but the man had CAPTAIN written all over him. No one else could look so disheveled and get away with it.

The man sloshed forward toward us and nodded a millimeter to Festina. "Admiral Ramos." His eyes flicked over that blotch on her face; the bright police lights heightened the angry purple against the brown of the rest of her skin.

I tried not to stare at the birthmark myself.

"Greetings," Festina told the policeman, bowing the same tiny millimeter. "You are?"

"Captain Adam Tekkahawnee, Greater Bradford Regionals. Where’s the murder victim?"

"Follow me," the admiral told him.

She started back the way we’d come, and the whole company tagged along. Tekkahawnee matched our pace while the other cops tried to set up a moving perimeter around us. Since they didn’t know which way we’d go from one second to the next, there was a fair bit of jockeying every time Festina shifted a different direction: suddenly, the folks who were trying to stay in front of us had to jog sideways, trying not to trip on undergrowth or smack into trees. Once or twice it seemed the admiral turned deliberately away from the murder scene, just to give the cops more of a run… but she was probably taking shortcuts around bogs or something.

As we walked, Festina spoke to Tekkahawnee in a low voice. "So, Captain — not that I’m sorry you showed up, but who called you?"

"Who didn’t call us?" Tekkahawnee growled. He looked like the sort of man who growled a lot: still young, maybe in his forties, but already his face had set into permanent frown lines. "Every damned Mandasar from here to Orore rang up our station, screaming about recruiters… but we get calls like that five times a month, and they’re all false alarms. A stray dog wanders into the fields, a skimmer flies too low, or the wind makes a funny noise, and the stupid lobsters start wailing that someone wants to kidnap them."

Zeeleepull’s whiskers twitched angrily. Before the boy went all hotheaded on us, I told Tekkahawnee, "It wasn’t a false alarm tonight."

"Mmm." The captain didn’t sound convinced. "Then," he said, "we got a call from someone else, a woman named Kaisho. She claimed to be a retired Explorer, and said her exalted friend, Admiral Festina Ramos, was broadcasting an emergency Mayday from this area. Word is, this Kaisho threatened our police chief your navy would blockade the whole planet if we didn’t give you every possible assistance."

Festina rolled her eyes. "Kaisho, Kaisho, Kaisho," she muttered under her breath. To Tekkahawnee she said, "Kaisho is indeed an ex-Explorer now living on Celestia — she’s the one who tipped me off about the recruiter problem, and she’s been helping me investigate… says it’s the most fun she’s had since she retired. But I gave her strict orders to stay on the other side of the planet; she’s confined to a hoverchair these days and completely unfit to go waltzing into trouble." Festina made a face. "As if Kaisho ever obeys my orders. She must have followed me here in her own skimmer. If Kaisho heard my Mayday, she couldn’t run to my rescue herself; so she bullied the cops into doing it."

Tekkahawnee glanced in the admiral’s direction. "That talk about blockades was exaggeration?"

"You can never tell with the Admiralty," Festina replied. "Their idea of deterrence is being irrationally unpredictable. When outsiders endanger an admiral, sometimes the High Council just blows hot air. Other times they overreact spectacularly, blockading star systems, seizing ships, imposing sanctions on everyone who twitches. As far as I can tell, it’s deliberately random — if you annoy the navy, you never know if you’ll get away with it or be clobbered by an extravagant show of force."

"But," Tekkahawnee said, "you’re bottom of the barrel when it comes to admirals, right?" He wasn’t taunting her; it sounded like he was stating a widely known fact. Even so, it shocked me how anyone could say such a thing to an admiral’s face. No one would ever talk like that to my dad.

"Celestia may not be part of the Technocracy," Tekkahawnee went on, "but we hear rumors, Ramos. Word is, the High Council invented the rank of Lieutenant Admiral for you and you alone, as a sign you didn’t have a chance in hell of making it to the inner circle."

"Absolutely right," Festina agreed, "but the High Council might still go bugfuck if someone managed to kill me. It would be good PR to make a lavish show of grief. Poor Festina — she never saw eye to eye with us, but we still respected her. I can just picture them professing how dearly they loved me. And inner circle or not, I do wear the sacred gray uniform. It’s in the council’s best interest to send a message to Celestia and every other two-bit parasite world clinging to the Technocracy’s shirttails: ‘Thou shalt not allow any admiral to come to harm.’ "

Tekkahawnee grunted in reply. With only dim starlight, I couldn’t see the captain’s face clearly, but I could tell his mood was turning glowery. He had to be wondering if Festina was just trying to intimidate him or if there was really a chance the fleet would mount a serious crackdown.

Me, I was wondering the same thing. Back on Troyen, Samantha constantly used fudged-up threats as leverage. She would tell Queen Verity the navy demanded this or insisted on that, and nobody ever knew if Sam was actually relaying a message from the High Council or just spouting personal whims off the top of her head. A lot of times, she’d whisper afterward, "Of course, that wasn’t official, Edward; but it’s fun to see how much you can get away with." That tells you something about my sister, doesn’t it?

Zeeleepull got the growls long before we reached the murder site. From the way he snuffled — loudly, with a lot of nose-wiping — I knew he could smell the dead warrior’s blood. I put my arm around his shoulder, and whispered, "Can you tell who it is?"

He shook his head. "Guts too much the stink. Know I my friends by skin scent, not by intestines."

Even when we got to the clearing, he couldn’t identify the other warrior by smell. He had to walk straight up to the corpse and stare into the dead face, while one of the policefolk held a flashlight. "Wiftim is," Zeeleepull said at last. "Wiftim of Hive Seeliwon."

"Wiftim" meant "ever-prepared" and Seeliwon was a pretty little lake district where Verity had kept a manor house. That might have been why Wiftim’s hive adopted the name — because of its connection with the long-lost high queen.

I wanted to explain that to the policewoman who recorded Zeeleepull’s statement. Someone should have told her the names meant something: not just empty facts about some dead stranger. But I was afraid she’d just look at me, the way they always do, blankly puzzled about what was going on inside my head — what was wrong with me, that I thought such things were important?

I should have told her anyway. I should have.

16 MEETING THE BALROG

The police got busy with murder-scene stuff: putting up big bright lights, taking VR snaps, all that. Captain Tekkahawnee edged us noncops off to the side, then started making calls on a portacomm. I don’t know who all he talked to — he went to the far end of the clearing so we couldn’t hear what he said — but sometimes he hunched over, almost shouting into the vidscreen, and sometimes he leaned way back with a very neutral expression on his face… like he was contacting lower-downs and higher-ups, telling all kinds of people about Wiftim’s death.

"Fuss and nothing," Zeeleepull grumbled. "Care they not of recruiters before. Bet I, still nothing but show."

Admiral Ramos shook her head. "There’s one big difference tonight, Zeeleepull. This time the recruiters killed someone."

The warrior’s whiskers twitched. "Stealing Mandasars, killing as good as."

"No," Festina told him. "Kidnapping and brainwashing are ugly, but the damage is reversible — bring everyone back into mixed-caste hives and they’ll return to more balanced personalities. Even if that weren’t true, murder is still more serious than anything else the recruiters have done. Murder catches the attention of the League of Peoples."

"The League!" Zeeleepull’s voice was full of bitterness. "Nothing, nothing, nothing they do."

Festina shook her head again. "They do one thing, and they do it flawlessly — they stop dangerous non-sentient lifeforms who try to travel from one star system to another. To the most advanced races of the League, humans and Mandasars are no more than bacteria; ignorable unless we start turning nasty, like a disease. Even then, the League doesn’t bother to exterminate us… they just don’t let us spread."

Zeeleepull looked like he was going to argue some more, but I put my finger to his snout and shushed him. I didn’t want him raising a ruckus in front of the police; the cops already thought Mandasars were whiny troublemakers, and we didn’t want to show them they were right.

"Trust me," Festina told Zeeleepull in a low voice, "the League doesn’t give a damn if lesser species kidnap, brainwash, and enslave each other. The upper echelons of the League are too lofty, and too damned alien in their thought patterns, to care about such minor mischief. But murder is something different. Deliberately killing a sentient being automatically brands you as non-sentient… and if a government is negligent in controlling dangerous non-sentient creatures, the government gets declared non-sentient too."

She waved her hands toward the police, dutifully picking up bloody flechettes from the dirt. "The Celestian authorities might have looked the other way when recruiters just took slaves, but no government can ignore intentional homicide. The League won’t let them. If the police don’t make a sincere effort to catch that glass-chest guy, all of Celestia may be declared non-sentient… which means no traffic in or out till the civil system is cleaned up. And I’m not talking about a pissy little blockade by the Outward Fleet, where ships are simply impounded; this will be the League flexing its muscles, killing whole crews till everyone gets the message."

I nodded. "The way they killed everyone on Willow."

"They did what?" Festina said, spinning to face me. "Something happened to Willow?"

She made me tell the story, all of it: the party and the queen and the nanites and the black ship… even how the woman in admiral costume died kissing me. Now that the cops had lit up the clearing, I could see the real Admiral Ramos didn’t look much like the Willow woman; it was only the dark that made me think I was seeing a ghost. Still, I got plenty embarrassed talking about that kiss to the admiral’s face — as if I were one of those folks who use VR to do dirty stuff with famous people. I kept stammering and apologizing, saying the kiss hadn’t been my idea but the woman was so sad and desperate…

The admiral stopped me: lifted her hand and patted me on the cheek. "It’s all right, Edward — really it is. If I’d been in your position, I probably would have kissed her too." She smiled. "Besides, with a sweet handsome face like yours, people must be dying to kiss you all the time."

Um. I decided that last bit was a joke.

Just as I was finishing my story, I heard a whoosh coming up behind me. I spun around fast, thinking it might be the Larry back for another run… and Festina spun tight in unison with me, her fists up in guard position. Even Zeeleepull clicked his pincers to the ready, all three of us jumping like we’d heard a ghost.

Which made it embarrassing when the noise turned out to be a lady in a wheelchair.

Of course, regular wheelchairs don’t go whoosh; but this one had a tiny skimmer engine under the seat, strong enough to lift it to knee height off the ground so it could fly over sticks and tangles. The chair traveled slowly, half as fast as a baby’s crawl, keeping straight and upright so the passenger wouldn’t get jostled… but as stately as a bride inching down the aisle, the wheelchair-woman drifted up the hillside toward us.

Because of the shadows under the trees, I couldn’t see the woman clearly… except for her legs. They glowed dim red, like embers in a campfire: one leg shone all the way to the hip, the other from her toes to the knee. The glow had a fuzzy look to it; as she got closer I realized she had luminescent moss slathered thick as carpet on her skin.

Was that the fashion now, wearing patches of scarlet mold from ankle to thigh? Or could it be some medical treatment? The woman was in a wheelchair; maybe the moss was a sort of medicine, a nanotech foam working to repair whatever damage kept her from walking.

You never know what crazy stuff doctors will come up with.

The woman floated into the spill from the floodlights, but I still couldn’t see her face; it was hidden behind streamers of long straight hair, like maybe she was so ugly she didn’t want to be looked at. The hair itself wasn’t ugly at all — jet-black threaded through with silver, that gorgeously dignified effect you see with some folks as they start to turn gray. The woman’s clothes were black mixed with silver too… skintight and seamless, as if someone had sprayed coal-pitch ink over her whole body from the throat down: over her hands and fingers, over her arms, her chest, her stomach, right to the very edge of the glowing red moss. Then, while all that ink was still wet, bits of silver glitter had been sprinkled everywhere so she’d glint in the starlight.

Probably her clothes weren’t fabric at all… just a sweat sheen of nano paint, programmed to cling snugly to her body. (Also to lift what needed lifting, corset what needed corseting, and so on — my dad always wore tuck-and-tidy nano under his clothes to make himself look trim and muscular. This woman did the same, but without the clothes on top.)

"Gentlemen," Festina said softly to Zeeleepull and me, "this is Kaisho… who supposedly works for me as an informant, but is piss-poor at remembering who signs her paycheck." The admiral had lowered her fists, but her jaw was still clenched tight. "Are you out of your mind?" she asked the wheelchair-woman. "Didn’t I give you a direct order to stay someplace safe?"

"Dear simple Festina," Kaisho answered in a whisper, "we don’t do orders anymore. It’s not in the Balrog nature. We had a feeling you were heading for trouble…"

"You had a feeling, but you didn’t tell me?"

"One must never speak of feelings until they come true. The Mother of Time will pull out your tongue."

Zeeleepull nudged me. "Mad crazy hume," he muttered, in a voice he probably thought was too soft for the woman to hear.

"Wrong on all counts, young warrior," Kaisho said. "Not mad, not crazy, not hume. Very much not hume." I could see a brief smile flash under the cover of her long long hair: the whiteness of teeth in the darkness, disappearing quickly. Then she shook her head so the hair fell in and hid even more of her face — both eyes concealed completely, nothing more than a thin open strip down the middle, showing her nose and a tiny peek of lips. She probably couldn’t see much; I got the feeling she didn’t have to.

"Kaisho has an unusual condition," Festina murmured to Zeeleepull and me. "Twenty-five years ago, when she was an Explorer, she, uhh, had the honor to be chosen as the host for an advanced lifeform."

"To be precise," the woman said in her whispery voice, "I stepped on something I shouldn’t have. Simple red moss. Which immediately corroded through the soles of my boots and implanted itself in both feet." Her smile flashed again. "I have since christened it the Balrog — a creature of glowing flame that has locked me in its grapple. Which is to say, it’s slowly eating me."

I gulped hard. "Can’t doctors do anything?"

"No," Festina replied. "Detaching the Balrog would kill it. That’s not allowed because… well, the moss is sentient. Several rungs up the evolutionary ladder from both humans and Mandasars. Grossly intelligent… marginally telepathic and telekinetic… possibly precognitive…"

"Oh no," Kaisho whispered, "we avoid peering directly under Mother Time’s skirts. But compared to your species, we are more astute at guessing where things will lead."

I stared at her… which means I stared at the thick black hair covering her face. Was there moss on her face too: thick clots of red, fuzzed all over her cheeks… her forehead… her eyes? Was that why she used her hair as a veil? And was her voice stuck in that soft whisper because she had moss on her vocal cords, a layer of glowing red velvet coating all down her throat? I wanted to ask, but was afraid the answer would turn my stomach. Instead, I said, "How can this moss stuff be sentient if it’s eating you? Sentient beings don’t hurt other people."

"Sentient beings don’t murder other people," Kaisho corrected, "and the Balrog takes care not to threaten my life. At its current rate of digestion, I will happily live my allotted span… which alas is only another eighteen years, twenty-three days, six hours, and forty-two minutes. I have an untreatable liver condition. Or I will have by then. Or you could say I’ve been sick since the moment of my conception, and it will just take a hundred and thirty years for the disease to get down to business."

"You know that for sure?" I asked.

"The Balrog knows," Kaisho told me, "and therefore I do too."

"Stupid hume," Zeeleepull muttered, "believing true a parasite."

"Other people have parasites," Kaisho answered. "I have a highly beneficial symbiont." She chuckled softly. "Or rather, we have each other. We are now a human-Balrog synthesis. Not completely integrated yet, but we’re gradually coming to… a meeting of the minds."

"Eating you," Zeeleepull growled, "and corrupting your brain."

"Say rather, improving my brain."

Zeeleepull gave a dismissive sniff. "Heard I the same tale from recruiters: Smarter you happy when we get done."

Kaisho shrugged. "I recognize the parallels. If you’d asked me, ‘Would you like to have your mind and body mutated by an alien organism for its own secret ends, while it slowly consumes your flesh?’ — well, tempting though the offer sounds, I once might have said no. Now, it’s what I am. My identity, even if I never asked for it."

"Stupid identity then," Zeeleepull muttered.

"Are you any different?" Kaisho asked. "You think your brain is fine; but I’ve talked to warriors living in single-caste barracks, and they’re convinced you’re the one who’s been brainwashed. They like having hair-trigger tempers; they appreciate the simplicity of always following orders, without suffering pangs of conscience; and they claim you’ve been brainwashed by an unnatural human-biased upbringing that’s kept you a self-centered little boy instead of an honest-to-God warrior. You, naturally, disagree. Your current identity is precious to you, and you’ll fight any son-of-a-bitch recruiters who try to make you change.

"And what about you, dear Festina?" Kaisho said, turning to the admiral. "You’ve made no secret how much you despise the Admiralty: how they prevented you from leading a normal life and forced you into the Explorer Corps. You were methodically indoctrinated by behavior-mod programming into the permanent paranoia required for xeno-exploration… yet knowing all this, you’re still profoundly proud to be an Explorer. Isn’t that odd? When you were a girl, I’m sure you were furious at the people who were taking away your choices — I know I was — but now that you are an Explorer, it’s the very heart of your identity. You never wanted to be this, and now you can’t imagine being anything else. Just like me."

Festina turned slightly so her face was out of the light. Even Zeeleepull was sensitive enough not to stare at Festina while she… I don’t know, I wasn’t looking either, whether she was crying or angry or wistful or what. The silence got strained real fast, and Zeeleepull leapt in to break it. "Teelu then?" he growled, glaring at Kaisho. "Is just fine, Teelu. No brainwash him, no question his mind."

Kaisho turned to me. "What about it, Teelu?" she asked in a teasing whisper. "No one ever tampered with your head? You got to choose what you are, without anyone forcing an identity down your throat?"

Her hair hid her face, but I could imagine her eyes glittering — as if she’d just told a joke that only the two of us got, and only she found funny. Did she know I was a gene-engineering mistake with mixed-up chemicals in my brain? Could she read my mind and see my past? Or maybe, was the precognitive part of her seeing my future?

Kaisho’s lips opened, and for a second I got the feeling she was going to answer the questions I hadn’t spoken. The dull red glow on her legs flared brighter, like a warning, and she closed her mouth again.

"What?" I asked.

Kaisho shook her head. "Mother Time says it isn’t my secret to tell."

No matter how much I asked her to say more, her mouth stayed shut in a mysterious little smile.

17 INVESTIGATING THE BANDOLIER

Kaisho soon got tired of being badgered for answers.

She pointedly turned her chair away from me and glided over to the admiral. "Festina dear," Kaisho said in her whisper, "if you’re finished your little cry…"

Festina lifted her head immediately, and it sure didn’t look like she’d been crying. "What do you want?" she said, all tightly controlled.

"Just to tell you I noticed something back in the woods. Or perhaps the Balrog noticed it — it’s hard to tell where I stop and the Balrog begins. I’m not sure I remember what it’s like to see with ordinary eyes."

Zeeleepull squinched up his whiskers the way Mandasars do when something turns their stomachs. He was clearly squeamish about the Balrog-brainmeld thing… and I think Kaisho got a kick out of making him squirm.

Festina didn’t have an ounce of squirm in her. With a no-nonsense voice, she asked Kaisho, "What did you see?"

Kaisho gave a meaningful glance toward the police, still puttering nearby. "Maybe I’d just better show you."

After a moment, Festina nodded. "All right. Lead on."

The police paid no attention as we headed off through the trees. Maybe they were happy to get rid of us: easier for them to get their work done without noncop observers.

Kaisho took the lead, her chair moving slow as molasses. I found myself looking down at her glowing legs, all limp and useless under that moss. Were they moss clear through? Was that how the Balrog ate her, replacing human muscle and bone with its own fuzzy self? Or was the moss just a coating and there was still a woman underneath, maybe all paralyzed and sucked dry of nutrients, but recognizable as flesh and blood no matter how withered? I imagined putting my fingertips against her glowing thigh and pushing down, my nails squishing through the damp fuzz, deeper and deeper till they touched raw bone… or maybe going all the way through to the leather seat of the chair without touching anything solid…

A hand patted my own thigh, right where I’d imagined touching Kaisho. I nearly jumped out of my skin. When I looked up, Kaisho was obviously staring at me from behind her veil of hair. "Don’t be embarrassed," she whispered. "I don’t mind people looking at my legs. I know they’re magnificent."

"Oh," I said. "Um."

"And," she went on, "many people have an irresistible urge to touch."

"Does the stuff rub off on them?"

She shook her head. "I stepped on the Balrog when it was in a dispersal phase — actively looking for a new host. Now, it’s happily bonded to me and reproductively dormant. Entirely. Almost. It would only spread to someone else if the chance was too promising to pass up: a host so superior, the Balrog had to seize the opportunity, for the greater good of the universe." Her smile flashed under the cover of her hair. "Do you consider yourself that superior, Teelu"?

"No," I said. But I kept well clear of the moss. Kaisho was kind of daring me to touch her… and Samantha trained me when we were kids, never ever ever take a dare.

Kaisho’s wheelchair stopped beside a clump of scrawny trees. The trees didn’t look much different from any others we’d passed — almost like Earth trees, except for the blackish leaves and a light puffiness to their trunks, as if their bark was wooden foam — but Kaisho cut her chair’s skimmer engine so the chair settled down on its big solid wheels.

Apart from the starlight and those three confetti moons, we only had the glow of Kaisho’s legs to see by. Still, it was easy to tell the soil had been trampled half to mire by the Mandasar militia; they’d come through here chasing Mr. Clear Chest.

"There," Kaisho said, pointing to the ground between four close-growing trees. Festina and I leaned our heads in; Zeeleepull tried to look too, but the trees were rooted too near each other for him to get his wide shoulders into the gap. I guess that’s why the dirt here didn’t get mucked up as the warriors stampeded past — they had to go around the trees instead of between.

Imprinted in the soft mud was a sharp-edged circular outline… like a big heavy can had been set down long enough for it to settle its weight into the soil. As far as I could tell, there was nothing else to see; but Festina made a soft, "Hah!" sound and grabbed a little thread caught on one of the tree trunks.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Black fiber," the admiral answered. "Probably off that recruiter’s pants. They were black, right?"

I couldn’t remember. I’d been so busy gawking at his exposed heaving lungs, I hadn’t noticed much else. "You think he was doing something here?" I asked.

"He tucked himself between these trees for a while," Kaisho said. "A good place to hide — his shadow would blend in with the tree trunks." She turned to Festina. "Do you recognize that outline on the ground?"

The admiral nodded. "It’s exactly the size of a Bumbler."

"Bumbler?" Zeeleepull asked. "Bumbler what is?"

"Equipment from the navy’s Explorer Corps," I told him. Too bad Festina’s Bumbler had been destroyed, or I could have showed him. "It’s like a medium-sized cooking pot," I said, "only the lid is a vidscreen. It’s got cameras and sensors and things, so it can show you an IR scan of the area, or work like a telescope or microscope…"

"Not to mention reading and recording the entire EM spectrum from gamma waves to radio," Kaisho put in.

"So the recruiter… Explorer is? Navy hume Explorer?" His voice was going huffy with outrage.

"Of course not," Festina answered, just as huffy. "I’ve read the files on every Explorer in the fleet, and not one has a see-through thorax. That recruiter might have carried Explorer equipment, but he doesn’t belong to the corps." She turned to Kaisho. "Do you think it really was a Bumbler? All we’ve got is a circle in the mud…"

"The Balrog assures me it was a genuine Bumbler," Kaisho replied. "It left a characteristic metallic taste on the dirt. As distinctive as a fingerprint."

I stared at her a moment, trying to think how the Balrog could taste the soil. Had Kaisho touched her mossy legs against the ground? Or could Balrogs taste things from long distance, the way you can sometimes taste campfire smoke, or the vinegar in strong pickles before you actually lift them to your mouth?

"My guess," Kaisho said, "is the recruiter set down his Bumbler while he was busy with something else. Probably he had some gadget for monitoring the Laughing Larry as it homed in on our dear Festina. He stayed till he heard the Mandasar militia coming toward him…" She looked at Zeeleepull. "Following his scent, correct?"

"Smelled him we," Zeeleepull agreed proudly. "First the loud laugh-laugh that drew us across the water. Then the stink of hume on the ground. Chased him we. Harried him we."

Kaisho nodded. "The recruiter snatched up his Bumbler and ran, with the warriors on his heels. He headed for that other clearing, where his skimmer waited to pick him up."

Festina frowned. "I saw him on the rope ladder," she said. "No Bumbler then. Which means," she went on, suddenly eager, "he must have lost it as he ran from the warriors. Either he dumped it deliberately so he could sprint faster, or he got the carrying strap snagged on something and he didn’t have time to work it free." She gave a wry smile. "When I think how often I’ve caught my own Bumbler on bushes… well, finally, some poetic justice."

"You really were an Explorer?" I asked. "With a Bumbler and everything?" The first time Festina had mentioned being an Explorer, the Larry showed up before I could ask any questions. Now… I still found it hard to believe an Explorer could ever make admiral. When I was young, the Explorer Corps was stuck off to one side, out of the chain of promotion for the regular navy. Explorers couldn’t become ship captains or admirals or anything. That was one reason Dad made me wear the black uniform — to be sure I’d never get put in charge of anything. (Or maybe just because the High Council had no Admiral of the Black to tell Dad I wasn’t wanted.)

The navy must have changed a lot in the twenty years I’d been out of touch. An admiral who’d been an Explorer — pretty amazing. But when I studied Festina’s face for a moment, that big purple blotch sure made her look like an Explorer.

"Yes, Edward," Festina said, "once upon a time, I was a full-fledged ECM." (ECM means Expendable Crew Member… what Explorers call themselves.) "But I’ll tell you my life story later," she went on. "Right now, we have more pressing business. If we find that recruiter’s Bumbler, its memory may contain useful evidence."

She struck off forward, tracing the recruiter’s path as he’d run from the militia. Soon she called for Kaisho to take the lead; a Balrog’s spooky senses were better than human eyes following a track in the dark. That didn’t sit well with Zeeleepull — he couldn’t stand waiting for the wheelchair’s snail-slow progress, so he put his nose to the ground, caught the scent, and barged his way forward as fast as he could sniff. You’d think the trail would be hard for him to make out, considering how a horde of warriors had trampled over the original scent… but Zeeleepull never seemed to hesitate. Of course, he’d gone this way before: only half an hour ago, when the militia followed the same spoor through the trees.

Mr. Clear Chest must have had a rough time of it, racing on the slant of a hillside through the deep night dark… trying not to trip over logs or get tangled in patches of brush. Of course, this forest was alien, not like the nice Terran woodlands on my father’s estate; but the undergrowth here knew all the Earth tricks, with bristles and prickers and nettly bits to jab you as you dashed by.

It also had those puffbally things I’d felt popping under my feet ever since I came into these woods. Festina said they were insect eggs and got a crinkly fond look in her eyes; she even scraped up a few and put them in a test-tubey thing she had in her pocket. Me, I just saw those eggs as slimy gunk that made it easy to fall if you didn’t watch your step. That recruiter must have got whipped and ripped by branches pretty thoroughly on his run… till finally he hit a major hitch. "Bandolier," Festina said, crouching to peer at something in the mud: a big leather sash with all kinds of clips, the sort of thing you sling from your shoulder and hang doodads on. It was tangled into a shrub with thorns the size of knitting needles, nasty sharp things that stuck out in all directions. Mr. Clear Chest must have brushed too close to the plant and got himself snagged; in the dark, with all those thorns, he wouldn’t have a chance of getting the sash unstuck without gouging up his hands. Especially not with a horde of musk-crazed warriors on his heels. All he could do was unbuckle the strap and abandon his gear.

Which may have given us all kinds of good evidence, like stuff from the Bumbler’s memory… except that right after Mr. Clear Chest ditched his equipment, it got trampled to topsoil by two dozen stampeding Mandasars.

The shrub with the thorns was crushed into the dirt. So was the Bumbler — nothing but scrap metal now, hammered as flat as a waffle. Now, the only data you could read on it was a whopping bunch of dents from warrior feet.

Festina kept poking at the ground, prying up the squashed remains of everything from the recruiter’s bandolier. A lot of it looked like navy equipment — not just the Bumbler, but a service communicator, a deluxe multitool, and even a universal map. (The map was a flexible vidscreen that could fold down to palm-size or out to a meter square. Its memory didn’t really have charts of the whole universe, but it could display top-sheets for every planet known to the Outward Fleet.)

The map and everything else was smashed and dirty… not even good for fingerprints, though the admiral did her best not to smear the surfaces more than they were already. I knelt beside her for a closer look at the wrecked equipment. The plastic case of the multitool had split open, showing its broken insides, all folded neatly in place: a jackknife, some scissors, a whisk brush, several electronic skeleton keys…

Those keys sparked a memory. "That tool," I said to the admiral. "It’s the kind used by Security Corps." All the Security officers who guarded Dad and Samantha had carried little gizmos like this one.

Festina grabbed a pair of nearby twigs and used them like chopsticks to pick up the tool. When she brought the casing close to the glow of Kaisho’s legs, we could see the plastic was olive green — the color of navy Security. "A Security Corps tool," Festina murmured, "but an Explorer’s Bumbler. And universal maps are only carried by the Diplomacy Corps."

"They’re all navy issue," Kaisho agreed. "Can you see any serial numbers?"

The admiral used her chopsticks to flip through the debris. Despite dents and damage, it wasn’t hard to find ID codes notched into every piece of equipment. The navy was always real thorough about labeling fleet property. "You’ve got your communicator?" Festina asked Kaisho.

"Of course."

"Then call Starbase Iris and check the ordnance database. I’ll give you my own access codes. Find out who’s registered as the owner of this stuff."

Kaisho’s legs flared a little brighter. "Is that an order, dear admiral?" she asked, all innocence.

Festina rolled her eyes. "I know — the Balrog doesn’t take orders from lesser species. Consider it a humble request."

"We love to serve," Kaisho said with a smile.

18 THINKING ABOUT ADMIRALS

Kaisho got to work, whispering into her communicator: reading off serial numbers, issuing search instructions to the computers on Starbase Iris. Meanwhile, the rest of us prowled around, looking for anything else that might be in the neighborhood. Zeeleepull snuffled in the mud; Festina tracked forward a bit, still following the recruiter’s path through the woods; and since I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I tagged along behind her.

When she saw I was following, she waited for me to join her… and even smiled a bit as I came up. I couldn’t remember an admiral ever smiling at me — laughing, yes, but not smiling. When I was young, Dad mostly kept me out of sight when other admirals came to call… but if someone stayed for several days, I couldn’t be hidden forever. My father had this trick of staging "family" breakfasts, as if he and Sam and I ate together every morning; he thought it would make a good impression on visitors. When my sister and I were old enough not to give away the game, he even put a photo of our "late mother" above the dining table.

I don’t know who the woman in the picture was — someone blond and pretty. Our real mother had been a paid surrogate, chosen for her healthy medical profile and ability to keep a secret. Dad never took a photo of her.

So I’d met a fair number of admirals at those contrived little meals: men and women, humans and Divians, but all of them with the same sort of look in their eyes. Staring at me when no one else was watching, as if I were a mystery they were keen to figure out. Exactly how stupid was I? Was it a miracle I could even handle a knife and fork, or had Dad exaggerated how dumb I was? Could I be some kind of secret weapon — that Dad wanted them to think I was a total idiot, when really it was part of some devious plan?

The admirals I’d met were very keen on devious plans. But Festina Ramos was different. A real smile for me. Not a grin, like someone amused at the way I got tongue-tied in front of strangers, or a leer, like those women on Willow who offered to show me the service tunnels. Just a smile, a nice smile.

"How are you feeling?" she asked, as we walked side by side through the woods.

"I’m all right," I said.

"No aftereffects from the venom?"

"Not that I can tell."

"Good." She glanced my way. "You should still see a doctor, as soon as you can."

"Oh." I didn’t like doctors so much; I decided to change the subject. "That recruiter guy — Mr. Clear Chest. He sure had a lot of navy equipment."

"He did, didn’t he?" She was looking away from me now: making a show of examining the ground, though there was nothing down there but trampled mud.

"How do you think he got it?" I asked.

She didn’t answer for a moment. We were entering the clearing where the recruiter had faced off with the militia; ridges of stone poked up through the soil, which must have been why the trees hadn’t grown in to fill the gap.

"What do you know about admirals?" Festina suddenly asked.

"Um," I said. "One or two things, I guess." She must not know who my father was… and I didn’t want to tell her, not right now — for fear she started looking at me like those admirals at the breakfast table, sizing me up to see if I could be used as political leverage.

"Do you know the difference," she asked, "between the High Council and the lower admirals?"

I thought, Lower admirals never got invited to breakfast. But out loud, I said, "The High Council is the inner circle. One for each corps in the service."

"Except the Explorer Corps," she told me in something close to a growl. "Officially, Explorers fall under the jurisdiction of the council president. Which mean they mostly fall between the cracks."

"But if you used to be an Explorer," I said, "and now you’re an admiral, couldn’t you sort of be the admiral in charge of the Explorer Corps?"

She turned to me and smiled. Another nice, real smile. And pretty, too. Even with just the starlight, I could see the splotch on her face, but I was getting used to it. It wasn’t so bad, especially when her eyes were so alive… and the way she moved, very easy and graceful, sure on her feet. I even liked her voice — it was sweet and kind, without the teeniest bit of talking down to me. Just for a second, I wondered if she ever put perfume in her hair; then I nearly smacked my own face for being so stupid.

Thank heavens Festina couldn’t read my mind the way Kaisho seemed to. Still smiling, the admiral sat down on a small stone outjut in the middle of the clearing and patted the rock beside her, like I should sit too. She was just being friendly, I knew that; ready to have a talk with a fellow Explorer. Feeling shy and awkward, I took a seat but made darned sure I wasn’t so close I might accidentally brush against her.

"Edward," she murmured quietly, "I’m never going to be the admiral in charge of the Explorer Corps. Like I said, that job goes to the council president — Admiral Vincence. Vincence would never surrender a shred of his power to someone else… which means he won’t let anyone take over the Explorers, even if he doesn’t give a damn about the corps."

She sighed and stared out into the darkness. "The High Council is like that, Edward. Admirals lower on the totem pole are mostly decent competent professionals: the ones who make sure ships are where they’re supposed to be with the supplies they need. But the bastards who claw their way to the top — and stay there for decade after decade — sometimes I think they’re all clones of a single Machiavellian bastard who seized power four hundred… what’s wrong?"

I’d nearly jumped to my feet and run off into the night. Talk about clones always did that to me — flooding me with guilt. "Sorry," I said, trying not to sound like a terrible liar, "I just saw a shadow… like a wolf or something."

"There are no wolves on Celestia," she answered. "The planet’s still in its Devonian period; the only native life-forms on land are insects." Festina rolled to her feet. "Maybe we’d better look around, in case the recruiters have come back."

"No, no," I said, "it was nothing. Just a shadow. A tree moving in the wind. Sorry."

She peered off into the woods for another moment, then slowly sat down. "Where was I?" she asked.

"Um." I remembered very clearly but didn’t want to remind her. "You were talking about admirals, but I’m not sure why."

"Oh. Well." She thought for a moment. "You asked how that recruiter got hold of navy equipment. I was getting around to that." She eased back onto her elbows, staring idly up at the stars. "For the past twenty years, the High Council has taken a great interest in Celestia. And when I say great interest, I mean on the order of eighteen percent interest per annum."

"Money?"

"Money. The Admiralty funded a lot of people to come to Celestia two decades ago, and they’ve been reaping dividends ever since. Solid returns on investment." She glanced at me. "Does that surprise you?"

"Um. No." When Sam described how Dad had sneaked twenty million humans onto Celestia, she hadn’t described all the financial arrangements; but of course the Admiralty would have worked out some way to take a percentage of whatever the settlers earned.

"So," Festina went on, "members of the High Council have a strong incentive to ensure that Celestian business stays profitable. Lately, the biggest profits have been coming from…"

She looked at me as if she was sure I could finish the sentence. "From recruiting Mandasars?" I guessed.

"That’s right," she nodded. "Cheap blue-collar workers, brilliant white-collar workers, and fanatic security guards to keep everybody in line."

"So the High Council is on the recruiters’ side?" I asked, outraged.

"The recruiters put money in the High Council’s pockets, but I doubt if they’re backed by the council as a whole. My guess is the recruiters are sponsored by a single admiral."

"Who?"

"I don’t know," Festina replied. "But it’s someone who’s decided to equip the recruiters with navy gear."

"That’s awful!" I said.

"Business as usual for High Council admirals," she sighed. "But that’s not the worst part." I didn’t want to hear the worst part. But I swallowed and said, "Tell me."

She didn’t speak for a moment; she was staring up at the stars over her head. "There it is," she said suddenly. "See that constellation that looks like a big X? Second star from the middle on the upper right arm — that’s Troyen’s sun."

I looked up quickly. The X was easy enough to see; but the star she’d pointed out was nothing special. Somehow I thought it should be brighter than any other object in the sky, not an ordinary little pinpoint like everything else. I lay on my back beside Festina to get a better look.

"Edward," she said softly, "why did someone order Willow to transport a queen from Troyen to Celestia?"

"I don’t know." My voice sounded distant in my own ears; I was staring up at the star, wanting to feel some connection with it. That was Troyen. The closest thing I had to a home. But my heart didn’t beat a millisecond faster. Nothing.

"It’s getting harder for the recruiters to find more victims," Festina murmured. Her voice was quiet, right there on the ground beside me. "Mandasar communities like this one have organized for their own protection: militias, sentry patrols, security systems. And the Mandasars are starting to find sympathetic ears among humans and other races on Celestia: people who will lobby politicians or raise a stink in the media. So the recruiter press gangs have found it harder and harder to meet their quotas."

She lifted up on one elbow and looked down at me. "Now think, Edward. How would that change if the recruiters had a queen on their side?"

"You mean… Willow was bringing the queen to help the recruiters?"

"Willow was following orders from someone in the High Council — no one else would dare send a ship to a planet that’s having a war. And someone in the High Council is probably channeling navy equipment to the recruiters. Odds are it’s the same person."

I thought about that a second. "If this bad admiral gave orders to Willow, wouldn’t there be records or something? I mean, if it’s an official order…"

My voice trailed off as Festina shook her head. "Sorry, Edward," she told me. "Our navy computer systems are so full of back doors and secret access codes and intentional security loopholes…" She sighed. "An inner-circle admiral can issue instructions, then erase any trace that it happened. I’ll check, of course, just in case someone got sloppy covering up tracks; but in all likelihood, not even the admirals on the High Council can figure out which of them sent Willow to Troyen."

"But you’re sure," I said, "that Willow was bringing that queen for the recruiters?"

"That’s my guess," Festina answered. Her face was dark with shadows. "Now tell me: what would happen if the recruiters had a queen working with them?"

I winced. Mandasars have fanatically strong instincts to follow a queen’s orders. Even if the queen said something ridiculous like, "Surrender to the recruiters," a good chunk of the population would start thinking, "If a queen wants us recruited, maybe that’s the way things should be. Maybe we just don’t understand, and it’s selfish trying to stay the way we are." More likely though, the queen wouldn’t be so blatant. The recruiters would use her to trick a few kids at a time, luring warriors into traps, thinning out numbers gradually, till the hives weren’t strong enough to defend themselves. These kids were so innocent, one queen could make suckers of them all. Look how eagerly the warriors listened to me, just because I smelled of week-old venom and once had a fancy title.

Yes, a queen would be a godsend to the recruiters… if she felt like cooperating with them. "But why would a queen do it?" I asked. "Why would she help humans do bad things to her own kind?"

"Maybe just to get off Troyen," Festina said. "Suppose a queen was doing badly in the war — surrounded by enemies, low on troops and supplies. Then Willow shows up with a proposition: free passage to Celestia and a chance to start fresh on a new planet. All she has to do is help the recruiters a bit. Would the queen take the deal?"

"Yes," I said. "Then double-cross the recruiters as soon as she got the chance."

"They wouldn’t give her the chance," Festina told me. "They’d keep a gun to her head the rest of her life. Except the League killed her and the whole of Willow before any of that could happen."

Festina eased off her elbow and rolled onto her back again — side by side with me in the darkness, staring up at Troyen’s sun. "That’s what makes me think it’s just one admiral, rather than the whole council. The council are power-mad sleazebags, but they aren’t collectively stupid. Transporting a queen from one star system to another? When the queen had been waging a war for twenty years? That’s an insane risk. The League was almost sure to consider the queen a dangerous non-sentient… so any fool could see they’d kill her and the Willow’s crew. If the council jointly agreed to give Willow its orders, then the council would be branded non-sentient too. Next thing you know, the League might ground our whole navy till the admirals were thrown out on their asses. That’s a very real threat, and the inner circle knows it."

She shook her head. "No, Edward, our noble leaders have a finely honed sense of self-preservation; they’d never go far enough to bring the League down on their heads. But a single admiral might — if he or she had a big stake, keeping the recruiters in business."

"Which admiral?" I asked.

"I don’t know. One who can’t leave New Earth anymore — he or she is definitely non-sentient. But that doesn’t narrow down the possibilities. None of the high admirals leave New Earth; they’re all afraid of people conspiring against them while they’re gone."

"So you can’t even make a guess who it is?" I was up on my elbow now, leaning in over her. Her eyes opened wider, maybe surprised I was so concerned who it might be. She just stared at me for a moment…

…and that’s when I realized I was lying beside an admiral, a young woman admiral, a very pretty young woman admiral, in the middle of a forest, in the middle of the night. More than lying beside her, I was practically on top of her, for heaven’s sake.

That’s also when Zeeleepull walked into the clearing. "Oh, you humes! Always the sex, sex, sex."

19 FIGURING OUT WHO DID WHAT

I bounded to my feet, afraid my face was burning as red as Kaisho’s legs. Festina didn’t look bothered at all; with an impish little smile, she actually held out her hand for me to help her up.

She didn’t need help getting up — she probably could have done a backflip straight to her feet. But she’d reached out her hand, and I had no choice except taking it. Her skin felt so warm against mine… I had to force myself not to give her a huge yank up, jerking her arm out of its socket or tossing her halfway across the clearing. But I went very easy: pulled her up, then let go of her hand fast. She smiled again, amused by my flusterment. "Thank you," she said, then turned to Zeeleepull. "Yes?"

Zeeleepull’s ears were twitching in the Mandasar version of a you-randy-old-humans laugh. But all he said was, "Tracked serial numbers Kaisho has. Come. Come."

Festina gave me a look — a mischievous sort of look, and for a second I thought she might try to fluster me more, by taking my arm or something. But I guess she decided teasing me would be mean. She told Zeeleepull, "All right. Let’s see what Kaisho’s got." Then the three of us walked back in silence, little puffbally things going pop under our feet.

While we were gone, Kaisho had rearranged her hair. Now it completely covered her face, not the tiniest gap down the middle; in fact, she’d grabbed the long straight strands that’d been hanging down her back and flipped them up over her forehead, so they covered her nose, chin, throat, all the way to her chest. I didn’t know how she could see a thing… but as we trudged up to her, she said, "Festina dear, you’re looking amused."

"Enjoying the fresh night air," Festina replied. "What have you found?"

Kaisho lifted her hand and ticked off points on her fingers. "The communicator: still supposedly present and accounted for in a storehouse on New Earth. The universal map: present and accounted for on Moglin. The Bumbler: present and accounted for on He’Barr."

Festina wrinkled her forehead. "Three different storehouses, dozens of light-years from each other. And dozens of light-years from Celestia too."

The two women nodded to each other, like it was obvious what was going on. I tried to think it through myself. If the computer records said the Bumbler was still on He’Barr, but it was right here crushed into the mud… then someone had stolen the Bumbler and rigged the inventory computers to overlook the discrepancy. That might mean a thief in the local Supply Corps; but you wouldn’t have three thieves at three different supply depots, all sending stuff to one recruiter. Easier to assume a single thief: someone so high up in the navy, he or she had access to any depot. And also had computer permission codes to cover up the thefts.

In other words, an admiral.

"So who?" Kaisho asked… looking straight at me for some reason instead of at Festina.

"What who?" Zeeleepull demanded. He glared around at the rest of us, like we were intentionally hiding some secret from him.

"Who provided the recruiters with navy equipment?" Festina told him. "And who ordered Willow to fetch a queen from Troyen? It can only be an admiral on the High Council. Someone who’s sponsoring the recruiters… for cash or for power, or for some scheme we don’t know about yet."

"An admiral?" Zeeleepull growled. "Humes never trust be can." He glared at Festina, then caught sight of me right beside her. "Teelu exception is," he mumbled. "Not really hume at all."

Kaisho giggled at that. You wouldn’t think an advanced human-Balrog synthesis could giggle. Festina stared at her in surprise for a moment, then said sternly, "Let’s get a grip, shall we? A rogue admiral is helping the recruiters!"

"Ah, dear Festina," Kaisho sighed, "always business, business, business." Her head suddenly cocked on an angle; when she spoke again, her voice had the sly smug tone of someone who’s realized something you haven’t. "Pity no one from Willow survived," she said. "They might have known which admiral ordered them to Troyen."

Festina looked back at her. "You have an idea? Or should I say, the Balrog has some brilliant alien insight?"

The moss on Kaisho’s legs flared brighter for a second, almost as if it was taking a bow. "Who were the Explorers on Willow?" Kaisho asked.

"Plebon and Olympia Mell," the admiral answered.

"Ever meet them?"

"I knew Plebon," Festina replied. "He was one of the Explorers marooned with me on Melaquin. After we got back, I made a point of spending time with him because he was a friend of my old partner Yarrun; they’d considered themselves kindred spirits because they both had the same…"

The admiral stopped, lowering her eyes as if she was suddenly embarrassed. Vaguely, she waved her hand under her chin. I had no idea what she meant but Kaisho did. She turned straight to me and said, "Among the bodies on Willow, did you see a man with a deformed jaw?"

I stared stupidly at her while my brain tried to catch up with the question. Festina was way ahead of me. She gawped at Kaisho, then whirled and grabbed my arm. "Edward, please… think back. Was there a man, an African man, very tall and dark, but missing the lower half of his face? If you saw it, you wouldn’t forget it. He had practically no jaw at all."

Still not quite understanding, I cast my mind back over the crumpled bodies in the lounge. "No," I said, "there wasn’t anyone with a funny jaw on the ship." Not in the lounge, not on the bridge, not in any possible hidey-hole. "I’m certain."

Festina let out a sigh of relief. "Hallelujah."

Kaisho held up her hands in a "What would you expect?" gesture. All smug and proud, she said, "The Explorer Corps vindicates itself again."

"Cryptic and mysterious and annoying humes," Zeeleepull grumped. "What, what, what this means?"

"Willow carried two Explorers," Festina answered, "and at least one of them wasn’t aboard when they headed back to Celestia."

"Probably both," Kaisho put in. "If Plebon stayed on Troyen, his partner would too."

"Why would they stay on Troyen?" I asked.

"Because Explorers are smart," Kaisho said. "Because they believed the queen was non-sentient. They knew the League would kill the queen and everyone who helped transport her. Plebon and Olympia wanted no part of it."

Zeeleepull sniffed, all disapproving. "Desertion is," he said. "If orders say, no cowarding out."

"Not true," Festina told him. "The Admiralty can give orders that skate to the edge of non-sentience, but if they ever go over the line, you don’t have to obey. In fact, official policy says you must not obey. Of course, the High Council really wants subordinates to shut up and do as they’re told; but the council has to keep the League of Peoples happy, and that means allowing folks to follow their consciences. NAVY PERSONNEL WILL AT ALL TIMES CONFORM TO THE STRICTEST STANDARDS OF SENTIENCE, EVEN WHEN THIS NECESSITATES DEFIANCE OF A DIRECT COMMAND. That’s right in the Outward Fleet’s charter — the League wouldn’t accept anything less. So if Plebon and Olympia believed the queen committed atrocities during the war, they had every right to say, ‘Count us out.’ " Festina paused. "I wonder if others from Willow’s crew stayed behind."

"No way to tell," Kaisho said. "Not with the ship missing and its records EMP’d."

I stared at her a second. How did Kaisho know that? She hadn’t showed up till after I’d told my story. But before I could say anything, Festina was talking — all excitement and glee. "Plebon and Olympia must know which admiral controlled Willow" she said. "Any good Explorer would demand to know who ordered such a lunatic mission. Hell, they’d break into the captain’s quarters if they had to, just to peek at the signature on the official dispatches."

"So," Kaisho murmured, "if we find Plebon and Olympia, we learn which admiral is backing the recruiters."

"Whereupon we raise a big stink with the High Council," Festina said, "condemning the bastard for stealing navy property. And for routing that property to a group who murdered poor Wiftim and tried to kill me. The council will not be pleased. The council will, in fact, howl for blood… if only because one of their own was playing fast and loose behind their backs. Next thing you know, they’ll squeeze the guilty party to spill his or her guts: demand name, rank, and serial number for every recruiter on Celestia. Anything else would be harboring a murderer, and not even the Admiralty would be stupid enough to do that."

Kaisho gave a whispery chuckle. "Knowing the High Council, they’ll make a show of arresting the recruiters personally. Demonstrate their good intentions by sending a Security force straight to the recruiters’ base. Once you back the council into a corner, they have a knack for turning a hundred eighty degrees, snatching the limelight, and taking credit for defending the weak."

"Just their style," Festina nodded. She made a face, like she’d seen it happen plenty of times before. "On the other hand, our first concern is stopping the recruiters. Doesn’t matter who gets their pictures in Mind Spurs Weekly."

"But, um," I said, "you have to get the name of the guilty admiral, right? And the only people who might know that are stuck on Troyen."

"True," Festina agreed. "You understand the situation admirably."

Her eyes glittered in the glow from Kaisho’s legs. Both women were looking at me now. Even though I couldn’t see Kaisho’s face, I could tell she was grinning. "Um," I said. "So I guess you’re going to Troyen?"

"Not just me," Festina answered. She put her hand on my arm. "I’ll need a native guide, won’t I?"

Kaisho laughed and laughed. The sound of it made me dizzy.

20 LYING BESIDE COUNSELOR

I don’t remember much from there on — all of a sudden my body got so tired I couldn’t think straight. It felt like Kaisho’s laughter was going all hyena-ish like the Laughing Larry, getting so loud it drowned out everything else in my head. I had time to think, It’s the venom again. Then things turned into a fuddled-up blur where time seemed to get the hiccups.

First I was lying facedown in the mud, while insects no bigger than pepper scuttled under my nose; then suddenly I was neck deep in water, with Zeeleepull and the admiral dragging me across the canal; then whoops, I was back where I started, in the hive’s dome, lying on a pallet beside the Queen Wisdom table. After that, I might have slept, or just passed out for an hour or two… but not the whole night. When I woke with a clearer head, it was still dark, and Counselor had snuggled in beside me.

Several of her legs draped lightly over my body. One of her upper hands was cupped against my cheek: six delicate fingers covered in soft walnut brown skin. The fingers were too long to be human, and they had no nails, but they didn’t look strange to me; they looked like home. Night after night in Verity’s palace, the queen would assign a maidservant to stay next to me as I slept, in case I might wake and want something.

"Are you well now, Teelu?" Counselor whispered.

There was no light in the room where we lay, but a dim glow came from next door — just enough for Counselor to watch me as I slept. Mandasars love to do that… I guess because they don’t sleep deeply themselves. They’re curious about it; the way humans go totally unconscious is kind of eerie to them, creepy but magical. Some of the maidservants back on Troyen actually took anaesthetics before sliding into bed beside me: they wanted to knock themselves out cold, to see what it was like, "sleeping together." Of course, they didn’t understand what that phrase means to humans… any more than Counselor understood what a man gets to feeling when he wakes up and there’s someone stroking his face. Mandasars never think about sex stuff at all, except during egg-heat. They know humans work differently, but Mandasars don’t realize how much… um… how often… how persistently certain urges keep poking their way into a Homo sapiens’ imagination.

(Close your eyes, and a gentle’s voice sounds pretty much like a human woman’s. Her hand feels the same too. And so soft.)

Looking at Counselor, feeling her hand on my cheek, I found myself remembering that kiss aboard Willow — the woman pulling me in tight, the perfume in her hair… a woman who was exactly like Admiral Ramos except she wasn’t… and Festina herself, lying beside me in the dark forest, looking up at the stars…

Crazy, I thought to myself. My brain must still be jumbled, going all swimmy with what-ifs. Festina was pretty and kind, but she was an admiral; as for Counselor, she was just in my bed because I’d been sick. Why was I so eager to get dumb ideas about every female around me: an admiral and an alien for heaven’s sake… and I was even having thoughts about Kaisho, with her skintight clothes and her dangerous glowing thighs…

"Teelu," Counselor whispered. "Are you troubled?"

I reached up and took her hand, pulling it gingerly away from my face. "Maybe you shouldn’t call me Teelu, okay? It’s kind of…" I wanted to say "sacrilegious," but that would upset her. "You shouldn’t overuse the word," I mumbled.

"Very well," she said. "Is there anything else I should or shouldn’t do?" She asked it in a soft sweet whisper, still holding my hand — all innocently intimate, not knowing how complicated things can get inside a human’s head. When you’re tired and lonely, you can catch yourself thinking, maybe, maybe, she really meant…

No. She didn’t.

But I couldn’t get my thoughts aimed any other direction. I told myself, Don’t be stupid, she’s a big brown lobster. It didn’t help. I’d had more kindness in my life from Mandasars than I ever got from humans. Lying beside one again brought back the golden days when the war hadn’t started and Sam was alive and we were all twenty years younger…

I slipped my hand out of Counselor’s grasp and eased down on my pallet: rolling away from her, flat on my back, feeling lumpish and rude. "Where’s Admiral Ramos?" I asked.

"She left with the other human — the one with frightening legs."

"Are they coming back?"

"In the morning. But the admiral had to arrange a journey. To Troyen."

Counselor leaned in close to my face, her whiskers trembling. Her snout brushed lightly against my cheek, delicate and cool. Gentles have no nose-spike; just soft skin that smells faintly of ginger. "Are you really going to the home-world?" "Admiral Ramos wants me to. She thinks I know the lay of the land."

"You do," Counselor said. "You were the high queen’s consort."

"That was twenty years ago. Before the war." I closed my eyes. "All the time I stayed at the moonbase, I did my best not to hear what was happening on the planet. The observers couldn’t tell much anyway — with all the rogue nano on Troyen, nobody can use radios or computers or anything, so there’s nothing to listen in on. Our satellites kept track of troop movements, but when you don’t know who’s in charge of which army… half the time, the observers just made stuff up so their reports wouldn’t look too skimpy. Nobody really knows what’s happening."

Counselor lay silent for a few seconds. I wanted to see the expression on her face, but decided eye contact would be a mistake: she’d take my hand again or go back to stroking my cheek. "Admiral Ramos has been investigating the recruiters," Counselor murmured at last. "The woman with the red legs said the admiral tries to prevent regrettable things. Admiral Ramos is what you call a watchdog and a troubleshooter."

I didn’t know the navy had such things, but I was glad they put someone like Festina in the position. "She thinks another admiral is helping the recruiters," I said. "It makes her mad, and she’s trying to set things right."

"Then Admiral Ramos is a good hume," Counselor murmured. "Even if she wants to take you away from us."

"Um."

When I looked at Counselor, her face was sad — the terrible kind of sad where someone is trying hard not to show it, and it spills through anyway.

"Do you want to — go away?" Counselor asked.

"No," I told her. "But Admiral Ramos thinks people on Troyen might know who’s behind the recruiters. She said it could solve your problems."

"She told me the same," Counselor said. "But it’s painful to gain you and lose you in the same day."

Suddenly, she bent in and pressed the soft end of her snout against my lips. A kiss. I’d never seen a gentle do that on Troyen. It must have been something she’d learned on Celestia, a gesture picked up from the humans who took care of her in childhood. So awkward and clumsy, like a little girl imitating adult things — she wrapped one arm around my neck and kept her nose against me… not moving her mouth, just holding it tight to my face as if she didn’t know a kiss could be anything else.

I pulled back away from her, feeling awkward and clumsy myself. "It’s all right," I whispered. "Really. It’ll be all right."

She lowered her chin so she could look me in the eye. Her eyes were solid black, blinking slightly — Mandasars don’t cry when they’re sad, but their faces can still be heartbreaking. "Troyen is at war. You could be killed… and then where would we be?"

What could I say? That I wasn’t the savior she thought? I didn’t want to go back to Troyen, but I wasn’t worth much on Celestia. People would soon see I didn’t have a head for organization, or strategy, or rousing speeches, or anything that could help anyone. I said, "If Admiral Ramos thinks I’d be useful on Troyen—"

"This Admiral Ramos," Counselor interrupted. "Is she your lover?"

I winced. Zeeleepull must have blabbed how he’d found Festina and me in the forest. "No," I said. "She’s not my lover."

"Do you intend to make her your lover?"

"No. She’s an admiral. Anyway, I can’t make anyone my lover — people don’t work that way."

"Teelu" Counselor whispered, "Teelu, Teelu, Teelu, don’t you know you can make anyone into anything you want?" She cupped my chin in her weak upper hands, holding me so she could stare straight into my eyes. "Don’t you know," she whispered, "you can stir any heart and make it yours?"

If she’d been human, her words would have been an invitation. Maybe even a plea. Over the years, other women had come to me with that kind of offer… because they liked the way I looked, because they were bored, or because they’d been hurt by someone else and thought, Oh, Edward, at least he won’t be cruel. They told me that to my face — I was "pretty" and "safe" and "decent."

And plenty of times, I’d said yes. In my twenty years on the moonbase, new personnel would arrive and even though I knew they’d just leave again after six months, sometimes you tell yourself six months is six months. (Forgetting how lonely it is when they go away… the awful point where they start pulling back from you, even before they ship out… how sometimes they’re never there with you at all, just treating you like medicine that’ll keep them from getting cranky.)

So yes, there’d been human women; but not Mandasars. Gentles didn’t make come-ons, ever. Not to their own species and certainly not to humans. Even in egg-heat, gentles didn’t act amorous — it was all pheromone signals, not direct attempts at seduction. "I’m available," not "Now, now, now!" Whatever Counselor wanted to tell me, it was just my one-track human mind misinterpreting it as… the sort of proposition you yearn for when things are going all lonesome.

"Counselor." I wrapped my arms around her shoulders, feeling her thin carapace yield: fragile as eggshell compared to a warrior’s armor. She put her arms around my shoulders and my waist, then pressed her snout against my neck… maybe another kiss, maybe just where her nose ended up. "I’m not as special as you think," I told her. "Verity married me for politics, not because I was some hero. And the way you kids react to me — it’s just the smell of venom, that’s all. Sooner or later, you’ll get mad at me for not being what you hope."

She pulled back a bit from my neck so she could look me in the eye. "You are the Little Father Without Blame," she said. "You’re more than we hoped, and more than you know. Just for tonight, I wish I were your own species… so you’d stop treating me like some child you mustn’t corrupt. I was raised by humans, Teelu; I’m not as naive as you think."

Once more she leaned in for a kiss: light, quick, on my cheek, then she slipped softly out of my arms. I let her go, stunned by what she was suggesting. I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t — for all that she was a grown-up of her species, she didn’t know… she was confused by the smell of venom, that had to be it. And by her human upbringing. After years of hume stories like "Snow White" and "Cinderella," Counselor might fantasize about offering herself to some Prince Charming; but Mandasars didn’t really feel… they didn’t really want…

Did they?

She was still very close, near enough that I could smell her soft ginger scent; and she was waiting for me to call her back. To reach for her hand or her kiss. But it wouldn’t be right. Whatever she thought she wanted, it truly wasn’t in her nature. I couldn’t take advantage of her, no matter how soothing it would be just to give in, surrender, get lost in the dark.

Counselor must have seen the decision on my face because she sighed quietly — a human sigh, yet another mannerism she must have picked up from the people who raised her. "Teelu" she murmured, "may I at least accompany you on your journey? To Troyen?"

"It’ll be dangerous," I said. "They’re still at war."

"All the more reason for me to go. You humans will be conspicuous and perhaps treated as enemies. I won’t attract as much attention."

"Yes, you will," I told her. "There are so many things you were never taught. Ways to behave. And habits you’ve picked up that just aren’t Mandasar. You’d stand out as badly as any human."

"Not if you teach me. The voyage to Troyen takes ten days — I can learn quickly. I’ll study with you every waking second."

"But if I let you come," I said, "then Zeeleepull would want to go too. And Hib Nib Pib."

"Well, of course," she answered, as if that had never been in doubt. "We all have to go." She fluttered her whiskers teasingly. "You wouldn’t want to recruit me off by myself, would you?" The fluttering stopped. "Would you?"

Her last "would you?" was so wistful — as if she still hoped I might take her seriously. I couldn’t possibly… not because she was an alien, but because she was so young and innocent.

And because in my head I might be thinking of other women besides her.

If I told that to Counselor straight out, it would hurt her feelings; so I decided to give her one thing when I couldn’t give the other.

"All right," I said. "I’ll talk to Admiral Ramos about taking your hive to Troyen."

Immediately there was a cheer — not from Counselor but from four other voices. Zeeleepull and the workers tumbled out of the next room, all glee and triumph. "Troyen!" Zeeleepull yelled. "Troyen going, Troyen seeing, Troyen going, Troyen seeing…"

He might have been singing. And dancing. It’s hard to tell with Mandasars.

"I told you she could make Teelu say yes," Hib whispered, elbowing Nib proudly. "And she didn’t even have to sleep with him."

"Don’t you know anything?" Nib answered. "She wanted to sleep with him."

"After all," Pib added, "he’s a king."

21 TAKING OUR LEAVE

Festina came back the next day at noon. By then the workers had packed, Counselor had arranged for neighboring hives to look after the vegetable fields, and Zeeleepull had made a complete nuisance of himself, getting in everybody else’s way.

Of all of the kids, he was the most excited — telling me things he wanted to see on Troyen, places he wanted to go, stuff he wanted to do. After a while I just had to say, "You realize if we’re lucky, we’ll never set foot on the planet. Radio the missing Explorers, pick them up, fly away. No going down ourselves unless there’s a problem."

"But Troyen is," he insisted. "Is Troyen. Is home."

"Was home," I said. "Nobody knows what-all’s been destroyed in the past twenty years. Buildings bombed. Famous art burned or stolen. Even natural scenery gets wrecked or covered with ugly-looking bunkers. Whatever you think you’ll see, it’s not there anymore."

He refused to listen. Of all the people in his hive, Zeeleepull had the most romantic notions about the planet he’d left as a hatchling. He told me he’d been brought up by elderly human sisters, Willa and Walda, who’d devoted themselves to raising the boy in accordance with his sacred heritage. The way he spoke of them, I just knew the women didn’t have a clue what they were talking about — their heads had got crammed with off-kilter ideas about Troyen, sparked by a ten-day trip they’d made in their thirties. That trip must have been the one impulsive thing the sisters had ever done, and they’d built their lives around it ever after… which explains why they leapt at the chance to take a baby Mandasar under their roof and acquaint him with his fabulous culture.

No wonder Zeeleepull spoke such bad Troyenese. And worse English. He’d come to human language very late, because the sisters didn’t want to "pollute his mental development with contaminating influences." When they finally realized he had to learn English to communicate with his fellow Mandasars — the other kids spoke English 99 percent of the time — Willa and Walda encouraged Zeeleepull to use English words but Troyenese syntax, so he wouldn’t "warp his brain’s neural connections" with an alien grammar.

I got the feeling Zeeleepull could speak normal English if he wanted to, but now he was making a political point. He’d even persuaded his fellow warriors to speak the same way, especially when they were out on maneuvers together. Like a secret code that proved you belonged to the club.

It didn’t hurt that Counselor and the workers loved Zeeleepull to pieces for the bullheaded way he stuck to his twisted-up word structures. Us guys — even when we’re big red platonic lobsters — we put on silly poses to impress the girls.

No rutabagas got weeded that day — when Festina’s skimmer set down on the road, every Mandasar in the valley was there to watch. A big colorful horde of them, reds and whites and browns, all jostled each other for the best view. It reminded me of something Sam said as we watched a riot from my palace balcony: "Like a water tank in a seafood restaurant: lobsters crammed in shoulder to shoulder." When I thought about it now, it’d been a cruel, mean thing for Sam to say… but she had a point. Mandasars cram together a lot; they like it. They’re the sort of species who snuggle together all the time — who bed down in a huddle, and who press into a single corner of a room rather than spacing themselves evenly around. Even these kids raised by humans… you’d think they’d be taught to maintain some personal distance, but there they were on the road, practically crawling on top of each other as the skimmer settled down to the pavement. Even so, they managed to skootch together a little more to clear a path for me up to the side hatch.

The hatch opened. Festina hopped out and smiled when she saw me. "Edward! You’re looking better. Good. Great. Very fine." She was eyeing me up and down. "You had us worried when you passed out last night."

"I wasn’t worried," said a voice inside the skimmer. "He was just exhausted." Kaisho’s wheelchair floated into the sunlight and lowered itself to the road. Her hair looked beautifully combed this morning — combed so it covered her face like a silver-black veil, very neat and glossy. Even the Balrog looked well-groomed. Under the bright orange sun, you couldn’t tell Kaisho’s legs glowed on their own; they just looked like thick beds of moss, as unthreatening as red pillows.

"Well," Festina said, still giving me the once-over (the twice-over by now), "you look damned terrific for a man who was poisoned yesterday. Are you ready to go?"

"Um." I leaned in, and whispered, "Is it okay if I bring some company?"

"Who?"

I pointed behind me. Counselor, Zeeleepull, and the workers were lined up looking freshly scrubbed and gleamy bright themselves… all except Nib, who’d tried to paint a BON VOYAGE sign and got smears of green paint all over its just-washed white hands. (Workers!) Naturally, Zeeleepull carried the luggage; most of the hive’s worldly possessions were strapped to his back, boxed up in a wooden crate labeled ONIONS.

Festina sighed deeply. "How many of them do you plan on bringing?"

"Five."

Counselor and the others waved gleefully — antennas as well as hands.

"Told you," Kaisho whispered to Festina.

"I could have guessed myself," Festina muttered back. "Are they all right?"

"They won’t cause trouble," I promised.

"That’s not what I meant." Festina motioned to Kaisho. "You and the Balrog check them out."

Kaisho’s wheelchair glided toward the five Mandasars… and all of a sudden, the rest of the crowd scrambled back, putting a good healthy distance between themselves and the woman’s mossy legs. I don’t know if they’d heard gossip about the Balrog since last night, or if they all just spontaneously decided they didn’t like the moss’s smell. Either way, they were doing their best to keep clear; and from the looks on their faces, Counselor and the others would have been turning tail too, if they didn’t think they’d hurt their chance of seeing Troyen.

"What’s Kaisho doing?" I whispered to Festina.

"The Balrog can supposedly determine whether a being is sentient. Don’t ask me how it works — maybe a killer gives off non-sentient psychic vibrations. The damned moss isn’t perfectly telepathic, thank God, but it can sometimes do an uncanny job of peeking into someone’s mind."

No kidding, I thought. Out loud, I said, "You really think the Mandasars are dangerous non-sentients?"

"No." Festina gave me an apologetic look. "But we have to make sure, Edward. Otherwise, we could end up like Willow — killed for not being careful enough. The League expects us to make our best efforts not to violate the law."

"So you don’t trust the kids, but you trust the Balrog?"

"In this particular instance, I trust the Balrog’s judgment. It doesn’t mean I trust the Balrog in general — that fuzzy-assed bastard scares the piss out of me. But on our upcoming trip, the Balrog’s life is at stake too."

"Why?"

"Kaisho’s coming with us to Troyen," Festina replied. "If one of your Mandasars is non-sentient and the Balrog lies to us about that, it’s the Balrog who’ll die when our ship crosses the line. We mere humans will be blameless; the League won’t fault us for being deceived by a superior species."

As she spoke, Festina had a grim little smile on her face… and for a second, I thought she might be hoping the Balrog would get executed by the League. If there was no other way to get rid of the creature — if you couldn’t scrape it off its host — then maybe you’d look for situations that’d kill the Balrog without hurting the human underneath.

A few seconds before, I was going to ask Festina why she wanted Kaisho to come with us to Troyen… but I decided I didn’t want to know.

The wheelchair drifted around each Mandasar in turn — Counselor trying to look composed, Zeeleepull trying to look tough, the workers trying to look so meekly unimportant they wouldn’t be worth eating — while Kaisho barely turned her head to give the kids a glance. Why would she? She couldn’t see for all the hair in front of her face, so why pretend to stare at anyone?

"Why does she wear her hair like that?" I asked Festina. "Does she have moss on her face? Is she really really…" I stopped. Considering the blotch on the admiral’s own cheek, there was no polite way to finish my question.

But Festina guessed what I was going to say. "Is she really really ugly?" Festina suggested. "Is she disfigured?" "Um. Sorry."

"No," the admiral said, "it’s a valid question. Especially since Kaisho used to be an Explorer. You know she must have had something wrong with her."

I felt myself blush. I couldn’t even look in the admiral’s direction.

"Kaisho did have… a facial condition," Festina said. "You don’t need to know the details. But when she got infected with the Balrog, the condition cleared up. The Balrog actually tinkered with Kaisho’s genes and hormones to cure the problem. I suppose the Balrog was trying to be nice; it could read Kaisho’s surface thoughts well enough to know how she hated the… blemishes. In a way, clearing up Kaisho’s face was like a wedding gift — a demonstration that being bonded to a Balrog wasn’t all bad.

"But from Kaisho’s point of view," Festina continued, "her face and its flaws were key parts of her life. Her identity. To have that identity casually erased by an alien parasite… well, imagine being subjected to cosmetic surgery till you didn’t look like yourself. It wouldn’t matter if you ended up more beautiful than you’d ever dared hope; you’d feel violated. Especially if your hideous old face was what made you feel like an Explorer, and that was the one thing in your life you felt proud of."

Festina suddenly sucked in a sharp breath and turned away from me. "Anyway," she muttered, "I’m sure that’s what Kaisho feels. Her mind gets more and more integrated with the Balrog every day, but still there’s a part of her, outraged and bitter over what the damned moss did to her face. Making her look ‘normal’ instead of like herself. So she hides behind her hair in shame — she doesn’t want to be seen as she is now."

Odd. Someone hiding and ashamed for being made better than she was to start with. Of course, "better" is always in the eye of the beholder… but if I were Kaisho, I’d cover my legs, not my face.

The Balrog’s inspection didn’t take long. One circuit around each Mandasar, then Kaisho announced, "They’re acceptable. No more homicidal than the rest of you."

Festina grimaced. "Not what I’d call an effusive recommendation."

"What do you expect?" Kaisho asked. "Humans and Mandasars are borderline at best. With luck in the gene lottery, and no crisis that stresses you past the breaking point, you can stay sentient all your life. If luck goes the other way… you flunk the sentience test. Nothing to be embarrassed about — both your species are still evolving in the right direction. You just have farther to go before you reach the exalted level of… oh, a certain mossy race that modesty forbids me to mention."

Zeeleepull muttered, "Evolve, evolve, evolve, and end up as moss? Stupid universe."

"Now you know how the dinosaurs felt," Festina told him.

"All right," the admiral announced, raising her voice to the assembled Mandasars, "as you probably know, my name is Festina Ramos and I… I’m heading for Troyen, where I hope I’ll find information to solve your recruiter problem." The kids gave a cheer, but short and polite… like they wanted to hear more before they got really enthusiastic.

"In the meantime," Festina said, "the recruiters should be lying low. Last night, they murdered one of your people as he bravely protected Consort Edward and me; as a result of Wiftim’s sacrifice, the police can’t ignore your problems the way they’ve done in the past. With luck, Mandasars all over Celestia will be able to demand better protection… and the cops will have to take them seriously."

That got a slightly bigger cheer. I could imagine how frustrated these kids must be, getting dismissed every time they complained to the Civilian Protection Office. Now, as Festina said, the police had no choice but to put the squeeze on recruiters.

"So I hope," the admiral continued, "you won’t have trouble while we’re gone. Just in case though, I’m leaving this skimmer which I rigged last night with a Mandasar-shaped control seat. You can fly patrols over the valley and keep watch for anyone suspicious — this baby has the navy’s best sensor equipment, able to pick up human heat signatures ten kilometers away. Nobody will be able to sneak up on you."

Everyone in the crowd was beaming now — especially the gentles, who’d probably get into a big fight about who should drive the skimmer. All gentles love to operate expensive machinery… and each one is absolutely convinced she’s the best driver in the universe.

Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing I was heading off to Troyen; for the next little while, Celestia might get pretty dangerous.

Particularly Celestian airspace.

"That’s settled then," Festina said. "I hope we won’t be gone more than three weeks, but you never know. Whatever happens, we’ll be back as soon as we can." She smiled. "In the meantime, cooperate with the police but don’t let down your guard. The recruiters hurt themselves badly last night when they resorted to murder; they’ve suddenly lost a lot of friends. Even companies that buy employees from slavers will think twice about dealing with killers. So there’s a chance the recruiters will grow stupid and desperate in the coming days."

"If that’s true," said a gentle in the crowd, "why are you taking Teelu away from us?"

Festina glanced at me. "You want to answer, or shall I?"

"Um," I said. Then I found words coming out of my mouth, with no direction from my brain — taken over again by whatever had grabbed me before. That worried me; I’d hoped that getting possessed was just some weirdness from being poisoned. Why was it happening now, when I felt okay and healthy?

"Children of Troyen," my mouth said, "the next few weeks may be hard for everybody; but if we succeed, you’ll never need to fear recruiters again. Just as important, good people have been abandoned on the homeworld and they deserve to be rescued… if they’re still alive. They’ve been forced to fend for themselves a long long while. It’s time we did something to help them."

"Teelu" Kaisho whispered, "are you speaking of our poor lost Explorers… or someone else?"

Festina looked at her curiously. Kaisho just chuckled. Her legs flickered, as if the Balrog were laughing too.

The crowd let themselves be shooed back, clearing a patch of ground beside the skimmer. Festina walked to the center of the area and set down a small black box covered with horseshoe-shaped inlays of gold. I’d seen such a box before; it was a Sperm-field anchor, designed to attract and snag the tail from a starship. Festina flicked a switch on the box’s lid and immediately skipped back a pace.

For three seconds nothing happened; then, fluttering out of the sky like the funnel of a tornado, a milky white tube swept down and slapped silently against one of the anchor’s gold horseshoes. The tube was filmy and unsolid, with sparkles of blue and green twinkling deep in its creamy body — like a glittery sleeve of smoke rippling up and up into the blue. It was transparent enough that I could look straight through the tail and see boggled Mandasar faces on the other side.

"Don’t worry," I whispered to Counselor. Which meant I was back in control of my body again — I’d been so busy gawking at the tail, I hadn’t noticed getting unpossessed. "Don’t worry," I repeated, "it’s just a sort of elevator up to a starship."

"A starship in orbit?" she asked.

"Yes."

"But the starship must be hundreds of kilometers above us!"

I nodded. "Sperm-tails are really elastic. You can pull them out thousands of kilometers long."

Counselor swallowed hard. "What do we do?"

"Um. If you stick your hand into the tube’s open end, you get… drawn up. All the way through the tail and into the spaceship overhead."

"Teelu," Counselor said, "if someone dragged me by my arm for several hundred kilometers…"

"It won’t hurt you," I promised her. "As soon as you put a single finger into the tube, the outside universe kind of shoves you in the rest of the way. You don’t get pulled, you get pushed. And once you’re inside the tube… well, it feels very strange, but it doesn’t do actual damage."

Counselor winced. "You’re not filling me with confidence, Teelu."

"Then watch."

I walked over to the Sperm-tail. Before reaching down to the mouth, I asked Festina, "Shall I go first?"

"Be my guest," she replied. "I’ll go last to make sure everyone else is all right."

I nodded and knelt. If you want the honest truth, I’d never gone through a Sperm-tail before either. Real Explorers shot the chute all the time, but me, I’d always traveled in the company of diplomats. "Diplomats," Sam once told me, "do not subject themselves to indignities. It’s called a Sperm-tail, for heaven’s sake. The name alone is enough to demolish your credibility. And I understand that riding one is appallingly visceral. Diplomats hate that; we like to remain detached from physical reality at all times."

Maybe part of that was joking, but Sam still meant it. She and the rest of the diplomats took shuttles from ship to surface, not the slippery white way.

At the last second, just as I was sticking my hand into the Sperm’s mouth, I wondered what my sister meant by "appallingly visceral." Then I found out.

22 SQUIRTING THROUGH THE TUBE

Gulp.

That was the Sperm-tube swallowing me. Out of the real universe, into an artificial one that fluttered and fish-tailed, taking me with it. My whole body turned to water, pumping through a pipe that twisted, turned, narrowed, expanded, did loop-the-loops. I had no bones; I had no solid parts at all, just liquid and steam, spurting up the Sperm-tail at high pressure.

One other thing: I wasn’t alone.

I could feel another presence squirting along with me, a blaze of intelligence burning right next to my skin, as if it was only separated from me by a tissue-thin membrane. It had to be the thing that’d been possessing me: a spirit, a ghost, an alien parasite, some entity that hitchhiked in my body and occasionally shoved me aside so it could drive.

What are you? I thought. What do you want? Why me?

The answer was a blast of fiery emotions — angers and sorrows, regrets and resolutions, all knotted up in a package of memories.

My own memories.

Samantha’s body, her clothes sodden with the blood that kept gushing from her punctured chest. A red pool spreading over the floor. Smears of red on my fingers.

Queen Verity’s head plunked on a platter and placed on the royal dinner table… while the rest of her corpse lay ten paces away, both venom sacs sliced open and spilling dribbles of green.

Me running through the night with a heavy black sack over my shoulder, while shooting echoed in the palace behind me. Racing to a garden shed, lifting up a floorboard, seeing the little black box with the gold horseshoe inlays, and the narrow mouth of a Sperm-tail threading off through an underground conduit. Feeding one end of the sack into that mouth and holding my breath as the bulky load disappeared through the impossibly tiny opening, zipping off heaven knows where. Smashing my heel down on the anchor box, breaking it, releasing the Sperm-tail to slither off on its own so no one could follow… Could follow…

Innocence. My daughter.

Whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years.

Whom I’d abandoned on a planet at war.

And I was supposed to be "The Little Father Without Blame"? If I hadn’t been riding the Sperm-tail at that second — if I’d had a solid body — I would have thrown up everything in my stomach.

Second after second, my own memories pounded into my mind like a repeating loop. Sam soaked with blood; Verity dead; carrying young Innocence in that bag; Sam and her blood again. As if the thing riding with me up the Sperm-tail was trying to make me see something, but I wasn’t smart enough to understand.

Sam’s blood. Me, reaching down to touch the red stick-mess. Lifting my fingers to my nose…

A voice screamed No! inside my head: fighting the memory, fighting the thing that was trying to make me remember. The screaming voice didn’t seem part of me, any more than the force pummeling me with my own memories; but I was eager to shout No! myself. Anything to escape ugly replays of the most awful night of my life.

So I yelled, No, go away, stop it, stop it, stop it! I could feel the memory-thing howl in despair, burning with frustration at my refusal to watch. It pounded away on the thready thin barrier that separated its consciousness from mine; but before it could bash through, I hurtled back into normal space and collided with a mound of soft padding.

I don’t know how long I lay there, trying to clear my head. Not long — the padding was jelly bagged up in rubbery plastic, nice and yielding on impact but cold and wobbly the longer you stayed on top of it. They must have made it that way on purpose, so you wouldn’t sprawl there forever… especially when other people were coming through the Sperm-tube right behind you.

Other people. Kaisho.

With a surge of adrenaline, I tried to heave myself off the landing pad. The jelly beneath me gurgled and sloshed, absorbing my motion; when I pushed harder, my hand just sank into the folds of the bag. Like trying to fight a tar baby, I thought. Forcing myself to be calm, I pulled my hands tight to my chest and simply rolled sideways… off the bag just as Kaisho barreled out of the tube behind me.

Her mossy legs missed me by a whisker. I was sure that’s why she’d come right after me — in hopes of an accidental collision. The Balrog would slam into me, then a splurge of hungry red spores would ooze across my skin…

No, I told myself. Don’t be stupid. The Balrog couldn’t want to possess a person with screwed-up chemicals in his brain. Especially not when I was already half-possessed by something else. "Help me up," Kaisho whispered as she sprawled on the jelly pad. "Please."

On her trip through the Sperm-tail, Kaisho’s hair had got all mussed… which means it’d fallen off her face enough to show what she really looked like. I found her striking in an elegant, weathered way — what people usually call "handsome," because they won’t call women beautiful after the first wrinkle appears. Kaisho had her share of wrinkles around her soft brown eyes… but the wrinkles had such a well-aged grace, maybe they deserved to be called crinkles instead. Serene and amused, both at once. Strong cheekbones, wide half-smiling lips…

She saw me staring. The half smile froze on her face — not a sudden jolt, but a clamp-down of control, keeping her expression exactly as it was till she could cover up. I could tell she was forcing herself not to hurry; oh so slowly, she shook her hair down over her eyes, then brushed her fingers through a few times to make sure there were no gaps in the veil.

"Maybe someday you should stop hiding," I said.

"Maybe someday I will," she answered in her usual whisper. "When the Balrog has ‘elevated’ my consciousness to such heights I can’t feel childish emotions." For a moment, the fingers she was combing through her hair clenched into fists — gripped by some sudden emotion, rage, shame, I don’t know. She trembled with the power of it; I could imagine her face scrunched in on itself under that hair, her eyes squeezed shut, the serenely crinkled skin bunched up into ridges and hollows.

A long ten seconds passed before she relaxed. Then she shook her head and flung her arms wide toward me, crying, "Help me, Teelu." Not a whisper — a desperate plea.

But in the next instant, a shudder went through her; and though her position scarcely changed, all the pleading passion vanished. Got squashed down. "Help me, Teelu," she said, back to her old staid whisper. "Help me up, if you please. Festina promised me time to get clear, but soon that Sperm-tube will spit out a three-hundred-kilo lobster with big sharp claws."

I stared at her a moment. What had just happened? The woman herself speaking, "Help me," then the Balrog choking her off? Or was it all playacting: the Balrog amusing itself by making me worry, or trying to trick me into something I’d regret?

No way to know. But Kaisho was right about one thing — if Zeeleepull flew out of the tube while she was still in the line of fire, his pincers could spear straight through her. I hurried over to pull her away… but realized in the nick of time that if I picked her up face-to-face the way her arms were outstretched, her legs would flop into mine when I lifted her. Instead, I slipped behind her, hiked my hands under her armpits, and dragged her backward off the padding.

"This is a damned undignified position for an advanced lifeform," she muttered.

I didn’t answer. I was marveling at how light she was… like a child. Whatever was under the moss on her legs, it didn’t weigh half as much as human flesh and bone. Still, it had to be pretty strong — it’d withstood the sploosh into the jelly pad, not to mention me dragging it across the floor. Normal moss would have crumbled to pieces with all that knocking around. Then again, the Balrog wasn’t normal moss, was it?

As I set her down, well clear of the landing pillow, Kaisho reached up and pressed her hand warm against my cheek. "Thank you, Teelu" she whispered. "You shouldn’t really call me that," I said. "It’s only for queens."

"Ah," she said, kissing her fingers, then brushing them against my lips. "Thank you for clearing that up, Teelu."

As we waited for the next person to shoot through the Sperm-tube, I had a chance to check out our surroundings. We’d arrived in the transport bay of a navy starship: a big empty room with an irising entry mouth at one end. The mouth was wide-open, showing the ghostly white Sperm-field outside as it stretched off into the distance — all the way down to the planet. At the moment, the starship would be orbiting tail down; if you pictured the Sperm-tube as a big tornado sucking up things from Celestia’s surface, the transport bay was like a bucket at the top of the funnel, ready to catch anything the wind brought us.

The upper part of the bay’s back wall was transparent pink-tinted plastic, a window into the control room where someone would be monitoring the transport process. From my angle down on the floor, I couldn’t see if anyone was actually up in the room; but safety regs required a qualified operator at the console whenever people Spermed in or out.

It kind of surprised me the person in charge hadn’t said a word: no hello, not even a warning for us to get off the landing pad and clear the way for others. I told myself it must take lots of concentration, keeping track of technical details — aligning the Sperm-tube properly so folks flew straight into the ship, maintaining the proper air pressure in the bay so that it was balanced with Celestia’s surface — but still, a simple welcome would be nice.

For one thing, I wanted to know what ship this was. There were rainbow-colored trees painted on the walls of the transport bay, but I didn’t recognize the trees’ species. Something tropical and flowery. At least they weren’t willows; and this wasn’t one of the conifer ships (Jackpine, Sequoia, Golden Cedar) used as flagships for admirals. That was good. If this’d turned out to be my father’s ship, the Royal Hemlock, I would have stood in the entry mouth, just praying for Zeeleepull to come through and skewer me.

"Wondering where we are?" Kaisho whispered. Either she’d read my mind, or noticed me staring at the trees painted on the wall. "It’s Festina’s old ship," she said. "The Jacaranda."

Jacarandal Where Prope was captain? With orders to dump me someplace forgettable? For a second, I wondered if this had all been a giant trick, a way to make me disappear. If they’d decided they couldn’t just kidnap me because the Mandasars would make a fuss, why not engineer an excuse for taking me away? Pretend I was going on an important mission, wait a while, then tell the kids on Celestia, "Sorry, your poor Teelu had an accident on Troyen, and he’s never coming back."

My father would have considered it a neat strategy — get the results you want without causing a public hubbub. But Festina was a different sort of admiral, wasn’t she? Someone who’d be honest with a fellow Explorer?

"You don’t look so good," Kaisho whispered. "What’s wrong?"

"Twenty-four hours ago, the Jacaranda’s captain had orders to get rid of me. Do you think anything’s changed since then?" "Yes," Kaisho said. "Festina has taken charge. She’s commandeered the ship using an admiral’s Powers of Emergency — pursuing the vital interests of the Outward Fleet. Which means she’s bailing the council’s ass out of hot water. Basically, if Festina thinks the top dogs have screwed up so badly they’re risking a League crackdown, she has the authority to do anything to put things right."

"The other admirals don’t mind?"

"The other admirals practically chew out their own livers, but they can’t stop her. The League of Peoples demands that our navy behave in a sentient manner. That doesn’t mean acting good or moral or decent in human terms; your average high admiral is a loathsome criminal bastard." She looked straight at me. "As you well know, little Jetsam."

My father’s not-so-pet name for me. Which meant the Balrog knew exactly who I was. Not that Kaisho seemed to care; she went straight back to telling me what was what.

"The point is," Kaisho said, "the High Council has to obey the letter of the League’s law… and that includes policing themselves for non-sentient behavior. Last night, Festina contacted Admiral Vincence and said, ‘I have reason to believe an inner-circle admiral has condoned cold-blooded murder, and I require the immediate services of a ship to investigate the matter.’ In such a situation, the council simply can’t stand in her way. If they block her or silence her or even try to slow her down, it’s deliberately abetting a possible non-sentient."

Kaisho shrugged. "The most the council can do is work their tails off to prove Festina wrong. If they conscientiously look into the matter and decide her fears are unfounded, they can pull the plug on her. Maybe even demote her or throw her out of the service. But until that happens, they have to let her follow her conscience… and they even have to cooperate with her. Festina wants a ship? She gets the closest one available. Jacaranda. And to hell with any previous orders that get in the way." She turned her head toward the pink-tinted window high above us. "Isn’t that right, Captain?"

There was a three-second silence. Then a voice came over the transport bay’s speakers: a voice I’d heard before. "My orders are to cooperate with Admiral Ramos for the duration of the emergency," Captain Prope said frostily. "If those orders cease to be operative, I can’t speculate what new instructions I might receive. Or what old instructions might be reactivated."

In other words, I could still get chucked onto an uninhabited planet if Festina got overruled. I was thinking about that when Hib came flying through the Sperm-tail.

23 MAKING OURSELVES AT HOME

One by one, the Mandasars came up the tube, each in his, her, or its special way.

The workers enjoyed it. They buzzed excitedly among themselves, probably comparing how much they loved getting turned inside out and pulled through a tube five hundred klicks long. (I couldn’t tell for sure what they said; they were speaking their own personal patois, made from English and Troyenese, plus words that were likely invented out of the blue. Workers who are raised together always develop private languages that no one else can understand. It drives warriors and gentles crazy.)

Counselor couldn’t decide what to make of her trip up the tube. It obviously disturbed the heck out of her, but she wanted to see it as a religious experience: zipping through a universe where her carapace bent like rubber. Gentles have a sort of mystic fear of getting their shells stripped off. If a gentle loses a sizable chunk of armor through disease or injury, she’s considered "blessed by the stars" and treated as a prophet… the terrifying kind of prophet who’s nine-tenths crazy and one-tenth cosmic bliss. (The Troyenese word for "blessed," ullee, also means "naked" and "dangerous.") So when Counselor got herself twisted every which way, as if her husk had turned to taffy… well, she must have felt scarily, vulnerably open to the Five Gods. I think she believed they’d planted some great revelation inside her, if only she searched her soul hard enough.

No such spark of divine truth for Zeeleepull — he just hated the sensation, pure and simple. A split second after he hit the landing pad, he launched into a long tirade of Mandasar cursing… and on those words, his accent was perfect. Next thing you know, he’d ripped open the landing pad and there was jelly slurped all over the transport bay. Zeeleepull got real huffy about it being an accident — his claws had spiked through the rubber bag when he landed, and it wasn’t his fault how the Sperm-tail spat him out. Me, I think he might have given the bag a deliberate snip during his blue-streak tantrum; but considering Zeeleepull’s temper, I kept my opinion to myself.

Festina was the only one left on Celestia… and now instead of a nice soft landing pad, she had a wobbly blob of cold wet jelly to smack into. Not a dignified entrance for an admiral, getting buried and glopped up with goo. I hurried forward to clean things, trying to push the slop back into the torn bag; but Kaisho told me not to bother. "Wait," she said. "You underestimate our noble leader."

"But she’s going to fly straight into the—"

"No," Kaisho promised. "Not with Prope watching."

And she didn’t. The rest of us had come out of the Sperm-tail like people shot from a cannon, no control at all; but Festina emerged like a gymnast nailing a perfect dismount. Two feet slammed on the floor without the tiniest stumble: Festina Ramos, standing straight and calm and balanced, well short of the guck that trembled with the thunk of her impact.

She lifted her eyes to the pinkish window at the back of the transport bay. "Captain Prope," she said evenly. "Admiral on the deck."

"Yes, Admiral," came back Prope’s voice. I couldn’t see the captain, but I could tell she was gritting her teeth.

The entry mouth of the transport bay irised shut. Moments later, a door in the back wall opened and Phylar Tobit thudded forward, pouchy face beaming. He was half a second away from giving Festina a bear hug when Prope’s voice snapped over the speakers. "Explorer Tobit! At attention for greeting an admiral."

Tobit didn’t exactly stop, but he slowed down. Then he did a passable job of faking a trip — catching his right foot behind his left leg — so he could tumble into Festina anyway, wrapping his arms around her shoulders as if to break his fall. She laughed and whispered, "Happy birthday, you dirty old man," before giving him a light kiss on the cheek. "Never the kisses for aliens," Zeeleepull muttered.

I tried to give him a peck on the forehead, but he ducked.

Over the next hour, we got settled in. The two Explorers, Tobit and Benjamin, showed us to our rooms; Captain Prope and an oily lieutenant named Harque put in a token appearance ("Welcome to Jacaranda, always an honor to host an admiral, a consort, and a sentient parasite…"), but the captain and lieutenant disappeared again almost immediately. ("Needed on the bridge, have to get started for Troyen.") After they were gone, I think Festina murmured, "Good riddance," but I might have misheard.

So the Mandasars got five separate cabins, and left four of the rooms empty so they could all squash into the fifth; Tobit and Festina went off to talk about unspecified old times; Kaisho got a new hoverchair, and amused herself discussing intimate details of her condition, while a terrified Benjamin tried to lift her into place without touching her legs. ("A hundred and ten years old, but I’ve started menstruating again! I suppose it means I could have a baby… if I found the right man. Dear lovely Benjamin, what would you think of having a fuzzy-haired child whose head glowed in the dark?")

Me, I found myself in an exact twin of the room I’d occupied on Willow. No big coincidence since cabin design was standardized throughout the fleet, but it still felt a little creepy. As I sat there alone, wondering why I’d agreed to all this, Prope’s face appeared on my vidscreen with that half-light half-shadow trick she’d used before. "Attention, all passengers and crew. Now leaving Celestia orbit. Next stop…" (dramatic pause) "…Troyen."

I was such a bundle of nerves, even such cheap theatrics could give me the chills.

There’s a routine you’re supposed to follow when you’re stationed on a new ship. I wouldn’t have remembered it, except that I’d gone through the same thing recently on Willow — two women from Communications Corps had walked me through the whole procedure, taking every possible chance to brush against me accidentally on purpose. (The more I thought about it, the more I realized how everyone on Willow had been keyed-up to the point of craziness: ten times more wild and impulsive than you got from mere boredom.)

So I went to the cabin’s terminal and introduced myself to the ship-soul. Gave my name, rank, and access code so the computer could fetch my records from Navy Central — not that I had much in the way of records, but at least there’d be stuff about the Coughing Jaundice and my allergy to apples. (That ran in the family — my father and sister too. The doctor who engineered Sam and me offered to fix the problem, but Dad ordered it left in. He didn’t want his kids snacking down on a nice juicy apple when he couldn’t. That tells you something about my dad… and it tells you something more that he told us what he’d done: "I could have made you perfect, but I didn’t want you little brats enjoying yourselves in a way I can’t")

Once I’d given my ID to the ship-soul, I figured it would take a while to get any response — the closest copy of the navy archives was Starbase Iris, a full light-minute away. But the instant I finished the identification process, the ship-soul announced I had a personal, confidential, eyes-only recorded message.

Um.

"Eyes-only" meant no one could read this message before I did… despite the long-standing fleet tradition that if you belonged to the navy, so did your mail. The only people authorized to send eyes-only messages were admirals; and there were only two admirals likely to care about Explorer Second Class Edward York:

1. Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos. But if she wanted to pass me a note, she could just walk down to my room.

2. Admiral of the Gold, Alexander York. My father.

If Jacaranda carried a recorded message from Dad, when had he sent it? Probably a while ago… when Jacaranda’s mission was to make me disappear. I wondered if the message could possibly be an apology: "Sorry we’re forced to do this, son, but the Admiralty can’t let you go home." No, not much chance of that. More likely, he wanted to call me a disappointment one last time — his final chance before I got dumped somewhere cold and airless.

Well, only one way to find out. "Ship-soul, attend," I muttered. "I’m alone, so you can display the message."

When the video flicked on, I found there was another possible sender I hadn’t considered. "Surprise!" said Samantha from the screen.

"Hold!" I shouted. The picture froze.

Sam. It was Sam.

The honey brown hair, the giggly blue eyes, the spatter of freckles across her nose… twenty years and she’d hardly aged a day. Heaven knows how she managed to get hold of YouthBoost on a planet at war; but if anyone could manage, it would be Sam.

My twin sister was alive. And that picture of her in my memory, with her gold uniform soaked scarlet… the jagged hole punched through her rib cage, gushing out blood…

"Tricks," I said aloud. Something was a trick. Either Sam’s death long ago, or the picture I was looking at now. Experts could play games with computer images, everybody knew that. I couldn’t trust what I was seeing. But who would be cruel enough to send such a thing if it wasn’t real? And who had the authority to deliver the message with eyes-only status?

"Ship-soul," I said, "identify message’s sender."

"No identification."

"No name? No transmission information? Nothing?"

"Negative. The recording itself is dated by the Troyenese calendar, 23 Katshin."

Which meant Sam had made the recording the day after Willow picked me up from the moonbase… unless the date was a trick too. Gritting my teeth, I told the ship-soul, "Resume play."

Sam’s picture came back to life. "Poor Edward," she said, "I hope you’re not having a heart attack or something. This must be an awful shock for you, but you’ve handled worse stuff than this."

She was talking the way she always did to me, kind of imitating the way I spoke. When she was playing diplomat, Sam could toss off flowery phrases with the best of them, but behind closed doors with me… well, I guess a really good diplomat always suits her words to her audience.

If this really was Sam. I had to remind myself it could be fake. But a fake by someone who knew exactly how Sam talked to me in private.

"The thing is, Edward," she went on, "I’m still alive. As you can see. It’s way too complicated for me to explain right now, but I will someday, I promise. In the meantime, I want to make sure you’re all right… and that means you have to join me on Troyen."

She reached toward the camera lens and turned it to one side. It swung around to show a golden summer afternoon in a place I knew well — the Park of the Silent God, on the outskirts of Unshummin city: no more than fifteen kilometers from Verity’s palace. Sam and I used to go there for walks all the time, especially during the redfish migrations each spring; the park’s creek would turn scarlet with thousands of new hatchlings, and the air would fill with the strong smell of sugar-sap, as Mandasars heated cauldrons on the shore. Redfish boiled in sugar-sap… we ate that every year, sitting on the creek bank under the diamond-wood trees.

The trees were still there — I could see them in the camera shot. Twenty years taller and thick with green leaves. I always liked those leaves: they were the same color of green as the oaks on my father’s estate.

"Not much sign of the war, is there?" Sam said in a soft voice. "That’s because it’s almost over. One queen has come out on top, and I’m her favorite advisor. By the time you get here, there’ll be peace; and I can protect you from those bastards on the High Council of Admirals."

She swiveled the camera lens back and looked straight at me. "If you want the honest truth, Edward, I know everything that’s happened to you. I found out about Willow, and how they sneaked in to get a queen. The idiots took Queen Temperance, Edward — the last queen who was standing in the way of peace. She’s one of the outlaw queens and nearly the most vicious tyrant on the whole planet, even if she has a placid-sounding name.

"So I know what’s going to happen," Samantha went on. "Willow will pick you up, then head for Celestia. Dumb idea — the moment Willow crosses the line, the League of Peoples will execute Temperance and most of the ship’s crew. Maybe all of them. You’re safe, brother, because there isn’t a more innocent person in the entire universe… but when Willow coasts into Starbase Iris and the navy sees all the corpses, the High Council will have a grade A large conniption.

"Next thing you know, they’ll try to get rid of you, Edward. That’s how admirals think — when they screw up big-time, their first reaction is to lose the witnesses down some deep hole. And I don’t want to let you get lost."

She smiled again: a big bright smile that made me want to smile back… even though a dozen worrying thoughts were nibbling at the back of my mind. If Sam didn’t want me getting lost, why had she let me sit on the moonbase for twenty years and never once tried to contact me? If she was the top queen’s closest advisor, couldn’t Sam have found a way to send a message? But no word at all — no hint she was alive — till suddenly I left the Troyen system, and that’s when she got in touch.

Like she was happy to ignore me, right up to the point when I headed home.

But the message kept playing, and Sam kept smiling: my smart and pretty sister who taught me everything I knew. "I didn’t find out about Willow right away," she was saying. "Not till they’d taken you with them. But I’m sending people after you, Edward, to get you back. It turns out I have a starship: a nice black one, run by Mandasar friends. If you want the honest truth, it used to belong to the navy — a sweet little frigate named Cottonwood. But, umm…" She leaned toward the camera and said in a loud whisper, "I stole the ship, Edward. Just before the war started. I knew the navy would stop all traffic to and from Troyen, and I wanted an escape route in case things got really bad."

"Hold!" I snapped. My sister froze in the middle of a blink, her eyes half-closed and clumsy-looking, the way people always come across in blink-pictures. It was a pretty unflattering shot, but I wasn’t so interested in Sam’s appearance at the moment.

Not when I knew she had a ship — the black ship that had stolen Willow. The ship’s crew must have hoped I was still aboard; they’d taken Willow in tow so they could drag me back to Troyen.

So: Sam had left me alone on the moonbase for twenty years, but the second she heard I was gone from Troyen airspace, she sent her starship to get me.

And how had Sam stolen a starship? I guess it wouldn’t be hard; my sister was a high-ranking diplomat, and an admiral’s daughter. She could get herself invited on board, maybe with some helpers, then drug people, gas people, mop up with stunners… but that wasn’t the tricky part. What had she done with the crew members after she’d taken the ship? A frigate carried a crew of a hundred. If you only had to deal with one or two sailors, you might bully or bribe them into silence; but not a hundred people. Someone would refuse to cooperate. Where could Sam put them so they’d never tell the navy what she’d done?

I hoped there was some brilliant answer I was just too dim to figure out — the most obvious possibilities made me go all queasy. Sam! I thought, what did you do? And why was she cheerily telling me this stuff? Did she think I was so stupid I wouldn’t ask questions?

For the tiniest of moments, a thought flicked through my mind: Yes — there was a time when these questions wouldn’t have occurred to me. But that was scary too and not something to dwell on. I snapped at the ship-soul, "Resume play."

Sam’s eyes smoothly finished their blink as she said, "So I’m sending my ship after you. With a bit of luck, you’ll still be on Willow when Cottonwood reaches Celestia — that’ll make it easy to bring you back. If not, my crew has to assume you’ve been transferred elsewhere; so Cottonwood will squirt this message to every navy vessel in the Celestia system… eyes-only." She gave a girlish grin. "Dad showed me a sort of a kind of a back door into the navy computer system: how to pretend I’m an admiral. The High Council would barbecue him if they found out, but they probably do the same for their kids. In case of dire emergencies."

She paused for a moment, then made a big show of looking right and left, as if checking to make sure no one else was listening. It was kind of a code gesture the two of us used as kids — a "just between you and me" thing that meant Sam was going to say something really really important. She leaned back in toward the camera, her eyes bright and piercing. "Okay now, Edward, I want you to listen very carefully." Her words came out so slowly… had she always spoken to me like that? "The absolute most crucial thing now is that you get away from the navy. Understand? If people say they’re taking you home, don’t believe them. Escape, Edward; you have to escape. Don’t let them trap you, or hurt you, or put you under a microscope…"

Sam’s gaze dropped for a second, and she took a breath. Then she looked up again, and said, "I’m going to give you something very valuable, Edward: Dad’s special backdoor access code to the navy computer network. You can use it to pretend you’re an admiral, a High Council admiral, invoking Powers of Emergency. You’ll be able to give orders, look at confidential files, whatever you need. Don’t do anything crazy — if you draw too much attention, you’ll get in serious, serious trouble — but think smart, and make sure you escape."

Her eyes drilled into me for a moment more; then she relaxed and smiled. "Once you’ve got away, Edward, come back to me. To Troyen, to the high queen’s palace in Unshummin. Okay? Go straight to the palace, and I’ll be waiting. It’ll be safe and happy like old times. Queen Temperance was the last holdout against the new high queen; with Temperance gone, there’s nothing in the way of peace but a few leaderless troops. By the time you get here, Edward, we’ll be finished mopping up, and no one will ever have to fight again."

She lifted her fingers to her lips and kissed them, staring straight into the camera the whole while. "Come home, Edward. Come to Unshummin, to the palace. Please. This is where you belong. This is where you can do good. This is where you’ll be loved."

Samantha’s face stayed on the screen a moment longer… and even though she was smiling, there was something saddened about her, as if something hurt inside. Then the image went black and the ship-soul was informing me that the message carried attached data — the backdoor access code. I told the computer to save the code in a file, then slumped back in my chair.

For a long time I just sat there, chewing my knuckle.

24 HAVING A CHECKUP

Sometime later — I don’t know how long — a knock came at my door. Not a real knock, of course; the person out there had touched the REQUEST ENTRY plate and the ship-soul had interpreted that signal as knock-knock-knock. You could customize your door signal to anything you want: a bell, a buzzer, a dog barking, whatever suited your fancy. Sam always liked a real knock, soft and deferential, as if the person outside your door was a shy little servant begging permission to take a moment of your time. Naturally, if that was the signal Sam used, I wanted it too. Sort of. I couldn’t remember actually asking for the knock, but Sam had programmed it into my permanent navy records, assuming that’s what I’d want.

Um. All of a sudden, that bothered me. Maybe I should change the knock to a ding-dong. Or a chime. Or one of those frittery bird-chirp sounds. Except as I thought of all the possibilities, it seemed like a lot of work to choose something new when a knock was perfectly okay.

The knock came again. I looked at the peep-monitor and saw Tobit standing there, glowering into the camera’s eye. "Let him in," I told the ship-soul.

Tobit didn’t stop glowering as he entered, but he aimed the glare at the room rather than me. "Just like my cabin," he growled, "except you don’t have underwear strewn about the floor for convenience." He glanced my direction. "You settling in okay? Or do you want me to bug the quartermaster for some doodads to brighten the place up? He’s got some glass figurines that shatter real nice when you throw them against the wall."

"No thanks." I gave a sideways glance at the vidscreen on my desk, but it’d gone blank. Sam’s message must have automatically purged itself from the databanks after playing.

"Well," Tobit said, "if you aren’t busy, Festina wants you down in sick bay. Since you’ve done the do-si-do with hive-queen venom, she wants to make sure you’re all right." Tobit rolled his eyes. "I’m supposed to be your escort. In case the poison drops you into a writhing heap and you need to be dragged the rest of the way."

"I’m not going to drop into a writhing heap," I said.

"Glad to hear it," Tobit replied. "I’ve got a bum arm, and I hate heavy lifting."

He motioned me toward the door. It slid open in front of us… and I was just about to step out when Tobit grabbed me by the back of my shirt. With a yank that almost ripped the fabric, he jerked me back into the room and spun me around.

My fists came up of their own accord. Wild ideas dashed through my head — like the whole ship had been spying on me while I listened to Sam’s message, and now Festina and Prope and everyone intended to get me. I came a millisecond away from punching Tobit straight in his purple-veined nose… but he backed up fast and pointed at the floor outside my door.

The deck was covered with carpet — this part of the ship was all prettied up for visiting VIPs — and the carpet had a pattern of red jacaranda trees surrounded by multicolored swirls. For a second I couldn’t see anything where Tobit was pointing; but then, on one of the jacarandas closest to my door, I saw a little fleck of glowing crimson.

"Ship-soul," Tobit said in a strained voice, "turn off the lights in this corridor."

The passageway went dark-except for five patches of crimson spores twinkling up from the broadloom. They’d been planted right on five red jacarandas in the carpet’s pattern, where they’d be hard to spot and easy to step on.

"Um," I said, swallowing hard.

"Kaisho seems to be exfoliating," Tobit muttered. "I just caught sight of a flicker before you stepped down."

He flumped on the edge of my bed and lifted his feet to check the soles of his boots. No glowing red dots. "Either I was lucky where I walked," he said, "or the Balrog knew better than to bite into me. My bloodstream has enough liquor left over from my drinking days to pickle any damned fungus that tries to take root."

I just kept staring at the glowing specks: one straight in front of my room and two on either side, likely to get stepped on whichever way I turned. "Do you think Kaisho deliberately wanted… I mean, it’s my door…"

"York, buddy," Tobit said, "the fucking moss has a bone on for you. Or Kaisho does. Or both. If you try to buttonhole her, I’m sure she’ll swear it was only a ‘darling wee joke.’ Only teasing, the spores wouldn’t really eat you. Just lick you a bit, then let go… the Balrog’s way of flirting." He scowled. "Better watch your step, pal — you’ve got all kinds of conquests drooling over you."

He said that last with a grumbly sort of snappishness: like maybe there was a woman he was interested in, except she liked me better. But the only women on Jacaranda who’d even seen me were Prope and Kaisho and Festina…

Oh.

"Christ," Tobit muttered disgustedly, wiping his boots on my floor, even though the soles were already clean. "Let’s call a vacuum cleaner and get the hell out of here. People are waiting for us in sick bay."

I nodded quietly.

"We aren’t supposed to do this," the doctor said. Yet another navy kid — in his thirties, but that’s pretty young for an M.D. His name was Veresian and he’d just accessed my medical history. "There’s a note on York’s chart, NO MEDICAL EXAMINATIONS EXCEPT IN EMERGENCIES. Certified by the Admiralty. Certified."

Festina frowned. "That’s ridiculous. Everyone in the fleet gets regular checkups."

"Not quite true, ah, Admiral, sorry," Veresian said. "The navy will make exceptions. Usually on religious grounds — Opters, for instance."

He turned to look at me. The doctor couldn’t straight-out ask who or what I worshiped — not with the navy’s strict policies on religious tolerance — but Opters are never shy about stating their beliefs. Their god disapproves of all medical treatments; you’re supposed to let heaven decide whether or not you recover. (Don’t ask me why a god would create a universe full of medicines, then tell you not to use them. Gods have a real fondness for making great stuff and putting it right under your nose, but saying, "If you love me, leave this alone." Kind of like my sister hiding her diary in my room so Dad wouldn’t find it.)

By now, everyone in sick bay was looking at me — Veresian, Festina, and Tobit. "I’m not an Opter," I said. "I’m… um… different."

"You’re an Explorer, pal," Tobit replied. "We’re all different."

But I was illegally different. I didn’t say that out loud, of course — if there was one thing hammered into my head, it was keeping quiet about how I came to be. Not just because I’d been engineered. If you want the honest truth, I was also a sort of a kind of a clone of my father.

Pretty awful, right? Being him.

Of course, I wasn’t him exactly — the doctor who designed me started with Dad’s DNA, then fiddled with it to make me better. Samantha was exactly the same as me: the same person exactly, our dad’s clone, except she got an X chromosome where I got a Y.

Which meant she wasn’t the same person at all. Do you know about sex-linked gene deficiencies? Where if you’re a girl you’re all right, but if you’re a boy you don’t get built properly? Sam tried to explain it once with big blowup pictures of actual X and Y chromosomes, but I didn’t feel much like listening. It couldn’t be changed, could it? That was all I needed to know.

Even if Sam couldn’t make me understand how my brain went stupid, she sure made it clear I had to keep everything secret. Cloning had been banned for centuries in the Technocracy, and gene manipulation was strictly limited to fixing "catastrophic disorders" — if you just wanted your kids prettier or smarter, you got thrown in jail.

Worse than that, the children were classified "potentially non-sentient" since no one could predict how a DNA tweak would affect "moral character." There were just too many variables to calculate… and too many awful examples over the years, people trying to make perfect offspring and ending up with monsters: psychopaths, killers, people whose brains were messed up worse than mine. If the navy knew the truth about Sam and me, we’d never be allowed on a starship again — on the off chance we might suddenly turn crazy and inhuman and non-sentient.

The more I mulled it over, the more I wished I hadn’t let Tobit bring me down to the doctor. But I hadn’t thought things through fast enough.

Sometimes you just get so tired of being slow.

"Um," I said. I knew better than to make up some story of why I shouldn’t be examined. Lies get complicated real fast. It would have been nice if Dad had told me about the NO CHECKUPS order so I wasn’t taken completely by surprise; but of course he hadn’t. All I could do was mumble, "My father didn’t like doctors looking at me too much. It bothered him."

Festina gave me a sympathetic look. She probably thought my dad was an Opter, and I was all embarrassed about it. "Don’t worry," she told me, "if you’re allowed to have medical exams in an emergency, I’d say this counts. You’ve had two doses of hive-queen venom, Edward, and that’s serious business. Only a few humans have ever suffered venom poisoning, but several ended up with chronic metabolic imbalances. Isn’t that right, Doctor?"

Veresian looked flustered by the question. It’s tough being a doctor in the Outward Fleet — every new planet that humans visit has a thousand diseases nobody’s seen before. The medical databanks have write-ups on millions of ways to get sick, and for many there’ve only been three or four cases ever. Veresian couldn’t possibly hold all that information in his head. If he was like other doctors, he looked up what he needed when he needed it… and at this moment, he knew absolutely zero about Mandasar venom.

Too bad. Festina was an Explorer, and Explorers did their homework.

Veresian mumbled, "Yes, yes, dirty stuff, that venom." He looked at Festina once more, then decided you seldom went wrong agreeing with an admiral. "Definitely, we can say this qualifies as an emergency. Definitely." He turned to me. "Could you take off your shirt, please, Explorer?"

"Do I have to?"

"Come on," Tobit growled, "forget about your dad hating doctors. No matter how loony he is, your old man wouldn’t want you to Go Oh Shit."

Going Oh Shit was a term Explorers used for dying. My father wouldn’t care if I went Oh Shit, I thought, as long as I just went. On the other hand, Dad had let me see a doctor now and then. And it wasn’t like a sign would flash BIO-ENGINEERED CLONE the moment I hopped onto the examination table. Veresian wouldn’t find anything suspicious unless he went to the trouble of sequencing my entire genome… and why would he do that?

"Okay," I grumbled, and began unbuttoning.

Festina and Tobit watched as the doctor listened to my heart and looked down my throat. Veresian was just passing the time — while he mucked about with a stethoscope, sensors around the room were taking far more detailed readings and checking them against every possible index in the databanks — but Sam always said people were suckers for personal attention. "Medicine is nine-tenths showmanship," she once told me, "just like diplomacy."

The doctor wasn’t the only one providing a show. After all, I was the one with my shirt off; and neither Festina nor Tobit made a move to leave when the examination started. They weren’t gawking or anything, but… well, actually, yes, they were gawking, particularly when Veresian got me to take deep breaths. I told myself they must come from parts of the Technocracy where people weren’t all self-conscious about their bodies. Even so, if the examination headed below the waist, I didn’t want a bunch of spectators.

Especially not Festina.

Veresian finished with the simple stuff and went to his terminal to see what the mechanical sensors had found out While he scanned the readout, I tried not to scratch an itch that all of a sudden flared up on the soft inside of my elbow. I assumed nanites were at work there, sneaking under the skin and sipping blood from my veins — not so different from the eyeball nano that had burrowed into the queen’s venom sacs.

All navy sick bays had nanotech squads floating in the air, like little labs for doing blood analysis, taking tissue samples, and that kind of stuff. The medical computers had probably sent microscopic sensors scrambling toward my internal organs, swimming down my throat to lungs or stomach, in search of more data. I wasn’t sure how much time they needed to do their jobs — it must take a fair while to find the spleen, let alone do a bunch of tests on it — but bit by bit they’d send reports to the main computers, telling how my innards measured up.

"Well," said Veresian after only a few seconds, "well, well, well."

"Well what?" Festina asked.

The doctor glanced at her a moment, then back at the readouts. "There’s just… ahh… maybe it’s time to recalibrate." He thumbed a few dials on the control panel, then gave us a false smile. "Time to run diagnostics on the diagnostics. That happens sometimes."

Festina gave him a look. "How often does it happen?"

"Not often but sometimes."

"This goddamned navy," Tobit muttered. He and Festina looked deeply suspicious, but said nothing. No one in the Outward Fleet was immune to machines going off kilter — not doctors, not Explorers, not admirals — so you had to give Veresian some benefit of the doubt. Tobit watched the doctor play with the control panel, while Festina glowered at no one in particular. Finally, she glanced at me and said, "You’re feeling all right?"

"I’m fine."

She gave a half smile. "You look fine." Then she turned away from my bare chest to watch Veresian tinker with his equipment.

Five minutes later, the doctor finished recalibrating, realigning, reprogramming, reinitiating.

Five minutes after that, Veresian swallowed, and said, "There you are, same results as last time. This patient is definitely not human."

25 GETTING DIAGNOSED

For a split second, I felt like dashing out of the room. I didn’t; but I opened my mouth, intending to babble something, I don’t know what, some cowardly nonsense about it being Dad’s fault. Not a word came out — the spirit that sometimes possessed me had taken over, keeping me stone quiet.

"What do you mean, not human?" Tobit demanded. He gave me a quick glance, as if he could verify my race just by looking.

"Every tissue in Explorer York’s body has components not found in Homo sapiens. Hormones. Enzymes. Protein compounds I can’t even classify."

"Do they match other species?" Festina asked. "Balrogs maybe?"

I shuddered at that — both me and whatever was possessing my body. It would be very bad if the Balrog had planted a spore on me, and little Balrog brigades were already romping through my bloodstream.

"Not Balrogs," Veresian said after checking his screen. We all breathed a sigh of relief. "But it’s hard to narrow it down much farther than that." He pointed to something on the readout. "This lipid, for example… it’s not found in humans, but it’s reasonably common in alien species. Matches twenty-three sentient races that we know of and billions of lesser creatures from the same worlds."

"Are Mandasars on the list?" I asked calmly. (Not me — the spirit in control of my mouth.)

"Why yes, yes they are," Veresian answered, scanning down his data.

"If you check the other alien compounds," continued the thing inside me, "I think you’ll see they’re all found in Mandasars."

"Hmm. Yes. Yes."

"You think it’s the hive-queen venom?" Tobit asked.

"No," I said. "When I was on Troyen, I came down with something they called Coughing Jaundice. Supposedly one of their local microbes. It hung on for a full year — nearly killed me dozens of times. A group of Mandasar doctors improvised a number of treatments… including tissue transplants, and filling me up with nano that would prevent the transplants from being rejected."

Veresian’s eyes widened. "They transplanted alien tissue into a human? Without killing you? And the transplant can actually survive on human blood nutrients?’

I wasn’t sure what-all treatments I’d got, but I figured the spirit could be telling the truth. Over that horrible year, there were so many operations and injections and "Just lie in this machine for a while, Edward," I must have had every medical procedure you could imagine. Of course, I didn’t say that to the doctor. I didn’t say anything. The spirit in my mouth said, "You know Mandasars. Put enough gentles on a problem, and they come up with brilliant solutions." The doctor looked at me as if he didn’t quite believe it… but he should have. Before the war, Troyen had developed the most advanced medical knowledge of any race known to humanity. It was the Mandasars’ big area of expertise: they didn’t build starships or robots or nanotech, they just specialized in doctoring. Any species, anytime. Which meant they’d invented practically everything in this sick bay, even if Veresian didn’t know it. He was too young — Troyen had been out of the picture for twenty years, way longer than this scrawny stethoscoped kid had been practicing medicine.

"If they did that to you," Veresian said, "why isn’t there anything on your chart?" He pointed to his vidscreen… which I couldn’t see because doctors always sit you down at an angle so you can’t look over their shoulders. Heaven forbid a patient ever gets to see his own information.

"I guess the records didn’t get transferred properly," the thing controlling my mouth replied. "When the war started, we were all so disorganized… important documentation might have got lost."

"But if you had this jaundice a full year," Veresian said, "there was plenty of time to file a report. The moment any member of the navy contracts an alien disease, it’s mandatory to notify the Admiralty. Direct to HQ, no exceptions."

"Yes," Festina added, "there are League issues involved."

I knew that: the League expected our navy to keep a sharp eye on threats to human life. The High Council couldn’t let such things slip between the cracks, or the whole fleet would be accused of willful negligence toward each other’s safety.

"Sorry," I said, "I wasn’t in any shape to submit a report… and I don’t know why the others didn’t. A breakdown in communications, I guess — everybody in the diplomatic mission must have thought someone else would do it."

That’s what the spirit possessing me said. But in my heart I knew it was no accidental slip-up. Sam was in charge of the mission, and in charge of me. Filing the report was her job, and apparently, she hadn’t done it. Why? Because she didn’t want official navy doctors getting involved, checking me out, discovering my tailored DNA? Or…

Something flickered in my brain, then disappeared.

The doctor spent another hour puzzling over my anatomy, but didn’t make much progress. As far as he could tell, the two doses of venom hadn’t caused any obvious damage; but since he didn’t know what my normal chemical balance should be, he couldn’t say if my body had gone haywire or if I was flat on the bubble.

"You’re almost three percent Mandasar now," he said in a voice full of wonder, "and frankly, frankly, I couldn’t begin to make a prognosis. The venom wasn’t as alien to you as it would be for a normal human. That could mean your body has a better chance of shrugging the poison off… but it could also mean the poison will have more long-term effects because your body is responsive to it. The purpose of venom is to change Mandasar metabolisms. Three percent of you could be mutating like crazy, and I wouldn’t know the difference."

That wasn’t so very comforting.

Veresian told me to come back the next day to see if anything had changed. I said all right, but was already going over excuses for getting out of it. (By then, it was me doing my own talking again — the spirit possessing me must have got bored and taken off.)

The doctor also asked if I’d submit to a complete physiological study for scientific purposes. I was an astounding case and should be written up in some journal. For that, he’d need my permission to go public… and I refused point-blank. If he did a full examination, he’d surely learn stuff about my genes that I’d rather keep secret.

Finally, the doctor demanded Kaisho come down and certify me as sentient: I wasn’t human, I wasn’t Mandasar, and considering what happened to Willow, Veresian refused to take chances. Tobit grumbled, "Aww, Doc, York’s a sweetheart," but Festina said it couldn’t hurt to get me double-checked.

"You don’t mind, do you, Edward?" she asked. "Better safe than sorry."

"Sure," I said… as if it didn’t bother me that Festina trusted Kaisho more than me. Tobit and I had told all about the spores planted outside my room — but I guess Festina didn’t care if Kaisho tried to Balroggify dumb old Edward. Kaisho was sentient; maybe I wasn’t.

Five minutes later, Kaisho stood in front of me, hair completely covering her eyes. It only took a moment before she said, "He looks fine." Then she laughed. "You don’t know how fine he is." Veresian didn’t seem all that reassured.

Tobit walked me back to my cabin. He didn’t talk much, but he stayed to help me check for Balrog spores, inside the room and out. We got the ship-soul to drop the lights almost to nothing, making it easier to see any glowing red specks… which is why we were practically in pitch-blackness when Tobit began to speak, low and gruff, from the opposite side of the room. "I peeked over the doc’s shoulder as he checked your records," Tobit mumbled, as if he was talking to himself. "That note about NO MEDICAL EXAMINATIONS? It was tagged onto your file twenty-one years ago. Long after you first enlisted. Which makes me think your father had nothing to do with it."

I stared stupidly at him in the darkness. "What do you mean?"

"Twenty-one years ago," Tobit repeated. "Wasn’t that the same time you picked up the pox on Troyen?"

I nodded. And swallowed hard.

"So not only did your pals on Troyen fail to report you were sick," he said, "someone hacked your medical records to keep folks from learning what happened to you. Someone snaffled you with that NO CHECKUP crap so navy doctors wouldn’t find out you were three percent Mandasar. And whoever did it was either an admiral or someone who could fake Admiralty authorization." Tobit’s face was completely lost in shadows. "So what’s the story, York? Who jerked you around? Do you know?"

"No," I answered — glad it was too dark for him to see my face, because one look would have showed I was lying.

There was only one person who could have faked up everything: never filing the proper reports and using Dad’s backdoor access to tag my medical records.

Why, Sam, why?

26 EATING AT THE CAPTAIN’S TABLE

Since it was the first night of a new voyage, Captain Prope held a formal dinner in the lounge — the kind of dinner where people wear dress uniforms and try to act gracious. Everyone moves a bit more slowly; talks a bit more expressively; keeps conversation on "social" topics, instead of the usual, "What blazing idiot designed those damned fuel filters?"

Me, I wasn’t so good at witty repartee. I’m not much of a talker at the best of times, and it didn’t help that Jacaranda’s onboard clock was way off my current day-night cycle. My brain was still synchronized with the shifts on Willow… so dinner at 8:00 P.M. Jacaranda time felt more like three in the morning for me.

The problems of space travel that no one ever talks about.

The VIPs had to eat at the captain’s table: Festina because she was an admiral, Kaisho because her legs were the most advanced species on the ship, and me because… well, maybe Prope wanted to keep me under close watch. Not so long ago, she’d been ready to dump me on some ice moon; and I was still a man who knew too much.

The Mandasars had a table of their own right beside us. Naturally, it was lower than ours — only a few centimeters off the floor, with passable dining pallets laid all around. That had to be the work of Tobit and Benjamin: Explorers are always the ones stuck with figuring out how to make aliens comfortable. (Explorers spend a lot of time learning about alien customs; knowledge like that helps you survive on strange planets. You’d be surprised how many races will slit your throat over bad table manners.)

As for Tobit and Benjamin themselves, they were stuck at the back someplace, rubbing elbows with the enlisted. Since Festina, Kaisho and I sat at the head table, Prope must have decided there were plenty of Explorers on display already.

Festina sat on Prope’s right: the position of highest honor and the only possible place to seat a visiting admiral. For some reason I got the second best spot, on the captain’s immediate left. Next to me was that smarmy fellow Harque, who seemed to hold some privileged status aboard Jacaranda, even though he was only a lieutenant. Much-higher-ranking personnel — the chief engineer, the commander of Security, even the XO — all got shunted off to other tables. Maybe they had enough clout to ask for those seats; Harque was the one stuck under the steely gaze of both a captain and an admiral.

For the first part of the meal, Prope aimed most of her attention at Festina, trying to wheedle juicy gossip about power struggles on the High Council. The captain was one of those people who went all oozy with charm when she wanted something. She had a pretty good touch with it too — all warm and winning, so you found yourself smiling even when you knew it was only an act. The secret was that Prope herself didn’t realize she was an awful hypocrite; she thought this was as genuine as anyone ever got. I’d seen the same thing in diplomats: honestly believing they were paragons of truth because they thought everybody else was a bigger liar than they were.

Festina didn’t work nearly as hard on the social niceties as Prope. One word answers. No little stories about the time a Myriapod ambassador gave birth at the breakfast table. I got the feeling Festina had some grudge against Prope, one she’d been nursing a long time; she was making an effort not to be petty, but refused to go any farther than frostily polite.

As for the actual content of the conversation — like which high admiral said what to whom during a recent summit on some race called the Peacocks — I sleepily let it pass by till Prope asked me, "So what did your father think of it all?"

I jerked awake. Felt myself blushing. Prope knew who I was; and as I glanced around the table, Harque smirking, Festina looking grim, Kaisho hidden behind her hair but tilting her head to one side as if she was eager to hear my answer — I realized they all knew. Since I’d come aboard, they must have had time to look over my navy records.

Dumb me: I should have expected they’d check. Smart people learn who they’re dealing with. I just wished… I don’t know. I wished I could have stayed Edward York instead of becoming Alexander York’s son. Especially with the way Festina felt about High Council admirals.

"Um," I said. "Um. My father has never told me what he thinks about anything. Except maybe when he was talking to somebody else and didn’t notice I was in the room. I haven’t heard a word from him in the past twenty years; and even back then, he sent letters to my sister, not me. After Sam died…" I stopped, remembering Sam wasn’t dead. "My father and I aren’t close," I mumbled, hoping folks would leave it at that.

Prope didn’t. "Frankly, I’m astounded," she said, "that you and your dad are… estranged." She gave me a sympathetic smile. Prope’s kind of sympathy anyway. "You look so much like him, you know. A chip off the old block. Only better — more handsome."

She laughed lightly. I tried to laugh too, but didn’t do such a great job; no matter how stupid you are, you get good at spotting when someone is flirting with you. If you don’t flirt back, you’re being rude, or a prig. Except that I never think fast enough to toss off sexy banter, especially when I don’t feel sexy. (If you really want to snare me into bed, convince me you’re lonely, not coy.)

So for a second, I just sat there with no idea what to say. I didn’t want to talk about my father, and I definitely didn’t want to talk about being handsome. Then I found myself replying, "Sorry, Captain, but the real chip off the old block was my twin sister Samantha. Another case of ‘my father’s looks only better’ — stupendously better, almost as beautiful as the lovely ladies here at this table — but Sam inherited Dad’s personality too. His force of will. Which I’m afraid led her to a bad end."

"You have our sympathies, Your Majesty," Kaisho whispered. She stressed Your Majesty just a bit, not sarcastically but pointedly. As if she knew she was talking to more than boring old Edward York, Explorer Second Class.

Yes. I’d been possessed again — a backseat passenger watching someone or something else take the wheel. Almost as beautiful as the lovely ladies here at this table… I’d never say something like that. I wondered why Festina didn’t demand, "What’s wrong with you?" Even if we’d only known each other a single day, she should have noticed the difference. But she just said, "Tell us about your sister, Edward. What really happened to the mission on Troyen?"

The thing controlling me was only too happy to give its version of those long-ago days… a version filled with jokes and sly asides, many of them directed toward Prope. "Oh Captain, you should have seen…" "If only I could have shown you…" "Perhaps someday we can walk through the…" Nudging her on the good parts, making Troyen’s descent into war sound like a series of silly missteps and goofed-up blunders rather than a desperate fight to avoid a fight.

As the spirit possessing me made Prope’s eyes gleam, smirking over tales of disintegration, I thought about what really happened. The truth.

What really happened were the wrong ideas at the wrong time. I guess that’s an old, old story in human history, and it’s just as common in other parts of the galaxy.

Mandasars were genetically programmed for monarchy… anyone could see that. But not everyone could accept it. Least of all some of the races who started visiting once Troyen joined the League of Peoples.

You know what I’m talking about — you’ve probably watched The Evolution Hour at least once, where that purple Cashling with the high-pitched voice yells at everybody how Totally Selfish Anarchy(tm) is the only way for any race to advance up the ladder of sentience. Then there are those "free sensuous VR experiences" that really just send you to a Unity Arcana Dance, and the "traveling art shows" that the Myriapods think will inspire you to reject the decadent Culture of Entertainment they say has poisoned human civilization. A lot of aliens are fanatically determined to make humans see the error of our ways.

But humans have always had it easy compared to the Mandasars. We never pissed off the Fasskisters.

The same way Mandasars specialized in medical stuff, the Fasskisters specialized in robotics. You wouldn’t think there’d be much overlap between the two fields, but there is. Fasskister robots have a lot of biological components, because there are fancy things you can do with organic chemistry that are real hard to match with electronics. The other place medicine meets cybernetics is the whole area of nanotech: doctors really love teeny microscopic robots that can get inside a person’s body, snip away at tumors, scrape guck out of arteries, that kind of thing.

So Troyen always had tons of trade with the Fasskisters — selling sophisticated new tissues for use in robots, and buying smart little nanites for doctorish tricks. Both Mandasars and Fasskisters should have been happy with the booming business… except for one tiny problem: Fasskisters can’t stand royalty. It drives them positively manic.

A long time ago the Fasskisters had royals of their own, a whole separate caste like Mandasar queens; and overall these rulers were pretty decent types, competent, generous, not too tyrannical. In fact, that was the problem. One day, someone from the League of Peoples showed up and declared that the royals were sentient, but the commoners weren’t. Next thing you know, most of the noble caste left the home planet for upscale homes in the stars. The normal folks who were stuck behind got so mad they killed the nobles who stayed and swore they’d never tolerate monarchy again. Even after the commoners got civilized enough to be accepted into the League (a thousand years later), the Fasskisters were still totally rabid on the subject of crowns and thrones and palaces.

Samantha said it was a big psychological thing: the Fasskisters still had this bred-in drive to be ruled by royals, but they felt all betrayed and abandoned by their leaders, so they overcompensated with aggressive antimonarchical something or other. Like humans who don’t have a mother, and feel this big hole in their lives, even if they have kindly nannies and all the toys in the world.

So no matter how much the Fasskisters depended on Troyen for trade, they just couldn’t stomach the idea of queens. In fact, they took every possible chance to rabble-rouse, preaching how a democratically elected parliament — or a republic or an oligarchy or technocracy or even a random selection of two hundred people from the Unshummin census database — could run the planet better than High Queen Verity and the three lower queens.

This stirred up trouble… not a lot at first, because Mandasars pretty well ignored what the Fasskisters said, but as time went on, the Fasskisters learned how to play on the natural discontents of the people. Whenever anything went wrong for the Mandasars — a deal falling through, a tissue graft that didn’t hold, natural disasters, or even just at the end of a long slogging workday — you might find a Fasskister there, whispering how the queen was to blame.

Naturally, it made the queens furious. Several times they expelled the worst of the troublemakers, but that was bad for business. Not only did it sour trade with the Fasskisters, but it upset other races too: Troyen wasn’t "alien-friendly." So mostly the queens had to let it go — grumble to themselves as they kept their claws tight shut and their stingers tucked away.

But they still hated it. In the end, they approached a third party to see if anyone could get the Fasskisters to back off.

Enter a small diplomatic mission, headed by Samantha York of the Outward Fleet.

First day on the job: an official reception in the Great Hall of Verity’s palace in Unshummin city. It was a huge space, three stories high with mezzanine galleries, and long enough to hold an Olympic javelin throw… but no artificial lights at all. Instead, the place was filled with Weeshi, a bioengineered insect that was like a firefly with no flicker. Little glass dishes of sugar water were hung overhead to feed the Weeshi, so light tended to concentrate around the dishes; but there were still plenty of Weeshi just flitting about on their own — like tiny roving stars glittering in every direction.

In honor of us navy folks, the room was swathed in a turquoisy blue that Verity had designated the caste color of Homo sapiens. (Mandasars felt sincere pity that humans didn’t have a set color scheme — we were all different skin tones, not to mention shades of eyes and hair — so Verity insisted on giving us official title to that turquoisy blue. That way, we wouldn’t feel all bashful and inadequate among people who had a real caste color.)

I didn’t look so bad in turquoisy blue. Sam, of course, looked fabulous… especially since she was wearing the color in a slinky evening gown with one skintight sleeve and the other arm bare. Sam had our outfits made before we left New Earth; and I can’t tell you how snippish other diplomats got, that no one else was told about dressing in that color. They were all stuck with a bunch of ugly shapeless jumpsuits made by Mandasar tailors. (The tailors knew that Homo sapiens had two arms, two legs, and a head, but that was pretty much the limit of their familiarity with the human form.)

Since it was our first official function, my sister kept me close to make sure I didn’t get into trouble; but I couldn’t really tell what she thought I might do. Go dance in the fountains that were spritzing up turquoisy blue water? Munch on the turquoisy blue floral arrangements? Climb the turquoisy blue draperies that had been hung on the walls and the ceiling and the stair-ramps, so that the whole place looked like a sea grotto lined with velveteen?

No — I knew how to behave in public. It was the Fasskisters who needed a lesson in manners… because they came dressed as hive-queens.

You may have noticed I haven’t described what a Fasskister looks like. There’s a reason for that: even today, I’ve never seen one in the flesh. Whenever they go out among other species — and maybe even on their homeworld, for all I know — they always ride inside custom-made robots. Really. When they visit New Earth, they show up in android thingies, pretty humanish-looking except they have big chests the size of beer barrels. Those chests are basically cockpits; the Fasskister sits inside and drives the machine, making the legs walk and the arms move and the mouth chatter away on the bad points of royalty. You never see the Fasskister itself, just its robot housing.

Of course, lots of folks speculate on what Fasskisters look like. The species has to be pretty small to fit inside those chests… the size of an otter or a big barn cat. Most diplomats on our mission believed Fasskisters were nothing but great big brains: the rest of their bodies withered up shortly after birth, and their robot shells provided everything necessary to keep the brains alive. Samantha thought this theory was too tame — that the old brain-in-a-box cliche was melodramatic hooey, and the truth was probably a lot stranger and more interesting — but neither she nor anyone else could say for certain.

One thing everybody knew was that Fasskisters could change robot bodies whenever they wanted; and on that first night of our mission to Troyen, all the Fasskisters came in identical mock-ups of a Mandasar queen — each full-size and sulphur yellow, with four working claws, bright green venom sacs, and a brain hump even bigger than Verity’s. As if that weren’t bad enough, they all came reeking of royal pheromone… which none of us humans could smell, but which practically paralyzed every Mandasar but the high queen. Royal pheromone is a special scent queens can produce at will. One whiff is enough to reduce other Mandasars to trembling wrecks — barely able to think straight, and pathetically eager to do whatever the queen tells them. Like an obedience drug you inhale. It takes a heck of a lot of self-control for any Mandasar to resist it, and most don’t even try. After all, why would you disobey your rightful ruler?

Verity hardly ever used the pheromone herself; she thought it was beneath her dignity, doping her subjects into submission. Almost no one in the palace had ever smelled the stuff before, till the Fasskisters doused themselves like it was cheap perfume. Heaven knows how the Fasskisters reproduced the pheromone — maybe a secret team of nanites hung around Verity till she produced some, after which the nanites carried a sample home for analysis. However they did it, the Fasskisters had obviously worked out the formula to perfection… because every last warrior, worker, and gentle dropped belly down and groveled as the Fasskisters pranced into the hall.

Every voice fell quiet. No sound but the babble of fountains and the slow thud of feet as the Fasskisters came forward. The six of them stepped over each prostrate body in their way, walking up to the silver dais that Verity used as a throne. I had no experience reading Mandasar facial expressions back then, but any fool could see the queen was almost homicidally furious. Any second, I could imagine her saying, To hell with sentience and the League of Peoples, these Fasskister fucks are going down.

That’s when Samantha stepped forward, straight in front of the Fasskisters, between them and the throne. I stayed right at Sam’s side, determined to protect my sister for the full second and a half it would take the queen to kill me. The two of us stood bang in the middle, with six elephant-sized robots to our right, and a seething Verity, just as big and up on a meter-high dais, to our left. I felt small and surrounded, outnumbered and overshadowed… so it was a darned good thing I had absolute confidence Sam would fix everything with a few clever words.

"My job," she said, "is to get people to talk. When people aren’t ready to talk…" She turned toward the Fasskisters. "When they just want to piss everybody off and deliberately cause scenes…" Sam reached into her handbag. "Then you need a way to catch their attention."

She pulled out a small globe of glass crystal. Every eye in the room followed her hand as she passed the globe to me. Under her breath, she murmured, "Break it."

For a second I hesitated — I hated all the fuss whenever I broke something — but Sam was smarter than me and must know what she was doing. With a sudden clap of my hands, I smashed the globe between my palms.

Glass tinkled down to the floor. Little drops of my blood fell too, though my palms were callused enough from martial arts that I didn’t get cut too badly. What I felt more clearly than the shards of glass digging into my skin was a kind of fuzziness in the air between my fingers: nano.

I lifted my arms and spread them wide, feeling blood trickle down my wrists; but I could imagine the teeny nano-bots fanning out, zipping toward the Fasskisters who loomed above us.

The closest Fasskister must have known enough to worry about what the crystal held — Fasskisters of all people know about nanotech weapons — so the big queen robot tried to take a step back. The body moved, but the legs stayed where they were, quietly separating themselves from the main shell. With a muffled thud, the robot’s body clumped onto the turquoisy blue carpet. The legs stayed standing a heartbeat longer, then toppled sideways away from the body, like tent poles flopping down from a collapsed tent. Some of the other Fasskisters tried to get away; the rest stayed rooted to the spot, maybe thinking they’d be all right if they didn’t move. But it didn’t matter. Within ten seconds, the legs fell off every queen robot there, leaving the big yellow machines (and their drivers) stuck high and dry in the middle of the hall.

Verity’s antennas and whiskers slowly relaxed from anger into a very satisfied smile. The other Mandasars, noses still full of royal pheromone, stayed quivering on the floor till she said to them, "Laugh."

The room erupted into sound — kind of like human snickering, not loud but intense, with much waving of antennas and clacking of claws. A bunch of warriors dragged the broken robots out of the palace and took them to Diplomats Row, where the legless queens were left on the curb outside the Fasskister embassy. Meanwhile, Verity showered praises on Sam and me, declaring us Beloved Companions of the Throne.

Our first night in the Great Hall might have won Verity’s friendship, but it sure didn’t soothe the bad feelings between Troyen and the Fasskisters. Things got worse… especially because Fasskisters began to use their royal pheromone all around the planet. In a business meeting with Mandasar manufacturers, they might let a bit of the pheromone loose "just to aid in negotiating a fair deal." There were also rumors of pheromone bombs being triggered in taverns or schoolrooms, and someone telling the gas-shocked Mandasars to rebel against the queen.

I don’t know if such things really happened; but rumors started circulating, and next thing you knew, Fasskister warehouses were getting burned by Mandasar vigilantes. The Fasskisters reacted by protecting their properties with really nasty security stuff, not quite lethal but pretty darned near-poisons that could cause permanent nerve damage, booby traps designed to cripple, flash bombs so bright they blinded every Mandasar within range, including innocent bystanders.

As time went on, Sam negotiated agreements to ease the tensions, but nothing ever stuck. Troublemakers were jailed or kicked off planet; then more troublemakers took their place.

Of course, kicking rabble-rouser Fasskisters off Troyen caused problems of its own. A lot of times, when the Fasskisters had a chance to cool off and think, they’d begin to doubt whether their behavior had been 100 percent sentient. Pretty soon, the banished Fasskisters turned pure terrified how they’d acted "without due concern for sentient life," and they moaned they’d surely be killed by the League if they left the Troyen system. Our navy ended up paying the Fasskisters to build themselves an orbital habitat close to Troyen’s sun — part of some settlement Sam brokered, as the Technocracy tried to keep both Troyen and the Fasskisters happy.

Why did the Technocracy bother with the expense? Because humans needed Mandasar medical technology and Fasskister robotics. Once we got involved in the mess, we couldn’t walk away without infuriating both our trading partners. And as the situation on Troyen got worse, we all still thought the bickering could be sorted out with just one more formal accord.

Sure.

In one of those accords, I got married to Queen Verity. Sometimes I think Sam set it up as a joke — so she could claim to be the only twenty-fifth-century human who’d arranged a diplomatic marriage. She also had a great time teasing me about snuggling up to an elephant-sized lobster… which I didn’t actually do, not in any sexual way.

Unlike gentles, queens don’t go into egg-heat on a nine-year cycle. Instead, they produce an egg once every twelve weeks; at the right time, they grab themselves a warrior, do what has to be done, then forget about sex till the next egg comes along. In other words, queens are nearly as platonic as gentles: when they have sex, it’s about fertilizing eggs, not, um… well, about all the things that sex is about with humans. Since I was the wrong species, Verity would never even think about me at such times.

(Then again, she gave me all those maidservants to sleep with. It never occurred to me before this very second, but maybe she thought I might want to… um.)

I haven’t said much about the other queens: Fortitude, Honor, and Clemency. They each had their own huge continents to rule, like provincial governors who answered to the high queen. The lesser queens were never too happy being subservient, but they’d got along okay till things turned tense with the Fasskisters. Then the whole political order started to fall apart. When the world goes to pot, queens have this natural instinct to boss folks around. It doesn’t matter whether they have any good ideas to deal with the crisis, they’re just absolutely convinced they must take charge.

That’s what happened with the Fasskister mess: clamp-downs on the Fasskisters, or the Mandasars, or both. While Verity sat in Unshummin and tried to keep everyone cool, the lesser queens ached to exert their own power. Next thing you knew, each lesser queen had created a secret police force to deal with the troubles… and these forces were made up of segregated warriors.

Segregated: kept in separate barracks, where they didn’t interact with workers or warriors. In troubled times, the queens said, it was important to have elite squads of soldiers who would take orders without asking the tiniest questions. Maybe some bleeding hearts would condemn this as brainwashing, but it was just so darned efficient.

Verity had to tread softly — if she angered the lesser queens too much, they might revolt outright. Lesser queens had rebelled against the high queen before. So maybe a few segregated warriors weren’t so bad. And after that, what was wrong with segregating workers in key industries, to make sure production didn’t decline? And segregating a few gentles to use in think tanks, because they were so much more focused when not distracted by family.

You get the idea: the thin edge of the wedge prying Troyen apart. But law and order still might have survived if someone hadn’t cracked open the frozen queens.

Just outside the grounds of the high queen’s palace stood the Royal Cryogenic Center: storehouse for the next generation of Troyen’s rulers. The thing was, only an existing queen could create a new queen, by nursing a six-year-old gentle girl for a full year. Then what did you do? It was really really dangerous to have queens hanging around when there was no land for them to rule — that’d just be asking for trouble.

In olden days, the solution was usually for a queen to avoid suckling up a successor till very late in life — by the time the new queen was ready to rule, the old queen would likely be dead anyway. But anyone can see how many things can go wrong: a queen might die before she creates an heir; the queen might create an heir but die before the girl is old enough to take over; the old queen might actually live a long long time, leaving the younger queen seething and plotting a coup.

So the modern approach was for queens to produce heirs whenever they wanted, let the girls grow to age eighteen under the guidance of their mothers, then freeze the kids into suspended animation till one of the old queens died. This made sure there were always young queens ready to take over, but kept them from interfering with their seniors. Even if the junior queens weren’t too happy being put on ice, they accepted it as a reasonable compromise — it guaranteed that sometime down the road, maybe two or three generations after she was born, each queen would have her full chance to reign, without having to fight other claimants to the throne.

All well and good… till the night when I was woken by a huge whacking explosion near the palace.

I leapt out of bed and shouted something stupid like, "What was that?" But the maidservant who’d been keeping me company didn’t answer: she just lay there trembling like a scared rabbit. By then, I knew the symptoms well enough — even if I couldn’t smell it myself, there must be a ton of royal pheromone wafting through the air. The pheromone couldn’t have come from Verity, since she was gone on a visit to Queen Fortitude; I suspected the Fasskisters had set off a big old gas bomb somewhere close by, and they were now up to no good in the palace.

The palace guard had learned to take precautions against pheromone attacks, with gas masks part of their standard equipment and a few airtight security control rooms. I ran to the nearest of those rooms to see what was going on; the sergeant on duty told me the explosion wasn’t in the palace itself, but the Cryogenic Center next door. That was very bad… especially since the palace forces couldn’t spare many people to check out the situation there. They were afraid the big boom was just a diversion to draw guards outside the walls, while the real target was the palace.

In the end, I ran to the Cryogenic Center by myself. Well, not by myself — I didn’t have a squad of warriors backing me up, but I sure wasn’t the only person hurrying to see what the explosion had done. Half the folks from Diplomats Row were racing in the same direction, Divians, Myriapods, even a thing that looked like a tumbleweed with eyestalks. Me, if I’d been a diplomat, I would have stayed in a nice safe embassy rather than going to gawk at the latest act of terrorism in a not-quite-declared war; but diplomats are real big fans of viewing atrocities close-up, and maybe getting their pictures taken in the process.

By the time I got to the Cryogenics building, my sister was already standing outside, staring at a big hole in the wall. Gushers of steam poured out through the gap, so thick you couldn’t see a thing inside… but you could hear sounds like metal clanging and stuff getting thrown against other stuff. Someone in there was making a real mess.

"Fasskisters?" I whispered to Sam.

"Looks like their handiwork," Sam told me, not whispering at all. She didn’t seem to care if other bystanders heard every word she said. "First, pheromones to neutralize the locals. Then a bomb attack against young queens… frozen and unable to defend themselves. This has Fasskister written all over it."

I stared at the steam pouring out into the night. "Maybe we should go in and see if someone needs help."

Sam looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, "All right."

We moved forward… and the crowd of gawkers parted to let us through. I think they were eager to see someone go inside: just not eager to be the ones to do it. Sam let me go ahead — I was the bodyguard, wasn’t I, the one who should take the lead — so I was the one who stuck my hand, slowly and carefully, into the steam.

It was dry and very cold… not water steam at all, but some other chemical. Cold enough that real water ice was forming on the street under our feet; I could see my footprints in the frost as I walked forward. I could also see footprints, real human footprints, of someone who’d come out of the building sometime not so long ago — if it’d been more than a minute or two, the footprints would have got frosted over again.

I turned to Sam. The steam was already icing her hair with frost. "Did you see anyone come out of the building before I got here?"

She shook her head. "No. Why?"

I just shrugged. Someone else could investigate this whole business later on, someone smarter than me. Dumb old Edward shouldn’t put on airs, thinking he’d found a Big Important Clue. Better just to stick to what I was good at: blundering into trouble.

Close to the hole, it was possible to see a little way forward through the steam — nothing distinct, just some bright light inside, and a shadow moving in front of it. The clanging noises were still going on, and something that sounded like ripping. "Maybe you should stay out here," I told Sam. "It might not be safe."

"Then it’s not safe for you either," she answered.

"I’ll just—"

She grabbed my arm and yanked me back. "Fasskister!" she shouted.

Coming forward through the steam was something big and yellow, backlit by the light inside. For a moment, I thought it was a Fasskister, dressed in one of those queen-shaped robots. The thing had a jerky movement, not like the walk of a real queen… but then I started to wonder how a real queen would walk if she was cold and stiff from years in cryogenic storage.

I pulled Sam to one side, out of the steam, out of the path of a queen who might be mad at the way she’d been woken up.

The queen came slowly out onto the pavement, ice still coating much of her shell. Any lesser creature wouldn’t have been able to move; but it takes more than a layer of ice to stop a full-fledged Mandasar hive-queen. She was young, she was strong, she was a flaming saffron yellow far brighter than middle-aged Verity… and she was spitting with rage.

"Sissen su?" she hissed. Who did this?

"It might have been Fasskisters," Sam answered in Mandasar, "but we have no definite—"

"Fasskisters!" the queen roared. "Alien saboteurs?"

"We don’t know that," said a Myriapod back in the crowd. "Troyen has several factions who have resorted to violence in the past…"

"And the high queen permits this?" the young queen asked. "Is she an utter fool?" "Verity’s real smart," I said. "Things are just kind of complicated."

"No," the queen snapped, glaring at me. "Things are very simple. Someone has committed an act of wanton destruction, right outside the high queen’s palace… and all I see are outsiders come to leer at the chaos. Where is the queen herself?"

"Um," I said in a weak voice. "She’s visiting Fortitude in Therol."

"Leaving a vacuum in leadership here at home. Ridiculous! Appalling! How could she let this planet get so out of hand?" The queen took a deep breath. "Clearly, this Queen Verity is unfit to rule. It’s my duty to set things right."

The young queen smashed her claws together the way queens do when declaring an edict — kind of like a human clapping hands imperiously. The action knocked off chunks of ice that had collected on her claws; chips of snow flew in all directions, spraying over Sam and me. By the time I’d wiped my eyes clear, the queen was stomping off into the darkness, leaving a trail of meltwater.

"Um," I said. Which was when another queen staggered her way out of the steam, her face fuzzy white with frost. "Sissen su?" she growled.

Twelve queens in all — every one that’d been sitting in cryosleep, dreaming of claiming a throne. None of them was interested in waiting a single instant longer, now that they were free. They all had the same reaction as the first one: Verity was doing a lousy job, and it was up to them to fix everything. After a while, it got kind of funny, listening to them say the same things. "It’s my duty to set things right."

Even then, I knew better than to laugh.

The unfrozen queens didn’t hang around Unshummin. Within hours they were spread all over the planet and within days, each had claimed a group of soldiers to protect herself: well-equipped soldiers from existing armies, won over by pheromones and promises and charisma. Remember that the Fasskisters had spent years on their whispering campaign, preaching how Verity and the lower queens were doing a lousy job running the planet. When a new bunch of queens came along as a fresh alternative, a lot of folks were keen to give them a try.

As for Verity… that’s when she finally lost heart. In public, she was still the tough old queen, in control and able to face down all opposition; but at night, she’d just sit in her private chambers, staring at the wall. Sometimes I sat with her; sometimes Sam did; sometimes the queen wanted to be alone.

A month after the mess at the Cryogenic Center, I got summoned to the queen’s bedroom. Sam was already there, plus a shy little Mandasar girl I’d seen around the palace now and then — one of Verity’s many children, which kind of made her my stepdaughter. I’d tried to keep track of all the kids’ names, but with Verity laying an egg every twelve weeks it got tricky to remember after a while. I thought this girl was called Listener, with the hidden name Yeerlevin; but Verity introduced her as Innocence.

That was the kind of name only given to queens. Which pretty much told me what was going on. It would soon be that week in spring when Verity’s venom cycle started. In previous years, the high queen had always been too busy to nurse a successor; now, she was going to do it, because she might not have another chance. My sister and Verity wanted Innocence to be a big secret. With twelve outlaw queens already terrorizing the countryside, people might not appreciate Verity mothering up another contender for power. If word got out, a lot of folks would also take it as a sign Verity didn’t expect to live too much longer… which was absolutely true, but it would still wreck public confidence. Finally, if the other queens heard about little Innocence, they’d see her as a perfect target for kidnapping, holding hostage, all that stuff — not just now, but for a long time to come, till the girl could take care of herself. She was only six; after a year of nursing with Verity, Innocence might brighten from gentle brown to royal yellow, but she’d still just be a seven-year-old with a lot of growing to do.

So Sam and I were going to be the girl’s glashpodin: like godparents, charged with taking care of her in secret till she came of age. The job would start immediately. For one thing, Sam had to assemble a team of doctors to take care of Innocence through the year-long transformation — doctors who could be counted on not to blab, and who could also deal with any complications that might crop up while the little girl changed. Becoming a queen wasn’t always an easy process; in fact, the poor kid could easily stay sick and bleary through the whole thing.

As it happened, I was the one who got sick and bleary. The very day Innocence began to nurse, I caught the Coughing Jaundice.

If you want to know how I caught the disease, I had no idea at the time. There was a kind of embarrassing ceremony in the royal chambers at midnight — Sam and me standing there as witnesses, while Verity asked the Four-Clawed Goddess for blessing; then poor little Innocence, terrified out of her mind, took a tiny tiny sip of venom from both of Verity’s stingers… after which, a horde of doctors descended on the child, taking blood tests, sputum samples, and heaven knows what else. Innocence stayed snuggled up with her mother for the night, I went back to my room alone, for fear a maidservant might get curious where I’d been so late…

…and I just never woke up the next morning. When I finally came to, it was ten days later and I was in the special secret infirmary that’d originally been arranged for Innocence. She was there too, just a bit under the weather, nothing serious… and most of the doctors who were supposed to be looking after the girl were locked full-time on my case, trying to keep me alive.

In a way, my condition helped keep Innocence a secret that whole year. Folks in the palace knew about the private infirmary — you can never hide things from servants — but everybody thought the doctors were for me. Innocence was just one of Verity’s many daughters, assigned by her mother to keep me company… and occasionally to see the queen in private to "report on my condition": a pretty good cover for the many times Innocence wanted to see Verity alone for a few minutes, and sip a bit more venom.

So Innocence and I got to know each other… when I wasn’t busy coughing my head off or lying jaundiced and comatose. Yes, I’d tried to spend time with all Verity’s children — my stepkids — but most of them seemed pretty uncomfortable having a human think he was their father. Me, I wasn’t so great at being a dad either; my own father hadn’t set much of an example, and anyway, what felt natural to a human parent was nothing like Mandasar kids expected. As just one example, the little boys had a habit of trying to clip me with their claws. Their baby pincers wouldn’t have done a thing to a real Mandasar’s carapace, but they could cut up a human nice and bloody. End result: I was pretty darned useless for playing that particular game.

But with Innocence, I could just talk. She snuggled with me too, because Verity was too busy for that kind of thing. The poor kid needed tons of snuggling, because she was halfway to terrified most of the time. Strange things were happening to her body. Doctors were constantly poking at her. None of her siblings or friends were allowed to see her. Worst of all, people kept telling her she’d have to rule the planet someday, and that she was going to become huge and dangerous and intimidating like Verity herself. Who wouldn’t be frightened by that?

It helped her to be with me. Sam said it was good even when I was sick or delirious — Innocence stuck right by me, holding my hand, giving me sips of water, talking and talking and talking. It gave the girl something to think about besides herself. Kind of like a sick pet. And she had queenly instincts waking up inside her: the need to be in charge of someone, to give orders. "Time for the muscle stimulators, Daddy Edward; and don’t say you can exercise on your own, because you don’t. The only reason you’re strong enough to push me away is because I use the machine on you when you sleep. So stay still and let me strap this to your legs."

Even six-year-old queens know how to lay down the law.

A year passed. Sam told me they held another ceremony when Innocence took her last drink of Verity’s venom — just a tiny tiny sip like the very first, because she didn’t need any more. The little brown gentle had become a little yellow queen: no longer scared of the future, even if she should have been.

They held the ceremony in my sickroom, just so they could say I was there. My body may have been present, but my mind wasn’t: far off and unconscious, suffering through the final throes of my disease. A few days later, I finally woke up… and not a single cough in my throat. Another week, and Innocence was threatening to tie me down again. I swore I was feeling a hundred times better. She told me a blood-consort wasn’t allowed to argue with a queen. "You’re staying in bed, Daddy Edward, till Dr. Gashwan says you’re healthy."

But it didn’t work out that way.

I woke alone in the night, wondering what the awful beeping sound was. Some annoying medical monitor? But there weren’t any nurses rushing to check my condition. In fact, there wasn’t even a light coming from the desk outside my room. Pitch-blackness, and nothing but that continuing beep-beep-beep.

The sound came from my wrist. Some navy someone was signaling a Mayday. It might have been anybody from the diplomatic mission, but I knew in my heart it was Sam.

Without thinking, I rolled out of bed and stumbled toward the door. After being sick so long, I was nowhere near my physical peak, but Innocence and the muscle-working machines had kept me from going to seed. I could walk just fine and even run a bit if worse came to worst.

And maybe it had. There were no lights anywhere, not even on the medical sensors that were supposed to watch me night and day — someone must have cut the power, and even the emergency generators. That meant big trouble. I didn’t know much about what’d happened in the year gone by, just that things had gone down hill. A long way down hill. Maybe so bad that one of the outlaw queens had decided to attack Unshummin palace.

Outside my room, the doctors and nurses were gone. In their place, five palace guards wearing gas masks had ranged themselves around the room, all with souped-up stun-pistols aimed at the far door… like they expected an enemy to come smashing through any second.

"What’s going on?" I whispered.

They whirled on me, and for a heartbeat I thought they were going to shoot; but one of them, a sergeant, snapped, "Hold your fire," and nobody pulled the trigger. "Go back to bed, consort," the sergeant told me. "There’s been a mutiny. It’s not safe in the halls."

"Is the queen all right?" I asked. "And my sister?"

"Don’t know." He glanced at the others, then turned back to me. "Our assignment is to keep you safe."

"Me? Who cares about me?" I held up my wrist; it was still beeping. "You and your men are going to help me save someone who’s in trouble. Do you hear me?"

For a second he didn’t answer: his antennas bent just a bit, as if he was smiling. Then he snapped a salute. "Yes, sir. We’ll follow you."

The six of us raced through dark halls, tracking the Mayday. Once or twice, we passed close to fighting; we’d hear the whir of stunners somewhere down a corridor, then running feet and voices shouting orders. But none of the action ever came our way. We saw plenty of bodies, unconscious and dead, but nobody stopped us as we raced straight from the infirmary to Queen Verity’s chambers… the source of the Mayday.

Outside the door, the queen’s personal guards had been butchered. Inside, so had the queen — decapitated by some assassin who’d crept unseen through the palace during all the ruckus. Verity’s head had been laid on a big serving plate in the middle of her own dining table.

A few steps away sprawled my sister’s body, apparently stabbed through the heart while trying to defend the queen. Sam had triggered the Mayday… and even as I stared at the blood spilling from her chest, the beeping signal stopped. I knew what that meant — not enough bioelectric energy left in her body to power the transmitter.

A navy quartermaster once told me those transmitters could keep drawing power from your tissues at least five minutes after you were dead.

I took one step toward my sister’s body. Then hands grabbed me from behind: bright red hands, the sergeant on my right, one of his men on my left. They were only using their Cheejreth arms, but at that moment, they were strong enough to hold me.

"Nothing we can do here," the sergeant said. His voice was muffled by his gas mask. "No one to save."

"Wrong," I told him. "There’s still someone unaccounted for."

Innocence. My sort-of daughter. The new high queen.

She had a secret room in the palace, but not secret enough. When we got there, the door had been blown off its hinges by explosives. There was no sign of a struggle, no blood, no little yellow corpse; it looked like Innocence hadn’t been home when the assassin showed up.

Where else might she go? Would she run and hide like a seven-year-old girl, or throw herself into action like a queen? My first thought was she might run for my sickroom, to rescue her beloved Daddy Edward; but she hadn’t shown up, had she? The guards would have seen her the second she came charging through the door…

They’d had their stunners out, ready to fire. A single stun-shot wouldn’t take down a queen, not even a young one like Innocence. But five shots simultaneously would. And they were all wearing gas masks, so it wouldn’t matter if Innocence surrounded herself with a cloud of her own royal pheromone.

Now the same guards were waiting for me to tell them where Innocence might hide. They wanted me to lead them straight to her.

The sergeant had told me, "There’s been a mutiny." He hadn’t mentioned which side he was on.

Now the sergeant asked, "Where should we go, sir? You said there was someone you wanted us to protect?"

Yes — the sergeant definitely knew about Innocence. He shouldn’t have known, but he did. And he also knew I was so stupid, I wasn’t likely to see through their trick.

"This way," I said. "I know where she’s gone."

Unshummin palace is shaped like a Mandasar queen. Really. A long central body with eight legs sticking out at the sides — the legs are actually separate wings of the building, three stories tall — and up at the head, the queen’s "claws" are four more building wings stretched out on diagonals. The claw parts even end in crescent-shaped rotundas, so from the air they look like pincers.

Much farther back, where the palace’s "tail" meets the wider part of the body, there are two big glass domes to represent venom sacs. The domes are actually huge greenhouse roofs; beneath them lies the Royal Conservatory, with tropical-zone plants under the right-hand dome and temperate-zone plants under the left.

The right-hand part is the closest thing to a jungle you’ll find within a thousand kilometers of Unshummin. That’s where I led the five guards.

"There’s this little girl," I whispered to them. "And she has this secret place where she goes when she’s really scared."

They nodded and even smiled, like they understood. What I said wasn’t true — Innocence could never have gone from the infirmary to the conservatory without being seen by dozens of people — but the guards were willing to believe me. They didn’t suspect I suspected… till I led them into the middle of the dark trees and vines, then suddenly dashed away through a grove of Koshavese fire oaks.

The trees grew too close together for the warriors to follow me; and I moved fast enough that I was out of sight before they could bring their stunners to bear. The guns whirred anyway, but I didn’t feel a tingle — what with the dark and the tree cover and the gas masks on the guards’ faces, I guess they weren’t aiming very well.

Nice thing about those gas masks: the guards couldn’t sniff me out. A Mandasar warrior depends so much on his nose, he’s at a numb disadvantage when his smelling’s sealed off. Mandasar eyes are just as good as human, and their ears are sharp enough to hear a big guy like me blundering his way through the bush… but without their noses, they lose their edge: a fraction slower on everything they do. That was good — after a year of being sick, I was a fraction slower too, and I don’t mean a tiny fraction like one over a thousand.

My plan was just to lose the soldiers in the conservatory, then duck out a door to find Innocence. Just one problem: there were three doors — one toward the head of the palace, one toward the tail, and one that led through a bunch of potting rooms to the other half of the conservatory. While I was still dodging through the undergrowth, the sergeant sent three of his men racing to cover those exits. That left two of them to search for one of me… and they had all the guns.

I’ve already said I’m not one of those guys who can creep through the dark without making a sound. Lucky for me, most Mandasars are even worse at being stealthy than I am; there’s no such thing as a silent bulldozer. There’s also no such thing as a Mandasar who can climb trees — great big lobsters have no monkeys anywhere in their evolutionary past. Your average warrior never looks for trouble above head height… which is probably true for human soldiers too, but our species should know better.

Up I went — into some kind of tree with easy-to-climb branches. Its bark felt like moldy cheese: hard underneath, but with an outer layer of mushy fuzz. It smelled like moldy cheese too… moldy something anyway, all pulpy and rotten. I wasn’t happy getting the stuff on the front of my uniform, but I had an easy time digging in my fingers for handholds. Without much noise, I pulled myself up a story and a half above the ground, then settled into the shadows between a big branch and the trunk.

The sergeant passed cautiously below me. I considered dropping onto his head, but decided against it — considering how out of practice I was, I wouldn’t take him out instantly. Anyway, it would be sure to cause noise. The other warrior looking for me was only a short distance off; even if I managed to finish off the sergeant, I’d be shot unconscious before I escaped.

Instead, I waited till the guards searching for me were down the far end of the place (it’s a big conservatory), then I carefully began to clamber from tree to tree. This was just an exhibit, not a real rain forest; all kinds of trees had been crammed in together, and the gardeners had done that pruning trick that makes the branches grow out instead of up. I could sneak from one tree to the next without much trouble, heading for the door that led back into the main part of the palace.

My movement wasn’t completely silent, but neither was the conservatory. Birds lived in the place, the little flitty kind of birds you find all over Troyen. Sam once told me the feathers on Troyenese birds didn’t evolve the same way as on Earth — not as strong or aerodynamic or something, so local birds can’t fly if they get much bigger than a chickadee. The ones in the conservatory were all smaller than that, on the order of hummingbirds; and with us big people thrashing in the dark, the birds were zipping around like frantic wasps, making leaves rustle all over the place. Practically every step I took, I disturbed one of the little guys and sent it flying off to another tree… but the warriors were also scaring up flocks wherever they went, not to mention a bunch of birds with bad nerves who suddenly burst into a racket of cheeping for no apparent reason. The warriors couldn’t hear me over all that noise; so it only took me a few minutes to get within ten meters of the door.

One guard between me and escape. With his gas mask on, he couldn’t smell me; with the darkness, he couldn’t see me; with the birds making racket all over the place, he couldn’t hear me. But everything would change if I jumped out of the tree and tried to cross the gap between us — I figured it was fifty-fifty whether I’d get to him before he fired his stunner, and even less likely that I’d be able to put him down before his friends showed up.

So I stayed in the tree, hoping for a lucky break. Which I got, sort of.

"This is taking too long," the sergeant growled from somewhere far behind me. He was speaking in Mandasar, of course, but I understood just fine. "Take your masks off, and let’s sniff this bastard out."

"But Sarge…" one of the other guards said.

"The queen’s dead," the sergeant snapped, "and the brat obviously isn’t here. We’ll be all right. Do it."

They did. As the guard in the doorway began to slip his gas mask off, I knew I’d never have a better time to move — within seconds, he’d smell a human within spitting distance. I hit the floor running, with only a tiny stumble; and the guard was slowed by taking off his mask. Even then, I nearly didn’t make it in time… but at the last second, the guard hesitated a teeny bit.

I smashed him with a palm heel under the snout, snapping his head back hard. The strike was too weak to knock him out completely, but it dazed him long enough for me to rip the stunner out of his Cheejreth arms. Jumping back out of reach of his waist pincers, I shot him three times fast in the head. He slumped, his nose whupping down hard onto the floor.

Behind me, the other guards were shouting — they must have heard the stunner’s whir. I raced through the door, knowing I’d never outrun four Mandasar warriors but not having a lot of other options. The most important thing was getting around a corner fast, so I wouldn’t be in the line of fire from the stunners. At the first side corridor I dived off to the right, just as guns whirred behind me. I rolled to my feet and was about to start running again when a voice whispered behind me, "Psst!"

I turned. Directly across from me, where the side corridor continued, someone stood in the shadows. Even without lights, I could make out the buttercup yellow of her shell. The warriors raced up the main hall toward us. As they came level with Innocence and me, it was like the four of them were clotheslined by a wire running across their path at nose height; but there was no wire, just the smell of royal pheromone driving up their snouts and into their brains. The guards fell twitching. I stepped out of cover and drained the batteries of my stunner, making sure they wouldn’t get up.

Old Queen Verity, ever the long-range planner, had left an escape route for her newly royal daughter. Outside in the royal gardens, a shed held one end of a Sperm-tail transport tube. The tube led off to parts unknown, maybe halfway around the world, to a secret safe house where Innocence could grow up in peace. I carried my daughter to the shed, all wrapped in black so her bright yellow body wouldn’t be seen by mutineers; and I personally fed her into that Sperm-tail, then smashed the anchor that held the Unshummin end of the tube in place. The tail slithered off, like a string yanked from the far end… and that was the last I saw of my little girl, my daughter, the high-queen-in-waiting.

I dearly wanted to go with her — where else did I have to be, who else was left that I cared about? But someone had to smash the anchor. Besides, if I disappeared, the navy would search for me… and I didn’t want anyone snooping around, for fear the world would learn about Innocence. She was only seven years old; till she grew up, it was safer if nobody knew she existed.

Me, I headed back to the queen’s royal chamber. I avoided the pockets of fighting; too tired to help the good guys. Anyway, how would I tell the good from the bad? And with everyone dead or gone, what was worth fighting for? So I slunk through the palace as if I were the only man left on Troyen — alone, with Samantha, Verity, and Innocence all taken from me.

In the high queen’s chamber, the bodies had disappeared. I imagined them carried off by mutineers, so the corpses could be displayed as somebody’s trophies. Sickened by that thought, I fell to my knees in the sticky patch of blood where Sam had been lying… pressed my hands down on the dampness, and lifted my red-stained fingers to my nose…

Then it was days later, and I was on the navy’s moon-base. No memory of how I’d gotten from one place to the other. They said some navy security guards found me and dragged me onto an escape shuttle — abandoning a planet gone mad, transporting me to the safe airless silence of space.

With Verity dead, no one on the planet could maintain order. Everybody who could leave got out fast. Including the Fasskisters who started the whole mess.

The Fasskisters had one last indignity to dump on poor old Troyen: what they called the Beneficent Swarm. Without telling anyone else, they’d left huge caches of nano in Fasskister warehouses all over the planet. At the very instant the last Fasskister left Troyen’s atmosphere, all those caches opened wide… spreading clouds of self-replicating nanites in every direction.

According to the Fasskisters, the nanites were designed "to protect the Mandasars from themselves." In a way, that was even true — because of the Swarm, the Mandasars didn’t have a chance to nuke themselves to oblivion.

The microscopic robots ate plastics, particularly those used to insulate electrical wires, to build circuit boards, and to act as glue or sealants. Within a week, much of Troyen’s technological base had literally fallen apart… including all computers, the power grid, and most communication systems. The nanites also shut down nuclear weapons, nerve-gas missiles, and a bunch of labs where clever Mandasar doctors were studying alien organisms for their germ-warfare potential; the Beneficent Swarm even wrecked important chunks of military planes, tanks, and submarines. The Fasskisters could honestly say they’d saved the Mandasars from a war of total extinction.

On the other hand, you can kill a lot of people with spears and crossbows. For twenty years, that’s exactly what the Mandasars did.

Laughter. People were laughing. I came to myself and realized I was at the captain’s table on Jacaranda, still possessed by the spirit that kept shoving me out of my body. Whatever the spirit just said must have been hysterically funny… the way Prope giggled into her hand and Festina’s eyes glistened. Even Kaisho, face hidden by hair, was chuckling. I guess higher organisms aren’t immune to being disarmed by the occasional joke.

I wished I knew what’d just come out of my mouth. For the past little while — I don’t know how long — I’d fallen out of touch with what I’d been saying. Blanked out in my own thoughts, of Innocence, of Sam, of the night everybody died.

Had I told about that? I didn’t know.

Prope, Festina, and Kaisho just kept laughing… but when I glanced to my right, Lieutenant Harque didn’t look nearly so chuckly. Yes, he was smiling; but it was the strained sort of smile people wear when they don’t have a choice. I wondered whether I’d made a joke at his expense. I didn’t think so — if the others were laughing because I’d teased him, they’d glance his way from time to time, just to catch the look on his face. So far as I could see, all three women acted like he wasn’t even there. As if I was the only man at the table worth listening to.

Which explained why Harque looked so sour.

Slowly the laughter eased away. Prope’s eyes remained shiny — beaming straight at me, glimmery bright. I couldn’t mistake the look… and I was returning it, strong and clear, like electricity passing between us. Terrified, I fought the thing that wanted to lock me with the captain in that heart-pounding gaze. Sometime in the past hour, while I wasn’t paying attention, the spirit possessing me had built upon Prope’s light little flirtations and made them bloom into…

Into…

No, With a burst of willpower, I grabbed back control of my body and forced myself to lower my eyes. Maybe if I shied off, I could undo the effects of wooing the captain… and of wooing Festina and Kaisho too, by the look of them. All three women simmered with the same gush of attraction, as if my wit and my charm had dazzled them all.

Scared and ashamed, I turned away from the table. Would it be so bad if I just muttered, "Excuse me," and ran to my cabin? Rude, yes, but would it be so bad?

My eyes swept over the Mandasars at the next table. The five of them were shaking, shuddering like a group attack of epilepsy. Their nostrils had flared wide, inhaling to the very bottom of their lungs.

Only one thing could make Mandasars react that way. Somehow, undetectable to human noses, the air must be filled with the pure piercing scent of royal pheromone.

27 WATCHING FESTINA PUNCH

I was still staring at the Mandasars when someone at a nearby table gasped. "Are they sick?"

"No," I said. "Not sick."

More crew members were looking now: standing up to see over other people’s heads, and muttering, "What idiot brought diseased lobsters aboard a navy ship?" Things escalated to a general kerfuffle, with Veresian getting called, and nervous folks running out, and Prope glaring at Festina for exposing everyone to contagious aliens, and Festina asking me what could be wrong, and me saying I didn’t know when I knew full well, except where the pheromone was coming from. Eventually, the captain cleared the lounge "to give the doctor room to work." I wanted to stick around to make sure the Mandasars were okay; but Prope took me by the arm and walked me to my cabin, all of a sudden starting to talk in a giddy girlish voice you wouldn’t expect from a starship captain. Half the time, I couldn’t even follow what she said — I was getting sleepier by the minute thanks to space lag, being shifted off my body’s day/night cycle.

Now, I had a giddy woman on my arm; and I suspected she’d be in my bed soon, unless I somehow cooled her off. I didn’t want to make her mad, considering we were stuck on Jacaranda the next few weeks… but I sure didn’t want to sleep with her either. Barely a day ago, Prope was ready to dump me somewhere awful — and she might still do it if she got orders from the High Council. Some people might like rumpling the sheets with a ruthless cut-your-throat woman, but me, I had more gentle standards.

So I wasn’t in the mood to get lovey-dovey. It surprised me she was so keen for it: I mean, a lot of women like how I look, and Prope might have been thinking, "His father’s an admiral," but even so, the captain was acting awfully loose and loopy. As if she was drunk or something… except I couldn’t smell any alcohol on her. The way she was clinging right on my arm, I could smell a lot of other things — shampoo in her hair, soap behind her ears, chocolate mousse on her breath, sweat where her shoulder and hip pressed against me — but not a drop of booze.

Maybe she was just the sort of person who could make herself passionate whenever she wanted: turn it on, turn it off, like the diplomats I’d known on Troyen. Heaven knows, Sam was a master of whipping up whatever emotions she wanted… the same as a hive-queen could pump out pheromones at will, whether she wanted to scare people, or get them to listen, or even to make them love her.

I wondered what kind of pheromones could make the captain not love me.

When we reached my room, Prope didn’t even slow down: right through the door and on into the cabin, never letting me go. I think she intended to drag me straight to the bed… and she might have, if I hadn’t caught a strong whiff of something that reminded me of buttered toast. The smell was more than a smell — it had the feel of toast too, steamy hot, with a gritty, crumbly texture. Don’t ask me how an odor can have a texture; but the sensation was so strong, I drew back sharply in surprise.

My stopping caught Prope off guard. She was kind of jerked back by her grip on my arm — her momentum wasn’t nearly as strong as my inertia when I wanted to stand still. I stopped… listened… sniffed. Prope kept tugging on my elbow, not really hard but persistent, like a kid who wants to pull Dad into the candy store; but I kept smelling that buttered toast and wondering what it was.

"Edward," Prope said in a not-very-patient voice, "what’s wrong?"

"Do you smell it?"

"Smell what?"

"Buttered toast."

Prope gave a polite sniff, but she was just humoring me. "I don’t smell a thing," she said. Then she gave a coy flick of her eyelids. "Do you want to know what I’d like to smell?"

"Um." I thought, What the heck has gotten into her? But I didn’t say it out loud; I was still looking around the room, trying to figure out where the smell came from. The closet? No. The desk? The bed?

Suddenly, something clicked inside my half-asleep brain. "Ship-soul," I said, "lights ninety-five percent dim."

"That’s more like it," Prope murmured, as the room fell darker than candlelight. She leaned in and laid her hand lightly on my chest. "Now let’s just find out…"

Her voice broke off. I’d pulled away from her and stepped toward the bed. That was definitely where the smell came from. With a quick yank, I whipped the top blankets and sheets all the way off the mattress.

On the bottom sheet, low down where your feet would go, where you’d never look before you got into bed, the white linen was dusted with a sprinkle of glowing red specks.

"Ooo," Prope whispered, "very nice. But if I were you, I would have put that up where people could see it. Splash some on the pillow. On the walls. Dribble it up and down our bodies, then lick it off. How much of it do you have?"

I stared at her in disbelief. Was she drunk or something, that she didn’t recognize the Balrog? But then, she’d only seen it as a big mossy clump on Kaisho’s legs, not as single spores; and her mind was definitely distracted, focused on other things.

She reached toward the glimmering spores, like a little kid trying to touch the pretties. I grabbed her wrist and pulled her away. "You’d be sorry if you did that," I told her. I kept hold of her arm as I backed out of the room into the bright lights of the corridor.

"What’s wrong?" she asked. "Aren’t we going to—"

"No," I said. "Not in there."

"My room then? I’m captain. I’ve got a great big room. And a great big bed." She was still talking like a drunk with a one-track mind; I wondered if she’d popped some aphrodisiac drug when I wasn’t looking.

"Not tonight," I told her. "There’s something I have to report to the admiral."

"To Festina?" the captain asked, her voice turning shrill. "You’re dumping me and going to that freak-faced bitch?"

Then Prope screamed. It was the most amazing noise: just a shriek of pure outrage. It scarcely even sounded real — more like some eight-year-old who’d been challenged to a dare by her friends, and was wailing out this ear-piercing screech to prove she had the nerve. But there was nothing childish about the look on Prope’s face; it was fierce and furious, not aimed at me or anyone, just exploding out at the universe along with the scream. A primal venting of absolute rage, neither long nor short.

It happened, it shattered the silence of the empty corridor, and then it was over. Prope closed her mouth with a little clopping sound as her lips came together. She shuffled off without even looking at me, like a sleepwalker moving onto some new part of her dream.

Above my head, the ship-soul spoke through one of its speakers. "Is there a problem? Do you need help? Is there a problem? Do you need help?"

"Ship-soul," I said, "get a robot to take all the linen off my bed. I don’t care if it’s a cleaning robot or one of those that handle toxic substances — whatever you have handy. Take the sheets and leave them in Kaisho’s room; break down her door if you have to."

"I am afraid that is not—"

"Just do it," I snapped. "My father is Admiral of the Gold, Alexander York, and he doesn’t appreciate lippy AIs who don’t follow orders. Give me results, not excuses."

I wheeled around and stormed off down the corridor… as if the ship-soul was somebody I could stomp away from. Every two seconds I walked under another of the computer’s speakers, but I didn’t hear any more protests. Apparently, whoever programmed the ship’s system must have anticipated getting bullied by an admiral’s retard son.

Festina wasn’t in her room… even though it was almost midnight, Jacaranda time. I found her alone in the gym, already sopping with sweat from pounding the heavy bag. And I mean pounding it hard. Not one of those controlled sessions where you try the same combination twenty times, or see how many roundhouse kicks you can do in two minutes. She was throwing elbows and knees and head-high jump kicks, plus all kinds of palm heels, knife-hands, snake-strikes, that thing where you clap your opponent’s eardrums… even some plain old body checks, whomping into the bag with her shoulder and yelling something bloodthirsty. That didn’t look like a real martial-arts move to me, but maybe it was okay if you just wanted to smash something with all the strength you had.

I didn’t say anything — just waited for her to notice me. Festina was moving around the bag, hitting it from lots of different angles; eventually she got to the far side, facing the bag, facing my direction. When she saw me, she stiffened a little and stopped, panting lightly.

She looked good, puffing and sweating. For the workout, she’d put on a plain old T-shirt and loose cotton pants… both colored admiral’s gray, but very simple. You don’t see simple clothes very much in navy gyms — people are always wearing smart fibers that keep the body at perfect temperature, or chemical paints that make fat burn faster. Not Festina; but then, she made a point of being different from regular navy folks.

"I thought you were with Prope," Festina said, not quite meeting my eye.

"Prope was with me. Not vice versa. She was acting kind of funny."

Festina glanced at the clock on the gym’s wall. All of a sudden, I got the strangest feeling: that she was figuring out how long I’d been with Prope, and trying to decide if we’d had time to… you know.

Embarrassed, I said, "There were more Balrog spores in my cabin. Like a booby trap. I was lucky I smelled something odd."

"Oh?" She gave her arms a bit of a stretch across her chest. She must have been starting to cool down. "I’ve never noticed the Balrog had a smell." She still wasn’t meeting my eye. "Maybe you’ve got a better nose than I do."

I shrugged. "Being three percent Mandasar has to be good for something."

"Does that bother you?"

"I like Mandasars," I said. "It’s just weird, thinking I’m not all human."

"You’ll get used to it," she replied. "Feeling not all human is an Explorer’s natural state."

"You’re human," I told her. "One hundred percent."

She looked up at me for the first time since I’d come in — met my gaze no more than half a second, then shied away and slammed a fist into the bag in front of her. "Christ," she muttered, "there must be something in the water."

"What do you mean?"

She hit the bag with another punch. "At this second, Edward, I want to chew your clothes off. It’s so amazingly powerful…" She leaned forward and planted her face against the bag’s hard leather. "Maybe you should go away before I embarrass myself completely. If I haven’t already."

I just stared at her. After a few seconds, she said, "I notice you aren’t going away." Her voice was muffled up against the bag; from that position she couldn’t notice anything.

"Do you really want me to go?" I asked.

"Of course not. I want you to throw me onto the nearest judo mat and fuck my brains out. Which is so entirely unlike me, I don’t…" She stopped and shook her head. "I can barely speak in completely sentences. I’ve been horny plenty of times before, but I have never…" She broke off laughing — the sort of laugh when you’re afraid that otherwise you might cry. "This is so completely pathetic," she said. "Do you know how blind-raging jealous I was when I thought you and Prope were going to—"

"We didn’t," I put in quickly.

"Good for you," she answered, "and tough on Prope. God, the woman was ready to undress you right at the dinner table. Like it was the first time in her life she’d ever truly wanted to get naked and rub up against every beautiful dimple on your…" Festina gave another strangled laugh. "And I dearly wanted to smash her face so I could have you all to myself. If it hadn’t been for the Mandasars going catatonic… and I wanted to tell them, ‘Friends, I know what you’re going through, I’m a basket case myself.’ " She broke off. "Am I babbling? I’m babbling, aren’t I? I’m truly babbling. I have never talked to a man like this. And the appalling thing is, I’m only doing it because I desperately hope you’ll get aroused. A man wants women to throw themselves at his feet, right? Right? Because if you want something different, just tell me and I’ll probably do it. I lost all shame three minutes ago."

She might have lost all shame, but I hadn’t. My cheeks were burning. First Prope, now Festina… like both women were drunk or drugged. But that was crazy. Who would…

Festina shoved herself away from the bag and turned straight toward me. Her face was flushed; there were tears dribbling down her cheeks. "Edward," she said, swallowing hard, "please leave now. Go and forget you were ever here. Christ knows I’ll probably forget it myself — my head is spinning like a son of a bitch. Just… get out before I do something unforgivable. Please."

I wondered what she thought would be unforgivable. Throwing herself on me? Why did she think that would be awful? Because it would be taking advantage of a… someone like me?

All of a sudden, I thought of Counselor the previous night: her offering herself, and me turning her down. Because I thought she was just a kid who couldn’t possibly think for herself, someone I had to protect because she was really stupid. As if going to bed with her would be raping a mental defective.

Now Festina was protecting me.

For one brief second, I wanted to shout, "Why do you think I wouldn’t like throwing you onto a judo mat? Maybe I’ve dreamed of getting naked and rubbing dimples too. Why would you see it as committing some terrible sin?"

Did Festina think she’d be raping a mental defective? I didn’t want her protecting me. But I had to protect her. She was drugged or something.

Turning quietly, I walked from the gym. Outside the door, I stopped and waited. I could hear her sobbing softly. After a while, she began hitting the bag again. Really really hard.

I was so sleepy I felt like I was going to drop. Too bad my cabin was infested with Balrogs.

The Mandasars weren’t using four of their five rooms, but the ship-soul wouldn’t let me inside when they weren’t there. Maybe the computer thought I might steal something.

The way things were going, I probably could have walked into the cabin of any female crew member and got an invitation to stay the night. Maybe the male crew members too. But I didn’t want to find out if that was true.

Up to the front of the ship. A door just this side of the bridge.

Prope was still awake. When she answered my knock, I could see she’d been crying. I don’t think she’d done much crying before. And in the whole rest of the ship, she had no one who’d hold her till the crying stopped.

Oh well. She was right about having a great big bed.

Waking up, smelling my own sweat. And Prope’s. She lay sprawled behind me on the great big bed, her hair slick and damp from exertion. She was deep deep asleep, drawing in loud lungfuls of air and letting them out again heavily. In stories, women always sleep with a little smile afterward, but thank heaven that’s not true in real life. I don’t think I could have stood it, her looking all smug.

Me, I found myself sitting naked at the captain’s own computer terminal. No memory of how I got there. My skin felt really cold, like I’d been sitting out a long time.

The screen in front of me showed a list of files stored on bubble with the ship-soul. My own personal files, almost nothing in them — just official navy records, and my pathetically small personal address book. (Containing only my father’s name. It used to have Sam’s name too, but a woman I knew on the moonbase made me erase it.)

I stared at the screen blearily, not paying attention to the file names… till I realized something was missing.

Search. Search. But the file I was looking for had disappeared: the file containing the backdoor access code Samantha gave me. Vanished in the night.

And I was sitting at Prope’s official terminal, with no memory of the past few hours. Shivering, I wondered what I’d done.