Hunted

28 SAILING THROUGH SPACE

I left Prope’s cabin before she woke. Spent the rest of the night in the lounge. In the morning, two female life-support techs woke me and said I looked terrible. They were nice to me, in a spend-time-with-the-cute-stranger way, but they weren’t voracious or anything. Whatever I’d had the night before must have worn off.

Later in the day, Festina and Prope tried to act like nothing had happened… but for a long time, Festina wouldn’t look me in the eye, and Prope was always staring at me when she thought I wouldn’t notice.

Wrapped in its Sperm-tail, Jacaranda sped its milky way through the silence of space. Nothing happened as we crossed the line out of Celestia’s system… nothing beyond a few tense faces easing up, and people suddenly remembering gossip or jokes they’d been meaning to tell each other. We’d all survived another one. Life goes on.

As Tobit predicted, Kaisho claimed she’d put the spores outside my door and in my bed just as a joke. "To see the look on your face, Teelu" she said; which was kind of scary in itself, if she could see the look on my face when she was nowhere in sight. She swore the Balrog had always known I’d find the spores without stepping on them… so where was the harm?

Festina still gave her a real good chewing out, and Kaisho promised not to play such tricks again. None of us really trusted her; but Festina was reluctant to lock her up or invent some other punishment. Explorers liked to keep things in the family — it was one thing to yell at a fellow Explorer in private, but nobody wanted to take measures that might be noticed by the crew. Anyway, leaning on the Balrog too hard might backfire: if we got it mad, there was no telling what it might do… or what we could do to stop it.

So we pretended everything was all patched up. I spent my mornings with the Explorers — Festina, Kaisho, Tobit, and Benjamin — answering their questions about Troyen. They soon saw I knew nothing about the twenty years of war (nothing specific enough to be useful), so we turned to subjects like how to incapacitate a warrior without killing him, and the personalities of Queens Fortitude, Honor, and Clemency. Since they were the longest-established queens, maybe one of them had come out on top… except they were also the most obvious targets for the outlaw queens, so maybe they’d been eliminated early on.

No way to know. All those records kept by observers on my moonbase were marked TOP SECRET, and even Festina couldn’t get at them. Some higher admiral didn’t want us learning useful stuff about Troyen — likely the admiral who sponsored the recruiters, and Willow’s mission. Or my father, trying to hide how badly Samantha had failed.

About Samantha’s failure — in those days on Jacaranda, I finally realized how crazy it was to put an inexperienced twenty-year-old in charge of a diplomatic mission… then to leave her in charge for fifteen whole years, as things went from bad to worse. What the heck had Dad been thinking? And why had the other admirals allowed it? The way I figured it, Dad must have given the council doctored-up reports, so they wouldn’t know Sam was doing a bad job. Dad wanted to protect his daughter, and protect himself too; after all, he was the one who put her into a position she couldn’t handle.

I’d never had such thoughts before: recognizing that Sam had screwed up her mission. Screwed it up really badly. Why hadn’t that ever occurred to me before?

Maybe I was getting smarter. Festina kind of hinted at that after we’d been together a few days — she thought I should take an intelligence test, because she couldn’t believe the low scores in my official records. "You’re better than those scores," she told me. "You may not think you are, but it’s true."

I knew it was the other way around — Dad had fudged my real scores upward to put me over the navy’s required minimum. Anyway, if I had got smarter I didn’t want to know; all my life, I’d been who I was, and I hated the idea of changing.

But I was changing. When I was with Kaisho, I could smell that buttered-toast aroma all the time. Nobody else could. And as the days went by, I began to smell other things… strange things.

Captain Prope smelled of a light frost green: the color itself. A kind of glossy shade, like freshly licked lipstick. I can’t tell you how someone could smell of a color — my brain must have got really scrambled. But every time Prope started watching me behind my back, that smell of misty muted green filled the air.

Festina smelled like a thunderstorm: not the storm’s scent, but its sound. The rushing wind and the pouring rain, the rumble of coming thunder. Sometimes, she even smelled of the rainbow after. It didn’t make sense… but I’d smell the sound of thunder, and Festina Ramos would walk into the room.

Tobit smelled like the gnarled surface of a walnut — the texture of it, not the scent. And Benjamin… Benjamin was a feeling through my whole body that I wanted to yawn and stretch, but yawning and stretching wouldn’t make the feeling go away. For some reason, that made me nervous; I didn’t mind people smelling like frost green or thunderclaps or walnuts, but Benjamin got me real edgy. No matter how I yawned and stretched, I couldn’t make the edginess go away either.

After mornings with the Explorers, I’d pass the afternoons teaching the Mandasars about their own culture — so they could pass as natives if the mission absolutely required it. Counselor and the workers took my word as gospel, no matter how it conflicted with their previous ideas about home. Zeeleepull was more stubborn, arguing that Willa and Walda had explicitly told him Queen Prudence had pronounced the Continental Edict in response to the threat of the Greenstriders trying to colonize…

But his arguments never lasted long. Thirty seconds in, he would suddenly clamp his mouth shut and whisper, "Apologies, Teelu. Knowledge you, ignorance me. Apologies. Apologies."

The first time he did that, my jaw fell open. Warriors don’t suddenly turn meek and yield to an opponent, except…

I sniffed the air. My newly more-sensitive nose caught a powerful whiff of an indescribable something oozing off my own skin. The scent was as sharp and strong as ether.

I had a scary suspicion it was royal pheromone.

Pheromones — now that I could smell them, I realized they were everywhere. Not just coming from the Mandasars, but from the crew and everybody.

And from me. Every second of every day. They were like fanatic servants, leaping to carry out my least little whim… even when I desperately didn’t want them to.

I didn’t want to win arguments with Zeeleepull by whacking him with a chemical hammer; but I couldn’t help it. If he opposed me more than a few seconds, the pheromone gusted out on its own. Even worse, he accepted it without question, as if I had a perfect right to make him change his mind.

Was that any different from brainwashing? Dosing him with drugs till he abandoned his old beliefs and swallowed whatever I told him?

It made me sick. But it was worse with humans.

Those mornings in the briefing room with Festina, Kaisho and the others — they’d all get caught up in discussing Explorer stuff, contingency plans, what to do if they couldn’t find the people from Willow… and I’d let my mind wander wherever it wanted. Sometimes I’d find myself looking at Festina, thinking how pretty she was even with that blotch on her face: thinking about her talk of judo mats, and how maybe I’d been crazy to go to Prope’s room instead, taking a substitute for the woman I was really dreaming about.

Next thing you know, I’d be smelling a pheromone coming off me as strong as spring fever: pure undiluted sex, like a lust lasso trying to rope me a conquest. Festina’s face would flush so deep red her cheeks would almost match color, and she’d start shifting her weight back and forth from one foot to the other like she couldn’t stand still. I’d have to excuse myself and go to the head, where I’d splash myself with cold water till the pheromone backed off. Then, when I returned to the briefing room, Kaisho always asked, "Better, Your Majesty?" with a big smug smirk in her voice. I guess the Balrog could read my mind and "taste" the pheromones. As for humans, they never realized they smelled anything, but they melted like butter when the scent soaked into their brains.

Festina never showed up at my cabin door last thing at night; she had willpower. Prope, on the other hand — she held herself back two days, then arrived late the third evening "to make sure I was doing all right."

The funny thing is I’d never hit Prope with that lust-for-me pheromone — not since that first night, when the pheromone must have flooded off me like flop-sweat and I was just too dense to notice. But Prope came visiting anyway… with a kind of confused look in her eye, as if she didn’t understand it either. Maybe she wanted to recapture whatever crazy abandon she’d felt that other night; or maybe she wanted to prove to herself it hadn’t been real, that she could bed me in cold blood without getting all dizzy and lost in emotion.

Either way, she seemed pretty determined to spend another night with me — even if she had to force herself against her own instincts. That was the part that got me: like she was scared out of her wits, but had decided this was a thing that must be done. It brought out all these weird fatherly feelings in me, as if Prope was just a little girl trying to be brave.

(Edward, going all paternal. I guess it was condescending, me thinking of an adult woman that way… but lately, I seemed to see everybody as a poor innocent I needed to protect.)

So what to do with Prope? I certainly couldn’t sleep with her again; I shouldn’t have done it the first time. It’d be easy to produce some horrible gagging smell that would drive her away — all I had to do was think what I wanted, and my body would pump out the stink of rotten eggs, or gangrene, or worse — but that was pretty darned crude. I didn’t want to overpower the woman; I just wanted her to give up on getting me into the sack.

Meanwhile, Prope sat herself on the edge of my bed. Started talking about some minor something that’d gone wrong with a piece of equipment I’d never heard of, and it’d taken two hours to fix when it was only supposed to take an hour forty-five, and why didn’t the fleet train technicians properly anymore…

All the time she spoke, her hand kept lifting up to the fastener strap on her blouse then shying away again — as if she’d promised herself she’d start undressing the second she got inside my room, but now couldn’t quite go through with it. It was almost endearing; but she’d pretty soon find the nerve to rip off her clothes, and I really really wanted to think of some brilliant strategy before that happened.

Oddly enough, I did. While she was going on and on about lazy crewfolk, I wondered, What would happen if I smelled frost green?

Thirty seconds later, that’s exactly how I smelled. I didn’t have to squinch up my brow and concentrate, it just kind of happened — like my body knew what to do, without me having to think. Very weird and amazing and scary… but I smelled like a precise duplicate of Prope herself, only stronger: glossier.

As if I were her brother, or sister, or mother, or father. People were supposed to have instincts to avoid inbreeding, right? With Prope, there was a risk she’d be turned on by the chance to sleep with herself… but I crossed my fingers and hoped pheromones were stronger than vanity.

The captain’s voice faltered. She looked up at me, a tiny look of pain on her face. For ten full seconds, she just stared into my eyes. Then she muttered, "Well, I’ve got an early morning tomorrow," and barreled out of the cabin like she was going to throw up.

Maybe she was. It kind of made me wonder about Prope’s family.

That wasn’t the end of it. In the days that followed, Prope tried several times more… as if she hated herself for chickening out and desperately needed to prove I hadn’t got to her. Usually I smelled her coming and got my own frost green up fast enough to send her bolting away; but once she caught me by surprise, and with a sudden burst of resolve, shoved me up against the nearest bulkhead. She planted a kiss hard on my mouth, and ground her hips tight on my groin, back and forth, one, two. Then she heard people’s voices coming out of a doorway not far off, so she let me go. "Later," she whispered, and strode off cockily, like she was finally pleased with herself.

After that, I decided maybe just to keep smelling frost green morning, noon, and night, till I left the ship. But Festina got really grouchy at me, and that soapy Lieutenant Harque started following me around. When I met the Mandasars that afternoon, Counselor gave me a pained look. "Oh, Teelu… must you?"

So I turned off the Prope perfume and toughed out the flight as best I could.

29 JOINING THE SYSTEM

No sign of Willow or the black ship as we entered the Troyen system. That didn’t mean a thing — starships can hide just by powering down. Put them in orbit around a gas giant, and they pass for bits of space rock.

Nothing shot at Jacaranda as we settled into planetary orbit. Dade claimed that was a good sign. Over the past few days, he’d repeatedly stated his opinion that no one on Troyen had any surface-to-space missiles left; the Fasskisters’ nanites had taken care of that. He admitted it was possible some missile bases had escaped the Swarm — if they were sealed off well enough and protected with huge clouds of defense nano — but in that case, the missiles would have been used, wouldn’t they? When everybody else was fighting with swords and spears, an aerial bombardment would be so valuable, no army would have kept the missiles on ice for twenty whole years. Especially when the Swarm nanites were a constant threat. Any commander with common sense would use the bombs while they were still good.

"And what about the missile that nearly hit the moon-base?" Tobit had asked. "Was that a figment of York’s imagination?"

Benjamin shrugged. "It didn’t hit the moonbase, did it? It was an absolutely perfect miss — close enough to scare people into evacuating, but not to hurt anyone. Then surprise, surprise, as soon as the base personnel scurry away, Willow shows up on its secret mission."

"Oh boy," Festina said, whacking her forehead lightly with her palm. "Ouch."

I wasn’t quite sure what Dade meant. "Um… are you saying maybe Willow shot at us? To make everybody clear out?"

Dade nodded. "They could have modified a standard probe missile once they came in-system. That way they wouldn’t have any lethal weapons aboard while they were still in deep space — keep the League of Peoples happy. Willow lobbed the missile at your base, but made sure it didn’t come close enough to do real damage. No sentients were truly at risk, so the League wouldn’t give a damn."

"I hate to say it," Tobit growled, "but the kid makes sense."

"So I can come with you after all?" Dade said.

He looked back and forth between Tobit and Festina. The two of them exchanged looks but didn’t speak.

"I know what you’ve been thinking," Dade told them. "You don’t want me down on Troyen with you because I’m not a real Explorer."

Festina and Tobit had never said that to him… not in so many words. But in all their planning for the mission, there’d been sort of a kind of a subtext that maybe he’d be left behind. It was always, "Tobit, you could do this," and "Edward, you can carry that," with no, "Benjamin, here’s what you’ll do."

Now Festina answered Dade in a quiet voice. "You’re a cadet," she said. "Just here on training rotation. It would be irresponsible of us to jeopardize your life, taking you down to a planet at war, when Phylar, Edward, and I are fully qualified Explorers."

"You aren’t an Explorer, you’re an admiral," Dade replied. He ignored Festina’s steely glare. "And York isn’t a qualified Explorer, you know he isn’t — he’s never stepped foot into the Academy. That just leaves Tobit, and a landing party has to have at least two Explorers if they’re available."

"Benny…" Tobit began.

"Don’t Benny me," Dade snapped. "The real reason you don’t want me is that I’m not… I don’t look like an Explorer. Isn’t that it? I’m just a normal guy, who never had the rough life you people did, because I don’t have a birthmark or a deformed arm or a…" He just waved in my direction. "Whatever. I’m sorry the navy fucked you folks over, but that’s not my fault. And it’s ancient history. I mean," he said, gesturing toward Festina, "here I am with the very woman who put an end to that crap, and you want to discriminate against me because I don’t have anything wrong with me. Listen, Admiral, you’re the reason I’m here. You’re the reason the navy has to let everyday people into Explorer Academy, and you’re the reason I volunteered for the corps. You managed to fix an old injustice, and I thought, ‘Hey, I could help.’ The sooner people like me get integrated into the corps, the sooner the navy stops thinking of Explorers as totally expendable freaks. But let me tell you, I’ve received nothing but grief ever since I signed up. The teachers at the Academy… the other students… all of you here… you treat me like some annoying embarrassment who might go away if you just marginalize me enough. Well, I’m not going away — I’m going to be an Explorer. I just wish you’d accept that and start treating me as one of the team!"

Silence. I don’t know what anyone else was doing because I’d glued my gaze to my feet. The air was filled with the hot smell of emotions, but everything was all mixed together: anger, guilt, indignation, embarrassment, coming from all directions.

Finally, Festina sighed. "Dade — once upon a time I would have said anyone who wanted to be an Explorer was too fucking insane to be allowed into the corps. But seeing as I am the woman who forced the navy to consider Explorers as more than ‘expendable freaks’… all I’ll say is that you worry me. You might have depths I can’t see, but you sure come across as a starry-eyed kid who’s too gung ho to realize the real world is dangerous. You’ve lived a damned pampered life, no matter what hardships you think you’ve faced, and all the Academy training in the galaxy hasn’t prepared you to take care of yourself.

"But," she went on, "you aren’t going to figure that out till you see for yourself. So congratulations; you can land with us on Troyen. I’m going to gamble that taking you down to a war-ravaged planet will open your eyes without getting the rest of us killed. The prospect of relying on you to watch my back scares the piss out of me, but I’m going to take the risk. Otherwise, I might start believing the Admiralty had the right idea all along, only picking Explorers from people who know the universe is a cruel and bitter place. People who were born knowing it."

Very pointedly, she tipped her head to give the boy a face-on view of her birthmark. "I grew up knowing something you didn’t, Dade. So did Tobit. So did Kaisho. So did York over there, even if he still doesn’t think he deserves an Explorer’s uniform. York never went to the Academy, but the uniform fits him just fine. As for you, Dade — I’m giving you a chance because in your whole damned life, I don’t think you’ve ever been put to the test. Maybe by some miracle, you’ll find a real Explorer in your heart. If you don’t… well, considering we’ll be landing in a war zone, your future career is the least of your worries."

She waited a moment, then did the most unexpected thing an Explorer could do: lifted her hand, gave Dade a salute, and said crisply, "Dismissed." It took the boy a moment to remember Festina was an admiral; then his face went stony, he returned her salute, and walked stiffly out of the room.

The rest of us stayed where we were a moment, then slowly let out our breaths. In a low voice, Festina asked, "What do you think, Kaish? Any mystic visions of the boy smartening up?"

Kaisho reached both hands up to the hair over her face and suddenly lifted it high… as if her cheeks were hot and in desperate need of air. I caught a glimpse of her handsome crinkled face, just a tiny bit damp with sweat; then she let the hair fall back into place.

"The boy does have hidden depths," she whispered. "But I don’t think you’ll like them."

30 CHECKING IN ON THE NEIGHBORS

Three full orbits of Troyen and we still hadn’t picked up any transmissions from people down on the ground.

"Um," I murmured to Festina. "What if the Explorers’ radios have been eaten by Fasskister nanites?"

Festina shook her head. "As soon as the navy heard about the Fasskisters’ Swarm, our researchers developed equipment that was immune to the little buggers. Otherwise, the whole fleet would be at the Fasskisters’ mercy."

"Yeah," Tobit put in, "everything we carry should be fine. Of course," he added, "the Fasskisters have probably invented a Swarm that’ll eat our new equipment. But we’ll cross our fingers there isn’t any of that on Troyen."

"There shouldn’t be," Festina said. "If Willow’s Explorers aren’t transmitting, they’re just being careful. In a war zone, it’s dangerous to broadcast continuously, even if your messages are encrypted to look like static. Sooner or later, some army will decide you’re an undercover agent sending intelligence to the enemy; next thing you know, you’re surrounded by a platoon of spycatchers."

Lucky for us, there was a fallback plan for making contact. Whenever an Explorer team is assigned to a ship, they’re given a "transmission second" — one second of the standard twenty-four-hour clock when they should try a burst transmission, if they’re ever on a planet where longer broadcasts are dangerous. It took a bit of calculating, converting Willow time to Jacaranda time and allowing for relativistic slippages in everybody’s clocks… but eventually, Festina and Tobit agreed that the folks down on Troyen would try a single blip of contact at 23:46:22, Jacaranda time. Since it was only ship’s morning, we had most of the day before we’d hear anything.

"So, a whole day to kill," Tobit said. "You folks play poker?"

"Enough to know I don’t want to play with you," Festina told him. "What do you say to a side trip?"

"Where?"

Instead of answering, she turned to me. "Edward, do you know exactly what Willow did its five days in this system? Were you watching the whole time?"

"I wasn’t watching at all. The base’s monitors just had a big display of what navy ships were close by. Willow showed up on the list, and stayed there till they picked me up to go home."

"So Willow might not have stayed near Troyen all the time. They could have gone somewhere else for a while."

"But there’s nowhere else to go in this system," Dade said. "Nowhere else inhabited, anyway."

"Wrong," Festina told him. "There’s an orbital around the sun. Occupied by Fasskisters who don’t want to leave the area, for fear of being killed by the League." She smiled grimly. "Now ask yourself: if anyone in the galaxy created specialized nano like the stuff on Willow that was stealing queen’s venom, who would it be?"

"Oh," Dade said. "Yeah."

Festina nodded. "Let’s assume Willow visited the orbital while they were in this system. And let’s assume the Fasskisters smuggled nano onto the Willow during that visit. Shouldn’t someone ask them why?"

Like most orbitals, it was a big cylinder floating in space, the surface skin covered with photocells that gathered energy from the sun. Unlike most orbitals, the photocells had been arranged into bands running lengthways with strips of white in between, so that the whole cylinder was covered with long black-and-white stripes.

"Assholes," Festina muttered. We were all sitting in the bridge’s Visitors’ Gallery, watching as Jacaranda slowly approached the Fasskister habitat.

"What’s wrong?" I asked.

"Do you know why they left some stripes clear… even though they could collect more power if they covered the whole damned surface?"

"No," I said.

"They did it so you’d know the orbital wasn’t spinning," she told me. "Anyone flying up can see the stripes are holding steady… so the Fasskisters can’t be producing gravity with good old centrifugal force."

"They don’t have gravity in there?"

"They have it; they just use some flashy fancy artificial field that guzzles energy twenty-four hours a day. This close to the sun, they have solar power to spare… but it’s still waste for the sake of waste."

"Admiral," Prope said, turning around in her command chair, "they aren’t answering our requests to dock."

"Can we dock anyway?" Festina asked.

"Affirmative.," Prope answered, "but they probably won’t like it. Docking without permission can be interpreted as intent to commit piracy."

Festina made a face. "Send them a message in English, Fasskister and Mandasar. Say we’re worried about their status because they’ve gone incommunicado. If we don’t get a reply in five minutes, we’ll assume they’re in trouble and come to give aid."

"Begging the admiral’s pardon," Prope said, without an ounce of begging in her voice, "but that’s a standard tactic for pirates too. Even if the target is broadcasting like mad, the pirate ship says, ‘We can’t hear anything,’ and keeps coming in. Naive victims think their radios are broken and let the pirate come aboard. More experienced sailors think they’re under attack and take defensive action."

"What kind of defensive action?"

Prope shrugged. "The Fasskisters believe they can’t leave this system because the League considers them non-sentient. Under such conditions, they may have decided they have nothing to lose by arming themselves with lethal weapons. Especially with warring Mandasars nearby. The Fasskisters could legitimately argue they were afraid of being attacked."

Festina drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. After a few seconds, she said, "Send the message and go in anyway. Take any precautions you think necessary. I’ll assume responsibility."

"Aye-aye, Admiral," Prope said. She tried to make her voice sound icy — full of misgivings… but if I knew Prope, she’d lived her whole life hoping to luck into an honest-to-God space battle.

We docked without incident — sliding up to a hatch on the orbital’s dark side (the half that wasn’t facing the sun), and dropping our Sperm-field so we could stretch out a docking tube. Prope hated cutting the field; star captains feel kind of naked when they can’t go FTL to get away from trouble. (It must have mortified her when the black ship had ripped away Jacaranda’s, field back at Starbase Iris — like getting her clothes torn off in public.) Prope kept telling Festina, over and over, "One hour on the orbital… not a second more, if you expect us to reestablish the tail and get back to Troyen by 23:46:22."

I could tell Festina wasn’t too happy with the time limit; but considering the circumstances, she couldn’t argue. One hour would have to do.

Festina declared our jaunt to the orbital would be Explorers only. The Mandasars grumped, but the admiral held firm — with all the bad feeling between Mandasars and Fasskisters, it wouldn’t help to take the hive along.

Kaisho wanted to go too. "Why?" Festina asked.

"You’ll see," Kaisho told her.

"Come on, Kaish," Festina said, "cut the inscrutable-alien crap. Either give me a straight answer or stay on Jacaranda."

"Sorry," Kaisho replied, "but the Balrog loves watching lesser beings get smacked in the face with surprises. Just between you and me, the damned moss really gets off on human astonishment."

"Shit," Festina growled. "Just once I’d like to meet an alien who enjoyed giving clear explanations of what the fuck is going on."

We didn’t wear tightsuits this trip; apparently Fasskisters found the suits grossly offensive, though they never said why. With any group of aliens, there’s always some area where they just mutter, "Can’t you see it’s indecent?" and refuse to go into details. Anyway, the dock hatch reported good air on the orbital’s interior, and we didn’t have time to get dressed up. There could still be nasty germs wafting about… but if the Fasskisters ever wanted to regain their claim to sentience, they’d make sure we weren’t exposed to anything that could hurt us.

"All right," Festina said, as we hovered weightless in front of the dock’s airlock. "In we go."

She pressed the button to open the door. One by one, we passed over the threshold; and immediately gravity clicked in, twisting around so that the outside of the cylinder was down. If I’d been taken by surprise, I might have fallen right back out into the docking tube… but lucky for me, Festina went first and I could watch how she grabbed the support bars just inside the door.

I got in without too much trouble, followed by Tobit and Bade. All three of the others tapped their throats as soon as they were inside, activating the radio transceivers implanted in their necks. It made me feel a bit bad, to be an Explorer without a throat implant… but then, I wasn’t a real Explorer, was I? Meanwhile, they did the usual, "Testing, testing," and Lieutenant Harque back on Jacaranda answered, "Receiving loud and clear." Marque’s voice came in on receivers we’d clipped to our belts. The receivers could also transmit if you pushed the right button, but there was no need for that if you had a throat implant.

Festina worked the airlock while the rest of us stood back trying not to look nervous. The far door of the lock had a tiny peekaboo screen that wasn’t working — either the Fasskisters had deliberately blinded the cameras, or the system had broken down sometime in the past twenty years and nobody bothered to fix it. From my days on the moonbase, I knew the Fasskisters only got supply ships once every three years… so maybe they didn’t care a whole lot if the dock-area cameras went out.

"Are we set?" Festina asked, just before she pushed the button to open the inner door.

Dade tried to draw his stunner, but Tobit slapped the boy’s wrist. It was pretty unfriendly to be carrying guns at all; having them drawn and ready was going too far.

The door whisked open. A second later, the smell of buttered toast filled my nostrils. In front of us, a ramp led up at an easy slope; and the ramp was covered with glowing red moss.

31 GETTING TO KNOW THE FASSKISTERS

"Kaisho!" Festina roared.

Laughter came over our receivers. "A problem, Festina?"

"You knew about this!"

"Of course."

"And you didn’t tell us."

"As I said," Kaisho answered, "the Balrog adores surprises. The nice thing about precognition is knowing when someone else will step on a banana peel."

"We’re not going to step on anything," Festina growled. The four of us stared at the ramp again. It was completely crammed with moss, at least ankle deep, starting a few paces beyond the airlock door. No way we could go forward without getting it all over our boots, unless we could crawl across the walls like bugs.

Kaisho spoke again from our receivers. "If you like, I can ferry you over in my hoverchair."

"No," Festina told her. "I don’t want you anywhere near us. You’re hard to trust at the best of times, and recently you’ve been a real pain in the ass."

"Then what are you going to do?" Kaisho asked, a bit smugly. "Um," I said. "Give me a second."

In my mind, I tried to imagine a stench that would make moss wither… like really bad breath, something that could knock you straight off your feet, except that it’d only work on Balrogs. The Balrog could obviously smell stuff humans couldn’t, like royal pheromone; so maybe I could produce a stink so powerfully awful to Balrog senses, the moss would kind of shrivel. Not die — I didn’t want it to die. I just wanted to turn its stomach. If I started with its own buttered-toast scent and pictured the toast going all green and moldy…

"Teelu," Kaisho said sharply. Talking out loud, not whispering. "Stop it!"

"Stop what?" I asked, trying to sound innocent.

"You know what," Kaisho snapped, "but you don’t know what you’re doing. Given time, you might find something that would cause serious harm."

"What’s she talking about?" Festina asked me.

"Teelu and I are playing a little game," Kaisho answered, "and he doesn’t understand his own strength. Biochemicals can be more than smells, Your Majesty — one species’ pheromone is another species’ poison. If you muck about too much, you might hurt someone… and it could be humans just as easily as Balrogs."

"What?" Festina demanded. She stared straight at me. "What are you doing?"

"His own form of diplomacy," Kaisho said. "Talk softly and carry a big stink."

Festina looked like she wanted more answers; but at that moment, the moss in front of us simply rolled aside. A parting of the glowing red sea. The spores in the center of the ramp slid right or left, till they left a clear walkway up the middle-bare concrete floor, walled on either side by heaps of glowering fuzz. The buttered-toast smell turned a bit edgy… as if even a higher lifeform could get ticked off.

"Did you do that?" Festina asked me. I shook my head as Kaisho answered, "I did. Or rather, the Balrog did it at my request. Go ahead — the moss will leave you alone. I promise."

"She promises," Tobit muttered. "That fills me with loads of confidence."

"You two stay here," Festina told Tobit and Dade. "Edward and I will go in. If anything happens to us — like we get our toes bitten by spores — arrest that bitch for assaulting an admiral. Even if the Balrog is sentient, I have faith the High Council can devise an appropriately unattractive punishment." She lifted her hand to her throat implant. "You heard that, Kaisho?"

"You lesser species can be so suspicious. I said the Balrog would leave you alone, and it will. It won’t try to touch you as long as you’re on this orbital."

"Great," Festina muttered. "That sounds like those promises the gods always gave in Greek myths — loaded statements with nasty loopholes. But," she continued, staring at the open path through the moss, "I would dearly like to ask a Fasskister what the hell happened here."

She looked at me, as if I had some kind of deciding vote. I thought of what Captain Prope would say if we came running back at the first sign of trouble… not that I cared about my own reputation, but I didn’t want Festina to look bad. "Let’s go," I said.

So we did.

The ramp led to another hatch that should have been closed but wasn’t — it had jammed partway open, leaving a gap in the middle. Our path through the moss led right up to the gap and beyond.

"Looks like the Balrog has fouled up the gears," Festina said, examining the hatch.

"Do doors have gears?" I asked.

"Don’t go literal on me," she answered.

We squeezed through the gap and into a world glowing crimson. At one time, this must have been a pretty standard orbital — forty square kilometers of land on the cylinder’s inner surface, a lot of it dedicated to parks and agriculture. Orbitals always go heavy on the fields and forests, so people don’t fixate on being closed in; even if you can see the other side of the cylinder overhead, it’s not so bad if you’re surrounded by trees and grass.

So the Fasskisters’ home had probably been filled with their own native versions of nice little woods, quiet meadows, and the occasional rustic village. Now it was filled with Balrog, and it looked like some classic version of hell: scarlet, scarlet everywhere, like fire and lava and blood.

The orbital had a long white sun, kind of a fluorescent light tube stretching down the middle of the cylinder; but here on the ground, the whiteness of the shine was tinted crimson as far as the eye could see — as if we’d stepped inside a cherry-hot blast oven. The temperature was actually a bit cool, but the sheer look of the place made me break into a sweat.

"Dante would have been proud," Festina murmured, staring at it all. The red light shone up from the ground onto her face, casting weird shadows and giving her eyes little pinpoint dots of scarlet. I didn’t like the effect.

"What do we do?" I asked.

"Damned if I know," she answered. Looking off to our right, she said, "There’s a village over there. Let’s see if anyone’s around."

As soon as we aimed ourselves in that direction, the moss in front of our feet slipped aside to let us pass. Underneath was bare dirt. There must have been plants here once, grass or vegetables or something; but the Balrog had eaten clean down to the soil, gobbling whatever it found. It had probably eaten the support life too — all the worms and bugs and bacteria that orbitals need to keep the land healthy. The little animals weren’t sentient, so they were fair game for food… but still. It made me kind of squeamish to think of them getting dissolved by mossy digestive juices.

The path continued to open in front of us… and close in behind us. Not comforting. But the moss kept its distance, sifting away like drifting snow as we approached the village.

The huts in the village were half-sphere domes molded from glassy crystal, with millions of facets catching the light. The light was crimson, of course, glinting as if each dome was a cut-glass bowl plopped over a campfire. Twelve huts in all, and nobody in sight… till we got to the central square and found a single lumpy figure.

When Fasskisters aren’t dressed as some other species, they live inside "utility bots" — egg-shaped torsos with all kinds of legs and arms. I truly mean all kinds: ones that are clearly mechanical, as well as ones that mimic other species. If ever they have to deal with human technology, for example, it’s useful to have a human-shaped arm with lifelike human fingers; makes it easier to punch buttons, lift levers, and all that. So a utility bot is designed to have one of everything… a human arm, a human leg, a Mandasar Cheejretha, a pincer, a tentacle, a pseudopod, and so on.

Of course, these weren’t exact duplicates of the original limbs; since the robot had no head, each arm had its own eyes… and maybe ears and nose too. I can’t tell you how the Fasskister in the central egg keeps track of sixteen eyes at once, but I guess that’s none of my business. Anyway, it didn’t matter to this particular Fasskister: all its eyes and arms and everything were completely clogged over with moss. It had to be blind; it also seemed to be frozen in place, as if all that fuzz had gummed up its works.

"Aw," Festina said, "poor Tin Man. Need some oil?"

A strangled sound came from inside… maybe the actual voice of a Fasskister: what you got when you shut down the electronic amplifiers they usually used for speaking. It didn’t sound like words, at least not in English. I’d heard people say Fasskisters always spoke their own language; then circuitry in their suits converted their speech to a language their listeners understood.

Festina lifted her hand to her throat. "Kaisho," she said, "can you clean this guy off?"

Kaisho’s whisper sounded over our receivers. "Why would I want to do that?"

"To keep from pissing me off," Festina told her. "One. Two. Three…"

Like sand spilling through an hourglass, spores began to tumble off the Fasskister in front of us — clearing the tips of his uppermost arms and slowly sliding downward, leaving behind bare metal and plastic. I didn’t know which was more mind-boggling: that all these flecks of inanimate moss were moving of their own accord, or that Kaisho, way back in Jacaranda, could know which particular Fasskister we were looking at. And that she or her Balrog joyrider had some way of telling the spores in front of us, "Please, clear off, thanks so much."

The spores continued to fall. Suddenly, one of the Fasskister’s metal arms gave a twitch. Its wrist rotated through a complete circle, then its first elbow twisted most of the way around too, till the glass sensor on the hand’s thumb pointed directly at Festina and me. From the robot’s chest, a deep male voice said, "Humans?"

"Greetings," Festina said with a slight bow. "We are sentient citizens of the League of Peoples. We beg your Hospitality."

The Fasskister swung his arm and nearly took off her head.

Festina didn’t just duck; she deflected the swing with a quick little forearm block that flicked over and turned into a grab. Almost instantly she tugged on the robot’s wrist, pulling the whole Fasskister forward. At the same moment, her knee came up hard. The effect was the robot getting yanked into a very nice knee strike that landed CLANG against the machine’s metal chest.

On a human, the blow would have broken ribs. On the robot it didn’t leave a dent, but I could hear something go THUNK. It sounded like the flesh-and-blood Fasskister smacking against the walls of his robot housing.

I jumped forward to help, grabbing two more arms (one light and spidery, the other wide and chunky). Festina yelled, "Lift!" and together we heaved the Fasskister off the ground. He didn’t weigh much, but he’d started to wave his limbs wildly — not trying to wrestle us, more like a panicked attempt to get away, but I still got clonked a few good ones.

Festina snagged another of his arms with her free hand and shouted at the egg-shaped torso, "Settle down, or we’ll throw you into the moss. I mean it. We don’t want to hurt you, but if you can’t behave, we’ll toss you and find someone who can."

The Fasskister continued to flail about. Festina met my eye, and together we swung him back for a big throw, the way kids do when they’re about to chuck someone into a swimming pool. "Last chance," Festina said to the Fasskister. "That moss sure looks hungry."

For once, the Balrog decided to play along — the patch of moss in front of us flared up fiery bright, like hell flames leaping to catch another sinner. The Fasskister gave a mousy shriek and went completely limp.

Slowly, regretfully, the Balrog settled back into its usual dull glow.

"That’s better," Festina said. Keeping a tight hold on the robot’s arms, we lowered it until its feet touched the ground. Bare dirt — the Balrog had pulled back a few paces so we had a little circle of clear space in the middle of the village square. "No place to run," Festina told the Fasskister as she let go of the robot’s wrist. "You be nice, and we’ll be nice."

"He’ll be nice?" the Fasskister asked, pointing at me.

"Sure," I answered, confused by the question. "Why wouldn’t I be nice?"

"I know you," he said. "You are definitely not nice."

Festina opened her eyes wide in surprise. I was surprised myself; but then I remembered how the Fasskisters on this orbital had been booted off Troyen for causing trouble, back before the war. For all I knew, this guy might have been stuck inside a queen robot on that first night, when Sam got me to crush the crystal globe and discombobulate them all. Or he might have been one of the many Fasskisters who’d been banished personally by the high queen, while I stood solemn-faced beside Verity’s throne. He might just have despised me because I was tied to the whole system of monarchy, or because I was Diplomat Samantha’s brother — the Fasskister community never liked her much either. All kinds of reasons why I might not be popular with this fellow.

"I’ll be nice," I told him. "Really."

The thing about Fasskisters is they’re all locked up inside those robots, so you can’t read the expressions on their faces. They don’t even have body language unless they deliberately make the robot shake its fist or something. Even so, just standing there like a lump, this Fasskister pretty well communicated he didn’t trust me a bit. "Good," said Festina, "we’re all just the peachiest of friends. So tell me now, one pal to another: where did this fucking moss come from?"

"Humans," he replied. "And one of the Gragguk."

Gragguk was a Fasskister word they considered so obscene, their language circuits never translated it. Gragguk was also the word they used for Mandasar queens. "How long ago?" Festina asked.

A pause. "Twenty-four of your standard days," the Fasskister answered. I did some calculations: I’d been on Willow ten days from Troyen to Celestia, then two days hanging off Starbase Iris, a day on Celestia, and another ten days coming back here… so Willow must have visited this orbital just before picking me up from the moonbase.

The Fasskister was still talking. "They came from over there," he said, gesturing toward the docking port with one of his smaller arms. "A Gragguk and four humans. All wearing uniforms of your navy."

"Black uniforms?" Festina asked.

"No. Two in dark blue, two in a shade of green."

Dark blue meant the Communications Corps; the "shade of green" was likely olive, for Security. Just the sort of party Willow would have sent to meet with aliens, if the ship’s Explorers had already been left behind on Troyen.

"What did the group want?" Festina asked.

"Revenge!" The English word came out calmly from the translation circuits, but I could hear a sort of shriek inside the robot. The real Fasskister had screamed the word in his native tongue. "The Gragguk claimed she was the last of her caste, and she wished to apologize for the trouble caused by Verity’s old regime. What she really wanted was to infect us with this!"

He spread all his arms at once, waving toward the moss surrounding us. "It appeared as soon as the Gragguk left. Her blatant attempt to destroy us."

Probably true: your average queen is more keen on smiting her enemies than apologizing to them. If that Queen Temperance was leaving the Troyen system and thought she might never come back, she could have given Willow some story about wanting to make peace with the Fasskisters; then she’d dumped some Balrog spores on the ground when neither humans nor Fasskisters were watching.

"Where do you think the queen got the spores?" I whispered to Festina.

"From Kaisho herself," Festina answered. "Our beloved companion stepped on the Balrog twenty-five years ago, before the war started. When human doctors couldn’t help her, the navy brought in a Mandasar team — the best medical experts available. They took spore samples back home with them, so they could research ways of separating the Balrog from its host… not that they ever came up with any answers. The samples must have stayed in some test tube on Troyen, till the queen from Willow got her claws on them."

"If she only planted the spores twenty-four days ago," I said, "the stuff grew pretty fast."

"Like lightning," the Fasskister told me. He began to walk toward one of the crystal huts. Grudgingly, the Balrog slipped out of his path; Festina and I followed along behind.

"The plague swept over us without warning," the Fasskister said. "Tendrils of it spread through the grass, so thin they were practically invisible. When you took a wrong step the moss would suddenly sweep upward, covering your shell and shutting down all movement systems. It left life support intact, and even seemed to be providing basic food through our nutrient ports; but I’ve been frozen for days!"

"Do you think it’s the same everywhere?" Festina asked.

The Fasskister let his arms go slack. "I don’t know. Our village is closest to the docking port, where the plague was released. We were taken by surprise. Perhaps others had time to prepare…"

"And perhaps not," Festina finished. "When our ship came to call, no one was answering the radio."

The Fasskister pulled in its arms and passed through a door into the hut. There was plenty of light inside, diffused straight through the dome’s crystal. I could see a clutter of moss-covered bulges on the floor, but didn’t know if they were machines, furniture or people. The Balrog wouldn’t let any of us get close enough to tell — the moss let us inside the door, but wouldn’t yield any farther.

"Your family?" I asked sympathetically, looking at the bulges.

"My vidscreen and sound system!" the Fasskister answered. "I swear I’ll sue that Gragguk till she screams."

"That’ll be a good trick," Festina told him. "She’s dead." The admiral pursed her lips and thought for a moment. "You were one of the people who met the humans and the queen?"

"Yes." The Fasskister was still waving his arms, turning the eyes on his hands to survey the great mossy mess. "The bastards came straight to our village."

"Because it’s closest to the docking port," Festina murmured. "I don’t suppose you planted any of your own nano on them… the way the queen planted spores on you."

"What do you mean?" the Fasskister asked.

"Nano shaped like little eyeballs," I told him. "Well… like human eyeballs anyway." I slipped out the door to bare ground, then knelt and drew a picture in the dirt: a nanite’s big head, the long dangling tail. "They were programmed to sneak into a queen’s venom sacs, steal a bit of venom, then run off before they were caught."

"Yes," Festina said. "If you made the nano, what for? Why would you want to steal venom? And even if you did want venom, how did you think you’d ever retrieve the nanites when Willow was headed to a different star system?"

For a second, the Fasskister said nothing. Then, from inside the robot shell came a high-pitched cluttering sound, like a squirrel scolding someone for disturbing its nest. Mechanical arms lurched and bounced as if they were having spasms… or as if the Fasskister inside was rocking back and forth hysterically, bumping into control switches at random.

From the robot’s speakers, the language circuits drily pronounced, "Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha." The Fasskister was laughing his amps off.

"What’s so funny?" Festina demanded.

"You think… ha ha ha… we could make… ha… nanotech like that… ha ha… in so little time? The Gragguk was only here… ha… for an hour. Your little eyeballs… ha ha… took a team ages to develop."

Festina and I just stared bug-eyed. After a while, she said, "So you know about those nanites?"

"Of course. They were a major commission. Almost all of us on this orbital worked on the project."

"How long ago?"

"Many of your years. It’s gratifying to know they’re still operational."

"Why did you make them?"

"For a client," the Fasskister said. "I don’t know who. The business office said it was top secret — no name on the specifications."

"What did the specifications call for?" Festina asked.

"An integrated nanotech system," the Fasskister replied. "For secret entry, secret exit, some independent decision making, plenty of built-in evasion strategies… all standard requirements. We get a lot of orders for nanites that can sneak in and out of places without being noticed."

"I’ll bet," Festina muttered.

"The real trick was keying it to his DNA." The Fasskister pointed at me.

I yelped. "Me?"

"Yeah."

Festina’s jaw had dropped. "Edward? The nano was keyed to Edward?"

"Yeah," the Fasskister said. "The high Gragguk’s pretty-boy gigolo."

I swallowed hard. "What were the nanites supposed to do?"

"Find a queen," the Fasskister said. "Take a swig of venom. Go running back to you, wherever you were, and spit the venom down your throat. Like a mother illi’im that fills up on food, then vomits it into her baby’s mouth."

"So," Festina murmured, "the nanites weren’t on Willow to begin with?"

"I don’t know what this Willow is," the Fasskister told her, "but I do know those nanites. They follow the high Gragguk’s consort wherever he goes, and dose him with venom whenever they can steal some from a queen. That’s their job. And they’ve been doing it since well before the war started."

I stood there like a dummy, not really taking it in. I was the carrier: me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised — you can be surrounded by a horde of nano and never notice it, any more than you notice the billions of natural bacteria in the air around you. A full nano scan would have found I had hitchhikers, but I’d never been put through the slightest examination… not when I’d gone from Troyen to the moonbase, and not when Willow picked me up. That was pretty darned careless, when you thought about it; but by then, Willow had left its Explorers on Troyen, and Explorers are the ones who are supposed to be fanatical about decontamination. The rest of Willow’s crew just assumed I was clean.

I’d assumed I was clean too. In twenty years on the moonbase, my nanite attendants hadn’t done a thing. They’d only kicked into action when I found the dead queen in Willow’s hold. All of a sudden, they had something to do: filling their little eyeballs with venom and ferrying it back to me. No wonder I got sick — I probably would have died if I hadn’t stationed those defense clouds around the queen’s venom sacs. The clouds cut off the nanites from getting more poison.

The real question was why I hadn’t died on Troyen. If the nanites had dogged my heels since before the war, they must have had a busy time when I was living in the same palace as Queen Verity. They’d be dosing me with venom morning, noon, and night; but I was perfectly okay till I caught the Coughing Jaundice…

Oh.

Oh.

The jaundice was really venom poisoning. The night I got sick was when the nanites started their work. And the only thing that kept me alive was a team of the best doctors on Troyen. Right there at the end, when I started to get better, maybe I’d finally built up a resistance to the stuff; after all, it’d been a whole year and the queen’s chemical cycle was repeating itself. But till that time, I was constantly getting dosed with new enzymes and hormones and junk, twisting me inside out, practically killing me…

For what? Who would intentionally do that to me? The Fasskisters must have charged big money for a project so complicated… and who would put up that much cash just to kill yours truly? I wasn’t anyone important. And if somebody really did want me snuffed, why choose such a strange and complicated way to do it?

The same questions were probably going through Festina’s head. When I turned toward her, she was looking at me thoughtfully. "You, Edward," she said, "are the eye of one nasty fucking shitstorm. It’s not your doing, but it terrifies the crap out of me." She thought a moment longer. "I’m going to ask you a question, and I want an honest answer. Okay?"

All of a sudden, I felt too scared to talk. I just nodded my head.

"Edward," she said, "were you and your sister genetically engineered? From scratch? Before conception?"

Even though I’d been expecting something awful, I’d never expected her to hit my darkest secret. For a wild second, I hoped some spirit would take possession of my body — tell a convincing lie, or pump out some magical pheromone that would make her forget she’d ever brought up the subject. But no deus ex machina came to rescue me. In the end, all I said was, "Um."

"Okay," she said, patting me gently on the shoulder. "That explains a lot. About nanites and Mandasars and the war." Her mouth turned up in a wry little smile. "It even explains about judo mats." She lifted up quickly on tiptoe and gave me a light kiss on the cheek. "But you were a perfect gentleman. A real prince." She chuckled. "Now let’s get back to Jacaranda."

"Hey," the Fasskister said. A very calm, "Hey," because the translation computer seemed to be programmed to keep an even tone of voice. But inside the robot shell, the "Hey" had been a sharp piercing squeak. "You’re just going to leave now? Walk off like you’ve solved all your problems? Forget about my vidscreen and my sound system?"

"And the people," I said.

"Right," the Fasskister agreed hurriedly. "The people. There are hundreds of us on this orbital; are you just going to leave everybody frozen here?"

"What do you want us to do?" Festina asked.

"You got the moss off me," he said. "Do the same for everything else. Everybody." When Festina hesitated, he told her, "I helped you, didn’t I? I answered your questions. So now it’s time you owe me a favor. Lose the damned moss."

"All right," Festina sighed. She lifted her hand to her throat. "Kaisho, have you been following all this?"

A whisper came back over our receivers. "Yes."

"I have to sympathize with this fellow," Festina told her. "The Balrog has gone completely overboard. Sooner or later, the Fasskister Union is going to find out about this; they’re sure to notice if a whole orbital goes incommunicado for any length of time. When they send a ship to see what’s happened, the Fasskisters will turn ape-shit. They’ll run to every race in the known universe, screaming to have you declared non-sentient."

"Let them," Kaisho answered. "The highest echelons of the League know the Balrog is more sentient than all you lesser species put together."

"But it doesn’t look that way," I said, trying to be reasonable. "It kind of looks like you’re… well, that queen from Willow was a dangerous non-sentient, right? And she brought the Balrog to this orbital so she could get back at the Fasskisters. The Balrog did exactly what she wanted. So it looks like you’re aiding and abetting a dangerous non-sentient."

Kaisho chuckled. "Nicely argued, Teelu. They’ll be fitting you for a diplomat’s uniform any day now. But this has nothing to do with the queen. The Fasskisters know full well why it’s right and proper to lock them in their precious metal suits, with physical needs taken care of, but their minds slowly going crazy."

"What do you mean?" Festina asked. No answer. "Come on, Kaisho, cut the crap and explain what’s going on."

Still no answer from Kaisho; but it was obvious the Fasskister understood exactly what she was talking about. A high-pitched squeal came from inside the robot shell. The machine suddenly spun away from us and ran out the door. He only got two short steps before reaching the edge of the clear space untouched by moss. Beyond that, there was nowhere to go — the Fasskister’s arms waved in panic, all his eyes scanning the ground for an escape route. Even as we watched, moss surged forward, like a wave on a beach lapping over the Fasskister’s toes.

Except that a wave doesn’t leave a fuzzy red coating on your feet.

As quickly as the spores had trickled off the Fasskister’s metal housing, they swept back up again: crimson mold climbing over ankle joints and knees, crusting over the central egg, scaling the arms. Elbows stopped waving; wrists stopped writhing; fingers froze into frantic claws that fattened with moss till they looked like furry mittens.

Inside the Fasskister’s shell, a high-pitched mousy wail echoed for a few seconds, broke off, then started again. I took a step forward, but Festina grabbed my arm to hold me back. She pointed to the ground — the Balrog was starting to advance toward us, cutting us off from getting close to the Fasskister.

We had to retreat… with the moss crowding us out of the village, forcing Festina and me along a narrow track that grudgingly opened in front of our feet. Leaving us no option, the Balrog shooed us to the docking hatch and back into Jacaranda.

32 SCOPING OUT THE GROUND

I spent the rest of the day in quarantine. We all did: getting completely cleaned off, swept free of nanites. At least it didn’t hurt as much as getting scoured by the defense cloud — a personal detox chamber took its time, rather than ripping at anything that might be suspicious. Gentle thoroughness, as opposed to the quick and dirty.

But there were quick and dirty defense clouds at work in other parts of Jacaranda. The clouds purged my cabin and the Explorers’ planning room, places I might have left wandering nanites. The ship’s evac modules got a onceover too, on the theory that unattached nanites might be hiding there; that seemed to be their modus operandi.

I hope Prope assigned a cloud to her own quarters. She should have got detoxed herself, considering how she and I had had that session of really close contact… but she just stayed on the bridge, grumbling about all the bother of sending antinanite clouds hither, thither, and yon.

After all, the nanites were only dangerous to me.

By 23:00 we were back orbiting Troyen, with a litter of microsatellites listening all around the globe. I sat with the others in the bridge’s Visitors’ Gallery, occasionally casting glances at Festina. She was an admiral; she got to stand out on the bridge itself, hovering over Prope’s shoulder in a way guaranteed to make the captain irritable. That was probably why Festina did it.

We hadn’t had a chance to talk since coming back to Jacaranda… not in private, anyway. I wanted to apologize for being a clone, and ask her to explain what she’d been thinking back on the orbital. It seemed like maybe she’d figured out more about me than I knew myself; and I sort of kind of wanted to know what it was.

Sort of. Kind of. Whatever truth she’d guessed, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it.

At 23:46:22, our satellites picked up the beep. Not a real beep, of course — just a flick of radio energy at a frequency that could easily be mistaken for spillover from some electric appliance. Not that Troyen had any electric appliances working at the moment, but the navy’s equipment designers couldn’t plan for everything.

"Where are they?" Festina asked eagerly. "Can we triangulate?"

"Give me another second," Kaisho replied. She got to be on the bridge too, sitting at the Explorers’ station. Nobody was happy with Kaisho operating the controls — Festina was strongly inclined to lock her in the brig — but we didn’t have any other choice. It took hours and hours to program all the sensors, and everybody but Kaisho had been locked most of the day in nano detox. If we wanted to be ready by 23:46:22, Festina had to let Kaisho rig things up and run them.

From the look on Festina’s face, I figured this was the last time Kaisho would be allowed to run anything but her own wheelchair.

"All right," Kaisho announced in her usual whisper. "The signal came from Unshummin city — practically inside Verity’s palace."

"What the fuck are Explorers doing there?" Tobit asked.

Me, I was looking at the bridge’s main vidscreen where a map display showed the source of the beep. It was just outside the palace walls, on the south edge of Diplomats Row. "That’s the Fasskister embassy," I said. "At least it was. It could have got wrecked in the war."

"Stupid spot for the Explorers to hole up," Festina muttered. "If I wanted to avoid trouble, I’d head for open country, not the very heart of Unshummin."

"Perhaps, Admiral," said Prope, "the people from Willow are more comfortable in the city. Not everyone is from such a rustic background as you are."

Festina glared. "Thank you, Captain," she replied icily, "I’ll take that as the compliment it was surely meant to be. As for the supposed dangers that city-dwellers believe infest the wilderness…" She waved her hand dismissively. "The most dangerous creatures on Troyen right now are the Mandasar armies, and I guarantee Unshummin palace is crawling with soldiers. No matter who’s winning or losing the war, someone will have a huge military presence there… for the sheer symbolic appeal of holding the high queen’s throne and sitting on it from time to time. If I were in the neighborhood, I’d hightail it out of town — off to some nice quiet nowhere without the slightest strategic importance."

"Ah, dear Festina," Kaisho whispered, "suppose you didn’t have that option."

She pointed at the vidscreen and turned a dial on her console. The map display changed to an actual overhead photo of Unshummin — a high aerial perspective with the palace in the middle and a good chunk of property all around. A big circle, maybe ten kilometers across. At that scale, the palace itself was no bigger than the palm of my hand, but still recognizable by its hive-queen shape: head to the north; claws fanned out west, northwest, northeast, and east; the body stretching back to the south, with its huge five-story brain hump and those two glass domes nestled where the tail met the torso — the venom sacs, glistening bright green from the plants in the two conservatories.

Surrounding the palace were the canals, artificial waterways forming concentric circles that divided the city into rings; and crossing the canals by more than a hundred bridges were the radii, good-sized streets running straight out from the palace grounds. The whole layout looked like a dartboard with the high queen sitting in the bull’s-eye… which was a pretty lousy place to be when you thought about it.

As far as I could see, the city seemed pretty much intact despite twenty years of war — the only obvious destruction was a big burned swath between the fourth and fifth canals. A fire had taken out almost the entire ring, flattening everything black; but it looked like the flames hadn’t crossed the water on either side, so the damage had been contained.

Of course, there might have been other wreckage that didn’t show up on the picture. We’d caught the city at sunset, as long shadows stretched from west to east, jumbling up the patterns and perspectives. With all the computer gadgetry at her disposal, Kaisho should have been able to filter out those shadows and give a crystal-clear view of everything… but I guess she preferred the dramatic night-is-coming effect.

"Unshummin palace," she whispered. The ship-soul brightened the center of the picture to make it stand out.

"The signal source," Kaisho said. A blue pinpoint of light flared up on Diplomats Row. I squinted, trying to see if that really was the Fasskister embassy. Yes, that’s what it looked like… though the building’s front facade was missing, as if someone had mushed it in. No big surprise, I guess — considering how folks on Troyen felt about the Fasskisters, it was a wonder they hadn’t blown the embassy to rubble.

"The perimeter," Kaisho said. A green circle-ish loop appeared over top of Prosperity Water, the fourth canal out from the middle. It sure wasn’t the perimeter of the city itself — there were ten more canals beyond Prosperity, plus a sprawl of developments that had sprouted after the original zoning plan was set up.

"Perimeter of what?" Tobit asked. "The fire zone?" Prosperity was the inside edge of that burned-out area I’d seen.

"You could call it a fire zone," Kaisho answered. "It’s actually a perimeter of defense. For the palace. They’ve blown up all the bridges, making the canal a moat. I imagine they burned down everything in that ring so they’d have a clear shot at anyone coming in. Because here’s where the enemy is."

The photo blossomed with scarlet dots: thousands of them, maybe millions, covering the whole city outside the fire zone. They didn’t just block the radius roads; they were everywhere, hunkered down along the canals, at the bridges, inside buildings, sealing off every possible exit.

A vast red deluge of firepower… and our Explorers were trapped at ground zero.

33 APPRAISING THE RISKS

"Are you sure?" Dade asked Kaisho. "I mean… the sensors are just picking up heat sources right? Ones that match the Mandasar profile. So how can you tell the difference between one set of soldiers and another? How can you tell they’re soldiers at all? Those people outside the perimeter could just be civilians."

Kaisho gave a soft chuckle. "Next picture, ship-soul." As if she’d expected him to ask precisely that question and had already set up an answer.

The screen image split into halves, both sides showing Mandasar warriors. The warriors on the left were tucked under an urban camo awning, but the perspective came down at enough of an angle that we could see the front parts of their bodies. They all had black patches painted on their shells at the upper shoulders, like blobby epaulettes; for weapons they held wooden crossbows with big ugly arrows whose heads were nasty enough to penetrate Mandasar armor.

The warriors on the right half of the picture had crossbows too, and sharp steel tips attached to their claws. No epaulettes, black or otherwise. This group was slinking along the edge of a street, keeping well into the sunset shadows.

"The ones with black markings," Kaisho said, "are outside the perimeter. The unmarked ones are inside. And before you ask, Mr. Dade, no, I haven’t checked every warrior on both sides… but I’ve looked at enough to be confident of my sampling. The army of the black has surrounded a much smaller force based in the palace. Both sides are holding their positions rather than trying to kill each other."

"A cease-fire?" Festina suggested. "Perhaps their leaders are trying to work out a surrender."

"I suspect the palace army doesn’t have a leader," Kaisho replied. "Let me suggest a scenario."

"Oh good," Tobit muttered. "Someone thinks she can explain this mess."

Kaisho nodded, her hair bouncing slightly over her face. "Willow was supposed to find a queen. Where would the Explorers look first? Queens could be practically anywhere on the entire planet. Do you start going to every army camp your sensors pick up, asking, ‘Excuse me, do you have a queen here?’ Or do you go to a known position that’s almost certain to have a queen in residence?"

"Unshummin palace," Festina said.

"Exactly. It’s easy to find, and you can be sure some queen must have claimed it for her own. That’s where Willow went first; and they found a queen who was pantingly eager to go to Celestia, because she happened to be in deep shit: encircled and besieged by the Black Army.

"I see it going like this," Kaisho continued. "Willow sends Plebon and Olympia Mell to arrange things with the queen. The queen, of course, claims she’s perfectly sentient and has never done an evil deed in her life. The Explorers believe the queen is lying; so they decide that when Willow leaves, they’ll stay behind. Never mind that the palace is surrounded — better to take their chances with the Black Shoulders than be killed for sure by the League."

"And that’s how they got stuck," Tobit said, nodding. "They must have thrown in their lot with the palace guards — got the queen to put in a good word for them before she left. They’re not in immediate danger, but they’re still bottled up by the Black Army and waiting for the ax to fall."

"Except that nobody’s swinging axes," Festina pointed out. "Which is damned strange. How long has it been since Willow took away the queen? Three and a half weeks? With the queen gone, the palace guards have nothing to fight for; so why not surrender? And if the guards are too stubborn to give in, why hasn’t the Black Army overrun the place? They certainly have the numbers to crush the defenders. So what’s everybody waiting for?"

"Us," I said quietly. "They’ve been waiting for us."

Captain Prope sat up sharply in her chair. "Us?" she murmured. "Yes… us. We’re the missing ingredient they’ve been waiting for." Her face had an I-knew-it-had-to-be-about-me expression… as if everything in the universe made sense once you saw it as part of Prope’s own story.

Festina gave the captain an exasperated look, then turned to me. "How would they know we were coming, Edward? Even if it was common knowledge Willow left Explorers down there, no one would expect us to attempt a rescue. The Admiralty has an ironclad policy never to remove anyone from a war planet till the fighting stops. Complete quarantine. Our group can go down there because I think it’s necessary for the fleet’s sentience… but under normal circumstances, the navy would leave those Explorers to rot."

I couldn’t argue with her, but I knew I was right. Sam told me Temperance was the last holdout against the new high queen. Temperance must have been occupying the palace, and Samantha was advisor to the queen on the other side. Now my sister was telling the Black Epaulettes, "Wait. Don’t attack. Wait."

Sam expected I’d use Dad’s access code and order a navy ship to fly me to Troyen. Then I was supposed to land and join her in the high queen’s palace. Her very words: "in the high queen’s palace." Except that the palace was the one place Sam’s side didn’t control.

So what would happen if me and Festina and the rest tried to land at the palace as directed? The Black Army would go crazy. They’d see the Sperm-tail flutter out of the sky, and they’d think offworlders were coming to help Temperance’s side — summoned by Temperance herself, who was last seen leaving on a Technocracy ship. The black troops would spring to the attack, hoping to overrun the palace before we offworlders had a chance to get settled; and in the ensuing fight, with battle musk as thick as smoke in a burning house, every human in the area would be slaughtered. The attacking soldiers wouldn’t hesitate a second. They’d shred our whole group in the belief we were outside mercenaries trying to meddle in Mandasar affairs.

Isn’t that how it would go? We’d all be killed. And it would get written off as an accident of war, a sad, sad tragedy. The new high queen would apologize to the Technocracy, with all the grief in the world: "What a terrible shame. Let’s establish channels of communication so this never happens again." The Admiralty would say yes, while breathing their own sigh of relief — with Festina and me out of the way, the mess with Willow would be hushed up. Soon, the recruiters on Celestia would start operating again; maybe they’d even start a branch office on Troyen.

In the end, everybody would be happy. Except those of us who were dead.

I told myself there had to be something I didn’t understand. My sister would never draw me into a deliberate massacre. She must have some other scheme I just wasn’t smart enough to figure out.

But I had a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, and it wouldn’t go away.

"Do we go down or not?" Dade asked. He was looking at Festina. Everyone on the bridge was watching her — even the regular crew who were supposed to keep their eyes on their monitors.

"We’ll try it," Festina said at last, "but just a quick in and out. Five minutes, tops… and let’s hope the people we’re looking for are right where their signal came from."

Tobit had put on a poker face. "The second we send down our Sperm-tail," he said, "both armies will kick up a god-awful ruckus. They’ll each think the other side is trying something sneaky."

"I know," Festina sighed. "Captain" — she turned to Prope—"as soon as we go down, I’d like Jacaranda to broadcast a message on all radio bands, saying we’re a neutral party just retrieving a group of noncombatants. Peaceful and not allied with any faction."

"They’ll never believe it," Prope said. "It’s exactly the sort of ruse a group of invaders would try." (Prope sure seemed to have thought a lot about lies dishonest people might tell.)

"Even so," Festina told her, "we have to deliver the message. For the sake of sentience."

She glanced at the vidscreen. It still showed the two pictures side by side, Black Epaulettes and the palace guards, waiting uneasily. "When we go in," Festina said, "jittery soldiers are going to react from sheer nervous tension. We can hope they have enough discipline not to get carried away, but there’s no guarantee. If we can do anything to avoid triggering an all-out battle, we have to try. I admit the radio message is a weak idea — God knows, all their radios may have been eaten by Fasskister nanites. If anyone has a better suggestion, I’m happy to listen."

She looked around the room. No one spoke. Finally, Dade cleared his throat. "Uh… does it really matter?’

"What do you mean?" Festina asked.

"These guys," he said, waving at the soldiers on the vidscreen. "They’ve all been at war, killing each other, right? That makes ’em non-sentient. Even the people who aren’t on the front lines, the cooks and the baggage handlers and all — if they’re helping the armies, they’re knowingly abetting non-sentient activities, which makes them non-sentient too. So from the League’s point of view, why does it matter what happens to anybody in Unshummin? I don’t want those people to die, but if we do set off one bunch of non-sentients fighting another, the great and glorious League shouldn’t give a damn."

"Jesus, Benny," Tobit groaned, "it’s the first fucking rule of Exploration, always assume everything is sentient till proven otherwise."

"But it’s been proven otherwise," Dade said. "For twenty years, the armies have demonstrated just how non-sentient they are. Aren’t we justified in assuming—" "That there are no children in the palace?" I asked. "That while Queen Temperance lived there, she didn’t keep laying eggs every twelve weeks? That there aren’t other kids from all the warriors and gentles who’ve been thrown together with each other? That there isn’t a single Mandasar in the palace who just ran there for protection when the Black Army showed up? That there aren’t warriors and gentles and workers on both sides who firmly believe everything they’ve done was purely for the defense of their families, and others who may have been bloodthirsty once but now want peace more devoutly, more sentiently than any of us powder-puffs who’ve never gone through two decades of war? Is that what we’re justified in assuming?"

Dade blushed and lowered his gaze… while I pretty well did the same thing. I’d never spoken like that before; I half thought I was possessed again, and kind of stupidly, I tried to wiggle my fingers just to make sure I was still in control. They wiggled — the words had come from me. Just a part of me I didn’t know I had.

Festina patted me on the shoulder, then looked at the others. "Anything else?" she asked.

Prope opened her mouth to speak… but even she was careful not to meet anyone else’s eyes. "It’s my duty," the captain said, "to make official note of your analysis, Admiral. This landing may spark two hostile factions into battling each other; if that happens, the death count is bound to be enormous." She paused and made sure we were all listening — the normal bridge crew as well as us visitors. "It could be argued this landing constitutes a non-sentient act, since it runs the risk of provoking murder on a massive scale. The Outward Fleet will not force any of you to participate in the mission against your conscience."

I wondered if Willow’s captain had said the same to his crew. He might have — navy regs require starship commanders to recognize dicey situations and call them accordingly. But at the moment, I figured Prope wasn’t thinking about ethics so much as covering her butt… hoping this speech would get her off the hook with the League of Peoples. Even if the League killed the rest of us the next time we crossed the line, perhaps they’d let Prope pass because she’d spoken the right words. "Oh yes, I warned them it wasn’t smart…"

"Thank you, Captain," Festina said stiffly. "You’re perfectly correct. Anyone who considers this landing improper is encouraged to stay on the ship." She glanced at the screen again: the soldiers had flattened themselves in darkening shadows as the sun continued to set. "It’ll be full night down there in thirty minutes," she said. "We’ll begin suiting up then. If some of you don’t show up at the robing chambers, I won’t send anyone looking for you."

She nodded to nobody in particular and quietly left the bridge. For a long time, none of the rest of us moved.

34 WAITING IN THE TRANSPORT BAY

We all showed up. In the little anteroom in front of Jacaranda’s four robing chambers, everyone I thought might come, did: Tobit, Dade, Kaisho, Counselor, Zeeleepull, Hib Nib Pib. And me, of course. I can’t say I’d thought long and hard about the morals of what we were doing. Mostly I’d been busy on the bridge. With a bit of persuasion (talk, not pheromones), I’d convinced Prope to let me record the message that would be broadcast when we landed: telling everyone I was the Little Father Without Blame, just coming down to Unshummin to pick up some friends. It wasn’t what you’d call a slick performance, especially not for something that would be heard all over the planet, on every radio band, looping again and again and again; but I didn’t think it was totally awful.

Besides, good or bad wasn’t the point. The point was to persuade Mandasars not to worry about a Sperm-tail coming in… and secretly to tell my sister I’d come back to Troyen. I didn’t know what effect I wanted that to have; maybe just to see what Sam would do.

All kinds of terrible suspicions lurked in the back of my mind. I needed to give Sam the chance to prove me wrong.

Back at the robing chambers, Festina was last to arrive. She tried not to smile too hard when she found the rest of us waiting. "Well," she said, "an embarrassment of volunteers." She gestured toward the four robing chambers. "Four seats, four Explorers. Me, Tobit, Dade, and York. The rest of you stay on Jacaranda, and I don’t want any bitching."

She got bitching anyway. Kaisho and the Mandasars argued and argued and argued why they should go with us… but anybody could see it was crazy to let them tag along. Kaisho was in a wheelchair — a wheelchair that could hover, but one that moved as slow as a constipated snail. If we wanted to get down and back in five minutes, we couldn’t afford her slowing us up.

No way for the Mandasars to come either. The whole city would reek of battle musk, even before our arrival got the troops heated up. One whiff would make Counselor and the workers freeze with terror. As for Zeeleepull, he could handle the musk (even if it put him in the mood for a fight), but he’d cause plenty of trouble if we met any palace guards. With an all-human party, we might convince the guards we were just there to pick up our friends — especially with Plebon and Olympia Mell to vouch for us. But if we had a Mandasar warrior along, one with a strange accent and no knowledge of palace-guard passwords, we’d be ten times more likely to get arrested as spies.

Zeeleepull and the others weren’t keen on listening to such logic. I’d warned them they might not be allowed to land but they still got all huffy, asking why I’d spent so much time teaching them how to act on Troyen when they’d never get to set foot on the planet. Eventually, Festina had to pull rank on them. She told them they could consider themselves reserves, in case the landing party called for help… but they simply weren’t going down in the first shot with us real Explorers.

Yes. Festina called me a real Explorer. After thirty-five years wearing the black uniform, I was finally going to earn it.

Tobit tried to usher me into a robing chamber, but I said, "Sorry. I’d better not."

"For Christ’s sake, York," Tobit snapped, "Troyen might have been a nice cozy planet when you lived there, but it’s been at war for twenty years. Nobody has a clue what kinds of gas and germs and shit they’ve been tossing at each other. Sure, they lost most of their tech base right at the beginning… but they still managed to preserve those Balrog spores they used on the Fasskisters, didn’t they? Who knows what other nasty crap they managed to collect while they were the top dogs of medical research? The only way to protect yourself is wearing a tightsuit."

"But, um… um…"

"He must not be sealed up," Counselor said. "It’s important for the palace guards to know he is Teelu. They must be able to see him. And smell him."

She turned and looked directly at Festina… as if they’d talked about me recently and decided some things between themselves. I guess that shouldn’t have been surprising; if Festina had begun to suspect stuff about me and pheromones, she’d go straight to someone who could smell the scents I put out. Now Festina put her hand on Tobit’s shoulder, and said, "Let it go, Phylar. Edward can do more for us if he’s not closed off in an airtight cocoon."

"I can do more without the tightsuit too," Dade said. "They’re really hard to move in and you can’t—"

"In your dreams, junior," Tobit interrupted. "If you don’t shut up, we’ll make you wear two."

Fifteen minutes later, we stood in the transport bay — Tobit, Dade, and Festina in fully sealed tightsuits, me in a light "impact suit"… which was basically an Explorer uniform with elbow pads.

My face and hands felt itchy from getting doused with camouflage nano: smart little color-changing bugs, programmed to match general background shades and to break up my silhouette so I’d be hard to recognize as human when standing in shadows. My uniform was covered with the same stuff; so were the tightsuits. Even in the brightly lit transport bay, the other three Explorers were easy to overlook. At one point, I was listening to Festina run over last-minute details with Tobit, and suddenly realized Dade was standing right beside me, listening too. When he wasn’t moving, my eye seemed to slip straight past him without noticing he was there. Down on the ground where darkness had fallen, we’d be nine-tenths invisible.

Too bad invisible didn’t mean undetectable. My nose was picking up a nostril-gouging chemical smell from all the suits; Mandasars would know something strange was close by, even if we were completely lost in shadows. Then again, if they couldn’t see to aim their crossbows, maybe the camo wasn’t a total loss.

Festina turned to the rear of the transport bay and called up to the control console, "Do you have the message to broadcast?"

"All recorded and stored in the ship-soul," Prope answered.

"And is the anchor in place on the ground?"

"Naturally," Lieutenant Harque said.

He and Prope were running the console themselves, rather than letting the usual crew do anything. I told myself the captain was showing how cooperative she could be, by giving us her personal attention. Still, I had to wonder if Harque was really the best technician on the ship. While the others had been suiting up, I’d watched him fumble with the control dials, trying to maneuver a Sperm anchor down to the surface. I don’t know if he made any real mistakes, but he cursed a lot under his breath.

This particular anchor was the usual box with gold horseshoes, but it also had a tiny flight engine attached and a whole bunch of stealth bafflers to prevent people from noticing anything on radar. Not that we expected any radar dishes had survived the Fasskister Swarm, but Explorers hate taking chances. We needed the anchor on the ground, right where we wanted to land, like a pin to tack down the bottom end of the Sperm-tail. Without the little machine, the tail would flap about as wild as a firehose and might throw us out anywhere within a thousand-klick radius.

It would be really bad to get dumped into an ocean. Or in front of a big hostile army. Or thirty thousand meters above the ground.

"So the anchor’s in place?" Festina asked. "Did anyone down there notice it landing?"

"Negative, Admiral," Harque answered, as smooth as if he’d never had a flick of trouble putting the box in place. "Perfect insertion, in an alley within twenty meters of the Explorers’ signal source. The anchor’s been there for ten whole minutes and no one has come to investigate."

"So," Tobit muttered, "either the folks on the ground didn’t see the anchor go in, or they know exactly what’s happening, and are waiting in ambush."

"Ever the optimist," Festina told him. Her voice had a metallic ring to it, because she was speaking through her tightsuit transmitter. Since I didn’t have a tightsuit myself, I had a teeny receiver fastened into my ear — glued good and tight so it wouldn’t fall out. I didn’t have a transmitter, but I wouldn’t need one: the others could hear my normal voice just fine, as long as I was within normal talking range… and we had absolutely no intention of ever splitting up.

"Are we ready?" Dade asked, far too brightly. This was his first trip planet-down, and he was getting off lucky. Troyen might be at war, but it was a lot friendlier than most places Explorers went. Mandasar warriors might actually listen if you pleaded for your life.

"Ready as we’ll ever be," Festina said, without sounding too happy about it. "Start the sequence, Harque."

"Aye-aye, Admiral. Pressurizing now."

A weight pushed on my ears as Harque increased the air pressure around us. Regulations said we had to have a higher pressure on our end than the atmosphere we were heading for — otherwise, the end of our Sperm-tail might suck up stuff off the planet. The extra pressure would also give us a real strong push into the Sperm-tail.

"Fully pressurized," Harque announced. "Anchor activated. Preparing to plant tail."

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Festina. "Get ready, Edward," she whispered softly. "Harque is just the sort of asshole to eject us without warning."

She nudged me to face the Aft Entry Mouth — the big irising door that would snap open any second now. When stuff started happening, it’d go really fast: no countdown to ejection, just zoom, the instant our Sperm-tail was planted. The tail would be glaringly obvious to anyone on the ground… a glittery ribbon of colored sparkles, stretching into the sky. Ideally, it would only stay put a few seconds, just long enough for us to hit the ground and switch off the anchor. Then the tail would slither away wherever it liked, flicking in all directions and confusing observers about where it actually touched down. If we were lucky, we could slink away from the landing site before anyone came for us. "Almost locked in," Harque muttered.

I glanced over at Festina beside me. Through the visor of her helmet, I could see she’d closed her eyes. Maybe she was praying. I thought about the last time I’d ridden a Sperm-tail: the way I’d been bludgeoned with ugly memories I hadn’t wanted to relive. Did that happen to Festina too? Did that happen to every Explorer who shot through a Sperm-tail universe?

And yet we stood shoulder to shoulder as if we were brave people.

"Contact," Harque said.

For a moment nothing happened. Then Prope spoke in a gloating voice. "Good-bye, Festina."

The Mouth snapped open and swallowed us up.

35 WORKING INTO POSITION

Scooped off my feet by a gust of wind-puffed out the Mouth and into the Sperm-tail. I felt myself turn boneless, like water poured into a long long funnel that would spill me onto the dark soil of Troyen.

The palace grounds and Diplomats Row. My home.

I’d never felt wanted on my father’s estate; as for the moonbase, it was just a barren nowhere. My only true home was the place I was going — where I lived with Verity and Sam till they both died.

Except that Sam wasn’t dead, was she? Did that mean Verity wasn’t dead either?

No, no, no! a voice screamed in my head. Another presence was trying to pierce through to me as I gushed down the Sperm-tail. Just like the last time: an unknown spirit reaching in, dredging up my own memories and forcing me to confront them. I tried to resist, but couldn’t shut out the images.

Verity’s empty bedroom. After I’d escaped from those guards and sent Innocence to safety, I’d gone back to the high queen’s chambers. Both bodies had disappeared — nothing but that pool of Sam’s blood. I remembered kneeling in the damp, touching the red stickiness, lifting my fingers to my nose…

…only now I could remember the smell. The smell of the blood. As if my nose had been Mandasar-sensitive way back then. I smelled the blood and knew it wasn’t real — just artificial stuff, the kind the doctors synthesized for me whenever I needed a transfusion. Heaven knows, I’d needed tons of transfusions during my year of being sick. My nose knew the difference between real blood and fake.

That blood, the blood that had spilled out of Sam, was just stuff whipped up with a chemistry set. I knew that. Twenty years ago, I knew: knew that Sam’s death had to have been as fake as the blood.

How had I forgotten that?

And my sense of smell — so sharp back then, so far beyond human. But somehow it had gone all dull again… until those doses of venom woke everything up.

Everything.

Memories were coming back faster now. I remembered kneeling there in Verity’s chambers and squeezing my eyes shut to keep back tears. Crying because I knew. The Mayday signal that had brought me to the room… my sister lying in a pool of fake blood… the mutinous guards rushing me away before I could look at Sam’s body too closely… waiting for me to lead them to Innocence…

It was all a setup. By Sam and the mutineers. To fool dumb old Edward, who was close to the little girl queen and might know where she’d hide.

Twenty years ago, I’d wept bitter tears and pushed away those bad thoughts about Sam — pushed them away hard. Because if I didn’t, I’d have to ask who really killed Verity, and who released the outlaw queens, and who had made sure none of the peace initiatives ever really worked—$

Without warning, I hurtled out of the Sperm-tail and rammed against a brick wall.

Four Explorers shot into a dark narrow alley. Me, I collided with the nearest wall and crumpled. The other three, in big bulgy tightsuits, hit and bounced like they were wearing their own trampolines. Dade and Festina managed to keep their feet; Tobit caromed off the wall and went down, smacking flat on his butt, flipping over to his stomach, and hop-skipping along the pavement. If the folks on Jacaranda were watching via satellite, they must have been laughing their heads off.

Smashing the wall pretty near knocked the wind out of me, but my head was clear enough to realize I was closest to the Sperm anchor. Everyone else had bounced several paces away. Shaky and reeling, I kicked out my foot and hit the anchor’s off-switch. The glittery tail whipped away past my face in a jamble of colored lights, swishing across the city like a single strand of aurora borealis. With luck, Harque could keep the tail dancing all over Unshummin, distracting searchers in both armies. Meanwhile, we’d carry the anchor box with us; when we switched it on again, the tail would come straight back to our party, giving us a quick escape route.

"Everyone all right?" Festina’s whisper came softly through the receiver in my ear.

Tobit and Dade both answered, "Fine." I just nodded. Up in the ship, Festina had told me to keep quiet as much as possible. Since I wasn’t muffled up in a tightsuit, nearby soldiers might hear if I talked.

Festina made an okay sign, then craned her neck to look at the sky. "Jacaranda, are you receiving?"

"Loud and clear, Admiral," Harque answered.

"We’re on the move," Festina said. "Dade, you grab the anchor. Edward, stay right behind me." She turned to Tobit. "Have you figured out where we’re going?"

Tobit had unclipped a Bumbler from his belt and was scanning the area. "The signal came from that direction," he said, pointing to the wall I’d banged against. "Inside this building." He lifted his head and looked up. "For best transmission, they’d go to the roof. Of course, they may not be there now; it’s been an hour since the beep."

"If they’ve left, they’ll come back," Festina answered. "They can’t have missed our Sperm-tail."

The tail was still lashing the city, darting from block to block: whisking over the pavement, flapping against walls, lifting high over the rooftops and circling like a lariat before plunging down again in a splash of green and gold and blue and purple. I could hear distant Mandasar voices, commanders yelling orders at their troops, or just soldiers hollering at each other. Some would be shouting, "Keep cool," and others, "Look lively," and a few maybe even, "Naizo!"… tired palace guards who were ready to surrender to anything.

"Let’s head for the roof," Festina said. "Plebon and Olympia may still be there. If they aren’t, they’ll know they should hurry back to their transmission site. And from the roof, we’ll have an easy time grabbing a ride out."

"Sure, Ramos," Tobit growled. "Easy. Piece of cake. In the history of the Explorer Corps, have you heard of a single landing that didn’t turn into a complete ass-biter?"

"Always a first time," Festina answered. "Let’s go, people. Immortality awaits."

At the end of the alley, Tobit poked the scanner of his Bumbler just past the edge of the wall. That way, we could look around the corner without sticking our heads into the open.

The Bumbler’s vidscreen showed the front of the Fasskister embassy… or what was left of it. Something had smashed it hard, like a wrecking ball or an explosion or a barrage of cannon fire. A great chunk of the brick face had been knocked in, exposing the four stories of the interior to open air. Unshummin’s weather was as mild as you could get — shirtsleeve temperatures most of the year round, with only a bit of rain — but it had still taken a toll on the inside of the building. All the floors had a definite sag, and some were crumbling on the edges. I imagine the place was filled with insects and jiffpips: centipedey things that could jump and climb like squirrels. (For some reason, Mandasars found jiffpips sweet and cute… maybe because they were distant evolutionary cousins, like lemurs are to humans. Me, whenever I saw a jiffpip, I wanted to whack it with a sledgehammer.)

Dade’s voice spoke through my earpiece. "You really think the Explorers transmitted from this building? It doesn’t look safe."

"Maybe that’s why they chose it," Festina replied. "The floors look strong enough to hold humans but maybe not Mandasars. Plebon and Olympia could go in, set up their equipment, and know they wouldn’t be disturbed."

"Why would they be disturbed?" Dade asked. "I thought we were assuming the Explorers had got friendly with the palace guards."

"Friendly is one thing," Tobit said, "but guards might get a wee bit anxious if they knew humans were broadcasting radio messages to the world at large. Some nasty paranoid folks would suspect you were sending intelligence to the enemy. Better to set up your transmitter where you’ll have a little privacy."

"Besides," Festina added, "we don’t know for sure our friends are on good terms with the guards. They may be on the run and hiding out. Always suspect the worst, and… uh-oh."

The Bumbler’s screen showed a pair of warriors coming toward us. They were moving cautiously from the direction of the palace, gas masks over their heads and crossbows held steady in their waist pincers. Each had a Cheejretha finger resting on the bow’s trigger mechanism, so they could instantly fire an arrow with the slightest squeeze.

The warriors passed in front of the crumbling embassy, peeking in through gaps in the brickwork. They had to be looking for something… and I suspected it was us. Some keen-eyed lookout at the palace had spotted the Sperm-tail lingering a few seconds in this neighborhood; the team coming our way got sent to investigate.

"What do we do?" Dade asked over the radio.

"Let’s invite them to tea," Tobit said. "No, wait… let’s stun their fucking gonads off." He handed the Bumbler to me and quietly drew his stun-pistol. Festina had hers out too. They hadn’t let Dade bring a gun; he’d been just a teeny bit too eager to shoot, back at the Fasskister orbital.

Me, I didn’t want a gun. And nobody had offered me one.

The guards’ footsteps came closer, clicking softly on the pavement. Festina lifted her hand, with three fingers showing. Silently she lowered one finger, then a second, then the last… and together she and Tobit dived out of the alley.

Arrows twanged at almost the same instant the stunners whirred; but the warriors shot high, not prepared for humans who could throw themselves belly down on the street. The guns fired again in unison. That was enough. I heard the bows clatter to the pavement, and a moment later, two heavy thuds on the ground.

"Are they out?" Dade asked excitedly.

"We stopped shooting, didn’t we?" Festina answered.

Without another word, she led us forward.

When you hear me talk about streets and alleys, maybe you’re picturing some city you know — your local downtown late at night, with the sidewalks empty and everything quiet.

No. Put that out of your head.

First of all, Unshummin was dark. Really, really dark. The city had plenty of streetlamps, but none of them worked — there hadn’t been electricity on the planet since the Fasskisters loosed their Swarm, except for chemical batteries and maybe some motorized generators protected by thick nano defense clouds. The only significant light was a glow from the direction of the palace, where I figured soldiers were burning cookfires; but the palace lay to the rear of the embassy and we were in front, so most of the light was blocked by the building. Neither of Troyen’s moons was up, so we had to make do with the stars… and after all the lights on Jacaranda, my eyes needed time to adapt.

Next, you’re probably thinking of a normal human street paved with asphalt or cement or gravel or stone. Nope. Every road on Troyen was built from a pebbly stuff called Ayposh: kind of like coral, because it consisted of a whole bunch of tiny shelled organisms, some alive, some dead. They’d been bioengineered to grow in long level sheets, photosynthesizing most of their nutrients straight from the air. Every few months, the board of works sent out sprayers full of fertilizer and mineral supplements to feed the little guys; and each year, crews would paint the highway shoulders with a chemical suppressant to keep the Ayposh from spreading off the roadbed. It was cheap, it was simple, it was elegant… and with the war on, maybe it was doomed. All of a sudden, I started wondering if people had time to spray fertilizer when they were all busy fighting. I thought of millions of miles of pavement, slowly starving to death for lack of vitamins. Maybe all the streets around me were nothing but corpses, teeny husks that would slowly crumble away and never get replenished by new generations.

After twenty years of real people dying, it seemed kind of horrible to go misty-eyed about the roads and sidewalks. You’d have to be pretty stupid to do something like that.

Anyway, there’s one last thing you’ve probably got wrong in your mental picture of Diplomats Row: the buildings. If you’re thinking of human architecture, think again. Yes, the Fasskister embassy was built of bricks; but the bricks were clear crystal, the same sort of stuff as the huts back at that orbital. It wasn’t glass, I can tell you that much — when the front wall had been smashed in, not one of the bricks had broken. They were all perfectly intact, lying on the ground as we stepped into the darkness of the half-demolished building. The bricks’ edges were still crisp and clean despite years of weathering, and I couldn’t see a trace of mortar on them. Don’t ask me how the walls held together without some sort of stickum to attach each brick to its neighbors… but the side and back walls were still intact, and I couldn’t see mortar in them either. Just rows of crystal bricks that let in the tiniest glimmer of starlight so I wasn’t completely blind.

Dim light or not, the Explorers could see fine. Their tightsuit visors had vision enhancers that made the night bright as day. I had to tag along on Festina’s heels, so I wouldn’t walk into a wall or pothole or something… and even then, I had a heck of a time not getting lost, with her practically invisible in camo. Mostly I went by the sound of her footsteps and the smell of her suit — as if I were a full-fledged Mandasar, navigating by nose.

It took me by surprise when we started going upward: a slow-sloping ramp that must have been in the middle of the building. Ramps were pretty common on Diplomats Row — lots of nonhumans (including Mandasars) didn’t do so well on stairs, and no alien species ever liked each other’s elevators; the compartments were either too big or too small, the lift mechanisms were too quiet or too clanky, they went too fast or too slow… and the interior always smelled of something you didn’t want to inhale any longer than you had to. The diplomatic solution was to build your embassy with ramps at easy-to-climb slants, so as not to irritate important visitors.

We went up slowly, switching back four times for each floor. Once we got above first-story level, the side of the stairwell was missing, giving a clear view of the street out front — Diplomats Row in all its glory. The other buildings seemed pretty well intact, even if they were dark and empty: the high silver towers of the Myriapods, like tinsel hanging from the sky; the clear glass globe of the Cashlings, its multicolored interior lights now gone dark and lifeless; the embassies of the Divian sub-breeds, Tye-Tyes in their rock mountain, Ooloms in their giant tree, Freeps in their neon casino; the Unity’s mirror garden where they’d held masked rituals every night; and at the end of the block, the mall of the up-League envoys.

Once upon a time, that mall held a fifty-meter-high flame on one side and an even taller tornado on the other, both real and roaring but never moving from their positions. Gawking tourists used to argue whether the envoys actually lived in the wind and fire, or if it was just a flashy gimmick aimed at impressing lesser species. None of us ever learned the truth… but the night Queen Verity died, the flame and tornado winked out of existence in the exact same second. It was a sign, if anybody needed one, that the higher echelons of the League were turning their backs on Troyen. By dawn, every other embassy had been evacuated too — no one wanted to go down with a sinking ship.

Now, here we were, back again.

There must have been a door or something closing off the stairwell from the roof, but it had vanished into the general wreckage. Still, the roof itself seemed in pretty good shape — at least the back half was. My eyes were getting used to the darkness; as we came up the final ramp, I could see a flat expanse of those smooth crystal bricks, with no dips or sags all the way to the rear edge of the building. Tobit checked with the Bumbler and grunted a few seconds later. "It looks safe," he announced. "If you want to trust the engineering judgment of a stupid machine."

"Any sign of the Explorers?" Dade asked.

Tobit fiddled with dials and peered at the Bumbler’s screen. "No… no… wait. Back there in the shadows," he said, pointing at the far rear of the roof. "I think it’s an Explorer’s backpack."

Dade immediately started forward, but Festina grabbed his arm. "You and Tobit stay here. In case the roof isn’t as solid as we think."

"And in case it’s a trap," Tobit muttered.

"Why would it be a trap?" Dade asked.

"Because anything could be a trap!" Tobit growled "We don’t know dick about what’s going on. Someone may have lured us here with a fake signal so they could blow us to smithereens. And don’t say that doesn’t make sense, junior — stuff that doesn’t make sense can still make you Go Oh Shit."

Festina was already heading toward the knapsack. Since nobody stopped me, I jogged a few paces and caught up with her. Side by side, we walked toward the building’s rear… and the farther we went, the less I cared about the pack and the more I worried about something else.

The smell of buttered toast trickled through the air.

Like I said, the back of the Fasskister embassy faced the palace — just a stone’s throw from the diamondwood palisade surrounding the palace grounds. Shining from inside that wall came the glow I’d thought was cookflres. A dull red glow.

The queen-shaped palace had its tail toward us, but not quite straight on. There was enough of an angle that we could see along its body, past the glass conservatory domes, up the torso, all the way to the head and its outstretched claws.

Moss. Balrog moss. Covering every square millimeter of the building from the venom sacs forward. In the dark, it glimmered a very self-satisfied crimson.

36 LYING LOW ON THE ROOF

"Holy shit," Festina whispered.

I just nodded. The buttered-toast smell was making me dizzy.

"That queen," Festina said. "The one who dumped those spores on the Fasskisters. She must have left some here too — to make the place uninhabitable for the Black Army."

"Kind of hard on her own guards," I said. It gave me a crawly feeling, thinking about that. I could understand a queen setting up a nasty parting gift for her enemies, but not when it would also hurt her own subjects. Protecting your citizens should always be your number one concern, shouldn’t it? A king who didn’t put his people’s safety ahead of his own hunger for revenge…

A queen. I meant a queen who didn’t put her people’s safety ahead of her hunger for revenge…

Never mind.

Festina growled under her breath. "That fucking Kaisho. She had to know about this."

"Why?" I asked.

"She took that damned satellite photo," Festina said. "The whole front half of the palace should have been glowing, for Christ’s sake. But there wasn’t any shine in the shot she showed us. She must have deliberately told the computer to filter out the red." The admiral made a disgusted sound in her throat. "And I never double-checked. I checked the landing site, and the spot where the signal came from, but I never bothered to look at the palace. Sloppy, Ramos — really sloppy."

"You didn’t know," I said.

"I knew enough," she snapped. "Kaisho has jerked us around time and again. I kept letting her do it, in the hope she’d go too far and we could justifiably whack her. But enough is enough." She tapped a button on her wrist, changing the channel on her radio. "Tobit, Dade: full paranoia mode."

Dade’s voice sounded in my ear, even though he was standing back at the stairwell. "I thought we already were in full paranoia mode."

Festina sighed and rolled her eyes. "What can you do with a kid like that?"

"Um," I said, "if you want I can keep an eye on—"

That’s when the cannons started firing.

A real soldier probably wouldn’t call them long-distance guns — they were shooting from the top of the palace toward that kill zone beyond Prosperity Water. Only about a kilometer; in artillery terms, that was practically point-blank range. But from where we were standing, the shells looked like they were zooming past us and heading way off in the distance before they blew up.

Of course, we didn’t stay standing too long.

I dropped flat to the roof. Festina did a dive, then rolled to her feet again, fists up… like it was some pure reflex to hit the dirt and come out fighting. A second later, she threw herself onto the roof again, cursing in a language I didn’t understand. Spanish, I guess. Considering how comfortable she was swearing in English, she must have been really mad this time.

Another boom of a cannon. While its thunder still echoed from nearby buildings, Dade’s voice came over my earphone. "It’s all right," he babbled excitedly, "they’re firing over our heads. Shelling the enemy."

"And what happens," Tobit growled, "when the enemy starts shelling back? If the guns are a few degrees too low, we’re bang in the line of fire. How do you think this building got wrecked in the first place?"

Good point. The front of the embassy could have got hit by a barrage intended for the palace — just a few hundred meters short, that’s all. How long ago would that have been? When the Black Army first surrounded Queen Temperance? Or back earlier in some other battle… maybe when Temperance herself grabbed the palace from whoever held it before her.

"What do we do?" Dade called over the radio. "Leave?"

"No," Tobit and Festina snapped in unison.

"We’re here to pick up fellow Explorers," Festina said a moment later. "We stay until we absolutely have to go."

"Yeah," Tobit put in. "We aren’t going to get another chance down here."

He was right. If the palace was firing, the Black Army must be attacking out on the defense perimeter — going for their final offensive. The moment they saw our Sperm-tail, someone must have called the attack.

Someone. Maybe Sam. Whose time of waiting was over.

In a few hours now, the war would end… right where it started, inside the high queen’s palace. There’d be fighting in the halls, just like the night Verity died — loyal palace guards without a queen, just trying to survive till the dawn. It made me feel guilty, realizing I was soon going to run off on them again. We’d pick up the other Explorers, or we’d decide they weren’t coming and hightail it back to Jacaranda. Either way, I was abandoning a lot of warriors, when I should be there with them, helping them, leading them…

Wait a minute — what the heck was going through my head? I was no leader.

The cannons fired again. I covered my ears and tried not to think.

Festina began to crawl on her belly back to Tobit and Dade. It didn’t look very graceful, her in that big fat tightsuit… but she moved surprisingly fast, and if you took your eyes off her the tiniest split second, she disappeared. That camo was good. I started to crawl too, then stopped. The Explorer’s backpack was still lying on the roof behind me; Festina hadn’t had a chance to look at it. I turned around, and slithered up to it, sniffing furiously.

It smelled of the same stuff as the tightsuit, plus the odor of a male human. No trace of female scent. Maybe Plebon had been here an hour ago to send the contact beep, but Olympia Mell hadn’t been with him.

Was that a bad sign? I couldn’t tell.

I sniffed at the knapsack again, not sure what I was looking for. Even if the pack was booby-trapped with some kind of bomb, I wouldn’t know what explosives smelled like. Anyway, there were a whole lot of odors jumbled together: Explorer stuff, like a radio transmitter, and food rations, and a Sperm anchor…

My fingers twitched. I didn’t make them do that. Uh-oh… getting possessed again.

I watched as my hands reached out and flipped open the pack. Nothing went boom. That was the good news. The bad news was my hand scrabbling into the mess of equipment and pulling out the little anchor box.

"Edward!" Festina called over my earphone. "What do you think you’re doing?"

The spirit that possessed me didn’t answer. It set the anchor down on the roof and flicked the activation switch.

I didn’t even see the Sperm-tail coming — it was somewhere behind my back, still flipping and flapping, swishing aimlessly across Unshummin and far out into the countryside, like some cat-toy bouncing on a string. One second it was a dozen kilometers away; the next instant, it had snapped into place against the anchor, plastered to the side of the little box with only the tip of its mouth hanging free.

Festina’s voice rang loud in my ear. "Turn off the anchor, Edward. Turn off the anchor!"

Too late. The Sperm-tail’s tiny mouth suddenly became a nozzle squirting out a crowd of newcomers: Counselor, Zeeleepull, Hib Nib Pib, exploding out of the tube, smacking down hard on the crystal-brick roof. I could feel the impact under my feet; it must have jarred the Mandasars to their very bones. Right behind them was Kaisho in her hoverchair, shooting forward, spinning sideways, almost flipping over in a somersault… till the chair’s stabilizers kicked in and pulled upright with a whine of engines.

They must have been waiting, I thought. They must have been right there in Jacaranda’s transport bay, all set to come through the moment the anchor came on.

How did they know what would happen? Had the spirit possessing me set this whole thing up?

But the spirit had one more trick to play. Before I could react, my own foot lifted high and smashed the anchor box under my heel.

Electronic guts spilled onto the bricks. The glittering Sperm-tail whipped away and disappeared from sight.

"Dade, quick, Dade!" Festina yelled. "The other anchor — turn it on."

"What?" the boy asked. "Why?"

"Turn on the fucking anchor!" Festina roared.

He’d set it down on the roof back near the stairwell. Dade threw himself across the bricks, bounced once on his tightsuit stomach, then landed within arm’s reach of the box. He slapped his hand on the switch… and nothing happened.

Nothing happened for a long time.

I lifted my head. The Sperm-tail was nowhere in sight.

"Ohhhh, fuck!" Tobit groaned. He skittered across the roof toward Dade, pulling his Bumbler with him. With the Bumbler’s scanner, he started a quick once-over of the anchor box… maybe checking for malfunctions.

Meanwhile, Zeeleepull struggled to straighten himself up to his usual height. He and his hive-mates looked winded from their landing — slapping down hard on the unforgiving roof. With all their weight, Mandasars fall a lot more heavily than humans. "Teelu," he gasped, "help how?"

"Help?" I asked. The spirit possessing me had quietly let go. "Help how who?"

"You, Teelu. Radioed you for help."

"I didn’t radio for help. I don’t even have a transmitter."

"But the captain said—"

"Oh. The captain."

I didn’t need to hear more. If Prope had lied to the Mandasars about receiving a call for help — if she’d hurried them and Kaisho into the transport bay and waited for the Sperm-tail to get anchored again — she had to have known the spirit inside me would turn on the anchor, then smash the box to free the tail.

Which meant Prope was working with the spirit. She might have been pheromoned into doing it… but more likely, the spirit had used my father’s access codes to send instructions in the Admiralty’s name. That’s what I’d done when I’d found myself sitting all dopey at the captain’s terminal: the spirit had given Prope orders to maroon us here.

But why? I thought the spirit was on my side. Back on Celestia, it had helped me — pretty well saved my life and Festina’s. So why turn against us now? Unless its purpose had just been to keep us alive till we got to Troyen…

I scanned the night sky again. No dancing Sperm-tail anywhere… as if Jacaranda had reeled up its fishing line and headed for home. Across the roof, Dade and Tobit were poking at the anchor box, but I knew there was nothing wrong with it. Jacaranda had simply flown away. With Kaisho and the Mandasars down on Troyen, no one on the departing starship would raise a fuss that we’d all been abandoned.

From the start, Prope had been ordered to dump me someplace nasty. I just never suspected I’d help her do it.

37 MOVING OUT

Footsteps rushed up the ramp. Festina rolled over on her back, stun-pistol held in both hands… but she lowered it when she saw the newcomer was a man, a human man.

Both his skin and his uniform were black: not camo’d up like our party, but still plenty hard to see. Even so, I could tell he was definitely Explorer material. The bottom part of his face just wasn’t there — the skin swept straight down from his cheekbones to the thinness of his neck. His chin was only a little nub, scarcely bigger than his Adam’s apple.

I was kind of glad I couldn’t see him very well in all this dark.

"Festina?" the man said in a deep, very precise voice. You could tell he was making an extra effort to enunciate clearly. "I didn’t expect a rescue party at all, much less my favorite admiral."

"Don’t count your rescues before they’re hatched," Festina told him. She’d switched on a small external speaker in her tightsuit so people without radio receivers could hear her. I noticed she kept the volume down to a whisper. "How’re you doing, Plebon?" she asked. "Where’s Olympia?"

"Gone." His face barely changed, but his eyes showed pain. "When Queen Temperance left, some of the palace guards defected to the enemy. They took Olympia as a bargaining chip — a valuable hostage they could offer to the Black Queen in exchange for their own lives."

"Shit." Festina’s fists clenched. "Any chance she’s still alive?"

Plebon shook his head. "Two days later…" His voice caught and he swallowed hard before trying again. "Two days later, they hung her corpse on their front lines. That’s what ‘expendable’…"

He couldn’t finish the phrase. The rest of us were all busy, trying to look anywhere but at him.

"Anyway," he said after a while, with that hard tone of someone trying to hold himself together, "if it’s any consolation, the defectors were hung on the front lines too. Their bodies looked worse than Olympia’s."

"Craziness," Counselor murmured. "Smart armies don’t kill defectors, they show them off: happy, safe, and well fed. That way, you encourage more people to surrender."

"Unless you don’t want your enemies to surrender," I said softly. "What if you want them to stay right where they are, so the war doesn’t end three and a half weeks too early?"

It’s hard when you feel people’s deaths on your head. Those defectors got killed to keep the war going… delay things till I got here. As for Olympia Mell… it explained how my sister had known Willow was in the system. Olympia had told the Black Army everything she knew: maybe under torture, or maybe just chatting with Sam as a fellow member of the navy. Then, after the talk was over, Olympia had been murdered and put on display — to make sure the palace guards stayed at their posts till the very end.

This Black Queen, whoever she was: she could have had an easy victory weeks ago, but she wanted a massacre. And Sam was the queen’s closest advisor. What did that say about my sister? What did that say?

"The anchor’s working just fine," Tobit announced. "But Jacaranda isn’t replying to any calls. They’ve buggered off on us."

Festina let out her breath slowly. "Damn it to fucking hell," she said in a controlled voice. "That’s twice Prope has stranded me in some shithole. Next time…"

I never got to hear about next time. Her words were drowned out by a pack of warriors storming onto the roof. It looked like the embassy’s floors were strong enough to hold Mandasars after all.

You can tell a lot about folks from how they react to a bunch of soldiers.

Festina and Tobit cranked up the volume on their tight-suit speakers and shouted in stilted Mandasar, "Greetings, we are sentient citizens of the League of Peoples, we beg your Hospitality." At the same time, they were drawing their stun-pistols.

Dade gaped a moment, then just held up his hands in surrender. Counselor did the same, except that she folded her arms in a gesture I’d taught her, and cried out, "Naizo! Naizo!"

Zeeleepull stepped in front of her, flexed his pincers theatrically, and began to pump out a combination of battle-musks. I couldn’t distinguish all the scents he used, but the basic message was clear: "I will not attack, but I will defend."

Hib Nib Pib backed to the edge of the roof and whispered as they stared admiringly at Zeeleepull. "Isn’t he strong?" "Isn’t he handsome?" "Isn’t he a teeny bit outnumbered?"

Kaisho said nothing — just standing her ground, with her legs glowing bright as lasers.

Me, I was watching everybody else, waiting to take my lead from them… but I was also concentrating mighty hard on smelling royal. Half the soldiers had gas masks; half of them didn’t. I still wasn’t great at controlling my pheromones, but I figured if worse came to worst, I could dose the maskless ones and sic them on their troopmates.

But it was Plebon who stepped toward the soldiers: waving his hands and shouting, "Nairit ul Gashwan!" Friend of Gashwan. Plebon’s accent was pretty awful, even on three short words; I got the Impression he’d memorized the phrase by sound, rather than actually understanding it. Still, the soldiers eased up a bit: they didn’t lower their bows but a few took their fingers off the triggers.

For a moment, I considered walking up to them anyway: use my pheromones to win a bunch of them over to our side. But that wouldn’t work on the masked guys, and they might get really mad about their fellow guards being zonked by chemical warfare. Grumbling to myself, I damped down the smell factory and let the fumes drift away on the breeze.

The soldiers hustled us down to street level, not giving us the tiniest chance to talk among ourselves. "Jush, jush!" they kept saying… which means, "Shut up and keep moving."

Plebon didn’t look too worried about this treatment, so he must have thought we were safe. His friend Gashwan must carry a lot of clout.

Who was she? I wondered. Gashwan was a female name, but the only Gashwan I’d ever known was the doctor who looked after me when I had the jaundice… or rather, when I had venom poisoning from all those nanites dosing me up. Could it be the same Gashwan, hanging around the palace for twenty years? Maybe. No matter which queens passed through Unshummin in the past two decades, they could all use a smart doctor. I didn’t know much about Gashwan herself — she was the sort of M.D. who reads medical charts rather than talking to patients personally — but if she’d been on Verity’s staff, she must have been the best at what she did.

Out on the street, another guard ran up and whispered something to the corporal at the head of our group. The corporal looked back at me, his antennas lifting straight up like lightning rods. Um: I think I’d been identified. Either someone remembered me from way back when, or they’d seen my face when Jacaranda broadcast my little message. ("Don’t worry, neutral mission, keep calm.") Now they realized I was the Little Father Without Blame. I didn’t know what the guards would do about that, and the guards didn’t know either. Our platoon of escorts gawked at me when they heard the news, but didn’t say a word.

Sorry. They did say one word. "Jush!" And they hurried us even faster toward the palace.

We quick-marched up Diplomats Row to an army checkpoint where Aliens Gate used to be. The gate had been a big diamondwood arch in the palace’s outer palisade, nearly a century old and carved with Mandasar artists’ impressions of various aliens. No species would be flattered by the pictures — humans, for example, were shown as stick-thin and frail, men indistinguishable from women, with huge eyes, tiny mouths, and enormous quantities of hair growing from their heads like cedar bushes — but I still kind of liked the figures. This really was how Mandasars saw us, back years ago when we were exotic curiosities rather than day-to-day acquaintances. (Sam always claimed the male human on the gate was modeled after our father, back when he was just a greenhorn diplomat on Troyen. I couldn’t see the resemblance… but my sister loved thinking everything had some connection to her.)

Aliens Gate was gone now — maybe destroyed in battle, maybe just pulled down by armies occupying the palace, because it’s hard to defend a big open arch. In place of the gate was a narrow walkway past a row of arrow slits, then a path with twists and turns and odd little bumps in the concrete floor, probably designed to make Mandasar warriors stumble if they tried to charge through at speed. The path slanted upward too, rising at least two stories above the actual level of the ground; and once you were inside the walls, you had to go down again, on a set of awkward switchbacking ramps that were fully exposed to cannon and arrow fire from the palace.

It made me wonder how recent these defense measures were. Making it hard for attackers to get in also made it hard for defenders to get out for sorties and counteroffensives. I couldn’t help thinking the folks in the palace had abandoned all hope of fighting their way to open territory; this was their last stand, their Masada, their Alamo. If they had no chance of surviving, they wanted to take a ton of their enemies with them.

Our corporal borrowed a lantern from a guard post and led the way across the dark palace grounds. Once upon a time, this area had bloomed with gardens of glass-lily, queen’s-crown and skyflowers. Now there was only bare earth, tangled over with monofilament razor wire: stuff so sharp, it could even cut through a warrior’s carapace. Behind the wire were trenches, behind the trenches were more trenches, and behind them all was the palace, where archers and cannons were ready to fire on anyone coming too near.

Or maybe there were just archers — the palace’s cannons had stopped shooting. I doubted the Black Army had called off its attack; more likely, the gunners on the ramparts had run out of shells.

We scrambled up the ramp to the palace’s back door — what my sister called the Sphincter. Since the building was shaped like a queen, and this entrance was smack in the middle of the tail section, Sam always joked that the door led right up the queen’s rectum.

Not very funny you think about it.

The stonework here was free of Balrog moss. That was no accident — a lot of the place looked scorched, as if someone had taken a flamethrower to the walls. I guess the palace guards didn’t know the spores were sentient… or else they didn’t care. The stink of burned vegetation was strong enough that even a human nose would smell it.

The same stink filled the corridor inside. This end of the building had once been painted with scenes from around the planet — the great waterfalls at Feelon, the ocean grotto of Pellibav, the sacred hoodoos of the Joalang Mountains — but now the paintings were charred black, with thick flakes of ash littering the floor. The Balrog must have tried to crawl through here like soul-sucking ivy; and it’d been stopped. For the time being, this part of the palace was sanitized… but with the front of the building swallowed up, the red moss would surely keep trying to work its way back.

So we walked through halls that smelled of cinders and battle-musk. It was just vinegary Musk A at the moment, general tension but not panic. Even that was enough to get to Counselor — her antennas were jerking back and forth in little spasms, and her whiskers were constantly shivering. I adjusted my pace to walk beside her, then put out a standard worker pheromone that said, "Just keep going, it’ll be fine."

The smell seemed to help: a moment later, she wrapped one of her thin brown arms in mine. "Thank you, Teelu," she murmured, before the guards Jushed her into silence.

We turned down a side corridor and headed for a ramp to the second floor. This was the way to the royal infirmary, where I’d spent my last year on Troyen. As we climbed, whiffs of Mandasar blood began to overpower the stench of burned Balrog. By the smell of it, the infirmary was still very much in business, caring for an awful lot of sick and wounded. A middle-aged gentle stopped our party at the top of the ramp, scolding the soldiers for bringing filthy humans into a hospital area. Did they want us to infect the place with our awful alien germs? It took our corporal a full thirty seconds to break into her tirade, as he mumbled in Mandasar, "Please, Doctor… please, Doctor… please, Doctor… we must see Gashwan right away."

"Gashwan’s busy," the gentle finally said. "She hasn’t got time to waste on trivialities."

"But, Doctor… but, Doctor… but, Doctor…"

I took a deep breath and stepped forward. "Teeshpodin Ridd ha Wahlisteen pim," I said, trying not to feel sheepish at putting on airs. I am the Little Father Without Blame. "Gashwan himayja, sheeka mo." We must see Gashwan, if you please.

The gentle turned to me, anger on her face. It was the first time she’d seen me clearly — our only light came from the corporal’s lantern, and I’d been standing quietly back in the shadows. For a heartbeat I was sure the doctor would start hollering about dirty hume disease carriers; but her eyes opened wide, and her whiskers trembled. "Teelu" she whispered.

Mandasars gasped up and down the corridor; I nearly gasped with them. It was one thing for Gelestian kids to make the mistake of calling me, "Your Majesty"… but this woman should have known better. I wasn’t a queen, I was a consort. Addressing me as Teelu was like prostrating yourself before the royal plumber.

"Please," I told her, then got all flustered as I tried to think of a nice way to say she should watch her words. But the woman got the wrong idea from my hesitation.

"Yes, Teelu" she replied, whiskers still fluttering. "At once, Teelu." She scuttled off into the next room.

"Um," I said to the rest of the crowd. "Sorry."

"Don’t apologize, Teelu" Counselor whispered to me.

"You really shouldn’t call me that," I told her. "It’s only for queens."

"And you," she said, with no hesitation.

"Jush," muttered one of the guards. But he didn’t sound as tough and confident as before. He might have been wondering if he’d get in trouble for bossing around a queen’s consort. In a way, it was funny — Black Epaulettes were coming to slaughter us all, and these guys were afraid I might yell at them.

"It’s okay," I told them in Mandasar. "No one’s going to get mad at you."

"York," Festina said sharply in English, "I’d be more comfortable if you kept to a language I understand."

She held her stun-pistol not quite aiming at me, not quite aiming away. (The soldiers hadn’t tried to take the gun away from her… lucky for them.) But I wasn’t half so upset by the stunner as I was by her tone of voice — so hard and icy. Festina was mad at me; really, really mad. She’d seen me turn on the anchor then smash it, and she thought I’d betrayed her. Worst of all, I could only have done that bad stuff if I was in cahoots with Prope.

I think that’s what made Festina so furious. She might forgive me if I did something careless or stupid… but not if I was the least little bit tied in with Captain Prope.

Um.

An elderly gentle shuffled out of the infirmary, so old her brown shell had darkened nearly black. Every step she took seemed an effort; she grunted as she walked, and each heaving breath turned whistly in her nose.

Now I remembered: her nose. Dr. Gashwan had always had a wicked scar running the length of her snout, as if someone once stuck a knife tip into a nostril and yanked it all the way back to her cheek. It was an ancient wound from her youth; but even in the dim lanternlight, the ugly mark was still very visible.

Beside me, Festina lifted a hand to her own face.

"Gashwan," Plebon said. He bowed, but the old woman ignored him. Instead, she shuffled past everyone till she stopped in front of me.

"Edward York," she cooed in English. "My one and only son."

Leaning forward, she nuzzled me on the lips.

38 LEARNING SOME UGLY TRUTHS

I blinked. The kiss was almost exactly like Counselor’s back on Celestia — a human gesture imitated by an alien. I was so surprised I couldn’t speak; but Festina asked the question that was on my mind. "Son? What do you mean, son?"

"He’s my child," Gashwan answered, her eyes glittering. "I made him."

"You?" said Festina. "You were the engineer?"

Gashwan lifted one of her wrinkled hands and patted my cheek fondly. If I hadn’t been so frozen with horror, I would have flinched away.

Dad had never revealed who engineered Sam and me… but it only made sense that he went to someone on Troyen. He knew people here; the doctors were the best in the galaxy; and Mandasar medical facilities could ignore stuffy Technocracy laws about gene-tinkering.

Years later, when Sam needed a doctor for Innocence and me, it probably wasn’t coincidence she’d gone straight to Gashwan.

"You’ve turned out nicely," Gashwan purred. She’d taken my chin in her hands and was tipping my head from one side to the other: examining her work. "Still perfect, aren’t you, boy?"

"I’m okay," I mumbled.

She smiled. "So much like your father when I knew him. The same look. The same attitude."

I did some quick arithmetic. My father was a hundred and twenty-one now, still hale and hearty thanks to YouthBoost. He must have been in his mid-sixties when Sam and I were whipped up in a test tube. His original mission to Troyen was thirty years before that… which must have been when he first met Gashwan. Maybe she’d been a young medical researcher, eager to learn about the human metabolism. Mandasar doctors loved to study aliens.

"Well," Gashwan said, still looking at me keenly, "I’m proud of the way you turned out. Very presentable… for a human."

"But you made a mistake on me," I told her. "I’m stupid. My brain doesn’t work right."

"Your brain works exactly according to specification," she said. "I agree, it wasn’t fair; but your father promised you’d have a fine life, brought up so you’d never know you were different. That’s the only reason I said yes when Alexander asked to make you the way you are."

For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. "Dad asked you to make me… slow?"

"Oh, Edward," she chided. "Do you think I’d mess up your brain by accident?"

"But why?" I whispered.

"So you wouldn’t get in your sister’s way," Gashwan answered. "If you were smart enough to figure out how the admiral wanted to use you…" She shook her head. "You’d never have gone along. But things turned out all right, didn’t they? You’re here and you’re fine."

"But… but…"

There were no words inside my brain. No words. They’d been burned clean out of me.

No one had made a mistake. It’d all been completely deliberate. Premeditated. Carefully planned. Yet my whole life, my father had called me a disappointment: rejected me for being the way I was, when he was to blame.

It didn’t make me mad. It made me sick.

But Plebon had lifted his head. "Gashwan — you’re talking about an admiral named Alexander. Do you mean Alexander York?"

"Yes," Gashwan said, "Alexander York is Edward’s father." With a ghost of a smile, she added, "And I’m his mother."

Plebon turned to Festina. "Alexander York was the admiral who sent Willow here to Troyen. He wanted us to pick up a queen and take her to Celestia. York has some shady business deal with a group of people there, called ‘recruiters’…" Oof. I should have guessed — who else? who else? — but I was beginning to realize my greatest skill in life was denying the evil around me. My father was the one behind it all: Willow, the recruiters, the terrible inertia of my brain.

Festina said nothing, but nodded to herself… as if she’d suspected the truth for some time.

In the silence, a distant sound drifted up through the bleak stone corridors — possibly from outside, possibly somewhere in the castle.

Hyena laughter. Cackling and crazed.

"What’s that?" Gashwan asked.

"An old friend," Festina answered grimly. "His name is Larry."

Part 5 TAKING THE CROWN

39 BECOMING AN EXPLORER

"A Laughing Larry?" Dade blurted out. "There weren’t supposed to be any…" He closed his mouth sharply.

"There weren’t supposed to be advanced weapons on Troyen?" Tobit asked. "Looks like our navy researchers weren’t the only ones who got around the Fasskister Swarm."

"Don’t jump to conclusions!" Festina snapped. "Quick," she said to Gashwan, "who’s in charge here?"

"I am," Gashwan answered.

"In charge of the whole palace? The defense?"

Gashwan nodded. "Ever since Queen Temperance left."

"Willow took the queen away," Plebon put in. "To help the recruiters on Celestia control—"

"We figured that out," Festina said, then turned back to Gashwan. "The laughing sound comes from a killing machine… maybe more than one. Your arrows are useless, and your troops will be slaughtered. Surrender now before there’s a bloodbath." Gashwan patted Festina on the arm. "Dear child, I’m not a fool. I tried to surrender as soon as Temperance abandoned us. The Black Army refused."

"They wouldn’t let you give up peacefully?"

"They ignored my broadcasts and killed my envoys. The Black Queen doesn’t want capitulation — she wants to take the palace by force."

"Who is the Black Queen?" I asked. Knowing the answer.

"Your sister, of course," Gashwan said. "She started the war, and she’s about to end it."

I wished I could go all outraged: yelling, How could you say such a thing? But no. Sam had called herself an "advisor" to the Black Queen, but my sister had always been a leader, not a follower. And she’d led Troyen straight into this war. She’d been in a perfect position to incite hostilities, using diplomacy to pump up tensions rather than ease them. The footprints at the Cryogenic Center had been just her size. And Samantha had murdered Verity before faking her own death.

When war came, I could imagine her killing the fifteen queens one by one: getting on their good sides then murdering them, just as she did with Verity. She could have claimed to be a secret envoy from the Technocracy and promised navy support for the queen’s cause — that would be a quick route to royal favor. Then she’d betray the queen to some convenient enemy, or slit the royal throat personally when the time was right. It’d taken twenty years, but so what? And every time a queen died, Sam would try to keep control of the queen’s armies, giving orders to generals who still trusted her as the late queen’s closest ally.

Now, it was almost over — nothing to do except take the palace. In the process, she’d kill me because I was a loose end. She probably thought I was too stupid to figure out things on my own, but she didn’t want me talking to anybody else. Sam couldn’t afford that: my very existence was evidence against her.

"It’s me Sam wants," I said, "She’s afraid I know too much. If I give myself up, maybe she won’t kill anyone else."

"Dear boy," Gashwan replied, "I know too much too. A lot more than you do. But if we both give ourselves up, Samantha will worry we might have talked to someone or hidden a message somewhere. Besides, Edward, she can’t leave witnesses who’ll say you surrendered peacefully. You know she has to kill you and destroy your body. You know that, don’t you, dear?"

"Yes."

"And it will look suspicious if she does that to a voluntary prisoner. Your human friends will make a fuss. From Samantha’s perspective, it’s tidier if we all die accidentally in the heat of battle. Then she’ll lament the horrors of war, and make an apologetic donation to the fleet’s Memorial Fund."

Gashwan’s whiskers quivered with amusement… even admiration. She was truly tickled by the way Sam had worked things into a neat package — a mother’s pride at how clever her daughter turned out to be.

Festina snapped, "We’re wasting time. Plebon, can you find your way to the roof?" He nodded. "You want me to look for Larries?"

"And anything else you can see. Tobit, you and Dade go with him. Take a Bumbler and check what the Black Army is doing. Keep trying with the Sperm anchor too — maybe Prope will have an attack of conscience and come back for us."

"Prope?" Tobit snorted. "Conscience?"

"It’s a long shot," Festina admitted. "Try anyway." She put her gloved hand on the sleeve of his tightsuit and gave a little squeeze. "Get moving, you old sot."

"Right away, your magnificence." He gave her something that was nowhere near a salute, then grabbed Dade by the arm. "Come on, Benny, we’re off to fulfill the glorious Explorer tradition: getting our asses shot for no good reason."

"That’s what ‘expendable’ means," Dade replied.

Tobit cuffed him in the helmet. "Asshole — you say that after we die."

As Tobit, Dade, and Plebon hurried up a nearby ramp, Festina said, "All right — the rest of us need to get organized. Let’s get Kaisho to… Kaisho? Where the hell are you?" I looked around: lots of Mandasars, but no wheelchair. While we’d been distracted, Kaisho must have drifted quietly out of the lanternlight and vanished into the darkness. "Bloody hell," Festina glowered, "I knew there was a reason she ought to stay in the ship."

"Perhaps," Counselor suggested, "she wants to make contact with the moss at the front of the palace."

"She’s made contact already," Festina fumed. "Likely while she was still on Jacaranda — no one knows the range of the Balrog’s mental power, but there’s so much damned moss down here, it probably has the combined strength to talk with someone in orbit. Hell, it may have been able to contact Kaisho while she was still on Celestia; some experts think the Balrog is a single hive-mind, with instantaneous communication between every damned spore in the universe. Willpower stronger than the laws of physics. If that doesn’t scare the piss out of you, you haven’t thought about it long enough."

"But if she’s already talking to the other Balrogs," Counselor said, "why did she need to go off on her own?"

"Because the moss has an errand for her," Festina answered. "Something it can’t do for itself, while it’s stuck to the palace walls." She lifted her hand and pressed it to her helmet’s visor, as if she wanted to cover her eyes. "I really hate being manipulated," she growled. "Kaisho used me to bring her here. And so did you, Edward."

"My sister manipulated me," I told her.

"So did your father," Gashwaft put in, way too cheerily. "From the very start."

"To make Edward a king?" Counselor asked.

"Exactly," Gashwan smiled. "What a clever young girl you are."

"King of what?" I asked.

"Of whatever you want," Gashwan answered. "Mandasars. Or humans. Possibly both."

"Because of the pheromones," I mumbled. "Because I’m like a queen and can simulate…" I didn’t finish the sentence.

"When your father first came to Troyen," Gashwan said, "he saw the possibilities. Queens can consciously manufacture Mandasar pheromones; what if somebody created a being who could make human ones too? A secret weapon for swaying people to your side. The ultimate diplomat."

"The ultimate admiral," Festina murmured. "Manipulator supreme. Old Alexander must have dreamed of becoming royal himself."

"He couldn’t," Gashwan told her. "His DNA was entirely human: incompatible with the transformation he had in mind. He had to settle for making clones of himself — ninety-nine percent like the original, but with a sampling of transplanted Mandasar genes to pave the way for more changes later on…"

Festina nodded, as if she’d already known. That’s why she’d asked if I was bioengineered. She must have guessed I’d need fancied-up DNA if I was going to become… um…

…more than human.

The idea made me shiver — I was supposed to be Dad’s ideal of a superman.

Except that I was stupid. Supermen shouldn’t be stupid. Why would he deliberately ask for that?

Gashwan had already answered the question: so I wouldn’t realize what was being done to me.

"I was the guinea pig," I whispered.

"That’s right." Gashwan patted me fondly on the arm. "When Innocence started suckling from Verity, so did you."

"Thanks to the nano," Festina said, "that your sister commissioned from the Fasskisters. The nanites dosed Edward little by little over the course of the year… and Verity never knew it was happening. I assume you had a second batch of nanites that brought venom to your lab instead of to Edward?"

"Of course," Gashwan replied. "We needed to analyze the venom at every stage so we could reproduce it for Samantha later on. We also needed to test all kinds of medical techniques to make sure we could keep a human alive through a full year of venom poisoning… and through the transformation." She gave me a smile. "If it’s any consolation, the things we learned working on you made it much easier when we did the same for Samantha. Your contribution saved her a lot of pain. Sam transformed into a queen as easily as a natural-born Mandasar… all thanks to you."

Oh good — I’d fulfilled my one and only purpose. I’d been engineered as a near-genetic double to my sister, so I’d be the best possible guinea pig later on. A good testing ground before the doctors started on the real patient. I was just the disposable prototype, the one they’d throw away after they learned how to do things right.

So here’s the honest truth: I wasn’t a superman, I was a super-Neanderthal. Close to the real thing, but a dead end. Sam was the true progenitor — by the time the war started, she must have had some secret medical facility all prepared so Gashwan could put her through the same treatments I got. Sam was given the pheromone powers of a queen, but she stayed looking human, so no one would suspect what a threat she was. Over time, she’d eliminated her competition, built her big Black Army, and conquered the planet.

What was next? The League of Peoples would never let her leave Troyen, that was for darned sure; but she could have children. The next generation would still look human, so they’d have no trouble sneaking onto Technocracy worlds. After that, how long would it take for them to manipulate their way into top positions of power? A few decades maybe. My father would have himself a dynasty, secretly dominating human space.

But the dynasty would come from Sam, not me. I was never destined for anything but the trash heap.

Funny… for a long time, I’d felt guilty wearing an Explorer’s uniform when I didn’t think I deserved it. But surprise, surprise, I’d been perfectly suited for the Explorer Corps from the moment of my conception. No one could possibly be more expendable than me.

40 RACING THE BALROG

"Why did you do it?" Festina asked Gashwan. "Why did you help Samantha with everything? You’re too smart to think she’d be grateful — it’s a wonder Sam didn’t kill you as soon as she’d gone through her transformation."

"She would have tried," Gashwan agreed. "But I ran off to join Queen Temperance a few days before the job was done. My assistants finished the process. I doubt if they’ve been seen since."

"Then why?" Festina asked again. "Why help a ruthless murderer?"

"Because it was interesting," Gashwan said, as if that should have been obvious. "A pretty little challenge. And because I owed Alexander York a favor."

"What favor?" I asked.

She pointed to her nose: the old ugly scar running the length of her snout. "He gave me this."

Festina stared. "Alexander York hurt you? Damaged your face?"

Gashwan shook her head. "Alexander York helped me, with something no Mandasar would have done. He got human surgeons to destroy my sense of smell." She reached up with a wrinkled hand and stroked the scar affectionately. "They weren’t very skilled at dealing with Mandasars, but they got the job done. It’s trickier than you’d think — not just excising the olfactory nerves, but creating enough scar tissue inside the nostrils that the membranes can’t absorb odor molecules."

"But why?" Festina asked.

"To be free," Gashwan said. "Free of control by queens. Free of being terrified by warriors. Free of getting my moods altered by anyone who walked by. I got my brain into a state I liked, then cut the cords so no one could change me."

"That’s why you could betray Verity," I muttered.

"Why I was valuable to Verity," Gashwan corrected. "Other doctors told the queen what she wanted to hear; I told the truth. Mostly. The same with Temperance — she appreciated me because I couldn’t be swayed like other people around her. I’m the reason Temperance survived the war as long as she did. Smart objective advice. And now that Temperance is gone, I’m the one in charge, aren’t I? Because my brain isn’t muddled by every whiff of sweat drifting on the breeze. I’ve become my own queen."

Festina looked at me; I caught her gaze but said nothing. Like it or not, Mandasar society depended on communication smells: conveying emotions, providing feedback, tuning folks in to each other. Humans do the same with tone of voice and body language. Rejecting all that, Gashwan had become a sort of sociopath, untouched by the people around her. Disconnected.

Which is why she could go along with Dad and Sam, when their plan would lead Troyen into war. Gashwan thought it was interesting — a pretty little challenge.

If she wasn’t crazy before her nose got hacked up, she sure was now.

"Hey, kids," Tobit’s voice sounded in my ear, "you want a status report?"

"You’re on the roof?" Festina asked.

"More like an open parapet walk… though Mandasar architecture doesn’t conform much to the medieval European school. A true parapet needs some nice machicolations running alongside—"

"Phylar," Festina interrupted, "shut up and talk to me."

"Sure thing, your admiral-tude." I could hear the grin in his voice. "The bad guys have sent us four Larries: three outside the walls and one inside. They aren’t firing at the moment — just hovering and scaring the crap out of everybody. The guards are taking potshots at them, but arrows bounce right off."

"What about Kaisho?" Festina asked. "Any sign of her?"

"You’ve lost Kaisho?"

"Kaisho lost herself."

"Isn’t that disquieting." Tobit went silent a moment, then came back on. "I don’t have a good view, but the moss up front might be glowing brighter. Could just be my imagination."

"No, it’s probably some fresh hell coming our way." Festina sighed. "Anything else?"

"The Black Army has broken through the defense perimeter, and the palace guards are falling back to the next canal. Looks like an orderly retreat. I suppose they’ll form up again and kill a few more Black Shoulders at each canal they come to. It ain’t going to hold the enemy off forever, but they’re buying us time to pull off our brilliant plan. We do have a brilliant plan, right, Admiral?"

"Sure," Festina answered. "I’ll wave my hands and pixies will teleport the bad guys into the heart of the sun."

"Oh good," Tobit said, "I was afraid it would be something impractical."

"I could go to the battle lines," I offered. "Make some royal pheromone and see what happens."

"What happens," Festina said, "is you get shot by guys in gas masks." She turned to Gashwan. "I don’t suppose you’ve been saving a tac nuke for a rainy day."

"That rainy day came and went," Gashwan replied… and even she had the decency to sound subdued. "The first weeks of the war weren’t pretty, human — the Fasskister Swarm didn’t take out every missile silo in time. Unshummin survived because all the queens wanted to keep the palace intact… no bombing the pretty silver throne. Other cities weren’t so lucky. They say Fortitude’s old stronghold in Therol still glows in the dark. As for Queen Clemency in Koshav…"

We never got to hear about Queen Clemency. Gashwan was interrupted by Dade screaming over the radio. "Admiral, Admiral! There’s a Sperm-tail on the horizon!"

"My God," Festina said. "Maybe Prope does have a conscience. Have you turned on our anchor?"

"Affirmative, Admiral," Dade answered. "But the tail isn’t coming to us. It’s just quivering in place — its tip is dangling into one of the canals."

"Tug-of-war, Tobit!" Festina shouted. "You know the drill." To the rest of us, she snapped, "The roof. Run!"

Gashwan opened her mouth to say something… but we were already racing for the up-ramp. I looked back just before I disappeared into the stairwell; she was staring straight at me with a hint of sorrow on her face.

Gashwan. My creator. Maybe even my mother — if I had Mandasar DNA in me, Gashwan must have got it from somewhere. But I never slowed down to wave good-bye. I didn’t like her any better than I liked the rest of my family.

"Tug-of-war what?" Zeeleepull demanded as we raced up the slow-sloping ramp to the next floor. My heart was pounding. Even the placid workers were gabbling excitedly amongst themselves. "If the tail won’t come to our anchor," Festina told him, "that means there’s another anchor somewhere in the city. Pulling hard in a different direction."

"Samantha might have an anchor," I said. "She probably kept all kinds of navy stuff."

"My thought exactly," Festina agreed. "She let us land, but doesn’t want us getting away. Now she’s trying to steal the tail from us."

"So what are you going to do?" Counselor asked.

"Boost our anchor’s power by feeding it juice from other sources: a Bumbler, or a tightsuit’s battery pack."

Counselor panted, "Won’t the bad queen increase her anchor’s power too?"

"That’s what makes tug-of-wars interesting," Festina said. "Now less talk, more speed,"

The ramp took us up to the palace’s main gallery: a big wide hall like a spine running the length of the building. In Verity’s time, the gallery had been lined with memorials to Troyen’s medical achievements — paintings of famous doctors, first editions of medical books, and even (I’m not kidding) labeled dissections of all four Mandasar castes including crazy old Queen Spontaneity encased in clear plexi. Now, all I could see was a hot red glow fifty paces in front of us, like staring into an open furnace… the Balrog, clotted on floor, walls, and ceiling. Thick as carpet, stretching off hundreds of meters, all the way to the front nose of the palace.

"Holy shit," Festina whispered. "We don’t have to go through that, do we?"

"No," I answered, pointing. "There’s our way to the roof."

The door we wanted lay in the opposite wall of the gallery, maybe halfway between us and the glowing moss. Cautiously I led the group forward, keeping my eyes on the stone floor to make sure I wouldn’t step on stray spores that had drifted ahead of the main body. The gallery was unnaturally quiet with the moss’s muffling effect — it absorbed noise like crushed velvet laid over every surface. The pressure of sheer silence pushed against my eardrums, muting the sounds of our footsteps. I found myself holding my breath… but that wasn’t enough to keep from smelling the reek of buttered toast filling the air.

"Teelu" Counselor whispered, tiptoeing at my heels, "I am very very scared."

"Who isn’t?" I whispered back. "But remember, Tobit and the others must have come this way too. Nothing happened to them."

"Explorers are just normal humans," Counselor replied. "You are special, Teelu. What was it the moss woman said? The Balrog will act if it finds a host too good to pass up."

I winced. In the past few weeks I’d figured out two basic facts about the Balrog:

1. The moss got a kick out of scaring the pants off lesser species.

2. It preferred waiting to pounce till someone spoke a good straight line… like, "We should be safe now," or, "I don’t think it knows we’re here," or, "The Balrog will act if it finds a host too good to pass up."

Um.

The gallery’s silence was broken by a ripping sound, starting at the far end of the palace and racing our way. The moss on the walls and ceiling came sloughing off in great flat sheets, peeling from the stone and falling to the floor. Like mounds of snow sliding off trees, the moss slopped onto the ground, building up higher and higher… until it reached some critical mass and began to spill forward.

Rolling heaps of scarlet fuzz tumbled toward us with all the surging unstoppability of an avalanche.

"Run!" Festina shouted. As if we needed to be told.

I sprinted the last few steps to the doorway and threw myself inside, flattening against the wall of the stairwell. Outside, the moss had started to make a skittering scratchy sound — alien spores tripping over each other as they flowed after us. I waved the others to pass me and hightail it for the roof; but Festina planted herself against the wall opposite me, clutching the lantern in her gloved hand. She had the air of a woman who intended to make sure everyone else was safe before she headed up herself.

Zeeleepull seemed to have the same idea: stopping with Festina and me just inside the stairwell, all of us playing the hero, no one wanting to make a break for it till the others were safely on their way. Then Counselor gave her warrior-mate a tremendous shove that practically knocked him off his feet, forcing him to stagger a few steps up the ramp in spite of himself. She barreled forward and shoved him again: no delicacy at all, just whomp, like a small brown bulldozer plowing into an obstacle she was determined to move. One more shove and Zeeleepull accepted the inevitable — he ran, Counselor ran, Hib Nib Pib ran, with Festina and me racing close on their heels.

I had just reached the first landing when the stairwell behind me flushed bright with a crimson glow. The Balrog was coming up too.

Nothing to see in the stairwell but Festina’s lantern and the bloom of Balrog creeping up behind us. The moss didn’t move nearly so fast on the rarnp as it did on a level floor — the upslope slowed it to a baby’s crawl. We’d have no trouble staying ahead in the short run, but the long-term picture didn’t look so rosy. There was no way out of this stairwell but the parapet on the roof; and there was no way off that parapet but a bunch of ramps at the front of the building, where the Balrog was already in total control.

Oh well — at least the moss meant we had an alternative to getting killed by my sister.

The ramp went through half a dozen switchbacks, till I could no longer see crimson glimmering up from below. I could still smell buttered toast, strong and clear… but I could also catch a whiff of fresh night wind breezing down from the roof’s open air. It carried the scent of human sweat, and gusts of ozone too — the fragrance of lightning. Whatever the Explorers were doing, it used a lot of electricity.

By the time I topped the last ramp, the roof was getting crowded, what with five Mandasars and the same number of humans, three wearing big bulgy tightsuits. Once upon a time, the parapet had run along the whole west side of the palace… but some kind of explosion had blown out a big chunk of stone, leaving a gap of ten meters between us and the next intact section of walkway. The good news was the missing hunk of masonry made it hard for Balrog to migrate from the front of the palace back to us; the bad news was we were squeezed onto a patch of roof no more than three Zeeleepulls long. Lucky for us, the parapet was three Zeeleepulls wide too: you needed that much for bull-sized warriors to get past each other when they were marching sentry on the ramparts.

Even if we’d had more space, I doubt we would have used it — everyone was too busy crowding around Tobit, Dade, and Plebon to see what they were doing. They’d planted our remaining anchor atop the stomach-high wall that edged both sides of the parapet. Standing on either side of the box were two Bumblers, ours and Plebon’s, with back panels pried off to reveal tidy bundles of wires. Neat connections had already been spliced between those wires and some handy electrode knobs jutting out from the base of the anchor machine. The equipment was clearly built to make such rewiring easy; it made me wonder how often Explorers got into tug-of-wars, if navy engineers designed everything for exactly this situation.

But no design is perfect — the Explorers needed more power than just the two Bumblers. Both Tobit and Dade had the fronts of their tightsuits sliced open, cut very delicately by some kind of knife. The incisions were only deep enough to slit off the top layer of fabric, revealing the snarl of circuitry that ran the various functions of the suit: radios, temperature control, all that. Someone had yanked a finger-thick cable out of each suit’s belly and connected the cables to the anchor box too… making it look like each man had a length of intestine pulled out of his gut and hooked up to the anchor. Tobit and Dade stood side by side in front of the parapet wall like guys at adjacent urinals, not looking at each other, occasionally giving self-conscious glances down at the cables that were pumping power into the little black box.

"How’s it going?" Festina asked. She sounded like someone trying not to sound anxious.

"See for yourself," Plebon said. He pointed over the parapet wall, across the palace grounds and past the first canal, to a Sperm-tail twinkling down from the black sky. The tail tip lay pressed against the side of the old Hushed Museum, a memorial to every Mandasar who’d died in the last 144 years. (That’s supposed to be how long Mandasar souls stay in the afterlife before getting reincarnated again.) I was happy to see the museum had survived the war… even if it looked like the Sperm-tail had choked up against the building and wouldn’t come any closer.

"Is the tail stuck?" I asked.

"It’s held," Plebon answered. "We increase our power; the tail comes toward us. Then the other side adds more power to its anchor, and we lose ground."

"Okay," Festina said, moving into line with Tobit and Dade. "Cut me… before Queen Samantha finds more juice."

She spread her arms to expose the front of her tightsuit. Plebon hesitated a moment, then picked up a scalpel that’d been lying on the parapet wall — a regulation navy scalpel, taken from an Explorer’s first-aid kit. He skimmed the knife up one side of Festina’s rib cage, across at the shoulders, and down to the waist. A flap of heavy cloth fell open in her suit, baring the electronics beneath. Plebon carefully slipped his hand in among the wires and began feeling around for the power cable.

"Kind of an erotic experience, ain’t it, Admiral?" Tobit leered. "Having your clothes cut off, then getting groped."

"Shut up, old man," Festina mumbled. Her voice sounded like somebody blushing.

While Plebon worked, I looked over the edge of the parapet. The first thing to catch my eye was a Laughing Larry, hovering halfway between the palace and the surrounding palisade. At the moment, the Larry wasn’t giggling its full hyena laugh — just a light chuckle, as if it knew a joke we didn’t. The gold ball spun two stories above the ground, a good height for slaughtering soldiers when the shooting started, but from down there, they wouldn’t hit us up on the roof. Larries fired out the bottom and sides, not the top; they weren’t designed to butcher people who’d reached higher ground.

Another Larry hovered over the first canal, just beyond the west gate of the palisade. In the darkness I couldn’t see more of the metal balls, but I didn’t doubt they were out there — when Tobit had reported four of the nasty things, he’d been using his Bumbler as telescope and IR scanner.

Four Laughing Larries, and the Balrog inching up behind us. Not good. I noticed the five Mandasars had planted themselves at the top of the ramp, between me and the creeping moss. Counselor was grimly holding Festina’s flaming lantern; she obviously had plans to show the Balrog a hot time if it tried to attack her Teelu.

I turned my eyes toward the Sperm-tail, still plastered against the side of the Hushed Museum. The tail seemed to be quivering with excitement… but maybe it was just vibrating under tension as our anchor pulled one way and Sam’s pulled the other. Behind me, Dade yelled at Plebon, "Hey, be careful! If you feed too much power, you’ll fry the whole anchor."

"He knows that," Festina said in a tight voice. "Let the man work."

"Almost there," Plebon grunted. "Here goes."

Suddenly, the tail slithered away from the museum wall. It snapped up into the air, high, high, halfway to the thin clouds, then stabbed down again, straight at us — like a colored tube of lightning, and the anchor was the lightning rod.

Whish. Contact. Locked down.

I lifted my hand to my earphone and waited for someone to tell Jacaranda we were ready. Five seconds passed in silence. Finally, I said, "Um… shouldn’t we call the ship? Say we’re ready for transport?"

"No radios," Festina replied. Her voice came straight out of her tightsuit, with no amplification. "Our suit power is shunted into the anchor. But there’s nothing to worry about: the ship can tell when its tail has been snagged. Give them a few more seconds to establish an air-pressure gradient. Then we can start—"

She was going to say we could start transporting up. But she was interrupted by stuff transporting down: three Laughing Larries and a twentyish version of me.

One slight difference: the younger me had a chest made of glass.

41 GREETING THE NEW ARRIVALS

They came out of the Sperm-tail in a whoosh, spat onto the parapet through the tiny tail tip and suddenly exploding to full size. One of the Larries smacked against the parapet wall with a metallic clang; the other two bounced against the stone floor, then flipped over the outer wall, where they dropped almost all the way to the ground before stopping their fall. They spun down there, howling as loud as banshees… as if they were furiously angry and screaming for someone to kill.

The man nearly went over the side too. He shot out of the Sperm-tail and landed unbalanced on his feet, staggering forward out of control till he lurched over the stomach-high wall. I barely managed to catch him by the tail of his vest. It was a leather one, exactly like Mr. Clear Chest had worn on Celestia.

As I pulled him back to more solid footing, Festina wheeled around, ripping her connection away from the anchor. Her right fist caught the man hard in the jaw; he seemed so dizzy from the Sperm-tail ride, he didn’t see the punch coming. The impact nearly sent him over the wall again, but I kept hold of his vest and hauled him in. That brought him back into range for Festina to hit him with a left in the solar plexus and a knife-hand to the side of the neck. He slumped unconscious, his limp body staying upright only because of my grip on his vest. Gingerly, I lowered him to the ground, keeping a wary eye on Festina.

"Um," I began to say… but behind Festina’s back, the anchor box shot up a stream of sparks that hissed and fizzed in the darkness. When she’d torn herself free, some circuit must have shorted out. With the anchor discombobulated, the Sperm-tail snapped loose and whipped past our faces, making a beeline for the other anchor, somewhere in the middle of the Black Army.

Dade howled, "No!" A moment later, he spun to face Festina. "Do you know what you did? You ruined our chance to escape! They told me you were crazy, but…" He clamped his mouth shut.

Festina only sighed. "Dade," she said, "that wasn’t our Sperm-tail: it came from some other ship. Jacaranda sure as hell wasn’t carrying Laughing Larries… and I would have noticed a crew member who looks so much like Edward." She shook her head. "There must have been a second ship in this system. When we arrived, it hid behind an asteroid or something; but as soon as Jacaranda left, the ship came straight to Troyen. Obviously, this pretty fellow didn’t want to miss the final offensive. In so much of a hurry, he forgot to make sure his Sperm-tail had landed on the right anchor."

"But…" It was obvious Dade still wanted to blame someone. "You didn’t have to rip away from the anchor and break it. You didn’t have to hit the guy."

"No?" Festina knelt beside the clear-chest man and patted him down. At his hip, she found a holster holding a standard-issue navy stun-pistol: very bad if the man had been given enough time to start shooting. Even worse, Festina opened a zipped inner pocket of the leather vest and pulled out a palm-sized electrical doodad — a control box of some kind.

She held it for Dade to see. "Command module for those Laughing Larries," she said. "Voice-activated. He didn’t even have to pull it from his pocket; all he had to do was shout. One word, and his three nasty pets would have sliced us to ribbons."

Dade stared, his eyes growing wide. He whispered, "How did you know?"

Festina shook her head in despair. "I didn’t know, Dade — I made a snap judgment, based on inadequate facts. That’s what Explorers do. Sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, sometimes it’s life and death. You never know till it’s over… and often, not even then."

Slowly she got to her feet. Tobit took the controller from her. "Let me have a look at this," he said. "If I’m lucky, I can hot-wire the voice-recognition circuits, so it obeys one of us instead of sleeping beauty there."

"No need," Festina told him. She took the box back and held it out to me, like a microphone I should speak into. "Edward, say, ‘Rise two meters.’ "

I did. The three Larries that’d just come down the Sperm-tail whirled themselves up a couple meters higher. I swallowed hard, but Festina only shrugged. "Clones. You and this guy look the same, so I figured you’d sound the same too. At least close enough to fool a simple-minded voice-recognition system." She tossed the controller to me. "Congratulations, King Edward. You’ve got three killing machines. I’m curious as hell what you’ll do with them,"

Giving me the controller was a test: I knew that. Festina wanted to see if I’d go crazy or something. I think she still was inclined to trust me, but considering how I’d smashed that anchor, she couldn’t be sure I was on the side of the angels. If I’d tried to talk to the Larries, maybe she would have punched me just like the guy on the ground… or shot me with her stunner. She’d turned a titch away from me, so I couldn’t see either her holster or her gun hand.

But none of that mattered — I had no intention of using the Larries for anything. I came close to throwing the controller off the parapet, so I wouldn’t be tempted… and so the spirit that sometimes possessed me couldn’t use the Larries either. Instead, I just handed the little gizmo back to Festina, "You keep it," I said. "If you need the Larries to do something, I’ll give them your orders; but I don’t want my own army."

"Lousy instincts for a king," she muttered. But she took the controller and tucked it into a pouch on her belt. Glancing down at our new Mr. Clear Chest, she asked, "What do your instincts say about him?"

"Um… maybe shoot him with your stunner, just to make sure?"

She looked like she was considering it, but Dade spoke first. "If you shoot him, he’ll be out for six hours. Suppose we need to interrogate him or something."

Festina looked at the boy. "Interrogate him? What about?"

"I don’t know," Dade answered, not meeting her eyes. "But it’d be nice to have the option. And maybe we could use him as a hostage… if he’s important to York’s sister."

"You think my sister would care?" I asked.

"She might," Festina admitted. She knelt beside the unconscious man. From a pouch in her belt, she pulled a coil of copper wire (probably for making electrical repairs to her suit) and began trussing our prisoner’s hands behind his back. "Dade," she said, "if you’re so interested in this guy, you’re in charge of him. No matter what else happens, don’t take your eyes off him. Shout when he wakes up. Can you do that?"

"Yes," Dade answered, sounding all huffy with indignation. Festina didn’t comment; instead she turned to me.

"This fellow is a clone of your father, right? Or possibly of you yourself."

"Since I’m a clone of my father, there’s no difference."

"There’s a difference, If nothing else, your father’s fully human; you have that pinch of Mandasar. I suspect this fellow has Mandasar genes too — all the better to produce babies with your sister."

That made me gulp. "Babies? But that’s, umm…"

"Incest?" she suggested. "Absolutely. But it still produces healthier offspring than cloning the clones of a clone. How old was your father when you were produced? Sixty, something like that? So your own genes were sixty years old the moment you were conceived. YouthBoost can compensate to some extent, but sorry, Edward, you don’t have the hundred-and-sixty-year life expectancy of a normal human. A hundred and twenty, tops. And if we cloned you, your progeny might not make it to eighty.

"So," she went on, "since your sister wants to generate a dynasty of superkids, it’s best to avoid more cloning and just use the old-fashioned approach. A mummy and daddy love each other very much… and they mass-produce fertilized ova which are farmed out to surrogate mothers all over the Technocracy." Festina gave a rueful grin. "Your Samantha is the mother, and I’ll bet this fellow is the father."

"Oh." It made me kind of sick, thinking this copy of me might have been with Samantha. For all I knew, they could have produced kids already. But when I thought about it, that wasn’t so likely: Sam had been so busy running the war, she wouldn’t have time to go through pregnancy; and on Troyen, she’d have a hard time finding another human woman who could act as surrogate mom. All the humans had been evacuated twenty years ago.

Still, this clear-chest guy — this version of me or my father — it made me feel horrible, thinking of him and Sam together. Was he smart? It was such a dumb jealous question, but was he smart? Was he witty and charming and all, a real equal who could keep up with her and not some halfwit moron who always needed to be babied? Because if he was stupid, maybe I could stand the thought of him with Sam, her giving him orders, do this, do that… but if he was so smart that sometimes he got the better of her, and sometimes he said, "This is what I want," and she did it…

That would make me truly, truly sick. I don’t know why but it would.

Kneeling beside Festina, I bent over the man and sniffed… as if I could somehow smell whether or not he was clever. I couldn’t tell you what I expected to find, but I do know what actually hit my nose: the odor of buttered toast.

Uh-oh.

The hairs on the back of my neck curled cold and clammy. I was remembering something from back on Celestia, as the glass-chested recruiter stood in the hatchway of his skimmer. There’d been that tiny dot of red shining in his belly, like the tip of a ruby laser… but back then, I hadn’t known enough to be terrified of little glowing specks.

Gingerly, I flipped the man’s vest all the way open. Inside the glass torso, his lungs lifted up and down; his heart thudded behind his ribs; and there in his gut, tucked among the folds of his small intestine, was a glowing pinprick of red.

"Look," I said, pointing. I made sure to keep my finger high above the glass.

Festina squinted, then sat back abruptly. "Jesus Christ. Is that Balrog?"

"Smells like it," I told her.

"In his stomach. How could it get into his stomach? How could you smell it in his stomach?"

That was a real good question. For the first time it occurred to me maybe I wasn’t really smelling stuff at all. Maybe I was just kind of sensing it, the way Kaisho could see things even though her eyes were covered with hair. That could explain why some people smelled like sounds or colors: I wasn’t actually using my nose. Or at least I wasn’t using it for everything. Mandasar queens might secretly have a sixth sense, like ESP or something… and now I had the same thing. Considering how Balrog spores were supposed to be all telepathic, maybe other telepaths could sense them pretty easily — as if they were giving off strong signals on the ESP channel.

But I could think about such things later. I told Festina, "I don’t know how I smelled it, I just did." I took a deep breath. "That other guy had a Balrog too. The recruiter on Celestia. I noticed a little red speck glowing in his stomach, but didn’t know what it was."

"Oh, fuck," Festina whispered. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." She quickly turned to Tobit, and snapped, "Put a Bumbler back together. Fast."

Two minutes later, we were staring at the Bumbler’s vid-screen, looking at a mocked-up anatomical diagram made with X rays and ultrasound. The clear-chest man did indeed have a Balrog in his belly; but it was locked in a thumb-sized containment chamber that must have been surgically implanted. The chamber itself was glass, which was why you could see the spore glowing inside; but it also had a set of black tubes sunk into the intestinal wall, and a bunch of wires leading back to the man’s spinal cord.

"Got to be some kind of life support," Tobit said. "Those tubes into the intestines — they’re probably siphoning nutrients from the guy’s digestive system. Feeding the damned moss."

"And everything is glass," Plebon pointed out. "Balrogs need sun as well as food, correct?"

Festina nodded. "They have to get solar energy every day… and some warped fool must have replaced this guy’s chest with glass, so light could get in. Drastic, but it does the job. That’s why he prances around in just a vest — a shirt would get in the way."

"But why would you want a Balrog in your belly?" Dade asked. "If that glass container ever broke…"

"It can’t be real glass," said Festina. "Neither is the man’s chest. They’re both some transparent polymer… probably as tough as armor."

"But why keep a Balrog at all?" Dade insisted. "Dangerous little parasites, who can see the future and read your mind…"

Something went click in my head. "Communication system," I blurted out. "What do you mean?" Plebon asked.

"Festina said some folks believe all the Balrogs are in telepathic contact with each other… instantaneous communication, no matter how far apart individual spores might be. Suppose someone figured out a way to use Balrogs as, um, relays. You lock one up inside you, hook it to your brain — through those wires there, straight to the spinal nerves — then you kind of use it like a broadcast link. This guy’s thoughts go into his Balrog, and get transmitted instantaneously to Mr. Clear Chest on Celestia. Mr. Clear Chest’s thoughts come back the same way. They constantly hear what each other is thinking." I stopped a second. "For all we know, their thoughts may go back and forth so fast they scramble together. Like one joint brain inside two separate heads, light-years apart. A little hive-mind of their own."

"Bloody hell," Festina whispered. "If your father can not only make superhumans, but keep all their brains in synch so they don’t fight among themselves… staying in instantaneous contact even when they’re spread across the galaxy…"

"They’d be worse than the damned Balrogs," Tobit growled. "Speaking of which, imagine how the mossy little bastards feel about this: their fellow spores taken as slaves and used as someone else’s phone line."

"They hate it," Festina said softly. "And they hate the people who built it." She turned to me. "That containment chamber looks like Fasskister technology — Fasskisters are masters of hooking machines to organisms and vice versa. Remember what Kaisho said back on the orbital."

I nodded. The Fasskisters know full well why it’s right and proper to lock them in their precious metal suits, with physical needs taken care of, but their minds slowly going crazy. That’s why the spores had taken over the Fasskister orbital: tit-for-tat vengeance against the folks who’d sealed up spores in little glass cases.

"Makes you wonder," Festina said, "who really got the idea of dumping spores on the Fasskisters. Did Queen Temperance think of it herself? Or did the Balrog plant the notion in her head?"

"Generally," a voice whispered, "we stay out of the heads of lesser creatures. But we do make exceptions."

Kaisho hovered in her chair at the top of the nearby ramp. Behind her, the stairwell blazed as bright as a forest fire.

42 ACCEPTING THE INEVITABLE

Zeeleepull leapt in front of her, his pincers wide and ready. "Back, you," he snarled. He looked more mad at himself than at Kaisho, because he’d let her sneak up on our backs.

"Dearest boy," Kaisho whispered to him from behind her veil of hair, "you might stop me, but not my colleagues." She waved a lazy hand at the spores all around her. They gleamed on the surface of the ramp like a burning red carpet — not advancing but thickening, as if more and more of them were climbing up from below, accumulating layer after layer of alien fuzz.

Zeeleepull didn’t flinch. Mandasar warriors have a crazy fondness for doomed last stands. "Back," he said again, and made a snipping gesture with his claws. "Smelly un-hume."

Kaisho chuckled. "Easy, my dashing innocent. We aren’t here to swallow you up… just for a little justice."

Festina straightened to her full height. "Justice against whom? Mr. Glass Chest here?"

"Amongst others," Kaisho said.

"Because the Balrog doesn’t appreciate being used."

"That’s right."

Festina snorted. "Some aliens can dish it out but they just can’t take it. The damned Balrog had no moral qualms enslaving the woman you once were, Kaish — twisting your mind and body for its own mossy convenience — but heaven forbid a human ever takes advantage of a single fuzzy spore. Not that I’m defending our glass-chested clone here, but don’t you see the irony?"

Kaisho lowered her head. "I’m not enslaved," she whispered. "Not quite. But I’m bound close enough to the Balrog to feel the suffering of the spore in that man’s stomach. Can you imagine the humiliation — the degradation — of being imprisoned like an animal, forced to transmit bestial human thoughts every second of the day? Barely kept alive by glimpses of sunshine and the cast-off waste of a human’s gut? Used as a debased go-between, a conduit for sordid schemes of violence and domination…"

Her voice broke into a sob. A real sob, out loud. When she spoke again, it was a normal human voice — no whispering, no taunting, just a genuine person talking. "Festina… all of you… I know you think the Balrog is evil. You see it as a threat because you imagine some terrible parasite eating you, stealing your soul. But it’s not like that. It’s… beautiful. Just beautiful. It’s wise, and honest, and gentle, and caring; I love it with all my heart. Of course I’m scared how I’m changing, and I have my moments of doubt… but I love this creature inside of me. I do. Because it’s so much more holy than anything I ever dreamed possible."

She tossed her head defiantly, flicking the hair away from her face. Her mouth was a fierce line, and her eyes blazed with reflected red light from the moss as she stared at each one of us — daring us to argue. "Think how this bastard is using the spores he’s captured. There are three of them linked together: Admiral York on New Earth; this clone here; and that recruiter on Celestia… who’s another York clone, an earlier model without the fancy DNA. He had his features changed with plastic surgery so he wouldn’t be immediately recognized by people using the recruiters’ services, but it’s still the same old Alexander York, Three versions of the same man, touching mind-to-mind, thoughts kept perfectly in synch so they’re effectively the same person."

Kaisho gestured to the man at my feet. "This is your father, Edward — body and brain. The cloned zygote was planted in a surrogate mother right here on Troyen, and born a few weeks before the war started; that glass thing was installed in the baby’s stomach a little while later. From that day on, the child’s brain was so dominated by transmitted thoughts, the infant had no chance of developing a separate identity. He is Alexander York: helping Samantha on Troyen, leading the recruiters on Celestia, playing Admiralty politics back on New Earth. A man with blood on his hands in three separate star systems, and the League can’t touch him because he never physically crosses the line.

"Now," Kaisho went on, her voice still choking on tears, "can you imagine how it pains the Balrog to be caught up in this? Every day, Admiral York commits murder and war, using sentient creatures like disposable means to repugnant ends. Can you imagine how the Balrog feels, melded to such a putrescent mind? The entire Balrog race is in agony. I’m in agony, and I’m not holy, I’m just a lower animal out of my depth."

"Kaisho." Festina’s voice was soft, more tender than I’d ever heard it before. "Please don’t cry. Please. What does the Balrog want?"

"To free itself, of course. To detach itself from that awful man."

"And to punish him?"

Kaisho met Festina’s gaze for a moment, eye to eye. Then she reached up and fluffed her hair back over her face, hiding once more behind her natural veil. Her voice dropped down to the old familiar whisper: back to speaking for the Balrog instead of herself. "If someone doesn’t do something, he’ll keep playing the same tricks. He has more spores — commandeered from the navy hospital that examined me."

Festina contemplated the unconscious man at her feet. "Suppose we take him to Gashwan for surgery. Have the gadget removed from his gut."

"We get the gadget," Kaisho said immediately.

"Of course," Festina agreed. "As for the man himself… if he’s committed crimes, and I don’t doubt that he has, we’ll turn him over for a proper trial. Considering that the Balrog has heard York’s every thought for the past few decades, it won’t be hard getting a conviction."

"Yes it will," Kaisho said. "Where is he going to get a proper trial? Even if Jacaranda rescued us this very moment, you couldn’t take this man back to the Technocracy. He’s a dangerous non-sentient creature; if you try to move him out of this system, the League will kill you as well as him. And if he stays on Troyen, he’ll be acquitted by the new High Queen Samantha." Kaisho shook her head. "Sorry, Festina dear, but you can’t arrange any ‘proper trial’ — you’ll never find a suitable legal authority."

"There is one," Counselor said. "There’s Teelu."

Silence for a moment. Then the other Mandasars nodded enthusiastically, ignoring that I was waving my hands no, no, no. "I’m not a legal authority," I protested.

"You’re as legal as your sister," Festina said, "and you suffered through the venom treatments before she did. When it comes to being royal, you’ve got seniority."

Tobit grunted. "Not to mention you’re older than she is."

"Just ten minutes!" I objected.

"They tell me you were the high queen’s consort," Plebon put in. "That makes you the last surviving member of the old regime."

"I was just a glorified bodyguard!"

Festina took me by the sleeve and pulled me close, pressing her helmet against my ear so I could hear her whisper. The smooth plastic visor was surprisingly warm where it touched my skin. "Edward," she said in a low voice, "if you don’t say you’ll do something, the Balrog may take the law into its own hands. That’s a precedent we want to discourage." She drew in a breath. "I’m not asking you to pass judgment on the spot. Just agree you’re the closest thing we have to lawful authority, and that you’ll consider all the issues at an appropriate time."

I turned to look at her: those grave eyes of hers were inches away but half-lost in the shadows inside her helmet. My lips almost touched her visor… probably the closest I’d ever get to kissing her.

Silly ideas can go through your head at the strangest times.

I stepped back from her, faster than I meant to. Everyone was watching me — even the Balrog. Its red glow focused on me like a scarlet spotlight: not shining brightly, but making me feel conspicuous.

Suddenly, another silly idea went through my head: that all this talk of trials was pure moonshine, especially in our current circumstances. We weren’t going to convene a court out here on the ramparts while enemy troops were charging the palace. But somehow, Kaisho had wangled us all into thinking about it, and I was half a second away from saying, "Okay, I’ll declare myself in charge here." Which meant I’d be claiming the throne. Was that what the Balrog really wanted? How much of the past few weeks was a big Balrog plan? If you let your imagination take over, you could start believing the Balrog had brought about this whole expedition to Troyen, just to rescue the single solitary spore inside this guy’s stomach. But if that were true, I was so far out of the game I didn’t have a chance of understanding what was really going on: who was good, who was bad, what was planned, what was sheer dumb accident. Better just to do the right thing as best I understood it, and hope that was good enough.

"All right," I said, trying to ignore the pounding of my heart. For a second, I didn’t have a clue what to say next; but then the words began to come — not like being possessed, but as if a spark had suddenly jumped across a dead-gap inside my head.

"In the name of High Queen Verity the Second…" I felt strange, as if something was waking up inside of me. "In the name of her daughter and rightful successor, Innocence the First…" The words kept flowing — from my own head, but some part I’d forgotten was there.

"In the name of my obligations as defender of the crown, and bearer of the burden of royal blood…" Like there’d been a whole section of my brain that’d closed itself off, shoved down dormant till the day I finally faced up to everything I’d known but not admitted — that my sister and father were monsters, that I was someone special, that I had a duty I’d been trying to escape for years and years.

"In the name of all that I am, all that I have been, and all that I should be… I accept responsibility as steward of this realm, regent until such time as the true monarch of Troyen assumes her proper throne."

I could barely catch my breath. My head felt so clear… as if I could sense all of creation as one unified whole all around me. For one brief second, I swear I knew what was coming a heartbeat before it happened. I was already turning around when the words came.

"That’s so sweet, brother," Sam said from behind me. "I must compliment whoever wrote that speech for you. Pity you’re going to have the shortest regency on record."

43 CONFRONTING THE BLACK QUEEN

Without the slightest pause, Festina dropped and rolled. You wouldn’t think someone could move that fast in a bulky tightsuit… but in the blink of an eye, she’d spun across the parapet and grabbed the scalpel Plebon used to cut open the front of her outfit. Another blink and she was poised above my father’s clone, holding the blade to his throat.

Only then did she look up to see where my sister’s voice came from.

At least this time we hadn’t let someone sneak up under our noses — nothing was anywhere near us. My amazing sensation of comprehending the universe had begun to fade, but I still had a sense of exactly where to look: out past the palisade wall, all the way to the second canal.

Soaring high above the water was a huge glass cube, three stories tall, three stories wide, three stories deep. A faint blue glow glimmered inside — softer than candlelight, barely enough for the cube to be visible against the night’s blackness. Shadowy somethings moved about within, but it was too far away to make out anything clearly… just wavery motions that meant nothing to me.

I’d soon have my chance to look again from closer up: the cube was flying straight at us, fast as a horse could gallop.

As it drew nearer, I noticed a parabolic dish mounted on the cube’s roof — one of those fancy gadgets for eavesdropping on people a long way away, and for talking back to them if you felt like it. That’s how Sam had heard what we were saying and put in her two cents worth. When you thought about it, that kind of communication system would be pretty useful in a war like Troyen’s. Thanks to the Fasskister Swarm, there were almost no radios on the planet… so if you wanted to talk to soldiers on the other side of a battlefield, you had to use something different, like tight-focused sound waves. The big hearing dish would also be handy for listening in on enemies: picking up battle plans, status reports, and juicy stuff like that.

So here was another reason Sam had won the war. No other queen would have a flying command post with all kinds of complicated audio equipment. It was kind of surprising Sam could have that kind of stuff… but then, she was doing business with the Fasskisters and our own navy. She must have got them to smuggle in a few goodies that were immune to anti-electronics nanites.

As the cube soared over the palisade, defenders on the ground peppered the glass with crossbow bolts; but the arrows bounced off as if they were toothpicks. The instant after firing, the guards ducked for cover… because the cube had an escort of four Laughing Larries, one floating under each bottom corner, like round gold casters holding up a floor-model fish tank. None of the Larries tried to fire — they weren’t even making a big howl, just a leisurely spinning whistle — but the warriors below weren’t taking chances.

The cube stopped a stone’s throw away from us, hanging in midair, level with our parapet. The blue glow coming from inside still didn’t reveal much; nothing but unidentifiable shadows. It occurred to me, we probably weren’t seeing the interior at all — just a video projection, all murked up, like a thick gauze curtain that hid almost everything but let through enough to catch your attention.

No matter how hard it was to see in, I was sure Sam could see out just fine… with fancy nightscopes and sensors that showed our group as bright as if it were sunny afternoon.

"So. Edward." Sam’s voice sounded clearly from the cube, as if we were talking face-to-face, not separated by thick arrow-proof glass. "You’ve finally come back to me."

"I’ve come back," I said. "But not to you."

"To whom then? Those poor castaways from Willow! By now you must know there’s only one left; Daddy rather used up the other one. I can’t tell you how angry he was that they stayed behind — he hates loose ends."

Tobit gestured to the unconscious man with Festina’s knife to his throat. "At this moment, your dad’s a loose end himself."

"Yes, I figured you’d take him hostage." Sam gave a theatrical sigh. "Pity you won the tug-of-war. Daddy was up on Willow, cannibalizing parts to make some more Laughing Larries—"

Plebon gasped. "You’ve got Willow here?"

"And a ship of my own," Sam told him. "A pretty black one. We do a lot of manufacturing up there, where we don’t have to worry about Fasskister nanites. Anyway, I told Daddy not to try a landing, but he insisted it would be safe. He’d tapped into your own satellite sensors, and watched Edward break that anchor box. He thought it was the only one you had. Idiot. And speaking of idiots, brother, why did you smash the box?"

I didn’t answer. Eventually, Sam sighed again. "I’m hurt, Edward. You never used to keep secrets from me. But then, you’re probably upset. I’m sure Gashwan has been telling all kinds of awful truths about me."

The front of the cube bloomed into a big view of my sister’s face, as if the whole surface was a single huge vid-screen. Even blown up three stories tall, Sam still looked beautiful: eyes warm and twinkling, her skin flawless, her face gaspingly perfect.

"So, Edward," she said, "I figure you have an hour before my troops kill you. Any last words?"

"Yes," I said. "We surrender. Any terms you want. Just call off your soldiers."

She shook her head sadly, the way she always did when I was too stupid to understand something obvious. "You heard what I said about loose ends — Dad doesn’t like them. Two weeks from now, a group of navy diplomats are scheduled to show up here, ready to establish new relations between the Technocracy and poor war-torn Troyen. By then, we don’t want anyone left alive who knows what actually happened. That means we have to kill all of you, plus Gashwan and anyone you might have talked to."

"What about the High Council of Admirals?" Festina asked. "Don’t some of them know the truth?"

"Certainly not — it’s Daddy’s little secret. Not even Admiral Vincence knows… despite all the energy he’s devoted to meddling in Daddy’s affairs. The High Council is always such a hotbed of spying on each other. Do you realize, Vincence had bought off the Executive Officer of Daddy’s own ship? That’s right: the XO of Willow was in Vincence’s pocket. It was the XO’s idea to pick up Edward on Willow’s way out of the system; that wasn’t in Daddy’s plan at all. He wanted Edward on that moonbase, where we could keep an eye on him. When Daddy interrogated your Explorer Olympia and learned Willow was taking Edward back to civilization… my, my, my, there was quite the tantrum."

"Why would Dad care?" I asked.

"Because you know things, Edward. And you are things. I’m sure you don’t understand what’s going on, but if you ever got home and told Vincence everything you’ve seen… well, Vincence has brains."

"Unlike us," Tobit muttered.

"Don’t pout," Sam told him. "The average Technocracy citizen is simply less capable than humans once were. The Admiralty has statistics to prove it; four hundred years ago, when the navy began testing recruits, they scored much higher in almost every area. All nine indices of intelligence… psychological maturity… emotional stability… you name it. Homo sapiens as a species has gone into decline, and nobody knows why. Maybe our pampered lifestyles. Maybe too many people with inferior genes, surviving and having children. Maybe some environmental factor was present on Old Earth but not where we live now. Navy researchers are quietly trying to figure out what’s gone wrong, but the diminishment is undeniable, especially on Technocracy core worlds. Four centuries ago, idiots like Prope on Jacaranda wouldn’t have been allowed to command a rowboat; now she’s the best captain the navy can find. Isn’t that appalling?"

Samantha paused for us to comment… but she didn’t wait too long. Sam loved making speeches, especially to a captive audience. "So what to do? The civilian governments are gutless incompetents; they lost control of the fleet ages ago, and don’t even realize it. As long as there’s no interruption in imports of Divian champagne, they don’t give a damn what the navy does. Same with most of the navy itself. Captain Prope is the rule, not the exception."

"Not in the Explorer Corps," Festina answered. Her voice was quiet, but tough as iron.

"I wouldn’t know," Samantha replied with a breezy wave of her hand. "Explorers have nothing to do with anything. All I’m sure of is the Technocracy suffers a major shortage of brainpower. It’s time for new management to take the situation in hand."

"Meaning you," I said.

She smiled. "Old Japanese proverb: Who will do the harsh things? Those who can."

Kaisho growled. "In defense of my ancestors, they were talking about shouldering difficult responsibilities. Not acting like a bitch because you can get away with it."

"I know what they meant," Sam said, "and I mean the same thing. People in the Technocracy are no longer able to govern themselves. Someone more gifted has to take charge. So my father and I intend to create the best leaders humanity has ever seen."

"Yeah, yeah," Festina replied in a bored tone. "Super-kids, able to fabricate pheromones, linked into a communal mind, blah, blah, blah. Sounds like a VR game I played when I was six."

Sam couldn’t keep her eyes from widening in surprise; I think she truly believed no one was smart enough to see through her plan. But Festina was still talking. "Let’s get back to the present, can we? You have the armies, we have the hostage. What are we going to do?"

"Why should I care about your hostage?" Sam asked. "If he’s stupid enough to get himself caught…"

"Um," I said, "I think you have a soft spot for stupid people, Sam. Especially ones you brought up yourself. You raised this clone from a baby, didn’t you? He was born just before the war started. So the instant I left Troyen, you got a baby Edward substitute; and you had the fun of playing mother to me all over again, just like when we were kids."

Sam stared at me. "Did you think of that all by yourself, Edward?"

"Yes. I’ve also thought of who this guy actually is. He was produced on Troyen, twenty-one years ago, which means he couldn’t have been cloned from Dad — by then, Dad was way too non-sentient to leave New Earth. So where did the DNA come from? Either from me or from you: we’ve both got Dad’s DNA too. Except Festina says it’s not healthy to clone a clone; it’s better to go the old sperm and ovum route. Am I right, Sam?"

"Edward," she said, "I’ve never seen you like this."

"No, you haven’t," I agreed. "But I’m right, aren’t I? This man is our son: you and me together. Gashwan could have got the sperm from me when I was delirious from Coughing Jaundice. You donated the egg, and the fertilized result was planted into a surrogate… but he’s still our child, isn’t he, Sam, even if he was put together in a test tube."

My sister’s eyes had turned glittering sharp. "Brother dear, when did you get so smart?"

About the same time you made me a father, I almost answered. But I didn’t say anything out loud. I was too busy mulling over the effects of hive-queen venom.

What happened when a gentle changed into a queen? She got stronger, she got bigger… and she got smarter. Gashwan might have dumbed down my original DNA, but the venom mutated me, just like venom mutates a Mandasar girl. For all I know, Gashwan may have deliberately designed my brain to kick into high gear when it got hit with venom — just to make things interesting.

However it happened, the venom gradually stopped me from being stupid. It was scary and hard to admit… but it was the truth. I’d stopped being stupid. Nobody could tell the difference while I was all sick and poisoned, but by the night Sam killed Verity…"

Yet again I remembered kneeling in Verity’s chambers, smelling the blood on the floor, knowing it was fake… me seeing in a flash of insight that everything had been a setup, and that my sister was a horrible murdering butcher. I understood it all; I even understood that I must have got smarter, because the old Edward would never have figured out any of the awful stuff that had happened. The old Edward had been slow but happy, with a kind, beautiful sister who never did bad things to people.

It hurt to be smart. Understanding what really happened in the world just made you sick to your stomach.

So I turned that part of me off: just put it to sleep. I don’t know how I did it — you couldn’t call it a conscious decision — but something in my head had become so clever, it knew how to hide away my excess intelligence so I wouldn’t have to suffer. I packed up the memories too… just forgot them all. Like a completely separate person I didn’t want to be.

For twenty years, I went back to dumb old Edward. I might have stayed dumb forever… except I got dosed with a new shot of venom. That woke something inside of me — the seeds of memories, plus that separate person I’d set aside so long ago. Who was the spirit that kept possessing me? The spirit was me too: the brainy part of me, who saw I needed to be smart again. Bit by bit, Smart Me worked to join back up with Slow Me. I couldn’t tell if the process was finished, but accepting my responsibility as king had sure closed a lot of the gap.

There were still a lot of questions to answer… like why the clever half of my brain had smashed the Sperm-tail anchor and marooned us all on Troyen. Why trap us in a war zone? What kind of scheme had it worked out with Prope? Was Smart Me so keen on a showdown with Sam that it cut off our only escape route, leaving us no choice but to play this out to the end?

No way to tell. A lot of my brainy half’s thoughts were still out of touch. Nothing to do but keep going and hope I was suddenly smart enough to deal with whatever happened.

But I didn’t say any of this out loud. The last thing I wanted was Sam taking me seriously. Let her keep underestimating me, the way she always had. That might give me a tactical advantage.

In the back of my mind, some old-Edward part of my soul felt a twinge of sadness: how I was already scheming, using deceit to get the better of my own sister. The stakes were too high to do anything else… but I knew why, twenty years ago, I’d decided I didn’t want to be smart.

Sam waited a few more moments for me to say something. When I kept my mouth shut, she sighed. "Well, brother, it seems I’ve exhausted your supply of banter. Anyone else want to join the conversation? How about you with the knife — Festina Ramos, right? My father told me you were coming to cause trouble. Do you really think I care whether you slit that man’s throat?"

"Yes," Festina said in a steely voice. "He’s your son. And your father. And your brother too, for all intents and purposes — he looks the same as your beloved Edward. Quite a trinity in just one package." She slid the scalpel lightly across Mr. Clear Chest’s neck, like she was giving him a dry shave. "And just one carotid artery. Which could very easily get nicked." Festina lifted her head and stared straight at the projected image of Sam’s face. "Don’t consider this an idle threat. It won’t be the first throat I’ve cut." Plebon and Tobit drew in their breaths sharply. Whatever Festina was talking about, both of them must know the story… and their reactions were enough to convince everybody else Festina wasn’t lying.

"All right," Sam said. "You have a knife to my father-brother-son’s throat. I can match that."

Suddenly, the vidscreen vanished. In its place, the glass wall went clear and a bright light came on inside the cube — giving us our first view of what the cube really contained. Samantha was there, wearing her dress golds — the showiest uniform a navy diplomat owns.

To Sam’s left, a gentle perched in front of a control console, monitoring the cube’s flight computer.

And to Sam’s right was a beautiful queen I recognized as Innocence. All grown-up now, bright glossy yellow, shining with strength.

Samantha held a gun to Innocence’s head.

44 TAKING THE CUBE

Dade was the first to move. He grabbed the stun-pistol out of Tobit’s holster and fired at Samantha in the cube. Nothing happened. Not to Sam, at least. I felt a tingle as the stunner’s hypersonics bounced off the cube and echoed back… but the effect was so thinned out by the time it returned to the parapet, none of us got knocked for a loop. Nothing more than a scritchy pins-and-needles sensation that passed in a heartbeat.

Grimacing with disgust, Tobit plucked the pistol from Dade’s hand and set the gun down on the parapet wall.

"Thanks," Samantha told Dade. "You just demonstrated you can’t touch me." She gave a nasty smile. "Just so everybody knows, Innocence here is the last Mandasar queen in the universe. If she dies, there’ll never be another. You can’t make a new queen without a full year of an old queen’s venom."

I called, "Are you all right, Innocence?"

"Quite well, Little Father," she replied in a cold, clear voice. "Do what’s right — don’t worry about me."

"She’s always saying noble things," Sam laughed, using her free hand to pat Innocence on the shell. "So irrationally heroic. It’s a pity I didn’t find her till last year; if I’d taken her under my wing when she was a girl, I might have brought her round to my way of thinking."

"You flatter yourself," Innocence said drily.

"I like flattery," Samantha replied, "and I’m good at it. I rather like your defiance too. If you start getting subtle, then I’ll worry."

Sam glanced my way. "Innocence has only been with me a few months, but she’s been a tremendous help. My troops fight so devotedly when they think they’re working for Verity’s rightful successor. Of course, I’ve had to make sure the girl doesn’t talk to anyone. Usually I keep her drugged unconscious… with little servomotors to make her body move, and a hidden speaker so my own words come out of her mouth. It’s not a bad system if you keep the room dark, and I’ve passed the word poor Innocence can’t stand bright lights. A result of chemical torture at the hands of an outlaw queen."

"If Innocence is so valuable," Festina said, "you don’t dare shoot her."

"She’s useful," Sam agreed, "but keeping her alive is a risk. Always the chance she might escape, or tell the wrong people how I’ve been using her. The sooner I kill her, the safer I’ll be. And why not do it now, when I can blame it on human provocateurs? I’ll put your fingerprints all over the gun, then blackmail the fleet for a few million: ‘Pay up or I’ll tell everyone the last queen was killed by an admiral.’ "

"The council wouldn’t care," Festina laughed. "They’d shout from the rooftops, MAD DOG RAMOS SHOWS HER TRUE SELF. As for the navy accepting responsibility for anyone but me… you’re looking at expendable Explorers, a woman controlled by alien parasites, and a man who’s never been right in the head. Look up deniability in your favorite dictionary, and you’ll see our pictures."

As she spoke, Festina got to her feet, lifting the unconscious man with her. She kept her scalpel to his throat by locking her knife arm under his chin. Then she hiked her other hand under his armpit, around his chest, and heaved straight up. Even though she was plenty strong, it was still an awkward maneuver; I could imagine my sister watching and wondering if there was a chance of killing Festina during those moments, while she was struggling and slightly off-balance with the man’s weight.

I worried about the same thing myself. It seemed crazy for Festina to take such a risk, hoisting the man up… and for what? To make it easier for Sam to see the knife blade glinting in the starlight?

Then my eye was caught by another tiny glint: a faint reflection, some star shining on the voice control for the clone’s Laughing Larries. Sometime in the past few minutes, Festina must have slipped the controller out of her belt pouch without any of us noticing; when she stood, she’d left it lying on parapet’s stone floor.

Now, while everyone’s gaze focused up on her hands, and the scalpel, and the exposed throat, her foot nudged forward a bit and sent the controller sliding toward me.

Um.

I didn’t have a clue what she wanted me to do… and she couldn’t tell me. Maybe she didn’t have a plan at all — just hoped the king would dream up something.

Um, um, um. I had to force myself not to chew my knuckle or Sam would know I was trying to think hard.

Um. Um. Okay. I had an idea.

Sam had started talking again. "You think the High Council has deniability? Wrong. You all came to Troyen in the Jacaranda… a ship known to run errands for Admiral Vincence. Dad will have a field day with that at the next council session. By the time he’s through, Vincence will be in disgrace, and the rest of the council will trip all over themselves to pay me hush money. But," Sam said, her voice turning cold and hard, "that’s none of your concern — it’s time for ultimatums. Drop your weapons and lie facedown on the ground. If you surrender right away, I might be in such a good mood I’ll let you and Innocence live a while longer."

Tobit actually laughed. "How stupid do you think we are?"

I told him, "You may not be stupid. But I am."

Slowly, carefully, I lowered myself to the parapet’s stone floor. In the process, I palmed the remote control Festina had shoved my way. As I laid myself down on my stomach, the little voice-controlled gizmo ended up right under my mouth.

The others kept talking — arguing with Sam, wrangling over treachery-proof schemes to exchange Dad’s clone for Innocence — but I ignored them. I was too busy straightening out in my head where my three Larries were: one still up on the parapet, the other two way down near the ground. Sam wouldn’t be able to see the ones below her; not when she was paying so much attention to Festina and the others. I just had to picture where those two Larries were in relation to Sam’s glass cube…

Taking a deep breath, I whispered orders into the voice control right under my mouth. No way to tell if the Larries were obeying me — I couldn’t see them for the parapet wall, and anyway, my face was pressed tight to the stone beneath me. I couldn’t hear the Larries either, because I’d told them to run as quietly as possible. All I could do was shift the lower two into what I thought was the right position, and tell the other one to get ready for a fancy maneuver.

Then: up, up, up.

I scrambled to my feet fast… and maybe my movement was enough to distract Sam from seeing the two gold cannonballs shooting up from ground level. They smashed the bottom of the glass cube with a thunderous crunch, both striking on the same side edge — like grabbing one side of a fish tank and yanking up with all your strength. The cube lurched and rolled, knocked over ninety degrees onto its side. For an instant, Sam and Innocence became a jumble of flailing arms, legs, and claws; then both dropped to the new bottom of the cube, Sam falling hard, Innocence falling harder.

Call it a two-story drop: a long way when you’re too surprised to twist into a good landing position.

The impact was enough to knock the wind out of both of them. I couldn’t see if Sam had held onto her gun, but it didn’t matter: a human could recover faster from that fall than an alien who weighed as much as an elephant. Innocence would survive — queens are tough — but she’d be in no shape to stop Sam from retrieving the gun and using it at point-blank range.

So I had to get inside the cube before that happened.

The two Larries that had smashed into the cube were out of the picture; one had hit so hard it embedded itself into the cracked glass, while the other was showering down onto the ground in a hail of broken pieces. That gave me one Larry left — the one waiting on the parapet walk, ready and raring to travel.

I ran and jumped, shouting into the remote control, "Go!"

Good thing I’d given instructions to the Larry before I threw myself on top of it — the moment I leapt on board, I was whirling so fast I could barely think. Scrabbling to hold on, I dug both hands into flechette slits. Even then, I nearly spun off before we reached the upended cube; if the ride had been a single second longer, I wouldn’t have made it.

I hung on just long enough for the Larry to dump me in the middle of what was now the cube’s top surface. Too dizzy to move, I just lay on the glass while the Larry carried on with the orders I’d given: flying straight over my head and unleashing every last flechette in its magazines.

Back on the parapet, Festina shouted "Get down, get down!" But I’d told the Larry to make sure no shots got as far as the castle. Everything was aimed at the cube… with me lying in the middle, at the calm eye of the razor hurricane.

Remember how crossbow arrows hadn’t even scratched the glass surface? High-velocity steel flechettes were a whole other story.

Thank heavens it wasn’t real glass; things got nasty enough with blunt chips of plastic flying in all directions. I wrapped my arms around my head as the Larry sliced a ragged ring around me — deeper and deeper into the cube’s wall, a circumference of shredded plastic, like a buzz saw cutting out a hole in a patch of ice… till I felt something shift under me and shouted, "Stop!" into the remote control. For a heartbeat I stayed lying there, on an untouched circle of glass surrounded by a slashed area cut almost all the way through. Then my weight finished the job: with a noise halfway between a rip and a crack, my whole chunk of wall broke free and plunged, like a glass plate with me in the middle. I tucked, rolled, and kicked — the tuck and roll to save myself with a breakfall, the kick to aim the huge chunk of plummeting glass straight at Sam.

It was quiet as I got to my feet — no sound but the whistle of the Larry hovering far overhead. The glass walls around me cut off almost all noise from the outside world.

The cube was still flying, and stable as stone underfoot: just as happy to float on its side as right way up. That was a lucky break — I didn’t know how to operate this thing, and the pilot hadn’t been wearing any safety straps when the cube tipped. She’d fallen almost as heavily as Innocence, and gentles aren’t built to take damage. Her body lay crumpled at the far end of the cube, her shell split wide open all along the spine. Puffy brown skin pushed up through the break, the way meat sometimes does when you crack open a lobster. I didn’t know if she was alive or dead, but I concentrated a moment and produced the worker pheromone that’s supposed to dull pain. Maybe it would help. Sam groaned. She lay under the slab of heavy glass like a lab specimen on display. At the last second she must have seen the slab coming, because she’d thrown up her arms to protect her face.

It may have helped her face, but it sure didn’t help her arms.

I tried to heave the glass off her, but it was way too heavy to lift — several hundred kilos at least. It took all my strength just to slide it to one side; I tried not to hurt Sam again, but I could see there wasn’t much left to hurt.

Sam’s eyes flickered open. "Edward?" she whispered.

"Yes."

"I think you got me."

"You were going to kill Innocence."

"Was I?" She let her head slump, as if holding it up took too much effort. "How do you know Innocence wasn’t in cahoots with me all along? My troops will tell you she’s been giving them orders for the past few months."

"But you drugged her… and rigged her up so your words came out of her mouth."

"That’s what I said," Sam whispered. "But how can you know if it’s true? I could’ve been lying."

"Or you could be lying now. One last chance for you to cause trouble."

"Always a possibility." She coughed… very lightly, but a bead of blood dribbled out the side of her mouth. "Neither of us got very good brain chemicals, did we? Even now, I’m trying to think of ways to trick you into giving me the gun." "Who would you shoot?" I asked. "Me? Innocence? Yourself?"

"Yes," she said, with a weak grin. "In that order."

She coughed again. The sound had a choking gurgle to it. "Kiss me," she whispered. "Kiss me good night."

I wondered if she had some hidden weapon she could kill me with if I got close, or perhaps some suicide pill she’d pop into my mouth instead of her own. No sign of anything like that; no smell either. She must have guessed what I was thinking, because she said, "Do you really think I’m that evil?"

"Yes."

"You’re right. But kiss me anyway."

I knelt beside her and leaned forward, only intending a little peck on the cheek. But she turned her head at the last moment to meet my lips with hers, and she reached up to hold me — hold me with her crushed broken arms. It must have hurt hideously but she didn’t even wince. For a long moment, there was only her mouth pressed desperately against mine, my sad, scared sister…

Then she became the second woman to die kissing me. I’d barely known either of them.

45 FINDING INNOCENCE

Something went CLONK above my head. Looking up, I saw Festina had heaved out a grapnel attached to a rope and caught it on the hole in the cube’s glass. As usual, the Explorer Corps had come prepared for any contingency… even for snagging a floating cube and hauling it closer to the palace. It took everybody up there to get the cube moving — all five Mandasars as well as the Explorers — but centimeter by centimeter, they began dragging me in.

I couldn’t help them, so I went to check on Innocence. The glass slab had missed her, but she’d hit real hard when the cube rolled. All eight of her legs looked broken and a tiny ooze of blood had begun seeping through a crack in her tail. Still, she was breathing pretty evenly. Like I said, queens are tough.

Her eyes were shut as I approached… but the moment I came within grabbing range, the eyes snapped open and one of her front claws whipped toward me, I dodged and slapped it aside, which shows how badly the fall had hurt her — under normal conditions, humans just aren’t strong enough to block a queen’s pincer.

Then again, maybe Innocence had pulled her attack at the last instant.

"My apologies, Little Father," she said in a soft voice, "but I didn’t know it was you. You smell exactly like your sister." "My sister’s dead," I told her.

"Good. Then you won’t smell alike much longer."

Um.

"How badly are you hurt?" I asked.

"I’ll live," Innocence replied. "I hope."

"Don’t worry," I told her, "there are good doctors in the palace infirmary…"

"Later," Innocence said. "First, I have to call off Samantha’s troops."

"Oh. Right."

I thought that would be an easy job, considering we were in the command cube with that fancy sound system for talking long-distance; but we hadn’t heard a peep from outside since I’d dropped in. Worried, I looked through the glass wall, trying to see the parabolic dish… but the only bit left was the dish’s metal support stand. The rest had been shredded to shrapnel by a barrage of razor flechettes.

Oops.

Still, there must be some other way for Innocence to speak to the Black Army — maybe the palace had working broadcast systems. Even just a big megaphone.

Except that Sam’s soldiers were used to hearing Sam’s voice come out of Innocence’s mouth. If Innocence spoke in her normal voice, her troops would think it was a trick… that we’d captured their beloved queen and were projecting our own words through her. The black warriors would go screamingly berserk, killing everybody in the palace till Innocence was "rescued."

Oops again.

With a thud, the glass cube bumped against the palace wall. Immediately, Festina hopped across from the parapet; I could see the soles of her boots walking cautiously across the glass ceiling above me. "Are you all right?" she shouted down.

"Some are, some aren’t," I answered… not looking toward my sister. "Our biggest problem now is the Black Army," I said. "No way to call them off."

"Just fucking wonderful," Festina muttered. "Can we use this cube to get the hell out of here?"

"Maybe — it’s still in the air. Do we have any decent pilots?"

Festina turned and yelled, "Tobit! Get your ass over here."

His gravelly voice shouted back, "What now?"

"You like flying alien aircraft," Festina said. "See what you can do with this one."

"Oh goody," he grumbled. "My favorite type of airplane: anti-aerodynamic and totally made of glass. Who the hell keeps building these things?"

It took a minute to lower a rope and have Tobit shinny down into the cube… which he did pretty well, considering that "bum arm" he talked about. Getting him up to the pilot’s console was a lot more work, but eventually I helped him clamber to the command couch. As he strapped himself in sideways, he yelled, "The dials are labeled in Fasskister Basic!"

That was an ultrasimplified version of the Fasskister language, one they used on products they shipped to other races. I said, "That proves Sam had some side deals going with the Fasskisters."

"We already knew that," Festina told me. "Your sister must have had her black ship running regular shuttles between here and the Fasskister orbital. Remember how that Fasskister took one look at you and announced you were definitely not nice? He was confusing you with Clone Boy back on the parapet… who no doubt acts like an utter bastard, no matter where he goes."

"Christ," Tobit muttered, "have we drawn up a diagram, who’s been conspiring with whom?"

"Everybody with everybody else," Festina answered, "and everybody against everybody else. Secret alliances, secret betrayals, secret quid pro quo. Sam probably told the Fasskisters she was working to kill all the Mandasar queens, and they were happy to help her… especially since she and her precious Daddy had cash to pay for whatever was needed. Given how Fasskisters feel about monarchy, they’ll probably be pissed when they hear Sam was using them as pawns to make herself queen."

"With luck, they’ll never know," said a new voice. My own. Only it came from the clear-chested man up on the parapet.

He and Dade were standing side by side, both holding stun-pistols.

46 TALKING WITH DAD

Festina dived through the hole in the glass cube’s roof I a split second before the stun-pistols fired. Soft, soft whirring sounds… but Plebon and Zeeleepull crumpled, followed by the other Mandasars. Even Kaisho slumped in her hoverchair. As for Festina, the rope Tobit had climbed down was still dangling in place; she grabbed it as she fell and swung wildly as she braked herself to a stop. When she let go at the bottom, the gloves of her tightsuit gave off tiny wisps of smoke from rope burn.

"God damn it," she growled as she jumped down beside me, "I’m getting really pissed at people sneaking up behind my back."

Tobit was looking out the side of the cube, to where Dade and my father-son-twin stood on the parapet. "You fucking little weasel!" Tobit yelled at Dade. "What the hell do you think you’re doing?" "Helping me," Clear Chest answered. "Who do you think arranged for Dade to be assigned to Jacaranda? If Vincence could plant a spy on my Willow, I could plant one on his ship too."

"Shit," Festina muttered. "And I told Dade to guard the clone: a job I thought he couldn’t screw up."

By now she had her own stunner out of its holster. She couldn’t shoot out through the glass, and the others couldn’t shoot in; but there was always that big opening in the cube’s roof. If Dade and my father shot down through the hole, they could stun us like fish in a barrel — provided Festina didn’t stun them first.

Things were shaping up into another standoff… except that Dad and Dade had a whole bunch of hostages: the Mandasars, Plebon, and Kaisho. Those of us in the cube didn’t have any matching leverage.

And Dad knew it.

He lifted his foot and rested it on Plebon’s unconscious face. "Come on out," Dad yelled at us. "Or I’ll prove this bastard can look even worse than he does."

I tried not to picture the damage my father could do, stepping forward with all his weight: his heel breaking what little jaw Plebon had, then crushing up into the roof of the Explorer’s mouth, teeth snapping off and driving up into the brain…

"Don’t you dare!" Festina called in an angry voice. "Hurting that man would be a blatantly non-sentient act—"

"So what?" Dad snapped back. "I am non-sentient, Ramos. Haven’t you figured that out yet? I’m not just the man you see here. I’m also the man who tried to kill you on Celestia. And the one who sent the entire crew of Willow to their deaths."

"Knowingly?" Festina asked.

"Hell yes, knowingly," Dad answered. "Samantha was having a bitch of a time with Queen Temperance. The way Temperance had fortified the palace, it might have taken months to capture the place by siege. So I sent Willow to remove Temperance from the picture. Offer her free passage to Celestia."

"But Temperance didn’t want it," I said. "Did she, Dad?"

He looked at me in surprise. "How did you know?"

"Because queens aren’t stupid," I told him. "She knew exactly what would happen if she headed for Celestia — the League would kill her as soon as she crossed the line. So what was Willow’s second offer, Dad? Something to do with the Fasskister orbital?"

My father did a double take. "Either you’re amazingly well informed," Dad said, "or you’ve developed an idiot savant gift for lucky guesses. Yes," he said, nodding, "something to do with the orbital. Only it was the queen’s own idea. She sent those goody-goody Explorers out of the room, then offered Willow’s captain a deal. Temperance wanted to meet with the Fasskisters… supposedly to make peace with them, in the hopes they’d start helping her instead of Samantha."

Um. On the orbital, the Fasskister never mentioned that last part to us… but then, if he thought I was actually my father, he might want to keep the queen’s proposition a secret.

"Of course," Dad went on, "what Temperance really wanted was to infect the orbital with those damned Balrog spores… but Willow’s captain didn’t know that. His orders were to get Temperance off the planet any way he could, so he just went along. Unfortunately, the queen got to the orbital, stayed barely an hour, then demanded to be taken back to Troyen. Once she’d escaped from the siege at Unshummin, Temperance wanted to go home, get dropped somewhere far from Samantha’s army, and start building her own forces again."

"Which," Festina said, "was definitely not something you and Sam wanted."

"Definitely not," Dad agreed. "Willow’s captain took the queen back aboard, then locked the hold door on her, and headed for Celestia anyway."

I thought about how Temperance had tried to bash through the wall of the hold. Battering herself bloody, knowing that when Willow crossed the line, the League would execute her for all the people she’d killed during the war. As for the crew who’d basically kidnapped her and dragged her into space against her will… it was pretty clear why the League killed them too. They weren’t such nice people.

But there was still one thing I didn’t understand. I asked, "Why, Dad? Why really? If this was just about making supergrandchildren, you could have done that without bloodshed. Sam didn’t kill Verity till after I’d finished my transformation; at that point, you’d run through your test case, you had all the data… so why murder the queen? And why set up the recruiters, when Celestia has nothing to do with either Troyen or the Technocracy? You could have got your dynasty of superkids without destroying a single life."

Dad took a long time to answer. When he finally spoke, his voice was so soft I almost couldn’t hear him through the glass. "Jetsam," he said, using his cruel old nickname for me, "have you ever really seen the Mandasars in action?"

"What do you mean?"

"I came to Troyen a century ago," he told me, "and even then it was clear Mandasars were special. Stronger than humans… more rationally organized… smarter. Your average gentle scores twenty percent higher than a corresponding Homo sapiens, on all nine intelligence scales. And that was just in peacetime. In war… Christ Almighty, compared to Troyen, the Technocracy is so pathetically weak, I sometimes want to puke. We’re lazy and venal, like Imperial Rome at its most decadent; but the League of Peoples make sure that barbarians never come banging on our gates. That’s a crime against evolution. Mandasar society is the most efficient war machine I’ve ever seen, and it’s a travesty they can’t run right over us."

"They aren’t war machines," I objected. "Troyen stayed at peace two hundred years before Sam got everybody riled up."

"Two hundred sterile years," Dad replied, "unnaturally imposed when Queen Wisdom sucked up to the League of Peoples. She was the one who forced warriors and gentles and workers to live together, poisoning each other with their own pheromones, diluting what they should be…"

"And what they should be is separate from each other?" I asked. "The way your recruiters ripped apart families into single-caste slave camps and brainwashed them—"

"Like hell I brainwashed them!" Dad interrupted. "They were brainwashed before. I returned them to their true strength. You think it’s an accident that when they’re segregated, the gentles become brilliant tacticians, the warriors become unstoppable soldiers, and the workers become uncomplaining servants? Open your eyes, boy — it’s not an accident, it’s what nature intended. Evolution made Mandasars into perfect infantry, perfect strategists, perfect civilian support… with an iron-willed queen at the top to dictate what everyone else should be doing. That’s the natural state of the Mandasar world, Jetsam: a crystal-clear division of duty."

"No," Festina said quietly, "that’s only one natural state of the Mandasar world. Evolution also provided the other paradigm: castes mingling with each other, their pheromones balancing each other’s personalities. Less aggressive warriors, less slavish workers, less tunnel-visioned gentles. Not as ruthlessly efficient, but a way of life where everyone has more breathing space."

"A way of life where everyone is weak," my father sneered. "Easy prey the moment some other Mandasar tribe goes onto a segregated military footing."

Festina said, "Really? If turning militaristic was always stronger, wouldn’t evolution get rid of the other possibility after a while? But Mandasar pheromones are tuned to make both ways of life possible: segregated and unified. Historically, I’m sure Mandasars sometimes needed to abandon everything else and gear up for war… but they also had to be prepared for peace. Otherwise, what would they do when they’d defeated all their available enemies?"

"There are always more enemies," my father replied dismissively.

"Maybe," Festina admitted, "if you go out and look for them. But to do that, you have to invent the peaceful art of boat-building. And navigation. And cartography. And systems of government that hold your empire together when your queen is too far away to make every decision for you." She shook her head. "Success in war always leads to the demands of peace, Admiral. Suppose tens of thousands of years ago, the Mandasars did have a subspecies one hundred percent devoted to fighting; that breed didn’t survive, did it? Either they killed each other in some prehistoric Armageddon, or they starved to death because the workers became too bored and stupid to plant crops properly. Modern Mandasars — Mandasar sapiens — came out on top because they weren’t one-trick ponies."

She peered up intently at the glass-chested man on the battlements. "Glorify war if you want, Admiral York. A lot of people do, especially since the League has made armed conflict so rare. When no one’s seen combat for a long time, some folks get the idea they’re missing a primal source of energy. But fighting is only part of the story for any species, and the other parts are just as important."

"Other parts only become important after the fighting stops," my father retorted. "Kill or be killed, Ramos; that’s the fundamental issue, and everything else comes after, if you can spare the time. Don’t go writing poetry until you’re sitting on your enemies’ bones."

He waved his hand out beyond us, toward the approaching Black Army. They’d reached the last canal now, the one surrounding the palace like a moat. Soon they’d be driving their way across, breaching the palisade and storming onto the palace grounds. My father smiled. "This is what it always comes down to, Ramos. Naked aggression: might against might. You can rhapsodize about art and science and anything else you think is a great accomplishment, but nature doesn’t respect that superficial crap. Death is the one reality our universe truly acknowledges. That’s why Sam and I chose to start a war; I’ve devoted myself to life’s one overwhelming imperative."

"Killing those who threaten you?" Festina asked. "Yes."

"Eliminating those who are dangerous to you?"

"Right."

"The strong subjugate the weak?"

"Correct." He lifted his foot, then set it down on Plebon’s face again. "You have ten seconds to surrender or I’ll show you how ugly war can be."

"I may have ten seconds," Festina answered coldly, "but you don’t. You’re a dangerous non-sentient, threatening to kill a sentient being… and any nearby sentients have an absolute duty to stop you. You’re also a pompous jerk-off, Admiral, extolling the joys of conquest but failing to grasp the most important law of all: no matter how tough you are, there’s always someone who can beat the living shit out of you." She clapped her hands once, sharp and loud. "Balrog!"

Like fire belching from a furnace, plumes of glowing red erupted from the stairwell. Crimson smoke, thick as a wall, exploded outward to sweep over my father and Dade, so fast the two men were coated with spores before they could react.

Dade shrieked and dropped his stunner, throwing his hands to his helmet. For ten long seconds, he tried to scrape his visor clear with his fingers, scrabbling at the dusty layer of moss that continued to thicken around him. Then some particularly hungry mass of spores managed to corrode through his tightsuit, down near his stomach where the front had been cut to expose the power circuits. Air puffed out from the suit’s belly, swirling the spores around like steam on a breeze. As the suit began to deflate, Dade howled and doubled over, like something was clawing at his gut. A moment later, he dropped out of sight behind the parapet wall, and his howling cut off dead.

As for my father — my son, my twin brother — he didn’t even have a tightsuit to protect him. In a single heartbeat, his head was enveloped by a spongy clot of moss: red wads of fuzz coating his hair, covering his eyes, clogging up his nose and mouth. I think he tried to scream, but the noise was muffled to an almost inaudible whine. He took two blind steps but couldn’t manage a third… more moss congealed around him every second, weighing down his legs, freezing him in place. His arms waved feebly till they became too heavy to move; already his body looked twice its original size, with still more spores accumulating all over, packing outward until the human shape was lost. Soon there was only a fuzzy red ball, man height and glowing as bright as a bonfire.

Twenty seconds of hold-your-breath silence. Then the top of that red-shining ball began to flatten in. Moment by moment, more of the ball sank away, spores sloughing off onto the stone parapet; and there was nothing underneath. No man. No bones. Nothing but solid moss. I could smell an overpowering buttered-toast odor on the wind that blew through the hole in our glass cube… and it made me think of a smugly satisfied predator that’s just eaten a nice meal.

As the ball of moss continued to dissolve, I could see that the glass chest plate hadn’t been consumed — it must have been indigestible. Also untouched was the tiny glass container that had once nestled in the man’s intestines. The container floated atop the mass of moss, like a bottle bobbing on a calm lake, while spores kept falling away. Within a minute, the ball that had once been my father shrank to nothing but a flat sheen of red on the parapet’s stone. For a moment more, the glass container remained motionless on that mossy bed… and I could just make out the tiny dot of scarlet inside, the Balrog spore my father had imprisoned.

The surrounding moss suddenly flared a brilliant burning neon: bright enough to blind me for a second. When I could see again, the container was gone — vaporized, dissolved — and the once-captive spore was now just one among a million others glimmering silently in the darkness.

Mission accomplished for the Balrog… the prisoner freed. But the rescue hadn’t happened till after Dad’s clone had been eaten alive. My father’s other copies — Mr. Clear Chest on Celestia, and Alexander York, Admiral of the Gold, on New Earth — must have stayed mentally linked with the dying man through the whole ordeal: must have felt every millisecond of the devouring as if it was happening to them.

I wondered what it would do to you… feeling yourself being eaten alive. The Balrog could surely tell me — if it was telepathic, it must have heard my father’s silent screams — but I decided I didn’t want to know.

Festina was already scaling the rope, hand over hand toward the top of our glass cube. As she climbed, she called to Tobit, "Have you figured out how to fly this thing yet?"

"Almost," he answered. "Provided there aren’t any built-in security checks. If the onboard computer wants me to type a password or something, we’re screwed."

"Cross your fingers that doesn’t happen," Festina told him. "If we can’t stop the attacking army, this cube is our only way out of the city."

The moment she clambered onto the cube’s glass roof, I grabbed the rope and headed up too. No point me staying in the cube: I couldn’t help Tobit with the controls, and I couldn’t help Innocence either. Sometime in the past two minutes, while I was watching my dad get eaten, Innocence had quietly passed out. Maybe that was a good sign — Mandasars shut down like that when their metabolisms shift into a full-out healing state — but it could also mean she was too broken inside to keep herself awake. We needed to get Innocence to the infirmary… but she wouldn’t be safe till we stopped the Black Army.

Outside the cube, the air had curdled with the smell of buttered toast — eau de Balrog, so thick the night breeze couldn’t dissipate it. From this angle, I could see how much of the parapet was covered with glowing red: a bulgy patch where my father had been, a Dade-shaped mound nearby, a light dusting everywhere else. Plebon and the Mandasars had been pelted with their share of spores when the Balrog exploded from the stairwell, but they weren’t coated solidly… just a sprinkle of specks, like gleaming freckles all over their bodies.

Festina turned toward me as I joined her. She stood at the edge of the cube, where it nuzzled the top of the parapet wall. No spores had fallen on the cube itself; but if Festina took another step forward, she’d be walking on moss dust.

"What do you think?" she asked. "Is it going to eat us?"

"I don’t know," I said. "It sure likes pretending it wants to eat us… but that might be its idea of a joke. Jumping out and going, ‘Boo!’ at the lower species. If the Balrog really wanted to have us for supper, it could have done that long ago."

"Maybe it’s just following its own code of ethics," Festina suggested. "Can’t eat anyone who keeps a respectful distance, but if you actually step on a spore, you’re fair game."

She had a point. Maybe if you stepped on a bunch of moss, it actually hurt the spores — I’d get hurt if someone walked all over me. In that case, the Balrog might feel perfectly justified in biting your feet.

I glanced back at the palace’s palisade. Outside, the Black Army was massing for its final assault, with ramps and battering rams and siege towers. Even worse, four Laughing Larries had taken up positions just inside one section of wall; by the look of it, they’d soon open fire, slaughtering nearby guards as the attackers began smashing their way in.

Whatever we needed to do, we’d better do it fast. Time to try a trick. "Give me a second," I told Festina. Then I closed my eyes and thought of pheromones.

Here are the pheromones I’d made: the lust scent that got Festina talking about judo mats; the "don’t be scared" smell I’d used to comfort Counselor; the royal pheromone that screamed, "Obey me now!" Some of those chemicals worked on humans, some worked on Mandasars. I didn’t know if I could make something to work on Balrogs… but Balrogs could "taste" pheromones so maybe the darned moss could be affected too.

Back on the orbital I’d tried to make a Balrog repellant and Kaisho had got real mad: Stop it, Edward, before you produce something deadly. Okay — maybe it was dangerous, trying to make the Balrog go away… but what if I made it nice?

I pictured a different sort of royal pheromone: not one to subdue peasants, but one that spoke to rulers. A scent that said, Some people end up in positions of power; and if you’re the one who comes out on top, you have to be good about it. You have to do the right thing, and never ever act like a jerk.

It wasn’t a fancy sentiment, and any philosopher would nitpick it to pieces… but the Balrog and me, we had things in common. If we really wanted, we could both run roughshod over normal folks; so we had to take special care not to. Do the right thing and don’t act like a jerk. That was a rule I wanted to follow myself, and I wanted the Balrog to follow it too. I tried to make a pheromone that would stir some sense of scruples in a bunch of glowing alien spores…

…and as I stood there on the edge of the ramparts, the spores just drifted away — slid silently off Plebon and the Mandasars, sifted over the parapet stones, and drew back to the stairwell. Ten seconds later, Dade was still covered in fuzz but the rest of the area was absolutely clear.

"Holy shit," Festina whispered. "Did you do that?"

"Um. Maybe."

"With pheromones?"

"Maybe."

She shuddered. "Makes me glad I’m wearing this tight-suit. If you can drive off the Balrog, you probably smell like the rear end of something whose front end is dead."

"No," I said. "I smell like conscience." Then I stepped over the rampart wall and onto the parapet.

Fast as we could, we heaved Plebon and the Mandasars onto the top of the glass cube. The unconscious Zeeleepull took a ton of work and when we were finished, his shell had a bunch of new dents and scratches… but at least we got everybody safely onto the cube’s upper surface. No way we could get them all inside — it would take a heavy-duty winch to lower Zeeleepull through that hole in the roof — but if Tobit could hold the cube level as it flew, our friends would be safe where they were.

Provided Tobit could fly the cube at all.

"Ready to go?" Tobit yelled up through the hole.

Festina looked back at the parapet. Kaisho and her wheelchair still sat in the mouth of the stairwell. The admiral paused a moment longer, then sighed. "Hold on a minute, Phylar. One more passenger to pick up."

I was already hopping onto the parapet one last time. The main mass of Balrog had retreated a bit down the ramp, leaving Kaisho sitting out on her own. She’d slumped good and limp when Dade shot her with the stunner; but as we grabbed the arms of her chair, she lifted her head. "That won’t be necessary," she whispered.

Festina jerked in surprise. She let go of the chair and balled her hands into fists; but after a second she let her hands relax. "You recover amazingly fast from being stunned," she told Kaisho. "Most organisms stay unconscious for six hours."

"Only if they have conventional nervous systems," Kaisho replied. "I’ve gone a bit beyond that."

"Were you unconscious at all?"

"Part of me," she admitted. "As for the other part… it’s thrilled not to be linked with Alexander York."

"There are still versions of him on Celestia and New Earth," Festina said.

"Not in working condition," Kaisho replied. "When the Balrog retrieved that gizmo from the clone’s gullet, we used it to send a shot of feedback along the line. One good focused pulse of psychic energy… and the containers inside the other two Admiral Yorks suffered rather spectacular meltdowns. At the time, the New Earth version of the bastard was sitting with the entire High Council at Admiralty HQ. His death made quite a splash. Consider it a windfall for the other admirals’ dry cleaners." She turned to me. "Should I offer my condolences or my congratulations?"

"Um."

I didn’t like my father. I didn’t like my sister either, not once I learned all the awful things she’d been doing. It seemed really dumb to be sad they were gone.

But then, I’ve always been dumb, haven’t I?

47 PUSHING BACK THE ENEMY

A booming thud hit the palace’s west gate: the first slam of a battering ram. "No more time," Festina snapped. "Hang on, Kaisho, you’re coming with us."

"Where?"

"Anywhere the Black Army isn’t." She pointed to the hoverchair’s controls. "Fire up your engines and let’s go."

"No need," Kaisho said. "We’re safe here."

Another boom smashed the gates. The Black Army’s Laughing Larries spun into a full hyena cackle, their whoops echoing off the palace’s stonework. Any second they’d open fire.

"Hear that?" Festina asked. "Nobody’s safe, not tonight. Even your precious Balrog should worry. Those troops are surely prepared to burn every speck of moss they see. No matter how fast spores can eat through an enemy’s shell, fire works faster."

"There is no enemy," Kaisho replied. "Not anymore. We’ve dealt with Admiral York, and everybody left is just an innocent pawn."

"Those pawns have been ordered to kill, and there’s no one to call them off."

"They’ll call themselves off, dear Festina… if we demonstrate there are forces in the universe that lesser species shouldn’t fuck with."

"Uh-oh," Festina said. "You aren’t going to… remember, you just called them innocent pawns."

"Of course," Kaisho answered sweetly. "But as Teelu told you a few minutes ago, the Balrog loves jumping out and going, ‘Boo!’ "

Another boom banged above the Larries’ howl. The noise was followed by a heavy crunching sound… but the crunch didn’t come from the army at the palace gates. I looked toward the front of the palace, out where the moss was thickest. It had blazed up bright and angry, a furious fuzzy crimson all over the stonework queen’s head and her four claws.

One of the claws was trying to wrench itself off its foundations.

Slowly, ponderously, the claw crunched back and forth, as if it was stuck in a bit of mud and just needed to be teased.loose. The moss on the wriggling claw flared another notch brighter… and suddenly the claw was moving freely, a building wing four stories tall, lifting into the air.

The claw flexed once, as if it was stiff from lying immobile for so long. Mortar crackled and dust showered put from between cracks in the stone, but the whole thing held together somehow: from the sheer telekinetic force of a trillion Balrog spores showing off their strength. Without a pause, another claw began to work itself free.

"If I were you," Kaisho told Festina, "I’d hop onto that glass cube and head a hundred meters straight up."

"It’s going to get dangerous down here?"

"No, the Balrog won’t hurt anybody. But you’re going to kick yourself if you don’t go high enough to get a good view."

She caught Festina’s gloved hand and pulled it to her lips for a kiss. As she did, the hair covering her face slid aside; with a squirm in my stomach, I saw crimson moss now coated her cheeks, her forehead, even bristly wads over her eyes. There was no way she could possibly see through that glowing fuzz… but I guess Kaisho had reached the point where the moss did her seeing for her.

"Go," she said to Festina: a single word, spoken in a real human voice, not her usual whisper.

Then Kaisho turned to me and held out her hand. A bit reluctantly, I came forward and took it. She clasped both hands around mine and drew me in gently, so I was forced to crouch up close to her. "Teelu" she whispered, her breath brushing my cheek, "a pity we won’t be working together. I would have enjoyed touching my mind to yours. But you’ve persuaded the Balrog not to embrace you as its own. Others have prior claim on you."

"Who?" I asked.

She gave me a little kiss on the nose. "Your people," she whispered, "as you know full well. You still consider yourself unintelligent, Teelu; it’s charming, but you’ll have to grow out of it. Kings need confidence."

Before I could answer, she put her finger to my mouth to stop me from speaking. Next thing I knew, her voice was talking right inside my head. "Sometime in the next eighteen years, Teelu, I’ll visit you, wherever you are. The Balrog believes it would be amusing for you and me to have a child: mostly human, but with your control of pheromones and my enhanced mental abilities. Apparently, this is why the Balrog fused with me in the first place; and for twenty-five years, it’s been transforming my body chemistry to make such a pregnancy possible. A few more years, and I’ll be ready." She leaned forward and kissed me with her moss-covered lips. "It’s a bitch dealing with precognitive races. But if everything I’ve gone through is gearing me up for a night with you… well, life has its compensations, doesn’t it?"

"Um… what if I don’t think this is such a good idea?"

"It’s not an idea, Teelu — it’s fate. Already written by the Mother of Time. Relax and accept that some evening you’ll find something warm and fuzzy in your bed."

She laughed out loud… probably at the look on my face. Then her hoverchair rocketed down the stairwell a hundred times faster than it’d ever moved before. The sound of her laughter echoed long after she was gone.

Festina grabbed my arm. "Let’s go, Edward. Things are going to get crazy real fast." I pulled myself away from looking down the empty stairwell and glanced toward the front of the building. All four claws had ripped themselves free, and now the queen’s head was pushing itself up. The stone under my feet rocked slightly… just a little tremor, but I still wobbled for a moment, off balance.

"Yeah," I said, "going sounds good."

We ran to the edge of the roof and threw ourselves over the wall, onto the glass cube. Even as I jumped, another tremor shivered through the stone beneath me — the queen’s head had risen, and now she was lifting her body on its eight legs.

Far below, things popped and groaned inside the building: walls tearing away from floors, support beams breaking, furniture toppling over. A stream of palace guards charged out a ground-floor door, all of them screaming martial battle cries and brandishing crossbows in search of someone to shoot. They must have thought the Black Shoulders had started the building shaking by clobbering the walls with battering rams. When the guards saw huge masonry claws waving high over their heads, they screamed again. This time, it didn’t sound nearly so martial.

Festina scrambled over the glass roof and stuck her head through the hole in the cube. "Phylar! Are you ready to fly this thing?"

"Maybe."

"Make it yes, and make it now. Straight up till we’re clear of this mess."

"Easy for you to say," he grumbled.

He reached out and hesitantly nudged a slider control. Without a sound, the cube rose lazily; I was poised near the bodies of our unconscious friends, ready to catch them if they started to slide off… but the cube’s motion was so smooth, they didn’t shift a millimeter. Keeping level, never giving the slightest lurch, Tobit took us into the air as slowly as smoke rising.

The scene below wasn’t nearly so placid. Out near the first canal, the Black Army must have heard the crashes and creaks of the palace coming alive, but they couldn’t possibly guess what was making the noise. Their line of sight was blocked by the high palisade walls; perhaps they thought the ripping and rumbling came from some kind of weapon being trundled into place. The attackers continued to work their battering rams, smashing at the gates again and again, hoping to get inside before the defenders could get the weapon ready. They had no idea what was happening to the palace till the gates fell open and the Black Shoulders surged onto the grounds.

With impeccable timing — of course — that was the exact same moment the Balrog finished detaching the entire palace from its foundations. As the Black Army charged through the gates, they were greeted by a huge stone queen, four stories tall and larger than a city block, her shell blazing scarlet with angry moss.

Mandasar warriors are as brave as any creature in the universe, but even they have their limits.

For a moment, much of the Black Army simply froze. They watched as the queen’s four claws, each bigger than a house, swept through the air over their heads and caught the Laughing Larries that were supposed to give covering fire. The claws slammed shut with the sound of thunder, solid stone walls whacking together… and when they opened again, four gold-colored lumps of scrap metal flopped to the ground like crushed walnuts. No more hyena laughing. But the night was far from quiet.

The claws rose again, high enough to clear the heads of the attackers but not by much. Then they clacked their pincers a few times, showering the troops below with whatever dirt had accumulated on the palace walls over the years: stone dust and insect carcasses, bird nests and chips of old paint, dried-out flakes of autumn leaves and clots of mud daubed by playing children. All of it rained on the soldiers beneath, as if the queen was just brushing her hands off before getting set for serious fighting. When the spill of debris was finished, the claws came down onto the palace lawn and began to push forward like huge snowplows, ready to shove the Black Army back over the canal.

The shove wasn’t needed. With a jumble of confused bellows the warriors fell back, some trying to maintain an orderly retreat, others simply running. A few held their ground, till not-very-gentle nudges from the stone walls knocked them back into the canal.

Possibly, some of the generals tried to contact Samantha for new orders. When they got no answer, they made a decision on their own: strategic withdrawal. Within fifteen minutes, the battle for the palace was over.

48 WINDING DOWN

I won’t bother you with details of the next few hours. What’s the point in describing, say, the trouble we went to, getting Innocence out of the cube? Unless you’re a fan of techniques for using block and tackle, you don’t want me going on at length; so let’s just give you the short form.

Innocence survived, and came through without permanent injury. The people inside the palace turned out safe and sound too; when the building started walking about, they reported being held in place by "an invisible force" till the excitement was over.

Kaisho disappeared in the confusion; she hasn’t been seen since. I guess she’ll show up eventually, expecting me to take her to bed. I’ve kind of decided I will — considering how the Balrog stopped the battle and saved thousands of lives, I owe the moss a favor. (Even if the idea of producing a spore-baby is really really gross.)

Unlike my father, Benjamin Dade wasn’t completely consumed by the moss that enveloped him… just nibbled a lot. We lugged him to the infirmary but Gashwan decided he couldn’t be treated — the Balrog had invaded his bloodstream, his nervous system, every part of his innards. Trying to remove the spores would kill him; but if we left him alone, he’d live out his normal span, the same as Kaisho.

Eventually, Innocence made Dade a centerpiece on Diplomats Row, set on a small pedestal like a moss-covered statue. He still gets regular meals and plenty of light, not to mention all kinds of people to talk with. Sometimes he complains how unfair it is, that he’s become a fuzzy paralytic; other times, he goes all spacey and gives incomprehensible prognostications that he claims come from the Balrog. A lot of folks think he invents the predictions on his own, but they visit him anyway: Mandasars who want to know what crops to plant, human kids asking who they’ll marry, that sort of thing.

If you want the honest truth, Dade loves the attention. It’s not how he envisioned his life, but deep down, he’s tickled by it.

Dawn came up warm but cloudy gray. I sat with Festina and Tobit, dangling our feet on the edge of one of the trenches in the palace lawn, watching envoys scurry between the palace and Black Army headquarters. We got pretty good at guessing which messengers would tell us, "Talks are going well," and which would say, "I’m very, very worried." From what I knew of diplomats, things were pretty much on track. No one wanted to fight anymore; they just had a lot of bluster that needed to blow itself out.

Somewhere back in the palace, our friends would soon be waking up: it’d been almost six hours since they’d got shot by Dad and Dade. We’d left them in a corner of the infirmary, with instructions on how to find us when they came to. Gashwan wouldn’t let us wait anywhere nearby — us and our filthy human germs — so we’d gone outside to cool our heels and watch the sun rise.

Festina and Tobit had taken off their helmets long ago. Ever since they’d cannibalized their tightsuit power supplies, their personal cooling systems had been out of order; as Tobit put it, "We’re sweating our fucking bags off." Opening the helmets helped air circulate inside the suits, but as the day warmed up, their "bags" would sweat even more. The two of them were discussing whether to take off the rest of their suits — and where to find replacement clothes, since Festina only wore a light chemise under the suit while Tobit had nothing at all — when the admiral suddenly cocked her ear and whispered, "Listen!"

We listened. High over head, something was coming toward us, fast and whistling. "Fuck," Tobit groaned, "a bomb." All three of us shoved ourselves forward and dropped into the trench in front of us, ducking low as Tobit continued to grumble. "Here we are, hours away from peace, and some jerk-off decides, ‘Hey, the arsenal isn’t empty yet, let’s aim for the palace.’ "

"If it’s a bomb, it’s taking its sweet time," Festina said. She peeked at the clouds above us. "Where the hell is it?"

"Probably some kind of smart missile," Tobit replied, "flying in circles till it chooses the optimum target."

"Or else…" Festina began to say.

A jet-black shadow lanced out of the clouds: torpedo-shaped, riding an almost-invisible vapor trail. "Bloody hell," Festina said. "It’s one of ours."

"One of our what?" I asked.

Festina didn’t answer; she was already scrambling out of the trench, holding up her arms and waving. Tobit told me, "Navy probe missile. Black means it belongs to the Explorer Corps." Then he too began climbing, hollering at the probe as if it could hear him.

Maybe it could. It swept in low to the ground, ejected something small that dropped at Tobit’s feet, then soared up into the clouds again. The ejected object was a black box covered with horseshoe-shaped gold insets: a Sperm-tail anchor. It hummed softly, already switched on.

"Look alive, Edward," Festina told me. "We’re getting company." "Friendly company?" I asked. "The last Sperm-tail brought my dad and three Larries."

"Good point," Tobit said. "Get ready to pound the crap out of anyone who doesn’t look like our kind of people."

Ten seconds later, a Sperm-tail stabbed from the sky. It happened almost too fast to see — one moment there was nothing, and the next there was a fluttering milky tube, stretching up into the clouds. Its end lay draped across the little anchor box, like a glittery white sock laid over a footstool. Festina and Tobit lifted their fists into fighting stance and positioned themselves around the tube. I joined them, all the while hoping I wouldn’t have to hit anyone. There’d been plenty enough fighting already.

Behind me palace guards were shouting, wondering if they should be worried about the Sperm-tail. A few came our way; others hollered, "Stay at your posts and let Teelu handle it. He’ll call if he needs help."

Let Teelu handle it. Not a healthy attitude, leaving responsibility to someone else. When I became king for real… if I became king for real… if and when I became whatever Queen Innocence thought was best, I’d sure try to get everybody thinking more independently.

A figure shot out of the Sperm-tail — a human wearing a white tightsuit. I waited to see if Festina and Tobit would start punching and kicking; but they only stared for a moment, then Festina leapt forward and threw her arms around the newcomer’s neck. "Ullis!" Festina shouted. "What the hell are you doing here?" She turned to me, a huge smile on her face. "Edward, this is an old, old friend of mine. Ullis Naar."

"Hi," I said… not quite sure if Ullis was a man or a woman. All I could see were a pair of blue eyes blinking behind the tightsuit’s visor.

"You’re Edward York?" Ullis asked. A woman’s voice. "Son of Admiral Alexander York?"

"Um. Yes." I wished people would stop harping on that.

"Then I’m supposed to render you all possible assistance in whatever you’re doing. We have Jacaranda, Tamarack, Bay, and Mountain Ash here in orbit. What are your orders?"

Tobit and Festina looked at me. I looked at them, then at Ullis Naar. "Um," I said, wracking my brain for something to say. A tiny inspiration hit me. "How about starting with a status report?"

"Certainly," she replied. "My ship Tamarack arrived on the outskirts of this system four hours ago. By then, the other three ships were already at their assigned stations. Together, we swooped in on Troyen, where we found Willow and the former Cottonwood in orbit. Willow was in no condition to do anything; Cottonwood gave us a bit of a run, but eventually we caught it with tractors."

She glanced at Festina and gave a rueful chuckle. "The Vac-heads are annoyingly proud of themselves right now. Talking about ‘textbook operations’ and slapping each other on the back. Meanwhile, we Explorers were the ones who had to board the captured vessel. Lucky for us, there were no warriors — just a skeleton crew of gentles, who surrendered without a fight." Ullis lowered her voice. "Poor kids were scared out of their wits: all teenagers, and naive as they come. Scarcely knew Troyen was having a war. Only thing they cared about was their ship… you know the way some kids get, when they can talk for hours about optimizing waste recyclers, but have no idea what day it is."

Tobit grunted. "Sister Samantha probably chose them for that very quality… then kept ’em isolated from the nasty realities of war, so they wouldn’t have blood on their hands. If you’ve got a starship, you want the crew to be sentient, so they won’t die the moment they cross the line. Those kids were likely raised in some sheltered environment where Sam made sure they never had a homicidal thought. And where they lived and breathed spaceships."

"Probably raised on Cottonwood itself," Festina agreed. "Plenty of room up there, and no interference from the war."

I thought about that. "Didn’t Sam use the Cottonwood for making Laughing Larries?"

Tobit shrugged. "Those were built by your clone. The kids wouldn’t have to know what the Larries were — the clone could say they were something harmless… surveillance monitors or weather sensors, something so boring the kids wouldn’t ask questions."

"I would dearly love to know what you’re talking about," Ullis said, "but first, I should see if there’s anything we need to do." She turned to me. "Do you have any orders for us?"

"Um." I whispered to Festina, "Do I have any orders for them?"

"Just get her to explain what’s going on," Festina whispered back. "These ships couldn’t be here now unless they set out for Troyen a week ago." She stopped and turned to Ullis. "Did you say you’re following Alexander York’s orders?"

"Yes."

"And those orders said you’d find Cottonwood and Willow here?"

"That’s right. Jacaranda was supposed to drop off your landing party, then pretend to leave the system. It rendezvoused with the rest of us, and we all came zipping back to catch Cottonwood by surprise."

Festina frowned. "Why would Admiral York want the navy to capture Samantha’s pet starship?"

"Oh," I said. "Um."

I remembered that night ten days ago, when I’d found myself sitting in front of Captain Prope’s terminal. That’s when I noticed someone had used the authorization codes Samantha gave me… and I was beginning to guess what the Smart half of my brain had done.

Issuing orders to Prope. Diverting three other ships to Troyen. Doing it all with my father’s codes… and doing it pretty well, I guess, since it’d come off without a hitch.

Good for me. Or at least for Smart Me. He must have understood what was going on long before I did — that Sam was evil, that she’d made me a king, and she intended to start the last battle as soon as we landed on Troyen — so he’d used my dad’s codes to make sure she wouldn’t get away with it. He’d secretly called in four cruisers to capture Willow and the black ship; not only did that wipe out Sam’s "fleet," it also provided hard evidence that my sister had pirated two navy vessels. The High Council would hit the roof about that… then Sam could forget any perks or concessions she wanted to beg from the Admiralty. She wouldn’t get a cent to rebuild Troyen. Quite possibly, the Technocracy would have imposed all kinds of economic sanctions, and backed them up with a heavy navy blockade. But Smart Me had done more than call in those four ships: he’d arranged with Prope to trap our whole party down on the surface. Why? I guess because he didn’t want us to have the option of running away. Smart Me was no Balrog — he sure couldn’t foresee how we’d save Innocence, or stop Sam and my dad — but he must have had the colossal arrogance to believe he’d set things right somehow. All he had to do was show up, take charge, confront his enemies… and he’d come out on top.

In other words, my brainy half had the same kind of ego as every Mandasar queen since the dawn of time. Like it or not, I was one of them.

If you want the honest truth, that scared me. I didn’t want to become all clever and cunning and cruel. But what was I going to do? Push my smart bits away and keep them choked off somewhere? I’d done that twenty years ago when I’d decided I’d rather be stupid than admit the truth about Sam; and how did that help anybody?

Time to stop hiding. Stupid or smart, it was time for me to be who I was — what I was. And if some parts of me were kind of terrifying… I wasn’t so different from anyone else.

Twelve days later, I rode a Sperm-tail from Jacaranda down to Celestia. No strange flashbacks or conversations with other sides of myself. Just a whole lot of flip-flops in my stomach as I twisted and turned and corkscrewed.

Festina said that was normal.

We landed on the edge of the Hollen Marsh, within spitting distance of where my evac module had splashed down weeks earlier. Night was falling on this part of the planet — a soft summery dusk, filled with the rich smells of humus and growing vegetables.

The Mandasars were with us, of course; but they made a big show of hurrying off to their home "to give the humes some privacy." Counselor and the rest still devoutly believed a human man and woman would nuzzle up to each other the instant they were left alone… and as soon as the Mandasars reached their domes, they settled down to watch in eager anticipation.

"Um," said Festina with a smile. "Are you ready for this, Your Majesty?"

"I thought Explorers called each other by name, not title."

"King Edward the First," she suggested. "Supreme Monarch of Celestia."

"Don’t say things like that!" I shuddered. "The government is scared enough of me as it is."

"Scared is good," Festina replied. "They deserve it."

For the past two days, our ship had sat in orbit while Festina argued with Celestian officials about whether I should be allowed to land. They had the idea I might be some fanatic rebel leader, who intended to organize ten million Mandasars into crazed revolt. They had a point: word was starting to leak out, what Sam and my dad had done, so it wasn’t too surprising folks would mistrust someone from the same family.

But Celestia didn’t have much choice. Any day now, a whole passle of journalists in the Technocracy (and the Divian Spread, and the Fasskister Union, and heaven knows where else) were going to receive a communique from High Queen Innocence I of Troyen, giving precise details of the heinous acts committed by a Technocracy admiral against the Mandasar people. As of that moment, Mandasars would become a Big Important Cause at breakfast tables and in boardrooms throughout the galaxy.

Festina told Celestia it was very, very important for their government to come down on the right side of the issue. Take all those factories, for example — the ones that cheerfully used Mandasar workers kidnapped by recruiters. Real soon now, the people who owned those factories would find it colossally unpopular for them to have brainwashed Mandasars on the assembly line. They’d be facing boycotts, protests, and much worse, disquieted stockholders who found themselves unwelcome at the usual cocktail parties. Would these rich owners take the blame themselves? No. They’d point their fingers at the Celestian government, and say, "Hey, you told us those lobsters were happy!"

Also: how would it look if Celestia refused to allow the official ambassador from Troyen — namely, me — to land on the planet and try to set things right? That was a solid-gold guarantee that ten million Mandasars would whip themselves into crazed revolt. It was also a guarantee the irresponsible rich who usually vacationed on Celestia would give the planet a miss this year; they didn’t mind if Celestia was the home of sleazeball profiteers, but heaven forbid it should ever be considered unenlightened, or worse, unfashionable.

So in the end, the Celestian government gave in: promised to close down recruitment operations, help rehabilitate brainwashed Mandasars by bringing them back into mixed-caste hives, and recognize me as a sort of a kind of a spokesman for all Mandasars on the planet. Not a king — they didn’t want that, and neither did I — but it was okay me being a guy who asked Mandasars what they thought, then passed the word to everybody else.

"Well," Festina said, looking at the purple twilight rather than me, "if you’re all right here, I should head back to Jacaranda. The Celestian authorities are supposedly fixing the recruiter problem even as we speak, but someone has to keep an eye on them."

"Shouldn’t I help you?" I asked.

"Nah," she told me, "watchdogging planetary governments is my job. You just look after your own people."

She’d said the same things up in the ship — couldn’t stay long, work to do, no need for me to help. Yet she’d still come to see me safely down on Celestia.

Maybe she just didn’t want to say good-bye with Prope watching. Festina longed to nail the captain with a few good punches for marooning us on Troyen; but since Prope had been following my orders, decking her wouldn’t be fair. Instead, Festina gave Prope the cold shoulder and spent all her time with me. That probably hurt Prope way more than a simple whack in the jaw — the captain was always staring at us venomously, as if it pierced her to the heart that I’d chosen Festina over her.

Prope obviously believed Festina and I were up to something steamy. But we weren’t: we just talked. About the responsibilities of power, and the ways of power, and the limitations of power. A crash course in galactic politics, and a whole lot of reminders not to see people as children who needed Daddy’s help.

I think hive-queens have a gene that makes them go all condescending about their subjects. Now I had that gene too… but Festina did her best to help me get over it. Never once did we talk of judo mats. Never once, in all our trip back from Troyen, did we touch each other.

I’d been afraid my pheromones would start acting up and make her go all crazy against her will.

I don’t know what Festina was afraid of.

"Okay," she murmured in the Celestian twilight. "Time to go." She stepped toward me, and just for a moment, she looked straight up into my eyes. Then she rose on tiptoe and kissed me on the cheek.

I couldn’t help remembering that woman back on Willow, the one pretending to be Lieutenant Admiral Ramos. It made me kind of wistful that the real Festina wasn’t the one who kissed me on the lips.

But that was just me, being stupid.