Good thing there was no one on board to see me.
I hurried back to my cabin for new clothes. And to wash off my blood-specked hand. While I was dressing, I asked the ship-soul what was happening down in the hold.
“Our defenses are engaging the enemy,” the ship-soul answered. “There is ongoing opposition.”
“So the nanites are fighting back?”
“Some are providing cover while their fellows retreat. Our defenses have numerical superiority, but are encountering difficulties.”
“Show me.”
The vidscreen in my cabin wasn’t nearly as big as the captain’s, but it still gave a decent view of the hold. Not that I had much to see: the black cloud of
Willow’s
defenders were bunched up close to the door and trying to push farther into the room. Something unseen was pushing back, bottling up the cloud in a pocket around the hatch.
Our forces and the enemy, fighting nano-a-nano.
“Can you magnify the shot?” I asked the ship-soul. “I want to see what they’re actually doing.”
The picture switched to microscopic resolution: four black hunter-killers, each with a blobby body, a whiplike tail, and a jaggedy pincer claw, had surrounded a much smaller enemy. The enemy looked like it was made from jelly, and shaped like a ripped-out eyeball—a juice-filled balloon with a little bulge on the front and a stringy tail out the back. The tail was for propulsion, so the little beastie could swim through air like a tadpole through pond water; the bulgy bit up top probably held the nanite’s tiny brain. As for the main balloon body, it was full of grass green fluid…Mandasar venom, stolen from the dead queen.
The hunter-killers closed in fast, whipping their own tails and driving forward till the enemy was within pincer range. They all grabbed on at the same second: four claws scissoring into the enemy’s jelly body and slicing right through. The eyeball didn’t try to defend itself…and it didn’t have to. As soon as its body got cut open, venom splooged out onto all four attackers, beading up on their claws and slopping back onto their bodies. The hunter-killers suddenly started jerking their tails as if they were having fits, two of them flying right off the screen while the other pair jittered like crazy till their claws broke off.
That venom was wicked stuff. Especially against hunter-killers who weren’t built for chemical warfare.
I sat back from the vidscreen and chewed a bit on one of my knuckles. Our hunter-killers were programmed to attack four-on-one, I knew that much…so for each enemy eyeball destroyed, four of our guys would be taken out by the venom spill. Not such a great ratio for our side. We’d still win in the end, by sheer force of numbers—
Willow
carried at least three full defense clouds, and could manufacture more pretty quick—but by the time we fought through the nanites who were trying to delay us, the other invaders would have retreated to other parts of the ship. Finding them would be a real needle-in-the-haystack.
Of course, the computers would handle the search. Nothing for me but to sit back wondering what it all meant.
Who in the world could smuggle nano onto a navy ship? Who knew the queen would be on
Willow
? And who would ever want to steal queen’s venom?
Drug pirates? Supposedly the big crime lords were always looking for new chemicals that did strange things to people. So were legitimate drug companies. Those databases on Troyen, the ones that listed the ingredients of venom at each point in the cycle…they were locked up top-secret, passworded and encrypted. Samantha once called the databanks “the high queen’s golden trust fund”— formulas that could be sold for tons of money if Verity ever needed the cash.
Of course, Verity was dead now. Maybe all the people who knew the passwords were dead too. Troyen’s civil war had been going on for twenty years.
I wondered if one of the rebel factions on Troyen might want to steal venom to manufacture a whole bunch of new queens. But that was crazy—even if they milked this dead queen dry, they’d only get juice from one point in the yearlong cycle. You couldn’t use that on some poor little girl. Today’s venom might kick a gland into high gear, and tomorrow’s shut it off again. If you gave a girl one day’s dose without giving her the next day’s too, you’d completely throw off her body’s chemical balance. Like the gene treatments that were supposed to make Sam and me extra special, you might end up with someone better than average…but you might also make the little girl “a hopeless retarded idiot.”
Would anyone take such an awful risk with a child? Well, yes—who knew that better than me? But it still didn’t make sense. Sending nano onto a navy ship would make the Admiralty as mad as a swarm of hornets. There had to be easier ways to get a sip of venom than taking on the entire Outward Fleet.
So why did someone do it?
For a second, I wished there was a special venom to make
humans
smarter. I knew I’d never be smart-smart; but I hated the way so many things went straight over my head.
If Samantha were here,
she’d
know what was going on.
4
SHIVERING A LOT
The pinpricks on my hand kept stinging. I soaked the sore parts in cold water and thought about going to sick bay for ointment…but the doctors were dead, and I wouldn’t know what to look for on my own. Instead, I headed for the captain’s quarters again, to keep tabs on the search for the nanites.
An hour later, the computer reported the hold was clean. That didn’t mean we’d killed the intruders—they’d just managed to get away to other parts of the ship. The ship-soul had found a teeny hole chewed through one of the lock hatches in the vent shafts between the hold and hydroponics next door. No surprise there; even if most of the nanites were miniature tankers loading up venom, they’d have an escort of sappers for digging in and out of wherever they wanted to go.
By now, the nanites might be spread like dust through the whole of
Willow
, or hiding in little bunches, tucked into crawl spaces where no one would notice them. The ship’s scans might trip over a few invaders, but a Security officer once told me such scans missed at least 95 percent of the bugs that were out there. It’s just monumentally difficult to search every particle of air for something the size of a virus, especially when the things you’re trying to find are programmed to avoid being caught. The best I could do was tell the ship-soul to station a defense cloud around the queen’s venom sacs in case the invaders came back. I didn’t expect the cloud would have any luck—the rotten little thieves knew we were onto them. But you have to do something, don’t you?
I fell asleep in front of the captain’s vidscreen, just as ship’s day was dawning. When I woke again, my right hand
really
hurt—the pinprick marks were redder than before, and turning hot. So I went to sick bay after all, where I spent half an hour holding up one medicine after another and asking the ship-soul, “What does this do?” (It’s no good reading the packages; they’re all written in doctorese. Big complicated words that are intentionally invented so people can’t understand them.)
Eventually I found something to smear on: an antiinflammatory, the ship-soul said, and that sounded like just what I wanted. By then, I was worried the swelling might be more than a simple infection; there might be eyeball nanites under my skin, or hunter-killers that had got carried away when they were cleaning me off. Supposedly the hunter-killers knew enough not to chop up human tissue…but if they noticed an eyeball burrowing its way into me, they might decide to claw in after it.
That’s not something you want to think about too long.
The infection got worse over the next day. My hand swelled up; I tried icing it, but after a while I couldn’t stand the pain of anything touching my skin. The red flush of inflammation started creeping past my wrist and slowly up my arm. I wondered if I should put on a tourniquet or something…but that seemed like a lot of work, and I was deep-to-the-bone tired. No energy to care about stupid red flushes. I felt freezing cold, too—now and then I’d get so shivery, my teeth would chatter. Eventually I pulled myself over to the captain’s bed, dialed up the heat to maximum, and wondered why I still wasn’t warm enough.
Sick and dizzy, jumbled and confused. Sometimes I thought I was back on Troyen again, where I’d spent a year in and out of my head with a disease called the Coughing Jaundice. My sister had come by every day—wasting time on me when she should have been solving the little crises that were piling up into one big disaster. For years after, I wondered if
I
was the one to blame for the civil war: keeping Sam from her work, because I’d caught some alien flu. Me, lying in a special royal infirmary, woozy and out of touch, while the streets filled up with mutineers…
I tried to keep my mind off the bad times. Soon, I couldn’t think of anything else.
Every so often, I’d hallucinate there was someone else in the captain’s cabin, trying to talk to me. For a while it sounded like Samantha and Queen Verity, asking why I hadn’t saved them. Then it turned into a male voice I didn’t recognize, telling me it was time to wake up, that I’d slept long enough and people would suffer if I didn’t come to my senses soon. I decided it must be the ship-soul trying to snap me out of the shivers…except for one little snippet of pleading that must have been completely inside my head.
“Please, Edward. Innocence needs us. Both of us.”
That’s what the voice said. And it wasn’t the ship-soul speaking, because
Willow’s
computer couldn’t possibly know about Innocence. Nobody did, except me and Verity and a few other people who were bloodily murdered twenty years ago. So it must have been my own brain talking, babbling all mixed-up and bleary.
Well…yes and no.
Two days of that, all spinning and confused. Then I woke and it was over. My head clear. My shivers gone. Even a bit of energy and appetite.
But I’d sure made a mess of the captain’s bed.
While I cleaned up the sheets, the ship-soul gave me an official report on the status of
Willow.
Most of the words just bounced off my brain—there was a big long recitation of statistics, fuel, battery power, and what all, which I guess the captain was supposed to listen to every few days. The ship-soul absolutely refused to talk about anything else till I’d heard the whole checklist.
I nodded and said, “Oh, is that right?” now and then, the way my sister taught me when I didn’t understand much of what someone was saying. You’d be surprised how seldom you get into trouble that way. Most times, when people go on and on, they aren’t talking about things you have to
do
anything with, they’re just emptying their heads.
After the ship-soul finished its spiel, I wanted to, say, “How much of that is normal, and is there anything that’s really broken?” But if something was broken I wouldn’t know how to fix it, so there wasn’t much point in asking. Samantha always claimed it was a golden rule of diplomacy,
Never ask a question when you don’t want to hear the answer.
So instead I got the ship-soul to tell me about the search for invader nano. In the three days since the fight in the hold, our defense clouds had apparently destroyed 143 definites, 587 probables. Those were pathetic numbers, even if the probables were all real nanites, which they likely weren’t—just unidentified bacteria that the hunter-killers ripped apart on the theory of better-safe-than-sorry. Seeing as there must have been millions of nanites in that fuzz I’d felt,
Willow’s
defenses were doing a pretty lousy job.
Maybe if there’d been a
real
captain running the search, we would have found the invaders by now. Of course, I’d been sick with that infection…
I stopped, and thought about that. Had it really been an infection? No—now that I wasn’t dizzy or delirious, my head was clear enough to understand what had happened. There’d been a whole bunch of eyeball nanites on my hand: nanites filled with venom. The hunter-killers had ripped those nanites apart, spilling venom droplets all over me. Even worse, the hunter-killers had clawed up my skin pretty good during the fight. The pinpricks they’d chewed into me had given the venom a way into my bloodstream.
What I’d thought was infection had actually been a microscopic dose of venom poisoning. I figured it was a good thing I’d only absorbed a tiny bit of the stuff—anything more might have killed me. But I was all right now. Wasn’t I?
5
ARRIVING AT STARBASE IRIS
Three days later,
Willow
reached the Celestia system. I’d spent most of that time wandering around the ship, hoping I’d find something useful to do. It wasn’t much fun walking through the lounge and the hold, or the bridge either, where there were three more corpses: people who’d stayed on duty instead of going to the party. But I went through every room anyway, because I was the captain. I even asked the ship-soul if there were logs I should be keeping, or paperwork or something. But the computers handled stuff like that automatically, so they didn’t need me getting in the way.
A few times I checked over computer files, just to see if there was stuff I ought to be taking care of. Mission stuff…you know. But every database I tried to look at, records and logs and all, turned out to be passworded or encrypted or just plain inaccessible to lowly Explorers Second Class, even if they’d become acting captain. Maybe that was normal; keeping everything locked away just on general principles. Then again, maybe
Willow
had been doing something extra-specially secret, and outsiders like me were supposed to mind our own business.
I found out there was only one thing I absolutely had to do as captain of
Willow.
Apparently, captains are supposed to get at least half an hour of exercise every day, to keep themselves fit for command. So my only mandatory duty was going down to the gym when the ship-soul told me, and working up a sweat.
Weights. Jogging. Bagwork. It made me laugh, that my one compulsory chore was the only thing I’d ever been good at. I went to the gym twice a day and stayed a lot longer than just half an hour—thinking maybe I’d turn out to be captain material after all.
I made a point of being on the bridge as we drew near Celestia. Not that I actually sat in the captain’s command chair—there was a sweet-looking red-haired woman slumped dead in it, and I didn’t want to disturb her. (She seemed too young to be officer of the watch. Nineteen or twenty, tops. All the senior officers must have wanted to go to the party, so they’d given the bridge to the most junior lieutenant-cadet on board. Poor kid: I wondered what she could have done that was so bad the League needed to kill her.)
“Starbase Iris is hailing us,” the ship-soul announced.
“Okay,” I said. My breath came out steamy—I’d asked for the bridge to be cooled like the lounge so the bodies didn’t go bad. “Do I just talk or what?”
“Connecting now.”
The vidscreen on the command chair lit up with a young man who started to say, “Greetings,
Willow,
this is—” Then he broke off and gawped at his own screen, staring at the face of the dead woman in the chair.
I should have thought of that. Now I’d gone and scared the poor boy on the other end of the line.
“Sorry,” I said, as I nudged the woman aside and pushed my own head in front of the vidscreen. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” I told the boy, “but we’ve got a problem up here.”
“Is she…” The boy stopped himself, gave his head a shake, and went all professional. “State your problem,
Willow.”
I told him about everybody being dead. Then I told the same thing to his commanding officer. Then I told the base’s Commander of Security. After that I spoke to a doctor who kept talking like the people on
Willow
had died of a disease. To me that was just plain foolish—if several dozen humans and a hive-queen die in the same second while crossing the line, you don’t need to be a genius to figure out why. But next thing I knew, everyone at the base had latched onto the disease idea, and they told me I’d have to stay quarantined where I was till the Admiralty could fly in an Outbreak Team. Whenever I tried to point out what really happened, the base personnel cut me off, saying maybe I was delirious with the plague myself.
“No,” I told a Security captain, “I was delirious for a while but now I’m better.”
“What do you mean you were delirious?” she snapped in surprise. Then suddenly, she said, “Oh. Right. You were
delirious.
Thank you, Explorer York, that confirms our disease hypothesis. Thank you.” She gave me a relieved smile before she cut the connection.
After chewing my knuckle a bit, I figured out why she’d acted that way. People at the base wanted to
pretend
there’d been an outbreak, because otherwise they’d have to admit the truth: a whole navy ship had done something so horribly bad, the League decided to execute everybody. And when I’d talked about getting delirious myself, the Security captain thought I was helpfully playing along.
It was so strange. Something important had happened, and the whole starbase staff just wanted to hide their heads in the sand.
I wasn’t too happy being part of the lie, but Samantha used to tell me, “If everyone else is denying an obvious truth, you go along with them, Edward, okay? Because the Admiralty sometimes plays games, and if you spoil the game, they’ll be mad at you.”
I didn’t want anyone mad at me. Even if this particular game seemed stupid. And dishonest. And cowardly.
Maybe it all made sense if you had the big picture.
While I waited for the Outbreak Team to arrive from some other starbase, I used the captain’s vidscreen to watch outside the ship. I didn’t see much—nothing came or went at Starbase Iris, not even in-system shuttles. Once I noticed a merchant vessel passing within range of
Willow’s
hull cameras, but it didn’t come very close; it was aiming for the planet Celestia, a light-minute nearer the local sun.
After two more days of waiting, another navy ship popped into view with that gorgeous FTL effect: the ship appears without warning and then you see a streak trail out behind it. That’s light from where the ship used to be, catching up with where the ship
is.
Through a nearby speaker, my ship-soul announced, “Heavy cruiser
Jacaranda
of the Outward Fleet.”
“Is it hailing us?” I asked.
“No. It’s communicating privately with the starbase.”
Jacaranda
chatted with Starbase Iris for half an hour…and according to my ship-soul, they were using higher-than-normal levels of encryption to keep anyone from eavesdropping. I wondered if they were worried about being overheard by civilians on Celestia, or if they were just keeping secrets from me. Maybe both.
So I sat and stewed, staring at the
Jacaranda
as it floated in the blackness. The ship was shaped like a long baton, with a big round knob on the front end; that was where they kept the Sperm-tail generator. The tail itself rippled all milky around the ship’s hull and far back into space until it dwindled away to nothing. Mostly the free end of the tail just drifted…but every now and then it gave a flick, the way a fish in a quiet river sometimes comes awake for a second to dart at something too small to see.
My sister once told me the Sperm-field created a separate little universe around the ship, and the little universe could slide through the big Outside universe faster than light, without worrying about inertial effects of acceleration. I got lost when she tried to explain how it worked. Samantha was usually pretty good at avoiding subjects that confused me, but sometimes she got extra fired-up like she was absolutely certain she could make everything clear, no matter how slow I was. “I’m a
communicator,
Edward,” she would say. “It’s my
gift.
If I can communicate with alien races, I can damned well communicate with you.”
Well…sometimes it didn’t work with me; and I thought to myself,
There at the end, it didn’t work with the aliens either.
At last I got a call from
Jacaranda’
s captain, a woman named Prope. In all the days to come, she never let on whether that was her first or last name. Maybe she came from one of those colonies where people only have one name, because they think it sounds more dramatic.
Prope certainly was the dramatic type. Whenever you talked to her, she always made you think she was half listening for something that was
really
worth her attention— like assassins sneaking up behind her back, or a Mayday from a luxury liner struck by a meteorite. Now and then she’d suddenly pause, as if she’d thought of some important point that went over the head of everybody else in the room…except she never told us what these great insights were, and after a while, I wondered if maybe she was just playacting.
As my sister’s bodyguard, I’d met a lot of diplomats. I’d seen
tons
of playacting.
So Prope’s face appeared on my vidscreen. She was lit from only one side, which meant the left part of her face was swallowed up in deep dark shadow—the captain’s attempt at dazzling me with a dramatic first impression. As far as I knew, the only way she could get that effect was turning off the lights on one whole side of her ship’s bridge.
“Captain Prope of the
Jacaranda
, calling for Acting Captain Edward York of
Willow.
Are you Explorer York?”
“Yes, Captain.” I couldn’t help noticing how fast I got switched from acting captain to Explorer. Maybe Prope didn’t like treating me anywhere close to an equal.
“How are you feeling, Explorer?” the captain asked. “No ill effects from the disease?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “Are you going to send someone to help dock this ship?”
“Sony, not yet. Because of the risk of contagion, standard operating procedure says we start by sending an Explorer team to assess the situation.”
“There’s not much risk of contagion,” I answered. “Really.”
“Even so, you can never go wrong following the proper protocols. Don’t you agree?”
“Um.” In my years with the Outward Fleet, I’d seen things go wrong all over the place, protocols or no. “So after your Explorers check things out,” I said, “then can I go home?”
“One thing at a time,” Prope replied. “Please go to your transport bay and let my people in through the main airlock. They should be there in fifteen minutes.”
She nodded a vague good-bye and waved her hand in the general neighborhood of her forehead. Ship captains are supposed to exchange full salutes after talking to each other…even if one of you is only a lowly acting captain. I guess Prope couldn’t bring herself to give me a real salute, seeing as I was only an Explorer.
Lots of regular navy people are embarrassed by Explorers. Or scared of them. Even fake Explorers like me. Everybody knows Explorers aren’t normal.
Before I could show Prope what a real salute looked like, she cut her end of the connection. I saluted anyway, to the blank screen. As long as I was sort of a kind of a captain, I wanted to do the right thing.