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.