I stared at her a moment. What had just happened? The woman herself speaking, "Help me," then the Balrog choking her off? Or was it all playacting: the Balrog amusing itself by making me worry, or trying to trick me into something I’d regret?
No way to know. But Kaisho was right about one thing — if Zeeleepull flew out of the tube while she was still in the line of fire, his pincers could spear straight through her. I hurried over to pull her away… but realized in the nick of time that if I picked her up face-to-face the way her arms were outstretched, her legs would flop into mine when I lifted her. Instead, I slipped behind her, hiked my hands under her armpits, and dragged her backward off the padding.
"This is a damned undignified position for an advanced lifeform," she muttered.
I didn’t answer. I was marveling at how light she was… like a child. Whatever was under the moss on her legs, it didn’t weigh half as much as human flesh and bone. Still, it had to be pretty strong — it’d withstood the sploosh into the jelly pad, not to mention me dragging it across the floor. Normal moss would have crumbled to pieces with all that knocking around. Then again, the Balrog wasn’t normal moss, was it?
As I set her down, well clear of the landing pillow, Kaisho reached up and pressed her hand warm against my cheek. "Thank you, Teelu" she whispered. "You shouldn’t really call me that," I said. "It’s only for queens."
"Ah," she said, kissing her fingers, then brushing them against my lips. "Thank you for clearing that up, Teelu."
As we waited for the next person to shoot through the Sperm-tube, I had a chance to check out our surroundings. We’d arrived in the transport bay of a navy starship: a big empty room with an irising entry mouth at one end. The mouth was wide-open, showing the ghostly white Sperm-field outside as it stretched off into the distance — all the way down to the planet. At the moment, the starship would be orbiting tail down; if you pictured the Sperm-tube as a big tornado sucking up things from Celestia’s surface, the transport bay was like a bucket at the top of the funnel, ready to catch anything the wind brought us.
The upper part of the bay’s back wall was transparent pink-tinted plastic, a window into the control room where someone would be monitoring the transport process. From my angle down on the floor, I couldn’t see if anyone was actually up in the room; but safety regs required a qualified operator at the console whenever people Spermed in or out.
It kind of surprised me the person in charge hadn’t said a word: no hello, not even a warning for us to get off the landing pad and clear the way for others. I told myself it must take lots of concentration, keeping track of technical details — aligning the Sperm-tube properly so folks flew straight into the ship, maintaining the proper air pressure in the bay so that it was balanced with Celestia’s surface — but still, a simple welcome would be nice.
For one thing, I wanted to know what ship this was. There were rainbow-colored trees painted on the walls of the transport bay, but I didn’t recognize the trees’ species. Something tropical and flowery. At least they weren’t willows; and this wasn’t one of the conifer ships (Jackpine, Sequoia, Golden Cedar) used as flagships for admirals. That was good. If this’d turned out to be my father’s ship, the Royal Hemlock, I would have stood in the entry mouth, just praying for Zeeleepull to come through and skewer me.
"Wondering where we are?" Kaisho whispered. Either she’d read my mind, or noticed me staring at the trees painted on the wall. "It’s Festina’s old ship," she said. "The Jacaranda."
Jacarandal Where Prope was captain? With orders to dump me someplace forgettable? For a second, I wondered if this had all been a giant trick, a way to make me disappear. If they’d decided they couldn’t just kidnap me because the Mandasars would make a fuss, why not engineer an excuse for taking me away? Pretend I was going on an important mission, wait a while, then tell the kids on Celestia, "Sorry, your poor Teelu had an accident on Troyen, and he’s never coming back."
My father would have considered it a neat strategy — get the results you want without causing a public hubbub. But Festina was a different sort of admiral, wasn’t she? Someone who’d be honest with a fellow Explorer?
"You don’t look so good," Kaisho whispered. "What’s wrong?"
"Twenty-four hours ago, the Jacaranda’s captain had orders to get rid of me. Do you think anything’s changed since then?" "Yes," Kaisho said. "Festina has taken charge. She’s commandeered the ship using an admiral’s Powers of Emergency — pursuing the vital interests of the Outward Fleet. Which means she’s bailing the council’s ass out of hot water. Basically, if Festina thinks the top dogs have screwed up so badly they’re risking a League crackdown, she has the authority to do anything to put things right."
"The other admirals don’t mind?"
"The other admirals practically chew out their own livers, but they can’t stop her. The League of Peoples demands that our navy behave in a sentient manner. That doesn’t mean acting good or moral or decent in human terms; your average high admiral is a loathsome criminal bastard." She looked straight at me. "As you well know, little Jetsam."
My father’s not-so-pet name for me. Which meant the Balrog knew exactly who I was. Not that Kaisho seemed to care; she went straight back to telling me what was what.
"The point is," Kaisho said, "the High Council has to obey the letter of the League’s law… and that includes policing themselves for non-sentient behavior. Last night, Festina contacted Admiral Vincence and said, ‘I have reason to believe an inner-circle admiral has condoned cold-blooded murder, and I require the immediate services of a ship to investigate the matter.’ In such a situation, the council simply can’t stand in her way. If they block her or silence her or even try to slow her down, it’s deliberately abetting a possible non-sentient."
Kaisho shrugged. "The most the council can do is work their tails off to prove Festina wrong. If they conscientiously look into the matter and decide her fears are unfounded, they can pull the plug on her. Maybe even demote her or throw her out of the service. But until that happens, they have to let her follow her conscience… and they even have to cooperate with her. Festina wants a ship? She gets the closest one available. Jacaranda. And to hell with any previous orders that get in the way." She turned her head toward the pink-tinted window high above us. "Isn’t that right, Captain?"
There was a three-second silence. Then a voice came over the transport bay’s speakers: a voice I’d heard before. "My orders are to cooperate with Admiral Ramos for the duration of the emergency," Captain Prope said frostily. "If those orders cease to be operative, I can’t speculate what new instructions I might receive. Or what old instructions might be reactivated."
In other words, I could still get chucked onto an uninhabited planet if Festina got overruled. I was thinking about that when Hib came flying through the Sperm-tail.
23
MAKING OURSELVES AT HOME
One by one, the Mandasars came up the tube, each in his, her, or its special way.
The workers enjoyed it. They buzzed excitedly among themselves, probably comparing how much they loved getting turned inside out and pulled through a tube five hundred klicks long. (I couldn’t tell for sure what they said; they were speaking their own personal patois, made from English and Troyenese, plus words that were likely invented out of the blue. Workers who are raised together always develop private languages that no one else can understand. It drives warriors and gentles crazy.)