Counselor couldn’t decide what to make of her trip up the tube. It obviously disturbed the heck out of her, but she wanted to see it as a religious experience: zipping through a universe where her carapace bent like rubber. Gentles have a sort of mystic fear of getting their shells stripped off. If a gentle loses a sizable chunk of armor through disease or injury, she’s considered "blessed by the stars" and treated as a prophet… the terrifying kind of prophet who’s nine-tenths crazy and one-tenth cosmic bliss. (The Troyenese word for "blessed," ullee, also means "naked" and "dangerous.") So when Counselor got herself twisted every which way, as if her husk had turned to taffy… well, she must have felt scarily, vulnerably open to the Five Gods. I think she believed they’d planted some great revelation inside her, if only she searched her soul hard enough.
No such spark of divine truth for Zeeleepull — he just hated the sensation, pure and simple. A split second after he hit the landing pad, he launched into a long tirade of Mandasar cursing… and on those words, his accent was perfect. Next thing you know, he’d ripped open the landing pad and there was jelly slurped all over the transport bay. Zeeleepull got real huffy about it being an accident — his claws had spiked through the rubber bag when he landed, and it wasn’t his fault how the Sperm-tail spat him out. Me, I think he might have given the bag a deliberate snip during his blue-streak tantrum; but considering Zeeleepull’s temper, I kept my opinion to myself.
Festina was the only one left on Celestia… and now instead of a nice soft landing pad, she had a wobbly blob of cold wet jelly to smack into. Not a dignified entrance for an admiral, getting buried and glopped up with goo. I hurried forward to clean things, trying to push the slop back into the torn bag; but Kaisho told me not to bother. "Wait," she said. "You underestimate our noble leader."
"But she’s going to fly straight into the—"
"No," Kaisho promised. "Not with Prope watching."
And she didn’t. The rest of us had come out of the Sperm-tail like people shot from a cannon, no control at all; but Festina emerged like a gymnast nailing a perfect dismount. Two feet slammed on the floor without the tiniest stumble: Festina Ramos, standing straight and calm and balanced, well short of the guck that trembled with the thunk of her impact.
She lifted her eyes to the pinkish window at the back of the transport bay. "Captain Prope," she said evenly. "Admiral on the deck."
"Yes, Admiral," came back Prope’s voice. I couldn’t see the captain, but I could tell she was gritting her teeth.
The entry mouth of the transport bay irised shut. Moments later, a door in the back wall opened and Phylar Tobit thudded forward, pouchy face beaming. He was half a second away from giving Festina a bear hug when Prope’s voice snapped over the speakers. "Explorer Tobit! At attention for greeting an admiral."
Tobit didn’t exactly stop, but he slowed down. Then he did a passable job of faking a trip — catching his right foot behind his left leg — so he could tumble into Festina anyway, wrapping his arms around her shoulders as if to break his fall. She laughed and whispered, "Happy birthday, you dirty old man," before giving him a light kiss on the cheek. "Never the kisses for aliens," Zeeleepull muttered.
I tried to give him a peck on the forehead, but he ducked.
Over the next hour, we got settled in. The two Explorers, Tobit and Benjamin, showed us to our rooms; Captain Prope and an oily lieutenant named Harque put in a token appearance ("Welcome to Jacaranda, always an honor to host an admiral, a consort, and a sentient parasite…"), but the captain and lieutenant disappeared again almost immediately. ("Needed on the bridge, have to get started for Troyen.") After they were gone, I think Festina murmured, "Good riddance," but I might have misheard.
So the Mandasars got five separate cabins, and left four of the rooms empty so they could all squash into the fifth; Tobit and Festina went off to talk about unspecified old times; Kaisho got a new hoverchair, and amused herself discussing intimate details of her condition, while a terrified Benjamin tried to lift her into place without touching her legs. ("A hundred and ten years old, but I’ve started menstruating again! I suppose it means I could have a baby… if I found the right man. Dear lovely Benjamin, what would you think of having a fuzzy-haired child whose head glowed in the dark?")
Me, I found myself in an exact twin of the room I’d occupied on Willow. No big coincidence since cabin design was standardized throughout the fleet, but it still felt a little creepy. As I sat there alone, wondering why I’d agreed to all this, Prope’s face appeared on my vidscreen with that half-light half-shadow trick she’d used before. "Attention, all passengers and crew. Now leaving Celestia orbit. Next stop…" (dramatic pause) "…Troyen."
I was such a bundle of nerves, even such cheap theatrics could give me the chills.
There’s a routine you’re supposed to follow when you’re stationed on a new ship. I wouldn’t have remembered it, except that I’d gone through the same thing recently on Willow — two women from Communications Corps had walked me through the whole procedure, taking every possible chance to brush against me accidentally on purpose. (The more I thought about it, the more I realized how everyone on Willow had been keyed-up to the point of craziness: ten times more wild and impulsive than you got from mere boredom.)
So I went to the cabin’s terminal and introduced myself to the ship-soul. Gave my name, rank, and access code so the computer could fetch my records from Navy Central — not that I had much in the way of records, but at least there’d be stuff about the Coughing Jaundice and my allergy to apples. (That ran in the family — my father and sister too. The doctor who engineered Sam and me offered to fix the problem, but Dad ordered it left in. He didn’t want his kids snacking down on a nice juicy apple when he couldn’t. That tells you something about my dad… and it tells you something more that he told us what he’d done: "I could have made you perfect, but I didn’t want you little brats enjoying yourselves in a way I can’t")
Once I’d given my ID to the ship-soul, I figured it would take a while to get any response — the closest copy of the navy archives was Starbase Iris, a full light-minute away. But the instant I finished the identification process, the ship-soul announced I had a personal, confidential, eyes-only recorded message.
Um.
"Eyes-only" meant no one could read this message before I did… despite the long-standing fleet tradition that if you belonged to the navy, so did your mail. The only people authorized to send eyes-only messages were admirals; and there were only two admirals likely to care about Explorer Second Class Edward York:
1. Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos. But if she wanted to pass me a note, she could just walk down to my room.
2. Admiral of the Gold, Alexander York. My father.
If Jacaranda carried a recorded message from Dad, when had he sent it? Probably a while ago… when Jacaranda’s mission was to make me disappear. I wondered if the message could possibly be an apology: "Sorry we’re forced to do this, son, but the Admiralty can’t let you go home." No, not much chance of that. More likely, he wanted to call me a disappointment one last time — his final chance before I got dumped somewhere cold and airless.
Well, only one way to find out. "Ship-soul, attend," I muttered. "I’m alone, so you can display the message."
When the video flicked on, I found there was another possible sender I hadn’t considered. "Surprise!" said Samantha from the screen.
"Hold!" I shouted. The picture froze.