They’d had their stunners out, ready to fire. A single stun-shot wouldn’t take down a queen, not even a young one like Innocence. But five shots simultaneously would. And they were all wearing gas masks, so it wouldn’t matter if Innocence surrounded herself with a cloud of her own royal pheromone.
Now the same guards were waiting for me to tell them where Innocence might hide. They wanted me to lead them straight to her.
The sergeant had told me, "There’s been a mutiny." He hadn’t mentioned which side he was on.
Now the sergeant asked, "Where should we go, sir? You said there was someone you wanted us to protect?"
Yes — the sergeant definitely knew about Innocence. He shouldn’t have known, but he did. And he also knew I was so stupid, I wasn’t likely to see through their trick.
"This way," I said. "I know where she’s gone."
Unshummin palace is shaped like a Mandasar queen. Really. A long central body with eight legs sticking out at the sides — the legs are actually separate wings of the building, three stories tall — and up at the head, the queen’s "claws" are four more building wings stretched out on diagonals. The claw parts even end in crescent-shaped rotundas, so from the air they look like pincers.
Much farther back, where the palace’s "tail" meets the wider part of the body, there are two big glass domes to represent venom sacs. The domes are actually huge greenhouse roofs; beneath them lies the Royal Conservatory, with tropical-zone plants under the right-hand dome and temperate-zone plants under the left.
The right-hand part is the closest thing to a jungle you’ll find within a thousand kilometers of Unshummin. That’s where I led the five guards.
"There’s this little girl," I whispered to them. "And she has this secret place where she goes when she’s really scared."
They nodded and even smiled, like they understood. What I said wasn’t true — Innocence could never have gone from the infirmary to the conservatory without being seen by dozens of people — but the guards were willing to believe me. They didn’t suspect I suspected… till I led them into the middle of the dark trees and vines, then suddenly dashed away through a grove of Koshavese fire oaks.
The trees grew too close together for the warriors to follow me; and I moved fast enough that I was out of sight before they could bring their stunners to bear. The guns whirred anyway, but I didn’t feel a tingle — what with the dark and the tree cover and the gas masks on the guards’ faces, I guess they weren’t aiming very well.
Nice thing about those gas masks: the guards couldn’t sniff me out. A Mandasar warrior depends so much on his nose, he’s at a numb disadvantage when his smelling’s sealed off. Mandasar eyes are just as good as human, and their ears are sharp enough to hear a big guy like me blundering his way through the bush… but without their noses, they lose their edge: a fraction slower on everything they do. That was good — after a year of being sick, I was a fraction slower too, and I don’t mean a tiny fraction like one over a thousand.
My plan was just to lose the soldiers in the conservatory, then duck out a door to find Innocence. Just one problem: there were three doors — one toward the head of the palace, one toward the tail, and one that led through a bunch of potting rooms to the other half of the conservatory. While I was still dodging through the undergrowth, the sergeant sent three of his men racing to cover those exits. That left two of them to search for one of me… and they had all the guns.
I’ve already said I’m not one of those guys who can creep through the dark without making a sound. Lucky for me, most Mandasars are even worse at being stealthy than I am; there’s no such thing as a silent bulldozer. There’s also no such thing as a Mandasar who can climb trees — great big lobsters have no monkeys anywhere in their evolutionary past. Your average warrior never looks for trouble above head height… which is probably true for human soldiers too, but our species should know better.
Up I went — into some kind of tree with easy-to-climb branches. Its bark felt like moldy cheese: hard underneath, but with an outer layer of mushy fuzz. It smelled like moldy cheese too… moldy something anyway, all pulpy and rotten. I wasn’t happy getting the stuff on the front of my uniform, but I had an easy time digging in my fingers for handholds. Without much noise, I pulled myself up a story and a half above the ground, then settled into the shadows between a big branch and the trunk.
The sergeant passed cautiously below me. I considered dropping onto his head, but decided against it — considering how out of practice I was, I wouldn’t take him out instantly. Anyway, it would be sure to cause noise. The other warrior looking for me was only a short distance off; even if I managed to finish off the sergeant, I’d be shot unconscious before I escaped.
Instead, I waited till the guards searching for me were down the far end of the place (it’s a big conservatory), then I carefully began to clamber from tree to tree. This was just an exhibit, not a real rain forest; all kinds of trees had been crammed in together, and the gardeners had done that pruning trick that makes the branches grow out instead of up. I could sneak from one tree to the next without much trouble, heading for the door that led back into the main part of the palace.
My movement wasn’t completely silent, but neither was the conservatory. Birds lived in the place, the little flitty kind of birds you find all over Troyen. Sam once told me the feathers on Troyenese birds didn’t evolve the same way as on Earth — not as strong or aerodynamic or something, so local birds can’t fly if they get much bigger than a chickadee. The ones in the conservatory were all smaller than that, on the order of hummingbirds; and with us big people thrashing in the dark, the birds were zipping around like frantic wasps, making leaves rustle all over the place. Practically every step I took, I disturbed one of the little guys and sent it flying off to another tree… but the warriors were also scaring up flocks wherever they went, not to mention a bunch of birds with bad nerves who suddenly burst into a racket of cheeping for no apparent reason. The warriors couldn’t hear me over all that noise; so it only took me a few minutes to get within ten meters of the door.
One guard between me and escape. With his gas mask on, he couldn’t smell me; with the darkness, he couldn’t see me; with the birds making racket all over the place, he couldn’t hear me. But everything would change if I jumped out of the tree and tried to cross the gap between us — I figured it was fifty-fifty whether I’d get to him before he fired his stunner, and even less likely that I’d be able to put him down before his friends showed up.
So I stayed in the tree, hoping for a lucky break. Which I got, sort of.
"This is taking too long," the sergeant growled from somewhere far behind me. He was speaking in Mandasar, of course, but I understood just fine. "Take your masks off, and let’s sniff this bastard out."
"But Sarge…" one of the other guards said.
"The queen’s dead," the sergeant snapped, "and the brat obviously isn’t here. We’ll be all right. Do it."
They did. As the guard in the doorway began to slip his gas mask off, I knew I’d never have a better time to move — within seconds, he’d smell a human within spitting distance. I hit the floor running, with only a tiny stumble; and the guard was slowed by taking off his mask. Even then, I nearly didn’t make it in time… but at the last second, the guard hesitated a teeny bit.
I smashed him with a palm heel under the snout, snapping his head back hard. The strike was too weak to knock him out completely, but it dazed him long enough for me to rip the stunner out of his Cheejreth arms. Jumping back out of reach of his waist pincers, I shot him three times fast in the head. He slumped, his nose whupping down hard onto the floor.