"The plague swept over us without warning," the Fasskister said. "Tendrils of it spread through the grass, so thin they were practically invisible. When you took a wrong step the moss would suddenly sweep upward, covering your shell and shutting down all movement systems. It left life support intact, and even seemed to be providing basic food through our nutrient ports; but I’ve been frozen for days!"
"Do you think it’s the same everywhere?" Festina asked.
The Fasskister let his arms go slack. "I don’t know. Our village is closest to the docking port, where the plague was released. We were taken by surprise. Perhaps others had time to prepare…"
"And perhaps not," Festina finished. "When our ship came to call, no one was answering the radio."
The Fasskister pulled in its arms and passed through a door into the hut. There was plenty of light inside, diffused straight through the dome’s crystal. I could see a clutter of moss-covered bulges on the floor, but didn’t know if they were machines, furniture or people. The Balrog wouldn’t let any of us get close enough to tell — the moss let us inside the door, but wouldn’t yield any farther.
"Your family?" I asked sympathetically, looking at the bulges.
"My vidscreen and sound system!" the Fasskister answered. "I swear I’ll sue that Gragguk till she screams."
"That’ll be a good trick," Festina told him. "She’s dead." The admiral pursed her lips and thought for a moment. "You were one of the people who met the humans and the queen?"
"Yes." The Fasskister was still waving his arms, turning the eyes on his hands to survey the great mossy mess. "The bastards came straight to our village."
"Because it’s closest to the docking port," Festina murmured. "I don’t suppose you planted any of your own nano on them… the way the queen planted spores on you."
"What do you mean?" the Fasskister asked.
"Nano shaped like little eyeballs," I told him. "Well… like human eyeballs anyway." I slipped out the door to bare ground, then knelt and drew a picture in the dirt: a nanite’s big head, the long dangling tail. "They were programmed to sneak into a queen’s venom sacs, steal a bit of venom, then run off before they were caught."
"Yes," Festina said. "If you made the nano, what for? Why would you want to steal venom? And even if you did want venom, how did you think you’d ever retrieve the nanites when Willow was headed to a different star system?"
For a second, the Fasskister said nothing. Then, from inside the robot shell came a high-pitched cluttering sound, like a squirrel scolding someone for disturbing its nest. Mechanical arms lurched and bounced as if they were having spasms… or as if the Fasskister inside was rocking back and forth hysterically, bumping into control switches at random.
From the robot’s speakers, the language circuits drily pronounced, "Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha." The Fasskister was laughing his amps off.
"What’s so funny?" Festina demanded.
"You think… ha ha ha… we could make… ha… nanotech like that… ha ha… in so little time? The Gragguk was only here… ha… for an hour. Your little eyeballs… ha ha… took a team ages to develop."
Festina and I just stared bug-eyed. After a while, she said, "So you know about those nanites?"
"Of course. They were a major commission. Almost all of us on this orbital worked on the project."
"How long ago?"
"Many of your years. It’s gratifying to know they’re still operational."
"Why did you make them?"
"For a client," the Fasskister said. "I don’t know who. The business office said it was top secret — no name on the specifications."
"What did the specifications call for?" Festina asked.
"An integrated nanotech system," the Fasskister replied. "For secret entry, secret exit, some independent decision making, plenty of built-in evasion strategies… all standard requirements. We get a lot of orders for nanites that can sneak in and out of places without being noticed."
"I’ll bet," Festina muttered.
"The real trick was keying it to his DNA." The Fasskister pointed at me.
I yelped. "Me?"
"Yeah."
Festina’s jaw had dropped. "Edward? The nano was keyed to Edward?"
"Yeah," the Fasskister said. "The high Gragguk’s pretty-boy gigolo."
I swallowed hard. "What were the nanites supposed to do?"
"Find a queen," the Fasskister said. "Take a swig of venom. Go running back to you, wherever you were, and spit the venom down your throat. Like a mother illi’im that fills up on food, then vomits it into her baby’s mouth."
"So," Festina murmured, "the nanites weren’t on Willow to begin with?"
"I don’t know what this Willow is," the Fasskister told her, "but I do know those nanites. They follow the high Gragguk’s consort wherever he goes, and dose him with venom whenever they can steal some from a queen. That’s their job. And they’ve been doing it since well before the war started."
I stood there like a dummy, not really taking it in. I was the carrier: me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised — you can be surrounded by a horde of nano and never notice it, any more than you notice the billions of natural bacteria in the air around you. A full nano scan would have found I had hitchhikers, but I’d never been put through the slightest examination… not when I’d gone from Troyen to the moonbase, and not when Willow picked me up. That was pretty darned careless, when you thought about it; but by then, Willow had left its Explorers on Troyen, and Explorers are the ones who are supposed to be fanatical about decontamination. The rest of Willow’s crew just assumed I was clean.
I’d assumed I was clean too. In twenty years on the moonbase, my nanite attendants hadn’t done a thing. They’d only kicked into action when I found the dead queen in Willow’s hold. All of a sudden, they had something to do: filling their little eyeballs with venom and ferrying it back to me. No wonder I got sick — I probably would have died if I hadn’t stationed those defense clouds around the queen’s venom sacs. The clouds cut off the nanites from getting more poison.
The real question was why I hadn’t died on Troyen. If the nanites had dogged my heels since before the war, they must have had a busy time when I was living in the same palace as Queen Verity. They’d be dosing me with venom morning, noon, and night; but I was perfectly okay till I caught the Coughing Jaundice…
Oh.
Oh.
The jaundice was really venom poisoning. The night I got sick was when the nanites started their work. And the only thing that kept me alive was a team of the best doctors on Troyen. Right there at the end, when I started to get better, maybe I’d finally built up a resistance to the stuff; after all, it’d been a whole year and the queen’s chemical cycle was repeating itself. But till that time, I was constantly getting dosed with new enzymes and hormones and junk, twisting me inside out, practically killing me…
For what? Who would intentionally do that to me? The Fasskisters must have charged big money for a project so complicated… and who would put up that much cash just to kill yours truly? I wasn’t anyone important. And if somebody really did want me snuffed, why choose such a strange and complicated way to do it?
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?"