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“You mean he’s—”

Klaus nodded. “Infected by Slaver Wasps. A ‘revenant’ under the command of The Other. Yes.”

“But he... he looks perfectly normal.”

“Yes.” Klaus lowered his voice. “As do the one hundred and seventy others we have uncovered aboard Castle Wulfenbach so far.”

Bangladesh shook her head in denial. “But The Other is dead!”

Klaus shrugged. “It’s possible that we’re just discovering old infections.” He paused, “But I was never sure. Did she die? Or did she just stop? There was no way to tell.”

“But the Heterodyne Boys—” DuPree paused. The Pfennig dropped. “Wait...‘She’?”

Klaus nodded. He placed one of his hands upon the Captain’s back, something few other people would have dared to do, and indicated that she was to walk with him. They left the observation platform and took an otherwise empty catwalk out towards the flagship. Below them the embarkation proceedings were reaching a crescendo. Finally Klaus began to speak.

“You know that I’ve standing orders to bring me The Other’s creations.” Bangladesh nodded. She’d transported a few of them. Those were some of the few times she’d felt nervous. There were things a Captain did not want on her ship.

Klaus continued. “I’ve studied them. The internal logics are familiar to me. Now these devices are very advanced, but their underlying principles are similar to those I saw years ago in the work of Lucrezia Mongfish. They were so similar, that I had long entertained the notion that Lucrezia was, in fact, The Other. This was despite the fact that, as gifted as Lucrezia was, she had never displayed this level of skill. It was almost impossible to believe she could have advanced so radically in just a few years.” Klaus paused, and directly faced Bangladesh.

“But now I find that there is a daughter. Sired by Bill Heterodyne, no less. Styles do tend to run in families, and any offspring of those two—”

“Whoa! Whoa!” Bangladesh interrupted. “The daughter—That was the girl who was here. But she’s dead now. I saw—”

Klaus overrode her. “You saw what you were supposed to see. You were tricked. The girl is alive.”

Bangladesh thought back to the charred corpse they had exhumed. “Really? You’re sure?”

Klaus nodded. “Yes.”

Bangladesh shook her head in admiration. “Wow. She sure looked dead.”

Klaus stared at her for several moments. He was at a loss for words. Bangladesh did this to him occasionally. Unluckily, it was never a condition Bangladesh herself suffered from.

“So she’s The Other’s daughter.” She thought about this for a minute. “Big deal.”

Klaus shrugged and resumed walking. “I fervently hope that is the case.”

Bangladesh frowned. “You hope so? What else could she be? Klaus, what are you so worried about?”

Klaus turned and looked the puzzled woman in the face. “She could be The Other.”

Bangladesh scratched her head. “Neat trick. She doesn’t look like she was old enough to even be born back then.”

Klaus nodded, and took a deep breath. This was going to be complicated, which was never Bangladesh’s strong suit. “DuPree, do you remember where you first saw this girl?”

The Captain nodded. “Sure. That big weird hole in the sky.”

“That’s right. From your description of the incident, I believe those were... windows into... the future.”

DuPree looked blank. “The future?”

Klaus plowed ahead. “Time. She will be able to manipulate time. She was looking at you from sometime in the future. Do you understand what that means?”

Bangladesh opened her mouth. She paused and then closed her mouth. Klaus was encouraged.

“What you saw might have been just a window. But what if it was a Gate? She could discover how to do this ten... twenty years from now, and still be the one who destroyed Castle Heterodyne nineteen years ago!”

He dropped his hands to his sides and looked at the Captain with raised eyebrows. It was then that Bangladesh shocked the Baron more than she ever had, or indeed, ever would again.

“But if I saw her... looking at us from the future...Then she’ll still be running around in this future. If we’re going after her now, then we’re going to lose.”

Klaus shrugged wearily. “And thus our predicament. I just don’t know enough about the nature of time. Maybe she isn’t The Other. Maybe The Future you observed can be changed. Maybe we do lose because you observed it.” He spread his hands wide. “Maybe everything that has happened was some huge misunderstanding and we don’t have to fight her at all. The problem is that while we know what it was that you saw, we did not see it in context. We do not know the larger story.”

They approached the great airship. An airshipman who was winding a cable saw them and almost broke his back with the speed with which he untangled himself and snapped off a crisp salute. They moved along to the Captain’s quarters.

Bangladesh’s private suite was the standard size, two rooms, one little more than a large bunk surrounded by storage cabinets, and the other a ready room, notable for its generous size (almost twelve square meters) and the large set of floor to ceiling windows that covered one wall. This held the Captain’s desk and dining table, and was again lined with racks and storage spaces. The ceiling overhead was covered with rope nets that on longer expeditions held bales and packages.

By tradition, Klaus should have taken the Captain’s cabin, but as always, he insisted on sleeping with the other officers. No one blamed him for this.

Most Captains preferred to keep their quarters simple. Bangladesh, however, preferred a decorating style that Gilgamesh had once described as “Debauched Barbarian Princess.” He had meant it as an insult, but once Bangladesh had learned what “debauched” meant, she had worked hard to live up to it.

The first surprise was the color. Everyone always expected red, but in fact, the room was painted a dark emerald green. This allowed any added red to really stand out. Which was a big help during clean-up. Most of the available wall space was taken up with mounted weapons, guns, knives, swords, all lovingly polished and oiled and ready to be grabbed. There was a great deal of ornamentation, every edge was filigreed with gold paint, and almost all of the fixtures were gold. The chains that held the hurricane lamps, the hooks that held clothing, every visible strut and rivet gleamed in the light. Those decorations that weren’t gold, were bones. They always turned out to be the bones of animals and monsters, but Klaus felt compelled to keep checking. Whatever they were, there were a lot of them. They had been cunningly fashioned into pieces of furniture, drinking vessels, chart holders, clothes hangers and lampshades.

The curtains gathered away from the windows and across the Captain’s bunk were a luscious shimmering silk, with an intricately batiked design of skulls.

As always, the sight of the place gave rise to mixed emotions in Klaus. There was no denying it was tasteless, gaudy and ostentatious, but it did stir fond memories of his long lost wife.

While Bangladesh stowed her gear, Klaus continued. “Dr. Beetle’s notes were very well encrypted, but my team finally cracked them. Unfortunately, many of them were lost in an ill-conceived fire, but some of the material we were able to salvage was about the Heterodyne girl.

“Barry and Agatha arrived in Beetleburg around twelve years ago. Shortly thereafter he disappeared, leaving her in the care of the constructs, Punch and Judy.”