A hand patted my own thigh, right where I’d imagined touching Kaisho. I nearly jumped out of my skin. When I looked up, Kaisho was obviously staring at me from behind her veil of hair. "Don’t be embarrassed," she whispered. "I don’t mind people looking at my legs. I know they’re magnificent."
"Oh," I said. "Um."
"And," she went on, "many people have an irresistible urge to touch."
"Does the stuff rub off on them?"
She shook her head. "I stepped on the Balrog when it was in a dispersal phase — actively looking for a new host. Now, it’s happily bonded to me and reproductively dormant. Entirely. Almost. It would only spread to someone else if the chance was too promising to pass up: a host so superior, the Balrog had to seize the opportunity, for the greater good of the universe." Her smile flashed under the cover of her hair. "Do you consider yourself that superior, Teelu"?
"No," I said. But I kept well clear of the moss. Kaisho was kind of daring me to touch her… and Samantha trained me when we were kids, never ever ever take a dare.
Kaisho’s wheelchair stopped beside a clump of scrawny trees. The trees didn’t look much different from any others we’d passed — almost like Earth trees, except for the blackish leaves and a light puffiness to their trunks, as if their bark was wooden foam — but Kaisho cut her chair’s skimmer engine so the chair settled down on its big solid wheels.
Apart from the starlight and those three confetti moons, we only had the glow of Kaisho’s legs to see by. Still, it was easy to tell the soil had been trampled half to mire by the Mandasar militia; they’d come through here chasing Mr. Clear Chest.
"There," Kaisho said, pointing to the ground between four close-growing trees. Festina and I leaned our heads in; Zeeleepull tried to look too, but the trees were rooted too near each other for him to get his wide shoulders into the gap. I guess that’s why the dirt here didn’t get mucked up as the warriors stampeded past — they had to go around the trees instead of between.
Imprinted in the soft mud was a sharp-edged circular outline… like a big heavy can had been set down long enough for it to settle its weight into the soil. As far as I could tell, there was nothing else to see; but Festina made a soft, "Hah!" sound and grabbed a little thread caught on one of the tree trunks.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Black fiber," the admiral answered. "Probably off that recruiter’s pants. They were black, right?"
I couldn’t remember. I’d been so busy gawking at his exposed heaving lungs, I hadn’t noticed much else. "You think he was doing something here?" I asked.
"He tucked himself between these trees for a while," Kaisho said. "A good place to hide — his shadow would blend in with the tree trunks." She turned to Festina. "Do you recognize that outline on the ground?"
The admiral nodded. "It’s exactly the size of a Bumbler."
"Bumbler?" Zeeleepull asked. "Bumbler what is?"
"Equipment from the navy’s Explorer Corps," I told him. Too bad Festina’s Bumbler had been destroyed, or I could have showed him. "It’s like a medium-sized cooking pot," I said, "only the lid is a vidscreen. It’s got cameras and sensors and things, so it can show you an IR scan of the area, or work like a telescope or microscope…"
"Not to mention reading and recording the entire EM spectrum from gamma waves to radio," Kaisho put in.
"So the recruiter… Explorer is? Navy hume Explorer?" His voice was going huffy with outrage.
"Of course not," Festina answered, just as huffy. "I’ve read the files on every Explorer in the fleet, and not one has a see-through thorax. That recruiter might have carried Explorer equipment, but he doesn’t belong to the corps." She turned to Kaisho. "Do you think it really was a Bumbler? All we’ve got is a circle in the mud…"
"The Balrog assures me it was a genuine Bumbler," Kaisho replied. "It left a characteristic metallic taste on the dirt. As distinctive as a fingerprint."
I stared at her a moment, trying to think how the Balrog could taste the soil. Had Kaisho touched her mossy legs against the ground? Or could Balrogs taste things from long distance, the way you can sometimes taste campfire smoke, or the vinegar in strong pickles before you actually lift them to your mouth?
"My guess," Kaisho said, "is the recruiter set down his Bumbler while he was busy with something else. Probably he had some gadget for monitoring the Laughing Larry as it homed in on our dear Festina. He stayed till he heard the Mandasar militia coming toward him…" She looked at Zeeleepull. "Following his scent, correct?"
"Smelled him we," Zeeleepull agreed proudly. "First the loud laugh-laugh that drew us across the water. Then the stink of hume on the ground. Chased him we. Harried him we."
Kaisho nodded. "The recruiter snatched up his Bumbler and ran, with the warriors on his heels. He headed for that other clearing, where his skimmer waited to pick him up."
Festina frowned. "I saw him on the rope ladder," she said. "No Bumbler then. Which means," she went on, suddenly eager, "he must have lost it as he ran from the warriors. Either he dumped it deliberately so he could sprint faster, or he got the carrying strap snagged on something and he didn’t have time to work it free." She gave a wry smile. "When I think how often I’ve caught my own Bumbler on bushes… well, finally, some poetic justice."
"You really were an Explorer?" I asked. "With a Bumbler and everything?" The first time Festina had mentioned being an Explorer, the Larry showed up before I could ask any questions. Now… I still found it hard to believe an Explorer could ever make admiral. When I was young, the Explorer Corps was stuck off to one side, out of the chain of promotion for the regular navy. Explorers couldn’t become ship captains or admirals or anything. That was one reason Dad made me wear the black uniform — to be sure I’d never get put in charge of anything. (Or maybe just because the High Council had no Admiral of the Black to tell Dad I wasn’t wanted.)
The navy must have changed a lot in the twenty years I’d been out of touch. An admiral who’d been an Explorer — pretty amazing. But when I studied Festina’s face for a moment, that big purple blotch sure made her look like an Explorer.
"Yes, Edward," Festina said, "once upon a time, I was a full-fledged ECM." (ECM means Expendable Crew Member… what Explorers call themselves.) "But I’ll tell you my life story later," she went on. "Right now, we have more pressing business. If we find that recruiter’s Bumbler, its memory may contain useful evidence."
She struck off forward, tracing the recruiter’s path as he’d run from the militia. Soon she called for Kaisho to take the lead; a Balrog’s spooky senses were better than human eyes following a track in the dark. That didn’t sit well with Zeeleepull — he couldn’t stand waiting for the wheelchair’s snail-slow progress, so he put his nose to the ground, caught the scent, and barged his way forward as fast as he could sniff. You’d think the trail would be hard for him to make out, considering how a horde of warriors had trampled over the original scent… but Zeeleepull never seemed to hesitate. Of course, he’d gone this way before: only half an hour ago, when the militia followed the same spoor through the trees.
Mr. Clear Chest must have had a rough time of it, racing on the slant of a hillside through the deep night dark… trying not to trip over logs or get tangled in patches of brush. Of course, this forest was alien, not like the nice Terran woodlands on my father’s estate; but the undergrowth here knew all the Earth tricks, with bristles and prickers and nettly bits to jab you as you dashed by.