"I can clean up now?"
"As if anyone ever cared. It’s not like there’s a question about cause of death. Right, Benny?"
Benjamin was staring at the Willow’s captain. The captain’s holo-surround had used up its battery power days ago, so you could see the man himself now. He was wearing his uniform shirt, but from the waist down, all he had on were white socks. It was a pretty undignified look for someone of his rank. If I were a captain and thought I might die, I’d aim at leaving a more presentable corpse.
"Benny," Tobit said. "Partner mine. Prospective pride of the Explorer Corps. Are you with us?"
"What? Oh. Sorry. Do you want to move on?"
"No," Tobit answered, "I want to go home for a bubble bath. We’ve wasted enough time on goddamned standard procedures." He glowered at the boy for a moment, then said, "For novelty’s sake, how ’bout I give you a direct order? Head back to the hold, cut off the queen’s venom sacs, and pack ’em for transport back to Jacaranda."
"What?" The boy’s voice sounded like a yelp. I felt kind of yelpy myself. Mutilate a queen? Even if she was dead, that was nigh-on sacrilege. "Why?" Benjamin asked.
"Because somewhere on Willow" Tobit replied, "there are nasty wee nanites who want to steal her venom. Christ knows why they want it, but I can’t imagine it’s for the blissful good of the universe. Besides, it pisses me off when people sneak nano onto a navy ship; just on general principle, I don’t want the bastards to get what they’re after. Best way to do that is haul the venom back to Jacaranda — empty the place so the nanites are shit out of luck." He held his hand up quickly, to stop me from saying anything. "And before you ask, we’ll have Jacaranda triple-check to make sure we aren’t carrying nanites ourselves. Our micro-defenses aren’t half-bad… on the rare occasions we’re willing to cool our heels six hours in quarantine getting a full nano scan."
Benjamin’s eyes were wide. "You really want me to hack the sacs off?"
"Not hack, you lunkhead. Perform a delicate surgical excision. With all due care and safety. Use a scalpel instead of a chainsaw. You know — finesse. Now get your scrawny butt moving."
The boy sounded sick but he started off. I called after him, "Be careful, okay? Venom is dangerous stuff."
"He’ll do fine," Tobit said. "Benny trained for Medical Corps before he transferred to exploring. He has great hands with a scalpel."
"Thank you," Benjamin called back over his shoulder. He could still hear Tobit’s words over the ship’s speaker system.
"But you’re a piss-awful Explorer!" Tobit shouted as the boy disappeared.
I think Benjamin gave Tobit the finger, but it’s hard to tell with a tightsuit’s bulgy gloves.
As soon as the boy was out of sight, Tobit popped off his helmet. That surprised me; Explorers are supposed to stay suited up whenever they’re on a mission, even if it’s just over to another navy ship. For another surprise, he reached up to the bulge on his throat — his communications implant — and gave it a double-tap. "There," he said. "I’m not transmitting anymore." He took a deep breath. "Christ, it reeks in here, doesn’t it?"
"Sorry."
"Not your fault, pal. You wanted to leave everything as is because you thought there’d be a real investigation. Which there won’t."
He gave me a long look as if trying to decide something. Me, I was just trying not to stare. Tobit’s face had a ravaged flush to it, pockmarked, red and veiny. An old soak’s face, though I couldn’t smell booze on him. Maybe he’d been an alcoholic but had lately gone on the wagon; or maybe he had some genetic condition that made him look like a lush. Sure, that had to be it — Explorers always had things wrong with them, whether they looked funny or smelled funny or sounded funny. Phylar Tobit’s problem was just a whiskey-ish face. The navy surely wouldn’t let drunks be Explorers.
"We don’t have much time," Tobit told me, "so just shut up and listen, okay? It turns out, York, you’re in a shitload of trouble."
"I’m sorry," I said. Apologizing was always a good first step, even if I didn’t understand what I’d done.
"Nothing to feel sorry about," Tobit replied. "This crap-fest isn’t your fault. But the Admiralty is plotting a cover-up, I positively guarantee it. They’ve lost an entire ship because navy personnel acted non-sentient: all of Willow’s crew, and maybe the admiral who gave them their orders. That’s the sort of thing the High Council dearly wants to keep secret. Makes the whole fleet look bad."
"I can keep secrets," I said.
He patted my shoulder. "Yeah. Sure. But the Admiralty won’t take the chance. They only trust certain types of people — assholes who want to be admirals themselves and will do anything to get into the inner circle. Our beloved Captain Prope is like that, and a lot of other folks on our ship. High Admiral Vincence has stacked Jacaranda with scumbags who don’t mind taking orders that would disturb normal navy personnel."
"Orders like what?" I asked.
"Like making you disappear, so you can’t spill the beans. Prope already has reassignment papers for you; I read them when I accidentally logged onto her computer and decrypted all her files. You’re headed for some godforsaken outpost in the back of beyond, where contact ships only show up once a decade. A one-man station. Jacaranda will take you straight there without a chance to talk to anyone, then they’ll fly away without looking back." Tobit gritted his teeth. "You won’t be the first person our shite of a captain has marooned."
For a second I didn’t say anything. You can’t imagine what it’s like, to be going home after twenty years-twenty years on a moon with nothing but vacuum outside, like a prison except no one has the decency to call it that — and just when you think it’s all over, that you’ll soon see grass and sky and lakes again, someone decides you’re going to be dumped on some new lonely dung heap. And why? Because a boneheaded admiral wants to hide you away from everyone else, for fear you’ll make him look bad. The story of my life.
"So what should I do?" I whispered to Tobit. Whispering because if I didn’t whisper, I’d scream. "I’m stuck out in space," I said. "I can’t run away."
"Yes, you can," Tobit answered, "but you have to make your move while you’re still acting captain of Willow. Hop into one of the evac modules and declare an immediate forced landing emergency. Use those exact words: immediate forced landing emergency. The ship-soul will launch all the escape pods straight toward Celestia, because it’s the optimal site for a forced landing right now: close by and habitable. You hit it lucky there, York — Celestia is a free planet, not part of the Technocracy. Once you touch down, the navy has no legal right to drag you back."
"But won’t Jacaranda stop me from getting away?"
"They’ll try. But they can only catch one pod at a time. Even if they’re lucky, they’ll only grab four of the eight pods before you reach Celestia’s atmosphere. You’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of making it to the ground."
"And a fifty-fifty chance of getting caught."
"So what?" Tobit asked. "The worst they can do is banish you to some asswipe of a planet, and they plan on doing that anyway." He gave me a yellow-toothed grin. "You have dick-all to lose, York. And Celestia is reportedly a cream-puff world: all tame and terraformed. If you lie low for a while, you can head back for the Technocracy eventually. Within six months, some new crisis will make the High Council forget all about you. Admirals have the attention span of lobotomized gnats."