"But the captain said—"
"Oh. The captain."
I didn’t need to hear more. If Prope had lied to the Mandasars about receiving a call for help — if she’d hurried them and Kaisho into the transport bay and waited for the Sperm-tail to get anchored again — she had to have known the spirit inside me would turn on the anchor, then smash the box to free the tail.
Which meant Prope was working with the spirit. She might have been pheromoned into doing it… but more likely, the spirit had used my father’s access codes to send instructions in the Admiralty’s name. That’s what I’d done when I’d found myself sitting all dopey at the captain’s terminaclass="underline" the spirit had given Prope orders to maroon us here.
But why? I thought the spirit was on my side. Back on Celestia, it had helped me — pretty well saved my life and Festina’s. So why turn against us now? Unless its purpose had just been to keep us alive till we got to Troyen…
I scanned the night sky again. No dancing Sperm-tail anywhere… as if Jacaranda had reeled up its fishing line and headed for home. Across the roof, Dade and Tobit were poking at the anchor box, but I knew there was nothing wrong with it. Jacaranda had simply flown away. With Kaisho and the Mandasars down on Troyen, no one on the departing starship would raise a fuss that we’d all been abandoned.
From the start, Prope had been ordered to dump me someplace nasty. I just never suspected I’d help her do it.
37
MOVING OUT
Footsteps rushed up the ramp. Festina rolled over on her back, stun-pistol held in both hands… but she lowered it when she saw the newcomer was a man, a human man.
Both his skin and his uniform were black: not camo’d up like our party, but still plenty hard to see. Even so, I could tell he was definitely Explorer material. The bottom part of his face just wasn’t there — the skin swept straight down from his cheekbones to the thinness of his neck. His chin was only a little nub, scarcely bigger than his Adam’s apple.
I was kind of glad I couldn’t see him very well in all this dark.
"Festina?" the man said in a deep, very precise voice. You could tell he was making an extra effort to enunciate clearly. "I didn’t expect a rescue party at all, much less my favorite admiral."
"Don’t count your rescues before they’re hatched," Festina told him. She’d switched on a small external speaker in her tightsuit so people without radio receivers could hear her. I noticed she kept the volume down to a whisper. "How’re you doing, Plebon?" she asked. "Where’s Olympia?"
"Gone." His face barely changed, but his eyes showed pain. "When Queen Temperance left, some of the palace guards defected to the enemy. They took Olympia as a bargaining chip — a valuable hostage they could offer to the Black Queen in exchange for their own lives."
"Shit." Festina’s fists clenched. "Any chance she’s still alive?"
Plebon shook his head. "Two days later…" His voice caught and he swallowed hard before trying again. "Two days later, they hung her corpse on their front lines. That’s what ‘expendable’…"
He couldn’t finish the phrase. The rest of us were all busy, trying to look anywhere but at him.
"Anyway," he said after a while, with that hard tone of someone trying to hold himself together, "if it’s any consolation, the defectors were hung on the front lines too. Their bodies looked worse than Olympia’s."
"Craziness," Counselor murmured. "Smart armies don’t kill defectors, they show them off: happy, safe, and well fed. That way, you encourage more people to surrender."
"Unless you don’t want your enemies to surrender," I said softly. "What if you want them to stay right where they are, so the war doesn’t end three and a half weeks too early?"
It’s hard when you feel people’s deaths on your head. Those defectors got killed to keep the war going… delay things till I got here. As for Olympia Mell… it explained how my sister had known Willow was in the system. Olympia had told the Black Army everything she knew: maybe under torture, or maybe just chatting with Sam as a fellow member of the navy. Then, after the talk was over, Olympia had been murdered and put on display — to make sure the palace guards stayed at their posts till the very end.
This Black Queen, whoever she was: she could have had an easy victory weeks ago, but she wanted a massacre. And Sam was the queen’s closest advisor. What did that say about my sister? What did that say?
"The anchor’s working just fine," Tobit announced. "But Jacaranda isn’t replying to any calls. They’ve buggered off on us."
Festina let out her breath slowly. "Damn it to fucking hell," she said in a controlled voice. "That’s twice Prope has stranded me in some shithole. Next time…"
I never got to hear about next time. Her words were drowned out by a pack of warriors storming onto the roof. It looked like the embassy’s floors were strong enough to hold Mandasars after all.
You can tell a lot about folks from how they react to a bunch of soldiers.
Festina and Tobit cranked up the volume on their tight-suit speakers and shouted in stilted Mandasar, "Greetings, we are sentient citizens of the League of Peoples, we beg your Hospitality." At the same time, they were drawing their stun-pistols.
Dade gaped a moment, then just held up his hands in surrender. Counselor did the same, except that she folded her arms in a gesture I’d taught her, and cried out, "Naizo! Naizo!"
Zeeleepull stepped in front of her, flexed his pincers theatrically, and began to pump out a combination of battle-musks. I couldn’t distinguish all the scents he used, but the basic message was clear: "I will not attack, but I will defend."
Hib Nib Pib backed to the edge of the roof and whispered as they stared admiringly at Zeeleepull. "Isn’t he strong?" "Isn’t he handsome?" "Isn’t he a teeny bit outnumbered?"
Kaisho said nothing — just standing her ground, with her legs glowing bright as lasers.
Me, I was watching everybody else, waiting to take my lead from them… but I was also concentrating mighty hard on smelling royal. Half the soldiers had gas masks; half of them didn’t. I still wasn’t great at controlling my pheromones, but I figured if worse came to worst, I could dose the maskless ones and sic them on their troopmates.
But it was Plebon who stepped toward the soldiers: waving his hands and shouting, "Nairit ul Gashwan!" Friend of Gashwan. Plebon’s accent was pretty awful, even on three short words; I got the Impression he’d memorized the phrase by sound, rather than actually understanding it. Still, the soldiers eased up a bit: they didn’t lower their bows but a few took their fingers off the triggers.
For a moment, I considered walking up to them anyway: use my pheromones to win a bunch of them over to our side. But that wouldn’t work on the masked guys, and they might get really mad about their fellow guards being zonked by chemical warfare. Grumbling to myself, I damped down the smell factory and let the fumes drift away on the breeze.
The soldiers hustled us down to street level, not giving us the tiniest chance to talk among ourselves. "Jush, jush!" they kept saying… which means, "Shut up and keep moving."
Plebon didn’t look too worried about this treatment, so he must have thought we were safe. His friend Gashwan must carry a lot of clout.
Who was she? I wondered. Gashwan was a female name, but the only Gashwan I’d ever known was the doctor who looked after me when I had the jaundice… or rather, when I had venom poisoning from all those nanites dosing me up. Could it be the same Gashwan, hanging around the palace for twenty years? Maybe. No matter which queens passed through Unshummin in the past two decades, they could all use a smart doctor. I didn’t know much about Gashwan herself — she was the sort of M.D. who reads medical charts rather than talking to patients personally — but if she’d been on Verity’s staff, she must have been the best at what she did.