When war came, I could imagine her killing the fifteen queens one by one: getting on their good sides then murdering them, just as she did with Verity. She could have claimed to be a secret envoy from the Technocracy and promised navy support for the queen’s cause — that would be a quick route to royal favor. Then she’d betray the queen to some convenient enemy, or slit the royal throat personally when the time was right. It’d taken twenty years, but so what? And every time a queen died, Sam would try to keep control of the queen’s armies, giving orders to generals who still trusted her as the late queen’s closest ally.
Now, it was almost over — nothing to do except take the palace. In the process, she’d kill me because I was a loose end. She probably thought I was too stupid to figure out things on my own, but she didn’t want me talking to anybody else. Sam couldn’t afford that: my very existence was evidence against her.
"It’s me Sam wants," I said, "She’s afraid I know too much. If I give myself up, maybe she won’t kill anyone else."
"Dear boy," Gashwan replied, "I know too much too. A lot more than you do. But if we both give ourselves up, Samantha will worry we might have talked to someone or hidden a message somewhere. Besides, Edward, she can’t leave witnesses who’ll say you surrendered peacefully. You know she has to kill you and destroy your body. You know that, don’t you, dear?"
"Yes."
"And it will look suspicious if she does that to a voluntary prisoner. Your human friends will make a fuss. From Samantha’s perspective, it’s tidier if we all die accidentally in the heat of battle. Then she’ll lament the horrors of war, and make an apologetic donation to the fleet’s Memorial Fund."
Gashwan’s whiskers quivered with amusement… even admiration. She was truly tickled by the way Sam had worked things into a neat package — a mother’s pride at how clever her daughter turned out to be.
Festina snapped, "We’re wasting time. Plebon, can you find your way to the roof?" He nodded. "You want me to look for Larries?"
"And anything else you can see. Tobit, you and Dade go with him. Take a Bumbler and check what the Black Army is doing. Keep trying with the Sperm anchor too — maybe Prope will have an attack of conscience and come back for us."
"Prope?" Tobit snorted. "Conscience?"
"It’s a long shot," Festina admitted. "Try anyway." She put her gloved hand on the sleeve of his tightsuit and gave a little squeeze. "Get moving, you old sot."
"Right away, your magnificence." He gave her something that was nowhere near a salute, then grabbed Dade by the arm. "Come on, Benny, we’re off to fulfill the glorious Explorer tradition: getting our asses shot for no good reason."
"That’s what ‘expendable’ means," Dade replied.
Tobit cuffed him in the helmet. "Asshole — you say that after we die."
As Tobit, Dade, and Plebon hurried up a nearby ramp, Festina said, "All right — the rest of us need to get organized. Let’s get Kaisho to… Kaisho? Where the hell are you?" I looked around: lots of Mandasars, but no wheelchair. While we’d been distracted, Kaisho must have drifted quietly out of the lanternlight and vanished into the darkness. "Bloody hell," Festina glowered, "I knew there was a reason she ought to stay in the ship."
"Perhaps," Counselor suggested, "she wants to make contact with the moss at the front of the palace."
"She’s made contact already," Festina fumed. "Likely while she was still on Jacaranda — no one knows the range of the Balrog’s mental power, but there’s so much damned moss down here, it probably has the combined strength to talk with someone in orbit. Hell, it may have been able to contact Kaisho while she was still on Celestia; some experts think the Balrog is a single hive-mind, with instantaneous communication between every damned spore in the universe. Willpower stronger than the laws of physics. If that doesn’t scare the piss out of you, you haven’t thought about it long enough."
"But if she’s already talking to the other Balrogs," Counselor said, "why did she need to go off on her own?"
"Because the moss has an errand for her," Festina answered. "Something it can’t do for itself, while it’s stuck to the palace walls." She lifted her hand and pressed it to her helmet’s visor, as if she wanted to cover her eyes. "I really hate being manipulated," she growled. "Kaisho used me to bring her here. And so did you, Edward."
"My sister manipulated me," I told her.
"So did your father," Gashwaft put in, way too cheerily. "From the very start."
"To make Edward a king?" Counselor asked.
"Exactly," Gashwan smiled. "What a clever young girl you are."
"King of what?" I asked.
"Of whatever you want," Gashwan answered. "Mandasars. Or humans. Possibly both."
"Because of the pheromones," I mumbled. "Because I’m like a queen and can simulate…" I didn’t finish the sentence.
"When your father first came to Troyen," Gashwan said, "he saw the possibilities. Queens can consciously manufacture Mandasar pheromones; what if somebody created a being who could make human ones too? A secret weapon for swaying people to your side. The ultimate diplomat."
"The ultimate admiral," Festina murmured. "Manipulator supreme. Old Alexander must have dreamed of becoming royal himself."
"He couldn’t," Gashwan told her. "His DNA was entirely human: incompatible with the transformation he had in mind. He had to settle for making clones of himself — ninety-nine percent like the original, but with a sampling of transplanted Mandasar genes to pave the way for more changes later on…"
Festina nodded, as if she’d already known. That’s why she’d asked if I was bioengineered. She must have guessed I’d need fancied-up DNA if I was going to become… um…
…more than human.
The idea made me shiver — I was supposed to be Dad’s ideal of a superman.
Except that I was stupid. Supermen shouldn’t be stupid. Why would he deliberately ask for that?
Gashwan had already answered the question: so I wouldn’t realize what was being done to me.
"I was the guinea pig," I whispered.
"That’s right." Gashwan patted me fondly on the arm. "When Innocence started suckling from Verity, so did you."
"Thanks to the nano," Festina said, "that your sister commissioned from the Fasskisters. The nanites dosed Edward little by little over the course of the year… and Verity never knew it was happening. I assume you had a second batch of nanites that brought venom to your lab instead of to Edward?"
"Of course," Gashwan replied. "We needed to analyze the venom at every stage so we could reproduce it for Samantha later on. We also needed to test all kinds of medical techniques to make sure we could keep a human alive through a full year of venom poisoning… and through the transformation." She gave me a smile. "If it’s any consolation, the things we learned working on you made it much easier when we did the same for Samantha. Your contribution saved her a lot of pain. Sam transformed into a queen as easily as a natural-born Mandasar… all thanks to you."
Oh good — I’d fulfilled my one and only purpose. I’d been engineered as a near-genetic double to my sister, so I’d be the best possible guinea pig later on. A good testing ground before the doctors started on the real patient. I was just the disposable prototype, the one they’d throw away after they learned how to do things right.