Tekkahawnee grunted in reply. With only dim starlight, I couldn’t see the captain’s face clearly, but I could tell his mood was turning glowery. He had to be wondering if Festina was just trying to intimidate him or if there was really a chance the fleet would mount a serious crackdown.
Me, I was wondering the same thing. Back on Troyen, Samantha constantly used fudged-up threats as leverage. She would tell Queen Verity the navy demanded this or insisted on that, and nobody ever knew if Sam was actually relaying a message from the High Council or just spouting personal whims off the top of her head. A lot of times, she’d whisper afterward, "Of course, that wasn’t official, Edward; but it’s fun to see how much you can get away with." That tells you something about my sister, doesn’t it?
Zeeleepull got the growls long before we reached the murder site. From the way he snuffled — loudly, with a lot of nose-wiping — I knew he could smell the dead warrior’s blood. I put my arm around his shoulder, and whispered, "Can you tell who it is?"
He shook his head. "Guts too much the stink. Know I my friends by skin scent, not by intestines."
Even when we got to the clearing, he couldn’t identify the other warrior by smell. He had to walk straight up to the corpse and stare into the dead face, while one of the policefolk held a flashlight. "Wiftim is," Zeeleepull said at last. "Wiftim of Hive Seeliwon."
"Wiftim" meant "ever-prepared" and Seeliwon was a pretty little lake district where Verity had kept a manor house. That might have been why Wiftim’s hive adopted the name — because of its connection with the long-lost high queen.
I wanted to explain that to the policewoman who recorded Zeeleepull’s statement. Someone should have told her the names meant something: not just empty facts about some dead stranger. But I was afraid she’d just look at me, the way they always do, blankly puzzled about what was going on inside my head — what was wrong with me, that I thought such things were important?
I should have told her anyway. I should have.
16
MEETING THE BALROG
The police got busy with murder-scene stuff: putting up big bright lights, taking VR snaps, all that. Captain Tekkahawnee edged us noncops off to the side, then started making calls on a portacomm. I don’t know who all he talked to — he went to the far end of the clearing so we couldn’t hear what he said — but sometimes he hunched over, almost shouting into the vidscreen, and sometimes he leaned way back with a very neutral expression on his face… like he was contacting lower-downs and higher-ups, telling all kinds of people about Wiftim’s death.
"Fuss and nothing," Zeeleepull grumbled. "Care they not of recruiters before. Bet I, still nothing but show."
Admiral Ramos shook her head. "There’s one big difference tonight, Zeeleepull. This time the recruiters killed someone."
The warrior’s whiskers twitched. "Stealing Mandasars, killing as good as."
"No," Festina told him. "Kidnapping and brainwashing are ugly, but the damage is reversible — bring everyone back into mixed-caste hives and they’ll return to more balanced personalities. Even if that weren’t true, murder is still more serious than anything else the recruiters have done. Murder catches the attention of the League of Peoples."
"The League!" Zeeleepull’s voice was full of bitterness. "Nothing, nothing, nothing they do."
Festina shook her head again. "They do one thing, and they do it flawlessly — they stop dangerous non-sentient lifeforms who try to travel from one star system to another. To the most advanced races of the League, humans and Mandasars are no more than bacteria; ignorable unless we start turning nasty, like a disease. Even then, the League doesn’t bother to exterminate us… they just don’t let us spread."
Zeeleepull looked like he was going to argue some more, but I put my finger to his snout and shushed him. I didn’t want him raising a ruckus in front of the police; the cops already thought Mandasars were whiny troublemakers, and we didn’t want to show them they were right.
"Trust me," Festina told Zeeleepull in a low voice, "the League doesn’t give a damn if lesser species kidnap, brainwash, and enslave each other. The upper echelons of the League are too lofty, and too damned alien in their thought patterns, to care about such minor mischief. But murder is something different. Deliberately killing a sentient being automatically brands you as non-sentient… and if a government is negligent in controlling dangerous non-sentient creatures, the government gets declared non-sentient too."
She waved her hands toward the police, dutifully picking up bloody flechettes from the dirt. "The Celestian authorities might have looked the other way when recruiters just took slaves, but no government can ignore intentional homicide. The League won’t let them. If the police don’t make a sincere effort to catch that glass-chest guy, all of Celestia may be declared non-sentient… which means no traffic in or out till the civil system is cleaned up. And I’m not talking about a pissy little blockade by the Outward Fleet, where ships are simply impounded; this will be the League flexing its muscles, killing whole crews till everyone gets the message."
I nodded. "The way they killed everyone on Willow."
"They did what?" Festina said, spinning to face me. "Something happened to Willow?"
She made me tell the story, all of it: the party and the queen and the nanites and the black ship… even how the woman in admiral costume died kissing me. Now that the cops had lit up the clearing, I could see the real Admiral Ramos didn’t look much like the Willow woman; it was only the dark that made me think I was seeing a ghost. Still, I got plenty embarrassed talking about that kiss to the admiral’s face — as if I were one of those folks who use VR to do dirty stuff with famous people. I kept stammering and apologizing, saying the kiss hadn’t been my idea but the woman was so sad and desperate…
The admiral stopped me: lifted her hand and patted me on the cheek. "It’s all right, Edward — really it is. If I’d been in your position, I probably would have kissed her too." She smiled. "Besides, with a sweet handsome face like yours, people must be dying to kiss you all the time."
Um. I decided that last bit was a joke.
Just as I was finishing my story, I heard a whoosh coming up behind me. I spun around fast, thinking it might be the Larry back for another run… and Festina spun tight in unison with me, her fists up in guard position. Even Zeeleepull clicked his pincers to the ready, all three of us jumping like we’d heard a ghost.
Which made it embarrassing when the noise turned out to be a lady in a wheelchair.
Of course, regular wheelchairs don’t go whoosh; but this one had a tiny skimmer engine under the seat, strong enough to lift it to knee height off the ground so it could fly over sticks and tangles. The chair traveled slowly, half as fast as a baby’s crawl, keeping straight and upright so the passenger wouldn’t get jostled… but as stately as a bride inching down the aisle, the wheelchair-woman drifted up the hillside toward us.
Because of the shadows under the trees, I couldn’t see the woman clearly… except for her legs. They glowed dim red, like embers in a campfire: one leg shone all the way to the hip, the other from her toes to the knee. The glow had a fuzzy look to it; as she got closer I realized she had luminescent moss slathered thick as carpet on her skin.
Was that the fashion now, wearing patches of scarlet mold from ankle to thigh? Or could it be some medical treatment? The woman was in a wheelchair; maybe the moss was a sort of medicine, a nanotech foam working to repair whatever damage kept her from walking.
You never know what crazy stuff doctors will come up with.
The woman floated into the spill from the floodlights, but I still couldn’t see her face; it was hidden behind streamers of long straight hair, like maybe she was so ugly she didn’t want to be looked at. The hair itself wasn’t ugly at all — jet-black threaded through with silver, that gorgeously dignified effect you see with some folks as they start to turn gray. The woman’s clothes were black mixed with silver too… skintight and seamless, as if someone had
sprayed coal-pitch ink over her whole body from the throat down: over her hands and fingers, over her arms, her chest, her stomach, right to the very edge of the glowing red moss. Then, while all that ink was still wet, bits of silver glitter had been sprinkled everywhere so she’d glint in the starlight.
Probably her clothes weren’t fabric at all… just a sweat sheen of nano paint, programmed to cling snugly to her body. (Also to lift what needed lifting, corset what needed corseting, and so on — my dad always wore tuck-and-tidy nano under his clothes to make himself look trim and muscular. This woman did the same, but without the clothes on top.)
"Gentlemen," Festina said softly to Zeeleepull and me, "this is Kaisho… who supposedly works for me as an informant, but is piss-poor at remembering who signs her paycheck." The admiral had lowered her fists, but her jaw was still clenched tight. "Are you out of your mind?" she asked the wheelchair-woman. "Didn’t I give you a direct order to stay someplace safe?"
"Dear simple Festina," Kaisho answered in a whisper, "we don’t do orders anymore. It’s not in the Balrog nature. We had a feeling you were heading for trouble…"
"You had a feeling, but you didn’t tell me?"
"One must never speak of feelings until they come true. The Mother of Time will pull out your tongue."
Zeeleepull nudged me. "Mad crazy hume," he muttered, in a voice he probably thought was too soft for the woman to hear.
"Wrong on all counts, young warrior," Kaisho said. "Not mad, not crazy, not hume. Very much not hume." I could see a brief smile flash under the cover of her long long hair: the whiteness of teeth in the darkness, disappearing quickly. Then she shook her head so the hair fell in and hid even more of her face — both eyes concealed completely, nothing more than a thin open strip down the middle, showing her nose and a tiny peek of lips. She probably couldn’t see much; I got the feeling she didn’t have to.
"Kaisho has an unusual condition," Festina murmured to Zeeleepull and me. "Twenty-five years ago, when she was an Explorer, she, uhh, had the honor to be chosen as the host for an advanced lifeform."
"To be precise," the woman said in her whispery voice, "I stepped on something I shouldn’t have. Simple red moss. Which immediately corroded through the soles of my boots and implanted itself in both feet." Her smile flashed again. "I have since christened it the Balrog — a creature of glowing flame that has locked me in its grapple. Which is to say, it’s slowly eating me."
I gulped hard. "Can’t doctors do anything?"
"No," Festina replied. "Detaching the Balrog would kill it. That’s not allowed because… well, the moss is sentient. Several rungs up the evolutionary ladder from both humans and Mandasars. Grossly intelligent… marginally telepathic and telekinetic… possibly precognitive…"
"Oh no," Kaisho whispered, "we avoid peering directly under Mother Time’s skirts. But compared to your species, we are more astute at guessing where things will lead."
I stared at her… which means I stared at the thick black hair covering her face. Was there moss on her face too: thick clots of red, fuzzed all over her cheeks… her forehead… her eyes? Was that why she used her hair as a veil? And was her voice stuck in that soft whisper because she had moss on her vocal cords, a layer of glowing red velvet coating all down her throat? I wanted to ask, but was afraid the answer would turn my stomach. Instead, I said, "How can this moss stuff be sentient if it’s eating you? Sentient beings don’t hurt other people."
"Sentient beings don’t murder other people," Kaisho corrected, "and the Balrog takes care not to threaten my life. At its current rate of digestion, I will happily live my allotted span… which alas is only another eighteen years, twenty-three days, six hours, and forty-two minutes. I have an untreatable liver condition. Or I will have by then. Or you could say I’ve been sick since the moment of my conception, and it will just take a hundred and thirty years for the disease to get down to business."
"You know that for sure?" I asked.
"The Balrog knows," Kaisho told me, "and therefore I do too."
"Stupid hume," Zeeleepull muttered, "believing true a parasite."
"Other people have parasites," Kaisho answered. "I have a highly beneficial symbiont." She chuckled softly. "Or rather, we have each other. We are now a human-Balrog synthesis. Not completely integrated yet, but we’re gradually coming to… a meeting of the minds."
"Eating you," Zeeleepull growled, "and corrupting your brain."
"Say rather, improving my brain."
Zeeleepull gave a dismissive sniff. "Heard I the same tale from recruiters: Smarter you happy when we get done."
Kaisho shrugged. "I recognize the parallels. If you’d asked me, ‘Would you like to have your mind and body mutated by an alien organism for its own secret ends, while it slowly consumes your flesh?’ — well, tempting though the offer sounds, I once might have said no. Now, it’s what I am. My identity, even if I never asked for it."
"Stupid identity then," Zeeleepull muttered.
"Are you any different?" Kaisho asked. "You think your brain is fine; but I’ve talked to warriors living in single-caste barracks, and they’re convinced you’re the one who’s been brainwashed. They like having hair-trigger tempers; they appreciate the simplicity of always following orders, without suffering pangs of conscience; and they claim you’ve been brainwashed by an unnatural human-biased upbringing that’s kept you a self-centered little boy instead of an honest-to-God warrior. You, naturally, disagree. Your current identity is precious to you, and you’ll fight any son-of-a-bitch recruiters who try to make you change.
"And what about you, dear Festina?" Kaisho said, turning to the admiral. "You’ve made no secret how much you despise the Admiralty: how they prevented you from leading a normal life and forced you into the Explorer Corps. You were methodically indoctrinated by behavior-mod programming into the permanent paranoia required for xeno-exploration… yet knowing all this, you’re still profoundly proud to be an Explorer. Isn’t that odd? When you were a girl, I’m sure you were furious at the people who were taking away your choices — I know I was — but now that you are an Explorer, it’s the very heart of your identity. You never wanted to be this, and now you can’t imagine being anything else. Just like me."
Festina turned slightly so her face was out of the light. Even Zeeleepull was sensitive enough not to stare at Festina while she… I don’t know, I wasn’t looking either, whether she was crying or angry or wistful or what. The silence got strained real fast, and Zeeleepull leapt in to break it. "Teelu then?" he growled, glaring at Kaisho. "Is just fine, Teelu. No brainwash him, no question his mind."
Kaisho turned to me. "What about it, Teelu?" she asked in a teasing whisper. "No one ever tampered with your head? You got to choose what you are, without anyone forcing an identity down your throat?"
Her hair hid her face, but I could imagine her eyes glittering — as if she’d just told a joke that only the two of us got, and only she found funny. Did she know I was a gene-engineering mistake with mixed-up chemicals in my brain? Could she read my mind and see my past? Or maybe, was the precognitive part of her seeing my future?
Kaisho’s lips opened, and for a second I got the feeling she was going to answer the questions I hadn’t spoken. The dull red glow on her legs flared brighter, like a warning, and she closed her mouth again.
"What?" I asked.
Kaisho shook her head. "Mother Time says it isn’t my secret to tell."
No matter how much I asked her to say more, her mouth stayed shut in a mysterious little smile.
17
INVESTIGATING THE BANDOLIER
Kaisho soon got tired of being badgered for answers.
She pointedly turned her chair away from me and glided over to the admiral. "Festina dear," Kaisho said in her whisper, "if you’re finished your little cry…"
Festina lifted her head immediately, and it sure didn’t look like she’d been crying. "What do you want?" she said, all tightly controlled.
"Just
to tell you I noticed something back in the woods. Or perhaps the Balrog noticed it — it’s hard to tell where I stop and the Balrog begins. I’m not sure I remember what it’s like to see with ordinary eyes."
Zeeleepull squinched up his whiskers the way Mandasars do when something turns their stomachs. He was clearly squeamish about the Balrog-brainmeld thing… and I think Kaisho got a kick out of making him squirm.
Festina didn’t have an ounce of squirm in her. With a no-nonsense voice, she asked Kaisho, "What did you see?"
Kaisho gave a meaningful glance toward the police, still puttering nearby. "Maybe I’d just better show you."
After a moment, Festina nodded. "All right. Lead on."
The police paid no attention as we headed off through the trees. Maybe they were happy to get rid of us: easier for them to get their work done without noncop observers.
Kaisho took the lead, her chair moving slow as molasses. I found myself looking down at her glowing legs, all limp and useless under that moss. Were they moss clear through? Was that how the Balrog ate her, replacing human muscle and bone with its own fuzzy self? Or was the moss just a coating and there was still a woman underneath, maybe all paralyzed and sucked dry of nutrients, but recognizable as flesh and blood no matter how withered? I imagined putting my fingertips against her glowing thigh and pushing down, my nails squishing through the damp fuzz, deeper and deeper till they touched raw bone… or maybe going all the way through to the leather seat of the chair without touching anything solid…
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."
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