If you ask me, Mouth and Muscle had crossed the line as soon as they decided to strip-mine my brain; but I knew the League of Peoples didn’t see it that way. If the dipshits (good name) sincerely made their best efforts not to kill me, the League wouldn’t raise a stink if I happened to die anyway… or if I ended up a pith-headed vegetable. After all, the League let the Vigil plant a link-seed in my skull, despite the chance of stir-frying my cerebellum. In the College Vigilant, one professor told us, The League doesn’t mind if you risk other people’s lives, as long as you honestly believe there’s some chance for survival… and as long as you take the best precautions you know of. The League’s definition of sentience doesn’t require us to be intelligent, humane or non-exploitive; we just have to be careful.

And some folks still call the League "benevolent."

Ramos lugged me out the door into a room filled with humming cabinets of the electronic persuasion — probably equipment for jamming my link-seed connection, plus hologram projectors and who knows what else. One black box looks precious like another, especially when you’re hanging upside down over somebody’s shoulder. Anyway, I was mostly paying attention to a growing queasiness in my stomach: my nervous system was still too jangly to provide accurate feedback, but I could feel the grumbly-rumblies where Ramos’s shoulder dug into my gut.

Not good. I’d never bothered with la-di-dah manners, but it wouldn’t do to puke down an admiral’s leg.

We passed through another doorway into a room with wall-to-wall picture-carpet: currently showing a velveteen view of Demoth from orbit, half daylight, half night. As Ramos walked forward, her feet brushed over a moving image of ships docking at one of our space terminals. "This is a live broadcast," she said, tapping the picture with her toe. "The dipshits have their own sloop parked near your North Terminus. This is probably the view through the ship’s nose camera. Or should I say the boat’s nose camera? I take great pride in being the only admiral who doesn’t know the difference between a ship and a boat… and who doesn’t give a flying fuck either way. I wouldn’t even know it was a sloop if my crew hadn’t told me."

She stopped herself suddenly. "I hope you don’t mind me blathering like this — Explorers are trained to give running commentaries whenever we go on missions, and I still haven’t broken myself of the habit. If I weren’t making one-sided conversation with you, I’d probably be describing the furniture." Ramos lowered her voice to a dramatic near whisper. "We are moving through what seems to be an artificial chamber, surrounded by four-legged assemblages of unconfirmed purpose and origin… perhaps of religious significance." She gave a laugh and went back to her normal voice. "Or would you prefer I tell you about the dipshits?"

"Dipshits," I said. Which came out "ick-ick." Not a bad description for the Mouth and the Muscle when you think of it.

"Dipshits it is," Ramos said. "And I was talking about their sloop… which came to my attention as soon as I arrived at Demoth two hours ago. I was flying in my so-called ‘flagship’ — which has living quarters the size of a pup tent, and the surliest crew of Vac-heads in the entire fleet. The comm officer made some sulky remarks about a Diplomacy Corps ship lollygagging here, eighteen light-years from our nearest diplomatic mission… and I immediately suspected a team of bad-ass boys had come to town.

"To check things out," she continued, "I radioed the base commander in Snug Harbor. He couldn’t tell me anything about the dipshits; they’d never contacted him. But he did say how glad he was that an admiral had finally deigned to drop in — he thought I was following up his report about a mysterious Sperm-tail seen during an assassination attempt. As a new wrinkle, the intended victim of that attempt, one Faye Smallwood, had just been reported missing and the civilian authorities were going bugfuck." Ramos shifted my weight on her shoulder. "Basically, the commander gave me a crisp salute, said, ‘You’re in charge, Admiral,’ and declined all further responsibility."

Step by step we continued to cross the moving-picture carpet — Ramos’s feet scuffing past the blue rim of the planet and into starry blackness speckled with parked spaceships, then the brick orange expanse of the terminus itself. The resolution of the rug’s image was so finegrained I could see tiny dockworkers in tightsuits, skittering over the space station’s hull… as if I were looking down on everything from far above…

Ooo, Christ. Vertigo. Just what my stomach needed.

"So I concluded," Ramos went on obliviously, "that the dipshits from the sloop had been sent by the High Council to investigate this strange Sperm-tail. If the prime witness was missing, the dipshits had probably snatched her; precisely their style. So I asked myself where they’d take you. Most likely answer: an Admiralty safe house. The fleet owns property on every planet in the Technocracy, secret hideaways where admirals can entertain government officials or have sordid little trysts because they think that’s what powerful people do. I decided to pay a visit to the house nearest where you disappeared… and you can fill in the rest."

Abruptly, Ramos stopped and bent over to set my feet on the floor. My stomach lurched like a bucket, then settled. I felt a wall behind me; a moment later, I was leaning ass-against it, wondering when my knees would buckle. They didn’t. And after a while, I even felt the blood stop draining from my face.

Ramos watched a few seconds, then said, "See? You’re stronger already. Wait here while I scout ahead."

She disappeared through another doorway. Now that I was upright, now that I was merely nauseous rather than prevolcanic, I had a chance to survey the room; before, all I’d seen was carpet and chair legs. Expensive legs attached to expensive chairs. Every piece of furniture was made of Grade A smart-stone: cores of depleted uranium topped by a simulated marble foam of nanotech that molded itself snugly to the shape of your rump. Looked like solid rock, but felt like comfy cushions. Farcical when you thought about it. From your butt’s point of view, these were just cozy easy chairs… but built obscenely chunky and ponderous (depleted uranium, for Christ’s sake!), purely so guests knew you paid top dollar.

I glared at the chair nearest me — letting myself build up a snooty blue-collar resentment, mostly just to keep my mind off the continuing rockiness of my stomach — when suddenly I heard a whisper-faint yipping in my mind. Yes, yipping: like when you accidentally step on a beagle’s tail. Suddenly the whole surface of the chair cringed under my gaze… flattening out against the frame, cowering, nanites fleeing around to the chair’s underside, hiding there, even peeking fearfully out from the edges to see if I was going to come after them.

You could almost hear their worried little hearts going pit-a-pat.

"Sorry," I mumbled. "Didn’t mean to scare you." Jumbly-mumbly sounds coming out of my mouth, not words; but the nanites began to creep timidly back, slug-slow in case I’d glare at them again…

I shook my head hard, then shut my eyes. Faye, I silently told myself, nanites don’t have pit-a-pat hearts. They’re teeny soulless machines, the size and intelligence of bacteria. They may be programmed to make a plushy surface under someone’s butt, but they are definitely not programmed to act like whipped puppies just because you stared at them harsh.

Hesitantly, reluctantly, I opened my eyes. The chair was back to normal. Stony-surfaced. Stony-faced. And there was no yipping/whimpering to be heard.

Well, I thought, that sure took my mind off the queasy stomach.