I could smell the battle musk rising thick off his skin: Battle Musk C, the one that smells like strong sweet caramel. It meant he was scared and starting to lose his head. The scent glands for Musk C only kick in when a warrior is feeling desperate — a signal telling his comrades-in-arms he needs help, even if he’s too stubborn to admit it. Lucky for me, there weren’t other warriors around… and the Mandasars back at the dome, the workers and the gentle, would never dream of joining the fight. It would be a horrible insult to this warrior’s honor, the tiniest suggestion that he’d need help from other castes in dealing with an unarmed human.

After ten seconds of trying to toss me off, the warrior settled down a bit: either trying to think of new tactics, or just not keen on scrunching up his throat anymore. While he considered his next move, I left my one arm in place around his neck, but reached out with the other hand and wrapped it around the end of his snout.

A Mandasar’s muscles for opening his mouth aren’t very strong — if you hook your thumb on his nose spike and your fingers under his jaw, you can easily hold his mouth shut. Work it right, and you can even press your palm up against his nostrils. You never get a perfect seal, but he still has serious trouble taking in air… especially when he’s panting from trying to buck you off. It’s a good way to impress a sparring partner that you’re in control, but not so life-threatening that he thinks you want to smother him dead.

Another few seconds of that and the kid under me stopped struggling. He said something out the side of his mouth, but with his jaw held shut, the words were too muffled to understand. I loosened my grip and let him try again.

"Give," he said.

"What?" I asked, letting go completely.

"Give up." He shook his head and snorted to clear his nose. "I." He shook his head again, then sneezed full force, spraying out a hurricane of spit and mucus. "Surrender, I. Yield, I. Grovel I, you stinky hume."

The warrior flapped one of his Cheejreth arms across the tip of his snout, like wiping his nose on his sleeve. "No fight wanted I but all, save you with nonwords made mock of me." He swung his head around till he could glare me full in the face with his beady black eyes. "What in hot hell means Naizo?"

10

SMELLING SOMETHING AWFUL

I slid off the warrior’s back, making sure to keep clear of his pincers. He didn’t even look in my direction — too busy cleaning his nose with his hands, fussing and blowing and sniffling.

"Naizo is a short form," I said, then waited for him to finish an especially liquidish round of snorting. "It stands for Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo. Have you ever heard that?"

His whiskers gave an angry flick; for a second I thought he was going to attack. I hopped back fast into a defense position, but he contented himself with a bristly glare. "Contemptible your accent. Twist the words sideways, almost to mockery… yet choose I to think it is mere hume ignorance."

"How would you say it then?"

The warrior stared at me a second more, then intoned his own version of Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo. He recited it in a deep reverent voice, like he might be saying a prayer… but his pronunciation was halfway between gutterspeak and baby talk. A Mandasar from Troyen would break up laughing at the very sound; either that, or slap the boy on the nose.

"Um," I said. Which obviously wasn’t the worshipful praise the warrior expected, so I added, "Interesting. Very interesting."

I shouldn’t have been surprised at the warrior’s horrible accent. The Mandasar children had come to Celestia a whole twenty years ago; back then, this warrior must have been a mere hatchling… baby talk only. On the other hand, a baby wouldn’t know big formal sentences like Nai halabad tajjef su rellid puzo. The warrior must have learned that later on — either from an older Mandasar kid, or from a human who’d picked up the words but not how to pronounce them properly.

Why didn’t the warrior have a better teacher for his own language? I knew the answer, and it didn’t reflect too well on my own family. If you want the honest truth, the evacuation had been my father’s idea — his pet project, planned and executed by him from start to finish.

No one had even considered the possibility of getting the kids out till Dad suggested it to Sam. I actually read the message he sent from New Earth. Sam was supposed to take credit for the notion, so she could win brownie points with grateful parents on Troyen… but it was Dad who organized the big navy airlift to ferry youngsters to the nearest safe planet.

"Just a temporary thing," Sam told me. I was sick in the palace infirmary by then, with a big isolation room all to myself. Humans weren’t supposed to visit unless they wore rubbery orange isolation suits, but Sam never followed the rules. She’d handpicked my doctors and nurses; they let her do whatever she wanted, almost as if she were an honorary queen. So she held my hand like she couldn’t possibly catch Coughing Jaundice herself, and she said, "The evacuation is only for a few weeks. Till I get the situation here back under control. Dad made a lot of important friends when he was a bright young diplomat on Troyen; now he’s keen to keep them happy. If a few Mandasar nobles want to send their kids to safety, Dad’s glad to arrange it."

Don’t ask me how helping a few friends turned into the full-scale removal of ten million young Mandasars; but things have a way of snowballing. When word gets out rich and powerful people want their kids offplanet, folks who aren’t so well heeled start clamoring for the same thing. Dad refused to take any adults — just a bare minimum of Mandasar nursemaids — but he found a place for every child who was brought to the transport depots.

When anyone asked who’d look after the kids, Dad promised he was sending "trained caregivers" to Celestia. "What a scam!" my sister had said, rolling her eyes. "People on Celestia will never know what hit them. The thing is, Edward, Celestia is an independent world sitting right in the path of Technocracy expansion. They’re undeveloped and underpopulated, not to mention their environment is nicely compatible with Terran life. Everyone knows the planet is a juicy prize the Technocracy wants to scoop up… and the Celestian government is sweating its tits off, trying to attract nonhuman immigrants to fill up all that inviting empty space."

Sam laughed. "At this very second, folks on Celestia are congratulating themselves how lucky they are to get ten million Mandasars. Warm bodies to add to the census so they can tell the Technocracy, ‘Hey, you can’t take us over, we’ve got a thriving population here.’ What the Celestians don’t understand is that the ten million kids are going to get twenty million humans to take care of them… courtesy of the High Council of Admirals. Celestia will find itself inundated with Homo sap guardians, and if anyone complains to the League, we’ll say we’re only acting from compassion for the poor wee lobsters."

"But," I said, "if the kids are only going to Celestia for a few weeks…"

"When the kids go home," Sam replied, "the baby-sitters will stay. What can Celestia do? It’s one thing to run off a few dozen squatters… but not twenty million. Especially not twenty million cranky pioneers who’ve been waiting impatiently for land of their own. This time next week, Celestia will be a de facto human settlement, answering only to Alexander York, Admiral of the Gold. Colonization by fait accompli."

So the people supposed to tend the kids weren’t trained caregivers at all; they were a bunch of get-rich-quickers who’d been waiting for colony homes to open up anywhere in frontier space. I guess they had visions of marching down to Celestia and owning the place within a year, while the current nonhuman inhabitants got shunted into reservations and scut jobs. Most of the would-be land-grabbers had no idea how hard they’d have to work to establish any kind of homestead… and they definitely didn’t have a clue how to raise Mandasar hatchlings.