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.