Kaisho wanted to go too. "Why?" Festina asked.

"You’ll see," Kaisho told her.

"Come on, Kaish," Festina said, "cut the inscrutable-alien crap. Either give me a straight answer or stay on Jacaranda."

"Sorry," Kaisho replied, "but the Balrog loves watching lesser beings get smacked in the face with surprises. Just between you and me, the damned moss really gets off on human astonishment."

"Shit," Festina growled. "Just once I’d like to meet an alien who enjoyed giving clear explanations of what the fuck is going on."

We didn’t wear tightsuits this trip; apparently Fasskisters found the suits grossly offensive, though they never said why. With any group of aliens, there’s always some area where they just mutter, "Can’t you see it’s indecent?" and refuse to go into details. Anyway, the dock hatch reported good air on the orbital’s interior, and we didn’t have time to get dressed up. There could still be nasty germs wafting about… but if the Fasskisters ever wanted to regain their claim to sentience, they’d make sure we weren’t exposed to anything that could hurt us.

"All right," Festina said, as we hovered weightless in front of the dock’s airlock. "In we go."

She pressed the button to open the door. One by one, we passed over the threshold; and immediately gravity clicked in, twisting around so that the outside of the cylinder was down. If I’d been taken by surprise, I might have fallen right back out into the docking tube… but lucky for me, Festina went first and I could watch how she grabbed the support bars just inside the door.

I got in without too much trouble, followed by Tobit and Bade. All three of the others tapped their throats as soon as they were inside, activating the radio transceivers implanted in their necks. It made me feel a bit bad, to be an Explorer without a throat implant… but then, I wasn’t a real Explorer, was I? Meanwhile, they did the usual, "Testing, testing," and Lieutenant Harque back on Jacaranda answered, "Receiving loud and clear." Marque’s voice came in on receivers we’d clipped to our belts. The receivers could also transmit if you pushed the right button, but there was no need for that if you had a throat implant.

Festina worked the airlock while the rest of us stood back trying not to look nervous. The far door of the lock had a tiny peekaboo screen that wasn’t working — either the Fasskisters had deliberately blinded the cameras, or the system had broken down sometime in the past twenty years and nobody bothered to fix it. From my days on the moonbase, I knew the Fasskisters only got supply ships once every three years… so maybe they didn’t care a whole lot if the dock-area cameras went out.

"Are we set?" Festina asked, just before she pushed the button to open the inner door.

Dade tried to draw his stunner, but Tobit slapped the boy’s wrist. It was pretty unfriendly to be carrying guns at all; having them drawn and ready was going too far.

The door whisked open. A second later, the smell of buttered toast filled my nostrils. In front of us, a ramp led up at an easy slope; and the ramp was covered with glowing red moss.

31

GETTING TO KNOW THE FASSKISTERS

"Kaisho!" Festina roared.

Laughter came over our receivers. "A problem, Festina?"

"You knew about this!"

"Of course."

"And you didn’t tell us."

"As I said," Kaisho answered, "the Balrog adores surprises. The nice thing about precognition is knowing when someone else will step on a banana peel."

"We’re not going to step on anything," Festina growled. The four of us stared at the ramp again. It was completely crammed with moss, at least ankle deep, starting a few paces beyond the airlock door. No way we could go forward without getting it all over our boots, unless we could crawl across the walls like bugs.

Kaisho spoke again from our receivers. "If you like, I can ferry you over in my hoverchair."

"No," Festina told her. "I don’t want you anywhere near us. You’re hard to trust at the best of times, and recently you’ve been a real pain in the ass."

"Then what are you going to do?" Kaisho asked, a bit smugly. "Um," I said. "Give me a second."

In my mind, I tried to imagine a stench that would make moss wither… like really bad breath, something that could knock you straight off your feet, except that it’d only work on Balrogs. The Balrog could obviously smell stuff humans couldn’t, like royal pheromone; so maybe I could produce a stink so powerfully awful to Balrog senses, the moss would kind of shrivel. Not die — I didn’t want it to die. I just wanted to turn its stomach. If I started with its own buttered-toast scent and pictured the toast going all green and moldy…

"Teelu," Kaisho said sharply. Talking out loud, not whispering. "Stop it!"

"Stop what?" I asked, trying to sound innocent.

"You know what," Kaisho snapped, "but you don’t know what you’re doing. Given time, you might find something that would cause serious harm."

"What’s she talking about?" Festina asked me.

"Teelu and I are playing a little game," Kaisho answered, "and he doesn’t understand his own strength. Biochemicals can be more than smells, Your Majesty — one species’ pheromone is another species’ poison. If you muck about too much, you might hurt someone… and it could be humans just as easily as Balrogs."

"What?" Festina demanded. She stared straight at me. "What are you doing?"

"His own form of diplomacy," Kaisho said. "Talk softly and carry a big stink."

Festina looked like she wanted more answers; but at that moment, the moss in front of us simply rolled aside. A parting of the glowing red sea. The spores in the center of the ramp slid right or left, till they left a clear walkway up the middle-bare concrete floor, walled on either side by heaps of glowering fuzz. The buttered-toast smell turned a bit edgy… as if even a higher lifeform could get ticked off.

"Did you do that?" Festina asked me. I shook my head as Kaisho answered, "I did. Or rather, the Balrog did it at my request. Go ahead — the moss will leave you alone. I promise."

"She promises," Tobit muttered. "That fills me with loads of confidence."

"You two stay here," Festina told Tobit and Dade. "Edward and I will go in. If anything happens to us — like we get our toes bitten by spores — arrest that bitch for assaulting an admiral. Even if the Balrog is sentient, I have faith the High Council can devise an appropriately unattractive punishment." She lifted her hand to her throat implant. "You heard that, Kaisho?"

"You lesser species can be so suspicious. I said the Balrog would leave you alone, and it will. It won’t try to touch you as long as you’re on this orbital."

"Great," Festina muttered. "That sounds like those promises the gods always gave in Greek myths — loaded statements with nasty loopholes. But," she continued, staring at the open path through the moss, "I would dearly like to ask a Fasskister what the hell happened here."

She looked at me, as if I had some kind of deciding vote. I thought of what Captain Prope would say if we came running back at the first sign of trouble… not that I cared about my own reputation, but I didn’t want Festina to look bad. "Let’s go," I said.

So we did.

The ramp led to another hatch that should have been closed but wasn’t — it had jammed partway open, leaving a gap in the middle. Our path through the moss led right up to the gap and beyond.

"Looks like the Balrog has fouled up the gears," Festina said, examining the hatch.

"Do doors have gears?" I asked.

"Don’t go literal on me," she answered.

We squeezed through the gap and into a world glowing crimson. At one time, this must have been a pretty standard orbital — forty square kilometers of land on the cylinder’s inner surface, a lot of it dedicated to parks and agriculture. Orbitals always go heavy on the fields and forests, so people don’t fixate on being closed in; even if you can see the other side of the cylinder overhead, it’s not so bad if you’re surrounded by trees and grass.