It was true. His had disappeared during the emergency evac explosion; mine had been torn away during the Balrog’s departure.

"Gotta cut off your feet," Tut said again.

I took a step back from him. "It won’t help."

"It might. You never know."

I backed another step. "I’ll bleed to death."

He gave me a withering look. "Think I don’t know about tourniquets? And I ran past a hospital on my way in. Less than five minutes away. No problem."

"Then get me to the hospital, Tut." Another step back. "Don’t cut off my feet right here."

"Time’s a-wasting. And I gotta ask why you’re fighting me on this. Maybe that Balrog is twisting your mind."

"If it’s in my mind already, there’s no point cutting off my feet."

"If it’s in your mind already and it’s so insistent on leaving your feet alone, amputation sounds like a real good idea. Anything the Balrog doesn’t want, that’s what I should be doing."

"Please, Tut." I felt tears in my eyes. "I won’t be myself much longer. Don’t take my feet. I’ll lose them soon enough. Please, Tut. Let me stay me as long as I can."

He didn’t answer — just rolled across the roof and grabbed another piece of equipment that had fallen from my suit. The holster holding my stun-pistol. I turned to run; the pistol whirred as he shot me in the back.

I dropped, with muscles like water. But I didn’t black out — just went limp and powerless. That shouldn’t be, I thought. Shot at close range with a stunner: I should have gone completely unconscious. How could I still be awake? Unless… oh.

The Balrog was inside me. And navy records said the Balrog was immune to stun-fire. The spores in my nervous system must have given me enough stun-resistance to stay conscious, but not enough to fight back as Tut scurried forward with the scalpel.

"Maybe I’d better take more than your feet," he said. "Cut you off at the knees. Or maybe the hip. Just to be safe." He patted my cheek. The bad one. The oozing one. Idly, he wiped his hand off on my chemise. "You’ll look pretty with artificial legs, Mom. I bet you can get gold ones."

He lifted the hem of my chemise, spread my legs, and put the scalpel to my thigh. I thought of how I’d once been a dancer… how I hadn’t been practicing enough recently… how I’d let the feel of movement slip away. Now I’d never get it back.

The blade was so sharp, I barely felt Tut slice in. What I did feel was the warm gush of blood running down my flesh.

Then something went WHIR. The sound of another stun-shot. And Tut toppled forward, landing unconscious on my blood-slick leg.

Still paralyzed, I couldn’t turn my head to see what was happening. I could only watch as a human hand reached down and rolled Tut off me. A stun-pistol whirred again, making sure he was out cold.

More sounds of movement outside my line of sight. A fat white bandage appeared and pressed hard against the scalpel cut in my leg. "Not too bad," a woman’s voice said. I could see her hand and her sleeve. She wore an Outward Fleet uniform. Admiral’s gray.

Fingers on my chin turned my head toward her. She had a strong face, piercing green eyes, and a furious purple birthmark splashed across her right cheek. The dark of it against her light skin was like a photographic negative of my own white-on-dark disfiguration.

Ah, I thought. The other human my Bumbler detected. Not an ambitious bureaucrat from the embassy, but the most famous admiral in our navy. Festina Ramos.

I had a terrible suspicion the Balrog had done all this to bring the two of us together.

CHAPTER 4

Karma [Sanskrit]: The consequences of one’s previous actions.

Ramos got surgical glue from the first-aid kit and carefully closed my wound. As she worked, I tried to guess what she was doing here. By "here," I didn’t mean the top of the ziggurat — if Festina Ramos had been anywhere on Cashleen, she’d hurry to Zoonau as soon as she heard of the Balrog’s attack. She would then search the city for the point of maximum chaos and inevitably find her way to Tut’s pulpit. Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos was the navy’s official troubleshooter-at-large. Her job and her instincts would have brought her unfailingly to the heart of the furor.

But what was she doing on Cashleen at all? What was important enough to bring her when she could have been the darling of New Earth?

Two years earlier, she’d driven the navy’s High Council of Admirals into meltdown by presenting evidence of their massive corruption and wrongdoing. Felony charges against council members still had to work through the courts, but that was just a formality. The important trial had been held in the news media, and the verdict was unequivocal: guilty as charged.

The entire High Council had resigned in disgrace. Even rank-and-file admirals who weren’t on the council fell prey to suspicion… except, of course, Ramos herself. She became so popular, newswires willingly printed her picture — usually with the birthmark lightened to soft mauve, but sometimes (when an article wanted to depict her as an implacable force for justice) with the birthmark left dark and foreboding.

Ramos had dominated the news for a month. During that time, she met with almost every politician on New Earth, plus many more who flew in from other planets just to grab a photo op. Those of us at the Explorer Academy believed that Ramos would be named president of the new High Council; she was the only admiral who still held the public’s confidence. Rumor said the civilian government wanted to announce a complete slate of High Admirals all at once, and needed time to make sure none of the new appointees had been involved in the old council’s crimes… but as soon as the background checks were complete, Festina Ramos would surely become the navy’s admiral-in-chief.

Then Ramos disappeared. No word where she was going — just a brief interview with a third-string reporter who happened to be hanging around New Earth’s main spaceport. Ramos said duty called her elsewhere, and she might not be back for some time. "Best wishes to the new High Council, may they serve with honor, I trust they’ll receive everyone’s full support, gotta go now, bye." Or words to that effect.

With that, Festina Ramos swept off the public stage like a tired ballerina who wants to get away before someone calls, "Encore!"

Navy gossip occasionally reported Ramos sightings around the galaxy — a day on Troyen with Queen Innocence… four days on Celestia with Lord Protector York and his Mandasar wife… three weeks in seclusion on Demoth with some junior proctor of the Vigil… rumors of surprise visits to archaeological digs, disease research centers, and the YouthBoost vats on Sitz — but Ramos avoided the media, never gave public statements, and kept on the move. By the time word leaked out where she’d been, she was already someplace else.

Her behavior provoked countless theories. For example, some suggested that during her investigations into the High Council, she’d discovered something she hadn’t made public: a threat much worse than the crimes she’d revealed, and now she was racing from planet to planet, trying to end the danger before disaster struck. A number of my fellow Explorers, however, were sure she was the victim of "pretty people politics" — the top echelons of the Technocracy couldn’t stomach a disfigured purple-cheeked woman taking command of the fleet, so they sent her on meaningless errands to remove her from the spotlight. Personally, I wondered if she’d just got fed up with the politicians, the media, and all the other talk-talk-talk. If she’d really been offered the highest post in the navy, she might have turned it down as more trouble than it was worth. Then she’d happily fled the public eye and was now on extended vacation, going wherever she liked… perhaps helping out here and there, but certainly not battling galactic-scale dangers.