The sunburned forehead wrinkled in bemusement, and she cocked her head again to get a better look at him. “Well! That’s sure as fuck the first time I’ve ever been called gracious!”

Carefully, trying not to be too obvious about it, Arkady looked in the direction he thought she’d been pointing.

A house—or rather, a nonhouse—just like the others along the street. He went into it. Osnat followed him.

Inside, in the dark, she prowled around him like a cat. She was in a hurry, he realized. And she was trembling with nerves or fear—a thing that scared him as much as anything in the past weeks had scared him.

“Did you mean what you said the other day about being willing to stick your neck out to save this friend of yours?”

“Yes.” Arkady had to crane his neck to keep track of her.

She prowled back toward the door, and reached a hand up to twitch away the curtain. “Are you sure? You’d better be sure. Because I’m about to throw out a lifeline. And if I throw it to the wrong person, we’re both going to get our teeth kicked in.”

Why did Arkady suddenly have the uncomfortable feeling that he’d just, for the first time in his life, heard the phrase “get our teeth kicked in” used as a euphemism?

“What—who are you going to go to?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t want to know. I’m just going to send up a flare and whoever shows up shows up. But you’d better be damned sure, Arkady. You can’t put the bullet back in the gun once you’ve pulled the trigger.”

“I’m sure.”

“And you’d better be able to keep your mouth shut until I tell you not to. I know you can do it. I watched you do it at GolaniTech. You willing to do it for me if I help you?”

“I’m willing to try.”

“Okay. Good enough.” The whisper of cloth on stone. Scuff of her boots in the dust. “You ever heard of the Mossad, Arkady?”

“Of course.”

“Moshe and I used to work for them.”

“But I thought—”

“They recruit out of the IDF. First pick of the litter, so to speak. We were both Sayeret Golani. Commandos. What you’d call tacticals. Didi Halevy tapped us after officers’ school.

“We went through training together. There were a hundred and thirty in our incoming class.” Pride sharpened her normally husky voice. “A hundred and thirty chosen out of over two thousand. And Didi Halevy told us”—her voice shifted into a schoolmasterish tone that Arkady assumed must be an imitation of Halevy’s voice—“We have no quotas. We take only those who we think can do the job. And if the best of you can’t do the job, then we won’t take any of you.” She looked at Arkady, dropping back into her own, rougher voice. “They took three out of our class, and even after that we had two years of training, living in one room, eating reheated garbage, only getting to visit our families twice a year. Me, Moshe…and a boy named Gur who you never met and never will because Gavi Shehadeh got him killed.”

“Is that why you’re so loyal to Moshe?”

“You think it’s a bad reason?” She coughed, took a step toward the door, turned around again, cleared her throat. “Anyway. I went back to my home unit after Tel Aviv. And then when it was time to re-up, I signed on with GolaniTech instead. Which hasn’t exactly been…well, never mind what it has or hasn’t been. I chose it, and I’m not going to whine about it. The point is, someone I know from King Saul Boulevard came to me a few months ago and asked me to keep my eyes open and, uh…let him know if I saw anything fishy going on at GolaniTech. I thought it was crazy. Reamed the guy out, actually. Told him Moshe wouldn’t be messed up in anything like that and he’d better tell the eighth floor to mind their own fucking business and clean up their own house.” She licked her lips. “Then you showed up.”

“Why are you telling me this, Osnat?”

“Remember what you told me about wanting to help your friend? I’m putting it to the test. Basically I’m handing you a loaded gun. If you want to pull the trigger on it, I’m dead. If you don’t pull the trigger…then I’ll do my best to help you. And your friend.”

“What changed your mind?” Arkady asked. “Was it something I said to Turner?”

Osnat turned back to face him, a stark silhouette against the backdrop of silver clouds, dust-gray desert. “You know damn well what it was.”

He shook his head no.

“Bella. Bella and her so-called sickness. That’s not a genetic weapon, Arkady. That’s Armageddon. And if Moshe were really working in Israel’s best interests, he would have sent you back to Korchow in a body bag the second he figured out what you were selling.”

“Outside!” Aurelia panted. “Now! H urry!”

Arkady and Arkasha stared, bewildered. But by the time Arkady thought to ask what was happening she was already several doors down, repeating the message. And already someone else was pounding on the hab module’s metal walls, hammering out the panicked signal that means only two things to a spacer: decompression or fire.

Arkady left the lab at a dead run with Arkasha close behind him. The last thing he remembered hearing as he left was the brittle crack of Arkasha’s dropped pencil shattering on the floor.

Aurelia dashed through the airlock ahead of them without pausing to let it cycle. So much for the last shreds of the theoretical quarantine.

The rest of the team was clustered on the open slope below the hab module, staring skyward, hands shielding their eyes or held over mouths dropped open in slack-jawed amazement.

“There,” Aurelia urged. “Look!”

It took Arkady a long, stunned moment to understand what he was looking at. Then he realized that the trailing mare’s tail of high cumulus streaming across the sky from horizon to horizon was no cloud at all.

It was a contrail.

“That’s not—” Arkasha began.

“No,” Laid-back Ahmed said. “It’s not ours. The sound’s all wrong. It must be one of the new drives UNSec hasn’t cleared for civilian use.”

“Shouldn’t we have seen them coming in-system?”

“Yes.” There was an edge to Ahmed’s voice that Arkady had never heard there before.

“Unless they were hiding behind the planet,” By-the-Book Ahmed pointed out ominously.

“But wouldn’t they have to know where we were to do that?” Aurelia asked.

“Yes. And where all our mapping satellites are as well.”

“Then…”

Aurelia’s voice trailed off into the general silence just as Arkady came to the realization that however frightening it had been to be alone on Novalis with help four months away, it was many times more frightening to be sharing the planet with a contingent of Peacekeepers.

Arkady remembered the next ten days of the mission as one long continuous slow-motion avalanche of panic.

Bella’s sickness spread through the crew with the ponderous inevitability of an avalanche gathering breadth and power as it flows down a mountainside. First the Ahmeds fell sick. Then both Banerjees and both the Aurelias went down in a single miserable day. Aurelia was unable, even after the most frantic efforts, to isolate the pathogen responsible for the sickness. And meanwhile, a new fight was splintering the crew into ever more violently opposed factions: the fight over whether the undiagnosable sickness and the inexplicable contrail were caused by a single common enemy.