Laid-back Ahmed cleared his throat and began to speak.

“Don’t bother,” Arkasha said, cutting him off brutally. “They don’t care about the truth. They only want to find a scapegoat. They’ll turn on you too if you try to stick up for me. I’ve seen it before.”

Arkasha stood up and began collecting his papers. No one spoke to him. No one met his eyes or even looked in his direction. As he left the room Arkady saw Bossy Bella and By-the-Book Ahmed exchange a glance of quiet satisfaction.

In the end Arkasha’s sacrifice didn’t make much difference. Laid-back Ahmed did his best to hold the line, but the final consensus was still for waking up the tacticals and sending the civilians back into orbit. The tacticals made contact just after local dawn the next day and hit their LZ by midafternoon. The first lander brought down only a single squad, running point for their fellows, but from the moment they arrived the base camp stopped being a research station and took on the unmistakable atmosphere of a military outpost.

To Arkady’s trembling relief, the tacticals paid no real attention to the survey team. They took it for granted that the Rostov A’s, no matter how adamantly they’d opposed the decision to wake them up, would now fall into line and do as they were told. And they were right, Arkady thought bitterly…though not bitterly enough to do anything about it.

He wasn’t sure when he began to realize that Arkasha wasgoing to do something.

There was no sudden, blinding revelation. Just a gradual surfacing of the idea that Arkasha was acting oddly…and that when you put all the little oddities together they made a disturbing pattern. By the afternoon of the tacticals’ second day on-planet, suspicion had given way to certainty and Arkady was secretly convinced that Arkasha had no intention whatsoever of leaving Novalis.

He went looking for him. He checked the orbsilk garden, thinking Arkasha might have gone there to check on poor Bella, but it was empty. He went to the bridge and found only By-the-Book Ahmed, busy and excited now that he had a war to run.

“Have you seen Arkasha?” he asked.

“Why? Is he off sulking somewhere? He’d better get over it in time to finish packing. We don’t have time for tantrums.”

“Do you know where your sib is?”

“No.”

“What about Be—”

“What?”

“Uh…nothing. Never mind. I’ll, uh, tell Arkasha to hurry up with the packing when I see him.”

He stepped off the bridge, waited until the door had fully closed behind him, and then let out the trembling breath he’d been holding.

Three people were missing, not one. Laid-back Ahmed and Shy Bella, who could be damn sure of landing on the euth ward if they ever made it home and the truth came out. And Arkasha, who had said he would die before he went through renorming again…and then taken the bullet for Ahmed in a quixotic attempt to keep the mission from falling apart.

Arkady hurried back to the lab, forcing himself to walk instead of run, freezing his face into an expression that he hoped didn’t reflect the rising panic inside him.

Arkasha’s work space was as gleamingly immaculate as ever. Not a notebook or a pencil or a slide plate out of place. Except for an all-but-imperceptible sag in the precisely arranged bookshelf that betrayed the hurried removal of several notebooks. Back in their quarters, a complete set of Arkasha’s clothes was missing as near as Arkady could make out…but there was no note there either. He wished he could check Ahmed’s and Bella’s personal things, but of course that was impossible.

There had to be a note, he told himself. They wouldn’t have left without giving him a chance to follow. Unless they hadn’t thought they could trust him. Or unless Arkasha had insisted on keeping him out of it. And of course Arkasha hadinsisted. Arkasha the reserved. Arkasha the cautious. Arkasha who would never risk dragging Arkady into danger—and who would never understand that Arkady would gladly have risked a stint on the euth ward for a last note from him.

He went back to the lab, forcing himself not to run down the corridor by an act of sheer will. But it was true. There really was no note. They were gone. And he would never know what decision he would have made, because he’d never have the chance to make it.

Then he looked over to his side of the lab and saw something that drove everything else from his mind.

He had forgotten to pack the arena where he’d been running his milling experiment. Worse, he’d forgotten to stop the experiment. It was still running, though the word runningcould only be applied to it with grisly irony. The pinwheel shape of the circular column remained. But the fleet-legged swarm of yesterday was now only a trail of crumpled corpses.

Arkady would never be able to explain what happened next, even to himself. He looked at the carnage in the arena. He looked at his field kit, lying forlornly in an open packing crate. He opened the rucksack and rummaged through it until he was sure that the first-aid gear and emergency rations were in their usual place. He told himself he was just going to stroll over to the airlock to see if he could see anything from there. No need to make his mind up about anything. And who cared if someone saw him? He had nothing to hide. But he noticed with a kind of bemused detachment that he rolled the kit up inside a clean lab coat before stepping into the corridor.

He could see nothing from the airlock, of course, only the impenetrable wall of the Big Wood. The air was heavy with some coming storm, and the cicadas were shrieking so wildly that he could hear them even through the lander’s sealed hull.

He wavered like a diver hanging over icy water. Then he hit the airlock, put his head down against the rising wind, and forged across the beaten ring of grass that separated the grounded ship from the forest. Ten strides took him under the shadow of the trees. Ten more strides and the wind had faded to the faint roar of surf on a distant reef.

He found Ahmed’s tracks first; Bella’s and Arkasha’s were fainter but still visible when you knew what you were looking for. When he was sure he had read them right he followed, erasing his own tracks as he went along and hoping against all reasonable hope that what little he knew of woodcraft was more than the tacticals knew.

PRINCIPLES OF THE SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEM

“So you mutinied,” li said when Gavi had gathered them all together and made Arkady repeat his story from beginning to end.

“You couldn’t even call it a mutiny, we were so incompetent. We never stood a chance against the tacticals. It’s a miracle we got out of there alive.”

“Oh,” Li murmured, “I doubt miracles had much to do with it.”

Osnat was staring at him, her expression intense but unreadable. Gavi, when Arkady dared to glance at him, was tracing the wood grain of the table with one long finger, up and down, over and over. The AI, in contrast, seemed so absent that if Arkady hadn’t known better he would have thought he was off-shunt.

Osnat was the first to break the silence. “What happened to Bella?” she asked.

Li stirred impatiently. “The more important question is why Arkady’s telling us this? What’s in it for him?”