“Neither did the Valers,” I said.

She gave me a sort of pitying look. Maybe with a trace of affection. “Okay,” I said, “Valers don’t need weapons.”

“The Geometers’ space suits are soft. Ours are hard. Just imagine.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’d almost rather not. But I can see how it would come out.”

“Suur Vay died. She took on five guys, one of whom happened to be carrying a plasma cutter. Uh, it’s a very unpleasant story. She and the five all ended up dead. But, largely because of her intervention, the other three Valers made it to that window.”

She paused for a moment, letting me absorb that. I had really hated Suur Vay when she had sewn me up after Mahsht, but when I remembered that picnic-table surgery now, it made me want to cry.

Once we’d given Suur Vay a decent moment of silence, Ala went on: “So, imagine this from the point of view of the big bosses inside the conference room. They see a large number of their people converted to floating corpses before their eyes. There’s nothing they can do about it. Fraa Osa trudges right up to the window and slaps on a shaped charge, right up against the glass. They’re not certain what it is. He makes a gesture. The World Burner explodes in three places: the primary detonator, the inertial guidance system, and the propellant tanks. There is a huge secondary detonation as the tanks rupture.”

“That we noticed.”

“Fraa Gratho is killed by a piece of flying debris.”

“Damn it!” My eyes were stinging. “He stood between me and a bullet…”

“I know,” she said softly.

After another silence, she went on, “So, the bosses now understand the nature of the object that’s been slapped on their window. They get the message and open an airlock. Esma comes inside. Osa stays where he is—he’s the gun to their heads. Esma stays in her suit. She herds all the Geometers she can find into the conference room, locks the door, welds it shut with Saunt Loy’s Powder. Now, Osa joins her, bringing the shaped charge with him. They lock the doors into the vertex, sealing it off from the rest of the Daban Urnud, and weld those too. They detonate the fourth charge in such a way that most of the vertex vents its atmosphere to space. Now it can’t be approached except by people in space suits. They hole up in one of the few rooms that still has an atmosphere. Their suits are out of air now, so they climb out of them, and suffer the usual symptoms.”

“What is up with that, by the way?”

She shrugged. “Hemoglobin is a classy molecule. Finely tuned to do what it does—take oxygen from the lungs and get it to every cell in the body. If you give it oxygen that is only a little bit different from what it’s used to, well, it still works—just not as well. It’s like being at high altitude. You get short of breath, woozy, can’t think straight.”

“Hallucinations?”

“Maybe. Why? Did you hallucinate?”

“Never mind…but wait a second, Jules can get along just fine on Arbre air.”

“You acclimatize. Your body responds by generating more red blood cells. After a week or two, you can handle it. So, as an example, some of the people who live on the Daban Urnud rarely leave their home orb. They have trouble going into common areas of the ship, where the air is a mixture. Others are used to it.”

“Like the Fthosian cosmographer who let us in the airlock at the observatory.”

“Exactly. When she saw you guys gasping for breath and starting to lose consciousness, she recognized what was going on. Sounded an alarm.”

“She did?” I said.

She gave me that pitying-but-affectionate look again. “What, you were hoping you’d managed to sneak aboard?”

“I, er, thought we had done exactly that!”

She grabbed my hand and kissed it. “I think your ego can be satisfied by what you did accomplish, which people are going to be celebrating for a long time.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling it was time to change the subject away from my ego. “She sounded an alarm.”

“Yes. Of course, there were lots of other alarms going off at the same time because of the Valers’ mayhem,” Ala said, “but some medics came to the observatory and found you unconscious, but alive. Fortunately for you, the physicians around here are used to dealing with such problems. They put you on oxygen, which seemed to help. But they had no way to be sure; they’d never treated Arbrans, they were worried you were going to suffer brain damage. Better safe than sorry. So they put you on ice in a hyperbaric chamber.”

“On ice?”

“Yeah. Literally. Dropped your body temperature to limit brain damage while oxygenating your blood as best they could with Laterran air. You’ve been unconscious for a week.”

“What about Osa and Esma, holed up in that vertex?”

She let a long moment pass before saying, “Well, Raz, they died. The Urnudans figured out where they were. Blew a hole in the wall. All the air escaped into space.”

I lay there for a minute.

“Well,” I finally said, “I guess they went out like real Valers.”

“Yes.”

I laughed in a not-funny way. “And—like a true non-Valer—I lived.”

“And I’m glad you did.” And here she started crying again. It wasn’t sadness over the dead Valers. Nor joy that the rest of us had lived. It was shame and hurt that she had sent us into a situation where we easily could have died; that the responsibilities placed on her shoulders, and the logic of the situation, had left her no alternative to the Terrible Decision. For the rest of her life—of our life, I hoped—she’d be waking up sweaty in the middle of the night over this. But it was a hurt she’d have to keep to herself, since most people she might share it with would not extend her much sympathy. “You sent your friends to do what!? While you sat on the ground, safe!?” So it was going to be a private thing between us, I knew, forever. I squirmed free and held her for a bit.

Once it felt right to go back to the story, I said, “How long did Osa and Esma remain locked up in that room before—before it happened?”

“Two days.”

“Two days!?”

“The Pedestal assumed that the place was booby-trapped, and/or that there might be other Valers lurking in it. But they had to do something, since the hostages were running out of air. It was either that, or watch their people die on the speely.”

“So they were scared to death.”

“Yes,” Ala said, “I think so. Maybe shocked is a better word. Because they had thought for a while that they had us locked down in Tredegarh, which they had infiltrated. Then you and your friends unmasked Jules Verne Durand, so they lost their eyes and ears on the ground. At the same moment, the Convox—and all of the other big concents—dispersed into the Antiswarm.”

“That was a great idea! Who dreamed that up?”

She blushed, and fought back a smile, but wasn’t happy with my turning the attention to her, so went on: “They are really afraid of the Thousanders—the Incanters—and must have noticed that all of the Millenarian maths had been emptied out. Where did all of those Thousanders go? What are they cooking up? Then, the two-hundred-missile launch. Very upsetting. A lot of data to process. Zillions of bogeys to track. They think they see a ship—it blows up—they think they’ve dodged a bullet. But a few days after that, out of nowhere, comes this horrifying and devastating attack on their biggest strategic asset. For two days afterwards, it is all that they can think of—they are worried sick about the hostages trapped in that vertex. Not only that, but some other dudes in black suits manage to gain entry to the ship, and are only foiled because they can’t breathe the air—”

“They mistook us for another squad of Valers?”

“What would you think, in their place? And the biggest concern of all in their minds, I believe, was that they couldn’t know how many others were out there. For all they knew, there were a hundred more of you on the way, with more weapons. So, the result of it all was that—”