Prope was obviously reluctant to open any of those doors until the medical team arrived. With her heroic stance abandoned, she shifted her weight back and forth from one foot to the other, probably wondering how to preserve her dignity while dealing with a madman. On the other side of the door, Admiral Chee had begun clinking the metal of his pressure suit with his finger, idly checking which surfaces made which tones. He may have been trying to tink out a song, but I didn't recognize the tune.

Yarrun cleared his throat. "Captain… hadn't we better let him in?"

"How do we know it's safe?" she asked. "He might have a disease."

Yarrun glanced at me, then turned back to Prope. "Captain, the admiral's behavior may be peculiar by the standards of mainstream Technocracy culture, but we could be mistaken in applying those standards to him. If the admiral comes from a Fringe World, his apparent childishness may simply be cultural idiosyncrasy."

"Trust an Explorer to talk about cultural idiosyncrasy," the captain muttered. And trust a Fleet captain to ignore it, I thought to myself. Officers of the Vacuum Corps invariably came from the great homogenized paunch of the Technocracy, with no representation from the more eclectic Fringes. But the captain admitted, "I suppose we have to let him in sooner or later. Go ahead, Harque: open the door."

The human-sized door slid into the floor with a hydraulic hiss. Harque snapped the admiral an ostentatious salute. Prope did the same a guilty second later, and Yarrun and I fluttered our hands somewhere near our foreheads. Chee blinked at all of us for a moment, then waved his hand dismissively. "Piss on saluting. I'm here incognito. I don't have to salute if I don't want."

"Of course not, sir," Yarrun said, smoothly changing his salute to a hand extended for shaking. "Welcome to the Jacaranda. I hope the ride over was pleasant?"

"The only fun I've had in thirty years. Can I do it again?"

"I'm afraid not, sir," I said after a glance at the tracking holo that glowed above the control console. "The Golden Cedar has already broken the tail-link, and it's heading out of range."

"I can call them back. I'm an admiral."

Captain Prope looked down the hall, apparently praying for the med team to arrive. In the meantime, I reminded Chee, "You're here incognito, sir. If you were to begin transmitting orders…"

"Oh." His face fell. "This secrecy stuff was a piss-poor decision on my part. Or was it my decision? I forget. Let me read my papers."

He reached into the front pouch of his impact suit and pulled out four sealed packets. One of them had my name on it, but he shoved that one and another back into the pouch. He took one of the remaining packets himself and handed the other to Prope. While he fiddled with his packet's lock mechanism, Prope pressed a thumb to her own packet's registry plate and flicked the top open. She withdrew a slim viewpad and retired to a corner to read.

The admiral finally got his own package open and pulled out a sheet of paper… paper made from trees. I supposed that admirals were too exalted to receive orders by viewpad like the rest of us.

Chee shouted, "Aha!" as he looked at the paper sheet. "I didn't decide this. Orders direct from the Admiralty High Council. Can I countermand those?"

Yarran and I busied ourselves examining the deck at our feet. Harque swallowed hard and answered, "No sir, you can't."

"Oh well," Chee shrugged. "Maybe some other time." He folded his orders into a paper airplane and threw it wobbling across the room.

Yarrun whispered to me, "I have a nasty suspicion. Ever been to Melaquin?"

"What do you mean?" I whispered back.

Before he could answer, Prope shut her viewpad with a crisp click. She had a far too satisfied smile on her face. "We're going to Melaquin," she said.

Under my breath I muttered, "Oh shit." But Yarrun only nodded to himself.

Melaquin — The Official Story

Melaquin (AOR No. 72061721) Third planet in the Uffree system.

Orbital survey data: CLASSIFIED.

Explorational data: CLASSIFIED.

Historical data: CLASSIFIED.

Official status: INAPPLICABLE.

– Excerpt from the Admiralty Object Registration Catalogue, distributed by the Admiralty to all sciento-military personnel

Melaquin — The Unofficial Story (Part 1)

I first heard of Melaquin from a dying prostitute on the Fringe World He'Barr. She had taken a knife under the ribs in an alley fight and happened to collapse against the door of my dormitory room while wandering in a daze. I watched her bleed to death on my bed over the course of an hour and a half.

"Guess I'm on my way to Melaquin," she had said. I wasn't sure I heard her correctly — she was slipping in and out of coherency with no discernible transition between lucid speech and babble — so I asked her to repeat her words. "I'm on my way to Melaquin," she said. "That's the planet of no return. You know?"

I shook my head.

"Hell of an Explorer you are," she wheezed. "It was an Explorer who told me. They send you there when they want you gone forever and never coming back home to the blue blue sky pulling black curtains over the little baby boy. He saw me watching and smiled, a great big smile with all his teeth out, like black black curtains…"

While she rambled, I keyed up the registration catalogue and requested details on Melaquin. There was no information to be had.

In time, the woman fell silent with her eyes closed; I wondered if she had finally died. I got up to check her pulse, but she heard me coming toward the bed and shrank away. "You sure you didn't call the cops?"

"The who?"

"The police. The Civilian Protection Office."

"You asked me not to call them."

"I know. That doesn't answer my question."

"I didn't call them."

"Good." She coughed, and a trickle of blood dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She licked her lips as if she couldn't identify the taste. "I'm an Opter."

"I guessed."

"I'm opting to die."

"Yes."

She looked at me with a sly smile. Her eyes kept losing focus. "You don't understand this, do you?"

"I've read about Opters," I said. "Your religion claims that any attempt to prevent death is an affront to your god's will."

"You don't understand." She let her head flop back onto the plastic sheet I had put over the pillow. Her breath slid softly in and out, gradually slowing.

For a while, I watched her stare blindly at the ceiling. Those blind eyes gave her face an ecstatic radiance that annoyed me. Radiance always did.

"Can't you close your eyes?" I asked.

"Why?"

"I don't like the way you look."

"You don't want to have to close them for me," she said with scorn. But she did close her eyes. After a while she said in a quavery voice, "It doesn't hurt, you know."

"Of course not. I gave you 20 cc's of picollin."

She didn't hear me. "It doesn't hurt because God is kind to those who come when She calls. It doesn't matter what you've done, if you say yes, She'll just sing you to sleep. La, la-lah, la, la-lah…"

The tune she sang in a broken whisper was a lullaby my own mother sang to me, years ago on my home planet of Agua — a lullaby sung over the thunderstorms that rattled our environment dome each night.

Day is done Night is nigh Farewell the sun Sleep deep, don't cry.

I couldn't bear to look at her as she sang her own lullaby. Her face was purple with bruises from the fight that had gotten her stabbed. I took out my textbooks and read survival manuals till dawn, long after the singing had stopped.

Melaquin — The Unofficial Story (Part 2)