Even in the dark, I could see the admiral make a face like she’d bitten into an apple and found a worm. Or maybe just the back half of a worm.

"You’ll have to tell me everything," she said, "like why Prope is chasing a black ship, and why you thought I was dead. But for now, let’s just get out of here. Give me a second to grab my Bumbler…"

She started across the clearing toward a shadowy blob lying in the grass. Bumblers were small machines with all kinds of data sensors — standard equipment for Explorers, though no one ever gave me one. Halfway to the Bumbler, the admiral stopped. "I’d better turn off my emergency signal," she muttered. "It just tells Prope where to find me." She lifted her wrist and told the implant, "Terminate Mayday." Lowering her wrist, she added, "For all I know, it might have told recruiters where to find me too."

"You know about the recruiters?" I asked.

"That’s why I’m on Celestia," she replied. "Trying to shut down the bastards. I was watching their main offices on the other side of the planet when I picked up your escape pod’s homing signal. Considering how tedious stakeouts are, I decided it would be more interesting to make sure you were okay."

"Well," I said, feeling all awkward, "thanks for coming. I’m sorry to drag an admiral so far from her…"

"Don’t apologize." She smiled, her teeth white in the dark. "And don’t think of me as an admiral. I may wear the gray, but I’m an Explorer, first, last, and always. So you have to call me Festina, all right? I don’t want to hear any more…"

She never finished her sentence. In the darkness, something started to laugh.

The sound was like a pack of hyenas, but breathier: piercing and whistly, echoing off the hillside. The noise seemed intentionally designed to carry long distances… and to scare the heebie-jeebies out of anyone who heard it. The crazy cackle never stopped for air, on and on, digging its fingernails into my nerves; and it was coming toward us.

"Holy shit," the admiral, Festina, whispered. "It’s a Laughing Larry."

She looked across at me, seeing if I knew what she meant. I nodded. In my years as a bodyguard, I worked real hard to read up on every weapon in human space… not to use the weapons myself, but to know how to defend against them if Sam or Verity ever came under attack.

The best way to defend against a Laughing Larry was to surround yourself with steel-plast walls. Not very likely in the middle of a forest.

I was trying to think of other defenses when something spun into the far side of the clearing. It was a golden metal ball, a meter wide: hovering a little way off the ground and rotating fast like a kid’s top. All around its outside, the thing had little slit openings that caught the air, making that whistle-ish laughing sound. Inside, I knew it had electric amplifiers to make the whistles louder — the person who invented this thing thought the cackly hyena laugh would be great for intimidation.

Absolutely right. I was shaking in my boots, hearing that sound chuckling in the darkness — and it didn’t help that I knew how Laughing Larries worked. Each of those whistly slit openings could shoot a hundred razor-sharp flechettes, tiny boomerang-shaped darts that could slice through skin like an ax through jelly. They could even pierce a Mandasar warrior’s carapace, spiking through the shell and deep into the flesh beneath. If this Larry opened fire, it would spray out a full 360 degrees of shrapnel, cutting us open like a hail of knives.

The golden ball whirled to the Bumbler where the little machine still lay in the grass. More hyena laughing. The Larry circled the Bumbler like a cat that’s found a dying mouse and wants to poke at it a bit. Or maybe it was more like a dog: a bloodhound that’s been following a trail and has sniffed out something that smells like prey.

Around and around the Larry hummed, prowling near the Bumbler as if trying to pick up someone’s scent.

"What is it?" a voice whispered. The warrior had lifted his head off the dirt and was staring at the spinning ball. His ear antennas had. flattened straight back against his skull; he didn’t like the hyena cackle either.

"It’s a weapon," I answered softly. "It shoots sharp things that can hurt even you."

"Run, Teelu" he said immediately. "Hold it I, whilst you escape."

"Stay still!" Festina snapped. "Maybe it’s looking for someone else."

At that moment, the thin whistly sound coming from the ball shaped itself into a single word.

"Ramoss… osss… osss… osss."

"Okay," Admiral Ramos muttered, "maybe it’s not looking for someone else."

"Ramoss… osss… osss… osss…"

The whispery sound whistled through the clearing as the ball continued to spin. Fifty revolutions a second… I remembered that was their top speed. Then again, that was twenty years ago; they were probably better now.

I held my breath for almost a minute… and still the Larry didn’t attack. "Maybe it’s just trying to scare you," I whispered to the admiral.

"Or maybe it isn’t sure who I am," she whispered back. "I’ll bet it was tracking my Mayday. Now that I’ve shut down the signal, it can’t identify me."

"I thought Laughing Larrys had visual sensors too."

"They do," the admiral replied, "but Larries aren’t smart, and it’s hard to recognize people in the dark. In the normal visual range we’re just black blobs; on IR, we’re still blobs, only brighter. So it’s straining its tiny computer brain, trying to figure out who we are. It doesn’t want to waste a thousand rounds of ammunition killing us if we aren’t its programmed target."

"Ramosss… osss… osss…"

The ghostly voice was getting on my nerves. "Why is it after you?" I whispered. There was no harm talking — when a Larry’s making noise, it can’t hear anything else.

"It must have been sent by the recruiters," Festina said. The warrior’s ears perked up and he turned, as if seeing her for the first time. "They know I’m investigating them," Festina continued, "and I’ve already had threats to stay out of their business. One of them must have followed me here… and decided this was the perfect time to take me out of the picture. All alone on Mandasar territory. If people find my body sliced to ribbons, they’ll blame it on local warriors, not the recruiters."

"Villains they," the warrior growled. "Black black villains…"

The smell of burning wood poured off his hide.

"Stay still," Festina warned. "It looks like Friend Larry is stuck in a decision loop. Let confused dogs lie."

"But if it’s confused," I said, "won’t it radio its controller for further instructions?"

Suddenly, the laughter increased to deafening volume and the Larry whizzed toward us.

All three of us jumped. Festina and I leapt toward the woods, hoping we could get behind a good solid tree trunk before the Larry opened fire. The only reason we succeeded was because the warrior jumped the other direction — straight on top of the golden ball, like throwing himself on a grenade.

The next two seconds weren’t pretty. It took that long for the barrage of flechettes to flense the carapace off him and slash his insides to pulp. The Larry’s laughter was overridden with a scream, then a gooey slurp of organs getting splattered in every direction. When I looked back, I couldn’t see the gold ball at all; just the warrior’s shell lying over the ball like a lid, and underneath, the whirling butcher-thing was still as loud as hyenas, spinning inside the warrior’s husk. The Larry had completely cored its way into the warrior’s belly… and soon enough, the occasional flechette was able to pierce out the warrior’s side, blowing away little chips of armor. I ducked my head behind my tree trunk just as the Larry giggled into view again, carving out through the last bits of shell like a buzz saw.