The policeman gave a heavy sigh, loud enough to carry over the loudspeaker. "All right," he said, "I want the Mandasars to return to their homes while Admiral Ramos and Explorer York stay to give us details. We’ll get statements from the rest of you later on, but for now, just disperse." Pause. "Please."

The warriors didn’t budge. They looked toward me, like they didn’t care a snifter for the police unless I said it was okay. "You can go," I said, "we’ll be fine."

But the warriors still seemed reluctant to head out… as if they didn’t trust the cops, or maybe they just wanted to hang around to see what happened next. Before anyone else could move, Zeeleepull stepped forward from the pack. He bulled his way up to me, then lowered himself till his head touched my foot. "Leave cannot I, Edward York," he said. "Sworn to protect, sworn to guard, sworn to defend."

"All right," I told him… and because every other warrior was a split second away from rushing forward to vow loyalty too, I held up my hands and waved the crowd back. "One bodyguard is all I need. It doesn’t look right for a consort to hide in the middle of an army."

Samantha had come up with that line for me, long ago when Verity wanted to assign a whole platoon of guards to keep me safe. The excuse had worked back then, and it worked now; warriors go all bashfully guylike when you suggest they’re undermining your honor.

Slowly, reluctantly, the militia slunk off into the woods till only three of us were left: Festina, Zeeleepull and I. We drew back to the edge of the clearing so the police had plenty of room to land. Despite that, their skimmer took its time… scanning its searchlights around the area, checking there weren’t big rocks on the landing site, and waiting till the warriors were really gone.

When the skimmer finally touched down, a gaggle of armored folks jumped out — most with truncheons but a few carrying rifles or pistols, and even a shotgun. You never saw police brandishing firearms on a Technocracy world… not unless they knew they were dealing with dangerous non-sentient criminals who had lethal weapons of their own. Then again, maybe this response team had heard about the Laughing Larry, in which case bringing out the big guns made perfect sense.

In the middle of the armored people, one hawk-nosed man stood out. He wore the same gear as the others, but on him it looked slapdash: his helmet was shifted way back on his head, with the visor dangling open; his bulletproof jacket was unfastened at the side seam; his boots weren’t strapped tight, so they slopped around his ankles as he walked. I couldn’t see any insignia on his uniform, but the man had CAPTAIN written all over him. No one else could look so disheveled and get away with it.

The man sloshed forward toward us and nodded a millimeter to Festina. "Admiral Ramos." His eyes flicked over that blotch on her face; the bright police lights heightened the angry purple against the brown of the rest of her skin.

I tried not to stare at the birthmark myself.

"Greetings," Festina told the policeman, bowing the same tiny millimeter. "You are?"

"Captain Adam Tekkahawnee, Greater Bradford Regionals. Where’s the murder victim?"

"Follow me," the admiral told him.

She started back the way we’d come, and the whole company tagged along. Tekkahawnee matched our pace while the other cops tried to set up a moving perimeter around us. Since they didn’t know which way we’d go from one second to the next, there was a fair bit of jockeying every time Festina shifted a different direction: suddenly, the folks who were trying to stay in front of us had to jog sideways, trying not to trip on undergrowth or smack into trees. Once or twice it seemed the admiral turned deliberately away from the murder scene, just to give the cops more of a run… but she was probably taking shortcuts around bogs or something.

As we walked, Festina spoke to Tekkahawnee in a low voice. "So, Captain — not that I’m sorry you showed up, but who called you?"

"Who didn’t call us?" Tekkahawnee growled. He looked like the sort of man who growled a lot: still young, maybe in his forties, but already his face had set into permanent frown lines. "Every damned Mandasar from here to Orore rang up our station, screaming about recruiters… but we get calls like that five times a month, and they’re all false alarms. A stray dog wanders into the fields, a skimmer flies too low, or the wind makes a funny noise, and the stupid lobsters start wailing that someone wants to kidnap them."

Zeeleepull’s whiskers twitched angrily. Before the boy went all hotheaded on us, I told Tekkahawnee, "It wasn’t a false alarm tonight."

"Mmm." The captain didn’t sound convinced. "Then," he said, "we got a call from someone else, a woman named Kaisho. She claimed to be a retired Explorer, and said her exalted friend, Admiral Festina Ramos, was broadcasting an emergency Mayday from this area. Word is, this Kaisho threatened our police chief your navy would blockade the whole planet if we didn’t give you every possible assistance."

Festina rolled her eyes. "Kaisho, Kaisho, Kaisho," she muttered under her breath. To Tekkahawnee she said, "Kaisho is indeed an ex-Explorer now living on Celestia — she’s the one who tipped me off about the recruiter problem, and she’s been helping me investigate… says it’s the most fun she’s had since she retired. But I gave her strict orders to stay on the other side of the planet; she’s confined to a hoverchair these days and completely unfit to go waltzing into trouble." Festina made a face. "As if Kaisho ever obeys my orders. She must have followed me here in her own skimmer. If Kaisho heard my Mayday, she couldn’t run to my rescue herself; so she bullied the cops into doing it."

Tekkahawnee glanced in the admiral’s direction. "That talk about blockades was exaggeration?"

"You can never tell with the Admiralty," Festina replied. "Their idea of deterrence is being irrationally unpredictable. When outsiders endanger an admiral, sometimes the High Council just blows hot air. Other times they overreact spectacularly, blockading star systems, seizing ships, imposing sanctions on everyone who twitches. As far as I can tell, it’s deliberately random — if you annoy the navy, you never know if you’ll get away with it or be clobbered by an extravagant show of force."

"But," Tekkahawnee said, "you’re bottom of the barrel when it comes to admirals, right?" He wasn’t taunting her; it sounded like he was stating a widely known fact. Even so, it shocked me how anyone could say such a thing to an admiral’s face. No one would ever talk like that to my dad.

"Celestia may not be part of the Technocracy," Tekkahawnee went on, "but we hear rumors, Ramos. Word is, the High Council invented the rank of Lieutenant Admiral for you and you alone, as a sign you didn’t have a chance in hell of making it to the inner circle."

"Absolutely right," Festina agreed, "but the High Council might still go bugfuck if someone managed to kill me. It would be good PR to make a lavish show of grief. Poor Festina — she never saw eye to eye with us, but we still respected her. I can just picture them professing how dearly they loved me. And inner circle or not, I do wear the sacred gray uniform. It’s in the council’s best interest to send a message to Celestia and every other two-bit parasite world clinging to the Technocracy’s shirttails: ‘Thou shalt not allow any admiral to come to harm.’ "

Tekkahawnee grunted in reply. With only dim starlight, I couldn’t see the captain’s face clearly, but I could tell his mood was turning glowery. He had to be wondering if Festina was just trying to intimidate him or if there was really a chance the fleet would mount a serious crackdown.

Me, I was wondering the same thing. Back on Troyen, Samantha constantly used fudged-up threats as leverage. She would tell Queen Verity the navy demanded this or insisted on that, and nobody ever knew if Sam was actually relaying a message from the High Council or just spouting personal whims off the top of her head. A lot of times, she’d whisper afterward, "Of course, that wasn’t official, Edward; but it’s fun to see how much you can get away with." That tells you something about my sister, doesn’t it?