"So I hope," the admiral continued, "you won’t have trouble while we’re gone. Just in case though, I’m leaving this skimmer which I rigged last night with a Mandasar-shaped control seat. You can fly patrols over the valley and keep watch for anyone suspicious — this baby has the navy’s best sensor equipment, able to pick up human heat signatures ten kilometers away. Nobody will be able to sneak up on you."

Everyone in the crowd was beaming now — especially the gentles, who’d probably get into a big fight about who should drive the skimmer. All gentles love to operate expensive machinery… and each one is absolutely convinced she’s the best driver in the universe.

Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing I was heading off to Troyen; for the next little while, Celestia might get pretty dangerous.

Particularly Celestian airspace.

"That’s settled then," Festina said. "I hope we won’t be gone more than three weeks, but you never know. Whatever happens, we’ll be back as soon as we can." She smiled. "In the meantime, cooperate with the police but don’t let down your guard. The recruiters hurt themselves badly last night when they resorted to murder; they’ve suddenly lost a lot of friends. Even companies that buy employees from slavers will think twice about dealing with killers. So there’s a chance the recruiters will grow stupid and desperate in the coming days."

"If that’s true," said a gentle in the crowd, "why are you taking Teelu away from us?"

Festina glanced at me. "You want to answer, or shall I?"

"Um," I said. Then I found words coming out of my mouth, with no direction from my brain — taken over again by whatever had grabbed me before. That worried me; I’d hoped that getting possessed was just some weirdness from being poisoned. Why was it happening now, when I felt okay and healthy?

"Children of Troyen," my mouth said, "the next few weeks may be hard for everybody; but if we succeed, you’ll never need to fear recruiters again. Just as important, good people have been abandoned on the homeworld and they deserve to be rescued… if they’re still alive. They’ve been forced to fend for themselves a long long while. It’s time we did something to help them."

"Teelu" Kaisho whispered, "are you speaking of our poor lost Explorers… or someone else?"

Festina looked at her curiously. Kaisho just chuckled. Her legs flickered, as if the Balrog were laughing too.

The crowd let themselves be shooed back, clearing a patch of ground beside the skimmer. Festina walked to the center of the area and set down a small black box covered with horseshoe-shaped inlays of gold. I’d seen such a box before; it was a Sperm-field anchor, designed to attract and snag the tail from a starship. Festina flicked a switch on the box’s lid and immediately skipped back a pace.

For three seconds nothing happened; then, fluttering out of the sky like the funnel of a tornado, a milky white tube swept down and slapped silently against one of the anchor’s gold horseshoes. The tube was filmy and unsolid, with sparkles of blue and green twinkling deep in its creamy body — like a glittery sleeve of smoke rippling up and up into the blue. It was transparent enough that I could look straight through the tail and see boggled Mandasar faces on the other side.

"Don’t worry," I whispered to Counselor. Which meant I was back in control of my body again — I’d been so busy gawking at the tail, I hadn’t noticed getting unpossessed. "Don’t worry," I repeated, "it’s just a sort of elevator up to a starship."

"A starship in orbit?" she asked.

"Yes."

"But the starship must be hundreds of kilometers above us!"

I nodded. "Sperm-tails are really elastic. You can pull them out thousands of kilometers long."

Counselor swallowed hard. "What do we do?"

"Um. If you stick your hand into the tube’s open end, you get… drawn up. All the way through the tail and into the spaceship overhead."

"Teelu," Counselor said, "if someone dragged me by my arm for several hundred kilometers…"

"It won’t hurt you," I promised her. "As soon as you put a single finger into the tube, the outside universe kind of shoves you in the rest of the way. You don’t get pulled, you get pushed. And once you’re inside the tube… well, it feels very strange, but it doesn’t do actual damage."

Counselor winced. "You’re not filling me with confidence, Teelu."

"Then watch."

I walked over to the Sperm-tail. Before reaching down to the mouth, I asked Festina, "Shall I go first?"

"Be my guest," she replied. "I’ll go last to make sure everyone else is all right."

I nodded and knelt. If you want the honest truth, I’d never gone through a Sperm-tail before either. Real Explorers shot the chute all the time, but me, I’d always traveled in the company of diplomats. "Diplomats," Sam once told me, "do not subject themselves to indignities. It’s called a Sperm-tail, for heaven’s sake. The name alone is enough to demolish your credibility. And I understand that riding one is appallingly visceral. Diplomats hate that; we like to remain detached from physical reality at all times."

Maybe part of that was joking, but Sam still meant it. She and the rest of the diplomats took shuttles from ship to surface, not the slippery white way.

At the last second, just as I was sticking my hand into the Sperm’s mouth, I wondered what my sister meant by "appallingly visceral." Then I found out.

Gulp.

That was the Sperm-tube swallowing me. Out of the real universe, into an artificial one that fluttered and fish-tailed, taking me with it. My whole body turned to water, pumping through a pipe that twisted, turned, narrowed, expanded, did loop-the-loops. I had no bones; I had no solid parts at all, just liquid and steam, spurting up the Sperm-tail at high pressure.

One other thing: I wasn’t alone.

I could feel another presence squirting along with me, a blaze of intelligence burning right next to my skin, as if it was only separated from me by a tissue-thin membrane. It had to be the thing that’d been possessing me: a spirit, a ghost, an alien parasite, some entity that hitchhiked in my body and occasionally shoved me aside so it could drive.

What are you? I thought. What do you want? Why me?

The answer was a blast of fiery emotions — angers and sorrows, regrets and resolutions, all knotted up in a package of memories.

My own memories.

Samantha’s body, her clothes sodden with the blood that kept gushing from her punctured chest. A red pool spreading over the floor. Smears of red on my fingers.

Queen Verity’s head plunked on a platter and placed on the royal dinner table… while the rest of her corpse lay ten paces away, both venom sacs sliced open and spilling dribbles of green.

Me running through the night with a heavy black sack over my shoulder, while shooting echoed in the palace behind me. Racing to a garden shed, lifting up a floorboard, seeing the little black box with the gold horseshoe inlays, and the narrow mouth of a Sperm-tail threading off through an underground conduit. Feeding one end of the sack into that mouth and holding my breath as the bulky load disappeared through the impossibly tiny opening, zipping off heaven knows where. Smashing my heel down on the anchor box, breaking it, releasing the Sperm-tail to slither off on its own so no one could follow… Could follow…

Innocence. My daughter.

Whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years.

Whom I’d abandoned on a planet at war.

And I was supposed to be "The Little Father Without Blame"? If I hadn’t been riding the Sperm-tail at that second — if I’d had a solid body — I would have thrown up everything in my stomach.