Too bad. Festina was an Explorer, and Explorers did their homework.

Veresian mumbled, "Yes, yes, dirty stuff, that venom." He looked at Festina once more, then decided you seldom went wrong agreeing with an admiral. "Definitely, we can say this qualifies as an emergency. Definitely." He turned to me. "Could you take off your shirt, please, Explorer?"

"Do I have to?"

"Come on," Tobit growled, "forget about your dad hating doctors. No matter how loony he is, your old man wouldn’t want you to Go Oh Shit."

Going Oh Shit was a term Explorers used for dying. My father wouldn’t care if I went Oh Shit, I thought, as long as I just went. On the other hand, Dad had let me see a doctor now and then. And it wasn’t like a sign would flash BIO-ENGINEERED CLONE the moment I hopped onto the examination table. Veresian wouldn’t find anything suspicious unless he went to the trouble of sequencing my entire genome… and why would he do that?

"Okay," I grumbled, and began unbuttoning.

Festina and Tobit watched as the doctor listened to my heart and looked down my throat. Veresian was just passing the time — while he mucked about with a stethoscope, sensors around the room were taking far more detailed readings and checking them against every possible index in the databanks — but Sam always said people were suckers for personal attention. "Medicine is nine-tenths showmanship," she once told me, "just like diplomacy."

The doctor wasn’t the only one providing a show. After all, I was the one with my shirt off; and neither Festina nor Tobit made a move to leave when the examination started. They weren’t gawking or anything, but… well, actually, yes, they were gawking, particularly when Veresian got me to take deep breaths. I told myself they must come from parts of the Technocracy where people weren’t all self-conscious about their bodies. Even so, if the examination headed below the waist, I didn’t want a bunch of spectators.

Especially not Festina.

Veresian finished with the simple stuff and went to his terminal to see what the mechanical sensors had found out While he scanned the readout, I tried not to scratch an itch that all of a sudden flared up on the soft inside of my elbow. I assumed nanites were at work there, sneaking under the skin and sipping blood from my veins — not so different from the eyeball nano that had burrowed into the queen’s venom sacs.

All navy sick bays had nanotech squads floating in the air, like little labs for doing blood analysis, taking tissue samples, and that kind of stuff. The medical computers had probably sent microscopic sensors scrambling toward my internal organs, swimming down my throat to lungs or stomach, in search of more data. I wasn’t sure how much time they needed to do their jobs — it must take a fair while to find the spleen, let alone do a bunch of tests on it — but bit by bit they’d send reports to the main computers, telling how my innards measured up.

"Well," said Veresian after only a few seconds, "well, well, well."

"Well what?" Festina asked.

The doctor glanced at her a moment, then back at the readouts. "There’s just… ahh… maybe it’s time to recalibrate." He thumbed a few dials on the control panel, then gave us a false smile. "Time to run diagnostics on the diagnostics. That happens sometimes."

Festina gave him a look. "How often does it happen?"

"Not often but sometimes."

"This goddamned navy," Tobit muttered. He and Festina looked deeply suspicious, but said nothing. No one in the Outward Fleet was immune to machines going off kilter — not doctors, not Explorers, not admirals — so you had to give Veresian some benefit of the doubt. Tobit watched the doctor play with the control panel, while Festina glowered at no one in particular. Finally, she glanced at me and said, "You’re feeling all right?"

"I’m fine."

She gave a half smile. "You look fine." Then she turned away from my bare chest to watch Veresian tinker with his equipment.

Five minutes later, the doctor finished recalibrating, realigning, reprogramming, reinitiating.

Five minutes after that, Veresian swallowed, and said, "There you are, same results as last time. This patient is definitely not human."

For a split second, I felt like dashing out of the room. I didn’t; but I opened my mouth, intending to babble something, I don’t know what, some cowardly nonsense about it being Dad’s fault. Not a word came out — the spirit that sometimes possessed me had taken over, keeping me stone quiet.

"What do you mean, not human?" Tobit demanded. He gave me a quick glance, as if he could verify my race just by looking.

"Every tissue in Explorer York’s body has components not found in Homo sapiens. Hormones. Enzymes. Protein compounds I can’t even classify."

"Do they match other species?" Festina asked. "Balrogs maybe?"

I shuddered at that — both me and whatever was possessing my body. It would be very bad if the Balrog had planted a spore on me, and little Balrog brigades were already romping through my bloodstream.

"Not Balrogs," Veresian said after checking his screen. We all breathed a sigh of relief. "But it’s hard to narrow it down much farther than that." He pointed to something on the readout. "This lipid, for example… it’s not found in humans, but it’s reasonably common in alien species. Matches twenty-three sentient races that we know of and billions of lesser creatures from the same worlds."

"Are Mandasars on the list?" I asked calmly. (Not me — the spirit in control of my mouth.)

"Why yes, yes they are," Veresian answered, scanning down his data.

"If you check the other alien compounds," continued the thing inside me, "I think you’ll see they’re all found in Mandasars."

"Hmm. Yes. Yes."

"You think it’s the hive-queen venom?" Tobit asked.

"No," I said. "When I was on Troyen, I came down with something they called Coughing Jaundice. Supposedly one of their local microbes. It hung on for a full year — nearly killed me dozens of times. A group of Mandasar doctors improvised a number of treatments… including tissue transplants, and filling me up with nano that would prevent the transplants from being rejected."

Veresian’s eyes widened. "They transplanted alien tissue into a human? Without killing you? And the transplant can actually survive on human blood nutrients?’

I wasn’t sure what-all treatments I’d got, but I figured the spirit could be telling the truth. Over that horrible year, there were so many operations and injections and "Just lie in this machine for a while, Edward," I must have had every medical procedure you could imagine. Of course, I didn’t say that to the doctor. I didn’t say anything. The spirit in my mouth said, "You know Mandasars. Put enough gentles on a problem, and they come up with brilliant solutions." The doctor looked at me as if he didn’t quite believe it… but he should have. Before the war, Troyen had developed the most advanced medical knowledge of any race known to humanity. It was the Mandasars’ big area of expertise: they didn’t build starships or robots or nanotech, they just specialized in doctoring. Any species, anytime. Which meant they’d invented practically everything in this sick bay, even if Veresian didn’t know it. He was too young — Troyen had been out of the picture for twenty years, way longer than this scrawny stethoscoped kid had been practicing medicine.

"If they did that to you," Veresian said, "why isn’t there anything on your chart?" He pointed to his vidscreen… which I couldn’t see because doctors always sit you down at an angle so you can’t look over their shoulders. Heaven forbid a patient ever gets to see his own information.