In olden days, the solution was usually for a queen to avoid suckling up a successor till very late in life — by the time the new queen was ready to rule, the old queen would likely be dead anyway. But anyone can see how many things can go wrong: a queen might die before she creates an heir; the queen might create an heir but die before the girl is old enough to take over; the old queen might actually live a long long time, leaving the younger queen seething and plotting a coup.

So the modern approach was for queens to produce heirs whenever they wanted, let the girls grow to age eighteen under the guidance of their mothers, then freeze the kids into suspended animation till one of the old queens died. This made sure there were always young queens ready to take over, but kept them from interfering with their seniors. Even if the junior queens weren’t too happy being put on ice, they accepted it as a reasonable compromise — it guaranteed that sometime down the road, maybe two or three generations after she was born, each queen would have her full chance to reign, without having to fight other claimants to the throne.

All well and good… till the night when I was woken by a huge whacking explosion near the palace.

I leapt out of bed and shouted something stupid like, "What was that?" But the maidservant who’d been keeping me company didn’t answer: she just lay there trembling like a scared rabbit. By then, I knew the symptoms well enough — even if I couldn’t smell it myself, there must be a ton of royal pheromone wafting through the air. The pheromone couldn’t have come from Verity, since she was gone on a visit to Queen Fortitude; I suspected the Fasskisters had set off a big old gas bomb somewhere close by, and they were now up to no good in the palace.

The palace guard had learned to take precautions against pheromone attacks, with gas masks part of their standard equipment and a few airtight security control rooms. I ran to the nearest of those rooms to see what was going on; the sergeant on duty told me the explosion wasn’t in the palace itself, but the Cryogenic Center next door. That was very bad… especially since the palace forces couldn’t spare many people to check out the situation there. They were afraid the big boom was just a diversion to draw guards outside the walls, while the real target was the palace.

In the end, I ran to the Cryogenic Center by myself. Well, not by myself — I didn’t have a squad of warriors backing me up, but I sure wasn’t the only person hurrying to see what the explosion had done. Half the folks from Diplomats Row were racing in the same direction, Divians, Myriapods, even a thing that looked like a tumbleweed with eyestalks. Me, if I’d been a diplomat, I would have stayed in a nice safe embassy rather than going to gawk at the latest act of terrorism in a not-quite-declared war; but diplomats are real big fans of viewing atrocities close-up, and maybe getting their pictures taken in the process.

By the time I got to the Cryogenics building, my sister was already standing outside, staring at a big hole in the wall. Gushers of steam poured out through the gap, so thick you couldn’t see a thing inside… but you could hear sounds like metal clanging and stuff getting thrown against other stuff. Someone in there was making a real mess.

"Fasskisters?" I whispered to Sam.

"Looks like their handiwork," Sam told me, not whispering at all. She didn’t seem to care if other bystanders heard every word she said. "First, pheromones to neutralize the locals. Then a bomb attack against young queens… frozen and unable to defend themselves. This has Fasskister written all over it."

I stared at the steam pouring out into the night. "Maybe we should go in and see if someone needs help."

Sam looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, "All right."

We moved forward… and the crowd of gawkers parted to let us through. I think they were eager to see someone go inside: just not eager to be the ones to do it. Sam let me go ahead — I was the bodyguard, wasn’t I, the one who should take the lead — so I was the one who stuck my hand, slowly and carefully, into the steam.

It was dry and very cold… not water steam at all, but some other chemical. Cold enough that real water ice was forming on the street under our feet; I could see my footprints in the frost as I walked forward. I could also see footprints, real human footprints, of someone who’d come out of the building sometime not so long ago — if it’d been more than a minute or two, the footprints would have got frosted over again.

I turned to Sam. The steam was already icing her hair with frost. "Did you see anyone come out of the building before I got here?"

She shook her head. "No. Why?"

I just shrugged. Someone else could investigate this whole business later on, someone smarter than me. Dumb old Edward shouldn’t put on airs, thinking he’d found a Big Important Clue. Better just to stick to what I was good at: blundering into trouble.

Close to the hole, it was possible to see a little way forward through the steam — nothing distinct, just some bright light inside, and a shadow moving in front of it. The clanging noises were still going on, and something that sounded like ripping. "Maybe you should stay out here," I told Sam. "It might not be safe."

"Then it’s not safe for you either," she answered.

"I’ll just—"

She grabbed my arm and yanked me back. "Fasskister!" she shouted.

Coming forward through the steam was something big and yellow, backlit by the light inside. For a moment, I thought it was a Fasskister, dressed in one of those queen-shaped robots. The thing had a jerky movement, not like the walk of a real queen… but then I started to wonder how a real queen would walk if she was cold and stiff from years in cryogenic storage.

I pulled Sam to one side, out of the steam, out of the path of a queen who might be mad at the way she’d been woken up.

The queen came slowly out onto the pavement, ice still coating much of her shell. Any lesser creature wouldn’t have been able to move; but it takes more than a layer of ice to stop a full-fledged Mandasar hive-queen. She was young, she was strong, she was a flaming saffron yellow far brighter than middle-aged Verity… and she was spitting with rage.

"Sissen su?" she hissed. Who did this?

"It might have been Fasskisters," Sam answered in Mandasar, "but we have no definite—"

"Fasskisters!" the queen roared. "Alien saboteurs?"

"We don’t know that," said a Myriapod back in the crowd. "Troyen has several factions who have resorted to violence in the past…"

"And the high queen permits this?" the young queen asked. "Is she an utter fool?" "Verity’s real smart," I said. "Things are just kind of complicated."

"No," the queen snapped, glaring at me. "Things are very simple. Someone has committed an act of wanton destruction, right outside the high queen’s palace… and all I see are outsiders come to leer at the chaos. Where is the queen herself?"

"Um," I said in a weak voice. "She’s visiting Fortitude in Therol."

"Leaving a vacuum in leadership here at home. Ridiculous! Appalling! How could she let this planet get so out of hand?" The queen took a deep breath. "Clearly, this Queen Verity is unfit to rule. It’s my duty to set things right."

The young queen smashed her claws together the way queens do when declaring an edict — kind of like a human clapping hands imperiously. The action knocked off chunks of ice that had collected on her claws; chips of snow flew in all directions, spraying over Sam and me. By the time I’d wiped my eyes clear, the queen was stomping off into the darkness, leaving a trail of meltwater.

"Um," I said. Which was when another queen staggered her way out of the steam, her face fuzzy white with frost. "Sissen su?" she growled.