I’ve already said I’m not one of those guys who can creep through the dark without making a sound. Lucky for me, most Mandasars are even worse at being stealthy than I am; there’s no such thing as a silent bulldozer. There’s also no such thing as a Mandasar who can climb trees — great big lobsters have no monkeys anywhere in their evolutionary past. Your average warrior never looks for trouble above head height… which is probably true for human soldiers too, but our species should know better.

Up I went — into some kind of tree with easy-to-climb branches. Its bark felt like moldy cheese: hard underneath, but with an outer layer of mushy fuzz. It smelled like moldy cheese too… moldy something anyway, all pulpy and rotten. I wasn’t happy getting the stuff on the front of my uniform, but I had an easy time digging in my fingers for handholds. Without much noise, I pulled myself up a story and a half above the ground, then settled into the shadows between a big branch and the trunk.

The sergeant passed cautiously below me. I considered dropping onto his head, but decided against it — considering how out of practice I was, I wouldn’t take him out instantly. Anyway, it would be sure to cause noise. The other warrior looking for me was only a short distance off; even if I managed to finish off the sergeant, I’d be shot unconscious before I escaped.

Instead, I waited till the guards searching for me were down the far end of the place (it’s a big conservatory), then I carefully began to clamber from tree to tree. This was just an exhibit, not a real rain forest; all kinds of trees had been crammed in together, and the gardeners had done that pruning trick that makes the branches grow out instead of up. I could sneak from one tree to the next without much trouble, heading for the door that led back into the main part of the palace.

My movement wasn’t completely silent, but neither was the conservatory. Birds lived in the place, the little flitty kind of birds you find all over Troyen. Sam once told me the feathers on Troyenese birds didn’t evolve the same way as on Earth — not as strong or aerodynamic or something, so local birds can’t fly if they get much bigger than a chickadee. The ones in the conservatory were all smaller than that, on the order of hummingbirds; and with us big people thrashing in the dark, the birds were zipping around like frantic wasps, making leaves rustle all over the place. Practically every step I took, I disturbed one of the little guys and sent it flying off to another tree… but the warriors were also scaring up flocks wherever they went, not to mention a bunch of birds with bad nerves who suddenly burst into a racket of cheeping for no apparent reason. The warriors couldn’t hear me over all that noise; so it only took me a few minutes to get within ten meters of the door.

One guard between me and escape. With his gas mask on, he couldn’t smell me; with the darkness, he couldn’t see me; with the birds making racket all over the place, he couldn’t hear me. But everything would change if I jumped out of the tree and tried to cross the gap between us — I figured it was fifty-fifty whether I’d get to him before he fired his stunner, and even less likely that I’d be able to put him down before his friends showed up.

So I stayed in the tree, hoping for a lucky break. Which I got, sort of.

"This is taking too long," the sergeant growled from somewhere far behind me. He was speaking in Mandasar, of course, but I understood just fine. "Take your masks off, and let’s sniff this bastard out."

"But Sarge…" one of the other guards said.

"The queen’s dead," the sergeant snapped, "and the brat obviously isn’t here. We’ll be all right. Do it."

They did. As the guard in the doorway began to slip his gas mask off, I knew I’d never have a better time to move — within seconds, he’d smell a human within spitting distance. I hit the floor running, with only a tiny stumble; and the guard was slowed by taking off his mask. Even then, I nearly didn’t make it in time… but at the last second, the guard hesitated a teeny bit.

I smashed him with a palm heel under the snout, snapping his head back hard. The strike was too weak to knock him out completely, but it dazed him long enough for me to rip the stunner out of his Cheejreth arms. Jumping back out of reach of his waist pincers, I shot him three times fast in the head. He slumped, his nose whupping down hard onto the floor.

Behind me, the other guards were shouting — they must have heard the stunner’s whir. I raced through the door, knowing I’d never outrun four Mandasar warriors but not having a lot of other options. The most important thing was getting around a corner fast, so I wouldn’t be in the line of fire from the stunners. At the first side corridor I dived off to the right, just as guns whirred behind me. I rolled to my feet and was about to start running again when a voice whispered behind me, "Psst!"

I turned. Directly across from me, where the side corridor continued, someone stood in the shadows. Even without lights, I could make out the buttercup yellow of her shell. The warriors raced up the main hall toward us. As they came level with Innocence and me, it was like the four of them were clotheslined by a wire running across their path at nose height; but there was no wire, just the smell of royal pheromone driving up their snouts and into their brains. The guards fell twitching. I stepped out of cover and drained the batteries of my stunner, making sure they wouldn’t get up.

Old Queen Verity, ever the long-range planner, had left an escape route for her newly royal daughter. Outside in the royal gardens, a shed held one end of a Sperm-tail transport tube. The tube led off to parts unknown, maybe halfway around the world, to a secret safe house where Innocence could grow up in peace. I carried my daughter to the shed, all wrapped in black so her bright yellow body wouldn’t be seen by mutineers; and I personally fed her into that Sperm-tail, then smashed the anchor that held the Unshummin end of the tube in place. The tail slithered off, like a string yanked from the far end… and that was the last I saw of my little girl, my daughter, the high-queen-in-waiting.

I dearly wanted to go with her — where else did I have to be, who else was left that I cared about? But someone had to smash the anchor. Besides, if I disappeared, the navy would search for me… and I didn’t want anyone snooping around, for fear the world would learn about Innocence. She was only seven years old; till she grew up, it was safer if nobody knew she existed.

Me, I headed back to the queen’s royal chamber. I avoided the pockets of fighting; too tired to help the good guys. Anyway, how would I tell the good from the bad? And with everyone dead or gone, what was worth fighting for? So I slunk through the palace as if I were the only man left on Troyen — alone, with Samantha, Verity, and Innocence all taken from me.

In the high queen’s chamber, the bodies had disappeared. I imagined them carried off by mutineers, so the corpses could be displayed as somebody’s trophies. Sickened by that thought, I fell to my knees in the sticky patch of blood where Sam had been lying… pressed my hands down on the dampness, and lifted my red-stained fingers to my nose…

Then it was days later, and I was on the navy’s moon-base. No memory of how I’d gotten from one place to the other. They said some navy security guards found me and dragged me onto an escape shuttle — abandoning a planet gone mad, transporting me to the safe airless silence of space.

With Verity dead, no one on the planet could maintain order. Everybody who could leave got out fast. Including the Fasskisters who started the whole mess.

The Fasskisters had one last indignity to dump on poor old Troyen: what they called the Beneficent Swarm. Without telling anyone else, they’d left huge caches of nano in Fasskister warehouses all over the planet. At the very instant the last Fasskister left Troyen’s atmosphere, all those caches opened wide… spreading clouds of self-replicating nanites in every direction.