She waited a moment, then did the most unexpected thing an Explorer could do: lifted her hand, gave Dade a salute, and said crisply, "Dismissed." It took the boy a moment to remember Festina was an admiral; then his face went stony, he returned her salute, and walked stiffly out of the room.

The rest of us stayed where we were a moment, then slowly let out our breaths. In a low voice, Festina asked, "What do you think, Kaish? Any mystic visions of the boy smartening up?"

Kaisho reached both hands up to the hair over her face and suddenly lifted it high… as if her cheeks were hot and in desperate need of air. I caught a glimpse of her handsome crinkled face, just a tiny bit damp with sweat; then she let the hair fall back into place.

"The boy does have hidden depths," she whispered. "But I don’t think you’ll like them."

Three full orbits of Troyen and we still hadn’t picked up any transmissions from people down on the ground.

"Um," I murmured to Festina. "What if the Explorers’ radios have been eaten by Fasskister nanites?"

Festina shook her head. "As soon as the navy heard about the Fasskisters’ Swarm, our researchers developed equipment that was immune to the little buggers. Otherwise, the whole fleet would be at the Fasskisters’ mercy."

"Yeah," Tobit put in, "everything we carry should be fine. Of course," he added, "the Fasskisters have probably invented a Swarm that’ll eat our new equipment. But we’ll cross our fingers there isn’t any of that on Troyen."

"There shouldn’t be," Festina said. "If Willow’s Explorers aren’t transmitting, they’re just being careful. In a war zone, it’s dangerous to broadcast continuously, even if your messages are encrypted to look like static. Sooner or later, some army will decide you’re an undercover agent sending intelligence to the enemy; next thing you know, you’re surrounded by a platoon of spycatchers."

Lucky for us, there was a fallback plan for making contact. Whenever an Explorer team is assigned to a ship, they’re given a "transmission second" — one second of the standard twenty-four-hour clock when they should try a burst transmission, if they’re ever on a planet where longer broadcasts are dangerous. It took a bit of calculating, converting Willow time to Jacaranda time and allowing for relativistic slippages in everybody’s clocks… but eventually, Festina and Tobit agreed that the folks down on Troyen would try a single blip of contact at 23:46:22, Jacaranda time. Since it was only ship’s morning, we had most of the day before we’d hear anything.

"So, a whole day to kill," Tobit said. "You folks play poker?"

"Enough to know I don’t want to play with you," Festina told him. "What do you say to a side trip?"

"Where?"

Instead of answering, she turned to me. "Edward, do you know exactly what Willow did its five days in this system? Were you watching the whole time?"

"I wasn’t watching at all. The base’s monitors just had a big display of what navy ships were close by. Willow showed up on the list, and stayed there till they picked me up to go home."

"So Willow might not have stayed near Troyen all the time. They could have gone somewhere else for a while."

"But there’s nowhere else to go in this system," Dade said. "Nowhere else inhabited, anyway."

"Wrong," Festina told him. "There’s an orbital around the sun. Occupied by Fasskisters who don’t want to leave the area, for fear of being killed by the League." She smiled grimly. "Now ask yourself: if anyone in the galaxy created specialized nano like the stuff on Willow that was stealing queen’s venom, who would it be?"

"Oh," Dade said. "Yeah."

Festina nodded. "Let’s assume Willow visited the orbital while they were in this system. And let’s assume the Fasskisters smuggled nano onto the Willow during that visit. Shouldn’t someone ask them why?"

Like most orbitals, it was a big cylinder floating in space, the surface skin covered with photocells that gathered energy from the sun. Unlike most orbitals, the photocells had been arranged into bands running lengthways with strips of white in between, so that the whole cylinder was covered with long black-and-white stripes.

"Assholes," Festina muttered. We were all sitting in the bridge’s Visitors’ Gallery, watching as Jacaranda slowly approached the Fasskister habitat.

"What’s wrong?" I asked.

"Do you know why they left some stripes clear… even though they could collect more power if they covered the whole damned surface?"

"No," I said.

"They did it so you’d know the orbital wasn’t spinning," she told me. "Anyone flying up can see the stripes are holding steady… so the Fasskisters can’t be producing gravity with good old centrifugal force."

"They don’t have gravity in there?"

"They have it; they just use some flashy fancy artificial field that guzzles energy twenty-four hours a day. This close to the sun, they have solar power to spare… but it’s still waste for the sake of waste."

"Admiral," Prope said, turning around in her command chair, "they aren’t answering our requests to dock."

"Can we dock anyway?" Festina asked.

"Affirmative.," Prope answered, "but they probably won’t like it. Docking without permission can be interpreted as intent to commit piracy."

Festina made a face. "Send them a message in English, Fasskister and Mandasar. Say we’re worried about their status because they’ve gone incommunicado. If we don’t get a reply in five minutes, we’ll assume they’re in trouble and come to give aid."

"Begging the admiral’s pardon," Prope said, without an ounce of begging in her voice, "but that’s a standard tactic for pirates too. Even if the target is broadcasting like mad, the pirate ship says, ‘We can’t hear anything,’ and keeps coming in. Naive victims think their radios are broken and let the pirate come aboard. More experienced sailors think they’re under attack and take defensive action."

"What kind of defensive action?"

Prope shrugged. "The Fasskisters believe they can’t leave this system because the League considers them non-sentient. Under such conditions, they may have decided they have nothing to lose by arming themselves with lethal weapons. Especially with warring Mandasars nearby. The Fasskisters could legitimately argue they were afraid of being attacked."

Festina drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. After a few seconds, she said, "Send the message and go in anyway. Take any precautions you think necessary. I’ll assume responsibility."

"Aye-aye, Admiral," Prope said. She tried to make her voice sound icy — full of misgivings… but if I knew Prope, she’d lived her whole life hoping to luck into an honest-to-God space battle.

We docked without incident — sliding up to a hatch on the orbital’s dark side (the half that wasn’t facing the sun), and dropping our Sperm-field so we could stretch out a docking tube. Prope hated cutting the field; star captains feel kind of naked when they can’t go FTL to get away from trouble. (It must have mortified her when the black ship had ripped away Jacaranda’s, field back at Starbase Iris — like getting her clothes torn off in public.) Prope kept telling Festina, over and over, "One hour on the orbital… not a second more, if you expect us to reestablish the tail and get back to Troyen by 23:46:22."

I could tell Festina wasn’t too happy with the time limit; but considering the circumstances, she couldn’t argue. One hour would have to do.

Festina declared our jaunt to the orbital would be Explorers only. The Mandasars grumped, but the admiral held firm — with all the bad feeling between Mandasars and Fasskisters, it wouldn’t help to take the hive along.