"Find a queen," the Fasskister said. "Take a swig of venom. Go running back to you, wherever you were, and spit the venom down your throat. Like a mother illi’im that fills up on food, then vomits it into her baby’s mouth."

"So," Festina murmured, "the nanites weren’t on Willow to begin with?"

"I don’t know what this Willow is," the Fasskister told her, "but I do know those nanites. They follow the high Gragguk’s consort wherever he goes, and dose him with venom whenever they can steal some from a queen. That’s their job. And they’ve been doing it since well before the war started."

I stood there like a dummy, not really taking it in. I was the carrier: me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised — you can be surrounded by a horde of nano and never notice it, any more than you notice the billions of natural bacteria in the air around you. A full nano scan would have found I had hitchhikers, but I’d never been put through the slightest examination… not when I’d gone from Troyen to the moonbase, and not when Willow picked me up. That was pretty darned careless, when you thought about it; but by then, Willow had left its Explorers on Troyen, and Explorers are the ones who are supposed to be fanatical about decontamination. The rest of Willow’s crew just assumed I was clean.

I’d assumed I was clean too. In twenty years on the moonbase, my nanite attendants hadn’t done a thing. They’d only kicked into action when I found the dead queen in Willow’s hold. All of a sudden, they had something to do: filling their little eyeballs with venom and ferrying it back to me. No wonder I got sick — I probably would have died if I hadn’t stationed those defense clouds around the queen’s venom sacs. The clouds cut off the nanites from getting more poison.

The real question was why I hadn’t died on Troyen. If the nanites had dogged my heels since before the war, they must have had a busy time when I was living in the same palace as Queen Verity. They’d be dosing me with venom morning, noon, and night; but I was perfectly okay till I caught the Coughing Jaundice…

Oh.

Oh.

The jaundice was really venom poisoning. The night I got sick was when the nanites started their work. And the only thing that kept me alive was a team of the best doctors on Troyen. Right there at the end, when I started to get better, maybe I’d finally built up a resistance to the stuff; after all, it’d been a whole year and the queen’s chemical cycle was repeating itself. But till that time, I was constantly getting dosed with new enzymes and hormones and junk, twisting me inside out, practically killing me…

For what? Who would intentionally do that to me? The Fasskisters must have charged big money for a project so complicated… and who would put up that much cash just to kill yours truly? I wasn’t anyone important. And if somebody really did want me snuffed, why choose such a strange and complicated way to do it?

The same questions were probably going through Festina’s head. When I turned toward her, she was looking at me thoughtfully. "You, Edward," she said, "are the eye of one nasty fucking shitstorm. It’s not your doing, but it terrifies the crap out of me." She thought a moment longer. "I’m going to ask you a question, and I want an honest answer. Okay?"

All of a sudden, I felt too scared to talk. I just nodded my head.

"Edward," she said, "were you and your sister genetically engineered? From scratch? Before conception?"

Even though I’d been expecting something awful, I’d never expected her to hit my darkest secret. For a wild second, I hoped some spirit would take possession of my body — tell a convincing lie, or pump out some magical pheromone that would make her forget she’d ever brought up the subject. But no deus ex machina came to rescue me. In the end, all I said was, "Um."

"Okay," she said, patting me gently on the shoulder. "That explains a lot. About nanites and Mandasars and the war." Her mouth turned up in a wry little smile. "It even explains about judo mats." She lifted up quickly on tiptoe and gave me a light kiss on the cheek. "But you were a perfect gentleman. A real prince." She chuckled. "Now let’s get back to Jacaranda."

"Hey," the Fasskister said. A very calm, "Hey," because the translation computer seemed to be programmed to keep an even tone of voice. But inside the robot shell, the "Hey" had been a sharp piercing squeak. "You’re just going to leave now? Walk off like you’ve solved all your problems? Forget about my vidscreen and my sound system?"

"And the people," I said.

"Right," the Fasskister agreed hurriedly. "The people. There are hundreds of us on this orbital; are you just going to leave everybody frozen here?"

"What do you want us to do?" Festina asked.

"You got the moss off me," he said. "Do the same for everything else. Everybody." When Festina hesitated, he told her, "I helped you, didn’t I? I answered your questions. So now it’s time you owe me a favor. Lose the damned moss."

"All right," Festina sighed. She lifted her hand to her throat. "Kaisho, have you been following all this?"

A whisper came back over our receivers. "Yes."

"I have to sympathize with this fellow," Festina told her. "The Balrog has gone completely overboard. Sooner or later, the Fasskister Union is going to find out about this; they’re sure to notice if a whole orbital goes incommunicado for any length of time. When they send a ship to see what’s happened, the Fasskisters will turn ape-shit. They’ll run to every race in the known universe, screaming to have you declared non-sentient."

"Let them," Kaisho answered. "The highest echelons of the League know the Balrog is more sentient than all you lesser species put together."

"But it doesn’t look that way," I said, trying to be reasonable. "It kind of looks like you’re… well, that queen from Willow was a dangerous non-sentient, right? And she brought the Balrog to this orbital so she could get back at the Fasskisters. The Balrog did exactly what she wanted. So it looks like you’re aiding and abetting a dangerous non-sentient."

Kaisho chuckled. "Nicely argued, Teelu. They’ll be fitting you for a diplomat’s uniform any day now. But this has nothing to do with the queen. The Fasskisters know full well why it’s right and proper to lock them in their precious metal suits, with physical needs taken care of, but their minds slowly going crazy."

"What do you mean?" Festina asked. No answer. "Come on, Kaisho, cut the crap and explain what’s going on."

Still no answer from Kaisho; but it was obvious the Fasskister understood exactly what she was talking about. A high-pitched squeal came from inside the robot shell. The machine suddenly spun away from us and ran out the door. He only got two short steps before reaching the edge of the clear space untouched by moss. Beyond that, there was nowhere to go — the Fasskister’s arms waved in panic, all his eyes scanning the ground for an escape route. Even as we watched, moss surged forward, like a wave on a beach lapping over the Fasskister’s toes.

Except that a wave doesn’t leave a fuzzy red coating on your feet.

As quickly as the spores had trickled off the Fasskister’s metal housing, they swept back up again: crimson mold climbing over ankle joints and knees, crusting over the central egg, scaling the arms. Elbows stopped waving; wrists stopped writhing; fingers froze into frantic claws that fattened with moss till they looked like furry mittens.

Inside the Fasskister’s shell, a high-pitched mousy wail echoed for a few seconds, broke off, then started again. I took a step forward, but Festina grabbed my arm to hold me back. She pointed to the ground — the Balrog was starting to advance toward us, cutting us off from getting close to the Fasskister.