We had to retreat… with the moss crowding us out of the village, forcing Festina and me along a narrow track that grudgingly opened in front of our feet. Leaving us no option, the Balrog shooed us to the docking hatch and back into Jacaranda.

I spent the rest of the day in quarantine. We all did: getting completely cleaned off, swept free of nanites. At least it didn’t hurt as much as getting scoured by the defense cloud — a personal detox chamber took its time, rather than ripping at anything that might be suspicious. Gentle thoroughness, as opposed to the quick and dirty.

But there were quick and dirty defense clouds at work in other parts of Jacaranda. The clouds purged my cabin and the Explorers’ planning room, places I might have left wandering nanites. The ship’s evac modules got a onceover too, on the theory that unattached nanites might be hiding there; that seemed to be their modus operandi.

I hope Prope assigned a cloud to her own quarters. She should have got detoxed herself, considering how she and I had had that session of really close contact… but she just stayed on the bridge, grumbling about all the bother of sending antinanite clouds hither, thither, and yon.

After all, the nanites were only dangerous to me.

By 23:00 we were back orbiting Troyen, with a litter of microsatellites listening all around the globe. I sat with the others in the bridge’s Visitors’ Gallery, occasionally casting glances at Festina. She was an admiral; she got to stand out on the bridge itself, hovering over Prope’s shoulder in a way guaranteed to make the captain irritable. That was probably why Festina did it.

We hadn’t had a chance to talk since coming back to Jacaranda… not in private, anyway. I wanted to apologize for being a clone, and ask her to explain what she’d been thinking back on the orbital. It seemed like maybe she’d figured out more about me than I knew myself; and I sort of kind of wanted to know what it was.

Sort of. Kind of. Whatever truth she’d guessed, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it.

At 23:46:22, our satellites picked up the beep. Not a real beep, of course — just a flick of radio energy at a frequency that could easily be mistaken for spillover from some electric appliance. Not that Troyen had any electric appliances working at the moment, but the navy’s equipment designers couldn’t plan for everything.

"Where are they?" Festina asked eagerly. "Can we triangulate?"

"Give me another second," Kaisho replied. She got to be on the bridge too, sitting at the Explorers’ station. Nobody was happy with Kaisho operating the controls — Festina was strongly inclined to lock her in the brig — but we didn’t have any other choice. It took hours and hours to program all the sensors, and everybody but Kaisho had been locked most of the day in nano detox. If we wanted to be ready by 23:46:22, Festina had to let Kaisho rig things up and run them.

From the look on Festina’s face, I figured this was the last time Kaisho would be allowed to run anything but her own wheelchair.

"All right," Kaisho announced in her usual whisper. "The signal came from Unshummin city — practically inside Verity’s palace."

"What the fuck are Explorers doing there?" Tobit asked.

Me, I was looking at the bridge’s main vidscreen where a map display showed the source of the beep. It was just outside the palace walls, on the south edge of Diplomats Row. "That’s the Fasskister embassy," I said. "At least it was. It could have got wrecked in the war."

"Stupid spot for the Explorers to hole up," Festina muttered. "If I wanted to avoid trouble, I’d head for open country, not the very heart of Unshummin."

"Perhaps, Admiral," said Prope, "the people from Willow are more comfortable in the city. Not everyone is from such a rustic background as you are."

Festina glared. "Thank you, Captain," she replied icily, "I’ll take that as the compliment it was surely meant to be. As for the supposed dangers that city-dwellers believe infest the wilderness…" She waved her hand dismissively. "The most dangerous creatures on Troyen right now are the Mandasar armies, and I guarantee Unshummin palace is crawling with soldiers. No matter who’s winning or losing the war, someone will have a huge military presence there… for the sheer symbolic appeal of holding the high queen’s throne and sitting on it from time to time. If I were in the neighborhood, I’d hightail it out of town — off to some nice quiet nowhere without the slightest strategic importance."

"Ah, dear Festina," Kaisho whispered, "suppose you didn’t have that option."

She pointed at the vidscreen and turned a dial on her console. The map display changed to an actual overhead photo of Unshummin — a high aerial perspective with the palace in the middle and a good chunk of property all around. A big circle, maybe ten kilometers across. At that scale, the palace itself was no bigger than the palm of my hand, but still recognizable by its hive-queen shape: head to the north; claws fanned out west, northwest, northeast, and east; the body stretching back to the south, with its huge five-story brain hump and those two glass domes nestled where the tail met the torso — the venom sacs, glistening bright green from the plants in the two conservatories.

Surrounding the palace were the canals, artificial waterways forming concentric circles that divided the city into rings; and crossing the canals by more than a hundred bridges were the radii, good-sized streets running straight out from the palace grounds. The whole layout looked like a dartboard with the high queen sitting in the bull’s-eye… which was a pretty lousy place to be when you thought about it.

As far as I could see, the city seemed pretty much intact despite twenty years of war — the only obvious destruction was a big burned swath between the fourth and fifth canals. A fire had taken out almost the entire ring, flattening everything black; but it looked like the flames hadn’t crossed the water on either side, so the damage had been contained.

Of course, there might have been other wreckage that didn’t show up on the picture. We’d caught the city at sunset, as long shadows stretched from west to east, jumbling up the patterns and perspectives. With all the computer gadgetry at her disposal, Kaisho should have been able to filter out those shadows and give a crystal-clear view of everything… but I guess she preferred the dramatic night-is-coming effect.

"Unshummin palace," she whispered. The ship-soul brightened the center of the picture to make it stand out.

"The signal source," Kaisho said. A blue pinpoint of light flared up on Diplomats Row. I squinted, trying to see if that really was the Fasskister embassy. Yes, that’s what it looked like… though the building’s front facade was missing, as if someone had mushed it in. No big surprise, I guess — considering how folks on Troyen felt about the Fasskisters, it was a wonder they hadn’t blown the embassy to rubble.

"The perimeter," Kaisho said. A green circle-ish loop appeared over top of Prosperity Water, the fourth canal out from the middle. It sure wasn’t the perimeter of the city itself — there were ten more canals beyond Prosperity, plus a sprawl of developments that had sprouted after the original zoning plan was set up.

"Perimeter of what?" Tobit asked. "The fire zone?" Prosperity was the inside edge of that burned-out area I’d seen.

"You could call it a fire zone," Kaisho answered. "It’s actually a perimeter of defense. For the palace. They’ve blown up all the bridges, making the canal a moat. I imagine they burned down everything in that ring so they’d have a clear shot at anyone coming in. Because here’s where the enemy is."