"Besides," Festina added, "we don’t know for sure our friends are on good terms with the guards. They may be on the run and hiding out. Always suspect the worst, and… uh-oh."

The Bumbler’s screen showed a pair of warriors coming toward us. They were moving cautiously from the direction of the palace, gas masks over their heads and crossbows held steady in their waist pincers. Each had a Cheejretha finger resting on the bow’s trigger mechanism, so they could instantly fire an arrow with the slightest squeeze.

The warriors passed in front of the crumbling embassy, peeking in through gaps in the brickwork. They had to be looking for something… and I suspected it was us. Some keen-eyed lookout at the palace had spotted the Sperm-tail lingering a few seconds in this neighborhood; the team coming our way got sent to investigate.

"What do we do?" Dade asked over the radio.

"Let’s invite them to tea," Tobit said. "No, wait… let’s stun their fucking gonads off." He handed the Bumbler to me and quietly drew his stun-pistol. Festina had hers out too. They hadn’t let Dade bring a gun; he’d been just a teeny bit too eager to shoot, back at the Fasskister orbital.

Me, I didn’t want a gun. And nobody had offered me one.

The guards’ footsteps came closer, clicking softly on the pavement. Festina lifted her hand, with three fingers showing. Silently she lowered one finger, then a second, then the last… and together she and Tobit dived out of the alley.

Arrows twanged at almost the same instant the stunners whirred; but the warriors shot high, not prepared for humans who could throw themselves belly down on the street. The guns fired again in unison. That was enough. I heard the bows clatter to the pavement, and a moment later, two heavy thuds on the ground.

"Are they out?" Dade asked excitedly.

"We stopped shooting, didn’t we?" Festina answered.

Without another word, she led us forward.

When you hear me talk about streets and alleys, maybe you’re picturing some city you know — your local downtown late at night, with the sidewalks empty and everything quiet.

No. Put that out of your head.

First of all, Unshummin was dark. Really, really dark. The city had plenty of streetlamps, but none of them worked — there hadn’t been electricity on the planet since the Fasskisters loosed their Swarm, except for chemical batteries and maybe some motorized generators protected by thick nano defense clouds. The only significant light was a glow from the direction of the palace, where I figured soldiers were burning cookfires; but the palace lay to the rear of the embassy and we were in front, so most of the light was blocked by the building. Neither of Troyen’s moons was up, so we had to make do with the stars… and after all the lights on Jacaranda, my eyes needed time to adapt.

Next, you’re probably thinking of a normal human street paved with asphalt or cement or gravel or stone. Nope. Every road on Troyen was built from a pebbly stuff called Ayposh: kind of like coral, because it consisted of a whole bunch of tiny shelled organisms, some alive, some dead. They’d been bioengineered to grow in long level sheets, photosynthesizing most of their nutrients straight from the air. Every few months, the board of works sent out sprayers full of fertilizer and mineral supplements to feed the little guys; and each year, crews would paint the highway shoulders with a chemical suppressant to keep the Ayposh from spreading off the roadbed. It was cheap, it was simple, it was elegant… and with the war on, maybe it was doomed. All of a sudden, I started wondering if people had time to spray fertilizer when they were all busy fighting. I thought of millions of miles of pavement, slowly starving to death for lack of vitamins. Maybe all the streets around me were nothing but corpses, teeny husks that would slowly crumble away and never get replenished by new generations.

After twenty years of real people dying, it seemed kind of horrible to go misty-eyed about the roads and sidewalks. You’d have to be pretty stupid to do something like that.

Anyway, there’s one last thing you’ve probably got wrong in your mental picture of Diplomats Row: the buildings. If you’re thinking of human architecture, think again. Yes, the Fasskister embassy was built of bricks; but the bricks were clear crystal, the same sort of stuff as the huts back at that orbital. It wasn’t glass, I can tell you that much — when the front wall had been smashed in, not one of the bricks had broken. They were all perfectly intact, lying on the ground as we stepped into the darkness of the half-demolished building. The bricks’ edges were still crisp and clean despite years of weathering, and I couldn’t see a trace of mortar on them. Don’t ask me how the walls held together without some sort of stickum to attach each brick to its neighbors… but the side and back walls were still intact, and I couldn’t see mortar in them either. Just rows of crystal bricks that let in the tiniest glimmer of starlight so I wasn’t completely blind.

Dim light or not, the Explorers could see fine. Their tightsuit visors had vision enhancers that made the night bright as day. I had to tag along on Festina’s heels, so I wouldn’t walk into a wall or pothole or something… and even then, I had a heck of a time not getting lost, with her practically invisible in camo. Mostly I went by the sound of her footsteps and the smell of her suit — as if I were a full-fledged Mandasar, navigating by nose.

It took me by surprise when we started going upward: a slow-sloping ramp that must have been in the middle of the building. Ramps were pretty common on Diplomats Row — lots of nonhumans (including Mandasars) didn’t do so well on stairs, and no alien species ever liked each other’s elevators; the compartments were either too big or too small, the lift mechanisms were too quiet or too clanky, they went too fast or too slow… and the interior always smelled of something you didn’t want to inhale any longer than you had to. The diplomatic solution was to build your embassy with ramps at easy-to-climb slants, so as not to irritate important visitors.

We went up slowly, switching back four times for each floor. Once we got above first-story level, the side of the stairwell was missing, giving a clear view of the street out front — Diplomats Row in all its glory. The other buildings seemed pretty well intact, even if they were dark and empty: the high silver towers of the Myriapods, like tinsel hanging from the sky; the clear glass globe of the Cashlings, its multicolored interior lights now gone dark and lifeless; the embassies of the Divian sub-breeds, Tye-Tyes in their rock mountain, Ooloms in their giant tree, Freeps in their neon casino; the Unity’s mirror garden where they’d held masked rituals every night; and at the end of the block, the mall of the up-League envoys.

Once upon a time, that mall held a fifty-meter-high flame on one side and an even taller tornado on the other, both real and roaring but never moving from their positions. Gawking tourists used to argue whether the envoys actually lived in the wind and fire, or if it was just a flashy gimmick aimed at impressing lesser species. None of us ever learned the truth… but the night Queen Verity died, the flame and tornado winked out of existence in the exact same second. It was a sign, if anybody needed one, that the higher echelons of the League were turning their backs on Troyen. By dawn, every other embassy had been evacuated too — no one wanted to go down with a sinking ship.

Now, here we were, back again.

There must have been a door or something closing off the stairwell from the roof, but it had vanished into the general wreckage. Still, the roof itself seemed in pretty good shape — at least the back half was. My eyes were getting used to the darkness; as we came up the final ramp, I could see a flat expanse of those smooth crystal bricks, with no dips or sags all the way to the rear edge of the building. Tobit checked with the Bumbler and grunted a few seconds later. "It looks safe," he announced. "If you want to trust the engineering judgment of a stupid machine."