Oh well — at least the moss meant we had an alternative to getting killed by my sister.

The ramp went through half a dozen switchbacks, till I could no longer see crimson glimmering up from below. I could still smell buttered toast, strong and clear… but I could also catch a whiff of fresh night wind breezing down from the roof’s open air. It carried the scent of human sweat, and gusts of ozone too — the fragrance of lightning. Whatever the Explorers were doing, it used a lot of electricity.

By the time I topped the last ramp, the roof was getting crowded, what with five Mandasars and the same number of humans, three wearing big bulgy tightsuits. Once upon a time, the parapet had run along the whole west side of the palace… but some kind of explosion had blown out a big chunk of stone, leaving a gap of ten meters between us and the next intact section of walkway. The good news was the missing hunk of masonry made it hard for Balrog to migrate from the front of the palace back to us; the bad news was we were squeezed onto a patch of roof no more than three Zeeleepulls long. Lucky for us, the parapet was three Zeeleepulls wide too: you needed that much for bull-sized warriors to get past each other when they were marching sentry on the ramparts.

Even if we’d had more space, I doubt we would have used it — everyone was too busy crowding around Tobit, Dade, and Plebon to see what they were doing. They’d planted our remaining anchor atop the stomach-high wall that edged both sides of the parapet. Standing on either side of the box were two Bumblers, ours and Plebon’s, with back panels pried off to reveal tidy bundles of wires. Neat connections had already been spliced between those wires and some handy electrode knobs jutting out from the base of the anchor machine. The equipment was clearly built to make such rewiring easy; it made me wonder how often Explorers got into tug-of-wars, if navy engineers designed everything for exactly this situation.

But no design is perfect — the Explorers needed more power than just the two Bumblers. Both Tobit and Dade had the fronts of their tightsuits sliced open, cut very delicately by some kind of knife. The incisions were only deep enough to slit off the top layer of fabric, revealing the snarl of circuitry that ran the various functions of the suit: radios, temperature control, all that. Someone had yanked a finger-thick cable out of each suit’s belly and connected the cables to the anchor box too… making it look like each man had a length of intestine pulled out of his gut and hooked up to the anchor. Tobit and Dade stood side by side in front of the parapet wall like guys at adjacent urinals, not looking at each other, occasionally giving self-conscious glances down at the cables that were pumping power into the little black box.

"How’s it going?" Festina asked. She sounded like someone trying not to sound anxious.

"See for yourself," Plebon said. He pointed over the parapet wall, across the palace grounds and past the first canal, to a Sperm-tail twinkling down from the black sky. The tail tip lay pressed against the side of the old Hushed Museum, a memorial to every Mandasar who’d died in the last 144 years. (That’s supposed to be how long Mandasar souls stay in the afterlife before getting reincarnated again.) I was happy to see the museum had survived the war… even if it looked like the Sperm-tail had choked up against the building and wouldn’t come any closer.

"Is the tail stuck?" I asked.

"It’s held," Plebon answered. "We increase our power; the tail comes toward us. Then the other side adds more power to its anchor, and we lose ground."

"Okay," Festina said, moving into line with Tobit and Dade. "Cut me… before Queen Samantha finds more juice."

She spread her arms to expose the front of her tightsuit. Plebon hesitated a moment, then picked up a scalpel that’d been lying on the parapet wall — a regulation navy scalpel, taken from an Explorer’s first-aid kit. He skimmed the knife up one side of Festina’s rib cage, across at the shoulders, and down to the waist. A flap of heavy cloth fell open in her suit, baring the electronics beneath. Plebon carefully slipped his hand in among the wires and began feeling around for the power cable.

"Kind of an erotic experience, ain’t it, Admiral?" Tobit leered. "Having your clothes cut off, then getting groped."

"Shut up, old man," Festina mumbled. Her voice sounded like somebody blushing.

While Plebon worked, I looked over the edge of the parapet. The first thing to catch my eye was a Laughing Larry, hovering halfway between the palace and the surrounding palisade. At the moment, the Larry wasn’t giggling its full hyena laugh — just a light chuckle, as if it knew a joke we didn’t. The gold ball spun two stories above the ground, a good height for slaughtering soldiers when the shooting started, but from down there, they wouldn’t hit us up on the roof. Larries fired out the bottom and sides, not the top; they weren’t designed to butcher people who’d reached higher ground.

Another Larry hovered over the first canal, just beyond the west gate of the palisade. In the darkness I couldn’t see more of the metal balls, but I didn’t doubt they were out there — when Tobit had reported four of the nasty things, he’d been using his Bumbler as telescope and IR scanner.

Four Laughing Larries, and the Balrog inching up behind us. Not good. I noticed the five Mandasars had planted themselves at the top of the ramp, between me and the creeping moss. Counselor was grimly holding Festina’s flaming lantern; she obviously had plans to show the Balrog a hot time if it tried to attack her Teelu.

I turned my eyes toward the Sperm-tail, still plastered against the side of the Hushed Museum. The tail seemed to be quivering with excitement… but maybe it was just vibrating under tension as our anchor pulled one way and Sam’s pulled the other. Behind me, Dade yelled at Plebon, "Hey, be careful! If you feed too much power, you’ll fry the whole anchor."

"He knows that," Festina said in a tight voice. "Let the man work."

"Almost there," Plebon grunted. "Here goes."

Suddenly, the tail slithered away from the museum wall. It snapped up into the air, high, high, halfway to the thin clouds, then stabbed down again, straight at us — like a colored tube of lightning, and the anchor was the lightning rod.

Whish. Contact. Locked down.

I lifted my hand to my earphone and waited for someone to tell Jacaranda we were ready. Five seconds passed in silence. Finally, I said, "Um… shouldn’t we call the ship? Say we’re ready for transport?"

"No radios," Festina replied. Her voice came straight out of her tightsuit, with no amplification. "Our suit power is shunted into the anchor. But there’s nothing to worry about: the ship can tell when its tail has been snagged. Give them a few more seconds to establish an air-pressure gradient. Then we can start—"

She was going to say we could start transporting up. But she was interrupted by stuff transporting down: three Laughing Larries and a twentyish version of me.

One slight difference: the younger me had a chest made of glass.