"Starbase Iris is hailing us," the ship-soul announced.

"Okay," I said. My breath came out steamy — I’d asked for the bridge to be cooled like the lounge so the bodies didn’t go bad. "Do I just talk or what?"

"Connecting now."

The vidscreen on the command chair lit up with a young man who started to say, "Greetings, Willow, this is—" Then he broke off and gawped at his own screen, staring at the face of the dead woman in the chair.

I should have thought of that. Now I’d gone and scared the poor boy on the other end of the line.

"Sorry," I said, as I nudged the woman aside and pushed my own head in front of the vidscrfeen. "I didn’t mean to startle you," I told the boy, "but we’ve got a problem up here."

"Is she…" The boy stopped himself, gave his head a shake, and went all professional. "State your problem, Willow."

I told him about everybody being dead. Then I told the same thing to his commanding officer. Then I told the base’s Commander of Security. After that I spoke to a doctor who kept talking like the people on Willow had died of a disease. To me that was just plain foolish — if several dozen humans and a hive-queen die in the same second while crossing the line, you don’t need to be a genius to figure out why. But next thing I knew, everyone at the base had latched onto the disease idea, and they told me I’d have to stay quarantined where I was till the Admiralty could fly in an Outbreak Team. Whenever I tried to point out what really happened, the base personnel cut me off, saying maybe I was delirious with the plague myself.

"No," I told a Security captain, "I was delirious for a while but now I’m better."

"What do you mean you were delirious?" she snapped in surprise. Then suddenly, she said, "Oh. Right. You were delirious. Thank you, Explorer York, that confirms our disease hypothesis. Thank you." She gave me a relieved smile before she cut the connection.

After chewing my knuckle a bit, I figured out why she’d acted that way. People at the base wanted to pretend there’d been an outbreak, because otherwise they’d have to admit the truth: a whole navy ship had done something so horribly bad, the League decided to execute everybody. And when I’d talked about getting delirious myself, the Security captain thought I was helpfully playing along.

It was so strange. Something important had happened, and the whole starbase staff just wanted to hide their heads in the sand.

I wasn’t too happy being part of the lie, but Samantha used to tell me, "If everyone else is denying an obvious truth, you go along with them, Edward, okay? Because the Admiralty sometimes plays games, and if you spoil the game, they’ll be mad at you."

I didn’t want anyone mad at me. Even if this particular game seemed stupid. And dishonest. And cowardly.

Maybe it all made sense if you had the big picture.

While I waited for the Outbreak Team to arrive from some other starbase, I used the captain’s vidscreen to watch outside the ship. I didn’t see much — nothing came or went at Starbase Iris, not even in-system shuttles. Once I noticed a merchant vessel passing within range of Willow’s hull cameras, but it didn’t come very close; it was aiming for the planet Celestia, a light-minute nearer the local sun.

After two more days of waiting, another navy ship popped into view with that gorgeous FTL effect: the ship appears without warning and then you see a streak trail out behind it. That’s light from where the ship used to be, catching up with where the ship is.

Through a nearby speaker, my ship-soul announced, "Heavy cruiser Jacaranda of the Outward Fleet."

"Is it hailing us?" I asked.

"No. It’s communicating privately with the starbase."

Jacaranda chatted with Starbase Iris for half an hour… and according to my ship-soul, they were using higher-than-normal levels of encryption to keep anyone from eavesdropping. I wondered if they were worried about being overheard by civilians on Celestia, or if they were just keeping secrets from me. Maybe both.

So I sat and stewed, staring at the Jacaranda as it floated in the blackness. The ship was shaped like a long baton, with a big round knob on the front end; that was where they kept the Sperm-tail generator. The tail itself rippled all milky around the ship’s hull and far back into space until it dwindled away to nothing. Mostly the free end of the tail just drifted… but every now and then it gave a flick, the way a fish in a quiet river sometimes comes awake for a second to dart at something too small to see.

My sister once told me the Sperm-field created a separate little universe around the ship, and the little universe could slide through the big outside universe faster than light, without worrying about inertial effects of acceleration. I got lost when she tried to explain how it worked. Samantha was usually pretty good at avoiding subjects that confused me, but sometimes she got extra fired-up like she was absolutely certain she could make everything clear, no matter how slow I was. "I’m a communicator, Edward," she would say. "It’s my gift. If I can communicate with alien races, I can damned well communicate with you."

Well… sometimes it didn’t work with me; and I thought to myself, There at the end, it didn’t work with the aliens either.

At last I got a call from Jacaranda’s captain, a woman named Prope. In all the days to come, she never let on whether that was her first or last name. Maybe she came from one of those colonies where people only have one name, because they think it sounds more dramatic.

Prope certainly was the dramatic type. Whenever you talked to her, she always made you think she was half listening for something that was really worth her attention — like assassins sneaking up behind her back, or a Mayday from a luxury liner struck by a meteorite. Now and then she’d suddenly pause, as if she’d thought of some important point that went over the head of everybody else in the room… except she never told us what these great insights were, and after a while, I wondered if maybe she was just playacting.

As my sister’s bodyguard, I’d met a lot of diplomats. I’d seen tons of playacting.

So Prope’s face appeared on my vidscreen. She was lit from only one side, which meant the left part of her face was swallowed up in deep dark shadow — the captain’s attempt at dazzling me with a dramatic first impression. As far as I knew, the only way she could get that effect was turning off the lights on one whole side of her ship’s bridge.

"Captain Prope of the Jacaranda, calling for Acting Captain Edward York of Willow. Are you Explorer York?"

"Yes, Captain." I couldn’t help noticing how fast I got switched from acting captain to Explorer. Maybe Prope didn’t like treating me anywhere close to an equal.

"How are you feeling, Explorer?" the captain asked. "No ill effects from the disease?"

"I’m okay," I said. "Are you going to send someone to help dock this ship?"

"Sorry, not yet. Because of the risk of contagion, standard operating procedure says we start by sending an Explorer team to assess the situation."

"There’s not much risk of contagion," I answered. "Really."

"Even so, you can never go wrong following the proper protocols. Don’t you agree?"

"Um." In my years with the Outward Fleet, I’d seen things go wrong all over the place, protocols or no. "So after your Explorers check things out," I said, "then can I go home?"

"One thing at a time," Prope replied. "Please go to your transport bay and let my people in through the main airlock. They should be there in fifteen minutes."

She nodded a vague good-bye and waved her hand in the general neighborhood of her forehead. Ship captains are supposed to exchange full salutes after talking to each other… even if one of you is only a lowly acting captain. I guess Prope couldn’t bring herself to give me a real salute, seeing as I was only an Explorer.