“How many bugs were there then?” Harley asked.

“Too many. I had the feeling they were going to overrun their habitat in a few days. But not this!”

Xavier said, “You don’t suppose they did this themselves?”

“No,” Nayar said, and Jaidev nodded in agreement. “Not unless someone suspended the laws of physics for these bugs. They have insufficient mass to gain leverage.” He turned to Harley.

“Someone tipped this over.”

“Who would be fucking stupid enough to do that?” Xavier said.

Harley didn’t have to think long. “Camilla,” he said. “This is probably what Chitran’s message was when she said that this girl was killing all of us.” He was growing numb from the repeated blows to his perceptions and well-being. Spilled Woggle-Bugs = my death? Impossible.

Yet…possibly not. “Okay,” he said, “even if it’s too late, we need to clean this up. Good-bye, bugs. Do we have anything?”

“Too bad we don’t have the RV,” Jaidev said. “We could drain gasoline from its tanks, douse the creatures, and burn them.”

“Do we know for sure that we don’t?” Weldon had the inventory of gear from both groups. Harley looked at Nayar. “We should find out what we have in the way of weapons.”

“We can probably synthesize something, too,” Nayar said. “Poisons, other chemicals.”

Jaidev rubbed his face. He had not slept for two days, Harley realized. Now he was being asked not only to keep performing his Keanu Temple magic, but to do so for the group’s survival. “We’ll get to work.”

“Thank you,” Harley said. “Meanwhile, Shane Weldon is out there somewhere, looking for Camilla. Xavier, can you find him for me?”

Xavier nodded and took off without a word.

“Okay, everyone,” Harley said. “You have your orders.”

Within moments he was alone, watching the spreading stain of the Woggle-Bug infection.

Before long, Sasha joined him in his vigil. “What in God’s name—?” He explained what had happened. “Should you be sitting this close? What if they’re infectious?”

“Then they got me an hour ago. Can’t infect me twice, can they?”

“How should I know?” she said. She sat down next to him.

“Well,” Harley said, “if they can infect me, they can infect you. Shouldn’t you be getting some food or sleep?”

“Doesn’t seem right, with you sitting up like this.”

“You aren’t going to try to talk me into going to bed?”

“I’ve learned one thing, Harley, and that’s not to try to talk you into things.”

“You really do know me, darling,” he said. His tone was sarcastic, but he realized he had let down his guard.

And so did Sasha Blaine. She touched his shoulder. “Our timing really sort of sucks, doesn’t it? It would have been fun to, you know, meet normally.”

“Yeah. But on the bright side, we’ve packed a whole lifetime of adventure into a week and a couple of days.”

“There’s that,” she said. “You know, in spite of that cynical, bitter exterior, you are pretty much a glass-is-half-full guy.”

He laughed. “Not exactly. Do you want to know what kind of things go through my head at a time like this?”

“Do I?”

He pointed to the growing smear of multiplying Woggle-Bugs. “If we manage to kill every one of those things,” he said, unable to keep from smiling, “do they all come back as Revenants? I’m hoping that there’s some sort of personality threshold the Woggle-Bugs don’t reach. Maybe they’re all one big entity…when a few of them die, it’s like, I don’t know, skin cells that flake off a human.” Keep trying, he thought. Eventually you’ll convince yourself—

Xavier Toutant appeared in the entrance. Seeing Harley with Sasha, he marched directly toward them. “Xavier, you look like a man with a message,” Harley said. In fact, he looked worn out and troubled.

“Mr. Weldon’s on his way back. Said to alert you.”

Oh, shit, he’s got Camilla. Harley immediately pictured the unpleasant scene in which he ruthlessly interrogated a nine-year-old girl.

But when Weldon arrived, he didn’t have Camilla. He was escorting a naked adult male who was moaning, weeping, and wheezing, an unholy trinity of unattractive activities.

It was Brent Bynum.

DALE

Building a raft—that worked fine. They wound up using one entire side of the shed, which was large enough to easily hold the four humans. Removed from the structure, the material proved to be light, like balsa. “I think it’ll float,” Zack said, in that bright, chirpy way that made Dale Scott want to drown him.

“Fine,” Dale said, wondering why it was his job to keep the group focused on operational details. Probably because he had been an engineer and a fighter pilot—an operational type—while Zack and Makali and even Valya were academics. “How do we get this thing moving across the water?”

“Paddles?” Makali said. She had already been at work, stripping several long, narrow pieces of material from the shed. She began searching for some kind of thin, flat flap that could be attached to the base of the paddle.

They settled on one of the leftover tiles for the shed, attaching it with cable. Which worked for one sweep before separating.

“That ain’t good.”

Even Makali, usually so sure of herself, looked worried. “Zack, what are we going to do?”

Zack turned to the Sentry. “Do you see what we’re planning?”

“Yes,” the alien said through its translator. “You wish to construct a platform to allow you to float.”

“Correct. But we lack propulsion for the, uh, platform.”

“Obviously.”

“Can you provide it?”

“I don’t fucking believe this—” Dale said, but Valya shushed him again.

“Easily,” Dash said. “I’ve been ready to do so for an entire cycle.”

Which was how the four humans wound up floating on a thin slab of Sentry shedding across the vast, unpleasant sea of the habitat…propelled by Dash.

Now Dale Scott dozed and remembered his Navy days, not that you ever felt much in the way of gentle ocean swells on the carrier Ronald Reagan. (If you could feel a ship that size rolling on the water, it was time to be worried.) But Dale had spent some time in smaller boats. The motion was soothing; it made him reflective. He touched his Hulk medallion, finding reassurance in its presence.

He thought about these Sentry creatures and how they had wound up with a colony on Keanu. They’d developed spaceflight; the abandoned vehicle on the surface proved that. Quite an achievement for folks that seemed to spend most of their time in the water.

(And swam so strongly and gently. Dash had submerged himself behind the raft and proceeded to nudge it forward with each long, regular stroke. Dale had amused himself by counting to ten between nudges.)

Had they ever found spaceflight to be more practical and useful than humans had? Hard to tell; all Dale Scott knew was that NASA’s Destiny and Venture program was hanging by a thread the day Keanu was discovered in the sky. The space agency had managed to pull off a pair of lunar landings, creating a brief buzz of public interest that lasted about a month, and soon subsided into boredom if not outright hostility over the expense (large) compared to the return (zero).

Zack’s mission, redirected to Keanu instead of the Moon, would have likely been the last. There was hardware in the pipeline for two more, but the budget cutters were sharpening their little blades. The Coalition program, Brahma, might have been able to mount a second landing mission in five or six years, depending on a variety of factors.

No human had yet to devise a good rationale for these programs behind prestige, “science,” and the nebulous idea that watching an astronaut bouncing across the lunar surface was somehow going to encourage kids to sign up for calculus…so they could build another limited vehicle to allow another group of astronauts to bounce, and so on. Dale had found that argument the weakest of the three.