I don’t know what I was expecting of the Pink Police, but this isn’t it; they’re using drones, basketball-sized metal spheres studded with thrusters and sensors. What, no villainous cops swarming aboard with DNA scanners clenched between their teeth? Two spheres, three — they spin around with unreal grace, bouncing between floor and walls and ceiling, pointing their sensors everywhere. The steam gouting through the companionway obscures my view of them, but I can see the passengers cringing. Then—

“Hello? Big Slow? You can let us out, now. Remember us?”

It’s Bill, or Ben, in the bag at my waist. With a start, I notice that the sky outside my eye slit has turned black, the ghostly blue haze stretching away to an indefinite horizon beneath my trailing feet. The boarding tube looms just overhead, a violent tentacle thrusting into the unwilling Pygmalion’s air lock.

“Right.” I loosen the flap holding them in, and Bill (or Ben) pops a prehensile, beady-eyed head out and looks around. Then he grabs hold of my face and swarms up to the cable, followed closely by his sib, along with the bag. I’m not used to being used as a stepladder. “Hey!”

“Keep it low, Big Slow. We’re trying to be sneaky. You wanna get ready to make with the decoy?”

“If you think it’s time.” I tie the other bag to the line, then open it and start preparing its contents. There’s a suit of clothes that the Honorable Kate Sorico never really liked, and a bunch of stuff to fill it out. Bulky stuff, massive… and padded with feedstock from the room printer that Pygmalion swore blind would look like a body on radar.

“Nearly there, Big Slow. Get ready.”

What we’re about to try is really stupid, but it beats all of the alternatives we’ve come up with. (I check the parasitic feed, but all it shows me is billowing steam; someone — I think it may be Mary X. — is complaining about the humidity wrecking her hairdo.)

The plan is simple, if not simple-minded. (a) Send out a bunch of encrypted decoy messages addressed to Jeeves, purely by way of distraction. Done. (b) Get out of Pygmalion before the police come storming aboard, and stay out of sight. Done. (So far.) (c) Let them search the ship. (d) Dump a decoy, so they go haring off after it. (e) Reboard Pygmalion, and hope they conclude that we left earlier, or were never there in the first place, or that they need to conserve fuel for their own orbital injection, or something. Like I said, it’s completely stupid. It’s just that, as Pygmalion pointed out, it stands a faint chance of keeping us out of the hands of the Pink Police. Unlike any of the alternatives on offer.

"Ready.”

It’s best not to think too hard about all the holes in this plan, even though I can see plenty. Really, short of sitting there and waiting for them to arrest us, there’s not anything else we can do. And who knows? Maybe it’ll even work.

“Okay, Big. Give it some elbow.”

I draw my legs up and shove the decoy hard in the small of her well-padded back. She floats away at a good clip, picking up speed rapidly and falling through the flickering blue curtain in only a few seconds. She’s got to cross another few kilometers of nearly empty space inside the plasma sail, dropping away from us as we continue to decelerate at ten centimeters per second squared. It all adds up; in a few minutes she’ll be making nearly two hundred kilometers per hour relative to the ships. If they’re as monomaniacally thorough as their reputations would have us believe, the cops will take time to finish sterilizing Pygmalion and withdraw their drones, before they undock; which will leave them trying to track down a human-sized target tens of kilometers away.

And then… we’ll see.

A thought strikes me as I dangle on the rope. I look up at Bill and Ben. “How are we going to get back aboard?” I ask.

“Worry about that later.” They’re busy tying the bags to the same anchor point as the rope. “Come on up here. We’ve got to get out of sight inside these sacks before they undock.” People clinging to the underside of a hatch would be a bit of a giveaway, wouldn’t they? “Get in.”

And so I spend the next two hours hanging upside down from the underside of an air lock, swearing quietly to myself, not crying, scared out of my wits, and periodically peeping through the steam-blinded cameras in hope of picking up some hint, anything at all really, of what’s going on aboard the Pygmalion.

The things I do to earn a living…

“HELLO, JULIETTE. CAN you hear this?”

“Can you hear this?”

(I’m tired. So very tired. It’s good to lie here, in this soft, warm bed. But he’s talking to me, and I need to, to do something. I ought to do something. Say something. But it’s hard.)

“Juliette?”

(I make a monumental effort.) “Boss?”

“That’s better, we knew you were going to pull through! You’ve done very well, but maintenance say you went into temporary shutdown. We were very worried for a while, but you’re going to be alright. Just a few repairs, of course, but you’ll be good as new again in no time. Fit as a fiddle. Isn’t that your instrument? Never mind. What one would mean to say is, ah, if there’s anything you need, just tell us.”

(An awful fear floats in the back of my mind, almost out of reach; I try to connect it to my vocalization system.) “Boss. The sample.”

“The sample?”

“Is it…?”

He sounds regretful. “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

(Which means… )

“The rumors are true, or at least plausible. Whoever broke in last year — we cannot count on them not having procured a viable sample of their own.”

(Which means he doesn’t know about the other thing… )

“Go back to sleep, Juliette. We can talk about this later.”

(Footsteps, diminishing.)

“There’ll be time enough for war.”

“HEY, BIG SLOW. Can you hear me?”

I come awake slowly. “Bill?”

“No, It’s Ben. Listen.”

I listen with electrosense and old-fashioned vibratory hearing. There’s bumping and banging in the boarding tube above me. Sounds of a hurried retreat. “Got it. Any news?”

“Check your parasite feed.”

He flags the view of the corridor heading toward the air lock. It’s half-hazed, and a big droplet clings to the middle of the lens, distorting the view, but a quick bit of visual filtering sets me right. The police drones are flying toward the air lock, escorting — yes, it’s Granita. She’s talking to them. “—not the one I’m looking for, but one of her sibs. Not my fault the bitch smelled a rat.” She sounds annoyed. “You’ll have to do better next time.” The drone is evidently conveying its driver’s excuses. “That’s not good enough! I’ve got better things to do than stand guard over your targets all year. No, I don’t suppose it matters. She could have been useful.”

They get to the air-lock vestibule. “Yes, thank you. I need to proceed to my estates as rapidly as possible — unfinished business. If you have a spare seat, I’ll take it. Yes, I’d love to witness your mopping-up. If you could record it for me, I am sure I can find a fitting use for it — pour encourager les autres.” She smiles coldly at the drone, then follows it aboard the police cutter.

I shudder. Dainty feet kick off overhead, leaving behind the Pygmalion and the rest of her false flag operation. Granita must be working for Her, one of my ghost-selves warns me. I think I know which one it is, now, and I resolve to trust those instincts in future.

A minute later, there’s a furious rattling and banging. Then the docking tube detaches. Almost immediately, the police cutter begins to fall away from Pygmalion, sliding past the air lock with the remorseless momentum of a freight train. It barrels down into the blue soupy sky of plasma and disappears in a flicker of lightning. With its high-thrust drive, it can drop toward Mars and fire up the motor just before arrival — getting there hours ahead of us.