Any admiral could commandeer navy ships to carry out Class One jobs at any time… after which, only the High Council could reverse the decision. Since the High Council wouldn’t dare overrule the illustrious Festina Ramos, she’d have free rein to make Pistachio her own. (Most admirals commanded flagships already, but not Festina; she’d lost hers to a saboteur some years earlier and had never asked for a replacement. According to rumor, she preferred to travel incognito on civilian vessels — usually ones operated by aliens, who were less apt to recognize her famous face.)

Therefore, it came as no surprise when she waved me to her side a few minutes later. "Call your captain, please. Say I’m invoking my Powers of Emergency and making your ship my flag. Class One mission. Verify authorization through Starbase Trillium. Prepare to leave orbit as soon as we’re on board."

"What destination, Admiral?"

"A planet called Muta."

I’d never heard of it. She gave me a set of coordinates. Only fifteen light-years from Cashleen, but in an unexpected direction. "Isn’t that Greenstrider territory?" I asked.

"Used to be. The Greenstriders sold it to the Unity."

I stared at her. "The Greenstriders sold it?" Greenstriders were aliens with extreme territorial instincts — extreme to the point of lunacy. Once Greenstriders took mates, all they wanted was to claim a chunk of property and live there the rest of their lives. They wouldn’t travel… not even to move to bigger, more prosperous holdings. Greenstriders bonded with their land for better or worse, and never willingly left their homesteads more than a few hours at a time. I said, "Greenstriders wouldn’t sell a square millimeter of ground to their own grandmothers. They’d never sell an entire planet to outsiders. Unless the place is utterly uninhabitable…"

"No," Festina said, "Muta is apparently superb — 9.7 on the Habitability Index. Perfect for colonization. Nevertheless, the Greenstriders sold it to the Unity ten years ago."

"And now?"

"Now the Unity has small settlements there. One of which just sent a distress call."

"What kind of distress call?"

"A nonspecific SOS. Someone just pressed a MAYDAY button, and now isn’t answering the comm."

"So let me guess," I said. "The Unity tried to call everyone else on Muta to see if anybody knew the reason for the Mayday. None of the other settlers responded."

"Exactly. Muta’s gone completely silent. We have to find out why… and try to save any survivors."

"Why us?" I asked. "Doesn’t the Unity have ships in the area?"

"No. The Unity only has a dozen ships in their entire fleet — huge damned things called luna-ships because they’re the size of small moons. Mostly, the lunas keep to the core of Unity space, making short trips between well-populated planets. Muta’s a long way off from other Unity holdings — and it only has a few thousand colonists, so it’s not worth visiting often. A luna-ship drops by two or three times a year. The rest of the time, Muta is on its own."

"What about the Greenstriders? Even if they sold the planet, it’s still near their territory. Don’t they have ships within a few light-years?"

Festina shook her head. "From what we can tell, the Greenstriders give Muta’s system a wide berth… although they do have a number of unmanned observation posts nearby."

I rolled my eyes. "That says a lot, doesn’t it?"

Festina nodded but didn’t speak… like a professor at the Academy, waiting for me to explain, though she already knew what I meant.

"There’s something bad on Muta," I said. "Bad enough to scare off the Greenstriders. Or more likely, the bad thing killed every Greenstrider colonist, since I can’t imagine Greenstriders leaving their land, no matter how frightened they got. The Greenstrider government wrote off Muta as too dangerous for further settlement, so they sold the planet to the Unity. Even then, the Greenstriders didn’t want to turn their backs on whatever had killed their people… so they built unmanned observation posts as an early-warning system in case the bad thing on Muta started to spread."

"My thoughts exactly," Festina said. "And the Unity?"

"Full of themselves, as usual. They only colonize high-quality planets, which are never easy to come by. So they bought Muta, even though they must have known the Greenstriders had run into trouble. The Unity is famous for believing it can succeed where others have failed. They founded some settlements on Muta, probably filled with elite survey teams on the lookout for danger… but obviously they weren’t as good as they thought."

"That’s the way I see it too," Festina agreed. "Lucky for us, we don’t have to live on Muta. Just go in, rescue survivors, and get out."

I looked at her. "It won’t be that easy."

She sighed. "I know. All this" — she waved her hand at the city around us-"the Balrog did this for a reason. It had advance knowledge that we’d be called to Muta, and it decided to come along."

"Inside me."

"Inside you."

"Why?"

"I don’t know," Festina said. "Do you think the damned moss confides in me?" Her face remained hard for a moment, then softened. "Look. I won’t say the Balrog is benevolent. It has its own agenda and gleefully manipulates people to achieve its ends. But at least the Balrog is sentient. It respects sentient life. And if there’s something on Muta that’s been killing settlers, the Balrog can’t be on the killer’s side. If anything, the Balrog might intend to eliminate the killer. Maybe the Balrog will score points with the League if it makes Muta safe."

"So why make the trip inside me?" I asked. "If the Balrog wants to play hero, why not teleport to Muta on its own? It could smother the killer with spores, the way it smothered Zoonau."

"Maybe the Balrog wouldn’t win a direct confrontation. Maybe it needs to land on Muta incognito."

"And I’m the Trojan horse?"

"That’s not necessarily…" But her words were drowned out by a thunderous crash over our heads. Li’s shuttle had arrived.

The rope walkways of Zoonau had lasted for millennia. Like chintah concrete, they weren’t nearly as simple as they looked — each rope was an amalgam of artificial fibers and microbes that could heal any fraying or decay. They could not, however, heal outright breakage… like the snapping and slicing caused by a several-ton shuttle coming straight down from the top of the dome.

The ropes weren’t the only casualties. They were tied to numerous supports: to buildings, to stanchions, to the dome itself. If a rope happened to be stronger than its end attachments, the attachments gave way first. Screw bolts got wrenched from the walls of skyscrapers, spilling chunks of chintah into the streets below. Pylons buckled and bent, or broke clean off and plunged earthward like spears. The glass of the dome resonated with pops and bangs and clatter. Occasionally, some cat’s cradle proved strong enough to hold the shuttle’s weight, at least temporarily; but Li just applied more downthrust, pressing the craft into the web of ropes until they collapsed under the strain. Panicked Cashlings ran for cover, while the more courageous (or foolhardy) called the newswires again. Dust and debris showered around us as rope ends whizzed past at high speed, slashing like bullwhips. Festina threw herself on top of Tut to protect him. I could only flatten facedown on the roof and hope I didn’t get slammed by some jagged piece of concrete.

My eyes were closed against flying dust. I covered my ears with my hands to block the roar of the shuttle’s engines. Wind buffeted around me. Yet I was still aware of exactly where the shuttle was. Not through vision, hearing, or the feel of disturbance in the air, but through sheer mental comprehension.