Ascending

13: WHEREIN I AM THOROUGHLY EXAMINED

More Tiny Things Invading My Person

Sick bay did not hurt, but it tickled. I could not see what did the tickling, so I blamed Nimbus — I thought he was sending specks of himself to brush against me, making my nose itchy and causing awkward irritations all over my body. But the cloud man swore he had nothing to do with it; he claimed to be suffering personal disturbances of his own, because the air of the infirmary was filled with Analysis Nano.

I did not know what Analysis Nano was, but the navy physician was delighted to explain. He was, in fact, delighted about every conceivable aspect of existence: the opportunity to examine me was "fabulous"; my personal transparency was "amazing"; and the chance to carry out a task for Festina was "a great, great honor." His name was Havel, a paunchy watery-eyed human who seemed to perceive more reasons to laugh than anyone else in the room. Dr. Havel was constantly chuckling or giggling or snickering over things that seemed quite ordinary indeed. He also displayed much hearty enthusiasm about anything that passed before his eyes… which meant when he said, "Ho, ho, you’re a stunner, the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen," I was not so gratified as I might have wished.

Some men are too easy to impress. When they praise your ethereal crystalline beauty, you get the feeling they would be just as ecstatic over a glittery red pebble or a potato shaped like a fish.

On the other hand, Dr. Ha-Ha-Havel was a good person to approach for clarifications of important Scientific topics — he was so enchanted with the glories of the universe, he would gladly tell you whatever he could, and never suggest you were ignorant for not knowing. Therefore he explained that Analysis Nano was a swarm of millions and billions of tiny machines, so small they could not be seen. They buzzed around patients in sick bay, reading your pulse, your body temperature, and the composition of your sweat. At instructions from the physician, the little bugs could also delve beneath your skin, digging for blood samples or flying down your throat to examine the workings of your stomach.

I did not want tiny machines journeying through my digestive system; but Dr. Havel said a number of them had already gone down my esophagus, and it did not hurt a bit, did it?

He was correct. It did not hurt, so I could not punch: him. But everything itched a great deal, as I have already said, and some of the nanos ventured into places they were not welcome. Though I wore my Explorer jacket, the coat did not seem sufficiently skilled at protecting the parts of me that needed safekeeping.

Myself Exposed

After five minutes of such indignities, Dr. Havel clapped his hands together with Anticipatory Zeal. "Well then, let’s see what my clever little helpers have discovered."

He scurried to a table in the middle of the room: the sort of table one might lie upon when being examined by a real physician.[9] However, Dr. Havel never once asked me to lie down; and when I looked at the table, I saw why not.

[9] — I am familiar with physicians because there were excellent medical machines in my home village. Once every month, I was required to recline on a proper examination table and submit to Necessary Regimens Of Health. These entailed authentic poking and prodding, not annoying little itches that lacked the courage of their convictions.

The entire table-top was a viewing screen… and there on the screen, life-size, was the exposed anatomy of a woman who could only be me. I do not say I recognized myself — instead of a face, there was an opaque rendering of my skull, not to mention whitish versions of other bones in my body, laid over internal organs depicted in ugly unnatural colors — but the general outline matched my own, so who else could it be?

"I do not look like that," I said. "My bones are not white; they are pleasingly transparent."

Dr. Havel laughed the way he laughed at everything. "Quite right, Ms. Oar, quite right, ha-ha. I got the computer to colorize your lovely insides so we could see everything better. You’re clearly designed to be clear, ha-ha, at least to human eyes; but once we scan you on IR and UV, not to mention X-rays, ultrasound, MRI, bioelectrics and so on, we get a lovely picture of what we can’t discern in the visible spectrum."

He proudly waved his hand toward the image — which I found most disconcerting to look at. When I breathed in, the picture’s lungs inflated; when I exhaled, the picture’s lungs did the same. I tried taking breaths in quick little gasps, hoping the machine would be thrown off and unable to match my rhythm… but no matter what I did, the image on the table imitated it exactly.

If I held myself quiet, I could fed my heart beating in perfect unison with the ugly crimson heart shown on the screen. Just noticing that made my heart beat faster. The picture’s heart beat faster too. I had the most disquieting sensation the image controlled my pulse instead of the other way around; so I looked at the floor until the sensation went away.

Meanwhile, Dr. Havel went around the table and placed his finger against the screen — not on my picture, but off to one side, where there was nothing but blank blackness. A host of squiggles appeared where his finger touched: printing in four different colors of light, and little diagrams that probably revealed vital facets of my health.

"Hmmr Dr. Havel announced. "Ms. Oar, it turns out you’re yourself."

"This is not a clever machine if that is its best observation."

"Oh," said he, "you think it’s reporting the obvious? Not at all, ha-ha, ha-ha. Before you got here, Admiral Ramos called to brief me… and when I heard your story, I bet the good admiral a modest sum you’d turn out to be a clone of the original Oar. But you aren’t."

"How can you tell?" Uclod asked.

The doctor must have been hoping for that question. "See here?" he said most gleefully. He patted his fingers against the screen, right on the picture of my ribs. The image expanded to show a magnified view, twice as big as before. Havel patted again and the picture expanded a second time; several more pats, and all you could see was one little patch of bone, blown up to fill the body-sized screen.

"All right," the doctor said, "fourth rib, right side: look at this area here." He circled his pudgy hand above the center of the picture, where there was an obvious line etched into the bone. "See this ridge running up the middle? And the bump at the top: one side of the ridge is a bit higher than the other. That’s a fracture site. The bone broke and didn’t quite knit cleanly. It’s only a microscopic discrepancy — whoever set the fracture did a fantastic job, better than any human surgeon. And the healing was more complete than anything I’ve seen in Homo sapiens, But magnify the image a few hundred times, and ta-da! The glitch is there, plain as day."

I stared at the picture. I did not like thinking my rib had a flaw in it, no matter how small.

"And," the doctor went on, "there are dozens of similar breaks throughout the skeletal system: the chest, the arms, the front of the face. Ms. Oar, you definitely suffered massive trauma at some point in the past — consistent with falling from a tall building, and your upper torso taking the brunt of the impact. Since I don’t know your species’ rate of recovery, I can’t tell how long ago the damage happened; but it’s safe to conclude you’re the same Oar who plummeted off the tower four years back."

"I know that," I told him. "I suffered Grievous Wounds and it took me time to heal."

"You didn’t heal by yourself," Havel said. "If the bones had knit on their own, the fracture sites would be a million times worse. A lot wouldn’t heal at all — the bone ends would be too apart to grow back together again. Someone damned good at orthopedics set each little break so it would fuse as good as new… and the surgery was performed within a few hours of the damage.

"On top of that," the doctor continued, "here’s the real telltale sign you got high-class medical attention." He pointed to a series of squiggles written in bright red on the table screen. They were not an alphabet I recognized; I assumed they were some hateful Scientific Notation describing tedious Chemicals.

"Your spinal fluid," Havel said, "contains the residue of a nifty little drug called Webbalin: developed on the planet Troyen several decades back, when the Mandasars were the best medical researchers in our sector. Webbalin prevents cerebral degradation after your neurons stop getting fresh blood; without it, a human suffers irreversible brain damage within five to ten minutes of coronary arrest. Even if someone gets your heart pumping again later on, you won’t be the same person. Your old brain architecture has fallen apart — the trillions of linkages that make you unique get erased by neuron decay. Even if we grow you new neurons, they won’t link together in the same way. Without Webbalin to keep your original gray matter from rotting, your body might get brought back to life, but your memories and personality sure won’t."

"And you found this Webbalin stuff in Oar’s spinal fluid?" Uclod asked.

"She obviously received a massive dose," Havel replied. "Enough to leave traces four years after the fact."

"Doctor," Nimbus said, "how soon does Webbalin have to be administered after death? In order to be effective."

"It’s usually given before death," Havel answered. "If a trauma victim’s in danger of dying, you want Webbalin in the patient’s bloodstream as soon as possible. Get it circulating while the heart is still working; then when the crash comes, ha-ha, the brain will be safe for ten hours instead of ten minutes. Gives you a lot more leeway for patching up the poor bastard."

"But suppose the patient has already died. Does that mean you only have ten minutes to inject the drug?"

"Worse than that," Havel told him. "Ten minutes to get the drug saturating the brain. Which is damned difficult if you don’t have blood circulation. You can force-pump a dose inside the cranium and hope it soaks into the cells… but that’s just farting around to mollify the next-of-kin. It seldom works at all, and it never works completely. If you’re lucky, you salvage thirty percent of the brain, tops. That’s rarely enough to keep the patient alive, let alone, ha-ha, help him remember the password to his bank account — which is often the family’s prime concern."

"So if Oar’s brain survived…" Nimbus said thoughtfully.

"It did survive," I told him. "It survived just fine. I am quite as clever as I have ever been."

"Maybe," Uclod said, "that’s because you ain’t human, toots. Your brain cells might not rot as fast as the average Homo sap. Maybe that’s how you stayed intact till the Pollisand picked you up."

"Or maybe," Nimbus suggested, "the drug was injected ahead of time. While you were still alive. Before you took the fall."

"No one injected me with drugs! I would know!"

But I was not so certain as I pretended. Only a short time before my fall, I had been lying unwatched in a state of unconsciousness. This was the result of being shot repeatedly with a whining noise-gun, causing such horrendous damage that I blacked out. When I eventually awoke, I located the villain who shot me and plunged with him from the tower… but during the period I was insensate, there was no way to tell what someone might have done to me.

"It does seem far-fetched," Dr. Havel said, "that the Pollisand injected Ms. Oar with Webbalin in advance. There’d be no reason to do that unless he knew she was going to take a swan-dive, ha-ha, onto bare cement. And the only way he could know that is by…"

"Foreseeing the future?" Nimbus said. "Isn’t that what the Pollisand is noted for? Being in exactly the right place when things go wrong?"

No one spoke for a moment. Then Uclod muttered, "Bloody hell."

Unpruned Anomalies

A time passed without conversation… which is to say, Dr. Havel talked and nobody paid attention. What he talked about was me as a "specimen" — his first "marvelous chance" to examine an "alien life-form never before seen by medical science," and he was "thrilled, absolutely thrilled" to have the opportunity.

But the foolish thing was, he did not examine me at all: he examined my picture on the table, while I stood bored at his elbow. And instead of praising my beauty and grace, he was forever blathering about Chemicals: substances with long complex names that my body contained, in lieu of other substances with long complex names that it did not. For example, it was apparently most remarkable that my blood did not include Hemogoblins (which I believe are little trolls that live in human veins); in place of those, I had Transparent Silicate Platelets (which, as the name suggests, are miniature plates that carry food from one cell to another).

Moreover, though I appeared visually similar to Homo sapiens, my composition was entirely different. I had numerous glands not found in humans; my basic internal organs (heart, lungs, and stomach) were arranged differently from Earthlings; even my bones were unique, and their attachments to various muscles deviated greatly from the Terran standard. I was, Havel said, a vastly different species from humans, structurally as well as chemically… but my nonhuman parts were assembled in such a way that I looked "morphologically human" on the outside. "Like a cat," said the doctor, "who’s been engineered to resemble a dog. Except that cats and dogs have a lot more in common with each other than you do with humans — your body chemistry is utterly extraterrestrial."

Finally, it seemed my brain had never undergone a process the doctor called pruning. He said this was something that happens to all known intelligent races by mid-adolescence: a large number of existing connections between mental neurons wither away in the interest of "efficiency." The theory goes that during childhood, the brain has many surplus linkages between neighboring nerve cells, because there is no telling which will eventually prove necessary. By adolescence, however, a person’s day-to-day experiences have established which connections are actually used and which are superfluous fripperies — links that never get activated in everyday life. The brain therefore discontinues low-use links as a means of streamlining the most common thought processes… making sure that essential mental activity is not slowed by extraneous clutter.

The doctor claimed pruning is good and desirable: a pruned brain is more quickly decisive, less plagued by needless doubts and uncertainties. After pruning, your brain knows conclusively that objects always fall down instead of up, that it is a poor idea to stick your hand into fire, and that animals never really talk; indeed, a pruned brain is resistant to, and even threatened by, any notion it has come to regard as absurd. The "mature" mind shuts the door on the impossible, so it can concentrate on The Real.

Or at least, that is what Havel claimed.

For myself, I did not think The Real deserved such drastic sacrifice. If pruning is the price of adulthood, is it not more courageous to remain a child? Of course one knows animals speak infrequently (and it is hard to believe ugly animals such as lizards will ever become engaging conversationalists); but it seems most high-handed to reject the possibility entirely. I tried to argue this point with the doctor, but because his brain had been pruned, he exhibited nothing but galling condescension toward my "naive" views… which meant I was close to choking him when Festina entered the room.

This was indeed a welcome interruption. "Hello, hello!" I said in great happiness. I wondered if she would want to hug again, and if I would be so foolishly self-conscious as before, and if maybe I should start the hugging this time to prove I was not standoffish… and none of that happened, because I saw my friend’s face was grave.

"Uclod," Festina said quietly, "our communications came back on-line: either the Shaddill have stopped jamming or we’re out of their range. Anyway," she took a deep breath, "I received a message from my staff on New Earth — your Grandma Yulai has been killed."

What Expendable Means

In a quiet voice, Uclod asked, "How?"

"Electrocuted by a faulty VR/brain connection. Several thousand volts to the cerebellum. Supposedly an accident." Festina rolled her eyes in disgust. "And the rest of your family is missing. I hope to God it means they’ve gone into hiding; my people haven’t collected enough details to know if that’s what happened, or if somebody got them too…" Her voice trailed off. "I’m sorry."

Uclod appeared frozen. Lajoolie had moved in behind him as soon as Festina began speaking; the big woman’s arms wrapped around her husband, holding him tight. She seemed made of stone… but Uclod was made of ice.

"What is that phrase you Explorers say?" he asked Festina. "Uncle Oh-God told me once — when somebody dies in the line of duty. What is it?"

Festina pursed her lips. "We say, That’s what ‘expendable’ means. Because the navy has always treated Explorers as expendable baggage."

Uclod stared at her a moment, then shook his head. "No. I can’t say that. Not for my own grandmother."

He turned around and buried his face against Lajoolie’s strong body.

The Utter Truth Of Death

Through all of this, I had not said a word. Indeed, I could not speak.

I did not know this Grandma Yulai personally, and the few things I had heard about her were bad. She was a criminal who dominated a family of other criminals.

And yet-

She was dead. She had died. She was no different now from the animal corpses one finds in the forest, the fresh ones covered with flies or the old ones as dried and withered as bread crusts.

Let me tell you a thing: my mother taught me death was holy, a blessing bestowed only on natural creatures. Rabbits and squirrels and fishes could die, but my own glass people could not. We were artificial beings; the Hallowed Ones refused to take us to the Place Beyond because we were not worthy of progressing to the life after life. Our species was cursed, spurned by death… or so my mother said.

It turned out my mother was wrong. My sister had died, died forever. Perhaps I had died for a short time too… though it does not count if someone brings you back.

But when I first met Festina, I got most angry with her when she claimed Earth humans could achieve death, I believed she was putting on airs, pretending to be holy herself. The ability to the seemed too wondrous and special to be true.

However, I did not feel that way anymore. Starbiter had died. Grandma Yulai had died. Even villains like Admiral York and the man who killed my sister had died. For the very first time — there in the infirmary, watching Uclod weep and Lajoolie comfort him — for the first time, I realized just how un-special Death was. How common. It was not the exception, it was the rule: a ubiquitous poison infesting the universe, and those of us from Melaquin were total simple-heads to think death was a blessed gift we had been denied.

Starbiter: disemboweled and smashed at high speed into the Shaddill ship. Grandma Yulai: her brain burned to smoke by some mysterious device. My sister: shot with invisible sound, churned up and blasted until her insides shattered, then buried to rot in the dirt.

What did that bode for anyone else?

Festina could die. Truly die. At any time. Perhaps as a noble sacrifice, perhaps as the foolish result of blind bad luck. The same for Uclod and Lajoolie. The same for me as well — the Pollisand had promised I was not immune to death, and had warned that a time of danger was imminent.

I could die. Anyone could die. The doctor, the cloud man, baby Starbiter, they were no more permanent than leaves on an autumn tree; one day their winter would come and then they would be trampled in the dirt.

How could these people stand it? Did they not know? Did they not realize? Why did they not scream and scream at the thought their lives would end?

But I did not scream either. The utter truth of death had taken my breath away.

"Are you all right?"

Festina stood by my shoulder, her face filled with concern. "I am not all right," I whispered. "I am not all right at all."

"What’s wrong?"

I steeled myself, then told her the truth. "Things die."

"Yes."

"People die."

"Yes."

"You and I, Festina — we could die."

"We will die, Oar. Sooner or later. Maybe in the next second, maybe years from now; but we will die."

I looked at her. Was this not a good time for my friend to offer an embrace, a comfort, a reassurance? Lajoolie had enfolded Uclod in her arms, but Festina was only watching me — as if she did not want to make the moment go away. As if she wished the thought of death to impress itself on my brain, deeply, deeply, deeply.

I fought back tears. "How can you stand it?" I asked. "Why do you not scream and scream?"

"Because screaming doesn’t do any good. Nothing does any good in the long run. Death will come." Festina locked my gaze with her blazing green eyes. "But we have choices, Oar. There are some deaths we don’t need to accept. If a blood clot hits my brain right here, right now, there’s nothing I can do about it, so no regrets. But if I die from something I could have prevented if I’d just thought ahead…"

She shook her head fiercely. "We Explorers have a saying, Oar — don’t die stupid. It’s got a double meaning: don’t die because of your own stupidity, and don’t die in a state of stupidity. Learn things; learn everything you can. Keep your eyes open. Prepare, prepare, prepare. You’ll still die eventually, but by God, in the final second you can tell yourself you didn’t just throw the fight."

"And yet," I whispered, "one still dies."

"Yes. One still dies." She glanced at the weeping Uclod. "It seems you’ve just recognized your own mortality, Oar. Everyone does sooner or later… then most people immediately try to put it out of their minds. They go into denial, except when the grim truth strikes so close to home it can’t be ignored." She turned back to me. "Don’t do that, Oar. Stay mindful of death. Stay constantly mindful."

She held my gaze a moment, then lowered her eyes with shy chagrin. "Of course, some people say you should also stay mindful of life. I’m still working on that one. C’mere."

Festina opened her arms to me and I finally, gratefully, slid into her embrace.

Afore Pressing Matters

We did not stay that way long. Behind my back, someone made the sound that humans call a Polite Cough… but I did not think it polite at all, for it caused Festina to release me. "Yes?" she asked.

I turned. Dr. Havel stood there in the company of the cloud man, Nimbus… who was now not shaped like a man but a featureless ball of mist. At the center of the ball lay the delicate silvery Starbiter; and do not ask me how a ball of mist can support a ball of baby for I do not know. Some mysteries are too pleasing to be questioned.

"Uhh," said the doctor, all shamefaced, "sorry to interrupt you, Admiral, but uhh, ha-ha, Nimbus has been saying some things I think we should, uhh, discuss."

"What sort of things?" Festina asked.

The doctor gestured for the cloud man to answer. "Well," Nimbus said, particles of mist roiling within him, "I’m sure you realize Grandma Yulai won’t be the last. She’s only the first casualty in a much larger campaign to keep York’s expose hushed up. If someone on the High Council was desperate enough to murder her—"

"Wait," Havel interrupted. "Does it have to be someone on the High Council?" He turned to Festina with his big watery eyes… as if, ha-ha, the admiral would reassure him the universe was not truly cruel. "Maybe it was just someone misguided," Havel suggested. "A lowly ensign perhaps, who thought killing this woman would make the admirals happy. That could be how it was, couldn’t it?"

"The council will try to make it look that way if this business ever gets out." Festina curled her lip. "They’ll find some gung-ho hotshot who’ll confess to doing it unasked… and the admirals will howl with horror that anyone could believe they’d approve of such a deed. For all I know, maybe it was some lousy lieutenant who wanted to impress the High Council. But we have to assume the worst: one or more admirals have gone bug-fuck and they’re ready to out-and-out murder folks who pose a threat." She gave a grim little smile. "I’m afraid I fall into the threat category. So does Oar. So does everyone on this ship."

"But even if the admirals are on the warpath," Havel said, "they can’t do anything, can they? They’re all on New Earth. They can’t send execution squads to murder us in space the League would never allow killers to leave New Earth’s system."

"The admirals don’t have to send killers. Every planet in the Technocracy has locals who don’t mind slitting throats for a price. And our beloved high admirals know who those people are. Wherever we dock, someone will be waiting for us."

"Then we don’t dock," Havel said. "We’re a navy starship, for heaven’s sake — we can survive in deep space for three full years. Even longer if we sneak into uninhabited star systems every so often and mine a few asteroids."

"And in the meantime, we let the killers run free?" Festina scowled, "I wasn’t the only Explorer marooned on Melaquin — there were dozens of others, and they’re all at risk. Most are still serving in the fleet; the next time their ships dock, there’ll be assassins waiting in port. As soon as my fellow Explorers go on shore leave, they’ll get their throats sliced. Do you think I’ll sit back and let that happen?"

"Then let us confront the Admiralty," I said. "Let us make them stop killing. Let us make them know how awful death is."

Festina shook her head. "The admirals are all on New Earth, and it’s way too dangerous for us to go anywhere near there. I don’t just mean New Earth itself — just entering the system may be a risk. Entering any Technocracy system. The council could spread word that Royal Hemlock has turned renegade: non-sentient. Every navy ship might have orders to manufacture missiles and put us down."

"Missiles?" Nimbus said. "You mean bombs? I thought the League of Peoples wouldn’t let ships carry lethal weapons."

Festina gave the cloud man a weary smile. "The League won’t let us carry weapons from one star system to another… but they certainly do let us kill dangerous non-sentients. Sometimes it’s nigh on mandatory. How do you think we handle pirates or terrorists? Plenty of nasty folk arm their ships and cause trouble for passers-by. If killers like that leave their home star system, the League takes care of them; but if the bad guys stay in one place, hiding in a handy asteroid belt and popping out from time to time to hijack local shipping, our navy has to declare a police action. A squadron goes in, sets up a secure base, then manufactures warheads from standard ship supplies. The warheads attach to normal probe missiles, and voila, you’re ready to shoot non-sentients. Once the enemy has been blown to smithereens, you dismantle your leftover warheads and go home with your pockets full of danger pay."

Dr. Havel muttered under his breath, "If the League lets you."

Festina nodded. "True. The biggest danger isn’t fighting a scruffy bunch of outlaws; it’s afterward, when you find out whether the League accepts your actions. The bad guys damned near always have innocent hostages aboard their ships, so the navy can’t just leap into an indiscriminate firefight. You try to negotiate, which seldom works, then you try blockading, then maybe a sneak attack to grab the enemy with your ship’s tractors… and nine times out of ten it still comes down to a shoot-out where you blast the bastards to bat-shit.

"Afterward, you ask yourself scary questions: did we really do our best to save sentient lives, or is the League going to hand us a death sentence when we reach deep space? Even worse, did we really clean up a nest of homicidal maniacs, or were those so-called terrorists actually high-minded dissenters against some corrupt local regime… and the fat-assed generalissimos fed our navy a pack of ties so we’d wipe out their squeaky clean opposition." Festina shrugged. "You can never be sure. The only way to learn if you did the right thing is to head home; if the League doesn’t kill you, you’re a bona fide hero."

"But even if the League doesn’t kill you," Dr. Havel said, "they may kill the person next to you." He dropped his gaze. "Admiral Ramos hasn’t mentioned what usually happens after our navy blows some ship from the sky. Even if you think you’ve pulled off a textbook operation, the League still executes a few people in your crew. Maybe those folks liked the killing too much — or maybe they didn’t do their best to encourage a peaceful surrender. Maybe the League are secretly sadists and they kill a couple crew members at random to keep everyone else nervous. You never know: God forbid the League should explain its actions. All you can say for sure is that the nice woman who always ate lunch with you, and the funny guy from engineering who had a new joke every day… they both got executed by the League and you’re still alive."

His voice carried such bitterness, we all stared at him. The doctor did not say more. It occurred to me that a man who laughs at the least opportunity may not be half so jolly as he seems.

Avoidance

"Well," said Festina in a quiet voice, "we won’t give anyone the chance to shoot us. Royal Hemlock will stay far away from Technocracy star systems; even if the council orders the rest of the fleet to vaporize us on sight, we’ll never come within target range."

"Then how shall we defeat the villains?" I asked.

"We’ll go public," Festina said. "Loud, brash, and the sooner the better. Before I came down here, I asked Captain Kapoor to contact news agencies on the closest planet to us: a Cashling world named Jalmut. We’ll record our testimony here on Hemlock, transmit everything to the Cashlings, and let them blare it across the galaxy." She smiled grimly. "I like the idea of putting out the news through nonhumans; it’s less likely the fleet will be able to get to them."

"Get to them?" Havel gulped. "What do you mean?"

"Bribe them, intimidate them, tie them up in red tape. Every human news agency has a few people who’ve been secretly bought by the navy." She glanced over at Uclod, still huddled against Lajoolie. "That must be how the Admiralty learned what Grandma Yulai was planning: she approached some reporter and the snitches got wind of it. But nonhuman media services are less subject to fleet interference; and once our statements hit general broadcast, the High Council won’t be able to keep things quiet. Even better, they won’t dare bump off the other Explorers who can testify about Melaquin — it’ll be too obvious.

"On top of that," she continued, "the whole council will likely get tossed in the clink as soon as we tell our tale, so they’ll find it hard to arrange assassinations. The government on New Earth will go berserk at what’s been happening behind their backs… especially the murder of Uclod’s grandmother. The top echelons of the Technocracy have never cared how the fleet handles its own people, but when admirals start killing civilians — even disreputable civilians like Yulai Unorr — every politician in human space will howl for blood."

"They might get it," Nimbus said. "Blood running in the streets. If the civilian government tries to crack down on the Admiralty, the admirals may crack back. Next thing you know, there’s a civil war."

Festina shook her head. "If our statements get out into public broadcast, the admirals’ own people will turn against them. That’s the problem with hiring opportunist scum to do your dirty work; they won’t stick by you when the wind turns. A few admirals may hole up in their mansions with squadrons of hired goons, but the police can deal with that. There’s absolutely no chance the navy itself will stick by the council once the truth gets out — honest folks in the fleet will be outraged, and dishonest ones will leap at the chance to eliminate the people above them."

"Then we must disseminate the truth immediately," I said. "Let us broadcast our messages right now."

Festina glanced at Uclod again. Lajoolie had dropped to her knees, the better to hug her little orange husband. They looked most ridiculous like that, the woman so big and the man so small; yet I thought how comforting it must be to have someone who did not mind looking ridiculous when you needed to be held.

"Uclod is a key witness," Festina said softly. "We’ll give him a few more minutes. Anyway, we can’t do much till the captain makes arrangements with some news agency. Then," she continued, "we’ll put a whole lot of nails in the Admiralty’s coffin."

"I am excellent at using a hammer," I said.