THE COLD SHOCKED ME to myself. Thin fingers of mist like the arms of phantasms snaked out into the hall. Crim and Switch were on me at once, drew back at once when they saw it was me. Siran and the Norman trooper stood guard at the door opposite, leaving Doctor Okoyo to fuss over the huge storage crèche that housed the Cielcin.

“This is the one, yes?” she asked, keying her way through a sequence of prompts on a panel on the side of the crate.

Shrugging into my coat properly, I squinted at the name stenciled in red on its side. “Yes.” I set the heavy mantle down and went to the bank of drawers fixed to the wall opposite the sleeping fugue crèches. On their feet, the Cielcin ranged from seven to nine feet tall, and so no human crèche could hold them. The eleven sepulchers that stood at intervals along the arc of that curving theater might have carried a bull auroch to some new colony. Finding the drawer I wanted, I drew it out and set it on the floor. Within was a sort of black jumpsuit of some rubbery material and a set of loose-fitting dark robes. At a strange look from Siran, I said, “Tanaran’s clothes.”

“Blood’s mixing,” the doctor said in her Norman clip. “Are you sure about this?”

“Quite sure,” I said. I wasn’t. I had no idea how Tanaran would react. It was no fighter, not like Uvanari had been, nor like any of these others slumbering in this hold. But for a moment I felt a hint of Bassander’s trepidation, I think. His defensive coil against the strangeness of these beings. “But doctor, the minute this thing unseals I want you to step back. Switch, keep a bead on the Cielcin, will you? I don’t know how it might react to the thaw.”

Being mostly water, organic tissue does not like to freeze. The crystallization of water in the blood has the potential to damage the delicate structure of organs and tissues, to break blood vessels and tear arteries. And yet the long years and decades of star travel are too long to face conscious, lest all but the most high among the palatine burn their lives in transit. And so the blood had to be cycled out, replaced with the TX9, which did not freeze as it cooled. Most tanks performed the task automatically, cycling the suspension fluid out, draining the body and the space in the surrounding tank before pumping the blood back in as the body warmed. I merited special attention from the medical officer only because of my high station. It dramatically reduced the risk of cryoburn.

“Draining the tank,” Okoyo said, hitting a switch on the side of the crèche. A ring of blue light glowed around one of the hoses that snaked away from the box and toward a reservoir for sterilization. That would be the suspension fluid. Arms crossed, I stalked just behind the doctor where she crouched at her ministrations, awaiting my cue like an actor hanging in the wings.

“How long?” Siran asked from her place by the far door.

Okoyo bit her lip. “I’m not sure. I don’t usually work with these sorts of tanks. I’m used to people.” She fiddled with another set of controls. “Temperature’s rising steadily. Starting TX9 drain now.” But before she pressed the final button, she turned to me. “Are we sure this will work? Their biology is different, and not cow different.”

My eyes darted to the doors, as if I half-expected Bassander to burst in with an inquisition at any moment. At length I shook my head, shrugging my arms tighter against the cold. “I’ve no idea. Not for certain. They weren’t afraid going in, so they must have some comparable technology, but . . .” I left the rest unspoken. I could only hope the technology worked as well on xenobites as it did on livestock. I knew that in the Empire there were circus troops and scholiasts and men of stranger professions who carried non-terranic life forms on their ships. On Emesh the Count’s vilicus had spoken of a plan to transplant thousands of the native Umandh population to another world for labor purposes, and I knew others of the coloni races were transported between human worlds for the amusement of the wealthy. They had to be transported somehow across the dark years between the stars.

“I’m sure the Legion medtechs did everything at their disposal to keep the Pale alive,” I said.

“It is alive,” Okoyo replied, pointing at a set of small panels. “I’m just not sure I can keep it that way.”

It seemed an odd time to be making that particular comment, given that she had already drained the suspension fluid and was cycling the TX9 out for blood. I needed a moment to understand. “I don’t doubt your abilities, doctor. I know you haven’t done this before.” Frost crunched beneath my feet as I crossed to her and, stooping, pressed the button to begin pumping blood back into the Cielcin’s body myself.

Red indicators began cycling blue with a series of faint chimes. I helped Okoyo to her feet, rehearsing my first words in my head. It had been a long time since I’d needed the alien tongue, and I was afraid of what I’d sound like.

You speak like a child. That was what the first Cielcin I had ever met said to me. Nietolo ti-coie luda. Like a child. I didn’t feel like a child. I felt old. Aged as only a traitor can be. My mind wandered beyond the edges of that frigid room and out across our little fleet. To Valka, wherever she was, aiding our little misadventure. To Bassander, clueless, I hoped. To Jinan, whom I’d betrayed. To Otavia and Ilex and the others waiting on the Mistral for our return. To Pallino, Elara, and the others I would leave behind. I felt at once like one of the necromancers out of antique myth, standing above the coffin of some revenant plucked back from the void. That put me in mind of my words to The Painted Man, from Shelley.

Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but you are solitary and abhorred. This wasn’t going to be easy on the xenobite, alone among us humans. Stranger in a strange land. Pneumatics hissed, whined with recharge as the great lid of the fugue crèche was lifted up and hinged backward. Acrid vapors snaked in the cold air, smelling of antiseptic and machine oil. Under normal circumstances, the doctor ought to have approached, to check the pulse and pupil response of her patient. I did not blame Okoyo for hanging back.

Behind me, I could sense the coiled tension in Switch and Crim, their phase disruptors raised and set to stun. Siran’s face and that of the nameless soldier beside her were white and drawn as corpses. I realized suddenly that I alone of all that group had been down in the tunnels at Calagah. I alone had been in Castle Borosevo and the Chantry bastille below its walls for the long interrogation and the inquest into the crash on Emesh. I alone had spoken with Uvanari and with Tanaran itself. Not Switch, not Siran, and certainly none of the Normans had ever seen a Cielcin in the flesh.

It was no wonder they were scared.

So I could not afford to be.

“Fear is a poison,” I murmured beneath hearing, the words smoking in the cold air, and brushed past the Norman doctor. There was a faint violet color to the smokes rising from the crèche, and through them I could see the slick grayness of the crèche’s interior. It reminded me of the paper egg cartons I have seen in marketplaces from Marinus to Jadd, wet with the undrained slime of the suspension fluid, like the snot of some fell beast. And in the center of it all—naked and dripping and pierced by several needled cords—the body of the alien. Corpse white it was, the flesh shining and bloated as if it were many days drowned and fit to burst. Yet it was thin and hard, a creature of sinew and bone, claw and horn and hide. Its long white hair—sprouting from the back of its head like a Mandari queue—was soaked and tangled beneath its crown of snarling horns. Reaching down past the lip of the crate, I peeled a sensor tape off its neck and felt for a pulse.

There it was. Faint but growing stronger as both hearts began to beat.

Ta-tum ta-tum.

“It’s alive,” I said, and moving drew the long tube from its mouth. I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster I had brought with us—and my young heart filled with the milk of pity and of guilt. I said again, “It’s alive.” Everything that happened to it next was because of me, and I’d set its feet on no easy road. Heedless of the purplish slime on its face, I lay a hand there, feeling the slow blossoming of warmth as the black blood piped into its veins.

Ta-tum ta-tum.

“Is it awake?” Crim asked.

“It’s dreaming,” Okoyo replied. “The mind still has to reorient.”

The muscles of the inhuman face hung slack in sleep. Its eyes shut, lips parted, it might have been a human face—carved as it were of alabaster or ivory—were it not for the absent nose. Something in the lines of its face put me in mind of those mad Italians who, by the dawn light of history, cut into corpses to understand the musculature. An artist myself, I wondered at the similarities between its face and mine: that Evolution should—beneath two separate suns—contrive two forms so alike and yet so estranged. What chance or powers had moved our two species to so similar a form I could not then guess, but I wondered, and wondering traced my thumb against the sharp line of Tanaran’s cheekbone. I imagined there was a kinship between us, as if Life shared a common ancestry with Life—as indeed is the case for all terranic life forms. I ignored our differences out of necessity and the necessary idealism of youth. I needed to ignore them, and so imagined that it was Humanity I saw in the inhuman lines of its face.

It jerked as if electrocuted and I yanked my hand away. Behind me, the others all gasped, and I heard at least one stunner ping as it was primed. Switch’s, at a guess. With a wet and rattling gasp the Cielcin lurched, trying to find its feet—its knees. Tanaran scrabbled instead and collapsed, pulling at the tubes that still fed its blood like ink beneath the wrinkled paper of its skin.

“Paiwarete,” I breathed, laying hands on its arm and shoulder. “Careful now.” I spoke its language softly, almost crooning. “You’ve been asleep a long time.”

It pawed around blindly, hand finding my elbow, my shoulder, the front of my shirt. Hard fingers closed on my tunic, and it pulled me down. “Yukajji-do,” it said, looking around. Its black eyes opened, large as my fist, and cast about the cubiculum. It took in Okoyo and the others before at last settling on my own face. “Hadrian.”

“Yes,” I said, still softly. “It’s me.”

“Is it the day?” it asked, raising its upper lip to show those horrible, glassy teeth. “Aranata? Did you find . . . my . . . master?”

I had thought long about what I would say to Tanaran when I awakened it. Nothing seemed sufficient, given the circumstances. One thing alone was clear: there was very little time, and the truth—in my experience—is always a long story. So too are lies. “Namne deshu civaqeto ti-zahem gi,” I said.

“When we get where?” it asked.

“Can you stand?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“I’ll help you.”

When at last it found its feet, Tanaran stooped over me, leaning on my shoulder, naked and covered in slime. It showed no particular shame at its undress—neither had Uvanari in the throes of its torture—and not for the first time I wondered if the xenobites had a nudity taboo. And why should they? The Cielcin were hermaphrodites, and had no special modesty to hide from one another as we.

Extending a hand to Okoyo, I said, “Towel.” She tossed one to me rather than handed it. I could see the whites in her eyes, like she was a racehorse spooked by some uncommon noise. Tanaran understood implicitly what the towel was for, and began to wipe itself off. “There isn’t very much time,” I said seriously. “I need you to come with us.”

“Iagami mnu ti-perem ne?” it asked. Where are we going?

“To another ship,” I said tersely, pointing it toward the drawer I’d removed that held its clothes. “I’ll explain once we’re there.”

If it understood at all what the urgency in my voice meant, it gave no sign, only continued to wipe the violet slime from its pale limbs with the rag. Presently it stopped, cast about the cubiculum, taking in the crèches where lay interred the others of its kind. It swayed there, narrow as a reed. “What about the others?” it asked, turning to look straight down at me.

I rolled my head in rough approximation of the gesture the Cielcin use to signal no. “Usayu okun.” Just you.

“You are taking me to torment,” it said, “like you took the captain.”

I had nothing to say to that. There was nothing I could say. Except, “Get dressed.”

Crim and Switch led the way, with myself and the hooded Cielcin close behind. The black halls had transformed themselves while we tarried in the cubiculum. I kept my hand on my shield-belt beneath my coat, shoulders tensed as if expecting at any minute a knife might plunge between them. But it was only Siran and the doctor behind me.

“The lift’s just ahead,” I said, speaking to the Cielcin. “Keep your head down.” The hall was lower than the cubiculum had been, and Tanaran stooped as it followed on.

Tugging the deep hood further down, it said, “Oreto yagiara. Raka hassu-iuna.”

“What’s it saying?” Crim hissed, pressing himself against the wall before Switch moved round the corner.

“It can’t see,” I said.

“Cryoburn?” the Norman asked over his shoulder as we moved quickly down the hall.

Shaking my head, I said, “Not sure. The Cielcin aren’t fond of light to begin with.” The tall xenobite shrugged its gray mantle about itself, and were it not for the hands—too white and with too-long fingers—one might have thought the creature the specter of some itinerant, bent by time and toil. It slumped against the wall, bent so that its head was almost at a level with my own. Remembering well the struggles of waking from fugue, I caught it. “Not far now. Not far.” Helping the creature to stand, I looked up at the ceiling, at the hemispheres of black glass studding the dark roof at intervals, each housing a camera. They must be quiescent, depowered by Valka’s will, but still I felt the weight of them, the lidless eye of the Imperial conscience. “Come now.”

We’d not gone three paces when Crim cried out in Jaddian and fired his stunner. I left Tanaran leaning on the wall and hurried forward. I had seen no one, but had been distracted helping the hulking alien to walk. Without having to be asked, Switch said, “Technician saw us. Don’t know which one.”

“Black planet!” I swore, grinding my teeth. “To the lift, then. Double quick.” I turned back and snatched Tanaran by the wrist. Switching tongues, I said, “Liara doh!” Quickly now!

Only the Pale’s silver-glass teeth were visible beneath its cowl. “What is happening?”

“We have to hurry,” was all I said. “Liara!”

It didn’t move, save to straighten as much as the hall would allow. Its mouth hung open for a moment, and it said, “You are fighting your own people. For me? Why?”

“Liara!” I said again, tugging its arm.

“You are a fool,” Tanaran said.

“Granted,” I said, “but if you want to see your people again, you’ll come with this fool now.”

Have you ever walked by night for the first time in a place too familiar to you by day? Have you felt the darkness and the light of stars and moons transmute that comfortable place into somewhere threatening and strange? Thus it was for that hallway. It was as if I had never walked that way before, who had walked it a thousand times. The ribbed walls and trapezoidal profile and the winking camera blisters felt as if they contained some unspoken threat.

We piled into the lift, Crim and Switch coming up last to take a position nearest the door. Tanaran had to lean, lest its head scrape the roof of the carriage. The door sealed, and we seven plunged back down several floors.

“Odds on there being a party waiting for us at the bottom?” Siran asked, triple checking her own disruptor was set to stun.

“Too soon,” Crim said. “But it won’t be long.”

The doors cycled open with a hiss, revealing a pair of haggard-looking fugue techs—bald-pated and pale in their gray-striped blacks. Crim didn’t hesitate, and so they had only the barest instant to register confusion before the stunner bolts felled them. They collapsed like a stack of wet rags.

“Don’t seem right,” Switch said, lingering by the nearest of the stunned men. “They’re our people.”

Tanaran’s distended form drew my attention as it emerged from the lift behind me, and I said, “Our Cielcin friend would agree with you.” Switch made a face, eyed Tanaran with a look of mingled horror and disgust, and when the xenobite had passed, the myrmidon made the sign of the sun disc, thrust it toward Tanaran as if the creature were a hedge witch Switch meant to ward against. I squinted at him, but was glad he did not see me shake my head as I added, “Leave them. They’ll be all right.”

All the same, Switch stooped and untwisted the man’s leg out from under him and moved off with a punctilious little nod. I smiled after him. What was it I’d said to Jinan—it felt like years ago? That it was intolerable such good men should spend their lives in battle? I felt that sense again, and with it the sense—too common in me—that I deserved neither their loyalty nor their friendship. I confess I tarried there a step, watching Switch and Crim and Siran fan out, the latter dragging Tanaran behind her, moving from support strut to support strut. I did not stand there long—just a moment—and despite the urgency of our moment I smiled.

“It’s not far,” Crim said, unhelpfully. I repeated the words to Tanaran. “Going to get more crowded the closer we get to the bay.”

He could not have said it at a worse time.

“Lord Marlowe!”

There was the knife I’d been waiting for, plunged right between the shoulder blades, just east of the heart. My name seemed pulled from me like a shard of ice extracted from my back, and turning I saw Lieutenant Alessandro Hanas standing with six Jaddian aljanhi in their striped blue and orange tabards.

They had phase disruptors trained on us.

Even as I turned, I thumbed the catch on my shield-belt and felt the energy curtain collapse around me, skin tightening as the static charge forced hairs to stand on end. Trying to speak casually, I slid my arms into the sleeves of my coat. “Lieutenant, hello.”

“I’m not sure what it is you think you’re doing, sir.”

“Sir,” I said, checking that Tanaran was still standing there, “I’m taking this Cielcin to its leader.” No sooner had the words left my mouth then I realized the cliché they contained, but I set my jaw all the same. I did not draw my stunner. Hanas was shielded himself, and though the aljanhi were not, I did not want to provoke them, for my companions’ sake. Solutions began to spin off in my mind, ways to get my people safely down that hall and out. It was a straight shot to the bay a couple hundred meters away, and turning our backs would only expose them to fire.

The Jaddian lieutenant scratched his beard. “Surrender, and I’m certain the captain will treat you fairly.” He shut his eyes, and for a moment the man spoke and not the officer. “After all she did for you.”

“Don’t talk about her, Hanas,” I snapped. “I know what I’m doing.”

The officer did not raise his hands, but his jaw worked as he glanced at the soldiers at his either side. He seemed to chew on some sour gristle, as if some foul taste had poisoned him. “I hope for your sake that you don’t.” The muzzles of six stunners glowed blue like the slitted eyes of a half dozen jeweled serpents. Crim had a shield. And Siran. And Switch. But the doctor, the other soldier, and Tanaran were not so fortunate. Tanaran might take a stunner bolt or two before it fell—I had seen its kind endure thus on Emesh—but I didn’t like the risk. And Tanaran would draw fire. There wasn’t an eight-foot-tall xenobite in the galaxy that wouldn’t draw fire from a cluster of human troopers in a narrow hallway. No matter how I turned it over in my head, I didn’t like our odds. I toyed with the idea of drawing my sword, but these men were—had been—my comrades. My friends. And they were Jinan’s people, and despite all that I was doing and had to do I could not bring myself to cross that line. Attacking those soldiers seemed too much like attacking her.

“Surrender!” Hanas said, placing his own hand on the stock of his phase disruptor where it remained slung on his hip. “For the last time! Throw down your arms and kneel!”

As he finished his demand, a stunner bolt from behind felled one of the aljanhi to his right, then another. A third. The lieutenant turned, drawing his weapon as two of the soldiers fired. One of their shots went wide, striking the ceiling, while the other struck me full in the chest and dissipated against my shield curtain. I moved forward, shouting at Tanaran to get down and out of danger.

The shielded lieutenant lurched sideways, staggering for the wall. I drew my own stunner and fired uselessly at him, watching the energy curtain coruscate as the field exchanged with my weapon’s discharge. The lieutenant’s square shoulders hid what he was doing, but I knew well enough.

Vwaa! Vwaa!

The standard Imperial alarm blasted through that corridor, urging the ship’s response division to our location. Red lights flashed. I heard a coarse oath from Switch behind me, and another set of stunner bolts whistled from a side passage behind Hanas’s men. Catching on, Crim fired at the remaining aljanhi, catching one full in the face.

“What the hell is going on?” Siran shouted, words half-drowned by the alarms.

Vwaa! Vwaa!

I had much the same question.

I did not have it long.

There ought to be a word, I think, for the opposite of a catastrophe, though such moments are rare. Two figures emerged from the side passage, still in their Company reds. Elara caught one of the remaining soldiers full in the face with her stunner and Pallino followed, weapon at his side. The lieutenant was still on his feet, and whirling to face the newcomers, he tugged his disruptor free from its holster. The silver stock gleamed in the harsh light. Knowing the officer was shielded, Pallino threw his stunner square at Hanas’s face. The lieutenant’s shot went wide, and Pallino dove in past Elara before I could so much as adjust to the myrmidons’ surprise appearance. He threw a vicious hook—following through fist-to-elbow—that clipped the square Jaddian’s temple and snuffed him out like a candle.

Vwaa! Vwaa!

It happened so fast you could be forgiven for thinking it hadn’t happened at all, or for disbelieving that the aged and wiry old man had done it. Pallino looked at me with his one blue eye and through clenched teeth said, “I should have guessed you’d try something like this, boy.”

“Guessed?” Clearly he had guessed; he was there, after all. “What do you mean?”

“I told him, obviously,” said the voice, and it was only then that Valka appeared in the doorway, carrying a stunner herself. She looked a little gray, as if she’d somehow gone days without sleep in the hour or so since we’d parted ways in the hangar. “Once I had the security under control, I thought I’d fetch them.”

Pallino’s one eye narrowed at me. “Going off on your own, is it?” He seemed not to notice the tall Cielcin standing right behind me, or else Tanaran was just another part of the furniture in its graying robe.

Vwaa! Vwaa!

“It is,” I said shortly.

“Not without us, you’re not.”

I swallowed, and we teetered there a full moment before I nodded and gestured on ahead. “We can fight about it later.”

“You’re damn right we will,” Elara said, brushing past. “Leaving us like that.”

“Save it!” I snapped, a little too palatine in that instant. “Let’s move it, people!”

They hurried past me—all except for Valka, who stood still framed in the door from the side passage. For a moment I thought she was staring past me, watching Tanaran. It was only after a pregnant instant that I realized she was looking at me. The red light of the alarms flushed her pale face, and she offered a curt little nod. I mouthed a silent “thank you” to her, and together we turned and followed the others down the hall.