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I honor. I am sorry you suffered so for your
indiscretions, but we’re different.”
    “ Are you?” For the first
time, Clea heard the acid venom in the spider’s voice. “Ask
yourself why Dr. Elena didn’t come on this trip, the great triumph,
the pinnacle. Tell me why she told you not to patent the Weave
Drive you developed right before you left. Explain why the only
other people on this vessel are low level ground engineers,
expendable to her affairs.”
    “ Why are you telling me all
this?” Clea asked. Trembling, she drew up to her considerable
height, and she towered now over the fragile, iridescent creature
standing over the image of her mentor’s face. A single swat with
the handheld Clea clutched in her hands, and Arachne’s voice would
be silenced forever.
    “ I like you,” Arachne
replied simply.
    Clea rested the handheld on the
gleaming metal desk, ashamed. “But how do you know me?”
    “ This is my home. I have
watched you prepare for this mission, watched you working on your
ideas, humming as you tried first one way then another. You…remind
me of who I used to be.”
    “ So you think my teacher is
stealing my new invention?” This was the worst thing Clea could
think of, and she said the words in a wounded, angry voice. As if
she were mad at the spider, not the betrayer.
    “ Yes. But I think she will
get away with it if you don’t disable the self-destruct
instructions embedded in your flight codes.”
    Clea staggered away from the spider.
The very idea of it was too absurd to even contemplate. But then
she remembered her grandmother’s admonition, and the fact that she
spoke with a spider. If she could accept Arachne’s existence, Clea
should at least prove her warning invalid.
    Clea swiped the spider out of the way,
and ignored her indignant exclamations while she pounded on the
face of the computer to bring up the flight codes, to see if
Arachne could possibly be telling her the truth.
    “ That’s not how you’re going
to get out of this alive,” Arachne said, in a low, intense rush of
words, but Clea was too focused on the screen to reply.
    She worked her way into the base codes,
and found the instructions pooling out.
    “ Self-destruct sequence
activation in 5:23, 5:22…”
    Clea disabled the flight codes, but the
computer reinstated them again a moment afterwards. If Arachne was
right, Elena had programmed this sequence with genius – the vessel
was set to destruct at the edge of Mars’s atmosphere. It would look
to a search team like the ship had simply broken up on
entry.
    Clea racked her brain, trying to come
up with a workaround. The seconds ticked away, faster and faster,
and she covered her face with her hands.
    “ I can’t override the
codes,” Clea forced out. Instead of screaming panic, she floated on
a dead calm, a serene certainty that in a few minutes she and the
entire crew would be exploded into microscopic
particulate.
    “ Yes you can,” Arachne said.
“But you have to believe in yourself. I never did, not until it was
too late for me to escape my fate. I defined myself only in
relation to my mentor.”
    Clea forced herself to take slow,
steady breaths. She had a few minutes left to work on this
problem…she had unraveled worse tangles in her professional
career.
    “ First things first,” Clea
said. “Elena’s a computer specialist. She can program anything. But
I…”
    “ You are a weaver,” Arachne
said. She drew closer, delicately climbed up and perched on the
bend of Clea’s knuckle like a miniature dragon. “You weave. Like
me.”
    Clea took another deep breath and
considered Arachne’s words. She invented new things, Elena
initiated sequences within existing systems. With a gasp, she saw
their relationship in a new, disturbing light.
    Elena had the technical skills. But
Clea had the flashes of insight, the crazy ideas that turned out to
be breakthroughs. “Why would she kill the golden goose?”
    “ Because she couldn’t bear
for you to