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outshine her. The protégée can never exceed the master.
At least for some mentors, the false ones, that is the secret
rule.”
    Clea looked down at the golden creature
perched on her hand, and she could see the iridescent eyes, the
pretty, neat limbs. The sharp mandibles.
    “ It’s going to take a crazy
idea, isn’t it.”
    “ Yes. A flash of brilliance,
or we’re all dead. Look, only a couple of minutes left, dear
Clea.”
    Clea looked from the spider to the
screen, back and forth, until she felt that familiar yet always
exhilarating click when the larger pattern was revealed. “This
meeting, you and I, is no coincidence.”
    “ No.”
    “ My gramma had something to
do with all of this.”
    “ She loves you very much.
She knows that space contains the greatest strangeness, and she
remains open to the whispers of intuition, the favors of the gods.
And she saw the danger you had gotten yourself into.”
    With a flash, Clea remembered her
grandmother’s final warning, before embarking on this now-doomed
mission. Gramma knew from knives in the back – she’d been betrayed
before, and survived. She warned Clea to watch out, and Clea had
shrugged, not really listening.
    Her fatal mistake.
    “ But it’s too
late.”
    “ Okay, say it’s too late.
What then?”
    In two minutes, less, the ship was
going to self-destruct. The ejection sequence wouldn’t work outside
of the planetary atmosphere…they’d just burn up out
there.
    What would Gramma do?
    What?
    Clea held her breath and did the one
thing her instructors had taught her she must never do.
    She reached down, under the console,
and punched the kill switch.
    The computer powered down, and now the
Arachne floated in space, without circulating oxygen, without
power, without automated pilot.
    Clea sat at the bridge computer, her
face in her hands, and heard the screaming from the bridge. A
minute later Juaraz, the ship’s engineer, came bounding into the
lab. “What the holy--” he began, but Clea held up a hand to stop
him.
    She explained the self-destruct
sequence she had discovered, how the only way to stop it was to
kill the system that ran the ship and piloted it. He protested
frantically, lunged for the command console, and only Clea’s
presence of mind kept him from overpowering her and re-activating
the automated captain program.
    The blaster she held in her hands was
forbidden by Federation regs, but her grandmother wasn’t about to
let her go outside of Earth’s orbit without protection. She
convinced him to go away or die, and eventually he saw reason and
left. Clea manually bolted and blocked the door behind
him.
    “ Now I’ve done it,” Clea
muttered. “The rest of the crew is going to break down this door,
and then…” she shuddered. The sequence was complete – if anybody
turned on that nav system now the entire ship would explode, nearly
instantly.
    She had no time left. The ship was
about to enter Mars’ terraformed atmosphere. It was still much
thinner than Earth’s but they would crash and burn without computer
navigation.
    “ Where are the manual
controls on this ship?” she muttered.
    She could no longer see the spider, who
had hid when Juaraz had barged in, but she heard her voice, barely
more than a subtle vibration. “None. This is a modern ship, with
the most advanced automated navigation system in the fleet. No
controls necessary.”
    Clea sighed with frustration, worked
the top off the command console. Underneath she found a tangle of
copper wire – most old-fashioned. But a lifesaver.
    Her grandmother had taught her wiring,
how to hot wire computer-controlled vehicles, override the
automatic systems, and how to drive them away. Long ago, her
grandmother had been known as the Witch of Moon Port 3, the wildest
and most resourceful pirate captain of the Federation.
    You don’t get ahead by following rules,
she had tried to teach Clea. By blindly following a leader, or a
mentor. But Clea was too much of a protégée to