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was broken I wouldn’t know how to fix it, so there wasn’t much point in asking. Samantha always claimed it was a golden rule of diplomacy, Never ask a question when you don’t want to hear the answer.
    So instead I got the ship-soul to tell me about the search for invader nano. In the three days since the fight in the hold, our defense clouds had apparently destroyed 143 definites, 587 probables. Those were pathetic numbers, even if the probables were all real nanites, which they likely weren’t—just unidentified bacteria that the hunter-killers ripped apart on the theory of better-safe-than-sorry. Seeing as there must have been millions of nanites in that fuzz I’d felt, Willow’s defenses were doing a pretty lousy job.
    Maybe if there’d been a real captain running the search, we would have found the invaders by now. Of course, I’d been sick with that infection…
    I stopped, and thought about that. Had it really been an infection? No—now that I wasn’t dizzy or delirious, my head was clear enough to understand what had happened. There’d been a whole bunch of eyeball nanites on my hand: nanites filled with venom. The hunter-killers had ripped those nanites apart, spilling venom droplets all over me. Even worse, the hunter-killers had clawed up my skin pretty good during the fight. The pinpricks they’d chewed into me had given the venom a way into my bloodstream.
    What I’d thought was infection had actually been a microscopic dose of venom poisoning. I figured it was a good thing I’d only absorbed a tiny bit of the stuff—anything more might have killed me. But I was all right now. Wasn’t I?

5

    ARRIVING AT STARBASE IRIS

    Three days later, Willow reached the Celestia system. I’d spent most of that time wandering around the ship, hoping I’d find something useful to do. It wasn’t much fun walking through the lounge and the hold, or the bridge either, where there were three more corpses: people who’d stayed on duty instead of going to the party. But I went through every room anyway, because I was the captain. I even asked the ship-soul if there were logs I should be keeping, or paperwork or something. But the computers handled stuff like that automatically, so they didn’t need me getting in the way.
    A few times I checked over computer files, just to see if there was stuff I ought to be taking care of. Mission stuff…you know. But every database I tried to look at, records and logs and all, turned out to be passworded or encrypted or just plain inaccessible to lowly Explorers Second Class, even if they’d become acting captain. Maybe that was normal; keeping everything locked away just on general principles. Then again, maybe Willow had been doing something extra-specially secret, and outsiders like me were supposed to mind our own business.
    I found out there was only one thing I absolutely had to do as captain of Willow. Apparently, captains are supposed to get at least half an hour of exercise every day, to keep themselves fit for command. So my only mandatory duty was going down to the gym when the ship-soul told me, and working up a sweat.
    Weights. Jogging. Bagwork. It made me laugh, that my one compulsory chore was the only thing I’d ever been good at. I went to the gym twice a day and stayed a lot longer than just half an hour—thinking maybe I’d turn out to be captain material after all.

    I made a point of being on the bridge as we drew near Celestia. Not that I actually sat in the captain’s command chair—there was a sweet-looking red-haired woman slumped dead in it, and I didn’t want to disturb her. (She seemed too young to be officer of the watch. Nineteen or twenty, tops. All the senior officers must have wanted to go to the party, so they’d given the bridge to the most junior lieutenant-cadet on board. Poor kid: I wondered what she could have done that was so bad the League needed to kill her.)
    “Starbase Iris is hailing us,” the ship-soul