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exertion of carrying the tree. He’d have sworn it had been much lighter when he’d grabbed it out of the ground.
    Forced to the side of the passage once more by through traffic, he leaned against the metal wall, resting for a moment, until a tap on the shoulder reminded him that he was on ship’s business and not his own.
    Moving forward, he vaguely wondered which—if any—of his belongings might have survived, but then let that thought go; he was here, and the tree was here, and that was more than he had a right to expect, after all.
    They came at last to the pilots lounge. The hatch was uncharacteristically dogged—to green at least!—but with ship’s air at risk it was only a common-sense precaution. He had time to note that his wing’s insignia was pasted roughly to the door, then the assistant quartermaster reached past him to rap—which was her right, after all, to have a lesser open for her from within.
    The hatch swung wide, an unexpected hand between his shoulders sent him through, half-stumbling, and he looked, quick eyes raking past the scraggly leaves of the tree, taking in the six empty helmets sitting with unsheathed blades beside them on a table, and five faces—familiar, strained, concerned, watching him.
    His knees shook. He locked them, refusing to fall, but . . .
    Six? Six gone ?
    Corporal Bicra it was who gently took the tree from him, and Under Sergeant Vondahl who led the salute.
    With Jela, they numbered six—the smallest number Command would recognize as a wing.
    And as luck would have it, he was now eldest in troop, and senior in rank.
    He returned the salute uncertainly, and sat heavily in the chair beside the tree.
    “Report,” he said, not at all wishing to hear the tale.

Five
    FIVE
    Trident
    Isolation Ward
    THE MED TECH WAS adamant, the while admitting Jela’s basic understanding of the theory of contagion.
    Yes, many diseases could be spread— could have been spread already —by the mere passage of an infected person, such as Jela, bearing an infectious object, such as the tree, through the ship.
    That Jela had been escorted by the assistant quartermaster, and welcomed into the temporary wing wardroom was unfortunate. That no one had yet died of some hideous, unknown disease since his return to the ship was not proof positive that no one would .
    More to the point, several standard protocols had been abused and the med tech was voluble in their listing.
    First and foremost, Jela should not have been permitted to land on the planet without a thorough reevaluation of the biological information from the old surveys.
    Secondly, neither Jela nor the tree should have been permitted back into the pick-up ship without disinfection.
    Thirdly, and most annoying to the tech, as Jela read it, neither he nor the tree should be aboard now without having been disinfected.
    The tech knew the rules and had the ear of someone on staff; and that someone had been appropriately notified, dignified, and horrified.
    And so it was that the second day of Jela’s reign as Acting Wingleader was spent in an isolation tunnel. The double-walled see-through chamber was inflated inside an ordinary infirmary room. The tree, within a double-walled flex-glass cubicle, was isolated all the more within that chamber while various tests were done on the dirt it called its own. At least they’d seen the wisdom of leaving the tree were Jela could watch it—if it turned blue or purple or became infested with bugs in its chamber he’d be right there to see it.
    He hadn’t pointed out to the med tech that no one knew exactly how long it might take a scruffy-looking tree of unknown genus to exhibit signs of parasitism, decay, or the like, but he had managed to get the tech to agree to a watering system for the plant so it wouldn’t give a “false positive” that might have the fleet isolating the whole ship . . .
    Luckily, the tech admitted the biotic sanctity of electronic communications, so Jela’s small command