Orion followed Treyjon and the snarling svenkar into engineering.

He hadn’t been given a choice about whether he wanted to come along. Sage stood inside, his back to the door as he listened to a report from a pair of engineers. The clean, white, well-lit room, filled with sleek modern equipment and with the engines built behind clear glass walls, was drastically different from engineering on the slaver ship. Orion doubted anyone would find a shadowy nook to hide in here.

“Yes, Chief Hierax,” Sage said, his voice back to its tone of command calm, “I understand that the water has been contaminated, and I’ve already set course to a planet where we can refill the tanks. What I want to know is what happened, why the contaminate couldn’t be filtered out, and how it got in there to start with.”

“We’re still working on that last part, sir,” the higher-ranking engineer said. Hierax. Wasn’t that the person Treyjon had said might be able to jury-rig a charging system for Juanita’s computer? He was a burly, olive-skinned man wearing his black uniform trousers and a gray tank top. The belt clasped around his waist held tools but also some intricate-looking trinkets that appeared to have moving parts. “But let me show you what we’ve discovered so far,” Hierax added.

He clicked a button, and a holo appeared in the center of engineering. A camera view showed the inside of a water tank, and a bluish green sludge growing on the wall. Algae?

“This is one of our four tanks,” Hierax said. “In less than eight hours, they’ve all gone from being clean and sanitized to having this strange growth all along the insides. It literally cropped up overnight. And I have no idea how to get rid of it in situ. I tried dissolving both pesticides and fungicides in the tanks, figuring I could filter them out of the drinking water later, but neither affected the growth. I also tried sending in microscopic cleaning bots to scour the stuff off the tank walls, but it destroyed the bots.”

“Destroyed them?” Sage asked. “Is that growth intelligent?”

“No, but it’s displaying a lot of the survival instincts of a virus. A belligerent virus?”

“Is there any other kind?” Treyjon asked.

Sage looked back, his gaze frosting over when he saw Orion standing behind Treyjon.

Hierax also looked back. “Your new svenkar is slobbering on my deck, Trey.”

“Svenkar slobber is fairly acidic. Makes a decent solvent. I thought you might want to try it in the tank.”

“Ha ha, find a rag and clean it up, or I’ll throw you in the tank.”

“You’d have to go through my new pup.” Treyjon patted Cutty’s beast on the back. “She’s developed a fondness for me.”

The svenkar growled and squatted. A stream of pee angled toward Treyjon’s boot with surprising accuracy.

“I see that,” Hierax said.

“Another solvent for you to try.”

“Forget the rag. Lieutenant Yagar,” Hierax called into the depths of engineering, “find the pressure washer for our good tracker.”

“Hierax,” Sage said, gripping his engineer’s shoulder and turning him back to the display. “How did this growth get in here? And does it mean the drinking water isn’t safe?”

“Oh, hells no, you don’t want to drink this stuff. It’s in the pipes too. I turned off the water supply and sent out a message. The engines aren’t even safe. We run water through everything as part of the cooling process, and an experiment showed the particulates now floating in there can corrode the pipes. The only thing I can think to do is land, completely empty the tanks, irradiate this stuff, and then refill the tanks with the local water.”

“Yes,” Sage said, “we’ll be on the only planet in the system with a breathable atmosphere and liquid water in an hour. We’re lucky it’s there, or we would be carving ice out of a comet.”

“I do like a challenge, but I’ve already got one for the day. Two if you count sanitizing my deck.” Hierax gave Treyjon a pointed look.

“You’ve now avoided answering my first question twice, Hierax,” Sage said.

“It’s because I don’t know the answer, sir.”

“Could we have picked this up in that new system? The one that supposedly holds Gaia?”

“I don’t see how, sir. We didn’t land anywhere.”

“We attached to the slaver ship’s airlock. Could some of this have cycled through with the men?”

“I don’t think it’s airborne, sir.” Hierax waved toward the fuzzy blue-green gunk. It seemed to have grown thicker in the few minutes Orion had been watching it. “I extracted a sample, and it died in about twenty minutes once it was out of its liquid medium. I think something in the air kills it, which is promising for getting rid of it once we’ve emptied the tanks. I reckon we can be done down there in twenty-four hours or less.”

Sage grunted. “Does that mean this was some deliberate sabotage?”

“That does seem likely, sir.”

Both men turned toward Orion.

Orion scowled back at them, heat flushing his cheeks. Now he was being accused of sabotaging the very ship he was flying on? His own brother’s ship? How could Sage think he would do that? Why would he do that? Why would anyone? To force a landing?

“Orion,” Sage said, “did you see or hear anything on the slaver ship that would have hinted of this? Did Cutty mention that he had some plan up his sleeve for dealing with pursuers?”

Oh, they weren’t accusing him, after all. Orion let his muscles loosen.

“No, but he never confided anything in me. He called me rookie and treated me like svenkar food.”

The svenkar growled and swished its leathery tail.

“Wait.” Orion snapped his fingers. “Remember when you were dragging Cutty off the bridge? He gave me a look over his shoulder, a very smug look.”

Sage’s eyes sharpened. “And then he spat on you.”

“Well, yes, but that’s not the part I wanted you to remember.”

“Did you wash your face afterward? With water?”

“I… yes. I washed everything and tended my wounds after getting to my cabin here. I guess his spit and a lot of my blood went down the drain.”

Sage turned to Hierax. “Could this thing have been introduced that way?”

“It seems unlikely that such a small amount could have grown to such proportions so quickly, not to mention surviving the filtration process to be recycled back into the main tanks, but the main colony has proven that it’s impervious to filtration attempts, at least at this stage.”

“Cutty could have put a capsule or something in his mouth right before we charged in,” Orion reasoned.

“Yes.” A disgusted expression twisted Sage’s face.

Orion had a feeling he was annoyed that he, the great Captain Sagitta, Star Guardian extraordinaire and hero of the Zi’i Infiltration War, had been tricked by some thuggish slaver captain. Alas, Orion couldn’t feel smug about Sage getting fooled, since he’d been the one who had been spit on and had apparently brought this thing on board. Would the court back home add this to the crimes that would be trotted out at his trial? Yet another sign that he could hurt or kill people simply by being oblivious?

“He’s a crafty bastard from everything I’ve heard,” Orion said, not surprised the slaver captain had pulled out a last-minute trick. “Though I’m not sure what he stands to gain from this. We left his ship adrift, right? With all his crew either dead or captured?”

Sage’s eyes tightened at the word dead, and Orion wished he hadn’t reminded his brother of that.

“He must have known we were several days and gates from home,” Sage said, “and that we would have to make an emergency landing to deal with this. Maybe he’s hoping he and his men can escape the brig while we’re down on a planet with a breathable atmosphere.”

“There aren’t any settlements or even research stations on the marsh planet down there, are there?” Hierax asked.

“No,” Sage said. “There were at one point, but the people had trouble with the predators.”

“What kind of trouble?” Orion asked.

His brother must have looked up the planet in the database before setting course.

“Getting eaten by them.”

“It’s alarming how many things in the galaxy like to eat humans,” Orion said.

“The gods shouldn’t have made us so succulent,” Treyjon said.

The svenkar growled. Agreement? Lovely.

“There’s a sentient moss that covers a lot of the planet too,” Sage added.

“Oh, good. Maybe it can make friends with our moss.” Orion waved at the floating display.

“We’re going to set down on a continent where it doesn’t exist. We don’t need extra problems.”

“Agreed. And it’s algae, not moss.” Hierax flicked a button on his remote, and the display changed to show the subject at the cellular level.

“And that matters, why?” Orion asked.

“Well, I guess it doesn’t.”

“I think we should question Captain Cutty,” Orion said, meeting his brother’s eyes. “I can do it if your people don’t want to hold a knife to his throat.”

“We have interrogation drugs.”

“Those pink pills that give people seizures? Are you sure that’s more humane than a few cuts?”

Sage eyed the algae. “At this point, I’m more concerned about getting the truth than in being humane.” He strode out of engineering.

“It’s about time,” Orion muttered.