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There was no official response from the capitol when the Sea Star reported the discovery of the saboteur. There were no questions asked about who would replace Siecha as the ships engineer, which wasn’t too out of the ordinary since it was generally the responsibility of the captain to make sure they were fully crewed.

“Are they going to shoot us down as soon as we clear the moon’s orbit?” Chester asked.

Siecha considered the question for a moment, then shook her head.

“They want you killed but they don’t want too big of a mess on their hands. They don’t want panic.”

“Killing everyone on the moon with a virus wouldn’t cause panic?”

“The plan was to report an illness and have a medical ship sent over, keeping the other ships orbiting. The medical ship would dock after the virus had run its course and instead of medical personnel it would have had a full replacement for each critical roll in the colony. Enough to keep up appearances while the rest of the colony was cleaned and additional workers could be brought in. The Solar King was quite excited with the prospect of a clean slate up here.”

“But he must realize I’m still here and planning to escape,” Chester said.

“Certainly,” Siecha replied. “I expect he will wait until the Sea Star is far enough out that no other ships would notice when it is destroyed, either by long range fire or direct intercept by fighter craft.”

“Then I can’t leave with the Sea Star,” Chester groaned.

“Staying here much longer won’t help you since the Solar King will undoubtedly send others to investigate the colony. I would be surprised if the next several ships didn’t have at least one spy or assassin on board.”

There were still the other ships in the port, though, that had been damaged in the explosion and subsequent fire.

“Does the Sea Star have the parts needed to fix any of the damaged ships in the port?” Chester asked his drones.

The hundreds of minds buzzed in the back of his own as they shared information and considered the problem.

“They have enough of the internal components as part of the resupply,” Tsukasa finally said. “But there’s not enough shielding for a full repair on even one of them. We could borrow panels from the other ships and get at least one working, though.”

“How long would that take?”

“A few days.”

They didn’t have a few days. They had the rest of today to unload the resupply ship and once it was gone the next set of ships were due to begin arriving.

“Let’s see what we can get done in the time we have, anyway,” Chester said. “Get as many people working on it as needed, even if it means not getting everything else reset in the colony.”

Yet another problem, another complication, and Chester was feeling more and more confined on this tiny colony than he ever had before. Even when he was confined to the Solar King’s palace and had technically less space to freely move about in, he didn’t feel trapped. Here, however, with Dawnstar trying to kill him and hundreds of minds all focused on fixing his problems, he couldn’t help but have his stress amplified.

It was times like this that he’d started taking out his mice and talking to them. Not all of them were under his control and he particularly enjoyed watching those ones play in the enclosure he’d made for them. Even though he let his drone mice do their own thing when he didn’t need them, he was always aware of them so watching them was like watching his own fingers or toes.

A pair of mice ran together in the wheel he’d made for them. One of them decided it was done and wanted off but the other one kept on running. The result was that the other mouse got swept up and spun around the wheel a few times before the extra weight convinced the running mouse to stop. Both of them hopped off after that and dove into the fluffy bedding where they vanished from view. Only the shifting surface gave Chester a clue as to where they’d gone. A moment later another mouse popped up onto the wheel and began running.

A heavy wave of depression settled onto Chester while he watched. What was the point in any of this? How was he any different than that mouse? Here he was on the moon, running on his own metaphorical wheel, but what was the point? Did he actually think he could escape? Did the mouse actually think it was going anywhere or accomplishing anything by running on the wheel? Maybe it just enjoyed the exercise, in which case it really was accomplishing more than Chester.

“I stay here, more assassins come looking for me,” he muttered. “I try and leave on a ship and Dawnstar just fires a rocket, or a mass accelerator, or sends fighter ships, or contacts the security forces at whatever port I go to.”

Just then, something darted passed him on the floor, just beneath his mouse enclosure. It was a mouse. That wasn’t so odd in and of itself, but there weren’t suppose to be anymore free mice in the residential areas of the moon. His mice had been methodically hunting down all the other mice for the last few days, ridding the colony of the pests.

“How’d you –

The mouse hadn’t noticed Chester and instant Chester began to talk it dropped to the ground and stopped moving. The way it was lying on its side, even keeping its breathing relatively slow for a mouse, Chester couldn’t help but think it was playing dead. He reached forward and poked the mouse with his finger. It didn’t react. Curious, he picked it up. It remained as though it were dead. He pulled one of his drone mice out from the enclosure and dropped both of them into the bio-reclamation chute.

Through his drone mouse’s eyes he watched as they were conveyed on towards the bio-processors. On a hunch, he made his drone mouse play dead as well. After a few minutes, the other mouse looked around for a moment, and then hopped off the conveyor and scurried off. Chester’s mouse followed and as soon the other mouse spotted it, it played dead again.

“Smart mouse.”

There was a flaw in the mouse’s strategy, of course. Now that Chester knew the trick, it didn’t work on him anymore. His drone mouse killed the other mouse with a quick bite to the throat and then dragged it up and back onto the conveyor before running back to Chester.

As he returned the mouse to the enclosure, though, he got to thinking about the other mouse. Not only did it raise questions about how successful he’d really been in clearing out the mice here, but also of a new idea for escaping. As long as the Solar King was hunting him, there was no way for Chester to get away. But if the Solar King stopped looking for him, if he believed Chester was truly dead, then as long as Chester stayed out of sight, so to speak, he would be free.

It just so happened that Chester did, in fact, have an easy excuse for his death as well.

“Quartermaster Cosa,” Chester said, “we’re going to need to infect some people with the virus Siecha brought.”