So walking across Willow’s hold, where there might be venom on the floor, I watched my step real carefully. But even when I got close to the queen’s carcass, I couldn’t see any leaks — not a drop on her lobstery tail, no wetness on the sacs themselves, no dribbles down her carapace or puddles on the steel-plast beneath her. Still, the sacs kept shrinking: very very slowly, but over the course of a minute, I could definitely see the difference.

So where was the stuff going? Seeping back into her corpse? I guess she had to have ducts or tubes connecting the sacs to the inside part of her body. Maybe the tubes got damaged as the queen tried to bash her way through the hull. Or maybe, when the League of Peoples wanted the queen to die, they’d just broken open a valve and let the venom slop back into her insides. Maybe that was considered poetic justice, having the queen poisoned by her own juices.

The League folks were aliens. Who knew how their minds worked?

As gingerly as a feather, I reached toward the nearest sac… and just before my hand touched the surface tissue, I felt a funny sort of fuzzy sensation on my palm.

Fuzz? There shouldn’t be any fuzz. The outside of the sac was as smooth as a balloon.

Then the truth struck me. "Ship-soul," I yelled, "nano scan! Here, now, centered on my hand."

Two seconds later, a rackety choir of alarms started wailing their brains out.

Lucky for me I’d left the hatch open. I dived out the door just before the automatic computer defenses slammed it shut with a great whacking clang. That didn’t mean I was safe, but at least I wouldn’t be locked in the hold when a full-scale nanotech war broke out.