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Most of the fleet had already gone. The skiff of HMIA Bonaventure was one of the last ships to lift off, and I was standing on the gang plank, helping the last of the Urgani board her. It wasn't my job, but when a friend asks a favor, a man's supposed to lend a hand.

Below us, the city of Urgan, the palace city (and, to be sure, the only city) of New Ulan Bator, was rubble and flames. The meteors had started to fall on the City of Gold -- along with the rest of the planet -- a month ago, and the sky was now as black at mid-day with smoke and dust as the inside of a Pumpkin Dragon? the day after Halloween.

New Ulan Bator was a dead world, now. Our job was to make sure that as many of its people lived as possible.

Which is why when I had to kill my seventh Urgani, charging the boat waving a scimitar and shouting something in no human language I'd never heard of, I was beginning to worry.

"Dunsmuir!" Captain Becky Martin's Zograscope image wavered, blue and staticky, in the air in front of me. "What the hell are you doing?"

"I'm trying to keep from -- son of a bitch --" My vortex blaster snarled again, sending another screaming native spinning back to the ground in more pieces than a Trathala? addict had rolling papers. "You're sure you Chancels Legion sorts let the folks here know we came in peace?"

"Of course we did. We've managed to evacuate one hundred fifty-seven thousand Urgani, Dunsmuir. Without, I'll add, having to kill any of them. Most of the rescue fleet is already in the aether on the way back to Earth. We're the last ship over the city, and our Philosophical Shields are under tremendous strain. Now, can you please get whatever folks are left alive down there onto the ship -- without killing any more of them?"

"Perhaps I can use harsh language," I considering using some on her, but a favor was a favor. Instead, I gazed down to see if anyone was still headed up the mountain that overlooked the city. The Urgani were a hardy race, bent on reestablishing the Golden Khanate. There were no weaklings among them. Anyone still alive would be heading to the evac point faster than a zestful Cammoran headed for a crooked deal.

"Any chance, Captain, that they're all aboard? I'm always happy to lend the Legion a hand when I can, but if your shields are about to fail, I'd just as soon not be here on the ground."

"I -- hang on." A tall, silver-haired woman in a black, lace-frilled uniform was whispering something urgently to her. "Can't you just -- damn." Becky looked at me, a frown furrowing that perfect forehead of hers. "The folks we already have aboard -- they're rioting down below. Attacking each other, the guards we've sent down. Insane fury, babbling some unknown language --"

"Just like the people down here." I finally put two and two together, and an answer only a Darklord could love slapped me like a two-by-four between the eyeballs. "Hell and damnation --"

"What?"

"Disease. I mean, the Urgani are ferocious bastards, as soon lop off the heads of their sick mothers as spit on 'em, but they're not this crazy. It must be some sort of psychoactive plague they're infected with. " Was it the meteors, I wondered, or some sort of bioweapon unleashed by the destruction, or just some Excrucian plot? Hell, for all I knew it was the KC Gang?. It didn't matter much, I supposed.

Becky stared at me through the teletheric beam. "Jim, there are a hundred-odd thousand of them on a dozen ships of the Fleet, out of contact until they get to Earth. And at flank speed, they're faster than any Zograscope beam ..."

I looked down at a broken city in flames, and thought of cities back home I knew, and people who lived there. Maybe there was a reason we weren't supposed to love. I shook my head. "There goes the goddamned neighborhood."

SEE ALSO: Anger Investiture, Chancels Legion, Trathala?, Zograscope

This is an N entry in the Lexicon of the Lost 500 Years.