He had to find some way to prove himself. Some way to show them he was ready to go back on the active list.
Not right now, though. Right now he had to find a way to get through this quick voyage without breaking anything. He knew perfectly well that the best way he could prove them right, that he wasn’t fit to serve, would be to act like he was unstable.
“Where’s Ginger?” Engineer Paniet asked. “She’s an officer. She should be headed to this shindig, too.”
Bury wanted to ask what the hell a “shindig” was. Instead, he forced himself to say through gritted teeth, “She requested to be excused, so she could look after the big bug she has in that holding cell.” He had begged her to come with him—pointlessly. In the past she had always been there for him, ready to give him a warning signal if his anger started getting the best of him. Now, though, she seemed more interested in the insectile chorister. It was that thing in her head, that damnable thing Lanoe made her get implanted in her head—
“I doubt she’ll miss much. Most likely Lanoe is just going to throw his weight around a little,” Engineer Paniet said. “Put on a big tough show for the new folks.” The engineer sighed. “Of all the reasons I chose to join the Neddies, escaping all this macho posturing is one I’ve never regretted.”
“They were our enemies yesterday,” Bury pointed out. “They need to get the fear of the devil stamped right into them, so they don’t think we’re weak.”
The engineer didn’t argue. He shrugged expansively and yawned. “Wake me when we get there,” he said.
Bury nodded, mostly to himself. He tried strapping himself in and sitting still, but before long the engineer started to snore. The atonal noise made Bury’s nerves itch. So he tore off his restraints and climbed back up to the cockpit, which at least had viewports. He could watch the distant point of light that was the carrier grow, and think about what he was going to do. How he would make them see he was fit.
Four, he thought to himself. It had become a mantra. Four. Four. Four.
The number wouldn’t stop echoing around his head. Not, he knew, until it turned into five.
Lanoe wished he could have had Valk with him for this briefing. The body that Valk inhabited—the suit with its polarized helmet—was permanently installed at the controls of the cruiser, though. Valk hadn’t left the workstation in days, and now only rarely so much as lifted one of his arms. He didn’t need to, he’d told Lanoe—he was plugged directly into the cruiser’s systems, controlling them as if by thought alone.
As a result, Lanoe couldn’t bring Centrocor’s officers over to the cruiser—he didn’t want them to see Valk, much less figure out what he was. So instead he had called the first official briefing of the allied forces together on the bridge of the carrier. A much larger space anyway, with room for everyone.
When Lanoe arrived at the carrier, Candless was already there, strapped into the IO’s position. She had a dozen displays open, most of them showing views of the system ahead of them. Lanoe had thought that perhaps the carrier had better sensors than the cruiser. That it could locate the planet Lanoe knew had to be there. The planet Valk and Paniet had failed to locate. As he caught her eye and raised an eyebrow, though, he already knew he’d been wrong.
She gave the tiniest shake of her head. A negation. She hadn’t found a planet.
Damnation and hellfire.
He turned and nodded at Captain Shulkin. The man didn’t even seem aware of where he was, much less Lanoe’s gesture. Lanoe still didn’t know what to make of the old veteran. Apparently he’d gone insane back during the Establishment Crisis. The Navy claimed to have fixed his brain, but the result left something to be desired.
If Shulkin was unresponsive, the Batygins stood in distinct contrast. The two of them gave him a cheery wave, their hands moving almost in unison. Beside them stood Lieutenant—formerly Sergeant—Foulkes, who had been promoted to the position of the carrier’s warrant officer, in charge of all the enlisted marines aboard. He must have been painfully aware of the price Major Yael had paid to get him that promotion. He looked haunted, but he came to attention quick enough when he saw that Lanoe was looking at him.
There were more Centrocor officers, lots of them. The carrier was home to some three dozen fighter pilots, all of whom were technically officers. There was no room for them on the bridge, however, so they remained in their wardrooms, watching this briefing on a display. Present for the sake of completeness were the carrier’s three pilots and two navigators, scared-looking people whose names Lanoe barely remembered. There were three ranking neddies as well, the engineering crew for the carrier, two women and a man with short hair and curious expressions. He expected little trouble from that quarter.
He wished he could say as much about the two people on the other side of the room. Ashlay Bullam and Auster Maggs did their best to blend into the wall of the bridge. Lanoe didn’t trust Bullam at all, but he knew how much he needed her, at least as a figurehead. She was the official representative of Centrocor here, and the carrier’s people still looked to her for guidance.
Maggs was only still alive because of her. There had been long and tense negotiations back on Caina, but in the end she’d gotten what she wanted. Lanoe got the sense that she almost always did.
She’d even been able to insist that Maggs be present for this briefing. The traitor made a very good show of looking at something on his wrist display, so that he didn’t have to meet Lanoe’s gaze.
The Centrocor contingent murmured amongst themselves as Lanoe’s own officers entered the bridge. Ehta had gathered Paniet and Bury from the flight deck and brought them right on time. The three of them moved quickly to Candless’s side, as if they were her honor guard. None of them said a word. They simply watched Lanoe with expectant eyes.
Even though they knew what he was going to say. He’d kept few secrets from his officers so far. He trusted them implicitly. He had to admit it was nice having at least a few people in the room he didn’t have to watch like a hawk.
“Commander on the bridge,” Candless called out. Some of the Centrocor people came to attention. Some didn’t. “Commander Lanoe will present a short briefing. There will be no questions permitted at this time.” She turned to him. “Sir?”
Lanoe nodded and pulled a minder out of a pouch at his waist. He unrolled it, then rolled it back up. Just something to do with his hands.
He had always been a fighter pilot first, an officer second. He’d never enjoyed speaking to a crowd. Zhang had always helped him with that. She’d been his wingman and his second in command, his best adviser and his harshest critic. She’d made it possible for him to lead squadrons into battle. Since she’d died, he’d found he had little patience for these kinds of briefings, and even less for the business of command.
That was going to have to change now. When you were surrounded by people you trusted, you could afford to let things slide a little, let your style of command run to the casual—a bit. With this bunch he needed to be as hard as brass. He needed to hold their attention. He needed to convince them of the rightness of his cause—and that he would brook no debate, no dissent.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I know things are still unsettled with our new arrangement. We’re all making adjustments. I want that over with as soon as possible. We’re going to work together from here on, because we have a mission to complete. Potentially the most important mission the Navy has ever undertaken.”
They started to gape and murmur. That could not be allowed. He made a signal with one hand.
“Quiet on the bridge!” Candless shouted. She glared at the Centrocor people, as if daring them to open their mouths again. Eventually, it worked.
“I’m going to tell you everything,” Lanoe said. “I’m going to show you all the data we have so far, and explain what we need to do here. I want to stress one thing, though. This is not a debate. Or a discussion. We have a clear objective to reach in this system. We will reach it—together. Anyone who
acts contrary to the goals of the mission, or who questions my orders in the slightest way, will be severely disciplined.”
He unrolled the minder again. Valk had helped him put together a presentation about the Blue-Blue-White, with plenty of visual aids. It was his job to walk them through it.
First, though, he could see he needed to do one thing. He’d shown them the stick, and the Centrocor people looked terrified, or angry, or just confused. He needed them to pay attention, and that meant giving them a glance at the carrot.
“When the mission is complete,” Lanoe said, looking around, trying to catch as many eyes as he could, “and only then, we will open a wormhole that will take us all home. That’s right. We have the capacity to do that. But it’s entirely at my discretion.”
He expected them to start shouting then. They didn’t. Instead they stared at him, like wanderers in a desert catching their first sight of an oasis.
Maybe they’d all thought they were stranded here. Maybe they just worried that that was the case. He knew it had to have been on all their minds since they first arrived. It was the one thing every one of them wanted, and the promise of going home was going to be the chief thing that motivated them to follow his orders.
“Now,” he said. “Let’s begin.”
Bury watched the faces of the crowd carefully. He knew where Lanoe was going to start his presentation, and he knew how people would react.
“For thousands of years,” Lanoe said, “humanity has wondered if we were alone in the universe. As we expanded across the stars, we found no trace of any other intelligent species—no life at all, other than a few microbes and insects. The worlds we discovered were harsh places, incapable of harboring complex life. This is why we named our new colony planets after old Earth ideas of hell—Avernus, Jehannum, Sheol, and the like. We came to believe that our most pessimistic models were true, that only one planet in the entire galaxy had the necessary conditions for life come together. That Earth was all there was.”
Lanoe tapped his minder and an image appeared in the center of the room. It was a still from a low-resolution video. It showed a view of a rocky canyon under a pale blue sky. In the image a few ground vehicles had gathered in the midst of a cloud of yellow dust. Human shapes could be seen through the murk—most of them dead. Towering over them, six meters tall, was a thing with no head or body, just a cluster of legs that each ended in a wicked sharp claw.
One of those legs had impaled a human body. A man with a beard and a look of horror on his face. There was a great deal of blood.
“We were wrong,” Lanoe said.
Some of the Centrocor people put hands over their mouths. Two of them—the captains of the destroyers—laughed.
“Impossible.”
“Impossible,” they said, almost in harmony.
Bury launched himself across the room, breaking through the image. He got right up in the faces of the destroyer captains. “It’s true,” he said. “Don’t you dare question Commander Lanoe. After what he’s been through, after what he lost—”
“Enough!” Lieutenant Candless shouted. “Ensign Bury, stand down.”
“But they were questioning the commander,” Bury insisted. He couldn’t see how he was possibly in the wrong here.
“I said enough. Don’t make me say it again,” Candless told him. “As for you two—as for everyone here. There will be no further outbursts. I trust I have made myself adequately clear.”
The destroyer captains nodded, but didn’t say a word. Bury went back to his position next to her at the IO’s station.
“I know it’s hard to believe,” Lanoe said. “I resisted it for a long time myself. Yet there can no longer be any doubt. This image comes from the planet Niraya. I assume some of you may have heard of the place. It is in fact the location of our first contact with a nonhuman intelligence. A fleet of spacecraft attacked Niraya, intending to kill every human being on the planet with drones like the one in this image. A small squadron of fighters took on that fleet, and we prevailed.”
A new image sprang up, this one showing what looked like a small asteroid. One end of the rock had been hollowed out, and long, segmented arms surrounded the opening. A dull red glow could be seen within. Not an asteroid at all, really, Bury knew, but an alien queenship, housed inside a thick skin of cratered rock. In the foreground of the image, small ships wheeled and darted around the asteroidal ship, dwarfed by it but still clearly visible. Some were shapeless but wicked-looking craft, studded with cannons. Others were just spherical pods mounted on skeletal frames. Jets of superhot plasma erupted from the pods, aimed at more recognizable vehicles—BR.9s, and one antique FA.2 fighter.
“It wasn’t easy,” Lanoe said. “We lost some … some good people.” His head swam to think of that. To think of Zhang. He shut that down fast, controlled himself. “But we prevailed. In doing so we learned a great deal about this fleet, and the aliens who’d built it.”
The image changed again, fading into a picture of a thing like a fat jellyfish turned on its side. A roughly spherical, semitransparent body, its innards lit up by different colors of light generated by unseen organs. Its circular, toothless mouth was surrounded by a fringe of fifteen slackly hanging tentacles. It looked surprisingly similar to the asteroidal ship from the previous image.
“This thing,” Lanoe said, “is why we’re here. This image is not to scale. The creature shown here is approximately twenty-five meters in diameter. Despite appearances, it’s also intelligent—and an existential threat to the human species.”
Lanoe moved around the image, gesturing at it as he spoke. “They don’t have a spoken or written language like we do. They communicate by pulsing various colors of light at each other. The name they give themselves can be rendered only as ‘Blue-Blue-White.’ They live in the atmospheres of gas giant planets and they have a very high level of technology. Considerably higher than ours, we think.
“Half a billion years ago, they decided they wanted to spread out and colonize other planets—other gas giants—around other stars. They built fleets like the one we fought at Niraya and sent them off in every direction. Those fleets were designed to terraform—for lack of a better word—every gas giant in the galaxy, to create new homes for the Blue-Blue-White. To accomplish that task they were given the directive to complete other subobjectives as well. They would make more fleets like themselves, constructing them out of materials mined from terrestrial worlds and rocky moons. They would speak to any intelligent beings they found. And they would take steps to make their work areas efficient and productive. Here’s where the problem arose. Part of that last subobjective included eliminating vermin from their factories and marshaling yards. That makes sense, of course. If you’re going to build new worlds, you don’t want rats chewing through your cables, or insects making nests inside your supply sheds.
“The problem is, the Blue-Blue-White didn’t provide their terraforming fleets with a clear definition of what vermin look like. When the drone fleets encountered other life-forms, they simply acted to eliminate them. To kill them. The fleets assumed that any intelligent life would look something like their masters—like giant jellyfish. Instead, they looked more like us.
“The fleet that came to Niraya didn’t understand—at all—that we were sapient creatures. They thought we were rats, or mosquitoes, and that we needed to be wiped out. I had to destroy their fleet because there was no way of convincing them otherwise.
“We’ve since learned a few things about these fleets. For one, that there are a lot of them. As they spread out through the galaxy, each fleet builds additional fleets. Those new fleets go on to build even more. We don’t honestly know how many of them are out there right now. We think they number in the millions.
“The other thing we learned is that life is not as rare as we thought. At least it didn’t used to be. We have records of hundreds of intelligent species that lived in the galaxy in the past. People, like us—no matter what they looked like. Cultures. C
ivilizations. Some never made it past their stone ages, while some developed space travel, even starships.”
The display changed again, to show the familiar image of the Milky Way galaxy, with its super-bright center and its spiral arms. Individual stars in the image flared and lit up one by one, and then faded away again.
“The Blue-Blue-White’s fleets exterminated them. All those planets, all those people—gone. We’re talking about genocide on a cosmic scale. There is no way to know for sure, but we estimate that the Blue-Blue-White are responsible for the deaths of trillions of intelligent beings. Trillions.
“All because of a glitch. A bug. A line of code missing from a program—all because the Blue-Blue-White couldn’t imagine intelligent life looking like anything other than themselves.
“There is no doubt that this is the single greatest crime committed in the history of the galaxy. There is no doubt in my mind that the Blue-Blue-White are guilty.
“It’s possible that some of you don’t care. Maybe you think we aren’t responsible for all those dead aliens. People we never met are hard to care about. Hard to even imagine in any kind of serious way.
“I can understand that, even if I think it’s a callous and cynical attitude.”
Bury almost laughed at that. He controlled himself—the last thing he needed was Lieutenant Candless disciplining him yet again.
“Let me, then, make one thing clear,” Lanoe said. “The fleet we fought at Niraya was not the last of them. As I said, there are millions of them out there. They work their way across the galaxy, one star at a time. Soon one of those fleets is going to come for Avernus, say. Or Adlivun. Or Irkalla. In fact, over time, every single system that humanity has colonized will be attacked. Even Earth itself is not exempt. The fleets do not stop coming. They can be resisted, but they cannot be deterred. If we don’t find a way to stop them, permanently, they will continue to be a threat to humanity for all eternity. And eventually—inevitably—they will win.
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