“Of course you will,” Bullam said, and smiled at the man. She glanced over at Maggs. “It’s well and good knowing Lanoe’s dirty little secret, but if I ever actually needed to reveal it, it would be my word against his. I need images, video, something to prove that Lanoe is harboring a thinking machine.” She turned back to Hollander. “Did you learn anything else?”
“The cruiser’s in poor condition. The damage’s not just cosmetic, either. I saw what was done to the drive, and that’ll be a hard fix. There’s an entire hatch missing from the vehicle bay, and we just sawed off the whole front section. Whole damned ship’s being held together with spit and hope.”
Maggs frowned. “Paniet’s a top-notch engineer. He’ll have it all fixed before long.”
“Begging your pardon, but no, he won’t,” Hollander replied. “Not unless he gets to some kind of drydock. There’s scratches and dings you can buff out, and there’s deep frame damage, and that’s what we’re discussing. I wouldn’t be surprised if that tub fell to pieces the first time in the middle of a battle.”
“All the more reason Lanoe needed to take us alive,” Bullam pointed out. “Why he went to such lengths to board the carrier—his own ship isn’t up to the task he’s set himself.” Bullam sat down on her divan and crossed her legs. “Fascinating. You’ve done quite well, Hollander. When we get back to the real world, you’ll be paid, and handsomely, for your true service to Centrocor.”
“Happy to help,” Hollander said, sketching a quick but deep bow. “Now, I should get back, before I’m missed, neh? Best no one sees me loitering here.”
“Of course. We’ll talk soon.”
Hollander tossed his empty squeeze tube to Maggs, who caught it easily. Then he raised his helmet and left the way he’d come, wriggling through the flowglas dome.
Maggs watched him go for a while, maneuvering away from the yacht on jets built into the boots and shoulders of his suit. Eventually he shrank away to nothing, and Maggs turned to look back at Bullam.
“You continue to impress me,” he told her. “Even in exile, you’re still playing this game like a master.”
“I’m very well trained,” Bullam told him. “Centrocor paid for six years of schooling because they saw potential in me. I’ve long since repaid that loan, with significant interest.”
“I didn’t know that there was a school of dirty tricks on Irkalla,” Maggs said, laughing. “I thought you needed to learn that sort of thing in the field, the way I did.”
“The curriculum at Centrocor’s boarding schools would surprise a lot of people,” Bullam told him. “Now. Back to business.”
“Yes, of course,” Maggs said, and nearly jumped to her side, reaching one hand out to stroke her hair.
“Not that business,” she said, batting his hand away. “Not yet, anyway. I meant that it was time we spoke about what your role is going to be in my grand plan.”
“Ah.” Maggs drew his hand back and in one deft motion smoothed down his mustache. “Well, I doubt Lanoe is going to let me get close enough for me to continue as your would-be assassin.”
“I thought I made myself clear. I want Lanoe kept alive and healthy.”
“Of course,” Maggs said, “right up until the moment you don’t anymore.”
The two of them smiled at each other.
“So we’ll need to find you another role. Something that suits your particular skills. I actually have a few ideas,” Bullam told him, “a couple stratagems that might be right up your alley …”
Lanoe arrived back at the carrier at such speed he had to shoot past it and bank around in a million-kilometer-wide turn to slow down before he could dock. He tapped at his control stick with an idle and impatient thumb, irritated by how long it took. He was anxious to get back to the bridge, to show Candless what he’d found. “Call Paniet and have him come over, I want him to look at this, too,” he told her over a private radio band. “And make sure Valk can hear us. He’ll have something to say, I’m sure.”
“As you wish. Are you hungry? I can have some solid food waiting for you when you arrive.”
Normally after a long patrol there was nothing Lanoe wanted more. This time his stomach was too tied up in knots to even consider food. “Don’t bother. Just get me some water that doesn’t taste like it’s been filtered through my kidneys three times.”
Candless was silent for a moment. Maybe she’d been offended by that. Well, he didn’t really care. “Yes, sir,” she said finally, which was what he needed from her.
He slid into a docking berth inside the carrier’s flight deck and wasted no time hurrying to the bridge. As he arrived, Candless pushed out of her seat toward him, a tube of water in her hand. “We’ve downloaded the imagery you sent us. It’s just processing now. Paniet is on his way—do you want to wait for him?”
Lanoe took the tube and sucked at it greedily. The water tasted amazing. “Bring up the video. Start at 6:21, and run through 7:02.”
Candless nodded at the carrier’s IO. Miles, Lanoe thought, or Giles. He’d studied the carrier’s personnel roster but still didn’t know their names.
The IO touched a virtual key, and the image appeared, floating before Lanoe. He swiped his arms open, expanding the hologram to fill most of the bridge. High towers of red cloud loomed over them, cut into layers by floating rivers of dark ionized methane. Strands of sunlight wove together as they shone down through gaps in the clouds, like searchbeams from on high picking out a tendril of mist or lighting up the swollen belly of a burgeoning cloud bank. A storm of black pebbles swept across the view, and even Lanoe turned his head as if the dust might get into his eyes. Looking down, he could see nothing but more clouds, more and more until they swirled around his feet, a thick carpet of roiling vapor.
“You must have got pretty close, to get imagery at this level of resolution,” Candless said. When he didn’t respond immediately, she said, “You were right. This is no protoplanetary disk. It looks more like the cloudscape of a gas giant planet, though if this metadata is correct it’s on a scale far beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. You could lose Jupiter in this image, couldn’t you?”
He continued to ignore her. He was looking for something very specific, something easily missed. It would be there, he thought, in a deep canyon between two heavy banks of piled stratocumulus. Something small and white, pale against the dark red clouds but shadowed until it was barely recognizable. “There,” he said. “There, look. Look!”
Candless pushed over to float next to him. She made a good show of staring into the image, of trying to see what he was pointing at, but he could tell she didn’t want to see it. She wanted to believe this was some sterile world, strangely shaped and incredibly massive but devoid of life like every other place humanity had been. She was trained to think of the universe as empty of intelligence, of sapience. And maybe it was more than that. Maybe she wanted him to be wrong.
But he was right. He was sure of it.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“Something lighter in color than the rest of this.” She shook her head. “It’s hard to tell if it’s solid or not. I suppose—”
“It’s solid,” Lanoe said. He turned to look at the IO. “Can we magnify this any further?”
“You’ll lose some resolution,” the man said. He looked terrified at having to say it. Candless must have been hard at work, he thought. Making the crew of the carrier terrified of her.
“Sure,” Lanoe said. “Do it.”
The image expanded so fast Lanoe felt like the clouds were blowing past him, through him. He suddenly felt lightheaded. “Now,” he told Candless. “Look again.”
A green pearl appeared in the corner of Lanoe’s vision. Valk, calling in. “I see it, if she doesn’t,” Valk said.
“Perhaps I see …something,” Candless said. She pursed her lips. “It’s irregular in shape, and it looks quite delicate.” The white object resembled nothing so much as foam clinging to the side of a thick wave of cloud
. Perhaps a torn scrap of lace, fluttering on the sooty wind. It was made of long spars that came together at various angles, forming six-sided, eight-sided, twenty-sided rings. Some of the rings joined together to form larger, three-dimensional shapes, like tetrahedrons and icosahedrons and polyhedrons with even more faces, shapes with names Lanoe barely remembered from his long-past school days.
Paniet came shooting into the bridge, upside down from Lanoe’s perspective. The engineer flipped over and grabbed the back of Candless’s abandoned seat. “What did I miss?” he asked. “Ooh, that’s very pretty.”
Lanoe was still watching Candless’s face. She was fighting it, but he thought her resistance might be breaking down.
“Are you going to tell me something like that could just occur naturally?” he asked her.
“Of course it could,” she told him. “I don’t claim to understand the processes that would give rise to such an object inside a hydrogen atmosphere, but—well, let’s be logical about this. Occam’s razor, yes? The simplest explanation is probably correct. Because what you’re suggesting is less plausible.”
“Is it? We know the Blue-Blue-White exist,” Lanoe told her. “We have good reason to think this is their home system.”
“You aren’t saying the word,” Valk told him. “Say it out loud.”
“That’s one of their cities,” Lanoe said.
Candless might have been about to make a point. She closed her mouth and drew in a long, shallow breath.
“There are hundreds of them,” Lanoe told her. “Once I knew what to look for, they showed up everywhere, scattered around the disk. Some are bigger than others, but they’re all pretty huge. This one is the size of Madagascar.” He pointed at the lacy construction again, as if she still hadn’t noticed it. “That’s a city. They’re here, in that disk. The Blue-Blue-White are here.”
“I’m still not entirely convinced,” Candless said. “But—”
“Look!” Paniet said, nearly squealing. “Look, there, at that edge of the city.” He pointed, and Lanoe saw it, too. Small dark shapes, just specks even at this magnification. They wheeled and darted around the long white spars.
“Those are vehicles,” Lanoe said. “Blue-Blue-White vehicles.”
“Or birds,” Candless said.
Enough. He’d had enough of her doubts. “It’s a city. And now we have this—”
He looked around at his officers. At the bridge crew of the carrier.
“We have a target,” he said.
PART II
MEGASTRUCTURE
Chapter Eleven
The cruiser and the carrier moved with glacial slowness, at least compared to the velocity fighters could achieve. Their engines were massive and incredibly powerful, but even in the absence of gravity it took an enormous amount of energy to move all that metal and carbon fiber. Just getting them turned toward the red dwarf and locked into the right trajectory had taken hours. Accelerating from a dead stop meant days of just slowly building up speed. It would take more than a week to reach the disk.
There was plenty to keep Lanoe busy during that time, busy enough he didn’t have to think about what would happen when they arrived.
There were repairs to be completed, on both the cruiser and the carrier. Endless combat drills to run through—the Naval and Centrocor forces had to learn how to work, and fight, together. Lanoe had given his officers tasks to complete, and those needed to be supervised. Candless was hard at work whipping the carrier’s crew into shape, bringing them up to something approaching Naval discipline. Ehta was working with her marines on the gun decks of the cruiser, making sure that if they needed to fire the heavy artillery the coilguns wouldn’t just explode when they went off. Valk was working up a computer model of the disk, trying to understand how it worked and how best to attack it. And then there was Paniet’s special project.
The engineer had set up a workshop on the carrier, deep inside the cavelike flight deck. The neddies had erected a tent of electro-stiffened plastic at the bottom of the deck. Inside it, as Lanoe watched, they were building a complicated drone. Two of them were curing a long, round piece of carbon fiber cladding while another one tested an electronics bus attached to an array of low-power lasers tuned to different frequencies. They had to crawl around a large thruster package that had been cannibalized from a carrier scout, three big cones mounted on a simple fusion torus.
Lanoe was, officially, supervising Paniet and the others, though mostly that seemed to amount to standing around watching the engineers work and occasionally grunting as if he had something to add.
Truth be told, he didn’t understand ten percent of what they were doing. When Valk sent him a signal indicating he wanted to talk, he flicked his eyes to accept the message almost instantly.
“Sorry if I’m bothering you,” Valk said. “I’ve found something I think you’d really like to see. It’s about the disk.”
Lanoe nodded to himself. “Yeah? Okay. I could use a break. I’ll be over right away. Just let me get to my fighter.”
“I could just tell you about it over this link if—” Lanoe had already cut the connection.
Lanoe pushed his way out of the flap of the tent and into the open cavern of the flight deck. He made his way to where his BR.9 lay nestled in a docking cradle, ready to launch. He kept it on standby mode at all times—he spent so much time moving back and forth between the carrier and the cruiser these days that the ship’s engines never had a good chance to cool down. The BR.9’s canopy melted back into the fuselage as he approached. Lanoe retracted the skeletal docking arms and had the fighter moving before the canopy had even reformed over him, edging his way carefully out of the flight deck, maneuvering around the ranks of Yk.64s and carrier scouts mounted on the inner walls.
Once out in space he located the cruiser with his naked eye—it was flying on a parallel course with the carrier and the destroyers, only a few kilometers away—and touched his control stick to activate his maneuvering jets.
There was no real need for him to fly the fighter manually. He could have let Valk handle the short flight. He was still Aleister Lanoe, though. No matter how far he’d climbed up the chain of command, he was still a pilot in his bones.
Ehta woke to the sound of someone knocking at her hatch.
It was a truism that a marine could sleep anywhere—in a mud-filled trench, in the middle of an orbital bombardment, even sitting up with her eyes open during a long briefing. When your life was made of ninety-nine percent boredom and one unpredictably timed percent adrenaline-spiked terror, you learned to rest when you got the chance.
But if marines had some special power in regard to sleep, it was balanced by the fact that when you had to get up—you got up in a damned hurry. Ehta nearly brained herself by sitting up too fast. Her helmet even started to raise automatically as it noticed the near collision between her skull and the ceiling.
“Hold on,” she said, because whoever it was, they were still knocking. Why wouldn’t they just send her a message? What was so damned important? If it was an emergency, she would probably already know about it—her suit would have told her if the cruiser was on fire, or if the jellyfish had sprung an ambush on them.
“I said hold on, you bastard!” she shouted, when the knocking still didn’t stop. She lowered her helmet manually and twisted around in the bunk. Like every sleeping compartment on the cruiser, it was a narrow rectangular space just a little bigger than a coffin. There was a fan at one end to make sure she didn’t suffocate in her sleep and a display mounted on what was sometimes the ceiling of the tiny chamber. If she stretched her arms out to either side, she could push against both walls. It was a good stretching exercise.
“I’m bloody well coming,” she shouted at the knocker. Then she finally triggered the release key and the hatch slid open and she saw who it was.
Bury. It was the little wet-behind-the-ears pilot, Bury. What the hell did he want?
“What the hell do you want?” she asked.
“It’s Ginger,” he said.
She started to turn away, yawning. “Valk is your supervising officer. Tell him to deal with it. I know he’s weird, but—”
“Please,” Bury said, and something in his voice made her blood run cold. There was a note of pleading in his tone she’d never heard from him before. Normally he was too proud to ask anyone for anything. “I think she might—do something. Bad. To herself.”
Ehta pushed out of the bunk and stumbled into the hallway, her legs still mostly asleep. Her head swam with the sudden rush of blood. She ignored it and got moving, heading for the axial corridor. “Why’d you come to me with this?” she said.
“I’m sorry if I should have gone to Lanoe or something, but—”
“I didn’t say that,” Ehta told him. “I just want to know why.”
The two of them hurried down the ladder that ran the length of the ship, rung after rung after rung. It was a long way down. “You were kind to her once. She told me about it,” Bury said. “When they called her a coward, you stood with her.”
“Yeah, and then she went and had that alien cut her head open and shove an antenna inside. Just to prove they were wrong.” Ehta scowled at the memory.
Ehta had fought tooth and nail against letting Ginger volunteer for the operation. She’d insisted that they stop the girl from doing something so strange and irreversible. Candless had shouted her down, even slapped her across the face, and in the end, Ehta’s protests had been for nothing.
She hadn’t spoken much to the girl since. Before the operation she’d thought maybe the two of them had some common ground, that they could even be friends. Instead Ginger had chosen to turn herself into something Ehta couldn’t even understand. Something Ehta could barely stand to look at.
When they got to the brig, she came up short in the hatchway, trying to make sense of what she saw. The cell that held the alien was open and she could see the chorister shaking like she was having a seizure, her four arms and many legs twitching wildly. Ginger was crawling on the floor outside the cell, her face buried against the padding there. Her arms and legs were spasming in perfect time with the alien’s movements.
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