He saw a horizontal pylon that was studded with what looked like bones, like skeletons of some headless creature he couldn’t quite imagine. Hundreds of skeletons, each fifty meters long. They were partially embedded in the skin of the pylon as if they were fossils that had only been partially uncovered.
He nearly flew into an enormous net, a filmy membrane no thicker than a soap bubble, stretched out between two diverging pylons. Long loops of transparent cable hung down from the membrane, blown nearly horizontal by the wind.
He got a bad start when he passed by what seemed to be a landing pad, a broad stretch of pylon that had been flattened on top. Hundreds of drone airfighters stood perched atop the pad, their long airfoils swept back behind them like the wings of insects. He reached for his throttle controls, thinking he would need to make a fast getaway—but then he noticed that some of the airfighters were slumped over on their landing gear, their wings grazing the pad. Others had their cockpits blown open, the cagework rough and twisted where it had been punctured, perhaps by weapon fire. Thick growths of pale vines anchored most of them to the pad, and he realized that this wasn’t a staging area but a junkyard—the airfighters were nothing but wreckage. It occurred to him they might be ships his people had shot down, but the vines couldn’t have grown over them that quickly, could they? The ships must have been destroyed in some battle of the past, presumably a battle between two factions of Blue-Blue-White.
He flew past colossal machines buried in webs of dark girders. He flew through what he thought might be an actual forest, a stretch of the city where thick white vines crisscrossed between three pylons, vines that sprouted long, spiraling tendrils. He flew over what he called, for lack of any better term, a farm, where long rows of fleshy sacs sprouted from the surface of a pylon, all of them slowly swelling and then collapsing, as if they were breathing in a fitful sleep.
It all just passed him by, his brain unable to gather more than basic impressions, or form anything but the simplest explanations for what he saw. The city was as complex and varied as any human city, as wild in its profusion, as chaotic in its design—just scaled up in size a hundredfold. After a while it became just a whirl, a fog of images, of meaningless lines and shadows. None of it made any sense. None of it meant anything. Eventually his brain just gave up trying. Except—one fact stuck with him, one he knew had to possess some incredible significance he just couldn’t work out.
He had yet to see a single Blue-Blue-White. They’d gone to the trouble of building this colossal city of pylons, bigger than any city humans had ever built, yet as far as he could tell it was utterly deserted.
Where the hell were they?
He found them when he’d stopped expecting to. When he’d already decided that the city must be a ruin, a skeleton of its former self haunted only by the many-legged hounds. He thought that right up until the idea was proven wrong.
He’d flown for hours through the city by then. He was numb to new sensation, almost asleep. He woke up very fast when something splattered on his canopy. A kind of sooty foam streaked across the flowglas, then was torn away by the wind.
As he looked around he saw more of the foam, whole long streamers of it twisting away from a nearby pylon. He touched his control stick, veering in for a closer look, and saw that a broad, jagged opening had been torn in the pylon’s side. The foam was fluttering out of that aperture, bits of it breaking free to flutter on the wind. Inside the hole he could see a vast quantity of the stuff, a lake’s worth, quivering and glistening in the dim light. And inside the foam, there was movement—frenzied, swarming movement. A large number of creatures were down in there, rustling around in the dirty foam. They were round and rubbery, and when he asked for a magnified view, he saw them using their fifteen tentacles to stuff the foam inside their toothless mouths.
He’d seen his first Blue-Blue-Whites, but it took him a second to realize it. There was something deeply wrong with the aliens.
They were tiny.
Not, perhaps, in comparison to a human. The smallest of them was at least three meters across. But Valk had led him to believe that the jellyfish were eight times that size. Of course, Valk had claimed to understand their language as well. Had all of his information about the Blue-Blue-White been faulty?
Lanoe studied the feasting aliens. They climbed over each other, tore at each other’s tentacles. There was plenty of the foam to go around, but they fought each other over … what? Choice bits of it? The foam all looked the same to Lanoe, but maybe some of it was more rich in nutrients, or just tastier.
They acted like animals. Like unthinking animals. How could creatures that disorganized build something as huge and complex as the city, much less the entire disk?
He had found the enemy. Maybe it was time to think about how he could fight them.
Lanoe reached for his weapons board. The Z.XIX carried a rack of high-temperature explosive bombs, fist-sized weapons that could fill the entire trough of foam with purging fire. He could kill so many of them in one fell swoop.
Just as he’d dreamed of doing since Niraya. Since Zhang died.
Lanoe touched a virtual key. Armed a bomb. He would have to get close, to make sure it fell exactly right, to make sure the wind didn’t catch it—
Then he saw something else, something that made him hesitate.
Just beyond the opening of the feeding trough, the flat top of the pylon was stained with some dark liquid. Blood, Lanoe thought, because in the midst of all that gore was the body of some giant creature, a thing like a whale with dozens of wings and fins and strakes. It had no eyes, but its forward end terminated in a round mouth filled with curling ivory fangs. The animal made him think of the skeletons, the fossils he’d seen embedded in one of the pylons. Especially, he thought, because it was being butchered. A square cut had been made in its side, revealing a structure like a rib cage. Blood poured from the cut, bubbling and turning to foam as it hit the surface of the pylon. Clearly this was the source of the food the little Blue-Blue-White were consuming.
Then he saw the butcher.
A Blue-Blue-White twenty-five meters across. Maybe thirty. It looked enormous, gigantic, compared to the smaller ones wallowing in the foam. Its skin was translucent and rubbery. Its fifteen tentacles clutched knives and axes that looked surprisingly similar to human implements, except that their handles were long and spiral-shaped.
Inside its globular body Lanoe could make out the shadows of vast organs and the branching lines of blood vessels, like a miniature image of the city around them. Prominent among the alien’s innards were long, looping filaments that flickered with light. In the augmented light view he could see through his canopy, colors were flattened, almost nonexistent, but he thought some of the lights were blue, some red, some just white. The lights throbbed in a rhythmic pattern, looking like the strings of lights people on Earth hung up for Fleet Day.
This Blue-Blue-White was as big as Valk had said. The others were so much smaller, they must be—
—infants.
Lanoe was flying over a nursery. The swarm of tiny aliens squabbling over their dinner had to be the children of the big one. Its babies.
He looked down at his hand. His finger was still touching the key that armed the bomb.
“Babies,” he said out loud. “They’re just babies.”
The fighter responded—but not the way he expected. He might have assumed it would say it didn’t understand his last instruction. It didn’t say that, though.
Moreover, its voice had changed.
Instead of the clipped, synthetic voice it had possessed before, it spoke now with the mellow, mocking tones of the only woman he’d ever loved. The voice coming from the fighter’s speakers was the voice of Bettina Zhang.
The woman he’d wanted to marry. The woman he’d wanted to spend the rest of his life with, until a Blue-Blue-White drone took her away from him.
“You and I never got to have any babies,” Zhang’s voice said.
L
anoe pulled his finger away from the weapons board. It was shaking.
What was going on? He must be hallucinating. He must be—“What did you just say?” he demanded.
“I don’t understand, Commander,” the fighter said. In the robotic voice it had used before. Zhang was gone. His delusion of Zhang was gone.
He’d felt her presence before. He’d been haunted by her ghost, ever since he’d lost her. Every time he saw Ginger’s red hair. Sometimes when he was alone, in his cabin, alone with his dark thoughts, it was like she was lying in the bunk next to him, so close he could feel her breath on the back of his neck.
Normally she didn’t speak to him. This was … something new.
He caught a flash of motion through his canopy. While he had temporarily lost his mind, the big alien had noticed him. It rose from its work, lifting up into the air under its own power. Its rubbery body deformed and pulsed as it rushed toward him, brandishing its weapons. Lanoe was suddenly very aware of the fact the Blue-Blue-White was ten times the size of his fighter.
It could swallow him whole if it wanted to.
He nudged his control stick, veering away from the nursery. Poured on a little speed. The jellyfish gave chase, but it couldn’t keep up, and soon Lanoe was kilometers away, moving fast.
There wasn’t much more city to traverse. The pylons grew farther apart, with fewer connections. They were simpler here, too, just unadorned lengths of white bony material.
In time he came to the place where the city ended. A place where there was nothing but a solitary hound loping across a forlorn length of pylon, its legs flashing as it slowed down, catching itself before it ran off the edge. The final pylon stuck out into the dim red cloud bank, unattached at its far end to any other, like a spear sticking over a battlement. Its end was rough and jagged, pebbly in texture. Lanoe watched the hound, at the very edge, tugging at the limp tentacles of tiny polyps, trillions of them, each in their protective coating of something like white coral.
If he’d been able to achieve some kind of mental focus, it might have occurred to him that he was seeing something important. How much the polyps looked like the tiny animals that built coral reefs. That the city had not been built, after all, but grown.
He was far too busy worrying that he’d lost his mind.
Zhang’s voice had come from the fighter’s speakers. He’d heard her speak, as clear as a ringing bell.
He’d known before that he was slipping. That all his reserves of careful discipline and mental toughness were starting to crack. The task he’d given himself, to take revenge on an entire alien species, was just too big for a human mind to bear. The burden of command was getting to him. But now—
He’d heard her. And as much as that scared him, he couldn’t deny it had been good, so very, very good, to hear her voice again.
He couldn’t let himself get distracted, he knew. He had to stay alert, stay strong. He needed to get back to the others. Maybe it was just the isolation, the loneliness of being the only human in the midst of the jellyfish city. If he could get back to other people, other humans, he would be fine.
Of course, that presented a whole new problem.
For a while he just focused on figuring out where he was. He’d traveled a long distance, crossing the city. Hundreds of kilometers. He was nowhere near the place where they’d first fought the Blue-Blue-White. Perhaps it was safe now to climb for outer space. To try to locate the cruiser and the carrier, and rendezvous with his people.
On the other hand, the cover of the clouds might be the only thing keeping him alive. He might get swarmed by airfighters the second he popped up out of the clouds. There might be a dozen new laser positions waiting to carve him into pieces if he showed himself in clear air.
There was only one way to find out.
Chapter Seventeen
Hours ticked by as they waited to see if the dreadnoughts had fallen for Candless’s ruse. All anyone could do was sit and watch. No one even knew what kind of sensors the alien ships possessed. If they had some way of seeing where the humans were hiding, Candless’s strategy was not only going to prove futile—it would get them all killed.
She made a point of not watching the clock. Of forcing herself not to count the minutes that passed.
Captain Shulkin returned to the bridge, the wound in his leg healing nicely. If he bore a grudge against Candless for shooting him, she couldn’t tell. He took his accustomed chair and strapped himself in—the carrier was not currently accelerating, so there was no gravity to keep him from floating away. He steepled his fingers before him and stared straight ahead, seemingly dead to the world.
That was fine by Candless. As long as he kept quiet, he could sit where he liked.
She had not ordered the bridge crew to remain silent. She hadn’t needed to, not while the dreadnoughts were still out there, searching for them. When the IO needed to send her information, he did so by messaging her wrist display. The pilot and the navigator—who had nothing to do as long as the carrier’s engines remained banked and cold—sat quietly, watching their displays.
The dreadnoughts couldn’t hear them, of course, not through the vacuum of space. Yet even soft sounds made everyone jump.
Just a few hours before, one of the dreadnoughts had come uncomfortably close to finding them. The alien ships were well organized and had established an efficient search pattern, each of them taking a separate part of the sky to patrol. The first time one of the giant ships came within ten thousand kilometers of the carrier, Candless had spent a nasty hour clutching her armrests, watching the display as the Blue-Blue-White vehicle grew larger and larger in the telescope view. She had stopped breathing as it made its nearest approach. She couldn’t remember if she’d blinked, in fact.
There was no way to tell if the alien ship was readying its weapons. No way to know if it had found them. Learning that information would have required switching on their active sensors, and that might have given them away. So all she could do was watch, and be ready to react if she thought one of the giant ship’s weapon pits was about to fire.
Eventually the dreadnought had simply moved past them, without so much as deviating from its course. She watched it recede, and only then did she allow herself to—just slightly—relax.
Now Valk called her, his voice surprisingly loud in her ear, and her nerves were jangled all over again.
“My turn,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” she whispered. But she was already tapping virtual keys, getting her telescopes turned around. There. She couldn’t see the cruiser, but she had a fair idea of its location. She could see very well that one of the dreadnoughts was inching closer to Valk’s position. Far too close for comfort, in fact.
“It’ll pass at a distance of six thousand three hundred and nine kilometers of me, in thirty minutes’ time,” Valk told her.
The carrier and the cruiser had been quite near to each other when they went silent, but because they couldn’t use even their positioning thrusters, the two ships had slowly drifted apart. Now they were nearly a hundred thousand kilometers from each other and getting farther away all the time.
Too far for her to send him any help, even if she could do so somehow without giving away her own position. “Understood,” she said. “How do you want to handle this?”
“I was kind of hoping you might have some ideas,” he told her. “I guess, the way I see it, there are two options. I can stay dark and wait it out. See if that thing notices me. Of course, if it does there’s not a lot I can do. It takes ninety seconds to get my coilguns ready to fire. Long before I got a shot off, the jellyfish could turn me to slag with those plasma cannons of theirs.”
“And your second option?”
“I can get proactive. Start warming up my guns now. They’ll notice right away, of course, and accelerate to intercept—but by the time I’m in range of their weapons, I’ll be ready to shoot, too. It’ll come down to which of us has better aim. And even if I win, the other two
dreadnoughts will see me and we get to start the chase all over again.”
“A hard choice,” Candless told him.
“You’re in charge here. I know which way I would go, but—”
“Yes, I’m sure you have an opinion. Everyone always does.” Candless pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger. Tried to think.
There were people on the cruiser that she cared about. Ginger was over there, for the devil’s sake. Candless’s first impulse was to tell Valk to take the initiative, to fire at will. Yet if he failed—
And if she told him to wait, to hope the dreadnought didn’t see him? What if that went wrong? It meant consigning everyone on the cruiser to a fiery death.
She had to decide. No one else could take this weight from her shoulders.
“Stay dark,” she said, and let out a sigh composed of equal parts resignation and terror. “Our only real chance is to wait the jellyfish out. Let them think we’ve escaped, and that their search is pointless.”
“Understood,” Valk said. “I’ll keep you updated.”
“Do,” Candless said.
You could have cut the tension on the cruiser’s gun decks with a knife. When Valk sent the message saying that Candless had made her decision, Ehta released a long-held breath, letting it sputter through her lips. “Stand down,” she told her people. There was some grumbling, but not much. The marines who were in charge of loading the guns moved their shells very carefully back into their cradles, while the crews in the target acquisition booths yanked their hands back from their consoles.
Ehta clutched a railing with one hand and looked around at her people. She’d told them very little of what was happening, but of course they knew. Any minute now one of the giant dreadnoughts was going to pass them by. If it saw the cruiser, or even guessed they were close, then it was all over. “We’re on standby,” she called out. “We have twenty minutes’ downtime, but everybody stay put. If the order comes to fire, we won’t have any advance notice.”
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