“Please,” Bury said.
Ehta pushed her way over to a wall of the corridor. Leaned her head against a padded bulkhead.
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.” She cut the link.
She would check on the girl. She should do it, she knew. If she couldn’t do what had been asked of her, she at least owed Ginger an explanation.
Right after she’d gotten her marines squared away, and seen to their food and their entertainment. Official duties first. Then—the hard thing.
It took a while to set things up, and make sure they weren’t going to give themselves away, but eventually the IO indicated that the carrier’s communications laser had been configured properly. Candless sat back down in her own seat and strapped herself in.
She was hesitating, she knew. She wasn’t sure how she should proceed. But she couldn’t let the bridge crew see that. “Go ahead,” she told the IO.
“It will take a few seconds to make the connection—he’s a long way away. And don’t forget, ma’am, there’ll be a few seconds of lag on the transmission.”
“Understood,” Candless said. She cleared her throat. “Lanoe? Is that you?”
And then she waited for the reply.
The carrier’s laser stretched across millions of kilometers of space, a fragile line of connection to Lanoe’s fighter. They had tuned the beam to the infrared—a color they knew the Blue-Blue-White couldn’t see. Just in case.
It was twelve long seconds before Lanoe answered. “Candless. Good. You figured it out—I knew you would. I need your position.”
“Are you all right?” she asked. “We were so worried when we didn’t hear from you.”
Another twelve seconds.
“I’m fine. We lost the other destroyer, but I’ve figured some things out down here. Things that will help us. Send me your position, so I can rendezvous.”
“Before I do that, we need to discuss what’s going on. Lanoe—Commander,” Candless said. Very carefully. “I have a strategy I’m working on here, one that’s keeping people alive. I’m not sure we should rush to abandon it. As soon as you move, the Blue-Blue-White will have a fix on your position—and ours, once you meet up with us. Rather than risking that, you could wait down there until it’s safe for us to pick you up.” Yes. Perhaps that would be for the best. “Or we could send the cutter—it’s designed for this sort of thing. We could—”
The IO interrupted her. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but you should know. He’s engaged his thrusters. He’s moving.”
Candless inhaled very slowly.
Of course he was. “Is he headed here?” She hadn’t given him their position. Maybe he’d simply triangulated it, following the communications laser back to its source.
“No, ma’am. He’s on a trajectory for the cruiser.”
How the devil would he know where the cruiser was? But then she got it. She held back a curse. Valk. The AI must have heard them talking—he heard everything that happened on the carrier’s bridge—and he’d given Lanoe his position. Of course. The AI would never refuse Lanoe anything.
Ehta pushed her way out of the gun deck and into the axial corridor. She had no more excuses. No more reasons to waste time. This had to be done. She owed the girl an explanation, and she had to give it to her in person.
Maybe, Ehta thought, she would feel a little better about herself when it was done. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so guilty about everything, all the time. Unlikely. But it was worth a shot.
The cruiser felt empty, utterly deserted. All her people were still at standby, and Valk was up at the controls, hundreds of meters away. Paniet and Bury were both on the carrier. When she reached the brig, there weren’t even any guards there. Nobody to give her a nasty look.
She reached the door of the cell where Ginger and Rain-on-Stones were locked away. She reached for the virtual key that would activate the door’s display, showing her the interior of the cell. But no. If she stopped here, even for a second, she worried she might turn back. She might see that they were sleeping peacefully in there, and decide she didn’t want to disturb them. She might see … something worse. Something that would make her turn around and run. If the girl had hurt herself, if the alien was—hell, the alien could have gone insane and cut Ginger to pieces with those huge claws, for all Ehta knew.
Ehta slapped the release on the hatch and kicked inside.
What she found was … weird.
Ginger was pressed into one corner of the room, her face smeared against the wall. It looked like her upper lip was stuck to the padding. Her eyes were wide, and she was hugging herself like she was ice-cold. She looked up as Ehta came toward her, but there was nothing in her eyes. They were glassy, dead. There was no hope there.
Rain-on-Stones was crammed up into a corner of the ceiling, using her many legs to brace herself. The wicked claws she had for feet had cut into the padding—which was supposed to be proofed against knives—and Ehta could see the alien’s mouth, a kind of wet, flexible beak. The alien was naked, shreds of her black dress drifting through the cell’s thick air.
The place stank. It was a smell Ehta couldn’t even place, and she’d experienced some nasty funks in her time. It smelled a little like rotten shellfish, maybe, ammonia and iodine, but there were notes underneath that made her head swim. The smell of fear, she thought, though she couldn’t have said why. Always before fear had smelled like human sweat, like blood. This was—different.
The stink was so thick it seemed to tinge the light, like it had discolored the air.
“Hellfire,” Ehta said. She reached for her wrist display. “I’m going to get the ventilators going in here, clear some of this out. Just give me a second—”
“No,” Ginger said. At the same time, the alien let out a quiet, diffident chirp. “No. You’re smelling her pheromones. It’s … a way for her to communicate.”
Ehta shook her head. If they wanted to stew in their own funk, fine. She didn’t close the hatch behind her, though.
She closed her eyes and forced herself to calm down. Okay. It was time. Best to get this over with quickly.
“Ginger,” she said. And then promptly realized she couldn’t think of what to say next. She struggled with finding any words at all. “Bury wanted—he called me, he wanted—” She shook her head. She looked up at Rain-on-Stones and realized she couldn’t see the alien’s head. It was buried in one of the corners of the ceiling, sheltered by her four jointed arms. “Hell’s bells,” she said quietly.
There was something wrong with the alien. Something beyond what she’d already seen. What was it?
“I need you to know something,” she said to Ginger. “I need you to know why … why I haven’t …”
She stopped. There was definitely something wrong with Rain-on-Stones. Something—missing.
“She isn’t covered in bugs,” Ehta said, when her brain finally dropped the last piece into place. “She used to have those bugs all over her.”
“Her males,” Ginger said, nodding a little. Her lip came unstuck from the wall.
“Yeah,” Ehta said. “She had all those little males running over her, getting between the plates of her armor. But I don’t see any of them now. Are they all tucked away, staying warm? I can get her a new dress, if you think that—”
“She ate them,” Ginger said.
Just like that. Like that was something that could happen.
“She—”
“They were too active. They were picking up on her distress, and it made them go crazy. She felt it like an itch she couldn’t scratch. So she ate them.”
“The devil you say. Is that something they … do?”
“No,” Ginger said. “Never.”
The girl rolled over, steadying herself against the walls so she didn’t float out of her corner. Ehta noticed for the first time that they were as far apart as they could get from each other and still be in the cell together.
“You were going to tell me something. Explain something.”
&n
bsp; Ehta nodded. “Yeah.” Maybe this wasn’t the time, though. Nobody was screaming, that had to be a good sign, right? That they had calmed down, that they had come to some kind of peace?
Sure. Because healthy, sane people eat their males all the time, she thought.
“Ginger,” she said, “I can’t help you.”
The girl turned her face away.
“It’s not that I don’t want to—I’ve been wrestling with this ever since you asked, I’ve tried to figure out a way to … to …” Murder your alien friend, she thought, but that wasn’t the way to put it. “Get you free. But there’s just too much riding on her. We need her too much. She’s the only way for us to get home. Don’t you see that? Without her, we’re all stranded here forever. I want to help you, I want to help you so much, but—but—”
She stopped, because Ginger was laughing.
It wasn’t a pleasant sound. It was halfway between a cackle and a coughing fit. But it was laughter. Across the room Rain-on-Stones chirped asthmatically, keeping the same rhythm.
“That’s why,” Ginger said. “That’s why.”
“Yeah,” Ehta said. “Come on, you have to see it from my perspective. And it’s not just about me—you’re asking me to trap hundreds of people here, so far from home. Can’t you see that’s too much to ask?”
“It might be. If you were right,” Ginger said.
Ehta took a deep breath. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“When we came here, when we came through the wormhole from the city of the Choir to here,” Ginger said, rolling around a little until it looked like she was sitting up. “It took everything the Choir had. All of them working together, to open one unstable wormhole. It cost them—so much.”
“Wait,” Ehta said. “You’re saying—”
“Rain-on-Stones can’t do that alone. She couldn’t even come close.”
“Just hold on—”
“I’m telling you that it can’t be done. There is no way back. We’re stranded here, forever—and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Not her, not me. Not you.”
Ehta put a hand over her mouth. Because she thought if she didn’t she might just start screaming and never stop.
“There’s no way back,” Ginger said again. The girl turned her face back toward the wall. “If you want me to forgive you, fine. You’re off the hook. Just go away.”
“No,” Ehta said. “If what you’re saying is true, then—” She reached down to her side and drew her sidearm. She lifted it and pointed it right at Rain-on-Stones’s ugly mouth. Thumbed a key on the side of the pistol to make sure it was fully charged. “If we don’t need her—”
“We need her,” Lanoe said.
Ehta’s head spun for a second. When it stopped, she realized two things. First, Lanoe was floating right behind her, in the open hatch of the cell. Second—he had the barrel of a pistol touching the back of her neck.
Chapter Eighteen
When Lanoe left the disk he’d gone straight to the cruiser. He’d updated Valk along the way, sent him all the video the Z.XIX had logged, all of its sensor data—everything except audio from his cockpit. He didn’t want the AI hearing what he’d said to Zhang, to his hallucination of Zhang. He didn’t want Valk thinking he was crazy.
When he arrived at the cruiser’s vehicle bay he’d gone straight to the brig. He’d thought he wanted to talk to Rain-on-Stones, get her impressions on what he’d seen in the Blue-Blue-White city. Talk with her about how he was going to win this war.
Maybe something else had drawn him there. Some intuition. No. Lanoe didn’t believe in anything so mystical as intuition. He’d just gotten lucky. He’d arrived just in time to stop his whole plan from going to hell.
“Ehta,” he said, very carefully, “put your gun away.”
The marine didn’t turn around. She didn’t so much as glance over her shoulder. Nor did she lower her weapon.
“You’re going to shoot me, Lanoe? Really? Over this alien piece of—”
“Yes,” Lanoe said.
“She’s no use to you,” Ehta said. “She can’t send us home. Come on, Lanoe! When did you start caring more about aliens than people? You’ve had Ginger stuck down here in your torture chamber this whole time for—for nothing! She’s just a kid, Lanoe. She’s a kid!”
“You’re wrong,” he told Ehta. “I still need Rain-on-Stones. I need her more than ever, and that means I need Ginger to talk to her.”
“She just told me the truth—Rain-on-Stones can’t open a wormhole for us. She can’t send us home!”
“I know.”
Ginger stirred in one corner of the room. Lanoe had only been barely aware that she was there, up until now. He saw her red hair drift around her face, like red clouds circling a pale planet.
“He’s always known,” Ginger said. “Take the shot, Ehta. Take the—ah!”
Ginger’s body convulsed and her eyes rolled up into her head. Rain-on-Stones must have figured out how much danger she was in. Ehta gasped and pushed her way over to the girl, grabbing Ginger up in her big arms. Her pistol was still in her hand but it wasn’t pointing at the chorister anymore.
“Is it true?” Ehta demanded. “You knew? You knew, Lanoe?”
“I did,” Lanoe admitted. “I let everyone believe she could open a way home because they needed to believe that. If they knew the truth—”
“They would have thrown you out an airlock the second we got here,” Ehta shouted. “They would have torn you to pieces!”
“Which is why I need you to keep this to yourself.” Lanoe kicked over to her. Grabbed the pistol out of her hand—she barely fought him—and shoved it in a pocket of his suit.
“You’re kidding me,” Ehta said. “You’re kidding—you bastard. You—”
Lanoe grabbed her by the ring collar and pulled her toward him until their faces were just centimeters apart.
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” he asked.
Ehta couldn’t seem to find a reply to that.
“You’ll keep this secret,” he told her. “That’s an order. Is that enough? Maybe not. Maybe you don’t respect my rank anymore. Maybe you need some more incentive.”
The look on her face might have killed him, in other circumstances. The mixture of betrayal and fear and confusion. Some part of him demanded that he release her, that he not say anything more. It’s Ehta! a voice in his head screamed. Your old squaddie from the 94th! Let her go!
He fought that voice. Pummeled it into submission.
“If you tell anyone about this,” he promised her, “I will blow your brains out.”
He let go of the collar ring. Pushed her away so she collided with the floor and he went gliding backward. Ehta stared at him with panicked eyes. Saliva leaked from one corner of her open mouth.
“And me?” Ginger asked. She was still in the middle of a seizure, her voice shaky but clear. “Will you kill me if I tell anyone?”
“I can’t kill you,” he told the girl. “I need you if I want to talk to Rain-on-Stones. But there are other ways to punish someone. You don’t want to hear details.”
Bullam had moved her yacht close to the open end of the carrier’s flight deck. It meant nestling into a berth right in the most damaged part of the ship, and took some very careful maneuvering. When the duty officer asked her why she wanted to make such a time-consuming move, she’d simply told the man that she wanted to be able to see the stars. The move freed up some room deeper inside the flight deck, including three undamaged berths that could be used for cataphracts, so the request had been granted without further questions.
Perhaps someone suspected she had an ulterior motive in the move, but almost certainly they couldn’t guess why. They couldn’t know that Bullam’s pet neddies, led by Hollander, had rerouted a number of network cables into the berth, allowing Bullam to monitor the carrier’s communications and data flow. Once she was securely redocked, she had access to all of the ship’s sensors—and its most heavily encrypted file struc
tures.
Maggs was deeply impressed. “So what’s first?” he asked, while gently rubbing her shoulders. “A denial of service attack on Valk, just to give him the fits? Or do we dim the lights in Candless’s bunk a little more each night to make her think she’s going blind?”
“I’m not above petty gaslighting if it serves a purpose,” Bullam told him, “but we have a situation here we need to handle.” She was crouched over one of her drones as if she were staring into a crystal ball. Not that far from it, as it were—instead of presenting a traditional holographic display, the drone was feeding her information by shining lasers directly onto her retinas. Information, therefore, that only she could see. It sparkled in her irises, as if tiny blue fires were burning within her eyes. “A lone fighter emerged from the disk a little while ago. It just made rendezvous with the cruiser.”
“Lanoe,” Maggs said. His hands stopped roaming across her neck muscles. Lanoe. Lanoe. It could be no one else. The bastard was alive.
Maggs was not, despite what some people might suspect, a betting man. He understood too much about the laws of probability for that. Yet the odds had suggested that Lanoe was dead. He hadn’t been seen since the disastrous retreat from the disk. He’d flown down into the very teeth of the enemy and with each mounting hour it had seemed more likely that the old fool had taken one too many chances. The law of averages and basic rationality suggested that a man in such a dangerous occupation couldn’t live forever.
Apparently, when it came to Aleister Lanoe, logic and common sense didn’t apply.
If he was back …
Buck up, Maggsy, his father’s voice said inside his head. You’ve still got your reprieve. For now.
Quite. Lanoe had no reason to suspect what Maggs and Bullam had been working at. It would probably take a while for him to come up to speed.
“This … changes a few things,” Maggs suggested. “We were counting on Candless being our biggest stumbling block. Now—”
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