Bullam nodded. “We’ve got our work cut out for us. But this doesn’t mean we need to make any major changes to our plan. We simply have to accelerate the timetable. You know what you need to do? What you need to say?”
“I have committed every line to memory. The greatest actors of stage and video would shrivel with jealousy could they see the performance I’m about to give.”
“Don’t lay it on too thick,” Bullam said.
He sketched a courtly bow. Not easy in the absence of gravity, but Maggs was nothing if not adaptable. He looked around for his suit and pulled it on with all the grace he could muster. As he headed for the canopy over the yacht’s deck, however, intending to blow her a kiss on his way out, he came up short because he’d heard a noise.
A rather quiet, rather sad little sound, if not entirely a dignified one. A grunt of pain.
He turned about and considered Bullam. She was still bent over her drone, her eyes full of light. Her mouth, perhaps, was a little twisted up. But that could signify concentration as much as it might indicate discomfort. If she looked a little pale, well, the lighting on the yacht’s deck wasn’t of the best.
“Anything the matter?” he inquired, trying to make it sound breezy.
“Fine. Get on with it,” she said.
And so he did. Maggs was a man of action before anything else. She didn’t look up as he left, so if he was frowning—the most subtle and noncommittal of frowns—she couldn’t possibly have seen it.
Lanoe kicked hard at the aft end of the axial corridor and shot through the cruiser’s decks, past the sick bay, the gun decks, the bunks. The place felt empty and haunted, hushed as if everyone were waiting for something to happen. Well, he was back now. Time to give them what they wanted.
He reached out and caught a handhold on the wall, stopping himself just as he reached the wardroom. Valk was at the ship’s controls, lying motionless in his seat with his arms floating in front of him. At least he had his helmet up and looked approximately human.
“Welcome back,” the AI said.
“Thanks,” Lanoe said. “I need an update. Tell me about the dreadnoughts that are looking for us. Are they moving?”
He reached across Valk and tapped at a virtual key. Displays sprang up all around him, showing him telescope views of the surrounding volume of space, tactical assessments, the status of the cruiser’s systems.
“All three dreadnoughts changed course when you left the disk,” Valk said. “They saw your engines burning, definitely. Two of them are headed for the disk, probably investigating where you came from. The third one is headed for us, but it’s still twelve hours out. Then—there’s this.”
One of the displays moved to the front, right where Lanoe was looking. It showed a telescope view of a portion of the disk, an endlessly swirling cauldron of red storm clouds. Scattered across one cloud bank were dozens of dark specks. Before Lanoe could ask, the view magnified, and then magnified again, and again, losing definition each time. The final view was pixilated and hard to read, but Lanoe got the point.
“Are those airfighters?” he asked. They had the same spherical glass hulls as the drone ships they’d fought inside the disk’s atmosphere.
“Same principle, similar design, but look, there’s something missing,” Valk said. “Wings. They don’t have wings.”
“You think those are spacecraft,” Lanoe said cautiously.
“I don’t need to think it. They left the atmosphere shortly after we received this image. They’re headed our way.”
“How many?”
“That’s the closest thing we have to good news. There were hundreds—thousands—of airfighters in their fleet, but it looks like the Blue-Blue-White are only sending forty-five of these things after us. Spacecraft are more expensive to build than aircraft, and maybe they didn’t expect to ever have to fight off an invasion from space—”
Lanoe held up a hand to stop the AI talking. “Interceptors. Probably drones. But interceptors. How soon will they be here?”
“They move a lot faster than the dreadnoughts, but they’re coming from farther away. Twelve hours, give or take a few minutes.”
Lanoe swore under his breath. “They’ll arrive at the same time as the dreadnought. They’re smarter than I thought they were. These,” he said, stabbing one finger through the display, “are reinforcements for the dreadnought. And they make our lives a lot more complicated.” When they were just fighting one big ship, the advantage was on the Navy’s side. The cruiser’s guns had a far longer effective range than the dreadnought’s plasma ball cannons. But if the Blue-Blue-White could field interceptors as well, this wasn’t going to be a showdown. It was going to be a pitched battle.
“We’ll fight them. On their terms, if we have to,” Lanoe said. “There’s no backing down. Tell me about Candless and the others. How’s their morale? You think they’re ready for a battle?”
“They’ve been busy, mostly focused on hiding. I think they’re scared, Lanoe. But if it comes to it, they’ll fight—if only to defend themselves.”
“I guess that’s good enough for now,” Lanoe said.
“They kept telling me you were dead. But I had a feeling that couldn’t be true.”
Lanoe snorted. “You had a feeling, huh? You’re telling me an AI believes in intuition?”
“Not intuition. Just logic, really. If you had died, I wouldn’t still be here.”
“What are you talking about?” Lanoe asked.
“The data bomb I gave you. You would have triggered it if you knew you were going to die. You would have erased me.”
Lanoe frowned. He’d promised to let Valk go when the time came, when the AI was no longer necessary to the mission. He’d never considered the possibility he might die first. “I might not have had time,” he said. “You know as well as I do that when you’re a pilot you can’t always know when your time is up.”
The AI had no comment on that.
Lanoe sighed and looked into the black dome of Valk’s helmet. It was blank, as always. He’d thought he knew the mind in there once. He’d understood Tannis Valk. Ever since it turned out that the Blue Devil was just a fiction, a false memory programmed into a machine, he’d seen Valk drifting away from him. Getting less and less human—less understandable—with every passing day.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“Okay.”
Lanoe strapped himself into a chair in the wardroom. Leaned forward so he could keep his voice low. Nobody was around, but this felt like a conversation that should be carried out in whispers. “How are you doing?” he asked. “I mean, really. Are you … I don’t know. Functioning optimally?”
“I’m fine. I run diagnostics on myself all the time, and I haven’t seen any problems.”
Lanoe rubbed at his face. “Because I kind of have. Seen problems.”
Valk couldn’t raise an eyebrow, or frown, or even turn his head to look at Lanoe. He did tilt over a little in his chair, and Lanoe figured that had to mean he was confused. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.
“It started when we first got here. I asked where exactly we were in the galaxy, and you couldn’t tell me.”
“I explained that at the time,” Valk said. “I couldn’t find any of the standard candles.” The landmarks of space, in other words—the most reliable stars and nebulae that could be used to fix a vehicle’s position relative to the rest of the galaxy. “The stellar population here is so dense it blocks traditional methods of orientation, and the effect of gravitational lensing can’t be ruled out because—”
“Sure,” Lanoe said. “But then what about when I asked you to talk to the Blue-Blue-White for me? Because you were supposed to know their language.”
“I have a small vocabulary that I got from a drone ten thousand light-years from here,” Valk pointed out. “It’s true I can’t understand what they said in response to our message. But there could be lots of reasons for that. Maybe the locals use an idiomatic form of
the language, or maybe the Blue-Blue-White have more than one language, just like humans do. If you went to a planet where they speak English, and broadcast a message in Mandarin, you would get the same response.”
Lanoe nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Those all sound like very logical reasons. Reasons for why you can’t do the things I need you to do.”
“Lanoe,” Valk said, “if you have doubts about my functionality, then by all means. Switch me off. Delete me now. But I’m telling you, I’m fine.”
Lanoe unstrapped himself. He pushed over to Valk’s chair and patted the AI on the arm. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. But I’m going to relieve you from duty for a while. At least until we can get Paniet to come over here and take a good long look at you. You okay with that?”
“What the hell do you think? No, I’m not okay with that.”
Lanoe reared back a little. He’d never seen Valk get angry before—not even back when he still thought he was a human being. He’d come to count on the AI being unflappable.
“I’m fine, damn you,” the AI said. Valk’s voice roughened into a distorted growl. “You don’t know the first damned thing about computers, about artificial intelligence. How dare you come in here and start insulting me, start suggesting I’m—I’m—”
Valk fell silent for a moment. Lanoe, surprised by the sudden outburst, could only wait until he spoke again.
“Lanoe. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I don’t know what came over me just then. I mean, I shouldn’t have yelled.”
“Why not? It’s what a human would have done.”
“Okay, but listen. You can’t take me off of duty. I don’t have anything else! I’m so deeply interconnected with this ship right now, giving it up would be like … like losing myself. Again. Please, Lanoe. Please don’t do this.”
“I’m sorry,” Lanoe said, pushing away from Valk’s chair. “I just can’t trust you right now. There’s too much at stake.”
“You’re telling me that Candless actually shot you? In the leg? Just because you refused to listen to her defeatist rhetoric? Surely that was a hair-raising moment. I would have been terrified.”
“I’ve fought my share of duels in my time. A man who’s afraid of being shot at is a man who is afraid to fully live,” Shulkin said, and slapped the leg of his suit.
Maggs laughed and raised his flask. “To a true hero,” he said, and drank. Shulkin waved away the compliment, but his eyes were still bright. Almost human.
He had learned the trick of getting anything out of Shulkin. The old captain was dead inside for the most part, scoured clean by the Navy’s best brain surgeons. They’d taken perhaps too much and left him with very little in the way of an inner life. They had, however, left him the ability to fight—and to talk about fighting. Luckily Maggs had some experience in dealing with old warriors of Shulkin’s stripe, who were fueled in their dotage by nothing but the warmth of memories of slaughter.
I’d almost take that thought personally, if I didn’t know better, Maggs’s father’s voice said inside his head.
“You know,” Maggs said, ignoring his ghostly paterfamilias, “speaking with you really takes me back. I was born and raised at the Admiralty—”
“Bah,” Shulkin said, sneering as if he’d smelled something unpleasant. “Bunch of bureaucrats, bean counters, and staff officers there.”
“Quite,” Maggs said. “A lad like me, who dreamed of high adventure and glory—why, I was in constant danger of having the spirit stamped out of me. So I sought out men and women like you, Captain, and like my father, the admiral. Those who had lived. Those who could still teach me something.”
As I recall, you spent most of your formatives chasing nubile young women and robbing my liquor cabinet.
I put in enough hours sitting at your knee to pick up a few tricks, Maggs told his father. “It was a magical time, hearing the old stories. I don’t suppose you have a few you might share. For old times’ sake.”
Shulkin smiled. At least his microscopically thin lips creased at the corners and his eyes sparkled like faulty circuits. He leaned back in his chair, his arms lifting in front of him in the classic pose of one sleeping in microgravity. Maggs made himself comfortable, assuming he was in for a good solid hour of dusty tales of murder and mayhem in the wild and wooly days of the Brushfire. At least he had his flask to help him sit through it.
Yet something unexpected happened then, something he hadn’t planned on. The old captain’s mouth closed, his teeth coming together with a click. His smile faded and his eyes visibly focused. Maggs could almost hear the neurons firing in the mass of scar tissue that was what remained of Shulkin’s brain.
“Flattery,” he said. “Flattery.”
“I beg your pardon?” Maggs asked.
“Flattery will … get you … nowhere.”
What had Maggs said? How had he triggered this change? Instantly, Shulkin had lost his air of bloodthirsty bonhomie and instead taken on the distracted air and hesitant speech of a sleepwalker. Some switch had been flipped, some logic gate had closed. It was downright spooky. And decidedly inconvenient.
“I do beg your pardon, Captain,” Maggs said. “I didn’t mean any offense—”
“You want … something,” Shulkin said.
“Only good company, I assure you! A friendly chat to help pass the time of my captivity, nothing more.”
“Lying … bastard. Just ask for it. Whatever … it is.”
Maggs set his jaw. He had been sent over to listen to Shulkin’s stories and plant a seed or two of sedition. Working closely with Bullam he’d planned out everything he would say to Shulkin, every subtle suggestion, every nuanced turn of phrase. Suddenly they had gone off script.
Well, Maggs was an excellent improviser, when it came to that.
“All right,” he said. “You’ve seen through me. You’ve got me.”
Shulkin didn’t even nod. He just stared. He was, Maggs had to credit it, very, very good at nasty stares.
“I’m not here for chitchat. I do want something from you. Or rather—I would say I want something for you.”
Stony silence ensued.
“I want to give you back your ship,” Maggs told him. “This ship.”
“Centrocor,” Shulkin said. Drawing out the word until it sounded like a draft of air leaking from a tomb. “You’re working for … Centrocor. Working for Cygnet. Cygnet was … a fool. It was a mistake to throw my lot in with him and his …monopoly.”
Dariau Cygnet was one of the directors of Centrocor—one of the most powerful people in all of human space. Bullam had told Maggs about him, how he had personally sent her on her original mission, to find and capture Lanoe. Cygnet had hired Shulkin to assist her toward that end. They had come a long way since then.
“Centrocor,” Maggs said, “is a dead issue. We’re ten thousand light-years from the nearest Centrocor field office. What happens here, what happens now, has nothing whatsoever to do with Big Hexagon.”
At least that got Shulkin nodding. Well, Maggs thought it was a nod. It might have been some kind of neural tic.
“I’ll admit it,” Maggs said. “Yes, I’m working—in a clandestine sort of way—for M. Bullam. She sent me here. You see, Captain? I can tell the truth. I’m working against the Navy by coming here today.”
“Lanoe let me fight,” Shulkin said. “He knows how to fight.” Spoken with a level of reverence bordering on the tone that religious zealots used when acclaiming their redeemers.
Ah. It seems there’s been a shift of loyalties, his father said. This one’s signed on with the other side, Maggsy. Tread lightly …
Maggs nodded, though whether it was in response to Shulkin’s spoken words or his father’s spectral voice he wasn’t sure. “Yes. Lanoe let you fight.” He took a deep breath.
All in, he thought. All in.
“Candless shot you when you refused to retreat,” he said.
Shulkin’s eyes darkened and his mouth pursed, as if he’d bitten into a lem
on. That deathly and deadly stare of his drooped, just a hair, until it was no longer focused like a particle beam on Maggs’s face.
It was always so encouraging when you saw the hooks go in. When you knew you had your mark.
Lanoe strapped himself into the cruiser’s control station and brought up a tactical board. The alien dreadnought was still closing in, burning hard to intercept them, but it was ten hours away. The interceptors were still trailing behind it, but they were catching up fast.
Candless had done an excellent job of using tricky maneuvering to hide her ships from the Blue-Blue-White searchers—honestly, Lanoe was impressed by what she’d accomplished—but he had no intention of following the same strategy.
He intended to stand and fight. He had other things to get done first, however, before they engaged.
First up was to call Candless and let her know that he was back in charge. She’d refused to give him her position, back when he was still down in the disk. She had to be reminded that she worked for him.
He sent the call and as expected she answered immediately. Maybe she knew what she was in for, but she was a teacher and she would know there was no point shirking discipline.
“Give me a report,” he said as soon as her face came up on his display.
“Of course, sir,” she said. She fed data to his system and new displays popped up all around him. “As you can see here, two of the dreadnoughts have moved toward the disk, away from us—”
“I’ve got the tactical situation covered. Valk filled me in about the interceptors.”
“I … see,” she said.
Something bothered Lanoe, something missing. When he realized what it was he frowned. “Where’s Shulkin?”
Her brow furrowed. “Sir?”
“I asked you a question, Captain. I can see his seat over your shoulder, and he’s not in it. Why is he not on the bridge of his own ship?”
She took a breath. “He’s resting. We’ve all been taking very long shifts here—I haven’t had a break in over twenty-four hours and even with caff tabs I’m in desperate need of some sleep myself.”
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