“Hmm,” Lanoe said. “I thought you might have relieved him of duty and claimed the carrier for your own. It seems you’re under the impression you’re in charge around here. I’m calling to ask you to formally relinquish command of the fleet, but maybe you’d like to fight me for it.”
“Of course not, sir. I’m glad to have you back. I understand that you may not see it that way, but I assure you—”
“It doesn’t matter why you failed to obey my order. I’m not particularly interested in excuses.”
She lifted her chin a fraction of a degree. “Sir,” she said.
He’d known her for a very long time. He’d fought beside her, lived in quarters with her. Anyone else might have missed it, but he could see the tension in her neck muscles, in the set of her shoulders. He’d wounded her deeply. She was a woman who very much valued Naval protocol and the chain of command. He’d struck her to the core.
Lanoe forced himself to soften his tone. He still needed Candless. He’d made his point and he didn’t want to antagonize her any further. “All right,” he said. “You did what you did to protect your crew. I suppose in this particular case I can forgive your insubordination. But, Candless, I need you on my team. I need to know I can count on you to carry out my decisions. We’re in the middle of a war, for the devil’s sake.”
“A … war, sir.”
“Yes, that’s right. Why do you look confused right now?”
“It’s just that I was under the impression that we … well. I suppose it doesn’t matter what I thought.”
“Go ahead,” he told her. “I want to hear your analysis.”
She nodded. “We had our noses pretty well bloodied back there,” she told him. “Our engagement with the Blue-Blue-White was an unmitigated disaster.”
“You see it that way? We shot down one of their dreadnoughts and dozens of their airfighters. We even took out their laser emplacement.”
“Yes, sir. And all it cost us was half of our fleet.” Candless pursed her lips and he knew she was wondering just how candidly she was allowed to speak. He could tell by the way her nostrils flared that she had decided to just say it. “We lost the battle. Lost it miserably. We are not capable of fighting the Blue-Blue-White—not here, not on their own ground. Our only sane option at this point is to retreat. Have Rain-on-Stones open a wormhole and head home to lick our wounds.”
Lanoe nodded. “I see. You don’t feel that what we’re doing here is worth the sacrifice.”
Candless shook her head. “I didn’t say that. However, you asked for my analysis, and it’s this: we can’t win here.”
“I think we can. And it’s what I think that matters.”
“Then you intend to continue to engage the enemy? There will be more battles.”
“That’s right,” Lanoe said. “Starting in a little less than ten hours. We’re going to clear the skies so that we have unrestricted access to the disk. And then we are going to rain hell down upon the Blue-Blue-White.”
The blood ran out of Candless’s face. She was afraid. Well, this was no time for cowards.
Lanoe cut the connection before either of them could say anything more.
Maggs made his way through the carrier with only moderate discretion. He was permitted in most areas of the ship, as long as he didn’t make a nuisance of himself. At one point he caught sight of young Bury, heading somewhere with a nasty look on his face—if the child was capable of some other expression, Maggs had never seen it—and he hung back in a hatchway rather than let the Hellion see him. A confrontation now, as delightful as it might be, would only slow him down.
He stopped off at a few bunks in the quartering decks, knocking on hatches and speaking a few words of encouragement to those Centrocor employees Bullam had identified as being the most loyal. He said nothing of any substance, of course, just reminded them that they had not been forgotten. Some of the people on his list looked downright terrified to see him, so he soothed their jangled nerves. Others struck him as impatient. These he offered reassurances that the time was coming, and soon.
They had to accelerate the timetable, Bullam had said. Move things along. Not the easiest of tasks when everything had to be handled so damned delicately, but Maggs understood how to wield subtlety as a weapon. How lucky Bullam was to have him as an assistant, he thought. Not for the first time he admired her intellect—had she allowed Lanoe to kill him back at Caina, she might have avoided some unpleasantness, but then she would have lost her very best asset.
He was rather proud of himself, honestly. He was a talented fellow, and a great help in such a time.
He kept telling himself that. He needed to puff himself up. The final visit he needed to make was going to be the hardest.
He headed for the quartermaster’s little office. The same little cubby of hell where he’d gone through such a trial getting his old suit—and his ceremonial dirk—back. He was not one bit surprised to find that when he arrived the same woman was on duty, lost in her endless spreadsheet displays. He’d almost forgotten the scar that crossed her nose and left her with but a single eyebrow, but he managed not to let his revulsion cross his features.
“Remember me?” he asked.
The sour look she gave him failed to surprise. She swiped away her displays and folded her arms across her chest. “It’s the big fancy Centrocor executive, then,” she said. “The one who threatened to get me fired.”
“Ah, now, I don’t remember saying anything of the kind,” he told her. “I asked how much you enjoyed your position. Just a friendly little inquiry as to your morale.”
She made a rude noise.
He’d run across her type before. Too beaten down by life to believe you when you flattered them. Too battered by time and history to believe in the universe’s grand possibilities—so you couldn’t appeal to their greed. Tough nuts to crack, it had to be said. But everyone, in Maggs’s experience, had an in. Something they wanted, something they were afraid of. Some hidden button you could push.
“Back then, you could bully me pretty easy. You were a big wheel with Centrocor so you could make my life hell if I didn’t play along. Funny thing, though. Centrocor’s gone. Now I’m Navy again. And you—you’re just a civilian.”
“I’ll point out I haven’t actually asked you for anything yet,” Maggs said. “For all you know I came down here to shoot the breeze. To try, perhaps, to make amends for my previous hubris.”
“Sure. And maybe you’re into women with scars, and you came down here to ask if I wanted to have dinner with you sometime.”
Maggs checked that particular line of approach off of his mental list of gambits to try out. So. He could not proceed by flattery, or greed, or seduction, or intimidation. Well, that left only a very few arrows in his quiver, and none that he liked to use very often. Perhaps … perhaps he might try to play to her pity. Sell her a story of woe and tragedy, and eke some sympathy out of her human heart.
He nodded sadly and dropped his chin. “I see. I’ve underestimated you. I beg your pardon, then. I seem to have wasted your time. I’ll go. Too bad. You were my last hope—you see, I’m in a spot of trouble with my employer, M. Bullam, and … never mind. You don’t want to hear this.”
“You’ve got that right.”
Maggs was too committed to his ploy to let her get under his skin. “Yes, really, my troubles have nothing to do with you. If I lose my job, well, I guess it was my own damned fault. I thought maybe she would be more understanding when I told her about my tragic upbringing, and how it made me … made me vulnerable to … I say. Stop that at once. That’s quite unseemly.”
The quartermaster was laughing at him. Chuckling without so much as bothering to cover her mouth with her hand. It was quite rude, given the gravity of the—admittedly completely untrue—story he’d been working up to.
“Relax,” she said. Her eyes still burned with hatred, but she let her arms fall to her sides. “I already know why you’re here. M. Bullam sent me a private mess
age while you were on your way over.”
“I—I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me.”
Maggs struggled to keep his face from turning red. “You were expecting me.”
“Yes.”
“You knew why I’d come. And you let me talk all that bosh anyway.”
The quartermaster shrugged. “I owed you for last time. You should see the look on your face right now. It’s priceless.”
“Damn you, let’s get to business, then. I have no interest in being raked further over the coals of indignity.”
“Yeah, okay. Come with me.” She unstrapped herself from her desk and pushed herself along the wall, deep into the low-ceilinged storerooms that held the carrier’s supplies. “Your boss is pretty generous,” she said. “She set up a nice schedule of payments, and even gave me some advice on how we’re going to do this. Basically you want to send your people down here one at a time, no more than a couple of them in any given day. I’ve changed the numbers on some requisition forms—they should ask for allergy medication. That’s how I’ll know you sent them.”
“Allergy medication,” Maggs said. “Aboard a ship with Navy standard-issue air filters that catch anything bigger than a micron. Do you even carry any such drugs?”
“It doesn’t matter. The point is to make sure nobody looks twice at the tracking numbers.” The quartermaster ran one finger along a line of shelves, then stopped when she reached one that Maggs could not tell from any of the other multitude of shelves around him. “Your people come down here and ask for the pills, and this is what they’ll get instead.” She pulled a box from the shelf and opened the lid.
“Ah,” Maggs said in appreciation.
The box was full of weapons. Mostly sidearms, though there were a few neural stunners, combat knives, and smoke grenades in there as well. Near the top he thought he saw an actual pair of brass knuckles.
“This is all the stuff that got seized when the Navy took control of the carrier. All the personal effects their marines dug out of our bunks. I haven’t even had a chance to log it into the system yet, so the powers that be don’t have an inventory on it. Even if somebody from Commander Lanoe’s crew does come down here and wants to inspect this box, there’s no manifest for them to check its contents against. No way to know what should be here.”
“You haven’t logged these in,” Maggs repeated. “Surely that would have been one of your first duties when these came in.”
“Oh, sure,” the quartermaster told him. “That was a total brain failure on my part. I totally should have thought of that.” She gave him a look so cynical it made him squirm. “Of course, if I had, I would have missed out on a pretty hefty bribe. I guess we all just got lucky.”
“Ma’am,” Maggs said, bowing just a little, “it is rare in this life that I meet someone who understands the game as well as I. One as devious and underhanded, one as skilled in the criminal arts—”
“Are you working up to asking me out for dinner after all?” she asked. “Because I’m still not interested.”
Chapter Nineteen
With the dreadnought and the interceptors closing in, Lanoe had given up any pretense of hiding. He switched on all the cruiser’s active sensors, to try to get better imagery of his opponent.
The dreadnought and its escort were still six hours out from the cruiser. The alien ship’s engines were burning hot, pushing it faster and faster toward them, but the two ships were still so far apart it took long seconds for millimeter-wave pulses to bounce off the dreadnought’s hull and return to the cruiser’s parabolic antennae. The data he got back made little sense to him. With Valk removed from duty, he needed someone else to look at the numbers. He called up the IO on the carrier to get an analysis of what he’d found.
“Interesting. See, here’s the problem,” the man said, “the reason why when we fought them before, disruptors didn’t even slow them down.” A display popped up near Lanoe’s elbow, showing a series of cross sections of the alien ship. “Disruptors work best on a ship that has big interior cavities. This one—”
“Sure,” Lanoe said. He saw it right away. The cross sections showed that the dreadnought was almost completely solid. Or, rather, almost completely made up of a hard material riddled with millions of tiny bubbles, some as big as two meters in diameter, some no more than a centimeter across. It looked very much like a cutaway view of a coral reef. There was nowhere a creature as large as an adult Blue-Blue-White could move around inside the giant ship—no passageways, no chambers a jellyfish could even squeeze into. “So you’re telling me most of the ship is just dead space.”
“I don’t think so, no,” the IO replied. “I think they use those little cavities to store fuel, like a giant sponge. And maybe the bigger ones could be used as ionizing chambers. With so many of them, it would explain how they can charge up those plasma balls so quickly. It’s weird. I mean, it isn’t like any kind of human technology. I guess that makes sense, since humans didn’t build these things.”
Lanoe touched the display, got it rotating. He examined the blisters, the cagework canopies that studded the outer skin of the coral. The blisters were hollow inside—and much bigger than the bubbles they’d seen in the main hull. “These have to be crew spaces. Cockpits, or something like that. But if the blisters are the only places the jellyfish can move around in, there can’t be more than a half dozen of them on the entire ship.”
Which, frankly, fit with what he’d seen down in the disk, in the city of the Blue-Blue-White. As enormous as that structure of white pylons had been, he’d only seen one adult jellyfish in the whole place. One adult, and a brood of its young.
Perhaps even calling the place a city had been wrong. Perhaps he’d been thinking in human terms, frames of reference that were useless when applied to the habits of an alien species. He’d seen a large structure and assumed it must be densely populated, just like the cities back on Earth or any human planet. Instead what he’d seen had been much more like a reef ecosystem, a vast structure made by tiny creatures, populated by small animals and dominated by a single apex predator.
It got him thinking. He’d estimated that there were a few hundred cities the same size as the one he’d flown through. Maybe three hundred lacy constructions of floating pylons in the entire unimaginably huge volume of the disk.
If every one of those reefs was the territory of just a single adult Blue-Blue-White, then even including the immature ones he’d seen (don’t call them babies, he reminded himself, babies are little humans), the entire population of the disk could be measured in the thousands. The disk might be seventy thousand times the size of Earth, but it only carried a tiny fraction of the population.
Just a handful of them. And they were going to wipe out humanity, just as they had wiped out so many other species.
Pain lanced through his temples suddenly. He felt as if someone had jabbed dull knives up under his eyelids, into his brain. He reached up to rub at his forehead, careful not to let the IO see his pain.
“Good work,” he told the man. “See what else you can find. Look for weak points. Look for … I don’t know. Just find me the best way to kill these things.”
“Yes, sir,” the IO said.
Lanoe ended the call. Once he was unobserved again he brought both hands up to his head and rubbed vigorously at his eyes. The pain receded slowly, but eventually he could see straight again.
He blew out a deep breath. Leaned back in his chair. His eyes ached and he closed them, thinking he would give them a rest. He’d been staring at displays for hours now, studying reports, reading tiny print. He was three hundred years old, for the devil’s sake. Of course he was going to get eyestrain.
He opened his eyes, but made a point of focusing on nothing, of staring into space.
Just a few thousand, he thought. A tiny population. They used so many drones because they didn’t have the crews for more than a handful of ships.
Just a few thousand of them.
It wouldn’t take much to wipe them out.
“I have a plan for how we’re going to take this dreadnought,” Lanoe told Candless, via communications laser. “The interceptors are getting closer every second. If we wait for the dreadnought to come to us, they’ll catch up and we’ll be fighting them all together. I don’t want to let that happen. We’re going to move to intercept—swoop in and kill the dreadnought before the reinforcements arrive.”
“I suppose that’s a wise choice,” Candless said. “Sir.”
“We’ll screen the cruiser’s advance with fighters. They were all but useless before, but we have a better idea now of what we’re facing. A new strategy. If we can get a disruptor or even just an AV round into each of those blisters, we can kill every Blue-Blue-White on the ship. If even one of them is left after the first attack run, we hammer the thing with every gun we have.”
Candless shook her head. “I don’t understand. Why employ the fighters at all? The cruiser’s guns did satisfactory work against the dreadnought we encountered in the disk. Why can’t we simply turn them on this one as well?”
“We got lucky that time. We fired sixteen guns at point-blank range on a mostly stationary target. It’s too big a risk to try to pull off the same trick when both ships are accelerating. If we even get half a broadside in before they roast the cruiser with a plasma ball, it’ll be a miracle—and we don’t know if eight shots will be enough. I don’t think I need to remind you just how big these dreadnoughts are.”
“No, you don’t,” Candless said. She fought the urge to sigh deeply. “When you’re asking me to take such a ridiculously dangerous action that will put my entire crew at risk, I do tend to pay attention.”
He almost smiled at that. On her display he looked tired. Wrung out. Admittedly he was three hundred years old. His face was as wrinkled as a bedsheet after a dirty weekend, and his hair was more salt than pepper. It was rare to see someone who looked that old these days. Most people got cosmetic treatments to make them look like they had when they were twenty-five. The truly rich would just skip the treatments and have their consciousness downloaded into a fresh new body.
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