He didn’t say another word.
Ehta shook her head. “Lanoe’s going to get every one of us killed. Including himself. And he doesn’t care. As long as he gets to butcher some more jellyfish before he goes down, he’s perfectly willing to take the rest of us with him. He’s using us, Candless. He’s—”
“Shut your mouth!” Candless roared.
Ehta wasn’t going to stop now, though. “He’s using us. Just like he’s using Ginger. You seen her lately? You seen what she looks like now?”
Candless flew at her, then, literally jumping across the room to grab Ehta by the collar ring. She pulled Ehta in close until their faces were just centimeters from each other. For a while they just stared each other down, their eyes locked together in a standing wave of hatred.
“You think,” Candless said, the words like bullets spitting out of her mouth, “that you can get to me by bringing up my former students. You think I can be swayed if you point out how I’ve failed them. Well, you’re wrong. You haven’t won me over, Major. In fact, if anything, you’ve just demonstrated why I should relieve you from duty. Why I should have you court-martialed. I think you may be a bigger threat to Lanoe’s command than that traitor over there.”
“I beg your pardon,” Maggs said.
Ehta and Candless both turned to stare at him.
“Oh, very well. I know when I’ve been rumbled,” he said weakly.
Ehta looked back at Candless. “You know Lanoe has to be stopped,” she said.
“I know no such thing. And unless you have something else to say, I believe we’ve exhausted this conversation,” Candless told her. She didn’t let go of Ehta’s collar ring, though.
“I have one more piece of evidence,” Ehta said. She guessed it was time. Even if she didn’t really want to say it out loud. Because that would make it real.
“Lanoe threatened to kill me if I told you this,” she said. “I guess he thought it would hurt morale.” She took a deep breath.
It looked like she had Candless’s attention.
“There’s no way home,” she said. “Ginger told me. Rain-on-Stones can’t open a wormhole to get us back. Not on her own—one chorister could never do that by herself. Lanoe doesn’t care. He got so caught up in his revenge fantasy, he stopped caring about what happens after he gets it.”
“I don’t understand,” Candless said.
“It’s true. We’re all stranded here. Lanoe stranded us here. I told you before—he’s willing to let every one of us die, so he gets a shot at avenging Zhang. The woman he loved. Hell, it’s not even a question of letting us die. All of us going out in a blaze of glory has been his plan this whole time.”
It was Maggs who responded first. The little bastard let out a cry of surprise. A cry of utter despair. “What?” he demanded. “What are you … what are you saying?”
He’d heard her. Ehta felt no need to repeat herself.
Candless had heard her, too. She could see it in the other woman’s eyes. She’d heard it, and she knew it was true.
“I … suppose,” Candless said, “given this new information— hellfire!”
She was looking at something over Ehta’s shoulder. The marine swiveled her head around, trying to see, even as Candless released her collar ring.
“The traitor is getting away!” Candless shrieked.
It was true. The hatch of the cabin was wide open—and Maggs was nowhere to be seen.
There was, of course, a chase. He could hear Ehta throwing herself down the corridors of the carrier, bellowing his name. No doubt brandishing that hand cannon of a sidearm, ready to shoot him down like a dog if she caught him.
Do me a favor and don’t let her, his father’s voice requested. I’ve made rather a cozy little domicile for myself in this skull, and I’d rather it wasn’t blown to flinders.
Maggs’s career in charlatanry wouldn’t have lasted very long if he didn’t know how to leg it when the time came. He’d been aboard the carrier long enough to know all its little secret ways, its secluded maintenance hatches and its more private airlocks. He had to take a rather circuitous route, but soon enough he found his way to Bullam’s yacht. The dome admitted him easily. He pressed himself through the flowglas as if he were moving through thick jelly, and came out on the other side already moving. He shot over to the controls and released the ship from its docking berth.
Ehta had known about the mutiny. How she’d figured it out was a mystery, but it didn’t matter, truly. What mattered was whether or not she had taken precautions against Bullam making a quick escape.
He had a bad moment as he waited for clearance to launch from the traffic controller. When it didn’t come immediately, he pointed the yacht at the open end of the flight deck and stomped on the throttle. The yacht surged forward, out into space.
It was only then that he heard a grunting moan and realized he wasn’t alone on the deck.
Bullam lay on her couch, one strap fastened incorrectly across her waist. Her body flopped over to one side as the yacht accelerated and her face rolled toward him.
“We’ve been made,” he told her. He chewed on his mustache. “They knew—how long they’ve known, I’m not sure, but—Ehta knew. We’re in terrible danger, I’m afraid.”
Bullam’s mouth moved but he couldn’t hear what she said. Maybe he was too distracted by the pounding of his much-aggrieved heart.
“There’s worse news, I’m afraid. It turns out the bloody chorister can’t open a wormhole. She never could, in fact. If we’d known that, I imagine we could have started our mutiny much earlier. As it is, I can’t currently see the point.”
He steered a course at random, simply trying to put as much distance between himself and Major Bloody Ehta of the Poor Bloody Marines as he could get. When the trajectory was locked in, he turned to look at Bullam directly.
“We need to call it off. The uprising, I mean. It’s hopeless—we’ll simply get our people killed if they try something now. As it is, they’ll be arrested, and—”
“Already,” Bullam said. She frowned. Her face grew lined with concentration. “Done,” she said.
“What?” Maggs couldn’t believe it. He glanced down at his wrist display, though, and saw it flashing at him. Three flashes, then a pause. Then three more. “You already sent the signal? But why? You said—you said I would pick the time. You entrusted me with that duty.”
“Don’t,” Bullam said, “trust.”
For the first time Maggs noticed there was something wrong with her.
Her drones were clustered around her, bobbing up and down around the divan like a pack of worried dogs attending to their mistress. One of them had a flexible tube extruded from its faceplate, its far end buried in the crook of her arm. Another was near her head, massaging her scalp with what looked like an ultrasound wand.
“Oh, no,” he said. “No. You—you had a clot. A blood clot.” He tried to remember what she’d said about her disease. That made him recall that the last time they’d spoken, she’d mentioned having a headache.
“Ischemic,” she said. She swallowed thickly, tried again. “Ischemic. An ischemic.” She groaned in frustration.
“A stroke,” he whispered.
“Drones are helping,” she said. Her eyes were shining with fear. “Helping. As much as they can. Need. Need a treatment.”
Maggs could guess what she was trying to tell him. The blood clot had occluded a blood vessel in her brain. The drones were stabilizing her for the moment, but some damage had already been done. She needed some sort of medical intervention or the damage would spread.
The kind of treatment you could only get from a hospital back on some civilized world. Some world ten thousand light-years away.
“Oh, damn,” Maggs said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Candless slapped a release panel and the hatch before her slid open. She looked through into the carrier’s brig. A short corridor lined with three hatches on either side, each with a display mounted
on its face. She triggered each one in turn as she floated past, making sure they were empty.
The last place a man like Maggs was likely to run to ground was a prison cell, she knew. She was, however, completely out of other ideas. She called Ehta, who was on the other side of the ship, doing the same thing she was. Chasing after a wild goose. “I’ve had no luck,” she said. “Please tell me you’ve got him in a choke hold right now.”
“Sorry,” Ehta replied. “But I think I know where he’s gone. I’m on the bridge right now, looking at a tactical board. That Centrocor woman’s yacht took off a few minutes ago. The traffic controller didn’t have any reason to stop it, so he just let it go. You want to grab a fighter, go chase after him?”
Candless scowled into one of the empty cells. “No,” she said. “We have bigger problems to solve just now.”
“You mean Lanoe,” Ehta said.
“Among other things. I still think we need to do this the right way, Major. We need to prove he’s of unsound mind. If we had a flight surgeon, that would be good, but we don’t. By protocol it can be anyone with medical experience. I’ll take a marine field medic, if that’s what we can get.”
“Rain-on-Stones was supposed to be a surgeon. Before Lanoe kidnapped her.”
“That isn’t helpful,” Candless said. “We need a doctor—a human doctor—to examine Lanoe and establish that he’s unfit for command. That means a psychological evaluation. One which I imagine,” she said with a sigh, “he’s unlikely to pass.”
“So you’ve accepted that he’s gone crazy,” Ehta said.
Candless closed her eyes and tried to think things through carefully. “I’d like proof. So that when you and I go before our respective courts-martial, we have something to justify our actions. But yes, you’re correct. He needs to be relieved. I don’t suppose you’d like to be the one who formally arrests him? Shipboard policing is traditionally a duty of the PBMs.”
“Tell you what,” Ehta said. “I’ll trade you. You arrest Lanoe. I’ll get my people over here to round up Maggs’s people. The would-be mutineers.”
Candless put one hand against a wall to stop herself from bashing into it. It helped, a little, to be stationary. To not feel like everything she’d ever believed in, everything she’d ever fought for, was being turned upside down.
A blue pearl appeared in the corner of her vision. Even with her eyes closed she could see it rotating there. Annoyed, she flicked it away without a thought. “How quickly can you apprehend them? If you strike quickly enough, maybe we can get them before they hurt anyone. Or themselves.”
“You understand that my people aren’t trained in taking captives, right?” Ehta asked. “This is going to be messy.”
Candless shook her head. “I’m ordering you to minimize that. These people may wish to betray us. If we catch them before they have the chance to do so, they’re only guilty of conspiracy. And I don’t consider that a capital crime.”
There’d been enough killing already. Enough death. She opened her eyes and looked around at the cells. Between the six here and the two on the cruiser, they could hold at least twenty-four mutineers. If there were more, well, they would simply have to find some other compartment with a door that could be locked and—
She whirled around. She was certain she’d heard something. A sharp report, like a door being slammed with some force.
Or perhaps a gunshot.
“Ehta,” she called, “you said you’re on the bridge? Can you bring up a security display? I have just had what, for the moment, we’re going to call a flash of pessimistic intuition.”
“You mean—a bad feeling,” Ehta called back. “Okay, display’s open. What am I looking for?”
“The sonic profile of a pistol being fired,” Candless replied. “Or perhaps a chemical record of a gunpowder discharge. I don’t think it sounded like a particle beam—”
She stopped because she’d heard a bloodcurdling scream.
“Ehta,” she whispered.
“Yeah. Hellfire, yeah. I don’t need any fancy sensors. I’ve got camera feed of the pilots’ wardroom. There’s blood on the wall in there. People jumping around with weapons in their hands. This thing is already kicking off.”
“Get your marines over here right now,” Candless said. “No, wait, have them secure the cruiser first. I wouldn’t put it past Maggs to attack the carrier purely as a feint, so he can take the cruiser and turn its guns on us. We need to move fast.”
Ehta released a profanity Candless hadn’t heard since she was a child.
“What?” she demanded. “What is it?”
“The troop transport,” Ehta replied. “It’s here. It’s on the carrier! I didn’t expect things to start this soon. Damnation—I had Maggs fly me over here in it. The cutter’s in the flight deck as well. Candless, there’s no ship bigger than a BR.9 over on the cruiser right now.”
“Which means what, exactly?”
“There’s no way to get my marines over here. They’re stuck on the cruiser.”
And therefore Candless and Ehta were stuck on the carrier. With a horde of mutineers coming to slash their throats.
A blue pearl rotated in the corner of Lanoe’s vision.
He flicked it away with his eyes. He did not want to be disturbed. Not now.
Not when he was communing with the ghost.
He had the lights turned down in his cabin. He’d switched off the air circulators, so he could hear her better. She was so close now. So close to him, and yet the slightest thing would send her flying away.
He floated in the middle of the room with his legs crossed. With his hands on his knees. He kept his eyelids mostly closed, to limit what he could see. To limit distractions. He breathed slowly, through his mouth.
“Zhang,” he whispered. “We need to talk.”
The blue pearl appeared again. Damned automated messages—he flicked this one away, too, thinking that as soon as he had a chance he would change his preferences to block them all immediately. But first—he was so close.
“Zhang. We need to—”
Yet again the blue pearl appeared. He started to flick it away, thinking there must be some virus in the carrier’s systems. Maybe some old advertising software left behind by Centrocor. It couldn’t have activated at a worse time. He turned his eyes to look at it, to check its metadata, and that was when he saw who had sent it.
Valk.
Lanoe scowled. He’d been trying … an experiment. Twice now, he’d hallucinated Zhang’s voice. He knew that couldn’t be good. He’d thought if he could put himself in the right frame of mind, maybe he could figure out why she was haunting him—and make her stop. Finding the right frame of mind was the hard part. Lanoe had never been very good at introspection. The last thing he needed right now was to talk to the needy AI. Clearly, though, Valk wasn’t going to stop trying. Angrily Lanoe flicked his eyes to answer the call.
“I figured it out, Lanoe,” the AI said. “I saw where I went wrong. I’ve been trying to reach somebody, anybody. Nobody’s taking my calls, but they need to. They need to hear this! Especially you. Listen, I know why you shut me out, but—”
“This isn’t the time,” Lanoe told the machine. “I thought I made myself clear. I can’t trust you anymore, Valk. You’ve grown unstable.”
“Damn you, Lanoe, that’s exactly it. I haven’t.”
Lanoe sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “What are you talking about?” he asked, knowing he would regret it.
“I assumed you were right. That there was something wrong with me. I went back and checked everything—everything I’ve done since we got here. You were upset for two reasons. The first one was that I couldn’t get an exact fix on our location in the galaxy.”
“That should have been child’s play for you,” Lanoe said.
“I know! And the second problem—that I couldn’t understand what the Blue-Blue-White were saying—”
“I really needed you to be able to do that.”
> “I … I know, and I’m sorry, but … it wasn’t my fault,” Valk insisted. “Lanoe, just listen to me for a moment, all right? I looked at those two failures. I looked at them from every angle. When I couldn’t find a single bad line of code or a checksum that didn’t add up, I thought maybe my hardware had gone bad. I checked a million other things, literally a million other things, before I thought to ask the right question. What if I was working fine, but the rest of the universe had a fault?”
“That’s absurd.”
“It should be. And I guess—look, the universe is working just fine, it’s just not the universe we expected.”
Lanoe opened his eyes. This was a fresh problem. Valk, apparently, had lost his mind.
“Valk,” he said carefully, “I’m going to cut this link. I don’t want you to call me again. Do you understand?”
“Lanoe—you have to hear this. I’m sorry, I know you’re busy, but you do. I’ll make it as simple as I can. I couldn’t fix our position because the standard candles had all moved. It would take five hundred million years for them to move to their current position. I couldn’t understand the Blue-Blue-White because my language files are half a billion years out of date.”
Lanoe opened up his wrist minder, intending to disable all of his comms.
“We traveled ten thousand light-years through space to get here, yeah? But we went a lot farther than that. We traveled through time, too.”
Lanoe stopped with his finger hovering over a virtual key. Press it, and Valk would go away. He could get back to trying to summon up Zhang’s ghost.
Something made him hesitate, though.
“Time travel is impossible,” he said.
“I’m sorry, but, no, you’re wrong. When you start playing around with wormholes—it’s trivial. A wormhole can go anywhere in spacetime. It’s actually very tricky to make a wormhole where both ends are in the same timeframe. It’s all there in the equations, I’m sure you don’t want a mathematics lecture right now—”
“You’re right, I don’t,” Lanoe said.
“—so just trust your living computer, okay? The numbers work out. Ask Paniet to check my work, get Candless to grill me. I’m absolutely certain about this, Lanoe. The Choir sent us back in time. They sent us half a billion years back in time.”
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