Cataphract-class fighters—BR.9s—swept by overhead, marines in big armored suits clinging to their airfoils. One by one they jumped down, their suit jets flashing in tight controlled burns. As they slammed into the hull they were already moving forward, rifles in hand, rushing past Candless. She tried to see their faces, to figure out which side they were on, but their helmets were up and silvered. She called out, but none of them answered—they were too busy sweeping forward, cutting through the last of the mob, slaughtering the mutineers.
Her side, then. The Navy side. These were Ehta’s marines, brought over from the cruiser riding on the outsides of the BR.9s.
The fighters, their human cargo safely delivered, swung around for another pass, their PBW cannons blasting away at the hull.
Who the hell was flying those things?
A blue pearl spun in the corner of Candless’s vision. A blue pearl—
Valk.
This time she answered it. “M. Valk,” she said, “I presume you’ve come to my rescue. You might have come earlier.”
“I thought you would be grateful,” the AI told her.
Candless sighed and rested her helmet on the hull. “I am,” she said, because apparently you needed to be very literal when speaking with Valk now. He’d lost so much of his humanity—apparently his sense of humor was gone now, too. “I am,” she repeated. “Thank you.”
“Okay,” he said. “Now that we’ve taken care of this problem, though,” he said, “will you finally listen to what I have to say? I’ve discovered something, something really important. I tried telling Lanoe, but he won’t listen to me. You need to hear this!”
“I suppose you’ve earned that much,” she said. “Go ahead.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
It’s over,” Ehta said. “You might as well come out.”
The marine had missed most of the bloodshed and violence of the mutiny. She’d spent most of it locked inside Shulkin’s cabin. She’d assumed he would be one of the ringleaders of the uprising, and so she’d gone there to arrest him before he could organize his people. She’d quickly discovered he wasn’t there—but she did find a crate full of heavy weapons. When she tried to leave, she found that the mutineers had seized the corridor outside. They’d blocked all her communications, and every time she tried to poke her head out of the hatch they’d done their best to blow it off.
She hadn’t let them. And every time they tried to get inside, she’d fought back with such ferocity that eventually they had to pull back. For over an hour they’d been locked in a stalemate, with Ehta unwilling to die and the mutineers unwilling to let her live.
When her own marines came to rescue her, she’d felt an immense relief—but also crushing embarrassment. From the sound of it, Candless had been far more active in resisting the mutiny. Thrice-damned Candless, the schoolteacher, had outfought big tough Caroline Ehta the deadly marine.
At least Candless couldn’t claim to have put down the mutiny by herself. It sounded like Valk had saved the day. And Shulkin—though Ehta could hardly believe it, the madman had fought like the devil himself on the loyalist side.
Now it was Ehta’s turn to do her part. At the head of a squad of marines she moved through the carrier, checking every compartment, every corridor, to make sure there were no more mutineers hiding away in a storage locker or anything, waiting for a chance to spring out and do mischief.
That meant a lot of pounding on sealed hatches. This one was worse than most—the people behind it were smart enough to figure how to seal so it couldn’t be opened, even from the bridge. Ehta thought they must have jammed a prybar into the hatch’s servos or something. “Come on!” she shouted, hammering on the bulkhead with one armored fist. “You’re done! I promise we’ll be nice to you if you come out peaceful. Otherwise, we’ll cut the oxygen flow to this compartment and you’ll suffocate in there.” She turned and rolled her eyes at Gutierrez, but the marine had her helmet up and silvered.
Behind the hatch were three mutineers, a man and two women. They were armed with old-fashioned projectile pistols. Revolvers, by the look of them. There was a camera in the compartment and it was feeding video to her wrist display. The mutineers looked scared. They kept moving around the room, kicking off a wall and flying to the next, kicking off that one. The microgravity equivalent of pacing.
Scared was bad. Scared people tended to shoot at the first thing they saw coming through a door. Scared people went down messy.
Not that Ehta had much sympathy for the mutineers, but she figured enough people had already died. And she didn’t want one of her marines getting hurt by a stray round.
“Come on!” she shouted. “At least talk to me, you idiots.” She pounded on the hatch with the butt of her rifle. Not really expecting a response.
She got one, though. “Stop that! Stop that pounding!” someone shrieked. Someone right at the edge of sanity.
“Will you come out? Throw your guns away and come out,” Ehta said.
“What? Just so you can shoot us as soon we open the hatch? We’re never coming out, you hear me? We’re going to sit right here until—”
“Do it,” Ehta told Gutierrez.
The corporal gestured for the other marines to move back. Then she slapped a shaped charge on the hatch and ducked as it blew a neat little hole out of the hatch, a hole barely three centimeters across. Gutierrez shoved a tiny grenade through the hole, and Ehta stuck her fingers in her ears.
Blinding light and a horrible whining noise burst out of the breach as the flashbang went off. Inside the compartment it would have been like looking into the heart of a star. Binah brought up a rotary saw and cut the hatch right across the middle and Ehta hit it with her shoulder until it gave way. She lurched into the room, her rifle already up and ready to fire, while her people covered her from the corridor.
One of the women and the man were clutching at their faces, screaming in pain. The third tried to shoot Ehta, but she couldn’t see well enough to aim. Ehta let go of her rifle and just broke the woman’s arm—two quick snaps—until she could take her pistol away.
When it was done she pushed back out into the corridor and let her marines take the rest. Outside the compartment she tried not to listen to the moans of pain and the repetitive meaty thuds of rifle butts hitting human heads. She called Candless. “Three more,” she said.
“For the morgue or the brig?” Candless asked. It sounded like she actually cared about the answer.
“Brig,” Ehta said. “I think these might be the last, though we’ll keep looking. These bastards really made a mess of the place, didn’t they?”
“I’ve never cared for your flippant tone,” Candless said. “They killed half of the crew. Perhaps you could show a little respect.”
Ehta moved her jaw back and forth, grinding her teeth together. For a moment there, just before the mutiny, it had felt like maybe she and Candless were going to start getting along. They’d had a common enemy, and that had brought them together.
Ehta guessed that some things didn’t ever change.
“You have my most sincere apologies,” she said. Candless sniffed at her sarcasm. “Listen, can we focus here? I’m telling you we’ve swept the entire ship. There’s no sign of Lanoe anywhere. Or Maggs, or Bullam.”
“I suppose that was too much to hope for,” Candless replied.
There was no real doubt about those three. Bullam’s yacht was gone. It had left the flight deck just as the mutiny started. Nobody on the bridge had gotten a chance to track where it went from there, nor could any of the carrier’s sensors pick it up now. Most likely the two conspirators just wanted to get as far from the scene of the crime as they could get. They would know there would be no mercy if Candless caught them.
As for Lanoe—that was a whole different matter. The cutter was gone. Lanoe was nowhere to be found, either on the carrier or on the cruiser. Valk was the last one who’d seen him, as he dragged Ginger and the chorister out of their cell.
; His destination was also unknown. Lanoe wasn’t like Bullam and Maggs, though. He must have known that he was going to be relieved from duty, and he had clearly fled before that could happen. He wasn’t the kind of man who just ran away, though. He must have something in mind, some new plan that involved Rain-on-Stones.
Neither Ehta nor Candless could think of what it might be.
The cutter was even harder to find than the yacht. It had been designed to be invisible to every sensor the Navy used, and to be impossible to see even with the naked eye—its skin could change color and pattern to give it perfect camouflage. Their only hope was that he would choose to contact them before he did anything rash.
Ehta had known Lanoe for almost two decades. She was pretty sure “something rash” was his standard operating procedure.
Just the three of them now. Lanoe, Rain-on-Stones, and Ginger. No other crew to worry about. No more distractions.
The cutter’s entire interior surface was one large display that showed a view of the universe outside. It felt, always, as if Lanoe were flying through empty space with nothing around him but a seat and a control stick. If he looked down, if he looked in any direction, he could see forever, to the ends of existence.
He felt like his entire life had shrunk down to this single point, this naked singularity of destiny. Every path he’d ever taken, no matter what he’d thought at the time, had pointed in this one, solitary direction.
None of them said a word. Lanoe focused on flying the cutter, though it was hardly a tricky course he’d plotted. The red dwarf hung before him like a beacon, a glowing dot that marked his destination. Below him the disk swirled in its infinite complexity, its homogeneous simplicity. Red and black vapor twisting into endlessly convoluted shapes, unwinding again as the hydrogen winds tore them apart. He could see no sign of life down there, no indication that there was a civilization hiding in those stacks of cloud. He could have called up a telescope view. If he wanted, he could have spied on the cities of the aliens down there. But he didn’t want to.
Rain-on-Stones didn’t speak. Well, choristers never did, not with audible words. They chirped, like crickets, chirps that could be laughter or moans of pain or alien sounds he could never interpret. The big alien was silent now, though. Whatever she was feeling, whatever she was thinking, she shared it only with Ginger.
Ginger had nothing to say. Lanoe had expected her to fight him, even though he hadn’t yet told her the details of what they were going to do. He’d expected her to resist on principle. She had to know they’d come to a very desperate point, the final point on a graph that didn’t have any future. Yet she didn’t say a word, and neither did she look at him. Instead she rested her cheek on the invisible bulkhead of the cutter and watched the billion stars go by.
Red hair, Lanoe thought. Ginger had red hair, and so had Zhang when she died. He’d made the connection before, many times. Now it seemed different, more meaningful. As if the universe, or fate, or some ancient and forgotten god had brought Ginger to him as a sign. A promise. This simple coincidence, that the two of them had the same color hair, was an indication that he would be allowed this terrible chance. This chance to make things right.
For nearly an hour the silence held. The cutter glided along, as silent as the nebulae that stained space between all those stars, as silent as the grave, and Lanoe was … if not happy, then at least focused. Committed. He didn’t need to think any new thoughts. He didn’t need to feel anything, not even grief. He was an arrow fired from a bow. A machine carrying out previously downloaded instructions. It was that simple.
And then one of them broke the silence, and it all got so much harder.
“What do you think Rain-on-Stones can do out here?” Ginger asked.
She was staring at him. Her mouth was flat, neither a smile nor a frown showing there. She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t demanding that he take her back to the cell in the cruiser’s brig. She was asking for information.
When he didn’t answer right away, she moved her leg and kicked an octagonal stone box that sat at her feet. Its surface was covered in exquisite inlays of some goldish metal, and it had tiny, delicate hinges.
“This is Rain-on-Stones’s medical kit,” Ginger said. “Why did we bring it?”
Lanoe looked over at her. There was no danger of the cutter colliding with anything—they were still half a million kilometers out from the red dwarf. He didn’t have to worry about ignoring the controls, not for the time it would take to have this conversation.
“I suppose I’d like to believe that you’re going to have her remove the antenna from my head. The one she put in there so that I could speak to her,” Ginger said. “I know that’s not it, but it’s a nice thought. You could free me from this, this thing you made me do.”
Lanoe didn’t remember it that way. The girl had volunteered. He said nothing. But he nodded. She was right—Plan C didn’t involve brain surgery. He needed her to be able to communicate with the chorister.
“There are some knives in there, and an empty hypodermic. Some other tools that—huh. I can see how they’re used. I don’t know their names, because there are no names for them in English or any spoken language. They’re used in surgery and the treatment of diseases that humans don’t even get. I don’t think you came out here to have her perform surgery on you, though. No. There’s one other thing in that box.”
Yes. Yes, there was.
“That must be what you wanted. It doesn’t make any sense, though.” Ginger leaned forward and slipped the catch that held the box closed. She pushed back the lid, then reached inside and took out a spherical object about twenty centimeters in diameter. It looked like it was made of carved ivory. It was hollow and a fractally intricate pattern of holes pierced its surface. It gave off a very soft tone when she held it, like a chorister’s chirp but stretched out into one long sustained note. As Ginger turned it in her hands the note changed, almost imperceptibly.
It was so beautiful. Such an incredible piece of technology built into such a small housing. Lanoe thought it must be the most elegantly engineered object he’d ever seen. Especially because it was going to give him his ending.
Three hundred years. He’d lived three hundred years and more, and life had finally shown itself to him in all its panoply. Always he’d been frustrated before, disappointed that life couldn’t be like a video or a story. The good guys never won—well, you couldn’t live as long as he had and expect that. The problem was that neither did the bad guys—nobody ever finished anything. The stories just went on and on and the longer they lasted the less they meant, the less cohesive they were, the less pure. There was nothing that life couldn’t sully, make dirty and disgusting, if it went on long enough. You could fight a war and a hundred years later find that you’d been on the wrong side. You could love a woman, and then you could see her die in front of you. Nothing good lasted forever. Nothing good could, because everything changed. Everything changed and got worse.
What you needed, he’d come to realize, was to die young, while you still believed in the stories. When you still thought there were things like good and evil.
It was too late for that, too late for him. He knew what he was going to do now wasn’t good. It was far from good. But it would give him Zhang back, and that was so much more than he’d ever thought he could ask for.
“This is a … well, there’s no human word. It’s a device for opening wormholes,” Ginger said. “It has certain medical applications. You can open a very, very tiny wormhole into someone’s stomach and draw out the poison they’ve eaten without having to cut them open. You can open a wormhole into a brain tumor and pull it out without damaging the surrounding tissue. That’s what Rain-on-Stones uses it for.”
Lanoe cleared his throat. “You can use it to open other kinds of wormholes, too,” he said.
Ginger started a little, as if she hadn’t expected him to speak. She shook her head and looked back down at the sphere. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you can.
Except not. Because you already know that Rain-on-Stones doesn’t have the ability to open a wormhole like that. She’s just one chorister—she doesn’t have the strength, or, for that matter, the power, the energy, to open a wormhole big enough to fly a ship through. She can’t send you home. She can’t send herself home. Don’t you think she would have, if she could?”
“I know,” Lanoe said.
“She can only make very small, very narrow wormholes,” Ginger said. She shook her head again. “I don’t understand. Tell me what you want her to do. Tell me, so we can figure out if maybe we should just give up and go back. Okay?”
Lanoe smiled. “I’m not looking for a wormhole big enough to fly a ship through,” he told Ginger. “That’s not it at all.”
“So, explain. Please, Lanoe. Just explain to me what this is about,” she said.
He knew he wasn’t just speaking with the girl. He knew everything he said was automatically being translated across the link she shared with Rain-on-Stones. The silent chorister, slumped now across three seats in the back of the cutter, was very much a part of this conversation.
“Back at the city of the Choir, back when we were first negotiating with Rain-on-Stones’s people,” Lanoe said, “Valk spoke with your predecessor.” A man named Archie, a pilot lost in time, adopted by the Choir and changed, just as Ginger had been changed. Archie had wanted to go home, so he had answered every question Valk had. Then he’d found out that home didn’t exist anymore, and he’d taken his own life.
At the time it had seemed like a terrible inconvenience. Archie had been the only conduit through which Lanoe could speak with the Choir, and losing him had nearly cost him his mission. His destiny. Now he saw it hadn’t been that way at all. Archie had cleared the way for Ginger, who had taken over his role. Archie had died so that Lanoe could have Ginger, and Rain-on-Stones, and the three of them could be here. Now.
“Archie,” Lanoe went on, “told Valk that the Choir built the entire network of wormholes that connects the stars. He told Valk about all the amazing things the Choir could do with wormholes. About surgeries like the ones you mentioned. About sending messages faster than light, and even back in time. Most importantly, he told Valk about how the Choir used to go to war, back before the Blue-Blue-White nearly wiped them out. About how they fought, and war machines they used. He told Valk about how you could turn a wormhole into a weapon.”
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