“Wait,” Ginger said. “No.”
She stared at Lanoe with disbelieving eyes. She got it. She knew everything that Rain-on-Stones knew, shared all of the chorister’s memories. She knew what Lanoe was asking for now.
Below them the disk turned and turned in its endless gyre. And right in its middle, in its center, the red dwarf burned like a lighthouse, beckoning them on.
The troop transport’s engines cut out, and some of the marines unstrapped themselves and floated around the cabin. Ehta shook her head. “You, marines, get back in your seats. Now. We’re not there yet—there’s still maneuvers coming up.”
Binah looked back at her, the quizzical look on his face melting as he nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I think you might want to see this, though.”
Ehta grumbled as she unhooked her straps. She kicked across the spherical compartment, up to a narrow viewport that ringed the hull above their seats. She shoved him out of the way and peered out into space.
She saw right away what he’d been looking at. The wreckage of the alien dreadnought—their destination—hung motionless out there, so big it looked like they were about to land on a densely cratered moon. From the carrier it had looked like a sleeping giant, like it might come to life and attack them again, but up close the destruction was unmistakable. The broken blisters stuck out from its edges like thickets of white bone and its weapon pits were scorched an ugly brown.
Across its broad back, in characters a dozen meters high, someone had written a single word, in English:
MUTINY
The letters fizzed and sparkled, as if they’d been written with fireworks. “Yeah,” Ehta said. “That’s why we came out here. Or did you think this was a shore leave you all earned for being such good little PBMs?”
One or two of her people actually laughed. They’d been in high spirits ever since they dragged the last of the Centrocor mutineers out of their hiding places. Nothing like winning a battle to ward off the boredom of life in the marines. Ehta turned and looked back at them. “Candless has no idea what that’s supposed to mean,” she said, jabbing one finger at the viewport. “I have no idea what we’re going to find down there. Maybe a bunch of Centrocor idiots who figured they would write their favorite word so big the whole world would know what they did. If that’s the case, well, we’re going to show them what we think of their graffiti.”
Mestlez whooped and slapped the bulkhead in a quick little rhythm. Gutierrez frowned, but she could barely hide her grin. As long as there were still more mutineers to roust out, it meant the marines didn’t have to go back to gun deck duty, not quite yet.
Ehta let them make their noise, just glad to see them in a good mood. She moved around the compartment, slapping shoulders and winking at her people, and it only seemed to get them more excited. When the pilot called back to say they were about to decelerate before arrival, though, she raced back to her seat and pulled her straps across her chest as fast as she was able.
Big as it was, the dreadnought couldn’t generate any appreciable gravity. The transport couldn’t land on the alien ship, so when they got close the marines put their helmets up and the ramp at the nose of the transport popped open, spilling all their air out into space. Ehta jumped up and started grabbing marines, pushing them through the opening, pointing them in the right direction. “Get down there and establish a perimeter. I’m last out. Move! Move, you damn beggars, move!”
Their suit jets flared like landing lights as Ehta followed them out, pointing herself at the white ground and trying not to vomit inside her helmet. It was only a few seconds before she touched down—only to find that the adhesive pads on her boots wouldn’t stick to the porous coral of the dreadnought’s hull. All around her marines were clutching to the white surface, trying to stop themselves from drifting away. Ehta threw some hand signals to tell them to follow her, then used her jets to push her toward the middle of the hull, toward the giant letters. Behind her a dozen marines brought their rifles up, ready to shoot anything that moved.
Ahead of her the letter Y sparked and spat, a ditch of fire dug into the hull. She shot toward it, pistol in hand, ready for whatever she found. If the dreadnought was infested with mutineers, though, they were smart enough to keep their heads down—she couldn’t see anybody.
As she flew close to the giant character she saw it wasn’t actually on fire. Well, no, of course not, she chided herself. There was no oxygen out here to sustain a flame. Instead it looked like some sticky goop had been spread across the top of the hull, a thick gel that bubbled and fizzed wildly as it caught the sunlight. Ehta chose not to fly directly over it—with no idea what chemicals were involved, she had no desire to be exposed to its fumes—and instead turned to move parallel to the line. She scanned the coral for any sign of life, any movement, but the shimmering character kept distracting her, fooling her into thinking she saw things that weren’t there.
It was Geddy, instead, who spotted their target. He slapped her on the calf and when she turned to look at him he pointed across the field of burning letters, to a point just at the base of the T. Ehta followed his finger and saw a tiny human figure there, clutching a cylinder about a meter in diameter.
“Could be a bomb,” Geddy said.
“Let’s not give them a chance to set it off,” Ehta told him. She changed course again, looping down under the bottom of the letters, headed toward the figure at speed. It hadn’t seemed to notice them yet, and she considered just telling her people to shoot it at long range and be done with it.
She knew Candless would give her hell if she did that, though. Sighing, she touched her wrist display to open a general radio channel. “You there, by the T. You! Stop what you’re doing and show us your hands! Right now!”
There was no response. The figure reached inside its canister and drew out a handful of glowing goop, clearly the same stuff that was used to make the fizzing letters.
“Surround and contain,” Ehta shouted. She pushed her suit jets for more speed, for more power, even as marines surged forward around her in perfect formation.
They came down fast, forming a ring of firepower around the lone figure. Ehta gestured for Gutierrez to keep her eyes open, in case this was a trap—in case fifty mutineers were waiting inside the shadowy pits that dotted the hull, ready to jump up and ambush them at any moment.
Then she flew down to the hull, to hover right next to the figure. “Don’t you move, you damned traitor!” she shouted, jamming her pistol into the mutineer’s helmet, ready to shoot the moment they made a threatening gesture.
Then she saw through their helmet, saw who it was, and she let out a deep breath.
It was Paniet, and he looked terrified.
He lifted his hands, one of them still clotted with the fiery gel. Behind her, Ehta could feel a dozen particle rifles aiming right at Paniet’s face.
“Stand down!” she shouted. “He’s one of ours!”
Paniet’s eyes were so wide she thought they might pop out of their sockets. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Why the hell didn’t you answer when I told you to put your hands up?”
She saw his lips moving, but heard nothing over the radio. A look of deep frustration crossed his face. Then he leaned forward, until his helmet smacked into hers. “Can you hear me?” he asked. The vibrations of his voice passed through two layers of flowglas to get to her, but she could make out the words.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked.
“My comms are disabled.” He smiled, clearly having figured out that no one was going to kill him now. He lifted one arm and gestured at the giant characters inscribed on the hull. “I see you got my message.” He showed her his handful of goop. “Plasma starter gel,” he explained. “Fascinating stuff. The Blue-Blue-White used it as an ionization reaction initiator for their plasma ball cannons. It’s self-oxidizing.”
“Okay,” Ehta said. “Uh, let’s save the science lecture for later. Can you just tell me one thing? Can you tell me why y
ou’re out here?”
“Because I made a very stupid mistake, dear. I trusted someone. On this mission—I ought to have known better.”
“It doesn’t matter how much power that can generate,” Lanoe said, nodding at the sphere in Ginger’s hands. “It’ll be enough. Wormholes are funny things. Hard as hell to open. Harder still to stabilize, so they don’t just collapse on themselves.”
“The Choir have forgotten how to do that,” Ginger pointed out. “They lost that knowledge when the Blue-Blue-White all but exterminated them.”
Lanoe nodded. “Sure. And when I first came up with this plan, I thought that was going to be a problem. But if we can open the wormhole I want, even for a few seconds, it’ll be enough.”
She—they—still didn’t get it.
“In the old days, before they were reduced to what they are now, the Choir used wormholes to kill each other.”
“They’re not … proud of that,” Ginger said.
Lanoe sighed. He realized he wasn’t telling Ginger anything she didn’t already know. She had full access to Rain-on-Stones’s memories—to the whole history of the Choir. “Okay,” he said. “What we’re going to do is simple. We’re going to open a wormhole that connects the disk with the heart of the red dwarf.”
Ginger stared at him with her mouth open.
“I had Valk run the numbers for me on this, back when I still trusted him. Right at the middle, the star burns at about ten million degrees. The pressure in there is so intense I don’t think a human brain can ever imagine it. When we open this wormhole, plasma from the star will come shooting out the other end. A lot of it will get annihilated along the way, but that doesn’t even matter. What emerges will still be hot enough to burn the entire disk.”
“No,” Ginger said.
“With one end of the wormhole right in the middle of the disk, right where their cities are, even if the wormhole is only open for a few seconds it’ll be enough to raise the temperature of the disk by thousands and thousands of degrees. Once the wormhole collapses, that heat will radiate off into space pretty quick, but by then it’ll be too late for the Blue-Blue-White. Every single one of them will be flash fried. Burned alive. Nothing organic could possibly survive that kind of heat.”
He scrubbed at his face with his hands. He was so tired, suddenly, just physically exhausted now that they were close to the ending. He only had to hang in there a little longer.
“The disk is almost entirely made of hydrogen gas. It’ll turn to plasma. Those coral cities of theirs will burn to ash. Their bodies will probably just vaporize. The model I ran showed that the sudden energy gradient will probably knock the shepherd moons right out of their orbits—eventually, the whole disk will disperse out into space. There won’t be anything left in a hundred years, not even a memory that the Blue-Blue-White were here. I don’t really care about that. I don’t care about posterity. All I want right now is to wipe them out.”
“No,” Ginger said again. Or was it Rain-on-Stones saying it? Hard to tell.
“They all have to die. Just like they wiped out so many other species. Just like they’re threatening to do to humanity.” Just like they’d killed Zhang.
He could fix it. He could fix all of their mistakes. They just had to die, first.
“You don’t … you can’t …”
“I can. With your help, I can do this.”
“No,” Ginger said. “That’s not what I was going to say, I—I just—” She was weeping. Behind her, in the back of the cutter, Rain-on-Stones let out a grating, whining chirp. “You aren’t doing this for humanity. Or for the Choir, either.”
Lanoe frowned, but he said nothing.
“Bury told me, and, and Ehta thought so, too. You don’t want to kill them all for justice. You don’t care about all those aliens you never even met. You don’t even care about the Choir—you were willing to kill them, too, if it got you here. It was just lucky that it didn’t come to that. You’re doing this because the Blue-Blue-White killed your girlfriend.”
“She was more to me than that,” Lanoe said.
“And even then—it wasn’t the Blue-Blue-White who did it. It was some drone half a galaxy from here, some drone that wasn’t even intelligent, it was just following a program—”
“A program written by the Blue-Blue-White. They told their drone fleets to eliminate vermin. Zhang died because they thought she was no better than a cockroach.”
“They didn’t know she existed! It was a mistake, Lanoe! It was a glitch, a missing line of code, an … an accident.”
“An accident that left the entire galaxy sterilized. Empty of life,” Lanoe said. “No—don’t start,” he went on, as Ginger started to protest. “Yeah, maybe I’m doing this for the wrong reason. It’s still the right thing to do. The Blue-Blue-White made a mistake, you say, well, it was the worst mistake anybody ever made—ever. In history. It was the kind of mistake you have to pay for. They don’t get away with this. They can’t get away with this. Zhang—she—you never met her, Ginger. You didn’t get a chance to. She was an incredible woman. Tell me, if you could dig up one of those aliens the Blue-Blue-White killed, something that looks like a bush with eyes, or a fish with hands around its mouth, whatever, it doesn’t matter. You find the ghost of one of the intelligent people the Blue-Blue-White killed. If you asked them whether they thought the Blue-Blue-White should be forgiven, because they didn’t mean to do it. What do you think they would say? How many of them lost lovers? Kids? They lost everything. They lost everything that ever mattered to them. They’d be on my side. Don’t you think?”
Ginger didn’t have an answer.
“Forget that, let’s make this personal. Because now you’re one of the Choir as much as Rain-on-Stones, right? Let’s talk about your ghosts. The Blue-Blue-White attacked the Choir not once but twice. They botched the job the first time. They came back to finish it, and they almost did. They killed so many choristers, in the end there were only how many of them left?”
“Twelve,” Ginger said. The number came out of her mouth so fast it had to be Rain-on-Stones talking.
“Just twelve. Only a dozen of them left, out of billions. Their memories are still in there, somewhere in that big head, aren’t they?” he asked, pointing at Rain-on-Stones. “You know what the Twelve thought. You know how they felt, when they came back to their planet and found it empty. All those voices, all that harmony, silenced. If you can tell me that not one of them considered something like this. That they didn’t want some payback. If you can tell me that—”
“You know I can’t,” Ginger said. “It was all they thought about, for a long time.”
Lanoe nodded.
“But then … they calmed down. They never got past it, but they learned to find another way. A way to heal things that didn’t involve genocide.”
Lanoe scoffed. He knew about that, about what the Twelve came up with. Their grand plan. They had collected genetic material from all the species that used to exist, all the aliens the Blue-Blue-White had wiped out. The Choir was holding on to that DNA for a time when the jellyfish weren’t a problem anymore. A time that might never come.
“Even if it works, even if it was what anyone really wanted—their way will take billions of years.”
“They’re patient! They can wait!”
“Really?” he asked. “Are you so sure? They sent me here. They sent us here, to this place.” To this time, he thought. “I asked for a wormhole to anywhere. I just wanted to save us from Centrocor. They could have sent us to Earth, but they didn’t. They sent us here. Because they knew what I would do.”
“No,” Ginger said. “No, that isn’t right.”
“You must know this,” he said. “The Choir share everything. They have no secrets. They must have agreed to send me all this way for a reason.”
“No,” Ginger said again. “You don’t understand how it happened. You don’t know—when they agreed to open a wormhole, there was a consensus that they wanted to get
rid of you. That they wanted to keep me, forever. I agreed to their terms to save everyone, but they never specified where you were going. That decision wasn’t made by the entire Choir, but by just one chorister, the one who aimed the beam. There was no time for debate or discussion. Rain-on-Stones didn’t even know where we were, when we got here. Neither did I.”
“But—then—” Lanoe shook his head. He’d assumed … well. Assumptions were for people who never doubted themselves. “At least one of them, then. One of them knew, and made the choice to send me here. It’s what the Choir wants, even if they won’t let themselves be complicit.”
“They don’t want this,” Ginger said. “I’m telling you—”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re here now. I’ve told you my plan. So tell me whether you’ll help me or not.”
“Why are you even asking?” Ginger asked. “Why are you acting like you’re asking me? We both know how this is going to happen. You’re going to try to force Rain-on-Stones to open this wormhole for you. And you know what she’ll say. She’ll say no.”
Lanoe nodded. He’d considered that might happen, it was true.
“She’ll say no,” Ginger repeated. “You can threaten her all you want. You can kill her—she’ll let you kill her before she does this.”
“Sure,” Lanoe said.
Ginger shrugged in incomprehension. “So … why …?”
“She’ll say no,” Lanoe told the girl. “So I won’t even bother asking her. The thing is, Ginger, I’m asking you. And I’m willing to bet you’ll say yes.”
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