“I didn’t do what I did because the math was wrong. For the devil’s sake, what did I care about math, or closed loops, or—or anything?
“I did it because of that red hair.”
Lanoe leaned over the side of the cutter and looked down at the disk. At the terrible thing he was about to do.
Then he took two steps, closing the distance between himself and Ginger.
“Lanoe,” Zhang said, just a distant wind blowing between the stars.
He grabbed the device out of Ginger’s hands. It shook violently, its blue light fracturing into a dozen spectra. He pulled his arm back and tossed it away from him, tossed it into the face of the red dwarf.
“I’m sorry,” he told Ginger, for a third time.
She was still standing there with her arms up. As if she didn’t understand what had just happened.
The device shrank to a pale dot, then became impossible to see. Eventually it would vaporize in the atmosphere of the unnamed star.
“I did it because of that red hair,” he told Valk. “I did it because I saw I was going to kill a girl with red hair to save a woman with red hair.
“Maybe it was just math, after all. Terms canceling each other out. A null set, right? Is that what it’s called?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Valk told him. “I don’t understand you. I don’t think I ever did.”
“I’ve hurt a lot of people in my time. Killed a lot of people—it’s my job. Killing Ginger, it wouldn’t have been hard to do. It wouldn’t have kept me up at nights, even. I don’t think it would have. But it would have created a new kind of loop, of its own. A kind of moral loop with no end.”
“I don’t get it,” Valk said. “But … you did the right thing.”
“I did what I did. I—I thought of something, later on. I thought of something that makes me wonder if I had any choice at all. If any of us have any free will. Paniet said that if I created a paradox, it would send us into an infinite loop. A series of unchanging events, repeated over and over.”
“Yeah, a closed timelike loop that—”
“But what if that isn’t quite right? I know enough about chaos theory and quantum mechanical probability to know you can’t ever say that two states are really identical. Just—just work with me here. Say we did get stuck in a loop. Say we repeated the same events over and over. And I kept setting off the device, I committed an act of genocide, over and over and over again.”
“Right,” Valk said.
“But say there was the tiniest bit of difference each time. Say one time a proton halfway across the universe was deflected by a magnetic field and it went left instead of right. Say one time a butterfly flapped its wings somewhere. Say one time we were just far enough from the red dwarf that Ginger’s helmet wasn’t completely opaque, that I could actually see her hair.
“Say we did loop through those events, over and over, with just the tiniest change in each iteration. Changes at the subatomic level, totally random fluctuations. But they would build up. Reinforce each other, creating larger and larger deviations from the standard script. Until one time, one trip through the loop, I decided I couldn’t do it.”
“I guess … well, that’s one way you could get conservation of time, I suppose,” Valk said. “Are you asking me to do the math? Do you want to know how many iterations it would take?”
How many times I saved Zhang, Lanoe thought. How many times I killed her.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to know.”
Ginger wept the whole way back. Rain-on-Stones chirped empathetically, but it didn’t seem to help.
“We’ll find another way,” he told the girl. “We’ll find a way to free you.”
When he arrived back at the cruiser, he thought maybe he could just put Rain-on-Stones back in her cell, and then take Ginger with him when he headed to the carrier. There was a limit on how far choristers could project their thoughts. When they reached the brig, however, she just shook her head. “I’m staying here with her,” she said.
Lanoe frowned. “I’m offering you a choice, here. A real choice, this time.”
“And I’m making it,” Ginger told him. “She needs me. Yes, I want to be free. But she needs me too much.”
He left them there. No guards in the brig, the cell hatch wide open. They pushed their way inside and curled themselves into separate corners, as far as they could get from each other while still remaining in the same room.
He docked the cutter in the carrier’s flight deck, then made his way to the bridge. No one tried to stop him. A few of Ehta’s marines were in the corridors, but they looked so surprised to see him that they didn’t even come to attention as he kicked by.
The bridge hatch opened for him—apparently his clearance hadn’t been revoked. He pushed inside and saw all of them there. Candless and Ehta, Valk and Paniet. Giles, the Centrocor IO, was still at his station, as was a Centrocor pilot he’d never met before. The mutiny had taken its toll, but the Navy didn’t have enough personnel to fill all the necessary positions. If Candless trusted the Centrocor officers, Lanoe supposed that was good enough for him.
As he entered only Candless seemed to have the presence of mind to do anything but stare. She moved toward him, but not quickly enough. Before she could reach him he sat down in the captain’s position and strapped himself in.
“I’d like a report on enemy movements,” he said.
That brought Candless up short. From the corner of his eye he could see Ehta moving now, too. Circling around to get behind him.
“Sir,” Candless said, “perhaps—”
“Commander,” the IO said, turning to face him. “We’re spotting a lot of activity inside the disk. Airfighters everywhere, scrambling to take up positions around the cities. We’ve laid in a course that will allow us to shell some of the cities while facing minimal opposition, but we believe that once we begin making strikes, they’ll change their order of deployment and we’ll need to recalculate.”
Lanoe nodded. “Thank you, Lieutenant. What about spacecraft?” He turned to look at Candless. “The message you sent was loud enough to wake up the entire system. I assume you knew that would draw the Blue-Blue-White to our position?”
“I … did,” Candless said. “Sir.”
“I warned her,” Paniet said.
Candless turned and gave him one of her signature nasty looks.
“It was unavoidable,” Lanoe said. “But now we’re going to have to move to evade. IO, what about Blue-Blue-White assets outside of the disk’s atmosphere? What are we facing?”
“No fewer than seven dreadnoughts,” the IO replied. “The number may be higher—we’ve been restricted to passive sensors to minimize our profile. At least a hundred interceptors have been spotted as well, all converging on our present position.”
Lanoe nodded. “Everything they’ve got, I would imagine. We’ve convinced them we’re a real threat. They won’t hold back now. All right. Our best bet is to not be here anymore when they arrive. Lay in an evasive course. We’ll withdraw from the disk, to … say fifty million kilometers out. Valk, are you currently in command of the cruiser?”
“Yes,” the AI said.
“We’ll maintain a close formation for now. Match your course to ours.”
“Okay,” Valk said.
“For the moment, at least,” Lanoe said, “we’re going to abandon any plan to aggress on the Blue-Blue-White. We’re going to focus on staying alive.”
“Commander,” Candless said, moving to float directly in front of him, “perhaps I could have a word with you in private.”
Lanoe was very good at playing card games, because he knew how to bluff. He kept his face perfectly impassive as he looked up and directly into her eyes.
He could feel Ehta behind him. Close enough to stab him in the back. Or, far more likely, hit him with a neural stunner.
Well, if they were going to relieve him of duty, there wasn’t a lot he could do to stop them. If
there was any doubt in their minds, though—
“No,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” Candless asked.
“I said no, Captain. We don’t have time for a private consultation right now. I’ve issued orders and I expect them to be carried out immediately. I’m attempting to ensure the safety of the crew of this ship. If you need a word, it’ll have to wait.”
He watched Candless’s face. Her nose lifted and she stared down across its length at him. Her lips pursed until they grew bloodless and pale. Her hands were behind her back, but he was certain they were balled into tight fists.
“I’m back,” he said.
Little by little, she relaxed. She suddenly looked extraordinarily tired. Maybe as tired as he felt.
“Of course, Commander,” she said. “Glad to have you back aboard.”
PART III
SHEPHERD MOON
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was a tense few hours while they maneuvered, trying to stay ahead of the oncoming Blue-Blue-White defenses. It was physically uncomfortable as well. The carrier had to accelerate like mad to keep up with the cruiser, which for Ehta meant lying in her bunk just trying to breathe. She’d gotten used to the lack of gravity over the last few days and now any weight at all felt wrong. The carrier accelerated at a steady two g, which meant she weighed twice as much as she would have on Earth. The strain on her heart left her feeling weak and like her head was spinning.
At the last moment there was a brief burn for lateral acceleration that threw her up against the side of her bunk, her face pressed against the bulkhead. And then—nothing. All the gravity went away. The blood rushed to her head and she thought maybe she had blacked out. Just for a moment.
Eventually she managed to crawl her way to the hatch and spill out into the corridor beyond. She kicked her way down to a wardroom that had once belonged to the carrier’s marines.
It was deserted. The vast majority of the people who might have used its facilities were dead now. Either they’d been cut down back when Lanoe boarded and seized the carrier, or they’d been on the wrong side of the mutiny.
Ehta strapped herself into a seat and sucked on a squeeze tube of water. She had hydration tabs in a pocket of her suit, but she figured she should save those. There was a big meeting called for later, a general meeting of all the surviving officers of the fleet to discuss what they would do next. To talk about just how much bosh they were in.
After that, she intended to get very drunk.
Hydration tabs were great for hangovers, and they were ten thousand light-years from the nearest place she could get any more of them. She was going to make them last.
As she was considering maybe actually eating some food—as unappetizing as the prospect might be—she heard someone coming down the corridor. “Hello?” she called, not sure if she wanted company or not.
It turned out it was Valk, kicking his way down the corridor with a sort of methodical grace. He came into the wardroom and sat down beside her without a word.
The silence dragged on far too long, until she realized he was expecting her to talk first. “It’s good to see you up and around,” she said. “When you were at the controls of the cruiser, slumped out and with your helmet down—I started worrying about you, big guy.”
“There didn’t seem to be any point in trying to act human,” he told her. “Maintaining this form takes energy I could use for other things.”
“That’s about how I feel when I look at my hair in the morning,” Ehta told him.
He didn’t laugh. “Maybe I was falling into a sort of digital version of depression,” he said instead. “I’m better now, I think. Now I know I’m not broken. Also, I’ve started to think that my mental health is something I need to be very careful with.”
“Yeah?” she said. “That just occurred to you?”
“It followed as a postulate from something else I was thinking,” he told her. “I was considering what’s going to happen to us. There’s no way back to human space, not if Rain-on-Stones can’t open a wormhole. We’re all stuck out here for the rest of our lives. Eventually all of you are going to die.”
Ehta bit through the end of her squeeze bottle. Water oozed out in a thick globule that wobbled its way through the air between them.
Valk cupped his hand around the globule and gently herded it over to a recycling chute. “There’s quite a bit of water onboard, but no reason to waste it. Food’s the real problem. The crew will probably starve to death in less than six months.”
“Valk,” Ehta said through gritted teeth, “maybe you could not talk about that right now? Maybe you could not say things like that to me?”
“Sorry. I was overly focused on what’s going to happen to me. Assuming Lanoe refuses to deactivate me, I’ll just keep going. I’ll be all alone here, until the power runs out. If I ration it properly I can probably make it last four hundred years. That’s a long time to be alone, and my programming prevents me from committing suicide. I’ll have to run the batteries down before I can really rest. So, you see, I need to make sure I can handle the psychological strain. I wouldn’t want to end my existence as a crazy robot wandering around a spaceship full of skeletons.”
“No,” Ehta said. “I can’t imagine that would be fun. Excuse me,” she said, unstrapping herself. “I need to be somewhere right now.”
“Oh? Where?” he asked.
“Literally anywhere else,” she told him.
They were Navy officers. Not fools.
Candless watched their faces as she laid out their situation. She wasn’t telling them anything they hadn’t already figured out on their own. “We can’t survive a direct confrontation with seven dreadnoughts. Even making proper use of the cruiser’s guns we might not make it through a fight with even one of them, especially if it is supported by interceptors. Fortunately, we don’t have to fight. We know that the dreadnoughts have trouble finding us when we run dark, so it’s likely we can postpone having to fight another battle indefinitely. We can drift for quite a while, letting them pass us by. My hope is that they’ll eventually get tired of chasing phantoms and return to the disk. When they do, we can start up the engines and burn for deep space.”
Paniet stared at the table, scratching at the padded top with his thumbnail. Giles, the IO, who’d remained loyal in the mutiny, just looked happy to be included. Ehta met her gaze directly, but her face was grim. Valk—well, it was impossible to tell what Valk was thinking.
Lanoe looked like he wanted to say something. When she raised an eyebrow at him, however, he just shook his head.
“We can stop at Caina, or any of the distant detached planetoids we passed on our way into the system. Assuming they’re similar to cometary objects we’ve encountered before, they’ll be a good source of deuterium and tritium that we can mine and use as fuel for our engines. We may even be able to find some organic molecules. Not food, exactly, but raw materials we can use to synthesize something like food. Once we’re done collecting resources, we can leave the system altogether and be done with the Blue-Blue-White. The next step after that is … well, I’m open to suggestions.”
Each of them had their own idea. None of them particularly appealed to Candless.
“I’ve been studying this chart,” Paniet said, unrolling a minder on the tabletop. It showed the wormhole network—not just the wormholes that connected human planets, but the entire network that the Choir had built, which allowed travel between half the stars in the galaxy. “The Choir very specifically did not build a wormhole anywhere near this system, because they’d encountered the Blue-Blue-White drone fleets twice before, and they weren’t anxious to meet the people who built those machines.” He looked up at them with a kind of desperate optimism. “The nearest wormhole throat to us right now is about seven hundred light-years from here.”
That got a murmur of dismay from the crowd. Candless rapped her knuckles on the hard edge of the table to quiet them down.
“Duckies, it
isn’t as bad as it sounds. If we can accelerate to a significant portion of the speed of light, time dilation will be our friend, for once. It won’t take anything like seven hundred years, as far as we’re concerned.”
“How long?” Lanoe asked.
“Including the time to accelerate to that speed, and then decelerate again when we reach the wormhole throat … well. Admittedly, we’re still talking at least a century,” Paniet admitted.
“Let’s … call that Option One,” Candless said.
Ehta grunted in frustration. “I’m sure this is dumb, but—Valk could try talking to the Blue-Blue-White again. Maybe … hell. Apologize. See whether they’ll, I don’t know. Take us in.”
“You want to spend the rest of your life as a guest of a bunch of giant jellyfish?” Giles asked. “Count me out of that one!”
“It can’t be done, anyway,” Valk said. “Not in any reasonable timeframe.”
“Define reasonable,” Paniet suggested.
“I couldn’t understand them because my language files were half a billion years out of date,” Valk explained. “It’s like if you went back to ancient England, say fifty thousand years ago, in a time machine and tried speaking English to the people there. They’d just look at you funny, right? You’d have almost no words in common. Languages change over time, and eventually they change so much there’s no way to translate. This is even worse because I’d be back-translating, like trying to figure out how to speak Indo-European by guessing.”
“But you can do that, right?” Ehta asked. “I mean, it’s possible. Yeah?”
Valk lifted his arms and let them fall. It was the closest thing he had to a shrug. “It’s basically a cryptanalysis problem. I mean, yes, I can do it, but it would take years to even make a dent in it.”
“Still, Option Two sounds a little more practical than Option One,” Ehta insisted.
“What about Option Three?” Giles said. His eyes were very bright.
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