The Blue-Blue-White was still higher. She jumped and cursed and threw out her hands, hoping she wouldn’t just slide off the damned thing’s slick skin.
She shouted in horror as her body slammed against its yielding flesh. It was hot enough to sear her skin right through her suit, soft enough that she worried she might sink right into it, sink in and be absorbed. Her fingers, outstretched like claws, parted its thin skin and hot liquid gushed down across the front of her helmet, making it difficult to see. She clutched on for dear life, even as the Blue-Blue-White started to rise, the marines and hounds below her dwindling.
When she could breathe again, Ehta started to climb, digging her fingers and the tips of her boots into the loose flesh. The outermost layer of skin split like the rind of an overripe fruit, but the tiny wounds she was making healed over again almost as fast as they’d opened. If the Blue-Blue-White even knew she was there, it gave no sign. Lights flashed furiously inside its body, blue and pink and white, but she had no way of knowing what they meant.
She crested the top of the thing and rolled over on her back for a moment, just trying to catch her breath. Then she looked down and tried to see Valk. The Blue-Blue-White’s innards were almost transparent, but it was so big that the AI was no more than an ill-defined shadow, deep inside its twenty-five-meter bulk. She couldn’t even tell if he was still alive in there—still conscious—still … whatever an AI could be that was the opposite of dead. She just had to hope that some part of him was still functional.
There was no way she could cut him out of there, no way to just tear the alien open and spill him out in a tidal wave of guts and jelly. It was just too big, and it healed too fast. No, if she wanted to save Valk, she was going to have to get nasty.
Downright vicious, in fact.
She fumbled at her belt and came up with her sidearm. Finding what to shoot first was a problem. She could see various translucent globules floating around inside the alien’s mass, organelles with functions she didn’t even want to guess. They moved independently, by the look of things, swimming around in endless circles, changing course only to avoid the long, intricately folded strings of lights. She saw one close to the thing’s top and fired six quick shots through the skin, mostly just to open a gaping wound.
Then she holstered the pistol and grabbed a combat knife instead. She shoved her other arm straight down into the Blue-Blue-White’s body. Paniet had told her the things had protoplasm made of dilute sulfuric acid, and she worried briefly that her arm would simply melt off. It didn’t. She fished around inside, her gorge rising at the sensation. It was like digging around in a trash can full of hot gelatin. She nearly drew her arm back in revulsion—but didn’t. “Come on,” she said, “come on, you beggar, you bastard, you—”
There! Her fingers had just brushed one of the organelles. She grabbed it as hard as she could and pulled. It was attached to something, she could feel it resist her muscles, but then it came loose with a snap that nearly sent her sprawling off the top of the Blue-Blue-White. Her arm emerged steaming from the thing’s body and she was holding a semitransparent glob of goo about the size of a beachball.
It throbbed in her hand, as if it were trying to squirm out of her grasp. White ribbons of something like cartilage twisted around inside of it, trying to maintain its shape.
She stabbed it with her knife and it popped like a water balloon. She threw what was left away and tried to grab another organelle. None were within her reach. Well, she’d known it would come to this.
She held her breath—just by reflex—and dove into the wound, headfirst, slashing all around her with her knife, trying desperately not to get herself stuck in the disgusting mass of the thing. She saw an organelle swim by her and tried to impale it with her combat knife, but it got away from her. What was within her grasp was one of the long strings of lights. She grabbed it with both hands, then put a foot between them and shoved as hard as she could.
That, at least, seemed to get the Blue-Blue-White’s attention. The lights flared with color, strobing so fast they nearly gave her a seizure. The ribbon was thick and muscular, like an umbilical cord, but Ehta was desperate. Eventually, it snapped.
The Blue-Blue-White spasmed with agony.
She was sucked deep inside its body by a quivering series of peristaltic tremors. All around her the jelly convulsed, contracted, crushing her arms against her sides. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move at all, and she saw her knife go floating away from her. “No,” she whispered.
She had meant to scream it, but her rib cage was so compressed by the jelly she couldn’t exhale.
Ehta knew she’d made a terrible mistake. Knew she’d run out of time. The jelly slackened its grip on her, just a little. Just enough that she knew it was preparing to squeeze again, and this time it would crush her to a pulp.
She couldn’t lift her arms. She couldn’t kick her way out, in that tiny moment of grace. She could, however, reach her belt and remove something from a pouch there.
A concussion grenade.
She primed it without being able to see what she was doing. Thank the devil for the endless drills she’d suffered through back in basic training. Then she tossed it away from herself, down into the pulsing body of the alien.
It was six meters below her when it detonated. The explosion wasn’t particularly loud, nor did it give off very much in the way of light. The shock wave did, however, expand rapidly. Ehta felt like every bone in her body was being pulled apart from every other bone as the blast wave swept through her. It wasn’t just her, though—the wave had an impressive effect on the Blue-Blue-White, too. A spherical ripple raced through the semiliquid flesh, cavitating the alien’s innards as it spread outward. Pureeing the jelly like the blades of a blender.
The Blue-Blue-White wobbled. It bobbed up and down in a queasy motion. It shook, it trembled, it went into fits. Waves of semisolid jelly slapped Ehta around, smashed into her legs, her chest.
She was too busy to care. She pulled herself upward, half swimming, half just clawing her way up through the amorphous mass. Somehow she managed to get her helmet up into the air, out of the thing. Heaving with all her strength, she got an arm up and on top of its paper-thin skin. She slithered out of the thing’s quaking body, her entire suit steaming and running with goo.
She’d hurt the jellyfish. Hurt it bad. Hurt it enough that it lost its most basic faculty, the power of flight.
It had been fifty meters up in the air when her grenade went off. It didn’t stay that high for very long. Even in the moon’s puny gravity, it fell. It fell hard.
When it hit the coral below, it splashed.
Ejected from the alien’s flesh, Ehta bounced off the hard surface, her arm snapping where she landed on it. She grimaced in pain but didn’t have the breath to scream. She landed again and rolled over, just rolled over on her back and stared up at the sky.
Come on, she told herself. Come on. Get up. Get up.
She really didn’t want to.
You failed Ginger, she thought. You’re mentally broken and you can’t fly anymore. You let your marines die, just to promote Lanoe’s mad crusade.
But you can do this.
Slowly she got to her feet. Her arm hurt—for a second she knew nothing but blinding, intense pain—but her suit pumped her full of painkillers and she was all right. She looked around, trying to find Valk in the midst of the ruin of the jellyfish.
He was a dark lump in the middle of a lot of transparent lumps. She ran over and grabbed him by his one remaining arm, tried to pull him out of the mess. A thin translucent skin was already growing over him, subsuming him.
She looked around and saw the organelles and the light-ribbons already rolling up together, rolling into a ball. Hellfire, no. The damned thing was still alive. It was alive and healing so fast that if she didn’t hurry—
“Valk,” she shouted, grabbing handfuls of the skin and pulling it off of him. It came away wet, with long mucuslike tendrils sticking
to him. She clawed and scraped at it, getting him free. “Valk, can you hear me? Come on, Valk!”
“I’m here,” he said. He clambered up to his feet. His suit was ruined. Torn up, scraped to hell. In some places it looked half-melted. His arm and his legs were crumpled, as if he was just an empty suit, as if there was no one inside there … right.
“What was that? A grenade?”
She stared at him. “Yeah,” she said.
He nodded, his black helmet bobbing up and down. The flowglas was intact, at least. “I knew explosives were the way to go.”
Ehta shook her head. She looked one way—saw her marines still fighting the hounds. Less than half of them were still alive. She needed to be over there, needed to be with them. Then she turned and looked across the domes.
“This is your chance,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?” Valk asked.
“We’ll cover you, you bastard. Just go, now. Get to the queenship. Run!”
“Oh,” Valk said, as if he hadn’t thought of that. He started walking past her. Then he turned back and brought his helmet toward hers, too fast, until it knocked against hers with a horrible grinding noise.
“For luck,” he said.
Hellfire—had he been trying to kiss her?
Then he turned again and bounded away, a one-armed scarecrow leaping from dome to dome, headed toward the construction yard.
When he was gone Ehta looked down and saw an organelle crawling across her foot, trying to rejoin the mass that had been, and soon would again be, the Blue-Blue-White.
She kicked the thing so hard it flew off over the domes and out of sight.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The cruiser’s guns kept chipping away at the dreadnought, knocking more and more coral off its hull. The crews couldn’t seem to manage a direct hit, though. Lanoe even had to dodge one of their shots that went wild, swerving almost directly into the path of an interceptor to stay clear. In just a few minutes, whatever remained of the dreadnought would be close enough to the cruiser to use its plasma ball guns. There was no question what would happen then. The cruiser would lose. “Damn it, Valk,” he called, to the copy of the AI flying the cruiser. “You need to take that thing down, now!”
“My people are doing the best they can,” the copy replied. “How are you holding up against the interceptors?”
“I’m learning their attack patterns. Their programming is pretty shoddy—they fall for the same tricks every time. I’m holding them. But if we can’t take out that dreadnought …”
He didn’t even bother finishing the thought.
If Lanoe had had a wing of fighters, if he’d had more guns—
But he didn’t. Candless was busy down on the moon, keeping the construction site clear in case the ground team could actually reach the queenship. Communication from Ehta had been spotty. It sounded like she was pinned down and needed more time.
Time. The one thing Lanoe absolutely did not have.
“We could withdraw,” the copy of Valk suggested.
“Live to fight another day,” Lanoe said. He knew it was probably their best move. Pull the cruiser and the carrier back, out of danger.
“The ground team might still make it to the queenship. Especially if Candless can provide sufficient close air support,” the copy said.
“If we retreat now, that means leaving them all down there. Letting them die.”
“Their sacrifice could still mean something,” the copy said. “If the cruiser and the carrier are destroyed now, by these dreadnoughts, they’ll die anyway.”
Lanoe was at the end of his rope. Clinging by his fingernails to the last frayed strand of it, in fact. He actually considered it for a second. Then he shook his head.
“No,” Lanoe said. “No. There has to be another way.”
“Very well. I do actually have another idea,” the copy said. “It’s a bit drastic.”
“Tell me what you want to do,” Lanoe said.
But he thought he already knew. And he knew he couldn’t afford to say no.
Valk jumped from dome to dome until the domes gave out. He reached a place where three pylons came together and then, just beyond—the construction site.
As he drew close he saw that it was a wide clear patch of ground, about three kilometers across, with very little cover. The queenship sat at its exact center, from this distance looking like a giant pockmarked boulder. It was supported by thirty skeletal metal arms that held it just a little off the ground.
Seeing it filled him with an emotion he thought he’d given up on long since.
It made him afraid.
There had been a time when Valk thought he was a human being. Tannis Valk, the Blue Devil. It had been a lie. It had always been a lie—Tannis Valk had died a fiery but unsurprising death. He, Valk, the AI, had been created in a lab to think he was that man. For seventeen years he had lived as a human being.
Then one day he had gotten into the wrong battle. He had encountered a queenship, just like this one. He had been captured and taken to its very core, and there, the lie had been exposed. He had been shown the truth.
Nothing since then had been right.
Once he’d known what he really was, seventeen years of humanity had slipped away, bit by bit. People he’d thought of as friends had turned on him. Lanoe most of all—they’d been comrades once, brothers-in-arms. Once he realized what Valk was, though, once he accepted the truth, Lanoe had only ever seen him as a machine. As a tool. An implement to be used, to be applied to problems.
Valk hadn’t wanted the truth. He would gladly have held on to the lie. He wasn’t given that option. Once he had the truth, all he’d wanted was to die. To cease to exist, to be deleted.
Lanoe had made sure he didn’t have that option, either.
Valk moved carefully, slowly, as he climbed down the side of the pylon and dropped to the open ground of the construction site. He could see now that it wasn’t empty. Drones moved about carrying heavy loads, hauling what had to be tools. Finishing the work. He recognized the drones because he’d seen them before. They looked exactly like the worker drones he’d seen inside the queenship at Niraya. They were similar in form to the hounds that were currently murdering Ehta and her marines, though slightly smaller. Their legs ended in claws that could better manipulate and control objects.
There were a large number of them between him and the queenship. He tried to study their movements, looking for some path that would allow him to reach the queenship without encountering any of them. No such path could be found.
He would simply have to make his way through the worker drones. Fight them, if they tried to stop him. He doubted that would be successful—they outnumbered him considerably.
The only option, though, was to turn back. To give up, and accept that his mission could not be completed.
Valk had learned to live without options. To simply obey orders. After all, tools weren’t meant to argue with their users, were they?
Lanoe wanted him to cross this patch of ground. Lanoe wanted him to enter that queenship. Therefore, he would do it.
And when it was done, if he somehow survived, perhaps Lanoe would finally give him what he wanted. Perhaps he would use the data bomb Valk had given him, and end this existence.
That would be nice.
“Paniet, I want you to bring the carrier up.” It was still a thousand kilometers behind the cruiser. There had been no reason—until now—to bring it within the range of the dreadnought’s plasma ball guns. “Get as close to the cruiser as you can—match positions and keep station,” Lanoe called.
“Commander, you know I hate to be a pest, but—”
“Just do it, Paniet. You’ll see why in a second.”
The engineer followed his order. On his tactical board, Lanoe could see the two big ships moving to rendezvous. He focused on holding the interceptors back. If any of them had been smart enough to break off from the main pack, they could easily have picked off the human
ships. None of them, thankfully, were that smart.
“Attention, gun crews,” the copy of Valk said. “I’d like to thank you personally for your attempt to learn gunnery in such short order. However, your services are no longer required. I’m going to ask you all to abandon ship now. Please proceed in an orderly fashion to the nearest airlock. Alternative transport will be provided.”
There was nothing Lanoe could do to speed along the process, nothing more productive than staring at his tactical board whenever he got a second and chanting “come on, come on,” below his breath. The gun crews ended up leaving the cruiser in anything but an orderly fashion, but they all made it out, eventually. One by one they spilled out into the vacuum of space, protected by nothing but their suits. They tumbled and spun, some of them with their limbs pinwheeling, some curled into fetal balls. As soon as they could get their bearings they headed for the carrier, their suit jets flaring in the dark. Lanoe was sure they grumbled and cursed his name the whole way. He didn’t care.
That left only two living beings on the ship. Ginger and Rain-on-Stones emerged from the vehicle bay—the chorister inside an inflatable emergency shelter that served as a kind of makeshift spacesuit. The carrier’s repair tender darted over to fetch them and ferry them over to the open flight deck.
Once they were safely away, the copy of Valk switched on his thrusters and opened his throttle wide. The maneuver he was about to make didn’t take a lot of finesse—just a certain degree of resolve.
Without the cruiser’s guns plinking away at it, the dreadnought—what was left of it—poured on extra speed. Plasma balls burst from its weapon pits. Though it was shooting at extreme range, still, it managed to tear armor plates off the sides of the cruiser, even as the copy of Valk held to his clear and final trajectory.
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