Ginger grabbed her arm, though, and looked directly into her eyes.
“You brought our sister home,” she said.
Candless frowned. It sounded like the Choir was speaking through Ginger now. Yet her eyes weren’t rolling up in her head, nor did her face take on the slack expression Candless had come to expect when the aliens took over Ginger’s body.
“It’s … different,” Ginger said, and somehow Candless knew they were the girl’s own words. “Different from how it was. With so many—they can—they—”
“Slow down. Take your time,” Candless said.
Ginger nodded gratefully. “It’s hard to translate. Even their language is different, it’s much more expressive. There are so many more opinions flying around, so many thoughts and ideas. I can hardly believe what’s going through my head right now.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Ginger said. And she smiled.
Candless couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Ginger smile.
“We’re fine,” Ginger said. She reached over and took one of Rain-on-Stones’s claws in her hands. “There are so many of them. The harmony is so much stronger.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure I can help you understand. We were worried they couldn’t accommodate her memories, her feelings. But with so many voices joined together, she’s just one dissonant note in a symphony, one note that can be smoothed out. Made to fit the pattern.” Ginger laughed. “We’re going to be fine!”
That did not exactly sound fine to Candless. But she held her tongue. “Fair enough,” she said. “You’ve returned your friend to her people. Now—maybe you and I can return to the carrier. There are things we need to discuss, about your future—”
“No,” Ginger said.
Candless felt like she’d been doused with ice water. “No,” she repeated.
“I’m staying here. I made them a promise, that I would stay with them,” Ginger said.
“You did not,” Candless informed her. “You made a promise to a Choir that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Ginger shook her head. “They need me. In this timeline, they just made contact with humans. Lanoe was their first experience of what humans are like. They need me to show them we aren’t all the same. They’ll need me when they want to talk to us. When they want to make trade agreements, or exchange diplomats.”
“You’re my student,” Candless said. “You should return to the flight school at Rishi with me. You should finish your studies.”
It came out far more plaintive than she’d meant it to sound.
“I’m fine,” Ginger said. She laughed, and the Choir laughed with her. Chirping merrily, a din fit to blast Candless’s eardrums. “We’re fine! We’re going to be fine!”
Candless noticed that Rain-on-Stones was laughing, too.
“Fine!” Ginger said again.
Ehta found Lanoe in the cupola, staring out at the ships that whizzed and fluttered past. The alien ships.
He hadn’t left the room for hours. Well, Ehta thought, there was a lot to see. Valk had been learning about the differences between this timeline and the one they’d started from, and it turned out this world was a lot more important now. Apparently the planet of the Choir was a nexus, a central hub of the wormhole network. Apparently you could get from anywhere to anywhere by using one of hundreds of wormhole throats that orbited the world. Ships belonging to every species of intelligent life in the galaxy came through here, headed … wherever they were headed.
Ehta had tried not to think about it too hard.
“Seventy-three,” Lanoe said, without turning to look at her.
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“When I met with the Choir, they claimed they’d had contact with seventy-three different intelligent species. That all of them were extinct, except one—us. Seventy-three. That doesn’t even include the ones the Blue-Blue-White wiped out before the Choir could make contact with them. It could be more, maybe a lot more. It’s going to take some getting used to.”
Ehta sighed. “They won’t say thank you,” she said, because it was something that had been bothering her. “They don’t know what we did. They don’t know what you did for them.” She sat herself on one of the cupola’s benches and strapped herself down. “Even if somebody told them, they wouldn’t believe it. As far as they know, the galaxy’s always been full of life.”
“Gratitude,” Lanoe said. “Is that something that’s important to you?”
“Marines don’t worry about that kind of bosh,” she told him. “We soldier on.”
“Sure,” Lanoe said.
A ship came quite close, perhaps stopping by to look at them. It looked more like a tree than a spaceship, though it glinted like metal in the light of the Choir’s star. It only stayed a moment before moving on.
“Intentions don’t matter,” Ehta said. “Actions have consequences.”
Lanoe did turn and look at her then.
“You said that to Candless. When we were talking about relieving you from duty, she told me about that. It was your justification for why we had to take on the Blue-Blue-White, even if what they did was just a bad mistake. Can I ask you a question, sir? Do you still believe that?”
Lanoe didn’t answer her.
“I think you did a lot of lousy things, back there. I think I know why. I mean, it was about Zhang, right?”
“You knew Zhang,” he said.
“Yeah.” Ehta and Zhang had both flown in the 94th, Lanoe’s old command. “She was a good friend of mine. I respected her, hell, I loved her. When she died it broke my damned heart. It didn’t make me want to commit genocide.”
“Did you come up here to rake me over the coals?” Lanoe asked.
“No.” Ehta took a deep breath. She needed to do this fast. “I came up here to forgive you.”
Lanoe raised an eyebrow.
Well, sure he did. Who was she to forgive him? He was a commander in the damned Navy. He didn’t need to explain his actions to a marine, nor did he need to be absolved of them.
Except he bloody well did.
“You put a gun to my head. You locked Ginger in a torture chamber. You got Bury killed. You turned on Valk—Valk who only ever wanted your approval, do you even know that? Everything he did, he did it because he wanted you to think he was still worth something. You did all kinds of things I don’t think anybody should ever do. I guess you did one good thing. You came back and picked me up off that moon, me and my marines …” She stopped because she thought she might cry. “You saved my life, again. You also nearly killed everybody under your command. Lanoe—you went crazy. You stopped being you.”
“I stopped being the legend,” he said.
“Bad enough, right? Bad enough you shattered my illusions, but no. You stopped being the man I knew. The man I fought beside. The man Zhang loved. You stopped … you lost yourself. But in the end, you saved, what, trillions of lives?”
“I don’t know if there is a moral calculus for that.”
“Me either,” Ehta said, wondering what the hell a moral calculus was. “Do intentions matter? You ended up doing a good thing for the worst possible reasons. And you made us all pay for it. I’ve been having a lot of trouble figuring out what it means, any of it, but one thing I know is, I need to forgive you.”
“You do?” he said, sounding dubious.
“Yes. Not for your sake. For mine. So—you’re forgiven. And with that comes one more thing. We’re even.”
Lanoe stared at her.
“When you needed help defending Niraya, you asked me and I jumped to say yes, because I owed you. When you came to Tuonela and dug me out of a foxhole, I jumped because of who I thought you were. Well, that’s done. The next time you have one of these damn fool adventures—don’t call me. Don’t look me up.”
She unstrapped herself. Suddenly she couldn’t even look at him.
“We’re done,” she said.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The carrier had
one more trip to make. One more wormhole to traverse.
They arrived back at Earth to a kind of honor guard—an entire wing of Z.XIX fighters that took up formation around the carrier before it was even fully out of the wormhole throat. All of them with disruptors hot and firing solutions ready.
It took some pretty quick talking to get clearance to enter Earth orbit.
A hologram of Admiral Varma’s dubious face loomed over Lanoe where he sat in the captain’s chair of the bridge. “I gave you a cruiser, Commander. A Hoplite-class cruiser, so you could go talk to these Choir people,” she said. “You’ve come back with about half of a Centrocor carrier.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Centrocor isn’t supposed to have a carrier. That’s illegal.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you going to explain what happened?”
“Well, ma’am, I’ll try …”
They put the carrier in drydock at Janissary station, a Naval shipyard halfway between Earth and the moon. They had orders to turn in both the cutter and the Z.XIX, both of which were classified technology that the Navy very much wanted back. Lanoe took the fighter, heading off without a word to the rest. The remaining four senior officers took the cutter, with Candless in the pilot’s seat.
Once they set down and turned the cutter over to a squad of neddies, they were somewhat at a loss. None of them had given much consideration to what came next. It was Ehta who suggested they might start with a drink.
Janissary station was a working facility, without much in the way of entertainment possibilities. It did have a big rotating drum of a crew area, though, with light and warmth and gravity, and where such things existed in Navy country, someone would always get a bar together.
It wasn’t much more than a counter in the back of a cafeteria, with a couple of stools and a box of bottles underneath the counter. The station’s cook served as the bartender. He was happy to pour them four shots of scotch, neat, lining them up and gesturing with a flourish. “Enjoy,” he said, and went back to his duties.
For a while they just stared at the little glasses. Maybe, Ehta thought, they’d been drinking out of squeeze tubes for so long they’d forgotten how to be civilized. Maybe they just didn’t know what to say. Eventually she pounded one fist on the counter and grabbed her shot glass. “We lost one of our own,” she said. “Here’s to Bury.”
Paniet nodded and lifted his glass high. “To Bury.”
Valk stuck a straw in his glass. “To Bury.”
Ehta watched Candless closely. The old flight instructor stared at her glass as if it might contain poison, but also as if she was considering drinking it anyway. Finally she nodded and picked it up. She couldn’t repeat the toast.
No one pressed her. They drank, and sat in silence for a moment, and that was all anyone needed to say on that score.
“I’m afraid I can’t stay,” Candless said. “I need to write some letters.” But before she got up she gestured for the bartender to refill the glasses, on her. “I’d like to say it’s been a privilege to serve with all of you. You all proved to be extraordinarily competent officers.”
She looked up, and for the first time met Ehta’s gaze.
Ehta thought about the time Candless slapped her. The time she, in turn, had spat at a hatch Candless had just passed through.
She supposed they both wanted to put that behind them. She stood up, at attention. Marines didn’t salute—they would just hit their helmets with their gloves if they tried, most of the time. Instead she just said, “Ma’am.”
Candless nodded. Then she rose from her stool and walked away.
It would have been easier to send the message over the network. Candless could simply have spoken it into her wrist minder and had it delivered automatically. It was important to her, however, to do this correctly.
She found a quartermaster and requisitioned a minder and a stylus. The man had to search deep in the station’s stores to find the latter item. “I don’t know anyone’s written anything around here in years. By hand, I mean.”
“I believe it confers a certain sincerity and respect,” Candless said.
“Sure, whatever. Ma’am,” the quartermaster replied.
In a quiet part of the station the Navy had erected a memorial chapel, a tiny space with a display wall that allowed anyone who wished to do so to search for the names and service records of those who had fallen in the service of Earth. Bury’s name wouldn’t be in there—not yet. Candless hadn’t come for that purpose. Instead she took a seat on a dusty pew and placed the minder across her knees. Then she tried to find the words.
To M. Bury, Hel, she wrote. She did not know Bury’s mother’s first name. Nor that of his sister.
Nor did she know what to write next. She struggled with platitudes, with empty sentiment. No words she could think of conveyed what she was feeling.
So she put that letter aside. She knew how to write the other one.
To Captain Gardner, Commanding Officer of the Naval Flight School at Rishi.
Sir.
It is with deep regret that I must inform you that effective immediately I will be resigning from my post. I have found that I am no longer capable of teaching students in a way that benefits them. Having failed to protect two of my cadets, and having allowed one to perish under my tutelage, I believe this is the correct course of action.
For nearly a century I have worked and lived among the officers and cadets of the flight school. It has been a great honor, and I hope that my failure will not tarnish the reputation of the institution. I will cooperate with any investigation you wish to conduct into the death of Cadet Bury, and will present myself to the judicial authorities forthwith if you find any delinquency of duty in my actions.
If I am not to be disciplined for the cadet’s death, then it is my wish that I be reassigned to active duty, as soon as possible, so that I can begin to repair my reputation. I remain, as always, your faithful officer, Lieutenant Marjoram Candless.
By the time she’d finished, her hand had started to cramp. She laid the stylus down beside her on the pew. She took a moment to draw a deep breath that threatened to turn into a sob. She didn’t let it.
When she had stopped shaking quite so much, she hit SEND.
Someone came up behind her, startling her. She did not like to be startled. When she saw who it was, wrath flared up in her soul. “I was under the impression I had made myself clear,” she said, “that I never wanted to see you again.”
“Sure,” Lanoe said. He walked right past her pew. His eyes were wild, every muscle in his body tense. “I’m not here for you. I need to confirm something,” he said.
He went to the display wall and started typing in a name.
By the fourth or fifth round—Ehta didn’t bother to count—Paniet was starting to turn red in the face. He spun around on his stool and Valk had to reach out and grab him before he fell off. The engineer erupted in a snort of laughter and slapped the counter to order more drinks. “What’s next for us, then, darlings? What’s next for us poor few who have no idea what world we’ve even come back to?” He looked at them cross-eyed for a moment. “I think I said that right.”
“I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding a new posting,” Ehta said. “I’ll give you a hell of a reference, if you want one.”
“No need, love. I’ve already been reassigned. They want me to fix up the carrier we brought in. Sand off all the hexagons Centrocor painted on it, get it back up to shape where they can send it somewhere to get shot to pieces again. A neddy’s work is never done. That’s tomorrow, though. Tonight, I want to find someplace I can dance. Maybe meet someone special.” He hugged Ehta’s neck and planted a kiss on the side of her head. “How about it?” he asked. “Want to tag along? I know all the best spots on the moon.”
“You go ahead,” Ehta told him. “Maybe I’ll catch up with you later.”
Paniet gave her an elaborate bow and then ran off, whooping.
&
nbsp; When he was gone she looked over at Valk. “How are you doing?” she asked.
“I can’t get drunk. Not anymore.” He shrugged, lifting his arms and then letting them fall again. “I guess I’m okay.” He turned his shot glass upside down on the bar. “Have you checked your service record yet?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Things are different here,” he said. Meaning this timeline, she thought. “Things have changed. I was worried about what was going to happen to me when we got back. By law, I’m supposed to be deleted as soon as possible. I thought maybe some military police would be waiting to take me away.”
Ehta frowned. “Valk, I know you think you’re some kind of monster, but—”
Valk shook his head, his whole torso rolling back and forth. “I checked. I checked my service record, my civilian ID documents … There was nothing there.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I don’t exist. There’s no record of me at all. I mean, there’s plenty of records about the Blue Devil. About Tannis Valk. He’s just listed as being deceased, though. The official register says he died during the Establishment Crisis.”
“What? But they claimed you didn’t die. They claimed—”
“Not here,” Valk said. “I don’t know. I don’t know how it works, but here, as far as anyone is concerned, none of that ever happened. I never happened. I think maybe the copy of me on the queenship did something. Erased me from the public memory.”
Ehta moved her knee over to touch his. “I remember you,” she said.
“Thanks.”
The truth was, Ehta had already checked her own record. It was one of the first things she’d done when they arrived and her wrist minder synched up with the local network. What she’d found had been a little less mysterious.
For her, nothing had changed. Nothing at all. She was still listed as having been injured during the fighting on Tuonela. Her service record had been closed out, because she’d been invalided out of the PBMs. Given a medical discharge.
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