The Blue-Blue-White had done that to her. They’d taken her from him.
“Lanoe,” she called. “Lanoe—I’m falling. I’m falling.”
Eyes open, eyes closed. It didn’t matter.
He could hear her. He could hear her voice.
So much for sleep.
Don’t be too hard on him, Maggsy. Admittedly, he’s not our sort, but it shows breeding to treat the lower orders with a certain respect. And don’t forget he still technically outranks you.
Maggs closed his eyes. It was his father’s voice he always heard inside his head, since he was a child. An overly developed superego, he supposed, though he’d never quite ruled out the idea that he was simply being haunted by his famous forebear. He knew better than to reply, as much as he wanted to say that while the prisoner might outrank him for the moment, he remained, de facto, a prisoner.
He heard a chime and when he opened his eyes he saw that the light in the elevator had switched to a warning amber. He knew what it meant and he reached over to grab one of the handholds built into the wall. Whatever pilot was currently flying the cruiser was talented enough that the change in gravity wasn’t too jarring when it came. It felt as if Maggs’s feet simply came loose from the floor, that was all. As if he’d turned into a helium-filled balloon. His stomach protested for a moment—it always did—but he’d learned how to ignore that, over the years.
A spacecraft in flight generates its own internal gravity whenever it accelerates. The cruiser had been burning hard ever since it left Rishi, and everyone inside it had enjoyed an almost Earth standard g. As they approached their destination, however, it was necessary to slow down—one most assuredly did not exit this particular wormhole throat at high speed—and so the engines had been switched off. Soon it would be necessary to actively decelerate, which meant that all the former floors would become ceilings, and vice versa. It was always so delightful when that happened.
The elevator doors opened and Maggs pushed himself out into a cramped little corridor. All the interior spaces on the cruiser were tight squeezes. Big as it was—three hundred meters long, nearly fifty abeam—it was still positively packed with equipment, weaponry, and smaller craft. More than half of the ship’s entire mass was taken up by a gigantic fusion torus engine. Space in the human-occupiable areas of the ship was always at a premium. Its halls were kept narrow for another reason as well, however, which was to keep people from bouncing around when the ship was in microgravity, as it was now. Maggs kicked off a wall and floated into the guard station of the brig, where he had to turn sideways to get past the marine guards. They had their helmets down and they stared at him as he approached. No love lost, of course, between the pilots of the Naval Expeditionary Force and the Planetary Brigade Marines, and this bunch were trained to be suspicious of everyone, but their cold gaze made him feel like he was a cadet again, preparing for his first inspection.
Well, there was a good solution for that. “Helmets up, boys,” he told them, even though he thought one of them might be a woman. Hard to tell with that sort. “I’m going in.” There were strict instructions that the prisoners were not allowed to see any faces other than Maggs’s handsome own, so they wouldn’t later recognize their captors.
There were three cells in the brig, but only two were occupied. A display on the front of one door showed Valk and the nonentities from Rishi floating around in there and trying not to kick each other in the face. Enormously funny, but he had other things to do than watch their antics. He switched off that display.
The display on the second door showed only a single occupant. He seemed a bit better acclimated to the sudden disappearance of weight. He had curled himself into the lotus posture, a technique used by old spacers to minimize the disorientation of sleeping without gravity. He floated in the center of the space, barely even rotating, and he had his eyes closed as if he were meditating. Maybe that was something he’d picked up back on Niraya.
Maggs touched a virtual key at the bottom of the display to activate the cell’s speakers. “Good morning, Commander. I hope you got some rest.”
“Maggs,” Lanoe said. His eyes still closed. “Ready to kill me now that we’re where nobody will see it happen?”
Not much basis for a trust-type relationship there, Maggs’s father said in his head. Sometimes that voice could be painfully obvious.
“Other plans, Commander. I’ve come to collect you—we have an important meeting to attend. Of course, I’m not going to open this door just yet. I’m of the opinion that if I do you’ll try to strangle me, or something equally barbaric.”
On the display Lanoe’s eyes were still closed. He said nothing, but Maggs thought perhaps a trace of a smile played across those weathered old lips.
“It would really be for the best if I didn’t have to drag you out of there in restraints. So I’m going to have to ask you for something,” Maggs said.
“What?”
“Your word. I need you to promise that you won’t try to attack me. Or strangle me. Or throw me out of an airlock.” He thought about it for a moment. “Or hurt me in any other way.”
No reply. Of course.
“Not forever, of course,” Maggs continued. “I know that’s asking for rather a lot. Just long enough to get through … what we need to get through. Call it twenty-four hours. Now, is that something you think you could do?”
Lanoe opened his eyes. He looked directly at Maggs, as if he could see through the door between them. Impossible, of course. He must simply know where the camera lens was hidden inside his cell. His face was perfectly impassive.
“I suppose I can wait that long,” he said, finally. And then a real smile creased his face.
Maggs suppressed a shudder of fear. It was of course quite unreasonable of Lanoe to harbor such animus against him. Hadn’t he saved the old fool’s life, back on Rishi? And not for the first time, really. Yet Maggs had been in the Navy long enough to know there were people in the world who simply couldn’t see reason.
It was damned inconvenient that they needed Lanoe so badly.
“I’m going to ask you to say it,” Maggs said. “I know you well enough by now, and your rather archaic conception of honor. I need you to make a promise.”
“I swear,” Lanoe said, unblinking, “that for twenty-four hours I will resist my primal urge to break your skull.”
“Very good. Then we can—”
“Starting now.”
Maggs sighed and hit the key to turn off the speakers. He turned to one of the mirror-helmeted marines, the one he was 70 percent certain was female. “Open it up, if you’ll be so kind. It appears I have no time to waste.”
Lanoe kicked along after Maggs, propelling himself into the axial corridor that ran the length of the Hoplite—almost three hundred meters from the bridge to the engine torus. Marines and crew pushed past them in the narrow space, darting out of side corridors and through bulwark hatches, busy at securing anything that might fall to the floor when ship’s gravity returned. Already the lights in the corridor were glowing amber—in a minute they would turn red. Lanoe knew what that meant. They were decelerating toward their destination.
He had to admit he was curious about where they were headed.
He remembered nothing of the time between when the marines knocked him unconscious and when he woke up in the detaining cell. He had half-expected never to wake up again, so when he came to—despite a roaring headache—he’d felt lucky.
Days of solitary confinement had eroded that emotion. No one had come to visit him. No one had asked him any questions. Had they tortured him for information, at least he would have seen another human being.
The fact that the first person he did see after being captured was Auster Maggs had put him in a sour mood, but at least it meant something was happening. Now the two of them were headed for the vehicle bay at the waist of the cruiser. Which meant they had to be headed toward a planet or an orbital habitat of some kind.
It looked li
ke he wasn’t just going to be quietly executed after all.
“You aren’t asking any questions,” Maggs said.
“I figure if I do, the only answers I’ll get will be lies.”
Maggs clucked his tongue. “Exactly what did I do to deserve this kind of attitude?” he asked.
“You ran away. On Niraya, with an”—he’d almost said alien, out loud, where they might be overheard, but thought better of it—“enemy fleet bearing down on a planet full of innocent people. When I had only a handful of pilots under my command, and couldn’t afford to lose even one.”
“I seem to recall,” Maggs said, “that you ordered me to leave that planet. Immediately after trying to shoot me dead. In a church.”
“You know what you did. You ran like a coward.”
Strong words, he knew. He half-expected Maggs to turn around in the middle of the passageway and take a swing at him. Perhaps the only reason he didn’t was that the gravity lights in the corridor turned a deep red just then.
The Hoplite had turned around so that its engines pointed forward, so when it burned them again it would slow down. Because in physics terms there was no real difference between acceleration and deceleration, that meant that suddenly the gravity came back, and down was in the opposite direction of thrust.
The corridor they were in became a vertical shaft ninety stories tall.
They did not fall to their deaths, because both of them were expecting it to happen. Because they were pilots, because they were well trained, they had reflexively grabbed for handholds embedded in the shaft’s wall. The cruiser had safety measures built in, of course. If they had started to fall an inertial sink would have grabbed them and slowed their descent before they could be hurt. Safety measures could always fail, though. Navy personnel never counted on them.
They had to climb down another fifty meters, using the handholds as a ladder. By the time they reached their destination Lanoe’s arms were sore. They headed down a side passage and into the largest open space onboard the cruiser, a vehicle bay big enough to hold an entire wing of fighters. Only one was currently aboard, the Z.XIX Maggs had flown on Rishi.
The cataphract wasn’t what they’d come for. Maggs led him to the back of the bay, where another ship waited for them. It was the size of a standard ten-meter cutter, but its hull was a matte black and it was crescent shaped, like a flying wing. Lanoe had never seen a ship with those specific lines before.
“Something new,” Maggs said. “Practically invisible—you see how the hull coating seems to just eat up the light? It absorbs just about every wavelength you can think of. No lights, no viewports to give away your position—you fly it by camera. Come on.” They climbed in through a hatch on the bottom of the ship, having to almost crawl on all fours. Inside there was room for maybe six people in Navy suits, or four marines.
The interior walls were coated in soft black foam that felt like rubber but looked like deep carpeting. Once they were inside, light burst all around them and then resolved to a view of the world outside, the entire cabin interior becoming one large display. It was like the cutter’s hull had evaporated, or maybe turned to glass. Everywhere Lanoe looked, virtual keyboards and instrument panels appeared without a sound.
“Nice, eh?” Maggs asked.
“Distracting,” Lanoe told him.
“I suppose at your age anything new seems threatening.”
Maggs warmed up the engines as Lanoe strapped in—and then they just sat there. For several minutes.
“You know you have to take off before you can fly, right?” Lanoe asked.
“Just waiting for the perfect moment.” Maggs tapped a virtual key. Out in the vehicle bay the exterior doors slid open, and beyond Lanoe could see the ghostly light of wormspace streaming past.
“We aren’t really here, you see,” Maggs told him. “Neither my name or yours appears on the Hoplite’s crew manifest. This cutter isn’t onboard, either, in case anyone asks. Now. This might be a bit disconcerting.”
Maggs threw open the throttle and the cutter jumped out of the vehicle bay, headed right for the annihilating wall of smoky light. He threw the stick over to one side while feathering his maneuvering jets and the cutter tumbled sideways, the cruiser flashing past over and over as the smaller craft corkscrewed around it. Lanoe caught just a glimpse of the distorted space of a wormhole throat, and then they were back in realspace, black with white stars. Still tumbling. Maggs hit the thrusters in quick, controlled bursts to put distance between them and the cruiser. Eventually he pulled them out of the spin, on a course perpendicular to the cruiser’s.
Soon the cruiser was just a bright spot in the sky, receding into nothingness.
It was extremely dangerous and decidedly foolhardy to launch from the cruiser while still in wormspace, but needs must and all that. “We need to make our own descent in case anyone is watching. Which they almost certainly are. Centrocor is after you, and they have plenty of people here willing to help make that happen.”
Lanoe did no more than grunt in response.
Maggs had to admit—strictly to himself—that flying the cutter was a tad disconcerting. The full-circle display left him feeling as if he were piloting nothing more than a rank of crew seats through the infinite void. It kept nagging him, an irritating tickle at the back of his mind, that his helmet was down, even though he appeared to be hurtling through hard vacuum. It made him jumpy and prone to oversteering.
Lanoe just sat there in stony silence. Arms folded across his chest, as if he were just waiting for this to be over. Maggs watched him carefully, out of the corner of his eye. Any moment now the planet of their destination would become visible, and he wanted to see Lanoe’s face when he realized where they were.
Keep an eye on the traffic, son. I want grandchildren someday, his father’s voice said, sounding as if he were standing directly behind Maggs’s shoulder.
Maggs snapped his attention back to the view in front of him. Space, this particular bit of it, anyway, was far from empty. In point of fact, the sky was full of ships. Commercial and civilian craft, mostly, big ungainly cargo haulers and zippy commuter craft. Free-floating habitats maneuvering to catch the sunlight or to shed excess heat. Drone ships by the myriad—space telescopes, power generators, communication satellites, traffic satellites, microgravity manufactories. As they drew closer to their destination, big orbital habitats began to wink into existence, wheels and spinning cylinders and simple aggregates that were just strings of cargo modules looped together like cheap necklaces.
All of it circling endlessly, etching out complicated orbits around the busiest, most heavily populated planet of them all.
“Welcome home,” Maggs said, as they came around the night side and caught their first real view of Earth.
“It hasn’t looked like home to me in a long time,” Lanoe said, softly.
Below them the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean rolled into view, spotted with platform cities that rose on great spider legs above the waves. The western extent of North America crested the horizon and unfurled before them, appearing exactly the way it did on maps. The ragged coast of California, the featureless cold deserts of Canada, which looked like the cartographers had forgotten to fill in a patch. The continent itself was bisected by a line of round craters that had, over the years, filled in with water to become the Midwestern Sea.
The view finally seemed to affect Lanoe. At least it got him talking. “When we shipped out, in the Century War, they warned us we wouldn’t be coming home for a long time. Maybe as much as six months. It was thirteen years before I got to come back on my first real leave. By then I didn’t even recognize the place. You see that line of craters?”
“I do, in fact, possess working eyes,” Maggs said.
“I remember when they weren’t there,” Lanoe said.
Back during the Century War the Martians had built the very first true artificial intelligence, a machine that could think and make decisions for itself. They had been
very proud of their creation. It had not, of course, been built for the sake of scientific curiosity. The Martians had given their machine a task that had proved impossible for human minds to solve. They asked it how it would be possible to end the Century War with a victory for Mars and its allies.
The machine’s solution had been to attempt to kill every man, woman, and child on Earth, because of course that was the most efficient way to end a war. By removing the enemy from play.
Before the Martians could stop it, the AI had seized control of the largest ship in the Martian fleet, the Dreadnought Universal Suffrage. The machine had turned every gun it had on Earth and kept firing until it ran out of ammunition.
Then it flew back to its base on Vesta. To reload.
It was exactly the kind of strategy that an artificial intelligence might come up with. After it was done, it took fifteen years and countless lives to bring the Universal Suffrage and its AI master down.
“It took thirty-nine seconds to do that,” Lanoe said, gesturing at the scarred planet. “Nothing we had back then could stop it. It kept going, turned southern Asia into one gigantic swamp before it was done. We threw every weapon we had at it and barely scratched its hull. After that we were sure we were going to lose. For decades we kept fighting, thinking there was no way we could save Earth. Knowing we didn’t have any choice but to keep trying.”
“Well, you won in the end. That’s the important thing.”
“Half the human race died,” Lanoe told him.
Maggs had never had much of an interest in ancient history. “Hold on,” he said. “We’re about to hit atmosphere.”
The transition from space to sky was bumpy, though Maggs was, if he said so himself, an excellent pilot. All around them as the air thickened it grew tinged with a dull red that grew to a fiery orange. For a moment the two of them rode in the heart of a white-hot fireball, but as the cutter slowed down to atmospheric speeds the flames receded and they could see the blue sky beyond, blue sky and white clouds and off in the distance a swarm of high-altitude drones like gnats. Cargo carriers riding the jet stream, mostly, and weather control machines like fixed stars. Nothing military, but still, best to avoid those—they would all have cameras, and anyone could be watching.
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