Lanoe scratched at the stubble on the side of his neck.
“I know. I know, old friend. I should have let you go. I should have just—”
“Do you know what it’s like? To be switched off? Nah, I guess you couldn’t know that. Because it’s not like you think. It’s not like anything a human ever experiences.”
“I guess it’s just, I don’t know,” Lanoe said. “Just everything goes black?”
“Nope.” Valk lifted his hand. The one that had struck at the floor. He flexed the fingers of his glove—the only fingers he had. “There’s no black. There’s no anything. I get switched off, and it’s like turning off a light. Like the light was never there to begin with. You switched me off a couple days ago. To me, it feels like you switched me off—and then in the same moment, the very same moment you switched me back on.”
They weren’t saying it. They weren’t talking about it. The fact that Lanoe had broken his promise.
“It’s not even like sleeping. It’s nothing. Except it’s not even that, it’s not even nothing, I mean—I guess—because it doesn’t … hell. I’m not a philosopher. When you sleep, right, a little of your brain keeps going. Keeps ticking over. You know time has passed when you wake up. I remember that. I remember when Tannis Valk, the real Tannis Valk, used to sleep. For me? It’s just … when it happens. There’s no time passing. Just, I’m in one place, and then I’m in another.
“No break in between. No break.”
They were supposed to have gone to the Admiralty. They were supposed to have downloaded all of Valk’s information. Then, when it was done, Valk was supposed to be allowed to finally, mercifully die.
Cease to exist.
Except then Lanoe brought him back.
“I guess we’re not done,” Valk said, in a very quiet voice.
“I still need your help,” Lanoe told him.
“Okay.”
Valk lifted his gloves. Gripped his black helmet with ten thick fingers. As if he had a bad headache. As if he were trying to comfort himself. He started rocking back and forth, back and forth.
“Okay,” he said again.
Chapter Fourteen
Bullam’s yacht shot straight upward, punching through the clouds of Irkalla. Through an advertisement for a nutritional supplement showing a child’s giant, beaming face. Through storms that thankfully, luckily, didn’t shake the spacecraft enough to damage her, to break her veins. Through the top layers of cloud, thin as promises against a night-blue sky. Out into the black, and the stars.
On the flowglas-domed deck, her passenger made a sound, when he saw the stars. An involuntary nasty little sound, a clicking deep in his throat. A sound of alarm, perhaps.
His eyes didn’t move.
Once out of the atmosphere the yacht could pour on the speed. It would take only a few hours to reach their destination, a secret Centrocor facility located deep in the system’s massive asteroid belt. Bullam considered heading back to the cabin so she could catch up with some correspondence. It was going to be tricky for her to just leave Irkalla for an indefinite period of time—the life of an executive was a web of obligations and relationships, and needed constant maintenance. Worst of all she couldn’t even tell anyone why she was heading out of the system. The best she could do was to say she had to head out for medical reasons. Her disease was well enough known among her peers that it wouldn’t raise any questions. She got up and was actually headed inside, then stopped because she’d caught something out of the corner of her eye. Her passenger had moved. It startled her.
“Captain Shulkin?” she asked.
He had stepped over to the dome. Put his hand on the flowglas. It made her think of a child on their first trip above the atmosphere, pressing their face up against the window so they could see everything.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
He didn’t turn around to look at her. “Do you have any family?” he said, his voice dry and creaking.
Bullam’s brows knitted together. “No,” she said. “No. They—no.” She shook her head. No point being closed off about it. The two of them were going to spend a lot of time together. Best to get things off to a convivial start. “They died in the Establishment Crisis. When the terrorists bombed Dunkelsberg.”
“You survived that?”
“I was away. At a preparatory school. I was just a child.”
He nodded. His hand moved on the flowglas. Wiping away the condensation of his breath. As if he couldn’t afford to have his view obscured, even for a second, even though there was nothing out there to see, nothing for thousands of kilometers in any direction.
“Lovers?” he asked.
“That’s a little personal, isn’t it?”
“It’s important. Do you have a lover, back on Irkalla? Someone who will miss you if you don’t come back?”
Bullam bit her lip. Was he threatening her?
“If you do, it’s good to say goodbye. Before you ship out, you should write something down. A sealed message, one only to be opened if you don’t come home. In the Navy we made a ritual of it. We called them Dear Justin letters.”
Bullam waved for one of her drones to bring her a cup of tea. “Who was Justin?” she asked.
“Justin. Just in case. It’s a stupid pun.” He turned, finally, and walked across the deck. He dropped down into a chair and stared at her with those glassy eyes of his. “So. Do you have a lover?” he asked, again.
In point of fact, Bullam had several. Half a dozen men and one woman, people who had somehow fit into her busy schedule. Most of them were business inferiors looking to climb the corporate ladder one way or another. Technically such liaisons were against employee policy, and therefore grounds for dismissal. In reality, an executive who didn’t make time for sex was considered unnatural and therefore unlikely to be chosen for promotions. Bullam had made a point of seeking out lovers. She’d enjoyed their company, but made a point of never getting truly attached.
“No one who would expect such a thing from me,” she said.
Shulkin nodded. “For the best,” he said.
“What about you?” she asked. “Any family, friends … anyone special?”
He grimaced as if he’d bitten into a sour fruit. “Not anymore,” he said, and turned his face away from her. To look back out through the dome. “How much longer until we get there?”
One of her drones lit up with a navigational display. Helpful little machines. “Three hours,” she said.
“Let me know when we’re close,” he said. And then he sank into himself with a deep sigh. She watched him for a while, expecting further impertinencies. None were forthcoming.
Eventually she got up without a word and went back to her cabin, to do some work. So much for conviviality.
There were no windows on the bridge, not even a porthole—all visual information on where the cruiser was headed came in through displays. It wasn’t like flying a fighter at all, and Ginger’s muscles twitched with the weirdness of it.
“You’re doing fine, for your first time,” Lieutenant Candless said.
“Am I?” Ginger asked, with a little laugh. She adjusted her trim just a hair, and felt the big ship moving around her, all that metal and carbon fiber vibrating as it responded to her touch on the virtual controls. She fought the urge to jerk her hand back.
Because the cruiser was accelerating, down was the direction of the engines. Up was the direction they were moving. She tried to visualize the ship as a tower and that she was sitting on its highest ramparts, craning her neck back to look at the sky. It helped, a little.
On her display the stars swung around her, Tuonela’s sun like a lamp that dazzled her eyes. Streams of data washed across the view, telling her all kinds of information she didn’t immediately need. Other spacecraft, too small to see at this magnification, appeared as green triangles, each of them surrounded by its own cloud of data. Blue lines divided the view into quadrants and sectors, while a bright yellow rectangle pulsed do
wn by her knees. That was their destination. She touched the controls again and the nose of the cruiser dipped toward the rectangle, just a few tenths of a degree a second.
“That’s right. Take it slow. You’re used to a more maneuverable ship,” Lieutenant Candless told her. “This one’s going to feel sluggish as it comes around.”
In truth it felt like it was swinging wildly out of control, a compass needle trying to find magnetic north. Ginger sucked on her lower lip and lifted her hand slowly, easing up on the steering thrusters.
She thought of all the exams she’d sat through, back on Rishi. All the equations she’d memorized. The ways thrust and load factor variables fit into trajectory optimization. Angle of attack command histories and downrange schedules. It had all seemed so abstract, so unreal—when you were in the cockpit of a fighter, you had to learn to move as if the spacecraft around you were an extension of your own body. With the cruiser that seemed impossible. It was just too big, its inertia too great. The only thing keeping her from panicking outright was the fact that there was nothing around her to run into. Tuonela had fallen away behind them, and its star was still millions of kilometers away. No matter how badly she screwed up she wasn’t about to crash.
The yellow rectangle grew steadily larger as they approached the wormhole throat, the exit from the Tuonela system. It was hard to see—just a patch of weirdly distorted space, invisible except when a star slipped behind it and its light was smeared into an unrecognizable blur.
As they got closer, Ginger’s level of fear began to spike. There was enough room, there was plenty of clearance—she knew that intellectually. But if you so much as brushed the walls of the wormhole—
“I believe I’ll take it from here, thank you,” Lieutenant Candless said.
The virtual keyboard vanished from under Ginger’s fingers. She sighed and sagged back into her chair in relief. The display wheeled around for a moment as it reoriented to Lieutenant Candless’s field of view, and suddenly it looked very different—the yellow rectangle much farther away than it had seemed, space itself far less crowded. Lieutenant Candless made an adjustment and the ship moved again, not lurching this time like it had under Ginger’s control but merely shimmying as the more experienced pilot feathered the controls.
“That was intense,” Ginger said, with a little laugh.
“With practice you’ll get the hang of it,” Lieutenant Candless told her. The older woman’s eyes flicked back and forth across the display as various streams of green data zoomed in and out toward her. “A couple more hours like that and you’ll be ready to fly solo.”
“Hours?” Ginger checked the clock in her suit display and found that she’d been at the controls for ninety-one minutes. It hadn’t felt nearly that long. She shook her head and tried to laugh again. “I never felt so nervous piloting a fighter.” She unstrapped herself from her position and carefully climbed down onto the deck. The gravity now was minimal, as the cruiser wasn’t accelerating much at all, but it was enough that she didn’t go floating off into the air. She did some quick stretches and knee bends, because she felt stiff and shaky, and she knew the exercise would help a little.
“Go get something to eat,” Lieutenant Candless told her. “It would be best to sleep a little, if you can. If you see Bury, send him up here so he can have a lesson, too.”
Ginger nodded and turned toward the hatch that led to the rest of the ship. Before she went, though, she needed to ask a question. “Lieutenant,” she said. “Um, permission to speak?”
“Granted. And shall we assume you have that permission from now on, unless I tell you otherwise? It will become tedious, otherwise.”
Ginger nodded. “I just—things have been moving so fast. I haven’t really had time to process all this. I mean, I was just a cadet a couple of days ago. Now I’m on some kind of secret mission.”
“Better than the alternative,” the Lieutenant replied.
“Would they really have thrown us in prison?”
Lieutenant Candless sighed. “It would appear that it is time for you to learn a most valuable lesson. A lesson in bosh. Back at Rishi, we taught you that being a Naval officer was a noble profession. That it meant working for the good of humanity. That was, most assuredly, true.”
“Okay,” Ginger said, carefully, because she could tell Candless had entered lecture mode. This might take a while.
“The Navy does good. This cannot be denied. It’s also a military organization, and that means that it ventures at times into dark territory. I don’t simply mean killing people. That’s part of the job. I mean the kind of secrecy that breeds paranoia. The higher up the ladder you get, the worse it becomes. Admirals, commanders like Lanoe, even just captains of big ships like this one, are forced to make decisions all the time that can cost hundreds or thousands of lives. They can’t afford to be nice, or just.”
“So—the answer to my question is yes?”
“They would have detained us for some indefinite period of time, yes,” Candless confirmed. “Of that I have no doubt. One of those hard decisions I mentioned, but there would have been no hesitation.”
Ginger frowned. “Is that why you became a flight instructor? Because they were going to promote you and you didn’t want to make those kind of decisions?”
Lieutenant Candless didn’t turn to glare at her. Didn’t seem to be angered by the question at all. Even though Ginger was already regretting asking it. It was something she’d wondered about many times, though. Lieutenant Candless was a war hero, with a whole stack of commendations. She’d been at the height of a glamorous career as a pilot and then one day near the end of the Establishment Crisis she’d just asked for reassignment, out of nowhere. She’d been a teacher ever since.
“You’re an officer now,” the Lieutenant said. “Perhaps you deserve an answer to that question.”
She stopped speaking for a moment and Ginger looked at the display. The yellow rectangle was huge now, filling half the bridge. The distortion of the wormhole throat made a mess of all the holographic stars.
“I decided to teach,” the Lieutenant said, very slowly, “because of what I saw during the last real war.”
“What—what was that?” Ginger asked, though she wasn’t sure she really wanted to hear it.
“Too many young people flying warships. Like you and Bury,” the Lieutenant said. “Children, really. Children with two, perhaps four weeks of training, sent straight to the front. By the end of the Crisis, the average pilot flew six missions. That average was so low because of all the pilots who only got to fly one.”
For a second Ginger didn’t grasp what the Lieutenant was saying. Then a chill ran down her spine.
“I knew I was good. I knew I was a talented pilot. I thought if I could pass on some of what I knew, it might help some young people live longer.”
She fell silent as the yellow rectangle swept across the bridge. The stars flickered out and the display changed radically. Instead of the void of space all around them, the walls of the bridge were on fire with the ghostlight of the inside of a wormhole. Virtual particles annihilating each other in perfect silence. Ahead of them, the tunnel stretched away to nothingness, to a point of dead light.
The transition had been so smooth, so effortless Ginger barely noticed it. She had felt the ship sway a tiny degree over on its side, that was all.
“Now, do you have any more questions?” Lieutenant Candless asked.
“Not right now,” Ginger said, her voice barely a whisper.
The asteroid didn’t have a proper name, just a catalog number. Two hundred years ago, back when Irkalla was still being readied for human use, the asteroid had been surveyed and found to contain high concentrations of silicate rock and not much else. Useless, therefore, and far enough away from anywhere that it wasn’t even a navigation hazard. It had been ignored ever since.
At least, officially.
The cratered surface of the rock sped away beneath the yacht, its night side rushing
toward them. One of Bullam’s drones moved across the deck and projected a display onto the carbonglas dome, showing a light-amplified view of the ground below. Traces of human construction began to appear—power plants and thick cable bundles that snaked along the curved edges of craters. Long parallel trenches dug into the soil by mining drones with snouts lined with grinding teeth, sifting through the loose regolith in search of traces of metals and water, anything useful. And there, beyond the trenches, a cradle made of arching gantries like the rib cage of some fossil beast.
Inside the cradle sat the thing they’d come for. A Hipparchus-class carrier, one of the largest and most deadly spacecraft ever built. A full half kilometer long and a hundred meters across, a vast tubular construction like a cannon built to shoot out smaller ships. The yacht sped toward its gaping mouth and Bullam could see cataphract-class fighters and small carrier scouts nestled against its interior walls, like bats clinging to the roof of a massive cave.
She couldn’t help but be impressed by what Dariau Cygnet had accomplished here. The Navy didn’t exactly sell its old carriers to the highest bidder. There were strict protocols in place to keep any poly from acquiring this kind of asset, and Earth had intervened every time one of the big corporations threatened to build one of its own. Centrocor had been forced to get creative.
She’d been told that in fact this particular vessel had been found as a wandering hulk on the fringes of the Adlivun system, abandoned after a nasty battle with DaoLink. The Navy had won that war but the carrier had been so heavily damaged it had been written off as a total loss and abandoned in place. Centrocor had claimed salvage rights, and the Navy had failed to raise a protest—most likely they expected the poly to break the carrier down for scrap.
Instead, Cygnet had begun the very long, very painstaking process of repairing and refurbishing the carrier. Patching the holes in its hull. Replacing those systems that couldn’t be saved. The costs involved would have been astronomical, and the fact that it all had to be done in absolute secrecy would have doubled or even tripled the expense. The project had taken fifteen years to complete.
Forgotten Worlds Page 17