Then a wave of cold air washed over her. Bullam opened her eyes and saw she was free, that the TG man had disappeared. She heard something above the screaming, a sound like plastic being torn, and she spun around.
Shulkin had the TG man down on the ground and was tearing at his armor with his gloved hands. The TG man tried to fight back, punching and kicking, but Shulkin ignored the blows. He yanked something loose from the TG man’s armor and the clear helmet dropped, flowglas shrinking back into the TG man’s collar ring.
Then Shulkin picked the poor bastard up in both hands and threw him out of the weather field, out into the hard vacuum and near-absolute-zero cold of the planetoid’s surface.
She thought she heard the man scream, though that was, of course, impossible. Then she thought she was the one screaming. She put a hand across her face and found that her mouth was closed.
No, the screaming came from the woman, the one TG had kidnapped for them. She was scuttling across the floor, kicking up off the filthy ground trying to get away from the blood that seeped into the dirt. Her face as a mask of panic.
Bullam turned to look at Shulkin. “Thank you,” she said. “I guess you’re worth having around, after all.”
Shulkin scowled at her. Then he knelt down next to the screaming woman, the Navy pilot. He stared into her eyes like a doctor diagnosing some neurological complaint. “Should I kill her, too?” he asked.
The woman’s screams somehow grew even louder.
“No, of course not,” Bullam said. She went over and squatted down next to the woman as well. She gave the captive a friendly smile. “She has something we need.”
Ginger had no idea where to go. She wasn’t welcome among the marines, obviously. She realized that Lieutenant Ehta had tried to make it easy on her, tried to warn her away. Clearly the woman wasn’t unkind. Yet it was also clear there were rules against pilots fraternizing with marines, rules that no one was willing to break.
She considered heading back toward the engines, to see if the neddies were equally unwelcoming. Why put herself through that again, though? No, it seemed the only people onboard that she was allowed to even talk to were her fellow pilots. A depressingly small pool of people. Especially since considerations of rank applied there, as well. Commander Lanoe was her CO. There was no way he was going to sit down and have a chat with her. He would have more important things to do, and anyway what could she possibly have to say to him? Lieutenant Candless was only slightly more approachable. As much as Ginger respected her former flight instructor, Candless definitely wasn’t someone she could just gossip with. When you looked into her sharp eyes you knew she was recording every word you said. Judging every facial expression, every gesture. It was a little unnerving.
Which only left one person on the entire ship she could really talk to. Bury. And she was still angry at him for his outburst during their first briefing as officers.
Ginger was a classic extrovert, a fact she’d identified in herself very early on. She needed people around her, drew all her energy from human contact. If she had no one but Bury to hang out with, this was going to be one very long, very lonely mission.
She found an officers’ mess up near the bridge, a deserted little closet of a place where she could at least get some food. The machine there dispensed a bag full of reconstituted mush that tasted like salt and chemicals. It was at least hot and filling. There was a display in the galley as well, which could play videos and books. She tried fiddling with its controls for a while, but everything in the library was old, prerecorded stuff. Because there was no good way to send radio waves through a wormhole, the cruiser had no access to any live streams. She couldn’t keep up with the latest video dramas or even hear any new music.
No, the only thing for it was to throw herself into work. If she could log more hours of piloting instruction, if she could start flying the cruiser solo, maybe Lieutenant Candless would respect her more. Maybe they could even become something like colleagues. It seemed like a lot of work just to get someone to talk to, but Ginger knew that if she didn’t try something she would go out of her head.
She kicked off a wall and headed out of the galley, following the color-coded lights on the walls of the companionways that would take her back to the axial corridor. From there she just had to pass by the empty officers’ wardroom and the captain’s quarters. She saw that Lanoe’s hatch was open and made a point of being as quiet as possible as she moved by.
She heard voices coming from inside the cabin, though, and she couldn’t help but overhear what was being said inside. It seemed somebody was in there with the Commander. Someone with a voice she recognized, though one she never thought she would hear again.
She stopped a few meters away, unable now to not listen.
“Why don’t you tell me the real reason?” the voice asked.
It was Tannis Valk. It had to be. But the last time Ginger had seen him—
“They’ve wiped out every species in the galaxy except us. You said it yourself. They sterilized millions of planets. Millions—how many kinds of vermin did they kill that might have become sapient? How much genocide are we supposed to forgive? Somebody has to do this,” Commander Lanoe replied.
“You’re really going to claim you care so much about a bunch of dead guys you never met? Come on, Lanoe. We both know this is about Zhang.”
“The reasons don’t matter. Do they? I know what I’m doing. And you’re coming along for the ride. I’m sorry, big guy. I really am. But without you—”
“Wait,” Valk said. “Wait—I think I heard—”
He poked his head out of the door. His big polarized helmet.
It was him. The—the artificial intelligence. He hadn’t been shut down after all, hadn’t been destroyed. Despite what Lanoe had said.
For a moment they just stared at each other. Well, Ginger stared. She had no idea what the AI might be doing. Maybe plotting to destroy the human race; they were supposed to do that sometimes.
“It’s Ginger, right?” Valk asked.
She nodded. She couldn’t look away from him, not for a second.
“Do you have somewhere else to be?”
She didn’t waste any time kicking her way up the corridor toward the bridge.
Bullam washed her face three times, digging a cloth deep into the creases around her nose, wiping her chin over and over. Getting all the blood out. Her little physician drone sprayed a fine mist up her nostrils to stop the bleeding. The smell of hot plastic would stick with her for days. Another drone gently pushed the cartilage of her nose back into place, then stabilized it with a transparent bandage. It hurt like hell.
The drone noticed how badly she was shaking, and offered her a sedative. She declined. She knew exactly why she was so rattled.
When Ashlay Bullam took her current job, she’d known she would have to get her hands dirty from time to time. She’d known that she would be doing things Centrocor didn’t want to admit to. She’d even known that she would have to make decisions that cost lives. This was the first time, however, that the poly had asked her to kill with her own hands.
She tried to tell herself that the TG man she’d shot was a soldier. That he should have expected a certain amount of risk, that he should have known he would be expendable once he’d kidnapped the Navy pilot. She told herself that Big Hexagon needed to make sure no one would ever know about the abduction, that the poly was more important than her sensitive feelings.
It didn’t help. It didn’t help at all. She’d put the gun against the poor bastard’s head and squeezed the trigger without a thought. If she’d had time to reflect, if she’d given herself a moment to consider what she was doing, she would never have been able to manage it.
But now it was done. She couldn’t take it back.
She had a drone bring up a mirror display and for a long time she just watched her face. She told herself she was looking for any lingering traces of dried blood, but in fact she wanted to see if she looked any dif
ferent. If she’d changed, now that she was a murderer. She studied the corners of her eyes, the coloration in her cheeks. Pushed the hair back from her forehead as if there might be a mark there, some brand that would let people know when they saw her.
Stupid. Pointless. She forced herself to stop shaking, to stop feeling so raw. If she didn’t get control of herself, she would end up like Shulkin, she thought. Compulsively suicidal. Holes burnt in his brain to keep him able to fight.
She shoved the drone away from her and pushed her way out of her cabin. Swam through the maze of corridors, guided by a drone that swept in front of her, always picking the right direction. It didn’t take long to reach the carrier’s brig. They had the Navy pilot there, locked away under constant guard in a cell bigger than most of the carrier’s bunks. On the door of the cell a display showed the pilot inside. She was crouched down in one corner of the room, holding on to the walls so she didn’t float away. She looked very worried.
“What’ll you do with her?” Shulkin asked.
Of course he was there, in the brig. Waiting for her to arrive. A man as dead inside as Shulkin would hardly pass up the chance to attend a good old-fashioned interrogation. Well, there was nothing for it. She couldn’t tell him to leave—technically, he was the ultimate power onboard the carrier. He didn’t take orders, he gave them.
She knew the time would come, eventually, when she would have to show him that was incorrect, that his position was not perfectly unassailable. This wasn’t that time.
“Will you torture her?” Shulkin asked. “I’ve seen torture before. Doesn’t work, not like you’d expect.”
Those eyes. Like glass beads. He’d killed a man, too, today. It didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. She wondered if anything could.
“You could try sleep deprivation,” he said. “That’s supposed to be effective. More than physical torture. You could try starving her. The brain starts to deteriorate after a week without food. Resistance breaks down. You become suggestible. Those tactics take time, though, and we’re in a hurry. You need something fast. What’s it going to be? Thumbscrews? The rack?”
She forced a smile onto her face. “Something even more old-fashioned than that,” Bullam said. “Lots and lots of money.” She gestured at the marine guarding the cell and he opened the hatch for her. She pulled herself inside and shoved herself into a corner of the room, not too close to the captive. Not too far. Curled herself into a ball, so she wasn’t looming over the other woman.
“Lieutenant Harbin,” she said. “Thank you for coming to meet us.”
The pilot nodded. Her eyes darted across the room and Bullam saw Shulkin hovering in the doorway. She didn’t bother to scowl at him—she knew he wouldn’t take the hint and leave.
“I’m sure it wasn’t easy, getting away from your base so that our friends could pick you up. We’ll make sure you’re compensated for the emotional trauma you suffered.”
“Wait,” Shulkin said. His eyes hadn’t changed, but something in his body language told Bullam she had actually surprised him. “Wait.”
She looked up at the Captain. “Lieutenant Harbin works for us,” Bullam said. “She’s done so for years. Centrocor has always found it useful to have people highly placed inside the Navy’s ranks. Now tell me, Lieutenant, when Lanoe dumped you on Tuonela—did he suspect you were a Centrocor plant?”
Harbin shook her head. She spoke for the first time, not without difficulty. “Just … just paranoid. Got rid of, of all of us,” she said. “Maybe he knew there was a spy onboard … I don’t know. I don’t think he suspected me personally. When he changed us out for a new crew I wasn’t sure what to do next. I contacted your people and—and—”
Bullam added a little extra wattage to her smile. “You did wonderfully,” she said. “Exactly what we hoped you would do in that situation. We’re very grateful.”
“Centrocor has been good to me,” Harbin said.
“We’re all in this together,” Bullam told her. “Now. You said you had some information for us. On how we could find Aleister Lanoe.”
Harbin scratched at her scalp. Bullam wondered how long the TG men had held her. How they had treated her. Better not to ask, she thought.
“I don’t know where he’s going. I hoped—I thought he would brief us, when he came onboard, but he didn’t. I don’t know what his mission is. But …” She shook her head. “I saw a map. A map of the wormhole network. Except it was more complete, more detailed than any map I’ve seen before.”
“Yes?” Bullam said.
“I don’t know where he’s going, but I kind of know what route he’ll take to get there. If you hurry—you can catch him before he gets very far.”
“Especially with the little surprise you left him, right?” Bullam said.
“Um,” Harbin said, not looking her in the eye. “About that.”
No one looked up as Ginger entered the bridge, though Lieutenant Candless lifted a hand to wave at her. She was too busy steering the cruiser through the ghostlight of wormspace, while Bury hunched over the duplicate controls, stabbing at them now and again until the big ship vibrated with the constant course corrections.
“Do endeavor to take it easy,” Lieutenant Candless said.
“This thing won’t move properly!” Bury’s hairless head was red with exertion, and his eyes were nearly bugging out of his head.
“You might get the feel for it if you give it half a chance,” the Lieutenant told him.
“Yeah—but will I run us aground first?” Bury asked. “Hellfire! It’s useless. Take the controls.”
“You need to learn this, Bury, if you want—”
“Want? I don’t even want to be on this ship. I sure as hell didn’t ask for this job. Take the damned controls!”
“Come on, Bury,” Ginger said, kicking over to grab the back of his seat. “Relax. This isn’t so hard. And it’s not like you get to choose your assignments in the Navy.”
He spun around to glare at her. Over at the pilot’s position, Lieutenant Candless hurriedly switched the controls around, the eerie light of the wormhole swiveling around the room until she seemed to recede forever down an infinite tunnel.
“Maybe it’s not hard for you,” Bury said, ignoring the fact that if Lieutenant Candless had been slower about taking control he might have just killed them all. “You’re always good at this kind of stuff. I’m a fighter pilot. I’m supposed to be a fighter pilot, not a damned truck driver!”
“For right now,” Lieutenant Candless said, “you’re confined to quarters. Ginger, escort him back to his bunk, please.”
“What? No, come on. He didn’t intend to … to …” Ginger spluttered. “He was just having trouble with—”
“Both of you, please attend me and take good note of what I am about to say. On this bridge, until I clear you for solo flights, I am your superior officer and my orders are not to be questioned. Yes?”
Ginger winced as if she’d been slapped.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said. She reached across Bury’s chest to undo the straps that held him in his seat. He tried to push her hands away, but she moved too quickly for him to stop her. Once he was free she pulled hard on his arm and dragged him toward the hatch leading off the bridge. He opened his mouth and she was sure he was about to say something, but she grabbed a handhold and then put one foot on his chest and shoved so he went flying out into the axial corridor.
If he kept acting this way, he would get himself demoted. He would probably get himself thrown in the brig. She would have given him a good piece of her mind, if she didn’t have other things to think about just then.
“Not a word,” she told him, because he was already fuming, already getting ready to say things he would probably regret later. “Not until we’re alone, okay?”
She headed down the axial corridor, and at least he had the good sense to follow her. As she passed by, she noticed that the hatch of the captain’s quarters was closed now. It was thick enough she co
uldn’t hear any voices from within.
She kicked off the walls until she’d reached her quarters, just one more narrow bunk in a corridor lined with them. She palmed open the hatch and gestured for him to get inside. There was barely room for both of them in there, even curled up in fetal position, but she needed the privacy.
“You saw how she spoke to me,” Bury said, when the hatch was closed. “You saw—”
“Oh, hellfire, Bury,” she said. “She gave you every chance. And you wasted them just like you always do. But shut up! We’re not talking about this right now.”
“We—wait. We’re not?”
He must have seen from the look on her face that she wasn’t going to waste any more time. As quickly as she could, she told him about what she’d seen in the captain’s quarters.
“Valk? But it was supposed to be destroyed,” he said.
“Obviously it—he—wasn’t,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s—”
“A lot of damned weird stuff,” Bury said, not looking at her. He frowned, his shiny lips creasing down the middle. “Ginger, I don’t know. I just don’t know what we’ve gotten ourselves into here. Everybody acts like this is just some standard Navy mission, but … did you know they have an officer locked up in the brig? That guy, the one who came to Rishi. Maggs is his name.”
“You saw him?” she asked.
“I spoke to him. And he told me to ask Commander Lanoe about something. Something called the Blue-Blue-White.”
“What’s that?”
“No idea,” Bury told her. “But add that to Valk still being onboard and active. And our course—did you see the map we’re using? It isn’t anything like the wormhole maps they showed us at Rishi. And the fact that we had to change the entire crew. And that when the Navy came for Lanoe at Rishi he acted like they were going to kill him or something—but then they just gave him an entire cruiser to play with. None of it makes any sense.”
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