He tapped at a virtual keyboard and the display came back to life, showing the message the Navy had intercepted. MORE WILL COME. WE CAN HELP.
“When it comes to stopping the Blue-Blue-White,” Lanoe said, “I’ll take any help I can get.”
Chapter Nineteen
Maybe this time it would work.
Maybe this time he could actually get some sleep.
The briefing had taken longer than expected, but Lanoe still had a little time. He was due to examine the wreckage of the forward part of the cruiser, with Paniet. Not for a few hours, though. For the moment, for the first time since he’d started this mission, he had nothing specific to do. There were no alerts on his minder, no calendar entries, no calls from Candless or Ehta demanding he come take care of some problem he didn’t care about. Even the ensigns were leaving him alone—Ginger locked up in her bunk, Bury still reeling from finding out they weren’t alone in the universe.
Lanoe headed for his own bunk, grateful for just the chance to catch his breath.
His cabin had been destroyed along with the bridge. He’d been assigned one of the tiny coffinlike bunks, just like everyone else. It didn’t matter. He’d slept in worse places. He pulled himself inside and closed the hatch. The bunk had a padded floor, not entirely unlike a mattress. He stretched himself out, his boots touching the far wall, and laid down his head.
Just a couple of hours. Just a little time to get some rest, to help clear his mind, organize his thoughts. If he could just sleep for a little while—
“Lanoe,” Zhang said.
The voice came before he’d even had a chance to close his eyes. He squeezed them shut now, trying to block out the whispering call.
She wasn’t there. Zhang was dead. He needed to accept that.
“Lanoe,” she said again. She sounded scared. She sounded like she was pleading with him, begging him for something.
“What do you need?” he asked. He barely vocalized the words, feeling foolish for talking to a ghost. “What do you want from me?” he asked her.
He didn’t really expect a reply. He thought of the voice in his head as a kind of glitch, as an artifact, as an echo. Just a last fading note played after the symphony had ended, sustained out into the silence.
It wasn’t really Zhang. She was dead. She couldn’t still be talking to him, beseeching him like this.
It was just his own subconscious, nagging at him, picking at old wounds—
“Lanoe. You’re so far away,” she said.
Lanoe sucked in a deep, long breath. Intending to push her away, to finally expel her from his weary head. He started to exhale—
“You’re so far from where you need to be,” she said.
When humanity first discovered the planet Avernus, they found its surface entirely covered by an ocean of warm, shallow brine that surged endlessly back and forth, waves building up over months until they were fifty meters tall because there was nothing for them to crash on. There’d been no solid land at all, nothing to stand on, so the first colonists had lived on enormous pontoon rafts capable of riding the planet’s mega-tsunami waves. Over the course of a hundred years of settlement, however, it became clear that that was never going to be a long-term strategy.
So the Avernians had built platform arcologies, elevated high above the constant pounding of the monster waves. Cities on stilts, perched atop carbon allotrope pylons that sank down hundreds of meters underwater to reach the rocky core of the planet. The platforms had been built big but as the population expanded there was never enough space on their high decks. The cities of Avernus could only ever build up, so they looked like single, impossibly tall skyscrapers encrusted with barnacles, their sides studded with layer after layer of shops and catwalks and tacked-on office parks and houses hanging from long booms.
As Bullam’s yacht drifted down into the shadow of one such city, the local sunlight was cut off almost immediately. It was replaced by blinking forests of neon signs and blue light streaming through shop windows. Funicular trains rolled past on long spiral tracks, headed down into the city’s mist-shrouded lower levels. On the open deck of the yacht Bullam sank through layers of sounds, of music and arguments and the endless rustling sound of commerce. Strata of smells of cooking and sewage and the ozone reek of fusion power.
Civilians, she thought. None of the people she saw wore uniforms, none of them were ex-Navy. Civilization. She breathed in its heady air and felt almost human again.
Captain Shulkin sat in one of her carved wooden chairs, his glassy eyes reflecting it all, absorbing nothing.
“We’re safe here anyway,” she told him, though she doubted he even heard her. “Wilscon’s claim on this planet is ironbound, never been challenged. The Navy has never had any reason to come out this way. It would be nice if this was a Centrocor planet but Wilscon isn’t currently at war with Big Hexagon, so I doubt the local constabulary will even bother spying on us very much.”
“Lady! Lady!” someone shouted, and she turned to see who it was. A boy ran along one of the railed balconies that stuck out everywhere from the city. He had a net bag of oranges at the end of a stick and he craned it out over the deck as she floated past. “Fresh, fresh! Fifty for the bag!” the boy called. “Flash me the money and they’re yours!”
She laughed and nodded at one of her drones. It transferred the funds automatically—there was no time to haggle, in a moment the yacht would sink past the boy’s level—and the boy dropped the fruit on to her deck.
The sound it made colliding with the wooden boards made Shulkin wince. Maybe he thought they were being attacked. She made it up to him by digging one of the ripe oranges out of the bag and tossing it to him.
“Better than that food paste we’ve been eating since we left Tuonela,” she said.
Shulkin caught the fruit effortlessly, then stared at it in his hand as if she’d thrown him a live grenade.
“Cheer up,” she told him. “This is just a quick stopover. We’ll be back in space with people shooting at us very soon.”
“Lanoe,” Shulkin said, staring at the orange. “Lanoe got away.”
“Yes,” Bullam said. She sunk her thumbnail deep into a yielding rind. Juice squirted out across the deck. “Yes, he did.”
“We failed,” Shulkin said. The words like a wind blowing through cemetery trees.
“Not yet,” she promised him. “Not yet.”
“Are you well, Commander?” Paniet asked, when they met up to examine the wreckage of the cruiser’s forward section. “You look a tad peaked. If it’s all right for me to say that.”
Lanoe waved away the engineer’s concern with a gruff gesture. “Fine. Just fine.” The two of them were climbing up the axial corridor, but they could only get so far. An emergency bulkhead blocked the way above them. It had slammed shut when all the air was sucked out of the forward compartments, protecting them from being exposed to hard vacuum. Lanoe had no idea what they would find behind that thick hatch. He reached up to pull the manual release latch.
It wouldn’t budge.
Lanoe swore and tried to yank at the damned latch again. It shifted a little, but he couldn’t quite get enough leverage.
“You’re at a bad angle,” Paniet said. “Let me have a go, ducks.”
Lanoe scowled at the man. “I’ve got it, damn you.” He put one foot up against the wall. Braced himself and heaved.
Below him a weather field snapped into place, a shimmering in the air. His helmet flowed up over his face automatically as the hatch released. A breeze ruffled the front of his suit, then was gone, and the two of them climbed up into hard vacuum.
“I’m not getting enough sleep,” Lanoe told the engineer.
“A common malady among starship captains, I imagine,” Paniet replied. “If you’d like to do this another time—”
“No,” Lanoe said. Sharp enough to make Paniet wince. “No. Sorry. I appreciate your concern, but this needs to be done now.”
No point in delaying it.
That would just mean having to go back to his bunk—and listen for Zhang’s voice again.
Instead he followed the engineer into the ruined section. They had to pick their way through carefully, avoiding broken spars and heaps of debris. Here and there, Paniet pointed out some particularly bad bit of damage. Lanoe watched as the engineer struggled to open a panel in the wreckage of the bridge. The panel had buckled and one side of it was covered in soot, but once it came free the bundles of wires and relays underneath looked intact. Diodes lit up in the ring of circuitry around Paniet’s left eye.
“What do they mean, those lights?” Lanoe asked, gesturing at Paniet’s face.
“They mean, love, that I can see what I’m doing.” Paniet bent over the open panel and his lights glittered on the cables. “This could be worse,” he said. He took a tool from a pouch on the front of his suit and used it to spread two bundles apart, to get at a length of fiber optic cable behind them. “Tell me, did they teach you in flight school that you should try to avoid having the bridge of your vehicle shot to pieces?”
He turned to look at Lanoe, a mischievous smile playing on his face. The lights made Lanoe blink and look away.
“They taught us to trash our equipment whenever possible, so that our mechanics would have something to do,” Lanoe replied.
Paniet chuckled. He closed up the panel and the two of them moved forward, deeper into the shambles of twisted spars and severed cable. Two of Paniet’s neddies were at work there stretching a sheet of carbon fiber over a gaping wound in the side of the former bridge. “When these two are done, we’ll have a proper seal and be able to get air back in here,” Paniet explained. “That’ll make the work go faster.”
“How much functionality can we expect when you’re done?” Lanoe asked.
“As I told you, a week in drydock would set us right, but since we’re not stopping, well … really, Commander, the damage is severe. We’ve lost the bridge, half the quarters on the ship … most of our sensors.” Paniet shook his head. “None of the ship’s elevators will work anymore, the shafts are all crumpled. The bad fellows cut the head off our lovely bird. All I can do here is cauterize the stump.”
That was worse than Lanoe had expected. He’d thought they would at least have a functional bridge, if not a comfortable one. Still. “We can fly without this section.” Piloting, navigation, and information systems could be handled from any display on the ship. Losing the bridge was damned inconvenient, but not fatal.
“Running this ship from emergency equipment is possible, yes,” Paniet said. “I can use the displays in the remaining wardroom, give that position root access, set up a pilot’s chair … all easy enough, and you’ll have a sort of makeshift bridge. But it’ll take a toll on all of your pilots. They’ll get stressed out more quickly and that’s never good. You have M. Valk at the helm just now, right?” Paniet asked. “You’ve been relying on him a fair bit.”
“He doesn’t need to sleep, or eat. He can interface directly with the ship’s systems.” Valk didn’t even need a terminal to fly the ship. “You think I should just assign him to permanent pilot duty?”
“The opposite, rather.” Paniet tapped at a broken aluminum spar with the business end of a wrench. Under the stress, the spar broke off in two pieces. Paniet collected the jagged bits of metal and shoved them in a bag slung from his hip. “Do not get me wrong, ducks. Please do not think I disapprove of your keeping him around.”
“Oh?” Lanoe said.
“I’ve always been of the impression that the laws about AI are too stringent. We have this impression that every AI is going to go evil at some point, that they’ll turn on us if we give them half a chance. That smacks of paranoia to me—and I imagine most engineers would agree. Not all people are bloody bastards, are they?”
“Just most of them,” Lanoe agreed.
“There’s no reason to think there’s something inherently dangerous in the synthetic mind,” Paniet said. “We had one very sad example, and we’ve assumed ever since that they would all be the same.”
“I feel like there’s a but coming up, though it’s taking its time arriving,” Lanoe said.
“Then let me be plain. It’s very handy that M. Valk doesn’t need to sleep. But he most definitely should.”
“That’s your idea of being plain?”
Paniet sighed. He reached for a bundle of cabling and tugged on it, hard. When it didn’t come loose he took out some complicated tool and ran it over the cables, while lights flashed green and amber on his wrist display. “M. Valk is still learning what being an AI means to him. Every time he figures out a new thing—that he doesn’t need to shave, that he can do differential equations in his head without counting on his fingers—he becomes a little less human. If he’s going to become dangerous, if he does go bad, it’ll be when he stops thinking of himself as a person and starts identifying more with machines. Anything you can do—anything to make him feel more like his old self, Tannis Valk, the Blue Devil, yes?—is going to help keep us in his heart.”
“So I’m supposed to worry about my pilots getting stressed out,” Lanoe said, “but I can’t rely too much on the one pilot I have who doesn’t feel the stress. Any other helpful advice you have for me?”
“Oh, deary.” Paniet shoved the tool back in his pouch and moved on to the crumpled remains of the navigator’s station. “I could go on for hours.”
Bullam consulted with her drones, then stepped back out onto the deck of the yacht. They were far out at sea, just bobbing along like a cork above the waves. She’d thought a little salt air might do them both some good, so she’d taken them well away from any of the arcologies, out of sight of any Avernian eye.
“M. Cygnet has been kind enough to send us reinforcements—replacements for the pilots and vehicles we lost, as well as fresh supplies.” As well as a tersely written message expressing his extreme disappointment with their failure to capture Lanoe. She chose not to share that. “They’ll be here momentarily. Resupply and basic repairs can be complete by the end of the day. Care to try your hand at fishing?”
Shulkin stood on the deck as lifeless as a mannequin. He looked like he ought to be tossed overboard by each passing swell, but instead he simply rolled with the motion of the yacht. As steady as a sailor of ancient days bestriding the deck of a war galley.
Shulkin nodded. “Doable,” he told her. At first she thought he meant fishing. “We can take down that cruiser with what we have,” he said, and she realized he’d barely heard her. “Though it’s going to be bloody work. We know better than to rush in again and face those guns. So the next battle will be at extreme range. Our fighters against their fighters.”
“Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?” Bullam said. “We have more cataphracts than they do, and plenty of carrier scouts.”
Shulkin made a sound like a machine venting gas. She assumed it was his attempt at a world-weary sigh. “Fifty, on our side. Five on theirs. But one of their fighters will have Aleister Lanoe in it. Aleister Lanoe …”
She waited for him to say something more. As usual, she waited in vain. When she had had enough, she decided to prompt him. “You fought alongside him, you said.”
“Did I?”
She suppressed the urge to scream. “During the battle. I asked if you’d fought against him, and you said if you had you would be dead now. I assumed—”
Shulkin lifted one hand. Let it drop again. “The Brushfire,” he said. “And again. In the Crisis. We crossed paths. I didn’t fight alongside him. But I saw what he could do.”
“The Brushfire,” Bullam said. She knew her history well enough to know what that meant. After the wormhole network was discovered, humanity had spread across the stars in a hurry. Planets were discovered, terraformed, and settled in the space of decades. The polys hadn’t yet laid their respective stakes on the new worlds, and Earth had proved incapable of governing such a far-flung population. It had been a time of warlords and space piracy and constant small-scale fi
ghting. It had never erupted into full-blown war, but the Navy had kept busy. “What did you do in the Brushfire?”
It was as if she’d opened the floodgates of a dam. Shulkin hadn’t spoken more than a score of words since they’d arrived on Avernus. Once he got going, reminiscing about the good old days, she could tell it would be difficult to get him to stop. So she didn’t—she just let him ramble on.
They had time to kill, anyway, before the reinforcements arrived.
“My first command, a Peltast-class destroyer.” Shulkin’s face cracked into a toothy smile. It wasn’t nearly as grim as she would have expected. “Wild times. The Navy would send me in to shell a rioting city one day, then delivering emergency food supplies to the same planet the next. Battles in space were few and far between, though. My ship outclassed anything the planetary militias could muster so all I had to do was show up in a given system and my enemies typically surrendered on the spot. Good for the ego. Makes you sloppy, though. One time I made a mistake and it nearly cost me everything. I was ordered to clean out a nest of pirates who had holed up on a moon of Asmodeus. You know Asmodeus? Big gas giant planet in the Sheol system. About two hundred AU out from the local wormhole throat, so even getting to Asmodeus takes days. I suppose the pirates thought that distance meant they were out of the Navy’s reach. They were wrong.
“I went in guns blazing, thinking to make a show of force. Crippled the pirate base in the first couple of seconds, mopped up their ground-based defenses, thought I was about done. That was when they sprang their trap. Our intel said they had only a handful of lightly armed ships. What we didn’t know is they had a lot of friends. Three other pirate groups who had joined forces to take us down. They came out of the sun, taking us by surprise—and cutting off our escape route. Forty ships, maybe, none of them carrying any heavy guns, but their PBWs kept us pinned down, kept us from launching our fighters in any kind of good order. They couldn’t cut through our armor but they could smash up our guns, leave us toothless, just fighting like curs to stay alive.
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