“How do you figure? He’s gotten out of worse scrapes.”
“He’s been harboring a known AI. That’s a straight-up capital offense, one nobody can talk their way out of.” She gave him a weak smile. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad you’re still here. But he made a bad mistake not just turning you over to the powers that be.”
Valk leaned forward, his helmet scraping the ceiling of the tiny space. He held out one hand for the bottle, and she gave it to him. “I wish I knew why he did that. I didn’t want it.” He took a quick swig. Didn’t pass the bottle back. “He says it’s because he still needs me. He’s going to fight the aliens, no matter what. Get his justice, and I’m the only one who can talk to them. The only one who really knows anything about them. But that’s bosh, isn’t it?”
“Yeah?”
“The Admiralty downloaded all my files. They know everything I know. If he’d asked, I bet they would have given him a minder preloaded with software to translate Blue-Blue-White into English, given him all the maps and data from my head, you know, minus my sunny personality. He didn’t need to make me suffer any longer.”
“Hey,” she said. “Hey. Don’t be—”
“Don’t you start getting all sympathetic with me now,” he told her.
Ehta frowned and looked away.
“No, I don’t know what Lanoe wants from me.”
“Maybe he’s just lonely,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Zhang’s gone. She was the only one he could really talk to. Maybe he needs you because he needs a friend.”
“He’s got lots of friends,” Valk said. “Candless, and you, and all the people who fought beside him over the years.”
Ehta shook her head. “No, that’s different. Those aren’t friends. Those are squaddies.” She sat up. Grabbed the bottle away from him. There were just a few drops left inside. She swished them around, just for something to do with her hands. “When you fight alongside people, you make this crazy strong bond with them. You trust them with your life. You love them, more than you’re ever going to love anybody again. It’s intense. And when the fighting is over, when the squad is disbanded, or you get reassigned, whatever, you vow you’ll stay in touch, that you’ll be there for each other no matter what, no matter when. But the years go by, and you never look them up. You don’t even send them messages. Maybe life just gets in the way, new stuff piling up so you’re too busy to call. That’s what you tell yourself. The real reason isn’t as easy to accept. Those bonds you made, those relationships, you made them at a time you never want to think about again. You see an old squaddie and everything comes back, the good times, sure, but the hell of it, too, the noise and the fire and the constant fear that you’re going to die. Squaddie relationships can’t survive in peacetime.”
“Lanoe and I fought together at Niraya.”
“A guy he knew named Tannis Valk fought with him there. You see the difference? You’re just like that guy. You’re just like the guy he bonded with, except … you’re not him. You’re just different enough now.”
“You’re saying he threw his life away—exposed himself to the death penalty—because he needed a friendly face around. Even though I don’t actually have a face.”
“Seeing as you’re not human?” Ehta told him. “Maybe you don’t know the big secret of people.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“We’re pretty much all crazy, one way or another.”
Surrounded by her fellow officers, Ginger could almost hear their thoughts as they worked their way through another meal of food paste.
Maybe she’ll just snap out of it, they were thinking. Maybe she won’t. Maybe when the call comes, she’ll answer it. Maybe she’ll never fight again. Maybe she snapped completely—she was in her bunk for a long time.
Maybe she was useless now. A liability to the mission.
“Could you pass the salt spray?” Lieutenant Maggs asked. He gave her a very bright smile. Showed a lot of teeth.
She reached for the spray—then jerked her hand back as the lights in the wardroom changed to amber and the gravity alarm sounded from the speakers overhead.
“Don’t worry, little girl,” Maggs told her. “We’re already strapped down.”
“Let her be,” Commander Lanoe said.
It was true, though. There was no need to be worried. They wore restraining belts when they sat at the table in microgravity. All the food items and utensils on the table were held down with adhering pads. There was no danger.
They’d even been warned that this burn was coming. For ten long seconds Ginger was pulled upward in her chair, accelerated toward what was now, officially, the ceiling. The cruiser was burning its retros to slow them down.
Lieutenant Candless was in the control seat, her eyes locked on the display in front of her. She waved her left hand and brought up a navigational display so they could all see why she’d slowed down.
“No more time to put it off, I’m afraid,” she told them. “We need to make a decision. That is to say, you need to make a decision, Commander.”
Ginger knew what they were talking about. Up ahead the wormhole split into two tunnels, and one of those two split again almost immediately. There were three possible routes forward. According to the charts any of the three would take them to their destination. All three of them were marked with the strongest possible glyphs for hazardous conditions.
In her classes back on Rishi, Ginger had been told about the early days of wormhole exploration, about all the ships that had been lost chasing wormholes that led nowhere at all, or shrank down without warning until they were only a few centimeters wide. Then there were the unstable wormholes—which could shift and change their direction unpredictably, at best suddenly opening into a new part of space humanity had never seen before, at worst twisting themselves into knots so convoluted no human pilot could fly through them. Those were all standard navigational hazards, however. Wormholes suspected of unorthodox behavior would be marked on the chart with yellow crosshatching.
These three were all marked bright red.
There were wormholes, it was said, that opened up inside the event horizons of black holes. They looked perfectly normal until you passed through their throats—and then nobody ever heard from you again. There were wormholes that passed through the hearts of stars, so that the temperature inside the wormhole rose into the thousands, even millions of degrees—temperatures no human ship could hope to tolerate. There were supposed to be even stranger things out there, wormhole storms where the ghostlight grew so thick it tore ships to pieces, wormholes that traveled through so many strange dimensions you could come out of them before you went in—and turned inside out. Wormholes were strange things, channels cut through the very fabric of spacetime. There was a lot of science regarding them that humanity still didn’t understand.
Ginger watched Lanoe peer at the chart, then lean over to take a look at the view ahead, as if he could see what hazards awaited them. She didn’t envy him having to make this choice. She really, really hoped he made the right one. Even if he had to guess.
“Take us forward dead slow,” he said. “If we’re very, very careful maybe we have a chance even if we’re wrong. We’ll start with the one nearest us,” he said, pointing at the route on the chart that stuck most closely to their present bearing.
“As you wish,” Lieutenant Candless said. She touched a virtual control and the gravity alarm sounded again. She’d supplied so little power to the engines that it took a full second before Ginger’s feet touched the floor.
It was notoriously difficult to gauge speed and distance inside a wormhole, at least visually. The view ahead didn’t seem to change much at all, the ever-fluctuating tendrils of ghostlight reaching for them with spectral hands. The tunnel of the wormhole crept by, maybe, though it was hard to say. They were still thousands of kilometers away from the place where the tunnel split for the first time. They were safe, for the moment. Soon enough, though, their c
ourse was going to take them into the hazardous wormhole, where they might die without any warning.
Ginger wondered if she could hold her breath until they got there. Her body certainly wanted to try.
Coward, she thought to herself. Have a little faith in your commander.
“Ensign,” Commander Lanoe said. “Ensign Bury.” He snapped his fingers and pointed at the wardroom. “Get on the display in there. You’re acting as IO right now. We’ll send sensor data through to you. I want you monitoring the external temperature, Riemann metrics, magnetic flux … anything that looks out of the ordinary, you let us know.”
Bury nodded eagerly and kicked backward, toward the wardroom.
Lanoe hadn’t asked Ginger to do it. She tried not to read too much into that. Especially when he started giving orders to his other officers.
“Paniet, get back to engineering. I know you want to see this, but I need you ready to head up damage control if we run into something.” Of course, if they did touch the walls of the wormhole, or anything else that might be waiting out there, there would be very little point in trying to repair the ship. It would be annihilated instantly, its mass converted to pure energy. Ginger supposed you never knew, and it was better to be safe than sorry. “Maggs,” Lanoe said next, “I’ll give you a job close to your heart. Go down to the vehicle bay and make sure if we need to we can launch all our small craft.” As escape pods, he meant.
“And how exactly, if I may ask, is that aligned with my heart’s desire?” Maggs said. He hadn’t moved from his spot, his eyes riveted to the display like everyone else’s.
“You’ve proved in the past to be very good at running away from things,” Lanoe told him.
Lieutenant Maggs actually laughed at that. Lanoe had just called him a deserter, and he was laughing … Ginger wondered how arrogant Lieutenant Maggs had to be to find such an accusation amusing. Well, she supposed the two of them had history.
“Ensign Ginger,” Lanoe said, finally, “you’re our navigator. Watch the display, make sure our bearing stays true.”
“Yes, sir,” Ginger said. Absolute busywork. Of course. No one could doubt that Lieutenant Candless was capable of holding the cruiser to a set course. Maybe Lanoe had just taken pity on her and given her an assignment he thought she could actually do.
“Thirty seconds until we enter the first diversion,” Candless said.
“Temperature’s normal, no sign of any magnetic anomalies,” Bury called out. “Do you want regular updates, or just—”
“Yes!” the Commander and Lieutenant Candless shouted in unison.
“Um, Riemann scalar is holding at g(3,3.02) … magnetic flux at 750 Wb … temperature unchanged at 129 K …”
Bury’s voice droned on, until Ginger couldn’t even hear it. Lieutenant Candless increased their speed just a little when it was clear they weren’t about to be vaporized without warning. Minutes ticked by as the cruiser edged ever onward, ever closer to the place where the three wormholes split off. Ginger found herself clutching to a nylon strap on the corridor wall, even though she wasn’t floating at the time. She forced herself to let go. Flexed her stiff fingers until the blood started moving through her hand again.
Up ahead, the wormhole split in two. Lieutenant Candless adjusted their course, just a little, to take them toward the first divergence. She glanced up as if she hoped someone would tell her to stop. No one did.
“Okay,” Commander Lanoe said, just as they were about to enter the divergence. “We’re doing well, I think we’re safe, let’s—”
A flash of light dazzled Ginger. She blinked and looked around and saw everyone else recovering, too.
“What the hell was that?” Commander Lanoe demanded. “Bury—what do you see on your sensor boards? Quick!”
“Uh—there’s nothing, no … well, there was a spike in the long end of the spectrum, but I think … I think that was just stray emission, I think it was a flare, like the ghostlight just flared up for some reason, and—”
M. Valk’s voice bellowed over the loudspeakers. “Lanoe—full stop! Full stop! That wasn’t a flare. It was a message!”
Ehta was standing closest to Valk. She had to duck as he waved his arms, trying to get everyone’s attention. Then, as Candless brought them to an abrupt stop, she had to grab the walls as for a moment gravity switched directions. Eventually all gravity went away as the ship came to a dead stop, right on the edge of the first wormhole.
“What kind of message?” Lanoe demanded.
“A radio broadcast,” Valk explained. He brought up a display to show a waveform analysis.
Ehta frowned. “Radio waves don’t work in a wormhole,” she said. She remembered that much from her pilot’s training, years ago.
“Right. Normally,” Valk said. “You send a signal, but the photons get annihilated when they touch the wormhole walls. This is different. These photons came from the walls. It’s crazy—I mean, it shouldn’t work, but somehow … somehow the wormhole itself generated the message.”
“Never mind how, for now,” Lanoe insisted. “What did the wormhole say?”
“It’s audio only,” Valk said. “Here. Let me play it for you.”
The wardroom’s speakers crackled and spat. It sounded like the kind of interference you got on a transmission sent from too close to the magnetosphere of a star. Then a voice cut in, buried in the static. The voice sounded exactly like one of the synthesized voices that drones used. The pronunciation was a little too perfect, a little too cadenced:
{We’re so glad you’ve come.}
{Take the third path.}
{Please be careful.}
“The third path,” Lanoe repeated.
“Not the first one, as we’d planned,” Candless said. Ehta thought she looked scared. Maybe too scared to be snarky, for once. “Shall I adjust our course?”
“Sure,” Lanoe said. “But let’s not get too excited. That wormhole’s marked as hazardous, too. Take us ahead slow. Ensign Bury, you keep calling out those updates.” He turned and looked at Valk. “And you, big guy. You hear any more secret messages from another dimension, or whatever. Just go ahead and play them for us—don’t keep them to yourself.”
Chapter Twenty-One
There were no more messages encoded into the ghostlight.
Candless took the cruiser past the first two branches, then gently, ever so carefully, into the third. At first all appeared normal. The other two branches had looked normal, as they passed them by. Candless wondered idly what would have happened had they ventured down the wrong path—what terrible hazards awaited in those dim tunnels. She hoped she would never have to find out.
The third tunnel ran straight and smooth and wide. Lanoe kept urging her to go faster—clearly he was in a hurry to get to their destination, just the other side of this stretch. “Very good, sir,” she told him. “And how many pieces would you like to be in when we arrive?”
“Point taken,” he told her. “Just keep in mind that Centrocor hasn’t given up on us. The longer we hang around here, the more likely they are to catch us.”
Candless had not forgotten that they were being pursued.
“How long are we looking at till we get there?” Lieutenant Ehta asked. “At this rate of speed, I mean.”
“About seven days,” Candless told her.
She could feel Lanoe’s jaw clench, even from across the room.
One by one the onlookers drifted away, the other officers realizing that the view of the wormhole ahead was going to look exactly like every other wormhole they’d ever seen. Soon only Candless and Lanoe were left in the emergency bridge station, listening to the constant announcements from Bury in the wardroom.
Lanoe waited another hour before telling the young man he could stop with his relentlessly meaningless updates. “In fact, I think I’ll take it from here. I can monitor all those things on my wrist minder,” the Commander said.
“Yeah,” Bury told him. “Yeah, okay. I think I might have pulled
a muscle in my throat with all that yelling anyway.”
“Go take a nap,” Lanoe told him.
Bury shrugged and headed off toward his bunk. Leaving only the two of them in the wardroom.
“Perhaps this would be a good time for us to speak,” Candless said. “Now that we don’t have an audience.”
“Sure,” Lanoe said. He leaned back in his seat and sighed. “This going to be about Ginger? Or maybe you want to tell me why you and Ehta aren’t getting along.”
“Two excellent subjects, both of which I think we would find tedious,” Candless told him. “No. I had intended to ask what you expect to find on the other side of this wormhole.”
“I already gave a briefing on that,” Lanoe told her. She wished very much that she could look at him, see his face. She didn’t dare look away from her displays, however.
“I thought perhaps you might have held something back,” she said. “As XO, I have a responsibility for the crew of this ship. I have a right, therefore, to know if that crew is to be exposed to any danger. I assure you that I can keep your secrets, if you’re willing to share them, in fact—”
He cut her off. A bit rudely. “Candless,” he said, “I told you everything I know. Mysterious message offering help with fighting the Blue-Blue-White. No idea who sent it, no idea whether this is a trap … I’m flying as blind as you are.”
She found that a little hard to believe. Perhaps, though, his paranoia was simply rubbing off on her. “Whoever they are, they’ve gone to great lengths to maintain their privacy. Hiding out here, well outside of human space—behind not one but three deadly wormholes. They’ve kept any possible identifying marks out of their communications and offered not even a hint as to their identity. And yet the Admiralty, in its exalted wisdom, saw fit to send you all this way just to say hello.”
“Whoever they are, they know the Blue-Blue-White are a serious threat. Maybe the biggest one humanity’s faced since, I don’t know, global warming. The admirals are willing to take a chance on this.”
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