“I have no idea what that means,” Lanoe said.
Valk nodded. Rather, he bowed forward several times. It was the closest he could get to the human gesture while keeping his helmet up. “Okay. I got to thinking about my arm. And then I started thinking about how I don’t really have an arm inside the sleeve of this suit. There’s nothing there—just some servomotors in the sleeve I can activate to make it look like an arm.”
“You already knew that,” Lanoe pointed out.
“Yeah. Rationally, yeah, I did. But I never really thought about it, until now. And once I did, I couldn’t remember anymore what it used to feel like, when I had a real arm. I couldn’t pretend anymore. There’s no arm there. There was never an arm. So now there’s no arm … I managed to pull myself out of that loop before I started to think about the fact I don’t have a head, either.”
Lanoe frowned. “Can you fix it? The arm?”
“I can write a program that simulates having an arm.”
“That’s not the same. Is it?”
“I’m not a philosopher, Lanoe. Tannis Valk was just a regular guy, and I … I’m trying real hard to be as like him as I can be. So don’t ask that question. Because then I’ll have to think about the answer.”
“Sure.”
“But … no. It’s not the same. Not at all.”
Lanoe took a breath and stepped closer. He reached down and picked up the left hand of Valk’s suit. It felt exactly like an empty glove, of course. He squeezed the glove, until the fingers buckled in his hand.
“Do you feel that?” he asked.
“I’m registering the pressure you’re applying, I—”
“Can you feel it?” Lanoe demanded.
Valk was silent for a long time. Lanoe twisted the sleeve, bent it at the elbow. Lifted it and held it in the exact position Valk’s arm ought to be in.
“A little,” Valk said. “Maybe.”
“Squeeze my hand,” Lanoe said.
The fingers twitched. Almost imperceptibly, but they twitched.
“Good,” Lanoe said. “Try again.”
Bury howled as the cool proteolytic gel ran over his swollen fingertips. They burned wherever the skin came away, frostbitten tissue debriding and running pink into the basin. Because he was a Hellion, long strands of polymer came away with it. Nerve endings that had never felt open air before pulsed and throbbed in agony.
“The skin’ll grow back,” Engineer Paniet told him. Bury scowled and looked away, embarrassed that the neddy had seen him flinching at pain. “A couple of stem cell injections and you’ll be right as rain, deary. Though it’ll hurt like the devil between now and then.”
“Hold still,” Ginger said. She squeezed some more of the fluid across his exposed toes. This time he couldn’t help but swear.
“Shouldn’t there be a medic on this ship?” he demanded. “I bet there was one, before Commander Lanoe kicked everybody off.”
“Don’t forget he kicked off a spy who would have gotten us all killed, too,” Ginger said. “Would you stop being a baby?”
“I wouldn’t have to act like a baby if he hadn’t made us go down this wormhole,” Bury said. Though he kept his voice low. Prudently, as it turned out, because Lieutenant Candless poked her head into the wardroom just then. Her hands were wrapped in gauze and he was gratified to see that even she winced as she grabbed at the table to steady herself.
The cruiser was burning hard, pushing its engines to get them into warmer climes as fast as possible now that something like normalcy had returned to the wormhole. Bury knew how sore his own bones were and he could guess Lieutenant Candless’s older joints would trouble her even more. He watched her as she lowered herself carefully into a chair.
“Ensign Ginger,” she said, “have you seen to your own extremities yet? Come now, take off those boots.”
Ginger bit her lower lip. “I’m fine. Let me finish up with Bury first, and—”
“Now, please,” Candless said.
Ginger took a deep breath. Then she reached down and ran a finger along the hidden seam that released the boots of her suit. She pulled them off slowly, so carefully that Bury wondered what she was afraid of.
Even with the boots off, she kept her legs tucked close under her, with her toes curled up as if she didn’t want anyone to see them. Bury frowned when he realized why. Every single one of her toes had turned black.
He noticed for the first time that she had kept her gloves on as well.
“Ginj …” he said. “Oh, Ginj—”
“You heard the engineer. It’s going to be fine,” she said.
“Hand me that tube, Ensign Bury. Now, if you please,” Candless said. Her mouth was a hard line. “I’ve seen your genetic profiles. I knew that Ensign Ginger was at high risk. Redheads are more susceptible to the cold in general. Yet I don’t remember you complaining. Did you plan on hiding this from us very long?”
Ginger shrugged. “I just didn’t want anyone to think I was … you know. Weak.”
“You do understand, I presume, that if left untreated this could lead to amputation? Well, no matter. Give me that foot, please.”
Ginger hesitated, so Lieutenant Candless grabbed her leg and pulled her foot up on the table without asking a second time. “Basin, please, Ensign Bury.”
“I had no idea,” he said, trying to meet Ginger’s eye. She looked over at Engineer Paniet instead, though—and kept eye contact with him even as Lieutenant Candless rubbed the gel deep into the cracks between her toes. Her face went very white as the enzyme bit into her skin, but she didn’t say a word.
“Tell me that’s what I think it is,” Lanoe said. He was at the controls, and there was little doubt about what he saw on his display. Still, he wanted Valk’s opinion.
“That’s a wormhole throat,” Valk said. “Yeah.”
It was hard to believe, after all they’d been through. The wormhole came to an end up ahead in a nice, wide, stable aperture back into realspace. Only a few million kilometers away. Lanoe touched the throttle, and the cruiser surged ahead.
So close now.
It didn’t take long for the wardroom to fill with people. Candless and the ensigns first, then Paniet and Ehta coming together. Even the marines poked their heads out of their bunks or lingered at the back of the wardroom, anxious for a look. Technically they weren’t permitted anywhere near the controls, but Lanoe could hardly begrudge them, not after what they’d been through. They still didn’t even know why they’d been dragged along on this weird mission.
“Take a good look, then report to the gundecks,” he told them. Ehta nodded and relayed his order, even though everyone could have heard it with their own ears.
“You want to come out of this wormhole ready to shoot?” Valk asked. “You’re not worried that our new friends might take offense at that?”
“As paranoid as they’ve been so far? These are people who live at the end of a death tunnel. I doubt they’re going to take it amiss if we’re a little cautious ourselves. Besides,” Lanoe said, lowering his voice, “I don’t know if we got here first. There could be a hundred Centrocor ships on the other side, lined up and waiting for us.”
“Hellfire,” Valk said. “I hope not.”
The transition to normal space went smoothly, the cruiser nosing its way through the wormhole throat with plenty of room to spare. The displays showed that they’d come out near a yellow G-class star, just like the one that warmed Earth. There wasn’t much else to see, at first, except for stars.
Glorious, clean, distant, unthreatening stars. Lanoe would take it.
“I’ll start analyzing the local star positions in reference to the standard candles, to get a fix on where we are,” Candless said. You never knew with a wormhole—it could open into a system just a couple of light-years from where you’d started, or halfway across the galaxy. There was no direct correlation between the length or path of a wormhole and which two points in space it joined. Theoretically the wormhole could have taken the
m to a different galaxy completely—or a different universe. “It’ll take me a while, but at least then we’ll know how far—”
“Seventeen hundred, three hundred and twelve light-years from Earth,” Valk said.
“Ahem. Yes. Very good,” Candless said. “If a bit presumptive.”
“Sorry,” Valk told her. “Just figured I would save you the trouble.”
Lanoe ignored them—the two of them were going to have to work out their differences on their own. He was too busy using the ship’s sensors to find where they should go next. Like a planet, or an orbital habitat. This place, this system, was the X on the map. Their destination. Whatever help he was going to get with fighting the Blue-Blue-White had to be here, somewhere.
The system proved to be average in most respects, if a little sparse. There was the usual belt of comets far out from the star, and a few rocky asteroids closer in. One gas giant planet about six astronomical units out, and—most promising—a terrestrial planet right in the system’s habitable zone. Laser spectrography showed that the planet had an atmosphere rich in oxygen and water vapor. Based on the planet’s albedo, its magnetic field profile, its axial tilt and rate of rotation, surface conditions would be perfect for supporting human life.
“Now, there’s a likely place, if I’ve ever seen one,” Maggs said, leaning over his shoulder. Lanoe winced—he hadn’t seen the scoundrel come up behind him. He waved Maggs away, then brought up a virtual keyboard and ordered a lot more scans.
Then he brought up a comms board and sent out a general call, on an unencrypted frequency. Just letting the planet know that they’d arrived. There was no immediate response but he didn’t let that bother him. Maybe the senders of the mysterious message didn’t want to announce their presence. Maybe they wanted him to make the first move. He launched a small fleet of microdrones to head for that planet and get a better look at it. No point in hesitating, though. He set a course to put them in a parking orbit around its equator.
This was it. He could feel it in his bones. This was real.
“XO,” he said, and Candless lifted her head. She’d been staring at the display, just like everybody else. “I’ll take the cutter down to the planet. I need you and your people out in orbit, keeping an eye out for me. Get your pilots to the vehicle bay. Take them to a standoff distance and have them ready to scramble. Just in case.”
“Certainly, sir,” she said. “Though … I imagine three of us can handle this duty. No need to commit all of our forces.”
Lanoe had no idea, at first, what she was on about. Then he looked over and saw Ginger’s face. The girl had gone as white as a ghost. Candless was trying to exclude the girl from duty—in a way that saved face for Ginger.
Lanoe just didn’t know if it was the right decision. Maybe all Ginger needed was to get back in the saddle. Another chance to prove herself.
There wasn’t going to be a better time to find out. “I need every pair of eyes I can get out there. The four of you go,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Candless replied. Her eyes showed him nothing—which he knew was a bad sign. She pointed at Ginger and Bury and gestured for them to follow her, and the ensigns fell in line. Ginger kept her eyes down, but she went. Maggs joined them with a sardonic grin. Valk got up slowly from his seat, as if he wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to go, too.
“You’re with me,” Lanoe told him. “Ready to meet some new people?”
“I … guess,” Valk said. “But wait. Who’s going to fly the cruiser if we’re all going?”
Lanoe smiled at him. “You can do that, too,” he said. “I need you in two places at once right now. Luckily for us, that’s something you can do. You can monitor and fly the ship even while you’re down on the planet, right?”
Valk was silent for a moment. “I guess so,” he said. “Though—it’s not a great solution. There’s going to be some signal lag. I can only communicate with the ship at the speed of light. Even if we’re just a fraction of a light-second away, I don’t like knowing it’ll take that long for the ship to react to my commands. There might be another way, though. I can make a copy of myself.”
Lanoe raised an eyebrow.
“It won’t be perfect. The ship’s computers don’t have enough storage capacity to hold all of my programming. I’ll need to prune some of my process trees.”
Lanoe frowned. “I’ve been hanging around you too long. I almost understood that. You mean you need to cut out parts of your programming, so you’ll fit in the ship’s memory. What needs to be cut? Your emotions?”
Valk laughed. “That would be pretty dumb. Fear is an emotion. I’ve always found that a big chunk of flying a spaceship is the terror of it. If you aren’t afraid of crashing, you won’t remember not to. You need desire, too—the desire to actually get somewhere, rather than just sitting in a parking orbit forever.” Valk shrugged. “Anyway, emotions are dirt simple. They don’t take up much file space at all.”
“Really? I never really felt like I understood them,” Lanoe said.
“Nah,” Valk said. “An emotion is just an arrow pointing in a given direction. One basic vector, right? Take fear. That’s an arrow pointing away from the thing you’re afraid of. Or love, that’s an arrow pointing toward the object of affection. No, it’s all the other stuff—how we react to our emotions, how we try to rationalize them, overcome them, consciously deal with them. That’s the big, complex stuff. But don’t worry. My copy will have those, too.”
“So what will you cut out?”
“All the stuff I didn’t need at all. The programs that let me simulate breathing, say, or eating or sleeping. It won’t need to have much of my personality, either, since there won’t be anybody here for it to talk to.”
Lanoe thought about it for a second. “All right. Make this copy. But one question—what happens when you come back? Do we just have to get used to there being two of you, then?”
“No, I’ll reintegrate with it. The two of us will have slightly different memories when I get back, but that’s just a question of comparing files. As long as I’m not gone for too long, say, less than a day, it should be fine. We should still be ninety-nine percent the same person, so it’s just a matter of checking some change logs and then deleting all the redundant files.”
“And if you’re gone more than a day?”
Valk nodded. “I guess we would both develop differently. The changes will build up gradually, but constantly. Each second we’re apart, our file structures will diverge. We’ll, you know, grow apart. Maybe, if we were separate long enough, you could say there were two of us. Maybe that’s how a thing like me reproduces. The idea makes me kind of uneasy, though. How about we don’t find out?”
Lieutenant Candless led them down to the vehicle bay, where their fighters were waiting. When they passed through the hatch Bury kicked off the wall and flew over to his ship, grabbing a stanchion on the side of its canopy to stop himself. He looked back and saw Maggs gliding toward him.
“Anxious to stretch your legs?” Maggs asked. “So to speak?”
“After spending so long in a pile with the likes of you,” Bury told him, “it’ll be good to be alone in a cockpit for a while. It’ll smell better anyway.”
Maggs smiled. “And who says that a Hellion can’t tell a joke? I admit, I’m feeling the need to get out and move around myself. Can’t remember the last time I so looked forward to a long patrol. Maybe we’ll even get lucky and find something to shoot.”
“I wouldn’t call that lucky,” Bury replied. “I’d much prefer to find out we lost the Centrocor ship. That we’re, you know. Safe.”
“Where’s that Navy fighting spirit? When I was a lad every boy wanted to grow up to be a pilot, couldn’t wait to get in a good scrap. Oh, don’t get me wrong—I suppose a little of the old self-preservation instinct is a good thing. As long as it doesn’t present as timidity, in the end.”
“Are you calling me timid?” Bury asked. He felt his eyes narrowing. Relax, he told
himself. He’s just baiting you. Hard to keep that in mind when his blood was boiling in his veins, though.
Maggs held up one hand in a dismissive gesture. “Never, I would never be so reckless. I saw that kill you scored the last time we fought. And anyway, when you’re on one of Lanoe’s little adventures, protecting your six just makes good sense. He has a tendency to throw people to the wolves. I applaud your … caution.”
Bury’s hand curled around the stanchion and squeezed until his glove creaked. He bit down hard on his lower lip. “If you’d like to see my fighting spirit, I’m sure something can be arranged.”
Maggs’s smile only grew wider and more infuriating. Why the hell was the man riding him? What did he hope to achieve? “Perhaps, someday we’ll—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish his thought. “Enough, you two!” Lieutenant Candless shouted. “Maggs, get to your vehicle. Ginger, I will not be sending out engraved invitations to this patrol. Move yourself, now.”
Maggs gave him a cheery mock salute and headed for his Z.XIX. Bury ignored him, instead looking over to see that Ginger was still back at the hatch. She’d barely come inside the vehicle bay at all. She was blushing, her face almost as red as her hair. Maybe because she knew she was being watched, she kicked over to her BR.9 and climbed inside the cockpit. In the moment before she raised the canopy, she looked right at Bury. Their eyes locked but he couldn’t say, precisely, what he saw there.
It almost looked like she was begging him, silently, for help.
Chapter Twenty-Three
No response from the ground,” Valk said. “I’m trying to hail them on every frequency I can think of. Maybe they don’t believe in radios.”
One of the marines in the back of the cutter laughed, but her squaddies elbowed her until she shut up.
Lanoe wasn’t in a very mirthful mood, just then.
He was flying the cutter down toward the planet, with its chromatophoric skin tuned to the color of the local sky. Just in case. He’d set the controls to mask their radar profile and shield them from any invasive scans in the millimeter wave and X-ray bands of the spectrum. Just in case. He’d brought along an honor guard—or maybe a bodyguard—of four marines. Just in case.
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