Lanoe nodded. “I have less than fifty on my ship. But you aren’t really asking me, are you? You want me to go back to Earth and get an answer from my government.”
“This is not a decision that should be made by one person alone. It affects the future of every human being.”
“Sure,” Lanoe said. “Sure.”
When Lanoe decided he’d seen enough, the three of them returned to the platform. It rose toward the surface at an almost sedate pace. As they neared the top, a green pearl appeared in the corner of Lanoe’s vision, throbbing in a pattern that told him he had missed a message. Most likely his suit’s radio hadn’t been able to pick up transmissions in the strange chamber under the water.
The message was from Valk. The AI had kept it short.
Candless called to warn us we’re out of time. Centrocor’s here.
“Is something wrong?” Water-Falling asked. “You have an expression on your face I recognize. Archie looks like that when he gets bad news.”
“I have to get back to my ship as quickly as possible,” Lanoe told the chorister. “I need to issue some new orders.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ginger arrived back in the vehicle bay of the cruiser and powered down her fighter. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. She reached up to her collar ring and brought her helmet down. Gasped for air. She was seeing spots.
There was no one in the vehicle bay. She hadn’t expected that. She’d thought that the marines would be waiting to arrest her as soon as she got in. She’d prepared herself for that—accepted it was better than being out there in the dark even one moment more.
Instead—it looked almost like they’d forgotten about her. Or maybe everyone was just too busy to worry about her future just then.
She opened her canopy and kicked out of the cockpit, moved to a railing by the hatch leading out of the bay. Wondered what in hell she was going to do next.
Shaking, wanting very much to scream, wanting very much to curl up in a ball and just stop existing altogether, she headed toward her bunk. She stopped when she reached the wardroom and saw Lieutenant Ehta floating there. Of all the people to run into … “So what was it?” the marine asked.
“I’m … sorry?”
Lieutenant Ehta frowned at her. “The bogey. The contact. Candless called to tell us that you lot were out on a snipe hunt. Did you find something?”
“Centrocor,” Ginger said, nodding. “They’re here.”
“Damn,” Lieutenant Ehta said. Then she went back to what she was doing, which appeared to be getting something to eat.
“They’ve come for us,” Ginger said. “How can you just …” She shook her head. “Don’t you understand? They’re going to try to kill us again.”
“Yeah, all right,” Lieutenant Ehta said. “Not in the next hour, though?”
“I … don’t know. I guess not,” Ginger said.
“Well, I’m hungry now.” Lieutenant Ehta turned around and went back to her meal, clearly done with the conversation. Ginger swallowed thickly. The woman didn’t like her, she thought, or maybe she just didn’t like pilots. Maybe it was just the old rivalry between flyers and ground-pounders, maybe … maybe it didn’t matter.
She had to talk, though. She needed so desperately to talk to somebody.
“I messed up,” she said. “I did something really bad.”
Lieutenant Ehta sighed, but didn’t look up. “Kid,” she said, “I don’t know if—”
Ginger shook her head. She needed to get this out. She needed to talk, to be spoken to. Until she could get her heart to stop pounding so fast. “I broke formation. I—I saw him. The scout pilot, and I knew I was supposed to shoot him, and I couldn’t do it. Oh, hellfire, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”
“You ran away from a patrol,” Lieutenant Ehta said, very carefully.
Ginger nodded. Bit her lip.
“You know that’s pretty much the Navy’s number one rule? Don’t run away. They taught you that, yeah?”
“Yes,” Ginger said.
Lieutenant Ehta held her gaze for a long couple of seconds. Then she went back to the controls of the food dispenser. “Here,” she said. “We’d better talk about this.”
She handed Ginger a squeeze tube of water. It tasted sour and Ginger barely managed to swallow the liquid.
“What’s in this?” she asked.
“Electrolytes,” Lieutenant Ehta responded. “You had a panic attack. When that happens your body thinks you’re actually dying. It pulls all the blood sugar out of your head and dumps it into your muscles, so you can run away faster. Useful if you’re being chased by a tiger, but it gives you a nasty hangover. That stuff won’t calm you down, but it’ll keep you from feeling like you got beaten up, later. How do your legs feel?”
“Weak. Shaky. I’m glad I’m in microgravity because I don’t think I could stand up right now.”
Lieutenant Ehta nodded sagely.
“How do you know all this?” Ginger asked.
“I’ve been there.” The older woman sighed and strapped herself into a chair. Clearly she thought this was going to be a long conversation. “I used to be a pilot, you know that? Yeah. I got the wind up. Bad case of nerves. These days, if I even get onboard a spaceship, I start to feel it. That weird sensation like your guts have been scooped out, like you’re hollow inside. The way, you know, when your head …” She placed her hands around her temples, her thumbs over her eyebrows. “Like there’s a string around your head and it keeps getting tighter and tighter. Nausea, darting eyes. Yeah, I can see in your face, you get it. Look, kid, human brains aren’t designed for what you do. Flying a fighter, I mean. You’re not supposed to be able to focus on two things at the same time, the scales and the velocities are all wrong, so much bigger than we can handle—”
“That’s not the problem, for me,” Ginger said.
Lieutenant Ehta gave her a sour look, and Ginger squirmed inside. She hated to think she’d offended the woman. “I don’t mean—I just—”
“So tell me what you did mean.”
Ginger nodded. “I’m not even supposed to be here.”
The Lieutenant didn’t say anything. She just watched Ginger’s face, as if she could read something there.
Ginger looked away. “I’m not … I was never supposed to be a pilot. I got washed out of the pilot program—before we came here. I was so ashamed when Lieutenant Candless told me that. That I was never going to be … damn it. You want to know the truth? I was relieved.”
Lieutenant Ehta nodded.
“I never wanted to be a pilot. Not even when I was a child. But they never gave me a choice. No one ever gave me a choice. Back there, when I saw the Centrocor ship … I just gave up. I gave up pretending.”
Lieutenant Ehta put her hands on the table and pushed backward, shoving herself deeper into her chair. “Okay,” she said.
“How is that okay?”
“It’s who you are.” The older woman shrugged. “You figured out your limits. Okay, so don’t do this job anymore. I’m not a therapist, kid. I don’t know what you were hoping I would say. I can’t help you change who you are. So let’s not even try that. We should focus, instead, on what comes next.”
“Oh,” Ginger said. “Hellfire.” She hadn’t really thought about that too much. She’d actively tried to not think about it.
“Yeah. They’re going to hit you with a charge of cowardice. You know that, right?”
“I thought—it might be desertion, instead.”
Ehta snorted. “Oh, no, you lucked out there! If you were back in the real world, right, if you were in the middle of an actual hell-bent-for-leather war, sure, it’d be desertion, and the penalty for that is the firing squad. But on this mission—well, nothing’s cut and dried out here. Nothing’s simple.”
“Cowardice,” Ginger said. “That’s … still pretty bad. They’ll stick me in the brig for years, and then discharge me with dishonor.”
Lieutenant Ehta shrugged. “
Maybe they’ll be lenient.”
Ginger shook her head. “I don’t know. Lieutenant Candless …”
“Yeah, she’s one tough nut to crack. She’ll bring the formal charges against you, but she doesn’t get to pass sentence. That’s Lanoe’s job, as captain of this ship, and that’s where you’ve got a chance. He’ll shout a blue streak at you, no question. And he’ll look like he wants to shoot you on the spot. But trust me, I’ve known him a long time. You play your cards right—maybe it won’t be so bad. Listen, when you go before him. Do not try to apologize. Don’t spin him a long story about right and wrong. That’s just wasting his time. He always thinks he’s the final judge on good and bad, and believe me, you do not want to try to disagree with him at that moment. No, you stand up, chin up, and you tell him you’re ready to accept your punishment. He’ll respect that.”
Ginger nodded. She thought maybe she should write all of this down. One question nagged at her, though.
“Why are you telling me all this?” she asked. “The one time I tried to talk to you, you basically froze me out.”
“Back when we were playing freepool, you mean? Back then? Hell, kid. I had to put on a good show for the marines.”
“So you don’t … hate me?”
Lieutenant Ehta sighed. “No, kid. I don’t hate you.”
Lanoe had to know that Centrocor was about to enter the system, that they’d been discovered. Candless had left Bury and Maggs on patrol so she could take him the message herself. Radio waves and comms lasers couldn’t pass effectively through a wormhole throat, so that meant she’d had to go in person. She queued up a message about the Centrocor scout, then set a course for the wormhole in the planet’s atmosphere. The message started broadcasting the second she was through, which was good. She was too busy to send it manually—she was too busy staring at what she’d found.
She’d had no idea what to expect to find on the other side of the wormhole.
Certainly not this.
She had circled the darkened city several times, just trying to comprehend what she was seeing, before she set down in a broad plaza right next to Lanoe’s cutter. She hadn’t left the cockpit of her fighter since. She didn’t want to go out there, into the dark streets. Not when they were full of those—things.
Aliens. They were intelligent life-forms. Lanoe had called her to tell her they were friendly, though she wouldn’t be able to talk to them. He’d told her she was in no danger.
Hard to remember that when one of them came over to her fighter and ran its claws all over her fairings, her airfoils. She’d stared out through her canopy at its face that wasn’t anything like a face and wondered just what the hell Lanoe had gotten them into. He had told her that there were no more aliens, that his Blue-Blue-White had murdered them all. So who were these … creatures?
Human knuckles rapped on the flowglas of her canopy. She forced herself not to jump out of her seat in surprise. It was Valk, the artificial intelligence. Because of course this mission had already been beyond bizarre, beyond anything her centuries of life had prepared her for.
“We got your message. Lanoe wants to talk to you,” the AI said. “In the cutter.”
Which meant getting out of her fighter. Candless set her face, then tapped the key to release the flowglas of her canopy. She jumped out and landed on her feet on hard flagstones. Somehow the solidity of the ground bothered her. Perhaps because it meant that all of this was real.
“There’s gravity here,” she said to Valk. “There shouldn’t be.”
“I’ll let the authorities know you disapprove. Come on.” The AI led her over to the cutter and together they climbed through the hatch in its belly. The internal walls of the vehicle, she knew, were all capable of acting as displays, but now they were switched off. Leaving the interior of the ship a flat gray that seemed to absorb all sound. Lanoe was already inside, facing away from her. Staring at a blank wall.
“I know,” he said. He wasn’t talking to her. He didn’t seem to have noticed that she’d come onboard. “I know—you keep saying that, but … how? How do I get closer?”
Candless frowned. Who was he talking to? What on earth was going on?
She cleared her throat.
His head jerked up. A trace of guilt shone in his eyes as he looked back over his shoulder at her.
“Sir,” she said. “Are you—?”
“Just thinking things through,” he told her. “Welcome to the City of the Choir. I take it you’ve met our new allies.”
“Aliens,” she said. “There are aliens here. Very … unsettling aliens.”
“I was surprised, too,” he told her. “They’re … friendly. So far. The message they sent us was real, they actually did want to help us. So there’s that.”
“You’ve been negotiating with them, this whole time?”
“Learning about their culture, mostly. Not by choice. They expected Earth to send diplomats. Instead they got me. Neither side is particularly happy about that. And now it looks like we’re out of time. I read your message. Centrocor’s here. Just a scout so far,” he said, not looking up. “You found a scout.”
“We eliminated a scout, to be precise. When it fails to return from its patrol, our enemies will know we’re here.”
Lanoe nodded. “They were going to find us eventually. We need to respond to this, and sooner rather than later. I’m afraid a lot of that is going to fall on your shoulders. I need to stay here. Keep talking to these people. You’ll need to assume command of the cruiser. You may have to fight Centrocor without me.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said.
He nodded. Still not looking at her. “I think we should move the cruiser in here. This bubble, I mean. It’ll be safer in here.”
Candless frowned. That wouldn’t be easy. The cruiser wasn’t built for that kind of tricky maneuvering. “Perhaps—”
Lanoe cut her off. “If we leave it out there, orbiting the planet, it’ll be a sitting duck when Centrocor arrives. Especially when we have so few pilots to hold them off. You need to keep Centrocor out of my hair while I negotiate. That’s easier done with the cruiser in here. It’s a better defensive position.”
“Of course,” Candless said, picking her words carefully. “And I do agree that whatever help these aliens are offering, we can’t let Centrocor have it—at any cost,” Candless said. “We have our orders from Admiral Varma.”
Lanoe sighed. “Sure. Though I’ve already found out what they had to offer us.” He shook his head. “Bosh,” he said. “It was bosh.”
Candless fought to keep her face still.
“Bosh,” she said.
She’d never cared for the term, or for slang in general. She let it roll around on her tongue like something she could spit out.
She didn’t want to accept it.
“Bosh,” she said again. “We crossed hundreds of light-years, fought a battle, nearly died in that freezing wormhole for … nothing?”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Lanoe said. “I wanted warships. I wanted an ally. Instead, they want to help us by preserving our DNA. So they can clone us, sometime in the distant future.”
“And you told them … no?”
“It never got that far. They know I can’t make that kind of decision. Maybe Admiral Varma wants what they’re offering. I’ll leave that to her. But I don’t plan on leaving here empty-handed.”
Candless might have hoped for more in the way of an explanation, but she didn’t get it. Lanoe paused the video he was watching. Then he looked up at Valk. “Big guy. Is what I’m seeing here …?”
“Yeah,” Valk said. “It’s real.”
Lanoe nodded to himself and went back to watching the video. From what Candless could see, it showed aliens putting on an illusionist’s act. It took place in the plaza outside, with hundreds of the lobsterlike creatures gathered around a central stage. The video looked like it had been taken from the front row. “While they were showing me what they had to offer, Valk stayed b
ehind and took in a … what do they call it?”
“An apportation show,” Valk said.
“I’m glad to see you’ve at least been entertained while you were here,” Candless said, bitterness nearly overcoming her.
“Look at the chorister on the stage,” Lanoe said. “Do you see what she’s holding?”
Candless leaned in for a better view. The alien held a sort of hollow sphere about twenty-five centimeters in diameter. Its outer surface was pierced with a sort of fretwork of small holes, and light flickered inside of it. The alien twisted the sphere in various directions, and a beam of light shot out from the sphere to create a distortion in the air. The alien turned around to face a different direction and repeated the process, and a plume of water shot out of the second distortion, arcing over the alien’s head to fall back into the first distortion … and vanish.
“It’s all tricks like that,” Valk told Candless. “The performer made stuff appear out of thin air, started a fire with light out of nowhere. She put a little stone ball in a box, then made it appear in her claw without touching the box again. She even cut a chorister in half, at one point. She didn’t use a saw, though.”
“I think I know how it’s done,” Lanoe said. He finally looked up at her. “And if I’m right …”
Candless raised an eyebrow.
“There’s a chance we can get what we need out of the Choir, after all.” He sighed and stretched his arms over his head. “Though they aren’t going to like it when I ask. Not at all. They’re going to take a hell of a lot of convincing.”
“Come on, kid,” Lieutenant Ehta said. “Let’s go face the music.”
Ginger thought she understood a little better, now, why the marine was being so nice to her. Clearly she considered them to be sisters, of a kind—they’d both been through a traumatic experience that left them at odds with the Navy.
As much as she was still a little afraid of Lieutenant Ehta, she was very glad to have a friend at that moment. She was facing probably the worst dressing-down she would ever get. The end of her career. All she could hope for was that it would be quick—and that she wouldn’t be heading straight into a jail cell when they returned to civilization.
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