Which left Ginger all alone, with nothing to do. Lieutenant Candless had assigned her to “assist” M. Valk by sitting in the wardroom, near the control displays. She’d been told that if M. Valk suffered some kind of computer malfunction, or if—as an AI might be expected to—he acted contrary to the interest of the mission, she was to take over control of the ship and somehow keep it in one piece.
Several people had promised her it wouldn’t come to that. Including M. Valk.
“You could say I’m Valk’s ghost,” the machine told her. It had no body, of course. It was just a copy of a computer program, currently housed in the ship’s servers. It didn’t even bother generating a face on a display that she could look at. To Ginger it was just a disembodied voice. “Except you could say that he, the one down there, is the ghost of the original Tannis Valk. What do you call the ghost of a ghost? A third-generation memory?”
“No clue,” Ginger said. “How long now, before we hit atmosphere?”
“What does a ghost become when it dies? Another interesting question. I like these. Normally I’d have an answer for you in microseconds. I’m using up so much processing power, though, with just flying this crate, that thorny logic problems are nontrivial to solve. Is there a word in English for this? For a problem you kinda look forward to solving when you have the time?”
“No idea.”
“It’s like having a bad itch, a really bad one, but knowing that eventually you’ll get to scratch it. It’s kind of weirdly pleasant knowing you have almost but not quite enough brainpower to work through a problem. Delayed gratification, right? But it’s more complex than that. Wait. Hold on. I never answered your question.”
“No. Should that worry me?”
“Honestly? I’m not sure. If I were an actual computer, my refusing to obey a command would be very worrying. I think I have free will, though. So if I tell you that we’ll hit thick atmosphere in thirty-nine seconds, it’s my choice to do so.”
“Thanks,” Ginger said.
In the case of a computer malfunction, or if the AI acted in a manner contrary to the interests of the mission.
She’d been promised that wouldn’t happen.
“Are you strapped in okay?” he asked.
Ginger had made sure of that. “I’ve got a full quick-release harness on, just like we wear in the cockpits of our fighters. There are air bags built in around my seat and in an emergency a couple hundred liters of shock-absorbing foam can spray down all over my head.”
“Good. Twenty-three seconds now.”
“You don’t really sound like M. Valk,” she said.
“Your heartbeat is elevated. Are you worried about the maneuver, or about me being naughty?”
Naughty? Ginger curled her toes inside her boots. “I’m human,” she said. “We worry about everything. Especially things we can’t do anything about.”
Valk laughed. The machine laughed. It sounded exactly like a human laugh. That didn’t stop it from being creepy. “Have you ever heard of the Ship of Theseus?” he asked.
“Can’t say that I have.” She could hear—or maybe she only thought she could hear—a hissing sound, like the noise air molecules might make as they dragged along the side of the cruiser’s hull. “How long?”
“Sixteen seconds. Theseus. Ancient Greek guy, one of their big heroes. Came back to Athens after he was done with his adventures. He beached his ship on the shore there, and the people of Athens, to honor him, kind of made it into a shrine. The problem was that wood rots, and one by one, the planks that made up the ship fell apart. The Athenians loved their hero, so they replaced the planks as necessary, one by one. Eventually, every single plank in the ship got replaced. None of the wood was original. Seven seconds. Here’s the question. Was it still the ship that Theseus sailed?”
“What?” Ginger asked.
“It’s an impossible problem. Nobody can answer it. You can use problems like that to test whether an AI is capable of self-directed thought. Just making small talk. Two. One. Zero.”
“What?” Ginger asked again, feeling very stupid—especially as the cruiser chose that moment to be struck by high-altitude winds and be thrown from side to side like an umbrella in a storm.
The cruiser hit the planet’s thermosphere at a dozen times the speed of sound. The air, still thin as a promise, bunched up in front of the ship’s broken nose like a rumpled bedsheet. It couldn’t get out of the way fast enough and so it was compressed, and a compressed gas gains temperature.
Candless had a minder taped to the wall next to her where she was strapped down in the warren of engineering. A minder that showed her a live camera feed from near the front of the cruiser. She saw plumes of vapor, a roiling ball of cloud, and then the screen turned a dull orange, the air in front of them literally incandescing. A roar of angry wind and the ship turned into a fireball.
That energetic air pushed back against their forward motion, slowing the ship—air molecules are small and not very hard but there were a lot of them, a trillion little elastic collisions a second and it added up. The ship slowed, but its energy had to go somewhere. The ship shook. It rattled, it shimmied, it rang like a struck bell. A structural member in the damaged prow broke loose and went pinwheeling back along the length of the cruiser, smashing again and again into stiffened carbon fiber cladding, tearing new holes in the ship’s already-battered side. “Gundecks, position sixty-one!” she shouted, and thought she could hear marine boots pounding up the axial corridor. Marines rushing to the job, tools out as they hurried to repair the breach. On her minder she saw a notification that a weather field had already clamped into place over the hole, so they weren’t at danger of explosive decompression. A little good news anyway.
They hit the planet’s mesopause next. The air outside grew painfully, bitterly cold, not that anyone onboard could tell. Candless was sweating inside her suit. The view forward showed nothing but cherry red. Two kilometers per second, still faster than anything inside an atmosphere had a right to move.
“Vehicle bay, position four!” she shouted, because another notification had come, another crisis to be handled. Next to her Paniet was buried facefirst in an inspection panel, sparks and then a jet of grease flashing past him, his tools smashing again and again against the bulkhead, jangling, clanging, one came loose and went flying forward. As fast as they were decelerating, gravity had come back into their lives. The nose of the ship was down, straight down, the engines up in the air. All wrong.
“Position nineteen, get that hatch closed!” she called, because one of the blast shields that covered the vehicle bay had come loose, was flapping like a loose shutter in a gale, but before anyone could reach it, before anyone could secure it, the whole panel of reinforced scandium tore loose, went spinning away into the void, melting, burning, vaporizing before it even reached the engines.
One kilometer a second. Stratopause. They hit the planet’s jet stream at a bad angle. The cruiser had no wings, no airfoils of any kind—and suddenly that was a problem. A river of wind moving four hundred kilometers an hour slammed into the side of the ship and tried to knock it aside, tried to throw it into a flat spin. There was no way the ship could survive that—its own mass and velocity would tear it in half. Candless had no control over what happened next. She could only hope Valk was capable of recovering from the spin, capable of putting them right. She was thrown from side to side as he worked the maneuvering jets with a savage hand, one second pressed down hard in her seat, the next thrown forward against her straps. Paniet cried out as his legs went flying back and forth. Up the corridor she heard a marine shouting in pain, and another shouting at him to hold on. Candless closed her eyes and waited to die as the ship bucked, and shook, and rattled.
And then—a moment of pure, crystalline peace. The ship settled down and despite the occasional groan of a structural beam under strain, fell into relative silence. On her minder’s screen their airspeed dropped steadily. Point seven kilometers per second. Point six
nine. Point six eight—
Without warning the ship turned over on its side, and a million loose objects, all the things they hadn’t had time to secure, went flying through the air, a wrench shooting across the corridor to embed itself in the far wall, a box full of emergency hydration tabs tearing open, its contents bouncing and flying down the corridor like rubber balls, bursting like wet grenades. Another lurch and Candless was upside down, hanging from her straps, blood pooling in her head until she couldn’t see anything but her own heartbeat as her bright red vision pulsed, and throbbed, and—
The ship flipped over once more and she fell down in her seat, hard, her arm smashing against the wall behind her. She looked and saw Paniet seemingly doing a handstand, his gloves wrapped tight around the edge of the inspection panel. A moment before he’d been hanging from the ceiling. Now he crashed to the floor, and she heard a sharp snapping sound, saw his face go deathly pale.
Tropopause. The cruiser hit air as thick as transparent gelatin, still traveling as fast as a rifle bullet. Gravity reached up and grabbed them in one massive, crushing hand, and the ship fell out of the sky.
There was nothing to hold it up, no wings to drag it back aloft. An altimeter came up on her minder, a flashing red graph of exactly how few kilometers were left before they plowed nose-first into the soil of the world below. The positioning and maneuvering jets, all the retrorockets, the gimbaled secondary thrusters all ignited at once with a whoosh and a roar, and Candless was very, very aware of the fact that only a meter of shielding lay between her back and the fusion torus that powered the entire ship. Acceleration shoved her deep into her chair, gravity pulled her down, and the blood that had pooled in her head dropped to her legs, dropped as if it had been poured down an elevator shaft. Her vision swam and her eyelids fluttered closed.
No, she thought, no, damn you, wake up, but she could barely hear her own inner voice through the ringing in her ears, through the high, piercing tone of a brain starved of oxygen. Wake up! Wake up!
“Wake up!” Paniet shouted at her, and her eyes snapped open. Except he hadn’t—he hadn’t said anything of the kind.
Paniet lay motionless in the corridor, his face down on the rubberized floor. He was sliding away from her, slipping at a glacial pace down the corridor toward the engines, unconscious—or dead. She couldn’t tell, she couldn’t—
“Paniet!” she shouted. “Paniet!” Not even thinking, she slapped at her quick-release harness and the straps jumped away from her arms and legs. She threw herself forward, even with the ship vibrating, shaking, rattling all around her. Fell down to the floor just behind him, just as his foot slid past her hand.
Point four kilometers per second. Three hundred ninety-nine meters per second. Three hundred ninety-eight.
She lunged, lunged forward and grabbed, grabbed and wrapped her fingers around his ankle. Tried to pull him back toward her but he was still sliding, and the forces at play, the vectors dragging him away from her were too many and varied for her to know even which direction to pull. She crawled forward and got her other hand on a pocket of his suit, up near his hip. Pulled. Heaved.
Somehow she got him upright. She dumped him into her old seat, pulled the straps around him. The ring of circuitry around his left eye was cracked and his eyeball was bright red, full of blood. There was nothing she could do about that. His suit would keep him stable, keep his blood pressure up or down or wherever it needed to be, keep his temperature and pulse oxygenation at the right levels. That would have to be enough.
She could stand now, the ship was bucking no more wildly than a crazed horse, and if she kept her hands on the walls she could just walk forward, just keep her balance. She passed by a knot of marines tending one of their own with two broken legs, passed through the gundecks where she could see blue sky through a hole right through the hull, a hole with nothing but an emergency weather field over it, nothing stopping her from falling out if she wasn’t careful, if she didn’t watch her step. She hurried forward toward the wardroom, toward where Ginger sat watching Valk fly the ship.
Two hundred sixty-one meters per second. Two hundred fifty-nine. Two hundred fifty-seven.
“Will we make it?” Candless shouted.
Ginger looked back over her shoulder, her eyes wide with terror.
Valk brought up a display of the air in front of them. Had Ginger been sitting there this whole time unable to see where they were going? Candless couldn’t worry about that. The display showed white puffy clouds and a brown horizon that was almost level. Dead ahead of them a droplet of water seemed to hang in midair. It grew until it looked like the lens of a microscope. That, Candless realized, must be the wormhole throat, the portal between this universe and the one next door. It was growing with alarming speed.
One hundred meters per second. Eight-seven. Fifty-nine. Just gliding along.
The cruiser slid through the portal with plenty of room to spare on either side. Blue sky vanished, replaced by ghostlight. Ahead of them—the spiky, every-direction, multi-spired City of the Choir.
Twelve meters per second. Eight.
“Yes,” Valk said.
“I beg your pardon?” Candless demanded.
“Yes,” Valk said. “We’re going to make it.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Lanoe sat with Valk atop the highest tower in the City of the Choir—one of the lighthouses—drinking coffee from the cutter’s stores. Archie and Water-Falling stood over by a railing, watching the cruiser awkwardly maneuver its way around the city, two kilometers above them. From that distance it looked mostly like a rough oblong of pale metal, bright against the ghostlight but lacking in detail, even when every lighthouse in the city shone its beam across its sides.
Valk brought up a magnified view on his wrist display. “Looks a little worse for wear,” he said.
Lanoe studied the hologram carefully. To be honest the cruiser looked like hell, like it had just been through a battle. A trail of debris twisted and spun in its wake. He pointed at the midsection. He’d been in touch with Candless, and knew how shaky the descent had been. This was the first time he could actually see the damage to his ship, though, and it seemed much worse than she’d reported. “What happened here? Looks like a hatch is missing from the vehicle bay. And the forward section wasn’t quite that mangled before, was it?”
“I’m getting an updated report from Candless now,” Valk said. “Oh. Oh, boy.”
Lanoe sipped at his coffee. Braced himself. “Bad?”
“The structural damage? Yeah, but beyond that—looks like there were some injuries. One marine’s in traction. A bunch of the others have bad bruises and scrapes. But—Lanoe, Paniet took a bad fall.” Valk shook his head. “Sounds like he’s got a subdural hematoma, blood pooling in his brain. He’s unconscious, and they’re worried.”
Lanoe grimaced. “That’s bad. That’s really bad. I was hoping he could help me make my case with the Choir.”
Valk sat back in his chair, and though he had no face behind that black helmet, Lanoe knew the AI was staring at him.
“What?” Lanoe asked.
“Of course, you’re worried about him on a personal level. Too.”
Lanoe looked down at his coffee. Damn. Zhang would have torn into him for that kind of mistake. “Of course I am,” he said.
“Everybody else seems okay. The ship’s still in one piece,” Valk said. “If you don’t mind, I need to reintegrate with my other half.”
Lanoe raised an eyebrow.
“The copy of me that’s been flying the cruiser while I’ve been in here. I’ve got nearly a day’s worth of new information to process. It’ll take me a couple minutes to synchronize.”
“Yeah, sure, have at it,” Lanoe said. He watched Valk hunch forward and go still. Communing with his other self, Lanoe supposed, took all his processing power. He lifted his coffee cup in Archie’s direction. “What do you think?” he asked.
The look in Archie’s eyes was difficult to process. T
here was some hope there, but also a lot of fear. Of course he was smiling—he pretty much hadn’t stopped since the Choir shamed him.
“Your ship? It’s lovely,” Archie said. “Been a long time, old bean. A long time since I saw a Hoplite. The Choir is interested in meeting the rest of your crew. Do you think they can be brought down to the city, to speak with us?”
Us, Lanoe thought. Meaning the Choir. Did Archie consider himself one of them, after so many years apart from humanity? If he did, why did he want to escape them? “I’m sure that we can work something out. In the meantime, though, I want to know if the Choir will do something for me. I’d like to close the portal, now that my ship is inside.”
“Close it?” Archie asked, looking confused. “Why would you want that? It’s your only way back to normal space.”
“Sure, but they can open it again later, when I’m ready to leave. In the meantime I’d like to ensure we have some privacy.” He considered carefully how to phrase this. He hadn’t said anything to the Choir so far about Centrocor. He hadn’t told them he was being chased. If he said the wrong thing now, made the Choir think that he didn’t speak for all of humanity, it could ruin his plans. “There are some people,” he said, “who might have followed us here. People who would want to intrude on our conversation. Disrupt our negotiations. Humans aren’t as … harmonious as the Choir.”
“They know that,” Archie said, chuckling. Water-Falling chirped in unison. “They’ve heard all my stories about the Crisis. But they don’t want to play favorites. If other humans want to come here, meet the Choir, they’re inclined to allow it.”
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