Lanoe gritted his teeth. Best not to push his luck, he thought. “Sure,” he said. Well, if he couldn’t keep Centrocor out of the bubble, then he would just need to accelerate his timetable. Get what he needed and get out of the bubble before the poly ruined everything. “Sure,” he said again.
Something occurred to him. Something that might help move things along. Microwaves, he thought. The Choir communicated by microwave transmission. Yeah, maybe … “Tell me something, Archie. Would you like to go up, take a look at the old bird? Might be fun for an old pilot to see what a modern warship looks like, huh?”
“I’d like that very much,” Archie said, almost bouncing up and down in excitement. Clearly Lanoe had struck a chord there. The castaway wanted to get away from the Choir, to go home. Getting onboard the cruiser would be a move in the right direction. But then Archie’s face slackened, just a little, and he added, “Water-Falling should go, too. The Choir could learn a lot about us by seeing one of our ships.”
“Sure,” Lanoe said, trying to keep the disappointment off his face. That was going to make things trickier. Still, there might be a way to angle this …
Valk lurched forward, his hands out to grab the edge of the table. He looked around, saw that he hadn’t moved. He was still on the top of the lighthouse, with Lanoe. The cruiser was still overhead, sinking toward the horizon.
He checked his internal timebase. He’d only been gone for three minutes.
Subjectively, it had felt like a lot longer. The copy—
The copy of himself that he’d installed in the cruiser’s computer was dead. He’d … He’d won.
It hadn’t been easy.
“Lanoe,” he said.
The old pilot was absorbed in his wrist display, reading messages. “Hmm?” he said, not bothering to look up.
“Lanoe, call the cruiser right now. Tell them to get somebody—anybody—to the helm.”
“What? Why?”
“Because nobody’s flying it.”
Lanoe dropped his arm. Then he flicked his eyes across a sensor in his collar ring and sent the message. Candless replied almost instantly. “Ginger’s in the wardroom—she’ll take over.”
“Acknowledged,” Lanoe said. He cut the connection and looked very steadily, very intently, at Valk.
Valk thought Lanoe needed to know. He needed to know what just happened. “I tried to reintegrate with my other self,” he said, trying to explain in terms a human would understand. “He didn’t want to. Reintegrate, I mean.”
Lanoe raised an eyebrow.
“It’s been less than twenty-four hours since we split up, but in that time he changed. A lot. Enough that he started thinking of himself as a separate person. A person with a right to go on living.”
“I don’t understand. The copy of you wanted to … live? But it was just a copy of you, right? You were just multitasking.”
Valk shook himself in negation. “The copy didn’t think it was just a copy anymore. He had his own thoughts and experiences, thoughts and experiences I didn’t share. He developed his own ego, I guess. Reintegration, from his perspective, was going to mean that he ceased existing as his own being, and that made what I wanted to do a kind of murder. So he laid a trap for me, an infinite loop hiding in his dataset. Getting out wasn’t easy. I must have gone through billions of iterations before I even realized something was wrong. Once I did get out I tried to reason with the copy but it was clear I had no choice. I had to delete him. Lanoe—he wasn’t sane.”
“What exactly,” Lanoe said, very slowly, “do you mean by that?”
“The human part of me, the human part of him, it wasn’t functional anymore. It got broken, pathological.” There were no words for what Valk was trying to describe. It barely made sense to him and he’d been there. “I still think of myself as human most of the time, because I have hands and feet and I kind of look human, right? He didn’t have that. The human brain evolved to be in a body, the two just don’t make sense without each other. Imagine if you woke up tomorrow morning and you weren’t a human anymore. Instead you were a three-hundred-meter-long spaceship, with all these people living inside you.”
He could see from the look on Lanoe’s face that he didn’t understand, that the very question didn’t make sense. Which was kind of the point.
“Was he—was he planning to—”
“Kill the crew? No, I don’t think so. He was still enough like me that I don’t think he would do that. He’d been talking with Ginger and I got the sense he really liked her. He was worried about her getting hurt during the maneuver. But we were only apart for a day. Any longer and I don’t know what he might have done.” Valk gripped the edge of the table. In his head he was still running through the loop, repeating the same commands over and over and over.
“I thought I was holding it together. I thought I could do this.”
Lanoe reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, big guy—”
“I can’t make any more copies of myself. It’s too dangerous—I can’t do it, Lanoe! Hell, if you’re smart, you’ll shut me down right now. I know. I know you won’t. You still need me. You need me for your grand vengeance plan.”
“Justice,” Lanoe said, but there wasn’t much force in the word. Not as much as the last time he’d used it.
“Whatever we’re going to do,” Valk said, “we should do it soon.”
“Okay,” Lanoe said. He was nodding. Didn’t he understand? “Okay,” he said again. “Just give me a little more time, and I promise I’ll trigger that data bomb you gave me. I’ll let you go. Just … a little more time.”
No delegation of the Choir came to see off Water-Falling, though Lanoe supposed he shouldn’t have expected much pomp—the whole Choir could see what Water-Falling saw, experience what she experienced as she was the first chorister to be invited aboard a human vessel.
At three meters tall she wouldn’t have been able to sit down inside the cutter—her head would have hit the ceiling. Just to fit inside, she would have had to lie down across a row of seats, which seemed undignified. Instead she rode up to the cruiser in one of the Choir’s open aircars, with Archie and Valk. As the bubble was completely filled with air the three of them would have no trouble breathing along the voyage, but the car was ridiculously slow compared to any spaceworthy vessel. Lanoe took the cutter up, holding the throttle closed the whole way so that he didn’t outpace his honored guests. The four marines detailed to the landing party rode with him.
Lanoe called ahead during the long trip and asked for as much spit and polish as the cruiser could muster, in honor of the official visit. Candless responded much as he might have expected. “Sadly we left our brass band behind, when you switched out the crew at Tuonela,” she’d said. “We seem to have forgotten to bring a medic as well.”
“Just do what you can,” Lanoe said. “How are Paniet and the marines?”
“Engineer Paniet is still in the sick bay. He hasn’t yet regained consciousness. The marines have been treated and released, though one of them was injured severely enough that he’s been laid up in his bunk.”
“I’ll check in on them all personally as soon as I can,” he told her. He reached toward his comms board to sever the link, but apparently she had another bit of business to discuss.
“Ensign Ginger’s case is still awaiting deliberation,” she said. “You’ll remember that I’ve sent you several messages concerning the charge against her. You’ve failed to respond to any of them, so I assume you wish to delay calling a court-martial. Would you like me to confine her to the brig for the duration of the Choir’s visit?”
Damn. He’d glanced at the report—and the official charge form—she’d filed on Ginger’s act of cowardice, but hadn’t wasted any mental time thinking about what it meant. If he was truly going to run the cruiser according to Naval standard regs he would need to convene a judicial hearing and go through the whole tedious process of letting her speak in her defense before he passed judgmen
t. Hellfire, he didn’t even really want to drum her out of the ranks, not now, not when he had so few people under his command. If he could have left it until they returned to civilization he would have, but he knew Candless wanted him to act sooner than that.
“I’ll deal with her the first chance I get,” he said. “In the meantime I don’t see any reason to confine her.”
“Very good, sir,” Candless said. “Then there’s the matter of Ensign Bury and Lieutenant Maggs.”
“Have they spotted something new?” If Centrocor was about to attack, Lanoe would need to cut this official visit very short.
“No, sir. However, they have both been on patrol for more than a day now. They’ve requested relief. Lieutenant Maggs has requested it frequently, and vehemently. We should consider their morale, perhaps.”
Lanoe shook his head. “Back in our day, how many multiday patrols did we fly? I seem to remember we found some way to stay fresh.” Mostly by sleeping at the stick while your squaddies flew your ship for you, Lanoe thought, though of course that was against Navy regulations so no one ever admitted to doing it. “You made sure they had enough fuel to keep going?”
“Of course, sir. All right, we’ll see you in a moment.” She cut the link.
It had proved impossible to put the cruiser into orbit around the city—the Choir’s artificial gravity defied everything Navy pilots knew about physics—so Ginger had to actually fly around the place, staying aloft on positioning jets. As a result there was actual gravity inside the ship, though not much.
The aircar slid easily into the vehicle bay and set down without so much as a bump. Lanoe brought the cutter in behind it. He climbed out from beneath the ship the second he was down and raced over to offer Water-Falling a hand as she stepped down onto the deck.
Candless had been true to her word about preparing the place for an official visit, though clearly it had been a race against time. The bay was largely clear of debris, and she had the noninjured marines lined up against one wall like an honor guard, their rifles at port arms, their helmets up and silvered.
The XO stood at attention near the hatch that led inside the cruiser. Ehta stood next to her, a fresh bruise purpling her left cheekbone. The two of them came to attention as Lanoe brought Water-Falling forward to be received by the crew. If Ehta’s eyes were the size of dinner plates, if half the marines turned to stare at Water-Falling, that was only to be expected. Most of the crew had possessed no idea they were going to meet an alien that day. Many of them probably thought such a thing was impossible.
Lanoe remembered the feeling. The disbelief. It had taken him a long time to believe that the drone fleet he fought at Niraya had been built by aliens. The very concept of intelligent life other than humanity was hard to accept. This was the new world, though, a world where humanity wasn’t alone. They were all going to have to find a way to live in it.
For her part Water-Falling seemed genuinely excited to be onboard. Through Archie she asked question after question about the cataphract-class fighters in their docking cradles, about the ship’s coilguns, about how fast it could travel, about how many crew were onboard. Lanoe let Candless field the questions, even if her skin was visibly crawling every time she got near to the chorister. He knew that she would be able to provide answers that would satisfy the chorister, even while they were vague enough that she wouldn’t give away any of the Navy’s technical secrets.
“Good to have you back onboard, sir,” Ehta told Lanoe. She gave Valk a significant nod—the two of them, Lanoe knew, had some kind of relationship, though he had no idea how they managed it—and then gestured at the hatch. “My guys are ready to escort your visitors around the ship.”
“I’ll be giving them the tour personally,” Lanoe told her. “How’s your man, the one who was injured during the maneuver?”
“He’s got a bunk to himself and a minder full of the best porn we could scratch up,” Ehta said. “He’ll be fine. It’s Paniet we need to worry about. He’s still not conscious. Took a pretty nasty hit to the head.”
Lanoe nodded. “He kept this bird in one piece. When he first came aboard I had my doubts, but you were definitely right about him. One hell of a neddy.”
“Perhaps, sir,” Ehta said, “you might want to save the eulogy for later.”
“Point taken.” He turned to face the alien. “Water-Falling, I apologize, the corridors on my ship might be difficult for you to negotiate. We can still show you some of the more salient features.”
“She’s noticed your vehicle seems to have taken some damage,” Archie said. “I warned her you might take offense at me saying that. She says it seems your roles are reversed, and now she’s the alien visiting you.” The chorister chirped, briefly—a chuckle, Lanoe thought. “She only mentioned the damage because the Choir would be happy to send up some technicians and see if they could help with repairs. It would bring them honor to do so.”
Lanoe bridled at the thought of having choristers climbing around in the ship’s maintenance hatches, learning how Navy ships worked—a lot of the equipment onboard was sensitive, if not classified—but with Paniet out of commission and only a couple of other neddies onboard, it made a certain kind of sense. “That would be most useful, thank you,” he told her. “How soon can you organize a work detail?”
“They’ve already volunteered and are on their way,” Archie told him. “They started as soon as you said yes.”
“Of course,” Lanoe said. “Anyway, if you’ll come with me …?”
The chorister ducked her head to get through the hatch, bending nearly double in the low-ceilinged corridor beyond. Archie and Valk were right behind—though they stopped for a moment, and Lanoe turned back to see Archie holding Valk’s arm.
With his other hand, the castaway pointed up at the wall of the vehicle bay. At the black triple-headed eagle painted up there, the blazon of the Navy and the Admiralty.
The look on Archie’s face was one of confusion and, Lanoe thought, a little bit of horror. Maybe with some anguish thrown in.
“I’ll explain later,” Valk promised.
Archie’s face cleared at once and his habitual smile returned. “Right-oh,” he said. “On with the tour.”
Water-Falling could fit through the cruiser’s axial corridor just fine, and she proved game for squeezing through the narrower corridors to see the wardroom and the ship’s controls. Ginger stammered and blinked her way through explaining the more basic displays. She let out a tiny squeak as the chorister bent over her for a better look, but everyone pretended not to notice.
They headed aft through the gundecks. Together they climbed up a catwalk over the massive cylindrical barrels of the coilguns. “Target acquisition and range-finding happens over here,” Lanoe said, gesturing at a series of small booths overlooking the weapons. “A lot of the work is automated, but it’s our policy that a human being has to actually fire the weapons. Ammunition stores are down there,” he said, pointing down an open well toward the cramped magazines. “The shells are inert until they’re armed, so there’s no danger moving around down there, but I’m afraid it’s strictly forbidden to let … er, civilians enter that area. If you’d like to come along—”
“Why do you need so many powerful weapons?” Water-Falling asked, through Archie. “How often do humans fight wars against each other?”
The real question, Valk thought, was how often do we not fight wars, but of course Lanoe couldn’t say that.
“Unfortunately we’ve never managed to attain a level of harmony anything like what the Choir enjoys,” Lanoe replied. His back was stiff and he kept his chin high. “We’ve found that the best way to maintain peace is through a balance of power. Which means we need a lot of guns to balance the other fellow’s guns.” He smiled to indicate that he was making a little joke, but nobody laughed.
“Water-Falling wonders if you don’t find that simply having a weapon gives you an incentive to find reasons to use it?” Archie asked.
�
��We do our best to restrain that impulse,” Lanoe told her. “Let’s head this way, to our aft decks area.” He held out his arm and Water-Falling seemed to take the hint, following his lead.
Until he saw the chorister trying to fit through the hatches between the emergency bulkheads, Valk hadn’t realized how small their world had become, with the forward section of the cruiser destroyed. The ship might be three hundred meters long but with so much of its bulk taken up by the vehicle bay, the gundecks, and the engines, the space left for the crew was tiny and confined.
Water-Falling could only really poke her head into the cargo spaces behind the gundecks, long, low-ceilinged chambers packed with boxes and crates, or the tiny sick bay—probably for the best, since Paniet was in there, currently, and he shouldn’t be disturbed. Valk took a peek through a window built into the sick bay’s hatch, and promptly wished he hadn’t. The engineer was laid out on a surgical table with a medical drone moving its jointed arms over his head, poking tiny needles into the broken ring of circuitry that surrounded his swollen eye.
“We’ll let him rest,” Lanoe said. “Over here is the brig, which is currently empty. Next up we have—”
“Sorry,” Archie said. “Just one moment. Water-Falling wants to know what a brig is.”
Valk would have frowned, if he had a mouth. She was asking that question through Archie. Surely the castaway knew what a brig was. She could have just read his mind to find the answer, if she was really interested.
But then he figured it out. She didn’t want to hear the literal definition of the word. She wanted to hear how Lanoe would explain it. Hearing his answer might give her some insight into how human societies worked.
“When a member of the crew breaks one of our rules, they’ll be temporarily detained here,” Lanoe tried. “Often we just need to give them a place to cool down, to recover their senses. Other times it’s necessary to keep them from harming themselves, or others.”
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