Archie nodded and reached for a squeeze tube full of water. His eyes kept darting around the room, as if he were looking for choristers hiding in the corners.
“You can still hear them, can’t you?” Valk asked.
“Not as much as before,” Archie said. “Not as much as I have for the last seventeen years. But they’re there. I don’t mind saying they’re angry with you all. Positively livid. And they’re shaming me rather hard for my part in this debacle.”
“They’re—angry with all of us, for taking you away from them,” Valk asked, “or just with Lanoe for offending Water-Falling?”
“It’s the Choir,” Archie said. “They’re extraordinarily good at outrage. They can be angry about multiple things simultaneously without breaking a sweat.”
Valk wished he still had a face, so he could smile.
“Can we get back to the point now, please? Pass that hot sauce.”
Valk grabbed the packet of fluorescent red goo and handed it over. Archie squeezed it into a tube full of deconstituted pasta and then dribbled the resulting orange stuff across his tongue.
“I used to dream about this day. The day I was rescued,” he said to Valk. “Though I assumed the Circle of Electors would send a diplomatic mission. Not a military ship.”
“The Circle of Electors,” Valk repeated. The governing body of the old Establishment. Archie’s—and Valk’s—old bosses.
“Right,” he said. “Listen, Archie. I know you don’t want to hear this, but the Establishment—”
“No.” Archie shook his head. “No. Don’t say it.”
But Valk had no choice. “The Establishment lost the war,” he said.
Archie lifted his hands and put them over his eyes. He sat there breathing heavily for a moment. Then he pulled his hands away and put them carefully, palms down, on the table. He sniffed, hard, just once, and then he nodded.
“They said it was inevitable that we would win. That justice was on our side, and so we were sure to win. At Tiamat they told us it was just a matter of time. It was just a couple more months, if we could hold out. No.”
“They told us a lot of things,” Valk said. In the last year of the Establishment Crisis the brass had worked the propaganda machine hard. They’d censored anyone who raised a doubt as to the Establishment’s ultimate success, and they’d generated all kinds of stories about how effective Establishment troops and ships were. False stories. Valk should know—that kind of bosh was the whole point of his existence. The whole reason he had been created out of the memories of the dead pilot Tannis Valk. “The truth is, they never had a chance. The Circle were willing to die for an ideal, and take all of us with them. Tiamat was a last gasp. Archie, the polys won.”
“No,” the castaway said. In a tiny, pathetic voice. “This whole time. This whole time I’ve been thinking, if I could just get home …”
“I’m sorry,” Valk said.
“Okay,” Archie said, his head slumping forward. “Okay.” As if he were accepting Valk’s apology. As if that was what mattered. “Home,” he said again. It came out in a higher octave than Valk thought he’d probably intended.
Valk knew what waited for Archie, back in human space. He knew what the transition was like, for an officer on the losing side of history.
Home didn’t mean what it used to, not for people like the two of them. Nothing meant what it used to.
It still had to be better than living as a puppet of the Choir, though. Right? Valk wished he felt more certain.
“Listen,” he said, “how would you like to sleep in a real bed tonight? A bunk anyway.”
Archie’s eyes lit up, just a little. “The Choir all sleep standing up. They have all those benches, but I don’t think there’s a single pillow anywhere in their city. That would be … That would be nice.” He looked away. “Nice,” he said again.
Chapter Thirty
Through the window in the hatch of sick bay, Lanoe watched as Paniet brushed away the arms of the medical drone that was trying to work on his face. He’d received a notice that the engineer was conscious, but it looked like he was actually alert, too. Lanoe opened the hatch and stepped inside. A low-power ultraviolet laser swept over him, killing all the germs on his face and his suit. He kept his eyes closed until it was finished. When he’d been younger, they’d always told you to do that. These days it wasn’t necessary, but he’d never lost the habit.
“I’m not that grisly to look upon, am I?” Paniet asked.
Lanoe grinned. The sterilization system chimed to tell him it was done and he opened his eyes. “You’re back with us,” he said. “Best news I’ve had so far today.”
The engineer sat up a bit. He was still deathly pale and the ring of circuitry around his eye was half-gone, only a few shards of copper and brass still embedded in his skin. Apparently when he fell he’d landed right on the implant and part of it had been driven into his brain, causing the buildup of fluid that had left him in a coma. Removing the broken circuitry had been enough to relieve the pressure.
“I can imagine,” Paniet said. “Valk’s already been in, and he told me everything that’s been going on. Incredible. An alien city, hidden away in the walls of space.” Paniet shook his head—then seemed to immediately regret it, as his face soured with pain. “I wish I could get out of here to go down and see it. So many questions I could ask them—how they keep the air in the bubble, for one.”
Lanoe frowned. “What do you mean?”
“The air molecules ought to annihilate as they rub against the ghostlight. But they don’t, do they? If they did we’d all be cooked in a ball of antiplasma right now. Then there’s the question of how they generate artificial gravity. Humans have been trying to work that one out for centuries, with not a glimmering of success. Oh, Commander. There’s so much we could learn from them. Too bad you’ve annoyed them so.”
“Diplomacy doesn’t come naturally to me,” Lanoe admitted.
“Indeed. You’ve made a real hash of things, haven’t you?”
Lanoe grimaced, but he didn’t immediately upbraid the engineer. There was an old tradition in the Navy that wounded personnel were allowed to speak their minds, even to their commanding officers—within reason. “Do you hear that sound?” Lanoe asked. Together they stood silent for a moment. Just at the edge of hearing Lanoe could hear the whine of a saw and the roar of a welding torch. “The Choir are fixing your ship for you, since you couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed.”
“I’m surprised you trust them that much,” Paniet said. “To let them work on your ship, even with my neddies supervising.”
“I worried about that. But the Choir have never given us any reason not to trust them, no matter what our differences might be. I don’t think they’re capable of subterfuge. And the fact they’re still here is a gesture,” Lanoe said. “It lets them demonstrate that they haven’t quite given up on us. As long as they’re working on the ship, that means there’s the possibility of further negotiations.”
“That, or they just want to help us leave as soon as possible,” Paniet pointed out. “Listen, ducks, if anyone should be worried about aliens working on this ship, it should be me. But I’ll let it pass, if you’ll humor me a little.”
“You have something on your mind?”
“I want to talk to you about Valk.”
Lanoe frowned. “I came down here to see how you were feeling. Not to get your opinion on how to handle my crew,” he said.
“So oft in life, what we want and what we need are such very different things. Commander, you’ve gone to some trouble to surround yourself with trustworthy advisors. The least you could do is actually listen to them.”
Lanoe sighed, but he sat down on the edge of Paniet’s bed. Crossed his legs. Folded his hands on his knee. Waited patiently.
“Our friendly artificial intelligence has come to a bit of a crossroads.”
“Valk’s fine,” Lanoe insisted.
“He didn’t sound that way when I spok
e to him. I warned you about this, didn’t I? I did. I told you he was at risk of losing his humanity—and that we could all be in danger if he did. When he was in here earlier he was near inconsolable. He told you about the fight he had with his lesser half, yes? Did he make it clear to you just how close he came to losing that battle?”
“He won it. He deleted the copy,” Lanoe said.
“And now he doesn’t trust himself to fly anymore. It was just too convenient, for us all. He could do so many impressive things, things us poor frail humans couldn’t manage. But every time you had him be in two places at once, or write code with no hands, or do your sums for you so you didn’t have to, you were sending him a message. That he was a better AI than he’d ever been a human.”
“I never said anything like that.”
“No, you just implied it. I’m giving you an engineer’s perspective here. We see things others don’t.” He reached up to touch the wreckage of the circuitry around his eye. “Ow.”
“You’re telling me Valk will turn on us, if we’re not careful.”
“Maybe, love,” Paniet said. “Maybe. I think it’s more likely he’ll just freeze up. Get lost in his own programming so he can’t find his way out. Or decide he needs to calculate pi to the last decimal place, and everything else can wait.” Paniet gave a little shrug. “Honestly? I have no idea what’s going to happen. But I’m afraid to find out. Think about it from his perspective. For years—for an entire lifetime—he was a human being. Then one day he found out everything he knew was a lie. What would happen to a human being who went through a shift like that?”
“It would be a lot to handle, sure,” Lanoe said.
“It would drive one of us to a psychotic break,” Paniet insisted. “You have to take him seriously, Lanoe. For all of our sakes. If you keep leaning on him, demanding he act like a computer, ignoring his human needs—”
“I appreciate your input,” Lanoe said, cutting the engineer off, “though perhaps you should confine your interests to the maintenance and needs of the ship.” The Navy’s traditions had their limits. He closed the hatch behind him, cutting off Paniet’s voice. He had better things to do than to listen to any more.
“You’ve been very lucky so far,” Lieutenant Candless said. “How likely do you suppose it is that that condition will last?”
The Lieutenant had come to relieve Ginger at her post at the helm. As much as she hated to see the look on her old instructor’s face, she was glad to be done with her shift. Keeping the cruiser in a stable position relative to the City of the Choir had not been a particularly tough duty—mostly she had just had to keep an eye on things as the ship drifted inside the bubble of wormspace, making sure it was never in danger of brushing against the bubble’s walls. In the entire time since she’d taken control, Ginger had had to make only three tiny corrections, burning a maneuvering jet for a fraction of a second each time.
She wasn’t entirely sure why she’d had to do it at all. The copy of M. Valk had been doing it just fine. Then out of nowhere she’d been told to take over. That had been twelve hours ago.
“Apparently Commander Lanoe feels you are of more use to us at liberty than you would be confined to the brig,” Lieutenant Candless told her as she slid into the pilot’s seat and adjusted her displays. “Shorthanded as we are, I suppose I concur. Please do not go too far, or touch anything you don’t need to. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ginger said. “If it’s all right with you I’ll just head to my bunk.”
“I believe I just said you were under your own recognizance,” Lieutenant Candless told her.
Ginger felt the older woman’s eyes boring holes in her back as she walked forward, through the wardroom and toward the bunks. She knew she probably deserved to be snubbed like that, but she couldn’t stand it. All she wanted to do was get away from Lieutenant Candless, get away from everybody. Curl up in a ball and try to sleep.
Unfortunately something was in the corridor, blocking the way to her bunk. Someone, she forced herself to think. It was a person, even if it wasn’t human. A chorister stood there in the main corridor, tapping its claws against the bulkheads. One of the repair crew, Ginger thought. They were all over the cruiser, fixing everything they could get their claws on. Trying to help.
Ginger had been terrified the first time she saw one of the aliens. She felt ashamed now when she thought of how she’d reacted. They were huge, and they looked like they could cut you to pieces with those big claws, and they had too many legs—that was probably the hardest part, somehow. Or maybe it was the fact they barely had faces. Tiny eyes in a ring around their heads, so they could see behind them. Just everything about them was inhuman. Wrong. How could a thing like that be intelligent?
Yet as she’d seen them moving around the ship, her distaste had faded and she’d become fascinated with them. Especially when she heard more about their culture and their society. They were always together, always talking to each other. For an extrovert like Ginger, who needed people around her to feel good, there was something incredibly attractive about the idea of being able to hear everyone’s thoughts all the time.
It would mean never being alone. Never. That was sort of Ginger’s idea of paradise.
The chorister in front of her tapped the wall again. Then it bent its head forward, toward her. It made a chirping noise and stamped its feet.
“Are you—trying to tell me something?” Ginger asked. She frowned. They couldn’t talk. The chirping sounds they made could convey a little information, but to really communicate they had to speak through that poor man—his name was Archie, she remembered. The one with the antenna in his head. “I’m sorry, do you want me to get Archie for you? I don’t understand.”
The chorister smacked the bulkhead so hard it rang. It chirped wildly—a series of trills and cries that hurt Ginger’s ears. It hit the bulkhead over and over.
No, Ginger saw now it wasn’t just a bulkhead. It was the hatch of one of the bunks. She stepped closer, thinking maybe the chorister needed her help getting inside. To perform a repair, maybe. “There’s a key, here,” she said, pointing out the release that would open the hatch. “You have to—”
She stopped because she’d noticed something about the hatch. It was leaking.
Red liquid was dripping down the side of the hatch, from a place where its seal had cracked, perhaps during the big maneuver. Ginger tried to think what that liquid could be. Some kind of hydraulic fluid, or—
A big red drop hit the floor and splashed. Ginger’s brain seemed to turn itself inside out. Of course she recognized that liquid. It was blood.
“Lieutenant Candless!” she cried out. “Call somebody, somebody who—” Ginger ran her fingers through her hair. She couldn’t think, couldn’t—there weren’t any doctors on the ship, nobody who could—“Just get somebody over here! I think someone’s hurt!”
Then she reached up and hit the release. The bunk’s hatch slid open and blood poured out into the hall, so much blood, so much blood, and Ginger—Ginger couldn’t look, she didn’t want to look, she absolutely knew she shouldn’t look, but she looked, and—
Archie lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling of the bunk. He had torn off his own cryptab. Folded it over and over until it snapped, leaving a sharp edge. Then he had cut through both of his own wrists, sliced himself open nearly to the bone.
People ran past Ginger, and someone shoved her out of the way. All over the ship she could hear the choristers chirping, chirping madly, screaming out musical notes of discord and assonance and wails of grief.
So much noise. So many people running around, shouting, trying to make themselves understood.
The choristers on the ship, the repair crew, were beside themselves. Frantic birdsong filled the air. The humans onboard were little better. A group of marines had been called up to lift Archie’s body and carry it aft, back toward the sick bay. Except there was only one surgical bed in there, and Paniet was still using it
. Someone else pointed out Archie was far past needing the ship’s medical drone. There had been tense discussions about what to do, desperate people shouting out for somebody, somebody to make a decision. No one could think, not with the noise. The damned chirping.
No way to get the choristers to calm down. No way to console them, or even to just tell them to shut up. Candless had eventually taken charge—this was definitely a job for an XO—and had them take the body to the brig. No one was using it, and there was enough room to lay Archie out, to make him look comfortable. For some reason that was important. That he look comfortable.
Lanoe had walked away from it. That wasn’t his usual style. He wasn’t usually under this much pressure. He didn’t usually lose.
He’d walked away and looked for someplace quiet where he could think. No such place had presented itself. The captain’s quarters were long gone, destroyed along with the front section of the cruiser. The wardroom where they all ate was full of people wanting to talk, wanting to know what was happening, or who was responsible, or what they were going to do next.
So Lanoe had gone to the vehicle bay—full of choristers who had been working on repairing the missing hatch, but now they were tools down, crying in grief. He’d stepped up to the weather field, to the very edge, and then he had adjusted the adhesive pad on his boots and walked out onto the hull. Walked until he couldn’t hear anything, anymore.
Except—he still could. Out on the skin of the cruiser, out in the air that filled the bubble of wormspace, he could still hear the Choir. He looked down and saw their city. The lighthouses were all ablaze, spotlights swinging back and forth across the stone streets. Aircars wobbled crazily, twisting through the air over deserted plazas. From this height he couldn’t see individual choristers. He thought, though, that he could still hear them screaming.
Mental illness, Archie had said, was the one thing the Choir’s carefully constructed society couldn’t handle. They couldn’t live with disordered thoughts cluttering up their perfect, sacred, bloody harmony. He’d thought them callous, thought they just weren’t compassionate enough to learn to live with their own sick and confused. Now, he thought, he saw it. He still didn’t like it, but he understood.
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