Red hair.
“You can’t do this, Lanoe,” Ehta managed to say.
Lanoe nodded. “Lieutenant Candless. Do you agree with Lieutenant Ehta?”
“As painful as it may be to admit, I do, yes, fully and completely from the bottom of my shriveled old soul. However—”
Lanoe raised an eyebrow. He was still staring at Ginger. Watching her squirm. “However?” he said.
Candless sighed. “She’s an adult. And an officer. She can make her own decisions.”
“You—you—” Ehta gasped. “You bit—”
Candless turned and slapped Ehta across the cheek.
The marine could only stand there with a stunned look as her skin turned bright red.
Lanoe inhaled sharply. Though they were both lieutenants, Candless was the ranking officer between the two of them—XOs were above warrant officers in the pecking order. Back in the bad old days of the Century War, even as late as the Brushfire, when Candless was still flying patrols, corporal discipline had been pretty standard in the Navy, but over time it had come to be frowned upon. Ehta couldn’t bring Candless up on charges for striking her like that. She could destroy Candless’s reputation, however, if she chose to make a stink.
Candless didn’t seem to care one bit.
“An officer does not use that word,” Candless told her. “Not even an officer of the Planetary Brigade Marines.”
Ehta shook her head and stormed out. Lanoe had no idea where she was headed. He didn’t care.
“Okay,” he said.
“Sir?” Candless asked.
He nodded at Ginger. “Why do you want to do this?”
The girl took one long, tremulous breath. “When we were moving them, sir. Getting them into the vehicle bay. They were just so sad. They’d lost Archie. He was one of their people, right? After so many years he was one of them and they were so sad. All I wanted was to tell them it would be okay. Make them feel better. But I couldn’t, because I couldn’t talk to them.”
It wasn’t the real reason. Lanoe had known she would make something up. There were two possible reasons that she had volunteered, and neither of them was particularly satisfying. Maybe she thought this was a way to get out of the charge of cowardice against her. Or maybe she’d just succumbed to peer pressure. Felt the need for a volunteer so heavily that she’d broken, and said something she didn’t mean.
Lanoe wouldn’t have cared except for the red hair. He would have accepted her offer without a thought. The red hair made it hard.
So damned hard.
“Okay,” he said, again. Because he was Aleister Lanoe. “Okay. Let’s get started.”
Bury swung back to the established patrol orbit as fast as he could, burning through his dwindling supply of fuel. His thruster would be visible from anywhere in the system, but maybe that didn’t matter now. Maybe it mattered, a lot. He just didn’t know.
“Back so soon?” Lieutenant Maggs called. He was back in his cockpit with his canopy up, at least. Ready.
“Maggs—I need you to be serious for a second,” Bury said. He was scared. He could admit that, even to himself. “I need your experience, okay? Because I might have just seen something.”
The sarcasm drained from Lieutenant Maggs’s voice almost instantly. “Something,” he said. “Young Bury, please be more exact.”
“It was … like before. When the scout came through. Just a little flash, except—except there were two of them, and then one more a couple of seconds later.”
“Three flashes of light. You’re sure?” Maggs asked.
“Yes. No. I don’t know. I don’t know! It could have been Centrocor fighters coming through the wormhole throat. It could have been—hellfire, it could have been anything. Rocks colliding, an old comet flaring up. Who knows. But if it was Centrocor—”
“Then we need to be prepared. All right, child,” Lieutenant Maggs said. “Calm yourself. Check your sensor boards. Look at the logs for your passive spectroscopy array, hmm? Do you see any evidence of deuterium exhaust?”
Bury had taken a class in how to do that six months ago, back at Rishi. It should have been the first thing he did. The thrusters of a cataphract-class fighter were slightly inefficient, and they tended to release unfused deuterium droplets along with their other exhaust.
He drummed his fingers on his knee while he waited for the computer to run the analysis. As page after page of logs spooled past him on a display he could barely see, because his eyes didn’t seem to focus right. Graphs of spectral lines shifted and wavered before him but before the log review had even finished, he had it.
Right there. The lines appeared three times in the log, three perfect signatures. First two of them, then, a few seconds later, a third.
“Hellfire,” Bury breathed.
“I’ll take that as confirmation. All right. Centrocor is beginning their attack. We should expect about thirty fighters to come screaming down on us at any moment, and as we are the only Naval assets in the system right now, they’ll concentrate all their fire on us. Breathe, young Bury. Breathe for me.”
“Okay. Okay,” Bury said. “Okay! But we still have, what, at least a couple of minutes. We can get ready. One of us can run down to the portal and tell Lanoe that the carrier is on its way. The other one—”
“Would face certain death. I’m afraid your plan doesn’t excite me,” Lieutenant Maggs said.
“But what else can we do? Lanoe has to know, and—”
“Lanoe dragged you out here to die. You see that now, don’t you?”
Bury stared at his comms board, even though the connection was voice only. “What?” he asked. “Maggs, what are you—”
“You’ve been getting angry at me this whole time. That’s all right, I have a thick skin. But right now, I would like to direct your anger in a different direction. I would like you to spend some of that amazing wrath of yours on a man who left the two of us out here to die while he sat sipping tea with aliens. A man who refused us even the slightest possibility of relief when we begged for it. A man who has shown neither of us the slightest scrap of respect.”
“He’s our commanding officer,” Bury pointed out.
“By fiat only. He ripped you away from your studies. He kidnapped me. Neither of us asked for this posting.”
Bury’s head spun. What Maggs was suggesting was nothing short of desertion. Admittedly, Bury was afraid to die. He knew he was a decent pilot, but up against thirty fighters his skill and talent would mean nothing. It would take a miracle for him to survive until reinforcements could arrive from the cruiser.
He’d also assumed that he would be the one to go tell Lanoe what was happening, while Maggs worked desperately to hold off the Centrocor advance.
He could feel his heart jumping in his chest. Felt sweat breaking out on his palms. “Maggs. You’re saying you want to run away,” Bury said. “I can see one big problem with that plan. Where would you go? The only wormhole out of here leads right past Centrocor’s main force.”
“Run away?” Maggs asked. “Dear boy, I never said anything about running away.”
“Oh.” Bury was confused. “But—then—”
“I’m simply going to switch sides. Turn my coat, as the old saying goes.”
They had been talking over a communications laser, a medium that prevented anyone from eavesdropping on what they said. Bury’s comms board showed that Lieutenant Maggs had opened a second band of communication, this time broadcasting an unencrypted signal over the general radio circuit. He was basically shouting for everyone in the system to hear him.
“Centrocor vehicles, please do not shoot,” the scoundrel called. “My name is Auster Maggs and my Centrocor Employee Number is TK-777423-Y7. I would very much like to speak to your commanding officer. I have information on Naval forces in this system that I’d love to share with them.”
Bury couldn’t speak. Couldn’t act.
He simply couldn’t believe it.
The choristers had all bee
n rounded up in the vehicle bay, and then left alone. When Lanoe opened the hatch he wasn’t sure what he would find.
The noise hit him first. A little like the rising and falling, oceanic sound of cicadas in a field. A little like desperate, horrified bird cries. A lot like nothing any human being had ever heard before.
The smell wasn’t great, either.
The aliens had gathered in the center of the space, clumped together for comfort, perhaps. They had their arms around each other and some had their heads bowed low, while others scratched and scraped at the armor plates around their eyes.
He could spend a lifetime trying to understand them, their gestures, their bizarre customs. He didn’t have a lifetime to spare. “You got them down here,” he told Ginger. “How do you get their attention?”
“It’s not so hard. You just have to be nice,” she told him. She walked over to the nearest chorister and reached up for one of its free claws. Stroked the carapace with her bare hands. The chorister didn’t turn around—of course, they didn’t need to, they could see in every direction at once. But it tilted its big cylindrical head toward her. She smiled up at it. Maybe they understood human facial expressions, Lanoe thought. They’d had plenty of time to study Archie.
“We want to talk to you,” Ginger told the alien, though she must have known the chorister couldn’t understand her. “We want to try to help. Please, can you help us?”
The chorister reached out a claw to touch her cheek. Lanoe was surprised at how human the gesture looked. Was it possible to communicate with just hands? Maybe, given enough time, they could have established some kind of sign language.
He came as close as he dared to the knot of aliens and raised one hand. Waved at them until he thought some of them were looking at him, then jabbed his finger in Ginger’s direction. “Her,” he said. “She wants the operation.”
The choristers just stared at him with their blank, silver eyes.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “They’ll understand when we show them. Go ahead, sir. I’m ready for this.” Then she reached up and pushed her hair away from the side of her head. The chirping didn’t change pitch, didn’t get louder, but a new chemical stink filled the air.
Lanoe lifted his minder and projected an image of the antenna onto the side of Ginger’s head. The image they’d pulled from the postmortem scan of Archie’s brain. It looked like Ginger had frosted the roots of her red hair.
He bit the inside of his cheek. Waited for something to happen. Nothing did. The choristers milled around, chirping at each other. Ginger stood there with her hair up. None of them even seemed to be looking at the projected image. Maybe it wasn’t going to be enough. Maybe the image didn’t mean anything to them—perhaps they’d never done a scan of Archie’s head after they changed him. Maybe they were just too lost in their grief to get it.
“Please,” Ginger said. “I want this.”
The chorister who had stroked her cheek wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. Leaned forward until its long head rested on top of hers. It looked like the alien was crushing her.
“This isn’t—” Lanoe began, but then a green pearl started spinning in the corner of his vision. Candless. He swiped his eyes across the pearl to accept the incoming message.
“An aircar just left the city,” the XO told him. “It’s coming this way. Just one chorister onboard, but it’s carrying a couple of boxes.”
“Medical equipment?” Lanoe asked.
“Perhaps, sir, you would be kind enough to look at this imagery and teach me exactly what alien medical equipment looks like. I’m afraid I never learned myself.”
“Understood,” Lanoe said.
He looked over at Ginger. Her cheek was crushed against the chorister’s lace collar. She had her eyes closed and she was speaking to it, in soft, low tones.
“Shh,” she said. “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”
“Maggs—what the hell have you done?” Bury demanded.
The reply took a while to come. Maybe Maggs was savoring the dramatic tension of the moment. Maybe he was too busy being a traitor to spare a word for his squaddie.
“I’ve saved my own life,” Maggs told him. “Now. Let’s talk about yours.”
“Damn you, Maggs, I’m not interested in—”
“I should think you would be,” the traitor said, talking over him. “The math wasn’t hard to work out. There are about fifty fighters in the vehicle bay of a fully stocked carrier. Given that your paramour Ginger has lost her bottle and can’t fight, Lanoe can count on—well, how many pilots? Himself, of course. Candless and Valk, certainly. Then there’s the two of us. If you’ve been following along you’ll notice that the odds are against us, ten to one.”
“We’re better than them,” Bury said, shaking off the fear. “We fought them once, and they couldn’t break us. We can do it again.”
“Heroes, all of us, certainly. But the funny thing about heroes is—they die just as fast as cowards. They just take down others with them.”
“Be sarcastic if you want. We still have a chance. You’ll see.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way, Bury.” Maggs sighed, long and deep.
On Bury’s tactical board, he saw the dot that represented Maggs’s fighter swinging toward him. Not as if he was in a hurry. Just closing the distance on a low-energy trajectory.
“I know it’s hard sometimes to tell if I’m being serious. I promise you, the next thing I say is absolutely sincere. I like you.”
Bury wanted to spit. “Shut up, you damned traitor. And don’t think you’re getting away with this! I’ll make sure you—”
“I like you,” Maggs said again. “You have spirit. So many Navy men I meet are just … dead inside. They have no personality, no drive. But there’s something inside you, some dark core of anger and hurt pride, and it makes you interesting.”
“Wow, thanks,” Bury said.
“Oh, you’re quite welcome. Now. I’m going to give you a choice. You can come join me. Sign on with Centrocor, and save your own skin. I’ll vouch for you—and I happen to know that Centrocor is always looking for talented pilots, especially those that have some Navy training. The pay is good and there are plenty of fringe benefits. The Navy will try to charge you with desertion, yes. But Centrocor has some very good lawyers on their payroll.”
Bury grabbed his control stick and squeezed it until his glove squeaked.
“Or?” he said.
“Or?” Maggs parroted.
“Or what? If I say no, what happens then?”
“Are you going to make me say it? I’ll have to kill you, of course. Right now, right here. As a sign of good faith to my new employers.”
Bury touched his stick and veered away from Maggs, working his engine board to plan out a five-second burn that would put thousands of kilometers between them.
“Ah,” Maggs said. “I see you trying to get away. You must have forgotten. My fighter is carrying the Philoctetes package. Long-range sniping capability, remember? You can run, Bury, but you’ll never get out of my range in time. Why not just say yes, instead?”
The aircar slid silently into the vehicle bay and came to rest on the deck plates. The sole chorister aboard stepped down and approached Lanoe and Ginger. The rest of them, the repair crew that had been howling since Archie’s death, clambered aboard the vehicle and took off, without so much as a chirp of goodbye.
Lanoe was hard-pressed to regret losing them. Maybe they could have continued the repairs, given the cruiser back a little more of its structural integrity, but their wailing and their stink had made it almost impossible for him to command his people.
He supposed he could worry about the ship’s damage later. Right now he had some alien brain surgery to supervise.
The chorister placed one claw against her chest. Lanoe realized for the first time that she wasn’t screaming, nor did she smell of anything in particular. Archie’s madness might have infected the enti
re Choir, but this one at least seemed to have pulled herself together.
She made a sound, a kind of sound he’d never heard before from one of them. A quiet pattering noise, very soft, very gentle.
“I wish we knew what she was trying to say,” Lanoe said.
“I think that’s her name,” Ginger told him. She placed a hand on her own chest. “Ginger,” she said.
The chorister didn’t respond.
“She must be a trained doctor,” Lanoe said. “She seems—professional.”
“I hope so,” Ginger told him. “Commander. I. I just …” She chewed on her lower lip and turned away from him.
Damn. She was scared. Well, of course she was. He just didn’t know what to do. How did you console somebody in a situation like this? Lanoe wasn’t much for emotional stuff on his best days.
The chorister held two carved stone boxes, octagonal in shape. With one of her free hands she touched Ginger on the shoulder, then the chin. Ginger seemed to understand what the alien was trying to tell her, and pulled back her hair while turning her head so the surgeon could take a look.
Then she reached up and took the claw in her hands, then tilted her head to indicate the hatch that led into the rest of the ship. The chorister followed her like a dog on a leash. Lanoe came up behind them, keeping a little distance.
It wasn’t too long a walk to the sick bay. Paniet had vacated it for their use, and someone had cleaned the place up, putting out fresh sheets on the bed, laying out a whole suite of surgical tools. As they stepped inside, the chorister ducking her head, the ultraviolet sterilization system came to life. The chorister started as the lasers swept over her, but then she lifted all four hands and scraped her claws together in front of the beam as it tracked back and forth.
“At least they know about germs,” Ginger said.
“You’re going to be fine,” Lanoe said.
Ginger looked up at him. “Please don’t say that again.”
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