The carrier stood up on end, and there was no floor beneath her. Bullam screamed as she grabbed on to anything she could, barely catching a nylon handhold in time. She felt a bone in her wrist bend almost to the point of snapping as she swung by one hand. Her hatch was just half a meter away, half a meter but she couldn’t—she couldn’t reach the release, she couldn’t swing toward it, not with the way the ship was tossing back and forth so violently; if she let go of her handhold she would fall, she would fall down the corridor and smash at the far end—
“Here,” Maggs said. He stood on the wall, his boots anchored to a panel, and grabbed her with one hand. He reached over with the other and slapped the release. He got his arm under her and picked her up. Half-carried, half-tossed her inside. “Bit of a bump just then, eh? We’ll get you sorted.” He pushed her down into her tiny bunk and pulled straps across her chest and hips.
“Drones,” she said. “My drones—I need my drones.”
He looked around and must have understood what she was trying to tell him. The drones were in the air, bobbing back and forth like corks on ocean waves, trying to reach her. With him hovering over her they couldn’t get through. He stepped aside and the drones swarmed around her, one displaying a mirror so she could check her skin, one holding out a painkiller tab in a skinny manipulator. She found a spot just below her chin and waved for the one she called her little vampire. It swung back and forth alarmingly but then its needle jabbed deep into her flesh, and she let her head fall back. Let her eyes flutter closed as the painkiller spread through her pathetic veins.
“Why?” she said, as the ship lurched, as things flew around the room, toiletries and minders and odds and ends. Maggs dodged them all nimbly as he strapped himself to one wall. “Why did you help me?” she asked.
“If we’re going to be allies,” he said, “we might as well be friends.” Then he flashed her a stunning smile, all big white teeth under his fancy mustache.
“You’ll be rewarded,” she said, her thoughts clouded and out of order. Things were slipping away from her. “We’re … all … in …”
In the mirror display, another dark spot appeared, this one on her cheek. A third blossomed on the back of her left hand.
“No,” she whispered. “No … No …”
The painkiller took her away, as the ship rocked her to sleep.
Lanoe laid Bury down as gently as he could. The sick bay’s drone reached out with its jointed arms to scan the kid and pump him full of stabilizers. Ginger crouched by the side of the bed and carefully pulled his gloves off.
A green pearl spun in the corner of Lanoe’s vision. Candless calling, no doubt wanting an update. He sent back a quick text-only message letting her know they were doing what they could.
The medical drone lit up with a display of Bury’s midsection. It looked like he had half a dozen cracked ribs, and his liver had been pulverized. There was a lot of blood pooling in his abdomen. Subdisplays popped up to show that his blood pressure and blood oxygen levels were crashing. A prognosis window came up but it was full of question marks. There was only so much a medical drone could do.
If the cruiser had a real doctor, if they could have taken him to a hospital on some human planet—
“Rain-on-Stones would like to help,” Ginger said.
He looked down at her and saw her eyes weren’t focusing. The Choir was talking through her.
“She is a surgeon,” Ginger pointed out. “She performed my operation.”
Lanoe frowned. “That doesn’t mean she knows anything about trauma medicine in humans,” he said. “You really think she can do something?”
Ginger’s face went slack for a moment. “Opinions are varied. Many of us feel it’s too dangerous. Others think you don’t deserve the Choir’s help. Not after all you’ve done. Not considering what you have brought to their city. War,” Ginger said, and her head jerked back. “War—they say you’re bringing war here.”
Lanoe wished he could deny it. “Ginger,” he said, though he knew he wasn’t talking just to her. “What do you think?”
“Opinions are trending toward—”
“Damn it, Ginger—talk to me! What do you think?”
Her eyes snapped into focus. “Please,” she said. “Please let her do it.”
Lanoe nodded. The hatch of the sick bay opened and the tall chorister folded herself inside, scraping her claws together under the ultraviolet light. Lanoe grabbed Ginger’s arm—a little more roughly than he would have liked, but he was in a hurry—and pulled her out of the small room.
“We need to stay out of her way now,” he told Ginger. “Besides. I need to talk to the Choir.”
Ginger had been staring back at the hatch, at Bury in the bed, but now she turned and looked at him with an absolutely blank face. “We are listening.”
“Can you get me Water-Falling?”
“Water-Falling-from-a-Height has lost the respect of the Choir,” Ginger said. “She no longer serves as our ambassador to humans.”
“What?” Lanoe didn’t like that. While he knew consciously that the Choir were all linked, that they spoke out of consensus, he had thought he’d developed a relationship with Water-Falling. Maybe it was just a human prejudice but he’d thought he actually had a chance to get through to her. “Why not?”
“She couldn’t keep Archie alive. She failed the Choir,” Ginger said. “She is currently being shamed. Opinions vary, but most feel she was a useless fool. Some suspect her of being mentally unwell, while others—”
Lanoe shook his head. “Never mind. I’m sorry if I played a part in that. But there are pressing concerns we have to deal with right now. There are a bunch of people about to come through the portal who want to kill us. They want to kill Ginger.”
Ginger’s mouth opened in a shocked circle, but her eyes were still blank. “No,” she said. “No—please, don’t let them! We just brought her into harmony!”
“Then close the portal,” he told her/them. “Close the portal and seal off the bubble. If they can’t get in, they can’t hurt her.”
There was a long pause. Maybe the Choir was thinking how best to respond. When Ginger opened her mouth to speak again, he saw that it was her, specifically, who answered. Her eyes locked on to his and her mouth twisted in fear.
“They can’t,” she said.
“Why not? Because of some stupid idea that they have to welcome all humans? Because I guarantee you that if Centrocor comes in here, they won’t leave until they own the entire place. The Choir doesn’t understand money, so they won’t even get a good price.”
“No, Commander Lanoe, it’s … it’s not that. They can’t close the portal. They don’t have the ability to close the portal. That system is all automatic—once you open it, back on the planet, it has to run through a complete cycle. It’ll be open for another seven hundred and twenty-nine days, and then it’ll close on its own, until somebody else comes along with the key.”
Lanoe seethed. They could have told him that earlier. Instead they’d made up that bosh about welcoming humans. Another lie by omission. For all their vaunted shared consciousness and total honesty, the Choir was damnably good at withholding things.
“Sure,” he said. “Sure. Forget that. You’ve doomed us all because you built your front door without a lock. But never mind. What about my other request? The one I specifically asked you for, before you cut open Ginger’s head?”
“The wormhole,” Ginger said. It was still Ginger talking to him. “You wanted them to open a wormhole between Balor and the homeworld of the Blue-Blue-White.”
“Yes, damn you. What about that?”
“They can’t,” Ginger said, again.
“I don’t care if they’re afraid of the bloody jellyfish,” Lanoe said. “I need that wormhole! Without it none of this—none of our deaths—will mean anything!”
“They can’t,” Ginger said, again.
Lanoe gave her his best command glare, but she didn’t relent.
“For the same
reason. The technology you’re asking about—it doesn’t exist anymore. They used to build stable wormholes, yes. They built the entire network of wormholes. But that was back before the First Invasion. There have been no stable wormholes opened since then, because the technology was lost. They don’t remember how it’s done.”
“They don’t remember?”
“Please stop shouting at me. Sir. I asked, just like you told me to. I begged them. I tried everything I could think of. But it’s true. They can’t open the wormhole you want. It’s impossible.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
She’d failed them.
Candless chewed on her lip as she spun loose circles around the cruiser, keeping her velocity up as she scanned the portal. The second something came through there she would need to pounce. It was crucial she hit Centrocor’s fighters before they had a chance to get properly inside the bubble, to set up a beachhead.
She’d let them down. They’d been her students. Her charges. Now both of them …
Ginger had submitted herself to the claws of an alien surgeon, and now she was in the thrall of a race of giant lobsters. Bury was probably going to die.
Candless took her hand off the control stick for a moment. Flexed her fingers three times, making a fist then snapping it open. Then she took the stick again and nudged it forward, sending her fighter toward the portal. It had to be any second now—Centrocor would know they were flying right into an ambush, but they had no choice. If they wanted to continue this pursuit—and slaughter the entire crew of the Hoplite—they had to poke their heads inside the bubble. She checked her boards. Plenty of ammunition. Plenty of fuel. The only thing she lacked was close support.
Bury was, she well knew, an ass. A child made of anger and exuberance in equal measure, and he let both of them get the better of him. He’d come through a multiday patrol and fought like a demon, though. He might have given his life for the mission. He shouldn’t have had to. It was all her fault.
She edged closer to the portal. When the attack came, when the fighters started streaming through that aperture, she would just have to start shooting. Any second now. Any second.
Ginger was technically, legally, a coward. Candless’s fault, again. She should have been more adamant about keeping her out of a fighter’s cockpit. As XO, she should have insisted that she couldn’t fight. Instead she’d bowed to Lanoe’s insistence, and forced the girl to disgrace herself.
Any second. Any moment. Any—
Four Centrocor fighters burst through the portal all at once, Sixty-Fours flying in such close formation they looked like their airfoils were touching. They split apart the nanosecond they were through, heading off in four different directions. Candless shouted a curse and poured fire into them but she only caught one of them—a direct hit that punched through its vector field and burst it open in a bright explosion. The other three got past her. Candless turned around in a hard bank and sped after a second one, but that left two unaccounted for, and the cruiser almost defenseless.
Damn me, she thought. Damn my eyes. I’ve failed again.
Ehta stood in one of the target acquisition booths above the barrels of the coilguns and watched her people run through yet another drill. “Loading crew four, pick up the damned pace!” she shouted, but she didn’t even bother checking to see if they did or not. “Fire control teams, pay some damned attention!”
She didn’t know if she could do it.
She owed Lanoe. She owed him her life, her career. Whatever little shred of self-respect she still had. The Navy and then the Marines had treated her like a machine, like a product, and more often than not they’d found her insufficient to requirements. Lanoe had given her a chance to be part of something important. At Niraya, she’d helped him save a hundred thousand people from bloodthirsty aliens.
Now he was asking her to shoot at some other aliens. Nice other aliens. Peaceful other aliens. She understood, really. She got that being in command meant sometimes you had to employ force to meet your objectives. Hellfire, she was military down to her bones, wasn’t she? Her whole job was shooting at people.
That didn’t include mugging them. Holding them hostage until you got what you wanted. It shouldn’t include that.
When the order came—she didn’t know if she could pull the trigger.
She guessed she would just have to wing it.
“You over there—barrel greasers! Do I need to come down there and kick the devil out of you with my own two boots? Move!”
Ginger put a hand on Bury’s forehead. It was hot but dry. Her skin didn’t stick to his plastinated skin, not the way she expected it to.
Rain-on-Stones reached inside Bury’s open chest and tugged at something, and Bury’s whole body jerked. Ginger whimpered a little to see him in that state.
“I have to go,” Commander Lanoe told her. “Damn. It looks like Candless is in real trouble. I’m going—but this isn’t over. Keep a channel open so I can talk to them.”
“Yes, sir,” Ginger said.
He hurried out of the sick bay and the hatch closed behind him.
He refuses to see logic, Rain-on-Stones told her. The Choir told her. He believes we will give him what he wants, if he demands it strenuously enough.
“We told him it couldn’t be done,” Ginger said. Out loud, needlessly. She wondered if in time she would learn to just think, to not phrase everything she said so carefully. You didn’t have to watch what you said with the Choir—there was no point. You couldn’t hide anything from them.
You still want to help him.
“He’s my commanding officer. I’m supposed to follow his orders.”
It’s more than that.
she respects him
the idea is foolish
his words offended us
he has endangered the Choir
she thinks he can defeat the blue-blue-white
he rejected our offer of help
she thinks he can do it
she believes in him
he is dangerous
“Opinions vary,” Ginger said.
Rain-on-Stones laughed, inside her head.
Lanoe roared out of the vehicle bay in his BR.9, boosting to catch up to the battle that had already started out there. Candless was wheeling across the ghostlight sky, chasing fighters, but for every one of them she caught, three more came through the portal. Already debris was beginning to build up in a loose ring around the city, pieces of wrecked fighters, bodies of dead pilots. Lanoe remembered the section of carbon fiber cladding he’d dropped, back when he was trying to repair the cruiser. It had fallen with an aching slowness, but an inevitability, too—every piece of junk they generated out here would eventually land in the Choir’s city, maybe with disastrous results.
Their problem, he thought. He needed to salvage something from this catastrophic ruin of a mission. The first step was keeping his people alive, at least a little while longer.
It was not going to be an easy task. He roared through half a squad of Centrocor fighters, spraying them down with PBW fire, accomplishing nothing. Pulled up into a steep loop just as his tactical board chimed at him. One fighter had escaped Candless and was headed straight for the cruiser, a disruptor round already armed in its belly.
He rolled out of his loop and burned hard to catch the Sixty-Four before it could release its deadly payload. Brought up a virtual Aldis sight and lined up his shot—knowing he had at most three seconds before the bastard fired the disruptor. His first few shots went wide, and the next volley sparked harmlessly off the Sixty-Four’s vector field. Two seconds, and he kept firing, walking his shots up the side of the enemy ship. One second and he finally got through, his fire digging deep into a fairing.
The Sixty-Four erupted in flame, pieces of it exploding outward, a bit of spar or maybe an engine line smacking against Lanoe’s canopy. He must have set the disruptor off inside the Sixty-Four’s undercarriage.
A thought occurred to him, out of the blue. It had nothi
ng to do with Yk.64s or disruptors or anything he saw in front of him.
“Stable,” he said, out loud.
It came to him just like that. Out of the blue. “Stable,” he said again. He reached for his comms board. Then jerked his hand away.
The first of the Peltasts was coming through the portal. He could see its bulbous nose, thick with guns, appear out of nothing. It kept coming, and coming, more of it appearing as if by magic. Hellfire. He’d thought, or maybe just hoped, that the destroyers would have stayed outside.
“Candless,” he called. “We’ve got trouble. I’m loading a disruptor—I need some cover, though, if I’m going to get close enough to use it.”
“A bit tied up at the moment,” she called back. “Be there as soon as humanly possible.”
“Make it sooner,” Lanoe said. He worked his tactical board, trying to find the best approach, the trajectory that would take him into firing range the fastest while also letting him cut through the worst of the fighter screen. There were no good solutions, no easy way to—
He didn’t even see it coming.
His head rang like a bell. All around him red lights flickered and alarms chimed. His BR.9 shook and twisted and flipped over on its back. Lanoe’s vision swam as the blood drained out of his head, as his inertial sink screwed him down hard into his seat.
He could just make out, in his peripheral vision, his damage control board. Some Centrocor bastard had gotten lucky, lined up a direct hit, and blasted him with PBW rounds. His hand had come off the control stick—he reached for it—
Just as another hit blasted a hole right through his canopy.
“Lanoe!” Candless called. “Lanoe, come in—come in, you old fool!”
She couldn’t get a reply. There were three Centrocor fighters right on her tail and she couldn’t raise Lanoe. The destroyer was all the way inside the bubble now, and something else was coming through, something round and hollow and—
By the last drop of water in hell, she thought. They’re bringing the carrier in, too.
Forgotten Worlds Page 57