The huge ship emerged a part at a time, looking like it was manifesting itself into the universe out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Fresh fighters were already launching from its massive vehicle bay as she stared in horror.
If Lanoe was dead—if she was alone out here—
There was no time for thinking such thoughts. She had to keep the fighters away from the cruiser. Bury and Ginger were on the Hoplite. One good disruptor shot was all it would take to kill them both.
She twisted around to face an oncoming Sixty-Four, her guns already firing. Her airfoils shook so much she thought they might snap off, but she handled the turn and stitched a line of shots across the Sixty-Four’s thrusters, sending it spiraling away. PBW fire blasted by her, some of it dancing off her vector field, and she accelerated into a corkscrew to shake her attackers.
“Lanoe,” she called. “Lanoe!”
People were shouting all around him, saying things he couldn’t understand. Lanoe’s head felt hollowed out, empty. He lifted his hand and reached for something, but forgot what he was trying to do before his fingers got there.
“Lanoe,” Zhang said.
He tried to shake his head to clear it. Tried to blink his eyes. They wouldn’t open.
“Lanoe, you need to wake up,” she said.
“I—I’m trying,” he told her. “Am I dead? Are we together again?” It made as much sense as anything else.
“You can’t die here,” she said. “You have to find them.”
“I don’t understand. Who—who are you talking about?”
“The Blue-Blue-White. They killed me, Lanoe. You have to find them.”
“I know,” he said, trying to think. The wind kept whistling through his head. “I know—I need to find a way to—to get justice for you, for—”
“No,” Zhang said.
He was so confused, and the wind was getting louder, roaring through him now.
“No?”
“Not justice,” Zhang told him.
His eyes were about to open. He was going to wake up and he would lose her again, she would be taken away from him all over again—
“What?” he asked.
“Not justice,” she repeated. “You need to find the Blue-Blue-White. And then you need to kill them all.”
“What?” he thought. The wind was howling, roaring in his ears. Zhang would never—she wouldn’t have wanted—
He opened his eyes.
—and saw the top of a Choir lighthouse flash past him, spinning in space. Saw other buildings, their dark stone towers, saw an empty plaza, all rolling, random images tumbling through his distorted vision, just hallucinations perhaps, or—
No. Hell, no—he was tumbling, falling, only a hundred meters above the Choir’s city. Instantly he snapped back to full consciousness and saw that he was falling out of the sky.
His canopy was shattered, its rough edges rippling as the flowglas tried desperately to resume its prior shape. There wasn’t enough of it left to actually cover him. He’d taken a hit straight through the canopy—that was why his head was ringing. It had nearly been blown off. For the moment, at least, it was still attached to his neck. He’d taken another shot, he remembered, another hit, but where? He didn’t have time to check his damage control board, he was falling, locked into a bad spin, headed downward faster and faster, and the city was getting closer and closer—
His hand lurched forward and grabbed his stick. He pulled back and his BR.9 whined, groaned, did absolutely nothing that could be considered flight.
“Damn you,” he said. “Damn you,” as he wrestled with the stick, as he worked his engine board, checking his thrusters, cursing at the red lights there, shifting power to his secondaries—when that didn’t work he shunted energy over to his positioning jets, his maneuvering jets, and somehow, somehow, got a little thrust, just a little.
He yanked back on the stick, pulled back until the muscles in his arms protested. Fought the air, fought gravity, fought death—
Aleister Lanoe had won every war he ever fought. He wasn’t going to lose this one. He pulled out of the spin and fired every jet and thruster he had left and missed colliding with an octagonal stone office tower by a matter of centimeters.
Burned to regain altitude.
The carrier emerged complete from the wormhole and a line of positioning jets on its side flared to life as it moved out of the way so the second Peltast could join the party. Candless could only stare in horror at all that firepower, all that doom. She almost let a Sixty-Four creep up on her. Almost—at the last moment she banked away and its shots went wide. She looped around and smashed open its thrusters with her own cannon, left it drifting, helpless.
“Lanoe!” she shouted.
“I’m alive,” he called back.
“Oh, thank the devil for that,” she said. “What’s your condition?”
“Took a couple bad hits. My thrusters are wrecked. I’m airborne but I’m not going to get close enough to that Peltast to launch a disruptor. We need to switch places—I’ll cover the cruiser.”
“We can’t do this, Lanoe,” she said, while strafing a pair of Centrocor fighters at extreme range. Four more were banking around to charge her. “We’re damned good pilots, but we’re not this good. If you’re going to think of some miraculous solution, now is precisely the time.”
“I’ve got something—maybe,” he said. “Don’t stop shooting just yet.”
“Understood,” she said.
Though she could barely see the point, she launched herself forward, shaking off the Sixty-Fours that were crowding around her. Tapped at her weapons board to load a disruptor. Twisted to the side as one of the destroyers fired a flak cannon at her, the shell exploding in midair, producing a cloud of white smoke and fizzing submunitions that would burn right through her armor if she got too close. The big ship’s missile rack pivoted to track her and its heavy PBW cannon swiveled back and forth, looking for targets. She was the only target they were likely to find.
Marjoram Candless had seen war. She’d seen her share of battles, fought like hell around a dozen planets. In the end she’d chosen to be a teacher instead. A flight instructor. Just so she didn’t have to do things like this anymore.
She still remembered how it was done, though. She roared in outrage and kicked in her secondary thrusters, throwing herself forward, right into the line of fire. It didn’t matter how many hits she took, didn’t matter whether she burned alive, she was going to fire her disruptor.
Sixty-Fours swung up all around her, whole squadrons of them. Fast little carrier scouts flitted like dragonflies in her wake, lining up shots.
Damn, she thought. Damn. They’ll knock me out of the sky before I can get close enough. Damn damn damn—there was no way she could punch through that screen.
She did not veer, or swerve, or so much as jink out of the way as guns erupted all around her, as explosions blossomed above her, below her, to every side, as—
—as Sixty-Fours and carrier scouts alike erupted in flames, came apart in pieces, lurched off on bad trajectories as their airfoils were shot off.
“Keep going,” someone said. “I’ve got your back.”
Valk. That was Valk’s voice.
“Valk?” she called.
“Better late than never, I guess. Keep going!”
Candless spared a split second to check her tactical board. There were eight blue dots on her screen—eight friendlies back there, twisting and darting like gnats, maneuvering faster than any human pilot could, racking up kills left and right.
Eight of them.
In front of her, the destroyer loomed enormous and cruel and impregnable—but suddenly there was a hole right in the middle of its screen of fighters. There was a hole there big enough for her to fly through.
Valk had figured out his mistake.
When he’d copied himself into the Hoplite’s computer, he’d had to prune his databases and processes, because the ship couldn’t hold all of him at once. H
e’d cut out every program in his directory that related to moving his hands and feet, that covered eating and drinking. All things the copy wouldn’t need to do. He’d also left out every subroutine that would allow the copy to feel pain.
He’d thought he was showing mercy, at the time. Having lived with phantom body syndrome for so long, having experienced so much pain himself, he’d thought he would spare his copy that torment. As a result, when it came time to resynchronize, the copy had fought him tooth and nail. It didn’t want to go back into a body that felt pain. It wanted to continue to live its paradisiacal existence.
The copies he’d made of himself now, the copies in the eight fighters that he’d sent as backup for Candless, felt nothing but pain. To them, death would be a blissful release.
He was in constant contact with them, updating their databases with information from the cruiser’s sensors, monitoring their thoughts to make sure they didn’t turn on him. He had no choice but to feel their agony. It made his bones hurt, even though he had no bones. It made his muscles ache, his teeth feel like they were rotting in his head.
But they were getting results. Because they had no fear and were more than happy to throw themselves at the enemy, they could take risks no human pilot would ever stomach. Because they had no weak flesh, they could pull maneuvers that would turn a human pilot into red jelly.
Because they longed to die, they had no trouble bringing death to Centrocor’s pilots. He had to force them to keep themselves alive, in fact—to prevent them from simply hurling themselves at the enemy in one quick suicidal charge.
He lay back in his seat in the wardroom, his arms hanging down loose at his sides. He could feel the lips he didn’t have shaking, feel his nonexistent eyes rattling in their sockets as his copies took hit after hit, as thrusters and fairings and fundamental systems inside their fighters were smashed and burnt and sliced apart by PBW cannon, as they absorbed shrapnel from flak explosions, as they caught fire, as parts of them exploded, as they were bathed in lethal heat and radiation.
And then one of them … vanished. There was no cry of exultation, nor a last desperate scream. It simply disappeared, and one-eighth of Valk’s sympathetic pain was gone. He shuddered with relief—
—and pushed the seven others to even crazier, more reckless acts of daring.
On Lanoe’s tactical board, a yellow dot blinked out. One of Valk’s ghost fighters streaked past his broken canopy, waggling its airfoils. The AI had freed Lanoe up, given him a second to speak to Ginger.
Something had broken loose in his head. Just as Zhang had come to him when he stood before the statues of the Twelve, when he hadn’t known how to open the portal. She’d come to him again and this time reminded him of one word, one word he’d forgotten in the rush of battle.
Stable.
“Stable,” he said.
“Commander? We don’t understand what you mean.”
“You said that the Choir had lost the ability to make stable wormholes, that they’d lost that technology in the First Invasion. But I know they can still make some wormholes—unstable wormholes. Wormholes that last only a short while.”
Ginger was silent for a moment, perhaps busy conferring with the Choir. It took far too long. Lanoe had to twist away from an incoming flak round that burst and spattered the side of the cruiser with glowing, ultrahot shards of metal. Some of them lodged in the Hoplite’s carbon fiber cladding and smoldered there, slowly burning their way through.
Lanoe gritted his teeth. If Ginger didn’t answer soon—
“They understand,” she said. “You are correct.”
A blazing comet of heavy PBW fire lanced past Lanoe’s BR.9 and struck the cruiser amidships, somewhere in the gundecks. The entire Hoplite rocked back and forth under the impact and a green pearl started rotating in the corner of Lanoe’s vision. A message from Ehta, no doubt warning him the cruiser couldn’t take much more of this. He ignored it.
“Then they can open an unstable wormhole for us. One big enough we can fly the cruiser through it. Ginger—we need to get out of here. We can’t beat Centrocor, not with those destroyers in here. Tell them! Tell them to open a wormhole so we can get out of here!”
Another long pause, as a missile grazed the cruiser’s engines, the shock wave from the explosion throwing Lanoe’s ship into a flat spin. He twisted out of it before he could collide with the cruiser. “Ginger!” he shouted. “Ginger, we’re dying out here!”
Seconds ticked by. Didn’t she understand? Didn’t she realize that every one of them was doomed if she didn’t convince them?
“They don’t trust you,” Ginger said, finally.
“What?”
“You’ve bullied and manipulated them since you got here. Rejected the help they offered and demanded impossible things. You’ve—”
“You,” he told her, “have twenty seconds to convince them to open a wormhole.” He muted her channel and flicked his eyes to acknowledge Ehta’s call.
“Boss,” the marine said, “if we keep taking damage like this, we’re not gonna have a deck to stand on and we’ll all have to flap our arms real hard. You want us to abandon ship, you just say so—in the meantime—”
“Do you have a firing solution on the Choir’s city?” Lanoe asked her.
“I do, but—”
“Stand by to fire,” he told her.
It might be a terrible cliché, but time did, in fact, slow down to a crawl. Candless could look around her and see clouds of flak exploding in slow motion, like flowers blooming. She could see PBW rounds stretching past her like brilliant pearls on a string. All around her Centrocor fighters were moving to fill the gap in their formation, to close the hole.
She ignored it all. Tapped virtual keys to lock in the target for her disruptor round. Rolled over on her side to avoid a missile that was burning right toward her. Checked her tactical board and saw that Valk had only five of his fighters left, but that they were tying up whole swaths of Centrocor’s forces, twisting and darting in incredible loops and spins, their PBW cannon blazing away constantly, seemingly at random, yet they kept hitting home, kept tearing the enemy to pieces.
Ahead of her, dead ahead, lay the destroyers, flying so closely together they might have been tethered one to another. They looked almost furry, so covered in the barrels of guns she could barely make out their actual hull plates.
She tapped one final key and her virtual keyboard winked out of existence. In the belly of her BR.9 a panel slid back and the disruptor’s cannon extended. A lucky shot from a carrier scout went right through one of her airfoils, and her fighter twisted over on its side, but it didn’t matter. She was through, she was ready.
The destroyers were moving, the nose of the one right in front of her lifting, turning to the left. Its pilot must know she was there, know what she was about to do. They were trying to turn away from her shot, to present their least vulnerable side toward her. The big ship moved with a glacial slowness, but she could sense the pilot’s desperation. The other destroyer had to compensate for the maneuver, turning in the opposite direction to avoid a collision.
In her peripheral vision Candless could see fighters on every side of her. She reached for the trigger built into her control stick.
At the last possible moment, she shoved the stick over to the side, just a hair, and her fighter banked right across the nose of the destroyer. Suddenly she was looking at the carrier instead, the enormous round curve of its flank.
She pulled the trigger. She felt like someone had kicked the bottom of her seat as the disruptor jumped away from her fighter—headed straight for the carrier.
She’d pulled this trick to make sure the carrier had no time to turn, to evade. The carrier was so big that one disruptor couldn’t cripple it, but as it slammed into the hull and dug its way through, still exploding, she couldn’t help but laugh.
They would remember her. She was almost certainly going to die in the next few seconds, but the bastards would never be able to
forget her.
More practically, if less emotionally cathartic, the crew of the carrier was going to have a very bad few seconds, and then a lot of damage control to carry out. The destroyers would have to recover from their hasty maneuvers, a delicate process for ships that big. They would be unable to focus on the battle—for a moment.
She’d bought her people a few seconds. She just hoped to hell that Lanoe could make that time count.
“Please,” Ginger said. “You have to help us. You have to do as Commander Lanoe asked.”
The interests of the Choir no longer include appeasing Aleister Lanoe, Rain-on-Stones told her.
he has no right to ask
he mocks our great work
he brought destruction here
he does not speak for all humans
maybe this centrocor will listen to us
why should we give him anything
he is going to threaten us next
he is no friend of the choir
he is a known liar
Ginger grabbed at her hair with both hands. She accidentally hit her new surgical scar with the ball of her thumb and the stinging pain echoed out through the Choir—she could feel them all recoil from the sensation.
“You care about me. Maybe you hate Lanoe, or—or—” No, it wasn’t hatred, the Choir wasn’t rejecting Lanoe’s request out of spite or anger. They wanted to shame him. To correct him. She shook her head. “He’s not one of you! You can’t make him harmonize. Don’t you understand? Humans and Choir are different species, they—”
You are one of us. Archie was one of us.
Right now opinions are trending toward refusing him. Many would lash out at him, if they could. Some feel we should turn our back on him, that he is a lost cause. A very few—
Yes! Ginger could hear the voices, almost drowned out in the flow of information that swept through her head every second, but yes—there, and there, and there—a few choristers actually wanted to give Lanoe what he’d asked for. Just a handful, but she could pick up their thoughts. Rebroadcast them, boost the signal. Because she was new, because she was still learning to harmonize, Ginger’s thoughts were … louder, given more weight, considered more carefully. By picking up thoughts that other choristers had already added to the consensus, she could highlight them. Make them stand out.
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