He stepped into one of the side passages and poked his head into the gun decks, a cavernous space in the middle of the ship dominated by the hulking masses of the sixteen coilguns. He was surprised to see how many of the enlisted were there, perched on the huge barrels, slumped against the electromagnetic firing chambers. Surprised to see that they weren’t at their stations, doing their jobs.
Caroline Ehta, his warrant officer, paced in front of them, occasionally chewing on a fingernail and spitting out the fragments. Lanoe could see she wasn’t looking any of them in the eye.
Ehta had been a pilot once, until she got a bad case of the nerves. Then she’d volunteered for the Planetary Brigade Marines because she didn’t know what else to do. The average life expectancy of a PBM in the field could be measured in weeks, but somehow she’d survived for years. Long enough to be promoted to sergeant. He’d made her a lieutenant so she could command his marines.
“I don’t know,” she said. She bit down hard on a hangnail, hard enough to draw blood. “I don’t know any of that stuff. You think they tell me everything? That’s a laugh. I don’t know where we are. I don’t know what we’re doing here. As soon as I find out, I’ll tell you guys. For now I need you to hang in there. I need you to keep working. Look, do any of you doubt I have your back?”
There were a few murmurs. No direct answers, yes or no.
“I fought with all of you on Tuonela. We went through hell back there, together.”
That, at least, garnered some assent.
“You remember what the officers there were like, right? Happy to send us out to be targets for enemy artillery, or hit with biologicals, or to just spend a week crawling through the mud looking for something that wasn’t there. And all the time they’d be back in their tents, drinking tea and polishing their boots and arguing about how many medals they should give each other.”
Some of the marines laughed. Most of them nodded.
“So when I tell you I trust Commander Lanoe, that oughta mean something. I’ve known him a long time, and he’s saved my ass more than once. You give him the benefit of the doubt now—it’ll pay off. We’ll come through this okay. You just gotta trust me. For now.”
Some of the marines nodded and got up from where they sat. They headed off into the deep recesses of the ship, presumably to get back to work. Others lingered behind to slap Ehta on the back or the shoulders, which she answered invariably with a nod.
She still wasn’t meeting their eyes.
Lanoe hung back near the axial corridor until she’d spoken with the last of them, made her final reassurances. When she was alone on the gun decks, he stepped inside and waved a hand to get her attention. She jumped when she saw him, but recovered herself quickly.
“Sir,” she said.
“I hope I can live up to that speech,” he told her.
“You … you heard that?”
“That’s right. Tell me something, Ehta. All those nice things you just said about me, all that faith you put in me—how much of that did you actually mean?”
Her eyes went wide. “ … Sir. I meant all of it.” She licked her lips. “Every word.”
She looked him right in the eye, without blinking. Clearly she wanted him to believe her.
Lanoe had lived a long time, though. More than three hundred years. After that long you learned to read people pretty well. He hadn’t missed the slight hesitation before she answered.
Candless left the sick bay and made her way back to the brig. There was supposed to be an armed guard stationed there, but the marines apparently had more important things to do. Candless supposed it didn’t matter. The brig was no longer being used as a detention center. Instead, the chorister, Rain-on-Stones, was sleeping in one of the cells. The aliens known collectively as the Choir were three meters tall, which limited the number of places where Rain-on-Stones could be quartered. The cells of the brig were just large enough.
Candless touched the display built into the door of the cell and it came to life, giving her a view of the interior. The chorister took up much of the space, an enormous monstrosity. Just seeing the alien still gave Candless the chills. They were just so inhuman … From the cylindrical head that lacked any features except a ring of silver eyes, to the four arms that radiated outward from the torso, to the many jointed legs hidden beneath the alien’s black dress, none of it made sense, none of it resonated with her idea of what an intelligent being should look like. Conceptually she could understand that Rain-on-Stones was as intelligent as herself, perhaps even more so. The chorister was a trained surgeon who had saved Bury’s life. Still, Candless could never think of anything but crabs and silverfish when she looked at it.
Not it, of course. Her. Rain-on-Stones was female. Candless had to remind herself of that constantly. The Choir were all female. The males of their species were stunted, many-legged things, no smarter or bigger than spiders. Several of them were visible even as she watched the alien. One crawled out of Rain-on-Stones’s collar and ran across her neck, then slipped between two plates of armor on the side of the chorister’s head. Others roamed across her claws, or picked their way along her dress. Rain-on-Stones was positively crawling with the things. She had dozens, perhaps hundreds of males secreted around her body, hiding anywhere they could find warmth and safety. Normally you saw only one of them at a time, if that. Now they were swarming, perhaps troubled, stirred up by their host’s uneasy sleep.
Candless’s skin crawled with revulsion.
“Lieutenant?” Ginger asked, coming up behind her. Ginger lived in the brig, too, now, never very far from the alien.
Candless turned and looked at the girl. Saw the red hair, the first thing anyone noticed about her—the thing that had given Ginger her name. Saw the soft, sad eyes, the trembling mouth. She saw the place on Ginger’s left temple where the hair had been shaved away. There was a short, mostly healed scar there.
“I’ve come to see how you are,” Candless said. “Whether you need anything.”
“We’re fine,” Ginger said. She turned to look at the display that showed Rain-on-Stones. “We will be for a while longer. Until I run out of her sedative. We have a week or two, maybe.”
Candless frowned. “And what happens then? When you do run out?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I imagine she’ll wake up screaming. Terrified, and maybe righteously pissed off. You did kidnap her, after all.”
The obscenity took Candless aback a little, but she forced herself not to show it. Naval officers were not supposed to use that word. Of course, Ginger had been relieved of duty—she was all but a civilian now. She’d proved that she was incapable of flying combat missions. Instead, she’d taken on a different role.
The scar on Ginger’s head marked where Rain-on-Stones had implanted an antenna in the girl’s brain. The Choir did not have a spoken language—instead they communicated by a form of telepathy. Ginger’s implant allowed her to speak with them, but that had turned out to mean much more than just simple communication. As the Choir saw it, Ginger was now part of their community—part of the harmony, the gestalt formed of all their thoughts and emotions.
Sometimes Ginger seemed to think they were right. Sometimes now, when Candless spoke with the girl, she seemed more alien than human.
Candless did not claim to understand it at all. She did know that Ginger had agreed to join the Choir in exchange for the unstable wormhole that had brought them here. The deal she had struck was that she would go among them and live with them for the rest of her life, as one of them. She had assumed that Lanoe would allow her and Rain-on-Stones to return to the Choir’s city before the cruiser entered the wormhole.
Lanoe had chosen not to fulfill that part of the agreement. Instead he’d brought Ginger and Rain-on-Stones along for the ride, against their will. He had not shared his reasoning with Candless. Perhaps he just couldn’t bear to part with Ginger, one of his crew. Or maybe he wanted Rain-on-Stones as a hostage, to guarantee the Choir wouldn’t collaps
e the wormhole as soon as he was inside. He’d given the Choir plenty of reason to hate him. He’d threatened their city, turned the cruiser’s guns on their only home. He’d been prepared to kill them all to get his wormhole. In the end, Ginger had reasoned with them and got Lanoe what he wanted. Nobody doubted he would have followed through on his ultimatum, though.
“When she wakes up she’ll be so alone,” Ginger said, her face heavy with grief. “She won’t know what to do. They’re surrounded by others like them from birth—they can’t imagine a world where they can’t hear each other’s thoughts all the time.” Ginger shook her head. “I can … hear her dreaming. It’s just, I don’t know. Shapes and colors and sounds that don’t make any sense. It’s terrible. She’s lost, frightened … It’s going to be much worse when she understands what’s happened to her.”
“We need to keep her healthy, and stable,” Candless pointed out. “She may be our only way to get home.” No human had the capacity to open a wormhole. Only the Choir knew how to do that. The wormhole that had brought them this far was gone now—it had been unstable, and now it had collapsed. If they were ever going to return to human worlds, Rain-on-Stones would have to open the way for them.
Ginger’s eyes flashed sideways for a moment, and her mouth opened as if she might say something. But then she closed it again and shook her head. “I’ll do what I can,” she said. “I’ll help her, any way that I can.”
“Very good,” Candless said. She sensed there was something there, something Ginger wasn’t telling her. She didn’t want to push, though. “You look tired. When was the last time you slept?”
Ginger just shrugged. She didn’t take her eyes off the display.
“I hope you’ll take care of yourself as well.”
“Of course. You need me, too. I’m the only one who can talk to her.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” Candless said. She reached for the girl’s arm, but Ginger pulled away. “Ginger—I’m here for you, if you need me.”
The girl didn’t look up.
The cruiser had taken a bad hit during an early battle with Centrocor. A disruptor round had torn through the forward section, obliterating the bridge and the officers’ quarters. Hoplite-class cruisers had a reputation for being indestructible, and this one had proved that out, but they’d been forced to make certain compromises. Now the ship was controlled not from a bridge but from a workstation built into the wall of an old wardroom—a space that had once been the marines’ dining facility.
Tannis Valk, or rather the artificial intelligence that had once believed itself to be a man named Tannis Valk, was permanently stationed there, strapped into an uncomfortable chair in front of a massive and ever-changing suite of displays. He still looked mostly human. He wore a heavy pilot’s suit with the helmet up and tuned until it was a solid, opaque black—hiding the fact that there was nothing inside, no head, no skull, no trace of the man whose memories the suit contained. He was taller than most people, well over two meters, but somehow that had always made Lanoe think he looked more human rather than less. Why would an AI need to be so big?
“You said you had new information,” Lanoe said as he came into the wardroom, with Ehta trailing behind. Candless and Paniet were already there, staring intently at one of Valk’s displays.
“There’s no shortage of that, dearie,” Paniet said. The engineer had been injured during maneuvers less than twenty-four hours before. He’d mostly recovered, though the ring of circuitry around his left eye was completely destroyed. He’d had most of it pulled out except for a few shards of metal where his eyebrow had once been. “We’ve been working our little telescopes to the bone, just trying to figure out exactly where we are. We must have logged a couple dozen terabytes of low-resolution imagery of star charts, and that’s just the start.”
“I still can’t get an exact fix on our location,” Valk said. “I don’t have an explanation for it … I’ve been looking for landmarks, the standard candles that let you find your way around the galaxy. But they aren’t showing up. At least not in the right places.”
“Maybe we’re just too close to the center of the galaxy,” Paniet offered. “Too many other stars in the way. We can’t see the forest for the trees, hmm?” Lanoe didn’t think Paniet sounded convinced that was it, though.
Maybe Valk’s malfunctioning, Lanoe thought. There was a terrifying prospect. They relied on the AI to keep the ship moving, among other things.
He put the thought aside for the moment. “There’s only one star I’m really interested in,” he said. “The red dwarf straight ahead of us.”
Valk gestured at the displays. “We’ve been scanning that pretty closely, yeah. And we’ve learned a couple of things. Not what we expected, though. You want the bad news first, or the weird news?”
Lanoe scowled. “Weird,” he said.
“I’ve checked the system from top to bottom,” Valk said, pointing at the vaguely orange dot in the center of his main display. The view zoomed in until it grew big enough to actually look spherical. “Looking for planets, or at least any sign that the Blue-Blue-White really live here.”
Lanoe nodded. In the entire galaxy, only three intelligent species were still in existence. Humanity and the Choir were equally afraid of the third—giant jellyfish who had wiped out all other life. Lanoe had forced the Choir to send him here so he could finally get some justice for all the species that hadn’t made it. He had to assume they had sent him to the right place, to the homeworld of the Blue-Blue-White.
“What did you find?” Lanoe asked.
“It’s what we didn’t find that makes it weird. No planets.”
Lanoe dropped to one knee down in front of the display, as if by physically getting closer to it he could spot what Valk had missed. “That can’t be right,” he said. “The Choir sent us here for a reason.”
Valk lifted his arms and let them fall again. “I’m just reporting what we’ve seen. There’s a lot of gas and dust in the system—way more than we’d expect, actually. Plenty of asteroids and comets, but nothing bigger than about two thousand kilometers across.”
Lanoe inhaled sharply. Earth’s moon was bigger than that. You couldn’t even build a proper colony on a rock that small—it wouldn’t support a thick atmosphere, for one thing. “The Blue-Blue-White live in the atmospheres of gas giants. We know that, right? And you’re telling me—”
“Nothing,” Valk said. “Giants are the easiest kind of planets to find. If there were any here … Well, there aren’t. I’m sorry, Lanoe. I’m not sure we’re in the right place at all. Or at least—this isn’t what we expected.”
Lanoe stood back up, his old knees creaking just a little. “You’ve missed it somehow. I’m not criticizing your skills, just—”
Paniet clucked his tongue. “We’ve had most of our sensors working on this since we arrived, Commander. Criticize us all you like, but the data doesn’t lie.”
“Hold on. Most of your sensors, you said. Not all.”
“That’s where the bad news comes in,” Valk told him.
Lanoe nodded. “Go ahead.”
Valk brought up a new display, this one showing the volume of space directly behind the cruiser. “This is a recording we captured just after we arrived in this system, a couple of hours ago,” the AI said. “I’ve magnified it to the limit of this display’s resolution so you can see … there.”
On the display, the wormhole throat they’d emerged from was just visible. A bead of glass hanging in that starry sky, a perfectly spherical distortion of spacetime. It shrank as Lanoe watched, until eventually it evaporated into nothingness.
Valk wasn’t showing him this just to remind him that they’d lost their only way home, however. There was something odd about the video. It took Lanoe a while to figure out what it was.
Just before it winked out of existence altogether, it grew darker, just for a split second. Lanoe squinted at the view. “Run that back.”
Valk set the video to play on
a loop. The quality of the image was maddening. It showed just enough detail for Lanoe to be certain there was something there. Maybe something dark had passed in front of the camera, or maybe it was a fault with the equipment. He didn’t think so, though.
No, he thought it looked like something was emerging from the throat, in the last few seconds before it collapsed.
“Something followed us,” Valk said. “Something—somebody—chased us through that wormhole.”
“By which, of course, you mean Centrocor,” Candless said.
“Sure,” Lanoe said. It was the only possibility that made sense. He had been crazy enough to fly through the wormhole without knowing where it went. Centrocor had been even crazier—following him in the hope they could make it through before the wormhole collapsed. If they’d still been inside the tunnel when it shrank down to nothing they would have been annihilated utterly.
They’d made it. Just. But they’d made it. Which meant that the Hoplite hadn’t escaped its pursuers after all.
“Damn,” Lanoe said. “This kind of distraction is the last thing we need.”
“Distraction?” Ehta said, snorting in derision. “That’s what you call a half a carrier group chasing us across ten thousand light-years? Boss, if they’re still after us, we could be sunk before we even find this mythical planet of yours.”
“Mythical?” Lanoe demanded.
Ehta lifted her hands for peace. “I just meant …”
“Perhaps you might think more, and speak less,” Candless said, glaring at her. There had never been any love lost between the two women. The XO turned to face Lanoe. “Though she does have a point, as loath as I am to admit it. If Centrocor is here, still chasing us—that’ll have to be our first priority.”
Lanoe shook his head. “Valk, how far are we from the throat? Where the throat used to be, I mean?”
“We were moving pretty fast when we arrived here, and we never slowed down,” Valk told him. “We’re about a hundred million kilometers from there.”
Forbidden Suns Page 3
