Chapter Twenty-Eight

Ginger arrived back in the vehicle bay of the cruiser and powered down her fighter. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. She reached up to her collar ring and brought her helmet down. Gasped for air. She was seeing spots.

There was no one in the vehicle bay. She hadn’t expected that. She’d thought that the marines would be waiting to arrest her as soon as she got in. She’d prepared herself for that—accepted it was better than being out there in the dark even one moment more.

Instead—it looked almost like they’d forgotten about her. Or maybe everyone was just too busy to worry about her future just then.

She opened her canopy and kicked out of the cockpit, moved to a railing by the hatch leading out of the bay. Wondered what in hell she was going to do next.

Shaking, wanting very much to scream, wanting very much to curl up in a ball and just stop existing altogether, she headed toward her bunk. She stopped when she reached the wardroom and saw Lieutenant Ehta floating there. Of all the people to run into … “So what was it?” the marine asked.

“I’m … sorry?”

Lieutenant Ehta frowned at her. “The bogey. The contact. Candless called to tell us that you lot were out on a snipe hunt. Did you find something?”

“Centrocor,” Ginger said, nodding. “They’re here.”

“Damn,” Lieutenant Ehta said. Then she went back to what she was doing, which appeared to be getting something to eat.

“They’ve come for us,” Ginger said. “How can you just …” She shook her head. “Don’t you understand? They’re going to try to kill us again.”

“Yeah, all right,” Lieutenant Ehta said. “Not in the next hour, though?”

“I … don’t know. I guess not,” Ginger said.

“Well, I’m hungry now.” Lieutenant Ehta turned around and went back to her meal, clearly done with the conversation. Ginger swallowed thickly. The woman didn’t like her, she thought, or maybe she just didn’t like pilots. Maybe it was just the old rivalry between flyers and ground-pounders, maybe … maybe it didn’t matter.

She had to talk, though. She needed so desperately to talk to somebody.

“I messed up,” she said. “I did something really bad.”

Lieutenant Ehta sighed, but didn’t look up. “Kid,” she said, “I don’t know if—”

Ginger shook her head. She needed to get this out. She needed to talk, to be spoken to. Until she could get her heart to stop pounding so fast. “I broke formation. I—I saw him. The scout pilot, and I knew I was supposed to shoot him, and I couldn’t do it. Oh, hellfire, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

“You ran away from a patrol,” Lieutenant Ehta said, very carefully.

Ginger nodded. Bit her lip.

“You know that’s pretty much the Navy’s number one rule? Don’t run away. They taught you that, yeah?”

“Yes,” Ginger said.

Lieutenant Ehta held her gaze for a long couple of seconds. Then she went back to the controls of the food dispenser. “Here,” she said. “We’d better talk about this.”

She handed Ginger a squeeze tube of water. It tasted sour and Ginger barely managed to swallow the liquid.

“What’s in this?” she asked.

“Electrolytes,” Lieutenant Ehta responded. “You had a panic attack. When that happens your body thinks you’re actually dying. It pulls all the blood sugar out of your head and dumps it into your muscles, so you can run away faster. Useful if you’re being chased by a tiger, but it gives you a nasty hangover. That stuff won’t calm you down, but it’ll keep you from feeling like you got beaten up, later. How do your legs feel?”

“Weak. Shaky. I’m glad I’m in microgravity because I don’t think I could stand up right now.”

Lieutenant Ehta nodded sagely.

“How do you know all this?” Ginger asked.

“I’ve been there.” The older woman sighed and strapped herself into a chair. Clearly she thought this was going to be a long conversation. “I used to be a pilot, you know that? Yeah. I got the wind up. Bad case of nerves. These days, if I even get onboard a spaceship, I start to feel it. That weird sensation like your guts have been scooped out, like you’re hollow inside. The way, you know, when your head …” She placed her hands around her temples, her thumbs over her eyebrows. “Like there’s a string around your head and it keeps getting tighter and tighter. Nausea, darting eyes. Yeah, I can see in your face, you get it. Look, kid, human brains aren’t designed for what you do. Flying a fighter, I mean. You’re not supposed to be able to focus on two things at the same time, the scales and the velocities are all wrong, so much bigger than we can handle—”

“That’s not the problem, for me,” Ginger said.

Lieutenant Ehta gave her a sour look, and Ginger squirmed inside. She hated to think she’d offended the woman. “I don’t mean—I just—”

“So tell me what you did mean.”

Ginger nodded. “I’m not even supposed to be here.”

The Lieutenant didn’t say anything. She just watched Ginger’s face, as if she could read something there.

Ginger looked away. “I’m not … I was never supposed to be a pilot. I got washed out of the pilot program—before we came here. I was so ashamed when Lieutenant Candless told me that. That I was never going to be … damn it. You want to know the truth? I was relieved.”

Lieutenant Ehta nodded.

“I never wanted to be a pilot. Not even when I was a child. But they never gave me a choice. No one ever gave me a choice. Back there, when I saw the Centrocor ship … I just gave up. I gave up pretending.”

Lieutenant Ehta put her hands on the table and pushed backward, shoving herself deeper into her chair. “Okay,” she said.

“How is that okay?”

“It’s who you are.” The older woman shrugged. “You figured out your limits. Okay, so don’t do this job anymore. I’m not a therapist, kid. I don’t know what you were hoping I would say. I can’t help you change who you are. So let’s not even try that. We should focus, instead, on what comes next.”

“Oh,” Ginger said. “Hellfire.” She hadn’t really thought about that too much. She’d actively tried to not think about it.

“Yeah. They’re going to hit you with a charge of cowardice. You know that, right?”

“I thought—it might be desertion, instead.”

Ehta snorted. “Oh, no, you lucked out there! If you were back in the real world, right, if you were in the middle of an actual hell-bent-for-leather war, sure, it’d be desertion, and the penalty for that is the firing squad. But on this mission—well, nothing’s cut and dried out here. Nothing’s simple.”

“Cowardice,” Ginger said. “That’s … still pretty bad. They’ll stick me in the brig for years, and then discharge me with dishonor.”

Lieutenant Ehta shrugged. “Maybe they’ll be lenient.”

Ginger shook her head. “I don’t know. Lieutenant Candless …”

“Yeah, she’s one tough nut to crack. She’ll bring the formal charges against you, but she doesn’t get to pass sentence. That’s Lanoe’s job, as captain of this ship, and that’s where you’ve got a chance. He’ll shout a blue streak at you, no question. And he’ll look like he wants to shoot you on the spot. But trust me, I’ve known him a long time. You play your cards right—maybe it won’t be so bad. Listen, when you go before him. Do not try to apologize. Don’t spin him a long story about right and wrong. That’s just wasting his time. He always thinks he’s the final judge on good and bad, and believe me, you do not want to try to disagree with him at that moment. No, you stand up, chin up, and you tell him you’re ready to accept your punishment. He’ll respect that.”

Ginger nodded. She thought maybe she should write all of this down. One question nagged at her, though.

“Why are you telling me all this?” she asked. “The one time I tried to talk to you, you basically froze me out.”

“Back when we were playing freepool, you mean? Back then? Hell, kid. I had to put on a good show for the marines.”

“So you don’t … hate me?”

Lieutenant Ehta sighed. “No, kid. I don’t hate you.”

Lanoe had to know that Centrocor was about to enter the system, that they’d been discovered. Candless had left Bury and Maggs on patrol so she could take him the message herself. Radio waves and comms lasers couldn’t pass effectively through a wormhole throat, so that meant she’d had to go in person. She queued up a message about the Centrocor scout, then set a course for the wormhole in the planet’s atmosphere. The message started broadcasting the second she was through, which was good. She was too busy to send it manually—she was too busy staring at what she’d found.

She’d had no idea what to expect to find on the other side of the wormhole.

Certainly not this.

She had circled the darkened city several times, just trying to comprehend what she was seeing, before she set down in a broad plaza right next to Lanoe’s cutter. She hadn’t left the cockpit of her fighter since. She didn’t want to go out there, into the dark streets. Not when they were full of those—things.

Aliens. They were intelligent life-forms. Lanoe had called her to tell her they were friendly, though she wouldn’t be able to talk to them. He’d told her she was in no danger.

Hard to remember that when one of them came over to her fighter and ran its claws all over her fairings, her airfoils. She’d stared out through her canopy at its face that wasn’t anything like a face and wondered just what the hell Lanoe had gotten them into. He had told her that there were no more aliens, that his Blue-Blue-White had murdered them all. So who were these … creatures?

Human knuckles rapped on the flowglas of her canopy. She forced herself not to jump out of her seat in surprise. It was Valk, the artificial intelligence. Because of course this mission had already been beyond bizarre, beyond anything her centuries of life had prepared her for.

“We got your message. Lanoe wants to talk to you,” the AI said. “In the cutter.”

Which meant getting out of her fighter. Candless set her face, then tapped the key to release the flowglas of her canopy. She jumped out and landed on her feet on hard flagstones. Somehow the solidity of the ground bothered her. Perhaps because it meant that all of this was real.

“There’s gravity here,” she said to Valk. “There shouldn’t be.”

“I’ll let the authorities know you disapprove. Come on.” The AI led her over to the cutter and together they climbed through the hatch in its belly. The internal walls of the vehicle, she knew, were all capable of acting as displays, but now they were switched off. Leaving the interior of the ship a flat gray that seemed to absorb all sound. Lanoe was already inside, facing away from her. Staring at a blank wall.

“I know,” he said. He wasn’t talking to her. He didn’t seem to have noticed that she’d come onboard. “I know—you keep saying that, but … how? How do I get closer?”

Candless frowned. Who was he talking to? What on earth was going on?

She cleared her throat.

His head jerked up. A trace of guilt shone in his eyes as he looked back over his shoulder at her.

“Sir,” she said. “Are you—?”

“Just thinking things through,” he told her. “Welcome to the City of the Choir. I take it you’ve met our new allies.”

“Aliens,” she said. “There are aliens here. Very … unsettling aliens.”

“I was surprised, too,” he told her. “They’re … friendly. So far. The message they sent us was real, they actually did want to help us. So there’s that.”

“You’ve been negotiating with them, this whole time?”

“Learning about their culture, mostly. Not by choice. They expected Earth to send diplomats. Instead they got me. Neither side is particularly happy about that. And now it looks like we’re out of time. I read your message. Centrocor’s here. Just a scout so far,” he said, not looking up. “You found a scout.”

“We eliminated a scout, to be precise. When it fails to return from its patrol, our enemies will know we’re here.”

Lanoe nodded. “They were going to find us eventually. We need to respond to this, and sooner rather than later. I’m afraid a lot of that is going to fall on your shoulders. I need to stay here. Keep talking to these people. You’ll need to assume command of the cruiser. You may have to fight Centrocor without me.”

“I’ll do my best,” she said.

He nodded. Still not looking at her. “I think we should move the cruiser in here. This bubble, I mean. It’ll be safer in here.”

Candless frowned. That wouldn’t be easy. The cruiser wasn’t built for that kind of tricky maneuvering. “Perhaps—”

Lanoe cut her off. “If we leave it out there, orbiting the planet, it’ll be a sitting duck when Centrocor arrives. Especially when we have so few pilots to hold them off. You need to keep Centrocor out of my hair while I negotiate. That’s easier done with the cruiser in here. It’s a better defensive position.”

“Of course,” Candless said, picking her words carefully. “And I do agree that whatever help these aliens are offering, we can’t let Centrocor have it—at any cost,” Candless said. “We have our orders from Admiral Varma.”

Lanoe sighed. “Sure. Though I’ve already found out what they had to offer us.” He shook his head. “Bosh,” he said. “It was bosh.”

Candless fought to keep her face still.

“Bosh,” she said.

She’d never cared for the term, or for slang in general. She let it roll around on her tongue like something she could spit out.

She didn’t want to accept it.

“Bosh,” she said again. “We crossed hundreds of light-years, fought a battle, nearly died in that freezing wormhole for … nothing?”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Lanoe said. “I wanted warships. I wanted an ally. Instead, they want to help us by preserving our DNA. So they can clone us, sometime in the distant future.”

“And you told them … no?”

“It never got that far. They know I can’t make that kind of decision. Maybe Admiral Varma wants what they’re offering. I’ll leave that to her. But I don’t plan on leaving here empty-handed.”

Candless might have hoped for more in the way of an explanation, but she didn’t get it. Lanoe paused the video he was watching. Then he looked up at Valk. “Big guy. Is what I’m seeing here …?”

“Yeah,” Valk said. “It’s real.”

Lanoe nodded to himself and went back to watching the video. From what Candless could see, it showed aliens putting on an illusionist’s act. It took place in the plaza outside, with hundreds of the lobsterlike creatures gathered around a central stage. The video looked like it had been taken from the front row. “While they were showing me what they had to offer, Valk stayed behind and took in a … what do they call it?”

“An apportation show,” Valk said.

“I’m glad to see you’ve at least been entertained while you were here,” Candless said, bitterness nearly overcoming her.

“Look at the chorister on the stage,” Lanoe said. “Do you see what she’s holding?”

Candless leaned in for a better view. The alien held a sort of hollow sphere about twenty-five centimeters in diameter. Its outer surface was pierced with a sort of fretwork of small holes, and light flickered inside of it. The alien twisted the sphere in various directions, and a beam of light shot out from the sphere to create a distortion in the air. The alien turned around to face a different direction and repeated the process, and a plume of water shot out of the second distortion, arcing over the alien’s head to fall back into the first distortion … and vanish.

“It’s all tricks like that,” Valk told Candless. “The performer made stuff appear out of thin air, started a fire with light out of nowhere. She put a little stone ball in a box, then made it appear in her claw without touching the box again. She even cut a chorister in half, at one point. She didn’t use a saw, though.”

“I think I know how it’s done,” Lanoe said. He finally looked up at her. “And if I’m right …”

Candless raised an eyebrow.

“There’s a chance we can get what we need out of the Choir, after all.” He sighed and stretched his arms over his head. “Though they aren’t going to like it when I ask. Not at all. They’re going to take a hell of a lot of convincing.”

“Come on, kid,” Lieutenant Ehta said. “Let’s go face the music.”

Ginger thought she understood a little better, now, why the marine was being so nice to her. Clearly she considered them to be sisters, of a kind—they’d both been through a traumatic experience that left them at odds with the Navy.

As much as she was still a little afraid of Lieutenant Ehta, she was very glad to have a friend at that moment. She was facing probably the worst dressing-down she would ever get. The end of her career. All she could hope for was that it would be quick—and that she wouldn’t be heading straight into a jail cell when they returned to civilization.

There had been a general announcement on the cruiser’s speakers, and then, just in case they hadn’t heard it, Engineer Paniet had come up to the wardroom to tell them. Lieutenant Candless was returning to the cruiser. All hands were expected to be in the vehicle bay to welcome her back.

“She won’t charge you in front of everybody,” Lieutenant Ehta said. “But I doubt she’ll waste her time getting to it. You ready for this?”

“I … guess. But why are we all being called down to meet her?” Ginger asked. “You think they found something important on the other side of that wormhole?”

Lieutenant Ehta shook her head. “Hell, kid, your guess is as good as mine.”

They arrived in the vehicle bay to find most of the marines already there. Ginger half-expected Lieutenant Ehta to brush her off again, to make a public show of pushing her away in front of the PBMs, but instead Ehta told her to grab a railing right next to her. The marines had their helmets up and silvered, so it was impossible to tell what they thought of their commanding officer getting chummy with a pilot.

Engineer Paniet arrived soon after they did. He said he’d been straightening up a little so that Candless could come home to a clean ship. There was grease on his gloves and he wiped it away with a nanofiber cloth that he then just shoved in a pocket of his suit. “Exciting, isn’t it?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” Ginger said. “We have no idea what this is about.”

“That’s what makes it exciting. Could be anything!”

Through the weather field that covered the open hatch of the vehicle bay, Ginger could see the dark shapes of fighters coming in for a landing. Lieutenant Candless came in first, climbing out of her cockpit as soon as her fighter was locked into its berth. She moved to one side of the bay and stuffed one foot through a nylon loop anchored to the floor, so that it looked like she was standing there. The only person in the bay who wasn’t floating like a balloon. She brushed down the front of her suit, smoothing out any wrinkles, then touched her hair, still in a tight, perfect bun at the back of her head.

Then she looked up at the crew on the railings, her sharp gaze moving from face to face as if she were doing a head count. When she got to Ginger her face went perfectly still. She didn’t even frown. Just stared at Ginger for what felt like an eternity.

Ginger fought down the urge she felt to jump out of her own skin and run away. Instead she tried to follow Lieutenant Ehta’s advice and stood perfectly still, looking straight forward, chin up. She tried to not make it look like she was staring at Lieutenant Candless out of the corner of her eye.

“Don’t let her rattle you,” Lieutenant Ehta whispered.

Ginger gave her the tiniest, most imperceptible of nods.

Lieutenant Maggs and Bury came in next, their fighters streaming vapor after their long patrol. The two of them opened their canopies and started to climb out, but Lieutenant Candless told them not to bother. “This is going to be a quick information session, then the two of you are headed back out. We need to maintain constant vigilance.”

Lieutenant Maggs made a harrumphing sound. “It’s been positively hours. I believe we’re entitled to a rest.”

“Not possible,” Lieutenant Candless told him.

“Why not, damn you?”

The XO’s eyes flashed. Ginger knew that look—the woman had no patience for people who wasted her time, especially when she was in a hurry. “If you would do me the signal honor of sitting there and listening for a moment, you might find out. Now, as for the rest of you—Commander Lanoe sends his compliments, and his gratitude for the long hours you’ve been working, and your patience. Maggs and Bury are instructed to continue their patrols, with no change in orders. As for the rest of us, we’ve got a rather stressful shift coming up, so no one should relax just yet. My orders are to bring the cruiser through the wormhole down on the planet.”

Engineer Paniet let out a little yelp. Ginger looked over at him and saw he had one hand over his mouth and the other flat against his chest.

“Judging by that reaction, I can tell you think this is a dangerous maneuver, Engineer,” Candless said. “I don’t disagree. Commander Lanoe was adamant, however. We’re exposed out here. Should Centrocor find us orbiting this planet, with half of our pilots engaged elsewhere, the cruiser wouldn’t stand a chance. The best way to protect it, he feels, is to move it. I can see that you’re going to burst if I don’t let you speak. Go ahead.”

Engineer Paniet simply shook his head for a moment, as if he was too overcome to talk. Finally he took a deep breath and said, “I’m not saying it can’t be done. But this ship was never meant to enter a planetary atmosphere, much less maneuver inside one. And then there’s the damage we’ve already sustained, to the forward section—the stress of atmospheric entry will rip out half of my repairs. Let’s not even get started on the g stress we’ll have to handle, and I mean we, us, our bodies. This is—”

“What I’m hearing is that it’s possible,” Lieutenant Candless said.

Engineer Paniet closed his eyes. “Theoretically, yes. I’ll get to work. It’s going to take at least a full day just to lash everything down and prepare the ship for that kind of strain.”

“Commander Lanoe wants it done in eight hours.”

Engineer Paniet nodded, his eyes still closed.

“Good. Now, everyone is dismissed—until this maneuver is complete, Engineer Paniet will be in charge of assigning duties. For now I want to see Ensign Ginger individually.”

The marines started to file out of the bay, grumbling among themselves. Lieutenant Ehta stayed close by Ginger. “Just remember, she doesn’t make the final call,” she whispered. “It’s Lanoe who’ll pass sentence.”

Ginger nodded. Lieutenant Ehta squeezed her shoulder, then followed her marines back inside the ship. Leaving nobody but pilots in the bay.

Bury kept trying to catch Ginger’s eye. He stood up a little in his cockpit. Gave her a little wave with one hand—then settled back down as if he was afraid Lieutenant Candless would see him. Ginger refused to look at him, even though she knew it was cruel. If he made some grand show of sympathy for her plight she thought she might scream. So she simply clung to the railing for dear life and waited for what came next.

Except it seemed fate wanted her to suffer in anxious anticipation a little longer.

Lieutenant Maggs cleared his throat. Lieutenant Candless turned to look at him. To look at him down her nose.

“Something I can assist you with, Lieutenant Maggs? You have your orders.”

“I’d like to apologize for my earlier outburst.”

“Noted.”

“And then I would like to suggest a duty change,” Lieutenant Maggs said. His usual suave manner was gone now—he stood up straight, there was no sign of a smirk on his face. He almost looked like a professional officer. “Ensign Bury and I have been flying for too long. We’re fatigued. You say we can’t afford time to take a rest. Well, that’s as may be. We could, however, switch out with Valk. He could come fly a patrol while one of us … does whatever it is he’s doing down there, on the other side of the wormhole. Then we could switch off again, and so on. One shift down there, two in space. It’s only fair.”

The look on Lieutenant Candless’s face was one Ginger recognized. One any of her students would have recognized. It meant she was no longer interested in entertaining that particular line of conversation. “Lanoe feels you’re best utilized out here, watching for Centrocor. Your special new targeting software, this Philoctetes package, makes your vehicle ideal for picket duty.”

Lieutenant Maggs’s eyes grew hard as flints.

“Picket duty,” he said. “The kind of duty you give your least talented, most expendable pilot. As opposed to me.”

“We all have orders,” Lieutenant Candless told him, turning away. Clearly she wanted to be finished with the conversation, but Maggs shouted at her back.

“He doesn’t want me to see what’s over there, beyond the wormhole. He doesn’t trust me.”

“He trusts you enough to give you this crucial duty.”

Red spots bloomed on Lieutenant Maggs’s cheeks. “That … bastard. That ass!”

“I’ll remind you that he is your commanding officer.”

“Only because he kidnapped me,” Lieutenant Maggs said. “Press-ganged me into this duty. It’s him who should be earning my trust back. And yet here I am, following his orders, fighting for him, that senescent piece of—”

“If you say another word I’ll bring you up on charges of insubordination,” Lieutenant Candless said.

The look Lieutenant Maggs gave her could have melted through armor plate. When she didn’t acknowledge it, he put up his helmet and sat back down in his cockpit. In a moment he was roaring out through the weather field, back out on patrol.

Bury stuck around long enough to give Ginger one more meaningful look. Then he, too, raised his canopy and launched himself back out into space.

Leaving Ginger and her former instructor alone in the vehicle bay.

For a while neither of them spoke. Nor did they look each other in the eye.

“I’m sorry, Ginger,” Lieutenant Candless said, finally.

“You’re … what?”

“I’m sorry it’s come to this. There’s no choice, though. Come with me,” Lieutenant Candless said. “There’s a form to fill out.”

“A … form?” Ginger asked.

“Yes, of course. The charge against you needs to be officially logged. One count of cowardice in peacetime. We’re going to do this exactly according to protocol. Then you’re going to go to work for Engineer Paniet.”

“You’re not going to lock me in the brig?” Ginger asked.

“Not when there’s so much work to do. We need every pair of hands we can get.”

Candless splashed some water on her face—well, in microgravity, she mostly rubbed it across her cheeks and brow, then soaked it back up with a sponge.

She tried not to think of Ginger. She tried not to think about how angry she was with Lanoe, for pushing the girl until she broke. He should have known, he should have understood that Ginger was never going to make it as a pilot—

No. She couldn’t really blame Lanoe. Not when the real failure here was her own. Had she been a better instructor, perhaps …

Candless squeezed her eyes shut. Forced herself to push away such thoughts. There was far too much work to be done now. She could wallow in self-recrimination later.

The eight hours passed in a blur as she moved crates of foodstocks from one cabinet to the next, as she locked down the more fragile mechanisms in the gundecks side by side with Ehta and her marines, as she climbed in and out of maintenance hatches securing loose cables. Everyone onboard pitched in—everyone worked as hard as she did—and still they knew it wouldn’t be enough. Her final duty before they moved the cruiser was to make an inspection of the damaged forward section. Paniet waited for her by the emergency hatch that had now become a makeshift airlock.

“You haven’t seen this yet, have you, dear?” he asked. “The wreckage of your old bridge. It’s terribly sad. Come on, I’ll walk you through it.”

Together they headed into the evacuated section, their helmets flowing up over their heads. There were no lights in the damaged areas so she followed a beacon that pulsed slowly on the back of Paniet’s suit. She climbed through the ruins of an old section of bunks, pulling herself along hand over hand, reaching for broken spars and burnt-out electrical conduits, for anything that she could hold on to.

“This, right here, is going to be a problem,” Paniet said, over a private communications band. He gestured at a bulkhead that had been torn in half, then lashed back together with silver tape and a few ugly spot welds. “I guarantee you this will tear open. It wasn’t a major problem when we were out in the deep vacuum, but once we hit atmosphere the wind will get in here and rip those panels right off. I’m of half a mind to just knock them out right now, just to get them out of the way.”

“If you think it best,” she told him.

“Mm-hmm. Then there’s this section. If it doesn’t look familiar, this is what’s left of the information officer’s position from the bridge.”

Candless frowned. “It’s farther back than it should be.”

“Strange things happen when you redecorate with high explosives,” he told her. “Now, of course, the real reason I wanted to walk through this with you,” he said, “was to get you alone up here. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I swear you’re getting as paranoid as Lanoe. I just wanted to talk.”

“About what, exactly?”

“About Lanoe, deary. And his paranoia.”

“I … see.”

Paniet lifted his hands in the air, in mock surrender. “No, no, perhaps I should put it another way. Lanoe and his obsession.” The engineer grabbed a spar that had bent away from a bulkhead and flipped over it, putting it between them. “You’ve known him a very long time. You clearly think highly of him.”

“I do,” Candless said.

“Was he always like this? Willing to sacrifice everything—including people—to achieve his ends?”

Candless inhaled sharply and prepared herself to give Paniet a proper dressing down. Who was he to question the motivations of his commanding officer?

Yet all she could think of was what he’d told her, in the City of the Choir. That they had come all this way for … bosh. But that he was ready and willing to wring something, some kind of win, out of an alien species that—loathsome as she might find them—had done nothing but offer their help.

“He doesn’t always explain the reasons behind his orders, it’s true,” she said. “Have you ever known a ranking officer who did?”

Paniet gave her a warm smile. “In the Neddies, we make a point of not asking too many questions. The brass tells us go here, go there, but at the end of the day they let us build lovely things, and that should be enough. Neddies don’t cause trouble. Yet sometimes … sometimes we do have to wonder. Currently, I’m wondering why you’re going to beat the devil out of my beautiful ship just to get it moved a few thousand kilometers. About why I only had eight hours to do a job most engineers couldn’t do without going back to school for four years.”

“Lanoe gave me very specific orders—”

“I’m sure,” he told her. “Did he explain why he issued said commands?”

A negation died on Candless’s lips. She was too tired to keep secrets anymore, and anyway, this was Paniet. So far he’d been the only person onboard who hadn’t disappointed her in some way.

So she told him. About the city beyond the wormhole. About the Choir.

“They’re … a bit terrifying, if I absolutely must be honest. I’ve never cared for insects. Frankly I find them abominable, and—”

“Aliens,” he said, before she could even finish. His eyes went wide behind his helmet. He brought up his hands and clapped them together excitedly, even though they made no sound in the vacuum. “How lovely! We get to make some new friends. Except, of course, Lanoe isn’t sure he wants to be friends.”

“What makes you say that?”

Paniet rolled his eyes. “I’m figuring that’s why he wants sixteen coilguns that he can point on them if things get dicey. It’s why he wants the cruiser in there, and why he wants it in there right away. Even if it means breaking the ship in half.”

“He didn’t say as much,” Candless tried.

“But you suspected it, didn’t you? That to get what he wants, he’s willing to threaten these aliens. To take what he wants, at the end of the barrel of a gun. And he’s not the sort of fellow who bluffs his way through card games, is he?”

Candless sighed. “And how, exactly, did you come to such a conclusion?”

“Keen analytical mind,” Paniet said, and went to tap his head. Instead his hand rebounded clunkily off his helmet. “Oof,” he said.

Candless did not grin. She shook her head, a bit. “Lanoe has always been … obstinate,” she said, because it was the kindest word she could think of. “He’s a good man, though.”

“No one’s questioned that,” Paniet protested.

“No, you’re just questioning his fitness for command.” Before he could react to that she held up one hand for peace. “I’ve heard what you had to say. I’m not discounting it. But for now, we have to give him a chance.”

“Darling XO,” Paniet said, “not one breath of mutiny has crossed my lips. I never said I would disobey orders. I just wanted them clarified. Of course … as I said before, I’m a neddy. We don’t make waves.”

“No.”

“No, we leave that to the others. The pilots and the marines. When they take you aside for a little talk just like this one, that’s when you should start to worry.”

“Understood,” Candless said.

And she did take his point. Especially because she thought that when the time came, when Lanoe had pushed things too far—it might not be necessary for someone else to take her aside. If Lanoe ever acted in such a way as to endanger them all, if he forgot that the first duty of command is to keep one’s people alive … well. She might have to be the one who relieved him of duty.

“You don’t sound like M. Valk. You’re not actually … Valk, are you?” Ginger said.

“That’s kind of a tricky question. Interesting one, though.”

The maneuver had already begun. Objects in orbit around a planet travel upward of eight kilometers per second. If the cruiser was going to survive its trip through the planet’s atmosphere, it needed to shed a lot of speed before it hit air. That meant a series of short, perfectly timed burns followed by the occasional sickening lurch as they lost altitude. Basic maneuvers for a ship in space, of course—any pilot could have handled them. The real fancy flying wouldn’t happen for a few minutes yet.

M. Valk was the only one who could handle the constant, pinpoint-accuracy calculations necessary to keep the ship from cracking up before it reached the wormhole. Reluctantly Lieutenant Candless had permitted the AI to take charge. Now she was helping Engineer Paniet and his small crew of neddies, down in the aft of the ship, where actual human hands might be needed to effect repairs when things got bad. Lieutenant Ehta and her marines were stationed along the axial corridor, strapped down in the safest places they could find—ready to jump up and perform emergency welds or simply hold the ship together with their bare hands if that was what it took.

Which left Ginger all alone, with nothing to do. Lieutenant Candless had assigned her to “assist” M. Valk by sitting in the wardroom, near the control displays. She’d been told that if M. Valk suffered some kind of computer malfunction, or if—as an AI might be expected to—he acted contrary to the interest of the mission, she was to take over control of the ship and somehow keep it in one piece.

Several people had promised her it wouldn’t come to that. Including M. Valk.

“You could say I’m Valk’s ghost,” the machine told her. It had no body, of course. It was just a copy of a computer program, currently housed in the ship’s servers. It didn’t even bother generating a face on a display that she could look at. To Ginger it was just a disembodied voice. “Except you could say that he, the one down there, is the ghost of the original Tannis Valk. What do you call the ghost of a ghost? A third-generation memory?”

“No clue,” Ginger said. “How long now, before we hit atmosphere?”

“What does a ghost become when it dies? Another interesting question. I like these. Normally I’d have an answer for you in microseconds. I’m using up so much processing power, though, with just flying this crate, that thorny logic problems are nontrivial to solve. Is there a word in English for this? For a problem you kinda look forward to solving when you have the time?”

“No idea.”

“It’s like having a bad itch, a really bad one, but knowing that eventually you’ll get to scratch it. It’s kind of weirdly pleasant knowing you have almost but not quite enough brainpower to work through a problem. Delayed gratification, right? But it’s more complex than that. Wait. Hold on. I never answered your question.”

“No. Should that worry me?”

“Honestly? I’m not sure. If I were an actual computer, my refusing to obey a command would be very worrying. I think I have free will, though. So if I tell you that we’ll hit thick atmosphere in thirty-nine seconds, it’s my choice to do so.”

“Thanks,” Ginger said.

In the case of a computer malfunction, or if the AI acted in a manner contrary to the interests of the mission.

She’d been promised that wouldn’t happen.

“Are you strapped in okay?” he asked.

Ginger had made sure of that. “I’ve got a full quick-release harness on, just like we wear in the cockpits of our fighters. There are air bags built in around my seat and in an emergency a couple hundred liters of shock-absorbing foam can spray down all over my head.”

“Good. Twenty-three seconds now.”

“You don’t really sound like M. Valk,” she said.

“Your heartbeat is elevated. Are you worried about the maneuver, or about me being naughty?”

Naughty? Ginger curled her toes inside her boots. “I’m human,” she said. “We worry about everything. Especially things we can’t do anything about.”

Valk laughed. The machine laughed. It sounded exactly like a human laugh. That didn’t stop it from being creepy. “Have you ever heard of the Ship of Theseus?” he asked.

“Can’t say that I have.” She could hear—or maybe she only thought she could hear—a hissing sound, like the noise air molecules might make as they dragged along the side of the cruiser’s hull. “How long?”

“Sixteen seconds. Theseus. Ancient Greek guy, one of their big heroes. Came back to Athens after he was done with his adventures. He beached his ship on the shore there, and the people of Athens, to honor him, kind of made it into a shrine. The problem was that wood rots, and one by one, the planks that made up the ship fell apart. The Athenians loved their hero, so they replaced the planks as necessary, one by one. Eventually, every single plank in the ship got replaced. None of the wood was original. Seven seconds. Here’s the question. Was it still the ship that Theseus sailed?”

“What?” Ginger asked.

“It’s an impossible problem. Nobody can answer it. You can use problems like that to test whether an AI is capable of self-directed thought. Just making small talk. Two. One. Zero.”

“What?” Ginger asked again, feeling very stupid—especially as the cruiser chose that moment to be struck by high-altitude winds and be thrown from side to side like an umbrella in a storm.

The cruiser hit the planet’s thermosphere at a dozen times the speed of sound. The air, still thin as a promise, bunched up in front of the ship’s broken nose like a rumpled bedsheet. It couldn’t get out of the way fast enough and so it was compressed, and a compressed gas gains temperature.

Candless had a minder taped to the wall next to her where she was strapped down in the warren of engineering. A minder that showed her a live camera feed from near the front of the cruiser. She saw plumes of vapor, a roiling ball of cloud, and then the screen turned a dull orange, the air in front of them literally incandescing. A roar of angry wind and the ship turned into a fireball.

That energetic air pushed back against their forward motion, slowing the ship—air molecules are small and not very hard but there were a lot of them, a trillion little elastic collisions a second and it added up. The ship slowed, but its energy had to go somewhere. The ship shook. It rattled, it shimmied, it rang like a struck bell. A structural member in the damaged prow broke loose and went pinwheeling back along the length of the cruiser, smashing again and again into stiffened carbon fiber cladding, tearing new holes in the ship’s already-battered side. “Gundecks, position sixty-one!” she shouted, and thought she could hear marine boots pounding up the axial corridor. Marines rushing to the job, tools out as they hurried to repair the breach. On her minder she saw a notification that a weather field had already clamped into place over the hole, so they weren’t at danger of explosive decompression. A little good news anyway.

They hit the planet’s mesopause next. The air outside grew painfully, bitterly cold, not that anyone onboard could tell. Candless was sweating inside her suit. The view forward showed nothing but cherry red. Two kilometers per second, still faster than anything inside an atmosphere had a right to move.

“Vehicle bay, position four!” she shouted, because another notification had come, another crisis to be handled. Next to her Paniet was buried facefirst in an inspection panel, sparks and then a jet of grease flashing past him, his tools smashing again and again against the bulkhead, jangling, clanging, one came loose and went flying forward. As fast as they were decelerating, gravity had come back into their lives. The nose of the ship was down, straight down, the engines up in the air. All wrong.

“Position nineteen, get that hatch closed!” she called, because one of the blast shields that covered the vehicle bay had come loose, was flapping like a loose shutter in a gale, but before anyone could reach it, before anyone could secure it, the whole panel of reinforced scandium tore loose, went spinning away into the void, melting, burning, vaporizing before it even reached the engines.

One kilometer a second. Stratopause. They hit the planet’s jet stream at a bad angle. The cruiser had no wings, no airfoils of any kind—and suddenly that was a problem. A river of wind moving four hundred kilometers an hour slammed into the side of the ship and tried to knock it aside, tried to throw it into a flat spin. There was no way the ship could survive that—its own mass and velocity would tear it in half. Candless had no control over what happened next. She could only hope Valk was capable of recovering from the spin, capable of putting them right. She was thrown from side to side as he worked the maneuvering jets with a savage hand, one second pressed down hard in her seat, the next thrown forward against her straps. Paniet cried out as his legs went flying back and forth. Up the corridor she heard a marine shouting in pain, and another shouting at him to hold on. Candless closed her eyes and waited to die as the ship bucked, and shook, and rattled.

And then—a moment of pure, crystalline peace. The ship settled down and despite the occasional groan of a structural beam under strain, fell into relative silence. On her minder’s screen their airspeed dropped steadily. Point seven kilometers per second. Point six nine. Point six eight—

Without warning the ship turned over on its side, and a million loose objects, all the things they hadn’t had time to secure, went flying through the air, a wrench shooting across the corridor to embed itself in the far wall, a box full of emergency hydration tabs tearing open, its contents bouncing and flying down the corridor like rubber balls, bursting like wet grenades. Another lurch and Candless was upside down, hanging from her straps, blood pooling in her head until she couldn’t see anything but her own heartbeat as her bright red vision pulsed, and throbbed, and—

The ship flipped over once more and she fell down in her seat, hard, her arm smashing against the wall behind her. She looked and saw Paniet seemingly doing a handstand, his gloves wrapped tight around the edge of the inspection panel. A moment before he’d been hanging from the ceiling. Now he crashed to the floor, and she heard a sharp snapping sound, saw his face go deathly pale.

Tropopause. The cruiser hit air as thick as transparent gelatin, still traveling as fast as a rifle bullet. Gravity reached up and grabbed them in one massive, crushing hand, and the ship fell out of the sky.

There was nothing to hold it up, no wings to drag it back aloft. An altimeter came up on her minder, a flashing red graph of exactly how few kilometers were left before they plowed nose-first into the soil of the world below. The positioning and maneuvering jets, all the retrorockets, the gimbaled secondary thrusters all ignited at once with a whoosh and a roar, and Candless was very, very aware of the fact that only a meter of shielding lay between her back and the fusion torus that powered the entire ship. Acceleration shoved her deep into her chair, gravity pulled her down, and the blood that had pooled in her head dropped to her legs, dropped as if it had been poured down an elevator shaft. Her vision swam and her eyelids fluttered closed.

No, she thought, no, damn you, wake up, but she could barely hear her own inner voice through the ringing in her ears, through the high, piercing tone of a brain starved of oxygen. Wake up! Wake up!

“Wake up!” Paniet shouted at her, and her eyes snapped open. Except he hadn’t—he hadn’t said anything of the kind.

Paniet lay motionless in the corridor, his face down on the rubberized floor. He was sliding away from her, slipping at a glacial pace down the corridor toward the engines, unconscious—or dead. She couldn’t tell, she couldn’t—

“Paniet!” she shouted. “Paniet!” Not even thinking, she slapped at her quick-release harness and the straps jumped away from her arms and legs. She threw herself forward, even with the ship vibrating, shaking, rattling all around her. Fell down to the floor just behind him, just as his foot slid past her hand.

Point four kilometers per second. Three hundred ninety-nine meters per second. Three hundred ninety-eight.

She lunged, lunged forward and grabbed, grabbed and wrapped her fingers around his ankle. Tried to pull him back toward her but he was still sliding, and the forces at play, the vectors dragging him away from her were too many and varied for her to know even which direction to pull. She crawled forward and got her other hand on a pocket of his suit, up near his hip. Pulled. Heaved.

Somehow she got him upright. She dumped him into her old seat, pulled the straps around him. The ring of circuitry around his left eye was cracked and his eyeball was bright red, full of blood. There was nothing she could do about that. His suit would keep him stable, keep his blood pressure up or down or wherever it needed to be, keep his temperature and pulse oxygenation at the right levels. That would have to be enough.

She could stand now, the ship was bucking no more wildly than a crazed horse, and if she kept her hands on the walls she could just walk forward, just keep her balance. She passed by a knot of marines tending one of their own with two broken legs, passed through the gundecks where she could see blue sky through a hole right through the hull, a hole with nothing but an emergency weather field over it, nothing stopping her from falling out if she wasn’t careful, if she didn’t watch her step. She hurried forward toward the wardroom, toward where Ginger sat watching Valk fly the ship.

Two hundred sixty-one meters per second. Two hundred fifty-nine. Two hundred fifty-seven.

“Will we make it?” Candless shouted.

Ginger looked back over her shoulder, her eyes wide with terror.

Valk brought up a display of the air in front of them. Had Ginger been sitting there this whole time unable to see where they were going? Candless couldn’t worry about that. The display showed white puffy clouds and a brown horizon that was almost level. Dead ahead of them a droplet of water seemed to hang in midair. It grew until it looked like the lens of a microscope. That, Candless realized, must be the wormhole throat, the portal between this universe and the one next door. It was growing with alarming speed.

One hundred meters per second. Eight-seven. Fifty-nine. Just gliding along.

The cruiser slid through the portal with plenty of room to spare on either side. Blue sky vanished, replaced by ghostlight. Ahead of them—the spiky, every-direction, multi-spired City of the Choir.

Twelve meters per second. Eight.

“Yes,” Valk said.

“I beg your pardon?” Candless demanded.

“Yes,” Valk said. “We’re going to make it.”