Chapter Eleven

The cruiser and the carrier moved with glacial slowness, at least compared to the velocity fighters could achieve. Their engines were massive and incredibly powerful, but even in the absence of gravity it took an enormous amount of energy to move all that metal and carbon fiber. Just getting them turned toward the red dwarf and locked into the right trajectory had taken hours. Accelerating from a dead stop meant days of just slowly building up speed. It would take more than a week to reach the disk.

There was plenty to keep Lanoe busy during that time, busy enough he didn’t have to think about what would happen when they arrived.

There were repairs to be completed, on both the cruiser and the carrier. Endless combat drills to run through—the Naval and Centrocor forces had to learn how to work, and fight, together. Lanoe had given his officers tasks to complete, and those needed to be supervised. Candless was hard at work whipping the carrier’s crew into shape, bringing them up to something approaching Naval discipline. Ehta was working with her marines on the gun decks of the cruiser, making sure that if they needed to fire the heavy artillery the coilguns wouldn’t just explode when they went off. Valk was working up a computer model of the disk, trying to understand how it worked and how best to attack it. And then there was Paniet’s special project.

The engineer had set up a workshop on the carrier, deep inside the cavelike flight deck. The neddies had erected a tent of electro-stiffened plastic at the bottom of the deck. Inside it, as Lanoe watched, they were building a complicated drone. Two of them were curing a long, round piece of carbon fiber cladding while another one tested an electronics bus attached to an array of low-power lasers tuned to different frequencies. They had to crawl around a large thruster package that had been cannibalized from a carrier scout, three big cones mounted on a simple fusion torus.

Lanoe was, officially, supervising Paniet and the others, though mostly that seemed to amount to standing around watching the engineers work and occasionally grunting as if he had something to add.

Truth be told, he didn’t understand ten percent of what they were doing. When Valk sent him a signal indicating he wanted to talk, he flicked his eyes to accept the message almost instantly.

“Sorry if I’m bothering you,” Valk said. “I’ve found something I think you’d really like to see. It’s about the disk.”

Lanoe nodded to himself. “Yeah? Okay. I could use a break. I’ll be over right away. Just let me get to my fighter.”

“I could just tell you about it over this link if—” Lanoe had already cut the connection.

Lanoe pushed his way out of the flap of the tent and into the open cavern of the flight deck. He made his way to where his BR.9 lay nestled in a docking cradle, ready to launch. He kept it on standby mode at all times—he spent so much time moving back and forth between the carrier and the cruiser these days that the ship’s engines never had a good chance to cool down. The BR.9’s canopy melted back into the fuselage as he approached. Lanoe retracted the skeletal docking arms and had the fighter moving before the canopy had even reformed over him, edging his way carefully out of the flight deck, maneuvering around the ranks of Yk.64s and carrier scouts mounted on the inner walls.

Once out in space he located the cruiser with his naked eye—it was flying on a parallel course with the carrier and the destroyers, only a few kilometers away—and touched his control stick to activate his maneuvering jets.

There was no real need for him to fly the fighter manually. He could have let Valk handle the short flight. He was still Aleister Lanoe, though. No matter how far he’d climbed up the chain of command, he was still a pilot in his bones.

Ehta woke to the sound of someone knocking at her hatch.

It was a truism that a marine could sleep anywhere—in a mud-filled trench, in the middle of an orbital bombardment, even sitting up with her eyes open during a long briefing. When your life was made of ninety-nine percent boredom and one unpredictably timed percent adrenaline-spiked terror, you learned to rest when you got the chance.

But if marines had some special power in regard to sleep, it was balanced by the fact that when you had to get up—you got up in a damned hurry. Ehta nearly brained herself by sitting up too fast. Her helmet even started to raise automatically as it noticed the near collision between her skull and the ceiling.

“Hold on,” she said, because whoever it was, they were still knocking. Why wouldn’t they just send her a message? What was so damned important? If it was an emergency, she would probably already know about it—her suit would have told her if the cruiser was on fire, or if the jellyfish had sprung an ambush on them.

“I said hold on, you bastard!” she shouted, when the knocking still didn’t stop. She lowered her helmet manually and twisted around in the bunk. Like every sleeping compartment on the cruiser, it was a narrow rectangular space just a little bigger than a coffin. There was a fan at one end to make sure she didn’t suffocate in her sleep and a display mounted on what was sometimes the ceiling of the tiny chamber. If she stretched her arms out to either side, she could push against both walls. It was a good stretching exercise.

“I’m bloody well coming,” she shouted at the knocker. Then she finally triggered the release key and the hatch slid open and she saw who it was.

Bury. It was the little wet-behind-the-ears pilot, Bury. What the hell did he want?

“What the hell do you want?” she asked.

“It’s Ginger,” he said.

She started to turn away, yawning. “Valk is your supervising officer. Tell him to deal with it. I know he’s weird, but—”

“Please,” Bury said, and something in his voice made her blood run cold. There was a note of pleading in his tone she’d never heard from him before. Normally he was too proud to ask anyone for anything. “I think she might—do something. Bad. To herself.”

Ehta pushed out of the bunk and stumbled into the hallway, her legs still mostly asleep. Her head swam with the sudden rush of blood. She ignored it and got moving, heading for the axial corridor. “Why’d you come to me with this?” she said.

“I’m sorry if I should have gone to Lanoe or something, but—”

“I didn’t say that,” Ehta told him. “I just want to know why.”

The two of them hurried down the ladder that ran the length of the ship, rung after rung after rung. It was a long way down. “You were kind to her once. She told me about it,” Bury said. “When they called her a coward, you stood with her.”

“Yeah, and then she went and had that alien cut her head open and shove an antenna inside. Just to prove they were wrong.” Ehta scowled at the memory.

Ehta had fought tooth and nail against letting Ginger volunteer for the operation. She’d insisted that they stop the girl from doing something so strange and irreversible. Candless had shouted her down, even slapped her across the face, and in the end, Ehta’s protests had been for nothing.

She hadn’t spoken much to the girl since. Before the operation she’d thought maybe the two of them had some common ground, that they could even be friends. Instead Ginger had chosen to turn herself into something Ehta couldn’t even understand. Something Ehta could barely stand to look at.

When they got to the brig, she came up short in the hatchway, trying to make sense of what she saw. The cell that held the alien was open and she could see the chorister shaking like she was having a seizure, her four arms and many legs twitching wildly. Ginger was crawling on the floor outside the cell, her face buried against the padding there. Her arms and legs were spasming in perfect time with the alien’s movements.

“Ginger!” Bury shouted. He shoved past Ehta and ran to the girl’s side, grabbing her shoulders. She shook him off.

“Hey, now,” Ehta said, licking her lips. She dropped to her knees and lowered her head until she could see Ginger’s face. “Hey, come on, now, are you—are you okay?”

The girl didn’t speak. Her lips twitched a little, but Ehta didn’t think she was trying to form words. More likely she was in the middle of a seizure.

Caroline Ehta had never been much of a nurturer. She’d spent her life shooting at people, not tending to their hurts. She had no idea what to do. Why the hell hadn’t Bury gone for Lanoe? She tried to remember the minimal combat medicine she’d learned as a marine. Mostly that involved splinting broken limbs and putting pressure on bleeding wounds. What did you do for someone having a seizure? Put something in their mouth? Or were you not supposed to do that?

There was a flight surgeon on the carrier, she thought—one of the Centrocor people. And the cruiser’s sick bay had a medical drone. “We need to move her,” she told Bury, because that sounded right. “We need to get her to—”

“No,” Ginger said. “N-n-n-no. I’m f-fine.”

Ehta looked up at Bury. The boy’s face was racked with indecision.

“Help her,” he said, sounding desperate.

“Ginger?” Ehta said. “Ginger, talk to me. What’s going on?”

“She’s waking up-p-p,” Ginger said, through chattering teeth. “S-sedative’s wearing … off. I expect-t-t-ted this.”

The girl’s head drooped. She collapsed against the floor. She’d stopped shaking, or at least she wasn’t shaking as much as she had been before. Ehta could see how pale her face was, though, and her red hair was slick with sweat. It looked like Ginger was fighting this—this—whatever it was, whatever had come over her.

“I feel every … thing she feels,” Ginger said. “She’s so alone.”

“That’s what this is about?” Ehta asked. She shook her head. “She’s having full-blown convulsions because she’s lonely?”

“You don’t understand. I don’t think you can,” Ginger told her. She took long, deep, gulping breaths.

“Ginj, we want to,” Bury said. The Hellion couldn’t sweat or cry, but Ehta could read the suffering in his eyes. He really cared about Ginger. The two of them had been classmates, friends—even squaddies, for a little while. Ehta knew how deep that bond could run. “We want to understand. Help us.”

“They’re born into a harmony,” Ginger said. “Born surrounded by others like them. They’re called the Choir because they all think together. Each voice an individual, but … shared, their thoughts, their feelings, shared … all shared. Now she’s alone, for the first time in her life. She’s terrified of it. She’s only half-conscious now, not even half, but she … she knows. She knows what she’s going to hear when she comes to.”

“What?” Bury asked. “What is she going to hear, Ginj?”

“Silence. Unbearable silence.”

Ehta had heard enough. She grabbed Ginger under her armpits—the girl was too weak to fight her off—and pulled her up until she was sitting on the floor. Her face was red where she’d pressed it against the padding.

“We’re going to take you to the sick bay,” Ehta said. “I’ll get Lanoe to come down and talk to you, see what we can do about this. How does this work, this telepathy? How does she send you her thoughts?”

“Microwaves … antenna,” Ginger said. She was fading.

“That’s good,” Ehta said. “You can shield against microwaves pretty easy. Maybe we just need to wrap your head in metal foil. Then you won’t have to—”

“No!” the girl said, flailing her arms in a feeble attempt to push Ehta away. “She needs me! You can’t cut her … off. Not now. Not now! She’ll go insane!”

Bury made a quick little gesture, aborted before it could really get started. Ehta thought maybe he was going to try to wrap his arms around Ginger. Hug her. But he didn’t dare.

Ehta understood. What had happened to the girl—what had been done to her—was just too weird. Too wrong.

“Lock my suit. In case … there’s another.” Ginger lifted the fingers of one hand and then they fell again.

“Another seizure?” Ehta asked.

“It’s all … all we can do,” the girl told her. “Ehta. Please.”

Ehta grabbed Ginger’s wrist and brought up the display there. Found the emergency controls.

“Ehta,” Ginger said again. Her eyes were closed now.

Ehta touched a virtual key and Ginger’s suit stiffened, all its joints and flexible elements locking into place. An air bag in the collar ring inflated to hold Ginger’s neck completely immobile. Her helmet started to come up, but Ehta retracted it before it closed over her face completely.

“Ehta,” Ginger said, barely a whisper now. “I chose this. I wanted it.”

The marine just shook her head.

Lanoe put his ship down in the cruiser’s vehicle bay without so much as a bump. He jumped out of his cockpit and headed inside, into the axial corridor, where he sent a signal to Valk indicating that he wanted to talk.

“I’m here,” Valk said, as if he’d ever been anywhere else. “Come up to the wardroom. I have the disk up on a display here, and I have a really interesting computer model of its formation I want to show you. I think you’ll find that—”

Lanoe tuned the AI out. He twisted his neck around, his eyes darting up and down the axial corridor. He’d heard something.

“What was that?” Lanoe demanded. “Did you hear it?”

Valk answered chirpily. “Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s a scream.”

He could hear it clearly now. Someone—a woman—was shrieking in agony. It sounded like it was coming from below him. From the direction of the brig, he thought. It was Ginger. It had to be Ginger.

Lanoe’s eyes went wide. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded.

“She’s been doing that for the last ten minutes, I think,” Valk told him. “I think she’s in incredible pain. Or maybe just distress.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me?” Lanoe demanded.

“Oh. No, I suppose I didn’t,” Valk said. “Honestly, I hadn’t given it much thought. It was getting distracting so I just turned off most of my auditory pickups.”

Lanoe scowled at the wall. He was sure Valk would be able to see his expression. Could the AI understand it, though? Valk was becoming less human all the time. Becoming more of the machine he was.

Lanoe would have to do something about that, he thought. Eventually. In the meantime he had an emergency to deal with. He got moving, hurrying not up—toward the wardroom—but down.

“Wait,” Valk said. “Where are you going? What about my computer model?”

Lanoe didn’t even bother to reply.

“Shh,” Ehta said. “Shh.” She couldn’t think of what else to say. She gripped Ginger’s shoulders and pulled her close, unable to stand the screaming anymore, unable to bear Ginger’s dismay. Ehta had to try to help, even if she knew it was futile. The girl’s eyes had rolled up in her head and her face was slack, only her lungs seeming to still work. Across the room Bury sat slumped against a wall, staring, just staring at them.

“Shh,” Ehta said again. “Shh.”

In the cell, the alien’s big body twitched like a bug, one jointed leg kicking at the air. Rain-on-Stones thrashed and hit her head on the floor, but it was padded, and anyway nobody was going in there—nobody was going to try to comfort a three-meter-long insect crustacean whatever thing.

When Lanoe came hurrying into the room, Ehta barely looked up at him. He should have been there, she thought, he should have been waiting with the girl. After all she’d done for him, after everything he’d asked from her.

No, no, that wasn’t right. Ehta knew Lanoe would have been there for Ginger if he could. He was a good man, he was the best man she’d ever known. He’d saved her life once. She had followed him through thick and thin. This wasn’t the thing that would break her loyalty to Aleister Lanoe.

It was just the screaming. It was just so hard to listen to Ginger, to hear her pain, and not want to lash out on her behalf. To—

Sudden silence crashed all around them. For a second Ehta didn’t understand what had changed.

“Lanoe,” Ginger said.

The girl had stopped screaming.

Ehta checked and saw that the girl’s eyes had rolled back down, that she was looking at Lanoe with a clear, dispassionate gaze. Her face had regained some of its muscle tone and even a little of its color.

That was all it took? For her to see Lanoe?

“You said we had ten days,” Lanoe said, standing in the hatchway. “That was barely a week ago.”

“I said we’d have ten days if I rationed the drug. I couldn’t,” Ginger said. “She was too close to waking up, so I had to give her full doses. I think she developed a tolerance to it.”

Ehta looked from one to the other of them. She could barely believe it. The transformation was so extreme. A moment ago Ginger had been crazy with pain, with suffering, and now …“You heard her, before?” she demanded. “Lanoe, you heard her screaming? That’s what brought you running?”

Lanoe frowned. Then he looked to the side and pointed at Bury. “Lieutenant,” he said. The kid didn’t even look up. Maybe he’d forgotten that he’d been promoted. “Bury,” Lanoe said, putting a little anger in the name. “Get back to your post.”

“I need to be with Ginger,” the Hellion replied.

“Why? You’re not helping her right now,” Lanoe told him. “You’re just sitting there. Looking foolish.”

Ehta wanted to gasp in surprise. That was just cold. But Bury got up, brushed off the back of his suit, and left without a word.

“I suppose you want me to leave, too,” Ehta said, when Bury had gone.

“No,” Lanoe told her. “You can hear this. But what I need to say to Ginger right now, it’s not for anybody else’s ears. Understood?”

“Yeah, of course,” Ehta said. You didn’t get far in the marines without knowing when to keep your mouth shut.

Lanoe came over and squatted down, his hands on his knees. He grunted just a little, an old man forced to adopt an uncomfortable posture. “Ginger,” he said. “Look at me. I know you’re fighting it off right now. I know it can’t be easy.”

“She’s almost awake,” Ginger told him. “She knows … she knows that she’s alone. That’s all. Not how far we came. She just wants to get back to the Choir, to rejoin the harmony. She still thinks that’s possible. When she wakes fully, when she understands—”

“I know,” Lanoe told her. At least his voice was softer now. “I know it’s going to be very difficult for her. Being cut off from the Choir. I guess it’ll be like—what? Waking up in the morning and realizing you’ve gone blind overnight? I wish I could help with that.”

“You don’t get it,” Ginger told him. “It won’t be like that.”

“No?”

“No. It’ll be like if you woke up tomorrow and you realized that you could still see just fine. But that every light in the universe had gone out.”

Lanoe shook his head. “You’ll have to help her. Keep her from—”

“Going insane? That may be too much to ask,” Ginger told him. “But I know my job. I know what I need to do.”

“Actually,” Lanoe said, “that wasn’t what I was going to ask you. I need to make sure she doesn’t talk to anyone else, no one but me. It’s crucial to our mission. Absolutely crucial that we keep her from talking, especially to any of the Centrocor people. I don’t trust them. I think they might try to get in here, to get access to her. We can’t let that happen. We can’t let them seize her. She’s the main thing keeping them under control.”

“Because …” Ginger glanced at Ehta. “Because she’s our only way home.”

Lanoe smiled. “Exactly.”

Something had just passed between them. Something secret. Ehta wished very much she knew what it was. Clearly, though, neither of them was going to tell her.

“You need me to isolate her further,” Ginger said. “It might actually help her to talk to lots of different people. But instead you want her in solitary confinement.”

“Not entirely solitary, since she’ll have you. And I’ll come by as often as I can, to check up on you, to talk. I promise.” He rose slowly to his feet. “Ehta,” he said, “can you step outside with me for a moment? We need to make sure these two are safe.”

Ehta gently extricated herself from Ginger. With her suit frozen the girl couldn’t move, but Ehta tried to make her as comfortable as possible, sitting there with her back against the wall. Ginger didn’t seem to care. Her eyes looked straight forward, not at anyone.

“Don’t go,” the girl said. “When he’s done with you—come back and stay with me, just a little longer. Please?”

“You got it, kid.”

Out in the hall Ehta gritted her teeth. Thought of all the things she would like to say to Lanoe just then. Most of them involved profanities.

But Ehta was a PBM, a Poor Bloody Marine, and she knew about duty, and respect for your commanding officers. That was one of the first things they taught you in combat school. You don’t have to like a man to stand at attention when he enters a room.

“I want guards down here, a full detail,” Lanoe said. “Set up shifts but make sure there’s never less than two marines outside this hatch.”

“Sir,” Ehta said.

“I’ll send a neddy over and we’ll see what we can do to soundproof the brig. In case she starts screaming again.”

“Sir,” she said.

“I want a full report on everyone who comes and goes in this hallway, even if they’re on their way somewhere else, even if they’re just passing through. I want to know if they so much as glance at that hatch. Understood?”

“Understood, sir,” she said.

He nodded and turned on his heel, walking away.

She stepped back inside the brig, to see that Ginger had fallen over. Her suit was still locked, so she had to lie there bent over, as if she were a statuette of a sitting girl that someone had knocked over on its side. Ehta hurried over and propped her back up. The girl hadn’t started screaming again, which had to be a good sign.

“You fought through it,” Ehta said. “You brought yourself back, when he came. You won’t let him see you hurting, will you?”

Ginger’s eyes turned to focus on Ehta’s face. She did not answer Ehta’s question, not directly. Instead she started whispering, words spilling out of her so fast and so low that Ehta could barely make them out.

“I need to tell you something,” Ginger said. “There isn’t much time. I need to say this before she wakes up. Once she does, she’ll hear everything I say, everything I think. And I don’t want her to hear this.”

“Go ahead,” Ehta told her.

As desperate and as short of time as she was, Ginger seemed to have real trouble getting the words out, though. Her eyes filled with tears and her lip quivered. But then she cleared her throat and stuck her jaw out and clearly worked hard to get control over herself.

“It’s too much,” she said.

“What?”

Ginger shook her head. “It’s too much. I can’t do it—I can’t take all her pain. I can’t save her, and trying will … will … I won’t make it.”

“Kid,” Ehta said. “If you need me to stand up to Lanoe for you, I—”

“You can’t. Nobody can—he’s on a crusade.”

Ehta frowned. “He’s got a mission here. He has a lot on his mind, sure, but—”

“He’s hell-bent on revenge, and he won’t let anyone stop him. He won’t set me free. He needs Rain-on-Stones too much. He doesn’t care if I don’t survive what’s about to happen. That’s just collateral damage.”

“Kid … come on,” Ehta said.

But she knew Ginger was right. About it all.

Lanoe, the man who’d saved Ehta’s life, had changed. She didn’t want to think about how, about what it meant. But she couldn’t deny it forever.

“Ehta. You need to find another way. I know I’m asking a lot but, Ehta—please. Please. Help me.”

And then her eyes rolled back up into her head. And she started once more to scream.

Lanoe headed up to the wardroom that served as the cruiser’s bridge, climbing up the axial corridor hand over hand. Valk kept sending him messages, green pearls appearing in the corner of his eye. He flicked his eyes to dismiss them—he intended to speak to the AI in person.

When he reached the top of the ladder, though, and came out into the wardroom, he wasn’t sure that was an option anymore. Valk’s suit lay slumped across the controls. The helmet was down and the sleeves hung slack, the gloves dangling and brushing the floor. The AI was making no attempt to impersonate a human being anymore.

“I’m here,” Valk said, his voice coming from a speaker in the ceiling. “As much as I can be said to be anywhere. It’s an interesting question, actually, one I—”

“Save it,” Lanoe told him.

The AI went quiet.

Bury sat at one of the narrow tables, a half-finished squeeze tube of food abandoned in front of him. He looked up at Lanoe with feverish eyes. “Ginger,” he said. “Is she okay? I mean, is she going to be okay?”

“Sure,” Lanoe said. An outright lie but the kid needed to hear it. “She’ll be fine. Listen, I know seeing her like that was rough. Take the rest of your shift off. Go catch up on some sleep, read a text, whatever.”

Bury’s face creased in concern, the plastination across his nose wrinkling and fracturing the light. “Is something wrong, sir?”

“What makes you say that?” Lanoe asked.

“You’re being strangely nice to me.”

Lanoe considered upbraiding the Hellion on his candor, but instead he sighed and shrugged. “It wasn’t easy for me, either. Listening to those screams. Maybe today we don’t stand on ceremony. Just get out of here. I need to talk to Valk.”

Bury nodded and left without further remarks. Well, thank the devil for small mercies, Lanoe thought. He turned a chair around to face the control stand and Valk’s abandoned suit.

“I’m starting to worry about you,” he said.

“May I ask why?”

The voice from the speakers sounded right. It sounded like Valk, like Tannis Valk. Like the simulation of Tannis Valk that Lanoe had met just before the battle of Niraya. But the Valk of back then had been less precise in his language. He’d been a lot more rough-and-tumble. A lot more human, Lanoe guessed.

“You’re deteriorating,” Lanoe said. “Stop—before you say it, I’m sure your software is working at peak efficiency. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“My personality, you mean,” Valk said. “My … ability to relate to my fellow man. Hmm. That bears some consideration. I could try reoptimizing some subroutines, see if that helps. The last thing I want is for people to feel uncomfortable around me.”

Lanoe looked down at his hands and smiled. They’d passed that junction a long time ago. “It didn’t occur to you that I might want to know that Ginger was in trouble. If I hadn’t come over to look at a computer model—”

“One I really think you should see,” Valk told him.

“In a minute. If I hadn’t come over for that, I wouldn’t have known what was going on until it was too late. Let’s put aside the human element here, that could have compromised the mission. What the hell were you thinking? You heard her screaming. You did nothing.”

Valk paused before answering. Lanoe wondered if that was just to simulate some level of contrition. “I knew she wasn’t in immediate danger.”

Lanoe shook his head in frustration. He was getting nowhere.

He’d known for a while that Valk was falling apart. Paniet had warned him about it, but he’d been able to see it with his own eyes. And he still needed Valk, the AI was still crucial to his plans. This wasn’t good. He gestured at the empty suit lying at the controls. “What’s going on here?”

“Manifesting a human shape was using up energy we could better use elsewhere,” Valk told him. “If it bothers you, seeing me like that—”

“It does,” Lanoe said.

“I never thought you were such a stickler for your troops keeping their uniforms in good order,” Valk said, and then he laughed. But the suit moved, straightening up. The black helmet flowed up out of the collar ring. The suit’s arms lifted and the gloves arrayed themselves over a virtual keyboard. “Better?”

Something occurred to Lanoe. “Stand up,” he said.

“Why?”

“I want to see you stand up. Don’t worry about wasting energy. Paniet fixed the leak in our engine, so we have plenty of power. Just stand up for me. Maybe walk around a little.”

“I’m not sure I want to,” Valk said.

“It’s an order.”

“Lanoe … it hurts.”

“You told me once that everything hurt. All the time. Phantom body syndrome, right? That’s what you called it?”

“Yes,” Valk replied. “I have that even now, but it’s like a dull ache. A soreness in muscles that should be there, but aren’t. If you make me stand up, it’ll turn into real pain. I don’t want to feel pain. What conscious being wants to feel pain?”

“One,” Lanoe said, “that wants to obey the orders of his commanding officer.”

It took a while. There were false starts, as Valk bent forward at the waist, then fell back against his padded seat. His legs moved, his boots shuffling against the deck plating. Making little progress. Eventually, though, he rose to stand. He took two steps forward, toward Lanoe.

“Is it bad?” Lanoe asked.

“Bad enough,” Valk said. He didn’t grunt in frustration, or gasp at fresh pains, but Lanoe could tell he was having trouble.

“Do a lap of the wardroom,” Lanoe told him. “Then I’ll look at your damned computer model.”

Valk took the suit for a spin, showing no sign of distress now. However much pain he might be experiencing, it didn’t slow him down.

Lanoe watched him go with a dubious look. “You seem to be doing fine.”

“Seem,” Valk said. “Seem. Seem. Seem. It’s a simulation. Everything I am is a simulation.”

“You need to get it together, Valk.”

The AI laughed. “Do I? I’m not supposed to exist, Lanoe. I’m supposed to be destroyed, deleted. Fragmented and then wiped. Even I think I’m an abomination. But you want me to ‘get it together.’ To stabilize.”

It wasn’t the first time Valk had talked about being erased. He’d even given Lanoe a gift once, a software package in the form of a black pearl. A data bomb—if Lanoe so much as swiped his eyes across that black pearl, it would start a chain reaction that would expunge Valk entirely from any computer he inhabited. Lanoe had archived the black pearl, knowing that someday he might actually need it.

But not today.

“I still need you,” he said.

“You do.” It wasn’t ego saying that. It was a simple statement of fact. Valk knew just how valuable he was.

Lanoe sighed. “Come on, big guy. You need to …” Something occurred to him. “You need to show me that computer model you keep talking about.”

The transformation was instant. Before, Valk had sounded depressed, even suicidal. Now, with no transition, he was all energy and purpose. The AI dropped back into his seat and called up a large display that showed the disk in all its swirling glory. Metadata flashed all around the image, numbers showing distances between objects, relative masses, a timeframe. “If you look here—”

“Hold on,” Lanoe said. He couldn’t shift gears as quickly as Valk. He rose from his seat—exhaling sharply as he exercised old, stiff joints—and walked over to the control stand. “Tell me what I’m seeing. Keep it simple for me.”

“Okay,” Valk said. “This is a simulation of all the mass in the disk, the gas and dust and the little shepherd moons. I plugged in all the variables we could think of, gravity, angular momentum, the effect of the stellar wind, and so on, and then I let it run for a couple of billion simulated years. That didn’t quite work. The disk fell apart almost immediately, all that hydrogen gas just pouring onto the surface of the star. The end result was just a bigger star, which made no sense.”

“How long would it take for the disk to collapse?”

“A few hundred years.”

Lanoe nodded. “The Blue-Blue-White have whole cities down there. Nobody would put cities in a gas cloud that’s just going to go poof in that kind of timeframe.”

“Right,” Valk said. “There’s some kind of force holding the disk back from falling into the star. Maybe a weather field, like we use in our airlocks, but on this kind of scale that seems unlikely. The power you would need to keep something like that going would be immense, much more than you could get even if you collected all the energy coming off of the star. No, there’s something else at work here. I have no idea what it might be, but I know it has to be there. I added a variable that pushes the gas away from the star and the model worked great, it ran for billions of years without significant loss of mass. Interesting enough, right?”

“I suppose,” Lanoe said.

“It is to me. But if that doesn’t get you interested, this definitely will. The next step was to run the model backward in time. Take it right back to zero. That’s when I found the real puzzle. There is no zero.”

“I have no idea what you mean by that.”

Valk sighed. It sounded like a real sigh, anyway. “I wanted to see how the disk formed in the first place. How all that gas could just accumulate without coalescing into a gas giant, or a brown dwarf, or even a star—a binary companion to the red dwarf. The answer is, it couldn’t. Or at least, the odds of such a thing happened are—ha—astronomical.”

“There must be something wrong with your model, then. Or there’s something we don’t know yet about astrophysics, something that can allow this.”

“Oh,” Valk said, “there are plenty of mysteries left in space. But this isn’t one of them. The answer isn’t that we don’t know how this sort of thing could form in nature. The answer is much simpler.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. It didn’t.”

It took Lanoe a minute to realize what Valk was telling him. When he did, he made a fist and thumped Valk’s console. “Holy damn,” he said. “You’re saying—”

“The disk is artificial. The Blue-Blue-White built it.”

Lanoe closed his eyes. He felt like his brain was reeling, spinning out of control. “Get Candless over here. And Paniet, we definitely want Paniet’s opinion on this. Get them over here now.”

In the brig, the two of them were moving. Ehta had unlocked Ginger’s suit and now the girl was in there, moving with the alien. They circled around each other, every motion exactly mirrored by the other. When Rain-on-Stones lifted one arm in a feeble gesture, Ginger matched it perfectly. When the chorister reared her head back in what looked like a silent shriek, Ginger’s head snapped back, too—and her mouth opened and she let out a chilling cry.

Ehta knew she should stop watching. That she should get away from this—for her own mental health if nothing else. But she couldn’t. She just stood there in front of the open hatch of the cell, stood there barely even blinking.

The alien’s movements were slow, still. The sedative hadn’t completely worn off. Her legs slipped on the padded floor, her feet unsuited to standing on such a smooth surface. Every time, Ginger slipped, too, almost falling.

Ginger didn’t look at Ehta. She didn’t say a word in any language. The lucidity that had come and gone before, the ability to focus on the human beings around her, was gone. She was trapped now, trapped in this strange dance with the alien.

Help me, she’d begged. Ehta, help me.

But how? How was Ehta supposed to do anything for the girl? She was gone, lost in her communion with the chorister’s slowly waking mind.

Lanoe won’t set me free.

Free—free of her connection to the chorister? Ehta had suggested earlier that they wrap the girl’s head in metal foil, to block off the alien thoughts that were being beamed ceaselessly into her brain. Ginger hadn’t thought that would work, maybe, or perhaps she’d simply known that wouldn’t be enough.

Set me free.

The two of them dropped to the floor, Ginger down on her hands and knees. Rain-on-Stones on more legs and arms that Ehta could count. Together they pawed and scratched at the padded walls of the cell. The alien’s limbs moved with furious speed, as if she were trying to dig her way out of a grave.

Ginger’s hands blurred as she desperately scrabbled to keep up. To match those anguished movements.

Set me free.

Suddenly, Ehta understood.

What the girl wanted. Why she had turned to a marine for help. Regardless of the problem in front of them, marines only ever used one solution.

Set me free, the girl had begged.

The only way that would be permanent. The only way Ginger could survive, long-term.

She wanted Ehta to kill the chorister.

It was the only possible way.

Candless stared at the display, her face pinched as her eyes followed its swirling course. Lanoe watched her carefully.

“You are telling me,” she said, “that the disk is artificial.”

“Yes,” Lanoe said.

“You’re saying—you’re claiming that the Blue-Blue-White don’t just live here. That they actually built the place, too.”

“Yes,” Lanoe said, again.

“You can’t possibly be serious. It’s simply too big.”

“It’s the only thing that fits all the data we’ve collected,” Valk insisted.

“Then for the first time in history, mathematics has been proved wrong,” Candless said.

Lanoe was pretty sure that coming from her that counted as a joke.

“I had him run me through it a couple of times before I realized he was right,” Lanoe said. “Look here, at these shepherd moons. They’re there for a reason. You see how the outer edge of the disk has those tiny gaps in it? Those are where the moons sweep through, clearing out dust. Their gravity isn’t much, but it’s enough to pull the gas along with them. They keep the hydrogen from just flowing off into deep space.”

“Ooh,” Paniet said. The neddy was crouched down next to the display, a look of utter excitement and happiness on his face.

“The gas is thickest here, on the inner rim of the disk,” Lanoe pointed out. “Where it’s balanced against the stellar wind. It’s thinnest at the outer edge. That’s important, too. The disk is only about two million kilometers in radius—”

“Only!” Candless said.

Lanoe shrugged. “It orbits pretty close to the star, is what I’m saying. So it gets pretty hot—that inner rim is baking at about a thousand degrees. But because that’s the thickest part, it serves as a buffer, soaking up all that heat and radiation. The central section, where the cities are, is protected by that buffer. The average temperature here,” he said, pointing at the central part of the disk, where the cities were, “is about three hundred degrees.”

“How temperate,” Candless said. “Balmy, even.”

Lanoe ignored her. “The density changes, too. There’s a gradient from inner rim to outer rim. In the center, the zone of the cities, it’s about the same average density as Saturn, six hundred and eighty-seven kilograms per cubic meter.”

“Ooh,” Paniet said, tilting his head to one side. “Less dense than water. Interesting.”

Lanoe ignored him, too. “We don’t know much about the Blue-Blue-White, but we know they evolved in the atmosphere of a gas giant planet. Probably one a lot like Saturn, but hotter. That city zone is the perfect environment for our jellyfish. Given how unlikely it is that the disk just formed naturally, how much more unlikely would it be that it would form in exactly the right conditions for them?”

“I imagine the odds would be quite low,” Candless admitted. “But you still need to answer one question. How exactly would they do such a thing? This is far beyond anything we—we meaning humans here—ever imagined. The scale alone …”

“Ah,” Paniet said. Then he stood up quickly. “We do know that the Blue-Blue-White are planetary engineers. That’s why they built their drone fleets in the first place. To spread out through the galaxy and terraform—if you’ll forgive a slightly incorrect term—every gas giant they could get their hands on.”

Candless still didn’t look convinced. She opened her wrist display and started tapping at virtual keys. “Two million kilometers major radius, one hundred thousand kilometers mean minor radius …” she said under her breath.

Which Valk seemed to find amusing. He laughed, anyway.

“May I inquire,” Candless said, “what precisely you think is so humorous?”

“You’re doing math,” the AI said.

Everyone, including Lanoe, turned to stare at him.

“What? You could just ask me. You’re trying to compute the volume of the disk. It’s about three hundred and ninety-five quadrillion cubic kilometers—roughly two hundred and seventy-six times the volume of Jupiter.”

“Quadrillion,” Candless said. “That’s a number you don’t run across very often.”

Paniet nodded. “Multiply that by the density, Valk. How much does this thing mass?”

Valk didn’t hesitate in responding. “Two hundred and seventy-one octillion kilograms.”

“Oh, now we’re into the octillions,” Candless said, nodding her head sagely. “And that, of course, is where your theory is going to fall apart.”

“How so?” Lanoe asked.

Candless practically spluttered in disbelief, as if it should be perfectly obvious. “Where, pray tell, would our jellyfish friends even find so much mass? Admittedly, hydrogen is common enough in the universe. But that much of it in one place—”

“Actually,” Paniet said, “I can think of one obvious source.”

“You can,” Candless said.

“Yes, dear.” He pointed at the display. At the very center of it. At the red dwarf in the middle of the disk. “A star. A red dwarf would do, say, about a quarter of a solar mass in size—”

“Less, actually,” Valk pointed out. “About thirteen percent of a solar mass.”

“Right,” Paniet said. “See? Easy.”

Lanoe frowned. “What are you suggesting?”

Paniet shrugged. “More what I’m guessing. But it fits. I think that a very long time ago this star system was a binary. Two red dwarfs orbiting each other very close. The Blue-Blue-White evolved on a gas giant that circled them both, but they outgrew their original planet and needed more space to move about. So to make this—this disk thing—they dismantled one of the red dwarfs. Sort of smeared it out across its own orbit.”

Candless had gone pale. Lanoe watched her carefully. She’d accepted it, he saw. She believed that the disk was artificial.

She was still having trouble with what that meant, however.

“You’re saying that these jellyfish don’t just tinker with planets in their spare time,” she said, in an uncharacteristically soft voice. “They build things out of stars, too.”

Paniet nodded gleefully. “Isn’t it just wonderful?”