Chapter Twelve

In the tent hidden deep inside the carrier’s flight deck, Paniet ran one hand along the smooth side of the Screamer. It felt good, solid. A piece of work he could be proud of. He turned and looked at Hollander and gave him a smile. “Would you be a dear and give those locking nuts one more turn?”

“Right,” the Hadean neddy said. He pushed his way under the connecting spar that held the thruster package onto the main body of the drone and made the adjustment. Other neddies polished the big lenses or checked the inflight electronics packages.

It was done. Paniet stood back and examined his handiwork. The Screamer’s main body was a spherical casing about two meters across, studded all over with the lenses of extremely powerful searchlights in fifteen different colors. The sphere was attached to the thruster package by three gimbal mounts that would let it turn in almost any direction. Four booms stuck out from the connecting spar, each of them carrying a photosensitive dish receiver.

“Not bad for a rush job. All right, neddies. Stand back and let’s see what this thing can do.”

The work crew filed out of the tent one by one, Hollander lingering for one last moment to slap Paniet on the back. “Is it going to work, do you think?”

“It’ll work,” Paniet told him. He gave the other man a quick hug, then sent him away. When he was alone in the tent with his creation, Paniet tapped at his wrist display and warmed up the Screamer’s thrusters. Then he pulled a cable that collapsed the tent, leaving the drone pointed out at the star-rich sky.

The disk was visible just up ahead, a red smear across the face of the red dwarf. Only a few hundred million kilometers away now. Lanoe had slowed the fleet down prior to final approach maneuvers, but still they hurtled toward their appointment with the jellyfish faster than a rifle bullet.

Paniet crouched down behind a spare piece of blast shielding, then sent a message to the commander, asking if he was ready to proceed.

Lanoe sent back a text-only message. SURE.

Paniet tapped one last key, and the Screamer’s engines lit up. The drone shot forward, past the rows of fighters hanging from the flight deck’s walls, out through the carrier’s mouth and into space. Paniet watched the flare of its engines until it was just a bright dot in the sky.

Ashlay Bullam snapped her fingers and one of her drones rose from the yacht’s deck. It manifested a display showing her a mirror image of her face and chest, which she explored carefully, looking for any shadows lingering just under her skin. Without access to proper medical facilities, there was no way to tell if there was a blood clot in her system even now, working its slow but inevitable way toward her brain.

It was a danger she’d lived with all her life. Always before, however, she’d been able to count on a small army of doctors ready to catch the clots before they could do any damage. Obsessively studying her own reflection might make her look vain, but it was impossible not to wonder, and worry.

Maggs was nattering on about all the devious things he’d done in her service. She knew she ought to pay close attention, but it sounded like things were moving along just fine.

“You were right about Shulkin, of course. I went over there with a bottle of schnapps and used my not inconsiderable charm to gain access to his cabin. At first it was rather like talking to a potted plant, but once he realized I was the son of a famous admiral, he came to life. What followed is best described as dull, tedious, and enervating—hours of war stories, endless discussions of the minutiae of campaigns that were fought long before I was born. But I do believe I’ve gotten on his good side. Whether or not I was perfectly willing to stick a knife in his back just ten days ago.”

“Well done,” Bullam said. She prodded at the skin below her collarbone. Nothing there but a perfectly natural shadow, she thought. “What about Ehta?”

“Oh, the good major was a bit tougher of a nut to crack. The way she spoke to me bordered on the gleefully sadistic. Once she saw I could take a joke, though, she eased up just a hair. Of course, she wouldn’t tell me anything useful—especially since I didn’t ask—but we chatted on this and that, the quality of various reconstituted foodstuffs and the fact that a marine’s work is never done. As you requested, I kept it light.”

“I know it seems like I’m having you gossip to no purpose,” Bullam said. “I hope you don’t feel like I’m wasting your talents.”

“Hardly. I understand the principle full well,” Maggs said. “I’m establishing a network, building—well, I wouldn’t call it trust. I’m afraid I’ve burned too many bridges, especially with the Navy folk. But as long as I can keep them talking, there’s a chance they’ll actually start listening to what I have to say. What you tell me to say, of course.”

“You’re a good man, Auster Maggs, and a positive asset in—”

Bullam stopped because one of her drones had drifted over to her, a green light burning on its face. She beckoned it closer and then ran one finger across a biometric panel below the light. The drone shot a laser into her eye. Bullam’s suit didn’t have all the fancy communications gear that was standard equipment on Navy suits. She had to receive her messages the old-fashioned way.

“It appears,” she said, “that my presence has been requested on the bridge of the carrier.”

“They’ve launched the Screamer, then,” Maggs said.

Bullam nodded. “Must be. Why they want me there when it activates, I have no idea. Perhaps Lanoe just wants a witness.”

“A witness to what?” Maggs said.

“Whatever happens next, there will be a lot of questions for Lanoe when we get home. He’s already disobeyed official Navy orders just by coming here. If he actually starts a fight with these bloody jellyfish of his, well, the powers that be might brand him a war criminal. I think maybe he wants someone—a civilian—who can vouch for the fact that he actually did try talking to the aliens, before he killed them all.”

Maggs laughed. “Bastards like Lanoe never get what’s coming to them. He’s far too lucky for that. Well, enjoy your outing. I’ll stay here and prepare your dinner for when you get back.”

“You really are a darling,” she said, and favored him with a warm smile. Then she put up her helmet and pushed her way through the yacht’s flowglas dome. She spared a thought as she went as to why Maggs really wanted to stay onboard while she was gone. No doubt he intended to rifle through her things. Well, let him. All of Ashlay Bullam’s best secrets were kept tightly inside her own head.

A green pearl rotated in the corner of Ehta’s vision. A message from Candless, of all people. What did that witch want? Ehta looked up and then down to archive the message. It was just going to have to wait—she had more important things on her mind. She had just reached the entrance to the brig, where two of her marines stood guard. Binah was one of them. Binah who’d had his face cut up when they boarded the carrier. The other was Horvath, a kid she’d found on Tuonela. She nodded at them, but their helmets were up and silvered, so if they nodded back she didn’t notice.

Neddies had bolted up foam rubber cladding on the hatch that led to the brig. It cut down on the noise coming from inside, the sobbing, the begging, the pleading. But not much.

Ehta had a sidearm, a pistol with explosive bullets she thought would do the trick. The marines would let her inside without a question. She could just walk into the cell, aim, and shoot, and then—

Then none of them would ever go home again. The alien in there, the big bug thing, was their only ticket back to human space.

But Ehta had promised the girl. She’d looked in Ginger’s eyes and told her she would help, somehow. She didn’t owe the kid anything, really. Ehta liked Ginger, she supposed, but not enough that she would disobey Lanoe’s orders for her. Not normally.

The noise from inside was pretty bad. Whatever was happening in there, it sounded … bad.

She took a step closer to the hatch. She realized she was breathing heavily, and she wondered why. She’d shot plenty of people in her time. Even some aliens, if you counted the drones she’d fought back at Niraya. She dropped her hand to her side, her thumb brushing the barrel of her pistol. Did the two marines bristle, then? Had they seen her touching her weapon, wondered what was up? No, she was imagining things. Neither of them moved a millimeter.

Open it up, she thought. All she had to say was open it up. The marines would jump to do what she said. Even after, when they saw what she’d done, they wouldn’t turn on her, she knew that. They would wonder why. They might even ask.

But they were her friends, her squaddies. Her troops. She was their immediate superior officer. If she did this they would back her up, as best they could.

Not that they would be much use once Lanoe heard what had happened.

She wasn’t afraid to die here, so far from home. She’d always known she would die on a battlefield. The where didn’t matter. When Lanoe had come to her and asked her to join him on yet another crazy mission, she hadn’t hesitated. But Binah and Horvath hadn’t known what they were getting themselves into. Maybe they had lives back home still. People who loved them. If she took this shot, if she killed the chorister, it was the two of them—it was all of her marines—who would pay the price.

Carefully, slowly, she lifted her hand away from her thigh. Reached up and scratched at the side of her nose. The fingers of her glove came away slick with sweat.

“Ma’am?” Horvath asked.

Ehta stared at him with wide eyes.

“Just checking in,” she told him. “You two all right down here? The noise isn’t bothering you?”

“We’re fine, ma’am,” Binah told her.

Ehta nodded. She stood there a moment longer, staring at the hatch. Not even seeing it, really. The screams were turning into background noise. It was now or—

She turned on her heel and walked away.

As she walked, she clamped her eyes tight. Gritted her teeth. Let the roar of her own blood in her head be the only thing she heard.

Eventually she calmed down enough to look at the message Candless had sent her. She was supposed to report to the bridge of the carrier.

She shook her head. Rubbed at her face with her hands.

She would come back. And maybe next time she would be stronger.

On the bridge of the carrier, Bury fought to try to get a good view of what was going on. He had been invited—he was an officer, after all—but no one was making room for him. Typical.

The bridge was packed full of bodies. Most of the Naval officers were there, Lanoe and Candless and Paniet, and somebody had said Ehta was on her way. A bunch of Centrocor people were present, the carrier’s pilots and navigators and IOs, and the leader of their marines. Captain Shulkin sat in the chair in the middle of the room, which was his by right. The two Batygins were present via hologram, their identical faces floating over the proceedings. Even the civilian woman, the Centrocor executive, was present.

Not Maggs, of course. Maggs had tried to kill Bury once, and the Hellion would have relished a chance to confront him now. But of course a traitor like that wouldn’t get an invitation. Valk was absent too—Lanoe didn’t want any of the Centrocor people to even get a look at his pet AI—but Bury had no doubt he was listening in.

“Three hundred thousand kilometers,” one of the IOs announced. “Still no activity from the disk.”

Lanoe nodded. He was watching the big display. It showed a schematic view of the disk, with the trajectory of the Screamer plotted across it as a yellow curve. The drone ship was headed toward the thickest part of the disk, the area where Lanoe had seen the cities. There was a display showing the view from the drone’s cameras, but Bury wasn’t tall enough to see over the people in front of him and he only got occasional glimpses. The display didn’t show much he hadn’t seen before, anyway. Red clouds circling a dull orange star.

Bury was reporting to Valk these days, serving as his information officer—an utterly pointless and boring assignment, since the AI had no use for an IO. The one prerogative of the job was that by eavesdropping, Bury got to hear all about what was going on, what Lanoe had planned for first contact with the Blue-Blue-White. Valk had even explained to Bury how the Screamer worked. The jellyfish didn’t have a spoken language, or any normal kind of written one. They communicated by generating colored lights inside their bodies. The Screamer was built to put out incredibly bright pulses of light, bright enough to be visible even through the thick clouds of the disk. It could broadcast in all the colors the jellyfish recognized, which, it turned out, weren’t exactly the same colors humans saw. They could see in the near ultraviolet and identified five kinds of blue as individual colors, but had only one name for both orange and red. There were fifteen total colors because they had fifteen tentacles. They even used base fifteen as their number system, which made no sense to Bury at all.

That was the majority of what they knew about the Blue-Blue-White. It would be surprising they knew that much—if not for Valk. Back during the battle of Niraya, the AI had been imprisoned on an alien queenship, a giant terraforming machine. The queenship’s computers had found a way to talk to him, machine to machine. From that brief contact Valk had gleaned a rudimentary understanding of their language and biology, though next to nothing about their culture or religion or their philosophy or anything else. They had no idea how the jellyfish would react to being signaled by the Screamer, so it had been decided to send the drone in first, unescorted. For all they knew, the Blue-Blue-White would attack the thing.

Bury hoped they did. He didn’t see much point in trying to talk to the aliens first. They were here to start a war, right?

A war other people would fight. He reminded himself he was on the inactive list, due to his supposed injuries. The only chance he would have to get his fifth kill—and his blue star—was if so many of the Centrocor pilots died that Lanoe had to send in any pilot he could get.

Bury was not so bloodthirsty that he wished any pilot dead. But maybe—maybe there would be a disease outbreak on the carrier. Something nonfatal but debilitating, even just food poisoning.

Maybe, just maybe, he would get his chance.

“Passing the outer edge of the disk now,” the carrier’s IO said. “Entering the uppermost layer of the atmosphere.”

Candless nodded at the man, though she’d barely heard him. Her attention was riveted on the forward view from the drone as it flew over the disk at a shallow angle. The drone was burning hard to decelerate and the disk unfurled beneath it with an aching slowness.

Tendrils of red gas licked upward toward the camera, like the tentacles of a beast two million kilometers wide. As the drone shot over one of the gaps in the disk she had a very quick glimpse of one of its shepherd moons. If there’d been any doubt left that the Blue-Blue-White had built the disk to their specifications, the moon disabused Candless of that notion. She’d expected to see an amorphous chunk of dead rock, perhaps pitted with craters. Instead its entire surface was covered with white spars like the ones that made up the cities, so that it looked like the moon was trapped inside a cage of bones.

Oh, come now. She told herself she was being melodramatic.

She isolated a still image of the moon. The resolution wasn’t fantastic. The drone was moving very fast and only got a split-second look, but the image was clear enough to make out some further details. Contained inside the cagework were colossal structures of some kind, fantastic shapes she couldn’t even recognize. They might be habitats or factories or maybe something else entirely. She nudged Lanoe’s arm.

“When you told me about Niraya,” she said, keeping her voice low, “you mentioned that you destroyed a Blue-Blue-White mining facility. Does any of that look familiar to you?”

He glanced at the isolated image and shrugged. “Sure. I guess—those towers,” he said. He gestured at a row of tall, skeletal pylons crowned with what looked like flexible segmented arms. She started to ask him what they were, but he had already looked away, his gaze fixed on the main schematic display.

But then she saw something else, something she recognized from images he’d shown her. “If you would be kind enough to give me some small shred of your attention,” she said, “look there.” And pointed with a trembling finger.

He turned impatiently toward her, but when he saw what she was pointing at she could tell she had his attention. Right on the surface of the shepherd moon, in a cradle of white spars not unlike a spider’s web, sat an oblong rocky object about a kilometer in diameter. An asteroidal rock, by the look of it, but the Blue-Blue-White had hollowed it out, leaving one end open in a wide circular maw. A maw surrounded by fifteen long dark pylons that resembled tentacles.

Tiny specks moved around the object, and she saw an infinitesimal flash of light come from within the mouth.

“That’s a queenship,” he said.

“The main element of one of their drone fleets, yes?” Candless said. “Am I right?”

“You’re right.” His face darkened and she saw his hands curl into fists. “And that must be a drydock it’s in. They’re still building the damned things. They’re building more. I guess their work isn’t done.”

Candless closed her eyes and tried to breathe.

“They’d better have a damned good explanation,” Lanoe said, very quietly.

She knew him, well enough that she recognized that tone. When he spoke that softly, it meant he was about to kill someone.

Please, she thought, please—when you hear our message, consider it carefully. Otherwise, we’re all going to pay.

On the camera feed, the drone was nearing the central zone, the city zone, where the disk grew thick with piles of red cloud. None of the cities were immediately visible, but Valk had logged their positions and their velocity and he could estimate their locations.

The scale of the cloudscape was beyond anything a human being could have imagined before. Earth could be dropped into those billows of red and black and it would simply sink from view, lost in the murk. Wherever the clouds parted to form infinitely deep canyons Valk saw massive, blindingly bright bolts of lightning jump back and forth between them.

“The drone is meeting atmospheric resistance,” the carrier’s IO said. Valk didn’t need to be on the big ship to hear what was being said. “Velocity has dropped to fifty kilometers a second.”

On this kind of scale, that was a snail’s pace. It would still take the drone half an hour just to cross the zone of the cities. More than enough time for a conversation.

A great deal of thought had gone into what they should say to the Blue-Blue-White. When Valk interfaced with their drone fleet at Niraya he had downloaded a large amount of data, but most of it had been in machine language. Only a few messages had been encoded in the color language of the aliens. As a result he had only a basic vocabulary to work with, so the message had to be simple.

The obvious choice had just been “Hello, we would like to speak to you.” Simple, and not aggressive. The kind of message that might get a favorable response.

Lanoe had shot that down at once. He didn’t want to give the Blue-Blue-White the impression that humanity had come to their doorstep to make friends. Sending any kind of message at all meant forgoing the element of surprise, so he had argued that they should declare their purpose here as clearly as possible. He wanted the message to read, “You must answer for your crimes.”

Candless had disagreed—she felt that Lanoe’s message might as well say, “You’re under arrest. Keep your hands where we can see them.” Instead, she’d argued for a more nuanced introduction. Valk had struggled to translate her words, but in the end they’d come up with, “We have a message of great urgency.”

Lanoe still didn’t like it. He was spoiling for a fight. Some great triumph to slake his thirst for revenge—but even he had to recognize that the best outcome here would be for real communication with the jellyfish. Eventually Candless had gotten him to compromise.

“Ready to begin signaling,” Valk said, sending his words directly to Lanoe’s suit. Through a camera view he saw Lanoe nod.

“Do it,” he said.

Valk painted the Screamer with a communications laser and sent the command. The little drone started to spin, its colored lights flashing in precisely timed intervals. The language of the Blue-Blue-White was heavily nuanced—the fifteen colors were important, but so were the durations of each color, their chromaticity and value.

The color schedule had all been worked out in advance, but Valk translated it to himself as the Screamer flashed out its message.

Blue–long blue–short white, the name of the species itself, which they always used to begin an address. Purple–purple–long purple–green–dark blue–long green: “We have a message.” White–dull red–white–very bright white, to indicate emphasis. Vivid blue–long vivid blue–very bright short white, to suggest that the message sender possessed high authority.

The message repeated, over and over.

Valk watched the people on the bridge. Every face was frozen with anticipation, with dread, with, perhaps, a little hope. If the Blue-Blue-White responded favorably, perhaps there was a chance at some kind of communication, of understanding. Perhaps, eventually, some form of reconciliation.

As the Screamer pulsed out the colors, over and over, heart rates on the bridge started to climb. A few people started to sweat.

Shulkin’s biodata didn’t change at all. The man was a statue. Bury didn’t sweat, because he was a Hellion.

Lanoe’s heart rate actually slowed down.

“We have to give them a chance to respond,” Candless said. “This is going to come as quite a shock to them, they’ll—”

But before she’d finished her thought, the reply came. Searchlights lanced upward through the clouds, incredibly powerful lights in all fifteen colors, flickering as they replied to the Screamer. Not just one reply, but dozens, from at least three different cities. The colored beams swept across the sky, homing in on the Screamer as it rocketed through the outer atmosphere of the disk.

Valk overclocked himself trying to record all the incoming messages. Blue–long blue–long blue–long blue–bright white.

Orange–short orange–vivid orange.

Green–blue–white–vivid red–dull red–blue.

Vivid orange–vivid orange–vivid orange–vivid orange–short vivid orange.

Some of the responses repeated, some were sent only once. Some were stronger than others. Data spooled at incredible speed through Valk’s processors, datasets combined, forced into arrays, broken back out into strings. He applied Fourier transforms and n-gram predictive algorithms, pushed it all through brute-force Markov models.

He was done long before Lanoe spoke.

“Well? What are they saying?”

The problem was, Valk didn’t have an answer.

In Lanoe’s ear, Valk’s voice sounded perfectly human. And perfectly apologetic.

“It’s … gibberish,” the AI said.

Lanoe scowled. Knowing full well that Valk would see the expression. Wanting him to.

“I’m trying, Lanoe, I really am. It’s just—I only have a limited vocabulary to begin with. I kind of expected I wouldn’t fully understand their replies, but I’m getting nothing. Not a single one of the replies means anything I can process. Maybe … I don’t know, it’s like there are some root words in there, a couple of suffixes I recognize, and even then I’m using metaphors, comparing this to the way we process spoken language, and this is a completely different kind of—”

“Say again,” Lanoe told him. “This time, speak plainly.”

“The message we sent is one of the simpler things you can say in their language. Their responses seem simple, too. Except I don’t understand any of it. I don’t have an explanation. Just the fact that it doesn’t make any sense.”

Lanoe pursed his lips. Nodded to himself. Then he turned to look at Candless, and the carrier’s IO, Giles. “Tell me what’s happening with the drone.”

Giles responded first. “The Screamer is still decelerating, mostly because of air resistance. It’s still moving faster than escape velocity for the disk, though. If we don’t change its course it’ll eventually collide with the star. Of course, it’ll be vaporized long before it reaches the photosphere.”

Lanoe nodded. That wasn’t a problem—in fact, flying into the star had always been built into the drone’s flight plan. If the Blue-Blue-White responded unfavorably, or even just ignored the Screamer, Lanoe had wanted to make sure they didn’t get their tentacles on it. They could learn a great deal about human technology by taking it apart and studying it.

“Valk is having trouble decoding their responses,” Lanoe told the crowd on the bridge. “In the meantime, we’re going to—”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” Candless said. “But look. There.”

She pointed at the display that showed the camera view from the Screamer’s nose. Much of the image was just a welter of dark red swirling clouds. Along one side, though, he could see some lighter dots. They grew in size as he watched them.

“Those must be Blue-Blue-White vehicles, coming to meet us,” Giles said. “At least, coming to check out our drone.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant, for stating the obvious,” Candless said. “Commander Lanoe, sir? Would you like us to respond in any way?”

“Valk,” Lanoe said, “have the Screamer send my message. The one I originally wanted to send. Maybe they’ll respond to that.”

“If you’re sure,” Valk said.

“I’m sure,” Lanoe told him.

On the main display, a schematic of the Screamer displayed which of its fifteen lamps was in use at a given time. The new message contained a lot more vivid orange than the previous one.

“Those vehicles are moving very fast,” Giles said. “In fact, the one in the lead is—oh. Uh, sir, those are—”

“I see it,” Lanoe said. Those weren’t vehicles approaching the Screamer. They were projectiles. Missiles.

The first one hit the drone off center, knocking it off its course. Bars of static raced up and down across the camera view.

The second projectile smashed the Screamer into a million pieces.

The camera view went blank instantly. On the schematic view the debris from the Screamer appeared as bright dots spreading out across the sky of the disk.

“The drone has been destroyed,” Giles said. Perhaps for the benefit of anyone who hadn’t already figured that out.

“There’s movement down in the clouds,” Candless said. She brought up a new display to replace the lost camera feed. The new imagery came from the carrier’s own long-range telescopes, and it showed a much wider view of swirling cloudscape. Something dark was swimming its way up through those clouds, tendrils of red wisping off its surface as it surfaced.

An actual vehicle this time, Lanoe thought. No missile, no projectile would ever be that large. As it rose above the top layer of clouds, he realized that he was seeing, for the very first time, a Blue-Blue-White ship. Not one of the drones he’d fought at Niraya but an actual ship containing actual jellyfish. It was oblong and lumpy, its surface broken in a dozen places by white cagework blisters. Deep pits in its hull glowed with heat—those had to be either thrusters or weapons.

The ship was—big. It could be hard to tell such things from a distance, but the amount of light it caught, even in that dim cloudscape, made Lanoe think it was very, very big.

“What’s the scale on this?” Lanoe said.

Giles leaned over his console, reading numbers from a display. “The wingspan is … Hellfire. Approximately five kilometers.”

Ten times bigger than the carrier. Far bigger than the largest dreadnought humanity had ever built. Five times bigger than the queenship Lanoe had fought at Niraya.

He let his mind reel for a second. Got himself back under control.

“All ships,” he said. “Move in for a close approach.”

Candless whirled around to look at him, her eyes bright with fear. “Sir,” she said.

“Do it,” he said. He turned and looked back at Shulkin. The madman was leaning forward in his chair, a tiny smile on his lips. Above their heads the holographic images of the Batygin brothers looked grim but resolute.

“They wouldn’t listen to our message,” Lanoe said. “Maybe if we show up in person, they’ll pay attention.”

The gravity on the bridge increased as the carrier accelerated toward the rendezvous. They had been hanging back behind the Screamer, but only by a million kilometers or so. It wouldn’t take long to close the distance.