Chapter Sixteen

Lanoe was surprised he was still alive. As soon as he took out the laser emplacements he’d assumed a wing of drone airfighters would come swarming down on him, hot for his blood. Or perhaps a ship even bigger than one of those dreadnoughts would surface from the murky clouds below him, giant guns blazing away at this tiny new threat.

None of that happened.

He’d been ignored. Unmolested. He’d crept away, craning his head this way then that, looking for any sign of pursuit and finding none. He knew he wasn’t invisible. He was pretty sure that if he rose above the city, punched for the sky and the void beyond, he would be picked up on some sensor somewhere and he would be attacked—the Blue-Blue-White had responded with surprising speed when the Screamer entered their atmosphere, and he guessed they had an elaborate network of early warning systems up there, above the clouds. But it seemed as long as he stayed below, inside the precincts of the giant city, he was safe. He decided the best chance he had was to fly out of the city and deeper into the clouds before he tried to make a break for space. It wasn’t much of a plan—he was banking everything on the fact that so far he’d been left alone. Yet at least for the moment, it seemed to be working.

“Like a beetle in an anthill,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that,” the fighter replied.

Lanoe watched a pylon go by, an impossibly long white bone of this skeletal place. It was pierced with windows, but nothing moved behind them.

“If a beetle attacks an anthill, looking for food, the soldier ants will swarm it, tear it to pieces. They have to defend their queen. But if somehow the beetle gets inside the anthill, the ants will leave it alone. They literally can’t imagine an enemy inside their ordered society, so they can’t defend against it. The beetle can steal their food, eat their eggs, do whatever it wants—the ants assume the beetle is just another ant, and so they never question what it’s doing.”

After a while he opened his throttle a little and soared off through the city, alone and unchallenged.

If it even was a city. He’d just assumed that such a large structure had to be inhabited. Yet he’d been flying for hours now and hadn’t seen any sign of occupation in the jungle of white pylons. He hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of a jellyfish floating between the long, bony structures, nor any other sign of life.

Just the endless, endlessly varied tangle of white pylons. He tried to study them as he drifted through, tried to make sense of the textures and shapes he saw built up on their surfaces. He couldn’t comprehend any of it—it was just too foreign to his experience. Too alien, in other words.

Maybe this place wasn’t a city after all. Maybe it was some incredibly vast, incredibly complex piece of machinery. A vast computer, or some piece of ancient terraforming equipment left over from when the Blue-Blue-White built the disk. Maybe it was … Lanoe didn’t know, a park of some kind? Or a graveyard. That might explain why it was so empty, so desolate.

Then he caught a flash of movement, and he saw the place wasn’t as abandoned as he’d thought.

Up ahead he saw a place where seven pylons came together in a single joint, a swollen white node on the endlessly branching network. Even from kilometers away he could see movement there, a kind of shifting, coruscating light. The enhanced optics of the fighter included an edge recognition algorithm, and it highlighted the sharp angles of the node, but also some much smaller, much more delicate curves, curves that were in constant flux.

He had no idea what it could mean. Even at that range he would have been able to tell if it had been a welcoming party of Blue-Blue-White readying another laser battery. It wasn’t that. As he drew closer he brought up a weapons board, just in case. “Can you give me a magnified view?” he asked.

“Of course,” the fighter’s voice said. She brought up a subdisplay and laid it over the forward view.

Lanoe half expected to find that the motion was nothing special, just the churn of some giant machine spinning its gears.

Instead he found life. Teeming life.

The node was thick with striped legs. Countless animals that stirred languidly, moving an appendage now and again, lifting away from the bonelike node and then falling back again. Creatures with no bodies, no heads—just clusters of legs like rubbery starfish. Jagged stripes in black and white ran up and down each sinuous, tentacular limb, which ended in a smaller cluster of even more delicate members.

Lanoe had seen something like them before. At Niraya, he’d fought the drones of the Blue-Blue-White. The worker drones of the fleet had looked much like these, but with one exception—the workers had obviously been machines, built of metal and bundles of wire. These creatures were made of flesh—squirming, rippling flesh.

Maybe the worker drones had been designed to look just like these things. Maybe these were some slave race bound to service by the Blue-Blue-White. Maybe they were just parasites that lived off the substance of the pylons.

So many questions, and no way to answer any of them.

Lanoe didn’t stop to take a closer look. So far the animals on the node had given no indication that they’d seen him—they didn’t appear to even have any eyes—but he didn’t want to wander too near and give them a chance to jump on his fighter, or raise an alarm, or … whatever they might do. He goosed his throttle a little and moved on.

As he passed by he saw several dozen of them break from the heap and go running along the top of one of the pylons, their many legs rippling, their stripes a welter of light and shadow. They looked surprisingly like greyhounds as they rushed along, legs flashing beneath them.

He didn’t stick around to see where they were going.

Lanoe had heard nothing from his people since he’d entered the clouds. He assumed there was some feature of the disk’s thick atmosphere that blocked radio signals. His communications laser was useless down there, too—he couldn’t see where to aim it, if it was even strong enough to punch through all that murk. He had to assume that Candless had gotten his people to safety, that they were regrouping and preparing for the next raid on the disk.

Assuming he’d gotten to the laser battery in time. Assuming any human ships had survived. He could be all alone in the disk, the only human for ten thousand light-years.

“Best not to think like that,” the fighter’s voice told him. “Your mental hygiene could suffer.”

He frowned, uncertain of what was going on. He was pretty certain he hadn’t been thinking aloud just then. “Did you just … read my mind?” he asked.

“Commander?” the fighter asked. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understand.”

“Just now—you—” Lanoe shook his head. “I thought you said something.”

“I’m happy to repeat it. I said, ‘Commander? I’m sorry, but I—’”

“No, before that,” Lanoe said. He grunted in frustration. “Never mind.”

“Okay,” the synthesized voice said. Just acknowledging his command.

He tried to put it out of his mind. He tried focusing on the city around him—on learning more about the Blue-Blue-White. Anything he saw here might be useful later, when he came back in force to pursue his war against the jellyfish. If he could spot some kind of weakness of the city, some vital piece of machinery, it could make all the difference.

The problem was, he understood almost nothing of what he saw. The pylons were complex and elaborately sculpted, but not in any way that looked familiar to human eyes. Spars stuck up at seemingly random angles. The pylons were cut open in various places, creating windows or maybe doors, but the openings were far too small to be used by a twenty-five-meter-wide jellyfish. Maybe they were designed to be used by the hounds he’d seen, the many-legged striped creatures, but he never saw one of them climbing in or out of one of the portals.

He didn’t even understand how the city worked—how it kept itself from falling out of the sky. It was so big, and must be unbelievably heavy, yet it seemed to float perfectly motionless in the atmosphere with nothing to prop it up. The winds of the disk blew incredibly fierce—hundreds of kilometers an hour—yet the city didn’t sway or bob.

Maybe all those pylons were hollow. Maybe they were filled with some kind of buoyant gas. Or maybe the Blue-Blue-White had invented some machine that could counteract the force of gravity.

A mystery in a sky full of them. Lanoe passed under one pylon that was swollen and banded like a giant’s rib cage, the white material of its surface wrapped tight around some kind of internal structure. The whole thing throbbed mightily like a heart the size of a human city. Lanoe could feel the vibrations coming right through his canopy, pounding on his own chest like a drum. He flew on.

He saw a horizontal pylon that was studded with what looked like bones, like skeletons of some headless creature he couldn’t quite imagine. Hundreds of skeletons, each fifty meters long. They were partially embedded in the skin of the pylon as if they were fossils that had only been partially uncovered.

He nearly flew into an enormous net, a filmy membrane no thicker than a soap bubble, stretched out between two diverging pylons. Long loops of transparent cable hung down from the membrane, blown nearly horizontal by the wind.

He got a bad start when he passed by what seemed to be a landing pad, a broad stretch of pylon that had been flattened on top. Hundreds of drone airfighters stood perched atop the pad, their long airfoils swept back behind them like the wings of insects. He reached for his throttle controls, thinking he would need to make a fast getaway—but then he noticed that some of the airfighters were slumped over on their landing gear, their wings grazing the pad. Others had their cockpits blown open, the cagework rough and twisted where it had been punctured, perhaps by weapon fire. Thick growths of pale vines anchored most of them to the pad, and he realized that this wasn’t a staging area but a junkyard—the airfighters were nothing but wreckage. It occurred to him they might be ships his people had shot down, but the vines couldn’t have grown over them that quickly, could they? The ships must have been destroyed in some battle of the past, presumably a battle between two factions of Blue-Blue-White.

He flew past colossal machines buried in webs of dark girders. He flew through what he thought might be an actual forest, a stretch of the city where thick white vines crisscrossed between three pylons, vines that sprouted long, spiraling tendrils. He flew over what he called, for lack of any better term, a farm, where long rows of fleshy sacs sprouted from the surface of a pylon, all of them slowly swelling and then collapsing, as if they were breathing in a fitful sleep.

It all just passed him by, his brain unable to gather more than basic impressions, or form anything but the simplest explanations for what he saw. The city was as complex and varied as any human city, as wild in its profusion, as chaotic in its design—just scaled up in size a hundredfold. After a while it became just a whirl, a fog of images, of meaningless lines and shadows. None of it made any sense. None of it meant anything. Eventually his brain just gave up trying. Except—one fact stuck with him, one he knew had to possess some incredible significance he just couldn’t work out.

He had yet to see a single Blue-Blue-White. They’d gone to the trouble of building this colossal city of pylons, bigger than any city humans had ever built, yet as far as he could tell it was utterly deserted.

Where the hell were they?

He found them when he’d stopped expecting to. When he’d already decided that the city must be a ruin, a skeleton of its former self haunted only by the many-legged hounds. He thought that right up until the idea was proven wrong.

He’d flown for hours through the city by then. He was numb to new sensation, almost asleep. He woke up very fast when something splattered on his canopy. A kind of sooty foam streaked across the flowglas, then was torn away by the wind.

As he looked around he saw more of the foam, whole long streamers of it twisting away from a nearby pylon. He touched his control stick, veering in for a closer look, and saw that a broad, jagged opening had been torn in the pylon’s side. The foam was fluttering out of that aperture, bits of it breaking free to flutter on the wind. Inside the hole he could see a vast quantity of the stuff, a lake’s worth, quivering and glistening in the dim light. And inside the foam, there was movement—frenzied, swarming movement. A large number of creatures were down in there, rustling around in the dirty foam. They were round and rubbery, and when he asked for a magnified view, he saw them using their fifteen tentacles to stuff the foam inside their toothless mouths.

He’d seen his first Blue-Blue-Whites, but it took him a second to realize it. There was something deeply wrong with the aliens.

They were tiny.

Not, perhaps, in comparison to a human. The smallest of them was at least three meters across. But Valk had led him to believe that the jellyfish were eight times that size. Of course, Valk had claimed to understand their language as well. Had all of his information about the Blue-Blue-White been faulty?

Lanoe studied the feasting aliens. They climbed over each other, tore at each other’s tentacles. There was plenty of the foam to go around, but they fought each other over … what? Choice bits of it? The foam all looked the same to Lanoe, but maybe some of it was more rich in nutrients, or just tastier.

They acted like animals. Like unthinking animals. How could creatures that disorganized build something as huge and complex as the city, much less the entire disk?

He had found the enemy. Maybe it was time to think about how he could fight them.

Lanoe reached for his weapons board. The Z.XIX carried a rack of high-temperature explosive bombs, fist-sized weapons that could fill the entire trough of foam with purging fire. He could kill so many of them in one fell swoop.

Just as he’d dreamed of doing since Niraya. Since Zhang died.

Lanoe touched a virtual key. Armed a bomb. He would have to get close, to make sure it fell exactly right, to make sure the wind didn’t catch it—

Then he saw something else, something that made him hesitate.

Just beyond the opening of the feeding trough, the flat top of the pylon was stained with some dark liquid. Blood, Lanoe thought, because in the midst of all that gore was the body of some giant creature, a thing like a whale with dozens of wings and fins and strakes. It had no eyes, but its forward end terminated in a round mouth filled with curling ivory fangs. The animal made him think of the skeletons, the fossils he’d seen embedded in one of the pylons. Especially, he thought, because it was being butchered. A square cut had been made in its side, revealing a structure like a rib cage. Blood poured from the cut, bubbling and turning to foam as it hit the surface of the pylon. Clearly this was the source of the food the little Blue-Blue-White were consuming.

Then he saw the butcher.

A Blue-Blue-White twenty-five meters across. Maybe thirty. It looked enormous, gigantic, compared to the smaller ones wallowing in the foam. Its skin was translucent and rubbery. Its fifteen tentacles clutched knives and axes that looked surprisingly similar to human implements, except that their handles were long and spiral-shaped.

Inside its globular body Lanoe could make out the shadows of vast organs and the branching lines of blood vessels, like a miniature image of the city around them. Prominent among the alien’s innards were long, looping filaments that flickered with light. In the augmented light view he could see through his canopy, colors were flattened, almost nonexistent, but he thought some of the lights were blue, some red, some just white. The lights throbbed in a rhythmic pattern, looking like the strings of lights people on Earth hung up for Fleet Day.

This Blue-Blue-White was as big as Valk had said. The others were so much smaller, they must be—

—infants.

Lanoe was flying over a nursery. The swarm of tiny aliens squabbling over their dinner had to be the children of the big one. Its babies.

He looked down at his hand. His finger was still touching the key that armed the bomb.

“Babies,” he said out loud. “They’re just babies.”

The fighter responded—but not the way he expected. He might have assumed it would say it didn’t understand his last instruction. It didn’t say that, though.

Moreover, its voice had changed.

Instead of the clipped, synthetic voice it had possessed before, it spoke now with the mellow, mocking tones of the only woman he’d ever loved. The voice coming from the fighter’s speakers was the voice of Bettina Zhang.

The woman he’d wanted to marry. The woman he’d wanted to spend the rest of his life with, until a Blue-Blue-White drone took her away from him.

“You and I never got to have any babies,” Zhang’s voice said.

Lanoe pulled his finger away from the weapons board. It was shaking.

What was going on? He must be hallucinating. He must be—“What did you just say?” he demanded.

“I don’t understand, Commander,” the fighter said. In the robotic voice it had used before. Zhang was gone. His delusion of Zhang was gone.

He’d felt her presence before. He’d been haunted by her ghost, ever since he’d lost her. Every time he saw Ginger’s red hair. Sometimes when he was alone, in his cabin, alone with his dark thoughts, it was like she was lying in the bunk next to him, so close he could feel her breath on the back of his neck.

Normally she didn’t speak to him. This was … something new.

He caught a flash of motion through his canopy. While he had temporarily lost his mind, the big alien had noticed him. It rose from its work, lifting up into the air under its own power. Its rubbery body deformed and pulsed as it rushed toward him, brandishing its weapons. Lanoe was suddenly very aware of the fact the Blue-Blue-White was ten times the size of his fighter.

It could swallow him whole if it wanted to.

He nudged his control stick, veering away from the nursery. Poured on a little speed. The jellyfish gave chase, but it couldn’t keep up, and soon Lanoe was kilometers away, moving fast.

There wasn’t much more city to traverse. The pylons grew farther apart, with fewer connections. They were simpler here, too, just unadorned lengths of white bony material.

In time he came to the place where the city ended. A place where there was nothing but a solitary hound loping across a forlorn length of pylon, its legs flashing as it slowed down, catching itself before it ran off the edge. The final pylon stuck out into the dim red cloud bank, unattached at its far end to any other, like a spear sticking over a battlement. Its end was rough and jagged, pebbly in texture. Lanoe watched the hound, at the very edge, tugging at the limp tentacles of tiny polyps, trillions of them, each in their protective coating of something like white coral.

If he’d been able to achieve some kind of mental focus, it might have occurred to him that he was seeing something important. How much the polyps looked like the tiny animals that built coral reefs. That the city had not been built, after all, but grown.

He was far too busy worrying that he’d lost his mind.

Zhang’s voice had come from the fighter’s speakers. He’d heard her speak, as clear as a ringing bell.

He’d known before that he was slipping. That all his reserves of careful discipline and mental toughness were starting to crack. The task he’d given himself, to take revenge on an entire alien species, was just too big for a human mind to bear. The burden of command was getting to him. But now—

He’d heard her. And as much as that scared him, he couldn’t deny it had been good, so very, very good, to hear her voice again.

He couldn’t let himself get distracted, he knew. He had to stay alert, stay strong. He needed to get back to the others. Maybe it was just the isolation, the loneliness of being the only human in the midst of the jellyfish city. If he could get back to other people, other humans, he would be fine.

Of course, that presented a whole new problem.

For a while he just focused on figuring out where he was. He’d traveled a long distance, crossing the city. Hundreds of kilometers. He was nowhere near the place where they’d first fought the Blue-Blue-White. Perhaps it was safe now to climb for outer space. To try to locate the cruiser and the carrier, and rendezvous with his people.

On the other hand, the cover of the clouds might be the only thing keeping him alive. He might get swarmed by airfighters the second he popped up out of the clouds. There might be a dozen new laser positions waiting to carve him into pieces if he showed himself in clear air.

There was only one way to find out.