Chapter Seventeen

Hours ticked by as they waited to see if the dreadnoughts had fallen for Candless’s ruse. All anyone could do was sit and watch. No one even knew what kind of sensors the alien ships possessed. If they had some way of seeing where the humans were hiding, Candless’s strategy was not only going to prove futile—it would get them all killed.

She made a point of not watching the clock. Of forcing herself not to count the minutes that passed.

Captain Shulkin returned to the bridge, the wound in his leg healing nicely. If he bore a grudge against Candless for shooting him, she couldn’t tell. He took his accustomed chair and strapped himself in—the carrier was not currently accelerating, so there was no gravity to keep him from floating away. He steepled his fingers before him and stared straight ahead, seemingly dead to the world.

That was fine by Candless. As long as he kept quiet, he could sit where he liked.

She had not ordered the bridge crew to remain silent. She hadn’t needed to, not while the dreadnoughts were still out there, searching for them. When the IO needed to send her information, he did so by messaging her wrist display. The pilot and the navigator—who had nothing to do as long as the carrier’s engines remained banked and cold—sat quietly, watching their displays.

The dreadnoughts couldn’t hear them, of course, not through the vacuum of space. Yet even soft sounds made everyone jump.

Just a few hours before, one of the dreadnoughts had come uncomfortably close to finding them. The alien ships were well organized and had established an efficient search pattern, each of them taking a separate part of the sky to patrol. The first time one of the giant ships came within ten thousand kilometers of the carrier, Candless had spent a nasty hour clutching her armrests, watching the display as the Blue-Blue-White vehicle grew larger and larger in the telescope view. She had stopped breathing as it made its nearest approach. She couldn’t remember if she’d blinked, in fact.

There was no way to tell if the alien ship was readying its weapons. No way to know if it had found them. Learning that information would have required switching on their active sensors, and that might have given them away. So all she could do was watch, and be ready to react if she thought one of the giant ship’s weapon pits was about to fire.

Eventually the dreadnought had simply moved past them, without so much as deviating from its course. She watched it recede, and only then did she allow herself to—just slightly—relax.

Now Valk called her, his voice surprisingly loud in her ear, and her nerves were jangled all over again.

“My turn,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” she whispered. But she was already tapping virtual keys, getting her telescopes turned around. There. She couldn’t see the cruiser, but she had a fair idea of its location. She could see very well that one of the dreadnoughts was inching closer to Valk’s position. Far too close for comfort, in fact.

“It’ll pass at a distance of six thousand three hundred and nine kilometers of me, in thirty minutes’ time,” Valk told her.

The carrier and the cruiser had been quite near to each other when they went silent, but because they couldn’t use even their positioning thrusters, the two ships had slowly drifted apart. Now they were nearly a hundred thousand kilometers from each other and getting farther away all the time.

Too far for her to send him any help, even if she could do so somehow without giving away her own position. “Understood,” she said. “How do you want to handle this?”

“I was kind of hoping you might have some ideas,” he told her. “I guess, the way I see it, there are two options. I can stay dark and wait it out. See if that thing notices me. Of course, if it does there’s not a lot I can do. It takes ninety seconds to get my coilguns ready to fire. Long before I got a shot off, the jellyfish could turn me to slag with those plasma cannons of theirs.”

“And your second option?”

“I can get proactive. Start warming up my guns now. They’ll notice right away, of course, and accelerate to intercept—but by the time I’m in range of their weapons, I’ll be ready to shoot, too. It’ll come down to which of us has better aim. And even if I win, the other two dreadnoughts will see me and we get to start the chase all over again.”

“A hard choice,” Candless told him.

“You’re in charge here. I know which way I would go, but—”

“Yes, I’m sure you have an opinion. Everyone always does.” Candless pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger. Tried to think.

There were people on the cruiser that she cared about. Ginger was over there, for the devil’s sake. Candless’s first impulse was to tell Valk to take the initiative, to fire at will. Yet if he failed—

And if she told him to wait, to hope the dreadnought didn’t see him? What if that went wrong? It meant consigning everyone on the cruiser to a fiery death.

She had to decide. No one else could take this weight from her shoulders.

“Stay dark,” she said, and let out a sigh composed of equal parts resignation and terror. “Our only real chance is to wait the jellyfish out. Let them think we’ve escaped, and that their search is pointless.”

“Understood,” Valk said. “I’ll keep you updated.”

“Do,” Candless said.

You could have cut the tension on the cruiser’s gun decks with a knife. When Valk sent the message saying that Candless had made her decision, Ehta released a long-held breath, letting it sputter through her lips. “Stand down,” she told her people. There was some grumbling, but not much. The marines who were in charge of loading the guns moved their shells very carefully back into their cradles, while the crews in the target acquisition booths yanked their hands back from their consoles.

Ehta clutched a railing with one hand and looked around at her people. She’d told them very little of what was happening, but of course they knew. Any minute now one of the giant dreadnoughts was going to pass them by. If it saw the cruiser, or even guessed they were close, then it was all over. “We’re on standby,” she called out. “We have twenty minutes’ downtime, but everybody stay put. If the order comes to fire, we won’t have any advance notice.”

She kicked off a wall and glided over the barrel of one of the guns, to where the maintenance crews were stationed. Gutierrez and Binah were sitting against a wall, straps pulled across their chests to keep them from floating away. They’d been chatting, laughing at some shared joke, and she smiled as she approached, thinking she would butt in and make them tell her what was so funny. But their faces fell when they saw her and they composed themselves like proper PBMs. Eyes straight forward, mouths closed, hands folded in front of them. Sitting at attention, as best they could.

They were freezing her out. Well, of course they were. She was a major now. You didn’t fraternize with your major. They could make too much trouble for you if you said or did the wrong thing.

She felt suddenly, crushingly lonely. She couldn’t let them see it, though. So she frowned and nodded at the two of them, and tried to make it look like she was just passing by, that she’d just noticed them there.

“Relax,” she said. She realized how long her people had been on duty—since before they launched the Screamer. “Get some sleep, if you can. Or pop a caff, if you have one.”

“Ma’am,” Gutierrez said. Binah just nodded.

Ehta kicked her way onward, past the loading crews. She needed a breath of air that didn’t stink of gun lubricant. At the hatch that led to the axial corridor, she pushed herself up against a wall and slapped the release. For a while she just hung there, one hand twisted through a nylon loop mounted on the wall. Weightless and, for the moment, without a thought in her head.

It couldn’t last, of course. Her wrist display lit up and she had to look at it. Just Valk telling her that they were one minute away from the dreadnought’s closest approach.

“Thanks for the update,” she told him.

“You’re welcome.”

“I was being sarcastic.” She shook her head. “How you holding up, big guy?”

“I’m … fine,” Valk told her. “A little worried.”

Ehta snorted in derision. “I’ll bet. Show me a picture of the dreadnought, will you? I just want to see what it looks like.”

“That’s actually kind of interesting, now you mention it,” Valk said, bringing up an image on her wrist. “Look at where the blisters are on this one.”

Ehta squinted at the image. She saw the big, pitted hull, the places where cagework stuck out from the corners. Six big weapon pits. None of them glowing, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

“It’s an alien ship. I have no idea what I’m looking at,” she told Valk. “Kind of by definition, you know?”

“The blisters are in different places from the first one of these we saw. Back in the disk, remember?” Valk didn’t sigh, but she could sense his frustration. He brought up a second image, one that showed the dreadnought she’d shot down, back in red-cloud land. She gave it just a cursory glance, but that was enough to show he was right. The one chasing them now had two more blisters than the first one, and all of the blisters were in different locations.

“Huh,” she said, unsure what that meant.

“When humans build ships, they make them look as close to identical to one another as possible,” Valk said. “There are good reasons for that. It lets you build them cheaper and easier, for one, because you can crank them out on an assembly line. The Blue-Blue-White don’t seem to have figured that out. Or maybe they have a completely different method for building their ships.”

“Valk, buddy, this is fascinating, but—”

“In fact, I’m not sure that ‘build’ is the right word at all. Look at the hull of the dreadnought.” The image on her display enlarged until she could see the texture of the ship’s skin. There were a lot more pits than she’d thought—in fact, the hull looked almost like a sponge, riddled with holes. As the image continued to expand Ehta saw that it didn’t stop, that the dreadnought’s hull was pitted to an almost fractal degree.

“What does this look like to you?” Valk asked.

“I don’t know. A nice piece of sponge cake?” Ehta tried. It had been a long time since she’d had any food that she didn’t suck out of a tube.

“Coral,” Valk said. “It looks like coral. I mean, doesn’t it? The whole ship looks like some kind of coral reef. I don’t think the dreadnoughts were built at all, I think they were grown. Isn’t that kind of amazing?”

“Sure,” Ehta said. She reached down deep inside herself, looking for that tiny shred of her soul that cared. She couldn’t find it. “Valk,” she said. “Just, you know, put that aside for a second. Can you tell me something?”

“What’s that?”

“How long until closest approach now?” she asked.

“About four seconds ago,” he said.

She fought the urge to call him names. She fought the urge to scream at him. “Does it look like the dreadnought saw us?” she asked, as carefully and politely as she could manage.

“Not so far. I would have told you, obviously.”

“If you would like any advice,” Shulkin whispered, “I’d be happy to provide it. For instance, I could teach you how wars are fought.” He seemed to have woken up, and was actually quite lucid for once—he’d even caught on to the fact that everyone was keeping their voices down, which was nice. “It’s all about projection of force, you see, by various means.”

Candless ignored him. She’d already shown the bridge crew who was in charge, and nobody else could hear him. She had no desire to shoot him again.

“You seem not to understand that the basic principle is to engage the enemy, not hide and hope he doesn’t see you,” Shulkin added.

Well, perhaps she had some small desire to shoot him again. He was, however, the captain of the carrier. Lanoe had made it quite clear that he was to remain in command—at least nominally—mostly so the Centrocor contingent would feel they weren’t prisoners of war.

“Thank you for your offer, sir. But perhaps we can continue this lesson another time,” she told him. She pushed off her chair and moved to the IO’s position. “Show me the state of play,” she said.

She could just as easily have called up a tactical board and analyzed it herself. This wasn’t a particularly complicated theater of battle. It was always good to get another pair of eyes on things, though.

“The dreadnoughts are here, here, and here,” the IO said, pointing at a display. Two of them were millions of kilometers away. No real threat there. The one that had just passed by the cruiser, though, was still far too close for comfort. “We’re here, and the cruiser is … there. I think.” Too far away for the carrier to come racing to its rescue, if things got hot. Close enough that they could still maintain good communications by laser.

“Is there anything else moving out here?” It had occurred to her that the Blue-Blue-White might have other ships in the volume of space around the disk. They wouldn’t even have to be military craft—mining ships working the system’s asteroids, or space telescopes, or who knew what might be out there, nearly as invisible as they were, but watching for them. Assisting the dragnet.

“I thought of that,” the IO said, nodding. “The answer, surprisingly, is no. I don’t see any sign that the Blue-Blue-White have assets in near space. No orbiting factories, no solar power satellites, no habitats.”

“Odd,” Candless said. “You’d think an advanced civilization would have all kinds of things in orbit. I suppose we can add this to the pile of mysteries we’ve already been stacking up.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ve been monitoring the disk as well, looking for any sign that they’re launching reinforcements, or refueling tenders, anything like that. It’s been quiet, though. Nothing’s left the atmosphere since we retreated.”

Candless nodded. Perhaps—perhaps her strategy was working. She tried to imagine it from the enemy’s perspective. Maybe the Blue-Blue-White thought the alien invaders had simply shown up in their system to blow up a few aircraft and one of their big dreadnoughts, then run away to whence they’d come. They must suspect there would be further attacks, but in the absence of any sign of the human ships, how long could they stay vigilant?

“Keep me updated. Constantly and thoroughly,” she told the IO. “I’m going to get something to eat, and check on the rest of the crew.”

“Ma’am,” he said.

She nodded and started to push away from his position. She was still in the process of kicking away, however, when she heard him give a little grunt of surprise.

“Yes?” she asked.

“It’s … nothing, ma’am. There was just a little flash of light in the disk’s upper atmosphere. Probably just ball lightning or something. If I hadn’t had my telescopes trained on that particular spot, I wouldn’t have noticed.”

Candless pursed her lips. “A flash of light,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. It’s … it’s … oh. There it is again.”

Candless pulled herself closer to his display. She didn’t ask for permission before swiping the image to magnify the view. The flash was little more than a blob of light on a single frame of the video feed. “The lightning we’ve seen before didn’t look like that. It was far more dramatic.”

“Yes, ma’am. This might just be an auroral discharge—like the northern lights on Earth. Interesting, though, that it’s so localized. And its color is weird, too. It’s not showing up on my visible light telescope at all.” He played with the display’s filters and the blob of light vanished—then came back in an intense, buzzing purple. “Just the near ultraviolet.”

Candless summoned a virtual keyboard and ran a few transforms on the image. As the IO had said, this was probably nothing, just a random fluctuation of electrons in the disk’s atmosphere. The fact that it was so specifically located in the ultraviolet portion of the visual spectrum bothered her, however. Natural light should be spread out across multiple wavelengths. There was also the fact that she knew the Blue-Blue-White could see some ultraviolet frequencies, and that distinctly worried her. If this were some sign of an enemy ship rising through the clouds, headed for space …“Dedicate one of your telescopes to this,” she said. “I want a better idea of what this—”

She stopped because the IO had just whispered a particularly shocking profanity. “Ma’am, it’s a laser.”

Candless’s heart stopped beating. She swallowed all the saliva in her mouth before she spoke. “IO, please tell me what you mean by that.”

“It’s not—I mean, it’s not one of their weaponized lasers, those were tuned to be bright red so they could punch through the clouds. It’s a very low-power laser, too—about as strong as one of our communications lasers. It’s not going to cut us to pieces.”

“Understood,” she said.

“But look—you can see in this image, you can definitely see that it’s a beam.” On the display the blob of light had stretched out, grown thin. It looked like a purple line drawn across the clouds. “And it’s sweeping.” The IO ran the video forward. The beam rotated around the red cloudscape, as if it were drawing a circle in the sky.

A searchbeam, Candless thought. The Blue-Blue-White’s dreadnoughts had failed to find the invading fleet, so now they were using one of their laser batteries to scan the darkness. If that laser so much as touched the cruiser or the carrier, whatever jellyfish was operating it could get a fix on their position. They could pass that information on to the dreadnoughts, and then—

Candless stabbed at her wrist display, calling Valk. “We might have a situation here,” she said. She broke it down for him as quickly as she could.

“Understood. You said it was an ultraviolet laser?” he asked.

“Yes, that’s right, it’s about …” She snapped her fingers at the IO. “What’s its wavelength?”

“Three hundred and five nanometers,” the IO told her.

“Three hundred and five,” she repeated. Wait. Three hundred and five. Three zero five.

“That’s weird,” Valk said. “A laser that color would get absorbed by the clouds down there pretty fast. If they really wanted to search for us with a collimated beam, they should use something with twice that wavelength, and—”

“It’s not them,” Candless said.

Valk said nothing. The IO looked up at her expectantly.

“It’s not the Blue-Blue-White,” Candless said. “Three hundred and five. As in the 305th Fighter Wing. It can’t be a coincidence.”

The IO looked very confused. “Ma’am? I beg your pardon, but I’ve never even heard of a 305th Fighter Wing. Is it a Navy unit?”

“It was. You haven’t heard of it because it was disbanded after the Brushfire. Once upon a time, though, it was quite the distinguished unit. It should have been—Lanoe and I were both assigned to it.”

“Wait. You’re saying you think that’s Lanoe down there,” Valk said.

“I’m sure of it,” she told him.

Damn him. Damn Lanoe—he had to be alive, didn’t he? He had to have survived alone in an alien world. And now he was going to get them all killed.

The minutes dragged on, with no word from Valk. Ehta moved around the gun deck trying to keep her people’s spirits up, trying to keep them focused. Just trying to keep them awake. After a while she called in the maintenance crews and had them check the long barrels of the coilguns. They were known to be finicky—even a tiny fault in the coils could cause a gun to fail to fire—but mostly she just wanted to give them something to do. They didn’t seem to mind much. Hard work was better than sitting around waiting to hear if they were going to die.

Eventually even she couldn’t stand it anymore. She called Valk and asked for an update.

“The dreadnought passed us by,” he said. “It didn’t deviate from its course at all. We’re well out of the range of its plasma ball guns now.”

Ehta gritted her teeth. “So my people can stand down?”

“For the moment,” he told her. “Keep them ready, though. If they stick to the search pattern they’ve established, another one of those ships will pass near us in six hours.”

Ehta shook her head in disbelief. “Six hours. Six more hours. How long is this going to go on?” she asked him. “How long are we going to have to stay on standby?”

“Until Candless says otherwise,” he said. At least he sounded a little apologetic.

“Damn that woman,” Ehta said. “Ice wouldn’t melt in her mouth, would it? She’s got us all sweating down here, waiting for—I don’t even know what. To get killed, maybe, or maybe she’ll just call over at some point and say everything’s fine. Well, to hell with her. I’m going to let my crews get some sleep.”

“Good idea. They’ll need to be fresh the next time.”

“Six hours from now,” Ehta said. “Fine.” She cut the connection, then waved one hand in the air for attention. Some of the marines actually looked up. Gutierrez moved from crew to crew, shaking people, kicking them if they didn’t get the point.

“Boss lady wants a word,” the corporal said.

“We’re clear,” Ehta shouted. There was no cheering this time, nor any grumbling. Her people had been pushed past their breaking point. They were still capable of work, but just barely. “Everybody find some place to curl up, get some sleep. You have five hours.” When the time came she would have to fight to get them moving again, she knew. Best to schedule herself a good hour just to wake them all up. “I’m going to organize some food, if anybody wants it. And maybe we can get a video to watch if—”

She stopped because a green pearl had appeared in the corner of her vision. She was receiving a call. The jolt of adrenaline that it gave her surprised her—she’d thought she was past being scared. If Valk had some new bad news, though, if they needed to go to full alert—

Then she saw it wasn’t Valk calling her. It was Bury, of all people.

She waved at her troops and they started moving, sluggishly shifting around to find somewhere they could strap themselves down for sleep. None of them seemed to care about the food or entertainment she’d offered.

She headed out into the axial corridor before she answered Bury’s call. The little bastard could wait, she thought. When she did answer, she growled at him. “What is it?” she demanded. “You know we’re supposed to keep communications to a minimum.”

The kid at least looked ashamed of himself. “I’m sorry. I really am. I just—it’s been a long time since I checked on Ginger. I can’t get over there myself but somebody needs to make sure she’s okay.”

“She’s not okay, kid,” Ehta said, because she was too tired for anything but the truth. “She’s not going to get okay, not as long as she’s chained to our pet alien. You’d better get used to it.”

Bury couldn’t meet her gaze. “She means something to me. Not—not like that, I know what you’re thinking. We’re just friends, but—good friends. We were classmates, and, and—”

“Squaddies,” Ehta said, softening just a little. “The two of you were squaddies once. I know what that means. Look, nobody’s going to let her get hurt. We need her to talk to Rain-on-Stones, and we need Rain-on-Stones if we ever want to go home. So Valk is watching her round the clock. You should have called him if you wanted an update. But don’t. Don’t do that, because you are not supposed to be making unnecessary calls between ships.”

“I get that. I just thought—I mean.” Bury shook his head. “I thought maybe you cared about her, too. It looked like you cared about her. When she had that seizure, and … it looked like you cared. Maybe I was wrong.”

Ehta rolled her eyes. “No. You weren’t wrong.” She couldn’t very well tell him that she’d been thinking about Ginger, probably as much as he had. That she’d been trying to steel herself to go into the brig and kill Rain-on-Stones. She couldn’t tell him, because she’d lost her nerve. Because she knew she couldn’t do it.

“Then you’ll go check on her for me?” Bury asked.

“What?”

It was the last thing Ehta wanted to do. Going in there meant making it very clear to Ginger that the help she’d asked for wasn’t coming. It meant Ehta admitting that she was a coward, that she was too afraid of being stuck in the wrong part of the galaxy to do the right thing.

“Please,” Bury said.

Ehta pushed her way over to a wall of the corridor. Leaned her head against a padded bulkhead.

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.” She cut the link.

She would check on the girl. She should do it, she knew. If she couldn’t do what had been asked of her, she at least owed Ginger an explanation.

Right after she’d gotten her marines squared away, and seen to their food and their entertainment. Official duties first. Then—the hard thing.

It took a while to set things up, and make sure they weren’t going to give themselves away, but eventually the IO indicated that the carrier’s communications laser had been configured properly. Candless sat back down in her own seat and strapped herself in.

She was hesitating, she knew. She wasn’t sure how she should proceed. But she couldn’t let the bridge crew see that. “Go ahead,” she told the IO.

“It will take a few seconds to make the connection—he’s a long way away. And don’t forget, ma’am, there’ll be a few seconds of lag on the transmission.”

“Understood,” Candless said. She cleared her throat. “Lanoe? Is that you?”

And then she waited for the reply.

The carrier’s laser stretched across millions of kilometers of space, a fragile line of connection to Lanoe’s fighter. They had tuned the beam to the infrared—a color they knew the Blue-Blue-White couldn’t see. Just in case.

It was twelve long seconds before Lanoe answered. “Candless. Good. You figured it out—I knew you would. I need your position.”

“Are you all right?” she asked. “We were so worried when we didn’t hear from you.”

Another twelve seconds.

“I’m fine. We lost the other destroyer, but I’ve figured some things out down here. Things that will help us. Send me your position, so I can rendezvous.”

“Before I do that, we need to discuss what’s going on. Lanoe—Commander,” Candless said. Very carefully. “I have a strategy I’m working on here, one that’s keeping people alive. I’m not sure we should rush to abandon it. As soon as you move, the Blue-Blue-White will have a fix on your position—and ours, once you meet up with us. Rather than risking that, you could wait down there until it’s safe for us to pick you up.” Yes. Perhaps that would be for the best. “Or we could send the cutter—it’s designed for this sort of thing. We could—”

The IO interrupted her. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but you should know. He’s engaged his thrusters. He’s moving.”

Candless inhaled very slowly.

Of course he was. “Is he headed here?” She hadn’t given him their position. Maybe he’d simply triangulated it, following the communications laser back to its source.

“No, ma’am. He’s on a trajectory for the cruiser.”

How the devil would he know where the cruiser was? But then she got it. She held back a curse. Valk. The AI must have heard them talking—he heard everything that happened on the carrier’s bridge—and he’d given Lanoe his position. Of course. The AI would never refuse Lanoe anything.

Ehta pushed her way out of the gun deck and into the axial corridor. She had no more excuses. No more reasons to waste time. This had to be done. She owed the girl an explanation, and she had to give it to her in person.

Maybe, Ehta thought, she would feel a little better about herself when it was done. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so guilty about everything, all the time. Unlikely. But it was worth a shot.

The cruiser felt empty, utterly deserted. All her people were still at standby, and Valk was up at the controls, hundreds of meters away. Paniet and Bury were both on the carrier. When she reached the brig, there weren’t even any guards there. Nobody to give her a nasty look.

She reached the door of the cell where Ginger and Rain-on-Stones were locked away. She reached for the virtual key that would activate the door’s display, showing her the interior of the cell. But no. If she stopped here, even for a second, she worried she might turn back. She might see that they were sleeping peacefully in there, and decide she didn’t want to disturb them. She might see … something worse. Something that would make her turn around and run. If the girl had hurt herself, if the alien was—hell, the alien could have gone insane and cut Ginger to pieces with those huge claws, for all Ehta knew.

Ehta slapped the release on the hatch and kicked inside.

What she found was … weird.

Ginger was pressed into one corner of the room, her face smeared against the wall. It looked like her upper lip was stuck to the padding. Her eyes were wide, and she was hugging herself like she was ice-cold. She looked up as Ehta came toward her, but there was nothing in her eyes. They were glassy, dead. There was no hope there.

Rain-on-Stones was crammed up into a corner of the ceiling, using her many legs to brace herself. The wicked claws she had for feet had cut into the padding—which was supposed to be proofed against knives—and Ehta could see the alien’s mouth, a kind of wet, flexible beak. The alien was naked, shreds of her black dress drifting through the cell’s thick air.

The place stank. It was a smell Ehta couldn’t even place, and she’d experienced some nasty funks in her time. It smelled a little like rotten shellfish, maybe, ammonia and iodine, but there were notes underneath that made her head swim. The smell of fear, she thought, though she couldn’t have said why. Always before fear had smelled like human sweat, like blood. This was—different.

The stink was so thick it seemed to tinge the light, like it had discolored the air.

“Hellfire,” Ehta said. She reached for her wrist display. “I’m going to get the ventilators going in here, clear some of this out. Just give me a second—”

“No,” Ginger said. At the same time, the alien let out a quiet, diffident chirp. “No. You’re smelling her pheromones. It’s … a way for her to communicate.”

Ehta shook her head. If they wanted to stew in their own funk, fine. She didn’t close the hatch behind her, though.

She closed her eyes and forced herself to calm down. Okay. It was time. Best to get this over with quickly.

“Ginger,” she said. And then promptly realized she couldn’t think of what to say next. She struggled with finding any words at all. “Bury wanted—he called me, he wanted—” She shook her head. She looked up at Rain-on-Stones and realized she couldn’t see the alien’s head. It was buried in one of the corners of the ceiling, sheltered by her four jointed arms. “Hell’s bells,” she said quietly.

There was something wrong with the alien. Something beyond what she’d already seen. What was it?

“I need you to know something,” she said to Ginger. “I need you to know why … why I haven’t …”

She stopped. There was definitely something wrong with Rain-on-Stones. Something—missing.

“She isn’t covered in bugs,” Ehta said, when her brain finally dropped the last piece into place. “She used to have those bugs all over her.”

“Her males,” Ginger said, nodding a little. Her lip came unstuck from the wall.

“Yeah,” Ehta said. “She had all those little males running over her, getting between the plates of her armor. But I don’t see any of them now. Are they all tucked away, staying warm? I can get her a new dress, if you think that—”

“She ate them,” Ginger said.

Just like that. Like that was something that could happen.

“She—”

“They were too active. They were picking up on her distress, and it made them go crazy. She felt it like an itch she couldn’t scratch. So she ate them.”

“The devil you say. Is that something they … do?”

“No,” Ginger said. “Never.”

The girl rolled over, steadying herself against the walls so she didn’t float out of her corner. Ehta noticed for the first time that they were as far apart as they could get from each other and still be in the cell together.

“You were going to tell me something. Explain something.”

Ehta nodded. “Yeah.” Maybe this wasn’t the time, though. Nobody was screaming, that had to be a good sign, right? That they had calmed down, that they had come to some kind of peace?

Sure. Because healthy, sane people eat their males all the time, she thought.

“Ginger,” she said, “I can’t help you.”

The girl turned her face away.

“It’s not that I don’t want to—I’ve been wrestling with this ever since you asked, I’ve tried to figure out a way to … to …” Murder your alien friend, she thought, but that wasn’t the way to put it. “Get you free. But there’s just too much riding on her. We need her too much. She’s the only way for us to get home. Don’t you see that? Without her, we’re all stranded here forever. I want to help you, I want to help you so much, but—but—”

She stopped, because Ginger was laughing.

It wasn’t a pleasant sound. It was halfway between a cackle and a coughing fit. But it was laughter. Across the room Rain-on-Stones chirped asthmatically, keeping the same rhythm.

“That’s why,” Ginger said. “That’s why.”

“Yeah,” Ehta said. “Come on, you have to see it from my perspective. And it’s not just about me—you’re asking me to trap hundreds of people here, so far from home. Can’t you see that’s too much to ask?”

“It might be. If you were right,” Ginger said.

Ehta took a deep breath. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“When we came here, when we came through the wormhole from the city of the Choir to here,” Ginger said, rolling around a little until it looked like she was sitting up. “It took everything the Choir had. All of them working together, to open one unstable wormhole. It cost them—so much.”

“Wait,” Ehta said. “You’re saying—”

“Rain-on-Stones can’t do that alone. She couldn’t even come close.”

“Just hold on—”

“I’m telling you that it can’t be done. There is no way back. We’re stranded here, forever—and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Not her, not me. Not you.”

Ehta put a hand over her mouth. Because she thought if she didn’t she might just start screaming and never stop.

“There’s no way back,” Ginger said again. The girl turned her face back toward the wall. “If you want me to forgive you, fine. You’re off the hook. Just go away.”

“No,” Ehta said. “If what you’re saying is true, then—” She reached down to her side and drew her sidearm. She lifted it and pointed it right at Rain-on-Stones’s ugly mouth. Thumbed a key on the side of the pistol to make sure it was fully charged. “If we don’t need her—”

“We need her,” Lanoe said.

Ehta’s head spun for a second. When it stopped, she realized two things. First, Lanoe was floating right behind her, in the open hatch of the cell. Second—he had the barrel of a pistol touching the back of her neck.