Chapter Twenty-Five

It’s over,” Ehta said. “You might as well come out.”

The marine had missed most of the bloodshed and violence of the mutiny. She’d spent most of it locked inside Shulkin’s cabin. She’d assumed he would be one of the ringleaders of the uprising, and so she’d gone there to arrest him before he could organize his people. She’d quickly discovered he wasn’t there—but she did find a crate full of heavy weapons. When she tried to leave, she found that the mutineers had seized the corridor outside. They’d blocked all her communications, and every time she tried to poke her head out of the hatch they’d done their best to blow it off.

She hadn’t let them. And every time they tried to get inside, she’d fought back with such ferocity that eventually they had to pull back. For over an hour they’d been locked in a stalemate, with Ehta unwilling to die and the mutineers unwilling to let her live.

When her own marines came to rescue her, she’d felt an immense relief—but also crushing embarrassment. From the sound of it, Candless had been far more active in resisting the mutiny. Thrice-damned Candless, the schoolteacher, had outfought big tough Caroline Ehta the deadly marine.

At least Candless couldn’t claim to have put down the mutiny by herself. It sounded like Valk had saved the day. And Shulkin—though Ehta could hardly believe it, the madman had fought like the devil himself on the loyalist side.

Now it was Ehta’s turn to do her part. At the head of a squad of marines she moved through the carrier, checking every compartment, every corridor, to make sure there were no more mutineers hiding away in a storage locker or anything, waiting for a chance to spring out and do mischief.

That meant a lot of pounding on sealed hatches. This one was worse than most—the people behind it were smart enough to figure how to seal so it couldn’t be opened, even from the bridge. Ehta thought they must have jammed a prybar into the hatch’s servos or something. “Come on!” she shouted, hammering on the bulkhead with one armored fist. “You’re done! I promise we’ll be nice to you if you come out peaceful. Otherwise, we’ll cut the oxygen flow to this compartment and you’ll suffocate in there.” She turned and rolled her eyes at Gutierrez, but the marine had her helmet up and silvered.

Behind the hatch were three mutineers, a man and two women. They were armed with old-fashioned projectile pistols. Revolvers, by the look of them. There was a camera in the compartment and it was feeding video to her wrist display. The mutineers looked scared. They kept moving around the room, kicking off a wall and flying to the next, kicking off that one. The microgravity equivalent of pacing.

Scared was bad. Scared people tended to shoot at the first thing they saw coming through a door. Scared people went down messy.

Not that Ehta had much sympathy for the mutineers, but she figured enough people had already died. And she didn’t want one of her marines getting hurt by a stray round.

“Come on!” she shouted. “At least talk to me, you idiots.” She pounded on the hatch with the butt of her rifle. Not really expecting a response.

She got one, though. “Stop that! Stop that pounding!” someone shrieked. Someone right at the edge of sanity.

“Will you come out? Throw your guns away and come out,” Ehta said.

“What? Just so you can shoot us as soon we open the hatch? We’re never coming out, you hear me? We’re going to sit right here until—”

“Do it,” Ehta told Gutierrez.

The corporal gestured for the other marines to move back. Then she slapped a shaped charge on the hatch and ducked as it blew a neat little hole out of the hatch, a hole barely three centimeters across. Gutierrez shoved a tiny grenade through the hole, and Ehta stuck her fingers in her ears.

Blinding light and a horrible whining noise burst out of the breach as the flashbang went off. Inside the compartment it would have been like looking into the heart of a star. Binah brought up a rotary saw and cut the hatch right across the middle and Ehta hit it with her shoulder until it gave way. She lurched into the room, her rifle already up and ready to fire, while her people covered her from the corridor.

One of the women and the man were clutching at their faces, screaming in pain. The third tried to shoot Ehta, but she couldn’t see well enough to aim. Ehta let go of her rifle and just broke the woman’s arm—two quick snaps—until she could take her pistol away.

When it was done she pushed back out into the corridor and let her marines take the rest. Outside the compartment she tried not to listen to the moans of pain and the repetitive meaty thuds of rifle butts hitting human heads. She called Candless. “Three more,” she said.

“For the morgue or the brig?” Candless asked. It sounded like she actually cared about the answer.

“Brig,” Ehta said. “I think these might be the last, though we’ll keep looking. These bastards really made a mess of the place, didn’t they?”

“I’ve never cared for your flippant tone,” Candless said. “They killed half of the crew. Perhaps you could show a little respect.”

Ehta moved her jaw back and forth, grinding her teeth together. For a moment there, just before the mutiny, it had felt like maybe she and Candless were going to start getting along. They’d had a common enemy, and that had brought them together.

Ehta guessed that some things didn’t ever change.

“You have my most sincere apologies,” she said. Candless sniffed at her sarcasm. “Listen, can we focus here? I’m telling you we’ve swept the entire ship. There’s no sign of Lanoe anywhere. Or Maggs, or Bullam.”

“I suppose that was too much to hope for,” Candless replied.

There was no real doubt about those three. Bullam’s yacht was gone. It had left the flight deck just as the mutiny started. Nobody on the bridge had gotten a chance to track where it went from there, nor could any of the carrier’s sensors pick it up now. Most likely the two conspirators just wanted to get as far from the scene of the crime as they could get. They would know there would be no mercy if Candless caught them.

As for Lanoe—that was a whole different matter. The cutter was gone. Lanoe was nowhere to be found, either on the carrier or on the cruiser. Valk was the last one who’d seen him, as he dragged Ginger and the chorister out of their cell.

His destination was also unknown. Lanoe wasn’t like Bullam and Maggs, though. He must have known that he was going to be relieved from duty, and he had clearly fled before that could happen. He wasn’t the kind of man who just ran away, though. He must have something in mind, some new plan that involved Rain-on-Stones.

Neither Ehta nor Candless could think of what it might be.

The cutter was even harder to find than the yacht. It had been designed to be invisible to every sensor the Navy used, and to be impossible to see even with the naked eye—its skin could change color and pattern to give it perfect camouflage. Their only hope was that he would choose to contact them before he did anything rash.

Ehta had known Lanoe for almost two decades. She was pretty sure “something rash” was his standard operating procedure.

Just the three of them now. Lanoe, Rain-on-Stones, and Ginger. No other crew to worry about. No more distractions.

The cutter’s entire interior surface was one large display that showed a view of the universe outside. It felt, always, as if Lanoe were flying through empty space with nothing around him but a seat and a control stick. If he looked down, if he looked in any direction, he could see forever, to the ends of existence.

He felt like his entire life had shrunk down to this single point, this naked singularity of destiny. Every path he’d ever taken, no matter what he’d thought at the time, had pointed in this one, solitary direction.

None of them said a word. Lanoe focused on flying the cutter, though it was hardly a tricky course he’d plotted. The red dwarf hung before him like a beacon, a glowing dot that marked his destination. Below him the disk swirled in its infinite complexity, its homogeneous simplicity. Red and black vapor twisting into endlessly convoluted shapes, unwinding again as the hydrogen winds tore them apart. He could see no sign of life down there, no indication that there was a civilization hiding in those stacks of cloud. He could have called up a telescope view. If he wanted, he could have spied on the cities of the aliens down there. But he didn’t want to.

Rain-on-Stones didn’t speak. Well, choristers never did, not with audible words. They chirped, like crickets, chirps that could be laughter or moans of pain or alien sounds he could never interpret. The big alien was silent now, though. Whatever she was feeling, whatever she was thinking, she shared it only with Ginger.

Ginger had nothing to say. Lanoe had expected her to fight him, even though he hadn’t yet told her the details of what they were going to do. He’d expected her to resist on principle. She had to know they’d come to a very desperate point, the final point on a graph that didn’t have any future. Yet she didn’t say a word, and neither did she look at him. Instead she rested her cheek on the invisible bulkhead of the cutter and watched the billion stars go by.

Red hair, Lanoe thought. Ginger had red hair, and so had Zhang when she died. He’d made the connection before, many times. Now it seemed different, more meaningful. As if the universe, or fate, or some ancient and forgotten god had brought Ginger to him as a sign. A promise. This simple coincidence, that the two of them had the same color hair, was an indication that he would be allowed this terrible chance. This chance to make things right.

For nearly an hour the silence held. The cutter glided along, as silent as the nebulae that stained space between all those stars, as silent as the grave, and Lanoe was … if not happy, then at least focused. Committed. He didn’t need to think any new thoughts. He didn’t need to feel anything, not even grief. He was an arrow fired from a bow. A machine carrying out previously downloaded instructions. It was that simple.

And then one of them broke the silence, and it all got so much harder.

“What do you think Rain-on-Stones can do out here?” Ginger asked.

She was staring at him. Her mouth was flat, neither a smile nor a frown showing there. She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t demanding that he take her back to the cell in the cruiser’s brig. She was asking for information.

When he didn’t answer right away, she moved her leg and kicked an octagonal stone box that sat at her feet. Its surface was covered in exquisite inlays of some goldish metal, and it had tiny, delicate hinges.

“This is Rain-on-Stones’s medical kit,” Ginger said. “Why did we bring it?”

Lanoe looked over at her. There was no danger of the cutter colliding with anything—they were still half a million kilometers out from the red dwarf. He didn’t have to worry about ignoring the controls, not for the time it would take to have this conversation.

“I suppose I’d like to believe that you’re going to have her remove the antenna from my head. The one she put in there so that I could speak to her,” Ginger said. “I know that’s not it, but it’s a nice thought. You could free me from this, this thing you made me do.”

Lanoe didn’t remember it that way. The girl had volunteered. He said nothing. But he nodded. She was right—Plan C didn’t involve brain surgery. He needed her to be able to communicate with the chorister.

“There are some knives in there, and an empty hypodermic. Some other tools that—huh. I can see how they’re used. I don’t know their names, because there are no names for them in English or any spoken language. They’re used in surgery and the treatment of diseases that humans don’t even get. I don’t think you came out here to have her perform surgery on you, though. No. There’s one other thing in that box.”

Yes. Yes, there was.

“That must be what you wanted. It doesn’t make any sense, though.” Ginger leaned forward and slipped the catch that held the box closed. She pushed back the lid, then reached inside and took out a spherical object about twenty centimeters in diameter. It looked like it was made of carved ivory. It was hollow and a fractally intricate pattern of holes pierced its surface. It gave off a very soft tone when she held it, like a chorister’s chirp but stretched out into one long sustained note. As Ginger turned it in her hands the note changed, almost imperceptibly.

It was so beautiful. Such an incredible piece of technology built into such a small housing. Lanoe thought it must be the most elegantly engineered object he’d ever seen. Especially because it was going to give him his ending.

Three hundred years. He’d lived three hundred years and more, and life had finally shown itself to him in all its panoply. Always he’d been frustrated before, disappointed that life couldn’t be like a video or a story. The good guys never won—well, you couldn’t live as long as he had and expect that. The problem was that neither did the bad guys—nobody ever finished anything. The stories just went on and on and the longer they lasted the less they meant, the less cohesive they were, the less pure. There was nothing that life couldn’t sully, make dirty and disgusting, if it went on long enough. You could fight a war and a hundred years later find that you’d been on the wrong side. You could love a woman, and then you could see her die in front of you. Nothing good lasted forever. Nothing good could, because everything changed. Everything changed and got worse.

What you needed, he’d come to realize, was to die young, while you still believed in the stories. When you still thought there were things like good and evil.

It was too late for that, too late for him. He knew what he was going to do now wasn’t good. It was far from good. But it would give him Zhang back, and that was so much more than he’d ever thought he could ask for.

“This is a … well, there’s no human word. It’s a device for opening wormholes,” Ginger said. “It has certain medical applications. You can open a very, very tiny wormhole into someone’s stomach and draw out the poison they’ve eaten without having to cut them open. You can open a wormhole into a brain tumor and pull it out without damaging the surrounding tissue. That’s what Rain-on-Stones uses it for.”

Lanoe cleared his throat. “You can use it to open other kinds of wormholes, too,” he said.

Ginger started a little, as if she hadn’t expected him to speak. She shook her head and looked back down at the sphere. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you can. Except not. Because you already know that Rain-on-Stones doesn’t have the ability to open a wormhole like that. She’s just one chorister—she doesn’t have the strength, or, for that matter, the power, the energy, to open a wormhole big enough to fly a ship through. She can’t send you home. She can’t send herself home. Don’t you think she would have, if she could?”

“I know,” Lanoe said.

“She can only make very small, very narrow wormholes,” Ginger said. She shook her head again. “I don’t understand. Tell me what you want her to do. Tell me, so we can figure out if maybe we should just give up and go back. Okay?”

Lanoe smiled. “I’m not looking for a wormhole big enough to fly a ship through,” he told Ginger. “That’s not it at all.”

“So, explain. Please, Lanoe. Just explain to me what this is about,” she said.

He knew he wasn’t just speaking with the girl. He knew everything he said was automatically being translated across the link she shared with Rain-on-Stones. The silent chorister, slumped now across three seats in the back of the cutter, was very much a part of this conversation.

“Back at the city of the Choir, back when we were first negotiating with Rain-on-Stones’s people,” Lanoe said, “Valk spoke with your predecessor.” A man named Archie, a pilot lost in time, adopted by the Choir and changed, just as Ginger had been changed. Archie had wanted to go home, so he had answered every question Valk had. Then he’d found out that home didn’t exist anymore, and he’d taken his own life.

At the time it had seemed like a terrible inconvenience. Archie had been the only conduit through which Lanoe could speak with the Choir, and losing him had nearly cost him his mission. His destiny. Now he saw it hadn’t been that way at all. Archie had cleared the way for Ginger, who had taken over his role. Archie had died so that Lanoe could have Ginger, and Rain-on-Stones, and the three of them could be here. Now.

“Archie,” Lanoe went on, “told Valk that the Choir built the entire network of wormholes that connects the stars. He told Valk about all the amazing things the Choir could do with wormholes. About surgeries like the ones you mentioned. About sending messages faster than light, and even back in time. Most importantly, he told Valk about how the Choir used to go to war, back before the Blue-Blue-White nearly wiped them out. About how they fought, and war machines they used. He told Valk about how you could turn a wormhole into a weapon.”

“Wait,” Ginger said. “No.”

She stared at Lanoe with disbelieving eyes. She got it. She knew everything that Rain-on-Stones knew, shared all of the chorister’s memories. She knew what Lanoe was asking for now.

Below them the disk turned and turned in its endless gyre. And right in its middle, in its center, the red dwarf burned like a lighthouse, beckoning them on.

The troop transport’s engines cut out, and some of the marines unstrapped themselves and floated around the cabin. Ehta shook her head. “You, marines, get back in your seats. Now. We’re not there yet—there’s still maneuvers coming up.”

Binah looked back at her, the quizzical look on his face melting as he nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I think you might want to see this, though.”

Ehta grumbled as she unhooked her straps. She kicked across the spherical compartment, up to a narrow viewport that ringed the hull above their seats. She shoved him out of the way and peered out into space.

She saw right away what he’d been looking at. The wreckage of the alien dreadnought—their destination—hung motionless out there, so big it looked like they were about to land on a densely cratered moon. From the carrier it had looked like a sleeping giant, like it might come to life and attack them again, but up close the destruction was unmistakable. The broken blisters stuck out from its edges like thickets of white bone and its weapon pits were scorched an ugly brown.

Across its broad back, in characters a dozen meters high, someone had written a single word, in English:

MUTINY

The letters fizzed and sparkled, as if they’d been written with fireworks. “Yeah,” Ehta said. “That’s why we came out here. Or did you think this was a shore leave you all earned for being such good little PBMs?”

One or two of her people actually laughed. They’d been in high spirits ever since they dragged the last of the Centrocor mutineers out of their hiding places. Nothing like winning a battle to ward off the boredom of life in the marines. Ehta turned and looked back at them. “Candless has no idea what that’s supposed to mean,” she said, jabbing one finger at the viewport. “I have no idea what we’re going to find down there. Maybe a bunch of Centrocor idiots who figured they would write their favorite word so big the whole world would know what they did. If that’s the case, well, we’re going to show them what we think of their graffiti.”

Mestlez whooped and slapped the bulkhead in a quick little rhythm. Gutierrez frowned, but she could barely hide her grin. As long as there were still more mutineers to roust out, it meant the marines didn’t have to go back to gun deck duty, not quite yet.

Ehta let them make their noise, just glad to see them in a good mood. She moved around the compartment, slapping shoulders and winking at her people, and it only seemed to get them more excited. When the pilot called back to say they were about to decelerate before arrival, though, she raced back to her seat and pulled her straps across her chest as fast as she was able.

Big as it was, the dreadnought couldn’t generate any appreciable gravity. The transport couldn’t land on the alien ship, so when they got close the marines put their helmets up and the ramp at the nose of the transport popped open, spilling all their air out into space. Ehta jumped up and started grabbing marines, pushing them through the opening, pointing them in the right direction. “Get down there and establish a perimeter. I’m last out. Move! Move, you damn beggars, move!”

Their suit jets flared like landing lights as Ehta followed them out, pointing herself at the white ground and trying not to vomit inside her helmet. It was only a few seconds before she touched down—only to find that the adhesive pads on her boots wouldn’t stick to the porous coral of the dreadnought’s hull. All around her marines were clutching to the white surface, trying to stop themselves from drifting away. Ehta threw some hand signals to tell them to follow her, then used her jets to push her toward the middle of the hull, toward the giant letters. Behind her a dozen marines brought their rifles up, ready to shoot anything that moved.

Ahead of her the letter Y sparked and spat, a ditch of fire dug into the hull. She shot toward it, pistol in hand, ready for whatever she found. If the dreadnought was infested with mutineers, though, they were smart enough to keep their heads down—she couldn’t see anybody.

As she flew close to the giant character she saw it wasn’t actually on fire. Well, no, of course not, she chided herself. There was no oxygen out here to sustain a flame. Instead it looked like some sticky goop had been spread across the top of the hull, a thick gel that bubbled and fizzed wildly as it caught the sunlight. Ehta chose not to fly directly over it—with no idea what chemicals were involved, she had no desire to be exposed to its fumes—and instead turned to move parallel to the line. She scanned the coral for any sign of life, any movement, but the shimmering character kept distracting her, fooling her into thinking she saw things that weren’t there.

It was Geddy, instead, who spotted their target. He slapped her on the calf and when she turned to look at him he pointed across the field of burning letters, to a point just at the base of the T. Ehta followed his finger and saw a tiny human figure there, clutching a cylinder about a meter in diameter.

“Could be a bomb,” Geddy said.

“Let’s not give them a chance to set it off,” Ehta told him. She changed course again, looping down under the bottom of the letters, headed toward the figure at speed. It hadn’t seemed to notice them yet, and she considered just telling her people to shoot it at long range and be done with it.

She knew Candless would give her hell if she did that, though. Sighing, she touched her wrist display to open a general radio channel. “You there, by the T. You! Stop what you’re doing and show us your hands! Right now!”

There was no response. The figure reached inside its canister and drew out a handful of glowing goop, clearly the same stuff that was used to make the fizzing letters.

“Surround and contain,” Ehta shouted. She pushed her suit jets for more speed, for more power, even as marines surged forward around her in perfect formation.

They came down fast, forming a ring of firepower around the lone figure. Ehta gestured for Gutierrez to keep her eyes open, in case this was a trap—in case fifty mutineers were waiting inside the shadowy pits that dotted the hull, ready to jump up and ambush them at any moment.

Then she flew down to the hull, to hover right next to the figure. “Don’t you move, you damned traitor!” she shouted, jamming her pistol into the mutineer’s helmet, ready to shoot the moment they made a threatening gesture.

Then she saw through their helmet, saw who it was, and she let out a deep breath.

It was Paniet, and he looked terrified.

He lifted his hands, one of them still clotted with the fiery gel. Behind her, Ehta could feel a dozen particle rifles aiming right at Paniet’s face.

“Stand down!” she shouted. “He’s one of ours!”

Paniet’s eyes were so wide she thought they might pop out of their sockets. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Why the hell didn’t you answer when I told you to put your hands up?”

She saw his lips moving, but heard nothing over the radio. A look of deep frustration crossed his face. Then he leaned forward, until his helmet smacked into hers. “Can you hear me?” he asked. The vibrations of his voice passed through two layers of flowglas to get to her, but she could make out the words.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked.

“My comms are disabled.” He smiled, clearly having figured out that no one was going to kill him now. He lifted one arm and gestured at the giant characters inscribed on the hull. “I see you got my message.” He showed her his handful of goop. “Plasma starter gel,” he explained. “Fascinating stuff. The Blue-Blue-White used it as an ionization reaction initiator for their plasma ball cannons. It’s self-oxidizing.”

“Okay,” Ehta said. “Uh, let’s save the science lecture for later. Can you just tell me one thing? Can you tell me why you’re out here?”

“Because I made a very stupid mistake, dear. I trusted someone. On this mission—I ought to have known better.”

“It doesn’t matter how much power that can generate,” Lanoe said, nodding at the sphere in Ginger’s hands. “It’ll be enough. Wormholes are funny things. Hard as hell to open. Harder still to stabilize, so they don’t just collapse on themselves.”

“The Choir have forgotten how to do that,” Ginger pointed out. “They lost that knowledge when the Blue-Blue-White all but exterminated them.”

Lanoe nodded. “Sure. And when I first came up with this plan, I thought that was going to be a problem. But if we can open the wormhole I want, even for a few seconds, it’ll be enough.”

She—they—still didn’t get it.

“In the old days, before they were reduced to what they are now, the Choir used wormholes to kill each other.”

“They’re not … proud of that,” Ginger said.

Lanoe sighed. He realized he wasn’t telling Ginger anything she didn’t already know. She had full access to Rain-on-Stones’s memories—to the whole history of the Choir. “Okay,” he said. “What we’re going to do is simple. We’re going to open a wormhole that connects the disk with the heart of the red dwarf.”

Ginger stared at him with her mouth open.

“I had Valk run the numbers for me on this, back when I still trusted him. Right at the middle, the star burns at about ten million degrees. The pressure in there is so intense I don’t think a human brain can ever imagine it. When we open this wormhole, plasma from the star will come shooting out the other end. A lot of it will get annihilated along the way, but that doesn’t even matter. What emerges will still be hot enough to burn the entire disk.”

“No,” Ginger said.

“With one end of the wormhole right in the middle of the disk, right where their cities are, even if the wormhole is only open for a few seconds it’ll be enough to raise the temperature of the disk by thousands and thousands of degrees. Once the wormhole collapses, that heat will radiate off into space pretty quick, but by then it’ll be too late for the Blue-Blue-White. Every single one of them will be flash fried. Burned alive. Nothing organic could possibly survive that kind of heat.”

He scrubbed at his face with his hands. He was so tired, suddenly, just physically exhausted now that they were close to the ending. He only had to hang in there a little longer.

“The disk is almost entirely made of hydrogen gas. It’ll turn to plasma. Those coral cities of theirs will burn to ash. Their bodies will probably just vaporize. The model I ran showed that the sudden energy gradient will probably knock the shepherd moons right out of their orbits—eventually, the whole disk will disperse out into space. There won’t be anything left in a hundred years, not even a memory that the Blue-Blue-White were here. I don’t really care about that. I don’t care about posterity. All I want right now is to wipe them out.”

“No,” Ginger said again. Or was it Rain-on-Stones saying it? Hard to tell.

“They all have to die. Just like they wiped out so many other species. Just like they’re threatening to do to humanity.” Just like they’d killed Zhang.

He could fix it. He could fix all of their mistakes. They just had to die, first.

“You don’t … you can’t …”

“I can. With your help, I can do this.”

“No,” Ginger said. “That’s not what I was going to say, I—I just—” She was weeping. Behind her, in the back of the cutter, Rain-on-Stones let out a grating, whining chirp. “You aren’t doing this for humanity. Or for the Choir, either.”

Lanoe frowned, but he said nothing.

“Bury told me, and, and Ehta thought so, too. You don’t want to kill them all for justice. You don’t care about all those aliens you never even met. You don’t even care about the Choir—you were willing to kill them, too, if it got you here. It was just lucky that it didn’t come to that. You’re doing this because the Blue-Blue-White killed your girlfriend.”

“She was more to me than that,” Lanoe said.

“And even then—it wasn’t the Blue-Blue-White who did it. It was some drone half a galaxy from here, some drone that wasn’t even intelligent, it was just following a program—”

“A program written by the Blue-Blue-White. They told their drone fleets to eliminate vermin. Zhang died because they thought she was no better than a cockroach.”

“They didn’t know she existed! It was a mistake, Lanoe! It was a glitch, a missing line of code, an … an accident.”

“An accident that left the entire galaxy sterilized. Empty of life,” Lanoe said. “No—don’t start,” he went on, as Ginger started to protest. “Yeah, maybe I’m doing this for the wrong reason. It’s still the right thing to do. The Blue-Blue-White made a mistake, you say, well, it was the worst mistake anybody ever made—ever. In history. It was the kind of mistake you have to pay for. They don’t get away with this. They can’t get away with this. Zhang—she—you never met her, Ginger. You didn’t get a chance to. She was an incredible woman. Tell me, if you could dig up one of those aliens the Blue-Blue-White killed, something that looks like a bush with eyes, or a fish with hands around its mouth, whatever, it doesn’t matter. You find the ghost of one of the intelligent people the Blue-Blue-White killed. If you asked them whether they thought the Blue-Blue-White should be forgiven, because they didn’t mean to do it. What do you think they would say? How many of them lost lovers? Kids? They lost everything. They lost everything that ever mattered to them. They’d be on my side. Don’t you think?”

Ginger didn’t have an answer.

“Forget that, let’s make this personal. Because now you’re one of the Choir as much as Rain-on-Stones, right? Let’s talk about your ghosts. The Blue-Blue-White attacked the Choir not once but twice. They botched the job the first time. They came back to finish it, and they almost did. They killed so many choristers, in the end there were only how many of them left?”

“Twelve,” Ginger said. The number came out of her mouth so fast it had to be Rain-on-Stones talking.

“Just twelve. Only a dozen of them left, out of billions. Their memories are still in there, somewhere in that big head, aren’t they?” he asked, pointing at Rain-on-Stones. “You know what the Twelve thought. You know how they felt, when they came back to their planet and found it empty. All those voices, all that harmony, silenced. If you can tell me that not one of them considered something like this. That they didn’t want some payback. If you can tell me that—”

“You know I can’t,” Ginger said. “It was all they thought about, for a long time.”

Lanoe nodded.

“But then … they calmed down. They never got past it, but they learned to find another way. A way to heal things that didn’t involve genocide.”

Lanoe scoffed. He knew about that, about what the Twelve came up with. Their grand plan. They had collected genetic material from all the species that used to exist, all the aliens the Blue-Blue-White had wiped out. The Choir was holding on to that DNA for a time when the jellyfish weren’t a problem anymore. A time that might never come.

“Even if it works, even if it was what anyone really wanted—their way will take billions of years.”

“They’re patient! They can wait!”

“Really?” he asked. “Are you so sure? They sent me here. They sent us here, to this place.” To this time, he thought. “I asked for a wormhole to anywhere. I just wanted to save us from Centrocor. They could have sent us to Earth, but they didn’t. They sent us here. Because they knew what I would do.”

“No,” Ginger said. “No, that isn’t right.”

“You must know this,” he said. “The Choir share everything. They have no secrets. They must have agreed to send me all this way for a reason.”

“No,” Ginger said again. “You don’t understand how it happened. You don’t know—when they agreed to open a wormhole, there was a consensus that they wanted to get rid of you. That they wanted to keep me, forever. I agreed to their terms to save everyone, but they never specified where you were going. That decision wasn’t made by the entire Choir, but by just one chorister, the one who aimed the beam. There was no time for debate or discussion. Rain-on-Stones didn’t even know where we were, when we got here. Neither did I.”

“But—then—” Lanoe shook his head. He’d assumed … well. Assumptions were for people who never doubted themselves. “At least one of them, then. One of them knew, and made the choice to send me here. It’s what the Choir wants, even if they won’t let themselves be complicit.”

“They don’t want this,” Ginger said. “I’m telling you—”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re here now. I’ve told you my plan. So tell me whether you’ll help me or not.”

“Why are you even asking?” Ginger asked. “Why are you acting like you’re asking me? We both know how this is going to happen. You’re going to try to force Rain-on-Stones to open this wormhole for you. And you know what she’ll say. She’ll say no.”

Lanoe nodded. He’d considered that might happen, it was true.

“She’ll say no,” Ginger repeated. “You can threaten her all you want. You can kill her—she’ll let you kill her before she does this.”

“Sure,” Lanoe said.

Ginger shrugged in incomprehension. “So … why …?”

“She’ll say no,” Lanoe told the girl. “So I won’t even bother asking her. The thing is, Ginger, I’m asking you. And I’m willing to bet you’ll say yes.”

“A fellow named Hollander,” Paniet said, as he rode with Ehta back to the carrier. “A neddy, like me. He had me fooled right from the start, I’m sorry to say. I’m pretty sure he was spying for Centrocor even when we first met. He’d been on the crew of one of the destroyers, you see, but I thought engineers couldn’t possibly be devious. It’s just not in our makeup, is it, ducks?”

“Anybody can be a bastard, if they’ve got a reason,” Ehta said.

“I think he wanted to expose M. Valk to the Centrocor contingent, or something. I was foolish enough to let him come onboard the cruiser with me. Oh, I’m sure I’m in for it when we get back. I’ve been so stupid!”

“I don’t understand,” Ehta said. “This guy took you out to the dreadnought?”

“No, of course not, love, do try to pay attention. Lanoe had asked me to investigate that hulk. See what I could learn of Blue-Blue-White technology. It was terribly spooky, but for a boy like me, well, how could I resist? Every time I see a machine I want to take it apart and see how it runs. So I went. But I asked Hollander to come with me, for company. And so I wouldn’t be alone in there.” Paniet sighed and rolled his eyes. “I thought it might be … well. A nice bonding moment. Instead it was all just one huge mistake. He cornered me in there. He had a pistol and he brandished it at me. Positively threatened me with it. I thought he was going to kill me, honestly, but his intentions were the exact opposite.”

Ehta frowned. “He wanted to … help you? With a pistol?”

“It’ll come clear in a moment, I swear it. So he told me there was a mutiny planned. A bunch of Centrocor people were going to rise up and seize the ships, and he knew that all the Navy officers were going to be, well, you know.” Paniet drew a finger across his collar ring. It took Ehta a second to realize he was miming cutting his throat. “It turned out that while, yes, he was a devious spy, and a real cad, he still had a heart. He’d started to like me after all, no matter how it compromised his secret mission. So he shot me. Yes, really! Except it turned out it wasn’t a pistol, it was a neural stunner. When I woke up, I found that he’d disabled some of my suit’s systems. He was rather clever about it—spy, perhaps, evildoer, yes, but he was also one hell of an engineer. He drained all the fuel out of my suit jets, and cross-welded all the antennas in my communications rig. I couldn’t call you lot to tell you what was coming, and I couldn’t fly back to the cruiser to warn you, either.”

“So you … wrote ‘MUTINY’ on the dreadnought.”

“To warn you, yes. And I’m guessing it worked. Right, dearie? It did? You were able to put down this nascent plot before it even got started. Of course you did, because you and Candless are very clever. So that’s that. You can thank me anytime you like for saving the day.”

Paniet’s chipper tone was belied by his face. Ehta could see the doubt gnawing at him. The fear.

She hated having to be the one to tell him he was right.

“No,” she said. “We didn’t get the message in time.” She gave him the broad strokes of what happened with the mutiny. She kept the bloodier details out of it.

His crestfallen look made her turn away. “I see,” he said. “I … see. Let me ask just one question, then.”

“Yeah, okay,” Ehta said.

“Hollander,” Paniet asked her. “Is he … I mean, I’m sure you had to, I don’t know, rough him up a bit. But you’ll have him in the brig or something. I want to recommend clemency. He did, after all, try to save me. I’m sure he would have come back for me, if the mutiny was successful. He would have protected me, he would have—”

He stopped abruptly, because Ehta was scrolling through a list on her wrist display. A list of names in red and blue, with far too many of them crossed out.

When she found the one she wanted, she cursed softly to herself.

“I’m sorry,” she told him.

Paniet looked away. She could see tears starting to pool in the corners of his eyes, so she looked away.

Eventually he reached over and patted her knee. “You did what you had to,” he said, but very softly, and with very little emotion.

When they docked with the carrier, she took him straight to the bridge. Candless had asked to see him as soon as possible. “Captain-Engineer,” the teacher said, rushing over to grab his hands when he pushed through the hatch. “By the devil’s own handmaidens, we didn’t think—that is to say, we thought you were—”

“I’m healthy as a well-fed marine,” he told her. “I—oh. That—that stain on the wall, there, that’s—”

“Don’t,” Candless said. “Don’t look.”

Paniet nodded. He swallowed thickly and looked away from the bulkhead. Ehta moved out of his way so he could see who was there, and who wasn’t. No one was sitting at the navigator’s position. The pilot had a bandage wrapped around her head. Shulkin’s seat was empty.

Valk was there, though. Looking almost human. He had his helmet up and tuned to an opaque black, of course, but he looked like Ehta remembered him, from back when she thought he was still the Blue Devil.

Paniet rushed over to him and dragged the AI into a bear hug. “Oh, old friend, it’s good to see you,” he said.

“You too,” Valk replied. He looked like he didn’t know what to do with his hands, though. Maybe he’d forgotten how humans showed affection for each other.

“I’m sorry to break up the reunion,” Candless said. “I asked Major Ehta to bring you here for a reason, Captain-Engineer.”

“You did?” Paniet asked.

“M. Valk has discovered something … troublesome,” Candless said. “Something that, frankly, I’m having trouble understanding. The mathematics are a bit dense, but the conclusions are simple enough. He says they’re irrefutable. One of the tasks I’d like you to undertake is to check his work.” She handed him a minder. Its display was densely figured with equations and mathematical symbols. Just looking at it made Ehta’s head spin. Paniet started running his finger across the numbers as soon as it was handed to him.

“It’s sound,” Valk said.

“I’m sure, love, but it’s always worthwhile having a second pair of eyes on something complex,” Paniet said.

“I don’t have eyes,” Valk said.

“Ah. Right. Wait just a mo—here, this figure, that would suggest—”

“Yes,” Valk said.

“That we’ve traveled through time. Half a billion years.”

“Yes.”

“Impossible,” Paniet replied.

“No,” Valk said.

“It should be,” Paniet said. “In a reasonable world. Yes, yes, I know—we don’t live in one of those. I suppose … I mean …”

Candless cleared her throat. Noisily enough that everyone on the bridge looked up at her. “Can you confirm M. Valk’s conclusions?” she asked.

Paniet blinked rapidly. He looked, to Ehta, about equal parts fascinated, curious, amazed—and scared to the point of soiling himself.

“It looks good,” he said. “Oh, goodness. Oh, goodness, darlings, this means—”

Candless stopped him with a nasty look. She was good at that, Ehta had to admit. Best nasty looks in the service. “There’s another thing I require,” she said.

“Yes? I’m all ears,” Paniet told her.

“You’ll notice Commander Lanoe isn’t here.”

“I assumed he would be on the cruiser,” Paniet told her. “Somebody has to fly it.”

“I made a copy of myself,” Valk said.

The very thought seemed to make Candless’s skin crawl. Which, of course, made Ehta want to grin from ear to ear. She suppressed it.

“Commander Lanoe has been relieved of duty,” Candless said. Before Paniet could respond, she held up one hand. “In absentia. He absconded with the cutter—and with Ginger and Rain-on-Stones.”

Paniet’s mouth opened wide. Then he shut it again, carefully. “What’s he going to do with them?”

“Something he calls Plan C,” Candless told him. “I don’t know the details, but Valk tells me he means to change history. I can guess why. He wants to bring a woman named Bettina Zhang back from the dead.”

“Oh. Goodness,” Paniet said.

Candless nodded. “The thing is, Valk tells me that if he tries to do that, there will be negative consequences.”

Paniet laughed out loud. He looked from one of them to the other, as if they should understand implicitly why this was so funny.

Ehta liked Paniet. She liked him a lot. That didn’t mean she didn’t want to hit him sometimes.

Paniet’s face eventually fell, as he realized no one else was laughing.

“There’s a great deal we don’t know about time travel, because of course we’ve never done it before, have we? But yes. Yes, dear heart,” he said finally. “Negative consequences. You could say that. Time travel would be dangerous. So very, very dangerous. Have you tried warning him? Telling him so?”

“That’s the problem. The cutter is designed to be stealthy. We have no way of tracking it. He’s somewhere in the system. I assume he’s most likely somewhere near the disk, but beyond that …he could be anywhere. I need to send him a message.”

Paniet nodded. “Ah, I see. You want me to rig up some kind of radio transceiver capable of reaching him wherever he is. A way to talk to the entire system at once, so you’re sure he hears it.”

“Exactly. Can it be done?”

“Yes, of course,” Paniet told her. “I can start on it immediately, if you like. Oh, but, dearest, there is one tiny smidge of a problem there. Barely worth considering, I suppose, but—”

“Tell me,” Candless said.

“Once you send this message, well. We’re talking about a very high-power signal. It will be heard literally everywhere, including in the disk. The Blue-Blue-White will have no idea what you’re saying, of course, but they’ll know exactly where we are, as long as you’re on the air.”

Candless inhaled sharply. “They’ll be able to triangulate our position.”

“Precisely.”

She turned to look at Ehta. Ehta was so surprised that Candless would turn to her for advice that all she could do was shrug.

“He needs to know,” Valk said. He tapped the minder. “Before he makes a terrible mistake. Before he drags us all down with him.”

Candless closed her eyes. Then she nodded, just once.

“Do it,” she said.