Chapter Twenty-Six

You’re insane,” Ginger said.

Maybe, Lanoe thought. It was a distinct possibility. There were a lot of kinds of insanity, though.

“You honestly think this is something I would do? To commit genocide, just because—what? Because you’re ordering me to do it?”

“No,” he said. He leaned back in his seat and scratched at his short hair. “No. It’s not an order. Maybe that would have worked on you once. Back when I first met you, when you were just a cadet. Or when I fought beside you, when Centrocor first attacked us. But no. Not now. You’ve come a long way since then. You’ve changed, a lot.”

“I—I chose this,” she said.

Clearly she understood what he meant. Maybe she suspected where he was going with this. “Did you? You volunteered, yeah. You volunteered to have an antenna put in your head so you could talk to the Choir.” Though at the time she’d been up on charges. She’d been in a bad place, and it was the only way for her to get out. “You didn’t know what that was going to mean, though. You didn’t know, back then, what was going to happen.”

Ginger shook her head. “I didn’t know you would kidnap us.” Meaning both her and Rain-on-Stones. “Drag us all this way.”

“No. And you didn’t know you would be tied to just one chorister, unable to harmonize. Stuck in her head as she went insane. You didn’t know that would happen, when you volunteered.”

“I’ve tried to make the best of it,” Ginger said. “I’ve tried to help her, to keep us both … stable.” She shrugged. “It hasn’t been easy,” she admitted.

“Exactly. It’s been unbearable, hasn’t it? Excruciating. You’ve had to cope with her pain this whole time. You’ve had to feel how cut off she is, handle all that anguish. Ehta tried to help you. She tried to kill Rain-on-Stones, to free you.”

“Because I asked her to. And then you threatened to kill her.”

“I had to maintain order in my fleet,” Lanoe rushed out, before realizing that it would sound like the empty rationalization it was. “Never mind. That’s not important. I’m going to offer you something, in exchange for opening this wormhole.”

“Lanoe, no, I—”

“I’ll free you from her. From Rain-on-Stones. All you have to do is this one thing.”

“No,” she said. “No, you can’t—I won’t let you just kill her!”

“That’s not what I said, and it’s not what I meant. I won’t hurt her. I’ll just separate the two of you. Move you someplace where you can’t hear her thoughts.”

“What? But then she—she would be all alone.” She shivered as if she were freezing. She understood he was serious.

“You, too,” he said. “You’d be free.”

“No,” she said. “No, I couldn’t.” She was shaking. Trembling so hard he thought she might have a seizure.

“Sure you could. You just have to say yes.”

“No—I. No!” she shouted, and smashed at her temples with her fists. “No, no, no!” she shrieked. “No!”

He leaned his head back and pressed it against the headrest of his seat. He knew perfectly well that half her reaction was coming from Rain-on-Stones. That Ginger, the real Ginger, was still in there, thinking it over carefully.

He hadn’t heard her final answer, not yet.

“Do you remember the night we spent on that troop ship, right after the fighting ended at the Belt of Styx?” Zhang asked. She was sitting in the seat next to him, hands on her knees. Strapped in and wearing a suit, as if she was really there.

It wasn’t just her voice this time. He could see her. She was right there.

She rolled her head to the side lazily, smiling at him. “The ship was full of marines and it stank, not just bodies but that horrible oil they used to use on their fighting suits, you remember, yeah? It was like synthetic lard or something, and they said it kept the enemy from grabbing them. And the women slicked their hair with it.”

Lanoe nodded. “We ate fried dough in the engineering section, because it was the only cool place on the ship, but they had their machine shop going, printing out replacement parts for a tank, and we couldn’t hear each other talk.”

Her smile widened. “You waited until the grinders were going full blast. My helmet kept coming up automatically to try to protect my ears. You thought I wouldn’t actually hear you when you asked me to marry you.”

“You did? You heard that?” Lanoe said, laughing.

Her smile faded, just a little. “I wish I’d said yes,” she said. “All those times you proposed. I could have said yes, at least once. And then—”

“Zhang never said yes,” Lanoe said.

“And then we wouldn’t have had to meet again at Niraya, and I wouldn’t be—”

“Dead.”

“ … right.” Zhang nodded, looking very serious. She turned her head to face forward. “I get it. But things can change now. I can come back.”

“You’re dead,” he repeated. It was all he could say—he’d hit some kind of wall, some kind of psychological barrier. He couldn’t think about the future. Only what had been, and what should have been.

“I know. But I don’t have to be.”

“You’re dead,” he whispered.

Her face blurred. Changed. She grew freckles. A scar on one temple where the antenna went in.

Ginger was staring at him with her blue eyes.

“Who are you talking to?” she asked, her face twisted with disgust.

“No one,” he said. “A memory.”

“We’re getting close now,” Lanoe said. Ahead of them, right in the middle of their view, the red dwarf had swollen to fill a third of the sky. They were coming in almost directly above the star’s north pole, so the disk filled the rest of their view, the red clouds boiling in tension as if they knew what was coming. The narrow band of black between the star and the disk was filled with distant stars.

It was a view, a landscape—for lack of a better term—beyond human scale, so it was beyond human meaning. All just hydrogen, the simplest thing in existence, but hydrogen in profundity. Hydrogen as transcendence, as immanence.

The human eye makes distant things small, because the human brain is small, and cannot contain the sky. What they were doing was crime on a cosmic scale, but because they were human beings, they couldn’t comprehend the size of it.

Lanoe laughed to himself. The rot his brain fed him sometimes … there was work to be done.

He didn’t know how close they would have to get. He figured Ginger would tell him. When she agreed to his plan.

“It’s your choice,” he told her. “You can do what I ask, and be free. Otherwise—we’re here for good. There’s no way back. You can spend what’s left of your life with the alien, locked up in a cell together. Feeling each other’s pain.”

Ginger wouldn’t look at him. She kept her face turned to the side, as if the light hurt her eyes. As if she wanted to be anywhere else, anywhere in the universe but next to him. He didn’t blame her.

There was still some part of him that felt sorry for her. That wished he could relent and give her what she truly wanted. Her innocence back.

That was impossible, of course. Even if you could change history, you couldn’t change who people were. You couldn’t fix them. Better to stamp out that feeling part of himself. Better to be what everyone thought he was. The fighter pilot, the Ace of Aces. The statue made of brass.

“It’s your choice,” he said.

Lanoe had worked as the personal pilot of a planetary governor once, a very powerful man. He had told Lanoe that the secret to negotiation was to take the other fellow’s options away. Leave him with nothing, no direction to jump except the one you want. And then tell him to choose.

“What about that one ensign, the one who thought he was in love with you, and I had to convince him otherwise? Giving him a black eye was no problem, but we both nearly got demoted for fraternization.” Zhang laughed. “Ten minutes after the hearing we were in a supply closet, going at it like rutting animals. Or what about the three days we got on Adlivun, at that chalet in the mountains? Where they didn’t let us wear our suits in the common areas, and we had to rent actual clothes.”

“We barely wore anything most of the time, if I remember right,” Lanoe said. “In fact—”

Zhang lurched forward in her seat suddenly, her face turning bright red. Foam flecked her lips. Lanoe’s eyes went wide in alarm—what was happening? What was going on? And then the freckles came back and it was Ginger, Ginger having a seizure, or—or—

Rain-on-Stones had been nearly catatonic the entire trip, slumped over the seats in the back of the cutter. Now the chorister was leaning forward, three of her arms wrapped around Ginger’s chest and mouth. It looked like she was choking Ginger to death.

Lanoe reached for his sidearm—then stopped, as Ginger spoke.

“Please do not be alarmed,” she said. No, it was Rain-on-Stones. Rain-on-Stones speaking directly through Ginger’s mouth. “I had to take control.”

Ginger’s body convulsed against her straps. “You’re hurting her,” he said.

“It is difficult for one of us to do this alone. Normally it takes the Choir in consensus. I don’t wish to cause Ginger distress. I would never want that. But there is something you must know, Commander.”

The girl’s face suddenly relaxed and her body had slumped backward against the seat. Her eyes stared off into space, seeing nothing.

“I’m listening,” Lanoe said. “Don’t expect that anything you say is going to change my mind, though.”

“Are you so certain? Then perhaps you should know this. The device you have stolen is not meant for human hands.”

“The Choir tried to keep it secret from me, but—”

“No,” Rain-on-Stones said. Ginger didn’t shake her head. She had no body language to read, not when she was under the chorister’s direct control. Her voice was flat and toneless. “I must make this clear. I do not mean the device is forbidden. I mean it cannot be used by a human.”

Lanoe narrowed his eyes. “Ginger seemed to think otherwise.”

“A chorister is covered in plates of armor. This armor guards my body against the energies the device will release. A human body does not provide the same protection. If Ginger activates the device, she will be exposed to a lethal surge of those energies. Do you understand the danger of this?”

“I guess I do,” Lanoe said.

“If she operates the device, she will die. You must understand. Ginger will die.”

“But the device will still function,” Lanoe said.

Rain-on-Stones chirped wildly. Ginger’s mouth moved in cadence with the noise that filled the cutter. “She will die. She will die. I will be alone.”

“Got it,” Lanoe said.

“Then you will stop this now? You understand it cannot be done?”

“What I understand,” he said, carefully picking his words, “is that you had to tell me this. Ginger knows everything you think. She can read your memories. She knew this all along. But she chose not to tell me. That’s why you had to take over her body—because you knew she would never tell me.”

“She will die.”

“I know. So does she. And she seems okay with that. What I’m hearing here isn’t that we have to stop.”

“She will die.”

“What I’m hearing,” Lanoe told the chorister, “is that her answer is yes.”

There were some minor maneuvers to complete. Lanoe put the cutter into orbit around the red dwarf, closer in than he normally would have liked. Ginger was clear that they needed to be within a certain distance to establish the wormhole.

The cutter’s skin darkened to protect them from the star’s brutal light, growing almost opaque as Lanoe circularized their orbit. The little space inside the ship started to feel claustrophobic, with echoes of their breathing lingering in the corners like cobwebs.

Rain-on-Stones had fallen back into a stupor, drained by her last-ditch attempt to sway Lanoe. She twitched occasionally, one of her arms or her many legs jumping spasmodically. She didn’t chirp or say anything new through Ginger’s mouth.

The girl didn’t say anything, either. She didn’t look at Lanoe, or out at what could be seen of the sky. She studied the ivory ball in her hands, turning it this way and that. Its hum was always there, right on the edge of Lanoe’s hearing.

He locked the controls. “You ready?” he asked her.

She didn’t reply. When he unstrapped himself, though, she did, too. Together they opened the cutter’s narrow hatch. Air poured out of the ship, but only for a moment. A weather field snapped into place with a twanging sound. Lanoe pushed through it, feeling it cling to his suit, tugging at him gently as he slipped out into the vacuum.

Outside the ship, the star was an angry god.

Only the gods had the power to bring back the dead. It made sense.

The star filled the sky with fire, its light coming through his clenched eyelids until he could see nothing but red. His helmet compensated for the extra light by polarizing itself, turning an opaque black as it tried to screen out the worst of the rays. He looked back and saw that Ginger’s helmet had made the same transition, so that she looked like a diminutive version of Valk.

They adjusted the adhesive pads on their boots and walked up onto the top of the little ship. The cutter’s camouflaged skin made it nearly invisible, so it felt like they were walking on empty space.

Above, below, all around them the red dwarf looked like it might fall on them at any moment, so big it didn’t even seem curved, just a wall of pure hellfire. That heat, that light, that pressure that buffeted Lanoe, that made him want to cringe away in shame—that would be the purifying fire that swept through the disk. The conflagration that ended the era of the Blue-Blue-White. He lifted his arms as if he could embrace it.

“Can we—can we just do this?” Ginger asked. “Can we get it over with?”

“Soon enough you’ll be free,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, with a sigh. “Yeah.”

She lifted the ivory ball in both hands. He saw they weren’t even shaking. Ginger had always been brave. With a careful motion she twisted the sphere. It remained as one solid piece, but somehow the patterns of holes on its top and bottom halves rotated independently. There was something odd about it now, something that made it difficult to look at, as if it existed in more dimensions than Lanoe could see.

The sphere started to vibrate, to shimmer. Ginger placed her fingers carefully over some of the holes, while leaving others exposed, as if she were playing a wind instrument. There was no air outside the cutter, so the sphere didn’t make a sound that Lanoe could hear. He wondered what unearthly melodies it might play under different circumstances.

Zhang came up behind him. Put her arms around his waist, and rested her cheek between his shoulder blades.

“Do you remember the day we met?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. If Ginger heard him, she didn’t look up.

“I was a little awestruck. Getting assigned to your squadron. The great Aleister Lanoe. I was nervous, believe it or not. I was going to meet a celebrity.”

“You didn’t show it.”

“Do you remember the last time you saw me?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Right before the battle for Niraya. We fought these bastards together. We’re just finishing that battle now. That’s all. This was always how it was supposed to end.”

“Sure,” he said.

Ginger let out a little grunt, possibly of pain, possibly of effort. She twisted the sphere again and bluish light started leaking from its fretwork.

“The beam’s ready,” she said, her voice hoarse and ragged. She was breathing very hard. Lanoe hadn’t noticed until that moment. “I just have to direct it. This is … the tricky part. It’ll take a couple minutes.”

“You can do it,” Lanoe told her.

“Do you remember—”

Zhang stopped in mid-recollection. Lanoe frowned and tried to figure out why. Then he saw it. He’d been so focused on Ginger that he’d almost missed the fact that a green pearl was rotating in the corner of his eye. A call from Candless.

“Don’t answer it,” Zhang said. She laughed and reached for his wrist. She was going to switch off his comms, he knew. Shut them down before he could hear what Candless had to say. “What lousy timing she’s got!”

The green pearl kept spinning. All he had to do was flick his eyes one way, to answer, or the other way to dismiss it.

He flicked his eyes.