Chapter Twenty-Seven

Candless’s message came through loud and clear. Normally you could only get that kind of noiseless transmission from a communications laser, but Lanoe knew she had to be broadcasting to every corner of the system. She had no way of knowing where he was.

Clearly, she felt he needed to hear what she had to say.

“I have an idea of what you’re doing, though not how,” she began, speaking fast, dispensing with any kind of preamble. “I understand why you feel you have to do this. But, Lanoe, it’s the wrong move. You’ve known me for a long time. I might hope that you would simply take my word for it. That you would believe I’m making this recommendation thoughtfully and with the best of intentions.

“Then again, maybe you’re thinking I’m your enemy right now. It’s true that I conspired to relieve you of duty. There’s no point in denying it. Lanoe, I’ve had nothing but respect and admiration for you for a century now. I’ve fought by your side and been proud to do so. I only agreed to relieve you because I needed to prevent you from making a mistake like this.

“A mistake that puts us all at risk. I need you to listen, Lanoe. Not to me, but to someone who actually understands what’s involved.”

Paniet spoke next. Lanoe had never seen the engineer less than cheery and amiable. Now he sounded distinctly terrified.

“Dearie,” Paniet said. He cleared his throat. “Commander. I hear you’re trying to change history. That’s a—well, a risky thing to do, under any circumstances. The truth is, we really don’t understand time as well as we’d like. We’ve never had a chance to study time travel, and we don’t know how our actions here will affect the future—that is, our own time. I can run down a few conjectures for you, though.

“First, there’s a chance that it simply won’t work. That the course of time can’t be altered, not by human beings, no matter how clever we get. It’s possible you’ll … do what you’re about to do, and it won’t change anything. That events will play out exactly as they did before, and you’ll have achieved nothing.

“Another possibility is that time is conserved, just like matter or energy. I’ll spare you the long and rather tricky equations. It’s possible that if you try to change things, the universe itself will stop you. Either it’ll simply blink you out of existence—or some sequence of apparently random events will occur, a meteor will appear and strike you dead, or you’ll have a sudden and unexpected stroke … We call this the Novikov self-consistency principle, and on paper it actually works. I know it sounds unlikely, but there may well be some mechanism to prevent the third possibility. The one that scares me the absolute most.

“The third possibility being that what you’re doing will work.

“Valk has suggested you may be about to wipe out the Blue-Blue-White. Kill every last one of them now, before they even have a chance to launch their drone fleets. That’s a rather horrible prospect, but it only leads to a much greater problem. It will create a paradox. A series of events that simply can’t happen.

“If there was never a Blue-Blue-White fleet at Niraya, you wouldn’t have gone there. You would never have known about the Blue-Blue-White, nor had any reason to kill them. So you never would have come here, either. You wouldn’t—couldn’t—destroy them. Which would mean they wouldn’t be destroyed. Which would mean they would launch a drone fleet, one that would eventually make its way to Niraya …

“Do you see where I’m headed here, Commander? Do you understand? If you do this thing, you remove the possibility of your doing it. That’s impossible, and the universe is very, very bad at containing impossible things.

“You’ll create a loop. A closed timelike loop, to be exact. You will send us all into an infinitely repeating series of events. You kill the Blue-Blue-White. History changes so you’ve never heard of them. Because they now exist again, they attack Niraya. That inspires you to come back in time to kill them. Except when you do, you remove your own motivation for doing so, and—and so on, and so on. It can’t end, you see? It has to repeat over and over, forever.

“Whether you will only doom yourself and your crew to this infinite recursion, or whether the rest of the universe comes along for the ride as well, I simply don’t know.

“What I do know—for certain—is this. If you save Bettina Zhang’s life now, you will be dooming her to die and be saved an infinite number of times. You’ll be saving her forever—but you’ll also be letting her die forever.

“You can’t want that. You have to see reason here.

“Please, Commander.

“Don’t do it.

“I’m begging you.”

Paniet’s voice cut out and for a while Lanoe heard nothing. The silence was unbroken, as blue light streamed out from between Ginger’s fingers. Growing stronger.

Eventually Candless spoke again. “I’m going to repeat this message,” she said. “Over and over. Until you hear it, Lanoe. Until you listen—or doom us all.

“I have an idea of what you’re doing,” she said, “though not how …”

Zhang stepped out from behind Ginger. She hadn’t been there before. Of course, the laws of space and time meant nothing to ghosts.

“We’re almost there,” she said.

Lanoe stared at her. She was wearing her thinsuit painted with red tentacles wrapping around one sleeve and one leg. The suit she’d worn the last time he saw her alive. She had her red hair down, falling forward across eyes he couldn’t see. Her helmet was down, but of course, she didn’t need to breathe.

“So close,” she said.

“Zhang?”

“What I heard,” she said, “in all that noise, was that he doesn’t know.”

“Zhang—”

“What I heard was what might happen. Not what will. There’s a chance he’s right, sure, and we’re going to destroy the entire universe, blah, blah.”

“Zhang?”

“But there’s also a chance that this will work.”

“Zhang …”

“That there is some nonzero possibility that doing this will give me my life back. That you and I can be together again. Didn’t you hear that? I know you were hoping it was what he would say. I know what you want, Lanoe. I know what you’re afraid of. If you read between the lines, if you listen to what he didn’t say—there’s some hope in there. Some possibility of everything working out perfectly.”

“Zhang,” Lanoe said, and opened his mouth to say—

“And we’re so close,” she said, laying a finger across his lips. Her hand passed right through his helmet. It didn’t occur to him that this was strange. “We’re so close, and you don’t have to do anything more. Just let this run its course. Let it happen, Lanoe.

“That’s all.

“Just let it happen.”

He would talk with Valk, later, about what he’d done. The AI was his only hope for a sympathetic audience, and he would need very much to discuss his actions. To try to find a way to justify what he’d done.

“The thing is, I barely heard Paniet. I was so far gone at that point, so far down the track … I don’t think anyone could have said anything that would have changed my mind. I’d already done so many things I couldn’t take back.

“When Orpheus went to hell to get Eurydice back, there was only one condition. He couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t look over his shoulder, or turn around, or so much as glance behind. When you decide you’re going to break the rules, you aren’t allowed to change your mind, or second-guess yourself.

“I wanted her back so badly. For a long time I’d been convinced it couldn’t happen. That she was just gone, and no one could change that, and that the only thing left to me, the last purpose of my life, was to get revenge.

“Then—out of nowhere—it was possible.

“I wasn’t acting rationally. I couldn’t act rationally. Not when the one thing that would make me whole again was right there, in my grasp.

“Maybe nobody ever makes a decision like that with a clear head. Maybe it’s not possible. I did what I had to do—I didn’t give it a second’s thought.”

He looked past Zhang. Looked across at Ginger, where she stood with her hands up in the air, her fingers contorting around the fretwork of the device. He could barely see her for the blue light streaming from it.

“I’m sorry,” he told her.

She didn’t respond. They were well past the point where an apology could possibly mean anything to her, or anyone else.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Just let it happen,” Zhang said, in a time outside of time, and already she was fading, her image cut to pieces by rays of blue light.

“I looked at her,” he told Valk, later on, “at Ginger. And her helmet was—was black, and opaque, I know it was. It wasn’t possible for me to see her face at that moment, not with the red dwarf right there, right next to us.

“Except I could. I could see her face twisted with pain. I could see her brow slick with sweat. And I saw her red hair. Zhang had red hair, too.”

“I remember,” Valk said.

“I didn’t do what I did because the math was wrong. For the devil’s sake, what did I care about math, or closed loops, or—or anything?

“I did it because of that red hair.”

Lanoe leaned over the side of the cutter and looked down at the disk. At the terrible thing he was about to do.

Then he took two steps, closing the distance between himself and Ginger.

“Lanoe,” Zhang said, just a distant wind blowing between the stars.

He grabbed the device out of Ginger’s hands. It shook violently, its blue light fracturing into a dozen spectra. He pulled his arm back and tossed it away from him, tossed it into the face of the red dwarf.

“I’m sorry,” he told Ginger, for a third time.

She was still standing there with her arms up. As if she didn’t understand what had just happened.

The device shrank to a pale dot, then became impossible to see. Eventually it would vaporize in the atmosphere of the unnamed star.

“I did it because of that red hair,” he told Valk. “I did it because I saw I was going to kill a girl with red hair to save a woman with red hair.

“Maybe it was just math, after all. Terms canceling each other out. A null set, right? Is that what it’s called?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Valk told him. “I don’t understand you. I don’t think I ever did.”

“I’ve hurt a lot of people in my time. Killed a lot of people—it’s my job. Killing Ginger, it wouldn’t have been hard to do. It wouldn’t have kept me up at nights, even. I don’t think it would have. But it would have created a new kind of loop, of its own. A kind of moral loop with no end.”

“I don’t get it,” Valk said. “But … you did the right thing.”

“I did what I did. I—I thought of something, later on. I thought of something that makes me wonder if I had any choice at all. If any of us have any free will. Paniet said that if I created a paradox, it would send us into an infinite loop. A series of unchanging events, repeated over and over.”

“Yeah, a closed timelike loop that—”

“But what if that isn’t quite right? I know enough about chaos theory and quantum mechanical probability to know you can’t ever say that two states are really identical. Just—just work with me here. Say we did get stuck in a loop. Say we repeated the same events over and over. And I kept setting off the device, I committed an act of genocide, over and over and over again.”

“Right,” Valk said.

“But say there was the tiniest bit of difference each time. Say one time a proton halfway across the universe was deflected by a magnetic field and it went left instead of right. Say one time a butterfly flapped its wings somewhere. Say one time we were just far enough from the red dwarf that Ginger’s helmet wasn’t completely opaque, that I could actually see her hair.

“Say we did loop through those events, over and over, with just the tiniest change in each iteration. Changes at the subatomic level, totally random fluctuations. But they would build up. Reinforce each other, creating larger and larger deviations from the standard script. Until one time, one trip through the loop, I decided I couldn’t do it.”

“I guess … well, that’s one way you could get conservation of time, I suppose,” Valk said. “Are you asking me to do the math? Do you want to know how many iterations it would take?”

How many times I saved Zhang, Lanoe thought. How many times I killed her.

“No,” he said. “I don’t want to know.”

Ginger wept the whole way back. Rain-on-Stones chirped empathetically, but it didn’t seem to help.

“We’ll find another way,” he told the girl. “We’ll find a way to free you.”

When he arrived back at the cruiser, he thought maybe he could just put Rain-on-Stones back in her cell, and then take Ginger with him when he headed to the carrier. There was a limit on how far choristers could project their thoughts. When they reached the brig, however, she just shook her head. “I’m staying here with her,” she said.

Lanoe frowned. “I’m offering you a choice, here. A real choice, this time.”

“And I’m making it,” Ginger told him. “She needs me. Yes, I want to be free. But she needs me too much.”

He left them there. No guards in the brig, the cell hatch wide open. They pushed their way inside and curled themselves into separate corners, as far as they could get from each other while still remaining in the same room.

He docked the cutter in the carrier’s flight deck, then made his way to the bridge. No one tried to stop him. A few of Ehta’s marines were in the corridors, but they looked so surprised to see him that they didn’t even come to attention as he kicked by.

The bridge hatch opened for him—apparently his clearance hadn’t been revoked. He pushed inside and saw all of them there. Candless and Ehta, Valk and Paniet. Giles, the Centrocor IO, was still at his station, as was a Centrocor pilot he’d never met before. The mutiny had taken its toll, but the Navy didn’t have enough personnel to fill all the necessary positions. If Candless trusted the Centrocor officers, Lanoe supposed that was good enough for him.

As he entered only Candless seemed to have the presence of mind to do anything but stare. She moved toward him, but not quickly enough. Before she could reach him he sat down in the captain’s position and strapped himself in.

“I’d like a report on enemy movements,” he said.

That brought Candless up short. From the corner of his eye he could see Ehta moving now, too. Circling around to get behind him.

“Sir,” Candless said, “perhaps—”

“Commander,” the IO said, turning to face him. “We’re spotting a lot of activity inside the disk. Airfighters everywhere, scrambling to take up positions around the cities. We’ve laid in a course that will allow us to shell some of the cities while facing minimal opposition, but we believe that once we begin making strikes, they’ll change their order of deployment and we’ll need to recalculate.”

Lanoe nodded. “Thank you, Lieutenant. What about spacecraft?” He turned to look at Candless. “The message you sent was loud enough to wake up the entire system. I assume you knew that would draw the Blue-Blue-White to our position?”

“I … did,” Candless said. “Sir.”

“I warned her,” Paniet said.

Candless turned and gave him one of her signature nasty looks.

“It was unavoidable,” Lanoe said. “But now we’re going to have to move to evade. IO, what about Blue-Blue-White assets outside of the disk’s atmosphere? What are we facing?”

“No fewer than seven dreadnoughts,” the IO replied. “The number may be higher—we’ve been restricted to passive sensors to minimize our profile. At least a hundred interceptors have been spotted as well, all converging on our present position.”

Lanoe nodded. “Everything they’ve got, I would imagine. We’ve convinced them we’re a real threat. They won’t hold back now. All right. Our best bet is to not be here anymore when they arrive. Lay in an evasive course. We’ll withdraw from the disk, to … say fifty million kilometers out. Valk, are you currently in command of the cruiser?”

“Yes,” the AI said.

“We’ll maintain a close formation for now. Match your course to ours.”

“Okay,” Valk said.

“For the moment, at least,” Lanoe said, “we’re going to abandon any plan to aggress on the Blue-Blue-White. We’re going to focus on staying alive.”

“Commander,” Candless said, moving to float directly in front of him, “perhaps I could have a word with you in private.”

Lanoe was very good at playing card games, because he knew how to bluff. He kept his face perfectly impassive as he looked up and directly into her eyes.

He could feel Ehta behind him. Close enough to stab him in the back. Or, far more likely, hit him with a neural stunner.

Well, if they were going to relieve him of duty, there wasn’t a lot he could do to stop them. If there was any doubt in their minds, though—

“No,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” Candless asked.

“I said no, Captain. We don’t have time for a private consultation right now. I’ve issued orders and I expect them to be carried out immediately. I’m attempting to ensure the safety of the crew of this ship. If you need a word, it’ll have to wait.”

He watched Candless’s face. Her nose lifted and she stared down across its length at him. Her lips pursed until they grew bloodless and pale. Her hands were behind her back, but he was certain they were balled into tight fists.

“I’m back,” he said.

Little by little, she relaxed. She suddenly looked extraordinarily tired. Maybe as tired as he felt.

“Of course, Commander,” she said. “Glad to have you back aboard.”