Chapter Twenty-Eight

It was a tense few hours while they maneuvered, trying to stay ahead of the oncoming Blue-Blue-White defenses. It was physically uncomfortable as well. The carrier had to accelerate like mad to keep up with the cruiser, which for Ehta meant lying in her bunk just trying to breathe. She’d gotten used to the lack of gravity over the last few days and now any weight at all felt wrong. The carrier accelerated at a steady two g, which meant she weighed twice as much as she would have on Earth. The strain on her heart left her feeling weak and like her head was spinning.

At the last moment there was a brief burn for lateral acceleration that threw her up against the side of her bunk, her face pressed against the bulkhead. And then—nothing. All the gravity went away. The blood rushed to her head and she thought maybe she had blacked out. Just for a moment.

Eventually she managed to crawl her way to the hatch and spill out into the corridor beyond. She kicked her way down to a wardroom that had once belonged to the carrier’s marines.

It was deserted. The vast majority of the people who might have used its facilities were dead now. Either they’d been cut down back when Lanoe boarded and seized the carrier, or they’d been on the wrong side of the mutiny.

Ehta strapped herself into a seat and sucked on a squeeze tube of water. She had hydration tabs in a pocket of her suit, but she figured she should save those. There was a big meeting called for later, a general meeting of all the surviving officers of the fleet to discuss what they would do next. To talk about just how much bosh they were in.

After that, she intended to get very drunk.

Hydration tabs were great for hangovers, and they were ten thousand light-years from the nearest place she could get any more of them. She was going to make them last.

As she was considering maybe actually eating some food—as unappetizing as the prospect might be—she heard someone coming down the corridor. “Hello?” she called, not sure if she wanted company or not.

It turned out it was Valk, kicking his way down the corridor with a sort of methodical grace. He came into the wardroom and sat down beside her without a word.

The silence dragged on far too long, until she realized he was expecting her to talk first. “It’s good to see you up and around,” she said. “When you were at the controls of the cruiser, slumped out and with your helmet down—I started worrying about you, big guy.”

“There didn’t seem to be any point in trying to act human,” he told her. “Maintaining this form takes energy I could use for other things.”

“That’s about how I feel when I look at my hair in the morning,” Ehta told him.

He didn’t laugh. “Maybe I was falling into a sort of digital version of depression,” he said instead. “I’m better now, I think. Now I know I’m not broken. Also, I’ve started to think that my mental health is something I need to be very careful with.”

“Yeah?” she said. “That just occurred to you?”

“It followed as a postulate from something else I was thinking,” he told her. “I was considering what’s going to happen to us. There’s no way back to human space, not if Rain-on-Stones can’t open a wormhole. We’re all stuck out here for the rest of our lives. Eventually all of you are going to die.”

Ehta bit through the end of her squeeze bottle. Water oozed out in a thick globule that wobbled its way through the air between them.

Valk cupped his hand around the globule and gently herded it over to a recycling chute. “There’s quite a bit of water onboard, but no reason to waste it. Food’s the real problem. The crew will probably starve to death in less than six months.”

“Valk,” Ehta said through gritted teeth, “maybe you could not talk about that right now? Maybe you could not say things like that to me?”

“Sorry. I was overly focused on what’s going to happen to me. Assuming Lanoe refuses to deactivate me, I’ll just keep going. I’ll be all alone here, until the power runs out. If I ration it properly I can probably make it last four hundred years. That’s a long time to be alone, and my programming prevents me from committing suicide. I’ll have to run the batteries down before I can really rest. So, you see, I need to make sure I can handle the psychological strain. I wouldn’t want to end my existence as a crazy robot wandering around a spaceship full of skeletons.”

“No,” Ehta said. “I can’t imagine that would be fun. Excuse me,” she said, unstrapping herself. “I need to be somewhere right now.”

“Oh? Where?” he asked.

“Literally anywhere else,” she told him.

They were Navy officers. Not fools.

Candless watched their faces as she laid out their situation. She wasn’t telling them anything they hadn’t already figured out on their own. “We can’t survive a direct confrontation with seven dreadnoughts. Even making proper use of the cruiser’s guns we might not make it through a fight with even one of them, especially if it is supported by interceptors. Fortunately, we don’t have to fight. We know that the dreadnoughts have trouble finding us when we run dark, so it’s likely we can postpone having to fight another battle indefinitely. We can drift for quite a while, letting them pass us by. My hope is that they’ll eventually get tired of chasing phantoms and return to the disk. When they do, we can start up the engines and burn for deep space.”

Paniet stared at the table, scratching at the padded top with his thumbnail. Giles, the IO, who’d remained loyal in the mutiny, just looked happy to be included. Ehta met her gaze directly, but her face was grim. Valk—well, it was impossible to tell what Valk was thinking.

Lanoe looked like he wanted to say something. When she raised an eyebrow at him, however, he just shook his head.

“We can stop at Caina, or any of the distant detached planetoids we passed on our way into the system. Assuming they’re similar to cometary objects we’ve encountered before, they’ll be a good source of deuterium and tritium that we can mine and use as fuel for our engines. We may even be able to find some organic molecules. Not food, exactly, but raw materials we can use to synthesize something like food. Once we’re done collecting resources, we can leave the system altogether and be done with the Blue-Blue-White. The next step after that is … well, I’m open to suggestions.”

Each of them had their own idea. None of them particularly appealed to Candless.

“I’ve been studying this chart,” Paniet said, unrolling a minder on the tabletop. It showed the wormhole network—not just the wormholes that connected human planets, but the entire network that the Choir had built, which allowed travel between half the stars in the galaxy. “The Choir very specifically did not build a wormhole anywhere near this system, because they’d encountered the Blue-Blue-White drone fleets twice before, and they weren’t anxious to meet the people who built those machines.” He looked up at them with a kind of desperate optimism. “The nearest wormhole throat to us right now is about seven hundred light-years from here.”

That got a murmur of dismay from the crowd. Candless rapped her knuckles on the hard edge of the table to quiet them down.

“Duckies, it isn’t as bad as it sounds. If we can accelerate to a significant portion of the speed of light, time dilation will be our friend, for once. It won’t take anything like seven hundred years, as far as we’re concerned.”

“How long?” Lanoe asked.

“Including the time to accelerate to that speed, and then decelerate again when we reach the wormhole throat … well. Admittedly, we’re still talking at least a century,” Paniet admitted.

“Let’s … call that Option One,” Candless said.

Ehta grunted in frustration. “I’m sure this is dumb, but—Valk could try talking to the Blue-Blue-White again. Maybe … hell. Apologize. See whether they’ll, I don’t know. Take us in.”

“You want to spend the rest of your life as a guest of a bunch of giant jellyfish?” Giles asked. “Count me out of that one!”

“It can’t be done, anyway,” Valk said. “Not in any reasonable timeframe.”

“Define reasonable,” Paniet suggested.

“I couldn’t understand them because my language files were half a billion years out of date,” Valk explained. “It’s like if you went back to ancient England, say fifty thousand years ago, in a time machine and tried speaking English to the people there. They’d just look at you funny, right? You’d have almost no words in common. Languages change over time, and eventually they change so much there’s no way to translate. This is even worse because I’d be back-translating, like trying to figure out how to speak Indo-European by guessing.”

“But you can do that, right?” Ehta asked. “I mean, it’s possible. Yeah?”

Valk lifted his arms and let them fall. It was the closest thing he had to a shrug. “It’s basically a cryptanalysis problem. I mean, yes, I can do it, but it would take years to even make a dent in it.”

“Still, Option Two sounds a little more practical than Option One,” Ehta insisted.

“What about Option Three?” Giles said. His eyes were very bright.

Candless turned her gaze upon him. “And what is that, exactly?”

“We go down in a blaze of glory,” the IO said. He laughed, and it was not a healthy laugh. “Turn around. Start shooting. Kill as many of those beggars as we can get before they kill us.”

No one around the table seemed to want to touch the idea. Not even Lanoe.

“That’s about what’s left, isn’t it?” Giles demanded. He pounded on the table with his fist. “It’s all we have left. The only thing we can hope to accomplish. We’re all going to die. We’re going to die whether we starve or burn when those plasma balls come for us, we’re going to burn … burn …” He lifted his hands to his face in shame as he started to sob, big chest-heaving tears leaking out through his fingers.

“No,” Valk said.

Lanoe and Ehta both turned around in their chairs to look at the AI.

“No,” he said again. “There’s something else we can accomplish. If we’ve given up on playing it safe. If we’re willing to do something really, really dangerous.”

“Well?” Lanoe demanded.

“We can do what we came here for. There’s still a chance.”

Valk didn’t need a minder, or a virtual keyboard. He loaded up the video file he wanted and fed it through display emitters built into the table. He could read human faces well enough to know that the gathered officers had no idea what he was showing them.

“When we first approached the disk,” he said, “we flew past one of the shepherd moons, out near the far edge. We got a pretty good look at it.” The display showed a rocky spheroid about two thousand kilometers in diameter. Its surface couldn’t be seen, because the Blue-Blue-White had encased the entire mass in their pale cagework, pylons joined together at odd angles to form a second crust around the moon. Inside that cagework were complex structures that were hard to make out. “We saw something there, remember? We saw a queenship.”

The view shifted, zooming in on an irregular hexagon of pylons, one small part of the moon’s cage. Inside that hexagon was a rock roughly a kilometer long. One end was open to the moon’s thin atmosphere. Long spiky structures—fifteen of them—ringed the aperture. It looked like nothing more than a giant statue of a Blue-Blue-White, but an unfinished or damaged one. The structure’s hull was already pitted with impact craters.

“A queenship?” Giles asked.

Valk nodded. “Right. You’ve never seen one of these before. Lanoe, Ehta, and I have, though. This is the main element of one of their drone fleets. We fought one of these at Niraya.”

“I only ever saw it on a display,” Ehta said, leaning back in her chair. “You and Lanoe actually got inside one. And then you blew the hell out of it.”

Lanoe’s mouth twisted over to one side. Valk could guess that his memories of that day were … complicated. It had been a great victory for him. It had set him on the path he was still following. It had cost him the woman he loved.

“These things,” Valk said, moving on, “are amazing machines. They’re built out of hollowed-out asteroids, which means they have a hull so thick we could barely scratch it with ground-based artillery. They can command and control entire fleets of smaller drones. They’re designed to rebuild gas giant planets into suitable homes for the Blue-Blue-White, without any supervision. They can also make perfect copies of themselves, and those copies can make more copies, and those copies—”

“Can sterilize a galaxy,” Lanoe cut in.

Valk nodded again. “The point I wanted to make is, the whole process started with just one ship. The Blue-Blue-White built just one of these and set it loose. By our time there were millions of them. They went everywhere. But it started with one.”

He pointed at the display.

“This one,” he said.

Lanoe frowned. “You think this is the first one. The original.”

“I’m certain of it,” Valk said. “The Choir sent us here, five hundred million years in the past, for one reason. To see this. To do something about it. I don’t know how much time we have. If I had to guess, I’d say the Blue-Blue-White will launch this queenship in the next few days. If we can get to it before they send it on its way, we can stop them from killing off every civilization that ever lived.”

“Wait,” Lanoe said, shaking his head. “Wait. If we destroy that thing now, won’t that cause the same problem we just avoided? Won’t it create a paradox? If we blow up this queenship, there’ll be no reason for us to come here in the first place.”

“Who said anything about blowing it up?” Valk asked.

Candless cleared her throat. “Perhaps you’d be kind enough to share with the rest of us what you’d like to do with it, if destruction is off the table?”

“I want to reprogram it,” Valk said. “Its mission was never military. It was designed to do construction work, not wipe out alien species. The problem was that the Blue-Blue-White programmed it wrong. They told it to wipe out vermin, but failed to give it a good definition of what vermin looked like.

“If we can change its basic code, we can stop that from happening. We can tell it not to kill any intelligent lifeforms it finds on its voyage. We can rewrite history.”

“Hmm,” Paniet said. “Huh. Well, yes.” He shook his head. “But no. No, it can’t be that simple. Just changing a few lines of code—easy enough, but you’re talking about making a major change in history. Just a massive, massive change.”

“Not every change we could make automatically results in a paradox,” Valk said. “That only happens if we don’t give ourselves a reason to come back here.”

“Oh, is it that simple? You have no idea what you’d be tampering with!” Paniet laughed. “Even if we assume there’s some kind of conservation of time, there are just too many variables for me to feel comfortable with this. We have no idea what kind of ramifications this small change could have—tiny changes add up over time, become big changes, become catastrophes. And the longer the stretch of history that you change, the more fraught it gets. Over half a billion years, how many things could go wrong?”

“You’re right,” Valk said. “Unless there was someone riding along with the queenship, someone who could steer it in the right direction over that whole stretch of time. Making sure to avoid paradoxes, teaching it to respect intelligent life. Guiding and steering its decisions, every step of the way.”

The engineer’s face clouded. “Someone who could make copies of himself as well, so they would be copied into each new queenship as it’s built.”

“Yes,” Valk said.

“Meaning you,” Lanoe said. “Yourself. You’re saying you want to copy your own programming into the queenship’s memory.”

“Yes,” Valk said again.

Lanoe’s eyes narrowed down to slits. “When we fought the queenship at Niraya, we were convinced there had to be a programmer onboard. Someone we could talk to, somebody who could be reasoned with. We were wrong—the queenship was just a drone, incapable of doing anything but what it was programmed for. You want to become that programmer. And when you get to Niraya, half a billion years from now, you’ll be waiting to talk to us. To me. To yourself—to explain what’s happening. To explain that we need to come back here and make this change, and as a result, not create a paradox.”

Valk was glad Lanoe could see it so clearly.

“Yes,” he said.

Candless shook her head. “I think Paniet’s objection is still valid. This is incredibly risky. And not least because it’s so dependent on Valk. Have we forgotten what he is?” She stared at Valk until he wanted to curl into a ball and roll away. “You,” she said, “are an artificial intelligence. I’m sorry, but I’ve never trusted you.”

This wasn’t exactly news to Valk. She’d been fighting to have him deleted ever since she learned what he was. It was hardly a unique opinion, either. AIs were illegal for a reason, after all. During the Century War, an artificial intelligence had murdered half of the human race.

“He’s been invaluable so far,” Lanoe said. “He’s—”

“He’s an AI!” Candless said. “And an unstable one at that. And now you want to entrust the entirety of history to him. You want to fix a lethally faulty computer program—by putting it in the hands of an unpredictably faulty computer program.”

Lanoe frowned. “I’ve heard your concern,” he said.

“But you’re going to ignore it, aren’t you?” Candless said. She leaned forward against the table, bracing herself on her hands. “Is that how it goes? You’re going to just make a decision, and we all have to live with it?”

“I’m the ranking officer of this fleet,” Lanoe said.

But Candless wasn’t having it. “No,” she said.

Lanoe raised an eyebrow. “No?”

“No, damn you!” she bellowed.

As tough as she was, Valk had never heard her shout before. He looked around the table and saw everyone staring at her in shock.

“I beg your pardon,” she said, “but this is far too important to let one person decide whether we do this or not. Commander, if you choose to act unilaterally on this, I’ll be forced to revisit the notion of—”

“Wait,” Valk said. Because he knew she was about to try to relieve Lanoe of command. He couldn’t let that happen. “Wait.”

Candless continued staring at Lanoe, but she fell silent. The rest of them all looked to Valk.

“If I’m sending one message into the future,” the AI said, “there’s no reason I can’t send two.”

“What are you suggesting?” Paniet asked.

“We know the Blue-Blue-White fleets visited the Choir, not once but twice. When I get to their planet, I can contact them as well. Tell them what’s happening, and ask them for a favor.”

“A favor?” Ehta asked.

“I can ask them to open another wormhole. Just like the one that brought us here. I can have them bring us home.”

“Home,” Giles said, his eyes wide.

“Home,” Paniet said, his voice cracking.

Lanoe scratched at the short hair on the top of his head. He nodded to himself, then turned in his seat to face Candless directly.

“You’re not comfortable with me making this decision myself,” he said to her. “Maybe you’d like to put it to a vote.”

Candless looked around the table. Valk could only imagine what she saw in all those suddenly hopeful faces.

“Apparently,” she said, “that won’t be necessary.”

The first step was to find out if it was even possible. Paniet and Giles went to the carrier’s bridge so they could gather as much intelligence as possible. They were a long way from the shepherd moon, and as they were still hiding from the Blue-Blue-White’s dreadnoughts, they could only use the ship’s passive sensors—mostly its telescopes. It was crucial, however, that they identify what kind of defenses surrounded the queenship.

“It’s going to take a while,” Giles said, shaking his head. The Centrocor IO seemed to have calmed down a bit since his outburst at the strategy session, but he was still very much on edge. “I can take a series of still images and synthesize them into a pretty good composite. We’ll need to do some pretty heavy object recognition analyses, though, to get any idea what we’re facing.”

Paniet nodded. “It’ll take exactly as long as it takes. No one’s expecting miracles here, love.”

“Isn’t that exactly what we’re talking about? Changing history? If you don’t consider that a miracle, well …”

Paniet smiled. “Fair enough. I’ll see if we can get Valk to help with the analysis, that should speed things up a little.” He patted the man on the shoulder, then kicked his way out of the bridge. He tapped at his wrist display to send a message to Valk. A blue pearl popped up in the corner of his eye almost instantly.

“How can I help you?” the AI asked.

Paniet explained about the image analyses. “Any chance you can take a look?”

“Of course. Have the imagery forwarded to me and I’ll do it right away.”

Paniet nodded to himself. “Excellent,” he said. He reached toward his wrist to end the call, but then stopped himself. “Valk,” he said, “I wonder—do you have a minute? I’d like to discuss something with you.”

“Of course.”

“I’ve just been thinking about what you’re offering to do. I’m wondering … well, I’ve been concerned, honestly. We’re asking a great deal of you. Do you really feel you’re up to this?”

“Certainly. I make copies of myself all the time. I can even partition my consciousness to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Right now, while I’m talking to you, I’m also sitting with Lanoe. We’re having a fascinating conversation about the nature of paradoxes and whether the temporal dimension is limited by constants or dynamic enough to permit stochastic effects and scalar fields.”

Paniet frowned. Well, at least he wasn’t the only one who had doubts. “That’s good. But I guess that wasn’t really what I meant. I’m sure you’re functionally capable of this. I was more concerned with your, ah, mental state.”

“You’re worried that I’m not stable enough,” Valk suggested. He didn’t sound offended by the implication. “I am a little concerned that I’ll degrade over time. I’ve considered that, and I think I have a solution. The fleets spend most of their time in a low-activity state, traveling between the stars. Because they don’t use wormholes, it can take them thousands of years to go from one system to another. I’ll only really need to do anything in the comparatively brief windows when a fleet is actually in the vicinity of one planet or another. I can put myself into standby mode during those long voyages, and experience only a tiny fraction of the elapsed time.”

Paniet sighed. Clearly the AI had thought all of this through—from a practical perspective. He doubted that Valk had given much attention to the larger issues, though.

“I trust you,” the engineer said. “You know I do.”

“You’ve always been supportive of me, even knowing what I am,” Valk confirmed. “I’ve appreciated that.”

“I believe in you,” Paniet said. Even though it sounded to his own ears like he was trying to convince himself. “It’s just—we’re giving you power no human being has ever possessed. If we do this, we’re basically asking you to play god.”

“Hmm,” Valk said. “I hadn’t considered that. I suppose it is a considerable responsibility. I’ll do what I can to discharge it faithfully.”

Maybe, Paniet thought, that was all they could ask.

“The shepherd moon has an atmosphere. Not much of one, but enough that it can be defended by airfighters,” Ehta said, pointing at the display that Giles had finally worked up, six hours later. “Our telescopes picked up the signatures of forty-five of them, stationed on platforms here, here, and here.” She indicated three square shapes in the view. To her eyes they just looked like pale splotches, but Valk had sounded pretty confident in his analysis. “They fly regular patrols around the moon, on a pattern that covers ninety-five percent of the surface every seventy-five minutes. Over here, we think these are laser emplacements like the one we faced in our first battle with the Blue-Blue-White.” Two blue dots appeared on the display, each of them only about ten kilometers away from the queenship. “That’s what we know we’re facing. What we can’t see here, what we can’t predict, is whether there are any ground-based defenses.”

Lanoe’s face flickered with light from the display as he leaned close, as if he could get a better view by being physically nearer to the image. “They’ll be minimal, if there are any,” he said. “I flew through an entire city and only saw one adult Blue-Blue-White and a bunch of immature ones.” He shook his head. “I didn’t see anything like tanks or infantry.”

“This place is a lot bigger than any of their cities,” Ehta pointed out. “We honestly don’t know what we’re going to find.”

As ranking marine of the fleet, she had known right away that it was going to be her people who got Valk to the queenship. He would need to be escorted down there and protected for a few minutes while he uploaded a copy of himself into the drone’s computers. If a hundred Blue-Blue-Whites were down there carrying anything more advanced than hunting knives, it could be a bloodbath. Worse still, the mission could fail.

“My original thought,” Ehta said, “was to take Valk and just a couple marines down there in the cutter. The thing’s damned near invisible. We could be in and out before they even knew we were messing with them.” She shook her head. “I suppose we could still try that, but …”

“It’s too big a risk,” Lanoe agreed. “We’re only going to get one chance at this.”

“So we pull out all the stops,” Ehta said. “I take Valk in on the troop transport, with every marine we’ve got left. They’ll see us coming, so we need to go in fast, while the landing zone is still hot. They’ll try to shoot us down before we can get close to the queenship, so we need vehicle support. Cataphracts to take out the lasers and then keep the airfighters busy. We bring in the cruiser—and its coilguns—in case any of those dreadnoughts show up. If their interceptors join the party, well … I don’t exactly know what we do then.”

“Leave that to me,” Lanoe told her. “I’ve fought them off once.”

“You engaged them once,” Candless said, in high dudgeon mode. “You didn’t fight them off. They left when they realized the dreadnought they’d been sent to protect was no longer functional.”

Lanoe shrugged. “Did you think this was going to be easy?”

Candless had nothing to say to that.

“Once Valk is on the queenship,” Paniet said, “we retreat, yes? Get out of there as fast as we can. Our work is done.”

“That’s the plan,” Lanoe told the engineer.

“Except,” Paniet said, “we’ll be drawing a great deal of attention to ourselves. The Blue-Blue-White already consider us a threat. And this queenship is valuable to them—it’s a massive project they’ve spent a lot of time on. If they see the cruiser approaching their construction site they’ll throw every ship they have at us, to try to protect it.”

“What did I say about this not being easy, just a second ago?” Lanoe asked.

Paniet shook his head. “No, I got that. What I’m wondering is how it’ll look to them. What they’ll see. From their perspective, the alien invaders are going to attack one of their most important installations—then run away without actually breaking anything that can’t be replaced. If you were in charge of their defenses, Commander, wouldn’t that raise a red flag or two? Or fifteen?”

Valk laughed.

Ehta shot the AI a quizzical look.

“It’s a joke,” Valk explained. “The Blue-Blue-White use a base-fifteen numbering system. So instead of a dozen red flags, they would raise fifteen.”

Ehta frowned.

“It’s funny,” Valk protested. “I thought it was funny.”

Paniet waved a hand through the display. “The point is, it’s going to look suspicious. They’ll suspect that we’ve sabotaged the queenship somehow. I imagine they’ll check its computers. What happens then?”

“I can hide myself pretty well,” Valk said. “That’s one of the nice things about being a self-aware computer program. If they scan the queenship’s memory I can just make sure I’m not in the place they’re looking.”

“I hope you’re right,” Paniet said. “Or we’ll have wasted a great deal of time and put ourselves in danger for nothing.”

“At least we’ll know right away if it works or not,” Lanoe pointed out. “If it does, we’ll see a wormhole throat open in the sky.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Candless asked.

“Do you see any point in worrying about that?” Lanoe asked her. “If it doesn’t, we’re all dead. Just like we were before we came up with this plan.”