Chapter Thirty-Four

The carrier had one more trip to make. One more wormhole to traverse.

They arrived back at Earth to a kind of honor guard—an entire wing of Z.XIX fighters that took up formation around the carrier before it was even fully out of the wormhole throat. All of them with disruptors hot and firing solutions ready.

It took some pretty quick talking to get clearance to enter Earth orbit.

A hologram of Admiral Varma’s dubious face loomed over Lanoe where he sat in the captain’s chair of the bridge. “I gave you a cruiser, Commander. A Hoplite-class cruiser, so you could go talk to these Choir people,” she said. “You’ve come back with about half of a Centrocor carrier.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Centrocor isn’t supposed to have a carrier. That’s illegal.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Are you going to explain what happened?”

“Well, ma’am, I’ll try …”

They put the carrier in drydock at Janissary station, a Naval shipyard halfway between Earth and the moon. They had orders to turn in both the cutter and the Z.XIX, both of which were classified technology that the Navy very much wanted back. Lanoe took the fighter, heading off without a word to the rest. The remaining four senior officers took the cutter, with Candless in the pilot’s seat.

Once they set down and turned the cutter over to a squad of neddies, they were somewhat at a loss. None of them had given much consideration to what came next. It was Ehta who suggested they might start with a drink.

Janissary station was a working facility, without much in the way of entertainment possibilities. It did have a big rotating drum of a crew area, though, with light and warmth and gravity, and where such things existed in Navy country, someone would always get a bar together.

It wasn’t much more than a counter in the back of a cafeteria, with a couple of stools and a box of bottles underneath the counter. The station’s cook served as the bartender. He was happy to pour them four shots of scotch, neat, lining them up and gesturing with a flourish. “Enjoy,” he said, and went back to his duties.

For a while they just stared at the little glasses. Maybe, Ehta thought, they’d been drinking out of squeeze tubes for so long they’d forgotten how to be civilized. Maybe they just didn’t know what to say. Eventually she pounded one fist on the counter and grabbed her shot glass. “We lost one of our own,” she said. “Here’s to Bury.”

Paniet nodded and lifted his glass high. “To Bury.”

Valk stuck a straw in his glass. “To Bury.”

Ehta watched Candless closely. The old flight instructor stared at her glass as if it might contain poison, but also as if she was considering drinking it anyway. Finally she nodded and picked it up. She couldn’t repeat the toast.

No one pressed her. They drank, and sat in silence for a moment, and that was all anyone needed to say on that score.

“I’m afraid I can’t stay,” Candless said. “I need to write some letters.” But before she got up she gestured for the bartender to refill the glasses, on her. “I’d like to say it’s been a privilege to serve with all of you. You all proved to be extraordinarily competent officers.”

She looked up, and for the first time met Ehta’s gaze.

Ehta thought about the time Candless slapped her. The time she, in turn, had spat at a hatch Candless had just passed through.

She supposed they both wanted to put that behind them. She stood up, at attention. Marines didn’t salute—they would just hit their helmets with their gloves if they tried, most of the time. Instead she just said, “Ma’am.”

Candless nodded. Then she rose from her stool and walked away.

It would have been easier to send the message over the network. Candless could simply have spoken it into her wrist minder and had it delivered automatically. It was important to her, however, to do this correctly.

She found a quartermaster and requisitioned a minder and a stylus. The man had to search deep in the station’s stores to find the latter item. “I don’t know anyone’s written anything around here in years. By hand, I mean.”

“I believe it confers a certain sincerity and respect,” Candless said.

“Sure, whatever. Ma’am,” the quartermaster replied.

In a quiet part of the station the Navy had erected a memorial chapel, a tiny space with a display wall that allowed anyone who wished to do so to search for the names and service records of those who had fallen in the service of Earth. Bury’s name wouldn’t be in there—not yet. Candless hadn’t come for that purpose. Instead she took a seat on a dusty pew and placed the minder across her knees. Then she tried to find the words.

To M. Bury, Hel, she wrote. She did not know Bury’s mother’s first name. Nor that of his sister.

Nor did she know what to write next. She struggled with platitudes, with empty sentiment. No words she could think of conveyed what she was feeling.

So she put that letter aside. She knew how to write the other one.

To Captain Gardner, Commanding Officer of the Naval Flight School at Rishi.

Sir.

It is with deep regret that I must inform you that effective immediately I will be resigning from my post. I have found that I am no longer capable of teaching students in a way that benefits them. Having failed to protect two of my cadets, and having allowed one to perish under my tutelage, I believe this is the correct course of action.

For nearly a century I have worked and lived among the officers and cadets of the flight school. It has been a great honor, and I hope that my failure will not tarnish the reputation of the institution. I will cooperate with any investigation you wish to conduct into the death of Cadet Bury, and will present myself to the judicial authorities forthwith if you find any delinquency of duty in my actions.

If I am not to be disciplined for the cadet’s death, then it is my wish that I be reassigned to active duty, as soon as possible, so that I can begin to repair my reputation. I remain, as always, your faithful officer, Lieutenant Marjoram Candless.

By the time she’d finished, her hand had started to cramp. She laid the stylus down beside her on the pew. She took a moment to draw a deep breath that threatened to turn into a sob. She didn’t let it.

When she had stopped shaking quite so much, she hit SEND.

Someone came up behind her, startling her. She did not like to be startled. When she saw who it was, wrath flared up in her soul. “I was under the impression I had made myself clear,” she said, “that I never wanted to see you again.”

“Sure,” Lanoe said. He walked right past her pew. His eyes were wild, every muscle in his body tense. “I’m not here for you. I need to confirm something,” he said.

He went to the display wall and started typing in a name.

By the fourth or fifth round—Ehta didn’t bother to count—Paniet was starting to turn red in the face. He spun around on his stool and Valk had to reach out and grab him before he fell off. The engineer erupted in a snort of laughter and slapped the counter to order more drinks. “What’s next for us, then, darlings? What’s next for us poor few who have no idea what world we’ve even come back to?” He looked at them cross-eyed for a moment. “I think I said that right.”

“I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding a new posting,” Ehta said. “I’ll give you a hell of a reference, if you want one.”

“No need, love. I’ve already been reassigned. They want me to fix up the carrier we brought in. Sand off all the hexagons Centrocor painted on it, get it back up to shape where they can send it somewhere to get shot to pieces again. A neddy’s work is never done. That’s tomorrow, though. Tonight, I want to find someplace I can dance. Maybe meet someone special.” He hugged Ehta’s neck and planted a kiss on the side of her head. “How about it?” he asked. “Want to tag along? I know all the best spots on the moon.”

“You go ahead,” Ehta told him. “Maybe I’ll catch up with you later.”

Paniet gave her an elaborate bow and then ran off, whooping.

When he was gone she looked over at Valk. “How are you doing?” she asked.

“I can’t get drunk. Not anymore.” He shrugged, lifting his arms and then letting them fall again. “I guess I’m okay.” He turned his shot glass upside down on the bar. “Have you checked your service record yet?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Things are different here,” he said. Meaning this timeline, she thought. “Things have changed. I was worried about what was going to happen to me when we got back. By law, I’m supposed to be deleted as soon as possible. I thought maybe some military police would be waiting to take me away.”

Ehta frowned. “Valk, I know you think you’re some kind of monster, but—”

Valk shook his head, his whole torso rolling back and forth. “I checked. I checked my service record, my civilian ID documents … There was nothing there.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I don’t exist. There’s no record of me at all. I mean, there’s plenty of records about the Blue Devil. About Tannis Valk. He’s just listed as being deceased, though. The official register says he died during the Establishment Crisis.”

“What? But they claimed you didn’t die. They claimed—”

“Not here,” Valk said. “I don’t know. I don’t know how it works, but here, as far as anyone is concerned, none of that ever happened. I never happened. I think maybe the copy of me on the queenship did something. Erased me from the public memory.”

Ehta moved her knee over to touch his. “I remember you,” she said.

“Thanks.”

The truth was, Ehta had already checked her own record. It was one of the first things she’d done when they arrived and her wrist minder synched up with the local network. What she’d found had been a little less mysterious.

For her, nothing had changed. Nothing at all. She was still listed as having been injured during the fighting on Tuonela. Her service record had been closed out, because she’d been invalided out of the PBMs. Given a medical discharge.

Her career was over. She had no idea what she was going to do next.

Even if she’d already been offered a new job. A message had been waiting for her, a message so heavily encrypted it took her wrist minder three minutes to decode it:

We hear that you’ve been removed from active duty by the Planetary Brigade Marines. Most likely you’re wondering how a woman with your skills and your commendations can adapt to civilian life. If you’re interested, we might have a proposal for you. The pay is very good, and it comes with a full suite of benefits. Please let us know if you’d be interested in hearing us out.

The message had deleted itself after she finished reading it. Not, however, before she could make out the watermark behind the words: a single, simple hexagon.

Centrocor wanted her. They wanted her just like they’d wanted the marines from the carrier, and Giles the IO, and Captain Shulkin.

Apparently, with everything that had changed, some things were exactly the same.

Ehta had ignored the message. She had no desire to work for Big Hexagon. Though she wondered if maybe she would feel differently once she tried to find a job outside of the military.

But maybe … maybe she didn’t have to try alone.

“You and me,” she said.

“Hmm?”

“You and me. We figure it out together. We start a new life, the two of us. We work security jobs, or maybe—you can fly, I can deal with shady people, we could get a little ship, do freight runs.” Smuggling, she meant, but best not to say that out loud. “You don’t like that idea? We’ll think of something else. But you and me, together, from now on. We could be a great team.”

“I’d like that,” Valk said.

She put a hand on his arm.

“But of course,” he told her, “we have to see what Lanoe says first.”

Right. Sure.

Ehta frowned. Looked down at the bar. No more drinks, she thought. Not right now. She’d nearly suggested something … foolish. “You can’t get drunk,” she said. “That’s too bad. There’s an upside, though. You don’t need to sleep, either. Right now I’d very much like to find a bunk I can actually lie down in, instead of strapping myself in so I don’t float away. Maybe tomorrow morning we can talk again. Okay?”

He turned his body toward her. Facing her. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll look forward to that.”

She patted his arm and left him there at the bar.

It wasn’t hard to find Valk, even though he didn’t show up on any public databases. Lanoe just asked for the wounded pilot, the one who kept his helmet up and opaque all the time.

When he got to the bar he found the AI sitting alone, an empty glass in his hand. Lanoe walked over and sat down next to him. Looked at the bartender. “Just give me a drink,” he said.

“Lanoe!” Valk said. Sounding happy to see him. “Ehta and I were just talking about you. How are you?”

Lanoe didn’t answer. He tossed back his drink and grimaced. Ordered another. This one he left sitting there, untouched.

“Back in the Crisis,” he said, “I had you in my sights once. Remember?”

“That happened to Tannis Valk. But I remember,” Valk said.

Lanoe nodded. “I was low on ammunition. Almost out of fuel. You got away from me.”

Valk laughed. It sounded like a human laugh, even though Lanoe knew it was just a sound file.

Lanoe wasn’t laughing. “There’s a docking bay about two hundred meters that way,” he said, pointing down a corridor. “There are two BR.9s in there. They’ve both been fueled up. I’ve had a word with traffic control. No one is going to stop us.”

Valk shook his head. “I’m confused. You want to … what? Take a joyride? Maybe race me somewhere?”

Lanoe touched the glass in front of him. Pulled his hand back. “I checked something, as soon as we got here. I had to know. See, I wouldn’t let myself say it out loud, barely let myself think it. But it occurred to me. With all the changes we made, all the history you played with. Maybe she would be here, somewhere. Still alive.”

“You mean Zhang,” Valk said. He was as still as a statue.

“Her service record is public data. It lists her as deceased. A casualty of the battle at Niraya.” Lanoe couldn’t look at the AI. “Still.”

“Lanoe, you have to understand, there was no other way—”

“You killed her,” Lanoe said. He grabbed the edge of the bar. Squeezed it until it creaked. “You killed her, Valk. You were there, this time. You could have stopped it, you could have warned us … You didn’t. You killed her.”

“Lanoe—”

“I’m giving you a head start. It’s more than you deserve, you bastard.”

A human might have hesitated. A human might have tried to talk his way out of this. Maybe. The AI didn’t bother with that. He jumped off his barstool and ran.

Lanoe tried to count to ten. He didn’t get very far. Instead, he reached forward, took the shot glass off the bar, and knocked it back.

He placed the glass back down, very carefully.

Then he stood up. And started moving.

Valk tore out of the docking bay, punching his throttle to get as much distance from the station as he could. He startled a swarm of drones that had been painting the exterior of the station, sending them flying in every direction, barely managing to avoid hitting any of them. A Z.XIX nosed toward him, its weapons hot—station security, no doubt wondering what the hell was going on.

The Z.XIX didn’t signal to him, though. It didn’t demand that he turn back. Apparently if you were a commander like Lanoe you could do what you liked and people knew better than to ask questions.

Once he was clear of the immediate traffic around the station, Valk hit his maneuvering jets and swung around to his left, headed for open space. He knew Lanoe wouldn’t be far behind, and he wanted to get somewhere open before the shooting started.

He didn’t quite get there. PBW fire streaked past him without warning, a couple of shots bouncing off his vector field. Valk could see in all directions, so he didn’t need to crane his neck around to see that Lanoe was right behind him.

Their ships were evenly matched. Back in the Crisis, Tannis Valk wouldn’t have stood a chance. He was never half the pilot Lanoe was. Now, though, Valk had the reaction time of a computer. He ran through a number of probability models, searched for the best way to get out of this. The best way to survive, at least, until he could say what he had to say.

He threw his cataphract into a tight corkscrew, nudging his stick left or right occasionally to keep his flight path as unpredictable as possible. PBW fire cut the vacuum into sections all around him, but he dodged the worst of it.

Valk studied his tactical board, called up infrared imagery of Lanoe’s ship, worked with every sensor he had. He saw one thing right away—Lanoe’s disruptors were cold. He wasn’t going to end this with one quick explosion. Valk figured that Lanoe wanted to drag this out a little before he moved in for the kill.

That gave him a chance to talk. He opened his comms board and linked their two ships with a communications laser. “Lanoe,” he said, “I made contact with that queenship we saw orbiting the Choir’s planet. My copy on that ship told me everything he’d seen, everything he’d done. The species he met. The species he saved. When he told me about Zhang, I was horrified. I was saddened. I couldn’t believe it.

“Then he told me why.

“It had to be done. Otherwise, there would have been a paradox.

“If Zhang hadn’t died, you never would have gone to the Choir and demanded they open the wormhole to the past. You never would have gone back there looking for revenge. Can’t you understand this? It’s exactly what we talked about before.

“If things were different—but they couldn’t be different. This one thing, this one terrible thing had to happen. Or it wouldn’t have worked.

“Please, Lanoe. You have to see that I’m right. That she had to die.”

Valk stopped talking, then, for two reasons. He’d run out of things to say. And also he saw that Lanoe had refused the comms laser. The message hadn’t gone through.

Ahead of Lanoe, Valk twisted out of his corkscrew in a flat spin, a maneuver that would have probably left a human pilot unconscious. It cut Valk’s velocity in half almost instantly, and Lanoe shot past the other BR.9, unable to decelerate as quickly. He threw his control stick over to the side and came around, banking hard to keep Valk from getting behind him.

“Nice trick,” he said.

For a moment, just a split second, Valk had him in a bad pocket. He could have disabled Lanoe’s fighter with a few well-placed shots, or even blown him out of the sky with a disruptor.

Valk didn’t fire. He had the perfect opportunity and he didn’t take it. Clearly he still thought there was a way out of this. That they could both walk away from this alive.

Lanoe had no intention of letting that happen. If Valk didn’t want to shoot, so be it. Lanoe opened up with his PBWs, firing wildly, knowing there was no chance he would actually hit Valk. Those potshots were just to let Valk know he was serious.

The message got across, apparently. Valk shot forward again, hitting his engines hard. He threw his fighter into a steep dive, and Lanoe followed. The silver face of the moon loomed up before them, big enough to fill Lanoe’s canopy.

Together they shot downward into the moon’s gravity well, the ground rushing up to meet them. The distance between them evaporated as their fighters plunged through the vacuum. Craters and low mountains and the boxy habitats of the lunar slums raced upward toward them, but Valk didn’t pull up. He moved his control stick only to swing back and forth as Lanoe fired shot after shot at him. A damage control board popped up in front of Valk and he realized he’d been hit. He’d been too busy flying to feel it, but it looked like Lanoe had clipped off both of his airfoils on one side.

It didn’t matter. Valk wasn’t going anywhere with air. He tore down through the lunar sky, until traffic control alerts piled up in his message queue, until a collision alarm sounded behind his head.

Twenty meters from the pale soil of the moon, Valk pulled back on his control stick, hard. The view through his canopy swung crazily as he leveled out, flying now at high speed over the rough terrain.

Valk kept his altitude low, flew so close to the ground he had to constantly bob up over giant rocks or drop vertiginously into the bottoms of craters. The constant altitude adjustments made him a tricky target, but Lanoe kept shooting, a steady stream of particles that sparked off his vector field.

Up ahead Valk saw the spires of a helium-cracking plant, black fingers reaching up toward a black sky. He dodged around a big spherical holding tank, then threw himself sideways to pass between two of the dark towers, clearing them by less than a meter. One spire exploded into shards of debris as Lanoe cut into it with a steady stream of fire. Pieces of the broken tower bounced off of Valk’s fuselage with a series of sharp thuds.

Valk had thought he could lose Lanoe by flying so recklessly. He’d been wrong. Even as he came around in a rotary turn, swerving to pass around the far side of the plant, Lanoe finally got him. A good, solid direct hit, right in one of his thruster cones.

The damage control board flashed wildly. Alarms sounded and a voice warned Valk that he was in danger of losing his engines. He tried to pull up, to climb for the sky before Lanoe could hit him again.

It didn’t work. Lanoe blasted him right in one of his fairings, the particle rounds blowing off a panel and cutting through a bundle of cables underneath. Valk felt his whole fighter buck and twist around as he lost control of his maneuvering and positioning jets.

PBW fire sparked and danced all over his vector field. Some of those shots got through. Valk saw the ground coming up fast and wrestled with his stick, trying desperately to maintain some altitude. Even though his boards all told him it wasn’t going to happen.

He managed, just barely, to avoid smashing nose first into the moon’s surface. He didn’t pancake. Instead he hit the ground at an angle, smearing his BR.9 across the powdery soil, sending up enormous clouds of dust that glittered in the sunlight.

The cataphract came apart in a million pieces. Valk’s canopy collapsed, the flowglas melting away as it lost cohesion, and he was thrown forward hard enough to break right through his straps, to be ejected from his cockpit and sent flying forward, pinwheeling off the ground, bouncing again and again.

Lanoe set down and popped open his canopy. He jumped down onto the dusty ground. He shuffled forward, a few meters at a time, in the bounding walk you had to use on the moon. He followed the trail of wreckage as if it were an arrow pointing at his target.

He found Valk a hundred meters farther on. Crawling in the dirt. The lower half of his suit was gone, his legs still back in the wreckage. Lanoe could see up inside what remained of the suit’s torso. He could see that it was empty inside.

He put his boot squarely on Valk’s back and pinned him down. Valk stopped trying to crawl away. He managed to squirm around, to turn so he was facing upward. Not that it mattered. There was nothing to see in that black helmet.

“You murdered her,” Lanoe said. He tried to keep his voice level. “You knew what she meant to me but you murdered her. You had a chance to save her. And you murdered her. The only woman I ever loved.”

Valk didn’t try to deny it. “Do it, Lanoe,” he said.

Lanoe squinted down at him. He started to reach for the pistol at his hip.

“No,” Valk said. “Not like that. The black pearl. Remember? The data bomb I gave you. Use it. If you shoot me, I can just make another copy of myself.”

“Shut up,” Lanoe said.

“If you use the data bomb—it’s a worm, a computer worm, it’ll erase all of me. Every version, every copy. It’ll find me wherever I try to hide in the network. It’s the only way.”

“I said shut up!”

The damned AI obeyed him.

Lanoe squatted down to stare right into that blank helmet. “You want this, don’t you? Hellfire. You want to die.”

“That’s all I ever asked for,” Valk replied.

Lanoe seethed with rage. “Maybe,” he said. He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Maybe I should just leave you here. Leave you with half a suit, wriggling in the dirt like a worm. Maybe I should—”

“I killed her!” Valk shouted. “I killed her! I watched her die, watched her fall into that ice giant. Lanoe—I did it, and I would do it again. I would do it again!”

The black pearl appeared in the corner of Lanoe’s eye before he’d even realized he had called it up. All he had to do was flick his eyes to the side, just one little gesture and it would be done. Forever.

“I killed her! Do it, Lanoe! Do it—and get your revenge! That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Let me give this to you, let me do one last thing for—”

Lanoe’s eyes flicked to the side.

The effect was instantaneous. Valk’s helmet came down, the black flowglas melting down into his collar ring. The remaining half of his suit crumpled under the moon’s gravity, now that there was nothing holding it up.

Valk was gone.

Lanoe let out a cry of pure distress. A single, terrible shriek of pain.

It was all he would allow himself. Even here where there was no one to hear it.

He straightened up. Pulled himself up to his full height. Turned away from the empty suit lying on the ground

Then he started to move.

Aleister Lanoe walked off, across the surface of the moon, all alone.

Behind him, Zhang followed, one hand reaching up to grasp his shoulder.