Forsaken Skies (25 page)

He explored her cupboards until he'd found two pony glasses. He gave them each a generous splash, then handed her a glass. Clinking his against hers, he said, “Here's to the poly who watches over and protects us all.”

She looked down at her glass. “Except when they don't.”

“Precisely,” he said, and took a sip.

Bracing
was one word that came to mind.
Industrial effluent
was another. It made his eyes water a bit but he nodded appreciatively and set his glass down.

Derrow knocked hers back with barely a grimace, then held it out for another go. He laughed again and poured, though he said, “Don't get too far ahead of me. We have plenty of actual work to discuss.”

And so they did, over bowls of noodles. The food was atrocious but she barely glanced at her bowl as she shoved the carbohydrates into her mouth. Her eyes were on a minder she had unrolled across the table. The display there showed a slowly rotating schematic of a basic rail gun. He had downloaded it from the Naval archives. A legend at the bottom of the display insisted the plans were only to be looked at by an officer of the Neddies, the Naval Engineering Division, but the encryption on the archive had been laughably easy to defeat.

He watched her as she studied the display. Her black hair had been cut just below her ears, which exposed her long, tanned neck. Her eyes were clear and rather bright, and if her chin was a little weak he didn't suppose it was a deal breaker.

She caught him looking and speared him with her gaze. Then she raised one eyebrow.

He made a point of looking decorously away.

“The principle's nothing special,” she said, poking at the schematic to make it turn faster. “Just a mass driver with a ramped-up output.” She frowned. “There's some fiddly stuff over here you need to keep the rails from melting every time you fire. But yeah, any half-competent engineer could put one of these together.”

“We need a bit more than just one,” he said.

“Lucky for you, I'm more than half-competent,” she said, and smiled at him.

It was one of those kind of smiles. Business wasn't quite done, though. “How many do you think you could put together in the next week?”

He could see in her eyes that she thought that was a ridiculously short amount of time to build a gun capable of shooting spaceships out of orbit, but she didn't say so. Instead she bit her lip and inhaled slowly, taking in extra air to cool her overclocked brains, perhaps. “I'll have to work up some schedules, make sure we have the right materials, or, because we won't, find materials that can be substituted for what's listed here. I'll need to get my teams sorted out, find the best people from each of my workgroups…It's not the kind of project where I can just give you an answer tonight.”

“Oh,” he said, “I can wait until morning.”

Her mouth pursed as if she was trying to hold back a gasp. “I'll work up a proposal, a budget, start on a schedule,” she said, never quite looking directly at him. “I don't know where to send it, though. Where are you and your friends staying?”

She could, of course, have sent the information directly to his electronic address. No need to have it couriered over. “We haven't worked that out yet. I suppose we can always bunk in our tender, if we have to. The accommodations are a bit…rough.”

“Maybe I can help with that, too, sort out a place for you to billet.”

He lifted one shoulder in a desultory shrug. “Shouldn't be too hard. I'm the only one who needs to find a place to sleep tonight. You're very kind, M. Derrow.”

“You need to start calling me Proserpina,” she said.

“Auster,” he replied, holding out his hand.

She took it in both of hers. Without releasing it, she got up and moved around the table until she was standing over him. He tilted his head back to meet her gaze and she leaned closer and then her lips brushed his, quite tentatively. When he didn't try to escape she went for a much more elaborate kiss.

Then she pulled back and returned to her seat. “I just wanted to get that out of the way,” she told him. “I've been waiting for it this whole time and it was distracting me, thinking so much about it.”

“Forthright,” he said. “Commendable.” He reached for the vodka.

“Now,” she said, “let's get back to this.” She unrolled the minder again and started poking at the schematic, pulling the virtual gun there to pieces to see how they fit together.

Zhang remembered when Lanoe first asked her to marry him.

They'd been in a bunk on a destroyer, a coffin-sized and -shaped room just big enough for one person to lie down in, with a display at one end and a fan at the other and not much else. Neither of them had cared that it was cramped.

She remembered the beads of sweat that floated around them, gently gravitating toward the fan. She had stretched out as far as she could and when she was drifting off to sleep, her face buried in his chest, he had said it. Very quietly.

Marry me
.

She had smiled against him, wanting to laugh but lacking the energy. He was making a little joke, she thought.

The second time they'd been standing on a ridge on a moon. She forgot what planet it circled but it was a gas giant banded with white and green, with storms like staring eyes that pulled themselves apart as you watched. It filled half the sky.

The ground below them, ammonia ice as hard as steel, was littered with the wrecks of a dozen fighters. They'd lost half the squad that day but they'd won. They'd won the battle.

You and me, he'd said. We quit this, go find a planet someplace warm and I don't know. Start a farm. Get married and have babies.

All she remembered thinking that day was that they'd won. That the battle was over and the Establishmentarians were beaten, shoved back from another star system, and the two of them—they'd made that happen. Why would they ever want to stop flying? Why would they ever stop fighting, when it was so glorious?

After that it was a joke between them.
Marry me
. He'd said it when she flew rings around some poor half-trained idiot, when she fought her way through a bad line of carrier scouts.
Marry me
. When she figured out how to scam the computers so they got double rations of beer.
Marry me
.

Maybe those times didn't count.

The last time did.

She'd been so high on painkillers she could barely speak. She knew there was something wrong, really, badly wrong but all she could see was the pattern of threads in her white sheets, the weave of the bandages on her arms. The bubbles in the tubes that stuck out of her belly below her navel.

Marry me now. While we're still alive. Please, Zhang.

She had looked at him, stared at him, until he came into focus. Until she understood what he was saying.

Until she remembered what had happened.

“I don't have a—” she'd wheezed. “There's nothing down there,” and she'd cried, and he'd held her hand tight, even though it was broken. “I can't—” She didn't have the breath to say it. What would marriage even mean? She'd forced herself to think it through. No sex. No babies. Not with what was left of her.

Just marry me. I'll take care of you.

“No,” she'd said. But he kept asking.

Until she screamed at him and threw things and swore bloody oaths that if he ever asked her again, if he mocked her like that again—

She opened her eyes. Her new, cybernetic eyes. Let go of the memories. Looked up at him, at the shadows and lines, the planes that made up his face.

“Is that why you came?” he asked. “To tell me why you said no?”

Or maybe to say yes this time. He didn't say that. He wasn't proposing now.

That was okay. Her answer wouldn't have changed. “Maybe,” she said. “I wanted to see you again; that was the only real thought I had.” She smiled up at him. “Irascible old bastard that you are, I missed you. But okay. I'll tell you why I said no.”

He was silent, his eyes locked on hers. His face might have been computer generated for all the emotion it showed.

“I said no because it wasn't me you wanted. You just wanted out.”

He growled at her. “You don't know what I was thinking.”

“When you retired, there was some talk. Actually, a lot of talk. You were a celebrity back then, in Naval circles. There were so many rumors. I was still in the hospital at the time, and even I heard them. You'd lost your nerve. You'd punched an admiral in the nose because he gave you orders you didn't like. You were a secret Establishmentarian.”

“Hogwash,” Lanoe said.

“I know. I know it was all nonsense. You never lost your nerve. But you lost something. You didn't want to fight anymore.”

“I get bored easily,” he said.

“Don't lie to me,” she told him. “Keep your secrets if you want, but don't kid me along, Lanoe. Not after what we used to be.”

He actually did what she asked, for once.

He kept his mouth shut.

“I knew, from the very first time you asked for my hand, what it was you were looking for. An excuse to get out of the Navy. You wanted me to give you that excuse, and I wouldn't.”

“I'm still technically on the reserve list,” he said. “And look where I am now. In a fighter, looking for somebody to shoot.”

“Sure,” she said. His favorite word. “You want to tell me why?”

“Why what?”

“Why,” she said, “
you're
here. Fighting somebody else's war for them.”

He sighed. Looked away from her, his eyes tracking across his panels. Maybe he hoped that a wing of enemy interceptors would suddenly appear and save him from having to have this conversation.

“Maggs said something to me once,” he told her. “He said he had debts. The kind you have to pay back. I've got debts, too.”

“What kind?”

“The kind you never can pay back. I killed a lot of people, Zhang. I killed so many people in all those wars. Pilots, marines, people who were just on the wrong damned cruiser when I happened to have a disruptor left. So many who never even saw me, because I killed them before they knew I was there.”

“You're here to make up for that?”

“No. Like I said, you can't pay off that debt. For a long time I thought I was just damned. Irredeemable. Still kind of think so, but I know that doesn't let me off the hook. I see people in trouble, I have to help them. That's why I went chasing after Thom. It's why I helped the Nirayans get their money back when Maggs robbed them. I can save a hundred thousand people here, which is a lot more than I ever killed. It still won't make things right. But it's something.”

“Hellfire,” she said. “Lanoe—I'm so sorry you feel that way. You—”

“That's it. That's all I'm going to say. The last thing I need right now is to spend this entire patrol talking about our feelings.”

She saw his hand move over his control stick. The FA.2 veered away from her, off into the nothingness. It would have been easy enough to follow, to pull back into formation with him, but she didn't.

She knew him. Knew him well enough to understand when he needed to be left alone.

She knew him well enough to know when he was lying—not to her, this time, but to himself.

Maggs woke to a flash of delightful skin as Derrow—
Proserpina, please,
he thought,
we've been properly introduced now
—clambered over him, her thigh brushing his cheek and then her foot in his face. She laughed as she stumbled off the bed and hopped over to a chair on the far side of the room. “Sorry about that,” she said, though she didn't look one bit sorry. Her tangled hair bunched up on one side of her face and her makeup was deliriously smeared.

Enticingly so, actually. He lunged across the sheets, grabbing for her hip, intending to pull her back down with him, but she danced away. She pulled on a
yukata
that hid absolutely nothing and sat back down in the chair.