Forsaken Skies (53 page)

At the vanguard, a lone alien interceptor stood sentry about ten thousand kilometers ahead of the main fleet. Thom could almost see it through his canopy, a smudge in the darkness. A shadow only really visible when it passed in front of a distant star.

His displays showed him the interceptor in much greater detail. He had plenty of time to study its alien curves, its irregular, lumpy shape. The spiky cones of its guns twitched and rotated in their sockets as if they were sniffing him out. He had no doubt the thing could sense him just fine.

“Move in,” Lanoe said. “I'm right beside you. Remember, the point is to get its attention without getting yourself killed. Stay out of its range—a minimum of a hundred kilometers. Keep your weapons board on standby, but don't touch it.”

“Got it,” Thom said. He opened his throttle. Fed a little fuel to his maneuvering jets until his BR.9 banked into a long, shallow curve that would take him on a course that intersected the alien ship's trajectory.

As he closed in, his display showed him that the interceptor's weapons had stopped moving. They were all pointed directly at him. Near-infrared imaging showed them glowing a dull orange, like banked furnaces. It was ready to shoot if he came too close.

He fought the urge to turn around and run for safety.

Closer. Close enough he could almost make it out with his naked eye. Closer still, and his hands started to shake, just a little.

“That's enough,” Lanoe said. “Move back now. See if it follows us.”

Thom just barely nudged his stick. His fighter arced away from the interceptor in a graceful, low-energy swoop. It would have been child's play for the interceptor to accelerate and close with him, if it wanted to.

The alien ship kept its distance, not varying from its previous course by even a thousandth of a degree. He did notice that its guns stayed hot.

Lanoe grunted with impatience. “I would have bet my salary that thing would give chase,” he said.

“Maybe they're serious about wanting to negotiate,” Thom pointed out.

“Then they should say something, damn it. They've heard Valk's message by now. They know we're here. It's their move,” Lanoe said. “Okay. Stay with me.” His FA.2 swung out on a new course, one that took it well clear of the interceptor but still in the general direction of the enemy fleet. “I'm picking up some scouts ahead, about five hundred kilometers from here. You see them?”

Thom tapped at his sensor board. “Got 'em,” he said. There were three of the tiny ships, which looked like glaring eyeballs connected by a skeletal frame to some rudimentary thrusters. They flew in close formation, on a nearly identical trajectory with the interceptor—their noses pointed straight at Niraya.

“They're armed with plasma cannon, which are only effective at very short range—maybe a hundred meters. Give them two hundred meters clearance, just in case.”

Thom licked his lips. By the standards of spaceflight, two hundred meters was nothing. Lanoe wanted to buzz the little ships so close it would set off collision alarms. Well, he was the boss.

“Nice and slow,” Lanoe said. “Like a cat with a mouse.”

The two of them pressed in on a course that passed between the interceptor and the three scouts. There was no way the enemy could see that except as an aggressive move, though Lanoe was sticking to his word so far—they had not, technically, attacked the enemy, not while they waited for the reply to Valk's message.

In Thom's forward view the scouts were invisible at first, too small to even make decent shadows. That changed rapidly as they approached. As Lanoe's course took them closer and closer Thom saw the scouts as outlines traced against the void at first, then as dark shapes, and then they were so close he felt he could reach out and touch them.

Their spherical plasma cannon rolled like eyes to stare at him. Infrared showed them burning hot as hell.

“I don't think they like this,” Thom said. They were three kilometers away now…two…one…

“Hold on, kid,” Lanoe called. “Hold steady.”

Five hundred meters. Four.

“Lanoe, you're off course,” Thom called. On his displays he could see the FA.2 veering away from him. Moving toward the scouts. “Lanoe—”

“I'm right where I want to be,” Lanoe said. “Hold steady!”

Three hundred meters, and the scouts were hurtling toward Thom, their eyeballs locked on his fighter; two fifty and they weren't moving; he'd expected them to break away and take up new positions but they weren't moving—

Two hundred. Thom jostled his stick and opened his throttle, shooting away from the enemy ships. No lance of fire burst from those eyeballs to spear him, to bathe him in flame. The scouts didn't move, didn't deviate from their prior course.

He looked back over his shoulder and saw Lanoe falling behind. He brought up a rearview display so he could see what was happening.

Just in time to see Lanoe pass across the nose of one of the scouts, no more than five meters from a collision. The scout's cannon swung around to follow the FA.2. Thom knew Lanoe's vector field wouldn't protect him if the scout fired just then. The plasma would wash across Lanoe's canopy, hot enough to roast him inside his cockpit.

In the infrared the scout's cannon burned white hot. For a microsecond the heat level spiked until Thom's display couldn't even register its temperature.

He started to shout, to call Lanoe's name. But there was no time.

The scout fired, a long plume of dazzling plasma streaming out into the cold of space. If it so much as touched Lanoe, if it grazed him—

But it didn't.

Lanoe had pulled a rotary turn at the last possible moment. His FA.2 twisted around and the plasma missed him entirely as he shot between two of the scouts, leaning hard to one side so he didn't clip off his airfoils on their hulls.

“Now, kid,” Lanoe shouted. “Light 'em up!”

The scouts had finally veered off their established course, swinging around in tight loops to get a better firing solution on Lanoe. All three of them were running hot now, ready to fire.

Thom brought up his weapons board and armed his PBWs. Before the board could even chime to tell him the guns were ready, he squeezed the trigger built into his control stick and blasted one of the scouts, his particle beam cutting through its thrusters like a kilometer-long knife. The tiny ship lost power and its eyeball lost containment. It erupted like a bomb, filling space with glowing debris.

Lanoe shot up and out of that mess, chunks of half-molten metal bouncing off his vector field to go spinning off into nothingness. One of the scouts tried to follow him up but Lanoe turned to face it in a tight spin and blasted it to slag.

The third scout had swung around until Thom could see the glow of its thrusters. It took him a moment to realize that he was right behind it. He cut it to pieces with his PBWs and then, finally, exhaled. He hadn't even realized he'd been holding his breath until then.

“Good,” Lanoe called. His FA.2 twisted around until he was facing Thom, canopy to canopy, no more than three hundred meters away. “We've got our answer.”

Thom shook his head. He couldn't process that, couldn't worry about what Lanoe meant. On his tactical board he saw the interceptor had broken course and was making a long, ponderous turn, coming about to meet them. Its guns pulsed and fired even though it was well out of range. “We're not done yet,” he said.

“Yes, we are,” Lanoe said. “Don't bother with that one—he's too slow to chase us home.” The FA.2 spun around until its nose pointed at Aruna and then Lanoe opened his throttle until his fighter shot off through space faster than anything had a right to. Thom didn't wait for the order to follow. He matched courses with Lanoe and punched for a burn. Behind his head he could hear his fusion engine roar as it came to life. His inertial sink grabbed him hard and very tight as his BR.9 accelerated and soon the interceptor dwindled behind him, disappearing back into the shadows.

Safe again.

Away from the fight. Away from the danger. Thom felt his whole body shake. His hands ached and he realized he'd been holding them tense the entire time, and they were just now relaxing.

“So much for negotiating,” Ehta said, nodding to herself.

“What just happened?” Roan asked.

Ehta pointed at the display. Ships were indicated there as tiny dots with a lot of empty space between them. “Lanoe buzzed one of their scouts and it took a shot at him. That was the answer he was looking for. He and Thom blasted the scouts and then ran, exactly as planned.”

“But—then—” Roan shook her head. “What does this mean?”

“It means the war's back on,” Ehta said.

On the display the dots shifted position, though not in any meaningful way, really. Battlefield displays were like weather forecasts. You could see fronts building up, watch pressure increase, but it wasn't until the lightning flashed that you knew you had a real storm on your hands. It would be a long time before the display told her anything she wanted to know.

In the meantime she had to deal with the girl.

“They could have given the enemy more time to respond,” Roan said. She chewed her lip like she wanted to bite it off. “We could have waited longer—”

“Nope,” Ehta said. “It had to be this way.”

“What do you mean? If there was a chance for peace, we should have taken it!”

Ehta sighed but there was part of her that was glad it had worked out this way. She'd never had much patience for diplomacy. War she understood; it was in her bones. “They know what a bad spot we're in. They're negotiating from a place of power, right? So the burden was on them to maintain a cease-fire. We have a lot more to lose. For all we know, the message they sent was just a trick. A way to buy more time so they could move their fleet closer to Niraya. Every hour we waited would have made our situation more desperate, and their position better. Lanoe had to test them, and they failed.”

Admittedly, she thought, he didn't have to be quite so aggressive about it. The enemy scout might have fired on him just because it thought he intended to ram it. Given the number of pilots under his command a suicide attack was sheer stupidity, but the aliens wouldn't necessarily have seen it that way. They threw away their drones all the time.

She had flown in Lanoe's squadron long enough to know him, a little. As much as anybody except Zhang probably did. Still, she had to wonder.

Had he even wanted the negotiations to succeed?

She looked at the dots on the display again. The enemy fleet looked a little more clumped to one side, maybe, but it could just have been random motion. If the fleet was turning toward Aruna, if Lanoe had drawn them into his trap, there was no immediate indication. Of course, fleets were always slow to react—it was one reason why cataphracts were so effective against them. A human fleet could take hours to change course as orders were passed down the chain of command, from one captain to another. The enemy, relying on computers more than people, should maneuver much more quickly. If the fleet was going to turn, it would do so soon, she thought.

On her display the dots continued to tell her nothing.

Roan turned away, as if she couldn't stand to look at the random scattering of pixels on the display. She paced back and forth across the floor of the tender, bouncing in the low gravity. Ehta tried to ignore her.

It wasn't going to happen.

“Is Thom okay?” Roan asked, looking out the tender's window as if there were something to see. “Is he…?”

Ehta pointed at two blue dots that were moving away from the enemy fleet at high velocity. “He's still alive,” she said.

T
he blue giant star Balor was only six times as wide as Earth's sun, but it put out forty thousand times as much energy. No spacecraft could get even close to its surface without being obliterated instantaneously, reduced to very, very hot particles that would blow away like a puff of steam on its gale-force stellar wind.

Balor's wormhole throat stood off from the star only a few hundred thousand kilometers, far too close for comfort. Yet the star's gravity anchored a massive nexus of wormholes, connecting dozens of planets—including Earth. You could get almost anywhere in human space from Balor if you could survive the trip. It was just too convenient a nexus not to use.

The answer had been to deploy massive shields of Mylar, hundreds of kilometers across, in a stationary orbit between star and throat. Though thinner than paper the shields were coated with a substance that made them almost perfect mirrors, reflecting Balor's annihilating light harmlessly back toward the star.

Almost perfect. The shields absorbed a tiny fraction of the star's output—no mirror was ever one hundred percent reflective. Enough heat built up in the Mylar that microscopic holes were constantly burning their way through, letting that deadly light pass. The shields didn't so much smolder as evaporate, little by little, over time. They had to be patched or replaced every twenty-four hours or so—an operation that required a lot of expendable drones and a staggering amount of money.

The inhabitants of the Balor system could afford it. After all, they wrote their own budgets.

The BR.9's canopy turned solid black, opaque as it could get, yet still bluish-white light suffused the cockpit, drowning out every display, every board. The pilot kept his eyes clamped shut, which blocked out some more of the light. Still, he could just barely see the green pearl rotating in the corner of his vision.

“Unidentified cataphract-class fighter, you have entered a secure area,” he was told. “If you attempt to maneuver we will open fire without further warning. If your weapons systems come online we will open fire without further warning. Maintain your current course and velocity or we will open fire without further warning.”

“Oh, I wouldn't dream of doing otherwise,” Maggs called back.

The light faded a little at a time as the BR.9 shot away from the—quite eponymous—blue star. Eventually Maggs could open his eyes and see that he was flanked on either side by a fighter escort. Z.XXs, in fact. Rather butch-looking cataphracts built specifically for dogfighting, with quad PBWs mounted around their cockpits and deflector baffles extending from their thruster cones like black crowns. The BR.9 would hardly be a match for even one of those ships, and Maggs knew perfectly well that the two he could see were backed up by hundreds more just like them, hiding nearby in the glare.

The system ahead of him was full of warships. Whole carrier groups cavorted in a belt of dust where once a planet might have spun, hundreds of giant ships engaged in constant war games, keeping themselves prepared for inevitable future wars.

Out past the belt lay a whole clutch of planets, though only one of them mattered, and even then not because of its own properties. Mag Mell was a super-earth, a chunk of solid iron and nickel much denser than humanity's cradle. Its heavy carbon dioxide atmosphere was thick enough that the surface was racked by constant storms. Its gravity was only one and a half times that of Earth, but that was beastly enough. Nobody ever went down there if they could help it.

Instead, they stayed up in the planet's artificial ring. From a distance the planet looked much like Saturn but when one approached more closely it became apparent that the ring wasn't made of shards of ice or dust. Instead it was formed of countless artificial worlds—stations and habitats and orbitals, some no bigger than luxury mansions, some that would dwarf the Hexus. Some of them spun to maintain their own interior gravity. Some were just empty shells, drydocks where new military vehicles could be constructed by endlessly toiling drones. Some of the elements of the ring were in themselves weapons of hellish power—cosmic ray guns, coherent energy weapons fueled by antimatter-matter explosions, particle beams that could cut moons in half.

Only one thing unified that vast collection of space junk, one symbol that appeared on the hull of every single man-made bit of it. The triple-headed eagle, of course. The logo, blazon, and flag of the Navy.

The ring, considered as a unity, was Navy General HQ. The Admiralty.

The grand beacon of human military might, the place where the highest-ranking officers in the service came to plan and scheme and debate strategy. Headquarters, marshaling yard, indomitable fortress. It was the closest thing Maggs had to a homeworld. It was the place he hated most in all the galaxy.

It was also, at the moment, the only place that was likely to take him in.

His escorts followed him all the way to the ring, keeping station no more than seven hundred meters on either side of him. He did not doubt they would make good on their threats if he tried anything. They must have pinged his cryptab by now and learned who he was, though—otherwise they would have blasted him out of space before he got within sighting distance of the Admiralty ring.

He was directed to set down on a docking hub in the ring's outermost band, a largely administrative sector. As he set his course for landing and let the BR.9 fly itself down he took a very deep, very pensive breath.

“I've really put my foot in it now. Haven't I, venerable father?” he said, careful not to broadcast the words to anyone who might be listening.

For once the voice in his head was silent.

The BR.9 came in for a perfect landing in a docking hub of one of the more secure orbitals. As the engine idled down, Maggs touched a key and let his cockpit flow back into the fuselage. He kept his hands visible, because a squad of marines had already gathered around him, ready to attack should he give them any reason to do so. There was no gravity in the docking hub but they floated with feet locked together and hands on their weapons, the free-fall equivalent of standing at attention. The message was clear. They could function equally well as an honor guard—or a firing squad—depending on what he did next.

He pinged the cryptab of their commanding officer. “Lieutenant,” he said, “my name is Auster Maggs and I—”

“I know who you are,” the lieutenant replied. Her golden hair was only a little longer than the stubble on Maggs's chin. Her eyes bored through him like cutting lasers. “What I don't know is why you're flying that cataphract.”

“This old thing?” Maggs asked. He had not yet climbed out of his cockpit. He felt that doing so might send the wrong message. Not that he possessed any right messages to share at that particular moment.

“Are you aware,” the marine lieutenant said, “that this vehicle was registered as having been stolen from general stores several weeks ago?”

Ah. He'd forgotten that Zhang hadn't secured the BR.9s through official channels. Bit of a complication, there. Of course, to one as quick as Maggs, complications could often be turned into opportunities.

“Well, of course I'm
aware
of that,” Maggs told the woman. One of the great secrets of lying: Never admit you don't know what you're talking about. “Why do you think I brought it here? I took it back from the thief and now I'm returning it to its rightful owners, aren't I?”

The lieutenant was clearly not the kind of woman who enjoyed uncertainty. Her left eyelid twitched as she processed his words. “You recovered this vehicle from its unlawful possessor,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you flew it here—to the Admiralty—to return it. Instead of just taking it to the nearest quartermaster,” she went on.

“Yes,” Maggs said. He hazarded a tiny closed-eyes nod as if to say,
Good, now you're getting it, dear
.

“You came to the Admiralty to—”

“It was on my way,” he told her. “I have business here.”

“What kind of business?” she asked. Doubtfully.

“I need to pay a social call,” he said.

Elder McRae had been lucky to avoid injury when the smelter spat out its molten metal. Others of the volunteers had not been so fortunate.

Two of them died—instantly, if that was any comfort—when a pylon they were dismantling collapsed on them. Even in Aruna's low gravity they hadn't been able to flee as countless pipes and tubes and pieces of alien machinery came tumbling down.

One engineer had a broken arm. He kept working, his suit keeping the injured limb pressed up tight against his side.

Two others were showing signs of radiation poisoning. They were expected to recover but they were sent back to the shuttles, where they could do nothing but lie on the floor, sweating and shivering at once. The elder took them food they couldn't keep down and swept up their hair when it fell out.

Minor injuries were legion. Bone bruises from improperly handling heavy loads, sprains, and simple fatigue took their toll. Many of the volunteers, stuffed into ill-fitting suits, chafed so badly they bled. They did their best not to complain, at least not on an open communications channel.

Cuts happened. Much of the debris in the alien facility had sharp edges. If they were sharp enough to cut through the thin material of the suits, they could gouge human flesh as well. Several of the engineers developed frostbite when their suits were punctured and the bitterly cold, choking air of Aruna touched their exposed skin.

Still they kept working. Still they kept at it, building the guns.

The elder understood little of the principles involved. She could see the pieces of the guns coming together, long skeletal tubes of cast metal that were then clad in a micron-thin layer of heat-resistant plastic. The firing chambers were far more complex, but built on a modular design that meant individual, simple components could be snapped together even by a layperson like herself.

She learned the gist of the guns' mechanisms by inference and from the terse answers the engineers gave to her infrequent questions. The tubes of course were the barrels of the guns, carefully designed but only so they wouldn't melt when they were fired. The ammunition was inert and simple as well, just large chunks of depleted uranium that was dense and heavy enough to survive being shot from the barrels at relativistic speed.

The firing chambers were the only parts of the guns that were at all complex. They were built with alternating layers of superconductors and superresistors that could be switched on and off with incredible speed, allowing the chamber to build up enormous electromagnetic potential. Inside the chambers the depleted uranium rounds would be given a massive static electric charge, negative in polarity. When the gun was fired, an even stronger negative charge would be introduced behind them, delivered through tightly wound capacitor loops. The rounds would be repelled by the new charge with incredible force, launched into space at a good fraction of the speed of light. There were not many things in the universe that could withstand their momentum once they were moving.

Four barrels were already complete. Engineer Derrow oversaw the construction of the firing chambers herself, shouting orders until she was hoarse. Four more barrels were almost finished, but it seemed there just wasn't enough depleted uranium on-site to make as many projectiles as M. Lanoe had requested. She sent her salvage parties farther and farther afield, deeper into the haunted ruins of the alien facility.

With her welding skills not currently in demand, the elder volunteered to go scouting with her Geiger counter. She spent long hours climbing over half-melted structures, poking her head inside enormous constructions like metal seed pods, watching the shadows, constantly, as if one of the alien landers might jump out at her at any moment. She knew the idea was absurd. She also knew that if one of them was still active, lying in wait under a pile of broken concrete or inside one of their massive factory buildings, there was no one around to help her.

Once she saw a fighter go streaking by overhead, too fast to make out any of its details. Long after it was gone her suit's computer picked up an image the fighter had transmitted, a surveying map of the local area with radiation sources marked in red. It seemed M. Zhang knew how badly they needed more ammunition and was helping out by scouting from the air.

With the pilot's help, the elder soon found a slag pile that chattered angrily when she waved her Geiger counter over it. There was far more depleted uranium there than she could hope to carry by herself and she climbed up on top of a ridge—what had once been a cluster of pipes until they all melted together—and tried to send a signal back to base camp.

Below her, about half a kilometer away, she saw a suited figure loping across the rocky soil. She waved at them and they turned and came toward her. They climbed up the ruined pipes with leaping bounds that made her think they must be very young. One missed step and they could seriously injure themselves.