Forsaken Skies (69 page)

It wasn't like sleep at all. It wasn't like blacking out. He had exact, perfect knowledge of the moment Lanoe shut him down, and then…nothing…and then he'd come back fully awake, fully aware.

Knowing exactly what he was. What he'd always been.

Tannis Valk was dead. The man had lived a slightly courageous life and died a nasty death and he was gone. The thing in his suit, this thing, this unit, he thought, using the term the alien machine had used—this was something else. Not even a recording so much as a simulation.

He was an artificial intelligence. Well, that put things in context. AI was illegal. Unacceptable. By rights, he should be shut down and dismantled. There was no wiggle room in the law. AIs were just too dangerous to be allowed to exist.

It would be easy enough to comply. The black pearl, the data bomb that would end his existence, was still there. It had moved over to the corner of his vision, replacing the white pearl that he'd resisted for so long. All he had to do was flick his eyes sideways, acknowledge the black pearl—

Except. Except he didn't have eyes now. He never had.

And there was the fact that he'd made a promise to Lanoe. A promise that he would do one last thing.

And then, when it was done—

Nowhere.

The display on the wall lit up even though nobody had touched it. “That was me. I can do that now,” Valk said. “Turns out I'm really good with computers. Takes one to know one, I guess.”

On the display a rotating image took shape. It showed something kind of like a jellyfish, a globular, translucent orange body filled with dim shapes that might have been organs or, maybe, bones. Lights shifted inside, glowing and then fading out. Fifteen limp arms dangled from its side, a ring of tentacles around a gaping, toothless mouth.

Thom gasped. “That's them?”

“Yeah,” Valk said. “The queenship gave me this image. That's what an intelligent being looks like, as far as it was concerned. That's one of the things that built it. They're big, you can't tell that from the display. Maybe twenty-five meters across. They evolved on a gas giant planet near galactic center. I guess that explains why they never invented the wheel, huh?”

Thom frowned. “Why do you say that?”

“If you evolve on a planet with no surface,” Lanoe said, “you can't build roads. No roads, no wheels.” He crouched near the minder and studied the image from up close. “What are they called?”

“They communicate with those flashing lights. Their name, I guess, would be Blue-Blue-White. Except it's more complicated than that, of course, because there's inflections, like how long the light lasts, how intense it is, and so on.”

Lanoe shook his head. “I guess it was too much to hope the first aliens we met would speak English.”

“Whatever you want to call them, they built the first queenship about half a billion years ago. Sent it out to make new worlds where they could live. Gas giants, I mean. They go after ice giants, warm them up, make sure the level of hydrogen in the atmosphere is right so the Blue-Blue-White can breathe it.”

“Ice giants. Like Garuda,” Lanoe said.

“Yep. They never wanted Niraya at all. No interest in terrestrial planets; they just wanted gas giants. They never figured out wormholes, either, and they knew it would take thousands of years to just find the planets they wanted, much less fix them up. They gave the queenships the ability to make copies of themselves, so they could spread out to new worlds faster. The queenships have been traveling from star to star ever since, gasiforming or whatever. Mining for silicates and metals on moons and rocky planets—that's what they were doing on Aruna, digging up raw materials to make more workers.

“Along the way they're supposed to look for other creatures like their makers, people for the jellyfish to talk to. Instead, they found creatures they couldn't recognize. Part of their programming was to kill off any vermin they found, any life-forms that might interfere with their work. When those life-forms didn't talk with flashing lights, they were automatically considered vermin. Even if they had spaceships and cities and who knows what else. Everybody just looked like vermin. And vermin had to be exterminated.”

“Hellfire,” Thom swore.

“How many?” Lanoe asked. “How many species you think they ran across in half a billion years? Intelligent or otherwise?”

“That's the thing, Lanoe,” Valk said. “I think the answer is all of them. I think what we met here, the fleet we fought—we didn't meet aliens.” He shook his head. “I think we met the reason there
are
no aliens.”

“Huh?” Lanoe asked.

“I think they wiped out every alien race that ever evolved. The queenship told me there were millions of fleets out there, each with a queenship just like itself, an exact copy. Millions of them—well, they've been reproducing for eons, after all. How long does it take for a species to evolve to become intelligent? A couple billion years? In that time, the odds are they would run afoul of at least one queenship. Humanity got lucky. We didn't meet them until just now. If they found us four hundred years ago, when we didn't have spaceships, well…we would have just been one more species of vermin that was no longer a problem.”

Lanoe nodded and moved back to a chair. “They talked to you, though.”

“Yeah,” Valk said. “The queenship did. Because it knew what I was. It knew I wasn't vermin. Because I was a computer, just like it was. The thing was excited, Lanoe. It didn't hate us. It didn't hate anybody. It was lonely, I think—lonely because after a half billion years it had never found anybody else to talk to. Maybe it ran across other computers, I don't know—but it told me none of them, no one, had ever come to speak with it. Until me. It was desperate to answer my questions. It believed, utterly and truly, that it was doing good work and spreading a message of peace and friendship.”

“Oh, come on,” Thom said.

Valk shook his head. “You're not seeing it, kid. The Blue-Blue-White—they didn't set out to sterilize the galaxy. They didn't want to kill us. They just couldn't imagine we existed. All of the damage they've done, all the death—it's just bad coding. Their programming was shoddy. That's all.”

“And because they didn't think, every living thing in the galaxy has to die?” Thom demanded.

For a long moment none of them could speak to that. They just stared at each other, letting it sink in.

There were a hundred billion stars in the galaxy. Half of them had planets. Some small fraction of those planets would have, should have developed life. Some tinier fraction of that number should eventually have evolved into sapience.

Should have, if not for the queenships.

“It was a mistake,” Valk said.

“Sure,” Lanoe said. He steepled his fingers in front of him. Looked at nothing at all, lost in thought. “You think that we should forgive them, because it was a mistake?”

“Hell, no,” Valk said. “Never.”

Lanoe nodded in agreement. He did not look up.

“Okay, that's what I've got,” Valk said. “I've done what you asked. Now I want to stop. I want to stop knowing things like this. I want to stop knowing what I am.”

“What do you mean?” Thom asked. “What are you going to do?”

Valk turned to Lanoe, though, when he said, “Permission to die, Commander?”

Lanoe didn't move. He didn't stop looking right at Valk's helmet.

“Denied,” he said.

Valk nearly jumped out of his chair. “Lanoe—”

“I still need you,” Lanoe said.

“For what, damn you?”

“You know how to talk to them. Valk, you and me, we're going to find these jellyfish. We're going to find them somehow and we're going to make them shut down all these fleets. I don't know how. Somehow. Stop this damned program. Failing that, we're going to make the bastards pay.”

This book would not have been possible without the encouragement and friendship of Alex Lencicki. He's no Johnny Halfways. I'd also like to extend my gratitude to my agent, Russ Galen, and my two perspicacious editors, Will Hinton and James Long.

introducing

If you enjoyed

FORSAKEN SKIES,

look out for

FORGOTTEN WORLDS

Book Two of The Silence

by D. Nolan Clark

Behind the wall of space lay the network of wormholes that connected the stars. A desolate and eerie maze of tunnels no more than a few hundred meters wide in most places. The walls there emitted a constant and ghostly light, the luminescent smoke of particle-antiparticle annihilations. This ghostlight provided a little illumination, but no warmth.

For more than a century humanity had used that web of hidden passages to move people and cargo from one system to another, yet the maze was so complex and so convoluted it was rare for one ship to pass another in that silent space.

It was even rarer, Aleister Lanoe thought, to find four cataphract-class aerospace fighters blocking your way. Rare enough that it couldn't be a coincidence.

“Those aren't Navy ships,” said Valk, his copilot, currently riding in the observation blister slung under the ship's belly. “Look at the hexagons on their fairings. They're Centrocor militia.”

“I bet their guns still work,” Lanoe said.

The two of them were still hours out from their destination. They could try to punch through this formation and make a run for it, but their Z.VII recon scout was slow compared to the BR.9s they were facing. It would be a long and nasty chase and it wouldn't end well. Fighting wasn't a great option, either. The Z.VII carried a pair of PBW cannon, as good as anything the Centrocor ships could bring to bear, but its vector fields weren't as strong. The BR.9s could shrug off most of their firepower. They would get chewed to pieces in a dogfight.

Lanoe tried opening a channel. “Centrocor vehicles, we need a little room here. Mind letting us squeeze by?” As if this were just a chance encounter on a well-traveled shipping corridor. “Repeat. Centrocor vehicles—”

“Lanoe,” Valk cut in, “their guns are warming up.”

About what Lanoe had expected.

Outnumbered four to one. Outpaced, outgunned, and no way to call for help. Well, if they had to fight, at least they had one advantage. The pilots of the BR.9s were militia, hired guns working for Centrocor poly—one of the commercial monopolies that managed all human planets except Earth. These pilots had been trained by a corporation. Lanoe was one of the best pilots the Navy ever had.

“Hold on,” he told Valk. Then he threw his stick over to the side and goosed his lateral thrusters, throwing them into a wild corkscrewing dive right toward the wall of the wormhole.

The recon scout's inertial sink pulled Valk backward in his seat. It felt like someone was sitting on his chest, pinning him down. He was used to the feeling—without a sink, any pilot who tried a maneuver like that would have been crushed into pink jelly by the g forces.

It made it tricky, though, to reach the gun controls. Valk grunted and stabbed a virtual menu, bringing his cannon online. The ship's computer automatically swung him around to give him the best firing solution possible on the BR.9s. That meant he was flying backward, which in turn meant he couldn't see the wall of the wormhole looming up toward them. He was just fine with that. If they so much as brushed the wall—a curled-up tube of spacetime—the recon scout would be instantaneously disintegrated, its atoms torn apart down to the quark level.

Valk trusted Lanoe to not let that happen.

“Coming in, seven o'clock high,” Valk called, and tapped another key to bring up a virtual Aldis gunsight, a collimated reticule that moved around his canopy to show him where his shots were likely to hit. It jumped back and forth as the computer tried to compensate for Lanoe's spinning dive and the movement of the four targets. Valk cursed the damned thing and switched it off. He was going to have to do this manually. “I think they're angry,” Valk said.

Streamers of PBW fire like tiny burning comets flashed across the recon scout's thrusters as the enemy opened fire. Lanoe twisted them around on their positioning jets and most of the shots went wide, only a few sparking off their vector field.

“I think they're trying to kill us,” Lanoe said.

They pulled up sharp just before colliding with the wormhole wall and Lanoe fishtailed back and forth as they pulled fire. Valk realized why Lanoe had headed for the wall—it kept the enemy from getting around them. The recon scout's top side was vulnerable to attack, and Lanoe wanted to make sure they couldn't get a bead on it. This did mean that Valk, in his observer's blister, was right in the line of fire.

Wouldn't be the first time. He swiveled around to face the closest BR.9 and squeezed his trigger. The PBW fire tore off one of the enemy's airfoils, but the bastard didn't need them—there was no air inside the wormhole, so he could afford to lose a wing. Valk started to line up another shot when his view swung around and suddenly he couldn't see the enemies at all. Lanoe must have pulled some fancy maneuver without warning him.

“Give me something to shoot at, at least,” Valk called.

“Don't worry,” Lanoe replied. “You'll get another chance.”

In the pilot's cockpit at the front of the recon scout, Lanoe worked his boards with one hand while the other stayed tightly wrapped around his control yoke. On a secondary display he saw a three-dimensional view of the four militia fighters with their projected courses streaming out before them like ribbons of glass. The four of them were cruising along well behind and above him, lined up in a textbook formation. They had him boxed in, at a distance where they never came close enough to get a good, clear shot at him. It was a solid play—they were keeping their distance because they knew time was on their side. They could afford to pepper him with long-distance shots, knowing they only needed one lucky hit to finish him off.

He couldn't outrun them. If he tried to fall back, to let them get ahead of him, they could just close the distance and then they could carve him up or just shove him into the wall of the wormhole, and that would be that.

Militia pilots weren't, as a rule, all that talented. Many were cadets who washed out of the Navy and found the only job they could get was flying for a poly. Others were recruited from the civilian population, given ten hours in a flight simulator, and sent out to do their best. This batch, though, were clearly a cut above—smart, adaptable. Patient.

He very much wished he knew who had sent them. And why they wanted him dead so badly.

If he was getting out of this trap, he was going to have to get reckless. “Valk,” he called, “I know you like to be miserly with your ammunition.” Valk had earned his wings during the Establishment Crisis. Back then resources had been scarce and every shot had to count. Valk never liked to squeeze off a shot that he didn't know would be a direct hit. “Right now, I need you to get downright profligate. When I pull this next trick, you hold down your trigger and don't stop until your gun overheats, okay?”

“Wait,” Valk said. “What are you about to do?”

Lanoe didn't waste time answering. He punched in a sequence of burns on his thruster board, then yanked his stick straight back and simultaneously kicked open the throttle.

The Z.VII had been built for long-distance patrols. It carried an impressive package of sensors and a very energy-efficient fusion engine. All that extra equipment made it bulky and slow to respond to commands, though. It had never been designed for close-in fighting, and definitely not for stunt flying. The complicated maneuver Lanoe executed just then ran the risk of tying its frame in knots. He could hear its spars groan as the ship twisted around nearly a hundred and eighty degrees on its long axis. It took more strain when the dozens of jets and miniature thrusters built into its nose and sides all fired in a complex rhythm. If Lanoe was unlucky, they might have torn themselves right out of their mountings.

It turned out—as it usually did—that he was lucky, instead. Everything held together. It just looked like he'd lost all control and sent his ship into a wild, uncontrolled vertical spin.

The Z.VII tumbled up and backward, right into the path of the pursuing militia fighters. They were fair pilots, Lanoe had to give them that, and they reacted instantly, breaking formation to make room and avoid a full-on collision. Fair pilots, but not great. One of them sideswiped a second in a great shower of sparks as their vector fields fought to shove each other away. A third pilot started to bank, to try to get a shot in as Lanoe's ship went cartwheeling past. It would have been an easy hit, and it would have cleaved right through the Z.VII's vector field and cut the recon scout in half.

If Valk hadn't already started shooting. He'd done as asked, releasing a wild spray of PBW fire that lit up the canopy of the BR.9. The militia pilot inside probably didn't have time to scream. The shot tore the BR.9 to pieces, and the three remaining militia pilots had to scatter further to avoid the superheated debris.

Lanoe pulled the recon scout out of its tumble and leveled out, skating along just a few dozen meters from the wall of the tunnel. They weren't out of the woods yet. He opened his throttle as far as it would go and burned for speed, headed in exactly the wrong direction.