Forsaken Skies (11 page)

She tapped at her keyboard to open a new video file.

“The message was encrypted, and we could make no sense of it. There was one thing we could do, however. Niraya has an orbital telescope—normally we use it to track the movement of terraforming impactors and as an early warning system to watch for incoming asteroids and comets. This time we used it to track the communications laser to its destination. We found there was something out there, something that was awaiting that signal. I apologize for the poor resolution of this image, but I believe it speaks for itself.”

She expanded the display until a still image filled the air above the faro table, spilling over the sides and stretching up to the ceiling.

The Navy men, including M. Maggs, got up to walk around the image, studying it from all sides.

A collection of blobbish gray shapes hung in the air there over the faro table. Some bigger than others. In general they were spindle shaped and they were all pointing in the same direction. They were fuzzy at the edges and tinged a distinct blue.

There were hundreds of them. Strung out in a loose cloud formation, the smaller blobs cluttering the front of the image, one very large shape loitering toward the back, where the resolution broke down and the image turned to fog.

A scale indicator floated near the bottom of the image. Even the smallest of those blobs was huge compared to the ton-and-a-half lander.

Roan had seen the image before, though she didn't claim to understand it. She didn't know what the Navy men were looking for as they bent under the image to look inside it or circled around it, pointing out details to each other. As far as Roan could tell there were no details to scrutinize, no profiles or silhouettes to make sense of. Her studies in planetary engineering hadn't prepared her to interpret this kind of image.

“They're all pointed the same way,” Valk said. “Moving on the same trajectory. I'm thinking that rules out a meteor swarm or anything natural.”

Lanoe nodded. “Moving too fast, anyway. Look at the blue shift.”

“I assumed that was a color error in the image,” Maggs said. “Now that you mention it, though…”

The other two turned to stare at him until Maggs backed away from the faro table, huffing in indignation.

“How fast are they moving?” Valk asked. “About half light speed?”

Elder McRae nodded. “A little less than that. Currently they're decelerating.”

“That definitely rules out anything natural,” Valk said.

“How far away?” Lanoe asked.

“Roughly five hundred billion kilometers,” the elder said.

Lanoe tilted his head to one side, then the other. “Twenty light days, give or take. So forty-some days until they arrive. When was this image taken?”

“Twenty-six days ago,” the elder said.

Valk spread out his arms to indicate the whole image. “Lanoe, am I wrong about what this is?”

“I doubt it. That first lander, the killer drone—that was an advance scout. Gathering intelligence for…” He waved at the display of bluish-gray blobs. “For this.”

He glanced over at Maggs, who just nodded.

“It's a fleet,” Lanoe said. “An armada.”

“We believe there will be more landers like the one in our video. Or perhaps worse things. As I said before, I dislike conjecture,” Elder McRae said. “I can't help but believe that this fleet intends us harm, however.”

Roan pulled her legs up to her chest and hugged them. “They're going to kill us. All of us.” The elder glared at her but she didn't care.

“You can't know that,” Valk said. “Listen, if this is just DaoLink opening a second front, they've already made their point. Maybe that's even why Centrocor is dragging their heels. Maybe they know DaoLink is laying a trap and they don't want to just rush into it.”

“It's not DaoLink,” Maggs said.

Roan glared at him. He'd already dashed their hopes. Did he have to make things worse?

“You know that for a fact?” Valk asked.

Maggs shrugged. “I'd wager money on it. The war between them and Centrocor—any war between two polys—is one of propaganda as much as arms. That means everyone has to know it when you make a move. If they intended to seize Niraya, even as a ruse, they would have already issued a proclamation and half the galaxy would be talking about it. They would want to provoke Centrocor into action, and that means getting this story in the public eye.”

“Okay, so maybe it's pirates or something,” Valk said.

“Technically, pirates attack ships in space,” Maggs pointed out. “The word you want is
raiders
. And why anyone would raid a place like Niraya—”

Valk lifted his arms and let them drop again. “Raiders, whatever! Have they tried to contact you? Maybe demanded money so they'll go away?”

The elder shook her head. “There's been no communication from the incoming fleet, of any kind. We've tried to contact them several times but there was no response.”

Roan couldn't look at them while they talked about the fate of an entire planet like it was a puzzle to be solved. Instead she looked over at Lanoe. The old Navy man was still staring at the telescope image of the fleet, as if it would start moving.

He must have noticed her staring at him. He turned and looked her in the eye, but his mouth was just a hard line.

“So you fight them when they come,” Valk said. “You—you buy guns, or something, you fortify your crater town.”

“Peace is one of our core beliefs,” the elder replied. “I'm not saying we won't defend ourselves—we have some weapons, as you saw in that video, for when there is no other choice. We'll try to fight this invasion, certainly. But you saw how ineffective our weapons were. We don't even know how to begin resisting this.”

“You can't just give up,” Valk said.

Lanoe never broke eye contact with Roan. He took a deep breath but he didn't move an inch. She tried to keep her face still, impassive, just as she'd been taught.

“I know some people at Centrocor,” Valk suggested. “Maybe I can put in a good word for you, assuming I'm not drowning in lawsuits by now.”

“Centrocor won't help,” Maggs said. “I've already explained—”

Then Lanoe nodded at her.

Roan had no idea what that meant. It made a chill run down her spine, though.

“They won't,” Lanoe said, standing up.

Everyone in the room turned to look at him. The sudden silence made Roan's head swim. There was something in his voice, something that demanded attention. Maybe they'd taught him how to do that in the Navy, she thought.

“But they should. Somebody should.”

He strode over to where Maggs sat in his chair. “You and me,” he said. “We're going to talk.”

Then he grabbed Maggs and pulled him to his feet. The Lieutenant winced but said nothing. The two of them headed for the door.

“Hey,” Valk said, chasing after them. “Where the hell do you think you're going with my prisoner?”

Lanoe shoved the swindler ahead of him, through an alley toward a big hexagonal reservoir behind the casino. It would be a great place to quietly kill Maggs and dump his body. That wasn't what Lanoe had in mind, but if the young fool wanted to think it, Lanoe wasn't going to stop him.

A narrow platform surrounded by a rusted iron railing stood out there on top of a giant outflow pipe. Lanoe put his hands on the railing and stared down into the turbid water five meters down.

Maggs was behind him, maybe two meters back.

“Go ahead and run, if you want to,” Lanoe said. “Valk will have microdrones watching you, so we can catch you again.”

He could almost feel Maggs fuming back there. “Honor precludes such a thing.”

“Sure. Maggs. Maggs. I knew an Admiral Maggs once.”

“My father.”

Lanoe nodded. “I knew him as Wing Leader Maggs, first. Then I served under him when he was a group commander. I wasn't there when he died at the Uhlan Belt, but I remember when I heard about it. You inherited your commission?”

“That's right.”

There was technically no shame in it. The wars had gone on for so long that the Navy's officer corps had become a veritable aristocracy, with the children of the top brass automatically qualifying for officer ranks when they came of age. Lanoe had never had much use for legacies, though. The skills you needed to fly a cataphract didn't come attached to your chromosomes.

This Maggs, Lieutenant Maggs, had a Blue Star, though. Lanoe had never heard of anyone buying one of those for their kid.

Maybe there was a chance. It felt kind of slim, but maybe.

“If,” he said, “we turn you in for impersonating a Sector Warden—fraud would be a lesser charge—you'd spend ten years in the brig. Not to mention having your commission stripped and your family name trampled underfoot.”

“A fate I'd avoid, at some cost,” Maggs said.

Lanoe nodded. “It would hurt the Navy's reputation, too. That's something that still means a little to me. Maybe there's another way. You contracted to do a job for the Nirayans. Maybe you go ahead and do it.”

“Even one possessing my skills can't shift Centrocor's hypothetical heart at this juncture,” Maggs pointed out. “They've established a protocol.”

Lanoe shook his head. “That's not what I meant.” He leaned forward on the railing.

Maggs was quiet for a bit, maybe wrestling with Lanoe's suggestion. “You're joking,” he said, finally.

Lanoe failed utterly to admit it.

Maggs shook his head. Laughed a bit. Walked a few meters away, came back.

“You're suggesting you'll keep my name clean if—and only if—I go defend Niraya. If I take on this entire raider fleet by myself. That's suicide.”

Lanoe kicked at the edge of the platform. Flakes of rust broke free and twisted down into the rushing water of the outflow.

“I didn't say you would be going alone.”

C
aroline Ehta woke up feeling almost
good
.

She was lying in a real bed under a heated blanket, instead of in some mud puddle on a half-terraformed moon. She was naked, still a little bit drunk, and when she stretched and flexed her muscles, she felt somebody else lying next to her. Which brought back the events of the night before.

Pretty much okay.

Something had woken her, some noise in the street, she thought. She lay there in the dim room listening for it to come again. If it didn't she could just go back to sleep, which sounded fun.

This was the Hexus, where it never really got quiet. There were people downstairs in the hostel's main room, laughing and shouting at each other. Probably having breakfast. As long as none of them shot each other she could sleep through that. She could hear the repetitive
ding-ding-ding
of thumb-cymbals down in the street, which she knew meant a cart was down there selling coffee. If she really put her mind to it, she could get used to that sound and eventually drift off again.

The guy in the bed next to her snored. Well, she'd done enough garrison duty to learn how you dealt with that. She brought her left heel back and prodded him in a sensitive place. He snorted in surprise and moaned like he had a hangover. But he stopped snoring.

Unfortunately, he didn't go back to sleep. “Oh, shit,” he swore. The profanity was a little shocking, even from the mouth of a marine.

“Sleep it off,” she said, the words muffled because her mouth was pressed against her pillow and she didn't feel like expending the energy to turn her head.

“Oh, hellfire,” he said. “Last night we didn't…Tell me we didn't—”

“Relax,” she told him. He was a PBM, a Planetary Brigade Marine like herself, but he'd been raised on Adlivun, a pretty conservative planet. They still had some weird hang-ups about sex back there. “If a girl does it, that doesn't make you—”

“Oh shit,” he said again. She felt him burrow deeper under the covers in shame, which made her smile.

Ding-ding-ding
. The sound from the coffee cart came almost regularly enough to be background noise. If she just focused on that, on listening for the next time it came, she would be fine. She would fall back asleep and maybe not wake up until dinner.

Ding-ding-ding
.
Chirrup
.

Ehta's eyes opened and she took a deep breath. That last sound hadn't come from the coffee cart. That was the incoming message alert. It was also, she realized at once, the sound that had woken her.

She pushed herself upright in the bed, throwing the covers back. Her bedmate, whose name was—was—best not to worry about that just then—started motivating, too. If that message was a deployment order, the two of them would have twenty minutes to report for inspection out at the docks.

“Where's my suit?” she asked.

“How would I know?” he asked, grabbing his own suit from a chair by the bed. He unzipped the back opening and shoved his feet inside. Of course he got both feet in the same leg of the suit the first time, so he had to pull them out and try again. Which meant he had to jump out of the bed and stand there, naked, facing away from her.

She admired the view for a moment. But she really needed to find her suit. It didn't immediately present itself. It wasn't lying curled up in a corner, or shoved under an end table. It was too big to be under the bed. She checked anyway.

“Seriously, where is it? You pulled it off me last night, I was too drunk. What did you do with it?”

“You think I was paying attention to that?” he asked her. He turned and she saw the long scar running down his cheek. She'd always liked men who didn't have their battle scars removed. Too bad they were deploying—there wouldn't be a chance for a reprise of last night until they next got leave, and one of them might be dead by then, given the average life span of a Poor Bloody Marine.

She went to the door of the room and threw it open. A man in paper overalls was out there, replastering a wall. She remembered seeing one of her squadmates put his fist through that wall two days ago.

The plasterer looked shocked when he saw her. She looked down. Right. Even on the Hexus, you had to wear shorts in public.

But then she saw her suit draped over the banister of the stairs. She ran over and grabbed it and hurried back into the room before the plasterer could say anything.

“Hey,” M. Last Night said. “There's no deployment order. I've got nothing in my message log.”

She frowned, then lifted her suit to look at the tiny display inside the collar ring. She'd gotten a message. But he was right, it wasn't a deployment order. It was a personal message.

Then she saw who it was from.

LANOE, ALEISTER (CMDR, NEF)

She dropped the suit on the floor and ran her fingertips over her cropped hair.

So much for her almost good day.

“I tried contacting some people I know in the Admiralty,” Lanoe said. “I thought maybe I could get some movement there, get them to authorize an official defense of Niraya. I'm afraid it didn't work. They told me Centrocor would have to approve any intervention, and we know Centrocor has already decided to ignore your distress call.”

“I'm not sure I understand how this all works,” Elder McRae said. She and Lanoe sat in a scrap of grassy park, taking a little lunch. She had been told this was one of the more respectable parts of Vairside, which meant that people kept their indiscretions to the bushes, where they wouldn't be seen.

There was no sunlight, just the ever-present glow of the lamps that ran in serried ranks along the park's winding lanes. Yet they had tea and good bread, and the grass under them was real, grown from actual seed. The elder would very much have liked to dig her toes into it, to feel how lush and soft it was, so unlike anything on Niraya.

She had been born on a world called Jehannum, where such a thing wasn't considered a luxury. She regretted she hadn't spent more time there enjoying things like grass and sunlight. In those days she would probably have been one of the libertines in the bushes.

The memory made her smile, a bit.

“I'm sorry,” Lanoe said. “Are you—all right?”

“Perfectly fine,” she replied. “Why do you ask?”

Lanoe shook his head. “You just had a funny expression on your face. Never mind. You were saying—you don't understand how things work.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know that my planet is under Centrocor's jurisdiction. And that Centrocor has refused our request for aid. But the Navy—your Navy—isn't controlled by the polys. Correct?”

Lanoe sighed. “Technically, the Navy's only mission is to defend Earth. Since nobody's attacked Earth since the days of the Short Revolt, that leaves a lot of people with nothing to do. So the mission was expanded to ‘protect Earth, and Earth's interests among the stars.' We take our orders from the International League and the Sector Wardens—together, they're the government of Earth, and either group can order the Navy around. So, yes. The polys don't run the Navy. They don't have the power to give us commands. Technically.”

“Technically.”

Lanoe nodded. “The polys have their own militias, and before the Establishment Crisis they used to fight wars on their own. The Navy never got involved. Since the Crisis, though, the Sector Wardens have initiated a new policy. When they feel it's appropriate, they send the Navy in to fight on the side of one poly or the other. The side with Navy support always wins, so the polys work very hard to curry favor with the Wardens.”

“How do they choose which poly to support?”

“Oh, they always claim there's some important reason. Maybe they'll say DaoLink was breaking interplanetary business law, or they'll accuse Wilscon of violating human rights. They have to justify military intervention.”

“But you feel this isn't always the case?”

“Every time they send the Navy into some war between two polys, the Sector Wardens pick the underdog. Regardless of who was doing what evil thing, they go with the weaker side. Whichever poly is stronger, they cut it down to size. The point of it isn't to prevent human suffering or anything. It's to keep any one poly from becoming too powerful. To maintain a balance of power between them.”

“So that none of them can become a true threat to Earth,” the elder said, nodding. “I see. So they do all this in defense of Earth, after all.”

“Yes,” Lanoe said. “Unfortunately, right now the Navy is supporting Centrocor in its war against DaoLink. Which means that if Centrocor doesn't want to defend Niraya, the Navy won't get involved, either.”

“I see,” she said.

“Look,” Lanoe told her. “I know this is rotten. I know that the whole reason we
should
have a Navy is to help people like you. I can't defend what my own people are doing, and—”

“I didn't ask you to,” the elder said.

Lanoe gave her that look, then, the one people gave her when they thought she was being inappropriately stoic. Her faith had taught her to think before she felt. To control her own emotions. Those who lacked her training could rarely understand that. To them, everything was personal. Everything was about them.

“You've offered to help us. I do not require you to set the entire world to rights, Commander. Just to help me with my little corner of it.”

His face went stony. “Sure,” he said. “Let me tell you what I'm actually doing, then. What I think I can accomplish in the real world.”

He looked back down at the minder in his hand. She knew that his suit was capable of sending messages and collecting data all on its own, but like many old people—like herself, for instance—he seemed to prefer to work with a device he could hold in his hands, a screen he could squint at. He turned the minder so they could both see the screen, and jabbed at the display with his finger.

She saw a list of names there, none of which meant anything to her.

“If the Admirals of the Navy won't help, there are still people out there who'll at least listen when I call. I've reached out to my old squadron, the Ninety-Fourth. People I know, people I can trust. They'll sign on for this mission, no question. The problem is there may not be enough of them. Even including Maggs, we may be short on pilots. Plus there's the fact that if we want to take him off the Hexus, Valk is going to try to stop us.”

“I'm not sure I understand why he's even a consideration,” the elder said.

“Valk? He acts like he's in charge around here, and he'll lose his job if Centrocor finds out what we're up to. Right now he's cutting me a little slack, because he knows I'm doing the right thing. But if he gets the idea he's supposed to uphold the law or something, he'll turn us in.”

The elder shook her head. “No. I mean Lieutenant Maggs.”

Lanoe looked up from his minder.

“I'm not sure,” the elder said, picking her words carefully, “why you feel you can trust him.”

The old pilot picked up a tea cup and sipped at it. “If I were you I'd probably want him drawn and quartered.”

“Luckily for him, I'm not you,” the elder said. “My faith teaches me forgiveness. Not out of any sense of holiness or nobility. Simply because what's done is done. He can't go back in time and convince his younger self not to defraud us.”

“I guess not,” Lanoe said.

“Nor would I want him to. After all, when he contacted us, Centrocor had already turned down our request. If we hadn't come here to talk to him, we wouldn't have met you, M. Lanoe. And thus we would have passed by our best hope.”

“Okay.”

The elder forced herself not to smile again, since it seemed to surprise him. “My question is why
you
trust him, after he's shown us who he is.”

“Sure,” Lanoe replied. “On the face of it, sure. I don't, is the answer. I don't trust him beyond the bounds of a very short leash. But I'm holding that leash. He believes in honor. A kind of honor, anyway, one that means he can never run away once he's been ordered to fight. His father bred that into him.”

“You can be sure of that, after having known him so short a time?”

“I know his type. You live as long as I have, you see the same kind of guy come up over and over. You get to know which way they'll jump when the shooting starts. Maggs will fight, if we don't give him any other choice.”

The elder had been a little surprised to learn that Lanoe was nearly twice her age, even though they looked equally weathered. People didn't die of old age, anymore, of course—medical science had taken care of that. It couldn't prevent accidents or cure every disease, though, and it was rare to meet anyone more than a hundred and fifty years old. Lanoe had survived twice that long, even though his job exposed him to nearly constant violence. He was either very, very talented at what he did, or just very lucky. Either way, she supposed she ought to respect his experience.