Forsaken Skies (14 page)

You couldn't really say the yacht was in orbit around Geryon. It was parked too low in the atmosphere for anything like that. But its engine still had enough power to keep it from falling into the clouds, using its thrust and its airfoils to endlessly circle the planet at just below escape velocity. He'd estimated it could stay at this height for three more days before it used up the last of its fuel.

As it got closer Lanoe could see that it looked in even worse shape than he remembered. Its whole front section and cabin were crumpled in, the carbonglas of its canopy reduced to jagged shards. He took a grapnel gun from the wall of the repair suite and fired a self-adhering line down toward the yacht. It struck home and he secured his end of the line to a stanchion just inside the tender's hatch. “Zhang, you hear me?” he called.

A green pearl started revolving in the corner of his eye. “Copy,” she said.

“Keep station with this craft,” he told her. “I'm going down there.”

“Got it.”

She was a good enough pilot, he knew, to match velocities. The line that tethered the two vehicles went taut but it didn't snap. He grabbed on to it with his gloves, then fired his suit jets for a second to send him skittering down the line until his boots touched the carbon fiber skin of the yacht. The wind howled all around him, tugged at his legs and his arms, tried to grab him and pull him free. He forced himself not to look down, or to the sides, where there was nothing but endless cloudscape for thousands of kilometers, nothing but air. If he fell now it would take him hours to die, as he tumbled down through denser and denser layers of atmosphere. He would be dead long before he reached anything like a hard surface.

He could just wedge himself inside the wrecked yacht's cabin. He tugged at the broken instrument panel and tossed it out through the viewports. Kicked at the pilot's seat until it reclined and he could climb over it.

Behind the seat was a narrow cargo locker. Its hatch was closed but the lock was broken. He lifted the door away and found Thom curled up inside.

Just as Lanoe had left him.

One of the kid's hands lifted toward the faceplate of his helmet. Lanoe pushed forward until they were face-to-face, the flowglas of their helmets clinking together. They could talk as long as they were in contact, the vibrations of their voices passing through the connection. “You okay?” he asked.

“Lanoe?”

“Yeah. It's me.”

The kid had a brain in his head. Back at the end of their chase, when he finally realized he didn't want to die in Geryon, Thom must have known what was going to happen. That the yacht's cabin wasn't going to remain intact. He'd just had time to wedge himself back in the cargo locker before the whole front of the yacht imploded. It had saved his life.

It had been Lanoe's idea for him to stay there until they could figure out what to do next.

“How long has it been?” Thom asked.

“More than thirty-six hours,” Lanoe told him.

“So he's dead. Really dead.”

“Your dad? Yeah. He's gone. Come on. Let me help you out of there.”

There was the usual annoying wait as the repair suite hatch closed and air flooded back into the compartment. Valk waited by the interior hatch, in the wardroom, with his arms folded in front of him. Behind him the others were all talking at once, trying to figure out what was going on when none of them had any information.

Lanoe had played this one close to the vest, no question.

When the hatch did finally open, Lanoe wasn't alone—he had a smaller suited figure under his arm. He let go of his burden and the newcomer drifted into the wardroom, toward Maggs.

The swindler pushed out of the way before they could collide.

Lanoe's helmet flowed back down into his collar ring. “Everyone, meet Thom.”

Gloved hands reached up to touch the quick-release catches on the side of a civilian-style helmet. The helmet came loose, then drifted into a corner near an air vent. Revealed underneath was the face of a kid with black hair and bloodshot eyes. He looked dehydrated and a little crazy. Deprivation hadn't ruined his high cheekbones, though, or the startling violet of his irises, which had to be a designer color.

The suit looked expensive. A racing model, fitted perfectly, with copper-colored wires woven into its fabric. Valk knew what that meant—the suit had its own built-in inertial sink. A safety feature, but a costly one.

The kid came from money, that was clear. What he was doing at Geryon still remained a mystery.

“I have questions,” Valk said.

Lanoe nodded at him. “Step into my office.”

Valk followed the old pilot back into the repair suite. There wasn't a lot of room to maneuver back there, especially not for somebody Valk's size, but both of them were used to the cramped quarters on military vehicles. Lanoe stabilized himself by grabbing a stanchion on the side of his FA.2, while Valk stayed near the hatch.

Valk listened to Geryon's atmosphere scraping along the underside of the hull. It put his teeth on edge. “Just Thom,” he said. “No family name.”

“For now,” Lanoe replied.

Valk nodded. “So he's in trouble. I mean, otherwise why was he running like a bat out of hell when he came here? And why else would you be chasing him?”

“Yeah, he's in trouble. He killed somebody,” Lanoe admitted.

“Judging by the fact you kept him alive—and out of sight—this whole time, I figure whoever it was, you think they deserved it.”

Lanoe just shrugged.

“We had a deal—you were going to tell me everything.”

“It happened a long way from here. Nothing to do with you or the Hexus.”

Valk reached for the hatch control. If Lanoe had brought him all the way just to keep lying to him—

But the old pilot wasn't finished. “He ran away because he didn't know what else to do. He came here because I was chasing him, and he thought he could shake me. Then he decided he couldn't, so he tried to kill himself. By ramming that freighter. When that didn't work, he tried again by diving into the planet's atmosphere. He got pretty close to succeeding before he realized he actually wanted to live.”

“And you owed him a favor,” Valk suggested.

“No. I don't owe him anything. But he deserves better than what's waiting for him back home. So I went to the Hexus to look for a way to smuggle him out of here, to someplace nobody would look for him. I thought the Nirayans could help with that.”

“That's why you wanted to talk to them without me around,” Valk said.

“Sure. Of course, once I heard the elder's story—”

“You had to jump in there, too. Had to fix everybody's problems.”

“They deserve help. Centrocor wouldn't do it, so somebody else has to.”

Valk laughed.

“What's so funny?” Lanoe asked.

“You can't resist, can you? Somebody gets in trouble and you have to save them. Why is that, Lanoe? Why does it have to be you? This thing on Niraya—my heart went out to them, yeah, when I heard their story. But my first thought wasn't to go flying halfway across human space to single-handedly stop an invasion.”

“I'm a Navy officer. A tactician. You tell me about a fleet, I immediately think of ways to fight it.”

“No,” Valk said. “No. There's something else. Something in you that
needs
to fix things.” What it might be was beyond him, though.

“When we made our deal we didn't say anything about plumbing the depths of my damned psyche,” Lanoe pointed out.

“Nope. Okay,” Valk said, taking a deep breath. “Here's the thing. If I want to save my job, I need to bring in the evildoers. Which means Maggs and this Thom. We're going to turn around and go back to the Hexus, and I'll take my prisoners off this tub, and then you can go to Niraya with your squaddies and save the planet. That's our deal.”

“I asked for a head start,” Lanoe pointed out.

“And I said we would see.”

The old pilot's eyes narrowed.

“Yeah,” Valk said. “I bluffed you. Sorry about that. I figured if I gave you enough slack, you'd show your hand.”

Lanoe touched a recessed key at his throat, activating his suit's communications rig. “Zhang,” he said, “set a course for the wormhole throat. Burn at will.”

The two pilots stood there staring at each other until she replied.

“My board's not responding,” she said. “I've been locked out.”

“Understood,” Lanoe said.

“Sorry, that was me,” Valk pointed out.

He was so damned hard to read, when you couldn't see his face. Lanoe fought to keep himself from flying at the big pilot and smashing in that polarized helmet.

“Every ship that comes through the Hexus is under my authority,” Valk said. “Including this one. I can seize control from the pilot whenever I deem it necessary. Did you really think I would come onboard without a couple of safeguards?”

“Let us go, Valk. You can take one of the fighters and fly it back to the Hexus. Give us that day's head start I asked for.”

“If I go back there,” Valk said, “without Maggs and Thom, I'll be fired. I've got nothing left but my work, Lanoe. It's not going to happen.”

Lanoe did leap at him, then. At least he started to.

Valk pulled a nasty-looking pistol out of a pocket of his suit and pointed it at Lanoe's chest. It was a microwave beamer, fully capable of cooking Lanoe alive inside his suit.

“You're out of luck, old man,” Valk said. “The hatch behind me? I've got it sealed. No way your friends are going to burst in here and save you. I hate that it came to this, but I'm out of options.”

Lanoe pushed himself backwards, away from the gun. Not that it mattered. In the tight confines of the repair suite there was nowhere to run. He couldn't fight his way out of this.

Which just meant he had to think.

“You've got one more option,” Lanoe said, before he'd even thought of what it might be.

“Oh?” Valk asked.

“Yeah,” Lanoe said. “Yeah. You can come with us.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We have more fighters than we need. What we don't have is pilots. You were the Blue Devil once. You can come to Niraya. Fly with us. Fight with us.”

Valk leaned his head back and laughed.

Lanoe frowned as he waited for the big pilot to get over it.

“I take it the answer is—”

“Yes,” Valk said.

“Yes?”

“Yeah. I'll go with you. Honestly, you old bastard, I've been waiting for you to ask. I was starting to get offended.”

Lanoe lifted one eyebrow in surprise.

“It's a suicide mission. Lanoe,” Valk said, “seventeen years ago I was a warrior, just like you. I fought for a losing side. I lost more than most. Now…well. I've been waiting ever since for somebody to give me the order to die.”

He put his gun away and called up a command panel that floated in front of his hands. He tapped a virtual key and the panel disappeared.

Over the comms, Zhang said, “Lanoe, my board just came back.”

“My previous order stands,” Lanoe told her.

“All hands, grab something and hang on,” she said. “Next stop Niraya.”