Forsaken Skies (26 page)

“I've been thinking,” she said.

“I'm deep in thought myself just now,” he said, leering at her.

His vanity did not suffer overmuch. Her eyes ran up and down his long leg where the sheet didn't cover it, and he knew she was very close to coming back to bed. She grabbed a minder, though, and unrolled it across her thighs, which was a damned shame.

Clearly she was one of those people who did their best work first thing in the morning. And by best work, it was not to be assumed that he meant—

“If we clad the upper part of those rails in phenolic plastic,” she said, “that would help with the heat profile. Though it won't be enough.”

The guns. The bloody damned guns. He reached for the bedside table and called up a display. The bloody damned guns at seven o'clock in the morning.

“Let me see,” he said, climbing out of the bed. His leg was still giving him trouble—when he wore his heavy suit he barely noticed it, but it would take time for it to properly heal. He hadn't had any painkillers since the night before, either, though there was probably enough rough vodka in his system to compensate.

Still, he was limping by the time he reached her.

“Oh, you poor, brave man. Sit down,” she said, patting the floor between her feet. He nestled in and she ran a hand through his hair while he found a way to get comfortable. He reached up a hand behind him to touch her but she batted it away.

“The power input is tricky, especially with our grid running at seventy-five percent capacity,” she said. Engineers, he thought. He'd met enough of them in his life to know the type. Give them a problem, a puzzle, and they would never be happy until they'd solved it. And then once it was done they weren't happy until they had another problem to sort out.

It looked like sex was going to have to wait. Maggs began to think about breakfast, instead.

“Plus, I have no idea what we'd use for projectiles. Niraya burned through its radioisotopes a long time ago, so there's no source for the depleted uranium to make these slugs. The hardest part, though, is going to be convincing people we need to do this.”

That struck an odd note for Maggs. “Your planet's being invaded. The threat of imminent demise won't be enough to motivate them?”

She clucked her tongue. “It's not that simple. I know a little about what's going on—just a little. I've seen the video of the killer drone. But the elders won't release it to the general public. They say it would be bad for morale.”

“It is hard to watch,” Maggs said.

Derrow looked right at him. “It's the only evidence we have, though, that this is even happening. For your average Nirayan, all they know is the power grid's gone wonky. There weren't any lights flashing in the sky. The drone was destroyed before any of us actually got to see it. People are scared, but they don't know why. They know something's going on but they have no idea what.”

“I can assure you, the enemy fleet is real. The threat is real.”

“But we don't know anything about it.”

“Sadly, we pilots are sharing the same boat, with scant more oars,” Maggs said. “We're still a bit mystified as to what we're fighting, ourselves.” He smiled to remember the conference of the severed claw. “Remember when Ehta thought it might be—ha—aliens? That's the best theory we've had so far.”

She did not smile or laugh. “You don't think…?”

“No, M. Derrow. I do not believe we are fighting
aliens
.”

She let out a long sigh. Clearly she was relieved to hear him say it.

Which got him thinking. Maybe there was something here, an angle. He doubted very much she believed in aliens—she was far too levelheaded for that. But perhaps if he planted just the right seed…

Too devious for your own good,
his father reproved him, in his head.

Devious, he thought, was another name for clever.

“Mind you,” he said, picking his words carefully, “if it
were
aliens—” He laughed at the thought. Positively scoffed at it. Best not to lay that on too thick, though. “I mean, if it were, we'd be right out of luck, wouldn't we? That's an unknown quantity pretty much by definition. We're trained to fight other humans, not tentacled monstrosities from beyond. We wouldn't even know how to fight something like that.”

“Hmm,” she said. She was silent long enough that he began to wonder if he'd pushed too far. He turned his head around as far as he could to look up at her face and caught her brooding. Once she realized he was looking at her, of course, she shook it off.

“But I can assure you, I have one hundred percent confidence, the enemies we're fighting are as human as you and me.”

“Fair enough. Now. As for your guns—I'm looking at these power spikes on this graph here,” she said, showing him something on the minder he didn't even try to recognize. “That's a magnitude greater than an iron projectile ought to be able to withstand. We need to think about high-density polymers instead, something so rigid it'll take that kind of acceleration…”

Lanoe kept them out on patrol all night, until Zhang was sure he was just daring the enemy to come attack them. They linked their controls so that they could take turns getting some sleep—though she was convinced he was less tired than that he just didn't want to talk anymore about
feelings
.

Well, he'd always been that way. She had, too, back when they were together. It was one reason they'd gotten along so well. She knew now that she had been running away from a lot of things—doubts, insecurities, the usual stuff. It was only after she'd lost her legs that she'd been forced to actually figure out who she was and what she intended to do with the rest of her life.

For a man like Lanoe, maybe that moment of decision never had to come. You do the same job for centuries, literal centuries, and maybe you get defined by it whether you want to be or not.

While she listened to him snore she had plenty of time to think about such things. And then more time to just be bored. And still more time, which she spent actually doing the job that had brought them out here.

Valk's microdrones had charted the system down to every rock bigger than a house. The space telescope in orbit around Niraya was slowly building up a better picture of the enemy fleet, though it wouldn't have true imagery until long after it was no longer required. By then the fleet would be defeated—or everyone on Niraya would be dead.

Still, every bit of intelligence they could gather was useful. Zhang's BR.9 had its own sensors and she kept them sweeping the void, looking for the telltale signs of invaders. Any object moving at faster than the escape velocity of the system. Anything that changed course in a way that couldn't be accounted for by gravity. Anything denser than iron, and especially any flash of light that couldn't be explained by natural causes.

She found only one thing worth investigating, and even that was a stretch. She let Lanoe sleep until he woke up on his own and asked if she'd detected anything.

“Maybe,” she told him. “It's almost certainly nothing.”

He almost growled as he replied. “We can't afford to make mistakes out here.”

She nodded to herself. He was right—though investigating her anomaly would take them well off their course, and probably extend the patrol by hours yet. That was the thing about patrols like this. They took forever, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred they turned up nothing.

That hundredth time, of course, you found somebody and they tried to kill you.

“Just a light flash,” she said, “on one of the moons of the ice giant. The profile was a little odd, it lasted just a couple of microseconds too long. Otherwise I'd say it was a meteor impact.”

“Did it repeat?” he asked.

“No,” she said. If it had, that would be a clear sign that something was going on. Meteors very rarely struck the same place twice. “I've already worked out a minimum energy course correction that would take us over that way, bring us in about ten thousand kilometers from the moon. Any closer than that and we'll burn a lot of fuel.”

“I've got plenty,” he told her. “How do your tanks look?”

“Fine,” she said, with a sigh. It looked like they were doing this.

According to her charts, the local name for the ice giant was Garuda. It was the farthest planet out from Niraya's star, about as far out as Earth was from the Sun. Roughly the size of Neptune, though less dense and considerably warmer—its top layers of clouds were just below the freezing point for water. It had a system of rings, like Saturn, though these were thin and made of dust rather than ice. They would be all but invisible to normal human eyes—even Zhang's lidar eyes could barely make them out.

The planet had twenty or so moons, most of them a hundred kilometers across or less, not big enough to be spherical. There were four exceptions. Three were ice balls that, judging by their density, were just globs of water covered by an icy skin, with no real cores at all. The fourth and farthest from the planet, called Aruna on her charts, was made of dense rock, three thousand kilometers in diameter. It even had an atmosphere of methane and nitrogen—thicker than the air she'd breathed on Niraya.

The light flash had come from the surface of Aruna. One of the microdrones had caught the flash just on the limb of the moon, a bad angle for imagery—Zhang had studied the recording but could barely make out the flash even after the display adjusted the image into something she could see with her lidar eyes.

The two of them swooped in toward the moon, burning a lot more fuel than Zhang would have liked. Especially since a lot of that time they flew backward, thrusting against their own velocity. Unless they slowed way down they would just shoot past Aruna too fast to even get a good look.

As it stood, if they did one quick orbit of the moon and found nothing, they would have enough fuel to make their way back to Niraya—if they canceled the rest of their scheduled patrol. If Lanoe wanted a better look than one orbit could provide, they might end up limping home.

Garuda grew swollen and fat as they approached, until it filled three-quarters of her view. Aruna swung into view from behind that turbulent cloudscape, dark because she'd tuned her displays to show density. “Lots of iron down there,” she told Lanoe. “That's going to block most of my sensors. You see anything yet?”

“No. I want to do some close contour chasing, bring us in nice and low,” he said.

“You're the boss.” She adjusted her trajectory again, burning still more fuel.

Pilots always felt a moment's disorientation when they transitioned from flying free through limitless space to actually flying over a solid surface like a moon or a planet. Suddenly “up” and “down” meant something again—so even though the moon could claim less than ten percent of standard gravity, its pull was real, something she had to compensate for. Zhang kept a light hand on her control stick as she raced along by Lanoe's side, hopping over spiny mountains, dropping like a brick into the deep basins of fresh craters.

The terrain flew by below them too fast for human eyes to make out much detail. Zhang's eyes weren't limited by human biology, though, and she saw how the ground had been stretched by gravity, cracked wide open in deep fissures. Jagged, almost serrated ridges of stone jutted up from plains lined with long furrows. Geologically fascinating, she was sure, but that wasn't what they'd come for.

“The flash came from inside a crater just over the horizon,” she told Lanoe. “If there's something there, we'll see it in—mark—ten seconds. Nine.”

She let the rest of the countdown pass silently. She'd already convinced herself there would be nothing down there. The flash had been some random bit of rock pulled out of the sky by gravity. For it to be visible from so far away, the impact must have created a serious shock wave in Aruna's atmosphere. It might have made the whole moon ring like a bell with seismic tremors. But it was meaningless to them, a waste of fuel to investigate, a waste of time to—

“Oh,” she said, as the crater came into view.

It wasn't like the others she'd seen. It was much deeper, for one thing. And its interior walls weren't smoothly curved like a normal crater's. Instead they were cut into broad terraces, forming a series of concentric rings. From above the crater would have looked like a bull's-eye. From their low vantage she could see how deep the inner rings sank, until they formed a round pit gouged out of the moon's side.

Things moved down in that pit. Things with lots of legs and no heads. They sank their appendages deep in the rock and tore it asunder, raising clouds of dust that billowed out in long plumes.

The outermost ring was wreathed with complicated machinery, kilometers of pipes and wires stringing together domes and cylinders and high towers crowned with their own writhing, segmented arms. She couldn't help but think they looked like sea anemones, their long limbs waving in some unseen current. Vapor and smoke puffed from their ends without any pattern she could see.