Forsaken Skies (49 page)

“A small fighter craft with a vector field—and a good pilot—could sprint in toward a battleship, shrugging off antivehicle fire, and get off three good disruptor shots before having to break away and evade. Three disruptors put in just the right place will cripple a battleship. The fighter pilots survived those attack runs seven times out of ten. It meant the end of city-killing raids and it's changed the way wars are fought in space. Every military force since then has depended on cataphract-class fighters. Every battle has been decided by who had the better pilots. It's why there still
is
an Earth, Thom. It's why you and I can even be having this conversation.”

Lanoe pulled up just a little. Thom gasped in relief, though he knew something even more terrifying than contour-tracing was up next on the slate. It still took him by surprise. One second the FA.2's thrusters were right there in front of him, shining like little suns. The next Lanoe had disappeared completely and Thom found himself flying at speed right at a wall of rock.

He pulled up into a tight loop to avoid the wall, then looked all around him for Lanoe's fighter. He found the FA.2 flying leisurely away from him off to his right. Lanoe had made a ninety-degree turn in the blink of an eye.

That wasn't physically possible. It couldn't have happened.

“How—how did you do that?” Thom asked.

“Rotary turn,” Lanoe told him. “One of our best tricks. Fighters have to be small to mount vector fields, but they need big engines to fly fast. This presents a serious design problem in the cataphract. Your engine is spinning perpendicular to your long axis and it acts like a massive flywheel, its momentum constantly pulling you toward the right. Your controls are designed to compensate for that effect but if you switch off the compensation for a couple of microseconds, you'll snap around in a right-hand turn sharper than a knife's edge. You may find this useful if you ever find an enemy on your tail. Which is something that's going to happen a lot.”

“If I tried that in a yacht I'd snap it in half,” Thom said.

“Yeah, it puts a lot of strain on your engine mountings. Which is why the Navy strictly forbids rotary turns. In the middle of a dogfight a lot of pilots conveniently forget that.”

“I want to try it,” Thom said. He pulled out of his loop and leveled out, then brought up a board of safety controls. The compensators were right near the top and he wasted no time tapping to cut them out, leaning hard on his stick at the same time.

His BR.9 screamed with the sudden turn. His inertial sink yanked him sideways until he couldn't move his arms and he felt like his teeth might tear their way out through his cheek. His airfoils stalled and he twisted into a corkscrew turn headed straight at the ground, sky and stone whirling all around him until he couldn't tell which way was up. He started to call for Lanoe's help, desperate for someone to come rescue him, but there was no time, nobody could reach him before he crashed—his boards lit up red, red all over the place, and all he could do was pull back on the stick, firing his maneuvering jets hard until a noise like thunder tore through his cockpit.

It took every bit of skill he had to pull back up, his nose almost scratching the ground. His whole body shook with terror as he leveled out and cut his throttle until the BR.9 just skated along on the air, until his airfoils caught the breeze once more.

“That,” he said, “did not go well.”

Lanoe laughed. The bastard laughed—didn't he realize Thom had just come within a millimeter of death?

“You can't fight the rotary turn, kid,” Lanoe said. “You have to give up control, just for a second—the hardest thing a pilot ever has to do. Let's practice that a few more times. Then I'm going to start shooting at you.”

The kid gave it his all, Lanoe had to hand him that.

Thom took off like a shot, blazing down a narrow canyon with barely any clearance, then zoomed upward just before a cliff face and corkscrewed up to ten thousand meters in the space of a few seconds. Lanoe twisted around in a barrel roll to keep up, not bothering to try to match Thom's orientation, just keeping them close. The FA.2's engine struggled to pour on that much speed—it was no match in a flat-out race with a BR.9—but he managed.

The sky turned black as they left the atmosphere behind, but Thom wasn't just running for the void. Outside the planet's atmosphere he could pull some tricky maneuvers that weren't possible in what passed on Niraya for thick air. As Lanoe watched, Thom pivoted around on his long axis until their two cockpits were facing each other. Then Thom goosed his engine and shot past Lanoe in a near collision. Lanoe pulled back on his stick and threw the FA.2 into a loop, only to see Thom dive under power back toward the ground below, his airfoils visibly flexing as they caught the wispy upper layers of the atmosphere.

Lanoe followed as fast as he could, twisting out of his aborted loop to shoot downward after Thom's glowing engines. He opened up his comms panel and switched his communications laser over to manual aiming. It was such a strange thing to do that his fighter demanded confirmation.

“Right,” he called, “instead of shooting at you with my PBWs, which might be dangerous,” he said, “I'm going to try to hit you with my comms laser. Don't worry, you won't feel a thing.”

“Catch me if you can, old man,” Thom called back, sheer jubilation in his voice. The kid loved to fly—something you definitely looked for in a fighter pilot.

The two of them hurtled down toward the yellow rocks below as if they'd made a suicide pact. Thom pulled up at the last possible minute, leveling out in a canyon so deep its walls shaded him from the sunlight.

Smart,
Lanoe thought.
He knows I can barely see him down there.
He followed Thom's flight path as if the two fighters were tethered to each other, then quickly shoved his stick over to the left as Thom just missed grazing a huge boulder that squatted on the canyon floor.

Up ahead a natural arch of stone covered the canyon like a roof, forming a narrow tunnel with sunlight just visible on its far side. Thom's airfoils all but retracted as he shot through the narrow gap, Lanoe right behind him.

Out into the light again, Thom reextended his airfoils and pulled into a tight bank, following the curve of the canyon floor. Just as Lanoe thought he had the kid, Thom started weaving back and forth, cutting a zigzag through the air as crooked as a lightning bolt. Lanoe held his own course steady, not even trying to match Thom's eccentric flight.

Which might have been exactly what Thom had hoped for. He'd subtly adjusted his airfoils in what should have been the wrong way. Instead of providing lift they added drag—which slowed Thom down to nearly half his previous speed.

Lanoe shot past him, still headed down the canyon at full throttle.

“Got you in my sights,” Thom called, from behind Lanoe. “I won't use my PBWs, though—that might be dangerous.”

“Nice maneuver,” Lanoe said, sincerely impressed. The kid must have seen a lot of videos about dogfighting.

Of course, there was a big difference between watching a video and actually dueling with a living, thinking pilot. Lanoe leaned on his stick and twisted around in midair. His airfoils shook with the stress—he half-expected them to tear off and go fluttering away—but the FA.2 made the turn, banking around in a tight arc. The stunt cost Lanoe some altitude and his navigation boards lit up red for a moment but once he was back in control he pulled back on his stick and shot upward, just meters in front of Thom's canopy. The near collision made Thom yelp in surprise, and Lanoe grinned to himself.

He'd been doing this awhile longer than Thom. He knew every trick in the book.

“Okay, break off,” Lanoe said. He executed a leisurely, slow loop until he was flying alongside the BR.9. He looked over and saw Thom inside his canopy. “You can fly, we already knew that,” he said. “I still won that one.”

“What, because you could have rammed me back there? You would have killed both of us,” Thom protested.

“Because I could have killed you long before you pulled that zigzag,” Lanoe replied. “Check your comms log. See how many times I painted you with my laser.”

The kid was silent for a moment. Then he swore.

Lanoe didn't need to confirm. He knew he'd scored at least six direct hits on Thom's thrusters while they were pulling dumb stunts. If that had been a real dogfight it would have been over before Thom climbed out of the atmosphere.

“Fancy flying won't keep you in one piece, not alone,” Lanoe said. “You need to—”

“Come on! That's not even fair,” Thom interrupted. “You expected me to dodge your laser? That's not physically possible. I can't outfly a projectile moving the speed of light. You can't, either.”

“That's part of what I'm trying to teach you,” Lanoe said. “You don't need to dodge the laser. You need to dodge
me
. You need to constantly be aware of the guy behind you, Thom. You need to anticipate when he's about to shoot.”

Together they flew toward the end of the canyon, then pulled back to crest the top of a wide plateau. They'd flown so far that Lanoe could see the planet's terminator up ahead of them, like a storm cloud running all the way across the horizon. In another few seconds they saw the sun set for the first time since they arrived on Niraya, the sky turning a brilliant crimson for just a moment before fading to black. In the few minutes they'd been chasing each other they'd flown over half the planet's surface.

“The enemy drones I've seen couldn't keep up with human pilots,” Lanoe said. “We flew circles around them. Still, all of us took hits fighting them—Valk lost an airfoil. Zhang, who is a better natural pilot than I am, nearly died out there. For one simple reason: There were more of them than there were of us. You're never going to dodge everything. But you need to learn to not get hit as often as possible. That means you need to be able to focus on a dozen different things at a time. You need to have eyes everywhere.”

“But that's just…Human beings don't work that way,” Thom protested.

“Cataphract pilots do. They have to,” Lanoe replied. He could sense the kid's frustration. Understand it, even. He wished he had something more to give him, some word of advice that would open the gates of enlightenment. Let the kid understand, in one fell swoop, how this was done.

But there was no such word. There was nothing that could show you, nothing that could make you see it. It took doing it over and over again before you actually got the point. Before you could call yourself a fighter pilot.

Lanoe had been as green as Thom once. He'd trained for months before the first time anyone tried to shoot him down. He'd had the best instructors Earth could offer, combat veterans whose bodies or minds were too broken to let them keep fighting, but who had found a real gift for teaching.

He knew perfectly well that he lacked that gift. That he was failing Thom. He was going to throw the kid into battle headfirst and he would probably die, probably in the first few minutes of the engagement.

If he had any choice, if he could just tell Thom to head back to the spaceport, to go be with Roan and forget about fighting, well…he would.

But what if Thom just gave up? He was a spoiled rich kid who'd never had to fight for anything in his life. A yacht racer—the most pampered kind of pilot there was. If Thom lost his nerve now, if he said he just didn't want to do this anymore, that it was too
hard
—what then? What would Lanoe even say to that?

Could he order a child to fly to his death?

If Thom backed out now—

“Okay,” Thom said, finally.

“Okay?”

“Okay! You've made your point. Do we have time to try that again?”

“Absolutely,” Lanoe said. He glanced down at the canyons below, their depths lost in pools of featureless night. “And this time we'll do it in the dark.”

E
lder McRae rode out to Aruna in one of the Centrocor shuttles, crowded into the small space with far too many engineers and technicians from Walden Crater. The tiny craft had been designed for the simple purpose of ferrying passengers to and from larger ships in orbit around Niraya. It had never been meant to fly between planets, and it had undergone a serious refitting in the short time it had been conscripted to the war effort. It showed everywhere she looked. Panels had been removed to expose bundles of wiring. The cockpit door had been removed and extra equipment bolted in where a copilot should have sat. Massive fuel tanks had been bolted onto the shuttle's exterior, with an additional tank shoehorned into the passenger cabin—an engineer with the hexagonal Centrocor logo shaved into the side of his head actually rode on top of this tank, strapped down with mismatched safety belts.

There was no room to move inside, barely room to breathe. The elder sat with her knees touching those of volunteers on either side of her. Fortunately they were all wearing cheap, disposable suits—fortunate because the suits took care of their biological necessities, as there was no way for anyone to reach the shuttle's washroom. Even if they could its fixtures had all been torn out to save on weight.

She could not help remembering the terrifying long voyage to the Hexus, when she and Roan had stowed away in a cargo container. The shuttle might be warmer and better supplied—but she and Roan had had far more room to get up and do basic exercises in the container.

It was going to be a long journey out to the ice giant's moon.

“Can we even make it so far on this ship?” she whispered to an engineer sitting next to her.

“The numbers look okay. We'll get there,” the young woman replied. Her face was very pale and she was sweating, a little. “Of course, how we get back is another question. Assuming there's somewhere to get back to, when this is over.”

“You look unwell,” the elder said to her.

The engineer laughed and shook her head. “We're about to launch,” she said. “It's the most dangerous part of the whole trip. Statistically, I mean. I'll be okay.”

“Take three quick breaths, then exhale very slowly,” the elder told her. “That's good. Keep up that rhythm. It'll help with—”

She didn't get to finish her sentence. Without any kind of warning, not even a verbal announcement, the shuttle's engines fired all at once and they were off. Elder McRae was shoved hard to the side, her safety straps digging into her flesh, and she felt like the loose skin of her face and neck were being stretched out by a fierce wind. The noise of the engines was so loud she couldn't hear anything, not the engineer breathing beside her, not her own thoughts.

The crushing acceleration seemed to go on for hours, though she supposed it could only have been a few minutes. She closed her eyes but then she felt like she was dangling from her straps, hoisted up over a great abyss, like she would be torn away from her seat at any moment, torn and thrown down toward the ground far below.

She forced herself to open her eyes. Up ahead, in the cockpit, she saw the windows glow with fire as the shuttle tore through Niraya's thin atmosphere. The glare increased until she couldn't see anything but coruscating light. She felt a crushing pain in her fingers and realized the engineer had grabbed her hand, grabbed it and held on so tight she might break it.

And then—again without warning—the light disappeared. The flames receded from the cockpit windows and through them she could see only darkness. Even the terrible acceleration eased up, and she sagged in her harness.

All around her, volunteers cheered and gasped for breath and applauded.

They were on their way.

Zhang watched to make sure the shuttles and the tender launched successfully, then raced ahead to meet up with Valk en route to Aruna. They didn't worry about wasting fuel this time—each of them had plenty of spare fuel cartridges onboard their fighters—and though it wouldn't be a comfortable ride they expected to reach the ice giant's moon in less than six hours.

That meant some heavy acceleration. Zhang's inertial sink could protect her from the worst of the g-stress, but still she found herself struggling to breathe as her thrusters burned hard and long behind her. Heat built up in her cockpit until she was sweating, despite all her shielding.

“You okay, big guy?” she called.

It took Valk a while to respond. “I'd like to speak to the cruise director,” he said, eventually. “My daiquiri is melting.”

She laughed. Pilots were notorious complainers. Lanoe had told her once that griping among his squaddies never bothered him—a pilot who can still bitch, he'd told her, is a pilot who's still alive. She'd never met a pilot like Valk, who just seemed grateful to be invited to the party.

Despite the fact that he was probably in excruciating pain the whole time.

She knew about the legend of the Blue Devil—she'd fought against the Establishment, and while she'd known that Valk was being used for propaganda she had to admit it had worked. They used to whisper about him in the bunkrooms, talk about how the Establishmentarians were tougher than carbon fiber, how when you killed one you had to make damned sure he stayed dead.

She'd never thought she would actually get to meet the man. Much less find out that the legend was true. She was very glad he was on her side.

“Hang in there,” she told him. “If it gets too bad, take a white pearl.”

“Thank you, but no,” Valk said. “After my accident they gave me this suit. It includes painkillers that are a lot stronger than what you're used to—which is why I've never taken them.”

“Never?” Zhang asked. If it hadn't been for the white pearl in her own suit, after her own
accident,
she would never have made it until she was rescued. She would have killed herself with her sidearm. She'd taken the white pearl plenty of times since then. She took it whenever she had a bad headache.

“If I take it once, I won't stop,” he told her. “They swore up and down the stuff isn't habit forming. I figure there's more than one way to get addicted to something. Anyway, I need to be sharp for this battle. I can't risk getting all fuzzy.”

The painkillers in Zhang's suit had never touched her skills as a pilot, but she supposed maybe it was true, that his were different. To each their own, she supposed.

To take his mind off the rough ride, she asked, “So—when I came over to the ground control station after last night's party, I couldn't help noticing that somebody put Ehta to bed. Without her suit on.”

“I figured she'd be more comfortable that way,” he replied, his voice carefully neutral.

“Uh-huh,” Zhang said. “She and I used to be squaddies. I know she never had a problem sleeping in a suit, even under gravity. She was a marine, too—they never take their suits off except for one thing. You and she didn't…I mean, not that I'd judge you, but…”

“An officer never tells,” Valk called back.

“You know, I've heard that expression before, a couple hundred times,” Zhang said, smiling even though the acceleration made her face ache every time she moved her mouth. “I've never heard anybody use it when they could have just said no.”

Valk laughed. “Maybe this is the first time, then. Am I going to hear about what you got up to with Lanoe? All the juicy details?”

“Fair point,” Zhang said, suddenly embarrassed. Certainly that story wasn't for sharing. “I was just glad, that's all I meant by it. If you and she found a little comfort. I didn't mean any offense.”

“None taken,” Valk said. “Listen, how about some music? I find it helps take my mind off the discomfort.”

“Sure,” Zhang said.

He switched on some terrible old-fashioned stuff, grungy and with a bass line so deep it just sounded like distortion in the speakers. Most likely recorded in the low-rent sound studios of Mars—it lacked the technical precision of Earth music. Before another minute had passed he started singing.

“Brand new threads / gonna hit the town / girls to the side / when the boys…get down!”

Zhang couldn't help herself. She laughed uproariously.

Valk might be superhumanly tough and a hell of a pilot. He still had the worst singing voice she'd ever heard.

They'd been forbidden to bring any personal possessions, but someone had smuggled a tiny drum machine onboard the shuttle, and the engineers passed the time singing very old songs. It was a way to pass the time during the long, cramped flight.

The woman who had squeezed Elder McRae's hand so hard seemed almost apologetic when she joined in. “Probably not the kind of music you're used to,” she said, in a break between songs.

“I wouldn't say that,” the elder replied, with a warm smile. “I wasn't born into the Faith. I grew up on Jehannum, as a matter of fact.”

“Really? I would never have guessed it. I have an aunt who lives there. I doubt you'd know her, though.”

“I imagine you're right. I left there very long ago. There was a time, though, when I knew the words to all of these songs. I used to love music.” She proved it by joining in on the next number. Some of the engineers cheered and clapped and smiled at her, which was nice.

Still, it was a very long journey, and the music couldn't stop her from thinking about how much her joints had started to ache, or how hungry she was getting. The latter need, at least, was seen to halfway to Aruna. Someone at the back of the shuttle opened a box of protein bars and handed them forward. It took the edge off the emptiness in the elder's stomach.

“Now this,” she admitted, as she licked the foil wrapper for every last morsel of the largely tasteless food, “is something I'm not used to. I'm going to miss fresh food while we're away.”

“I wish they'd let us bring minders, so we could just watch videos,” her neighbor said. “I've always hated spaceflight. I guess you probably know that—I hope I didn't hurt your hand, before.”

“Yours is not the first hand I've held in a stressful moment,” the elder replied. “I'm Elder McRae, by the way.”

“I, uh, I know,” the engineer replied, with a sheepish grin. “I'm Wallach. Yuna Wallach.”

“Well, M. Wallach, if we can't have videos, we'll have to find other ways to pass the time.” They'd already gone through all the songs she knew, but perhaps she had something else to offer. The elder couldn't stand up—she was forbidden to release herself from her safety straps during the flight—but she could raise her voice. “Would anyone be interested,” she asked, “in some spiritual guidance? Perhaps a sermon?”

Accustomed as she was to speaking with others of her faith she was a little surprised by the silence that was the first reply.

Then one of the engineers, on the far side of the shuttle, asked, “Are you trying to convert us?”

That even elicited a few laughs.

The elder mused that she had perhaps forgotten that the majority of people in the shuttle were Centrocor employees. They lived on Niraya, true, but not because they'd come there, like her, looking for a spiritual path away from the cosmopolitanism of other worlds.

She began to consider how to withdraw her offer without losing her dignity, when someone else spoke up.

“I'm, uh, I'm kind of scared,” a young man near the cockpit said. That got a few laughs as well, though they sounded more sympathetic this time. “I wouldn't mind hearing something. You know. Something kind of hopeful.”

“I'm afraid,” the elder said, “that in our faith we don't believe in raising false hopes. I can't offer you any promises. I can't tell you this will turn out just fine, or that we will for certain prevail against the enemy.”

“Maybe we don't need to hear what you have to say, then,” the engineer with the Centrocor logo shaved into his head, the one strapped to the extra fuel tank, said.