Forsaken Skies (52 page)

She had to learn a whole new way of moving. Shuffling along the ash-covered ground wasn't enough. She had to think through every step. Which quickly grew exhausting. Every muscle in her legs screamed to be set free, to walk again in the normal way. Her back ached from the simple exercise of bending over and picking things up. The heating elements in her suit scorched her abdomen but couldn't seem to keep her gloves warm. Her fingers grew first numb, then prickly in the incredibly cold wind of Aruna.

She wouldn't allow any of it to get to her. Lead by example, she thought. It had always been the way of the Transcendentalists. When this was over, they would say she had lifted more rocks, fed the smelter faster than anyone else.

No, she thought, her discipline straightening her spine. No. That was unnecessary competitiveness. Making this a game that someone could win meant everyone else had to lose. This was a group effort. When it was over they would say she'd done her part, and done it competently. That was all the praise she needed.

She found a rock that glittered a little in the faint orange light of the sun. A sensor on her wrist started to tick unhappily when her hand got too close to it. She knew what she had to do. She sent a signal to her supervisor indicating she might have found something radioactive. She flagged it on a map on her minder, all the while moving carefully away from it.

Her suit didn't protect her from radiation, either.

She found another piece of debris—a long pipe that had fallen from a high column made of similar pipes. She picked it up. Carried it toward the smelter. Its unwieldy shape kept swinging her around but she struggled up a long ramp and pushed one end of the pipe deep into the orange light that burst from the smelter's mouth. The pipe resisted, as if it had caught on something inside the smelter.

She pushed, as hard as she dared. The pipe slid forward a few centimeters, then stopped again. She looked around but she couldn't see any engineers nearby. Anyway, what would she say?
I'm sorry, this pipe is being stubborn
?
I can't handle it by myself
?

Self-reliance was one of the Four Eternals. She pushed again. The pipe gave a little, slid a little farther into the glowing pool of metal inside the smelter. She pushed a third time and it just stuck there, sticking up in the air.

Her helmet muffled external sounds. She could barely hear the keening of the nitrogen wind. When she heard the gurgling, glooping noise she had no idea what it was at first.

Then a trickle of molten metal spilled from the top end of her pipe. A spurt of bright orange liquid iron followed, jetting high up in the air.

She'd pushed the pipe down into the smelter and now it acted like a giant straw. Or, in this case, a deadly hose.

She staggered backward, lifting her hands as droplets of metal, no longer glowing but still soft, pattered all around her. A fat drop smacked against the front of her helmet and she almost screamed, except there was no time. As she ran she saw the iron solidify in a thick nodule against the carbonglas, right in the middle of her view.

If any of the hot metal fell on her arms or back, she would be incinerated. The thin fabric of her suit couldn't take the heat the way her helmet did.

Behind her the pipe slouched and bent as it melted, sagging until it pointed out of the smelter at a forty-five-degree angle. Hot metal jetted from the end, flicking out in great tongues of fire.

She threw herself to the ground, her hands over her head—stupidly, since her hands were far more at risk than her helmet. Behind her the pipe crimped and collapsed, one last gout of molten metal drooling from its end. All around her the hot metal cooled on the ground, coagulating and turning dark.

People came running from every direction, calling out to see if she was all right, demanding to know what had happened. A young man grasped her arm and helped her up to her feet.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Did you get any on you?”

“I don't think so,” she said. She checked her arms and legs and they looked all right. The glob of metal adhering to her helmet was the only thing she could see.

Suddenly a wave of exhaustion rolled through her muscles and she sagged in the young man's grasp.

“Hold on,” he said. “We'll get you some help. Maybe—maybe you should go back to the shuttles. Have a little rest.”

“Hey!” someone shouted.

She looked up and saw M. Wallach come loping toward them. “Hey—she's fine. She should get back to work,” the woman said.

“She's an old lady!” her benefactor, the young man, insisted.

“She's a volunteer,” M. Wallach replied.

Looking disgusted, the young man released her, then headed off toward his own next task.

The elder looked up at M. Wallach. The engineer looked back, studying the elder's face through her helmet.

Then Elder McRae nodded her thanks, and marched away from the smelter, looking for some other piece of debris she could salvage. She felt inordinately grateful to M. Wallach. Had the engineer not shown up just then, if the young man had continued to suggest she should go lie down—the elder was pretty sure she would have agreed. She would have gone and found a bunk and lay down in it and who knew how long it would have been before she got back up?

Temptation was a terrible thing.

Lanoe and Thom arrived at Garuda a few hours later, coming in at high velocity. They had to take a lap around the planet, with their airfoils grazing the outermost layers of its atmosphere, just to slow down. When they made orbit around Aruna, Zhang and Valk were waiting for them.

Valk started in first. “Listen, Lanoe, I don't know how much you know about what happened out here, and, frankly, I'm not too clear on it myself—”

“Take it easy,” Lanoe said. “We'll figure this out together. All of us. Zhang, you want to give me the quick version?”

“The aliens tried to communicate with us. They managed to get through to Valk, but nobody else. It sounds like they want to talk.”

She couldn't see him. His FA.2 was a dozen kilometers below her, tracing a faster orbit around the moon so that he was always pulling away from her. It frustrated her—she really wanted to know what he was thinking, and with a guarded man like Lanoe that meant getting a look at his face.

Maybe that was why he'd chosen the lower orbit.

“I've already heard from Ehta. Her sensors didn't pick anything up that yours missed. Let's get Derrow's opinion,” Lanoe said, with a sigh.

It didn't take long to get the engineer talking. “We have to take this chance. If we just start attacking them now, they may decide we're not worth talking to. We may never get to communicate with them again.”

“I've seen no indication these aliens can be trusted,” Lanoe said.

“Centuries in space. We've seen hundreds of worlds. We've never seen so much as the remains of an alien culture,” Derrow pointed out. “Until now. It's imperative that we make an attempt to talk.”

“What do we say? ‘Never mind about those dead Nirayans. Never mind that you tried to kill every single one of my pilots. Friendship is what's important.' Something like that?” Lanoe asked her.

“No, of course not—look, they'll have to explain themselves. And they'll have to stop killing us, if they want any kind of truce. Obviously. But we can't even begin to know how they see things. They had this base on Aruna, they've been working here for years. Then we came along and blew it up. They may well consider us the aggressors.”

Zhang bit back a curse. She was amazed at how quickly Derrow had turned on them. One minute she'd been their best friend, helping them build the guns, now…What made it worse was that Derrow knew what the aliens were like. “You might be forgetting something, Engineer,” she said. “You were the one who figured out how the landers operate. They see an organic life-form, they kill it. That's their only function.”

“Just think about what we might lose, if we stick to the battle plan,” Derrow said.

“If we change it,” Valk said, “we'll definitely lose the war.”

Derrow called back, her voice hot with rage, “You can't think that—”

“Engineer, thank you for your input,” Lanoe interrupted.

“What? Commander, you can't just ignore what I'm saying.”

“I can do exactly that,” Lanoe told her. “This is a Naval operation. That means I'm in charge, as ranking officer on-site. I appreciate your comments and your concerns. But we still need to think of this as a military decision.”

“I could shut down work on the guns,” Derrow said.

The threat hung in the air, unanswered, for far too long. Zhang just sat there in her cockpit and tried to breathe. What Derrow was suggesting—

“Sure,” Lanoe said. “You could.”

“Then maybe you should listen to—”

“You could,” Lanoe said. “But you won't.”

“Why's that?”

“Because you're a reasonable person. You know full well that this could be a trick. Or that even if we talk to them, it doesn't mean we can come to any agreement. They might demand our unconditional surrender. They might just want to gloat about how they're going to wipe us out. Given their numerical superiority, I think the possibility of peace talks right now is slim.”

“I'll admit that much,” Derrow replied, in a quiet voice.

“So you'll keep building my guns. Just in case.” Zhang could hear Lanoe take a deep breath. “Okay. It's up to me to make this decision. I wish to hell it wasn't. I wish we had time to contact the Admiralty and ask for advice. Too damned bad for me.”

He was nearly around the limb of the moon now. Zhang could barely see the FA.2 as a speck of light, far away.

“We continue as planned,” Lanoe said. “Thom and I will make a feint at the fleet, get their attention. Draw them into our trap. Derrow, you have those guns ready for when they take the bait. Zhang, I want total reconnaissance on the local volume of space. If they have a wing of interceptors hidden on one of the other moons, if there are more landers hidden around here somewhere, just waiting to attack my guns, I need to know that.”

“You've got it,” she said.

“What about me?” Valk asked.

“Valk, buddy? You've got a call to make.”

A
trickle of cold sweat ran down the back of Thom's suit, tickling his spine. He'd never felt so alone, so far from help. There was nothing for a thousand kilometers in any direction, no shelter whatsoever to hide behind if the enemy started shooting at him. Lanoe was just a bright speck of light, far off to his left. Garuda was just a bluish smudge far behind him.

Even on the longest races he'd ever sailed—endurance runs that could go on for days and cross entire star systems—he'd always had a support team waiting to catch him if things went bad. Rescue vehicles, supply ships, hundreds of spectators watching his every move. Every ship around him had been there to help. Now he was facing down an entire fleet of craft designed to kill him.

Flying exercises with Lanoe in the canyons of Niraya hadn't made him nervous like this. There'd been real danger involved but only if he messed up, if he made some idiotic choice. His death would have been his own fault, then. This was different.

He reached for his comms board, then pulled his hand back. Lanoe had told him to maintain comms silence as much as possible. Not because he was worried the enemy might hear them. If the two fighters stayed in touch by communications laser there was no risk of that—it was next to impossible to intercept a tightbeam signal. No, Thom had gotten the impression that Lanoe just didn't want to be bothered.

A sensor panel flickered into life in front of him. There was new imagery of the enemy fleet available if he wished to review it. As far as they might have come from their base at Aruna, the fleet still wasn't visible to the naked eye. The enemy ships were built of low-reflective materials and were nearly as dark as the black void behind them. The fighter could see more of the electromagnetic spectrum than Thom could, however, and it had built up a picture of what they faced.

He hesitated. Did he really want to know? But of course a fighter pilot couldn't think like that. He tapped for the imagery and watched as his display filled up with the spiky shapes of interceptors and scouts, alien machines with no pilots onboard. They wove complicated patterns around their swarmships, which seemed to hang motionless in space. Behind them the huge round bulk of the queenship looked more like scenery than an enemy spacecraft. This was the clearest picture Thom had seen yet of the massive vehicle, perhaps the first time anyone had actually seen it in visible light.

A green pearl appeared in the corner of Thom's vision. He flicked his eyes across it and he could hear Lanoe breathing. “You getting this?” the old pilot asked.

“Yes,” Thom said. “How close are they?”

“Check the corner of your display. There's metadata for this imagery.”

“Right. I should have thought of that,” Thom said. He expanded a tiny window inside the display and saw that the closest parts of the image—an interceptor at the vanguard of the fleet—was still a hundred and seventy thousand kilometers away. Far beyond shooting range.

“What do you make of the queenship?” Lanoe asked. “You can adjust the focus on the image to get a clearer look.”

Thom studied the big vessel. It was roughly spherical, nearly a kilometer in diameter. Much bigger than any spacecraft the Navy could field. “Um,” Thom said, trying to think of what to say. Beyond the fact that the giant ship scared the hell out of him. “Well. We know one thing for sure. It didn't come through a wormhole.”

“Is that right?” Lanoe asked.

Thom realized, suddenly, that Lanoe would already know that. That he was asking Thom's opinion on the queenship not for actual information but to see what Thom could work out on his own. This was just one more test.

This one, at least, he had a chance of passing. Back in his yacht racing days he'd made an exhaustive study of spacecraft design. You had to know why ships were built the way they were if you wanted to find ways to make them go faster.

Even the biggest human ships were built long and thin, and for good reason. “Some wormhole throats are only a few hundred meters across. There's no way the queenship could have fit through a wormhole without disintegrating. So they must have traveled here the long way—across interstellar space.”

“Good,” Lanoe said.

“Which raises the question of why,” Thom said. “Why fly all that way—a voyage that must have taken hundreds of years, probably even longer—just to attack a backwater planet like Niraya?”

“We're not likely to figure that one out just by looking at them,” Lanoe said, “so let it go for now. What else do you see?”

Thom looked for things that didn't make sense. “What are all those circular depressions?” he asked. The queenship was spotted with them, dozens of round shadows like the dimples on a golf ball, perhaps. “Do you think those are weapons or docking bays?”

“Neither,” Lanoe called back. “I think those are craters.”

Thom wanted to laugh at the idea. Craters on a spaceship? No, you found craters on a moon, on an asteroid…“Oh,” he said.

“We know that thing's old,” Lanoe said. “It flew here without the benefit of a wormhole, which means it's been out in the deep void for centuries, at least. Probably even longer. And judging by its albedo and by virtual spectroscopy it looks like it's made out of rock, not metal.”

“You think it's not a ship at all,” Thom said. “You think it's an asteroid. You think they hollowed out an asteroid and stuck an engine on the back of it.”

“Makes sense, actually. If you're going to fly from star to star you need a lot of radiation shielding, and rock is good for that. Plus it's probably cheaper to use a hollow rock than to build a ship hull that big—and we know the enemy likes to build things cheap. I don't know if those craters were part of the original rock or if they're from impacts it suffered along the way, but, yeah, those are definitely craters.”

Once Thom knew to look for it, the nature of the queenship was obvious. No one, not even an alien, would build a ship that lumpy and amorphous. The natural shape of the asteroid made the artificial parts of the queenship stand out by way of contrast. The long toothlike projections on its forward end looked like gracefully engineered pylons, though Thom couldn't hazard a guess as to their function. Maybe they were weapons, or docking facilities, or…something unguessable. Alien. They stood in a perfectly spaced ring around a circular maw at the very front of the ship, a pit dark and deep enough that it showed no features at all. Most likely that was how smaller craft got in and out of the queenship. Then again, it could be a ramscoop designed to suck in interstellar hydrogen. Or the barrel of an enormous cannon.

“This is good,” Lanoe said. “This tells us something important, even though it makes our lives more difficult. My scans tell me the rock of that thing's hull is at least twenty meters deep. Way too thick for our disruptor rounds to penetrate. Even the guns we're building on Aruna would take hours to dig their way through.”

Lanoe didn't sound like he was ready to give up, though. It took Thom only a second to see why. “That means,” Thom said, working through the idea, “we'll need to attack the maw directly. The forward opening. In the hope there's something in there we can blow up.”

“Good,” Lanoe said. “All right. That's enough recon for now. Time for actual operations. Right now that fleet is headed on a direct course for Niraya. We need them to change that course so they're moving toward Aruna instead. The way we make that happen is to convince them we take Aruna seriously.”

“By attacking them from Aruna,” Thom said.

“Exactly.”

“What if they don't turn?” Thom asked. “What if they ignore us and just keep to their current trajectory?”

“They won't. If they fly past Aruna that means leaving us—the only threat in this system—behind them. It's basic military strategy. You never let your enemy take up position behind you, because that makes it way too easy for them to stab you in the back. Okay, follow my lead. We're going to move in as close as we dare, just out of range of their interceptors. But remember—we don't shoot first. We give them a chance to hear what Valk has to say. Maybe they'll agree to negotiate and we don't have to shoot at all.”

“You don't think that's very likely, do you?” Thom asked.

“No. But I'd love to be proved wrong.”

The green pearl disappeared as Lanoe cut the connection. On Thom's left he saw the bright little dot of Lanoe's FA.2 race forward, ahead of him. He opened his throttle up to follow, straight toward the enemy fleet.

Ehta had expected her role in the battle—ground control—to involve a lot of sitting around watching displays and relaying information people already knew. She'd expected it to be mind-breakingly boring.

Instead it had turned out to be terrifying.

The trip from Niraya to Aruna had been bad, very bad. She'd been crammed into the wardroom of the tender—as far as she could get from any windows—with a bunch of engineers who couldn't help but comment every time the ship rattled or lurched. She'd kept her eyes tightly shut for hours at a time, just trying not to think about the fact they were in space.

Once they'd landed, the engineers had all jumped out of the tender as quick as they could, so they could get to work. Ehta and Roan had remained behind so they could turn the tender into a ground control station close enough to the action to maybe even be useful. The ship was designed to serve such a role—its sensor pod was better suited than even the field of radar dishes back on Niraya—but still it took endless work to get ready, configuring the tender's software to the task at hand, laying out rectennas on the cold soil of Aruna and calibrating them until they gave good intel. Ehta and Roan had worked nonstop for hours.

Now they had another job. One that could mean the end of the war.

“Transceivers are up and running,” Roan announced. She was over at the tender's main console, fine-tuning equipment at a virtual control board.

“I've got the signal cross-checked and rechecked,” Ehta replied, watching lights turn green on her minder. Valk's message was simple enough but they weren't taking any risks. This could be the only chance they had to talk to the enemy.

The data file Valk had sent to the station had to be perfect. The transmission needed to be carefully managed, as well. It had to come from a very strong signal source—stronger than anything the fighters could put out—to match the strength of the alien message. The tender was the only comms unit in the system that could pump out a signal that strong.

Ehta came over and stood next to Roan. The girl had been born on Niraya, and this message could determine the fate of her planet. She should be the one to press the button. “You do the honors,” Ehta said.

They traded a tense nod, and then Roan tapped a key on the console. The minder fed Valk's message through the tender's equipment and blasted it out into space. They heard the big pilot's voice on the minder's tiny speakers. Ehta fought the urge to grab Roan's hand.

“You have indicated a willingness to speak to us,” Valk's recording said. “We are also willing to speak. We are willing to negotiate with you. We require that you cease all hostile activity immediately. As a show of good faith, we will not attack your vehicles unless we are attacked. Please indicate receipt of this transmission.”

Just that, nothing more.

“How long…?” Roan asked.

Ehta didn't need to check the minder. “The fleet's more than a million kilometers away, but it won't take long for the signal to reach them. Give them some time to think about what we said and come up with a proper response. Who knows? That could be hours, or just a few seconds.”

“What do we do in the meantime?”

Ehta cleared her throat. “We stand here. And we wait.”

The images Thom had seen of the enemy fleet had lied to him. They'd made it look like all the alien ships were bunched together in a tight knot of steel. In fact the images had been squashed to better show detail, and individual enemy vessels were quite far from each other, strung out in a long line almost a hundred thousand kilometers long. The queenship was surrounded by escorts but the seven swarmships stood off from each other so far they wouldn't have been visible to one another with the naked eye, and small patrols of scouts and interceptors flew even farther afield, screening the fleet's advance.