Forsaken Skies (13 page)

The girl's eyes were wide, and not entirely with horror. Elder McRae worried she might have given Roan ideas. “Is the story true?”

“No story is ever true. You can never know all the details. How many people ever really did such a thing? I don't know. Did any of them perish up on their columns, or did they give up once they got hungry enough? It doesn't matter. The point of the story is to show that we can be too committed to our path, too devout. So that we forget that our purpose is to be in the world and make it a better place. Not to turn away from it completely.”

“I'm not doing that,” Roan said. “I came here, with you, didn't I?”

These children. Always so literal, always so hard on themselves. You offered them forgiveness, compassion, lenience and they rejected them—even if those were the things they craved the most. The elder had studied the human mind for decades and still there was so much she couldn't comprehend. “Let's talk about other things. What did you think of Corporal Ehta?”

Roan didn't sweeten her words. “She seemed distracted. Even ill, I thought.”

“Most likely she was hungover. Marines live very dangerous lives, and they compensate by feeding their impulses when they can. They think this will make them happy, somehow. You've never been hungover, have you, Roan? No, of course not. It is the very opposite of happiness. Still, for one so clouded, she seemed willing.”

“I had the impression she agreed out of a sense of duty.”

“Yes? No bad thing, duty,” the elder said. “Humans find structure where they can, any structure at all to organize the randomness of existence.” There could be a good lesson there, the elder thought. She made a mental note to work up a teaching. For the moment there were other concerns.

“So,” she said. “I am told we leave tomorrow morning, to return to Niraya. The Commander says he has an old comrade coming in, a Lieutenant Zhang, and that she will be bringing with her as many of his old wingmates as she can find. He hopes to field a dozen fighters in our defense.”

“That doesn't seem like much,” Roan said.

The elder shrugged. “It's twelve more than we had when we came here.”

“Of course, Elder.”

Elder McRae leaned her head back against the hard wood of the chair. Acceptance, she thought, was so much easier to express than to feel.

Maybe there was another teaching in that.

A new suit was waiting for her at the hostelry, fresh from the quartermaster. One with no anchors on the collar ring. It smelled weird at first, but then she realized that nobody else had worn it before her. That was what a new suit smelled like. She checked the cryptab and saw it listed her as
EHTA, CAROLINE
(
ENSN, NEF
)
. Her Blue Star was in there, too. Marines weren't allowed to have those.

It looked like she was back in the Navy.

A drone waited by the window of her room. She gave it her old suit and watched it dip in the air as it accepted the weight. It flew off without comment.

Then she managed to put the new suit on. Unlike marine suits, it included a comfort garment, a cloth one-piece you put on first. Not unlike civilian underwear, except it was studded with receptacles for the suit's many hoses and cables. She ran her thumb down a tab on the back of the heavy suit and it slid open for her. Put one leg in, then the other. She didn't freak out, not very much anyway, when the seals automatically pulled tight across her back and the comfort module snugged up hard against her groin. If anything, it felt
right,
the way the marine suit never had. Pilot suits were designed to keep you warm and safe. Keep your blood circulating and your fluids balanced. The suit, she decided, had never been the problem.

Maybe she could do this. Maybe it had been long enough.

She reported as instructed to the Vairside docks just before local dawn. Zhang was coming to meet them with the ship that would take them on to Niraya. It was going to be weird seeing Zhang again. They'd been friends, in the kind of offhand way most pilots were friends. You made a point of not getting too close to the members of your wing because every time you went out on a distant patrol you didn't know which of them would come back.

Zhang was a grizzled campaigner, a survivor, much older than Ehta. Zhang was Lanoe's second in command, and she'd seen plenty of battles. It had felt almost safe to get close to her, to confide in her. Ehta had expected Zhang to outlive her—and she had, though not in one piece. In one of the last battles of the Establishment Crisis Zhang had taken a broadside from a destroyer's Mark II coilgun. It had totaled her Yk.64 fighter but after the shooting stopped they brought her in still breathing. Half of her, anyway. The lower half of her body stayed in the wreck.

Last Ehta had heard, Zhang was working as a flight instructor back on Triton. You didn't need legs to fly. They'd given her a kind of drone she could ride around on when she wasn't in a cockpit. The few messages Ehta had exchanged with her were light, breezy. But Zhang had always been like that. Cut her in half and she would make a joke about it making her more streamlined.

The last message had come six years ago. Ehta hadn't replied to it. She couldn't stand to.

As Ehta kicked off the floor of the cavernous docks and up toward the bay she saw Lanoe clinging to the edge, waiting for her. He reached down and grabbed her arm and pulled her into the bay. “She's on her way in,” he said. He had a smile on his face that looked half-genuine. Maybe he was just as simultaneously excited and worried about seeing Zhang again as she was.

Maybe more.

It had been no secret that the two of them, Zhang and Lanoe, were lovers back in the day. Ehta had heard that was over—that one of them had broken things off, and it had gotten messy. By that point Ehta had already tuned out, so she didn't know the details.

Lieutenant Maggs was there, at the top of the gantry. She smelled gin on him so she stayed clear. She had never met him, nor his famous father, so he was still an unknown quantity. Valk floated next to him, impassive as if he were a drone with its speech synthesizers turned off.

The Nirayans had strapped themselves to a bench near the gantry, perhaps not trusting themselves in microgravity. They were civilians, ground folk, and thus could be safely written off. She intended to have as little to do with them as possible.

As far as she could see, as much of this stupid mission as she'd heard, their planet was doomed. Ehta was pretty sure this was just Lanoe's last hurrah. He'd retired his commission so long ago, and now, out of nowhere, he just showed up wanting pilots to join him on some crazy mission? Maybe this was just one last valiant ride before he became entirely irrelevant. It was probably a suicide mission.

Ehta had no problem with that, as long as it was over quick.

At the far end of the bay, massive shield doors slid open and air howled around them for a moment. Ehta's ears popped in the split second before the weather field activated and sealed in the bay's atmosphere. Out in the black void she could see Zhang's ship approaching.

A Peryton-class fighter tender, judging by its silhouette. It had a big shovel-shaped nose with the three-headed eagle of the Navy painted in black. A single PBW, a particle beam weapon cannon—standard Navy armament, the same the fighters carried—had been mounted on one side of the crew section, and a sensor pod in a nest of cables on the other. Six shiny new fighters rode attached to its sunken belly like wolf cubs nursing. It was hard to get a good view of them but they looked like BR.9s.

“You expect us to fly those?” Maggs asked.

Lanoe grinned. “What did you fly back in the Crisis, Lieutenant?”

“A Z.IV with a Wivern Mark II engine and woven nanotube airfoils,” Maggs replied.

“I suppose being an admiral's son comes with certain perks,” Lanoe said. “The BR.9's the workhorse of the fleet, and for good reason. Fast, strong, maneuverable. I knew Zhang would make a good choice.”

The tender didn't seem to move, just grow bigger, in that funny way space robbed you of all perspective. It wasn't until its nose poked inside the bay that Ehta got a sense of its actual scale. It ran about twenty meters long and five wide—big compared to the fighters slung under it but tiny as far as Naval ships went.

It slowed as it came into the air and warmth of the bay, then ground to a halt well clear of them. Reaction gas vented from recesses along its sides and the roar of its engines whined down to a throbbing hum.

A hatch on the side of the tender slid open and a young woman kicked out and into the bay. She wore a thinsuit with a red octopus painted up and down its right side, its tentacles wrapped around her left arm and leg.

She couldn't have been more than twenty-one. Her red hair was put up in two small buns on top of her head. She had high cheekbones and a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her tiny nose. She could have been a video presenter, except for one thing: Both of her eyes were made of dull metal, with no pupil or iris. She wore small-lensed sunglasses to hide them but it didn't quite work.

Ehta had seen replacement eyes like that before, of course. Plenty of injured pilots were blinded in the course of duty. Typically, though, losing your eyes like that was a ticket out of the service. Ehta had no idea how effective the replacements were, but she knew they kept you from being a pilot on the active list.

The woman smiled and waved at them, though, as if she could see them just fine.

Lanoe kicked off the floor to glide over to her, and she reached out to grab him but instead he touched the side of the tender and pushed himself in through the open hatch, ignoring her.

The young woman looked a little hurt, but then she shrugged and bounced over to where the rest of them waited. “Your chariot awaits,” she said.

Ehta shook her head in confusion. It was Elder McRae who held out a hand and introduced herself. “May I have the honor of an introduction?” she asked, as nicely as if she'd met the blind woman at a formal ball at the Admiralty.

“Bettina Zhang,” the woman said, and shook the elder's hand.

Ehta swore under her breath. Then she thought to do the obvious thing and pinged the cryptab on the woman's painted thinsuit. It checked out.

“I'm Lanoe's wingman,” Zhang said.

L
anoe was on the tender's bridge, checking the displays, when the woman—when Zhang—came back in. He'd figured it out by then, and felt a little stupid. “You've changed your look,” he managed to say.

“This old thing?” she asked, gesturing at her face. The face that didn't look anything like Zhang's. The hair, the body, everything about her was different now. He could only think of one way that might have happened.

She'd changed bodies. Just as Thom's father had planned on downloading his consciousness into a younger frame, Zhang must have found a body donor. Traded in her old, injured self for a newer model.

He wasn't sure how he should feel about that. At the moment it made him a little queasy.

“It just wasn't what I expected to see,” he told her. He stabbed at a control display to check the tender's self-diagnostic systems. The ship was ready to head out as soon as he gave the order.

“I thought you might recognize something in my posture. Or maybe the tone of my voice,” she said. She tilted her head to one side and looked at him at an angle. A challenging look. Zhang used to do that, when she wanted to cut him down a notch. Which was frequently. “All perfectly legal,” she said. “It's a sort of a club. You get all the neural compatibility scans and share them around, figure out who you're a close enough match with to take the transfer, to avoid psychic rejection syndrome. This body belonged to a girl who was born without optic nerves. She wanted to know what it was like to see with real eyes. I was in the mood to have legs again. So we swapped.”

Lanoe stared down at the display. She'd already laid in a course for Niraya, even. Well, Zhang had always been thorough. It was what kept her alive for so long in the anarchic battles of the Brushfire conflicts that followed the Century War, long enough that they'd actually started to trust each other. And then something more.

But the woman sitting next to him smelled wrong. She was the wrong size, the wrong shape.

“Why didn't you ever message me?” she asked. “Seventeen years and—”

“You know why,” he said, almost a whisper.

“I forgave you. A long time ago.”

He shook his head and she let it go with a shrug. Just like Zhang would have. Zhang knew his limitations. “Can you see at all?” he asked.

“Better than you,” she told him. She lifted one long slender finger and tapped one of her eyes, under the sunglasses. “Stereoscopic lidar. The only thing I can't see is colors—this body was born without the ability to see them. Even the best technology can't tell someone blind from birth what the color blue looks like. I can't tell how much of your hair has turned white.”

“More than I'd like,” he said. This was too much. Too much like old times—it felt wrong, somehow. He turned away from her. “I didn't find anybody else onboard. I asked you to see if you could find the old squaddies for me, but they're not here. Where's Jernigan?” The kid from Malbolge had been the best ground-strafer Lanoe had ever seen, a specialty exclusive to madmen and those with stainless-steel nerves. Damned loyal, too. “Did you tell him I asked for him personally?”

The woman scratched at her nose. Zhang's favorite evasive gesture.

“Hellfire. You're about to tell me he's dead.”

“Enemy action,” she said, softly.

Lanoe gritted his teeth. “What about Khoi?”

“Accident. She was testing a new class of carrier scout. It wasn't quite ready for production. That was ten years ago.”

Lanoe should have kept in touch. He'd always promised himself he would, and then never gotten around to it. Too many memories, he guessed. Too much pain he'd been trying to put behind him. “Ngai? Hakluyt? Carter?” He stopped naming names because he could see the look on her face.

“Lanoe,” she said, and reached over to put a hand on his arm. He didn't shake it off. “They're gone. These new wars—they've been rough on us. Earth sends us where we need to go, but when we get there, it's the polys who issue our orders. And they've got no use for Navy regs; they send us out alone against ridiculous odds, put us on extended patrols for months at a time. They figure we're like any other resource. They can always get more.”

“Who's left of the Ninety-Fourth?” he asked.

“Just Ehta, and me,” she told him. “And neither of us is on the active list. The squadron was…disbanded. I'm sorry, Lanoe. There is no Ninety-Fourth anymore.”

He closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the pilot's seat.

Valk stayed in the bay while the pilots worked around him, securing the tender for its trip to Niraya. There were all kinds of supplies that needed to be stowed properly—food, fuel, cartridges for the life support system and the PBW cannon, luggage and personal effects. Spare suits, spare parts for the fighters, hand weapons.

Roan and even Elder McRae lent a hand, though they had to ask where everything went and often just got underfoot.

Valk could have helped. He'd loaded his share of craft in the past, knew how it was done. Instead he just waited by the gantry until Lanoe finally came over and asked for the one thing only Valk could provide.

“I need to load my fighter,” he said. “My FA.2. You have a port restriction on it so I'm not allowed to move it.”

Valk leaned over to look at the tender and the fighters clinging to its undercarriage. “Looks like there's no room. You've got a full complement on there already.”

Lanoe's eyes narrowed. “There's a repair suite inside. She'll fit in there.”

“That's against your Navy's regs, isn't it? Overloading a transport?”

“You know perfectly well it's done all the time. And that this isn't an official Navy operation anyway. Are we really going to fight over this?”

Valk had never been very good at playing coy. “I've got my job to think of.”

Lanoe just squinted and looked away.

“I need to file my reports. I need to explain what happened and why I explosively offloaded a freight hauler right in the middle of the Hexus and cost Centrocor so much money. That means telling them about the Nirayan stowaways, and about Maggs. They'll want to know where Maggs went. If we're all very lucky, they'll find a way to blame this whole thing on him, and the rest of us get to go on with our happy little lives like nothing happened.”

“I need Maggs,” Lanoe said.

Valk nodded. “I get that. And I'm not unsympathetic. When I heard the elder's story, you think I didn't want to help? And I have been helping, so far. I've stood back and let you plan this suicide mission. Maybe I wanted to see how far you would get. How many pilots still owed you favors.”

“Not enough. I need Maggs,” Lanoe said again.

Valk laughed. “Well, so do I.”

The old pilot grabbed a girder on the side of the gantry and just floated there for a second. Then he took a deep breath. “Maybe I can give you somebody else.”

“Sorry?”

“Somebody else to blame the mess on. Somebody who actually was at fault, who made you deconstruct that freighter.”

“The pilot of that damned yacht,” Valk said. “The yacht that you won't talk about.”

“Yeah. That would look better in your report than some convoluted story about Maggs trying to defraud some hayseeds, wouldn't it?”

“Sure. And if we can blame a dead guy, all the better,” Valk replied. “Fewer forms to fill out. Okay, I'm interested. How do we work this?”

“I can show you. You wanted answers to a couple of mysteries. You've got half that job done. I'll show you the other half. All I ask is, once you know everything, you give us a day's head start before you file your report.”

“Show. You said show. Not tell.”

Lanoe nodded. “Yeah. Let me show you what's left of that yacht. So you know what happened. Then you give me a day.”

“I see this yacht. Then I decide about your day.”

“I suppose,” Lanoe said, “that's the best I can ask for.”

Lanoe swung himself into the tender's bridge and strapped himself into the copilot's seat. Zhang already had the command displays up, though they weren't the kind Lanoe expected. Instead of colored lights and flashing pearls, she'd brought up a three-dimensional display her electronic eyes could make sense of. Gray liquid swam across her panels, swarming up around her fingers as they danced through the preflight checklist. He couldn't make any sense of it.

She had flown the tender through wormspace to get to the Hexus. He had to assume she knew what she was doing. “Closing blast doors. Releasing weather field,” she said. Through the viewports Lanoe could see a twist of dust get sucked out through the open end of the bay, out into the void. “Are we cleared to proceed?”

Valk had come into the bridge while Lanoe wasn't looking. The big guy could be damned quiet when he wanted to be—with his helmet always up, you didn't even hear him breathing. “You're cleared,” he said.

Zhang released the magnetic locks on her landing gear and the tender started to drift around in the bay. She got it under control with just a couple of microburns, then eased it out of the bay, into open space. “I've got a clear run all the way to the wormhole throat,” she said.

“We've got a course change,” Lanoe told her. “Bring us around to face the planet.”

She craned her head around to face him, her eyebrows knitting together. Another old expression he was going to have to get used to seeing on her new face. “What's down there?”

“Take us into the upper atmosphere. I'll give you numbers when we get close.”

She didn't ask any more questions. The tender's nose swung around and Geryon filled up their view, all dark clouds with red light streaming up through every gap between them. She burned for a second to get clear of the Hexus, then ordered a longer burn to accelerate them down toward the hellish storms of the planet. Lanoe consulted his minder and gave her all the flight data she needed. In a few minutes he heard a faint hiss as the tenuous upper reaches of Geryon's atmosphere lapped at the hull of the tender.

A green light came up on Lanoe's console, which was still set to normal display mode. It was a call from the wardroom behind the bridge. Elder McRae's face appeared before him in a new visual display.

“I don't claim to know anything about space travel,” she said, “but I believe Niraya is the other way,” she said.

“Just a quick stop first,” Lanoe told her. “Nothing to worry about.”

He dismissed the display and looked up through the viewports again. Stacks of black clouds towered all around him, walls rising up to swallow the tender. Ten thousand kilometers away a lightning bolt jumped from one cloud to another, suffusing them both with brilliant light. The viewports dimmed as they polarized to protect his eyes.

The tender creaked and groaned as they drifted lower through the storms. Carbon soot rasped against the tender's belly as if they were running aground on a sandbar. “No vector fields on this thing,” Zhang pointed out. “If we go any lower—”

“This is good,” Lanoe told her. “Keep steady on this heading.”

“You're the boss,” Zhang said.

Lanoe unstrapped himself and climbed out of his seat. Valk moved out of the way to let him push through the hatchway into the wardroom. Everyone in there looked expectantly at him but he just nodded and headed farther back, into the repair suite where his FA.2 hung, padded skeletal steel arms holding it secure. He closed the wardroom hatch and sealed it tight.

He put up his helmet and purged all the air out of the repair suite. A hatch at the back of the tender slid open and he fought against the sudden surge of hydrogen wind. Once the pressures had equalized he moved to the hatch and looked out.

There, exactly where he'd expected it to be. Lost against the wild cloudscape, a tiny brownish dot that was steadily growing larger. A flicker of blue light danced around its main thruster.