Forsaken Skies (15 page)

T
hom couldn't sleep.

He never wanted to sleep again.

While he'd waited inside the wrecked yacht for Lanoe to return, he'd had to ration his life support resources brutally, restricting his intake of oxygen and water to the bare minimum. His suit had kept him unconscious for all but a minute every few hours, just long enough to make sure the yacht hadn't drifted too low into Geryon's punishing atmosphere. He'd phased in and out of awareness until he couldn't sense the time passing, until it had felt like an eternity down there.

Now that he was out, alive and free, he fought for every moment of wakefulness he could get.

The pilot—her name was Zhang—had announced that it would take sixteen hours to make the trip to Niraya, wherever that was. Lanoe and his Navy friends had taken that as their cue to climb into bunks and catch some sleep. Lanoe had told him that was standard practice for Navy pilots. They spent all their time on standby, waiting to go out on long patrols or running endless drills, so whenever they had a chance to get uninterrupted rest they took it. They snored now inside their bunks, turning over in their dreams, while Thom sat in the darkened wardroom alone.

He spent the time staring out a narrow viewport, watching the luminous fabric of wormspace flow by. He'd always thought it was beautiful in a dark sort of way, the twisting, kinked walls of the wormholes, the silent wailing of the pale tunnel walls, the ghostly spears of radiance that lashed out toward the ship like phantom claws snatching at you, only to evanesce away into nothingness before they could connect. Once they passed through a junction where two wormholes crossed, and there the walls positively blazed with bluish-gray light.

He knew a little of the physics of it. Wormholes were inherently unstable, and if given their way they collapsed as soon as they formed. The wormhole throats that humanity had found near its stars kept the tunnels from imploding by putting stress on the fabric of spacetime, which protested by shedding endless photons and antiphotons that combined and annihilated each other as soon as they were created. The shimmering, spectral light was the result of all those tiny explosions.

Thom didn't spend much time thinking about science, though, as he watched the wormhole burn all around him. Mostly he thought about what was going to happen to him next.

Not that he had much to go on. Lanoe had promised to keep him hidden until his father was properly dead. That time had come and gone. It was clear that Lanoe didn't intend to turn him over to the authorities now—but what the old pilot had planned for him next remained a mystery. Thom's fate was entirely in Lanoe's hands.

He didn't like that much. He had a whole life ahead of him now—his own life, free and clear. He'd never really considered what he might do with it before. Starting out as a hunted fugitive didn't sound like a good plan.

A sudden jolt of panic shocked him out of his thoughts as he heard someone moving behind him. He turned around and saw a panel door opening at the far side of the wardroom. Just the door that lead to the sanitaries, of course. Someone had woken up and needed to pass water and he hadn't heard them go in there.

He dropped his eyes when he saw it was the girl, the civilian. He started to turn back to the viewport but then he felt the air move as she kicked across the compartment toward him. She grabbed a stanchion by the side of the viewport and stared out at the wormhole with him.

He studied her reflection in the carbonglas of the viewport. She was his age, maybe a year or two older, with undyed hair that floated around her cheeks. Her breath clouded the carbonglas and she wiped it away with the coarse fabric of her sleeve.

“It's so eerie,” she whispered.

Something in her tone made him frown. “You've never seen wormspace before?”

“That's a terrible name for this,” she said, as the phantasmagorical light washed across her nose, down her cheek. “It makes me think of graves. No. No, I haven't seen it before. On the way to the Hexus, we—well, we didn't have any windows. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to disturb you.”

“It's all right. I couldn't sleep,” he told her. “My name's Thom.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. She seemed entranced by the view. Thom tried to remember the first time he'd seen it, and couldn't. His father had traveled a lot and had started taking Thom with him from an early age. Most likely so that if he had an accident while away from Xibalba he would have his backup body there and ready for the transfer. As a result Thom had visited half the worlds of human space.

“What's
your
name?” he asked.

In the 'glas her reflection scowled. Had he offended her? “It's Roan,” she said. “Do you often have trouble sleeping? Typically that's caused by unresolved guilt feelings.”

“I'm just not tired,” he told her. In the 'glas her eyes were locked on his face. Suddenly that was unbearable.

“I know a meditation technique that—”

“I'm
fine,
” he said, pushing back from the viewport. He grabbed the side of a bunk and pulled himself inside it.

She turned to face him. She was silhouetted in the viewport so he couldn't see her eyes. “I was only trying to help,” she whispered.

One of the Navy people—Lieutenant Maggs, Thom thought—curled around in his bunk to glare at both of them. His eyes were very red. “Is a bit of peace too much to ask?” he demanded.

Thom ignored them both. He turned around in the bunk so he was facing the wall. He'd never felt more alone.

Maggs couldn't sleep.

Not with the
children
creeping around and talking in what, in their youthful ignorance, they no doubt thought were low whispers.

Not with the pain in his leg. Though truth be told, it was more a discomfort than a pain. The old Commander had forced him to trade in his dress uniform for a pilot's heavy suit, which had rather excellent equipment for handling sprains and an exquisitely stocked reservoir of painkillers. He'd come to quite enjoy the cocktail made by mixing good old-fashioned gin with the white pearl that sporadically appeared in the corner of his vision.

The main reason he couldn't sleep, however, was that there was work to be done. Rather delicate work, that would benefit from being completed unseen.

He waited a decent interval after the children finally went to bed. Then he waited a bit longer, just to be safe. Only when he was sure that everyone was snoring did he begin to extricate himself from his bunk.

Now's the time, Maggsy,
his father's voice said in his head.

He'd come to believe that he heard his father talking to him because he was finally accepting adulthood and his responsibilities. That he was beginning to step into dear old dead Daddy's polished boots. Yes, that had to be it.

Strafe-dive while the beggars are downwell,
the voice said.

Maggs quite intended to comply. He pushed himself along the wall to the hatch to the repair suite and opened it quietly, then slid it closed again when he was through.

Lights flickered on all around him as he squeezed into the small compartment. The bloody Commander's famous if rather pathetically antiquated FA.2 sat there in the skeletal metal arms of a restraint cradle, its canopy polarized, its engine ticking away as if it were asleep, too.

Now came the rather tricky part.

Not much could happen onboard the tender that passed notice up on the bridge. When he'd opened the door to the repair suite, no doubt a light had appeared on some console up there. He assumed that the blind Zhang wouldn't notice that. If one attempted to release the restraint cradle, however, it would surely come to her attention.

Unless one knew how to spoof the logging scripts.

Maggs had a certain aptitude for systems. One needed those skills to be a confidence man in a world where computers watched everything. Over the years he'd accumulated a nice bag of tricks and hacks.

He opened a display on the repair console and called for root access. Everything was encrypted but just to Navy standards, which were woefully behind the stuff Centrocor used. The system's security features offered him only a token resistance. He found the modules he wanted and switched off automatic logging, then keyed to release the restraint cradle.

The metal arms folded back and the FA.2 drifted a bit, suddenly loose inside the repair suite. All well and good. The next step was to open the rear hatch. He pumped all the air out of the suite first so it wouldn't howl as it exploded out into the void. His helmet flowed up around his face as the suite's air sighed away. Once it was all gone the hatch slid open silently, letting the ghastly light of wormspace flood inside.

So far no alarms had sounded. No one had called down from the bridge asking him what in damnation he thought he was doing.

Almost done. He just had to climb inside the FA.2 and back delicately out of the hatch. Once he was clear of the tender he would be home free. He could pick the wormhole of his choice and make good his escape.

Using handholds on the side of the repair console, he maneuvered himself over to the cockpit of the FA.2. Rather distasteful, honestly, to have to run away in such an old crate. Still. When he arrived at his destination perhaps he could sell the thing to a private collector. That might go a ways toward paying off his debts—or at least the one he always thought of as the Debt.

A single recessed key would open the canopy. He reached for it, knowing it was all smooth sailing from here.

Then, of course, his father's voice had to speak to him again and ruin everything.

Well done. Though I'll admit I never thought of you as a quitter, Maggsy
.

Now that, Maggs thought, was more than just a bit unfair.

He clamped his eyes tight and winced until the voice stopped echoing in his skull.

This had to be done. There was the Debt to be thought of. He touched the canopy release key.

And found Commander Lanoe sitting in there, smiling at him.

Maggs nearly shrieked in surprise. Such a thing was quite beneath his dignity, of course, so he fought down the impulse.

“I've spent so much of my life in this cockpit,” Lanoe said, as if they'd just met by accident and were having an idle bit of chat. “Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I come in here and curl up. My squaddies used to know if they couldn't find me they should look for me here. Funny, isn't it?”

“Hmm?” Maggs asked.

“How predictable people are,” Lanoe told him.

“Right. Well,” Maggs said, struggling with words, “here we are.”

An officer never begs for mercy,
the voice in his head said. Maggs found himself fully in accord with Dear Dead Old Damnable Daddy, for once. Lanoe could toss Maggs out of the rear hatch just then, let him drift forever in wormspace, and Maggs wouldn't give him the satisfaction of screaming.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“We go back to sleep,” Lanoe told him.

“We—ah—”

“I'd appreciate it,” Lanoe went on, “if you would reactivate the restraint cradle on your way back to the wardroom. I'd prefer not to get up and do it myself.”

“Certainly,” Maggs said.

The canopy swung shut again between them, hiding Lanoe from view.

Thom finally managed to sleep, for about half an hour.

Then the wardroom lights came on and Zhang's voice spoke to him through a speaker mounted in the wall of his bunk. “Realspace in about ten minutes. Thought you might like some new scenery to look at.”

All around him the others rose, stretching their arms, swishing hydration tabs around their mouths. Lieutenant Maggs even stripped off a sheet of razor paper and swiped it across his smooth chin and cheeks. Just like that it was morning.

And just like that, they left wormspace behind, and emerged from the throat at Niraya. Displays lit up all over the wardroom showing charts and database entries on the local system. The tender's viewports were all polarized down to total opacity, so the displays were the only thing to look at.