Forsaken Skies (16 page)

The planet circled a red dwarf star only about half the radius of Earth's sun. Keeping a wormhole throat stable near a gravity well that shallow was tricky—the throat had to be positioned almost inside the star's atmosphere. The tender didn't waste its time getting away from the star—if the star flared up while they were still close it could vaporize them, and red dwarfs were known for their volatility. Zhang poured on the velocity and soon the star dwindled behind them in the display until they could see its full disk.

It wasn't actually red, of course. More of a rich orange. Ulcerous black spots covered a good portion of its surface and a long, arching prominence jetted from one side, cascades of plasma rising and then falling back toward the shimmering skin of the star.

“Cintamani,” someone said, from behind Thom's shoulder.

He spun around, a little startled, and saw the old woman he'd met the night before. He knew she was an elder something but he couldn't remember her name. She was smiling, a kind smile, but her eyes were sharp enough to cut through him.

“Is that—I mean, is that the star's name?”

“It's the name Centrocor gave it when they discovered this system,” she said. “It's a name from the ancient myths of Earth. Niraya—the name of my world—is the name the same people gave to the land of the dead.”

“The underworld,” Thom said. “My planet, too. I mean, it's called—” He stopped himself. Lanoe had said he should be careful what he told people about his past. If he was going to have a life after what he'd done, he needed to distance himself from Xibalba and what he had been there. “It's named after a mythic underworld, too.”

She nodded. “When the first explorers passed through the first wormholes, they went seeking earthlike planets, and were disappointed. They found worlds like Venus, or Mars, instead—worlds that were frozen and dry, or with toxic atmospheres, worlds that were uninhabitable, sterile, dead. In their despair they named the worlds they found after hells and purgatories.” She shrugged. “In time, terraforming makes any world habitable, but names persist. I take it you've never been this way before. Few people come to Niraya unless they intend to stay.”

She fell silent, then, though her eyes never left his. It got creepy very fast. He looked away and muttered, “I'm sure it's a nice place.”

“It's what we need. What sustains us,” she told him.

He couldn't shake the thought she was after something. Why else would she single him out like this, engage him in conversation when they hadn't even been properly introduced? Thom had never truly fit in anywhere. He'd been socially awkward his whole life, probably because traveling with his father he'd never had a chance to make lasting friendships. Even he knew, though, that the old woman wouldn't stare him down like this unless she expected him to say something.

He picked the least innocuous topic he could think of. “Roan was born on Niraya, right?” he asked.

“Yes. I imagine she thought she would spend her entire life there. Until we went to the Hexus she'd never seen anything of civilization. That was a great deal of temptation to experience all at once. She must make her own choices in life, though of course I hope she'll choose to stay with her studies and her devotions, and follow the path that leads to her becoming an elder someday.”

“I'm, uh, I'm sure she will,” Thom said.

“If she can renounce worldly things, she has a good chance.” Another warm, comfortable smile. The woman's eyes hadn't changed a bit. “Forgive me for talking your ear off, young man. I'm just excited to be going home, back to where things make sense.”

“No problem,” Thom said.

She pushed off the wardroom wall and went to join the pilots who were gathered around a new display that had just opened up, this one showing Niraya itself. Thom lingered behind, wondering what that was all about. He knew better than to think the woman was just making conversation. She must have seen him talking to Roan while everyone else was asleep. Was she worried he was going to—oh, no, it couldn't be. He hadn't even thought of such a thing. And anyway, he had pretty much ruined any chance he had of getting to know Roan the way he rebuffed her.

He shook all such thoughts out of his head and went over to the new display.

“We'll make landfall in three hours,” Zhang called over the speakers. “This is imagery from a weather satellite in orbit around Niraya.”

Maggs couldn't see a damned thing. The others were all elbows and feet and ambition to get a look. After the rather bad showing of the night before he figured he'd keep his head down, but still. He maneuvered himself around as best he could.

By craning his head around Ehta's altogether too muscular thigh he could just make out the display. Niraya, as it turned out, was a yellowish-gray sphere with a thin skin of blue hazy atmosphere. A single curl of white cloud cast a deep shadow on the bright surface. Long cracks stretched in every direction like a cobweb of ravines and canyons, broken only by bright round patches that must be old, weathered craters.

Two craters near the terminator line, the border between the night and day sides of the planet, stood out for the patches of dark green at their bottoms. One had the square patchwork of agriculture as well. No sign of human habitation was visible from this height, but Maggs could clearly make out a whitish stretch that glittered in the scant sunlight. That, he thought, must be where they'd dropped containment on their fusion plant, to melt the murderous drone. The heat of the explosion would have turned the rock beneath to glass.

“This is it,” Lanoe said. “This is the place we've come to protect. There's a hundred thousand people down there and they're counting on us.”

On the display the planet didn't appear to be rotating at all. It hung there in its spherical immensity, silent and bright, while the twist of cloud turned with aching slowness, its shadow washing over those endlessly branching canyons, touching them with darkness then moving on without a sound.

The gathered pilots and Nirayans studied the world with a hushed intensity, all of them looking as if they wanted to memorize every detail of the surface. Maggs supposed it was hardly surprising. Even for veteran travelers, it wasn't like you saw a new planet every day. The boy, Thom, floated by the display with his mouth open. The Nirayans watched it with their features hardened to masks of reverence.

Maggs drew his own conclusion.
Bit of a pesthole,
he thought.

Z
hang put the tender into a parking orbit around Niraya and then headed back to the wardroom, where Lanoe was hunched over a display. She couldn't, of course, see what he saw. The girl whose body she'd traded for had no optic nerves, and her brain as a result had never learned to process visual information. Zhang's lidar eyes could make out solid objects but not holograms or visual displays.

There were ways to compensate. The tender's controls were all forwarded to her suit, so she called on its computers to bring up the kind of display she could use. One of the wardroom's smaller displays switched on and generated a matrix of beams of infrared light at various frequencies. Though she couldn't see the light it gave off she could feel it as warmth on her skin. She dipped her hand through the infrared array and felt where it was warmer, where it grew cold. She'd had time enough to practice the technique and soon she had an idea of what the others saw on Lanoe's big display.

Not that it told her much. Just crude shapes, hundreds of them, like a cloud of gnats circling around a giant beetle. “What is this?” she asked.

Lanoe turned to face her. His eyes were flat black and unreflective—just like those of everyone else in her world. She remembered how hard they could look, in the old days, when he was carrying out a briefing or giving orders. How soft they got other times. “This is trouble,” he said.

“This is the best image you have of the enemy fleet?” she asked.

“Updated since we arrived. Some of the elements have changed position. The smaller ships here are moving up, on a course headed right for Niraya. The bigger ships are hanging back.”

“Makes sense,” Zhang said. “They're sending in their fighters to screen their advance, keeping the big ships safe from direct assault.”

“Sure,” Lanoe said. “Perfect sense. If you know you're facing an opposing fleet. I was hoping that we would have the element of surprise here. Their original lander—their advance scout—didn't meet any real resistance. I was hoping they would assume the planet was undefended. But they're being careful, the bastards.”

“Never count on your enemy's stupidity,” she said. “A very wise and old man once taught me that.”

“Never rush in where you don't know what the enemy's thinking, either,” Lanoe said back.

Zhang nodded. “This image is next to useless. I'm assuming these little ships are fighters, but we don't know what kind or even how many there really are. And this big thing in the back—what in damnation is it?” It was hard to get a sense of scale from the crude image, but it had to be much, much bigger than any carrier Zhang had ever seen. Bigger than a lot of space stations. “We should send out a deep picket.”

It could be hard to read people's expressions when you couldn't really see their eyes. Zhang had known Lanoe for a long time, though, and she could tell by the way the right side of his mouth curled up that he was annoyed.

“Great idea,” he told her. “I was just asking for volunteers for that exact thing when you deigned to join us.”

Zhang had to admit that stung. Back in the glory days she'd been Lanoe's good right hand. The two of them had never stood on military protocol. Few fighter pilots did—it wasn't like you could take time-out to use proper forms of address when you were shouting updates back and forth in the middle of a dogfight.

“I'll go,” Valk announced, from the other side of the wardroom. She had no trouble reading his body language, since he didn't have a face to read. He was as eager as a puppy who'd been offered a scrap of chicken.

Deep picket duty wasn't exactly the kind of posting pilots squabbled over. It meant spending days out there in the void, with no one watching your six—and nobody to talk to, either. The kind of work that was both insanely dangerous and mind-crushingly boring.

“I don't do well on planets,” Valk explained. “Gravity and me had a falling-out a while back.”

Lanoe nodded. “Sure. Thanks. The rest of us will go down to Walden Crater—that's the local capital—and figure out what we can expect in the way of ground support. Maggs, I'm counting on you, there.”

The lieutenant hadn't been paying attention. He looked around as if he'd forgotten where he was. “I beg your pardon?”

“Elder McRae tells me we're going to have to meet with all the planetary bigwigs. Convince them we actually have a chance at saving their skins. Before anyone asks, yes, I pointed out they don't have a lot of other options. Sometimes, though, you need to play nice. If we can get the Nirayans to think we're the right sort of saviors, they'll work with us on building static defenses and intelligence gathering. We can use all the help we can get. I've heard you talk fancy enough, Lieutenant, to assume you're pretty good at it.”

“What do you want me to do?” Ehta asked. She was chewing on her fingernails. Well, everyone got nervous before a new deployment.

“Take a look at our new crates. Make sure they're all in working order, ready to head out as soon as I give the word.” He ducked his head a little and glanced over at Zhang. “I'm sure they're fine,” he said.

They should be. Zhang had already checked them herself, back when she'd requisitioned them. Technically,
stolen
was probably the more accurate term, since she hadn't gotten proper authorization from the quartermaster corps to take the fighters. But she knew they were in good shape. She had brought nothing but the best, for Lanoe.

“I'll just fly the tender, then,” Zhang said. “If we're handing out assignments.”

He looked away. It took her a second to realize he was failing to meet her gaze.

Okay,
she told herself.
Okay, let it lie
. It had been years since they'd seen each other. It wasn't like they could just go back to the way things were as if nothing had happened. She hadn't expected this much awkwardness but…
Give it time
.

She refused to accept that the thing they shared, the relationship they'd never quite given a name, was broken beyond repair. He would come around.

Valk headed out through the rear hatch of the tender. When you spent your whole life with your helmet up, you didn't much notice the transition from air and heat to the cold of the void, except that everything got very, very quiet.

Valk didn't mind a little quiet.

Pilots had a special fear of the void. Of being sucked out of a hull breach into space, out where you could just fall and fall forever. Back when Valk still had a face people could look at without cringing, he'd felt it like anybody else—he'd had the same dream every pilot had, the dream where you were walking on a black floor and suddenly there was no floor, there was nothing beneath you at all. Those dreams had woken him in sweat and panic.

He didn't get them anymore.

It was no real difficulty for him to move along the outside of the tender, using stanchions placed just for this purpose, until he reached the nearest of the BR.9s. He clambered over the tiny ship, getting to know its shape, looking to make sure it hadn't been damaged on the journey from the Hexus. In the reflected light of the planet it was sleeker, prettier than Lanoe's FA.2, with four swept-forward airfoils that looked like the curved blades of scimitars.

The canopy was all one piece, unlike the faceted eye of Lanoe's fighter. He touched the recessed key that opened it up, expecting it to swing up on a hinge. Instead it melted back into hidden grooves, flowing like dark water until it was gone completely. Just like the fancy flowglas of Navy helmets.

Valk swung himself into the cockpit and automatic straps wove across his chest. The canopy flowed up around him, sealing him in, and a dozen bright panels came to life all around him. He set one to run a diagnostic program, then dismissed three more, since he didn't need weapons at the moment. One of the panels he'd never seen before—apparently it let you tune your vector field manually, directing field strength to where you thought you might need it the most. That could come in handy.

The fighters Valk had flown for the Establishment had been obsolete even before the Crisis began, and Navy technology had developed a fair bit in the seventeen years since they took away his Blue Star. This picket duty would be good for him, if only to help him catch up on what a cataphract could do, these days.

A green pearl appeared in the corner of his eye. Just the tender checking in, establishing a link. He acknowledged and set his comms panel to automatically retain that connection. Then he touched another panel to release the magnetic clamps that held the BR.9 to the tender's belly.

He thought of what he might say to the other pilots.
See you around. Don't forget me while I'm gone
. All of it sounded forced in his mind's ear. He didn't feel any real connection to these people—another reason why he'd volunteered for this lonely duty. So instead he said nothing, just pinged to let them know he was moving. Then he brought up the flight controls and set up a ninety-second burn that would take him out to the edge of the system.

Out into the void.

The tender had been designed to support cataphract-class fighters in theater—carrying out repair and resupply missions in deep space, dodging antivehicle fire and flak fields, swooping in to grab wounded fighters and carry them back behind the lines. In the vacuum it was fast and maneuverable. In a planetary atmosphere it handled like a brick. It had no airfoils, so Zhang had to bring it in on positioning jets and a very light touch on the stick.

She brought them in hot but not too hot, skimming the atmosphere to shed some velocity, pulling long serpentine banks for stability. Through the wardroom hatch she could hear the others cursing as gravity pulled them to the floor and inertia made them grab for stanchions.

The ground below sped by until even her lidar eyes registered nothing but a blur. Up ahead she saw the rim of Walden Crater, a gently curving wall fifty meters high. She goosed the engines just a bit to clear a big dish antenna, then let the tender drop like a stone toward the landing field just inside the rim. She pinged local traffic control only to find there wasn't any. They must get so few spacecraft coming to Niraya they didn't need to worry about midair collisions.

Using her positioning jets as retrorockets she set down gentle as a lamb, all four of her landing struts making contact at the same time. Then she powered down the engines and stepped through the wardroom hatch. Lanoe gave her a gruff nod, which all things considered was pretty good praise.

“I'll go and get the fighters unlimbered,” Ehta said, rushing past Zhang. She headed for the sanitaries rather than the exterior hatch, and Zhang could clearly hear her vomiting inside the tiny compartment.

“Was I that rough?” Zhang asked.

The Nirayans—the old woman and the girl—looked a little shaky, but Maggs just shrugged. “Were this a combat zone, I would have considered that a cakewalk,” he told her. “But then again, it's been a long time since any of us saw combat.”

Zhang went to the sanitaries door to ask if Ehta was okay, but Lanoe shook his head.

“Let her be,” he said. “We've got things to do. She can take care of the fighters while we're gone.”

They left her in the tender. The elder person, the old Nirayan, called for ground transportation on a comically antique minder while the three remaining pilots—Lanoe, Maggs, and Zhang herself—stretched their arms over their heads and stamped their feet. It could take a while to get used to gravity again, even after less than a day without it.

The kid, Thom, just skulked around the side of the tender, looking like he wanted to be anywhere else in the world. Zhang had no idea what his story was—Lanoe wasn't exactly confiding in her yet. She supposed she would find out when she needed to know.

“There will be a vehicle waiting for us at the field gates,” the elder said. The young local, the girl Roan, ran to grab the elder's minimal luggage and soon they were all bundling out of the exterior hatch, onto Nirayan soil for the first time.