Forsaken Skies (17 page)

Lanoe got about three steps before he had to say something. Zhang smiled to herself, knowing how he was—when they'd made him a squadron leader, he'd fought it bitterly, saying he was not the kind of pilot who watched after unruly children. Ever since that day he couldn't help himself. He barked orders and handed out duties like a born officer.

“We're going to be polite, but firm,” he said. “I want—”

Zhang didn't get to hear what he wanted. Before he could finish his thought, his helmet flowed up around his face, cutting off his words.

Zhang's own helmet went up a second later. She looked over and saw Maggs looking confused behind clear flowglas—his helmet, too.

Lanoe scowled and punched the key on his collar ring that retracted the 'glas. He stared at the elder as if she'd tricked them into landing on some airless rock instead of a habitable planet.

It was Roan who explained, however.

“When we first settled Niraya,” the girl said, “there was barely a millibar of atmospheric pressure, and most of that was carbon dioxide. The first elders had to live in domes. We've been working hard ever since to give the planet an oxygen-rich atmosphere but it's still pretty thin. I think your suits are responding to that.”

Zhang realized how heavily she was breathing, sucking in big lungfuls of air just to get the oxygen she needed.

“It's better here in the crater,” Roan said. “We're a hundred meters below the surface datum. Up on top you need a respirator but down here—well, you'll get used to it, if you stay awhile.”

The elder started off at a brisk pace toward a low building in the distance. “It's good to be home,” she said.

No up, no down. Nothing in every direction.

The peace of it—that was what Valk had missed, these last seventeen years. Since the last time he'd sat in a fighter's cockpit.

The utter, perfect silence of the void. Once his engine cut out, he could sense only the slightest vibration trembling through his seat. No gravity to pull at his aching bones. No comms coming in, no red lights on his panels. He let the emptiness come inside his head, let the nothingness drive out all the bad memories, all the social anxieties. You couldn't even feel lonely, at least Valk couldn't, when the nearest human being was a hundred million kilometers away.

Some pilots cracked when faced with deep picket duty. With the long, slow hours when nothing at all happened, and they were left alone with their thoughts. Others worked themselves into a lather, trying to stay sharp, stay ready for a threat that might never come. Valk knew the trick, though. There was no time out there in the deep black, no proper way to measure it, anyway. If time stopped, everything else could, too.

Niraya had shrunk to a yellowish dot well behind him. Even the red dwarf looked like nothing more than a very bright star. There were other planets in the system but they were too far away for him to make out. A few comets and stray rocks ambled across the system on long, slow elliptical orbits but they didn't bother him.

Somewhere out there was the enemy fleet, days away still. He was out here to make sure they hadn't sent any scouts racing ahead. He had a secondary mission, which was to map the system and inventory all the places that would make for good cover, places to make forced landings, places that would serve as hunting blinds. That didn't take much of his attention, though.

The BR.9 had a little hatch recessed into its belly. He touched a control and it slid open, revealing a compartment full of microdrones. Tiny satellites, in practical terms—twenty of them, about the size of a human thumb. Each microdrone carried a camera eye and a radio transceiver and a low-energy ion thruster. Valk touched another control and they shot out of their compartment, each headed in a different direction. They would take up wide orbits around the red dwarf, spreading out to create a scattered array of eyes that would miss nothing. The cameras they carried weren't a match even for Niraya's outdated space telescope, but working in concert there wasn't a part of the system they couldn't observe in minute detail. When the enemy fleet arrived, the microdrones would provide Lanoe and his pilots with real-time imagery and telemetry data. Hopefully with that kind of intelligence they could avoid any nasty surprises.

The drones moved fast getting away from the fighter. Valk saw a flash as one of them caught a stray beam of light, and then nothing. He checked to make sure they were broadcasting on the right frequency, and that was it. The end of his secondary mission.

Back to his primary role. He touched his engine controls and the fighter thrummed to life. He programmed a ten-second burn that would take him on a long arc across the orbit of a gas giant planet, out farther into the dark far corners of the system, then slowly circle back toward Niraya. It would take him more than a day to get back, assuming he didn't find anything. If there were enemy scouts in the system already, he might get to stay out longer.

The burn hurt. His inertial sink protected him from most of the acceleration, but it was designed for normal human tolerances. Since his accident, any kind of sudden motion gave Valk new pains to endure. But that was all right. He blinked the white pearl away from his vision and let the hurt flow through him.

In his Zen state, he could imagine that the pain was just light, greenish-white light that flowed up through his legs and out through his spine. He was at one with the void, at one with the universe. There was nothing out there. There was nothing inside himself.

Pilot distress detected,
a synthetic voice whispered in his ear
. Would you like to adjust inertial sink settings?

He opened his eyes. He hadn't realized they were closed.

A new panel had appeared before him, one with a bewildering number of options for customizing the BR.9's various systems.

Back during the Establishment Crisis, he had flown crates that were welded together from spare parts, obsolete fighters with secondhand engines jammed in where they didn't belong. Piles of junk that could just barely keep a human being alive long enough to fire a gun or two.

This fighter, though, this BR.9 that Lanoe had given him—it was brand-new. Straight out of a factory yard, with all the bells and whistles the Navy, backed by poly money, could think up.

He could adjust the inertial sink so it would keep him from hurting himself every time he triggered a burn. The idea that you could do that had never occurred to him. You could adjust the lumbar support of the pilot's seat. You could change how your displays popped up, change the tones your alarms used—you could change everything.

He spent a good hour just paging through the options. And then he found the entertainment settings and his jaw dropped.

Music from a dozen worlds—videos from the studios on Mars and Patala—hundreds of games and applications for learning new languages or brushing up on your math or your Navy regs.

Valk laughed out loud.

Back in the Crisis his patched-together FA.6 never had a damned
entertainment system
.

Enough with this Zen nonsense—if he was going to be stuck out in the dark for twenty-four hours, how about a little music? He punched in some Martian Ska and a horn section blasted its way through his ears and soon he was singing along at the top of his lungs.

“My baby's got a brand-new dress! My baby's hair's all in a mess!”

Even the microdrones were too far away to notice how badly out of key he sang, and that was just the way Valk liked it.

The crater wall rose all around them like a mountain range that stood over the town in every direction. As the little ground car zipped along the streets Zhang couldn't not see it—despite how much else there was to take in. She was in the back, on a seat that faced backward, her feet dangling above the semipaved road. Roan sat next to her, pointing out anything she thought Zhang might find interesting. “That bunch of pipes there is the top of our reservoir,” the girl would say. “We can't just dig wells—there's no aquifer here—so we recycle every drop. Oh, and over there is the school I went to when I was younger. My teachers were all elders—look, there, that's the Meeting Hall, that's where we come together to debate anything that affects the entire community.”

Zhang nodded and smiled but paid very little attention. She was more interested in the houses and side streets they drove past, the little scenes of life she caught as mere glimpses as they passed by. Children playing with a ball in a big, fenced-in yard, chickens running in crazy circles around their feet as they rushed back and forth. Old men drinking tea in a café with a dusty awning. Laundry hanging from lines between houses to catch the sun. The serious face of a dog staring at her from an open doorway.

Did people really still live like this? It was hard to imagine. Zhang had been in the Navy for so long she could barely remember her own childhood, back on Earth. Even back then, more than a hundred years ago, the streets had always been deserted, certainly no children out there where they could be hit by the traffic. Her young life had been contained inside the concrete tower blocks two, three hundred stories high.

There was only one building in Walden Crater more than two stories tall, and that was their destination. It didn't take long to reach.

“It's just called the Retreat,” Roan told her. “It's where the elder and I live and study.”

Zhang's first impression was of a pyramid, or a ziggurat, a pile of stone tapering as it rose to a narrow, flat top. Its surface wasn't smooth, however, but intricately, elaborately worked, with no sense of order or restraint. Rows of columns held up square blocks of foamcrete studded with perfectly square windows. Elaborate gargoyles perched on top of glass solaria. Rather tacky stringcourses ran along the tops of rooms fronted with elegantly minimal paper screens. Taken as a whole the building looked wild, like maybe it had grown that way naturally. If one was feeling generous. Zhang tried not to think of it as a jumbled mess.

“It was just a basic dome when the planet was settled,” Roan explained. “But each aspirant is expected to add something of their own to the structure. A new room, or just a statue, or maybe they fix the plumbing or update the electrical system. You work on your contribution the whole time you're studying and then when you become an elder you live inside something you built with your own hands.”

“You can just build whatever you like?” Zhang asked, as the ground car pulled up in front of a humble little doorway.

“It's important to make your own choices,” Roan said. “To express your true being. Maybe it helps you purge the chaos from your self, or maybe you find peace in the work. It's different for everybody, I guess.”

Well, that explained the combination of architectural styles, anyway. “Where's yours?” she asked.

Roan looked down at her hands where they lay folded in her lap. “It's not very good,” she said.

“I want to see.”

The ground car had stopped and the others were piling out, headed in a group toward the door. Roan jumped down and led Zhang around the side of the building to show her a point on the structure near the top. The wall there was simple concrete with a single tall, narrow window that didn't look quite straight.

“I'm still learning,” Roan said. “I have years yet to get it right.”

“It looks—sturdy,” Zhang said.

“You don't need to coddle me,” Roan said. “When people lie to preserve the feelings of others, they harm everyone involved. I know it's terrible.”

Before Zhang could say anything more, the girl led her back around the building to rejoin the others. Together they filed inside, through a long corridor that led straight to the heart of the Retreat, a massive room with a high, domed ceiling. Long structural members arced like a steel cobweb overhead, dividing the dome into hundreds of triangular panels.

The space beneath the dome was cold and drafty but some effort had been taken to make it cheery. A long banner—which Zhang couldn't read—hung across half of the big chamber, while underneath it a small stage had been erected. A couple hundred chairs had been set up before the stage, only a scattering of them filled with people, who turned to stare at the pilots as they came inside. To one end of the stage a band with acoustic instruments played a jaunty tune. One of them was seriously out of key, which made Zhang smile.