Forsaken Skies (29 page)

He had a feeling it was about to become a very hazardous environment.

The pipes he could see were only the top and smallest part of very, very long shafts sunk into Aruna's fiery innards. They pumped magma up toward the surface and used the heat of the molten rock to generate power. The magma lost ninety percent of its heat when it reached the top of that column, turning almost solid. That cooler rock slurry was pumped back down toward the core, where it could be heated again and brought back up in an endless loop.

All of which simply meant that the enemy had been foolish enough to put a bunch of pipes full of red-hot pressurized magma right in the middle of their mining facility. It didn't take much for Lanoe's bombs to crack those pipes wide open so they spurted endless gouts of lava all over the complex.

The spidery drones down in the pit didn't have heads, much less eyes to look up and watch as the lava came showering down on them. Some of them managed to scuttle out of the pit before they were swept away. But not many.

Meanwhile, all over the complex, the power supply just suddenly…disappeared. Lights went out. Conveyor systems stopped moving.

In the base of each of the plasma towers, magnetic fields collapsed, magnetic fields that had been holding in enormous quantities of high-temperature ionized gas.

Almost in the same instant, every single tower in the facility turned into a Roman candle, explosions blasting apart their girders, sending the twined arms of their crowns pinwheeling away across the moon's skin. Debris blasted across the crater like an endless hail of bullets, smashing equipment, blasting drones to pieces.

And at the center of the complex the lava kept bursting from the broken pipes. It filled up the central pit until it was a cauldron of orange glowing soup, then spilled out over the rim and filled the innermost terrace as well, the biggest volcanic eruption Aruna had ever seen.

High above, Lanoe and Zhang burned for orbit, so they could watch it all happen without getting incinerated themselves.

T
he elder had asked Roan to look in on M. Ehta and see how she was getting along setting up a ground control base. So she checked a ground car out of the Retreat's motor pool and headed out to the edge of Walden Crater, to where an impossibly long staircase doubled back and forth up to the very lip. By the time she reached the top she was panting for breath, even though she'd been born on Niraya and was used to its thin air. She leaned against a steel railing until the black spots stopped swimming in front of her eyes, then walked around a squat concrete building to where a field of huge radar dishes sat rusting in the sun. M. Ehta was down among them, unreeling a spool of cable. “Half of these aren't even hooked up,” she said, when she saw Roan approach. “It took me a while to figure that out. I spent most of my morning clearing rats out of the main building.”

Roan shrugged in apology. “This place used to keep us in touch with the farms out in the canyons,” she said.

“Used to? You lost interest in what they had to say?” M. Ehta asked. “I suppose herders aren't known for their sparkling conversation.”

Roan looked away. “Those were the stations where the people were murdered by the killer drone. Most of them. The rest were abandoned after we sacrificed our fusion plant to stop the massacre.”

M. Ehta at least had the decency to drop her eyes. “I didn't know,” she said. “Here. Hand me that cable crimper.”

Roan looked and found the tool lying on a cloth a few meters away. For a while she helped M. Ehta hook up the maze of cables linking the dishes together. It took some mental effort to keep the snarled network straight in her head, but physically it wasn't too demanding. When it was done they headed back to the control building, a concrete box full of spiderwebs and machinery so old and dusty it looked antiquated even to Roan's untrained eye. M. Ehta plugged a minder into the main console and through a broad window they watched the dishes turn on rusty pivots, creaking and groaning until they all pointed straight upward.

“There,” M. Ehta said. “Now I can talk to anybody in the system.” She called up a series of displays from her minder, none of which showed any data Roan could understand. “See what's going on.”

“You're going to coordinate the defense?” Roan asked.

M. Ehta snorted. “Hardly. That's Lanoe's job. I just keep an eye on the skies, you know? Watch out for trouble, let them know if I see anything coming in. For all the good it does anybody.”

Roan was confused. “You make it sound like that isn't important.”

“Let's say I actually spot an incoming wing of landers, right? Except they're out at the edge of the system. Light and radio waves can only travel so fast. It takes twenty minutes for that information to get to me. I forward on the sighting, and Lanoe gets to hear about it twenty minutes after that. I've never heard of a dogfight that lasted forty minutes. In the time it took me to ping him and warn him of trouble, he'd already be dead.” M. Ehta pulled her gloves off and threw them down on a console in disgust. “This isn't a real job, kid. This is exile, for the pilot who can't fly.”

Roan could sense the woman's frustration and anguish. Roan had been trained in disciplines of compassion and forgiveness, and her immediate reaction was to reach out, to comfort. But when she opened her mouth, something else entirely came out, unbidden.

“Why did you come here?” she asked. At least her tone of voice made it sound more like curiosity than anger.

M. Ehta just turned a tired-looking eye at her and said nothing.

“Why did you tell M. Lanoe you could fight? You must have known—suspected, at least—what would happen when you tried to fly again. You must have known! But still you came here. You've endangered us all.”

“That's how you figure it?”

Roan shook her head. Better to just let this go. She couldn't help herself, though. “If you'd told M. Lanoe back at the Hexus, he could have found somebody else, some other pilot to take your place, someone who could fight.”

M. Ehta nodded slowly. Then she leaned back in her chair until its springs squealed and it slipped an inch across the floor. She put her hands to her eyes and rubbed hard at their sockets. “Let me tell you something about Lanoe,” she said, finally. “You have this idea he's some kind of demigod. That he's going to save your planet with one arm tied behind his back. And yeah, in his day—he was red hot. The best pilot who ever lived. But people get old, kid. People lose their touch.”

“What are you talking about?” Roan demanded.

“I lost my nerve, sure, that makes me some kind of freak to you. He lost—something else. They still tell stories about him but every story ends the same way. ‘I wonder what happened to him?' ‘Why did he stop fighting?' His squadron doesn't exist anymore. His rank's straight-up vestigial at this point—I doubt if he went to the Admiralty anyone would even stand to attention for him these days, even if they recognized him. Long before you met him, his star was already falling.”

“He's a good man. He helped us when nobody else would.”

M. Ehta nodded. “Sure. But when he put out the call for other pilots to come, the only people who would even consider it were the ones who owed him bad, or had no choice. If I didn't come, nobody would have taken my place.”

“You don't care. You don't care about Niraya. Or us. The people who live here.”

M. Ehta just shrugged. “Not my job to care. I just follow orders.”

Roan shook her head and got up to leave. “If we're done here, I have some other duties to see to.”

The pilot just waved her away.

She headed back down the endless staircase, gasping for breath all the way. It wasn't lack of oxygen that had her in such distress, though. It took all of her training to regain her composure so she could drive.

She had one more errand to do. Elder McRae had tasked her with helping all of the offworlders, as requested. It wasn't a difficult assignment, since most of them seemed happier flying around in space than spending time on the planet they were supposed to defend. At least one of them actually seemed to care about the people of Niraya.

Not that he was much use. She pulled up in front of the Retreat and found Thom waiting for her, a tentative smile on his face. “Thanks for driving me around,” he said, once he was in the car and had his safety belts on.

“I live in service to my faith and my people,” she said. She knew it sounded almost sarcastic, but it was a mantra that had gotten her through plenty of unpleasant duties before.

Thom might have been forgiven if he'd chosen to just give up on his role as goodwill ambassador, after the disaster at the animal feed factory. He'd left there having convinced half of the staff that the Navy was carrying out biowarfare experiments on Niraya. Roan had not expected him to ask for her help again—but here he was. Maybe he thought he could turn things around. Maybe he thought that if he actually convinced some people the Navy was on their side Lanoe would respect him. Or at least notice.

It was a fool's errand, but Roan had to admit it was nice being around somebody who actually thought the pilots had a chance.

In spite of his poor showing at the factory, or perhaps in hope of repairing some of the damage, the Retreat had organized a public meeting so Thom could address people directly. Not at the Retreat itself, of course—the elders didn't want to be directly involved in Thom's mission. Instead the Christian Gnostics had agreed to let him speak from the pulpit of their church. After the Transcendentalists and the Church of the Ancient Word they were the third largest of Niraya's communities of faith, representing thousands of people. No one really expected much of a turnout, but the chance to be heard seemed to galvanize Thom. Maybe a little too much.

“I'm worried I might be sick,” he said, as she drove him through town.

“I'm barely driving fifteen kilometers an hour,” Roan pointed out. They had to keep the speed down to avoid a herd of ostriches being driven through the central square. Dust and stray bits of down fouled her windshield and she triggered her wipers—the only use they had on a planet where it never actually rained.

“It's not motion sickness—I just. I've never really, you know. Spoken in public before. My father,” he said, then suddenly fell quiet. He was staring at her. She took her eyes off the road just long enough to glance over at him.

“What about your father?” she asked.

“He's…He was a politician. He used to talk to crowds all the time. I would stand up on a platform next to him and watch and smile, but that was it. I was always amazed at how he could just look out at a sea of faces and not be petrified wondering what they were all thinking.”

“Maybe it's genetic,” Roan pointed out. “Maybe you'll be a natural.”

“If I don't puke all over my podium,” he said.

Despite herself, she laughed. Which made him smile. It felt good to be able to help someone like that, she had to admit.

She pulled up in front of the church, one of the bigger structures in Walden Crater, and together they watched the entrance for a while in silence. The church was shaped like a giant seashell lying on its side, its spirally curling walls glistening like mother of pearl. Roan had no idea why they'd chosen that shape—there were no seas on Niraya, not so much as a lake, and she doubted most Nirayans even understood what the church was supposed to represent.

The opening of the shell, where whatever cyclopean sea-beast that once lived inside it would have poked its head out, was filled in with stained glass and a huge Gothic arch through which people were streaming inside.

Lots of people. When Elder McRae told her about this meeting, she'd assumed that maybe a dozen or two of the curious would show up. Judging by the line to get in, it looked more like hundreds. Word must have spread—the workers at the factory must have told everyone they knew about the Navy's arrival. Roan hadn't expected anyone to really care, since Nirayans tended to be uninterested in anything that happened outside Walden Crater. Clearly, she'd been wrong.

“We're supposed to use a back entrance,” she said, and started the car up again before Thom could be ill inside her vehicle. She drove around to the back, which was mercifully clear of people, and together they stepped in through a small gate. Inside a man wearing a tunic with a high collar was waiting for them. He had a long but perfectly groomed beard and wore a kind of flat hat with a tassel on one end. “Welcome,” he said, raising his hands up as if he were surrendering to them. “I'm Patrus Ogham. We're so glad you could come.”

Thom shook the man's hand and the three of them headed to a small space behind the pulpit. “Not much of a greenroom, sorry,” the Patrus told them. “This is where we don our vestments before going out to preach.”

The walls of the little room were covered in intricately carved wooden panels, stained black. Over their heads stone statues battled each other across the ceiling, some with beautiful human features, others twisted and deformed and demonic. For a Transcendentalist like Roan it was positively grotesque.

“Whenever you're ready,” the Patrus said, his eyes shining as he smiled at them.

“I can't go out there with you,” Roan told Thom. “I'm not here in any official capacity.”

He just nodded and stared at the door to the pulpit. From beyond they could both hear the hissing sound of many people in hushed conversation.

“Roan,” Thom said. “Roan, hold my hand.”

“What?”

He didn't look at her. He was staring at the door. “Just—just squeeze my hand, once. It'll help. Please.”

She reached down and took his hand in hers. It felt damp and weak, as if he could barely hold on to her fingers. She wrapped both her hands around his and gave it a good squeeze. It felt like the least she could do.

The effect on Thom surprised her. He seemed to stand up taller and his mouth set into a bright smile.

The Patrus cleared his throat.

Thom nodded, once, still not looking at her. Then he stepped through the door. Roan got just a quick look out at the audience and saw that the church was packed to capacity, people even standing in the aisles between the ranks of pews. All of them come to hear what Thom had to say.

There was a great roar of excitement, though no applause, and then the Patrus closed the door behind Thom and shut off her view.

By the time they reached the ice giant's moon, Valk was more than ready to set foot on solid ground again. As much as he hated gravity it would be better than spending more time in the tender with his two passengers.

He'd been alone up in the pilot's seat, while they'd stayed back in the wardroom for the six-hour flight. The bulkhead that separated the two compartments was thin enough, though, that he'd heard every word as Maggs tried to convince Derrow, the mining engineer, to join the zero-g club.