Forsaken Skies (3 page)

Everything shook and strained and groaned. The wooden veneer on the console in front of Thom creaked and then split down the middle, a jagged fissure running across his instrument displays. So close now.

The carbon fiber hull of the yacht couldn't take this pressure or this heat. The ship's vector fields were the only thing keeping Thom alive. If they failed—or if he switched them off—it would be over before he even knew what had happened. The ship would collapse around him, crushing his flesh, his bones. His blood would boil and then vaporize. His eyes would—

A sudden loud pop behind him made Thom yelp in surprise and terror. Broken glass splattered across his viewports and yellow liquid dripped down the front of his helmet. Hellfire and ashes, was this how it happened? Was that cerebrospinal fluid? Was his head caving in?

No. No—the fizzy liquid running across his vision was champagne.

Behind the pilot's seat was a tiny cargo cabinet. There had been a bottle of champagne back there, put there by the old man's servants for when Thom won his next race. Wine made from grapes actually grown in the soil of Earth. That bottle had been almost as expensive as the yacht itself.

The bottle had been under pressure already—the added strain of Geryon's crushing grip had been too much for it.

An uncontrollable laugh ripped its way up through Thom's throat. He shook and bent over his controls and tears pooled in his eyes until his suit carefully wicked them away. He had been scared by a champagne bottle going off. That hadn't happened since he was a child.

Scared.

Fear—now that was funny. He hadn't expected to be afraid at this point. Thom was no coward. But now his heart raced—he could feel adrenaline throbbing through his veins.

He hadn't expected to be scared.

He looked out through his viewports at the dark haze ahead, at the center of the planet, and it was so huge. So big beyond anything he could comprehend.

Suddenly he couldn't breathe.

“Lanoe?” the kid said. “Lanoe, I think I made a mistake.”

Lanoe clamped his eyes shut. There was nothing to see, anyway, except the tail of the yacht. “Yeah? You're just getting that now?”

“I'm sorry I dragged you into this,” Thom said. The transmission was full of noise, words compressed down until the kid's voice sounded like a machine talking. “Something's gone wrong. Lanoe—I thought I could do this. But now—”

“That's your survival instinct kicking in. Self-preservation, right? Don't fight that urge, Thom. It's there for a reason.”

“I think maybe it's too late. Oh, hellfire.”

Lanoe shook his head. The kid had some guts to have gotten this far, but what a damned idiot he was. “Pull up. Come on, Thom, just pull up and get out of here.”

“I can't see anything—I don't even know which way is up!”

“The Hexus. Look for the Hexus. Its beacons should be all over your nav display—latch on to them. Pull up, Thom. Come on! Don't go any lower.”

“I'm trying….My controls are so sluggish. Lanoe…I.”

The green pearl kept rotating, numbers streaming across its surface. The connection hadn't been cut off. The kid had just stopped talking.

“Damn,” Lanoe said. He started easing back on his control stick. Fed fuel to all of his retros and positioning rockets, intending to swing around and punch for escape velocity.

But then the kid spoke again.

“I don't want to die,” Thom said.

Lanoe saw the yacht ahead of him. Its nose had come around, a little. The kid was doing his best. All of his jets were firing in quick stuttering bursts as he tried to check his downward velocity. If he could get his tail pointed down he could fire his main thruster and head back toward space.

But the nose was swinging around way too slow.

Lanoe saw why right away—it was that broken airfoil, the one he'd smashed against a cargo container. Airfoils were deadweight in space but in an atmosphere like this they were vital, and Thom was running one short. That was going to kill him.

No. Lanoe wouldn't accept that.

“Listen,” he said. “You can do this. Take it easy, don't waste any burns.”

“I'm trying,” the kid told him.

“Get your nose up, that's the main thing.”

“I know what to do!”

“I'm going to tell you anyway. Get your nose up. Come on, kid!”

The yacht had fallen so far down Lanoe could barely see it. How much longer would the kid's fields hold out? They must be eating up all his power, just to keep the yacht from being crushed. That extra energy could make a real difference.

“Thom—transfer some power from your vector field to your thrusters.”

“I'll be splattered,” the kid pointed out.

He was probably right. But if he didn't get his nose up, he was going to die anyway.

“Do it!” Lanoe shouted. “Transfer five percent—”

One whole side of the yacht caved in. Lanoe felt sick as he watched the carbon fiber hull crumple and distort.

But in the same moment the yacht swung around all at once and got its nose pointed straight up. Its main thruster engaged in a burst of fire and it shot past Lanoe's fighter, moving damned fast.

Lanoe's own fields were complaining. He was used to the fighter's alarms, its chimes and whistles and screaming Klaxons. He ignored them all. He sent the FA.2 into a tight spin until his own nose was pointing up, then punched for full burn.

Ahead of him the wall of buzzing red neon came and went. The clouds of soot and dark blue methane. For a split second he saw blue sky overhead, pure, thin air, and then it turned black and the stars came out.

Ahead of him the yacht burned straight out into the night, standing on its tail.

In the distance, past the kid's nose, Lanoe could see the Hexus. If they could just make it there maybe this chase could end. Maybe they could both come out of this okay.

“Thom,” he called. “Thom, come in.”

There was no green pearl in the corner of his vision. Lanoe came up alongside the yacht and saw just how much of it had collapsed. The whole forward compartment had imploded, all of the viewports shattered down to empty frames.

“Oh, hellfire, Thom,” Lanoe whispered. “I'm sorry. I'm so damned sorry.”

A
s usual, Valk had been left to clean up the mess.

And this was a big one.

Already the synthetic voices were burbling away with demands and threats. Centrocor owned both the freight hauler he had nobbled and the Hexus itself, and he had damaged both of them. Centrocor was a poly—one of the big transplanetary commercial monopolies that owned, de facto, this entire sector and all twenty-three of its worlds. They had much more pressing concerns than asking if there had been any casualties. The fact that Valk had saved some lives here was far less important than those barrels he sent spilling out into the void.

Most likely he would come out of this with a bunch of lawsuits on his record. More important, he would probably get fired, too. Without a job—well, he didn't know what he would do then. The job was all he had.

So he sent a drone swarm out to recover the cargo containers and as many of the barrels and boxes and broken crates as they could chase down. He sent a quick message to the maintenance staff asking them to make sure the Hexus hadn't been damaged irreparably by flying debris. Then he switched traffic control over to the autonomics and logged out for the day.

He had a mystery to solve. To wit: What the hell were people doing onboard a cargo ship?

The noise was the worst of it. The cargo container vibrated like a struck bell, and every so often they would feel the pull of acceleration and be squashed up against one barely padded wall, sometimes hard enough that red spots would burst behind Roan's eyes. But the noise was worse. Booming, mechanical noises that resonated inside the container and made her teeth hurt.

She had a vague idea of what was going on. The container had come loose from the freighter somehow and they'd gone tumbling off into space. She'd thought they were lost forever until the noise started. That had to be a drone or something grabbing the container in mechanical arms. Dragging it back to safety, she hoped.

Very, very slowly. It had been more than an hour already and she had no idea how much longer it might take.

The two of them, Roan and her teacher, Elder McRae, were low on breathable air—they'd barely budgeted enough on life support to make the twelve-day trip—and the container had started to stink the first time they'd had to use the chemical toilet. There had been nothing to do during the slow journey to Geryon. They had exactly what they needed to survive and nothing more. The only illumination inside the container came from a single display foam-sealed to one wall, a flickering plane of light no wider than Roan's two hands laid side by side. It showed nothing now but the hexagonal Centrocor logo, slowly rotating as it tried to reestablish communication with the freighter's computer brain. And failing.

“How much longer?” she asked, just to hear her own voice.

“Patience is not one of the four eternals,” Elder McRae replied. “Perhaps it should be.”

The elder had her eyes closed. Her lined brown face barely stirred as she took one shallow breath after another. Roan envied her composure, her discipline. For years Roan had studied to come close to the kind of inner peace she saw in the elder. The woman had been like a second mother to Roan, and a great teacher.

Right at that moment Roan hated the elder's stupid face.

Which of course immediately made her feel deep shame and regret. She was forgetting her disciplines, forgetting all she'd learned—

The container lurched sideways so suddenly it was all Roan could do to grab one of the nylon loops attached to the wall, to keep herself from being thrown about like a pebble in an empty can. The elder, of course, had already strapped herself down.

The movement was followed by a new suite of noises, each louder and more ear-piercing than the last. A nasty thud rocked the container and Roan felt that they had stopped moving. Maybe they'd finally reached their destination, she thought.

Then the whole container began to spin around them, and Roan felt all the blood rush out of her head. She was certain she was going to be sick.

The Hexus had six long arms, each of which rotated on its long axis to generate artificial gravity. Valk's traffic control station was in one of the vertices between the arms, a place where he could just float and not have to use his legs.

Going into one of the arms—going into any place with gravity—meant agony. But the only safe way to pop open the cargo container and extract its stowaways was to bring it inside, into heat and air. If Valk wanted to see what was inside that container, he had no choice.

He had the drones bring the container into one of the giant spin locks, a huge drum at the end of Vairside, one of the six arms of the Hexus. He floated in beside it as jets flooded the drum with air. The walls started to rotate and then, almost gently, Valk and the container settled down to its floor. It took three minutes for the lock to match the rotation of Vairside, during which time Valk felt himself grow heavier and heavier.

The second his feet touched the floor, it began. Cramps in what were left of his feet, first. A throbbing in his thigh muscles. He became far too aware of the shapes of the bones inside his legs, felt his kneecaps grind back into place.

His suit knew what to do. It massaged his calves with custom-made rollers. Heating elements in his boots activated and warmed his aching flesh. A white pearl appeared in the corner of his left eye, offering painkilling medication.

He blinked it away.

The hospital had given him his special suit after his accident, seventeen years ago. He hadn't taken it off since. At least a dozen times a day that white pearl appeared before him, asking him if he wanted the drug. It was proven not to be habit-forming, they told him. There was no chance of chemical addiction. It wouldn't impair his ability to work.

Valk knew if he started saying yes to the white pearl he wouldn't stop. Why, when the pain would always be there? Blinking away the white pearl had become a reflex after a few years. Now it was a tiny victory every time he did it. Tiny victories being the most he let himself hope for, these days.

He gritted his teeth and waited for the pain to suffuse him. To become just part of who he was. Over the years he'd grown so familiar with it that he could, if not ignore it, at least grunt his way through it.

Eventually the spin lock reached the correct angular momentum and the big doors opened. Drones picked up the cargo container, their segmented arms straining under its new weight, and carried it into the broad, open entrance vestibule of the Vairside arm. Other drones waited their turn, big construction models that could cut the container open without damaging anything inside.

Centrocor wasn't taking any chances. If the people inside died on Hexus property the poly could, conceivably, be sued for wrongful death. It would never happen, of course. Centrocor had more lawyers than the Navy had pilots. But Valk supposed you didn't get to be a Multiplanetary Development Monopoly by taking risks.

As the drones moved in to dismantle one of the short ends of the container, Valk walked over to stand where he could get a good look inside. Steel dissolved to bubbling foam as the dismantlers did their work and then a drone with a floodlight came up to illuminate the interior.

There wasn't much to see. The interior walls of the container had been lined with soft plastic, studded with the nylon hand loops you saw everywhere in microgravity environments. There were a few pieces of life support and sanitary equipment but the cavernous interior was otherwise completely bare.

Then the stowaways came forward. An old woman and a teenage girl, both dressed in colorless but clean tunics and leggings.

Instantly a hundred Centrocor drones came swooping down on them, all talking at once.

A fist-sized plastic drone drifted into Roan's face with a whir of ducted propellers. Manipulator arms and sensors on flexible stalks dangled from its underside. It spoke to her in a voice that wasn't human at all.

Welcome to the Centrocor Hexus.

Another one bobbed up beside her, and another until a cloud of them had gathered around her head, all speaking at once.

Please do not move while the scan is in progress.

You have certain rights, some of which you may have already waived.

How can we help you explore Vairside?

Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law.

State your language preference so we can proceed.

Please fill out these forms, which are vital for public health and safety.

You may be under arrest. Authorities will be with you presently.

Please speak or enter your Centrocor Rewards Club number now.

She winced backward, overwhelmed. She bumped into Elder McRae, who put a steadying hand on her arm, but the teacher looked just as confused and frightened.

Then a giant in a heavy space suit loomed through the cloud, batting at the drones with his hands. One by one they moved back, away from the big man. He had to be two and a half meters tall—taller than anyone Roan had ever met. His suit gave bulk to his already wide shoulders. His helmet was up and polarized to a glossy black. She expected him to lower the helmet, to show his face, but he didn't.

“You just have to show them you mean business,” he said, shoving one last drone up against the wall. It protested in a high whine for a moment, then fell silent. “Sorry about that,” he said.

“Who are you?” Roan asked.

“Tannis Valk. I'm in charge of traffic here. I've got some questions for you.” He leaned farther into the cargo container. “Are you serious?” he asked.

“Serious about what?” she asked. Roan didn't like this, not at all. Why wouldn't the man show them his face? “Are we under quarantine or something?”

“Hmm, what?” Valk asked. “No. Serious—I mean, where are you two from?”

It was all too much. Roan wanted to shrink back into the container, to get away from this strange man and the swarm of drones.

“Why can't we see your face?” she asked.

“I had an accident awhile back,” Valk replied. “Trust me, you don't want to see what's under here. Listen, I need some answers. How long have you two been in here?”

“Twelve days,” Roan said. The elder squeezed her arm again, but she ignored it. “We're from Niraya.”

“You came all that way in
this
?” Valk asked. “In a cargo box? It's a miracle you made it. That freight hauler you were attached to didn't even have a human pilot. It barely knew you were alive in here. Which I'm guessing was the point, huh? You knew it was illegal to travel like this.”

“When you don't have any money,” Roan said, “you have to—”

The elder's hand grabbed her arm again. This time she pinched hard enough to make Roan fall silent.

“M. Valk,” the elder said, stepping forward, “are we under arrest?”

The giant shrugged. The hard shoulder plates of his suit lifted and fell, anyway. It looked like an exaggerated shrug, like the gesture of a cartoon character. “That's kind of an open question. Technically you broke the law, stowing away like this. But Centrocor's interest is in limiting its liability, so maybe they don't want to start a docket on you two. If you could just tell me why you came here, and what you—”