Forsaken Skies (31 page)

Sometimes that was hard to keep in mind. “You were told, specifically, not to mention it! Thom, what were you thinking?”

“I thought they had a right to know.”

“Even if it fills them with anger? Even if it leads to wrath?”

What he said surprised her. “They're scared,” he told her.

“They sounded pretty wrathful to me.”

He shook his head. “That's just a side effect of the fear. They're terrified of what's going to happen to their planet. Well, you can hardly blame them for that. But it's more than that. They're scared because they don't know. They don't know what's coming. They don't even know what we're doing about it—and I can't make them see it. I'm just not that good an orator. Hellfire, they don't even know what the enemy looks like, because they've never seen that video.”

“The elders are worried that if they see it, it'll start a panic,” Roan pointed out.

“Maybe,” Thom said. He shook his head. “Maybe it would. And maybe that's what they need. Right now they're just confused and scared and I didn't help with that. It looks like all I did was give them a chance to vent.”

“Maybe,” she said, “just maybe, you should let wiser heads make decisions like this. Let the people who know this planet and its people choose what information to release, and what to hold back.”

“Okay,” he said. “If you can tell me I did the wrong thing, and mean it.”

“Thom, that isn't what we believe. We hold to the four eternals, which include—”

“No. Don't give me dogma. Give me your real opinion. You think I did the wrong thing? I want to hear it. Not what your faith would say. Not what Elder McRae wants you to say. I want you, Roan, to tell me how you feel.”

“I can't—”

“Yes, you can.”

She'd intended to say that she couldn't extricate herself from the faith, because she belonged to something larger than herself. That she had duties that precluded her having a personal opinion in this matter.

Even in her own head, it sounded like an evasion.

“Tell me people don't have a right to know what's going to happen. Tell me that, and mean it, and I'll…I'll apologize.”

Roan rolled her eyes. “I think you should get out of my car,” she told him.

Which for some reason, some unguessable reason, made him smile. Then he said something that truly surprised her.

“Can you do me a favor?” he asked.

Now? He was going to ask her for something now? But of course the faith believed in service. She fought back the urge to sigh. “If I can,” she said.

“I want to set up another event like this.”

“Really?” she asked.

“I have to try again,” he said. “Please. See if the Retreat will let me talk to the—the Church of the Old Word?”

“Ancient. The Church of the Ancient Word,” she corrected.

He turned and flashed her a smile. In the dim cabin of the ground car, his eyes caught some light off the dashboard perhaps, and they flashed at her. She saw, perhaps, why Lanoe had chosen Thom to be his goodwill ambassador. The boy was very good looking, for one thing. For another he had a sort of easy charm, a charisma about him. You could sense it. If he'd chosen to go into politics, he probably would have done very well. Assuming he learned how to give a speech.

“I'll do what I can,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said. Then he fumbled getting his door open and jumped out of the car.

She watched him climb the stairs toward the ground control station. Once he was gone, she sighed a little to herself. Then she switched on the car and drove back to the Retreat.

The tender flew long, slow circles over the crater, the sensor pod on its side tilting this way, then that. Zhang had taken it up as soon as the others arrived, to scan the structures of the mining facility for any sign of motion. High above the clouds Lanoe's FA.2 hung in a stationary orbit, ready in case the enemy had any nasty surprises lurking up in space.

Down on the ground Valk kept his eyes open, watching out for any drones that might have survived the apocalypse in the strip mine. He had a heavy particle rifle swinging at his side, which made him feel a little better about the job he'd been given. He had to stop every so often and pour out the rainwater that filled the barrel, but he was pretty sure the weapon would still function.

“Over here,” Derrow said. Her voice quavered with anxiety but so far she'd been all right. She pointed at a structure that looked to Valk like a giant sponge, shapeless and riddled with holes. It stood maybe twenty meters high, and three times that wide. The three of them headed over, careful where they stepped. The ground here was webbed with cables and pipes, some so small you didn't see them until you tripped over them.

Up close the structure looked like it was made of lace. Around the big holes were countless smaller ones, and around those were tiny holes the size of pinpoints. Kind of like foamsteel, except the pattern wasn't random. Fractal, maybe. “You have any idea what this is?” Valk asked.

Derrow shrugged. “All that empty space probably makes the building really light. Cheap on material costs, too. It makes sense, but—I've never seen anything like it.”

Valk reached up and punched the side of the structure. It dented in without much effort at all. Dented, but didn't break.

“I'll remind you,” Maggs said, “Lanoe saw a half-dozen landers come squeezing out of a structure like this. What if one of them was still in there?”

“Then I probably just woke it up,” Valk told him. As soon as he'd said it, though, he felt bad. Teasing Maggs was one thing but he didn't need to scare Derrow. “Relax. Lanoe and Zhang already knocked out all the landers and worker drones.” At least, they claimed to have done so.

Valk stuck the rifle's snout inside one of the big holes. A lamp on the weapon's receiver lit up and swept across the opening but Valk could see nothing but shadows inside. “Let's take a look,” he said.

“By all means, you first,” Maggs said, with a laugh.

“We need to see,” Derrow said. It sounded to Valk like she was trying to convince herself. She looked to Valk and through her faceplate he could see her sweating. It was hot out here but he imagined her suit was compensating just fine.

Okay, then. He put a hand up on the edge of the hole and pulled himself up inside, wriggling around to get his bulk through the aperture. That hurt, a little, but not enough to make his suit offer him painkillers. The hole must have been designed to be just big enough for a lander to squeeze through, he decided. Well, the landers were just machines, and probably didn't worry too much about comfort.

After he'd pushed about a meter forward the hole opened up into empty space. It was pitch dark in there. He could hear a steady dripping, most likely from rain finding its way inside. He summoned a display on his wrist and held his arm up so the light would illuminate the interior.

Maybe he'd half-expected to find a lander towering over him, its legs raised to impale him on metal claws. In that he was disappointed. What he did see, though, was weird enough.

The interior of the structure was open and empty, a mostly spherical chamber more than fifty meters across. There was no distinction between walls, floor, or ceiling—the inner surface curved seamlessly all around him. That surface wasn't flat, but instead lined with ribs that converged at either end of the space. He felt like he was inside the hollowed-out rind of some colossal piece of fruit.

The endless pattern of holes made the thing feel rotten or maybe skeletal, and all that empty space was just eerie. Rainwater fell in a steady stream from the upper portion, only to leak out again through holes in the floor before it could collect.

He got the impression this was a place human beings were never supposed to go.

Derrow clambered up beside him and he reached out a hand to help her. Maggs brought up the rear and once he was inside he climbed a ways up one of the ribs, using the holes as fingerholds. Just showing off, Valk assumed, but then he saw what Maggs was after. The interior wasn't as featureless as he'd thought. Maggs had found a thing like a floppy segmented worm hanging from one of the smaller holes. He batted it back and forth, and luckily for him it didn't come to life and attack him. “What is this?” he asked.

Valk looked around and soon saw others just like it, dangling lifelessly from holes spaced evenly around the interior.

Derrow went over to one that she didn't have to climb to reach. She stared at it for a long time before answering. “A hotpoint, I think. The drones…live inside these things, right? This is a kind of barracks. That's our hypothesis? I think this is how they recharge themselves.” She dropped the wormy thing and ran her glove along the curving edge of one of the ribs. “Okay, I need to not think about dozens of those things crammed in here like sardines, writhing against each other. I need to think about something else, right now.”

“I have a suggestion,” Maggs said, with an unmistakable tone in his voice. Valk expected her to snarl at him and tell him now wasn't the time but instead she laughed.

“I'll bet you do,” she said.

“Yeah,” Valk told them both. “Come on, there's nothing else to see here.”

The three of them climbed out through one of the big holes, back into the storm. Valk was almost glad for the rain that lashed across his helmet, as if it were washing him clean.

Their next stop was a sort of pylon about two hundred meters away. They shuffled over toward it in the low gravity, careful not to launch themselves off the ground with anything like a confident step. The pylon was a lot less creepy than the barracks, or at least it looked more like something a human would build. It was triangular in cross section and rose about thirty meters off the crater floor. They craned their heads back to see its top, a bulbous sort of pod from which dangled dozens of short arms.

“Communications?” Maggs suggested.

Derrow shook her head and pointed at a column of thick pipes running up the pylon's side. “No. This is a cracking tower. I mean, it's not how I would build one, but…the process is pretty fundamental. We use something similar at the mines back on Niraya. It's for distilling heavy chemicals down to smaller compounds.”

Maggs looked over at Valk, who just shrugged. Their job wasn't to understand what she said, just to keep her safe while she looked at things.

There was no way inside the cracking tower, so they moved on. Ahead of them the crater floor gave way at a massive and abrupt cliff. Looking over the side Valk could see the next level down, about half a kilometer below him in the murk. There was no way to get down without jumping so they turned aside and headed toward a very large structure they could just see in the distance.

As they approached it took on an oblong shape, though not as round as the barracks they'd first explored. One whole side of it was open to the elements, which made Valk think it looked like a hangar or something. It was hard to tell from a distance but it was clearly gigantic in size, maybe half a kilometer long and half that wide.

The pipes and cables that crisscrossed the ground lifted into the air near the big structure and draped over it like the strands of a spiderweb. Close up he could see they wrapped around the structure like they were enclosing it in a cocoon.

Their was no sign of a door or hatch in its exterior walls so they walked around to the open side. Darkness filled the cavernous space within. Well, that made sense—Lanoe had cut all power to the crater's structures. Valk couldn't shake the thought, though, that even when this place was fully operational it would have done its work in darkness. Neither the killer landers nor the interceptor he'd fought had anything like eyes, after all, so why would they need lights?

As they stepped inside out of the rain Maggs took a Very pistol out of a pocket of his suit. He loaded two flares inside, then fired them up high, into the open space of the structure. They lit up as soon as they left the barrel, then deployed rotors at the top of their arcs so they could hover in the air. The reddish light they gave off filled the giant space with a slowly coruscating glow, almost as bright as daylight back on Niraya.

What they illuminated looked to Valk like a hundred thousand braids of hair hanging down from the ceiling, long and ropy, some coiling on the floor, some hanging free. He hadn't the slightest clue what he was looking at, though something about the braids seemed familiar.

Together the three of them moved through the forest of hair, careful not to touch any of the hanging plaits. Valk quickly realized they were bundles of metal wire, not actual hair, but he still didn't want to get anywhere near them.

Deeper inside the hangarlike space were machines, some of which Derrow could identify as wire swages—devices for taking thick wire and making it thinner. Other machines just made her shake her head. At the very center of the giant structure several massive shapes hung in the shadows. Maggs sent a command to his flares, moving them forward to light up more of the space.