Forsaken Skies (34 page)

So he stayed quiet.

After all, there were others more than willing to speak.

“I've spent my whole life thinking we were alone in the universe,” Zhang said. “I don't know—”

“Just because we haven't met any aliens before doesn't mean there aren't any,” Valk pointed out. “We've settled less than a hundred planets, right? How many planets are there in the galaxy? Billions? We could easily have just missed finding them before a dozen times.”

“I get that,” Zhang replied. “Sure. It's a big galaxy. But if there are aliens, whole space-faring cultures of them out there—maybe we wouldn't have met them in person by now, but surely we would have heard something. Some radio signal, some video broadcast of a situation comedy starring a guy with four eyes and two heads. Some chatter between their ships…anything.”

“Maybe we just don't communicate the same way they do,” Valk pointed out. “Look at this bunch. We've been trying to contact them by radio ever since the first lander put down on Niraya, and nothing. Not a word from them. Maybe we've just been trying the wrong way—maybe they communicate by telepathy instead of talking. Or maybe they communicate with smells, or radioactivity, or—”

“Stop, both of you,” Proserpina said. “Just listen to me for a second. Let's say they are aliens. What does that mean?”

“It would mean we have no idea how to fight them,” Maggs put in. “And let's be honest, that's exactly what we've seen so far. Valk nearly got killed using the wrong ammunition against them. Lanoe and Zhang thought they were fighting antivehicle guns that turned out to be smelters. All of our training is in how to fight other humans.”

“We've done all right so far,” Lanoe said. “Valk took out that interceptor. We smashed this place just fine.”

Maggs shrugged. Best not to overplay his hand.

“You wanted me to build you some guns,” Proserpina said. “Rail guns. Auster—M. Maggs, I mean—showed me the schematics. Do you know if those will even work against alien ships?”

“No,” Lanoe admitted. “Though it seems likely. This bunch don't have the wheel, you said. They don't seem to have vector fields, either. You said their technology was all cheap and disposable. I'm guessing that doesn't line up with being immune to rail-gun shot.” He looked around at his pilots. “Aliens. Sure. We'll run with that thought for now, until it gets proved wrong. That just means we need to keep our eyes and our brains open. We need to learn some new tactics. M. Derrow, I want to hear your thinking about that.”

“Me?” Proserpina asked. “I don't know anything about fighting.”

“You've got a better idea than any of us what the enemy's made of,” Lanoe told her. “If there's a weakness there, something we can exploit…anything, I want to hear about it.”

She sat down for a while to think. The others kept silent, as if they didn't want to disturb her mental processes.

“Well,” she said, finally, “there's the fact that all we've seen is drones.”

“Go on,” Lanoe said.

“Like I said earlier. You can't just let drones do their own thinking. They're not smart enough to know when they've got something wrong. Say—just as an example—say you have a drone and its job is to clean a certain stretch of hallway. It's very good at it, it gets every little speck of dust, disinfects all the doorknobs, picks up any trash. But it's only as good as the person who programmed it. If that person made a mistake, or just left something out, the drone will eventually screw up. It'll clean the floor so hard it wears a hole through it. Or it'll pick up what it thinks is trash but is actually somebody's pet dog.”

Zhang, at least, laughed at the thought.

“Because, see, it doesn't know any better. The programmer didn't tell it that a dog isn't trash. Or that the purpose of a floor is to not have holes in it. So when the drone does something unexpected like that, the programmer has to come in and fix the program. Refine the instructions. The drones here on Aruna achieved something amazing, all on their own—they built a factory to make more drones. That's great programming. But if there was a zero somewhere in that programming that should have been a one, somebody conscious and self-aware will need to come fix it.”

“An alien,” Valk said. “One of the aliens needs to be close by to make sure the drones stay on-task.”

Proserpina nodded. “It makes sense to send drones in to do your fighting for you, I mean, we all know how that goes wrong, but from one perspective it makes a lot of sense. You don't have to endanger yourself. You don't have to feel guilty if some of your drones get destroyed. You'd need to be close by, though, just in case.”

“So what's your suggestion?”

She waved her hands in the air. “Look, I'm no fighter, I said that. But I think I understand that programmer, a little. I understand that they chose to send drones instead of doing their fighting themselves. So my suggestion is that you find the programmer. You find them and threaten them and I bet they would surrender on the spot. They're willing to throw away countless drones, but not themselves.”

Lanoe nodded. “Sure. And I bet I know where they are.”

“The carrier,” Zhang said. “That really big ship we saw in the space telescope imagery. That's why it hangs back, at the rear of the fleet. And why it's different from all the other ships.”

“That's where I'd want to be, if I was soft and squishy and all my troops were robots,” Valk said.

“A wonderful analysis, Proserpina. Of course,” Maggs said, “we'd have to find a way to get to that carrier. Through all the line ships and fighter escorts and whatnot. With just four of us.”

“I never said it would be easy,” Lanoe replied.

Roan signed out a ground car and drove them to the far edge of the town, to where a long ramp led up through a lava tube and through the wall of the crater. It was dark inside the tube, the car's lights illuminating the road ahead of them only a little ways. In the gloom she and Thom glanced at each other. Neither of them said anything.

They emerged into dazzling sunlight on a plateau just below the crater's rim. He could see for kilometers in every direction—he saw the labyrinth of twisty canyons that covered most of Niraya's surface, and realized he'd never been out there before, out where the air was too thin to breathe and people were few and far between. Strange to think that there was an entire planet beyond the little town. A whole world.

Roads headed off in various directions—to the mining concern in its other crater, kilometers away. Toward farms in distant, deep canyons. A narrow track, barely a path smoothed through the rock, led north, and it was this way Roan took.

The path headed down into canyons, walls of rock soaring up over them. It was all slickrock, solid stone carved by wind, except for the occasional tiny patch of dusty yellow plant life. Nothing stirred among the fallen scree of boulders and broken rocks—there were no animals out here at all.

Occasionally the walls of the canyon would come together in a dramatic arch that made the sun flicker as they sped by underneath. Roan pointed out her window once and he saw a place where the rock had weathered down to a cluster of hexagonal columns, shiny and smooth as glass, like the pipes of a church organ. Mostly Thom was only aware of the silence, of the incredible hushed feeling of Niraya, as if the entire planet were holding its breath. The ground car's engine made almost no sound at all, and the air was too thin for any more than a puff of wind. If Roan hadn't been sitting next to him, bouncing around in her seat as the big balloon tires took the rough terrain, Thom might have panicked, alone as he was in that desolate place. As it was he just felt like the two of them were the last two people in the universe.

The canyon floor started to rise through a series of long switchbacks. The walls on either side receded and they came up onto another flat stretch of land, a scratched-up plain of rock and sunlight. Roan drove another kilometer or so until Thom saw a long, low mesa climb over the horizon.

She switched off the engine and coasted to a stop. He couldn't see why she'd chosen this particular place to end their journey, but he didn't protest. She reached across him and opened a compartment in the dashboard. Taking out two respirator masks, she put one over her face, then showed him how to do the same. “We're walking from here,” she said.

The ground car's cabin had been pressurized. When they stepped down onto the naked rock, the air pressure was so low that Thom felt his skin tighten as his pores closed, a natural response to the lack of air. The respirator sprayed water across his nostrils so they wouldn't dry out and crack.

“Be careful where you step,” she told him. Then she set off at a quick pace, walking toward the mesa. Thom followed after her, watching her weave around a patch of ground that was slightly bluer than the rest. Ahead the rock was speckled with bright yellow and deep black.

Lichens. He understood the principles of terraforming, and he knew that lichens were used on planets that could just barely support multicellular life. They needed very little water to survive, and they gave off a surprising amount of oxygen. If you could grow enough of them on a planet like Niraya, they would eventually give you a breathable atmosphere.

The lichens came in a dozen different muted colors and a hundred different shapes, from simple black spots on the ground to feathery masses like green dust bunnies gathering in the cracks of the slickrock. Roan was very careful not to step on any of them—they must be very delicate.

Thom did his best to do the same. He watched his feet and tried to match her stride. His respirator hissed and snored against his face but very quietly and the only loud sound was the crunch of his boots on the dusty rock, the repetitive thuds of his clumsy footfalls. He fell into a careful sort of rhythm of walking and so it was jarring when Roan grasped his arm to make him stop.

The mesa had snuck up on them when he wasn't looking. Now it was right before them, a wall of stone thirty meters high that ran off in either direction for what seemed like forever. It presented a craggy face to the sun that hung motionless in the sky behind him.

Every square centimeter of that wall was covered in lichens. Huge, concentric rings of them, dozens of meters wide, black and purple and a frosty pale green. Where the rings touched they joined together in trefoils and looping curves, some of them forming broad patterns bigger than the ground car behind them, bigger than he could take in. They had a slightly furry texture that rippled in the tenuous breeze, until the whole wall shimmered and coruscated with trapped light.

It was…beautiful. So incredibly beautiful.

“I come here,” she said, “when I can't find peace anyplace else. I think about how this happened, about how long it took for the lichens to colonize this wall. Season after season of growing and then quieting down during the long nights, then growing again when the sun came back.” She sat down with her legs folded and he joined her, sitting close enough that their knees touched.

He nodded, his eyes never leaving the shimmering spectacle before him.

“What do you see?” Roan said, whispering, as if even a raised voice here could harm this precarious ecology.

“Raindrops,” he said. “Raindrops falling on the surface of a pond.”

A funny little smile crossed her face, never quite settling down. “It doesn't rain here,” she said. “I've never seen rain.”

A strand of her hair fell down across her nose and the top of her mask. He felt a very strong urge to reach over and brush it away, but he didn't. She left it there for a long minute, then reached up and moved it back into place herself.

“When I first met you,” she said, “I thought you were just some useless pretty boy from some decadent world. A social parasite.”

He laughed, though he knew she was serious. And not entirely incorrect. His life so far had been a privileged one. Compared to the lives people lived on Niraya, his had been an uninterrupted pageant of luxury.

“When Lanoe asked you to be his goodwill ambassador, I thought he was just making busywork for you. But you took the job seriously. When you spoke to the Gnostics, when you tried to do that video interview…I saw something new in you, Thom. I could see you really wanted to save Niraya, while everybody else—the pilots, the elders—they'd already given up. You hadn't even seen this,” she said, gesturing at the shimmering lichens. “You didn't know this place could be beautiful. You wanted to help anyway. Thom, you can't give up now.”

He looked down at his hands. “Everything I do goes wrong. I've managed to piss off everybody. Even Elder McRae.”

If she was shocked by his obscenity, she didn't show it.

“You know how this planet got settled,” she told him. “About the original elders, and how they wanted to choose a life for themselves. A spiritual life. That's a good story. It's an old one, though. There are a lot of people who didn't choose this place. They were born here, and had no place else to go.”