Forsaken Skies (42 page)

Derrow scrabbled to pull a minder out of her pocket. “I need to contact my people. Make sure they're okay,” she said.

Lanoe dismissed her with a nod. She stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

“There's a funny thing about crowds,” Lanoe told the elder. “You can't predict how they're going to act. Maybe they're just demonstrating peacefully today—give it twenty-four hours and you could have a mutiny on your hands. Lieutenant Maggs and I brought sidearms with us. We can get you out of here, one way or another.”

An old man who Lanoe had been told was Elder Ghent gasped at the thought. “You can't be considering firing on the crowd.”

“Just over their heads,” Lanoe said. “It'll make 'em disperse. Then we get you over to the ground control station. I had Zhang and Valk head over there to get Ehta and Thom—they'll be ready to fly as soon as we arrive. It'll be a squeeze, but we can get all of you elders on the tender and get you into orbit, where you'll be safe.”

Elder McRae sat down in her chair. “Unnecessary, as I said.”

Lanoe wanted to grab her by the arm and haul her to safety. He fought to keep his cool. Why couldn't Zhang be here? She'd know what to say. Or maybe Maggs might have some thoughts. He turned and looked at the pilot but Maggs just shrugged.

“You seem to think we're prisoners here,” Elder McRae said. “That we would have left already given the chance. You're incorrect. One of our four basic principles, our eternal truths, is self-reliance. That includes preparing for all contingencies.”

“What are you getting at?” Lanoe asked.

“There's a flare shelter at the bottom of the Retreat, under the dome. When we constructed it, we included an escape tunnel in case this building was damaged in a natural catastrophe. The tunnel runs out to a house in town—one whose owners probably don't even know what's in their basement. We could leave anytime we liked. We choose to stay.”

Lanoe looked at the other elders, standing in a semicircle by the windows. Their faces were just as impassive as Elder McRae's.

“This is our place,” Elder Ving said. “Now, especially. Someone must stand for order on Niraya. Our path is clear.”

Lanoe sighed. Damned zealots. Well, he'd tried to rescue them. If they wanted to die here that was their business.

He turned next toward Roan. “When I got back here, I had a message waiting for me, from Thom,” he told her.

At least she had the decency to react, a little. She tried to hide it but he could see by the sudden light in her eyes that she desperately wanted to know what the kid had said.

“He tells me this whole thing, this damned broadcast, was his idea. That he coerced you into helping him turn this planet upside down. He says he exploited your feelings for him and he hopes you won't be punished.”

“He…said that?” Roan asked. “He's just trying to protect me. If anything, it's the other way around. I coerced him.”

Lanoe nodded. About what he'd expected. “Elder McRae, are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

“I imagine so,” the old woman said. “They did this together.”

Roan's mouth opened but she was too disciplined to say anything.

Lanoe took a step toward her. “I could shoot you both for treason,” he said.

He expected her to break down in fear but she barely winced. Instead she stood up as tall as she could—still about six inches short of Lanoe's height—and set her mouth in a hard line. “I wasn't aware that Niraya was under military authority,” she said. “Then there's the fact you have no official jurisdiction here at all, since your mission isn't sanctioned by the Navy.”

Maggs laughed. “She's got you there,” he said.

Lanoe didn't bother glaring at his pilot. He was too busy trying to stare Roan down. “Sure,” he said, finally. “Okay. You do have me there, kid. Now—how about you use that powerful brain of yours and tell me what we're supposed to do next? Huh? How do we get that crowd to disperse so we can get back to the business of saving all your asses?”

“You don't,” Roan said.

Lanoe said nothing.
Give her some more rope,
he thought.
See if she ties a noose
.

“The people out there were confused and frightened and angry before. They knew they were in danger but they didn't understand what that meant—they had some rough idea they were being invaded, but no concept of what was going to happen. Well, now they're not confused anymore.”

“Which just left more room for the frightened and angry part,” Lanoe said.

Roan nodded. “Perfectly rational responses to what's happening, don't you think? They know they're going to die. All Thom and I did was to give them a chance to make their own choice about how they're going to spend their last days.”

Lanoe stepped back. Then he looked around at the elders. “That's how it is, huh?” he asked.

None of them dared reply.

He nodded at them. “You think we're going to lose. You think you're doomed, so none of this matters.” He rested one hand on Elder McRae's desk. Suddenly he was leaning on it. He forced himself to stand up straight. “Well, just maybe we're going to prove you wrong.”

“Perhaps,” Elder McRae said. “Anything is possible.”

There was more talking. Such was the nature of human existence—a thing could not happen but it would be endlessly discussed. Even when there was so little to say.

Elder McRae listened patiently as the Commander told her of the desperate fight out past the moon Aruna. She heard his report on swarmships and drone fighters and how M. Valk had saved them. Of what a terrible and alien thing they had fought.

It did little to improve her estimate of the pilots' chances.

When Commander Lanoe ran out of words, he started asking for suggestions. It almost seemed like he expected her to give him orders. She found she couldn't fulfill that need, so she simply asked him to do his best.

When she had first met him, at the Hexus, she had possessed a fragile kind of hope, a sort of half belief simply because he seemed so competent, so knowledgeable in the ways of war. There had seemed, then, to be plenty of time—and anyway, it might have turned out that the enemy fleet wanted something they could part with, some tribute or ransom that they would gladly have paid.

It was clear now, in these last days, that all such hopes had been pointless. That there had never been a chance.

Eventually he left her office—storming off to consult with Lieutenant Maggs and the engineer, Derrow. The other elders went with him. Roan had slipped away at some point, presumably to return to her own room, where she could contemplate what she'd done.

Quiet and a false peace filled her office and for a while she simply sat at her desk, her minder rolled up securely so she didn't even have to see the crowd outside. She sat and tried to breathe and tried, simply, to be. She meditated on the Four Eternals, worked through the catechisms of self-reliance and self-understanding. Attempted to clear her mind of all nonessential thoughts.

It proved difficult.

Impossible, actually. She couldn't concentrate, couldn't focus with so many clouded and angry people all around her, even if she couldn't see them directly. She needed to escape her office, the place where she considered worldly business all day long. She rose from her chair and went out into the hall, then passed down a side corridor until she was deep within the mass of the Retreat, until she could feel its bulk around her, sheltering her. A windowless meditation room lay there at the heart of the building and she stepped inside, closing the door silently behind her. The room was kept dim and some aspirant, keeping to their duties despite what was going on, had lit incense to fill the room with its calming scent.

It was only after she sat down on a woven mat, crossing her old and aching legs underneath her, that she realized she was not alone in the little room.

Elder Ghent sat against the far wall, his eyes closed. Ghent was the oldest and most infirm of her fellow elders and she thought perhaps he had fallen asleep. She tried to focus on herself, on her own being, pretending he wasn't there.

Then he spoke, and she nearly jumped in surprise.

“How did we come to this?” he asked, in a very soft voice.

“What do you mean?” she asked him.

He was silent for some time, perhaps collecting words. In the quiet room they seemed out of place. Yet when he spoke again he did not falter.

“Those who built the Retreat, those who settled Niraya, came here to get away from worldly things. To escape the temptations and empty stimulations of the wider universe. They came here to study and to practice their disciplines, and only that.”

“It seems that one can keep the universe at bay only for so long,” she replied.

He did not move. He did not nod or even open his eyes. Yet she could tell he was lucid and quite present. “It didn't take an invading fleet to make that plain,” he said.

Ghent was a teacher. He was in charge of leading the aspirants in their studies and helping them find their way. Years of that task had given him a roundabout way of speaking—a Socratic method of asking questions instead of simply giving answers. She wished he would just get to the point.

“We,” he said, “never meant to rule. To govern. Did we? And yet here we are. Choosing a path for others, not just for ourselves.”

“You mean the people outside,” she said. She permitted herself the tiniest, least audible of sighs. “We never asked to lead them. They simply followed.”

“As humans will. And we acted—as leaders will. We held information back from them. Hoarded secrets.”

“We agreed, all of us, to withhold the video,” Elder McRae insisted.

“I do not claim to be innocent in this. I thought, as you did, that it was the right thing to do. There is no point in pondering what might have been different. Yet I wonder now—what is the way forward? They know they will die. Now they know how it will happen. What is our responsibility to them in their final days? Do we try to teach them acceptance? Give them peace?”

“I doubt they're in the mood to listen to sermons now,” she said.

“Is there time to teach them by example? I think not.”

She closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of the incense. “I came here today—to this room, I mean—to escape such thoughts.”

“That's too bad,” he told her. “I don't think you can.”

Her eyes snapped open. She felt anger rise up inside her like a snake lifting from its coils. That was not an appropriate way for one elder to speak to another.

Which, of course, was the point.

“Whether you asked for this responsibility or not—it is yours,” he told her. “I will support you as I can. So will the others, I'm certain. You must choose for all of us, however. Please choose well.”

She rose from her mat, wanting to storm out of there. To tell him exactly what she thought of his elliptical demand. Instead she collected herself and bowed in his direction. “Thank you for your counsel,” she told him.

Then she opened the door and stepped out of the dim room, back into the hall.

It seemed there was nowhere left for her to go.

“I refuse to give up,” Lanoe said. “I refuse to just accept defeat. Even if every damned religious nut on this planet thinks we're doomed.”

“An admirable position,” Maggs replied. The smarmy little bastard had a smile on his face. Lanoe supposed that was the upside of not being in charge. You didn't have to take the blame when things went wrong.

Lanoe brought a gloved fist down on a little wooden table, not quite hard enough to smash it to pieces. Even though he wanted to. Damn it all. If Zhang was there—

Funny how fast things could change. When he'd first seen Zhang in her new body he'd wanted nothing but to keep away from her. He'd felt so awkward just talking to her again. Now he desperately missed her. She, he knew, would never give up. Not when she could still fight.