Forsaken Skies (55 page)

“It's wonderful to see you, Maggsy,” his mother said. Her smile was very warm and bright. It ought to be—it had been expensive enough. They were out for a walk in the manicured gardens of the Green, just a little past dark. A drone lit their way so they didn't stumble on the grass. Another floated beside her, connected to her wrist by two lengths of tubing. It was filtering her blood, something that had to be done every day now. Staying as youthful as she appeared without swapping bodies took a certain amount of maintenance. “I hesitate to even ask, but…”

“I don't have any money for you,” he told her. He'd long grown out of the decorous way some children spoke to their mothers. Their relationship had changed the first time she'd asked him to pay off her debts.

To her credit, she did not attempt to hide her disappointment. Her smile evaporated like spilled coolant off an airfoil and she took a meaningful step away from him. “I see.”

“I came quite close,” Maggs said. “Twice, in fact. Once I literally had terraforming chits in my tight little hand.”

“Are those valuable?” his mother asked.

“Rather.” He had trouble looking at her, just then.

He did not enjoy watching her red blood flow in and out of those tubes. Not out of any squeamishness, of course. Simply because he knew how much those treatments cost.

“You might be interested to know,” he explained, “that both times I was foiled by none other than Aleister Lanoe. The famous pilot.”

“Oh, yes, I remember him, from when he flew for your father.” She leaned close and grasped his arm. “Bit working class, on the whole, but he did look rather dashing in the videos. They would trot him out whenever we won some major new offensive. They needed a young man to encourage recruiting. Of course, it was the Admiral who won the wars. He never did get the recognition he deserved.”

A fighting man cares not for medals and parades,
Dear Old Dad said inside Maggs's head.
Though I'll admit I never turned either down
.

“And now it takes positively all of my energy just to remind people who your father was. Around here admirals might be ten a penny, but your papa was something special. Don't you want people to remember that?”

“Of course I do,” Maggs said, a bit more snappish than he liked. He felt her stiffen beside him. “You know I spend every waking minute trying to help with your work.”

The wives of admirals were expected to be accomplished for themselves—though only in certain fields. If they were award-winning scientists, say, or yacht racers, or musicians, that was all well and good. Unfortunately Guennifer Maggs had possessed none of those talents. Her particular skills had mostly revolved around throwing delightfully wild parties and losing money in casinos.

Now she was engaged full-time in maintaining the family honor. A fact she never let Maggs forget.

“I really do need that money, child. You can't imagine how expensive it is, just keeping up appearances.”

“I know, Mother,” Maggs said.

“Living expenses keep going up and up and up. And one can only rely on creditors for so long. Oh, for the days when Earth would shower its victorious officers with little gifts. How marvelous that was! But he's dead now, and you're not quite in a position to earn encomia. Working in an office, as you do.”

“I did my bit,” Maggs insisted. More than his bit, in fact. He'd draped himself in glory back when he could afford to be a pilot, not a poly liaison. He'd only given up the pilot's life to support his mother's largesse.

“If I default now, it'll be such a scandal,” his mother implored. “It'll tarnish the name of Maggs forever. You can't possibly want that.”

“No, of course not—”

“Then we must have some money,” she said, patting his arm.

“I suppose you could get a job,” he told her.

She stopped walking and he was forced to do the same or drag her off her feet. The air around them turned frigid and overhead the stars whirled crazily in their courses.

“Just a bit of a joke,” he assured her. “Don't worry, Mother. I'll find some way to get the money.”

“For your father's sake, not mine,” she said, a trace of steel in her voice. “You know I'd give up all this,” she said with a little exhausted wave of her free hand to take in the Green, the social life of the Admiralty, the endless medical treatments, “if it wouldn't hurt his name.”

“I know, I know. I'm so very sorry to have failed you again,” Maggs said. Saying it made him feel like he'd bitten into a rotten pear. “I was sidetracked, I'm afraid. Press-ganged into a spot of fighting I had no interest in. Lanoe forced me to come along on a doomed jaunt for honor in some backwater system, wasting my time and yours. He had us fighting aliens, of all things.”

“Aliens!”

“Yes, I know it sounds ludicrous. I don't mind saying, though—I was half-convinced they were real by the time I got away.”

“Aliens,” she said again, with a pretty little laugh. “You sound just like your uncle Wallys, don't you just. Do you remember how he would go on so, with his wild theories and funny little surmises?”

“Wallys? Was he the one who shot one of our servants for spilling soup?” Maggs's memory of his childhood was hazy now, full of bright colors and loud noises but not much context. Only a few events stood out.

“No, that was Auntie Helminthus. She's dead now, I've heard. Poisoned by a disgruntled ex-lover. Wallys, now—he was the one who gave you your rare coin collection for your fourteenth birthday. The collection you looked at once and then put in storage.”

Maggs sighed. “I wonder what became of those coins,” he mused. Of course he knew perfectly well. Some of them had been valuable.

“Wallys was of a sort you just don't see anymore. An officer and a scholar—he had a degree from some university back on Earth, a rather distinguished one. Full of knowledge, and he always wanted to talk about abstruse things. I remember one time he caught me at the end of a lovely ball, out on a balcony where I'd gone to take the air. I thought he was going to try to seduce me. Well, such things happen. Instead he talked my ear off about lost wormholes and ghost fleets and the like. I'm sure there was something in there about aliens, as well. I couldn't break away, of course, that would have been terribly rude, but I swear that by five minutes in, my brain had quite shut down and he might as well have been talking about dog breeding, for all I actually heard.” She smiled at the memory, which meant the encounter must have happened back when his father was still alive. Back when an invitation to one of her parties was a sign that someone was about to get promoted. Now her invitations were just accepted pro forma by those who couldn't think of a good excuse.

“For all that he was a terrible boor,” she said, “and he was, Wallys was a good friend to us. Not really your uncle, of course. Your father had no siblings, but Wallys was like a right-hand man to the Admiral. Lovely mustache as well. He kept it waxed.”

Maggs felt a quite familiar sensation then, a certain rippling chill down his spine.

The feeling he always got when a scheme occurred to him.

“Uncle Wallys,” he said. “He's not still alive, is he?” He reached for his wrist display, intending to check the old man's service record. “Do you have a way to get in touch with him?”

When the elder and Roan arrived back at the main camp the barrels of the guns were already standing up on end, like skeletal fingers clawing their way out of the icy soil. Engineers and volunteer workers swarmed around them, sparks flying from welding torches, gun components being tossed back and forth so they could be installed.

The pace of the work had been feverish before. Now it looked like sheer chaos, though the elder knew it was all being done in the most efficient way, every step overseen by Engineer Derrow as she drove in circles around them in her little rover.

A call came in for Roan, from the tender where Ensign Ehta had set up her ground control station. The two of them dropped off their load of depleted uranium and parted ways. The elder ran to meet her supervisor, to find out what work she should be doing next. She didn't even have a chance to ask what had changed, why the pace had picked up so much, as she helped grind and polish the projectiles, making them so perfectly smooth they looked like drops of mercury. When the rounds were fired from the guns even the slightest imperfection in their shape might drag them off course by hundreds of kilometers, missing the enemy entirely. They had to be polished down to a tolerance of microns, which meant constant adjustments and calibrations. No time for questions.

She picked up a little information anyway, just by listening. Derrow and her core group of engineers didn't bother to censor themselves as they worked and while most of their conversation was technical to the point of being arcane, the occasional word registered. Soon the elder knew that it was true, that something major had changed.

The enemy fleet had started its turn. Changed course toward Aruna.

M. Lanoe's gambit must have succeeded. He would get the battle he wanted—the fight that could save or doom everyone back on Niraya.

L
anoe forced himself not to grunt in impatience as Thom fumbled with his forward thrusters and threw his BR.9 into a flat spin. The kid cursed but straightened himself out easily enough.

“Don't be afraid to lean on your positioning jets,” he told Thom. “They can take the strain. Fighters spend half their time flying backward, so you need to get used to this.”

The two of them were edging away from a small cloud of interceptors and scouts that kept threatening to come into attack range. Exactly what he wanted—Lanoe's plan was to draw the enemy after them, to force the fleet to commit to its turn. So instead of burning hard for home, the two fighters were easing their way back toward Aruna with their noses pointed outward at the fleet.

“This is ridiculous,” Thom complained. “I touch the stick to the left and I go spinning off to the right.”

“You ever go ice skating?” Lanoe asked. “It's just like skating backward. Pretend your stick is on the other side of a mirror.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” Thom insisted. The kid was right on the edge of panic. “Lanoe—there must be fifty of them out there. Fifty!”

Lanoe couldn't help but laugh. “You haven't seen anything yet,” he told the kid. “If those swarmships deploy, you'll have ten times that many on you.” All the same he checked his sensors and did a quick count. There were in fact only thirty-nine enemy ships in the local volume, about evenly divided between interceptors and scouts. It would seem like plenty if they actually engaged, but for the moment nobody had fired a shot.

“Why haven't they deployed yet?” Thom asked. “They could swamp us anytime they wanted.”

“The enemy doesn't think like us,” Lanoe said. “They're using drones. They don't care if a couple of their ships are killed—they have plenty more, and they're cheap to replace. They don't think the two of us are a real threat.”

“I'm inclined to agree,” Thom told him.

Lanoe ignored the negativity. “As long as we appear to be retreating, they'll keep thinking that way. I don't think they'll really deploy until they're close enough to attack Aruna. I'm counting on it, in fact.”

“The guns,” Thom said.

“Sure,” Lanoe said. “The guns are powerful, our strongest weapon, but they fire a lot slower than our PBWs. If the swarms deploy too far out, the guns will take forever to pick off individual scouts—way too long to be helpful. If we can keep the swarmships intact, though, the guns can blast them with one or two shots and save us a hell of a lot of trouble. Watch out for that interceptor on your left—your left!—do
not
let it get behind you.”

“Its guns are heating up,” Thom pointed out.

“Yeah, looks like they're tired of chasing us. They want a kill. Time to start playing for real stakes—get your weapons board up, so you're ready to fight. Whatever happens, though, stay on course for Aruna. Maneuver as much as you need to, but always keep your tail pointed toward home, and don't let them get behind you.”

“You already said that.”

“It bore repeating,” Lanoe called back.

“Good luck,” Valk said.

“You, too,” Zhang replied.

The two of them had been flying in close formation, hidden inside the thin ring of dust circling Garuda. Zhang's BR.9 broke off, dodging around house-size chunks of rock and burning hard to circle around the enemy fleet. He watched her go for a moment, then plotted his own course.

The burn hurt, of course—his bones ached inside his suit as he was pressed back against his seat. His inertial sink absorbed a lot of that energy but it couldn't get it all. His course carried him in the opposite direction that Zhang had taken, looping around the banded atmosphere of the ice giant, so close in he could hear stray molecules of hydrogen hiss against his canopy. He let the planet's gravity pull him around in a broad slingshot curve that flung him at the left flank of the enemy fleet, still a million kilometers away.

The plan was for Valk and Zhang to take up position on either side of the enemy, picking off any scouts or interceptors that strayed from the main body of the fleet. They weren't supposed to engage directly, just corral the enemy to keep their formation nice and tight.

It made a better target for the guns that way.

With the gravity assist from the giant it wasn't long before he saw enemy ships. Just a couple of scouts, riding ten thousand kilometers out from the fleet. Pickets, set there to screen against flanking attacks. They had no support from interceptors and the nearest swarmship was too far away to send reinforcements in any kind of timely fashion.

He had plenty of time to line up his shots. The scouts didn't even seem to notice him until he was upon them, flashing right through the center of their formation, PBWs firing left and right and up and down. He cut two scouts in half before they even had a chance to maneuver. A third wheeled around on him and he blasted apart its eyeball gun. It went up like a blossoming rose of destruction, its stored plasma expanding outward in a bright red fireball. Two more scouts came screaming down at him before the explosion had even faded. He spun around and caught one of them with a direct hit, then maneuvered hard to get out of the way as the second one breathed fire, its plasma blast missing him by only a few meters.

Valk kicked out with his maneuvering jets and turned his nose to face the last scout. In the infrared he could see its eyeball glowing hot, ready for another blast. He burned backward to get clear, then cut through its skeletal frame with a raking salvo of PBW fire. Its eyeball spun away from its severed thruster. Cut off from its power plant, the eyeball lost containment of its stored plasma but instead of exploding, this one just melted, its metal hull swelling and changing shape then falling back to form a rough, amorphous ball of slag.

He reached out for his comms panel. “In position,” he signaled to Lanoe.

“Same here,” Zhang called back.

On his display he saw Lanoe and Thom racing backward, away from the oncoming fleet, taking the occasional potshot but not engaging the enemy in any real sense. The kid was flying messy, his tail all over the place, but he was hanging in there. “Received,” Lanoe called. Then he and Thom broke left and right, burning hard away from the enemy—they'd just been toying with them before. Now their job was to get out of the way.

“Engineer Derrow,” Lanoe announced, “you may fire at will.”

Lanoe burned hard to get away from an interceptor that had caught his scent. No point in engaging the thing just then—he couldn't take it down with just his PBWs, and he couldn't spare a disruptor round. He needed all of those for the queenship, if he actually got a chance to make a run at the thing.

It hung there in his view like a planet, a dull grayish black this far from the system's sun. Its vast maw was darker still, a hole cut out of space. Ahead of it the swarmships hung like huge needles, all of them pointed right at his FA.2.

“Lanoe, I've got scouts on my tail,” Thom called, sounding panicked.

The old pilot gritted his teeth. He fought back the urge to go racing over to help Thom—the kid needed to stand on his own now. “Get away from them if you can,” he called back. “Give the gunners a chance to—”

He didn't get to finish his thought. The first of Derrow's projectiles came rocketing past him just then, maybe ten kilometers away but moving far too fast for him to see it at all. Instead he felt the way it warped space, a weird tug that pulled at his bones and his teeth.

He brought up a tactical display and traced its path, arrow-straight as it tore through space. Before the display could even refresh he slammed one hand against the console in front of him. For all its speed, for all its precision, the round was going to miss the entire fleet. It would pass right through them and head off into interstellar space, at half the speed of light.

They were still most of a million kilometers out from Aruna. Even the best computers would have trouble hitting a moving target at that distance. But he needed a hit, he needed to thin out those swarmships, or they were all dead. He—

Another shot made his head buzz. Then a third, close on its heels. His display lit up with their tracks, glowing orange lines like lasers fired across his field of view. He looked up and saw one strike the queenship, well clear of the maw. It brought up a long plume of dust from the surface and left a new crater there, but the queenship didn't so much as vibrate with the impact.

The third one hit a swarmship. Just a grazing blow, raking along the side of the alien vessel. Its initial impact looked almost comically pathetic, as it tore a hole through an interceptor near the nose of the swarmship and disappeared. The projectile kept moving, though, too energetic to be stopped by mere metal. It obliterated the scout moored behind the interceptor—and the one behind that. As it traveled it built up a bow wave of vaporized metal in front of it and no alien ship could withstand that heat. Scouts and interceptors exploded, their fuel and plasma adding to the cascade of explosions. The swarmship came apart in pieces, all of them glaring white in Lanoe's infrared display. A handful of small craft managed to deploy before the swarmship died, but the vast majority were slagged before they could launch. Light and heat and burning debris showered the survivors, sending them twisting away on desperate trajectories that couldn't save them—they just couldn't get clear in time.

“Holy hell!” Valk shouted, and whooped for joy.

More rounds were incoming from Aruna, most of them failing to connect, but a second swarmship was destroyed even faster and more violently than the first. A third was clipped by an errant round that still left it crumpled and half-dead. Zhang and Thom joined in with the chorus of excited yelling until Lanoe had to turn down the volume on his speakers.

He wished he could join in. It would be good to get in a whoop or two of his own. There was only one problem—he saw what the others must have missed.

The aliens weren't stupid. As soon as the first swarmship was destroyed, they'd already begun to react. The remaining swarmships seemed to bubble and grow as they deployed their scouts and interceptors as fast as they could, sending out small craft in a hundred directions, all of them burning hard to get away from the debris of their wrecked brethren.

The guns on Aruna would be useless against the smaller ships—they were too maneuverable, too small in cross section for proper targeting. Once they deployed, they were Lanoe's problem.

“Did we—” Thom sounded like he was trying to catch his breath. “Did we just start the battle?”

“Started an hour ago, kid,” Valk told him. “You must've blinked and missed it.” He understood what Thom must be feeling, though. In every battle Valk had ever fought it was the same way. A whole lot of maneuvering and not engaging and getting into just the right position. When the shooting actually started, you were usually too busy planning your next trajectory to notice.