Forsaken Skies (57 page)

Maybe the scouts weren't so stupid after all. The two of them split up, one going right, one going left, so they would fly around either side of the hill. The maneuver didn't slow them down at all.

Valk let go of his stick, his hands hovering over it like he was afraid to touch it, afraid that he would chicken out at the last moment. The hill came rushing toward him, filling the view through his canopy. The scouts kept creeping closer, ever closer—

Now
.

He pulled back hard on the stick like he was trying to break it off. His BR.9 shot upward in a tight corkscrew, a hundred meters up over the hill. He feathered his positioning jets until he tumbled through space, his nose twisting around. When it was pointed right back down at the queenship he punched his thrusters for a power dive, until he was dropping faster than a stone back down toward the hill.

On the far side of the hill, the scouts closed up again, rebuilding their formation. He saw their eyeball cannon twisting around wildly as if they were looking for him, trying to figure out where he'd gone.

A weapons panel lit up on either side of him, his PBWs armed for independent fire. Valk pried his hands off his stick and brought up two virtual Aldis sights, one for each of his guns. Tough to aim that way, but he didn't need to be precise. As he fell down toward the scouts he blasted away, his shots kicking up plumes of dust wherever they touched the queenship's rocky soil.

One scout erupted in a ball of flame. The other just came to pieces, turning into debris that streaked across the asteroidal surface and plowed up great furrows wherever it touched.

A green pearl appeared in the corner of Valk's vision. Ehta calling to congratulate him? Lanoe asking for a progress report? It didn't matter.

As he straightened out and turned his nose back toward his previous course he could see what he'd come for: two of those spiky projections that ringed the queenship's maw, standing up tall and triangular like the pillars of a gate.

“Holy hell,” Ehta said, her mouth open as she stared at the display. “He's going to make it!”

Roan turned from her console and looked at the model of the queenship. It filled so much of tender's wardroom with white light she felt like it might crush her. A single blue dot broke up the white, moving with aching slowness over the rough surface of the asteroidal ship. It was only centimeters now from the maw, at least in the scale of the display.

Ehta clenched her hands together and looked over at Roan. “I thought the queenship would have more weapons, or they would send more drones after him, or…hell! I didn't think it was possible. I thought we were all going to die here. I thought—”

Roan pointed at one of the spiky protrusions surrounding the maw, the things they'd all started calling teeth. “What's going on there?” she asked.

When Ehta saw it her face didn't change, not right away. The excitement, the wide eyes stayed the same. As if Ehta were frozen in place.

The tooth in question had started to bend over. Curling like a frond toward Valk's fighter. Its tip split apart like the fibers of a rope teasing apart. Like the petals of a flower in bloom, maybe.

Or like skeletal fingers.

It happened so fast Valk barely had time to register it.

Something long and ropy and made of bundled wire slapped across his canopy, tendrils of it sparking as his vector field tried to push them away. More of them wrapped across his view and then he felt like his skeleton was trying to jump out of his skin.

Valk's inertial sink grabbed him tight and shoved him back into his seat. He heard a mechanical whine just behind his head, a rising, building howl of tortured machinery. Something bounced off his vector field and his BR.9 lurched over on its side. The stick moved in his hands, fighting him as the ship tried to stabilize itself. That wasn't supposed to happen—the fighter was never supposed to take control like that, it was supposed to obey the pilot's every command.

Unless the pilot tried to pull a stunt that would instantly kill him.

The fighter shook and then lurched over again and Valk bobbed in his seat, his inertial sink trying desperately to compensate for whatever was going on. He stared in horror at his instrument panel. A second ago he'd been traveling as fast as a bullet in flight but now his speed indicator just flashed meaningless numbers, dropping impossibly fast—

More tendrils slapped across his canopy, a web of steel that gripped him tight, stopping him in midflight as if he'd flown right into an impenetrable wall.

The white pearl in the corner of his vision began to blink but he didn't even have time to see it.

On the display the skeletal hand grabbed the blue dot and just…squeezed it out of existence.

The tooth—except of course it wasn't a tooth at all, it was an
arm
—bent again, bringing its prize down toward the maw.

It looked exactly like the queenship had snatched Valk out of the air and then swallowed him whole.

Roan shook her head. “Where is he? I don't see him. Where'd he go?”

Ehta moved over to the console and switched off the display.

She wouldn't meet Roan's eye.

“Where's M. Valk? What happened?” Roan asked, because she wanted to hear that she was wrong, that she didn't just see that.

“Dead,” Ehta told her.

“No, it grabbed him, but he—”

Ehta punched the console in front of her, hard. In the low gravity of Aruna the vibrations made every loose object in the tender jump and clatter. “Kid,” Ehta said, very quietly, “they teach you anything about physics back on Niraya? Valk was moving at seventy meters per second. That thing grabbed him and stopped him cold. Inertial sinks are good, but they can't handle that kind of deceleration.”

“So, maybe he's hurt, maybe he's broken some bones,” Roan suggested.

“You go from that speed to a dead stop, you don't just break bones,” Ehta said, almost spitting the words. “You damn near
splash
. Roan…give it up. There's nothing left of Valk right now but red jelly.”

L
anoe, Valk is—”

“I saw it,” he called back. He wasn't really aware of who was talking to him. A woman, so either Ehta or Zhang. It didn't matter. He didn't want to talk to them.

He didn't want to talk to anybody. Which was too bad, since everyone seemed to want to talk to him.

“He just—it just—”

“—pinging him, but there's no response, no telemetry—”

“Thom, are you—”

Lanoe gritted his teeth. He didn't need this chatter. He needed to see what was happening over at the queenship.

“Silence,” he called, on the general frequency. “Now.”

He put his very best commander growl on it, and it seemed to work. For a moment at least there was silence.

“People die in battles. Happens all the time,” he told them. “We all knew coming out here the odds were against us. Valk was a friend. More than that, a comrade.
He would want us to keep fighting,
don't you think?”

Eventually Zhang replied. “Give us orders,” she said.

That was better.

“Break up those formations. Don't give them time to think.” Exactly what they'd been doing already, in other words. Just holding their own.

He banked around a thick group of interceptors that were struggling to create a formation. They started shooting at him almost at once but at least he had a better view of the queenship from his new position.

The teeth—the arms—around the maw were all moving now. Bending inward, their tips unraveling and growing. Strands of them flowed across the maw until it looked like the opening was covered in a spiderweb of tendrils.

The programmer, or whoever was onboard the queenship, knew their plan now. It knew they were trying to attack its one weak spot, and it was taking steps to protect itself. Closing off the maw.

Lanoe's original plan, his one best shot at winning this battle, was sunk. As he watched, the web thickened and new filaments shot across the maw, until it was covered almost completely. There was no clear shot at the queenship's power plant anymore.

Kinetic impactors bounced off his vector field and he had to wheel away from the view. He dove down through a cloud of scouts that turned to face him but never got a chance as he raced past them. He blasted a few just to make himself feel better.

He needed to concentrate. He needed a new plan.

Meanwhile, the queenship drew ever closer to Aruna, and the enemy fleet kept organizing itself into meaningful formations.

They were running out of time.

Elder McRae went to grab another projectile from the stack, but when she got there, there was no stack. All the projectiles had been loaded, and nearly a third had already been fired. The guns kept up their pace, firing a new round every few seconds, but the volunteers who weren't part of the gun crews could only stand around, looking at each other, looking up at the savaged sky. Bruise-colored aurorae danced over their heads, sheets of gray and purple light dancing and shimmering in and out of existence, and still the guns kept firing, their noise making the elder's senses reel, making her feel dizzy—

“Elder!” someone called. She jerked her head up and saw Engineer Derrow not five meters away. She was staring right at the elder, her faceplate glaring with the purplish light. “Get over here, now!”

She ran to obey. “What can I do?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Derrow replied. “I just needed you out of the way of the number six gun crew.”

The elder blinked and looked around and saw that she had been standing in the middle of a flurry of activity, volunteers bent over machinery with welding torches and circuit probes.

“I'm…sorry,” the elder breathed, unable to believe she'd been so close to the gun, to its crew, without even realizing it.

“No time for apologies,” Derrow told her. “Just stand there, and don't move.” The engineer was bent over a console with sixteen displays that she constantly moved around, dismissing some, pulling up others. Some showed raw data coming in from the guns' computers; some were live feeds of what was happening out in space.

“What's going on there?” the elder asked, pointing at one of the displays.

The engineer stared at her for a moment, then reached up to her neck. The light that had been flashing there went out—the light that indicated that the engineer's words were being broadcast to all of the volunteers. Then Engineer Derrow leaned forward until her helmet touched the elder's. When she spoke her voice was muffled and almost drowned out by the noise of the guns. “This is just between us, all right? I guess you deserve an update. But this can't become common knowledge.”

“All right,” the elder said.

“Tannis Valk is dead. He made a run at the queenship but it didn't work. Don't ask me for details—nobody up there is telling me much—but it looks like now they can't attack the queenship directly at all.”

“I see,” the elder said.

“Commander Lanoe wants me to train the guns directly on the queenship, see if I can damage it somehow. But these guns weren't made for that. They were just supposed to take out the swarmships. I can't punch a hole through an asteroid with these things. Hell, Elder. He must know that. What do you think of all this? Did we just lose this battle?”

“I'm sorry,” Elder McRae said again. “I'm not a warrior. I just don't know.” She'd never felt more useless in her life. As a woman who had devoted herself to work, to always having some function to fulfill, the feeling was nearly unbearable.

“I just don't know…Is there any point to what we're doing?” Derrow asked. “Is there any point to keeping this up, if we're just taking potshots?”

“I wonder,” the elder tried, “is there any point to stopping?”

The engineer met her eyes directly. Then she took a deep breath. She tapped the key on her collar ring and the light there started flashing again. “Guns three through six,” she called, on the universal channel, “prepare for new targeting information. Guns seven and eight, reload!”

Then she reached out a hand in the elder's direction. The elder grasped it, understanding. There was one small thing she could do, after all—she could be present. Give moral support.

It was something, anyway.

A green pearl rotated in the corner of Lanoe's vision. A call from Zhang, but she'd chosen to send it as a request rather than just signaling him directly. Which meant she was giving him the option of ignoring it.

He looped around an interceptor, blazing away with both barrels of his PBWs, pouring fire into the thing's thick skin. Useless. Nothing short of disruptors could get through the armor on the bigger drones. The interceptors would be the thing that killed them all, he thought. They just didn't have a good method for destroying the things. He rolled away as its guns spoke and kinetic impactors started skimming off his vector field.

“Zhang,” he said, opening a private channel, “you have something?”

“An idea. Maybe just a thought. We can't get at the queenship through the front door. We need another weak spot to go after. We could target its engines. Get behind it and use up every disruptor we've got and maybe we get lucky, maybe we cripple it. Leave it dead in space.”

“Until it can repair itself,” Lanoe pointed out.

“In the meantime we fall back. Regroup. Live to fight another day.”

Lanoe shook his head, though he knew she couldn't see it. “No. We're never going to have a stronger position than what we've got right now. There's a way to win this battle; we just haven't seen it yet.”

“That's your read on this?” she asked.

She was giving him a chance to doubt himself. To question whether he was just too hot, too committed to this battle. She was doing her duty as his second in command, holding up a mirror for him.

So he gave it serious thought before he answered.

“Yes,” he said. “We win here or we die. You, me, and Thom.” Otherwise, he thought, Valk had died for nothing. Otherwise, Niraya had no chance.

He stitched a line of particle fire up the nose of the interceptor that was still chasing him. Mostly just to get his frustration out, to—

A section of armor plate peeled back from the hull of the interceptor, ragged and shiny around the edges. Underneath he could see bundles of wire flexing and shifting. The guts of the machine.

Somehow, through sheer ablation, he had cut through the interceptor's armor. Exposed its soft underbelly.

He brought up a virtual Aldis and lined up a perfect shot. Squeezed his trigger.

The interceptor didn't explode. It didn't melt or fall apart or scream in agony, nothing like that. Yet as he maneuvered around it, it failed to match his course, and in the infrared he could see its guns cooling down.

It was dead as a doornail. No way to tell by looking at the thing, but he'd killed it.

In life, he told himself, you cherished the small victories.

Number seven gun crackled with stray energy as the engineers took it offline. Its last shot had launched successfully, but only at about half the expected speed. Derrow shouted for as many people as she could spare to take its firing chamber apart and find the fault. They saw it right away, a capacitor that had melted under the strain of repeated firings. Without waiting for her to give the order, they replaced the capacitor and put the firing chamber back together again. They stood clear as it came up to charge, but when it failed to explode and kill them all they moved quickly to load a new projectile into its chamber. There was no time to make everything perfect, no time to test the repaired circuitry. It needed to get up and firing again as quickly as possible.

They must have gotten something wrong, though. In their haste, they must have overlooked something vital.

Elder McRae happened to be looking in the right direction when the firing chamber came apart in a shock wave of loose energy and flying shrapnel.

She saw the light, felt the heat of the explosion through her faceplate. Heard the screams over her suit radio. Staggered as the ground shook beneath her feet. She saw an engineer's suit come apart in shreds, the man's naked skin exposed to the cold, poisonous atmosphere of Aruna. He didn't live long enough to asphyxiate. She saw the number eight gun lean over on its side even as it launched another projectile, sending it off over the horizon of the moon.

Engineer Derrow shouted for repair crews, shouted for the rest of the gunners to keep working. Shock turned her face pale and bloodless but she kept her hands moving, swiping at her displays, bringing up new data as if nothing had happened.

Down by the base of the guns, in the crater of wreckage where number seven had been, bodies crawled over cracked rock. Blood slicked the framework of number six. The screams didn't stop.

“Let me go help them,” the elder said.

“That gun's a loss, no fixing it now,” Derrow told her.

“I mean the wounded—let me go tend to the wounded.”