Forsaken Skies (64 page)

Her beam finally cut across the lander's front legs, digging in deep through its cladding and into the bundles of wires inside. A leg came loose, severed near its root, and the lander tumbled forward, rolling with its momentum, knocked off its feet.

Ehta whooped in joy, but not for very long.

A thing with that many legs could spare a few. It was up again in an instant, running toward them just as fast as before.

And just off to Ehta's left three more of them were coming down, burning through the atmosphere and striking the ground hard enough to leave craters.

Lanoe bounced off a chunk of debris hard enough that he saw stars. He couldn't catch his breath. A filament of the web slashed toward him but it snagged on the broken skeleton of a scout, and they both went spinning away.

Behind him as he tumbled he caught stroboscopic images of the FA.2, as more and more thin arms of the web grabbed it and wrapped it up like they were spinning a cocoon. The entire fuselage had collapsed inward and the nose had crumpled upward. The next time he spun around he saw the fighter break in half. Its reactor collapsed, blinding him with a sudden flash of light.

Lanoe

His helmet responded by turning opaque, protecting him from the harsh light. He tried to flick his eyes at the virtual controls to depolarize the flowglas but he could barely feel his face, much less move any of it. As he spun his blood was all shoved into his head and his feet and he felt like an overripe tomato, like he might burst.

Inside the opaque helmet he could only see afterimages, flickering green and blue. He couldn't hear anything but the thudding of his own heart.

As quickly as the helmet had polarized it cleared again. He squinted to see what was left of the fighter but there was nothing but more debris, more chunks of metal spinning between the thin columns of the filaments.

are you

His back struck something—he never saw what—and he went flying off in a new direction, his arms flailing in front of him. He fought for control, fought to get his right hand over to his left wrist even as centrifugal force kept forcing it back.

There…there…just another centimeter, and the tip of his index finger just brushed the gray surface of the display patch on his wrist. A flashing red screen popped up, filled with warnings—hundreds of collision alerts, oxygen and nitrogen gauges dropping as he hyperventilated, biometric readings telling him what he already knew, that he was perilously close to losing consciousness.

He was so busy looking at the alerts he almost missed the filament that came speeding toward him, its thin end moving so fast it could cut him in two.

receiving

He threw up his arms, knowing it would do no good at all, knowing he was dead, that his incredibly risky gamble had not so incredibly failed, that he had thrown away everything on—

A particle beam stabbed out of the dark, a perfectly straight line studded with gems of pure light. The filament came apart in sections that moved slowly away from each other, inert and harmless, each of them missing Lanoe's suit by full meters.

He saw more beams slanting down through the debris, carving away at a nest of serpents that twisted and bent beneath him. Filaments he hadn't even seen, filaments that had been reaching for him, filaments that recoiled now, away from the deadly beams.

Lanoe?

With a start he realized that Thom was trying to contact him. The kid's voice was incredibly faint and distant. Whether that was because of the congested blood in Lanoe's eardrums or that his suit's comms unit had taken damage, he didn't know.

“I'm alive!” he shouted. “Thom, I'm alive.”

He reached for his wrist again. Fought with physics until he could tap at the display. He switched on his suit's emergency positioning jets. Fired one after another until he'd canceled out the worst of his spin. Almost instantly the blood flowed out of his head. He felt like he might pass out for a second, and even when that sensation was gone a horrible ball of nausea cramped his stomach, but he was alive.

And right where he wanted to be.

“Go, go, go!” Ehta shouted as a lander came chasing after her. She yanked her feet out of the nylon straps and jumped up on the roll bar so she could swivel the cannon around a hundred and eighty degrees, then poured particle fire into the pursuing drone. It gained ground steadily, even as she chopped limb after limb from its mass.

“Go!” she cried again, not even bothering to line up shots, just spraying fire across the chasing lander's front. “Faster!” she shouted.

Without warning Roan stamped on the brakes. Ehta's feet went up in the air and she had to grab hold of the cannon to avoid being thrown clear of the rover. Behind her the lander took a swipe at her with one long, jointed leg but she cut it off before she'd even got her footing back. The thing fell back and she kept cutting away until it toppled over—only then turning to look and see why Roan had stopped so suddenly.

Dead ahead of them stood two landers, one to either side. Closing in.

“Reverse!” Ehta shouted.

Roan worked the gear selector, peering back over her shoulder so she could steer and avoid the dead lander back there. She got them turned around, then threw the rover back into forward motion. Ehta hurriedly got her feet back in the straps and swiveled the cannon around to point at the lander coming from their left—it was the closer of the two, the more dangerous.

They were still coming down. Pillars of fire stretched upward into the sky all around them. They were in serious danger of being surrounded—Roan was a hell of a driver but she needed room to maneuver. Ehta looked around to see where the worst danger lay.

She spotted a gentle slope leading down toward the rim of a small crater. “That way,” she said, pointing, before going back to shooting at the lander on the left.

“That takes us farther away from the camp,” Roan said. Meaning, away from any possible help, Ehta knew.

The girl didn't seem to understand that they were it, the only chance the engineers had. “These things go for the nearest living thing they can find,” she told Roan. “That's all they're programmed for. Leading them away from Derrow's people is a good thing. Trust me!”

“You're the boss,” Roan said, and turned the wheel hard to the left.

All around Lanoe filaments of the web rose up and lashed toward him. He dove under them, then twisted around to see how far he was from his goal. Not far now—the ragged hole in the web was only a few hundred meters away—but his suit only had a small reserve of propellant left. The jets built into his boots and shoulders weren't designed for this kind of acrobatic work.

Above him Thom did what he could, dashing in until the tendrils snapped out toward his BR.9, then climbing hard away to stay out of their range. His PBWs cut through the individual filaments just fine, but there were hundreds of them—thousands. The big triangular spikes they'd seen when they first scanned the queenship had been made of countless strands of metal braided together so tight they looked like one solid mass. It seemed the queenship could control every single one of those threads independently.

One slashed across his arm, and he barely accelerated away in time. It cut through an outer layer of his suit but foam hissed across the tear, sealing it automatically.

Next time he wouldn't be so lucky. Nor were the filaments the only thing he had to worry about. Debris was hurtling all around him, some moving fast enough to tear him apart if it hit him. His suit didn't have a vector field to protect him.

He needed a lucky break, and he needed it now.

When it came, though, it nearly killed him.

A shadow passed across his view and he swiveled around to look up, away from the queenship—and saw the wreckage of a swarmship drifting toward him. The swarmship was just a skeletal frame, having deployed most of its drones except a few that had been slagged and hung like rotten fruit off its spars. It wasn't moving fast but there were still tons of metal in the thing and if it fell on him it would crush him like a bug. He reached for his wrist controls and found he only had a tiny reserve of propellant left—nowhere near enough to get him out of the way of the giant skeleton.

He looked desperately for a way out but couldn't find one. There was no way he could get clear.

Of course, if it was going to hit him, it couldn't help but strike the queenship. Suddenly every filament around him went taut as they stretched upward to snag the swarmship, trying desperately to cancel its momentum before it could crash into the web. Lanoe touched the controls on his wrist and burned hard, straight down toward the web.

The filaments ignored him. Fending off the swarmship occupied every single one of them.

“Thom,” he called. “Thom—I'm going in!”

“Received,” Thom called back. The kid was busy holding off a group of scouts that had moved in to do what the filaments no longer could.

“Do what you can,” Lanoe told him. “Just—get clear of this and stay alive, and try to—”

“I'll be here when you come back!” Thom shouted. Lanoe could hear all the warning chimes ringing inside Thom's cockpit. “I'll wait for you!”

“Don't wait too long,” Lanoe said.

The last of his propellant escaped from his jets just as he smacked into the web. He'd half-expected it to grab him and pull him apart but it just twisted under him, individual filaments moving to fill gaps in the web every time a piece of debris fell around him.

He'd been very careful about where he came down. Only a few dozen meters away was the hole that Derrow had managed to punch through the web. Its edges looked ragged, bits of sheared wire sticking up in every direction. Some of them twitched but most were just inert.

He dragged himself over to the hole. It was going to be a tight fit. His suit might tear on the jagged edges.

He'd come this far, though. He wouldn't stop now, not after what the bastards had done to Zhang. He wriggled his head and shoulders into the hole, then pushed hard to get through, into the perfect blackness beyond.

Into the queenship.

O
ne by one the landers came galloping after the rover. Ehta took a half a second to check her wrist display and see the data Engineer Derrow had sent her.

Hot damn. It was working. Every single one of the landers was headed in their direction. Not normally something to celebrate. But if even one of the landers had turned around and headed toward the crater where the volunteers were, it would have been a catastrophe. They had no weapons to defend themselves. They could have huddled inside the tender but it would have just been a matter of time before a lander could tear through its armored walls.

It looked like that wasn't going to happen—at least as long as Ehta and Roan kept moving and shooting.

Ehta sliced through the front legs of a lander and it stumbled—only to be overrun by the landers behind it, trampled as they clambered over its twitching body. She got a lucky shot on another one, her particle beam lancing right through its legs so it fell over, inert, shaking the ground with its impact even in Aruna's low gravity.

There were still more than a dozen of them back there. But this was working, she was having an effect, thinning their numbers and—

Roan just had time to say “Wh—” before a pillar of flame came down right beside them, a lander touching down only meters away. Ehta hugged the cannon as the girl threw her wheel over to one side and cornered, hard, trying to get away from the impact site. Roan knew the rover's tolerances by now and she didn't cut her turn too hard, but she didn't account for the shock wave of the impact.

The sky and the ground tried to switch places as the rover went up on two wheels. If it tipped over the two of them could probably right it—but that would take precious seconds, and the herd of landers would be on them before they could get moving again.

Ehta gripped the cannon's hot barrel with one hand, then threw herself over the side of the rover, dangling over its edge between its two spinning wheels. The rover started to right itself and Roan turned the wheel this way, then that, until it fell back to the ground with a crunch. Ehta's ankle hit a rock and she felt her foot twist around inside her boot. Sharp pain lanced up her calf.

“You okay?” Roan asked, as she accelerated away from the impact site.

“Fine, keep going!” Ehta shouted, dragging herself back up onto the back of the rover. “They're almost on us!”

“I'm doing what I can,” Roan said, but then Ehta felt the rover fishtail underneath her as Roan stamped on the brakes and swung the wheel at the same time. “Damn damn d—”

In her desperation to get the rover back on all four wheels, Roan must have ignored what was right in front of her.

“Hold on!” she cried, as the rover went pitching over the rim of a tiny crater.

No gravity under his feet. No air inside, no warmth, nothing you would find on a human ship. No lights.

Lanoe could hear himself breathing, the same thing you heard when you were floating in the void, very far from anything else. His eyes adjusted slowly to the gloom. In the distance, very faint, he could see a smudge of red.

He switched on his suit lamps, adjusted his helmet's filters for low-light amplification.

He didn't know what he'd expected to see, really. Not decks full of aliens bent over consoles, calling out orders. Not a giant thing made out of legs sitting at the center of it all, meditating on war. Something more than this, though.

Before him the inside of the queenship was almost all empty space, cold, useless darkness. Metal catwalks spiraled inward, stretching toward the red glow. Curved constructions of long girders braced by triangular supports. They looked almost like something humans would build, but they were off—they didn't run straight, not anywhere, but always curved in long sinuous coils, and the supports were spaced farther apart from each other than seemed proper. Here and there on those skeletal frames crouched big pieces of machinery that shook and twitched and pushed out the round shapes of orbiters. Factories, building war machines. Nearer the center larger structures hung motionless and unsupported. Impossible to guess what those were—their forms were covered in scaffolding that hid their intent.

Here and there on the catwalks, things moved. Workers—bundles of legs, some of which ended in tentacular hands. There weren't nearly as many of them as he'd expected. They picked their way along the girders carefully, as if they were trying to walk in a place that had no floor, no down of any kind.

Around the maw, just inside the web, the catwalks grew together to form a thick ring. A sort of staging area, maybe. He saw the thick body of an interceptor embedded in the mass of girders as if it had crashed there and was slowly being absorbed by the metalwork. Then he noticed it had no thrusters, no guns, just cavities where such things should be and his perception shifted and he thought that no, the drone ship hadn't crashed there—more like it was
growing,
the girders around it like stems holding a piece of complicated fruit. Workers scuttled over the interceptor's surface, welding pieces of the war machine into place. Even as he noticed them, though, they stopped moving. Lifted themselves up on their many legs. They didn't have eyes, or any visible sensory organs, but he knew, he was certain that they had just become aware of his presence.

They didn't need to waste any time deliberating among themselves, or checking with superiors. As one, with fluid motions, they came streaming toward him across the catwalks, multi-fingered hands raised before them.

They made no sound at all. They didn't need to. He understood just fine what they wanted—to tear him to pieces.

Lanoe reached down to his hip and found his sidearm, the one he'd nearly killed Maggs with, back in the basement of the Retreat. It had maybe a dozen rounds left in its clip. There were at least twenty workers coming for him, moving so fast they would be on him in seconds.

He really, really wished he'd had time to come up with a better plan.

The cannon went spinning out of Ehta's hands. She needed them to grab the roll bar, to hold on. The rover tilted underneath her and she felt weightless, that horrible, water-in-the-gut feeling of zero gravity, and she heard Roan scream.

She ducked down as low as she could. There was no chance of using her weight to balance the rover this time. Its wheels spun in Aruna's poison air. Stars and clouds twisted overhead and they were falling, bouncing in the low gravity, bouncing and falling and clattering down the steep slope.

She heard something creak, some pipe in the rover's chassis failing under stress. Heard it snap with a sudden, final sound, and then a wheel came up and smashed into the side of her helmet—the flowglas held but her neck was wrenched sideways. She felt the rover dig in hard as it struck loose soil but still it was falling, spinning around now so all she could see was white, powdery dirt and then she was facedown in it, half-buried.

“Ehta!” Roan called. “Ehta! Are you alive back there?” There was something wrong with Roan's voice. Or maybe Ehta's ears were ringing, or—or her brain was still reeling from the crash, or—

She pushed herself up with her hands. Looked around.

“Ehta?”

“I'm okay,” she called back. “I think.” Her neck felt weird and her left arm throbbed with pain. Broken, maybe, but when she got to her feet her suit just tightened from her elbow to her wrist and she could move the arm just fine.

She looked around and saw they'd fallen all the way down into the crater. The dirt at the bottom was soft and shifted under her feet, like she was walking on sifted flour. In the low gravity she didn't quite sink into it.

The rover was a total loss. It had been designed to be lightweight and to break down into small, easily portable sections. It was a twisted pile of junk now. One of the batteries had cracked open and lithium slurry was draining into the loose soil. Incredibly toxic, but it wouldn't eat through their suits, so she decided not to care.

“I don't think we're driving out of here,” she told Roan. Roan, who—

Roan.

Where the hell was Roan?

She ran around to the front side of the wreckage. Not that it was easy to tell which side of the wreckage was the front. The steering wheel had snapped off completely and lay a meter or so away. She found a boot sticking out from underneath the tangled pipes. She grabbed at the chassis and lifted it, her injured arm barely complaining. And there the girl was.

Flat on her back, staring upward with vacant eyes. Impaled on a piece of broken pipe.

“Are you okay?” Roan asked.

“Oh, hellfire,” Ehta said, kneeling down next to the girl. “Roan—Roan, honey, you're hurt. Don't try to move.”

“Okay.”

Ehta searched through the wreckage, hoping to find a first aid kit. There wasn't one, and it wouldn't have helped anyway. She went back and saw that Roan was breathing, still. There was very little blood—the thing that impaled her had penetrated her suit and her body with very little resistance.

Ehta had no idea what to do. She'd never been trained as a field medic. Pilots typically either died in space instantaneously, or were able to fly themselves home. Marines typically just died where they fell.

“Is Thom okay?” Roan asked.

“What? I—I don't know,” Ehta told the girl. Did Roan think they were back in the tender, monitoring the sensors? “No, wait, never mind. I just checked and he's fine. He's just fine.”

“Okay,” Roan said. “Watch out.”

Ehta spun around, unsure what she was going to see. It didn't surprise her in the least, though.

All around the rim of the little crater, the landers had gathered. Standing above her like a fence of claws, blocking out her view of the sky.

One of them put a tentative leg down into the crater, testing the steep wall, preparing to clamber down toward the two humans.

Lanoe lifted his pistol and lined up a shot. The worker was no more than five meters away. The projectile dug through one of the thing's hands, blasting off a couple of fingers, but that didn't even slow the drone down.

Others came up behind it. They clambered over each other, grabbed each other's limbs to throw themselves forward, toward him. Lanoe cursed. If he didn't move they would be on him in seconds.

He looked up—toward the center of the queenship, toward the red glow. Then he braced himself as best he could with no gravity to support him and kicked hard, tossing himself off the gantry and out into empty space. He started to tumble almost instantly but there was nothing he could do. His suit's propellant tanks were empty and he was at the mercy of physics.

Behind him one of the workers tried to do what he had done. It had a lot more legs to kick with and it came at him fast, its dozens of limbs spinning outward until it looked more like a sea anemone than a spider.

If he didn't act fast it would catch up to him. Pull him to pieces in midflight. He lifted his pistol and steadied it with both hands. Fired three quick shots. Two missed. The third one barely chipped at the cladding on the worker's leg—but it sent the bastard spinning off in a slightly different direction. For a second he was safe.