Forsaken Skies (20 page)

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Lanoe said. “I think he just started our war for us.”

Valk had a secret.

He pulled the BR.9 around into a corkscrew roll, accelerating away from the enemy interceptor. It lumbered after him, just starting to gain speed. It was a lot bigger than he was, and all that mass would take some time to get turned around. But there was no question now—it was coming for him.

Valk's secret was that he was only a middling pilot.

Oh, he'd been the leader in his squad. But that wasn't saying much. Even in its early glory days the Establishment had been lousy at training its pilots. Many of them died before they even got their flight certificate. Those that made it to the front lasted, on average, three missions before getting killed.

Valk had got his Blue Star by luck, mostly, by staying alive long enough to catch fighters that were low on fuel or had already been damaged. He'd come close to dying way too many times, and always by his own fault. Even his accident had happened because he wasn't looking behind him, hadn't even seen the AV fire coming his way. Somebody high up in the Establishment's ranks had heard his story and had created the Blue Devil nickname because at the end, right before the grand idea fell apart, they'd needed propaganda victories as much as material ones. They'd created the myth of the pilot who refused to die before finishing his mission.

They'd had to bully him back to the front. He'd wanted to die, had thought he had a right to that. But the grand cause wanted a hero instead of a martyr.

As the enemy interceptor came for him, out there in the dark far from Niraya, he had only one thought in his head:
oh damn oh damn oh hell
.

The weapon spikes on the interceptor's spine recoiled visibly as it opened fire. The corkscrew roll saved him—the projectiles passed to his left and his right, above and below him, none of them connecting. Behind him the interceptor's thrusters belched fire as it sped after him, not even bothering to match his roll, just flying up his six as straight as an arrow.

Valk snapped around in a rotary right and burned away at a sharp angle, thinking he would flank the interceptor. He had the advantage in speed and maneuverability.

The interceptor had more guns than he did. They bounced and shook as it spread rounds all across his course. One of them came close enough that a panel lit up inside his cockpit, his computer having analyzed the projectile. A kinetic impactor—basically a lump of dense metal. The interceptor might as well be shooting cannonballs at him.

Of course, as fast as he was going, if he ran into one of those it would tear a hole right through him. His vector field would deflect anything but a direct hit, but if even one shot got through it would kill him.

It would be easy enough to break off, to pull some quick snap turns and burn for Niraya. That would mean abandoning his attack on the orbiters, though—which had been the whole reason why he'd started this fight.

He was going to have to close and engage. No choice.

The interceptor kept firing, nonstop. How many of those impactors could the thing carry? Valk swept in toward his enemy, wiggling his stick back and forth, jinking so the interceptor couldn't get a solid firing solution on him. A kinetic impactor smacked off his vector field and he felt the BR.9 thrum like a violin string but a quick check of his systems panel showed no significant damage. The interceptor was close now, filling up his viewports with its lumpy, dark shape. It showed no lights at all but that didn't matter. Valk's sensors had painted the thing stem to stern and he could see it just fine on his displays.

He readied an AV round—the same kind of projectile that nearly killed him and made him famous—and told his computer to work up a solution. He knew the algorithms it would use. It would sweep the interceptor with millimeter wave scanners that could see right through the enemy craft's hull. If it found any significantly large cavities inside—for example, the pilot's cockpit—it would find a way to put his AV round right inside that space. The AV would breach the hull and then explode in a jet of superheated metal inside the cockpit, incinerating any organic material it touched. Like, for instance, the pilot. A bad way to die, but Valk didn't waste any sympathy on this bastard.

While the computer worked on its solution, Valk focused on staying alive. Impactors zipped past him on every side. There was no human way to predict where the next one would be. Valk could only trust to intuition and luck. He swiveled around on his long axis until the interceptor looked upside down in his viewports and then punched for a quick Z-burn, simultaneously pulsing his engine. The effect was to throw the BR.9 into a tight loop, getting him out of the way of the enemy's fire and giving the computer time to think. As he swung around in space, he trained his PBWs on the interceptor and loosed a volley of shots at it. All of them went wide. He'd known they would, but had hoped they would make the interceptor's pilot keep his head down.

The impactors came on just as fast and as thick as ever. Valk saw one approaching—actually saw it as a shadow looming dead ahead—and twisted out of his loop just in time to avoid it.

A blue pearl appeared in the corner of his vision. The computer was done finding its solution. He reached for the trigger to launch the AV—but first he actually looked down at his weapons panel.

No cavities detected. AV fire not recommended against target
.

What? That was—that couldn't be right. There were no hollow spaces inside the interceptor's hull? None at all? That would mean there could be no cockpit in there. That made no damned sense at all. Though if the computer had told Valk that the enemy ship was just a hollow skin full of impactor ammunition, he supposed he might have believed that.

Working fast, he took his AV offline and switched to a disruptor. No need for a firing solution this time—he would just need to get close, and be lucky.

The interceptor hadn't just sat there dead in space while Valk flew circles around it. Whether or not there was a cockpit in there, somebody onboard was smart enough to figure out that Valk was trying to edge his way back toward the orbiters. They'd brought the interceptor's nose around and moved to keep him from the defenseless targets. Now they turned again, to face him head-on. Because the interceptor was longer than it was wide, that meant giving him a smaller target. It also meant that the distance between them was shrinking at an alarming rate.

Valk burned away from the interceptor, straight out into the void. Just as he'd expected, the interceptor followed him, pouring on speed to catch up with him. The spiky guns kept belching out impactors the whole time. Valk kept his acceleration low, just enough to keep ahead of the oncoming juggernaut. What he was about to try would take some very careful timing. It also demanded from the gods that the interceptor didn't fire an impactor right up the funnel of his main thruster.

As if thinking made it so—or nearly—the BR.9 shook just then as a near miss tore through its vector field. A noise like a gunshot echoed through the cockpit, deafening Valk until he couldn't hear his music anymore. He let out a scream he couldn't hear and looked down at his displays. One of his airfoils was gone, sheared off by an impactor hit.

Well, out here in space he didn't need them.

Just hold on. Don't panic and run. Let him come to you,
Valk told himself.

Behind him the interceptor blocked out half the stars. It was right on his tail, barely five hundred meters back. Three hundred. Impactors hit his vector field so often now the whole fighter shook and groaned.

One hundred fifty meters. Now.

Valk stabbed at a virtual key on his flight display. The fighter's positioning jets fired and the BR.9 spun around, the stars in Valk's viewport blurring as he swung around to face the interceptor. The jets fired again in the opposite direction to stabilize him and he was flying backward.

He didn't even look at his displays. He brought up a virtual Aldis sight, just a glorified set of crosshairs superimposed on his canopy, and focused on a likely spot on the interceptor's right flank. Two bulbous pods met there, with a small gap between them. Valk gave his computer a second to firm up the shot, then squeezed his trigger.

The disruptor round was a lumpy rod about a meter long. Most of it was solid carbon, dense and hard as diamond. Studded inside the rod were hundreds of small but very powerful explosive charges. They were timed to explode in series, each of them going off a millisecond after the one before it.

The disruptor dug through the interceptor's solid bulk, tearing the enemy craft apart as it wormed its way through. The carbon rod turned to shrapnel that tore the interceptor apart from the inside.

The interceptor's guns kept firing, impactors whizzing past Valk in a steady stream. He felt cold dread grip his stomach and he was certain, absolutely convinced, that the interceptor had some way of shrugging off his disruptor just like it had proved immune to his AV round.

But then something inside it—maybe its fuel tank, maybe an ammunition magazine—exploded, and the whole ship blossomed outward in a spreading ball of fire that turned dark and dissipated almost instantly. Pieces of the interceptor flew off in every direction. Stray impactor rounds formed a cloud all around it, glittering in Valk's lights.

Inside the BR.9's cockpit, Valk had stopped breathing. He watched the interceptor's pieces spread outward, tumbling and twisting, until he couldn't hold out any longer.

He drew a breath.

He'd made it.

I
t was hard to make small talk when you couldn't tell anybody where you were from. Or who your family was. Or, for that matter, why you'd been dragged out of a wrecked yacht hidden inside a gas giant and lugged along as deadweight to the middle of a combat zone.

Thom did his best.

“Lanoe said you were in the marines,” he said.

Ensign Ehta didn't seem to have heard him. At least, she didn't reply. She punched a virtual key on her wrist display instead. The magnetic winch on the side of the tender whined and groaned and another fighter detached from the undercarriage. A telescoping crane arm reached out and gently deposited the fighter on the ground.

Thom tried to help, steadying the fighter as it touched the concrete, trying to keep it from wobbling. Of course, if something went wrong and it tipped over, the fighter would crush him, even in Niraya's low gravity. So Ehta had to keep an eye on him as well. “Is it true? You were a marine?”

“Yeah,” she said. She walked around the fighter, checking it for damage. Her wrist display flickered and chimed as it ran a diagnostic on the fighter's systems.

“You must be pretty brave,” Thom suggested.

She glanced up at him. He couldn't read her eyes.

“You hear stories,” Thom said. “You know. I saw a newscast on the battle at Nergal last term. We thought there had to be some kind of rounding error when we saw the number of casualties.”

She picked up a tool, something with a light on the end, and swept it around inside the fighter's main thruster.

“It wasn't an error, though, was it? You really lost five thousand troops in one day?”

“More like in a minute,” Ehta said. She switched off her wrist display. “The marines fight on the ground. Ground's a bad place to be when the Navy's in orbit.” She shrugged, then peered down the barrel of a particle beam cannon.

“How does something like that even happen?”

She looked down at the tool in her hand. Then she set it carefully on a ground cloth and sighed. “If I tell you, will you be quiet and let me work?”

“I'm—I didn't mean to—”

She tilted her head to one side, ignoring his stammering apology. “There was a lot of fighting around the main refinery yard on Nergal, lots of DaoLink insurgents but they were low on supplies and we were about to break through.” She shrugged. “DaoLink had a cruiser in a polar orbit, though. It opened up with its seventy-fives—that's a kind of gun with a seventy-five-millimeter bore. Fires about six thousand rounds a minute, though that's misleading, because it only carries enough ammo to discharge for ten seconds at a go. Anyway, they had a whole battery of those guns and they opened them up all at once. Blew up the refineries, but I guess they figured it would be cheaper to rebuild them than to surrender them.”

Thom made a conscious effort not to let his jaw drop. “But all those people—they just—just killed thousands of marines to—”

“Well, see, marines are even cheaper than refineries,” she pointed out. “There's a lot of people on Earth and Mars and Ganymede and not a lot of jobs since the polys got enfranchised. So you can always get more marines.”

She closed her eyes for a second, as if she were remembering that day. Slowly a smile curled across her mouth. “Nergal,” she said. “Real pretty.”

“It…was?”

“The fighting was actually on one of its moons. Nergal was up there in the sky. It's a gas giant, a hot one like Geryon—you saw Geryon pretty good, I guess.”

“More of it than I would have liked.”

She nodded, but she wasn't looking at him. “Well, this one had rings. That close to the star, they weren't ice rings, though, like Saturn's. Ice would have just sublimated away. These rings were made out of rock, so hot it was molten. The rings glowed, like a ribbon of fire floating around this big dark planet.” She opened her eyes and looked at him. “Pretty.”

Thom had no idea how you could think about the scenery when so many of your friends and comrades were getting blown up from space. How much violence and death did you have to witness before it was less noteworthy than the view?

He'd wondered the same thing about Lanoe, though in the abstract. He knew Lanoe was a highly decorated pilot. That he'd fought in more battles than Thom had even learned about in his history classes. You'd think that would leave some kind of mark on somebody. That you would just be able to tell.

Instead, back when he worked for Thom's father, Lanoe had just seemed like a quiet old man. It wasn't until Lanoe had chased him halfway across the galaxy that Thom had realized there was more to him. That he had depths Thom couldn't even begin to fathom.

Being around all these old people with their stories, with their decades or centuries of experiences, made him feel ridiculously young. Unproven. His father had always kept him away from any kind of danger or excitement. His life had been one of unrelenting boredom, relieved only by the occasional yacht race.

He wondered if he was ever going to have a chance to make something of himself. Lanoe had brought him to Niraya, he knew, because it was the last place the authorities would think to look for him. But did that mean he was going to spend the rest of his life, there?

Hellfire, he hoped not. The air was so thin he could barely breathe. The gravity was lower than he was used to and that was annoying every time he tried to walk straight. It was cold, too, near freezing even with the local sun riding high in the sky.

“You must have seen a lot of things nobody else ever will,” Thom said. “I mean, I've seen a bunch of planets, but typically just the spaceports and some hotels and—”

“Kid,” Ehta said, “I've got work to do here, you know?” She tapped at her wrist display and small hatches opened on the sides of the unlimbered fighter. One after another she yanked out long, rectangular slabs of metal that Thom knew were fuel and ammunition cartridges. She laid them carefully on a sheet and started rubbing at them with her gloved fingers. He had no idea what she was trying to check.

He waited until he couldn't stand it anymore. The not talking. “I'm sorry if I bothered you,” he said.

She sighed and looked up at him. He couldn't take the expression on her face. He could imagine what she was thinking. He was just a kid, some stupid rich kid Lanoe had taken a shine to for some reason she couldn't guess. Meanwhile she was a pilot and a Navy officer doing vitally important work that could save lives.

“I'm sorry,” he said again. He turned away. He would have run off, if he'd known of anyplace to go. “I'm sorry I'm in the way. I'm sorry I'm so useless.”

“Kid,” she said, “relax. Just…relax. And shut up.”

His cheeks burned with shame. He was about to say something more, make another apology, except just then her wrist display started chiming and she looked up into the sky. He turned to look as well, and saw something small, moving fast, headed in their direction. It quickly revealed itself to be a fighter—a BR.9—coming in for a landing.

“Valk's back,” Ehta said. “Early.” She glanced at her wrist. “
Really
early.”

Her display chimed at her again and Lanoe's face appeared floating above her wrist. “Ehta?” he said. “When Valk lands, get him over here to the Retreat as quick as you can. We've got a lot to talk about.”

By the time they reached the elder's office, Ehta was gasping for breath. She was gratified to see that Thom was in just as bad shape—she'd thought she was getting old.

Valk never even slowed down. He hadn't lowered his helmet, of course, so he had plenty of oxygen. He hammered on the door like he owned the place and hurried inside. Ehta gave Thom a look and headed in as well.

Inside, the elder and the other pilots were huddled around a desk, deep in conversation with a tall woman Ehta didn't recognize. She had black hair cut to fall around her ears and she wore civilian clothes that were less than a decade out of date, so for this planet she looked pretty hip. “This is M. Derrow,” Lanoe said, pointing at her. “She runs the mining operations for Centrocor. She's an engineer.” He looked up at Valk. “You have it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Valk said.

When he'd landed at the spaceport, he was carrying something big and heavy in his arms. He'd been in too big a rush to get to Lanoe to show it to her on the way over. Now he dumped it onto the desk with a clang. Powdery black residue scattered across the display top.

Ehta joined the general throng, trying to get close enough to see what it was. Not that it was easy to tell. The object had been heavily damaged, cut up by a particle beam by the look of it. It was about as thick as Ehta's thigh and scorched black until whatever color it had been originally was gone. One end of it was just a mass of severed wires and cables. The other tapered to a savagely sharp point. Like the claw of some giant robot wolf, maybe.

“Do you recognize this?” Lanoe asked the elder.

The old woman studied it carefully before she replied. “Yes. It looks just like one of the legs of the lander that killed my people.”

Lanoe nodded. Clearly that was what he'd expected to hear.

Ehta had barely glanced at the video of the killer drone attack. She remembered seeing a claw like that protrude from the chest of the dead elder in that video, though. She shivered a little.

“This time they sent fifteen of them, with one interceptor as an escort,” Valk said. “I've got video and my fighter's logs to look at, if you want.”

Thom reached out one finger to poke at the exposed wires.

“Leave that,” Lanoe barked.

“I just thought—”

“We don't know if it's safe,” Lanoe said, his voice softening a little. “Roan,” he said. “Can you do me a favor?”

The Nirayan girl looked surprised. “Yes, of course,” she said.

“Take Thom somewhere and get him something to eat,” Lanoe said.

Ehta could see Thom winding up to protest, but the look on Lanoe's face was pretty clear. This wasn't a conversation for unauthorized civilians. The kids left the office together without any more fuss.

“This isn't for public consumption,” Lanoe said, gesturing at the thing on the desk. “Okay? M. Derrow—when Valk told me what he was bringing back, I knew we'd want an engineer's perspective. That's why we called you in here.”

Derrow nodded uncertainly. She stepped up to the desk and took a long, thin probe out of one of her pockets. Then she looked at Valk and Ehta as if she'd suddenly realized there were strangers in the room. “I'm, uh, that is—I'm an administrator, mostly. I have a desk job. It's been a long time since I actually did any fieldwork.”

“You're saying you can't tell us anything?” Lanoe asked, looking angry. He never did have much use for people who wasted his time.

“If I may,” Maggs said, leaning in. He smiled at the administrator and she glanced away.
Uh-ho,
Ehta thought. Maggs was already working his magic. “We need to keep this at the very top level. Tip-top. That's why we wanted a woman of your…standing to give it the eye.”

“Well…” Derrow said. “Let's see.” She touched the claw with her probe in a couple of places. “Pretty bad scoring. This damage—it looks like maybe some kind of laser cutter did this?”

“Particle beam,” Valk said. “My, uh, particle beam.”

“Ah.” Derrow squatted down to get a better look at the ragged end. She stuck her probe into the stringy mass there, then took out a pair of pliers and grabbed one of the strands. She gave it a good tug as if she was trying to pull it out.

Instead, the claw spasmed and thumped against the desk, its point digging a deep gouge out of the display top. It started flopping its way across the desk until Derrow let go of the pliers.

Instantly it fell back, inert again.

“Is that thing alive?” Zhang asked. “
Was
it alive?”

“No,” Derrow told her. “It's all metal. Lightweight alloys but nothing all that exotic. This was built, not born. Though it's not a design I'm familiar with. These wires,” she said, touching the strands with her probe again—Ehta flinched in case the thing came back to life, but it didn't—“are designed to act like muscle fibers. You pull on them and the whole limb contracts or flexes.”

“A drone,” Lanoe said. “We knew that already. But you say this is new to you. Maybe some kind of new technology? Something DaoLink cooked up in a lab, maybe, and they needed to test it so they sent it here to see what it could do?”

“No,” Derrow said. “No. This isn't new technology at all. In fact, it's pretty archaic. The concept goes way back, but this implementation is crude compared to modern myomechanicals—plastics with selective elasticity that make this look like a child's toy. If Centrocor has that tech, so does DaoLink. This is antique. This,” she said, looking distinctly unimpressed, “would rust if it got wet.”