Forsaken Skies (23 page)

Oh, she remembered. Ehta had no trouble remembering things. Forgetting was the hard part.

She forced herself to walk past Maggs to the next fighter in the row. Its canopy was polarized and it stared at her like the eye of some cyclopean insect. Her mouth was suddenly full of saliva. She choked it down, then reached over and tapped the recessed key. The canopy melted and flowed down into vents along its rim. Revealed inside was the cockpit, with its complicated seat and its dead displays.

“Is there a problem with that one?” Lanoe asked. He was standing right behind her. She hadn't seen him come up, and she jumped a little.

“No, I checked them all out myself. They're all good,” she said. She grabbed a handhold on the edge of the cockpit and tried to lift her foot up to step inside.

Her foot might as well have been glued to the concrete. It wouldn't move.

She had been putting this off ever since Lanoe contacted her, back on the Hexus. She'd gotten this far mostly through denial. She'd known perfectly well that eventually she was going to have to do this, but always it had seemed like that was something far off in some dreadful future. Now the day had come.

She tried lifting her other foot. It came up, but not far enough.

“Ensign?” Lanoe asked. Not unkindly.

She thought about turning around, facing him and telling him what was wrong. Telling him everything. But she couldn't do that. She owed him. She had to—

She closed her eyes. Her head rang like a bell. She couldn't open her eyes. She felt something hard smack against the side of her head and she realized she must have collapsed.

“Get a medkit!” she heard Zhang say.

“Watch out!” Maggs shouted. “I think she's going to—”

Ehta's stomach heaved. She didn't know if she threw up or not. She finally managed to open her eyes and saw boots all around her. She was lying flat on the ground. They were all looking at her.

Her whole body shook as she sat up on the concrete. Zhang came toward her with a spray hypo, but Ehta just shook her head. She looked over at Lanoe.

She could see in his eyes that he knew. He knew.

She pulled her knees toward her and wrapped her arms around them. Tried to breathe. Just tried to stop shaking.

I
didn't get busted down to the marines. I volunteered.”

Zhang leaned forward, her hands reaching for Ehta's. Ehta refused the consolation.

They were sitting with the elder in the old woman's office. Ehta had been unable to talk out at the spaceport, barely able to breathe. Zhang had brought her here because she thought maybe the elder could help. She was supposed to be some kind of counselor or something, at least as Zhang understood it.

The elder had barely spoken since they arrived, however. She just sat behind her desk, her hands palm down on top of it. Occasionally she nodded in sympathy, but that was it. It looked like it was up to Zhang to make sense of what had happened.

She shook her head. “I don't understand. The marines? But that's so
dangerous
. Marines get killed all the time. I'd think if you were afraid to fly, then—”

Ehta's eyes blazed with anger. “I'm no coward!” she said. “I just can't do it anymore. I can't get back in a cockpit.” The anger dissolved abruptly and she rubbed at her eyes with her fingers. “I'm so sorry, Zhang. I'm so sorry.”

The elder took a box of tissues out of her desk, but Ehta ignored it.

“Tell us what happened,” Zhang said. “How this began.”

“You think that'll help?”

“I need to understand.”

Ehta nodded, but she wasn't looking at either of them. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

She took a breath. Blew it back out. Zhang sat back in her chair, ready to listen.

“It started a couple of years ago. I couldn't sleep. I would lie down and close my eyes and I would be back in my cockpit. Running through checklists, making sure everything was working. It was fine, just distracting. I was flying two, sometimes three patrols a day back then, and I thought it was just like when you look at the sun and afterward you see spots. Just, like, a residue of the day. It didn't stop, though. It was every night. When you don't sleep for a long time, it gets to you. You get forgetful. You drop things, like, little things, you pick them up and they just slip out of your hands. It's annoying. But you keep going. You have to keep going, so you just…You don't stop.

“At night, when I really, really wanted to just sleep, I was still going through those checklists. Except then red lights kept coming up.” She glanced briefly at the elder. “That means something's wrong. Something's broken, or you're out of fuel or ammo, or you can't get a comms signal…whatever. Red lights are bad. And there were more of them every night.

“Sometimes, I would play out one of my patrols in my head. Go through every part of it, thinking through what I did right, what I did wrong. A lot of the time, I just didn't know which was which. And always there were more red lights, and I got more and more tired…I was getting nervy, and I knew it, but I had to hold on. Always there were more patrols. They bumped us up to four a day at one point. I had to eat in my cockpit because there was no time for it back at base. The only time I wasn't in my fighter was when I was supposed to sleep.

“Then one day I went to the hangar to start a patrol and it just came to me, like this amazing idea. It's funny—at the time, I thought I was the first one to think of it. If I was sick, I didn't have to fly. So I made myself throw up. They took me away to the infirmary and the doctor there barely even looked at me. He tested my vitals and gave me a pill. I threw it away—I knew I didn't need it.

“What I'd needed, what I'd gotten, was time. A little time when I wasn't on patrol. Just skipping that one mission, it felt like enough. I was mostly okay for the rest of that day. I flew the rest of my patrols and it was fine. And that night there was one light on the board in my head that wasn't red. Just one. But by then, that was a victory. Something had
worked
.

“The problem was, the brass knew about malingerers. They knew, the second time, the third time I made myself throw up, they knew I was faking it. They let me get away with it for a week, until one day I skipped two patrols. That was half my workload, and that was too much.”

She looked across the desk at the elder. Zhang could see by the way Ehta scrunched up her face, her mouth twisted over to one side, that she didn't think the elder could understand. Well, maybe that was true. If you weren't a pilot, if you'd never flown a bad patrol, and then another one, and another…

“Pilots get nervy. They call it ‘getting the wind up,' which is an expression I will never understand. There was no wind in my cockpit. I didn't feel crazy. I didn't feel sick, just so very tired.

“They told me I
was
sick, though. Sick in the head. But lucky me! There was a treatment for what I had. They would go into my head and find whatever it was that had gone wrong, the wires that got crossed or whatever. The specific neurons that were keeping me from sleeping. The problem, they told me, was that I was making the wrong connections in there—attaching memories of flying to the wrong kind of emotions. The connections are carried on your dendrites, the, like, the branches that spread out from one neuron to another. So they would use a tiny little laser to burn off the bad little dendrites but leave the body of the neurons intact. I wouldn't miss a few diseased dendrites, would I? Of course not.

“I actually, you know, for one second I was actually excited. Just so happy. They could fix me like a broken airfoil. Make me okay again. Let me sleep.

“Then I met another pilot, a guy who'd had this procedure. He was all right, sure. You could have a conversation with him, even joke around. He flirted with me and we talked about old battles. Just like any other pilot. The whole time, though, I could see right through his eyes. Like they were made of glass.

“I could, you know, I could see right inside his head, maybe because he and I had the same damage. I don't know. But I could look inside his head and there was nothing in there. Nothing but engine and weapons panels, and PBW tracers bouncing back and forth. I looked up his flight record. He'd gotten more kills since his procedure than he'd had before it, lots more. I looked at recordings of his fights and I could tell. That wasn't a man in that cockpit. It was—it was something they'd made, something they'd put together in an operating room. It could fight, it could fly. But it wasn't him anymore. All that other stuff, the flirting and joking and everything—he was doing that on autopilot. Inside his head he was still flying, even when he was talking to me. He was
always
flying.

“They hadn't fixed him at all. He was even more broken than I was. They just made him stop caring about how broken he was.”

Zhang tried not to shiver. She'd met pilots who'd had that procedure. She'd fought with them. They fought hard, but never for very long. They started taking bad risks, because they just didn't care—they'd lost their fear. And so they died, because they couldn't get scared enough to run away when everything went wrong.

“The treatment wasn't voluntary,” Ehta said. “I needed to fly, according to the brass, so I was going to get treated whether I wanted to or not. But I couldn't do it. I just couldn't.

“So instead, I asked for a transfer. I volunteered for the marines.”

Zhang pursed her lips. “Who was commanding the Ninety-Fourth at that point? Rannegan?”

“No, he died at Asmodeus. It was Genet.”

Zhang nodded. “I knew her. Trained her, in fact. Decent woman. I imagine she wasn't pleased when you transferred.”

“She tried to stop me. But there's a regulation about that. They need marines, more of them all the time. If you volunteer, nobody can stop you—not your parents, not your planetary governor. Your commander doesn't stand a chance.”

The elder leaned forward. “When M. Lanoe asked you to volunteer for the current mission,” she said, “you said yes before you'd heard the details. Did you know he wanted you to fly again?”

“There's only one kind of mission Lanoe does. I knew,” Ehta replied.

The elder nodded. “You could have said no. You could have told him all of this, back then.”

“If you're going to say I've let down the squad, or I've let down your damned planet, save your breath, lady,” Ehta said, angry again. She was cycling through moods very rapidly—Zhang didn't imagine that was a good sign.

“I simply wish to know,” the elder went on, “why you accepted a mission you knew you couldn't perform.”

“I didn't know if I could do it or not,” Ehta replied. “It's been a couple of years. In the marines, I never had trouble sleeping. I thought maybe it would work again. That I'd gotten over it. I was lying to myself, of course. But I owe Lanoe so much. I owe him this huge debt, so I guess—I wanted to believe it.”

She covered her face in her hands.

The elder looked over at Zhang. “Perhaps,” she said, “we should give M. Ehta some time to compose herself.”

Zhang nodded and got up from her chair. The elder took her out into the hall and closed the door. “I assume you've seen this before,” she said.

“It happens,” Zhang said. “More often than the Navy likes to admit. What we do—the missions we fly—human brains didn't evolve for that kind of work. There's so much to keep track of, so many things going on at once, and if you make one little mistake you're dead. We all feel it—what happened to her, we all go through that.” She shook her head. “Everybody handles it differently, but—her story doesn't surprise me.”

“I was asked to speak with M. Ehta and to offer my opinion on her mental state,” the elder said. “I'm not a psychologist. I counsel to the faithful, but mostly that means helping aspirants find their path, or at most helping two miners keep their marriage together. I have no formal training in the treatment of stress trauma. I don't think I need to be an expert, though, to make a prognosis here.”

Zhang nodded, her face very tight and controlled.

“That poor woman is never going to fly again,” the elder said.

Dozens of compartments had been cunningly constructed inside the walls of the tender, places to stash extra ammunition and fuel, food, and consumables, not to mention actual luggage. It took Maggs the better part of an hour to find what he sought—a toolkit that contained a rotary cutter. He shoved the rest of the equipment back in the kit as best he could, then headed back out into the light and what passed in this desolate place as air. Valk and Lanoe were out there deep in conversation, no doubt discussing the fate of young Ensign Ehta. He ignored them and leaned against the side of his fighter. The rotary cutter spun up with a satisfying whine as he engaged its motor, its diamond carbide cutting wheel sparkling as it spun faster and faster.

Just the thing for trimming his fingernails. He was almost finished when Zhang returned, sans ensign.

“Where is she?” Lanoe demanded, his voice lowering into a growl.

“She's in the elder's office. You're not going anywhere near her,” Zhang told him.

“Is that right?”

She put a hand on Lanoe's chest, just above his cryptab.
A tad familiar with her commanding officer,
Maggs thought, in his father's disapproving voice.

One hears things,
he replied, under, as it were, his mental breath.

“She's got a bad case of nerves. She thought she had it under control, but she was wrong. How many times have you heard that story?” Zhang asked.

Lanoe turned his face away in disgust.

“Don't,” she said. “Don't even start. That woman worships you, you know that? She only made it this far because she didn't want to disappoint you. The very last thing she needs is a lecture.”

“Sure. And the last thing I need,” Lanoe said, looming over the little slip of a blind girl like some ogre in a reality play, “is a twenty percent reduction in my force. You understand what this means, don't you? We had five pilots to face an entire fleet. Now we have four.”

“Then we'll just have to make do!” Zhang said.

Lanoe stared down at her with eyes not entirely dissimilar to the cutting wheel in sharpness and steely glint.

Zhang's eyes were of course made of metal, and it was difficult to read their expression. But Maggs could see from the set of her shoulders she wasn't about to back down.
Well, good for her,
he thought, then patted himself on the back—mentally, of course, as such a thing would be dangerous while holding a cutting tool—for his charitable estimation
. Anyone who can stand up to that bully deserves a bit of respect,
he decided.

It took positively ages, but eventually Lanoe gave in. “Fine,” he said. “She can run ground control. Right now you and I are heading out on patrol.”

“Us?” Zhang asked, a trifle gobsmacked.

“Valk just came back from a deep picket; he's earned a little rest,” Lanoe pointed out.