Forsaken Skies (21 page)

“I don't understand,” Lanoe said. “Why would they send old technology here?”

Derrow shrugged. “It's cheap? Disposable?”

Zhang leaned over the claw, studying it with her metal eyes. “Is there any indication who built it? Any, I don't know. Serial numbers? Maker's marks?”

Derrow used her tools to turn the thing over, study it from all sides. “Nothing like that.”

Valk turned to face Lanoe. “There's something else. I tried using an AV on the interceptor, but my sensors couldn't detect anything like a cockpit onboard. No cavities large enough to hold a pilot at all.”

“So the interceptor was a drone, too,” Lanoe said. He looked confused. It was hard to see the difference in that wrinkled face between confusion and anger, but Ehta had known him long enough to tell. “Remotely piloted, maybe.”

Valk shook his head from side to side, an exaggerated gesture for a man with no face. “No way. My scans were thorough—there were no other enemy craft in the system, and the rest of the fleet is still light-days from here. The interceptor was slow, but it was tracking me in real time. No way a remote pilot could fight like that. The battle would have been over before they even knew it was happening. The interceptor was relying on its onboard computers.”

“No. That's impossible,” Zhang said.

“Um,” Derrow said, “can I ask why?”

Zhang folded her arms and lifted her left shoulder in a kind of noncommittal shrug. “You don't let a computer fly a warship. You just don't.”

“Humanity,” Lanoe said, “has made a lot of mistakes with our technology. But we don't make the same one twice. We dropped atomic bombs on ourselves once, and never again. We turned one planet into gray goo with nanotechnology. Never again. We don't build artificial intelligences smarter than a mouse, and we will never, ever make a computer that smart and give it weapons. They tried it in the early days of the Century War and—well. It took a lot of us to fix that mistake.”

“Then how do you explain this?” Derrow asked.

“I'd love to hear suggestions,” Lanoe replied.

Ehta surprised even herself when she cleared her throat.

“Maybe,” she said, “I, uh. Have one.”

Though she knew they would scoff when they heard it.

Thom stomped down the stairs, with Roan following close behind. He couldn't believe Lanoe would just dismiss him like that. Lanoe had saved his life—and risked so much in the process. Now he was just going to dump Thom on this backwater planet and leave him to do…what? Nothing. Worse than nothing—he had to be looked after, tended to. Lanoe was treating him like a liability.

Well, he might be just that. If the authorities ever found out that Lanoe had helped Thom, they could arrest him as an accessory to—to—

He couldn't bring himself to even think it.

“There's a refectory downstairs,” Roan called after him. “I don't know if you were actually hungry or not, but…”

He turned around on the steps. Even walking down the stairs had left him out of breath, and now a surge of anger swept through him, pure unfocused, frustrated wrath that made his head swim. Why had Lanoe saved his life at all, just to bring him to this place that wasn't even habitable? He thought of about a dozen choice comments he could make, barbed witticisms to direct at the girl's bland, impassive face. She was already angry at him, like so many other people. Why bother even trying to be social?

Because she was the only person on the planet, maybe, who would actually talk to him. If he was going to spend the rest of his life here, he needed to start making connections. Friends.

He stopped himself before he could say anything nasty. Leaned against the wall and just breathed for a second. Then he nodded to himself. “Roan,” he said, “you and I got off on a bad foot. Last night, I mean, on the tender.”

She nodded but didn't say anything.

“I guess I'm—I'm very sorry, if I was…if I was abrupt.”

“I've already forgiven you,” she said. She came down the steps until their faces were level.

“You have?”

Cold as it was on the stairs, everywhere on the planet, he could feel the heat radiating from her body.

Was it possible that she didn't hate him? He'd just kind of assumed that he'd already ruined his chances for finding a friend his own age here. But maybe—

“The faith teaches us not to hold on to resentment.”

“Oh,” Thom said.

“The elder says that attachment to a slight is like clutching a venomous snake to your breast and hoping your enemy dies.”

“Oh,” he said again.

“So
are
you hungry?” she asked.

“Not—not really.”

“Then what do you want to do? Other than run off in a huff?”

Thom inhaled sharply through his nose. Was she making fun of him? No, he could see in her face that she didn't mean anything by it. In fact, what she'd said…was kind of funny.

He smiled, and started to laugh, but then just shook his head. He needed all the breath he could hold on to. “I guess I want to do something meaningful,” he said, at last, when he could think clearly.

“You want to work,” she said, nodding. “Good. Work is an excellent method for handling confused feelings.”

Thom rolled his eyes. “I didn't mean I wanted to dig irrigation ditches or anything. I'm supposed to be some kind of goodwill ambassador here. I have no idea what that means, or how to do it.”

“I know a place you could start,” she said.

Everyone stepped back so that Ehta could approach the desk and the black claw lying there. She squatted down next to the desk and studied it from a different angle, but it didn't reveal any great secrets to her.

She looked up at the elder. “You say you've been trying to communicate with the enemy fleet this whole time, and there's never been any response.”

The elder nodded.

She turned and look at Lanoe and Zhang. “The fleet that's coming at us from the wrong direction. If it came through the local wormhole throat, it would be coming out of the sun. Instead, it's headed inward from deep space. As if it didn't use a wormhole at all.”

Lanoe frowned. “Which is preposterous. You can't travel faster than light without using a wormhole.”

“So how did they get out there?”

Lanoe shrugged. “There are thousands of passages in wormspace, plenty more than have ever been charted. Maybe there's a wormhole throat out there, just outside the system.”

Ehta shook her head. Instead of refuting him, though—he was her commanding officer—she turned and looked at Derrow, the engineer. “This technology is nothing like what you would use, right? You were trained to build things.”

“I was,” Derrow admitted, as if she were being cross-examined in a courtroom.

“You wouldn't build like this. If you were designing a killer drone, you wouldn't use this technology, that's right, isn't it?”

Derrow gave an acquiescing shrug.

Ehta nodded. “I know this is going to sound crazy. But—”

“Oh, do be serious,” Maggs said, interrupting.

Ehta tried to stare particle beams at him, but he just shrugged off her look.

“You're going to say that we're fighting aliens,” he said, and laughed.

“Maybe they don't communicate because they don't know our language. Maybe they don't even have what we would consider a language. Their technology is different, the way they fly between stars is different—”

“Ensign,” Maggs said, in the way only a lieutenant could. “You're downright cracked. Humans have been exploring the galaxy for two hundred years. In all that time, we've never found anything with better conversational skills than an amoeba.” He turned and gave Derrow a smile. “A superstitious crowd, fighter pilots,” he told the engineer. “They tend to pass around conspiracy theories the way some people pass on a cold.”

“It fits all the data we've got,” Ehta pointed out.

“Except the biggest data point of all, which is that aliens don't exist,” Maggs said. “Are you really going to waste our time with this nonsense?”

“Let her talk,” Zhang said.

Ehta nodded her thanks. And then found that most of what she'd planned on saying had fallen right out of her head. Maggs had shaken her confidence in her idea, but she knew there was something there.

Maybe if she tried a different tack. “You've been operating under the premise that this is DaoLink attacking Centrocor in some new, impossible way,” she told Lanoe. “But would DaoLink send armed drones against another poly? I know they think they're untouchable, but are they really that stupid?”

“I wouldn't put much past a poly,” Lanoe said.

“Maybe,” Ehta admitted. She could feel herself deflating. If somebody else would agree with her, anybody—

“I saw those things, out there,” Valk said. “I killed a bunch of them.”

“And?” Maggs asked.

“Could have been aliens. They didn't act like human ships, I'll say that much.”

Ehta could have kissed the giant right then and there. If his helmet wasn't up. And assuming he had lips underneath it.

“For the sake of argument,” the elder said, “let us presume M. Ehta is correct.”

Maggs sneered, but nobody spoke against the elder.

“How does it change things?” the old woman finished.

Zhang blew a long breath out through her cheeks. “We still have to fight them. Alien or poly.”

The elder nodded. “Then perhaps we should focus on that.”

“Sure,” Lanoe said. He turned and looked at his pilots. “We'll start patrols as soon as we can get the fighters off the ground.”

Ehta's blood ran cold. They were supposed to have weeks yet. Days at the very least. Valk had run across an advanced group, a vanguard, but—

“Whatever they are,” Lanoe said, “they still want to kill us. We need to stop them.”

Thom stepped out of the ground car and looked around, not knowing what he had expected. It certainly wasn't this. Roan had driven him out into the town, through streets lined with low brick houses. They'd finally pulled up in front of what looked like a very large shed made of corrugated metal. A couple of ground trucks stood in a lot to one side, and he could hear heavy machinery rumbling inside.

“Where are we?” he asked.

Roan pulled a plastic crate out of the back of the car and handed it to him. “This is an animal feed factory. About two hundred people work here.”

“Okay,” he said. “But why are we here?”

“Part of my work as an aspirant is in community health outreach. I'm here to inoculate the workers today.”

“Okay,” he said again. “But why am I here?”

“You're a goodwill ambassador. You said you didn't know how to do that. Well, I assume part of it is meeting Nirayans and talking to them, right? So here's your chance to meet about two hundred of them.”

“Okay,” he said, wondering when he would start to understand.