Forsaken Skies (41 page)

Just as they'd expected, the interceptors' programming included a subroutine instructing them to go after wounded ships first. The hard part was keeping up the facade. He dodged just enough to miss colliding with the enemy projectiles. Worked up a firing solution for his last disruptor, just in case.

He didn't need it. Valk hadn't gone far. One interceptor after another burst apart, Valk's disruptors finding their fuel supplies and turning them into scrap. The broken debris came showering toward Maggs and he burned for a second—his thruster operating just fine—to get out of the muck.

“Fine show, sir,” he called, all fear of death forgotten.

Perhaps too soon, of course. Pride goeth before and all that. Valk hadn't even waited to confirm his kills before wheeling about and burning to catch a new formation of enemies. Maggs found himself surrounded with his own coterie of scouts before he even had a chance to catch his breath. He twisted around in space, corkscrewing through their formation. Plasma fire caught his flank but he shrugged it off, barely breaking a sweat. As he raced through and past the scouts he pivoted on his axis until he was flying backward, watching their thrusters recede.

He called up a virtual Aldis sight and lined up his crosshairs. One, two, three—the scouts broke into pieces as he cut through their skeletal frames. Four, five—

The sixth exploded before he could even get a bead on it.

Zhang limped up beside him, matching his velocity until their airfoils nearly touched. “Let's head over to Lanoe's position, see how he's doing,” she called.

“Gladly, if I didn't have a battle to finish,” he told her.

“Maggs, check your sensors. You see anything left but Valk out here?”

A rather cutting retort died on Maggs's tongue. He brought up a display and scanned the local volume in infrared and found she was correct.

He saw Valk blazing red in the midst of a field of twisted, scorched metal that had once been a trio of interceptors, cooling from blue to black. He saw Zhang's own engines glowing a sickly green. Beyond that—

Nothing.

No enemy ships remained. In the rush of excitement that gripped him after Valk arrived, Maggs had missed the most important part of any battle.

The part where you win.

Lanoe barely registered the three of them coming up alongside him. His FA.2 had already identified them as friends, so it didn't chime to warn him of approaching vessels.

In silence, he flew below the destroyer, his squadmates like an honor guard as he inspected what he'd achieved.

Nothing.

This battle—this battle that nearly cost him everything—had been over dead bones.

In the last few minutes of the fighting whatever intelligence controlled the destroyer had grown desperate. It had launched all of its remaining ships at once, so fast that many of them were destroyed in midspace collisions. The rest had been prime targets for his PBWs as they rushed toward the fight, and he'd let none of them through. The local volume was crowded now with their wreckage, dead metal spinning without a sound in the void.

The mother ship they'd left behind, the destroyer itself, was all that remained, a tiny fraction of its original size now. Its true shape was revealed and it did not impress. A bulky thruster unit had long since exhausted its fuel, its engines now cold and useless. Extending forward from that thruster unit was a network of girders, dividing and ramifying outward like the limbs of a tree, the skeleton of some alien beast. The scouts and interceptors had been hung on that framework like grapes on a vine.

Other than that—other than the thruster and the skeletal frame—there was nothing to the destroyer. Not a single gun. No communications antennae or sensor pods.

No command bridge. No crew compartments at all.

Inert, defenseless, the big ship drifted through space. Lanoe had already checked its trajectory. It would pass by the moon Aruna in thirteen hours, then most likely be caught by the ice giant Garuda's gravity, pulled down into the planet's crushing depths and lost forever. It lacked the fuel to alter that deadly course.

The destroyer had possessed one simple mission, a program of dumb simplicity. It was to fly toward Aruna, that was all. The cargo of smaller ships it carried had the real program to execute: Kill anyone they found along the way. If the four pilots had left the moon alone, if they'd flown back to Niraya without bothering to investigate the destroyer, it would have self-destructed all on its own.

“No programmer,” Zhang said, breaking the silence.

“No,” Lanoe said.

“No aliens. Just drones,” Valk said.

“One chances to think, perhaps it shouldn't be called a destroyer at all,” Maggs pointed out. “More of a carrier, really.”

Lanoe sneered inside his helmet. He very much wanted to tell Maggs to shut the hell up. But that wasn't how you talked to heroes, was it? And Maggs had just shown his sand. Taken Lanoe's orders and executed them with skill and aplomb, like a model officer.

Maybe it was time to rethink his opinion on Auster Maggs.

It was definitely time to rethink how he planned on fighting these aliens. “Swarmship,” he said.

“That sounds nasty,” Zhang said. “I mean, it fits. But it sounds nasty.”

“The thing we've been calling a carrier,” Lanoe said, because they'd got him talking now, got him thinking. “Call that a queenship.”

“Queen?” Valk asked.

“Like the queen ant, or the queen bee. They don't care if we kill their workers, or their warriors. They'll care if we threaten their queen. Their programmer. And the big ship, the queenship, that's where the programmer will be. If there is one. It's the only place left. We're going to have to fight it directly.”

“It's got seven more of these…swarmships defending it,” Valk said. “The four of us barely survived fighting one of them.”

“Sure,” Lanoe said. “It's going to take some work.”

He could hear the shiver in Zhang's voice as she spoke next. “What now, then? Give us some orders, Commander.”

“Back to Niraya, first,” he told them. “The three of you deserve some downtime. And I need a minute to think this through.”

In other words—he had no damned idea what to do now.

V
alk had brought extra fuel cartridges when he came to join the fight against the swarmship, but the fighters were damaged and they could barely limp back to Niraya. It took far longer than Lanoe liked, but they made it. Once they reached orbit around the planet they rendezvoused with the tender and he was glad to be out of the FA.2's cockpit. He'd been breathing his own recycled air for so long it had started to smell funny, never a good sign.

As they pulled themselves into the wardroom of the tender, Derrow rushed to embrace Maggs before he'd even dropped his helmet. She looked terrified.

“I'm so glad to see you,” she told all of them. “I have no idea how to fly this thing. If you hadn't come back, I would have been stranded up here.”

Lanoe was sympathetic but he knew her ordeal wouldn't have lasted very long. If the fighters hadn't come back, Niraya would have been defenseless. Derrow would have had a good vantage point to watch the apocalypse—the last place she would have wanted to have been would be down on the ground.

“Sorry,” Valk said. “I couldn't leave them alone.”

Derrow nodded at him. It was clear she had more to say, and was impatient with them while they scrubbed out the collar rings of their suits and gulped down some solid food. “There's something happening down on the planet,” she said, finally, when they gave her the chance. “I've been watching on the displays—I don't actually know what it's all about, but you should have a look for yourselves.”

Zhang ran her hands over a display from the sensor pod, a gray swirling image that made no sense to anyone who wasn't used to reading infrared arrays the way she was. “Oh,” she said. “Oh. That could be bad.”

Lanoe growled and reached for a virtual keyboard. He brought up visual light imagery of what she was seeing and whistled softly to himself.

Down in Walden Crater, all hell had broken loose.

The amorphous pile of the Retreat was visible on the display, but like an island in the midst of a flood. The streets around the building were packed with a surging mass of humanity. People—thousands of people—had gathered around the Retreat, a crowd so dense it was impossible to make out individual figures. “That looks like half the population of Niraya,” he said.

“Only about a tenth, actually,” Derrow said. “There's another crowd in the Centrocor crater. The canyon farms have all but emptied out—everybody's come to the craters to get some answers.”

“What in Earth's name is going on?” Maggs asked.

“There was some kind of weird broadcast yesterday,” Derrow explained. “That girl from the Retreat—Roan, right? That's her name? She opened an emergency channel on the network. She played the video of the lander attack.”

“She did what?” Lanoe demanded.

“She overran the network with a high-power signal,” Derrow said.

“How do you know it was her?” Zhang asked.

“The message was tagged with her personal metadata,” Derrow explained. “She didn't bother trying to hide her identity. I think she just wanted to make sure everybody on the planet got to see the video. The elders haven't made a formal announcement yet, but I'm pretty sure this wasn't their idea.”

“Hell, no,” Lanoe said. “Elder McRae was holding that video back. She was worried if people saw it that it would start a panic. Looks like she might have been right.” He turned to Zhang. “Pull up an image of the spaceport.”

Just as he'd expected, it was mobbed as well. There was no way they could land the tender down there, not without killing a few hundred people in the process.

“I can't tell if this is a riot or a full-fledged insurrection,” he said.

“At least they haven't torn the place down yet,” Valk pointed out. “It doesn't look like anything down there is on fire, either.”

“Actually,” Derrow said, “given how little oxygen there is down there, fires are incredibly hard to start. They'd be more likely to blow things up with explosives.”

Oh, good,
he thought.
Just back from the front and all kinds of fresh hell to deal with. Damned civilians.

He took a deep breath and tried to formulate a plan. “Okay, we need to get to Elder McRae and find out what's going on. Plus, we need to do it without being torn to pieces in the process. Zhang, is there any way you can put down on the Retreat's roof?”

Zhang ran her hands over her display. “There's no flat surface big enough to take the tender. And I would worry it couldn't support our weight anyway.”

Lanoe nodded. “Okay. Can you get close, though, hover over top of it, let a couple of us jump out?”

“That would take an incredibly skilled pilot with no sense of danger whatsoever,” Zhang said. She wove her fingers together and cracked all her knuckles at once. “So, yes.”

Elder McRae focused on her breathing exercises. Three short, shallow breaths in, one long slow exhalation. Repeat. As many times as it took.

Or until you hyperventilated, because you were so angry you couldn't focus and keep the rhythm.

She felt anger, of course, just like any other human. She knew many disciplines that allowed her to control the emotion, usually. Right now it was threatening to overcome her. To possess her.

She wanted very much to slap Roan across her damned face.

Somehow, she resisted the urge.

“What's done is done,” she said. She waved a hand across the display on her desk and dismissed the image there. She'd seen enough of the crowd gathered outside the Retreat. She'd heard their chants, seen their hastily put together signs and holographic displays that listed their demands, their fears, their needs.

There would be no mollifying that assembly. She had thought that she could wait them out, that if the Retreat made no official statement they would eventually lose momentum and disperse on their own. That had proven not to be the case. The crowd just grew with every hour, until those closest to the Retreat wouldn't have been able to leave if they wanted to.

Clearly this was going to require some action. As soon as she decided what that action should be, she would take it.

In the meantime, she had to speak to Roan. Speak, not shout.

“What's done is done,” she said again, mostly for her own benefit. “You made your choice. Now you'll have to accept the consequences of your action.”

Roan said nothing. She just stood there, shivering, in front of the elder's desk.

“Your time here as an aspirant is over,” the elder said. “I think you knew that would happen.”

Roan nodded and bit her lip.

“I would ask you to pack up your things and leave at once. We both know, however, that if I forced you to leave the Retreat just now you would have to face the crowd, and that would most likely not end well for you.” She imagined a pack of angry protestors tearing Roan limb from limb, desperate for any kind of scapegoat, any target for their pent-up fear and frustration. In her mind's eye she saw it quite clearly. Perhaps too clearly. She forced herself not to dwell on the image so that she didn't start relishing it.

“You will be allowed to remain here until such time as it is safe for you to leave,” the elder said. She took a deep breath and looked down at her minder. She began paging through the other business of the day. Elder Ving reported that they had enough food stored inside the Retreat's walls to last for another three weeks. More than long enough, surely. Elder Ghent informed her that classes for his aspirants had been moved to the dome so as to keep everyone away from the Retreat's windows. Just in case anyone threw a rock at them, or the like.

“I'm…Elder?” Roan asked. “I don't understand. Is that all?”

Elder McRae didn't look up from her minder. “Did you have something else to say?” she asked.

“I just thought…I mean, I was expecting something more in the way of punishment,” the girl said. “I thought you might…I don't know.”

“Flog you in the public square? Lock you in a pillory? That kind of thing doesn't belong in the Transcendentalist faith,” the elder said. “As I thought you would know. You didn't strike me as being that ignorant of our beliefs.” Regardless of how seriously the girl had violated them.
Better not say that out loud,
the elder thought.

“I just thought…”

The elder's minder chimed and a new display came up, showing a view of the sky over the Retreat. A large aircraft was approaching, flying very low. After a moment the view focused on the craft and she saw it was the tender, the same vehicle on which she'd returned to Niraya from the Hexus.

A message came in from the tender, one the elder found very hard to believe. Surely the pilots couldn't be so reckless?

She rolled up the minder and left her office, Roan following unbidden behind her. Elder McRae climbed three flights of stairs until she came out onto a narrow balcony on the roof of the Retreat. Before her she saw the wild profusion of shingles and tarpaper and flagstones that covered the top of the huge building. Others were out there as well, mostly elders, though a few aspirants stuck their heads out of skylights and the tops of stairwells.

The tender came in at a terrifying rate of speed, though Elder McRae imagined it was flying as slow as its pilot dared. As it crossed the top of the Retreat its nose suddenly reared up and for a split second it stood on its thrusters, all but hovering there. It was clear even to one as untutored in aerodynamics as the elder that the craft could not stay like that for long, not without stalling out and crashing into the rooftops.

It didn't have to. A hatch on its side opened and three human figures leapt out, and then the tender bucked up into the air and shot away, its wind nearly bowling Elder McRae over. In a moment it was gone, far away from the Retreat.

The three suited figures fell through the air without making any attempt to slow their descent. Two smashed down onto a distant balcony, rolling with the impact. The third hit a terra-cotta roof and burst right through the tiles, its weight and momentum too much for the fragile ceramic.

That roof was on top of Elder Ving's office, Elder McRae knew. She hurried back inside, then down a corridor until she reached Elder Ving's door. She could hear a commotion inside and she threw the door open without knocking.

Elder Ving was unhurt, even smiling in joy as she studied the ruin of her desk. A person in a space suit was struggling to stand up, but they kept slipping on broken pieces of roof tile. Elder McRae peered through a helmet obscured by red dust.

“Lieutenant Maggs,” she said. “Are you hurt?”

“My pride has seen better days,” the pilot said. “My inertial sink took care of the rest.” He finally got to his feet and bowed to Elder Ving. “My most sincere apologies,” he said. “I couldn't resist the urge to make a dramatic entrance.”

“First things first,” Lanoe said. “We need to get you out of here.”

They had gathered in Elder McRae's office—Lanoe, Maggs, and Derrow, along with half a dozen of the Retreat's senior elders—to watch the display and wonder just how things had gotten so bad. On the display they could see the people of Niraya weren't going anywhere. Some of them had set up tents outside the Retreat, including makeshift kitchens and even latrine facilities. Most of them were just standing out there, watching the Retreat's windows, perhaps hoping someone would poke their head out long enough to get it knocked off.

“That's not necessary,” Elder McRae said.

Lanoe stared at the old woman. “You do realize that half the people out there would put a bullet in you right now if they could? That the other half would probably just shout questions at you until you went deaf?”

“The doors downstairs are secure,” she told him. “There have been a few attempts to break in, but nothing serious. There's been very little violence, all things considered. A few Centrocor employees have been attacked, though there were no serious injuries.”