Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  Behind the seat was a narrow cargo locker. Its hatch was closed but the lock was broken. He lifted the door away and found Thom curled up inside.

  Just as Lanoe had left him.

  One of the kid’s hands lifted toward the faceplate of his helmet. Lanoe pushed forward until they were face-to-face, the flowglas of their helmets clinking together. They could talk as long as they were in contact, the vibrations of their voices passing through the connection. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Lanoe?”

  “Yeah. It’s me.”

  The kid had a brain in his head. Back at the end of their chase, when he finally realized he didn’t want to die in Geryon, Thom must have known what was going to happen. That the yacht’s cabin wasn’t going to remain intact. He’d just had time to wedge himself back in the cargo locker before the whole front of the yacht imploded. It had saved his life.

  It had been Lanoe’s idea for him to stay there until they could figure out what to do next.

  “How long has it been?” Thom asked.

  “More than thirty-six hours,” Lanoe told him.

  “So he’s dead. Really dead.”

  “Your dad? Yeah. He’s gone. Come on. Let me help you out of there.”

  There was the usual annoying wait as the repair suite hatch closed and air flooded back into the compartment. Valk waited by the interior hatch, in the wardroom, with his arms folded in front of him. Behind him the others were all talking at once, trying to figure out what was going on when none of them had any information.

  Lanoe had played this one close to the vest, no question.

  When the hatch did finally open, Lanoe wasn’t alone—he had a smaller suited figure under his arm. He let go of his burden and the newcomer drifted into the wardroom, toward Maggs.

  The swindler pushed out of the way before they could collide.

  Lanoe’s helmet flowed back down into his collar ring. “Everyone, meet Thom.”

  Gloved hands reached up to touch the quick-release catches on the side of a civilian-style helmet. The helmet came loose, then drifted into a corner near an air vent. Revealed underneath was the face of a kid with black hair and bloodshot eyes. He looked dehydrated and a little crazy. Deprivation hadn’t ruined his high cheekbones, though, or the startling violet of his irises, which had to be a designer color.

  The suit looked expensive. A racing model, fitted perfectly, with copper-colored wires woven into its fabric. Valk knew what that meant—the suit had its own built-in inertial sink. A safety feature, but a costly one.

  The kid came from money, that was clear. What he was doing at Geryon still remained a mystery.

  “I have questions,” Valk said.

  Lanoe nodded at him. “Step into my office.”

  Valk followed the old pilot back into the repair suite. There wasn’t a lot of room to maneuver back there, especially not for somebody Valk’s size, but both of them were used to the cramped quarters on military vehicles. Lanoe stabilized himself by grabbing a stanchion on the side of his FA.2, while Valk stayed near the hatch.

  Valk listened to Geryon’s atmosphere scraping along the underside of the hull. It put his teeth on edge. “Just Thom,” he said. “No family name.”

  “For now,” Lanoe replied.

  Valk nodded. “So he’s in trouble. I mean, otherwise why was he running like a bat out of hell when he came here? And why else would you be chasing him?”

  “Yeah, he’s in trouble. He killed somebody,” Lanoe admitted.

  “Judging by the fact you kept him alive—and out of sight—this whole time, I figure whoever it was, you think they deserved it.”

  Lanoe just shrugged.

  “We had a deal—you were going to tell me everything.”

  “It happened a long way from here. Nothing to do with you or the Hexus.”

  Valk reached for the hatch control. If Lanoe had brought him all the way just to keep lying to him—

  But the old pilot wasn’t finished. “He ran away because he didn’t know what else to do. He came here because I was chasing him, and he thought he could shake me. Then he decided he couldn’t, so he tried to kill himself. By ramming that freighter. When that didn’t work, he tried again by diving into the planet’s atmosphere. He got pretty close to succeeding before he realized he actually wanted to live.”

  “And you owed him a favor,” Valk suggested.

  “No. I don’t owe him anything. But he deserves better than what’s waiting for him back home. So I went to the Hexus to look for a way to smuggle him out of here, to someplace nobody would look for him. I thought the Nirayans could help with that.”

  “That’s why you wanted to talk to them without me around,” Valk said.

  “Sure. Of course, once I heard the elder’s story—”

  “You had to jump in there, too. Had to fix everybody’s problems.”

  “They deserve help. Centrocor wouldn’t do it, so somebody else has to.”

  Valk laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Lanoe asked.

  “You can’t resist, can you? Somebody gets in trouble and you have to save them. Why is that, Lanoe? Why does it have to be you? This thing on Niraya—my heart went out to them, yeah, when I heard their story. But my first thought wasn’t to go flying halfway across human space to single-handedly stop an invasion.”

  “I’m a Navy officer. A tactician. You tell me about a fleet, I immediately think of ways to fight it.”

  “No,” Valk said. “No. There’s something else. Something in you that needs to fix things.” What it might be was beyond him, though.

  “When we made our deal we didn’t say anything about plumbing the depths of my damned psyche,” Lanoe pointed out.

  “Nope. Okay,” Valk said, taking a deep breath. “Here’s the thing. If I want to save my job, I need to bring in the evildoers. Which means Maggs and this Thom. We’re going to turn around and go back to the Hexus, and I’ll take my prisoners off this tub, and then you can go to Niraya with your squaddies and save the planet. That’s our deal.”

  “I asked for a head start,” Lanoe pointed out.

  “And I said we would see.”

  The old pilot’s eyes narrowed.

  “Yeah,” Valk said. “I bluffed you. Sorry about that. I figured if I gave you enough slack, you’d show your hand.”

  Lanoe touched a recessed key at his throat, activating his suit’s communications rig. “Zhang,” he said, “set a course for the wormhole throat. Burn at will.”

  The two pilots stood there staring at each other until she replied.

  “My board’s not responding,” she said. “I’ve been locked out.”

  “Understood,” Lanoe said.

  “Sorry, that was me,” Valk pointed out.

  He was so damned hard to read, when you couldn’t see his face. Lanoe fought to keep himself from flying at the big pilot and smashing in that polarized helmet.

  “Every ship that comes through the Hexus is under my authority,” Valk said. “Including this one. I can seize control from the pilot whenever I deem it necessary. Did you really think I would come onboard without a couple of safeguards?”

  “Let us go, Valk. You can take one of the fighters and fly it back to the Hexus. Give us that day’s head start I asked for.”

  “If I go back there,” Valk said, “without Maggs and Thom, I’ll be fired. I’ve got nothing left but my work, Lanoe. It’s not going to happen.”

  Lanoe did leap at him, then. At least he started to.

  Valk pulled a nasty-looking pistol out of a pocket of his suit and pointed it at Lanoe’s chest. It was a microwave beamer, fully capable of cooking Lanoe alive inside his suit.

  “You’re out of luck, old man,” Valk said. “The hatch behind me? I’ve got it sealed. No way your friends are going to burst in here and save you. I hate that it came to this, but I’m out of options.”

  Lanoe pushed himself backwards, away from the gun. Not that it mattered. In the tight confines of the repair
suite there was nowhere to run. He couldn’t fight his way out of this.

  Which just meant he had to think.

  “You’ve got one more option,” Lanoe said, before he’d even thought of what it might be.

  “Oh?” Valk asked.

  “Yeah,” Lanoe said. “Yeah. You can come with us.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We have more fighters than we need. What we don’t have is pilots. You were the Blue Devil once. You can come to Niraya. Fly with us. Fight with us.”

  Valk leaned his head back and laughed.

  Lanoe frowned as he waited for the big pilot to get over it.

  “I take it the answer is—”

  “Yes,” Valk said.

  “Yes?”

  “Yeah. I’ll go with you. Honestly, you old bastard, I’ve been waiting for you to ask. I was starting to get offended.”

  Lanoe lifted one eyebrow in surprise.

  “It’s a suicide mission. Lanoe,” Valk said, “seventeen years ago I was a warrior, just like you. I fought for a losing side. I lost more than most. Now…well. I’ve been waiting ever since for somebody to give me the order to die.”

  He put his gun away and called up a command panel that floated in front of his hands. He tapped a virtual key and the panel disappeared.

  Over the comms, Zhang said, “Lanoe, my board just came back.”

  “My previous order stands,” Lanoe told her.

  “All hands, grab something and hang on,” she said. “Next stop Niraya.”

  PART II

  SUB-EARTH

  Chapter Nine

  Thom couldn’t sleep.

  He never wanted to sleep again.

  While he’d waited inside the wrecked yacht for Lanoe to return, he’d had to ration his life support resources brutally, restricting his intake of oxygen and water to the bare minimum. His suit had kept him unconscious for all but a minute every few hours, just long enough to make sure the yacht hadn’t drifted too low into Geryon’s punishing atmosphere. He’d phased in and out of awareness until he couldn’t sense the time passing, until it had felt like an eternity down there.

  Now that he was out, alive and free, he fought for every moment of wakefulness he could get.

  The pilot—her name was Zhang—had announced that it would take sixteen hours to make the trip to Niraya, wherever that was. Lanoe and his Navy friends had taken that as their cue to climb into bunks and catch some sleep. Lanoe had told him that was standard practice for Navy pilots. They spent all their time on standby, waiting to go out on long patrols or running endless drills, so whenever they had a chance to get uninterrupted rest they took it. They snored now inside their bunks, turning over in their dreams, while Thom sat in the darkened wardroom alone.

  He spent the time staring out a narrow viewport, watching the luminous fabric of wormspace flow by. He’d always thought it was beautiful in a dark sort of way, the twisting, kinked walls of the wormholes, the silent wailing of the pale tunnel walls, the ghostly spears of radiance that lashed out toward the ship like phantom claws snatching at you, only to evanesce away into nothingness before they could connect. Once they passed through a junction where two wormholes crossed, and there the walls positively blazed with bluish-gray light.

  He knew a little of the physics of it. Wormholes were inherently unstable, and if given their way they collapsed as soon as they formed. The wormhole throats that humanity had found near its stars kept the tunnels from imploding by putting stress on the fabric of spacetime, which protested by shedding endless photons and antiphotons that combined and annihilated each other as soon as they were created. The shimmering, spectral light was the result of all those tiny explosions.

  Thom didn’t spend much time thinking about science, though, as he watched the wormhole burn all around him. Mostly he thought about what was going to happen to him next.

  Not that he had much to go on. Lanoe had promised to keep him hidden until his father was properly dead. That time had come and gone. It was clear that Lanoe didn’t intend to turn him over to the authorities now—but what the old pilot had planned for him next remained a mystery. Thom’s fate was entirely in Lanoe’s hands.

  He didn’t like that much. He had a whole life ahead of him now—his own life, free and clear. He’d never really considered what he might do with it before. Starting out as a hunted fugitive didn’t sound like a good plan.

  A sudden jolt of panic shocked him out of his thoughts as he heard someone moving behind him. He turned around and saw a panel door opening at the far side of the wardroom. Just the door that lead to the sanitaries, of course. Someone had woken up and needed to pass water and he hadn’t heard them go in there.

  He dropped his eyes when he saw it was the girl, the civilian. He started to turn back to the viewport but then he felt the air move as she kicked across the compartment toward him. She grabbed a stanchion by the side of the viewport and stared out at the wormhole with him.

  He studied her reflection in the carbonglas of the viewport. She was his age, maybe a year or two older, with undyed hair that floated around her cheeks. Her breath clouded the carbonglas and she wiped it away with the coarse fabric of her sleeve.

  “It’s so eerie,” she whispered.

  Something in her tone made him frown. “You’ve never seen wormspace before?”

  “That’s a terrible name for this,” she said, as the phantasmagorical light washed across her nose, down her cheek. “It makes me think of graves. No. No, I haven’t seen it before. On the way to the Hexus, we—well, we didn’t have any windows. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “It’s all right. I couldn’t sleep,” he told her. “My name’s Thom.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. She seemed entranced by the view. Thom tried to remember the first time he’d seen it, and couldn’t. His father had traveled a lot and had started taking Thom with him from an early age. Most likely so that if he had an accident while away from Xibalba he would have his backup body there and ready for the transfer. As a result Thom had visited half the worlds of human space.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  In the ’glas her reflection scowled. Had he offended her? “It’s Roan,” she said. “Do you often have trouble sleeping? Typically that’s caused by unresolved guilt feelings.”

  “I’m just not tired,” he told her. In the ’glas her eyes were locked on his face. Suddenly that was unbearable.

  “I know a meditation technique that—”

  “I’m fine,” he said, pushing back from the viewport. He grabbed the side of a bunk and pulled himself inside it.

  She turned to face him. She was silhouetted in the viewport so he couldn’t see her eyes. “I was only trying to help,” she whispered.

  One of the Navy people—Lieutenant Maggs, Thom thought—curled around in his bunk to glare at both of them. His eyes were very red. “Is a bit of peace too much to ask?” he demanded.

  Thom ignored them both. He turned around in the bunk so he was facing the wall. He’d never felt more alone.

  Maggs couldn’t sleep.

  Not with the children creeping around and talking in what, in their youthful ignorance, they no doubt thought were low whispers.

  Not with the pain in his leg. Though truth be told, it was more a discomfort than a pain. The old Commander had forced him to trade in his dress uniform for a pilot’s heavy suit, which had rather excellent equipment for handling sprains and an exquisitely stocked reservoir of painkillers. He’d come to quite enjoy the cocktail made by mixing good old-fashioned gin with the white pearl that sporadically appeared in the corner of his vision.

  The main reason he couldn’t sleep, however, was that there was work to be done. Rather delicate work, that would benefit from being completed unseen.

  He waited a decent interval after the children finally went to bed. Then he waited a bit longer, just to be safe. Only when he was sure that everyone was snoring did he begin to extricate himself fro
m his bunk.

  Now’s the time, Maggsy, his father’s voice said in his head.

  He’d come to believe that he heard his father talking to him because he was finally accepting adulthood and his responsibilities. That he was beginning to step into dear old dead Daddy’s polished boots. Yes, that had to be it.

  Strafe-dive while the beggars are downwell, the voice said.

  Maggs quite intended to comply. He pushed himself along the wall to the hatch to the repair suite and opened it quietly, then slid it closed again when he was through.

  Lights flickered on all around him as he squeezed into the small compartment. The bloody Commander’s famous if rather pathetically antiquated FA.2 sat there in the skeletal metal arms of a restraint cradle, its canopy polarized, its engine ticking away as if it were asleep, too.

  Now came the rather tricky part.

  Not much could happen onboard the tender that passed notice up on the bridge. When he’d opened the door to the repair suite, no doubt a light had appeared on some console up there. He assumed that the blind Zhang wouldn’t notice that. If one attempted to release the restraint cradle, however, it would surely come to her attention.

  Unless one knew how to spoof the logging scripts.

  Maggs had a certain aptitude for systems. One needed those skills to be a confidence man in a world where computers watched everything. Over the years he’d accumulated a nice bag of tricks and hacks.

  He opened a display on the repair console and called for root access. Everything was encrypted but just to Navy standards, which were woefully behind the stuff Centrocor used. The system’s security features offered him only a token resistance. He found the modules he wanted and switched off automatic logging, then keyed to release the restraint cradle.

  The metal arms folded back and the FA.2 drifted a bit, suddenly loose inside the repair suite. All well and good. The next step was to open the rear hatch. He pumped all the air out of the suite first so it wouldn’t howl as it exploded out into the void. His helmet flowed up around his face as the suite’s air sighed away. Once it was all gone the hatch slid open silently, letting the ghastly light of wormspace flood inside.