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.
She led him inside the building, into a cavernous space filled with heavy milling machines and old-fashioned looking conveyor belts. Workers in paper coveralls and facial masks poured out ingredients from colorful plastic drums or sorted through the pebbly feed as it came out of the drying beds. Some of them waved at Roan as she passed. She took Thom through to a suite of offices at the back of the factory floor, just a couple of simple rooms with desks and chairs pushed up against the walls. T
ogether they set up a folding table and some chairs, then unpacked the crates she’d brought from the Retreat. They said little as they worked at sterilizing the room, sweeping its corners with ultraviolet lights and filtering the air through a semipermeable membrane. When that was done she took out a bottle and a brush sealed in a plastic envelope. “Hold out your hands,” she said.
He did as she asked. She unwrapped the brush, then swirled it around inside the bottle, which looked mostly empty to Thom. “This is a viriphage culture,” she said. “It’s a bacterium we brew up in our infirmary.”
He started to pull his hands away as she daubed at them with the brush. “Hold on—”
She actually let out a little sigh. It was the most emotion she’d displayed since he met her. “It doesn’t affect human cells. The bacterium eats specific viruses that cause contagious diseases. Things like influenza and tuberculosis. This will actually make you healthier than you were before.”
He nodded and let her finish, coating his hands front and back with just a tiny film of sticky residue. She did her own hands next. “Now whenever we shake hands with somebody, we’ll inoculate them at the same time.”
“Oh. You still worry about diseases like that here?”
She didn’t sigh, but he thought she might have gritted her teeth a little. “Where you’re from, most likely there’s some incredible high-tech way of protecting people from getting sick. Here we have to use the old ways.”
Thom shrugged. He’d never bothered learning anything about medicine. He’d been genetically engineered from the chromosomes up and had never had so much as a sniffle in his life so far. “How often do you have to do this?”
“New strains of viruses come along all the time,” she said. “We try to inoculate everybody in Walden Crater at least twice a year. I’m here this week; next week I’ll head over to the farmer’s market. It’s this or deal with an inevitable epidemic.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Yes. Now. Are you ready to meet your public?”
“I…guess so,” Thom said.
“Good.” She unrolled a minder on the table and tapped out a message. Soon the factory workers started filing in one at a time.
There was a little more to it than just shaking hands, though they made sure they did that as often as possible. Roan’s minder contained full medical records for everyone they met, and she asked them if they needed anything else while she was there.
Their first patient, a middle-aged man named Alek, asked about back pain. “It gets pretty bad, leaning over the belt all day,” he said.
“There’s an exercise routine that should help with that,” Roan said, reading off her minder. “I’ll send you the details.”
He didn’t seem thrilled by that—maybe he was expecting some drugs or something—but he nodded.
“How do we handle payment?” Thom asked.
Alek and Roan both stared at him. “Payment?” Roan asked. “For what?”
“For…this,” he said. “You just do this for free?”
“Of course we do. This is about protecting all of us. Why should anyone have to pay for something that benefits everybody?” Roan asked. “I’m sorry, Alek. He’s not from here. In fact—he’s come to Niraya specifically to talk to people like you.”
Thom nearly fell out of his chair. But that was right, wasn’t it? A goodwill ambassador was supposed to talk to people. Get them on Lanoe’s side.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “I represent the—the Navy,” he said, trying to think in a hurry. Trying to remember what he was allowed to say. He wasn’t supposed to mention the invasion fleet, he knew that, but he figured it was okay to talk about things that had already happened. “I’m sure you’ve heard the news about the drone that landed here and killed those farmers,” he said.
“There’s a drone killing farmers?” the man asked. “Drones aren’t supposed to do that! What are you talking about?”
“It’s—it’s been destroyed,” Thom said. “I’m sorry, I thought you would have heard about this on the news videos.”
“I don’t bother with that kind of thing,” Alek said. He rubbed at his face, then stared down at his hands. He rubbed them together, perhaps feeling the slight stickiness of the viriphage film. “It’s just a lot of religious stuff, usually. Oh hellfire. Drones are attacking people, and you’re going to start charging us for health care? What’s going on?”
It took Roan quite a while to calm the man down. Eventually he left but he didn’t look very reassured.
“That could have gone better,” Thom said.
Roan didn’t meet his eyes. “Maybe so.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He couldn’t believe what a damned mess he’d become. Ever since he’d—ever since he’d shot his—since he’d run away, nothing had gone right, he’d just made one stupid mistake after another. “I’m—I’m just sorry. I assumed everyone knew about the drone attack, at least, if not the invasion fleet.”
“The Retreat has made information about the attack publicly available, but not everyone bothers to keep up with events outside their own neighborhood,” Roan said.
“But—how could they not all be talking about this? I mean, they must have broadcast that video you have, the one of the lander attacking the bird farm.” Thom had seen the video onboard the tender before they landed—Lanoe had made them all watch it and study the telescopic imagery of the approaching fleet.
“Actually, no,” Roan said.
“What?”
“The elders published a considered, text-only report about the attack. As for the video, they held it back. They decided that it might…demoralize Nirayans to see that. It’s very graphic.”
“Yeah. It is. And people should see it, anyway. They should know what’s coming for them.”
“Why?” Roan asked. “So they can be terrified of something they can’t do anything about?”
“If it were me, I’d rather know what was coming,” Thom said. “Can you honestly tell me you’d prefer to be kept in the dark?”
“My opinion isn’t important,” Roan said.
“It is to me,” Thom said. “Come on. What do you really think, Roan? That holding back that video was the right thing to do?”
“I can see both sides,” she said, turning her head away from him. He could tell she had her doubts. Still, when she spoke again, it sounded like she was handing him an official line. “We’ve done what we can to defend Niraya, by bringing Commander Lanoe and the other pilots here.”
Thom stared at the side of her head for a long time, trying to think of what to say next. Maybe he was starting to understand why Lanoe thought they needed a goodwill ambassador. Maybe there was actually something of value he could contribute.
“Call in the next patient,” he said.
“Thom, please, don’t make this difficult.”
He kept staring at her, even though she wouldn’t look at him.
“Call them in,” he said.
A young woman came through the door, though she didn’t close it behind her—as if she expected she might have to run away.
“Is it true?” she asked.
“I beg your pardon?” Roan asked.
“I just heard—the Navy is attacking farmers,” she said.
“It’s like it’s my birthday three months early,” Maggs said, though Ehta couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.
On the concrete of the spaceport the BR.9s lay sitting in a perfect little row, their airfoils nearly touching. Lanoe stood to one side by his FA.2, his arms folded behind his back. The way he stood when he was trying to look like a proper commanding officer.
“Pop ’em open and have a look,” he said to the gathered pilots. “We start patrols in an hour. For now just get used to your new crates.”
There were more than enough to go around. Valk went immediately to the BR.9 he’d already used against the enemy fleet. One of its airfoils was broken but the jagged edge had started to turn soft and furry. The BR.9 ha
d a self-repair function that would have the airfoil good as new in a few days. “You mind if I stick with this one?” he asked.
“Be my guest,” Lanoe told him.
Zhang went next, beaming from ear to ear as she rushed forward to claim her fighter. She lowered her canopy and slipped inside. She fiddled with the displays until they looked like they flowed with gray liquid—the kind of displays her artificial eyes could see. She didn’t waste any time getting to the customization screens, moving the cockpit seat forward, adjusting the running lights. Then she found the screen for the fairing lights and she squealed with glee.
Running along either side of the canopy of the BR.9, all the way back to the main thruster package, there were two curved sections of hull armor that weren’t pierced by vents or studded with equipment. Normally these twin fairings were a dull gray color, but they were embedded with chromatic filaments. On a command from the cockpit they could be made to flash various colors in varying levels of brightness. The idea was to allow pilots to light them up to indicate they were in distress, or to set them to the colors of their respective squadrons, or even use them to send coded messages back and forth during battle. Some bright pilot many years ago had realized, however, that you could program them to display pretty much any image you wanted. Back during the Establishment Crisis it had become a cliché for pilots to decorate their fighters with tiger stripes or slavering jaws full of teeth. It had become one more thing for Navy pilots to compete over—who had the most creative or shocking or aesthetically pleasing fairing art.
There was no real question what Zhang would choose. She tapped away at the controls and soon red tentacles wove and twisted across her fairings, just like the arms of the red octopus that decorated her suit. Ehta remembered that Zhang had always changed her fairing imagery every few years but once she had a motif she stuck with it.
“The irony, of course,” Maggs said, leaning over to whisper in Ehta’s ear, “is delicious, a blind woman getting so excited about fairing art she’ll never see.”
Forsaken Skies Page 18