Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

Then he pushed his stick forward as hard as he could.

  His various jets and thrusters all fired in carefully timed bursts, keeping him from just crashing headfirst into the ground. Instead, the FA.2 rolled forward in a somersault, ass over teakettle, without actually losing a millimeter of altitude. He didn’t so much as brush the ground.

  The mining drone on his canopy wasn’t as lucky. It scraped along the ground for a fraction of a second before disintegrating into a cloud of broken metal claws. Lanoe watched the debris tumble and bounce off the ground behind him—then watched the sky roll past above him, a sky like a mirror broken by streamers of plasma—then watched the facility come back into view before him as the fighter completed its flip.

  He could see just fine, now.

  And what he saw cheered him—the central pit, the deepest part of the crater, lay just ahead. In a few seconds he was going to reach the loops, the power plant that kept this place running, and he would release his bombs, and—

  Right in front of him four of the big landers stood up on their many legs, forming an impenetrable wall.

  Streamers of plasma cut through the air left and right, far too close. The sweat on Zhang’s face dried as fast as it came, leaving a crust of salt on her cheeks and nose. She felt like the blood inside her skull was starting to boil.

  Still she leaned on her stick, the nose of her BR.9 pointed straight at the ground. Her airfoils pulled her into a tight spin that was just enough to keep the towers from getting a solid lock on her. The more altitude she lost, the greater the danger that one time, just one time, a shot would get through.

  She had her orders. She didn’t care—Lanoe was down there, waggling back and forth in distress as he tried to avoid slamming into a wall of drone legs. She started firing long before she could actually see the drones with her cybernetic eyes, giving the computer free rein to pick its targets.

  Superhot plasma washed across her canopy, but it was an old shot that had already started to dissipate. Just hot enough to give her a nasty sunburn. She knew this because she didn’t vaporize in a puff of carbon.

  Then she was through, below the crowns of the towers, and they stopped shooting. Most likely they didn’t want to damage their own facility, but she didn’t care—any respite was welcome. She saw the four landers below her, saw her PBW shots go wide, splashing against the dusty surface, making tiny, useless craters.

  Computers never could shoot worth a damn. She grabbed back manual control of her cannon and stabbed at her weapons panel. Virtual sights were useless to her—she couldn’t see them—but Zhang had been shooting PBWs since she was a teenager, and that was a very, very long time ago.

  One target. Two. Three. Four. She yanked her trigger again and again, moving on from one target to the next without even checking to make sure they were down. They fell, but with painful slowness, and she could only watch as Lanoe shot right between two of them, two killer drones that hadn’t finished dying yet. One of them made a halfhearted stab at the FA.2 but it was through and clear well before the blow landed.

  Good old bloody old Zhang. Lanoe wanted to whoop in joy.

  She dropped down beside him, flying just off the edge of his left side airfoils, and he could see her through her canopy, see her wink at him. He gave her a cheery wave and then bent back over his controls.

  The FA.2 raced over the innermost of the concentric terraces and then, suddenly, there was nothing beneath him, nothing but the deep pit. A floating display near his knees showed him what was down there and the vision cut through his ebullient mood. He couldn’t see the bottom of the pit—the whole thing was full of spidery mining drones, their hands still plunging into the moon’s rock and tearing loose pieces of ore, as if nothing at all were happening above them.

  He tore his eyes away from them and saw the giant loops of the power plant before him, pipes so thick he could have flown down them if they were empty. He called up a virtual bombsight and let his computer find the weak points in the loops, the spots where they were hottest, the places where they’d been bolted to the side of the pit.

  The bomb rack on the belly of the FA.2 was full of very smart, very tiny munitions that could glide to their targets without any human help. Lanoe tapped a virtual key and they all fell away at once. His fighter bobbed upward, ten meters up—high enough to draw fire from the plasma towers. He ducked back down before any of them got any ideas, then banked hard—hard—to get away from the pit.

  He had a feeling it was about to become a very hazardous environment.

  The pipes he could see were only the top and smallest part of very, very long shafts sunk into Aruna’s fiery innards. They pumped magma up toward the surface and used the heat of the molten rock to generate power. The magma lost ninety percent of its heat when it reached the top of that column, turning almost solid. That cooler rock slurry was pumped back down toward the core, where it could be heated again and brought back up in an endless loop.

  All of which simply meant that the enemy had been foolish enough to put a bunch of pipes full of red-hot pressurized magma right in the middle of their mining facility. It didn’t take much for Lanoe’s bombs to crack those pipes wide open so they spurted endless gouts of lava all over the complex.

  The spidery drones down in the pit didn’t have heads, much less eyes to look up and watch as the lava came showering down on them. Some of them managed to scuttle out of the pit before they were swept away. But not many.

  Meanwhile, all over the complex, the power supply just suddenly…disappeared. Lights went out. Conveyor systems stopped moving.

  In the base of each of the plasma towers, magnetic fields collapsed, magnetic fields that had been holding in enormous quantities of high-temperature ionized gas.

  Almost in the same instant, every single tower in the facility turned into a Roman candle, explosions blasting apart their girders, sending the twined arms of their crowns pinwheeling away across the moon’s skin. Debris blasted across the crater like an endless hail of bullets, smashing equipment, blasting drones to pieces.

  And at the center of the complex the lava kept bursting from the broken pipes. It filled up the central pit until it was a cauldron of orange glowing soup, then spilled out over the rim and filled the innermost terrace as well, the biggest volcanic eruption Aruna had ever seen.

  High above, Lanoe and Zhang burned for orbit, so they could watch it all happen without getting incinerated themselves.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The elder had asked Roan to look in on M. Ehta and see how she was getting along setting up a ground control base. So she checked a ground car out of the Retreat’s motor pool and headed out to the edge of Walden Crater, to where an impossibly long staircase doubled back and forth up to the very lip. By the time she reached the top she was panting for breath, even though she’d been born on Niraya and was used to its thin air. She leaned against a steel railing until the black spots stopped swimming in front of her eyes, then walked around a squat concrete building to where a field of huge radar dishes sat rusting in the sun. M. Ehta was down among them, unreeling a spool of cable. “Half of these aren’t even hooked up,” she said, when she saw Roan approach. “It took me a while to figure that out. I spent most of my morning clearing rats out of the main building.”

  Roan shrugged in apology. “This place used to keep us in touch with the farms out in the canyons,” she said.

  “Used to? You lost interest in what they had to say?” M. Ehta asked. “I suppose herders aren’t known for their sparkling conversation.”

  Roan looked away. “Those were the stations where the people were murdered by the killer drone. Most of them. The rest were abandoned after we sacrificed our fusion plant to stop the massacre.”

  M. Ehta at least had the decency to drop her eyes. “I didn’t know,” she said. “Here. Hand me that cable crimper.”

  Roan looked and found the tool lying on a cloth a few meters away. For a while she helped M. Ehta hook up the maze of cables linking the dishe
s together. It took some mental effort to keep the snarled network straight in her head, but physically it wasn’t too demanding. When it was done they headed back to the control building, a concrete box full of spiderwebs and machinery so old and dusty it looked antiquated even to Roan’s untrained eye. M. Ehta plugged a minder into the main console and through a broad window they watched the dishes turn on rusty pivots, creaking and groaning until they all pointed straight upward.

  “There,” M. Ehta said. “Now I can talk to anybody in the system.” She called up a series of displays from her minder, none of which showed any data Roan could understand. “See what’s going on.”

  “You’re going to coordinate the defense?” Roan asked.

  M. Ehta snorted. “Hardly. That’s Lanoe’s job. I just keep an eye on the skies, you know? Watch out for trouble, let them know if I see anything coming in. For all the good it does anybody.”

  Roan was confused. “You make it sound like that isn’t important.”

  “Let’s say I actually spot an incoming wing of landers, right? Except they’re out at the edge of the system. Light and radio waves can only travel so fast. It takes twenty minutes for that information to get to me. I forward on the sighting, and Lanoe gets to hear about it twenty minutes after that. I’ve never heard of a dogfight that lasted forty minutes. In the time it took me to ping him and warn him of trouble, he’d already be dead.” M. Ehta pulled her gloves off and threw them down on a console in disgust. “This isn’t a real job, kid. This is exile, for the pilot who can’t fly.”

  Roan could sense the woman’s frustration and anguish. Roan had been trained in disciplines of compassion and forgiveness, and her immediate reaction was to reach out, to comfort. But when she opened her mouth, something else entirely came out, unbidden.

  “Why did you come here?” she asked. At least her tone of voice made it sound more like curiosity than anger.

  M. Ehta just turned a tired-looking eye at her and said nothing.

  “Why did you tell M. Lanoe you could fight? You must have known—suspected, at least—what would happen when you tried to fly again. You must have known! But still you came here. You’ve endangered us all.”

  “That’s how you figure it?”

  Roan shook her head. Better to just let this go. She couldn’t help herself, though. “If you’d told M. Lanoe back at the Hexus, he could have found somebody else, some other pilot to take your place, someone who could fight.”

  M. Ehta nodded slowly. Then she leaned back in her chair until its springs squealed and it slipped an inch across the floor. She put her hands to her eyes and rubbed hard at their sockets. “Let me tell you something about Lanoe,” she said, finally. “You have this idea he’s some kind of demigod. That he’s going to save your planet with one arm tied behind his back. And yeah, in his day—he was red hot. The best pilot who ever lived. But people get old, kid. People lose their touch.”

  “What are you talking about?” Roan demanded.

  “I lost my nerve, sure, that makes me some kind of freak to you. He lost—something else. They still tell stories about him but every story ends the same way. ‘I wonder what happened to him?’ ‘Why did he stop fighting?’ His squadron doesn’t exist anymore. His rank’s straight-up vestigial at this point—I doubt if he went to the Admiralty anyone would even stand to attention for him these days, even if they recognized him. Long before you met him, his star was already falling.”

  “He’s a good man. He helped us when nobody else would.”

  M. Ehta nodded. “Sure. But when he put out the call for other pilots to come, the only people who would even consider it were the ones who owed him bad, or had no choice. If I didn’t come, nobody would have taken my place.”

  “You don’t care. You don’t care about Niraya. Or us. The people who live here.”

  M. Ehta just shrugged. “Not my job to care. I just follow orders.”

  Roan shook her head and got up to leave. “If we’re done here, I have some other duties to see to.”

  The pilot just waved her away.

  She headed back down the endless staircase, gasping for breath all the way. It wasn’t lack of oxygen that had her in such distress, though. It took all of her training to regain her composure so she could drive.

  She had one more errand to do. Elder McRae had tasked her with helping all of the offworlders, as requested. It wasn’t a difficult assignment, since most of them seemed happier flying around in space than spending time on the planet they were supposed to defend. At least one of them actually seemed to care about the people of Niraya.

  Not that he was much use. She pulled up in front of the Retreat and found Thom waiting for her, a tentative smile on his face. “Thanks for driving me around,” he said, once he was in the car and had his safety belts on.

  “I live in service to my faith and my people,” she said. She knew it sounded almost sarcastic, but it was a mantra that had gotten her through plenty of unpleasant duties before.

  Thom might have been forgiven if he’d chosen to just give up on his role as goodwill ambassador, after the disaster at the animal feed factory. He’d left there having convinced half of the staff that the Navy was carrying out biowarfare experiments on Niraya. Roan had not expected him to ask for her help again—but here he was. Maybe he thought he could turn things around. Maybe he thought that if he actually convinced some people the Navy was on their side Lanoe would respect him. Or at least notice.

  It was a fool’s errand, but Roan had to admit it was nice being around somebody who actually thought the pilots had a chance.

  In spite of his poor showing at the factory, or perhaps in hope of repairing some of the damage, the Retreat had organized a public meeting so Thom could address people directly. Not at the Retreat itself, of course—the elders didn’t want to be directly involved in Thom’s mission. Instead the Christian Gnostics had agreed to let him speak from the pulpit of their church. After the Transcendentalists and the Church of the Ancient Word they were the third largest of Niraya’s communities of faith, representing thousands of people. No one really expected much of a turnout, but the chance to be heard seemed to galvanize Thom. Maybe a little too much.

  “I’m worried I might be sick,” he said, as she drove him through town.

  “I’m barely driving fifteen kilometers an hour,” Roan pointed out. They had to keep the speed down to avoid a herd of ostriches being driven through the central square. Dust and stray bits of down fouled her windshield and she triggered her wipers—the only use they had on a planet where it never actually rained.

  “It’s not motion sickness—I just. I’ve never really, you know. Spoken in public before. My father,” he said, then suddenly fell quiet. He was staring at her. She took her eyes off the road just long enough to glance over at him.

  “What about your father?” she asked.

  “He’s…He was a politician. He used to talk to crowds all the time. I would stand up on a platform next to him and watch and smile, but that was it. I was always amazed at how he could just look out at a sea of faces and not be petrified wondering what they were all thinking.”

  “Maybe it’s genetic,” Roan pointed out. “Maybe you’ll be a natural.”

  “If I don’t puke all over my podium,” he said.

  Despite herself, she laughed. Which made him smile. It felt good to be able to help someone like that, she had to admit.

  She pulled up in front of the church, one of the bigger structures in Walden Crater, and together they watched the entrance for a while in silence. The church was shaped like a giant seashell lying on its side, its spirally curling walls glistening like mother of pearl. Roan had no idea why they’d chosen that shape—there were no seas on Niraya, not so much as a lake, and she doubted most Nirayans even understood what the church was supposed to represent.

  The opening of the shell, where whatever cyclopean sea-beast that once lived inside it would have poked its head out, was filled in with stained glass and a huge Go
thic arch through which people were streaming inside.

  Lots of people. When Elder McRae told her about this meeting, she’d assumed that maybe a dozen or two of the curious would show up. Judging by the line to get in, it looked more like hundreds. Word must have spread—the workers at the factory must have told everyone they knew about the Navy’s arrival. Roan hadn’t expected anyone to really care, since Nirayans tended to be uninterested in anything that happened outside Walden Crater. Clearly, she’d been wrong.

  “We’re supposed to use a back entrance,” she said, and started the car up again before Thom could be ill inside her vehicle. She drove around to the back, which was mercifully clear of people, and together they stepped in through a small gate. Inside a man wearing a tunic with a high collar was waiting for them. He had a long but perfectly groomed beard and wore a kind of flat hat with a tassel on one end. “Welcome,” he said, raising his hands up as if he were surrendering to them. “I’m Patrus Ogham. We’re so glad you could come.”

  Thom shook the man’s hand and the three of them headed to a small space behind the pulpit. “Not much of a greenroom, sorry,” the Patrus told them. “This is where we don our vestments before going out to preach.”

  The walls of the little room were covered in intricately carved wooden panels, stained black. Over their heads stone statues battled each other across the ceiling, some with beautiful human features, others twisted and deformed and demonic. For a Transcendentalist like Roan it was positively grotesque.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” the Patrus said, his eyes shining as he smiled at them.

  “I can’t go out there with you,” Roan told Thom. “I’m not here in any official capacity.”

  He just nodded and stared at the door to the pulpit. From beyond they could both hear the hissing sound of many people in hushed conversation.

  “Roan,” Thom said. “Roan, hold my hand.”

  “What?”

  He didn’t look at her. He was staring at the door. “Just—just squeeze my hand, once. It’ll help. Please.”