She reached down and took his hand in hers. It felt damp and weak, as if he could barely hold on to her fingers. She wrapped both her hands around his and gave it a good squeeze. It felt like the least she could do.
The effect on Thom surprised her. He seemed to stand up taller and his mouth set into a bright smile.
The Patrus cleared his throat.
Thom nodded, once, still not looking at her. Then he stepped through the door. Roan got just a quick look out at the audience and saw that the church was packed to capacity, people even standing in the aisles between the ranks of pews. All of them come to hear what Thom had to say.
There was a great roar of excitement, though no applause, and then the Patrus closed the door behind Thom and shut off her view.
By the time they reached the ice giant’s moon, Valk was more than ready to set foot on solid ground again. As much as he hated gravity it would be better than spending more time in the tender with his two passengers.
He’d been alone up in the pilot’s seat, while they’d stayed back in the wardroom for the six-hour flight. The bulkhead that separated the two compartments was thin enough, though, that he’d heard every word as Maggs tried to convince Derrow, the mining engineer, to join the zero-g club.
Meanwhile Derrow had done a very poor job of hiding the fact that she felt spacesick. Otherwise she probably would have gone along with Maggs’s idea. Well, thank the devil for small mercies, Valk thought.
By the time the moon came into view, partly eclipsed by the ice giant, he’d had enough. He called them both up to the bridge and let them have a good look. Together the three of them watched the moon turn, a bluish-gray sphere pocked with craters. A sliver of blue haze was visible on its limb, and white clouds swirled across nearly a quarter of its visible surface.
“Yeah, that’s Aruna,” Derrow said. “Funny, though. When we set up the mining colony on Niraya, we looked at this place as an alternate location. We logged a lot of video. I don’t remember seeing any storms that big.”
Valk checked his instruments. “Well, you’re going to see a lot more of this one. Our rendezvous point is right in the middle there.”
Derrow scowled at him. “At some point am I going to find out why you dragged me out here? Or is that still a military secret?”
Valk shrugged. “You know as much as me.” Lanoe had called him while he was sleeping in orbit around Niraya. He’d said to bring Maggs and the engineer as fast as he could, but that was it.
“Perhaps,” Maggs said, “they shot down an enemy craft and they want you to take a look at it.”
To Valk, Derrow didn’t seem all that enthused about the prospect.
He brought the tender down carefully—it handled like a brick in any kind of atmosphere, and the storm didn’t help. They flew down through increasingly dark and foreboding clouds until he had to fly by instruments. Even when they cut through the lowest cloud deck and back out into clear air, it was nearly pitch black outside. Rain slapped against the viewports, sluicing away in long, fat rivulets that turned to steam as Valk watched. “That’s weird,” he said. “It’s a hundred degrees out there.” He was used to moons being cold and icy.
“That’s way too warm for Aruna,” Derrow agreed. “It should never get much above freezing.”
Through the murk Valk could just make out a V-shape of landing lights down on the ground. He brought them in slow and steady, then touched down with a sickening lurch. His instruments told them they’d landed on a shelf of rock high on the inner rim of a big crater. He pinged for Lanoe’s cryptab and found it less than a hundred meters away, though he couldn’t see anyone through the viewports.
By the time the three of them clambered out of the airlock—Derrow in a civilian suit that sagged around her waist and ankles—Lanoe and Zhang had come up to meet them. Zhang waved and Valk headed over toward her. The white pearl flashed in the corner of his vision, but just for a moment. The gravity here was a tenth what he was used to, and his legs barely ached.
“Sorry about the weather,” Zhang said. “That was our fault. Can you see anything in this?”
Valk looked around. The rain slashed at the soil around his feet and sent up little puffs of vapor wherever it hit. He wondered if it was more than just water. Deep fog cut off most of the light, but he could make out a dull red glow in the distance, in the direction of the center of the crater.
“It’s still molten down there. Try switching your helmet to low-light mode.”
Derrow must have figured that out before she was told, because before Valk could even switch the optical filter of his helmet, the engineer started swearing.
“What is this? A city? Who built it?” she demanded.
“Our enemy,” Lanoe told her.
Valk could see it now. The crater was filled with jagged edges and right angles, as well as curves unlike anything found in nature. A vast ruin, half of it melted down to slag, half still standing—buildings and machines and structures he couldn’t identify. And right in the middle, a pulsing soup of brilliant light. That red glow he’d seen was blinding in the enhanced view, a coruscating mass of heat and heaving motion.
“What is that?” Maggs asked. “A—what do you call it, a caldera?”
“No,” Derrow said. “There’s no history of volcanism on Aruna—I did a geological survey myself. I mean, I was just working from distant imagery and some computer-guided models, but…no. This isn’t a volcano. You guys did this.”
“Sure,” Lanoe said. “You figured it out. But that’s not why we brought you here. We melted a bunch of their stuff, but there’s enough down there still standing that we have a chance to learn something about them. Maybe something crucial. I’m sorry, M. Derrow. I know you have work back home. But we desperately need your eyes on this.”
Maggs turned to look at Lanoe, then. “And why, pray tell, was it so important that I come out here as well?”
“Because,” Lanoe said, “we just took away one of the enemy’s most important assets. Something they can’t just let us have for free.”
“We’re expecting an attack,” Zhang said. “In retaliation. Or maybe just so they can get their colony back. Either way,” she said, and shrugged, “they’re going to come at us here, soon, and extraordinarily hard.”
Patrus Ogham made tea for Roan while the two of them waited in the little vestry behind the pulpit. Neither of them spoke. They were far too busy listening through the door, listening to Thom give his speech.
Thom made a good start of it. He introduced himself as a special envoy from the Navy, sent to talk about the defense of Niraya and how no one should give in to fear, about how some of the best pilots the Navy had ever produced were at that moment fighting to keep Niraya safe.
Roan could hear the occasional cough from the audience. She heard someone out there yawn, as Thom kept talking about M. Lanoe’s qualifications. About how the fighters they’d brought carried the most advanced technology that Earth’s military had ever created. About how he truly believed that they were going to protect Niraya and keep everyone safe. Then he fell silent. He just stopped talking.
Someone started to clap then, halfheartedly, because they must have assumed Thom was done. That he had nothing else to say.
It turned out that wasn’t true.
“That, uh.” He paused for a very long time. Maybe he was drinking water. Roan wished she could see him. “That sounded like a press release, didn’t it?” he said.
There was polite laughter from the audience.
“The thing is—I’ve been told what I’m allowed to say,” Thom went on. Roan glanced over at Patrus Ogham. The Patrus had tilted his head to one side as if he was suddenly very much interested in hearing what came next.
“I’ve been told what I’m not allowed to say. I guess.” Roan had been trained in reading people. In understanding what they said emotionally, in addition to what they said in words. She heard Thom’s voice rise nearly half an octave, heard his words catch in his throat. H
e was frightened, she thought. Terrified of what he was going to say next.
“No,” she whispered. “No, you aren’t supposed to—”
Patrus Ogham hissed at her to be quiet.
“For instance, I’m not supposed to tell you that the danger isn’t over. That there’s an entire invasion fleet coming toward Niraya right now. Hundreds of ships, maybe, and we don’t even know who sent them. We do know that by the time they reach this planet, they’ll be—”
He might have said more, might have given more details, but just then people in the audience started shouting questions at him. First just a few, one at a time, but soon they were bellowing over each other to make themselves heard.
“What?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Invasion? You mean they’re—”
“How many ships?”
“Is it DaoLink? Is DaoLink coming to attack us? Is it—”
“How long before this fleet gets here?”
“Well,” Thom said, and for a moment he could be heard over the shouted questions. “That’s a complicated thing to figure out. It’s dependent on how hard the enemy fleet decelerates, and what kind of assets they choose to deploy in their final approach—”
They didn’t let him finish. The crowd was roaring now, exploding with questions.
“Who sent this fleet? Was it one of the polys?” someone shouted, and a dozen voices chorused in with “Here, here,” and the like.
“At the moment we haven’t determined—”
“It’s God’s judgment!” someone screamed. “The faithful will be tested, and the unrighteous laid low!”
About half the crowd seemed to agree with that statement. The rest hissed and booed and shouted for the fanatic to shut up.
Over his teacup, Patrus Ogham made a show of wincing in distaste.
Thom’s voice didn’t crack as he responded. “There’s no sign this is anything but a fleet of conventional spacecraft,” he said. “There’s no reason to think there’s a spiritual motivation for this attack.”
“But then why come against Niraya? We’ve got nothing to steal,” someone in the audience pointed out.
Someone else shouted loud enough to drown out the murmuring crowd. “It’s the polys, probably Centrocor. They want to drive us off so they can strip-mine the whole planet!”
“Are you stupid, or just naive?” someone else bellowed. “Centrocor already owns this place, down to the mantle. This isn’t an invasion fleet, it’s a new wave of mining ships and police, here to make sure we don’t—”
“Obviously it’s DaoLink; they’re fighting Centrocor right now, or don’t you watch the news videos? Don’t you—”
“Angels light and dark have bodies material as well as spiritual—”
“If it’s Centrocor, then why is the Navy fighting them and—”
It became difficult to hear any given voice after that, as the crowd shouted and screamed and laughed, the religious sneering at the more practical, the paranoid insulting the few voices of reason out there.
Roan watched the door to the pulpit, expecting Thom to come bursting through, perhaps in tears.
But he didn’t. As the argument lowed and bellowed and echoed until the walls of the church shook, Thom stayed out there, a focus for it all. Maybe hoping they’d eventually settle down, that he would get a chance to speak again. Roan hoped that was true—she found herself silently rooting for him, desperately hoping that he was okay.
The other possibility, of course, was that he had frozen in fear. That he stood out there paralyzed and swaying on his feet, unable to handle the barely contained animus that filled the church.
For the better part of an hour, the door stayed closed. Roan’s anxiety only increased. She was truly worried about him, she realized, this dumb boy from another planet whom she owed nothing, whom she barely knew. Despite herself, despite her training—despite the fact that he’d just gone against the collective will of the elders of her faith—she cared. Maybe it was just a normal human feeling, basic empathy for someone who must be suffering. Yes. That must be it.
In time the roaring settled down to an uncomfortable din. Either the people out there felt like they’d made their various points, or they had just run out of steam. Either way, eventually it grew quiet enough for Thom to speak again.
“Thank you, everyone, for your comments and questions,” he said. The babble didn’t stop. “I hope you found this worthwhile. Good night.”
There was no applause. The crowd seemed to have forgotten Thom was there.
The door opened and he stepped through. He looked pale and shaken and he didn’t waste any time sitting down. The Patrus poured him a cup of tea.
“I’m…sorry,” he said, finally, looking at the holy man. “I don’t think that’s what you expected to happen when you agreed to let me speak here.”
The Patrus raised one eyebrow. “No?”
“I thought maybe…Well, I expected it to go differently.”
“My child,” Patrus Ogham said, reaching over to pat Thom’s hand, “you did fine. Absolutely fine.”
“I…did?”
The Patrus nodded gleefully. “Nothing like a good threat of divine wrath to bring ’em in to church. I daresay we’ll double our normal attendance at our next service. And more congregants means heavier collection plates. This went splendidly, as far as I’m concerned.”
Thom had nothing to say to that.
Awhile later, when the church had emptied out, Roan drove Thom back to the ground control station where he was staying with Ensign Ehta. He didn’t say much on the ride. She forced herself not to keep glancing over at him, to see if he was okay. Clearly he just wanted to be left alone.
When they reached the bottom of the stairs leading up the crater wall, she switched off the ground car and released her safety belt, then turned in her seat to look at him. It was time. There was something that absolutely had to be addressed. “You weren’t supposed to tell them about the fleet,” she said.
“I know.”
She shook her head. She knew better than to chastise him. That wasn’t the way of the Transcendentalist faith. You accepted what had happened and moved on, looking for ways to do better the next time.
Sometimes that was hard to keep in mind. “You were told, specifically, not to mention it! Thom, what were you thinking?”
“I thought they had a right to know.”
“Even if it fills them with anger? Even if it leads to wrath?”
What he said surprised her. “They’re scared,” he told her.
“They sounded pretty wrathful to me.”
He shook his head. “That’s just a side effect of the fear. They’re terrified of what’s going to happen to their planet. Well, you can hardly blame them for that. But it’s more than that. They’re scared because they don’t know. They don’t know what’s coming. They don’t even know what we’re doing about it—and I can’t make them see it. I’m just not that good an orator. Hellfire, they don’t even know what the enemy looks like, because they’ve never seen that video.”
“The elders are worried that if they see it, it’ll start a panic,” Roan pointed out.
“Maybe,” Thom said. He shook his head. “Maybe it would. And maybe that’s what they need. Right now they’re just confused and scared and I didn’t help with that. It looks like all I did was give them a chance to vent.”
“Maybe,” she said, “just maybe, you should let wiser heads make decisions like this. Let the people who know this planet and its people choose what information to release, and what to hold back.”
“Okay,” he said. “If you can tell me I did the wrong thing, and mean it.”
“Thom, that isn’t what we believe. We hold to the four eternals, which include—”
“No. Don’t give me dogma. Give me your real opinion. You think I did the wrong thing? I want to hear it. Not what your faith would say. Not what Elder McRae wants you to say. I want you, Roan, to tell me how
you feel.”
“I can’t—”
“Yes, you can.”
She’d intended to say that she couldn’t extricate herself from the faith, because she belonged to something larger than herself. That she had duties that precluded her having a personal opinion in this matter.
Even in her own head, it sounded like an evasion.
“Tell me people don’t have a right to know what’s going to happen. Tell me that, and mean it, and I’ll…I’ll apologize.”
Roan rolled her eyes. “I think you should get out of my car,” she told him.
Which for some reason, some unguessable reason, made him smile. Then he said something that truly surprised her.
“Can you do me a favor?” he asked.
Now? He was going to ask her for something now? But of course the faith believed in service. She fought back the urge to sigh. “If I can,” she said.
“I want to set up another event like this.”
“Really?” she asked.
“I have to try again,” he said. “Please. See if the Retreat will let me talk to the—the Church of the Old Word?”
“Ancient. The Church of the Ancient Word,” she corrected.
He turned and flashed her a smile. In the dim cabin of the ground car, his eyes caught some light off the dashboard perhaps, and they flashed at her. She saw, perhaps, why Lanoe had chosen Thom to be his goodwill ambassador. The boy was very good looking, for one thing. For another he had a sort of easy charm, a charisma about him. You could sense it. If he’d chosen to go into politics, he probably would have done very well. Assuming he learned how to give a speech.
“I’ll do what I can,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said. Then he fumbled getting his door open and jumped out of the car.
She watched him climb the stairs toward the ground control station. Once he was gone, she sighed a little to herself. Then she switched on the car and drove back to the Retreat.
The tender flew long, slow circles over the crater, the sensor pod on its side tilting this way, then that. Zhang had taken it up as soon as the others arrived, to scan the structures of the mining facility for any sign of motion. High above the clouds Lanoe’s FA.2 hung in a stationary orbit, ready in case the enemy had any nasty surprises lurking up in space.
Forsaken Skies Page 24