Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  Down on the ground Valk kept his eyes open, watching out for any drones that might have survived the apocalypse in the strip mine. He had a heavy particle rifle swinging at his side, which made him feel a little better about the job he’d been given. He had to stop every so often and pour out the rainwater that filled the barrel, but he was pretty sure the weapon would still function.

  “Over here,” Derrow said. Her voice quavered with anxiety but so far she’d been all right. She pointed at a structure that looked to Valk like a giant sponge, shapeless and riddled with holes. It stood maybe twenty meters high, and three times that wide. The three of them headed over, careful where they stepped. The ground here was webbed with cables and pipes, some so small you didn’t see them until you tripped over them.

  Up close the structure looked like it was made of lace. Around the big holes were countless smaller ones, and around those were tiny holes the size of pinpoints. Kind of like foamsteel, except the pattern wasn’t random. Fractal, maybe. “You have any idea what this is?” Valk asked.

  Derrow shrugged. “All that empty space probably makes the building really light. Cheap on material costs, too. It makes sense, but—I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Valk reached up and punched the side of the structure. It dented in without much effort at all. Dented, but didn’t break.

  “I’ll remind you,” Maggs said, “Lanoe saw a half-dozen landers come squeezing out of a structure like this. What if one of them was still in there?”

  “Then I probably just woke it up,” Valk told him. As soon as he’d said it, though, he felt bad. Teasing Maggs was one thing but he didn’t need to scare Derrow. “Relax. Lanoe and Zhang already knocked out all the landers and worker drones.” At least, they claimed to have done so.

  Valk stuck the rifle’s snout inside one of the big holes. A lamp on the weapon’s receiver lit up and swept across the opening but Valk could see nothing but shadows inside. “Let’s take a look,” he said.

  “By all means, you first,” Maggs said, with a laugh.

  “We need to see,” Derrow said. It sounded to Valk like she was trying to convince herself. She looked to Valk and through her faceplate he could see her sweating. It was hot out here but he imagined her suit was compensating just fine.

  Okay, then. He put a hand up on the edge of the hole and pulled himself up inside, wriggling around to get his bulk through the aperture. That hurt, a little, but not enough to make his suit offer him painkillers. The hole must have been designed to be just big enough for a lander to squeeze through, he decided. Well, the landers were just machines, and probably didn’t worry too much about comfort.

  After he’d pushed about a meter forward the hole opened up into empty space. It was pitch dark in there. He could hear a steady dripping, most likely from rain finding its way inside. He summoned a display on his wrist and held his arm up so the light would illuminate the interior.

  Maybe he’d half-expected to find a lander towering over him, its legs raised to impale him on metal claws. In that he was disappointed. What he did see, though, was weird enough.

  The interior of the structure was open and empty, a mostly spherical chamber more than fifty meters across. There was no distinction between walls, floor, or ceiling—the inner surface curved seamlessly all around him. That surface wasn’t flat, but instead lined with ribs that converged at either end of the space. He felt like he was inside the hollowed-out rind of some colossal piece of fruit.

  The endless pattern of holes made the thing feel rotten or maybe skeletal, and all that empty space was just eerie. Rainwater fell in a steady stream from the upper portion, only to leak out again through holes in the floor before it could collect.

  He got the impression this was a place human beings were never supposed to go.

  Derrow clambered up beside him and he reached out a hand to help her. Maggs brought up the rear and once he was inside he climbed a ways up one of the ribs, using the holes as fingerholds. Just showing off, Valk assumed, but then he saw what Maggs was after. The interior wasn’t as featureless as he’d thought. Maggs had found a thing like a floppy segmented worm hanging from one of the smaller holes. He batted it back and forth, and luckily for him it didn’t come to life and attack him. “What is this?” he asked.

  Valk looked around and soon saw others just like it, dangling lifelessly from holes spaced evenly around the interior.

  Derrow went over to one that she didn’t have to climb to reach. She stared at it for a long time before answering. “A hotpoint, I think. The drones…live inside these things, right? This is a kind of barracks. That’s our hypothesis? I think this is how they recharge themselves.” She dropped the wormy thing and ran her glove along the curving edge of one of the ribs. “Okay, I need to not think about dozens of those things crammed in here like sardines, writhing against each other. I need to think about something else, right now.”

  “I have a suggestion,” Maggs said, with an unmistakable tone in his voice. Valk expected her to snarl at him and tell him now wasn’t the time but instead she laughed.

  “I’ll bet you do,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Valk told them both. “Come on, there’s nothing else to see here.”

  The three of them climbed out through one of the big holes, back into the storm. Valk was almost glad for the rain that lashed across his helmet, as if it were washing him clean.

  Their next stop was a sort of pylon about two hundred meters away. They shuffled over toward it in the low gravity, careful not to launch themselves off the ground with anything like a confident step. The pylon was a lot less creepy than the barracks, or at least it looked more like something a human would build. It was triangular in cross section and rose about thirty meters off the crater floor. They craned their heads back to see its top, a bulbous sort of pod from which dangled dozens of short arms.

  “Communications?” Maggs suggested.

  Derrow shook her head and pointed at a column of thick pipes running up the pylon’s side. “No. This is a cracking tower. I mean, it’s not how I would build one, but…the process is pretty fundamental. We use something similar at the mines back on Niraya. It’s for distilling heavy chemicals down to smaller compounds.”

  Maggs looked over at Valk, who just shrugged. Their job wasn’t to understand what she said, just to keep her safe while she looked at things.

  There was no way inside the cracking tower, so they moved on. Ahead of them the crater floor gave way at a massive and abrupt cliff. Looking over the side Valk could see the next level down, about half a kilometer below him in the murk. There was no way to get down without jumping so they turned aside and headed toward a very large structure they could just see in the distance.

  As they approached it took on an oblong shape, though not as round as the barracks they’d first explored. One whole side of it was open to the elements, which made Valk think it looked like a hangar or something. It was hard to tell from a distance but it was clearly gigantic in size, maybe half a kilometer long and half that wide.

  The pipes and cables that crisscrossed the ground lifted into the air near the big structure and draped over it like the strands of a spiderweb. Close up he could see they wrapped around the structure like they were enclosing it in a cocoon.

  Their was no sign of a door or hatch in its exterior walls so they walked around to the open side. Darkness filled the cavernous space within. Well, that made sense—Lanoe had cut all power to the crater’s structures. Valk couldn’t shake the thought, though, that even when this place was fully operational it would have done its work in darkness. Neither the killer landers nor the interceptor he’d fought had anything like eyes, after all, so why would they need lights?

  As they stepped inside out of the rain Maggs took a Very pistol out of a pocket of his suit. He loaded two flares inside, then fired them up high, into the open space of the structure. They lit up as soon as they left the barrel, then deployed rotors at the top of their arcs so they could hover
in the air. The reddish light they gave off filled the giant space with a slowly coruscating glow, almost as bright as daylight back on Niraya.

  What they illuminated looked to Valk like a hundred thousand braids of hair hanging down from the ceiling, long and ropy, some coiling on the floor, some hanging free. He hadn’t the slightest clue what he was looking at, though something about the braids seemed familiar.

  Together the three of them moved through the forest of hair, careful not to touch any of the hanging plaits. Valk quickly realized they were bundles of metal wire, not actual hair, but he still didn’t want to get anywhere near them.

  Deeper inside the hangarlike space were machines, some of which Derrow could identify as wire swages—devices for taking thick wire and making it thinner. Other machines just made her shake her head. At the very center of the giant structure several massive shapes hung in the shadows. Maggs sent a command to his flares, moving them forward to light up more of the space.

  That was when Derrow screamed.

  Valk didn’t blame her. He’d seen the video, same as she had. A dozen landers—all legs and claws—hung from the ceiling, motionless but instantly recognizable as the machines that had killed all those Nirayan farmers.

  One of them had a leg that had been flayed open, the skin parted and the bundle of wires inside exposed. That was why the hanging wire had looked so familiar—he’d seen it before when she’d examined the claw back at the Retreat.

  When they’d all had a chance to calm down—when the landers failed to come to life and kill the three of them were they stood—Maggs asked, “Is this a repair shop? Were they trying to rebuild the ones Lanoe killed?”

  Derrow took a step backward. Her hands were out in front of her, as if she could ward off the killer drones. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think…oh, damnation.”

  “Tell me,” Valk said.

  “I don’t think this crater was just a strip mine,” she said. “I think this is a factory. I think this is where they make those things.”

  After he’d addressed the Gnostic Christians, after he’d revealed the existence of the invasion fleet, Thom became a minor celebrity on Niraya. Roan—who had been assigned to help him however she could—arranged chances for him to speak with the Gospel of the Fallen Star and the Church of the Ancient Word. The Centrocor mining concern asked if he would present them with a formal statement on behalf of the Navy and he said he would give it his best shot. Local media got interested as well, sending a reporter out to interview him. They chose to do it at the ground control station, the closest thing the Navy had to an official base on Niraya.

  Roan went along, because Elder McRae wanted her to be present whenever he spoke. The elder, of course, refused to show any anger or displeasure at his revelation of her secret, but it was clear she was deeply concerned with how the news would affect the people of Niraya. Perhaps she thought that Roan would keep him from making things any worse.

  Roan tried to focus on her responsibilities to the faith, but instead found herself more worried about how Thom was handling the demands the people put on him. The day the reporter came he was very nervous before he spoke. He didn’t ask her to hold his hand, this time. Maybe he was just getting better at public speaking. Roan went and sat with Ensign Ehta, who, having nothing else to do, had decided to watch from a corner of the room.

  The reporter was a woman of maybe thirty, well dressed for a Nirayan. She had a camera drone that floated around behind her left shoulder, capturing everything for the record. “Thanks for agreeing to this,” she told Thom, as she made a big show of setting up—unrolling a minder on the table between them, adjusting the center’s lighting to get the best shot. “Before we begin, I want to ask you—just for my personal information—how much danger you think we’re in. Is the Navy up to stopping this fleet?”

  Roan could see what was happening—the reporter was hoping to catch him saying something meaningful while he thought they were off the record. Roan wanted to wave her hands in the air and warn Thom to hold his tongue, but it turned out to be unnecessary.

  Thom just gave the reporter a warm smile and nodded at the camera drone. “You’re already recording,” he said.

  “Hmm?” the reporter asked. “This thing? Oh, it’s always on, to catch any good B-roll for when I edit this piece.”

  Thom nodded. “Well, to answer your question—I have every faith in the Navy, and especially in the commander of the local force, Aleister Lanoe. If anyone can keep the enemy at bay, it’s him.”

  “What can you tell me about the enemy we’re fighting? There’s a lot of contradictory information out there. Some people claim it’s a fleet of ships sent by one of the polys, probably DaoLink. Some say it’s a swarm of angels descending to purify Niraya.”

  Thom’s smile turned up a little at one corner, just enough to indicate he didn’t take the idea of divine intervention seriously. “I can’t say much about who sent the fleet, because honestly, we just don’t know yet.”

  “You don’t even know who you’re fighting?”

  “We do know a few things. The fleet didn’t come through the local wormhole, and so far we’ve seen that they rely heavily on drones to fight for them rather than engaging us personally. I know there are a lot of people on Niraya who choose to live nonviolent lives, and I want to assure them that so far there’s been no blood spilled. We hope to keep it that way.”

  “Hold on,” the reporter said. “Drones?”

  “That’s correct,” Thom said. Did he look a little put out? Roan could guess what he was thinking—that if the Retreat would release the video of the first attack, he wouldn’t have to explain this.

  “Drones, like this one?” the reporter asked, gesturing at the machine that hovered behind her. “I’ve never heard of an armed drone. Drones don’t kill people.”

  Thom smiled through gritted teeth. “It’s actually illegal for anyone to put a weapon system on a drone. The penalties are considerable. But I assure you, whoever this enemy is, they’ve done it. The machines they’re sending against Niraya—”

  “And again, you don’t know who ‘they’ are,” the reporter pointed out.

  “Yes. I mean, no, we don’t know.”

  “It seems you don’t have much in the way of actual information to give my viewers.”

  Thom started to shrug, then seemed to catch himself. His smile was plastered on at that point—Roan could see his lips starting to twitch. “There’s a great deal that’s unknown. We do know that Niraya is in serious danger.”

  “From killer drones,” the reporter said, again.

  “The people of this planet need to know that,” Thom told her. “They need to understand what’s going on. It’s my job to tell them what we do know. And to reassure them that we’re fighting on their behalf, giving it everything we’ve got.”

  “How is the Navy doing that? What can you tell us about the fighting? Have Commander Lanoe and his pilots attacked this enemy directly, yet?”

  “I—I can’t comment on actual engagements—”

  “Yet another thing you can’t tell us. Or won’t.”

  Thom looked away from her, away from the camera. Even to Roan he looked shifty and defensive. This wasn’t going well.

  “I’ll share any information I can,” he promised. “I’ll answer any questions.”

  The reporter nodded and made some notes on her minder. “You recently addressed the Christian Gnostics,” she said.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Was there any reason why you went to them first? You aren’t a religious man yourself. I mean, not as far as I could turn up in my research.”

  Thom’s eyes went wide, shining under the lights. Roan winced to see how scared he looked. “You did a background check on me?” he asked.

  “Of course. That’s part of my job. I wanted to make sure I knew what questions to ask. It wasn’t easy, though. For one thing, you’re not listed anywhere in any Navy database.”

  “No—
I…no,” Thom admitted.

  “You aren’t in the Navy at all, are you? Unless”—and the reporter laughed at the idea—“you’re some kind of secret intelligence officer or something.”

  “No, no,” Thom said, “I’m not in the Navy. But Commander Lanoe asked me personally to be his liaison to the people of Niraya.”

  “An interesting choice, since—and honestly, I’m embarrassed by this. I mean, I think of myself as being good at my job. But I couldn’t find any records about you at all. Nothing. I’ve never seen anything like it. You and your Naval associates came here from the Centrocor Hexus, but their records don’t show you being there, ever.”

  “I met up with the pilots near the Hexus, but I never actually set foot on it,” Thom said. “Listen, forgive me, but I don’t see why talking about me is relevant. I’m here to discuss the invasion.”

  “Of course you are,” the reporter said. Then she rolled up her minder and sat back in her chair. “Except you have no actual information to pass on. What do you want to talk about? Not yourself. Not the Navy’s plans. Do you want to discuss Commander Lanoe? Do you want to tell me why, if we’re actually under attack, the Navy sent a man who’s been retired for seventeen years?”

  “This interview is over,” Thom said.

  “If you like,” the reporter said, as if it meant nothing to her. She packed up her things and left without another question.

  When she was gone Ensign Ehta came over and thumped Thom on the back. “Good job, kid,” she said.

  “What?” Thom asked, wheeling on the grounded pilot.

  “You kept your mouth shut.” Ehta nodded happily. “Never saw the point of public relations myself. Don’t know why people have so many damned questions. I mean, they should just let the Navy do its job, right? Stay out of our way.”