Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. She’d impressed him, this child from a backwater planet. She was more in control of herself, mentally stronger, than half the marines he’d met in his time. “I still think what you and Thom did—broadcasting that video—was a damn fool thing to do. I have to admit it worked, though. It looked like maybe McRae came around a little, too.”

  “Nobody stopped me on my way to the motor pool to talk about reinstating me as an aspirant,” she told him.

  “Is that even something you want?”

  Roan didn’t respond, except to shrug.

  When they arrived at the crater wall and climbed the long stairs up to the ground control station, Zhang was waiting for them outside. She wrapped her arms around Lanoe’s suited shoulders and kissed him before he could protest.

  “Nice work out there,” she said, releasing him. “Hi, Roan. He’s inside.”

  “Who is?” Lanoe asked.

  Zhang gave him a look of exasperation—not easy given her cybernetic eyes, but she’d had a lot of practice. “Thom, of course.” She turned to face Roan. “I have a feeling I know what you’re going to tell him. Try to be nice about it, okay?”

  “If you know what I’m going to say, I wish you’d tell me,” Roan replied, but she didn’t wait to discuss it further. She headed into the station like someone going to the gallows.

  Lanoe had spent enough of his time worrying about the kids. “We’ve got a long list of things to do,” he told Zhang. “I want to start shipping out first thing in the morning. Or whatever passes for morning around here. I’ve got a plan for how we’re going to fight these bastards but it means we have to move fast. First things first—”

  “First things first, tonight we don’t talk shop,” Zhang told him.

  “Zhang, we need—”

  “I know what you need. Which is to buy me that drink you promised,” she said.

  He started to talk again but she put a hand over his mouth.

  “We’ll be ready to go in the morning,” she told him. “That gives us all night. Who’s going to sleep the night before a battle? You and I never did. Valk could definitely use a little time off as well, though he won’t admit it.”

  He smiled under her hand. It wasn’t the first time she’d reminded him that his people needed to relax between battles. He’d always been thinking about the next fight while ignoring the mental condition of his squad. It had always been her job, as second in command, to make sure he didn’t push them so hard they broke.

  Well, he supposed he could find a few hours in the battle plan to cut loose. “What do we even have to drink out here?” he asked.

  “There’s some deicing fluid in the tender that isn’t too toxic,” she said. She laughed when she saw his face fall. “Just kidding. There’s a full bottle of scotch in there. Did you forget I was the one who commandeered that tender?”

  “You always were good at keeping us supplied,” he said.

  Valk sipped carefully at his liquor. No one had been able to find a straw for him, so he made do with a length of tubing from a vapor injector that still smelled like coolant—ably masked by the creosote taste of the scotch. He tried to savor the alcohol, though it didn’t taste as good as it used to, back before his accident. Nothing ever did.

  Still, he didn’t like to feel sorry for himself. Zhang pumped some music into the ground control station and he whooped and patted his knee to the beat and saw her smile back at him.

  The kids, Thom and Roan, had been talking quietly in one corner of the station, their eyes locked together in that intense way young people could manage. When the music started they looked up. Thom actually rolled his eyes. Maybe the tunes sounded too old-fashioned to him. Well, they had been popular back during the Establishment Crisis, so most likely before the kids were born. Together the kids got up and slipped out of the station together, probably intending to continue their conversation on a walk around the crater rim.

  Valk shrugged and looked over at Lanoe. He raised his glass and the Commander did the same. “This is a little different,” Lanoe said, “from the last time you and I shared a drink.”

  “Back then I was trying to figure out if you were going to ruin my life or just be a minor inconvenience,” Valk replied.

  Lanoe laughed—a genuine laugh for once—and poured himself another drink. “So which was it?” he asked.

  “Guess we’ll find out tomorrow,” Valk told him, and got another laugh for it.

  Zhang suggested a game of cards—she’d brought a deck for this particular purpose—but Lanoe barely started to shuffle before he gave up. Instead he pointed out the last time he and Ehta had played cards and she’d cheated him out of a month’s pay.

  “We’d just come off back-to-back patrols when you had me hunting for enemies we never found. You owed me,” Ehta said.

  Which just started them off on war stories, and as with all pilots everywhere, once those started they didn’t stop. Zhang recalled a patrol where she’d gotten separated from Lanoe, only to find him six hours later in the debris of half a wing of Establishmentarians. Ehta exploded with laughter and said the exact same thing had happened to her. Soon they were breaking down all the major engagements of the Tiamat campaign, none of them getting the details exactly right.

  Valk couldn’t join in much. A lot of the time the three of them ended up talking about how they’d killed pilots Valk had known, had flown with.

  He didn’t let it get to him. It was all history now, anyway, and he could hardly begrudge them a chance to share old memories of glory. He was especially pleased to see Ehta joining in. He knew how bad she felt about being grounded, and he was glad if she could feel like she belonged, if just for a little while. He did notice that the bottle was in her hand more often than not, and that her face had grown very flushed, but he figured if anybody could afford to get ripped that night, it was her.

  The music swelled and flowed and Valk let it pulse through him. It felt good, like a massage almost, and it eased his aching bones. For the first time in a while he didn’t mind the pull of gravity. The white pearl didn’t flash in the corner of his vision. He realized with a start that he was enjoying himself.

  He was, he had to admit, a little drunk. Which maybe justified the fact that he couldn’t stop watching Lanoe and Zhang. At least they couldn’t see him staring through his opaque helmet.

  They kept touching each other, in ways that weren’t approved of in polite company—though he didn’t suppose this counted as that. Lanoe kept looking her up and down like he’d never seen a woman before. Valk knew they had some history but if he didn’t know better, he’d think they were—

  “If you’ll excuse us,” Zhang said, standing up suddenly. She was holding Lanoe’s hand. “We need to go check something. In the tender.” She couldn’t help but grin wickedly. “Sensitive stuff, uh.” She cracked up laughing and Ehta pointed and guffawed at her. “Top secret.”

  Ehta whooped and slapped her leg as the two of them headed out the door, in a real hurry, it looked like. When they were gone she got up and changed the music to something with a gnarly groove and stood by the main console, swaying back and forth a little. Only two of them remained in the station.

  Lanoe climbed up through the hatch and reached for the lights but she pushed his hand away, kissed him hard, and then turned around to show him her back. “Open me up,” she said, her voice low and breathy.

  He laughed and ran a thumb down the release seam at the back of her suit. Her collar ring hinged open and the suit fell down around her shoulders. Her slender, perfectly shaped shoulders.

  He kissed the back of her neck and felt her shiver. Kissed her again, just behind her ear and she fell back against him, her hands reaching for his. For a while, for a perfect, fragile little time he just held her, his arms wrapped around her stomach, his face buried in her hair.

  The smell of her was intoxicating, even if it was a little wrong. Memories fell on him like a hard, driving rain. Flashes
of bare skin and the glint of her eyes in the dark. Bursts of motion, of hands grabbing each other, of breath coming heavy and thick as they made love in places light-years and decades gone.

  Her suit fell down around her ankles. She turned and pressed herself against him, reaching behind him to undo his own release seam. She stepped away from him just for a moment and pulled his suit down until he stood as naked as her. He felt the chill, the chill he always felt when he took his suit off, the bizarre sensation of air on his skin after so long, but it passed when she pressed herself against him and her body heat flowed into him, warming him, bringing back another memory.

  That time—that time on Tartarus, in a field of purple flowers a dozen kilometers from the nearest town, when it had felt like they were as far away from war and fighting as anyone had ever been. Two weeks’ leave could feel like an eternity.

  She kissed him, her head tilted back. He was so much taller than her now. He reached down and picked her up and she squealed with laughter as he carried her over to one of the bunks, it didn’t matter which one. He climbed in after her and she grabbed him, it didn’t matter where, grabbed him and pulled him close.

  The first time—he remembered the first time. They’d been up all night going over battle plans, he could barely remember which campaign. He’d been so tentative about making the first move, about responding to what he was pretty sure they both felt. But when he’d leaned across the table and kissed her, eyes open, her eyes open, too, she’d whispered, “Took your time about it,” and then there was nothing tentative in what happened next.

  Her eyes. He remembered her eyes in that moment. The way she’d looked at him. She’d lifted one eyebrow, trying for sarcasm, but in her eyes he’d seen how much she wanted him. How long she’d been waiting.

  Now she buried her face in his chest, her mouth moving downward in a wet line. He pulled her up and looked at her. Even in the dark he could see her cybernetic eyes, dark pools in her face. Not Zhang’s eyes.

  He tried to put it out of his mind. She was beautiful, in ways she hadn’t been before. Her body was taut and soft in exactly the right places, as if she’d been made for his hands, for his lips. She moved under him in exactly the right ways.

  Still. He must have hesitated. Tensed up.

  “I’ve been waiting for this for years, Lanoe. Don’t stop,” she said.

  “I feel like I’m cheating on you,” he told her. “While you’re in the room. Like you’re sitting behind me, watching me.”

  She cupped his cheek with one delicate hand. “Close your eyes,” she said. “Close your eyes and pretend, if you have to.”

  He closed his eyes. “Your voice is still different,” he said. “The way you smell…”

  “Work with me,” she told him. “Here. Put your hand here. That feels good, doesn’t it? How about if I do this?”

  It took a while. But they made it work.

  Valk picked up the cards. “How about a game?” he asked. Maybe if Ehta had to focus on her play she would sober up a little.

  “It’s good,” she said. She let out a roaring belch, which made her laugh. “Good to see the two of them, Lanoe and Zhang, back together. Been a long time. Back in the old days, in the damned old Ninety-Fourth squadron, he could be a real cuss of a commander, you know? But she always took his edge off.” That was apparently enough of an innuendo to make her laugh again.

  “They make a great team,” Valk agreed.

  Ehta nodded to herself. She beamed for a moment, and then her face fell. “We were. All of us. A great team. Madman Jernigan. Bloody Khoi. Hakluyt—he was a devil of a fighter, we were always running defense for him. They’re gone now but Lanoe and Zhang, they, they’re still here. Still together.”

  “And you. You survived.”

  “Yeah. Imagine that, huh? I made it through the war and then I made it in the marines. You’re not supposed to live very long in the marines, but I did. We have a saying in the Navy—if you’re born to die in the void, you’ll never buy it on the ground.”

  “We said something similar in the Establishment.”

  Which made her laugh more than anything so far. “Imagine that. Imagine old Lanoe fighting along side one of your bunch. That,” she said, “is irony. Or no. That’s not what that word means. It’s just funny, I guess.”

  “That’s all in the past. War’s over.”

  She nodded, not looking at him. “The past. Sure. You know—I don’t blame Maggs for running.”

  Surprised, Valk sat up a little in his chair. “You don’t?”

  “He didn’t owe Lanoe. Not like me and Zhang. He wasn’t one of us.” She got up to search for the bottle. She wobbled a little but she didn’t fall down. Eventually she found the scotch and poured herself another drink. “What’s the point of staying here to die? He knew we haven’t got a chance.”

  “Lanoe doesn’t see it that way,” Valk said.

  Ehta studied him for a long time, just sipping at her drink. “He’s not looking right now. Neither is Zhang.”

  “You suggesting something?”

  “Nobody would notice if you decided to do the same thing,” she told him, her eyes locked on his helmet.

  “Run away, you mean.”

  “You aren’t one of us, either,” she told him.

  Was this a test? Or maybe she hoped that he would say yes, that he would go out and steal the tender and fly back to the Hexus and try to rebuild his life—maybe she was hoping he would take her with him.

  Except he knew better. She might be tempted, but Ehta would never run away from Lanoe, would she? She’d come all this way. She’d tried to overcome her trauma and fly for Lanoe, even though she must have known it wouldn’t work.

  How much courage had that taken? Well, he knew she was no coward. She’d joined the Poor Bloody Marines when she realized she couldn’t fly. But there were different kinds of bravery.

  Like his own, he thought.

  It was easy being courageous when you were perfectly happy to die whenever the Grim Reaper had an opening in his schedule.

  “This is where I want to be,” he told her. “Until Lanoe came along, until he took me out of the Hexus, I hadn’t flown in seventeen years. I’d forgotten how much it meant to me. All the shooting, all the craziness of a battle, that I could have given up. But that feeling, when you’re all alone out there in your cockpit, hanging over nothing, not even sky over your head—”

  He barely registered how white her face had become until she dropped the bottle. It rolled across the floor, a few precious drops of liquor spilling on the concrete.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, suddenly feeling like an ass.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she insisted, scrabbling around on her knees to pick the bottle back up.

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “I said it’s okay.” She climbed back into her chair. “You want to hear something funny?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I miss it, too.” She wasn’t laughing. “I think about it every day. I think about it and then I catch myself hyperventilating, or I hear my heart pounding in my ears. It’s not me that’s broken, you know? It’s not me, it’s my body. That’s the funny thing. It doesn’t feel like me.”

  He had no idea what to say to that.

  Afterward, as Lanoe lay entwined with her, he kissed her toes, her tiny little toes. Zhang had big feet. She used to have big feet. Now they were positively dainty. The idea made him laugh.

  “This is the best part,” she told him. “This was always the best part.”

  “What, lying in bed being lazy?” he asked.

  “No. The part where I’ve brought you back to me. When I know you aren’t planning strategies or going over old patrols in your head. You’re just here with me and there’s nothing else.” She sighed happily and shifted around until they were face-to-face again. She stroked his hair.

  “I hope it’s worth it. After I dragged you out here to the end of the galaxy to fight a war you didn’t as
k for.”

  She shook her head. “You didn’t drag me. You asked for my help. I said yes.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you would.” He didn’t want to talk about what came next, but he felt he had to. “I’m so sorry, Zhang. I should have stayed in touch. The way we left things…”

  “I moved on, Lanoe. I got over it. Seventeen years. Do you think I spent all that time lying in that hospital bed, feeling sorry for myself? No. I built a new life. A good one.”

  “One you gave up the second I sent you a message asking for help.”

  “This is a good time for secrets, I think,” she told him. “Let’s start there. You don’t think I dropped everything and stole a Navy tender just because I was still carrying a torch, do you? I had very good reasons to come here.”

  “Not just to screw my brains out?” he asked.

  She laughed, startled by the profanity. It was a beautiful sound. Not Zhang’s laugh, not her old laugh, but he liked this new one all the same.

  “I came,” she said, “because—well, okay, that was part of it.” She snorted and buried her face in his neck. “But there was more. I came because you were still my commanding officer, regardless of what it says on the Navy rolls. I came because you and I were a team and you don’t just give up on that.”

  “They disbanded the Ninety-Fourth,” he pointed out.

  “They don’t have that power,” she said. “But even beyond that, there was more. I had to know something. I had to find out your big secret.”

  “Me? I’m an open book,” he assured her. “Never been subtle in my life.”

  “Ha. That’s just it, really.”

  She burrowed into him, her arms holding him close, one leg hooked over his hip. “You’re a lot older than me. You had whole lifetimes before I even met you. When I look back I think of our time as most of my life, but for you—it was just like an act in a video, a third or fourth act. Even when we were closest, when we were fighting side by side, I knew there was more to you than I was ever going to understand. But I wanted to. I wanted access to all of you. I still do.”