Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  “What do you mean?”

  “For me,” she said, “the fighting was like a drug. It was fun. It was like this big puzzle you had to solve, a challenge to be figured out. Even when we lost people, even when friends died, that was just momentum. Impetus to get out there and fight harder. For you, though—I could always see something happening behind your eyes. It meant more to you. You understood it better than I did, because you’d been doing it so much longer. Do you remember—there was this moon, some frozen chunk of rock and we stood on a ridge and looked down at broken ships lying on the floor of a crater. It was one of those times you asked me to marry me.”

  “I remember,” he said.

  “All I could think at that moment, all I could talk about, was the fact that we’d won. We’d won and they lost. I was thrilled. I was bubbling over with it. And then you proposed and I looked in your eyes and there was sadness in there, sadness I couldn’t understand.”

  “I remember,” he said again.

  “You saw something I didn’t. Something more. I’ve always wanted to know what it was. So,” she said. She reached down and did something extremely pleasant with her hand. “Are you going to tell me? I think I deserve that. Don’t I?”

  “Sure,” he said. Because he knew, for once, exactly what she wanted.

  Ehta looked around the room and seemed surprised by something. “Everybody else is gone, aren’t they? Hell. In the marines,” she said, “this happened all the time.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “People would pair up before a fight. They knew some of them wouldn’t be coming back. You ask your barracks room psychologists, they’ll tell you it’s some kind of evolutionary thing. Gotta reproduce in a hurry if your gene pool’s about to dry up. I always figured it was just to stave off the boredom, you know?”

  “I guess,” he said. He’d seen it happen himself, in ready rooms and in crowded berths on destroyers around half a dozen stars. “Maybe people just enjoy sex.”

  She laughed again and turned the music up. Then she surprised him—though he should have guessed it was coming. She came over to him and plopped down on his knee.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  He ignored the white pearl spinning in the corner of his eye. “Ehta—”

  “Maybe I’m not your type,” she said.

  “It’s not that.”

  She wrapped her arms around his collar ring and kissed the side of his helmet. “Might be our last chance,” she pointed out. “Unless you think I’m ugly. Do you? Don’t worry, I won’t slug you if you say yes. I’m a marine, I’ve got scars.”

  “I like tough women,” he said. “It’s just—I can’t take off my suit. Ever.”

  She slumped against him, her body weight falling across his shoulder and his side. For a second he thought she might fall asleep like that. Then she whispered into the side of his helmet, roughly where his ear might be.

  “You’ve still got hands, don’t you?”

  “You think there was something more,” Lanoe said. “Some great understanding I had about the nature of war and life and death that you were too young to get.” He shook his head. “No. After all those years, all those wars. There was something less.

  “Age doesn’t make you wiser,” he told her. “It makes you more experienced, but there’s a difference. You go into things knowing what’s going to happen. Maybe not all the details, but you’ve seen similar situations before and you know how it’s likely to play out. You know how you’re going to feel about it afterward; that’s the worst part.”

  He pulled her closer. He’d stopped thinking about the new body, about the cybernetic eyes. This was Zhang. It had always been Zhang. The one person he could ever tell this. “I’ve been fighting since I was a teenager,” he said. “When I signed on, it was because I thought girls would like me better if I was wearing a space suit.”

  She laughed. “I bet it worked.”

  “Absolutely,” he said, and laughed, himself. “It didn’t take me long, though, to realize that what we were doing meant something. This was the very start of the Century War, back when Earth and Mars were still squabbling over asteroids. Earth—my homeworld—had to win. I’d found something I was willing to die for. To kill for.”

  He closed his eyes and tried not to think about how long ago that was now.

  “The war ended. Not because I shot down all those pilots and all those line ships. It ended because the polys—we still called them corporations then—agreed to bankroll Earth. Mars and Ganymede didn’t have the resources to keep fighting, not when Earth had that kind of backing. Their populations starved and eventually they had to surrender. It wasn’t about guns, in the end. It was about money.

  “Most of the pilots I knew, the ones who were still alive, were smart enough to get out of the Navy then. But not me. I kept fighting. It wasn’t like I had trouble finding more battles. There was always some Brushfire conflict out there, some place they needed pilots. They were always so happy when I showed up. The legend, the hero. I won’t lie, that felt pretty good.

  “It wasn’t until the Establishment Crisis that I realized it hadn’t stopped. That I’d been fighting every day since I was a teenager. That patriotism I’d felt as a child, that need to protect Earth, that was long gone. Earth—this is about when you were born, Zhang—it wasn’t even home anymore. I couldn’t recognize the place. I guess, thinking about it now, maybe it hadn’t changed that much. But I had.

  “There were more wars, always there were more wars and I went and I fought even though I knew, in the end, I wasn’t going to achieve anything.”

  “You’re the most effective pilot who ever lived,” Zhang insisted.

  “Sure,” Lanoe said. “Except—we’re still fighting each other. Now it’s polys fighting other polys. Fighting over the flimsiest of justifications. Earth sends the Navy in, supposedly to keep the peace. In reality all the Navy is doing is maintaining a balance of power. Fighting for this poly today, that one tomorrow. Making sure none of them ever gets too big.” He shook his head. “When the Establishment Crisis began, I felt so clear, so focused. The Establishmentarians were terrorists, they had to be stopped. Even if I agreed with every damned thing they said, their methods were wrong. But once we put them down, the polys didn’t even take a break. They just started more wars. Always more wars. Why do you fight, Zhang? Why did you sign up?”

  She moved against him. A full-body shrug. “Somebody had to. And I wanted to learn to fly.”

  He took a long, deep breath. “When I fought for Earth, I fought to win. I fought so the war would end. I lost, Zhang.”

  “What?”

  “I lost. I lost that war because all I did was clear the way for more fighting, over things that mattered less and less. The polys always find another reason to fight. They wouldn’t let me win. They wouldn’t let me win because they make money off the fighting, and if I won, the wars would be over, and they wouldn’t make any more money. I was justifying their greed, that was all.”

  “Is that why you retired?” she asked him.

  “Yeah. That’s why I retired.”

  She kissed his neck. Maybe just because it was there. “Awhile back, I asked why you were here. Why you were fighting for Niraya. You told me you needed to pay back some kind of moral debt. Was that true?”

  “No,” he said.

  Because he could admit that now, to himself.

  Lanoe wasn’t given much to introspection. When he plumbed the depths of his psyche he rarely found anything he wanted to see. She deserved this, though. She deserved the real answer.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t come here to make something right. Not really. When Roan and the elder told me their story, I wasn’t thinking about right or wrong.”

  “So…why?”

  “I’m a warrior, Zhang. I’ve never done anything else, never learned how to be a farmer or an office clerk or a mechanic. I’ve spent my whole life fighting wars, and I don’t even know why. I don’t know w
hat all that fighting, all that killing achieved.”

  He shifted around until he was looking into her face. Into her artificial eyes.

  “I came here because if we actually succeed—if we drive back this invasion fleet. Well. That’ll feel like I fought for a reason, for something meaningful. I came here because I wanted to feel like I’d fought in a war and I’d actually won.”

  Ehta fell asleep before long, slumped forward over the main console. Valk tried to make her as comfortable as he could. There was a little cot in the corner of the ground control station. He laid her down carefully, then covered her in a thick blanket. She snored and slapped at his hands in her sleep, but she was drunk enough she didn’t wake up. He draped her suit over a chair nearby, where she would see it when she woke up.

  He switched off the music. Cleaned the place up a little, tossing cups and half-eaten plates of food in the recycling bin. Checked the minder on the main console, to see if there was any new imagery of the enemy fleet, or if anything else had changed. Nothing had. He found the bottle of scotch lying on its side on the floor. Only a mouthful of liquor remained inside. He picked it up and took it with him as he left the station.

  By all rights it should have been dark outside. He should have been able to see the stars. Niraya turned so slowly, though, that the sun was only halfway to the horizon. It would be weeks yet before it set.

  He shrugged in resignation. It still felt like the middle of the night. The quiet hours.

  He looked out over the crater. At the town, sleeping below. A few people were still camped outside the Retreat but most of the tents had been taken down and the open space around the big building had been cleaned up.

  He looked up, at the sky. Where he belonged.

  He heard footsteps crunching on gravel behind him and he turned and saw Thom and Roan walking toward him. They weren’t looking at him, though. They were deep in conversation. As they approached, Thom nodded at Valk.

  “You two have a good talk?” Valk asked.

  It was Roan who answered. “We worked a lot of things out,” she said. Then she blushed. At first Valk didn’t see why—but then she reached up and buttoned the top button of her tunic.

  “Good to get things straightened out now,” Valk said, turning his whole torso away from them so she would know he wasn’t staring. “Just in case.”

  She didn’t reply. As the two of them walked on past, she had her head down, her chin nearly touching her chest. They were holding hands.

  Valk sighed pleasantly. In a few hours everything would get crazy again. But now, in the dusty light of this quiet time, he felt okay.

  It had been a very long time since Valk felt okay.

  He leaned back, stretching. It hurt but not too much. He looked over at the tender and saw his BR.9 nestled against its side. Its fairings were switched off so they didn’t show the Establishment flag, but he could recognize it by the broken airfoil. It was possible, in fact, extremely probable, that he would die inside its cockpit very soon.

  The thought didn’t scare him, or bother him at all. These last few days had been worth it. To be a pilot again, after so long. It had meant everything.

  The tender’s hatch opened and Lanoe stepped out. He wore his heavy suit and he’d even run some razor paper over his face, so he looked as fresh as morning dew. Ready to get to work, even if everyone else was just winding down. He came over to stand next to Valk without a word, the two of them looking over the crater rim, not toward town but toward the empty canyon land beyond, at the maze of rock where nothing whatsoever moved.

  Valk handed Lanoe the bottle, and the old man drained it, then wound up and threw it as hard as he could over the crater wall. Together they watched it glitter as it arced downward, watched it shatter on the rocks twenty meters below. An old, old pilot tradition. Empty bottles were also known as “dead soldiers.” You didn’t keep them around where somebody might see them and remember that.

  “All in,” Lanoe said.

  “All in,” Valk replied.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Lanoe waited by the top of the stairs when the first load of engineers arrived, led by Derrow. They looked rested and ready to get to work. Good. “We’ve got two fighters here that need significant repairs,” he said, showing Derrow the damage to Zhang’s thrusters and all the superficial damage on Maggs’s BR.9. “Think you can put them back in fighting shape?”

  Derrow took a quick look at both of them. “No problem,” she said. She shouted orders at a couple of her people and they moved, not like sullen poly employees but like people who knew how much was at stake. Others came up to refit the tender itself. Under Derrow’s instruction they unbolted the cannon and the sensor pod from the sides of the big ship, then started stripping it of everything that wasn’t essential—tearing out the bunks in the wardroom, carrying out boxes of supplies and equipment they wouldn’t need.

  The noise of it woke Ehta. She came out of the ground control station looking supremely annoyed and in no small amount of pain. A little brown bottle flu, that was all, Lanoe decided. A hydration tab and a quick jolt from her suit’s onboard medical supplies would fix her up like new. “Get Zhang and Valk together,” he told her. She nodded without making a nasty comment, which was more than he expected. “Oh. And Thom—get Thom, too.”

  “The kid? Why?”

  “I’ll explain everything,” Lanoe said. That was all it took to get her moving.

  In a few minutes he had his pilots and Thom sitting in front of the station’s main console, all of them looking bright and chipper and ready for what came next.

  He hoped that attitude would last.

  “This is it,” he told them. “The end of this campaign, one way or another.” He touched a minder lying on the console and a display lit up, showing the enemy fleet. The image was in color, now, though all the shapes it projected were dark and drab. It showed the seven remaining swarmships in exceptional detail—if you looked close you could see the interceptors and scouts mounted on them. The queenship still looked a little choppy and indistinct but its general shape was distinctly visible. A rough, irregular ovoid, with a huge opening on one end surrounded by spiky projections. “In a couple of days the enemy fleet will be close enough to attack Niraya directly. But we’re not going to wait for that to happen. We’re taking the fight to them.”

  Zhang nodded grimly, and looked over at Valk and Ehta, as if to make sure they were paying attention.

  They were.

  “We hurt them bad at Aruna, at the moon here,” Lanoe said, bringing up a new image. It showed the ice giant planet Garuda rotating slowly, its moons swinging around it in their far-flung orbits. Aruna, where the enemy had built their mining facility, flashed once when he named it. “Bad enough they sent an entire swarmship to take it back. The main fleet is still on a trajectory straight for Niraya, but we can change their minds. If we give them a reason to think Aruna is more important, they’ll engage us there instead. We’ll fly out there today and harry them until we have their attention, until they commit to taking back their moon. Once they come around, our mission is clear. We use our guns to punch a hole through their defenses, then our fighters go straight for the queenship. It’s possible that if we just damage the thing, the programmer inside will panic and surrender. That’s our best chance. If that doesn’t happen—if they don’t surrender, well. We blow the hell out of the queenship and let the guns mop up the swarms.”

  Lanoe could see that Zhang had questions, but he wasn’t done.

  “The hardest part is going to be staying on mission. Once those swarms start deploying, the volume of space around the queenship is going to get very crowded. We’ll have to fight our way through a lot of small craft before we even get close to the main objective.”

  He tapped the minder, drawing arrows across the display. “We’ve all flown missions like this before. The fact these are aliens and not human enemies doesn’t change our best tactic. Two fighters here, two here. One pair screens the ad
vance of the other. I’m not looking for glory. Whoever has the best chance at a run straight at the queenship takes that chance, and they don’t have to wait for my permission. If they fail, somebody else takes their place. I can’t stress this enough—our only chance to beat these bastards is to hit the queenship hard and repeatedly.”

  He saw Zhang nearly bursting with questions. Maybe it was time.

  “Go ahead,” he told her.

  “Two major issues, here. First,” she said, “guns on Niraya won’t be able to shoot far enough to reach the fleet. I assume—”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We’re not building the guns on Niraya. We’re building them on Aruna. Engineer Derrow’s already got schematics and plans for how it’s going to be done. There’s plenty of scrap metal there—we made sure of that—so she’ll have the resources she needs, and now we’ve got the people to do the work. It means our engineers will have to work in suits on hostile territory. It’s hazardous duty, definitely. I told the volunteers as much and a couple of them retracted their offers to help. But only a couple. Most of our civilian support is ready for this. Including Elder McRae, who’s never worn a space suit before but says she’s willing to learn.” He nodded to himself. The civilians had no idea what they were getting themselves into, but they wanted to save their planet. They would work—and fight, when the time came.

  “Wait,” Ehta said, squirming in her chair. “If the guns are on Aruna, and you’re fighting out there in deep space, what’s my role?”

  “Ground control. You’re coming with us,” Lanoe told her. “We need you to aim the guns. To make sure they do as much damage as humanly possible.”

  Ehta’s face writhed in emotion. Maybe she was panicking at the thought of flying in a spaceship again. Maybe she just wanted a chance for redemption so badly it hurt. He couldn’t quite tell.

  “Okay, second, bigger question,” Zhang told him. “You said two fighters in each group, two fighters screening the advance of the other two.”