Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  “Sure,” Lanoe said.

  “Except there’s only three of us. You didn’t forget that Maggs is…that he left us, did you?”

  “Nope,” Lanoe said. “I said four. I meant four.”

  He turned to look at Thom. Chairs squeaked as everybody else did, too.

  For Thom’s part, he just looked stunned. Cartoonishly so, his eyes bugging out of his head, his mouth open, his knees visibly shaking.

  “Assuming,” Lanoe said to the boy, “you’re in.”

  “Me?” Thom asked.

  No one told him he’d misheard what Lanoe said. Nobody suggested it might have been a joke.

  They were all staring at him.

  Thom shook his head. Pushed his chair back. “Lanoe—I’m not a Navy pilot.”

  “You’re one of the best civilian pilots I’ve seen,” Lanoe replied.

  “But that’s…that’s different. I race yachts,” Thom pointed out. “Nobody shoots at a yacht. And I’ve never…I’ve never fought anybody in my life. I’ve never even fired a shot.”

  Lanoe tilted his head back and took a long breath. “We both know that’s not true.”

  Zhang and Valk were already staring at him. Neither of them had proper eyes to widen—it was hard to tell if they were surprised by Lanoe’s revelation. They couldn’t know, though. Lanoe hadn’t told them anything about Thom’s father. Thom certainly hadn’t. But that was immaterial.

  “I need a fourth pilot,” Lanoe said. “You’re the best candidate we’ve got. I’ll give you what training I can. I’ll show you how everything works. It won’t be enough—it takes years to make a good pilot—but it’ll be a start. No one’s expecting you to turn into an ace on your first patrol, Thom. No one expects you to be the one that blows up that queenship. But if you can provide covering fire while one of us moves in for the kill, it’ll mean all the difference.”

  Zhang twisted around in her chair. “Lanoe,” she said. “You’re sure about this?”

  Yes, Thom thought. Yes. Just one person point out how absurd this is. How impossible.

  Lanoe didn’t relent, though.

  “Thom, I can’t order you to do it,” he said. “All I can do is ask.”

  He didn’t point out any of the reasons why Thom should say yes. He didn’t mention the fact that Thom owed Lanoe his life. He didn’t suggest that this could mean saving Roan—and all of Niraya—from a terrible death. He didn’t even appeal to Thom’s vanity, or his pride, or his sense of shame.

  He just asked, and stood there waiting for a reply.

  Thom muttered something, the words meaning very little, really. Then he got up and staggered out of the ground control station, because he thought he might be sick.

  Outside the engineers were hard at work, bolting cargo pods onto the tender. He had to jump aside to dodge a shower of sparks. The noise was good, though. The noise drowned out everything in his head.

  He had to find Roan. She wouldn’t be far. Since she’d left the Retreat, she had nowhere else to go. He walked around the station and went to the top of the long set of stairs leading down into the crater.

  She was sitting a couple of flights down, down where the noise wasn’t as intense. When she saw him coming she stood up and smiled. A little breeze blew the hair back from her eyes and he had to catch his breath.

  She wrapped her arms around him when they came together. He held her very tight.

  “I’m going,” she said.

  “What?”

  Her smile changed. He could tell she was worried that what she said next might upset him. “We’re going to set up a ground control station. On Aruna. Ensign Ehta and I are…” She stopped and her smile was gone. She must have seen the look on his own face. “I know, it’s dangerous. I know—”

  “It’s something you have to do,” he told her.

  She nodded.

  “I—I have my own thing. To do.” He took a deep breath. Then he told her what Lanoe had asked of him.

  “No,” she said, as if she could just veto this. “No, you can’t do that.” Just a simple matter of fact. “Not after last night. I mean—I mean not after what we figured out.” She laughed, though he could tell she was laughing out of confusion, not humor. “No,” she said, and shook her head, still holding him close. “No. You won’t do it. Just tell him no.”

  “I already said yes,” he told her.

  Lanoe watched as the engineers loaded the last of their equipment into the tender. Tools, food, box after box of cheap disposable space suits donated by the mining concern. Habitat tents and oxygen generators. No personal items, no luxury goods. They could fit about twenty engineers in there, as well as Ehta and Roan. Down at the spaceport, other volunteers were readying two shuttles—also Centrocor property from the mines—that could just about make the journey to Aruna. Each of those shuttles could hold another fifteen passengers each. Fifty civilians in all who would go out to the moon and start building guns on a crash schedule, and hopefully have something ready to fire by the time the enemy fleet arrived.

  The timing was very tight. The enemy’s trajectory had them on a fast course toward Niraya. They would pass by Garuda and its moon in less than two days. They wouldn’t come within a million kilometers of the moon if they held to their present course, but Lanoe intended to force them to make a detour. If the guns weren’t ready by the time the enemy arrived, this was going to be a very short battle.

  The tender had its cannon, but the shuttles had no weapons at all. Zhang and Valk would fly out to Aruna with the engineers and run patrols to protect the civilian volunteers as necessary. Lanoe and Thom would stay on Niraya for the boy’s training, then rush to catch up.

  From here on in there was no more time to waste.

  Just time for a couple of quick goodbyes. There was a good chance he would never see Zhang again outside of her cockpit. He half-expected her to pull him into the station for a quick reprise of what they’d gotten up to the night before, but he’d forgotten who she was. Inside the young body, behind those metal eyes, she was still Bettina Zhang, Lieutenant, Navy Expeditionary Force. An ace pilot and a hell of a second in command.

  He found her over by where the fighters sat, ready for takeoff. “Repairs are finished,” she told him. “The engineers gave my BR.9 a good overhaul while they were at it. Probably flies better than ever.”

  “And when they were finished you checked it over yourself anyway, right?” he asked.

  “Of course. They did a little something for your FA.2, as well.”

  “They did what?” he demanded.

  “You might want to check it out.” She took him over to where his fighter sat a little distance away, separate from all the noise and chaos. At first glance he didn’t see anything had changed.

  Then he noticed the difference. Someone had painted the number 94 on the ship’s flank in Gothic script.

  He looked over at Zhang’s BR.9. On the fairing displays, he saw the designator of the 94th squadron superimposed over the red tentacles there. Even Valk’s ship had a 94 blazoned over the Establishment flag—which would have been in the poorest taste in any other circumstance.

  When he was quiet for a long while, holding his mouth steady so it didn’t betray him, she said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were moved.”

  “Good thing you know better. All right, Lieutenant. You have your orders.”

  “Yes, sir.” She gave him a snappy salute. Then, in a very different tone, she asked, “You ready for this?”

  “Sure,” he told her.

  She nodded and tilted her head back and they kissed, a long, soft kiss that said more than a hundred words possibly could. There was no talk now of them rebooting the old relationship, of beginning again. That had to wait and they both knew it. When the kiss was finished she put up her helmet and jumped in her cockpit and in less than a minute she was just a speck receding into the deep, deep blue of the sky.

  When this is over, he told himself. Except that was as far as the thought
got. When this is over.

  They would talk, then, he supposed. Maybe he would ask her to marry him again, and maybe this time she would say yes.

  He wouldn’t let himself think about that.

  Instead he headed inside the station, where Valk was sitting with Ehta, talking in low tones. Though she was smiling she looked slightly embarrassed. Well, wonders never cease, Lanoe thought. He’d never seen her blush before.

  “Time to go,” he told Valk.

  The big pilot nodded and got up. He patted Ehta on the shoulder and headed out of the station. Lanoe gave Ehta one last look, then followed Valk out. “Is she okay?” he asked.

  Valk shrugged. “She wants to do her bit. She’s scared witless by the thought of the flight to Aruna, but she’ll make it if she doesn’t have to look out a window.”

  “Good enough,” Lanoe said. “Hold on a second.”

  Valk had been headed toward his BR.9. He stopped and turned around.

  “Over here, where we won’t be bothering the engineers,” Lanoe said, and led Valk around the side of the station, away from the noise. “Before you go,” he said, “there’s something I needed to give you.”

  “Oh?” Valk asked.

  “It can’t be official, of course,” Lanoe said. He opened a display on his wrist and tapped at a virtual keyboard. “The Admiralty has to approve these. But check your cryptab.”

  The big pilot looked down at the blank gray patch on the front of his own suit. Lanoe knew what Valk would see there. Something new.

  Right at the top, next to his name, would be a blue star. A Blue Star.

  The mark of an ace, of a pilot with five confirmed kills. The only commendation any pilot had ever cared about. The one the Navy took away from Valk when he lost his war.

  “You earned that when we fought the swarmship, if not before,” Lanoe told him.

  Valk lifted his head. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “‘Thank you, sir’ is traditional,” Lanoe told him. “But belay that.”

  Valk couldn’t seem to help himself. He checked the cryptab again, presumably to make sure the Blue Star was still there.

  Lanoe let him look at how pretty it was for a while before he spoke again.

  “There’s something else,” he said. “Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now, but I knew you wouldn’t like it, so I’ve been putting it off.”

  “Yeah? After this? Anything you want.”

  “If I’m going to fight side by side with a pilot,” Lanoe said, “I want to know what he looks like. I want to see your face.”

  “No you don’t.”

  Lanoe just stood there, watching him.

  Valk let out a very deep, very long sigh. Then he swung around from side to side, perhaps to make sure nobody else was in sight. He reached up with a shaking finger and touched the recessed key at his throat. His helmet flowed down into his collar ring like black ice melting.

  What Lanoe saw underneath didn’t quite make sense.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Oh?” Valk asked. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Just—it’s not what I expected.” Lanoe fought to control his face. To not show his shock. “Tell me something, Valk. When was the last time you looked in a mirror? I mean, with your helmet down?”

  Valk shook his head. “Not since the accident.”

  “Do you…do you want me to get you a mirror now? Because I think—”

  “No!” Valk said. “No,” he said again, less vehemently. “I don’t want to know. Maybe you’re going to tell me it’s not as bad as I think. And then I’ll look, and I’ll see it’s healed some, but it still won’t be what I want. It won’t be what it was. Maybe you were going to tell me something else. Don’t.”

  Lanoe didn’t know how to respond. Except in his traditional manner.

  “Sure,” he said. “Whatever you want.”

  Valk pressed the key again and put his helmet back up. “Time to get moving, right? Time to deploy?”

  “Yeah,” Lanoe told him. “Okay. Maybe we’ll talk about this later—or not. If you don’t want to. Just—”

  “What with ‘later’ being a conditional kind of thing, let’s drop it for now.”

  Lanoe walked him over to his BR.9, then watched as he lifted into the air and shot away toward space.

  When this is over, he thought, I’m going to have to figure out what in hell’s name I just saw.

  When it was over.

  Thom ran one hand over the smooth fairing on the side of the BR.9. He had to admit he was a little excited. Like any civilian pilot, he’d grown up devouring information about every spacecraft in existence—especially the military ships. He knew all the specs and the control schematics for fighters ranging as far back as the original FA.1, the first real cataphract, up to the latest Z.XXV prototypes.

  None were more versatile or more proven than the BR.9. The Navy had more of them than any other kind of fighter, and for good reason. All the great stories of tense dogfights and crazy bombing runs featured the BR.9—an eminently flyable, survivable ship that could perform in multiple roles across a wide range of theater conditions.

  It was not, of course, much to look at. The airfoils were curved and swept forward to give it a predatory look but the main fuselage was lumpy and studded with equipment boxes that wrecked its lines and its aerodynamics. It was also quite small, even for a fighter. No bigger than Roan’s ground car, in fact. Much of the small volume was taken up with weapon systems and the massive Gôblin engine, so that the cockpit seemed to bulge from the front, as if the pilot were an afterthought strapped on at the last minute.

  “Want to pop ’er open?” Lanoe said.

  Thom didn’t want much else. “Can I? I mean—”

  “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  Right. Thom had forgotten, for a second, that he’d been recruited for a job that was almost guaranteed suicide.

  He ran his finger along a groove just under the canopy until he found a recessed key. The canopy melted away, just like a suit helmet. The engine ticked over as the cockpit displays lit up and the pilot’s seat reclined a little to let him inside. Thom jumped up into the cockpit and the safety harness automatically locked into sockets on the back and legs of his suit.

  His fingers danced over the various board displays. Power, flight, weapons, communications, sensors…New displays jumped up all around him, filling his view. He dismissed or rearranged enough of them that he could actually see forward. He tapped a virtual key and the canopy flowed up over his head, sealing him in.

  He watched as Lanoe jogged across the spaceport’s concrete apron, toward his FA.2. They were really going to do this.

  Thom lifted off the ground with just the slightest touch of the maneuvering jets. Flywheels hummed as the fighter stabilized itself in the air. A green pearl appeared in the corner of Thom’s eye. Lanoe calling him. He accepted the connection. “Head out, over the crater rim,” Lanoe said. “We’ll take ’em down into the canyons. Get you used to maneuvering.”

  “I know how to fly,” Thom pointed out.

  “You think you do,” Lanoe told him. “Just follow my lead for now, okay?”

  Thom opened his throttle just a touch and grabbed the control stick. The BR.9 tried to get away from him—it wanted to move fast, wanted to really fly. He could see his airfoils ripple as they changed shape to bite into Niraya’s thin atmosphere, could feel the engine spinning and roaring just behind his seat.

  He’d flown yachts with peppier throttles and shuttles with tighter controls, but the BR.9 was so well balanced it didn’t feel like he was in control at all. It was designed to fly itself as much as possible, to let the pilot focus on fighting, he presumed.

  He followed Lanoe up over the edge of the crater—the BR.9 hopped up over the rim with barely any input from the controls, automated collision avoidance systems kicking into play—then down the side of a gently sloping plateau. Below them the canyons twisted and bent back on themselv
es, a labyrinth of gray-yellow stone. He remembered driving through those defiles with Roan, but this was nothing like that. The BR.9 was designed to fly halfway around a star system in a day. Covering a few dozen kilometers of ground in a minute was an insult to its capabilities, and the fighter let him know as much, its thrusters whining piteously with the lean fuel mix he fed them.

  For a while Lanoe’s FA.2 seemed to hang motionless in the sky, just ahead and to the left, as the two fighters matched velocities and course. Then Lanoe promptly vanished. Thom had to check his boards to see that Lanoe had pulled a steep powered dive down into the canyons below. He followed as carefully as he could, dropping down until the walls of rock surrounded him on both sides. His navigation board tinged yellow to warn him he was in danger of crashing but he managed to ignore it.

  “The early years of the Century War,” Lanoe said, his FA.2 dipping under a natural bridge of stone, “were dominated by line ships. Destroyers and cruisers penetrated the skies over Earth with impunity—they could smash whole cities before ground defenses could even come online. The casualties were nightmarish. Fighters of the time,” he went on, banking hard to turn into a side canyon, “were useless against big ships—like gnats attacking a bear. Countermeasures mounted on the line ships could pick off an entire wing of fighters before they got close enough to fire disruptors.”

  “Lanoe,” Thom said, following the FA.2 through a ravine no more than fifteen meters wide, his nav board blaring red now, “is this really the time for a lecture?”

  “I had to listen to this when I was in training,” Lanoe said. “So do you. You’ve got to learn floating focus, Thom—you have to pay attention to a dozen things at once. I know what I’m doing. Now, as I was saying. The war would have been over in six months, with Earth and Mars both in ruins, if it hadn’t been for the invention of the vector field.”

  The two of them wove around a line of rock spires, then stood on their sides as Lanoe took them into a deep valley between two ridges of stone.