Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  “Well, of course I’m aware of that,” Maggs told the woman. One of the great secrets of lying: Never admit you don’t know what you’re talking about. “Why do you think I brought it here? I took it back from the thief and now I’m returning it to its rightful owners, aren’t I?”

  The lieutenant was clearly not the kind of woman who enjoyed uncertainty. Her left eyelid twitched as she processed his words. “You recovered this vehicle from its unlawful possessor,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you flew it here—to the Admiralty—to return it. Instead of just taking it to the nearest quartermaster,” she went on.

  “Yes,” Maggs said. He hazarded a tiny closed-eyes nod as if to say, Good, now you’re getting it, dear.

  “You came to the Admiralty to—”

  “It was on my way,” he told her. “I have business here.”

  “What kind of business?” she asked. Doubtfully.

  “I need to pay a social call,” he said.

  Elder McRae had been lucky to avoid injury when the smelter spat out its molten metal. Others of the volunteers had not been so fortunate.

  Two of them died—instantly, if that was any comfort—when a pylon they were dismantling collapsed on them. Even in Aruna’s low gravity they hadn’t been able to flee as countless pipes and tubes and pieces of alien machinery came tumbling down.

  One engineer had a broken arm. He kept working, his suit keeping the injured limb pressed up tight against his side.

  Two others were showing signs of radiation poisoning. They were expected to recover but they were sent back to the shuttles, where they could do nothing but lie on the floor, sweating and shivering at once. The elder took them food they couldn’t keep down and swept up their hair when it fell out.

  Minor injuries were legion. Bone bruises from improperly handling heavy loads, sprains, and simple fatigue took their toll. Many of the volunteers, stuffed into ill-fitting suits, chafed so badly they bled. They did their best not to complain, at least not on an open communications channel.

  Cuts happened. Much of the debris in the alien facility had sharp edges. If they were sharp enough to cut through the thin material of the suits, they could gouge human flesh as well. Several of the engineers developed frostbite when their suits were punctured and the bitterly cold, choking air of Aruna touched their exposed skin.

  Still they kept working. Still they kept at it, building the guns.

  The elder understood little of the principles involved. She could see the pieces of the guns coming together, long skeletal tubes of cast metal that were then clad in a micron-thin layer of heat-resistant plastic. The firing chambers were far more complex, but built on a modular design that meant individual, simple components could be snapped together even by a layperson like herself.

  She learned the gist of the guns’ mechanisms by inference and from the terse answers the engineers gave to her infrequent questions. The tubes of course were the barrels of the guns, carefully designed but only so they wouldn’t melt when they were fired. The ammunition was inert and simple as well, just large chunks of depleted uranium that was dense and heavy enough to survive being shot from the barrels at relativistic speed.

  The firing chambers were the only parts of the guns that were at all complex. They were built with alternating layers of superconductors and superresistors that could be switched on and off with incredible speed, allowing the chamber to build up enormous electromagnetic potential. Inside the chambers the depleted uranium rounds would be given a massive static electric charge, negative in polarity. When the gun was fired, an even stronger negative charge would be introduced behind them, delivered through tightly wound capacitor loops. The rounds would be repelled by the new charge with incredible force, launched into space at a good fraction of the speed of light. There were not many things in the universe that could withstand their momentum once they were moving.

  Four barrels were already complete. Engineer Derrow oversaw the construction of the firing chambers herself, shouting orders until she was hoarse. Four more barrels were almost finished, but it seemed there just wasn’t enough depleted uranium on-site to make as many projectiles as M. Lanoe had requested. She sent her salvage parties farther and farther afield, deeper into the haunted ruins of the alien facility.

  With her welding skills not currently in demand, the elder volunteered to go scouting with her Geiger counter. She spent long hours climbing over half-melted structures, poking her head inside enormous constructions like metal seed pods, watching the shadows, constantly, as if one of the alien landers might jump out at her at any moment. She knew the idea was absurd. She also knew that if one of them was still active, lying in wait under a pile of broken concrete or inside one of their massive factory buildings, there was no one around to help her.

  Once she saw a fighter go streaking by overhead, too fast to make out any of its details. Long after it was gone her suit’s computer picked up an image the fighter had transmitted, a surveying map of the local area with radiation sources marked in red. It seemed M. Zhang knew how badly they needed more ammunition and was helping out by scouting from the air.

  With the pilot’s help, the elder soon found a slag pile that chattered angrily when she waved her Geiger counter over it. There was far more depleted uranium there than she could hope to carry by herself and she climbed up on top of a ridge—what had once been a cluster of pipes until they all melted together—and tried to send a signal back to base camp.

  Below her, about half a kilometer away, she saw a suited figure loping across the rocky soil. She waved at them and they turned and came toward her. They climbed up the ruined pipes with leaping bounds that made her think they must be very young. One missed step and they could seriously injure themselves.

  She started to call out, to warn them—but then she saw through the figure’s helmet and realized who it was.

  “Elder,” Roan said. “I’m glad I found you.”

  “What are you doing here?” the elder asked.

  “I was helping Ensign Ehta set up a ground control station, over at the tender. We finished that job and then she told me I was annoying her and I should go see if I could help the engineers.”

  “And you just happened to run into me, so far from the base camp?”

  The girl had the decency to look embarrassed. “I guess I came looking for you.”

  “You came looking for me,” the elder repeated. “Why?”

  “I hoped we could talk,” the girl replied.

  It took all of the elder’s decades of training and discipline not to sigh.

  They couldn’t find any reason to arrest Maggs on the spot, so they had to just let him go. They impounded the fighter, of course, perhaps thinking that losing the BR.9 limited his mobility and kept him from running away.

  For the moment, at least, he intended on staying put. The bit about the social call, deliciously snide as it might have been presented, was no ruse.

  He took a ferry inward across the ring, heading toward the sector known locally as Officers’ Row. The orbitals there were built a little better than the rest, occasionally showing a token effort at ornamentation and even style—though that tended to run to triple-headed eagle motifs and patriotic murals. In the very midst of the sector was a large habitat called Fiddler’s Green, a massive foamcrete wheel with an ancient name and gilt decorations on all its fittings.

  Nearly half a kilometer in diameter, the wheel spun endlessly to generate a convincing semblance of Earth standard gravity. Its inner surface was lined with sumptuous green parkland and low stone buildings, artfully crumbling as if they were subject to actual weather. A vast greenhouse roof stretched over it all, transparent to visible light. One could actually see the stars if one looked straight up through that carbonglas ceiling.

  Of course, because the whole thing rotated at speed, the stars always looked as if they were streaking past, not unlike an endless meteorite display. The designers of the place suggested this wild
gyre added to the ambience. On his many visits here, Maggs had always found it made him feel a bit ill if he looked too long.

  He docked at the hub of the wheel, then took an elevator down to the inner surface. The moment he stepped out into the floor-level lobby, he pitched forward and nearly fell right on his face.

  He’d forgotten what gravity could do to you, when you had a broken leg.

  Drones descended on him instantly to help him up and offer medical assistance. They scanned his leg and sent a call to the nearest hospital—of which there were many on the Green—but he waved them away and cautiously, slowly, put weight back on the leg.

  His suit compensated for the broken bones, stiffening like a cast around the fractures and giving him added support where he needed it. A white pearl in the corner of his vision took the pain away, and he could walk again. He had no intention of arriving at his destination on a stretcher.

  Outside the lobby, paths stretched away in many directions, winding through low, rounded hills covered in lush grass. He could hear fountains nearby, and string music playing at a tasteful volume. Ahead of him lay an endless curving landscape of pergolas and gazebos and stately gray stone buildings. The light level had been adjusted so that it felt like late afternoon, just before dinnertime. Soon the glass ceiling overhead would turn a shade more opaque, favoring light in the pinker part of the spectrum, to simulate dusk. It was all so perfectly civilized, if a tad bourgeois for his tastes.

  He struck out on foot, heading antispinward. People walked everywhere in the Green. One was expected to enjoy a healthy level of exercise there—at least, until your legs wouldn’t carry you anymore.

  Fiddler’s Green was perhaps the most expensive and certainly the most highly decorated (in the military sense) nursing home in human space. It was where old admirals went to slowly die. Staff admirals, anyway. Field officers didn’t tend to last long enough to make use of the place.

  As he walked he nodded at the people he passed by, mostly old men with white hair—an affectation, but a socially required one—and women in dresses with high collars that had been fashionable fifty years ago. Almost all of them turned their faces away when they saw him, but he didn’t let it bother him.

  Paper tigers, the lot, his father’s voice said in his head. Brandish a dueling pistol around here, watch ’em scatter like starlings.

  Maggs had to admit the idea had its attractions. The men and women he passed had spent their careers issuing orders that sent braver officers to their deaths, all from the safety of wood-paneled offices on staff ships light-years away from any actual fighting. They could ping each other’s cryptabs all day long and never see an actual Blue Star.

  By the time he’d reached his destination he had a nasty sneer on his face. He took the time to switch it out for a warm smile. Then he took a deep breath and stepped inside a low stone building constructed to look like an ancient Greek arcade. As his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light of the place, a drone waiter handed him a flute of something more fruity than alcoholic.

  A thick knot of people reclined at the center of the space, some of them less than a hundred years old, though of course it could be hard to tell. Dress suits and actual cloth uniforms—unseen in the field since the Century War—on the men, brocade dresses and long shiny boots on the women. They chuckled at each other’s jokes and nodded gravely when someone broke into an old, oft-heard war story, all while feasting on small morsels of food from silver platters. Drones made sure their glasses were always full.

  Cocktail hour never ended in Fiddler’s Green. There were parties like this going on all over the wheel, filled with the human wreckage of centuries of warfare. Not that one could tell from the look of them that any of these people were veterans.

  Well, not all of them were.

  Halfway across the broad arcade, perched on a long divan, sat a woman in a rather louche gown—something much closer to modern fashions—slit high up one leg and with a black lace ruff that resembled, to an artful degree, the ring collar of a suit. Ringlets of blue-washed hair framed a face of alabaster and laughing eyes tinted the exact shade of a Blue Star. Other than the color of her hair she looked about seventeen, the same age she’d been when she first met her famous husband.

  White-hairs simpered and knelt around her. She was holding court, as usual. The center of attention—the queen bee. She hadn’t changed in the slightest since the last time Maggs had been here.

  Enough to make a horse kick its way right through the stable wall, Dear Old Dad’s voice said. Why, Maggsy, when I first laid eyes on her—

  To drown out the unwelcome words Maggs strolled right up to her and clicked his heels together.

  “Dearest heart!” she exclaimed, clutching her hands over her bosom. “You’ve come to see me again! How wonderful!”

  The courtiers around her didn’t applaud, though some of them looked like they were trying to decide if they should. The prodigal returned and all that.

  “Hello, Mother,” he said.

  They found some sheeting in the alien ruins. It wasn’t exactly cloth, and it definitely wasn’t plastic. Thin veins of graphite ran through it like the patterns of circuitry or perhaps like blood vessels. It didn’t matter what its purpose had been when the drones made it—it blocked radiation and that was all Elder McRae cared about.

  Between the two of them they managed to maneuver several dozen chunks of depleted uranium onto the sheeting, then roll it up like a carpet so they could carry it safely.

  While they worked, they talked. That had been the deal she struck with Roan. In exchange for the girl’s help moving the depleted uranium back to the base camp, the elder had to hear her former acolyte out.

  “First off,” Roan said, “I’m sorry. I know that when I stole that video from you, I put you in a bad spot.”

  The elder said nothing. The girl had clearly thought carefully about what she was going to say. She would let Roan finish before responding.

  “I know the Retreat is supposed to be above politics. I also know that isn’t true. You’re going to lose a lot of influence with the other elders after what happened. If you hadn’t volunteered to come out here, I think they might have stripped you of your rank, even. I didn’t want that, I promise. I didn’t want to hurt you—I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I just thought it was the right thing to do.”

  “All right,” the elder replied.

  “All right? That’s all?”

  Elder McRae didn’t shrug. That might have shifted the mass of the rocks rolled up in their burden, and made it more difficult for them to carry. “It’s clear to me now, Roan, that you weren’t suited to be a member of the faith.”

  “I—what?”

  “If you were, you would have listened more to our teachings. You would know that this apology isn’t necessary, or desired. You followed your own path. In the end it turned out your path moved us forward. It got the people behind the defense of Niraya, and it led to us both being here.”

  “So…I did the right thing?” Roan asked.

  “Had you paid more attention,” the elder went on, “you would know there is no such thing. The path you chose for us was the one that brought us here. That’s all. A different path would have led to different outcomes. The hardest part of our teaching, the truth that separates aspirants from elders, is this: You must choose a path, but you will never know if your path was the best possible one. The universe doesn’t work that way.”

  “But…but…” Roan sputtered and shook her head. “The people had to know!”

  “I think I understand why you felt the need to have this conversation,” the elder told her. “You don’t wish to apologize to me. You want me to tell you that you did the right thing. That you saw more clearly than I did.”

  “No,” Roan insisted. “This isn’t about me being better than you—”

  “Perhaps you want absolution, then? I’m sorry, Roan. I can’t forgive you. I don’t have that capacity. No one does. You did what you chose to do. What
ever the consequences of that choice may be, they’re yours to live with.”

  “I just wanted to save Niraya.”

  “Perhaps you did. Perhaps not. What if we fail here? If the pilots can’t turn back the enemy, and we all die? Will it matter then, what your intentions were?”

  “Hellfire!” Roan nearly dropped the bundle of rocks. “Would it really be that hard for you to say I did the right thing?”

  “No,” the elder said. “It would just mean turning my back on everything I believe in.”

  She might have said more but they had crested a low ridge and now they could see down into the camp where the engineers were working on the guns. Space-suited figures moved in knots down there, struggling with huge assemblies of girders and electronic components. Engineer Derrow raced around them in her pipe-work rover, pointing here and there, the light at her throat flashing as she gave orders. The tempo of the work had increased considerably.

  “What’s going on down there?” Roan asked.

  “Perhaps we should find out,” the elder told her, and started down the ridge.

  “It’s wonderful to see you, Maggsy,” his mother said. Her smile was very warm and bright. It ought to be—it had been expensive enough. They were out for a walk in the manicured gardens of the Green, just a little past dark. A drone lit their way so they didn’t stumble on the grass. Another floated beside her, connected to her wrist by two lengths of tubing. It was filtering her blood, something that had to be done every day now. Staying as youthful as she appeared without swapping bodies took a certain amount of maintenance. “I hesitate to even ask, but…”

  “I don’t have any money for you,” he told her. He’d long grown out of the decorous way some children spoke to their mothers. Their relationship had changed the first time she’d asked him to pay off her debts.

  To her credit, she did not attempt to hide her disappointment. Her smile evaporated like spilled coolant off an airfoil and she took a meaningful step away from him. “I see.”