Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  “Fuel. For the engines,” Lanoe said, giving Paniet a shrewd look. “Is that something we need?”

  “Not immediately,” Paniet admitted. “Though if we’re going to be operating in this system for a long time, or if, say, we wanted to relocate to another star, one that might actually have planets—”

  Lanoe nodded. “Understood. You’re saying this place would make a good base of operations. I agree. There’s just one problem, though. A couple million kilometers away is still a pretty significant distance when we can’t risk running our engines. The second we turn them on, Centrocor will know exactly where we are.”

  “They would see the light generated by our main thrusters, yes,” Paniet said. “We can run our maneuvering and positioning jets without too much of a worry, though. Centrocor would have to have telescopes trained right on us already to see them firing. It’ll be slow going, but safe.”

  “How slow?”

  “We can be at 82312 in sixteen hours,” Valk told Lanoe.

  “Sure.” Lanoe studied the image of the iceball and nodded for a while. “Sure. If Centrocor doesn’t find us by then … All right. Let’s do it.” He nodded one more time, definitively. Then his eyes narrowed and Valk knew he’d just thought of something. “One thing. If we burned our main engines just for a couple seconds, how much quicker could we get there?”

  “Half the time,” Paniet said.

  “Do that,” Lanoe told the engineer.

  “But Centrocor—”

  “Will see it and come investigate, yes. They’ll come look for us right here, where we are right now. By then we’ll be long gone.” And with that Lanoe departed the makeshift bridge, leaving the two of them alone with their instructions.

  “I suppose he has a point,” Paniet said once he was gone. “But he’s taking a largish risk there, isn’t he?”

  Valk cleared the displays and brought up the ship’s drive controls. “This is Lanoe we’re talking about. The man’s a master strategist. Did you see the look on his face just then?” he asked the engineer. “He gets that look every time he has a brilliant idea.”

  If Bury pushed off one wall of the sick bay as hard as he could, it took exactly three-tenths of a second to fly to the far wall. He caught himself against the impact with both hands, then twisted around and launched himself through the air again, careful not to get tangled in the arms of the medical drone. Point two nine eight seconds, according to his wrist display. He turned around and got his feet against the wall and launched himself across the room one more time.

  When the hatch opened, he barely had time to stick out a leg and catch the edge of the bed before he went sprawling into Ginger. Her eyes went wide as he bounced back, laughing. “Ginj!” he said. “Ginj! Hey!”

  “You should be in bed,” she told him.

  He shrugged and grasped the edge of the bed. He had no intention of getting back into that thing as long as he lived. “I feel fine,” he told her.

  “The last time I came in here you were comatose.” She pushed her way inside the room and let the hatch close behind her. “You never were very bright, Bury. You could have died. Do you understand that? I talked to Engineer Paniet a little while ago. He says your fighter was a total loss—he couldn’t even rebuild it after it got hit by that missile. You—”

  “I said I feel fine,” Bury told her, his voice sounding a little higher pitched than he’d intended. He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. “Look, you’re worried about me, and I appreciate it. I really do, Ginj. If it makes you happy, I’ll sit down. But I’m fine.”

  She frowned and looked away. “We need to run a bunch more tests. You lost a lot of blood, and there was some pretty severe organ damage. Rain-on-Stones fixed you up as best she could, but—”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Oh, hellfire,” Ginger said. “That’s right. You don’t know anything about the Choir. About what we found in the bubble. You probably don’t even know where we are.”

  “I’ve been napping,” he said, and smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back.

  What was going on?

  “You want to get out of this room for a while? See some things?”

  “Hellfire, yes,” he told her.

  She nodded. For the first time he noticed that the red hair on one side of her head had been shaved away. She had a thin scar running across her temple. Had she been hurt?

  What the ruddy hell was going on?

  Valk launched a flight of microdrones—tiny robots no bigger than a human thumb, each carrying nothing but a camera, an antenna, and a miniscule thruster package. They spread out away from the cruiser in every direction, moving fast. They would let him closely monitor the volume of space near the cruiser—and hopefully, eventually, give them some sense of Centrocor’s movements.

  “I don’t care for this one bit, ducks,” Paniet said. “We don’t know where the enemy are, any more than they can find us. They could be sitting close by right now—and your little friends there could be the thing that gives away our position.”

  “Not very likely,” Valk said. “I’m of the opinion that more information is always better.”

  “You would say that, wouldn’t you?” Paniet asked. “Oh, don’t give me that look. I was only kidding.”

  “What look?” Valk asked. “I’m not physically capable of having an expression, much less an objectionable—”

  “Don’t forget that having a sense of humor is a sign of functional intelligence,” Paniet told him.

  Valk laughed. He played a sound file of a human laugh. For a moment he wondered if he was genuinely amused, or if some deep-buried subroutine in his programming had simply recognized that a joke had been told and responded accordingly. Or if that was even a valid question.

  He never used to have thoughts like that.

  The display in front of him split in two, then four, then sixteen as the microdrones came online. Soon one hundred and twenty-eight different camera views floated around him. He closed the subdisplays, because of course he didn’t need them. He could query each microdrone independently or call up a composite view as necessary.

  As the tiny cameras maneuvered to spread as far from each other as possible, they gave Valk a good view of the cruiser. He hadn’t realized how badly damaged it was. Half the armor had been stripped from one side. The forward section, where the bridge used to be, was nothing but wreckage and skeletal girders. The damage to the thrusters looked the worst—one of the big cones looked like it had been chewed on by some enormous dog, and there was a deep gouge in the shielding back there. Paniet had completed all the repairs he could manage—if the Hoplite was ever going to be whole again, he’d told Lanoe, it needed to put in at a repair dock, and the nearest of those was ten thousand light-years away. Lanoe, being Lanoe, had simply told him to do what he could. Paniet had worked endless shifts putting the cruiser back together, but he couldn’t make carbon fiber sheathing or armor plate just appear out of thin air.

  Valk brought up a display so Paniet could see how ragged the ship looked. “You missed a spot,” he said.

  It was Paniet’s turn to laugh. “All right, all right. Are you ready for the burn?”

  “Yeah.” Valk activated alarm chimes and flashing lights throughout the ship to let everyone know they were about to be subjected to significant gravity, if only for a few seconds. He called up a control board and lifted a finger toward the virtual key that would activate the engines. He didn’t really need the board—he could have made the maneuver as easily as thinking about it—but he thought maybe Paniet would appreciate the gesture.

  The engineer strapped himself into a chair and gave Valk the nod.

  The engines roared to life, ionized exhaust flooding out through the cones. The microdrones were programmed to turn to follow any moving body in their vicinity, so in the composite display the cruiser didn’t seem to move at all. Valk switched to an infrared view and saw the brilliant plume of heat they left in their wake, like a giant arrow po
inting right at them.

  Valk let the engines burn for five seconds, then switched them back off. He sounded the gravity alarm again, then let his arm fall back at his side.

  “It needs a name,” Paniet said.

  “What?”

  “The iceball. The one we’re going to hide behind. We can’t just keep calling it 82312. At least I can’t. What do you think?”

  Valk consulted a database, looking for a suitable name. “Caina,” he said, after considering and rejecting several hundred possibilities.

  Paniet frowned. “I don’t get the reference.”

  “Caina,” Valk said, “was one of the lowest levels of Dante’s Inferno. Because this is one of the farthest objects from the red dwarf.” He brought up a text display about the name, and Paniet scanned a few lines.

  “A place of horrible cold and ice. Where only the very worst of sinners end up after they leave the world behind,” the engineer mused. “Sounds familiar.”

  “Sinners,” Valk said. “We’re not that bad, are we?”

  “We just got here,” Paniet responded. “Give us time.”

  Bury hardly noticed when gravity returned. He reached out reflexively and grabbed a nylon strap hanging from the brig’s wall. When the gravity went away again, he let go. He never moved his eyes from the display on the cell’s hatch.

  “That … thing … operated on me,” he said, very quietly.

  “She’s a gifted surgeon,” Ginger told him.

  “She’s a giant crab alien covered in bugs. Putting her in a black dress doesn’t help much.”

  “We didn’t put that on her. That’s how the Choir all dress. They believe in living harmoniously—they all dress the same, eat the same food.”

  “Sounds kind of, I don’t know. Dull,” Bury said.

  “They govern by consensus. They’re telepaths. They share everything, their thoughts, their emotions … You can’t understand.”

  “But you can,” he said.

  It was the hardest part for him to accept. Not the existence of aliens—he’d heard all about the evil Blue-Blue-White, so another species of intelligent life wasn’t wrecking his brain. The fact that these new aliens could create wormholes and share thoughts across distances was all so abstract and weird he didn’t even try to process it. No, what sent shivers down his spine was that this alien had cut both of them open. The chorister had performed surgery on Ginger and himself. Those wicked-looking claws had been inside their bodies. The thing had put an antenna in Ginger’s head so they could talk. And it had performed surgery on him, cut him open and clacked away in his guts.

  Commander Lanoe had let that happen to them. He’d ordered it to cut into them. To change them.

  Bury pushed back away from the hatch of the cell. The thing sleeping in there—he couldn’t bring himself to call it a person—disgusted him.

  He ran a hand down his chest. They’d taken him out of his suit and put him in a thermal comfort garment, the first piece of fabric clothing he’d worn since he entered flight school. Through the thin cloth he could feel the puckered scar that ran from his sternum down to his groin.

  He knew he should be grateful. By all accounts, if the alien hadn’t patched him up he would have died in the sick bay. But he wasn’t grateful. All he could think about was those little spider things crawling all over Rain-on-Stones’s body. All he could imagine was bugs like that inside of him, their tiny legs wiggling in the dark of his abdominal cavity.

  “I feel sick. I feel so sick right now,” he said. “I’m sorry, Ginj. I mean, I get it, you have a connection to that thing. But I can’t … Oh, hellfire.” An acidic belch worked its way up his throat. He tried to suppress it but there was no way to keep it down.

  “Bury?” Ginger said. “Bury?”

  He kicked his way out of the brig and back toward the sick bay. It wasn’t far, but he barely managed to get inside before he started heaving. There was nothing in his stomach, but his body kept trying to throw up anyway.

  He could feel his heart pounding in his chest like a piston. The muscles in his arms and legs turned rubbery and weak. He crawled back into the bed and pulled a strap across himself. The effort of doing just that left him feeling drained and half-dead. He pressed his face against the pillow and clamped his eyes shut, even as his stomach twitched and spasmed inside of him.

  “Bury,” Ginger called as she came inside the little room. “Your pulse is through the roof. You’re in shock, I think—I don’t know. I don’t know how any of these displays work. I’ll go and get Lieutenant Candless, she—”

  “No!” he said. “No. Please, Ginger. Don’t—don’t tell her about this. I’m fine. I’m going to be fine.”

  “You really scared her when you woke up and had your panic attack. She gave me strict orders to keep her informed about your health. I need to tell her.”

  “No, you don’t. Four, Ginger. Four.”

  She looked deeply confused.

  “Four confirmed kills. I have four confirmed kills already. I have to get better so I can fight again. So I can get to five. If you tell her I’m sick, she won’t let me fly. Just—just let me sleep a little, and I’ll be fine. Four. One more and I’ll be an ace. I’ll get my blue star.”

  “Even if it kills you,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I’m going to be fine. I just need to rest, okay? I just need to rest a little. Please.”

  “All right,” she said, with a sigh. “But if I see any sign that you’re not okay—”

  “Of course. But I just need to rest.”

  She nodded.

  He waited until she was gone before he let himself heave again. This time something did come up. A thin trickle of acidic spit squeezed out between his lips before he could catch it. The medical drone reached down with a suction arm to vacuum it away.

  Chapter Four

  Does it ever occur to you, son, that you might have acted in a not entirely ethical manner?

  Auster Maggs was the son of a famous admiral—Father had been a hero and a casualty of the Uhlan Belt, one of the last battles of the Establishment Crisis. He had left his darling baby boy Auster with two great legacies. The first was a commission. The Navy had become such an aristocratic institution by the time of the Crisis that the children of ranking officers inherited their parents’ status as officers. It was purely through this near-feudal policy of nepotism that Maggs fils had been able to rise so quickly to the rank of lieutenant.

  I’ll hardly call you out on cleverness, Maggsy. But betraying one’s own commander, in the very midst of a battle, never feels … decorous, what?

  The second inheritance he had from the admiral was a wealth of experience, of advice and counsel, learned at the knee of a man who could not resist telling the same stories over and over again. Young Maggs had absorbed these pearls of wisdom so thoroughly that now he could not but hear his father’s voice in his head, an eternal internal monologue that sometimes drove him quite mad.

  Perhaps next time you’ll look before you leap. Although, to be fair, I never did.

  “Enough,” he said aloud.

  The marines climbing past him in one of the carrier’s more heavily trafficked companionways did not turn and stare. They were too disciplined for that. All the same he felt a distinct prickling on the back of his neck, and knew he’d been observed.

  Bloody enlisted chaps. They saw so much more than you wanted them to. He forced a bright smile on his face and climbed the last few dozen meters to the very top of the carrier, to a small observation cupola in its bows.

  In shape the carrier was a cylinder five hundred meters long and a hundred meters across. At its aft end lay the massive engines, powered by dozens of tokamak reactors. Its fore end was the flight deck, open to space—the fifty fighters lay nestled inside like bats hanging from the walls of a cave. The vessel’s bridge was in its most protected spot, between engines and flight deck. There were no windows there.

  Thus if you wanted to look outside, to see where you
were with your natural human eyes, you had to climb to the very tip-top of the cylinder, where three observation lounges sat evenly spaced around the circular rim. They looked like miniature round greenhouses, their thick carbonglas panes mounted in a web of reinforced titanium.

  In the last fight with Lanoe, the harridan Candless had successfully wounded the carrier with a disruptor round that tore through the ship quite indiscriminately. As a result several crew spaces—including one of the observation cupolas—were now off-limits until they could be repaired. Which might take a while, as fixing up an observation lounge was very low on the list of things that needed to be done. Perhaps because of this—because she could expect a certain degree of privacy there—Ashlay Bullam had requested his presence in the damaged cupola so that they could discuss strategy.

  He found her sitting on a low bench, surrounded by her omnipresent drones. One of them turned toward him as he entered. Lights burned on its vacant face, looking not unlike eyes. The drone regarded him in silence for a moment, then turned back toward its customary adoration of its mistress.

  There was no air in the cupola, making normal speech impossible. Making it impossible for anyone to eavesdrop on them as well. A green pearl appeared in the corner of Maggs’s vision, telling him he had an incoming transmission. He flicked his eyes across the pearl to accept the connection.

  “Rather beautiful, isn’t it?” Bullam asked.

  She was facing away from him, looking up through the cracked windows. Her helmet was up, of course. Through the flowglas he could see that her frost-blue hair was gathered and held by a fine net of interlocking golden hexagons.

  “I beg your pardon?” Maggs inquired.