Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  Caroline Ehta was having a very hard time remembering why she’d ever agreed to this mission.

  She was sitting in the cutter with five of her best marines and Lanoe—probably the six people she trusted most, anywhere. The cutter was big enough for all of them. There was plenty of air to breathe, and it was warm enough inside, whatever the outside temperature.

  The cutter had no viewports. No portholes, no gun slits—nothing to look through. Those would have interfered with the vehicle’s aerodynamic and stealth properties. Its designers had come up with a solution to that problem—one that left Ehta unable to breathe properly. They had coated every square centimeter of the interior walls of the cutter with display surfaces that showed a real-time view from outside. The cutter might as well have been made of glass. Ehta felt like she was sitting in a crew seat unsupported in empty space, exposed entirely to the void.

  Right now the displays showed the smooth, almost vertical walls of one of Caina’s smaller craters. The walls were only a few dozen meters away, and rose like crystalline curtains on every side. Below them was the slushy dark floor of the crater, which undulated slowly according to some unknowable internal stress on the protocomet’s core. Above her were a million stars.

  In front of Lanoe a basic display lit up to show tactical and navigational data. Yellow and blue dots flickered across empty three-dimensional space. If you knew how to read that board—and Ehta did—you could see a space battle going on there, but it was so abstract as to be meaningless. It was all happening on the far side of the little world. If Lanoe was a careful pilot—and he always was—they would never see any of it with their own eyes.

  “Okay,” Lanoe said. “They’re busy. I’m taking us up.”

  Ehta nodded, though she knew he hadn’t been speaking to her directly. She gripped the sides of her seat and held on as Lanoe touched the throttle and the cutter rose through the shaft of the crater. Soon they were out and away and Ehta had to clamp her eyes shut to avoid seeing the ground fall away.

  Closing her eyes was a problem all on its own, though. In her head, she started to see red lights flicker into life. Heard alarm chimes she knew didn’t exist outside of her own skull.

  Ehta had been a pilot once. She’d been a member of Lanoe’s 94th Squadron, back during the Establishment Crisis. When he’d retired his commission she’d stayed on with the Naval Expeditionary Force, fighting in any number of little wars for various polys, running endless patrols in a BR.9. The polys had pushed their fighter pilots hard, making them work ridiculously long hours, endless and increasingly dangerous patrols. Their corporate masters hadn’t cared about pilots—they were happy to throw away whole squadrons to take the smallest and least strategically important objectives. Ehta had pushed through it, because she’d never known anything except flying.

  Over time, it took a toll on her. When she came back after a long patrol she would find it hard to sleep. She would feel like she was still moving at a good fraction of the speed of light, even lying in bed on a solid planet. That was when the red lights had started appearing—red lights like the ones you got on a damage control board when something went wrong with your fighter. Just one red light at first, but it was always there when she closed her eyes, when she tried to stop her mind. Just one—at first. More of them came later.

  It had reached a point where she couldn’t sleep at all. It reached a point where she couldn’t fly anymore. The Navy had wanted to fix her with invasive brain surgery. Ehta had chosen a different path. She’d enlisted in the PBMs. The Planetary Brigade Marines, or as they were also commonly known, the Poor Bloody Marines.

  Life in the marines was just as hazardous as life in the cockpit—even more so, depending on the campaign. Marines had an average life span of only a few weeks. Ehta had never been afraid of dying.

  Not the way she was afraid of red lights.

  She forced herself to open her eyes, to look around. Caina had shrunk behind them, only the size of a coin now, and it was dwindling fast. She craned her head around, trying to find any sign of the battle raging nearby.

  She almost didn’t see the burst of flak until the cutter rocked in the shock wave of a near miss. Until the twisting comet trails of exploding submunitions burned her eyes and she had to turn her head. She let out a tiny yelp, despite herself.

  “Ma’am?” Binah asked, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  She knocked it away. Binah was a friend. The two of them had been through real hell together in the fighting at Tuonela—but Ehta couldn’t bear the thought of being comforted just then. She was too embarrassed.

  “It was just a stray round, ma’am. They’re not aiming at us. They don’t even know we’re here,” Gutierrez said. Gutierrez who’d been her corporal once.

  “Lieutenant Ehta’s just anxious to get this mission started,” Lanoe said, not looking back over his shoulder. He was too busy veering around the expanding cloud of flak. Ehta tried not to feel sick as the cutter rolled over on its side. “She’s ready to get fighting again.”

  “Is that it, ma’am?” Gutierrez asked. There was no sarcasm in her voice. She was giving Ehta a chance to save face.

  As galling as it was to think she needed such a thing, Ehta took it. “That’s right. Just excited about getting to pop some hexagon ass.”

  The marines laughed at the profanity—even marines didn’t use words like that in mixed company, especially not marine officers. They slapped each other on the shoulders, whooped to build the excitement. If their merriment seemed a little strained, Ehta decided maybe they all needed a little bravado just then.

  Maybe she wasn’t the only one petrified by this mission. Maybe they all had the wind up them, and she just had it the worst. What Lanoe had in mind for them was enough to scare the hell out of anybody.

  Candless swung away from a pair of Centrocor fighters that had been trying to sandwich her and let loose a wild shot that didn’t even come close to hitting either of them. One of them veered away anyway and boosted off into deep space.

  She pulled back on her stick and up into a tight controlled loop, coming out of it right behind the other Sixty-Four before its pilot could even begin to react. She disabled the enemy’s engines with a few carefully placed shots, leaving the fool alive but drifting, far from the carrier. She supposed the Sixty-Four could limp home on its maneuvering jets. She let it go—no need to actually kill someone if they were no longer a threat.

  She turned, looking for another target, but found none. Centrocor’s fighters had pulled away from Caina. Maybe they’d sustained too many losses to continue the fight.

  That, of course, would be far too convenient. Most likely they would pull back and regroup, then come at her twice as hard the next time. But for a moment, at least, there was a lull in the fighting. She looked for Valk and found two of him flying together, not a hundred kilometers away. She banked over to meet them. “They’re losing cohesion,” she said. “Their formations are broken—I daresay they’re afraid of us. I suppose one expects nothing better of half-trained poly militia, but these pilots are ex-Navy.”

  “It feels like they’re holding back. Like maybe they know we’re just here as a distraction,” one of the Valks suggested.

  “For Lanoe’s sake, I very much hope that isn’t the case.”

  Candless wondered idly which of the two Valks was speaking to her. Without checking her boards it would be impossible to tell, even if she were right next to them. There were no pilots in those BR.9s, just empty cockpits.

  A bad chill ran down her spine, just thinking about it.

  The idea of a fighter being run strictly by a computer program, with no human hand on the stick, was loathsome to her. It had been drilled into her since childhood that one could never trust a machine with a gun. It was possible, sometimes, to look at Valk—the space suit at the helm of the cruiser—and forget what he really was. This was something completely different.

  Yet she had to admit the five Valks had fought admirably. Three of
them had far exceeded her own score in this battle, chopping down Sixty-Fours left and right. The other two had worked hard at corralling the enemy, keeping them from getting too far around the horizon of Caina. Candless almost felt as if they could have done it all without her.

  She cleared her throat. Perhaps it was time to accept that this was how things were going to be. Clearly Lanoe intended to use the Valks in every battle he fought henceforth. She might attempt to be civil to them.

  “You’ve done very well,” she said.

  “Thanks. Just doing our job. I’ll be glad when this is over.”

  Candless scowled, where they couldn’t see her. “You don’t enjoy fighting, then? Your … I don’t know the right term. Your inceptor. Your original, your ectype—”

  “You mean the Valk back on the cruiser, the one who made us? We call him Valk Prime,” the copy told her.

  “Quite,” Candless said. “He always seemed happy enough at the control stick. Is there some reason you differ from him in this?”

  “It … hurts. It hurts to fly these things. I don’t know if I can explain,” the Valk said. “Like being stuffed in a coffin that’s too big and too small at the same time. One that’s an awkward shape. The wrong shape.”

  “I’ll admit I don’t entirely understand.”

  The Valk grunted in frustration. “I’ve got cameras and sensors instead of eyes and ears. Airfoils and thrusters instead of arms and legs. But I’m based on a human body plan, just like Valk Prime. My nervous system is just a bunch of lines of code, but it knows when something’s wrong.”

  “That sounds dreadful,” Candless said. “Is that why you take so many risks?”

  “Yeah. Yeah—I don’t want to do this forever. I’ve got a root directory file saying I can’t just crash myself into Caina and be done with it. I’ve got to fight to the best of my ability, if I want Valk Prime to keep his promise. He— Hold on. You seeing this?”

  Candless had not in fact noticed anything. Now, just out of the corner of her eye, she did become aware of a blue dot on her tactical board. She swiped it back into the center of her view and bit her lip. There was just one blue dot there, a single enemy approaching. It was not, however, a fighter. It was far too big for that.

  “One of the destroyers,” she said.

  “Yeah. They must have finished their sweep of Caina. Noticed—”

  “—that the cruiser isn’t actually here,” she said, finishing the thought. “Indeed.”

  Lanoe had known that Centrocor would attack Caina, intending to destroy the cruiser for once and for all. He had known the battered Hoplite could not stand up to the combined onslaught of a carrier and two destroyers. So he had sent the cruiser onward, into deeper space, where it couldn’t be found. He’d left Candless and the Valks at Caina as a decoy, and of course Centrocor had fallen for it.

  If they’d figured out the deception, though—

  “They’re going to be mad as hell,” the Valk said.

  “Rather,” Candless said. “And they’ll want to take out their frustrations on someone. Too bad we’re the only ones around.”

  The cutter had five million kilometers to cross, most of it through perfectly empty space. Ehta worked very hard at not whimpering the whole way. She just about managed.

  She focused on her breathing. Focused on listening to the small sounds of the vehicle, the sigh of the air recirculators, the grumble of the engines. Lanoe used the drive very sparingly—they did not want to draw any attention to themselves. That left them in freefall almost the whole way, which was strangely comforting. Ehta’s triggers all had to do with being in the cockpit of a fighter as it weaved and darted through combat, and in a battle you were constantly under acceleration, zooming in one direction or another. The absence of gravity, and the lack of a meaningful view once they were away from Caina, made it easier to pretend she wasn’t flying at all, that she was simply floating between the stars.

  Her marines spent the trip talking in low tones. At first they kept glancing at the back of Lanoe’s head, perhaps expecting him to turn around and tell them to shut up. He was a good enough commander to know not to do that. Marines were a chatty bunch, born gossips every one of them. They needed to socialize. It helped them form the bonds of camaraderie that would hold them together as a unit once the shooting started.

  It was an unspoken tradition in the PBMs that before a fight you could talk about anything—any subject, no matter how grotesque or risqué—as long as you did not mention guns or bombs or any weapon of war. Typically that meant they talked about sex. About who had snuck away after lights-out with whom, about what video stars were like with their clothes off. They loved to discuss and especially to rate former lovers.

  There’d been a time when Ehta had loved those dirty talks, when it had been her favorite part of being a marine. Her first year as a PBM she’d memorized hundreds of dirty jokes and learned to twist anything anybody said into the nastiest, most sexually depraved innuendo. Then she’d made a terrible mistake. She’d lived long enough to get promoted.

  Marine sergeants did not talk to their people like that, except on very special occasions. Typically when they were all being shipped home. Marine lieutenants—her current rank—did not so much as acknowledge the existence of ribaldry. They were supposed to be sexless, humorless beings from some higher plane of existence where decorum was everything.

  So she couldn’t turn around and leer, much less comment, when Binah talked about the birthmark that Mestlez had in a very special place. Nor even when Gutierrez talked about the cat she’d had as a child, and its very soft fur.

  She could only bite her lip and pretend like she hadn’t heard.

  Still, listening in helped her. It kept her from feeling like she was going to jump out of her own skin. Even when Lanoe touched the control stick for the first time in an hour and she was pressed back into her seat by a gentle acceleration.

  “Close now,” he said, glancing over at her. “You ever done this before?”

  “Me? Hell no. I do my best fighting on the ground,” she told him. “Find me a trench full of mud, and I’ll show you some things.”

  She had to act as if she did not hear what Binah thought of that. She allowed herself a tiny smile.

  It faded very quickly when she realized that the patch of darkness up ahead was not just empty space between stars. That it was an object, a vessel, in fact, and they were approaching it at speed.

  The cutter had been built for clandestine work. It absorbed radar and lidar scans instead of reflecting them. Its drives and exhausts were fed through special ducts that left almost no trail behind and hid the light they gave off. Even the cutter’s skin had been constructed of a special chromatophoric polymer that could change color thousands of times a second. Right now it was tuned to the colors of deep space—black void and bright white stars. Anyone who saw the cutter pass by, even with their naked eyes, would have a hard time realizing it was there.

  Thank the devil for small favors, she thought. That was the carrier up there, Centrocor’s main ship. It had stayed well clear of Caina, probably because its commander expected Lanoe to stage an ambush there. Now it was far removed from its own defensive screen. The two destroyers and most of its fighters had been sent forward to the protocomet, while the carrier hung back at a safe distance. All alone.

  “You must have been trained for this, though,” Lanoe said.

  “Yeah, absolutely,” Ehta said. “The PBMs taught me how to infiltrate all kinds of things. But I’ve never actually had call to do it. I’m not a commando, boss. I’m a ground-pounder.” Ehta sighed and ran her fingertips over the short growth of fuzz on her scalp. It sent tiny shivers through her brain. “Okay, okay. I remember—something. Some mention of this, yeah.”

  “Go ahead,” he told her.

  She scowled. She was almost certain he knew the answer a lot better than she did. He’d been around so long he’d probably even done it before. He just wanted her to feel needed, maybe.
Or perhaps he wanted to help her impress her troops.

  “Okay,” she said again. “So you want to break into a Hipparchus-class carrier, without anybody noticing. The first step is …”

  The Peltast class of destroyers had been built for one role: to hunt down and obliterate big ships. They were covered in devastating weapon systems—missile packs, flak cannons, and heavy PBWs, as well as a full suite of information-war and dismantler equipment, and coated from stem to stern in reactive armor plating. Though they were a hundred meters long, most of their mass was taken up by weapons and drives, leaving only a small space inside for crew.

  They were theoretically vulnerable to an attack by a cataphract pilot. A fighter’s vector field could hold up, for a little while, against all that withering firepower. This one didn’t look particularly afraid of her.

  It had come straight for Candless, burning hard to close the distance. She’d tried to outrun it—her orders here were simply to distract Centrocor, not engage them in any meaningful way. In the end, though, there was one problem. She might be faster than the destroyer—but she wasn’t faster than its weapon systems.

  “Missiles loose,” one of the Valks said.

  She gave her tactical board a split-second glance and saw the missiles. Four of them. Moving slowly, for the moment, but accelerating hard. Well outside the range of her PBWs.

  All of them headed right for her.

  Panic wasn’t justified. Not immediately, anyway. “Evading now,” Candless said. She twisted her stick over to one side, throwing herself into a tight corkscrew to make it difficult for the missiles to get a lock on her. It wouldn’t work, but it might buy her a few milliseconds to think of something better.

  “I’ll move to intercept,” Valk called.

  Her tactical board told her that was a bad move. “If you do, you’ll be in range of their heavy guns. Stay clear—that’s an order!”

  The Valks did not argue with her. “Dive for Caina,” the AI said instead. “The bright surface might spoof their optical guidance.”