Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  Candless knew a good idea when she heard one. She cut out of her corkscrew in a flat spin, then burned hard toward the protocomet. The missiles were closing the distance fast—only thirty thousand kilometers now. They would be on her in a few seconds. She let fly a volley of PBW shots in their direction, knowing how unlikely it was she would hit any of them. There was always room for blind luck in space combat. Without even checking if she’d hit the missiles, she poured on the thrust until Caina grew to fill half her forward view.

  There was nothing down there to use for real cover, no mountains, no canyons to fly down. She could duck inside one of the craters, but then she’d be stuck, unable to move. Speed was always the fighter pilot’s best ally. She couldn’t afford to slow down.

  The missiles were ten thousand kilometers away.

  The ground rushed at her in a white blur. Candless brought up her engine board and readied her maneuvering jets. Set her secondary thrusters for gimbaled propulsion. She would have to cut this very close.

  Four thousand kilometers.

  Seven hundred kilometers, and her brain, her nerves, every fiber of her being, screamed at her to pull up, to avoid crashing into the protocomet. A moment later her collision alarm started chiming, and the stick jumped in her hand—the fighter trying to take control of itself, to avoid a crash. She shot out her left hand and disabled the collision avoidance system. The computer demanded to know if she was sure. She was sure.

  One hundred kilometers. Fifty. She was seconds away from plowing into the icy crust of Caina. She could fool the optical guidance systems of the missiles all she wanted. They still had heat-seeking capability, and her engines were by far the hottest things around.

  She cut her main thrusters, yanked backward on her control stick. Her secondaries and her maneuvering jets roared, but for a bad moment, the space of a single heartbeat, nothing happened. She’d been moving so fast, built up so much momentum, that her jets were having a hard time hauling her out of her death dive.

  The missiles were less than a kilometer behind her. Eating up the distance fast.

  The view through her canopy swung crazily as she suddenly shot forward instead of down, her secondaries shoving her away from certain death. One of the missiles, the one closest to her, couldn’t make the turn. It smashed into the ice beneath her and detonated, sending up a massive geyser of sublimated water vapor, a wall of steam right behind her.

  A wall of superheated water, between her and the three remaining missiles. Suddenly she wasn’t the hottest thing they could see. They veered away in random directions, hunting for her, unable to find her again—for the moment.

  She let herself exhale.

  Beneath her the smooth surface of Caina flew by, white broken only sporadically by the deep mouths of craters. She punched her primary thrusters back to life and poured on the speed, knowing she wasn’t done. When she’d maxed out her velocity, she twisted around on her long axis so she was flying backward, just meters above the protocomet’s surface.

  The three missiles were blurred shadows, racing toward her. They’d reacquired their lock and were accelerating to regain the speed they’d lost.

  She brought up a virtual Aldis sight, a set of crosshairs that drifted across her canopy as her systems tried to get a bead on the missiles. She was not surprised in the slightest when they failed. She took over manual control and tried to keep the sight steady, tried to line up the shot perfectly. Because the missiles were coming straight at her, she only had the cross sections of their nosecones to target, tiny dots in the distance. She could fire all she wanted, but she needed to score three bull’s-eyes under an extraordinarily tight timeframe.

  She’d seen Lanoe do this once. She’d watched—and tried to help—as he shot down missiles that were streaking toward Bury’s fighter. He’d got some of them. Not enough. Bury had taken a direct hit from one and nearly died.

  Now it was her turn.

  One of the Valks signaled her. “Candless—”

  “Not bloody now!” she howled, and squeezed her trigger.

  Her shots went wide. She tried to walk them back, tried to center the sight. She ignored completely the readout that told her the missiles were less than ten kilometers away, that she had at best a solid second before they touched her—fired again, and again, and—

  Yes! One of them exploded under her fire, its fuselage bursting into twists of carbon fiber that smoldered with the energy of her shot. She wasted no time in twitching the sight over to the next one, lined up a shot on the nosecone and fired, and fired, and fired. The Aldis swung back and forth, the tiniest vibration in her ship making it jump. Through sheer effort of will she forced the sight and the shadowed nose of the missile to converge, forced her shot home and—there! The missile all but evaporated in a puff of dark smoke. She must have ignited its propellant.

  One last missile, less than three kilometers back now, and she fired, and fired, and fired, but couldn’t hit it. She lanced out with PBW rounds that cut through space like perfectly straight strings of glowing pearls. She tried to find the magic again, tried to get a direct hit but—damnation! Hellfire! Her shots kept going wide, the missile got bigger and bigger and—seven hundred meters, five, it wasn’t going to work—

  PBW rounds came down from on high, shaft after shaft of golden fire spearing into the ice below, all around the missile. Gifts from some hypothetical archer god, but none of them struck home.

  “Candless!” Valk shouted, one of the Valks shouted. “I’m inbound, watch your head!”

  A dark shape swooped out of the brilliant sky, a ton and a half of cataphract-class fighter dropping like a stone. Candless let go of her stick, her hands reflexively coming up to protect her head as one of the Valks burned straight toward the ground, just as she had a few seconds before, coming down with incredible speed. Pull up, pull up, she thought—she didn’t have time to say the words aloud.

  But the Valk didn’t pull up. He smashed right into the ice, as fast and as hard as a meteoroid. On the way down he collided with the missile, smashing it to scrap instantly, and kept going, punching through the ice deep into the slushy mantle below. Water so hot it glowed shot straight upward, a column of light and bubbles, a stream of water that started to gel, to freeze, even as it cascaded downward again, even as it succumbed to Caina’s mild gravity. It would take a while for the vapor and mist to clear, but Candless knew that when it did the protocomet would have a new crater.

  “Valk,” she called. “Valk—”

  “Here,” he said.

  One of them did. One of the four that remained. The fighter that had crashed into Caina didn’t even show up on her tactical board anymore. It was gone—utterly annihilated by the impact.

  “What did he do—what did—you’re programmed not to self-destruct, you said. You told me that!”

  “Yeah. We can’t suicide. At least not without a good reason.”

  Candless chewed on her lower lip. What had Valk become? Valk Prime, she meant—how had he brought himself to make these things? “You said before he’d made you a promise. You didn’t have a chance to tell me what it was.”

  “Yeah. The promise is, we fight, we do our best. And the second we get back to the cruiser, he deletes us. Wipes us clean.”

  Candless bit back what she wanted immediately to say. Instead she took a moment to think of the proper words. “I shall be having a quite stern word with your original, if I make it back to the cruiser.”

  The remaining Valks had nothing to say to that.

  Candless sighed and pulled back on her stick, shooting back up into the sky. “For now,” she said, “it would appear we have the attention of this destroyer. Let’s see how long we can keep it distracted. Lanoe, I’m sure, will need as much time as he can get.”

  Lanoe moved the cutter into the exhaust trail of the carrier. The last place anyone would think to look for them.

  The cones of the main thrusters were big enough to swallow the cutter whole. The empty space around t
hem wavered with subtle distortions. Though the engines were currently switched off, they were still producing enough hot ion flux to raise the outside temperature to nearly five hundred degrees.

  “If those engines come online. If they decide to maneuver, while we’re sitting here,” Ehta said. “If they even just need to make a positional correction—”

  “No one volunteered for this job thinking it would be safe,” Lanoe said. “Now. Where’s this airlock?”

  “There,” Ehta said, pointing at a hatch just to one side of the tertiary thrusters. “It’s a maintenance hatch. It won’t be guarded, but we’ll need a Centrocor employee number to open it.”

  “I just happen to have one,” Lanoe said.

  Ehta nodded. Of course he did. Lanoe knew exactly what he was doing. He’d thought out all the angles in advance. She figured that gave them a very small chance of getting through this alive. “Maggs, right?”

  “Maggs,” Lanoe said. It sounded like he’d just bitten into an excrement pie. “It was right there in his service record. He used to work as an attaché between the Navy and Centrocor. I guess that’s why he figured when he betrayed us he could just jump onboard with Big Hexagon and be sure of a warm welcome.”

  “Okay,” Ehta said. She turned around to look at her people. “Corporal Gutierrez, are your troops ready to do this?”

  “Ma’am, yes, ma’am,” the marine shouted, her voice echoing in the enclosed space. She reached up and touched the recessed key at her throat. Her helmet flowed up over her face, opaque and silvered. The others followed suit. Binah and Mestlez, Malcolm and Yi. All veterans from Ehta’s old squad on Tuonela. Good people.

  She thought what a shame it would be, to throw them away on such a stupid, suicidal mission as this.

  She had that thought every time she ordered people over the top of a trench, or to rush an artillery position, or just to move out of cover during a firefight. That was the curse of command. You had to love the people you ordered around. And you had to tell them to go get themselves killed for reasons you barely understood yourself.

  You did it. You did it anyway.

  “Let’s go,” she said, and raised her own helmet. They dove out through the hatch in the floor of the cutter, one after another, exactly by the numbers. Lanoe coming last, his helmet up and opaque black—Navy style. It made him look a little like Valk.

  “Go, go, go!” Gutierrez shouted over the shared radio channel.

  Their suit jets activated automatically once they hit the vacuum. Once there was nothing for them to stand on.

  There was no way to dock the cutter to the carrier, not without setting off about a million alarms. They had to do this the old-fashioned way—by spacewalk. Ehta half expected to have a panic attack the second she was out of the cutter with nothing underneath her, nothing but the wall of the universe however many billions of light-years away. She’d thought the red lights would flash so bright in her head she wouldn’t be able to see.

  Instead—she didn’t panic. She didn’t scream in terror. She just … floated.

  She felt … nothing, really. Peace, but, no—not even that. She didn’t feel a Zen-like calm or anything, just … okay. She could hear nothing but the sound of her own breathing. She was neither hot nor cold. She held up one hand in front of her face, and saw it was holding steady. Not shaking at all.

  Being a pilot had nearly killed her. It had driven her crazy. Being a marine was like … like something she was born to do.

  She came around a big thruster cone, so big its curve was like the limb of a planet at dawn. She reached out her hands and touched the side of the carrier, its hull, its skin.

  Marines slammed into the hull all around her, one after the other, Lanoe bringing up the rear. The heavy weapons slung over their shoulders made them look a little like they had wings. Like devils falling.

  She moved along the hull, hand over hand. Every piece of armor plate, every junction box, every maintenance panel they passed had a little neat hexagon painted on it. Centrocor was in love with its own logo. She dug her fingers into a seam between two armor sections and pushed herself along until she reached the maintenance airlock.

  She glanced back at Lanoe. He gave her a thumbs-up. She nodded, even if he couldn’t see her through her silvered helmet, and turned to the hatch. She touched the edges of the keypad there, flexed her fingers to loosen them up. Lanoe read off a string of numbers and letters—Maggs’s employee number—and she typed them in, careful not to make any mistakes. Her index finger hovered over the ENTER key.

  When they opened this hatch, no alarms would sound inside the ship. No red lights would show up on the bridge. This would be an authorized entry, as far as the ship knew. Still, the access would show up on a log somewhere. If someone was looking at that log just now—

  It wasn’t worth worrying about. She jabbed the key. The hatch slid open, air from inside buffeting her for a moment, threatening to rip her free from her handhold. She’d used an airlock before. She was fine.

  She pointed at Gutierrez and motioned her into the airlock. One by one the marines crowded inside, piling in until they filled the not exactly large space. She shoved herself into the mass of suited bodies, then helped Lanoe pull himself in as well. The seven of them filled every cubic centimeter of the airlock. But they fit.

  Lanoe cycled the airlock the second he was inside. The outer hatch slid closed and then the tiny space filled up with air and suddenly Ehta could hear them, could hear her people moving, shifting, laughing as someone got an elbow in the crotch, griping as someone else got a good view of Mestlez’s posterior.

  “Quiet,” Ehta barked.

  They obeyed her.

  The inner hatch slid open and they pushed out into the carrier, silent, watchful.

  They were in.

  Chapter Six

  The carrier’s bridge was full of displays large and small—some showing the view dead ahead of a field of unbroken stars, some showing the protocomet so many millions of kilometers away. Dozens of little ones showed graphs and infometrics that meant nothing to Bullam. She had been through enough space battles now to know to ignore ninety percent of the information she could see. She watched the tactical board like an old campaign veteran.

  Even if it didn’t make any sense.

  “Give me some information I can actually use, IO,” Shulkin bellowed.

  The carrier’s information officer was a very young, very nervous man whose name she’d never managed to remember. “Sir, the numbers have been checked and rechecked. I’ve spoken personally with the Batygins. The data is accurate.”

  “Meaning?” Shulkin demanded.

  “The destroyers have scanned every square centimeter of the protocomet. The Hoplite-class cruiser isn’t there.”

  Shulkin growled like an animal.

  She could smell the frustration wafting off his thin, papery skin. Aleister Lanoe had gotten the best of him—yet again. It must be eating at his guts, she thought.

  She could take a certain perverse pleasure in that. She’d never liked Shulkin. She had tried, when the mission depended on it, to work with him in a civil and courteous fashion. It was like trying to seduce a brick wall. You got nowhere, and you ended up with scrapes in all the wrong places.

  Under Shulkin’s command she’d even sustained a grievous injury. He had ordered the carrier through a series of maneuvers that had nearly shaken her apart. Bullam had a rare disease called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome that meant her body couldn’t produce necessary collagens. As a result, under severe physical stress her veins and arteries could, and did, shred like paper, leaving her covered in ugly bruises and, far worse, letting her blood pool in her tissues and form free-floating blood clots. She might have a clot roaming around her body right now, and she wouldn’t know it until it reached her brain and gave her a stroke.

  The carrier didn’t have the right medical equipment to fix that. If she could have gotten back to a civilized planet, she could have a treatment at any hospital
that would break up any and all clots and protect her. Because of Shulkin that was impossible. He had dragged her out here to the literal middle of nowhere, just because of his mad need to kill Aleister Lanoe.

  Now he couldn’t even do that.

  She glanced over at Maggs where he hung from a wall at the aft end of the bridge. She could not, of course, wink at him—that would be indecorous—nor could she give him any instructions. Someone might overhear. But she was sure he was ready, that he would strike as soon as she gave the signal.

  It was always good to have a pet killer on your side. You never knew when they might come in handy.

  “He’s there. He’s there somewhere,” Shulkin said. “He’s smart. I’ll give him that. Smart enough to know where we would look. Maybe … maybe he’s hiding in one of those craters.”

  “Sir, there are only a few craters big enough to hold a Hoplite, and the Batygins have searched all of them,” the IO insisted.

  Shulkin didn’t even seem to hear the man. “Tell the Batygins to start a carpet bombardment of that iceball. I want it broken down to rubble.”

  “Sir—” the IO tried. Brave man, Bullam thought.

  Shulkin stared at him with eyes like welding lasers. The IO wilted visibly under that glare.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and turned back to his boards.

  “Lanoe is close,” Shulkin said, pounding his fist on the arm of his chair, his arm moving up and down like a triphammer. “He’s close. And he won’t get away, not this time.”

  Lanoe peered around a corner and down a long, empty companionway. The padded walls and the shapes of the hatches were all familiar to him. Not exactly surprising. They were regulation Navy design, exactly the same as those he’d seen every day for weeks now onboard the cruiser.

  He frowned behind his black helmet. Centrocor built their own spacecraft—usually cheap knockoffs designed around obsolete Navy technology. That was how they got the inferior Yk.64s that his own BR.9s could fly rings around. This carrier, though—this wasn’t some lowest-bidder copy of a Hipparchus-class. This was the real deal. Somehow Centrocor had gotten their hands on a prime example of the Navy’s most advanced and most powerful starship. That was illegal, of course—the Navy would never let a poly own a Hipparchus if they could help it.