Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  “Home,” Ginger said again. “You told them that. But you must know … one chorister all alone can’t—”

  “Don’t say it out loud,” he told her. “Anyone could be listening.”

  Chapter Nine

  If they were resolved to bring Earth’s finest military might against an alien planet, there was still something missing from the equation. Said planet.

  Candless had failed to find anything big enough to earn the name, even with the carrier’s impressive suite of sensors and telescopes. That wasn’t saying all that much, however. The little human fleet was still fifty AUs from the red dwarf. A distance of some seven and a half billion kilometers. At that distance even a planet the size of Jupiter would appear as no more than one dull star amidst the cosmic panoply. Picking its light out from the crowd of stars in the sky might just be a matter of luck.

  So she worked with Giles, the carrier’s IO, through two straight shifts—fine-tuning the equipment, establishing an interferometry network with whole waves of microdrones, poring over imagery until her eyes ached. She knew she was mostly repeating work that Valk and Paniet had already done, but she knew Lanoe wouldn’t be satisfied until he had a result he could use.

  Even if there wasn’t one. The idea that they might be in the wrong place occurred to her early. And often. She’d had relatively little interaction with the Choir—Lanoe and Valk had worked more closely with them, and then at the end, Ginger. The better part of her knowledge of choristers was the fact that they made her skin crawl. They were aliens, though, which meant their thought processes were unlike those of humans.

  “One wonders,” she said, speaking to Lanoe over communications laser after a long hour of paging through telescope views, “if they even sent us to the right place. I don’t remember you asking them for a specific destination. You asked them to open a wormhole, any wormhole that would let us get away from Centrocor. You’ve been assuming they gave you the wormhole you wanted the most. Perhaps they merely wished to be rid of us. After how shabbily you treated them, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “This is the right system. My plan had been to open a wormhole between the Admiralty and the homeworld of the Blue-Blue-White. I discussed that with them a couple times,” he replied. “They knew where I wanted to go. Where I needed to go. As to whether they sent us the wrong way on purpose—in the end, it wasn’t me who convinced them to open the wormhole. That was Ginger, and they like her just fine.”

  Candless sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. It helped a little with the eyestrain. “Lanoe, there will come a point where we have to accept the obvious. There are no gas giant planets in this system. There’s no place where one could be hiding.”

  “There’s an answer. We just haven’t found it yet.”

  “Your obsession,” she told him, “is blinding you. But all right. We’ll keep looking. I have one more idea.”

  She cut off the connection and turned to face Giles. “Get me six pilots. We’ll send out some scouts.”

  The carrier was considerably larger than the cruiser and therefore had room for any number of pieces of equipment that could not be shoehorned into the Hoplite. Among these things were a full dozen carrier scouts, tiny one-person spacecraft, lighter and slightly faster than a cataphract, little more than a seat with an engine and a single PBW cannon. They lacked a proper fighter’s armament and any airfoils. Most important, they did not carry a vector field, meaning they were much more susceptible to damage and absolutely useless in a dogfight. Because their engines did not need to support the field or heavy weapons, however, they could run for days without needing to refuel.

  The proper use of carrier scouts was to send them forward into a battle area where they could see what was happening, then have them run back to their carrier to report. A commander would have to be desperate to actually make them stand and fight—which meant it happened all the time. Space battles always ended in desperation. Assigning someone to fly a carrier scout was a clear indication you considered them expendable. When the six pilots who came and lined up for Candless’s inspection heard that they were not being sent on a suicide mission, they looked as much relieved as confused.

  “All I want is deep reconnaissance,” she told them. “We’ll send you out on a standard radial course. Four of you will come at the star from different directions. One up over the star’s north pole, one over its south pole. Keep your sensors at full gain. Make a good solid sweep, then return. I need good, clear imagery. That’s all. If,” she said, and smiled to try to indicate that she was joking, “you do meet any enemy resistance, don’t engage. Break off and return as fast as you can.”

  None of them seemed to think that was funny.

  Well, Candless had never been very good at smiling. Maybe she’d done it wrong.

  Paniet floated outside the cruiser’s front section, beckoning to an oncoming ship. The carrier had sent over a vehicle to help him. The bigger ship contained a multitude of small craft, not just warships but ancillary craft as well, like troop transports, M. Bullam’s personal yacht, and—most exciting for the engineer—a Helead-class repair tender. Not much to look at to the untrained eye, just a framework of girders with a thruster package on one end, but its open construction contained a surprising variety of heavy tools that it could extend on jointed arms. Today, Paniet intended to use its heavy laser cutter for a task he found decidedly bittersweet.

  As the ugly little ship moved into position on puffs of gas released from its myriad of tiny thrusters, Paniet waved it in with a hand lamp.

  “You don’t need to do that,” Valk told him. “I can guide it in a lot more precisely than any human pilot.”

  “Ducks, you will not take all the fun out of my job,” Paniet told the AI. “I intend to earn my engineer-captain’s pay today. Anyway, haven’t you better things to do?”

  “Not really. Flying the cruiser takes about three percent of my processor capacity, especially when all I’m doing is station-keeping. Lanoe took me off the search for the planet.”

  “A task I’m glad to hand off,” Paniet told him. “Let Candless worry about the snipe hunt. The cruiser needs these repairs, rather desperately, and now’s the time to get it done. Now when—finally—nobody is shooting at us.”

  Valk laughed. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it? But you don’t think—I mean, has Lanoe lost faith in us? Is that why he reassigned us?”

  Paniet sighed. Living and working with Valk had been a sort of master class in artificial intelligence research. Given the fact that there weren’t any other AIs to study, Paniet had probably become the greatest living expert in the subject. He’d figured out some of Valk’s psychology—if that was even the word for it—and he knew how desperate the AI was to please Lanoe.

  It made sense, of course. Valk had believed he was a human being for the first seventeen years after he was switched on. He still had the memories of the dead man who was his progenitor. He very much wanted to be human, to have normal human relationships, but once he’d learned his true nature, that was no longer an option. Hated and shunned just for what he was, he was desperate for any kind of human warmth or affection. Valk would do anything Lanoe asked, do anything at all to please the commander. And of course Lanoe knew it. He constantly pushed Valk to stretch his capacities, to find new ways to be useful. Every time Valk did pull off some new miracle, though, it made him just a little less human. A little less normal. Which alienated him from everyone else even more than before.

  “He needs you, still,” Paniet said. “You’re the only one that can talk to the Blue-Blue-White.”

  Depressingly, that fact seemed to cheer Valk quite a bit. “I guess so, huh?”

  “Assuming we find them.” Paniet saw a fellow neddy in the exposed pilot’s seat of the repair tender and gave him a cheery wave. The Centrocor engineer fired one last burn of his ship’s maneuvering jets and it came to a halt, taking up a stable position next to the cruiser.

  Paniet touched the virtual keyboard o
n his wrist display and a long arm craned outward from the tender. At the end of the arm sat a hemispherical pod that looked like a searchlight with multiple lenses on its face. Paniet grasped the pod by a manual aiming handle and lined it up with the side of the cruiser.

  “This isn’t going to hurt you, is it?” he asked Valk. Though the AI retained the space suit that had been his body for seventeen years, he had in some ways outgrown it. He was so deeply connected to the cruiser’s systems now that it might be more accurate to say that the entire ship was Valk’s body now.

  “No,” the AI said, laughing. “No, I don’t exactly have nerve endings up there.”

  Paniet nodded to himself. Then he activated the cutting laser and let its beam bite deep into the side of the cruiser.

  In their very first scrape with Centrocor, a lucky shot with a disruptor round had torn through the entire forward third of the cruiser. It had blasted its way through the ship’s bridge and its officers’ quarters, rendering those areas unusable. Further battles and desperate maneuvers had only put additional strain on the damaged area, until there were entire bulkheads and structural spars up there that were hanging on by threads. Paniet was a little surprised that the entire section hadn’t just torn off and fallen away on its own.

  He’d repaired what he could, but mostly that had meant sealing off cracks and rerouting power lines. At the time he hadn’t had access to the tools to do a proper repair job, and as a result the damage had simply gotten worse and worse. Now, as much as it offended his engineer’s sensibilities, he’d decided to accept the inevitable.

  He was going to cut the cruiser’s head off and break the whole section down for spare parts. There were other damaged sections of the ship that could be saved, or at least jury-rigged back together, if he just had the right raw materials.

  The laser was invisible in the vacuum of space. Paniet could only tell that it was working when he saw structural members and bundles of cables split apart, seemingly for no reason. Little by little the beam of coherent light dug a deep trench into the side of the cruiser, without so much as a flame or a puff of smoke. It was a kind of magic, the kind he loved, even if it caused his soul a little pain to see such a lovely ship decapitated.

  “What … what if we don’t?” Valk asked.

  “Sorry? I’m a trifle busy,” Paniet told him. Though to be fair, the cutting process was fully automatic and he didn’t need to even be there, unless something went wrong. “I’m not sure what you—”

  “You said, ‘Assuming we find them.’ Meaning the Blue-Blue-White.”

  “I suppose I did,” Paniet said. The laser sliced through one of the cruiser’s main support beams and the entire forward section lurched, just a hair. Paniet’s body tensed, but then nothing further happened, and he relaxed again.

  “You aren’t sure that we’re even in the right system,” Valk said. “It’s something I’ve contemplated myself. I … I don’t like to doubt Lanoe, but, well. We both know there are no planets here. What do you think will happen if it turns out he’s wrong? If this system is uninhabited?”

  The laser cut into a section of padded wall that had somehow survived largely intact. Fluffy clouds of insulation burst from the incision, some of them vaporizing as they crossed the laser’s path, others twisting away into the void. Paniet considered carefully what he was going to say next. He knew full well that anything he said to Valk might get back to Lanoe.

  “I doubt he’ll accept the data, no matter how exhaustive it gets,” he said. “I think he’ll order us to keep looking. In time, maybe, he’ll realize the Choir sent him down the wrong path, but long before then—I don’t know. My bigger concern is what everyone else will do if that happens.”

  “You’re thinking that they’ll mutiny. Turn on Lanoe.”

  “My job description, dearie, does not include guessing which way other people are going to jump. But I can imagine that the Centrocor contingent, especially, will grow frustrated. They’re chastened, for now. But we need to give them something to do or they’ll start to wonder why they’re here.”

  “I’m sure Lanoe has already considered that,” Valk said. “He must have some kind of contingency plan ready. Most likely he’ll just take us home, then. Better to admit defeat and try again some later day.”

  Paniet was … not as certain as the AI. The Aleister Lanoe he’d met at Tuonela had seemed a reasonable sort. The kind of man who was always considering the angles, always planning three moves ahead.

  Over time, though, the mission had definitely changed the commander. Paniet had tried to counsel Lanoe a few times. To give him an engineer’s perspective on things, or simply provide good advice. Every time, Lanoe had thanked him kindly for his opinion, then completely ignored it. Lanoe might have been a great leader once, but his obsession with hunting down the Blue-Blue-White had pushed him to make risky decisions. He’d put his own crew in real jeopardy many times rather than give up the slightest advance toward his goal.

  Paniet had been in the Neddies long enough to have served under many different commanding officers. He’d learned early on that there were some you could trust, people who had your welfare as their first priority. Then there were those who clearly felt the fight was the thing, and that people were just numbers on a spreadsheet, columns of figures to be shuffled around and deleted as necessary. For officers like that, defeat wasn’t a possibility. There was always some way to make the equation work out—no matter who got hurt.

  Officers of that second sort, the driven ones, the ambitious, were dangerous. Every time Paniet had found himself under the command of such a person before, he’d found some way to get transferred to a different unit.

  That wasn’t an option now.

  “I’m sure Lanoe will do the smart thing,” he said. He hoped very much that Valk didn’t have a way to tell that he was lying.

  The laser finished cutting and shut itself down. Paniet checked it carefully to make sure it was switched off, then flew around the cruiser in a tight circle, looking to make sure the cut was complete. He found a few places where strands of carbon fiber had been left untouched, stretched across the thin gap of the cut. He cut those with a handheld plasma torch, then used his suit jets to zip back, away from the cruiser. He wanted to be well clear for the next part.

  “Okay, love,” he said to Valk. “We’re ready. Take the cruiser back. Dead slow, now. Just ease it out of the way.”

  “Got it,” Valk said.

  Along the long flank of the cruiser tiny panels opened up, revealing the nozzles of positioning jets. They twisted around until they were all facing the same way, then released a single sigh of exhaust gas.

  The cruiser drifted backward, so slowly it didn’t seem to move at all. Paniet felt, instead, that he and the cutoff forward section were moving, and he felt the sudden urge to grab something and hold on.

  After a few minutes the cruiser was clear of the severed junk. Paniet flew over to examine the front end of the sawn-off ship. The laser had cut so cleanly that it had left a perfectly smooth face on the cruiser, almost as shiny as a mirror. For a moment he simply admired his own handiwork. A job well done was, of course, its own reward.

  There was still plenty to do. Paniet needed to break down the severed section into raw materials, backbreaking work that would take a crew of neddies the better part of a week. As for the cruiser, he wanted to put a layer of armor on top of that smooth face. A number of sensor pods had been located in the forward section, and he would need to find replacements for those, and good places to mount them. Finally he would need to test the cruiser’s stability in its new configuration, exhaustively monitor all of its functions to make sure he hadn’t accidentally severed something important.

  It looked like his work was cut out for him. That was good. It would help him not think about anything else.

  There was an enormous amount of disorganized gas and dust in the system, most of it in a thick belt around the red dwarf. Close in, where it was hard to see. There we
re all the objects that Paniet and Valk had already cataloged. Candless had taken one look at the database they’d made and then rejected it as useless—there was nothing in there big enough to serve as a base of operations, especially not for life-forms as big as the Blue-Blue-White.

  Her scouts had failed to find any miraculously hidden planets.

  There were a few possibilities left, hypotheticals to explore. It was possible that the Blue-Blue-White were in the system, but hidden away in some kind of incredibly dark structure, something with an albedo so low that it didn’t register against the black of the void. Perhaps something shrouded by a coating of carbon nanotubules, the darkest substance possible. Yet such a structure would generate heat, and some of that heat would be expressed in the form of infrared radiation. The carrier’s sensors had failed to pick up any such signature, which meant—

  “Ma’am?”

  Candless swiped away one of her displays. The carrier’s yeoman was floating just beside her elbow. A mousy woman with brown hair coiled atop her head. She was responsible for administration and accounting aboard the carrier. For the moment, she had a hopeful look on her face.

  Candless scowled at her. “Yes, what is it?” she demanded.

  “I just need someone to sign off on today’s duty roster,” the YN explained. She held up a minder showing a list of names that Candless barely recognized.

  “This is something you thought I could help you with, clearly. Just as clearly, you’re wrong,” Candless said. “I’m not in command of this ship. You want Captain Shulkin.”

  The YN grimaced. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am, but anyone of your rank can sign off, it’s really just a formality, and—”

  Candless looked down her nose at the woman and gave her a long, hard stare. Then she reached over and pressed her thumb to the screen of the minder. At least the YN was smart enough to leave without saying anything more.