Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  Now, Candless thought. Back to the possibilities. A second explanation for the lack of planets might simply be that they had arrived too late. The Blue-Blue-White had sent their fleets out across the galaxy some half a billion years ago. A great deal could happen in such a length of time. It was possible the jellyfish had gone extinct. Perhaps they’d destroyed themselves, or fallen prey to some cataclysm, something so dire it had left the system devoid not only of life, but of planets, too.

  As Candless organized her thoughts, she noted there were two subpossibilities there. One was that the Blue-Blue-White had survived, but moved on. The purpose of their construction fleets had been to create new habitable worlds for them to colonize. Perhaps they had simply all vacated their home system. Perhaps they had grown tired of the star that birthed them, and chosen to find greener pastures.

  Subpossibility two was that the Blue-Blue-White had been wiped out, but not by a natural cause. Perhaps the very fleets they had sent out to do their bidding had returned here—and decided that their own creators were vermin, like everyone else. Or perhaps Lanoe was simply late to the party. Perhaps some other intelligent species had gotten here first—looking for their own revenge. Perhaps—

  “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  Candless groaned in frustration as she pushed her display to the side. “Out with it, now.”

  This time it was Lieutenant Foulkes, the carrier’s new warrant officer and chief of its marines. “One of my people’s gone south,” he said. He looked distinctly embarrassed. As he should, she thought. “He’s sealed himself inside his bunk—he was one of the marines who fought your boarding party, and he refuses to believe there won’t be any reprisals. Thinks you’re going to shoot him the second he appears for duty.”

  Candless waited to hear how this was her problem. Her patience was not rewarded.

  “That’s something you should handle directly,” she told him.

  “I just hoped—ma’am, if you would speak to him personally—”

  “Stop that.”

  “I beg your pardon, ma’am? Stop what?”

  “Hoping. Do your job, WO. Tell him that if he reports to his station immediately, he can count on only light discipline. If he misses a work shift, cut off the life support to his bunk. He’ll come out fast enough once he can’t breathe.”

  “I …”

  “I am not psychic, and I cannot predict the future,” she told him. “However, I can tell you this. The next words you will speak are ‘Yes, ma’am.’ As in ‘Yes, ma’am, I will follow your orders without question.’”

  “Yes, ma’am, but—”

  “Without question,” Candless reiterated. Then she brought her display up to get back to work.

  The main problem with the possibilities she had identified was that there was little evidence for any of them. A catastrophe on a scale that would remove planets from the system should leave some sign. Yet the red dwarf looked normal enough, and—

  “I’m sorry to bother you again, ma’am, but—”

  It was the yeoman. Again. Candless swiped at her displays and gave the woman the look it had taken decades in the classroom to perfect. A withering storm of glares, a facial expression of pure, fatal venom.

  “You have one chance to explain why you value my time so little,” Candless told the YN. “One chance.”

  Whatever trivial errand the yeoman had brought with her was forgotten. She lowered her minder and hung there openmouthed, her skin growing paler as Candless watched. Clearly she understood the gravity of the situation.

  In a small voice she said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that Captain Shulkin, well, he—he—he’s not exactly detail-oriented. He just ignores me most of the time. When he even so much as looks at me, he scares me so badly I just want to run away.”

  “I see,” Candless told her.

  “I know you’re busy, and I don’t want to get off on a bad footing when we’re just starting to work together, but—”

  “I see that I have a task that I must complete here, if I’m going to accomplish anything.”

  “A … task?”

  “Yes. I’m going to have to make it my special mission to convince you and your fellow officers of one simple truth. An undeniable fact. The fact that whatever you may think of your commanding officer—I am far, far more terrifying. Furthermore, because you’ve interrupted me twice now, needlessly, I am going to start establishing this fact by making an example of you.”

  “You’ve done some good work here, love,” Paniet said. “Time to take a break.” To help with the work on the cruiser he’d requisitioned all the neddies from the Centrocor ships, most of whom had turned out to be useless. He’d been toiling away with one of the exceptions, a neddy from one of the destroyers, for a good six hours, and he could use a bit of a rest himself.

  The neddy, whose name was Hollander, nodded agreeably. “I wouldn’t mind getting some solid food down my gullet, ’strue.” He stowed a rotary grinder back in its charging station and followed Paniet to an airlock at the aft of the cruiser. Together they kicked down a short hallway into the main engineering station, little more than a junction of inspection passages inside the drive shielding. Paniet had to keep ducking his head to avoid hitting it on one wall or another, but Hollander didn’t seem to have any trouble with the confined space.

  “I’ve been cooped up in that rat’s den of a Peltast so long, this here feels like infinite space, neh?” Hollander said when Paniet remarked on his lack of claustrophobia. “Must say, it’s nice getting away from my own stink for a sec.”

  Paniet grabbed a pair of food tubes from a dispenser and tossed one spinning in Hollander’s direction. “You’re from Hades, is that right?”

  Hollander caught the spinning tube with one hand. “Yeah, can ye tell?” He laughed and ripped open the wrong end of the tube, then squeezed it hard to send all of the reconstituted food into his mouth in one go. “Is it the accent, or my rugged good looks?”

  Paniet gave him a knowing smile. “Ex-Navy, too, unless I miss my guess.” Hollander nodded again, too busy swallowing to answer. Paniet knew that most of the crew of the carrier and the destroyers were former Navy personnel. Centrocor, like all of the polys, traditionally crewed its ships with militia drawn from the civilian population. Navy pilots scoffed at the militias, and often with good reason—they got very little training before they were thrown into the field, where they typically died quickly. The polys considered their militias expendable. There were always more recruits available.

  Unlike the other development monopolies, Centrocor had been running a secret program for years now, identifying and recruiting people who had been discharged or drummed out of the Navy. It didn’t seem to matter to the poly why a given person had been cut loose—they took criminals and invalids alike, anything to bolster their ranks. Even Captain Shulkin was one of these hand-me-downs. The idea, of course, was to gain the benefit of Naval training without having to pay for it. The program worked—otherwise the battle between Lanoe and Shulkin would have been over after the first salvo.

  “You want to know why I left the triple eagle behind,” Hollander said.

  “I’m curious, but one does so hate to pry,” Paniet said. An utter lie—Paniet was a frightful gossip, and he knew it.

  Hollander shrugged. “It’s no great secret.” He pushed himself up against a wall and stuck his foot through a handy nylon loop to anchor himself. The words seemed to come easy, but he toyed with his empty food tube as he spoke. “I was down in the trenches on Yomi-no-kuni, back when the Navy fought Wilscon for that blighted bit of rock. I was running a wire-layer, a little half-armored car that strung out razor wire behind. Not much of a job, but I did me bit, right? Kept our PBMs safe in their dugouts. Long shifts—long nights, that planet’s got days sixty hours long—and that sort of cycle does a number on you, keeps a body from sleeping proper. Which might explain it.”

  “Explain what?” Paniet asked.

  “Why I didn’t notice that genera
l’s foot. ’Til after I’d run it over.”

  Paniet couldn’t help himself. He laughed, quickly covering his mouth with his hand. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, still chuckling. “I’m so sorry if that’s a painful memory, I just—I just—”

  “Not half so painful for me as for him,” Hollander said, which made Paniet nearly double over in hilarity. Hollander grinned to show that he’d taken no offense. “That’s my story, the long and mostly short of it. I was sent packing so fast my head spun, and I landed back home with no job and no prospects. Considered throwing myself off a cliff, to be honest, but before I could the offer came from Centrocor. No questions asked, hazard pay and benefits, well. One takes what one gets, neh?”

  “I suppose so,” Paniet said.

  “And now I’ve answered yer query, may I be so bold as to ask one of my own?”

  Paniet tensed up, thinking he knew what was coming. The question he got the most often. He was, however, mistaken—Hollander had something very different on his mind.

  “What’ll be our fates, do you think, when we get home?” His face showed no sign of humor now. “I mean me and me mates, of course. We Centrocor employees. We’ve thrown in our lot with your bunch, no hesitations there. And we’ll work and fight, right, every one of us, for this new head man Lanoe, as it’s our only chance to see home again. Yet we can’t help but wonder, can we? What happens when we see the lights of civilization once more? When we sail back to Earth or whatever. What manner of reception can Centrocorians expect then, neh? Are we working toward a prison sentence, as soon as we get back?”

  “I suppose that’s one possibility,” Paniet admitted. He felt this man deserved an honest answer. “Your captain did attack a Navy vessel in peacetime, which might count as a terroristic action. Assuming Commander Lanoe wants to denounce you. He might turn a blind eye, in reward for your service.”

  “Ah,” Hollander said. “Right.” His face darkened, and he lowered his gruff voice to a sort of hoarse whisper. “Should our big fellas let it come to that. I can imagine it’ll be a tense moment, when we arrive the other side of a wormhole. With our freedom at stake, and lots of guns to go around.”

  “You’re suggesting that maybe the battle between our two sides might not be over. Just delayed,” Paniet said. “Oh, don’t look like that. I know you’re not suggesting you’d want such a thing. And it’s only realistic to think it might happen.” He sighed. “I suppose we’ll just have to enjoy this armistice, then. As long as it lasts.”

  “Right,” Hollander said. “And men like you and me—we should stick together no matter what, neh?” He raised one meaningful eyebrow.

  Paniet dropped his eyes. “Because we’re neddies, you mean. The camaraderie of fellow service.”

  “Oh, right, that’s what I meant,” Hollander said, turning back to his meal.

  The carrier scouts transmitted their findings back to the little fleet on a real-time basis, flooding Candless’s displays with imagery and telemetry data. Within a few hours she had what she was looking for.

  A chill ran down her spine when she saw the image, a high-resolution picture of the system as seen from above. Her hands started to shake and she had to press them against her console so that no one would notice.

  If her bodily reaction was obvious, however, how she felt about what she was looking at was nothing short of bewildering. She felt as if her stomach had been cramped this whole time and only now could it relax.

  She waited until the scouts returned, however, before she allowed herself to believe what she’d seen. She found the men and women in a ready room at the base of the carrier’s flight deck, not far from the bridge. The six of them were laughing and popping tabs of hydration gel. One of them was already half out of his suit, and was scrubbing out the collar ring with an alcohol swab. She cleared her throat as she pushed into the compartment, and he hastily grabbed the suit and pulled it up over his chest, dropping the swab inside as he did so.

  “I want a full report,” she told them. “Do not, if you value your positions, leave out the smallest detail.”

  When she took this to Lanoe she had to be sure.

  He arrived only a few minutes after she called him in, docking his BR.9 and rushing down to the bridge so fast he was breathing hard. Not exactly how she thought a commander ought to appear before his underlings, but she supposed he had a great personal stake in what she was going to tell him.

  He came over to her IO’s position with a hungry look. He said nothing—just nodded at her.

  She brought up the image, the one that had left her shaking, and let him look at it for a while.

  It showed the system in all its glory, in a way that had not been possible before. She had known that there was far more gas and dust than seemed likely, especially in a system with no planets. Still, no two systems were ever alike, and she’d written it off as just a fluke of this particular red dwarf, or perhaps something you found in systems this close to the center of the galaxy. No such system had ever been charted before by human pilots—there were bound to be surprises.

  The red dwarf was surrounded by a thick belt of gas, mostly hydrogen and some particulates—a ring that surrounded the star’s equator, making it look not altogether unlike Saturn. There were even gaps and bands in the gas, as there were in Saturn’s rings. Narrow tracks cleared out by orbiting bodies. Shepherd moons, as these were called when they orbited a gas giant. Shepherd planetoids, then, if they orbited a star.

  The ring wasn’t as sharply defined as Saturn’s, of course, because it was made of gas rather than particles of ice. It stretched out for nearly a hundred thousand kilometers from the star. There was no proper boundary at its far edge—the substance of the ring merely petered out, attenuating to nothing.

  It was a dull black-red in color, brighter in some places than others. “We couldn’t see it directly before, because we were looking at it edge-on. Most of our telescopes were adjusted for low-light conditions, so they looked right through the thing. It’s only when you see it from above or below that it’s really visible.”

  Lanoe nodded. He gestured and the display expanded to fill much of the bridge. The pilot and the navigator looked up in surprise, but they’d learned enough about Candless by then to keep their mouths closed.

  Lanoe pushed away from her chair, swimming through the image, his hands moving constantly as he expanded one part of it or another. His mouth twisted over to the side of his face as he studied the picture in deep concentration.

  She almost hated to disturb him. Certainly she didn’t want to say what came next, not to him. Not after he’d staked everything on this system.

  “It’s a protoplanetary disk,” she said.

  He turned his head to stare at her. As if daring her to admit she’d just lied to him.

  Protoplanetary disks formed early in a star’s evolution. In its infancy, a star was just a cloud of loosely held-together gas and dust, enormous quantities of raw elementary matter with no form. Gravity gathered together most of the hydrogen and helium gas from that cloud, dragging it into a central, spinning mass. Eventually, when enough gas was pressed together, the star would ignite in a chain of thermonuclear fusion reactions, and from then on it would burn under its own power.

  Once the star was lit it would push away whatever was left of the cloud—any remaining gases and most of the heavier elements—on its stellar wind. Those remnants would fall into orbit around the star’s equator, creating a thick, soupy disk full of particles that bounced off each other constantly, whizzing back and forth under the influence of gravity and angular momentum.

  In time enough of the heavier elements would slam together to form planetesimals, semisolid masses that had enough gravity to draw in more and more of the disk’s substance. When the process was done you would have a system like Earth’s, mostly empty but with a scattering of large heavy bodies in orbit around the sun.

  The disk around the red dwarf wasn’t there yet. This disk had just begun to form planete
simals—hence the large number of small rocky objects that Paniet and Valk had cataloged. It would be millions, perhaps billions of years before they came together to form real planets—if they ever did.

  “You understand what this means, of course,” Candless said.

  Lanoe hadn’t stopped staring at her. “It could mean a lot of things. It could mean—”

  Candless and Lanoe had been squaddies once. She had earned the right to interrupt him when he was being foolish. “It means we’ve come to the wrong place,” she said. “This can’t be the homeworld of the Blue-Blue-White.”

  “I’m not ready to accept that,” Lanoe said.

  Candless shook her head. “I’m sorry, Lanoe. This system must be brand-new. We know the Blue-Blue-White, as a species, are at least half a billion years old.” She pointed at the image. “That’s a protoplanetary disk. Those only last a hundred million years at the most, and one this small would clear out even faster. Lanoe, it’s time to accept the facts. This system can’t be old enough to be the one you’re looking for.”

  Lanoe said nothing. He turned back to the image, studying every cubic centimeter of it as if it would yield up its secrets if he just stared at it hard enough.

  Candless pressed her lips together in a prim line. Clearly she was going to have to wait him out. She thought he would come around in the end. He was obsessed with his quest for justice, certainly. He was no madman, though. Eventually logic would have to sway him. Convince him that she was right.

  Unfortunately for her—perhaps for all of them—she and Lanoe weren’t alone.

  “I beg your pardon, ma’am,” someone said.

  She whirled around, rage spiking through her. She swore on all the church bells of hell, if this was another ill-timed request for some bureaucratic triviality, she would—

  It was Giles, the carrier’s IO, who had spoken. He had remained on the bridge while she commandeered his workstation, staying ready in case she required his services. Up to this point she had not.