Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  He could not possibly have missed her instructive berating of the yeoman, as it had taken place right in front of him. He would have listened to Candless outline the woman’s faults for a solid hour. If he was speaking up now, it couldn’t possibly be to ask her if he was allowed to go to the necessaries, or to ask for better food rations.

  “If,” she said, “you have something material to add, please do speak up.” She gave him a look that should make it very, very clear what the penalty would be for wasting her time.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I just—”

  Lanoe had turned his own gaze on the man. Candless couldn’t see his eyes well enough to gauge his expression, but it had a visible effect on Giles. It made his face turn white as all the blood rushed out of it.

  “I just … couldn’t help but overhear. You identified this as a protoplanetary disk, and that’s, uh—well, it definitely looks like one.”

  “Go on,” Lanoe said, when the man hesitated.

  “Yes, sir. If you showed me that picture and I didn’t have any other data, I’d definitely agree. It’s a star system forming out of inchoate matter.” He nodded. Swallowed thickly. “There’s just one problem. The metallicity of the red dwarf. We did a scan for that when we first arrived here before we, uh, allied with the Navy. Just standard practice—when you approach a star you check all its vital statistics, so to speak.”

  “What did you find?” Lanoe asked.

  Candless had a feeling she knew what she was about to hear. Metallicity was a quality of stars, a ratio of how much of their mass consisted of hydrogen or helium as opposed to heavier elements. It was a useful figure because it could allow you to determine the age of a given star. Typically the older a star was, the lower its metallicity would be.

  “We calculated that the red dwarf must be at least ten billion years old.” Twice as old, then, as Earth’s sun. “Which … raises a problem with your theory.”

  Candless saw it right away, of course. Protoplanetary disks formed very early on in a star’s life span. It was impossible for a star that old to still be forming planets, or at least to have a disk as complex and thick as this one.

  She closed her eyes and tried to breathe. She had not realized until just this moment how desperately she’d wanted their mission to be a wild-goose chase. How badly she wished that they could simply give up their search and go home.

  This new piece of data was going to ruin that. She knew it.

  “Interesting,” Lanoe said.

  She knew it for a fact.

  When she opened her eyes, Lanoe was already on his way out of the bridge. “I’m going to check this disk out for myself,” he said. “I’ll be away for a while, maybe twenty-four hours.”

  “Sir, are you sure this is an appropriate time for that?” she asked. The consolidation of the fleet was still a nascent, uneasy thing. Candless didn’t relish the prospect of overseeing the Centrocor contingent on her own. “Why don’t I send my scouts instead?”

  Lanoe shook his head. “This is something I need to do personally,” he told her. “Don’t wait up for me.”

  And with that, he was gone. As was any chance that the mission was complete.

  She turned to face the IO. His eyes were very wide.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry if I … if I …”

  She took a deep breath. “You never need to apologize to me for providing true information,” she told him. “I’m not that much of a monster.” Then she turned to face the rest of the bridge crew.

  “As for the rest of you,” she told them, “in fact, for everyone on this ship—I’ve been examining the logs of your readiness drills. More to the point, I’ve been examining the lack of readiness drills. It’s clear that you’ve all been very slack in your preparedness training. So we are going to start a six-hour ship-wide simulation of an attack by enemy forces, commencing immediately. All hands to stations.”

  They were learning. None of them even groaned.

  Chapter Ten

  Ashlay Bullam lay upon a divan on the wooden deck of her yacht, surrounded by a dome of flowglas that was slightly polarized so she didn’t have to look at all those stars. The small ship was moving, just a touch, making circles around the carrier, accelerating just enough to provide a little gravity. A waste of fuel, perhaps, but Maggs had to admit it was comforting to actually stand on his feet for a change.

  “I’m forbidden from the carrier’s bridge, and from speaking privately with any of my former employees,” she said. “I asked if I could be secluded here, on my own ship, and they said that would be fine. Then they pulled my claws. All communications from here have been blocked. This thing has no weapons, of course, nor a vector field. If Lanoe decides he made a mistake and wants to kill me, I’m rather a sitting duck.” One of her drones approached with a platter of fruit. Kiwi, peach, strawberry. All chemically stabilized at the peak of ripeness. She chose a slice of pineapple and lifted it to her lips. “As exiles go, I suppose it’s a comfortable one.”

  Maggs watched her bite into the fruit, watched the juice slick her lips. She was beautiful in the particular fashion that all poly executives were beautiful that year, with a slightly upturned nose, thick eyelashes, and long hair colored a frosty blue. She had changed out of her thinsuit and into a brocade dress with a weave of tiny hexagons. “The conditions of my continued existence,” he told her, “are a tad more stringent. I’m expected to report to Ehta once a day. Give her every paltry detail of my comings and goings. If I’m caught in a lie, it’s straight to the brig for me.” He shrugged. “I’ll have to tell her I came to see you.”

  “Fine,” Bullam said. “They’re never going to trust us, of course. So there’s no point trying to sneak about. Lanoe needs me, so I’m perfectly safe. If the crew of the carrier or the destroyers ever choose to mutiny, he’ll wheel me out and have me give them a big speech about how we’re all in this together.”

  “He’s assuming you won’t just whip them into greater frenzy, then, and lead the charge against him?”

  “He’s assuming correctly. We don’t know how to open a wormhole to take us home. He does. I assure you, Maggs, that Aleister Lanoe is the safest man in the galaxy, if I have anything to say about it.”

  More’s the pity, Maggs thought.

  Revenge is a suit best played long, Maggsy, his father’s voice told him. Sometimes it just means waiting for your enemy to die of natural causes.

  “I suppose, given my record, I should be glad you don’t want me for his assassin, then,” Maggs said.

  Bullam turned her head, never lifting it from the cushions. She gave him a long, appraising look. “Are we going to talk about that now?”

  “If my timing doesn’t please you—”

  “No, no,” she said, waving one hand at him. “You go ahead.”

  “You wanted me to kill Shulkin. I failed in that task,” he said, letting it out in one long exhale. Literally getting it off his chest.

  “I never said anything like that. I told you I wanted your help firing him.”

  “Of course,” Maggs said. “Though even there, I’ve let you down. I—”

  “He’s been demoted. Rendered harmless. That’s good enough. And frankly, I was impressed with how you handled the situation. I don’t know if you could have actually killed him before he shot Lanoe. I mean no criticism of your dagger-handling prowess, but it seemed a tricky blow to land. Instead you hit upon just the right words to make him stand down. Just the right button to press.”

  Maggs stroked his mustache. “I’ve spent my fair share of time amidst mentally ill Naval officers,” he said.

  Present company excluded, I presume, his father said.

  But of course, Pater.

  “I know the type. They may harbor the wildest delusions or be under the influence of a maniacal death wish, but respect for rank is bred into them. Bred to the bone. If Lanoe ordered Shulkin to stop breathing, the man would turn blue and lose consciousness before he disobeyed.”


  Bullam laughed. Maggs rather liked the sound of it. So few people these days had the mental attainment to appreciate his sense of humor.

  “I’m glad I kept you around,” Bullam said, propping herself up with one hand on her cheek. “You’re going to make my exile more bearable, I think.”

  “I wanted to speak of that as well,” he said. “I suppose many thanks are in order. You saved my life.”

  “I did,” she said, failing altogether to demur.

  “I’m not entirely sure why. Oh, I know I can be useful to you. I intend to show you just how useful at the earliest opportunity. I know you need all the allies you can get.” He waved one hand in dismissal. “You took a rather terrible risk, though, insisting that Lanoe spare me. That man has no crumb of love for me in the empty cupboard of his heart. Putting a round through my head was going to be the highlight of his day. He might well have killed you just so he could hurry things along on the way to my execution.”

  “Any investment carries the possibility of risk,” she said.

  Maggs nodded and looked away. Careful, son. She’ll want to be paid back eventually. No need calling your creditors and asking them when’s convenient.

  “I suppose … I just wonder if I’m worthy of what you’ve done for me. Please don’t take this the wrong way. I have a healthy self-regard. Some would even call me vainglorious.”

  “Only the ones who know what the word means,” she said.

  He snapped around to look at her and saw a mischievous smile playing across her plump lips. Her eyes sparkled as she watched him stride across the deck.

  He knelt down next to the divan. “Why did you do it? Really?”

  She wriggled on her cushions. “Oh, for all the reasons you named, and of course you’re technically my employee and I have a responsibility to you, a kind of noblesse oblige. But truly? Really, truly? I don’t know. Perhaps I just like your mustache.”

  He leaned over her, shoving an arm around her shoulders and pulling her close, crushing her lips with his own. Her eyes opened wide and she made a little noise of protest. Maggs, thinking he’d made a grave miscalculation, pulled back and turned his face away.

  “I’m so very sorry,” he said. “I thought—”

  “I have a disease, called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome,” she told him. “I’m fragile, to put a fine point on it. Rough handling or even sudden movements can be dangerous for me—even fatal.”

  “I … I didn’t know,” Maggs said, horrified. He’d been so sure, though, he’d thought he’d read all the right signals, caught the right innuendos—

  “Which means,” she said, “if you’re going to make a pass at me, you can’t be so rough about it.”

  Maggs struggled to control his surprise. Then he kissed her again even as she started laughing, his lips just gently brushing hers. She tasted of pineapple and collagen-enhancing lipstick, and—

  He pulled away a second time, because he’d heard something. A knock.

  “I hate to break things off there,” he said, “but there appears to be a neddy outside.”

  “Hmm? Oh, yes! I’ve been expecting him,” Bullam said, sitting up. She patted down the neckline of her dress. “Be a dear and let him in.”

  The BR.9 was a fast fighter, designed to cross entire solar systems at top speed. Space, however, was very, very big. Ten hours after he’d left the carrier, Lanoe was finally approaching his destination.

  Up ahead, the red dwarf had swollen until it actually looked round. He checked his fuel consumption and his reserve tanks and opened his throttle a little wider. Edged his control stick forward just a hair, until he was diving straight for the star.

  He could just make out the disk, if he strained his eyes squinting for it. A reddish oval, a belt around the star. As he got closer, his fighter’s instruments started showing him details, the imagery they gathered magnified and painted on the inside of his canopy. He saw the ragged outer edge of the disk, curling arms and tendrils of gas so transparent, so thin they did little but change the color of the void behind them. The bands in the disk showed up next, dark pencil lines etched around the circumference, dozens of them—not elements of the disk itself but gaps in its substance, places where the gas and dust thinned down to nothing. Farther in, closer to the star, the disk grew much thicker, looking first like a pale pinkish haze, then like a tube of dark red marble circling the star. Filaments of gas threaded through that mass, giving it texture, making it stand out in three dimensions. Storms swept through those filaments, twisting them into complex shapes like spiral galaxies, like the knots in the trunk of a tree, like cobwebs. He studied their ever-changing forms, noting each one carefully, watching how they formed and how they would break apart, as patient and as determined as an entomologist looking over a collection of bugs in jars.

  Occasionally a sweep of darkness would rush through the mass, a black wind. His instruments told him that wind was made of trillions of tiny particles of graphitic carbon, few of them more than a millimeter across. A hailstorm of soot, a tidal wave of coal dust tearing through the dim red sky. Occasional forks of lightning cut through the black wind, bolts of plasma a thousand kilometers long, bright enough they looked like cracks opening in the sky.

  Beyond the stormy, dense zone was … nothing. The disk just stopped, giving way to empty space. There was a clear gap of darkness between disk and star, a ring of blackness so clear that he could see stars through it. The disk didn’t touch the red dwarf—if it did, he imagined it would have dissipated long ago, sucked into the parent star’s hungry blast furnace heart, all that gas burned for thermonuclear fuel. Some process, some physical force, perhaps just angular momentum, kept the disk from falling inward and being consumed.

  He ran more models, looking for the equations that would balance the orbital rotation of the disk against the pull of the star’s gravity. Lanoe had never been much of a mathematician—his brain just didn’t work that way, it all seemed too abstract—but to be a good pilot you needed to understand the basic formulas. You had to be able to work out all the vectors, see how gravity and velocity could cancel each other out, how the cosmos kept spinning instead of falling in on itself in a reversed version of the big bang. His ship’s computer helped him as much as it could, filling in the numbers and the operators he needed, summing his data points and displaying graphs that made more visual sense than the numbers alone ever could. He grunted and swore as he tried to remember how it all worked, tried to recall the courses in astrophysics he’d taken back in flight school.

  It wasn’t the math that got his attention in the end, though. It was one of those long, long bolts of lightning, dazzlingly bright. It lit up the inside of one of the storms, showed him an incredible sweep of cloudscape, of fantastical forms and incredible shapes and—there.

  Right there.

  Lanoe twisted his mouth over to one side.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked himself.

  Maggs touched some virtual keys and the flowglas of the dome rippled. The neddy placed one hand on the dome, as if testing its ductility, then pushed his way through, the flowglas parting around him while maintaining a perfect seal so that the air inside the yacht didn’t even stir. The neddy dropped to the floor on one knee, then carefully rose to stand at attention.

  “This is Hollander,” Bullam said. “Fix him a drink, will you?”

  “Grog, or straight-up rum? We’re feeling Naval tonight,” Maggs said, striding over to the yacht’s bar. He wondered why his hostess had invited a neddy to this little party. At exactly the worst possible time. “Did you need something repaired, M. Bullam?”

  “Engineer Hollander isn’t your typical neddy,” Bullam said. She rose stiffly to her feet, then walked over to hold out a hand. The neddy stared at it for a moment as if unsure what tool to use on it. Then he shook it, like a normal person.

  “Is it … you know? Okay to speak?” Hollander asked.

  Oh, by the devil’s bunions, Maggs thought. He’s a Hadean. Hades had be
en one of the first human colonies outside the solar system, which meant that the people there had had time to develop their own accent—a mélange of a dozen Earth dialects—and their own mannerisms. Maggs, as a rule, was not a fan of either.

  “If Lieutenant Maggs wasn’t suspicious of you before,” Bullam said, “he certainly is now. It’s perfectly fine—we’re all in this together.”

  Hollander nodded meaningfully at her use of the Centrocor motto. “A friend, then,” he announced, and grabbed Maggs up in a bear hug.

  Maggs held his breath and waited until it was over. Again, mannerisms, not a fan, etcetera.

  “Hollander’s not just a neddy,” Bullam said, rolling her eyes just a little. “He’s also a spy. My spy.”

  Maggs whistled in admiration. “You’ve corrupted a neddy,” he said. “Now, that’s impressive.” He looked at Hollander. “Your branch has a reputation for being reliable—and completely uninterested in politics and intrigue.”

  “Don’t forget we’re heavy thinkers, neh?” Hollander replied. “We can see where our bread’s buttered. Where’s that grog, by the way?”

  Maggs poured something citrusy into a jot of rum and shook them together in a squeeze tube. The neddy sucked at it happily before he spoke again.

  “I’ve been hard at work over at the cruiser,” he said. “Getting close to the engineer there, a fella named Paniet.”

  “Did you see it?” Bullam asked. “The AI?”

  Maggs had told Bullam about Valk and what he truly was, but for the moment the existence of an illegal artificial intelligence on Lanoe’s ship wasn’t common knowledge. If Valk’s existence became common knowledge it might turn the Centrocor contingent against Lanoe. Clearly Bullam was already working the angles.

  Hollander shook his head. “I was only allowed to see the engineering section, and didn’t feel it prudent to press for greater access. I’ve laid ground for a future jaunts over there, though. I’ll get the evidence you need, no worries.”