Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  “If these things are really airfighters, we can get an advantage on them by flying up past their ceiling,” he said. “If they can’t fly in space, well, we can—and we can pick them off from relative safety up there,” he told her.

  “I’ll inform Alpha and Beta wings,” she told him.

  The dreadnought’s shadow crept across his canopy as he rocketed up toward its belly. Smoke billowed from a dozen wounds across its skin, but the giant ship was still fighting, still belching out plasma balls at a dismaying rate. Lanoe could just make out the long, thin shapes of the destroyers as they glided past it, one above, one below, all of their guns blazing away.

  “This is more resistance than I expected,” he told Candless. “There was no sign that they detected us before we sent in the Screamer. We should have caught them flat-footed. Instead we’re outnumbered—how did they have this many ships just waiting to respond when we showed up?”

  “Terror is a great spur to action,” Candless told him. “Try to see it from their perspective—they’re facing an alien invasion, perhaps the first one they’ve ever encountered. I imagine that if one of those dreadnoughts showed up in the atmosphere of Earth, even without warning, we would scramble our defense with some alacrity.”

  Lanoe shook his head. “But they were here, ready to go, the second we arrived. It doesn’t—”

  “Commander,” the Z.XIX said, “look out!”

  A plasma ball from the dreadnought came smashing down through the thin air right above him. Lanoe had to swing over to one side and burn hard to get out of the way. As the plasma blast shot past him the air inside his cockpit grew as hot as a furnace. Sweat poured down his face and his lungs ached as he inhaled superheated air. The light from the plasma ball burned his eyes and for a second he could barely see—there could have been a hundred drone airfighters right in front of him and he couldn’t have done a thing about it.

  “You’re in distress,” the fighter said. “You might want to—”

  “I know what I’m doing,” he told her, his hand squeezing the control stick until his knuckles ached. He forced himself to keep the fighter from twisting out of control. Phosphor afterimages blazed green every time he closed his eyes. When he opened them all he could see was red—the dim red of the clouds all around him.

  He pushed the stick over to one side and corkscrewed away from the dreadnought, trying not to make himself an easy target in case it loosed another shot. As his vision slowly returned, he called for Candless again. “Why isn’t that thing dead yet? We’ve got two destroyers attacking it with everything they’ve got, and two full wings of cataphracts picking away at it. How is it still flying?”

  “I’ve been running scans but there’s very little I can tell you,” Candless replied. “Maybe it’s just that heavily armored, or perhaps the Blue-Blue-White simply build their ships to be indestructible. Ehta tells me her guns will be up and running in another thirty seconds. If their ships can stand up to that much firepower—well, then we’re already dead.”

  The carrier swung and backpedaled, its pilot constantly working its maneuvering and positioning jets to keep it out of the path of the relentless barrage of plasma balls from the dreadnought. The constantly shifting gravity made Candless’s stomach churn, but she stayed focused, her eyes locked on her boards.

  “Carrier scouts,” Shulkin bellowed. “Send the carrier scouts out, now!”

  Candless didn’t feel that was prudent—the scouts lacked vector fields, which made them far more susceptible to enemy weapons than the cataphracts. More to the point, though, once they were sent out to fight, the carrier would have nothing left—no reserve of small craft at all.

  Alpha wing had been chewed to pieces by the airfighters and by stray plasma balls. Of the twenty fighters in the first wave, only eight remained, and two of those were out of the fight. One was so badly damaged it was already limping back to the carrier. The other wasn’t reporting—it was possible the pilot was dead inside the cockpit, cooked by a near miss from a plasma ball, and the cataphract was running on autopilot.

  Beta wing had acquitted themselves a little better. Once they realized that Lanoe was right, that they could simply climb out of the atmosphere and escape the airfighters, they’d actually started to fight. They’d quickly developed an effective strategy: one cataphract would dive through the battle area, luring enemy craft to follow it back up to the edge of the atmosphere, where five more human ships were waiting to carve them to pieces. The airfighters lacked any kind of armor or defensive equipment and—as might be expected from drones—they always seemed to take the bait.

  Beta wing had taken its own share of losses, however—mostly from the dreadnought. Centrocor’s pilots might have military training, but they’d never faced an enemy like this before. Three of Beta had been utterly annihilated by direct hits, their fighters literally melting around them as they died. Four more ships were damaged but still capable of fighting.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Ehta said. Candless had demanded that the marine keep a line open and that she provide constant status updates. Ehta had grumbled about it, but she knew how to follow orders in the middle of a battle. She’d been one of Lanoe’s squaddies, after all, just as Candless had. “Ten.”

  Candless nodded and opened a new tactical board, this one showing a wider scope of the battle area. When the carrier had originally approached the dreadnought, the cruiser had hung far back. Its coilguns had far better range than any other weapon Lanoe could bring to bear, so there was no need to expose it to enemy action. Valk had moved it forward slowly as the coilguns warmed up, but still the cruiser was ten kilometers from the fighting.

  Candless turned to face Shulkin. “Sir, I would recommend that the destroyers fall back. We’re about to have a lot of heavy fire coming in and I’d hate for one of them to take a stray round.”

  The carrier’s captain studied her as if he’d never seen her before. He nodded carefully, then looked away from her. “Batygins!” he shouted. “Get out of the damned way!”

  “Five,” Ehta called out. “Projectiles loaded. Target acquired. Three. Two. One.”

  Candless looked to the camera feed. The dreadnought had taken a real beating—most of its blisters had been smashed open, and a column of oily smoke leaked from its upper hull. Yet somehow it was still flying—and still shooting.

  “Lanoe,” Candless said. “The cruiser is ready.”

  “Don’t waste time telling me,” Lanoe said. “Fire at will!”

  On the tactical board eight blue dots appeared next to the cruiser. They moved so quickly they blurred as they shot past the carrier. Eight more dots appeared half a second later. Candless thought she could almost hear the shots whistling through the thin air as they hurtled toward their target.

  Candless couldn’t tell if the dreadnought’s pilot saw the projectiles coming. The giant ship moved just before impact, but there was no way to know if it was trying to evade the incoming fire.

  Either way, it didn’t matter.

  One after another, the shots tore into its thick hull. Seventy-five-centimeter high-temperature explosive shells designed to level cities smashed into it at a good fraction of the speed of light. Instantly a shroud of smoke and debris blotted it from view. Candless switched to an infrared view and saw the alien ship breaking apart. The dreadnought listed over to one side, ton after ton of debris raining from the sites of impact.

  Shulkin let out a barking laugh, a cackle of excitement. The carrier’s navigator whooped in joy.

  Candless didn’t want to be hasty. She checked her boards, running endless scans on the giant ship, making sure it had stopped firing, making sure it wasn’t simply wounded. She needn’t have bothered.

  She could have watched on the camera feed as the damned thing fell from the sky.

  There was an airfighter on his tail, but Lanoe swung around anyway to watch the dreadnought go down. His nerves sang with excitement and he barely managed to dodge as a lance of plasma rushed by him. He l
ined up a shot and blew the drone out of the sky as quickly as he could. The view was too good to miss.

  The dreadnought took its time descending. It broke into sections, each one seeming to hover under its own power. As one whole side of the giant ship fell away, he had to work fast, jets of pure ions pouring from his thrusters as he zipped back and forth, avoiding the cascade of debris. One whole blister section fell away, the white spars of its cagework twisting and pulling apart.

  No bodies. He didn’t see a single damned jellyfish falling from the wreckage. He scowled inside his helmet, where he knew no one could see him. “Ship,” he said.

  The fighter’s expert system was smart enough to know when it was being addressed. “How can I help, Commander?”

  “Scan that wreck—look for anything organic, any sign of life.”

  The computer only took a moment to comply. “I’ve found a number of traces of organic carbon compounds, but no human occupants, living or dead.”

  Lanoe bit off a curse. Of course the fighter wouldn’t know what a dead Blue-Blue-White looked like. It had never been programmed for fighting aliens—just other humans.

  They knew next to nothing about the jellyfish—nothing of their culture, nothing of how they organized their society. They could have a completely different basic chemistry from humans. Their cells could be based on silicon, or even arsenic. They could have ammonia for blood.

  Lanoe would just have to assume that some of them died when the dreadnought fell. That would have to be enough—for the moment.

  A swarm of airfighters was gathering around him, clearly intending to box him in. He didn’t bother shooting at them, just pulled back on his stick and climbed for space. He had a lot to think about.

  The destruction of the dreadnought proved that the Blue-Blue-White could be killed. Taking down a ship that size meant that the human fleet stood a chance, even against a world as huge and strange as the disk. In his head Lanoe started planning out the rest of his war for justice. They would have to start by taking one of the cities, as a base of operations and as a demonstration to the enemy that they were—

  A beam of light speared up from below, from deep in the clouds. It swept across the sky like a searchlight or a beacon. Without warning it swung toward Lanoe as if it would transfix his fighter. Irritated, he swerved off to one side. The beam tried to follow him, so he corkscrewed off to the other side. There were more beams now, three or maybe four searchlights swinging back and forth across the sky.

  He tried to ignore them. He’d proven that he could beat the Blue-Blue-White, defeat their best weapons. Now he needed to—

  “Lanoe,” Candless called. “Lanoe, the airfighters are pulling back below the clouds. I think they might be retreating. I’m not sure how to say this, but—”

  Not now, he thought, you can apologize for doubting me later. It took him a second to realize she’d stopped talking.

  There were a solid dozen of the searchlights now, streaming up out of the clouds, radiating off into space. Above him Lanoe could see one of them catch the side of one of the destroyers as it sailed past the place where the dreadnought used to be.

  The light played across the destroyer’s hull like it was hunting for something. Looking for something specific. It lit up a broad circle of hull, coloring it a dull yellow. As Lanoe watched, the spot of light shrank and started to turn red.

  “Lanoe,” Candless said, “I’m getting some reports, some radio chatter—”

  The spot of light narrowed down to a single point, a single point of glowing, ruby red. Instantly it brightened to a searing glare of light—and burned its way through the destroyer’s armor, through its equipment, through anything that got in its way, and kept going, spearing off into space, streaming onward forever.

  Red-hot slag dripped from the belly of the destroyer as the light carved it in half.

  “Lanoe,” Candless said, very carefully. But her voice was drowned out before she could say anything more.

  “Brother!” Rhys Batygin screamed. “Brother!”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The destroyer slid over to one side and then fell from the air, unable to support its weight. The searchlight flickered out—but another took its place, scanning the sky, looking for another target. It didn’t take long in finding one—it caught a cataphract from Beta wing and in a matter of seconds had reduced it to a plummeting ball of slag. Its pilot didn’t have time to scream.

  “Brother!” the surviving Batygin shouted. “Brother! I’ll come for you!”

  “Belay that,” Lanoe demanded, but clearly Rhys Batygin wasn’t listening. The remaining destroyer nosed down and burned toward the cloud layer, its many guns firing indiscriminately into the red billows.

  “Batygin—get back here,” Lanoe ordered.

  “Revise your course, you damned fool!” Shulkin insisted.

  But the destroyer stayed on course, vast plumes of red vapor swirling around it as it pushed into the clouds. In a moment all Lanoe could see was the occasional flash of light from below, as the destroyer fired off one of its heavy PBW cannons.

  “Candless,” Lanoe said, “they’re using some kind of laser—”

  “Yes, thank you, I saw it,” she replied. He could hear the tension in her voice.

  “I didn’t think that was possible,” Lanoe said. Laser weapons were supposed to be impractical because of the amount of power they needed to be lethal. “They taught us that back at flight school, remember?”

  “On behalf of teachers everywhere, I apologize for that misinformation. But, sir—we need to recall all of our vehicles this instant. And we need to retreat.”

  “What?” Lanoe said. “Retreat? We can’t retreat, not now. We’re winning.”

  Even as he said it he realized how foolish it sounded.

  This new weapon had changed everything. Vector fields couldn’t stop the lasers. They ate through armor without slowing down. Nothing Lanoe had could resist the energy being pumped through those lasers.

  Which left only one option. “Forget what I just said,” he told Candless. “Recall all the fighters. Get the ships out of here—our only chance is to move fast, make ourselves bad targets. I’m giving you control of the fleet—keep our people alive. I’ll need them later.”

  “Sir?” she called. “Lanoe? What are you talking about? Where are you going?”

  Lanoe didn’t bother to answer. She could track him on her tactical board. He pushed his control stick forward and dove for the clouds, chasing the destroyer.

  The marines on the cruiser—the gun crews that took down the dreadnought—were still whooping with excitement when the signal for new orders came in. Ehta lifted one hand for quiet, thinking she was about to get a new target, that she would need to get her people moving and motivated again. “Go ahead—we’re ready to fire on your command.”

  She’d also expected that it would be Lanoe who’d called her. Instead it was Candless. “Have your people stand down and report to their bunks. We’re in for some heavy maneuvering.”

  “Understood,” Ehta said. “But—why?”

  “I have a lot more important things to do just now than explain. I want you with Valk. I need someone monitoring him at all times.”

  Candless cut the connection without another word. Ehta, deeply confused, turned and looked at her people. “All right, marines,” she said, “passable job there, killing the biggest ship anybody ever saw. Passable indeed!”

  That got her a cheer and a few laughs.

  “Now, get someplace safe. We’re moving again. Gutierrez, you’re in charge of tucking everybody in.”

  The cruiser was already moving by then, in a new direction. Ehta didn’t even bother worrying about which way was up or down. She flipped into the axial corridor, intending to head straight to Valk. But then she stopped.

  She had another chance now. She could go down to the brig. Free Ginger from the chorister. This might be the perfect time—there wouldn’t be any guards on the alien’s cell.
>
  No one would know.

  For a long, bad moment, she hesitated. She thought about what it would mean, about what it might change. She thought about never going home again.

  She thought about the promise she’d made.

  She hesitated—and then she sighed in frustration. Not now, she thought. I can’t do it now.

  She spared one last glance downward, toward the brig. Wasted some mental energy hating herself. Then she started up the ladder, headed for the wardroom. When she arrived she found Valk motionless and dead to the world. As soon as she set foot in his domain, though, displays started opening all around her.

  What she saw made her forget all about Ginger.

  “Hellfire,” she said, watching the displays. She saw a cataphract-class fighter reduced to molten metal in the space of a few heartbeats. “Lasers?”

  “Lasers,” Valk confirmed.

  “Devil’s kneecaps,” Ehta swore. She found a seat and strapped herself in, knowing that if Valk needed to dodge lasers he was going to be making some very dicey maneuvers.

  On the displays two more cataphracts were caught by the searchbeams. Ehta winced—it wasn’t that long ago she would have been flying one of those crates. Cataphract pilots prided themselves on being able to dodge just about anything their vector fields couldn’t shrug off—but you couldn’t dodge a weapon like this.

  “They got one of the destroyers,” Valk said. “Since then they’ve been shooting down fighters, but it’s just a matter of time before they remember what we did to their dreadnought.”

  Ehta’s blood ran cold. “How many hits can we take from one of those?”

  “Depends where they hit us. Two, maybe three,” Valk said. “The carrier will do a little better, but if we don’t retreat right now this could be one of history’s shorter wars.”

  Another display came up, this one showing the interior of the carrier’s flight deck. Cataphracts were streaming in, two and then three at a time—as risky as hell, all of them crowding in together like that, inviting collisions. Especially when the carrier was moving. The alternative was worse, though—Ehta saw one fighter get blasted just half a kilometer from the carrier’s maw.