Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  There was no air in the flight deck, and no sound. Yet when he put his hands on a machine or found a foothold in his climb, he could feel a deep and unsettling vibration rattle through him. The carrier shouldn’t be accelerating, not when it was so badly damaged. It should, honestly, be towed to the nearest drydock for emergency repairs. Sadly, the nearest drydock—and for that matter, the nearest tug—was ten thousand light-years away, and the carrier could hardly switch off its engines while it was still being pursued by a million tons of alien metal.

  Studying the wreckage, Paniet wasn’t even sure how to proceed. He could hack off the damaged section of the flight deck, just as he’d cut the nose off the cruiser. Yet by doing so he would basically make the carrier useless for any kind of combat operation—its whole reason for existence was to provide a mobile launching platform for the rows of fighter craft, and without a flight deck those small ships wouldn’t have a home. He could try to reinforce the hull with spars and braces, but that would interfere with the ability of the fighters to get in and out. It was a depressing mess of a problem, and as much as he hated to admit it, it might be beyond his abilities.

  As he pondered it, he slowly became aware that he wasn’t alone in the cavernous deck. A group of people in suits were moving around up near the front of the carrier, where it was open to space. He climbed hurriedly up, thinking perhaps some disgruntled pilots were up to mischief.

  Instead he found a group of his own people—neddies—poking and prodding at some of the worst of the damage. As he approached he saw the hexagons on their shoulders and realized it was the carrier’s own crew of engineers. He hadn’t realized they’d already been dispatched.

  “Having any luck, darlings?” he asked.

  One of them reared her head and swung around as if Paniet had given her the shock of her life. Through her helmet he could see her wide eyes and pale face. A welding pen spun out from her hand and went bouncing down through the long deck, smacking against the canopy of an undamaged fighter on its way.

  “We’re, uh—we’re trying to—” she stammered out.

  Paniet barely heard her. He’d seen someone else—and gotten a wonderful surprise. “Hollander!” he said, and rushed forward to embrace the Hadean engineer.

  “Right, right, it’s me,” Hollander said, laughing.

  “I thought you were dead!” Paniet said, then instantly regretted it. “Your destroyer, it was—”

  “Gutted like a fish, by that laser,” Hollander said, nodding. His face fell. “And the crew inside it.”

  Paniet realized he was still holding the man. He pulled his arms away, as casually as he could. “It’s a miracle,” he said. “How did you—”

  “Well, I wasn’t on her when she went down, of course. For which you have my thanks, to be honest. I was here on the carrier, working on the Screamer, and then the battle started so quickly I never had a chance to join my mates. Maybe if I had been, if I’d been there—”

  “There’s nothing you could have done,” Paniet said. He could understand how the man felt, a little. Certainly Paniet had lost squaddies before, and marines he held dear—he was no stranger to survivor’s guilt. Yet he was so happy to find his friend alive he couldn’t keep a smile off his face.

  Hollander shook his head. “I’ve been at a loss, since, with no one to give me orders.” He laughed, but Paniet could hear the sorrow in it. “Just fell in with this batch, doing what we can.”

  Paniet glanced at the damaged hull section the crew had been working on. Bundles of cables hung limp from sheared-off conduit sections. Whatever they were trying to do, it was pointless—this whole section had lost power. “Let’s get you away from here, figure out what you’re going to do next,” he told Hollander. “As for the rest of you—forget this section. We’ve got much more pressing concerns. You, dearie,” he said, pointing at the woman he’d startled. “You’re in charge of this bunch? I want you down at the rupture, there. We need to get a foamsteel sprayer up here and fill in that hole.”

  “Of course, sir,” the woman said. She glanced at one of her people but he just shrugged. The crew dispersed, headed back down the deck, leaving Paniet and Hollander alone.

  “You’re going to need a new bunk,” Paniet said, putting a hand on Hollander’s shoulder. “We’ll find you something on the cruiser. Between us, I’m worried this hulk might fall apart in a stiff breeze.”

  “If you like,” Hollander said, nodding eagerly.

  “I’m so glad I found you, ducky,” Paniet said. “In all this chaos, I suppose we should cling to what remains, as best we can.”

  “Definitely,” Hollander told him. “Definitely.”

  Candless stared at the tactical board until her eyes lost their focus. She forced herself to blink.

  Six hours since they’d left the disk’s atmosphere, and still the dreadnoughts were following them. They’d expanded their lead to nearly ten million kilometers, but the jellyfish gave no sign they would abandon their pursuit. “M. Valk,” she said.

  “Here.”

  “Might I inquire how your engines are faring?”

  The AI replied instantly. He didn’t need to check a display—he was so deeply integrated with the cruiser now he could probably feel the thruster cones deteriorating. “They’re definitely softening up. I’d rate them as good for another three hours before we start seeing real damage.”

  “Better than the carrier’s, then,” Candless told him. “And Paniet has warned me that our hull can’t take much more of this, either. It’s time we tried something rather foolish, don’t you think?”

  “I’m ready when you are.”

  Candless nodded. “Very well. Be ready to mirror me.” She turned to the carrier’s pilot. “I would like you to make a course correction,” she said. “I want a burn from our maneuvering jets of sixteen seconds’ duration. At the end of which time, cut all power.”

  “Ma’am?” the pilot asked. “We’re barely outpacing the enemy as it is—”

  Candless silenced the woman with a fierce glare. Then she pointed at the IO. “Giles. When the engines have switched off, I want us running silent. Perfectly silent. No lights on the ship’s exterior. No radio communications. No active sensor pings. If someone on this ship needs to cough, I want them to do it quietly. Am I understood?”

  “Ma’am,” the IO said.

  “On my mark,” Candless said.

  “All personnel, all personnel,” the IO called. “Prepare for maneuvers.”

  Candless glanced one last time at the tactical board. The three dreadnoughts were just blue dots there, far enough away that they would be invisible to the naked eye. “Now,” she said. She grabbed the armrests of her chair.

  The carrier lurched sideways. The deck plates under her feet vibrated, started to shake. A nasty groan rose from the walls around her, and then she heard something snap far away, something metallic, something hopefully not very important. She saw red lights come up on the IO’s boards but she made a point of not asking what had just broken. If the carrier was going to tear itself to pieces during this maneuver, there was absolutely nothing she could do.

  It was a very long sixteen seconds. When it was over, the carrier gave one last rattling cry, and then—nothing.

  Her displays shut down, one by one. Her tactical board went last, but when it was gone she couldn’t see what was happening, couldn’t tell if her trick had worked.

  “IO,” she said, “give me something. A telescope feed. Anything.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the IO said, and bent over his console.

  In the sudden quiet Candless found it difficult to breathe. She forced herself to stay calm.

  It was a very old trick that she’d pulled. One that sometimes actually worked. As long as the carrier’s thrusters were burning, they had been a beacon for the dreadnoughts to follow—a signpost that could be read by anyone in the system who happened to be looking. With the engines switched off, the carrier became all but invisible in the depths of space. The
dreadnoughts could, of course, simply extrapolate their course from their last known location. The last-minute burn of the maneuvering jets, however, had sent the carrier moving on a whole new trajectory.

  With any luck—no, scratch that, with an extraordinary amount of luck—the dreadnoughts would continue on their prior course and fly right past the carrier.

  It would take some time to discover if the ruse had actually worked. In the meantime, all Candless could do was wait. And hope.

  “Candless?” Valk’s voice in her ear startled her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m calling you via communications laser. There’s no way for them to hear us.”

  “We should keep chatter to a minimum anyway,” Candless told him. “Just on principle.” And because the last thing she needed just then was an AI blathering in her ear.

  “Understood. I just need to know one thing. Lanoe’s still out there.”

  “If he’s still alive,” Candless said.

  “Right. If he is. And if he’s trying to get back to us, to come home, with all our lights turned out how’s he going to find us?”

  Candless sighed. She had considered that. “He’s Aleister Lanoe,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll find a way.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lanoe was surprised he was still alive. As soon as he took out the laser emplacements he’d assumed a wing of drone airfighters would come swarming down on him, hot for his blood. Or perhaps a ship even bigger than one of those dreadnoughts would surface from the murky clouds below him, giant guns blazing away at this tiny new threat.

  None of that happened.

  He’d been ignored. Unmolested. He’d crept away, craning his head this way then that, looking for any sign of pursuit and finding none. He knew he wasn’t invisible. He was pretty sure that if he rose above the city, punched for the sky and the void beyond, he would be picked up on some sensor somewhere and he would be attacked—the Blue-Blue-White had responded with surprising speed when the Screamer entered their atmosphere, and he guessed they had an elaborate network of early warning systems up there, above the clouds. But it seemed as long as he stayed below, inside the precincts of the giant city, he was safe. He decided the best chance he had was to fly out of the city and deeper into the clouds before he tried to make a break for space. It wasn’t much of a plan—he was banking everything on the fact that so far he’d been left alone. Yet at least for the moment, it seemed to be working.

  “Like a beetle in an anthill,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that,” the fighter replied.

  Lanoe watched a pylon go by, an impossibly long white bone of this skeletal place. It was pierced with windows, but nothing moved behind them.

  “If a beetle attacks an anthill, looking for food, the soldier ants will swarm it, tear it to pieces. They have to defend their queen. But if somehow the beetle gets inside the anthill, the ants will leave it alone. They literally can’t imagine an enemy inside their ordered society, so they can’t defend against it. The beetle can steal their food, eat their eggs, do whatever it wants—the ants assume the beetle is just another ant, and so they never question what it’s doing.”

  After a while he opened his throttle a little and soared off through the city, alone and unchallenged.

  If it even was a city. He’d just assumed that such a large structure had to be inhabited. Yet he’d been flying for hours now and hadn’t seen any sign of occupation in the jungle of white pylons. He hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of a jellyfish floating between the long, bony structures, nor any other sign of life.

  Just the endless, endlessly varied tangle of white pylons. He tried to study them as he drifted through, tried to make sense of the textures and shapes he saw built up on their surfaces. He couldn’t comprehend any of it—it was just too foreign to his experience. Too alien, in other words.

  Maybe this place wasn’t a city after all. Maybe it was some incredibly vast, incredibly complex piece of machinery. A vast computer, or some piece of ancient terraforming equipment left over from when the Blue-Blue-White built the disk. Maybe it was … Lanoe didn’t know, a park of some kind? Or a graveyard. That might explain why it was so empty, so desolate.

  Then he caught a flash of movement, and he saw the place wasn’t as abandoned as he’d thought.

  Up ahead he saw a place where seven pylons came together in a single joint, a swollen white node on the endlessly branching network. Even from kilometers away he could see movement there, a kind of shifting, coruscating light. The enhanced optics of the fighter included an edge recognition algorithm, and it highlighted the sharp angles of the node, but also some much smaller, much more delicate curves, curves that were in constant flux.

  He had no idea what it could mean. Even at that range he would have been able to tell if it had been a welcoming party of Blue-Blue-White readying another laser battery. It wasn’t that. As he drew closer he brought up a weapons board, just in case. “Can you give me a magnified view?” he asked.

  “Of course,” the fighter’s voice said. She brought up a subdisplay and laid it over the forward view.

  Lanoe half expected to find that the motion was nothing special, just the churn of some giant machine spinning its gears.

  Instead he found life. Teeming life.

  The node was thick with striped legs. Countless animals that stirred languidly, moving an appendage now and again, lifting away from the bonelike node and then falling back again. Creatures with no bodies, no heads—just clusters of legs like rubbery starfish. Jagged stripes in black and white ran up and down each sinuous, tentacular limb, which ended in a smaller cluster of even more delicate members.

  Lanoe had seen something like them before. At Niraya, he’d fought the drones of the Blue-Blue-White. The worker drones of the fleet had looked much like these, but with one exception—the workers had obviously been machines, built of metal and bundles of wire. These creatures were made of flesh—squirming, rippling flesh.

  Maybe the worker drones had been designed to look just like these things. Maybe these were some slave race bound to service by the Blue-Blue-White. Maybe they were just parasites that lived off the substance of the pylons.

  So many questions, and no way to answer any of them.

  Lanoe didn’t stop to take a closer look. So far the animals on the node had given no indication that they’d seen him—they didn’t appear to even have any eyes—but he didn’t want to wander too near and give them a chance to jump on his fighter, or raise an alarm, or … whatever they might do. He goosed his throttle a little and moved on.

  As he passed by he saw several dozen of them break from the heap and go running along the top of one of the pylons, their many legs rippling, their stripes a welter of light and shadow. They looked surprisingly like greyhounds as they rushed along, legs flashing beneath them.

  He didn’t stick around to see where they were going.

  Lanoe had heard nothing from his people since he’d entered the clouds. He assumed there was some feature of the disk’s thick atmosphere that blocked radio signals. His communications laser was useless down there, too—he couldn’t see where to aim it, if it was even strong enough to punch through all that murk. He had to assume that Candless had gotten his people to safety, that they were regrouping and preparing for the next raid on the disk.

  Assuming he’d gotten to the laser battery in time. Assuming any human ships had survived. He could be all alone in the disk, the only human for ten thousand light-years.

  “Best not to think like that,” the fighter’s voice told him. “Your mental hygiene could suffer.”

  He frowned, uncertain of what was going on. He was pretty certain he hadn’t been thinking aloud just then. “Did you just … read my mind?” he asked.

  “Commander?” the fighter asked. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understand.”

  “Just now—you—” Lanoe shook his head. “I thought you said something.”

  “I’m happy to repeat it.
I said, ‘Commander? I’m sorry, but I—’”

  “No, before that,” Lanoe said. He grunted in frustration. “Never mind.”

  “Okay,” the synthesized voice said. Just acknowledging his command.

  He tried to put it out of his mind. He tried focusing on the city around him—on learning more about the Blue-Blue-White. Anything he saw here might be useful later, when he came back in force to pursue his war against the jellyfish. If he could spot some kind of weakness of the city, some vital piece of machinery, it could make all the difference.

  The problem was, he understood almost nothing of what he saw. The pylons were complex and elaborately sculpted, but not in any way that looked familiar to human eyes. Spars stuck up at seemingly random angles. The pylons were cut open in various places, creating windows or maybe doors, but the openings were far too small to be used by a twenty-five-meter-wide jellyfish. Maybe they were designed to be used by the hounds he’d seen, the many-legged striped creatures, but he never saw one of them climbing in or out of one of the portals.

  He didn’t even understand how the city worked—how it kept itself from falling out of the sky. It was so big, and must be unbelievably heavy, yet it seemed to float perfectly motionless in the atmosphere with nothing to prop it up. The winds of the disk blew incredibly fierce—hundreds of kilometers an hour—yet the city didn’t sway or bob.

  Maybe all those pylons were hollow. Maybe they were filled with some kind of buoyant gas. Or maybe the Blue-Blue-White had invented some machine that could counteract the force of gravity.

  A mystery in a sky full of them. Lanoe passed under one pylon that was swollen and banded like a giant’s rib cage, the white material of its surface wrapped tight around some kind of internal structure. The whole thing throbbed mightily like a heart the size of a human city. Lanoe could feel the vibrations coming right through his canopy, pounding on his own chest like a drum. He flew on.