Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  She kicked off a wall and glided over the barrel of one of the guns, to where the maintenance crews were stationed. Gutierrez and Binah were sitting against a wall, straps pulled across their chests to keep them from floating away. They’d been chatting, laughing at some shared joke, and she smiled as she approached, thinking she would butt in and make them tell her what was so funny. But their faces fell when they saw her and they composed themselves like proper PBMs. Eyes straight forward, mouths closed, hands folded in front of them. Sitting at attention, as best they could.

  They were freezing her out. Well, of course they were. She was a major now. You didn’t fraternize with your major. They could make too much trouble for you if you said or did the wrong thing.

  She felt suddenly, crushingly lonely. She couldn’t let them see it, though. So she frowned and nodded at the two of them, and tried to make it look like she was just passing by, that she’d just noticed them there.

  “Relax,” she said. She realized how long her people had been on duty—since before they launched the Screamer. “Get some sleep, if you can. Or pop a caff, if you have one.”

  “Ma’am,” Gutierrez said. Binah just nodded.

  Ehta kicked her way onward, past the loading crews. She needed a breath of air that didn’t stink of gun lubricant. At the hatch that led to the axial corridor, she pushed herself up against a wall and slapped the release. For a while she just hung there, one hand twisted through a nylon loop mounted on the wall. Weightless and, for the moment, without a thought in her head.

  It couldn’t last, of course. Her wrist display lit up and she had to look at it. Just Valk telling her that they were one minute away from the dreadnought’s closest approach.

  “Thanks for the update,” she told him.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I was being sarcastic.” She shook her head. “How you holding up, big guy?”

  “I’m … fine,” Valk told her. “A little worried.”

  Ehta snorted in derision. “I’ll bet. Show me a picture of the dreadnought, will you? I just want to see what it looks like.”

  “That’s actually kind of interesting, now you mention it,” Valk said, bringing up an image on her wrist. “Look at where the blisters are on this one.”

  Ehta squinted at the image. She saw the big, pitted hull, the places where cagework stuck out from the corners. Six big weapon pits. None of them glowing, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  “It’s an alien ship. I have no idea what I’m looking at,” she told Valk. “Kind of by definition, you know?”

  “The blisters are in different places from the first one of these we saw. Back in the disk, remember?” Valk didn’t sigh, but she could sense his frustration. He brought up a second image, one that showed the dreadnought she’d shot down, back in red-cloud land. She gave it just a cursory glance, but that was enough to show he was right. The one chasing them now had two more blisters than the first one, and all of the blisters were in different locations.

  “Huh,” she said, unsure what that meant.

  “When humans build ships, they make them look as close to identical to one another as possible,” Valk said. “There are good reasons for that. It lets you build them cheaper and easier, for one, because you can crank them out on an assembly line. The Blue-Blue-White don’t seem to have figured that out. Or maybe they have a completely different method for building their ships.”

  “Valk, buddy, this is fascinating, but—”

  “In fact, I’m not sure that ‘build’ is the right word at all. Look at the hull of the dreadnought.” The image on her display enlarged until she could see the texture of the ship’s skin. There were a lot more pits than she’d thought—in fact, the hull looked almost like a sponge, riddled with holes. As the image continued to expand Ehta saw that it didn’t stop, that the dreadnought’s hull was pitted to an almost fractal degree.

  “What does this look like to you?” Valk asked.

  “I don’t know. A nice piece of sponge cake?” Ehta tried. It had been a long time since she’d had any food that she didn’t suck out of a tube.

  “Coral,” Valk said. “It looks like coral. I mean, doesn’t it? The whole ship looks like some kind of coral reef. I don’t think the dreadnoughts were built at all, I think they were grown. Isn’t that kind of amazing?”

  “Sure,” Ehta said. She reached down deep inside herself, looking for that tiny shred of her soul that cared. She couldn’t find it. “Valk,” she said. “Just, you know, put that aside for a second. Can you tell me something?”

  “What’s that?”

  “How long until closest approach now?” she asked.

  “About four seconds ago,” he said.

  She fought the urge to call him names. She fought the urge to scream at him. “Does it look like the dreadnought saw us?” she asked, as carefully and politely as she could manage.

  “Not so far. I would have told you, obviously.”

  “If you would like any advice,” Shulkin whispered, “I’d be happy to provide it. For instance, I could teach you how wars are fought.” He seemed to have woken up, and was actually quite lucid for once—he’d even caught on to the fact that everyone was keeping their voices down, which was nice. “It’s all about projection of force, you see, by various means.”

  Candless ignored him. She’d already shown the bridge crew who was in charge, and nobody else could hear him. She had no desire to shoot him again.

  “You seem not to understand that the basic principle is to engage the enemy, not hide and hope he doesn’t see you,” Shulkin added.

  Well, perhaps she had some small desire to shoot him again. He was, however, the captain of the carrier. Lanoe had made it quite clear that he was to remain in command—at least nominally—mostly so the Centrocor contingent would feel they weren’t prisoners of war.

  “Thank you for your offer, sir. But perhaps we can continue this lesson another time,” she told him. She pushed off her chair and moved to the IO’s position. “Show me the state of play,” she said.

  She could just as easily have called up a tactical board and analyzed it herself. This wasn’t a particularly complicated theater of battle. It was always good to get another pair of eyes on things, though.

  “The dreadnoughts are here, here, and here,” the IO said, pointing at a display. Two of them were millions of kilometers away. No real threat there. The one that had just passed by the cruiser, though, was still far too close for comfort. “We’re here, and the cruiser is … there. I think.” Too far away for the carrier to come racing to its rescue, if things got hot. Close enough that they could still maintain good communications by laser.

  “Is there anything else moving out here?” It had occurred to her that the Blue-Blue-White might have other ships in the volume of space around the disk. They wouldn’t even have to be military craft—mining ships working the system’s asteroids, or space telescopes, or who knew what might be out there, nearly as invisible as they were, but watching for them. Assisting the dragnet.

  “I thought of that,” the IO said, nodding. “The answer, surprisingly, is no. I don’t see any sign that the Blue-Blue-White have assets in near space. No orbiting factories, no solar power satellites, no habitats.”

  “Odd,” Candless said. “You’d think an advanced civilization would have all kinds of things in orbit. I suppose we can add this to the pile of mysteries we’ve already been stacking up.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ve been monitoring the disk as well, looking for any sign that they’re launching reinforcements, or refueling tenders, anything like that. It’s been quiet, though. Nothing’s left the atmosphere since we retreated.”

  Candless nodded. Perhaps—perhaps her strategy was working. She tried to imagine it from the enemy’s perspective. Maybe the Blue-Blue-White thought the alien invaders had simply shown up in their system to blow up a few aircraft and one of their big dreadnoughts, then run away to whence they’d come. They must suspect there wo
uld be further attacks, but in the absence of any sign of the human ships, how long could they stay vigilant?

  “Keep me updated. Constantly and thoroughly,” she told the IO. “I’m going to get something to eat, and check on the rest of the crew.”

  “Ma’am,” he said.

  She nodded and started to push away from his position. She was still in the process of kicking away, however, when she heard him give a little grunt of surprise.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “It’s … nothing, ma’am. There was just a little flash of light in the disk’s upper atmosphere. Probably just ball lightning or something. If I hadn’t had my telescopes trained on that particular spot, I wouldn’t have noticed.”

  Candless pursed her lips. “A flash of light,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s … it’s … oh. There it is again.”

  Candless pulled herself closer to his display. She didn’t ask for permission before swiping the image to magnify the view. The flash was little more than a blob of light on a single frame of the video feed. “The lightning we’ve seen before didn’t look like that. It was far more dramatic.”

  “Yes, ma’am. This might just be an auroral discharge—like the northern lights on Earth. Interesting, though, that it’s so localized. And its color is weird, too. It’s not showing up on my visible light telescope at all.” He played with the display’s filters and the blob of light vanished—then came back in an intense, buzzing purple. “Just the near ultraviolet.”

  Candless summoned a virtual keyboard and ran a few transforms on the image. As the IO had said, this was probably nothing, just a random fluctuation of electrons in the disk’s atmosphere. The fact that it was so specifically located in the ultraviolet portion of the visual spectrum bothered her, however. Natural light should be spread out across multiple wavelengths. There was also the fact that she knew the Blue-Blue-White could see some ultraviolet frequencies, and that distinctly worried her. If this were some sign of an enemy ship rising through the clouds, headed for space …“Dedicate one of your telescopes to this,” she said. “I want a better idea of what this—”

  She stopped because the IO had just whispered a particularly shocking profanity. “Ma’am, it’s a laser.”

  Candless’s heart stopped beating. She swallowed all the saliva in her mouth before she spoke. “IO, please tell me what you mean by that.”

  “It’s not—I mean, it’s not one of their weaponized lasers, those were tuned to be bright red so they could punch through the clouds. It’s a very low-power laser, too—about as strong as one of our communications lasers. It’s not going to cut us to pieces.”

  “Understood,” she said.

  “But look—you can see in this image, you can definitely see that it’s a beam.” On the display the blob of light had stretched out, grown thin. It looked like a purple line drawn across the clouds. “And it’s sweeping.” The IO ran the video forward. The beam rotated around the red cloudscape, as if it were drawing a circle in the sky.

  A searchbeam, Candless thought. The Blue-Blue-White’s dreadnoughts had failed to find the invading fleet, so now they were using one of their laser batteries to scan the darkness. If that laser so much as touched the cruiser or the carrier, whatever jellyfish was operating it could get a fix on their position. They could pass that information on to the dreadnoughts, and then—

  Candless stabbed at her wrist display, calling Valk. “We might have a situation here,” she said. She broke it down for him as quickly as she could.

  “Understood. You said it was an ultraviolet laser?” he asked.

  “Yes, that’s right, it’s about …” She snapped her fingers at the IO. “What’s its wavelength?”

  “Three hundred and five nanometers,” the IO told her.

  “Three hundred and five,” she repeated. Wait. Three hundred and five. Three zero five.

  “That’s weird,” Valk said. “A laser that color would get absorbed by the clouds down there pretty fast. If they really wanted to search for us with a collimated beam, they should use something with twice that wavelength, and—”

  “It’s not them,” Candless said.

  Valk said nothing. The IO looked up at her expectantly.

  “It’s not the Blue-Blue-White,” Candless said. “Three hundred and five. As in the 305th Fighter Wing. It can’t be a coincidence.”

  The IO looked very confused. “Ma’am? I beg your pardon, but I’ve never even heard of a 305th Fighter Wing. Is it a Navy unit?”

  “It was. You haven’t heard of it because it was disbanded after the Brushfire. Once upon a time, though, it was quite the distinguished unit. It should have been—Lanoe and I were both assigned to it.”

  “Wait. You’re saying you think that’s Lanoe down there,” Valk said.

  “I’m sure of it,” she told him.

  Damn him. Damn Lanoe—he had to be alive, didn’t he? He had to have survived alone in an alien world. And now he was going to get them all killed.

  The minutes dragged on, with no word from Valk. Ehta moved around the gun deck trying to keep her people’s spirits up, trying to keep them focused. Just trying to keep them awake. After a while she called in the maintenance crews and had them check the long barrels of the coilguns. They were known to be finicky—even a tiny fault in the coils could cause a gun to fail to fire—but mostly she just wanted to give them something to do. They didn’t seem to mind much. Hard work was better than sitting around waiting to hear if they were going to die.

  Eventually even she couldn’t stand it anymore. She called Valk and asked for an update.

  “The dreadnought passed us by,” he said. “It didn’t deviate from its course at all. We’re well out of the range of its plasma ball guns now.”

  Ehta gritted her teeth. “So my people can stand down?”

  “For the moment,” he told her. “Keep them ready, though. If they stick to the search pattern they’ve established, another one of those ships will pass near us in six hours.”

  Ehta shook her head in disbelief. “Six hours. Six more hours. How long is this going to go on?” she asked him. “How long are we going to have to stay on standby?”

  “Until Candless says otherwise,” he said. At least he sounded a little apologetic.

  “Damn that woman,” Ehta said. “Ice wouldn’t melt in her mouth, would it? She’s got us all sweating down here, waiting for—I don’t even know what. To get killed, maybe, or maybe she’ll just call over at some point and say everything’s fine. Well, to hell with her. I’m going to let my crews get some sleep.”

  “Good idea. They’ll need to be fresh the next time.”

  “Six hours from now,” Ehta said. “Fine.” She cut the connection, then waved one hand in the air for attention. Some of the marines actually looked up. Gutierrez moved from crew to crew, shaking people, kicking them if they didn’t get the point.

  “Boss lady wants a word,” the corporal said.

  “We’re clear,” Ehta shouted. There was no cheering this time, nor any grumbling. Her people had been pushed past their breaking point. They were still capable of work, but just barely. “Everybody find some place to curl up, get some sleep. You have five hours.” When the time came she would have to fight to get them moving again, she knew. Best to schedule herself a good hour just to wake them all up. “I’m going to organize some food, if anybody wants it. And maybe we can get a video to watch if—”

  She stopped because a green pearl had appeared in the corner of her vision. She was receiving a call. The jolt of adrenaline that it gave her surprised her—she’d thought she was past being scared. If Valk had some new bad news, though, if they needed to go to full alert—

  Then she saw it wasn’t Valk calling her. It was Bury, of all people.

  She waved at her troops and they started moving, sluggishly shifting around to find somewhere they could strap themselves down for sleep. None of them seemed to care about the food or entertainment she’d offered.

&
nbsp; She headed out into the axial corridor before she answered Bury’s call. The little bastard could wait, she thought. When she did answer, she growled at him. “What is it?” she demanded. “You know we’re supposed to keep communications to a minimum.”

  The kid at least looked ashamed of himself. “I’m sorry. I really am. I just—it’s been a long time since I checked on Ginger. I can’t get over there myself but somebody needs to make sure she’s okay.”

  “She’s not okay, kid,” Ehta said, because she was too tired for anything but the truth. “She’s not going to get okay, not as long as she’s chained to our pet alien. You’d better get used to it.”

  Bury couldn’t meet her gaze. “She means something to me. Not—not like that, I know what you’re thinking. We’re just friends, but—good friends. We were classmates, and, and—”

  “Squaddies,” Ehta said, softening just a little. “The two of you were squaddies once. I know what that means. Look, nobody’s going to let her get hurt. We need her to talk to Rain-on-Stones, and we need Rain-on-Stones if we ever want to go home. So Valk is watching her round the clock. You should have called him if you wanted an update. But don’t. Don’t do that, because you are not supposed to be making unnecessary calls between ships.”

  “I get that. I just thought—I mean.” Bury shook his head. “I thought maybe you cared about her, too. It looked like you cared about her. When she had that seizure, and … it looked like you cared. Maybe I was wrong.”

  Ehta rolled her eyes. “No. You weren’t wrong.” She couldn’t very well tell him that she’d been thinking about Ginger, probably as much as he had. That she’d been trying to steel herself to go into the brig and kill Rain-on-Stones. She couldn’t tell him, because she’d lost her nerve. Because she knew she couldn’t do it.

  “Then you’ll go check on her for me?” Bury asked.

  “What?”

  It was the last thing Ehta wanted to do. Going in there meant making it very clear to Ginger that the help she’d asked for wasn’t coming. It meant Ehta admitting that she was a coward, that she was too afraid of being stuck in the wrong part of the galaxy to do the right thing.