Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  “Captain Candless,” someone said. It sounded like they were standing next to her, tapping her on the shoulder.

  What now? “Present,” she said.

  “I, uh, thought you might like some help.”

  She turned her head, as if she would see who it was. In point of fact, she did see them. Uhl was right beside her, his fighter almost touching the tips of her airfoils, his cataphract streaking along at exactly the same velocity as her own. He gave her a polite wave.

  “I’m afraid I’m beyond needing cover,” she said. She sketched out—briefly—her situation, and saw his face drain of blood.

  “Then how about a ride?” he asked.

  What he had in mind was ridiculous. Beyond foolish. As a flight instructor, it was exactly the kind of thing she had taught her pupils to never, ever do.

  It wasn’t as if she had any better ideas, though.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m much obliged.”

  Then—as there was very little time left—she reached for a key recessed into the console before her. The key that would bring down her canopy. The Yk.64 had a large dome cockpit, the pilot sitting in almost a full bubble of flowglas. As it receded into the small craft’s fairings, Candless felt as if she were being thrown forward into the hard vacuum of space. Suddenly she wasn’t flying an advanced machine, but hurtling along on a narrow seat, completely at the mercy of the void.

  “Hold yourself steady, please,” she called. Then she trigged the quick-release on her straps and simultaneously threw herself sideways, out of the seat, out of her fighter altogether. Uhl held their velocities perfectly, exactly even—otherwise she would have sliced herself in half on one of his airfoils. As it was she collided painfully with the leading edge of one of them, all the wind puffing out of her lungs and clouding her helmet with condensation.

  It took every bit of strength she had to clamber up onto the airfoil. She got her fingers wrapped around a handhold on one of his fairings. It wasn’t much to hold on to—it was designed to help the pilot climb into his cockpit when it was sitting motionless in a docking cradle. It was better than nothing. She flicked her eyes across the tiny display built into her collar ring and the fingers of her gloves locked into place, forming a far stronger grip than mere human muscles could manage.

  Would it be enough? There was only one way to find out.

  “I’m as secure as I’m going to get,” she told Uhl. “Go!”

  Plasma balls were incoming. Her damaged fighter streaked past them, locked into its collision course. As Uhl peeled off, veering away from the chaos, headed for the lines of fighters out at the edge of the battle area, Candless felt as if her hands were being torn from her body, as if they would come off at the wrists at any moment. G-forces pummeled her inside her suit—she lacked the protection of an inertial sink out there in the vacuum. As the fighter pulled away from the dreadnought her feet flew out behind her. She swung back and forth like a pendulum as she clung for dear life to the side of Uhl’s ship. She gritted her teeth and tried to breathe and desperately, desperately hoped she was going to live through this, that she hadn’t put herself through all this pain for nothing.

  She glanced back just in time to see her Yk.64 smash into the dreadnought’s blister. The light of the ensuing explosion was so intense that it left bright green spots swimming through her vision long after she looked away.

  “Perfect,” Lanoe called. “Perfect! Just four more of those to go!”

  Candless took a deep breath. At least, as deep a breath as her precarious position would allow.

  “Terribly sorry, Commander, but that was it for me,” she said.

  “What? What are you talking about?” Lanoe demanded. “We need to get the other four. It has to be done, Candless.”

  “Alas, not by me.” She told him where, exactly, she was, and why.

  For a long moment he was silent. She knew him well enough to know he was thinking. Planning. Scheming.

  What he came up with, however, was utter rot.

  “I’m headed in,” he said. “I’ll take the Z.XIX, finish the job myself.”

  “That means leaving the cruiser without a pilot,” she said, trying to keep a level of calm in her voice. What a fool he could be sometimes. What a damned fool! “And the fleet without a commander. It will be supremely difficult to oversee the battle when you’re right in the midst of it.”

  “I’ve done it before,” he said. “I’ll be there in two minutes. Unless you think Centrocor’s pilots can finish this before I can arrive.”

  The disdain in his voice made her cringe. The disrespect for his own pilots. Candless looked over at Uhl, and saw him looking back. Of course he’d just heard that. She mouthed an apology.

  The Centrocor pilot just shrugged.

  “Lanoe, just—one more thing,” she said. “How long before the reinforcements arrive? The Blue-Blue-White interceptors?”

  He paused for a moment, perhaps to check a display.

  “Eight minutes,” he told her.

  “Ah,” she said. “Then you should get moving, shouldn’t you?”

  The Z.XIX’s engines pulsed with life as Lanoe slid into the seat. The straps snaked forward across his chest. He tapped a recessed key and the canopy flowed up around him.

  “I’ve run a full set of preflight diagnostics,” the fighter said. “All systems look good.”

  “How many disruptors have we got?” he asked.

  “I see ten in our ammunition loadout,” she told him.

  More than enough. He released the fighter from its docking cradle and tapped the stick to send it lurching forward, out of the cruiser’s vehicle bay. In front of him, at first, he saw nothing but stars. He banked around to one side, giving the engine plenty of throttle, and there it was—the battle area. Less than a hundred kilometers away.

  On his displays it was anarchy, a welter of blue dots swarming like gnats around the elephantine shape of the dreadnought. He brought up a magnified view and saw what Candless had been able to accomplish. One blister torn open, the spars of its cagework twisted and shattered, broken white fingers gesturing in futile desperation at the sky. The other blister she’d hit was gone altogether, nothing more than a jagged crater of broken coral there now. Cracks radiated away from the site where her fighter had detonated, deep fissures in the pitted hull.

  He leaned hard on his stick and went zooming in toward the giant ship. Plasma balls were everywhere—so many they dazzled his eyes, so thick in the volume of space around the dreadnought he couldn’t look away from them. He polarized the flowglas of his canopy to protect his vision, darkening the view until the plasma balls were just bright patches of color, the dreadnought itself a pale shadow hanging in space.

  It was fine. He didn’t need to see much. There was an intact blister not too far from his position, one he could probably hit without the benefit of other cataphracts to run cover for him. He nudged his stick and hit his maneuvering jets, coming in fast in a loose corkscrew that just avoided a passing plasma ball. He felt sweat break out on his upper lip and his forehead but he ignored it.

  “Give me a firing solution,” he told the fighter. He would probably need to manually aim his disruptor, but—

  “There,” she said. Yellow crosshairs appeared right in the middle of his view, centered on the blister. As the Z.XIX swung around and around in the corkscrew, the virtual sight never moved.

  “How long until we’re in range?” he asked.

  “We already are,” she said.

  Damnation! He’d forgotten about the Philoctetes aiming algorithm the Z.XIX carried, that doubled the range of all his weapons. He’d risked his life getting this close when he didn’t even need to.

  He laughed at his own folly. Armed the disruptor. Pulled the trigger.

  The explosive round tore into the blister. Light streamed out from the dark glass interstices of the cagework. Heat and expanding gas blossomed outward as the blister burst like a lanced boil.

  Lanoe watched
it all happen, even as his hands moved as if directed by some other consciousness. His cataphract twisted away from the wreckage, dodging a plasma ball with ease. He flew out toward the formations of Alpha and Beta wings without a scratch on him.

  “See, Candless?” he said on the open channel. “That’s how it’s done.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Bury took a deep breath before he pushed through the airlock. Not because it was necessary—his helmet flowed up around his face before he was even exposed to the vacuum—but because what he was about to do was maybe the most foolish and headstrong thing he’d ever considered.

  Bury didn’t lack insight. He knew who he was, why he felt this constant need to prove himself. Most people thought his home planet was a backwater, the exact middle of nowhere, and that its people were inferior. They laughed at a Hellion’s shiny face, the lack of hair. Ever since he’d left Hel and joined the Navy, everyone had laughed at him—his classmates first, and now the crew of Lanoe’s fleet. Behind his back they mocked him constantly. He’d intended from his earliest days in flight school to show the world they were wrong. He’d worked hard to fly faster, fight harder than anyone else. To become something special, to earn the respect of his peers—so he could rub it in their smug faces.

  Hard to accomplish anything like that, though, when you were stuck on the medical list. If he was ever going to exceed prejudiced expectations, he needed to get out there and get his fifth kill. Earn his blue star.

  What he was about to do was not only against orders, it was incredibly illegal. It could get him court-martialed, or worse. If it worked, though—

  There.

  He was in the carrier’s flight deck. Starlight streamed in through a hole in the carrier’s hull where the laser had nearly bisected it. The light fell across the ranks of docking cradles, each like the exposed rib cage of some ancient fossil. Almost all of them empty now. Far up ahead, near the open maw of the carrier, he could see the Centrocor woman’s yacht, a bubble of soft light. Closer to him was the bulbous side of a troop transport, and the deconstructed pipework of a maintenance tender.

  The ships he wanted were right at the back, clustered at the bottom of the flight deck as if they were huddling there for warmth. The slender carrier scouts looked unimpressive, even in the deep shadows. Their designers had spared no effort cutting them down to as small a size as possible. They lacked almost everything you expected to see on a cataphract-class fighter: they had no airfoils, no armored fairings, no heavy weapon panels. A single PBW cannon stuck out from underneath a bare-bones cockpit. The engines were powerful but largely unshielded and unprotected, just a trio of long thruster cones sticking straight back from the pilot’s seat.

  No real pilot would ever let themselves be seen flying one of those crates. Sometimes, though, you ran out of choices in life. Sometimes, Bury thought, you took what you could get. And if he could earn his blue star while flying such a worthless piece of junk—well, the glory would be all the sweeter for it.

  He opened the canopy and slipped inside. He wasn’t very big, but the seat still felt cramped and his helmet almost touched the canopy once it flowed back over him. He looked to the controls, wondering how different this was going to be from flying a cataphract. The carrier scout was so stripped down that all of its command options fit on a single display, which lit up as soon as he was in the seat. He pulled the straps across his chest—the scout lacked the automatic straps he was used to—and took a second to focus on his heartbeat, which was thundering in his chest.

  It sounded like it was beating out time. Like it was beating out the same number, over and over. Four. Four. Four.

  What came next was going to be the hardest part, he thought. The scout was still clutched tightly in the arms of its restraining cradle. He wasn’t going anywhere until he could release those arms, and normally they could only be triggered from the carrier’s bridge by a flight control officer. The approval process was meant as a safety feature—in the middle of a general scramble fifty fighters could all be trying to get out of the flight deck at once. Someone had to make sure they didn’t collide with each other in the mad dash. Even now, when the flight deck was all but empty, Bury couldn’t launch without approval.

  There was a way, he thought, to override the restraint’s clamps. If he could convince the carrier scout that there was an emergency—say, a fire in the flight deck, or an incoming asteroid collision—the clamps would release immediately. The problem was that meant hacking, and Bury didn’t know much about computers. He’d had a class in information studies back at Rishi, of course, but he hadn’t bothered paying much attention.

  The first thing he had to do was reroute the scout’s logging process so that it reported only to itself, not the bridge, and that meant getting root access, which … he had no idea how to do. He stared at the board, trying to think. There had to be a way. He’d come this far, and surely fate wouldn’t fail him now, surely he would think of something, anything. There had to be some way to—

  Motion out in the flight deck startled him so much that he hit his head on the low canopy. He cursed as he craned his neck around, trying to see if someone was coming. The light streaming in from the carrier’s open maw was obscured, turned to shadows that shifted rapidly. It took him a second to realize that it was a cataphract coming back from the battle, maybe a damaged fighter limping home. There was definitely something wrong with its silhouette—it looked all lumpy on one side, as if something had gotten stuck on one of its airfoils.

  As it came closer Bury saw a person riding there, clinging to the side of the fighter like a barnacle. What the hell? A beam of light caught the rider’s helmet and he saw, to his immense surprise, that it was Captain Candless.

  His old teacher. His old nemesis. Riding on the side of a cataphract, her legs swingly wildly as the ship maneuvered toward a cradle halfway up the deck.

  Bury shut down his control display so its light wouldn’t give him away. If she caught him here …

  As Bury watched, the cataphract’s canopy came down and the pilot—nobody Bury recognized—clambered out. He helped Candless move into the airlock next to the cataphract’s berth. The outer door closed behind the two of them.

  Bury had been holding his breath. He let it out now and started to relax a little. He reached to switch the carrier scout’s display back on, to get back to his task.

  Except before he did that, he took one last look at the cataphract. The only one in the flight deck—the rest of them were still out at the battle area, their pilots no doubt covering themselves in glory. This particular cataphract had been left half-docked, as if the pilot had forgotten to complete his post-flight checklist. Its canopy was still down, for one thing, exposing the cockpit to vacuum. Tsk tsk, Bury thought. If it was his fighter he would have taken better care of it. He would have—

  He would have fully engaged the docking cradle.

  The cataphract was perfectly stable where it lay on top of the cradle. But the restraining arms hadn’t been closed around its fuselage. The pilot hadn’t bothered to secure the fighter. Maybe he’d just forgotten, or maybe he intended to come back in a minute and take the fighter back out to the battle area. Rather than worrying about getting permission from the bridge, he could simply jump back in his cockpit and go.

  Bury licked his plastinated lips with a dry gray tongue.

  When destiny comes knocking at your door, he thought, it’s rude not to answer.

  Useless.

  The bloody Centrocor pilots were useless. They made a good show of trying to swoop in toward the dreadnought, to get close enough to launch a disruptor, but every damned time a plasma ball would come streaking toward them they would swerve away, running for safety.

  Not a single one of them was worth a wet damn, as far as Lanoe was concerned. Even after he’d risked life and limb over and over, trying to show them the way, trying to lead by example, none of them had the courage to actually take a shot.

  They couldn’t even
give him proper cover. He’d managed to take down one blister all by himself, and it should have just been a matter of time before he’d got the other three. Instead, now that he was the only real threat in the battle area, he’d also become the only meaningful target for the dreadnought’s plasma ball guns. The Blue-Blue-White weren’t stupid—or at least they’d learned from their previous mistakes. They didn’t bother shooting at the Yk.64s at all, instead concentrating all their fire on forming a defensive net that Lanoe couldn’t punch through.

  Not that he hadn’t tried. He’d pushed as hard as he could to break through that net, and had more than his share of near misses. He felt like he was roasting in a furnace, his skin dried out and crisping. He’d gotten so dehydrated that every time he blinked it felt like sandpaper rubbing against his eyes.

  “Somebody get over here, now,” he shouted over the open channel. A couple of the Centrocor pilots made a halfhearted stab at it, swinging down to fly beside him—until they were scared off by incoming plasma. Lanoe scowled at them as they ran away. Without a wingmate to cover him, there was no way he could get close enough to use his disruptors, even with his fancy targeting algorithm.

  “Give me cover!” he bellowed. A Yk.64 came corkscrewing down toward him, and he nodded to himself, planning out his next attack. Knowing perfectly well he would have to abandon his run when this fool ran away like all the others. “What’s your name?” he asked the pilot, thinking maybe he could shame them into sticking around long enough to actually accomplish something.

  “Sir? It’s … it’s me. Lieutenant Bury.”

  Lanoe swiveled his head around to look at the cockpit of his new wingmate. Damnation—it really was the Hellion. “I thought you were on the medical list,” he said.

  “I got better,” Bury told him.

  Lanoe laughed at that—a hoarse, dry sound, but one with real joy in it. “I take it Candless doesn’t know you’re out here?” he asked.