Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  Damn it, he would take it. They were just drones, with no jellyfish aboard. “Let them go,” he called, when he saw his comms board was back up. “Everyone—disengage. Return to the carrier—we’re done here.”

  There were a few exhausted whoops of joy. A few nasty curses, a couple of half-veiled threats directed at him on the common channel. Lanoe ignored the chatter. He repeated his order, over and over, though most of Alpha wing and Beta wing had already withdrawn from the battle area.

  The pilots who were still alive, anyway.

  “Bury,” he called, painting the kid’s ship with a communications laser. “Bury—you got your five. You did it, Lieutenant. I am personally going to present you with your blue star. Unless maybe you’d prefer to have Candless do the honors. Yeah, how’d you like to see the look on her face, then, huh? You did a hell of a job, you—”

  Bury’s Yk.64 hadn’t acknowledged the connection. It wasn’t receiving his signal.

  “Bury?” he called again, on an open radio channel.

  He found the kid’s fighter. It was hanging motionless right in the middle of the battle area, drifting slowly toward deep space. Lanoe banked around and headed over there. Maybe the kid had been hit by one of the microwave weapons. “Bury, if you can hear me—hang in there. Let your systems reboot, it’s all automatic. Bury, can you hear me?”

  No response.

  “Bury?”

  As he approached the Yk.64 he saw at once that its canopy was down. Flowglas required an electric charge to hold its shape, so if Bury had been hit with a microwave burst, sure, it made sense that the canopy would collapse. It was all right, though. It could be a little scary, Lanoe knew, to fly through a battle with your canopy down, with nothing but your suit to protect you against hard vacuum, but he’d done it himself plenty of times. He knew it was survivable.

  Lanoe maneuvered slowly around the Sixty-Four, coming about so he could look at the kid. Make sure he was okay. When he got there he saw …

  He saw the kid’s face. Slack, but with eyes open. Plastinated eyes staring out at the stars. Seeing nothing.

  The fighter’s canopy had come down.

  So had the flowglas of Bury’s helmet.

  The kid was dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Candless had a million questions ready for Lanoe when he came back. For the last half of the battle she’d had no information at all—the microwave weapons the interceptors used had played merry hell with communications, so she was barely aware that the fight was over, that the dreadnought had been destroyed, that the interceptors had withdrawn. She’d only learned that much by looking at telescope feeds.

  Lanoe hadn’t spoken to her since she’d berated him for letting Bury join the fight. Well, he wasn’t going to be able to avoid her forever. He’d barely docked his Z.XIX in the flight deck before she stormed up the corridor leading to his airlock. She was damned if she was going to let him get away without giving her answers. She needed to know what his plan was, first and foremost. Assuming he had one. She wanted to know why he’d put them all at such risk—why he hadn’t used the cruiser’s guns on the dreadnought, why he—

  Why he—

  He came through the airlock with a body in his arms. The shiny, hairless head lolled in the crook of his elbow.

  She’d had a million questions. Now she had one answer.

  No. It couldn’t be true. She opened her mouth to laugh. This had to be some cruel prank, or perhaps—perhaps Bury was just wounded, perhaps he was very badly hurt, yes, it looked like he was in a very serious condition, but then he’d been injured before, back before they’d come here, to this impossible place, he’d been injured but he had recovered, he had recovered from that, he really was stronger than he looked, stronger—

  Stronger than his limp body would suggest, stronger than his small frame, his smooth skin, his open, sightless eyes. His slack mouth.

  “No,” she said to Lanoe, because hadn’t she told him, told him a dozen times that Bury wasn’t ready to fight? That he should remain on the inactive list? She’d been quite clear, she’d done everything right, she’d—

  No.

  “No,” she said. Quite calm, still. Quite rational. Because it didn’t have to be true, did it? There had to be some way she could make this not true.

  Some way to turn time back, to—

  “No,” she said, and she forced herself to control her lips, to hold back the tears that had started to form at the corners of her eyes.

  “No!” she said a fourth time. No. She didn’t say it. She screamed it.

  She grabbed the body away from him, pulled Bury close to her chest. In the absence of gravity she could hold it, hold it effortlessly. It felt empty and unreal, like a wax doll of—of—

  “Oh, no. Bury,” she breathed. “Oh, Bury, I … I am so sorry. Oh, no.” It came out of her mouth, one long sustained note. “I’m sorry,” she wailed. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

  She couldn’t control herself. Couldn’t control her grief. She pressed her cheek against the smooth, cool skin of his head. Pulled him tighter, until he almost squeezed out of her arms. Changed her grip so he wouldn’t get away from her. Her back collided with the padded wall of the corridor and she bounced away again. She didn’t care. She floated down the empty passage, just holding him, holding him close.

  “No,” she whispered, into his bloodless ear. “No. No.” A rejection, a refusal. She looked up, wanting someone to tell her it wasn’t true.

  Lanoe was already gone. He’d closed a hatch behind him. At least no one could see her. No one could see her in her grief.

  “No,” she said, but it didn’t mean anything anymore. It was just a sound. “No. No.” She said it until she couldn’t hear herself anymore. No.

  No.

  No.

  Repeating, over and over, in the otherwise empty echo chamber of her skull. Just no. No. Because she knew, eventually, the answer was going to have to be yes. Yes, he was gone. Yes, he was dead, and it was her fault, her responsibility. Yes.

  But for now—

  No.

  No.

  No.

  Maggs pushed his way down the corridor, dreading what he was about to see. Even though he knew it promoted his interests, and those of M. Bullam. Even though he’d seen similar sights before.

  He opened the hatch to the pilots’ ready room and slipped inside. This time he had not brought a bottle of champagne. He knew exactly how such a gesture might be received. He said nothing, uttered no boisterous words of good cheer. How hollow would those sound?

  There was space in the ready room for fifty men and women, seats with straps so they could sit comfortably in microgravity, consoles so they could look at displays. The consoles were all dead now, switched off because there was nothing to see. Nothing anyone wanted to see.

  He surveyed the people in the few occupied seats. Pilots just back from the battle area, pilots weary and disgusted, pilots with looks of pure rage on their faces. Pilots with no expression at all, pilots who looked dead inside, who could have been ghosts.

  No, if there were ghosts in the ready room, it would have been packed to capacity.

  The ready room had space for fifty. Barely more than ten of the seats were filled now. This was all of them, all who had come back.

  They sat apart from one another, with rows of empty seats between them. They did not speak to one another, nor did they look up when Maggs entered.

  He pushed himself across the room. Came up behind a pilot who couldn’t seem to stop scratching at her short blonde hair. He placed a hand on her shoulder and she whirled around, one hand reaching for the quick-release catch of her straps, the other balling into a fist. The look on her face could not be described by any term short of homicidal.

  Then she saw it was him. Good old Maggs. Her face softened. Not as much as he might have liked, perhaps—there was still plenty of anger there. He thought, in fact, she might spit. Instead, she turned away from him again. But she nodded
, just a little.

  His message had been conveyed. Another ally secured.

  He felt like a bastard. Like a churl.

  This wasn’t Maggs’s first war. He knew that these pilots were busy. Despite the fact that they crouched in their seats abstracted, removed from the world, he knew that in their heads they were punching throttles and throwing control sticks back and forth, checking boards and craning their heads around to see what was behind them. Reliving every moment of the battle that had just ended, revisiting every detail, every choice they’d made. Analyzing what they could have done differently. Imagining hypothetical scenarios that might have led to fewer empty seats.

  Maggs had betrayed plenty of people in his life. He’d preyed on the weak, done dirty deeds when no one else would. He had wrestled with guilt often enough. None of his backhanded deals, none of his slimy tactics, though, had ever made him feel this dirty. These pilots were busy, inside their heads, and who was he to disturb them?

  He did what he had to do. He moved through the room, gliding over the seats, feeling like some perverse form of Valkyrie, perhaps. Not a chooser of the slain but a chooser of the ones who survived. One by one he touched them, on a shoulder or an arm. One by one they gave him some sign. Some small token of agreement.

  When he was done he moved on, headed out of the ready room. He left them with no comforting words because, truly, there were no words that might serve.

  Outside in the corridor he closed the hatch and then pressed himself against a wall, simply trying to breathe. It had to be done, he told himself. It had to be—

  You can’t win a war thinking of the other’s chap’s feelings, his father’s voice said inside his head. Save that sort of thing for when you’re home again.

  He knew the old man was trying to help. So he chose not to respond.

  He had more work to do. He needed to get moving. Yet as soon as he started to peel himself away from the wall, he saw a hatch open at the far end of the corridor, down by the bridge, and he stopped right where he was. Tried to make himself invisible.

  Lanoe came kicking down the corridor, his old, lined face unreadable, his body language fierce and unquestionable. Maggs kept his eyes down, kept his face carefully neutral. If Lanoe tried to engage him in conversation, he would keep his responses simple. He would refrain from using colorful phrases, make himself as boring as possible. He would show deference, somehow, submission in the face of authority. He would—

  Lanoe passed right by him. He didn’t so much as glance in Maggs’s direction. Maggs thought perhaps he had avoided a very difficult encounter. Yet halfway down the corridor, Lanoe shot out one hand and grabbed a nylon strap set into the wall, stopping his forward progress. A thick lump formed in Maggs’s throat—until he saw that Lanoe hadn’t stopped for him.

  Shulkin emerged from the hatch to the bridge, his eyes chips of nonreflective glass, his face hanging as slack as a rubber mask.

  The two men paused there in the corridor, near each other, occupying the same space. To Maggs they both seemed enormous, giants, perhaps grizzly bears meeting at a clearing in the forest. He could see them breathing, see their chests rise and fall.

  Shulkin’s head tilted up, just a touch. The muscles around his mouth tightened, though his lips stayed compressed in a flat line.

  The angle of Lanoe’s shoulders changed, lifting a hair. Making him look even bigger. The slightest, quietest grunt emerged from his throat.

  Shulkin made a sound like a low growl. An acknowledgment, a signal of respect, or a threat? Maggs couldn’t be sure. Between the two men the air seemed to shimmer, as if from the stray heat of a banked furnace.

  Lanoe pushed away from the wall. Shulkin’s whole body tensed, his slack dead man’s posture giving way instantly, his hackles rising. His ears even seemed to tilt back, as his face took on something approximating a wary expression. But Lanoe simply floated past Shulkin, twisting around in midair as he passed through the hatch and onto the bridge. Shulkin stayed motionless for a second after he was gone, panting a little, perhaps. Then he kicked off a wall and headed down a side corridor, toward his cabin.

  Hellfire and ashes, Maggs thought. What did I just see?

  The mad, his father told him, recognize their own.

  Indeed. All Maggs’s guilt, all of the self-doubt he’d accumulated bothering the surviving pilots of Alpha and Beta wing, fell from him like a dog’s shed hair. What he was doing—the scheme M. Bullam was enacting—was right, he knew. It was necessary. Lanoe had to be neutralized. And the sooner the better.

  Ehta took a very long, very hot shower when they finally got the order to stand down from the guns. She hadn’t seen her own skin in months, hadn’t taken off her suit since she was back on Tuonela, fighting in the trenches. Normally there was no need—her suit could keep her clean without her having to think about it.

  Now, though, she hung naked in a plastic sack, weightless and floating. She let the water cling to her, let its heat scour her until her skin turned pink and then red. The pain woke her up, got her blood moving. It felt right. She pulled her head down into the sack, held her breath and scrubbed at her face with a handful of low-residue soap, ran her fingernails across her scalp, digging through the short hair there, scratching hard at the soft skin underneath. She scrubbed furiously until her lungs started to give out, until her body demanded she breathe again. She held on a few seconds more until her body started to burn on the inside, too, before poking her head back out of the sack.

  She switched on a vacuum pump that sucked all the water away from her. Scraped the last of it off with a strigil until she was dry. Stood under a hot-air vent until her she felt her skin start to crack.

  Then she pulled her suit back on and headed down the axial corridor, toward the brig. There was something she had to do. At the hatch to the detaining cells two of her marines stood guard, helmets up and silvered. Good people who had just come off twelve hours’ duty on the gun decks. They must be as exhausted as she was, she thought, but they clung to the wall at attention, rifles cradled in their arms.

  Ehta moved toward the cell that contained Ginger and Rain-on-Stones. Before she could get there, though, one of the marines reached out an arm to bar her way.

  “Sorry, ma’am. We can’t let you go in there.”

  She frowned. “What the hell are you doing, Geddy? I’m your damned superior officer. You don’t tell me where I can go.”

  The marine didn’t move his arm. “Ma’am, we have orders.”

  She tried to stare him down. Hard to do that when she couldn’t see his face. Which of course was one reason that marines kept their helmets opaque.

  “I just want to talk to her. She needs to know about Bury, she needs to know—”

  “Orders from Commander Lanoe,” Geddy told her. “I’m sorry.”

  Yeah, Ehta thought. Yeah. Of course he would tell them to keep me out of there. Of course he would.

  “I’m not going to shoot the damned alien, I just want to talk to the girl,” she said. “Damn you, Geddy, I’ll have you demoted, I’ll make sure you never see corporal as long as you live, you bastard, you—”

  “Ma’am,” Geddy said, grabbing her shoulder. She knocked his hand away but he didn’t even flinch. “Ma’am, we have orders to remove you from the brig by force if you won’t leave peacefully. Again—I’m sorry.”

  She knew he was. Sorry. She knew he didn’t want this. What marine ever wanted to come between two officers? She was making an ass of herself.

  “All right,” she said. “All right. You’re just doing your job, I get that. But the girl needs to know. If I give you a message, can you give it to her?”

  Geddy turned to look at his fellow guard. Eventually he turned back to Ehta and shrugged. “Yes, ma’am. That’s okay.”

  Paniet might have felt like a toddler in a toy store, except for two things. One: the toys were all broken. Smashed to flinders. Two: he was terrified out of his mind.

  He’d been ordered to examine the
dreadnought—or what was left of it. Lanoe wanted him to learn as much as possible from the broken spacecraft. Which meant Paniet had to go over there, in person, into the belly of the beast.

  Ahead of him a sensor drone moved in little fits and starts, ion engines mounted in its chassis directing it now this way, now that. A range-finding laser swept around the inside of the ruined blister, taking precise measurements of what was left of the dreadnought’s control room. Lights mounted on the drone’s upper and lower sides cut through the swirling murk of debris and dust.

  Paniet grasped one of the broken spars of the cagework and pulled himself inside, into the dark.

  “I’m not detecting any motion in there,” Hollander said. Paniet’s fellow neddy was back on the repair tender, hovering a safe distance away from the wreckage of the dreadnought. Though he was nearly a kilometer away, Paniet was glad not to feel like he was entirely alone inside the alien vessel.

  “Can’t see much myself, ducks,” Paniet replied. He gingerly picked his way over a control panel the size of a divan. Levers and rods stuck up from the broken console, all of them twisted out of shape like the broken fingers of a giant skeleton.

  The disruptor round that tore through the blister had left little undamaged. Little for Paniet to even inspect. He pushed himself forward, following the drone. He figured that if nothing lurched out of the shadows to devour the drone whole, he was probably safe as well. At least, he was moderately convinced of that.

  In the dark he found the floor of the blister. It was covered in a thick mat of something soft and spongy. Padding, maybe, to protect the Blue-Blue-White pilot during hard maneuvers. Handfuls of the stuff came away when he tried to steady himself against it. He held them up close to his face, then gestured for the drone to shine a light on him.

  The floor material looked organic. Maybe. It was fibrous and it tore easily between his fingers. He cast it away and brushed his gloves off on the thighs of his suit. “You got imagery of that?” he called.