Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  “Half a billion years. The Blue-Blue-White sent out their first drone fleet half a billion years ago.”

  “It can’t be a coincidence. The Choir sent you exactly where you wanted to go. To the one place where you could stop the drone fleets and save all those aliens. They brought you here because it’s where you need to be.”

  “Half a billion years,” Lanoe said, to himself. Just trying out the words in his mouth. It didn’t make any sense. It couldn’t, possibly. No human had ever traveled in time, it had always been assumed to be one of those things that was never going to happen, a problem technology would never be able to solve.

  If you could travel in time you could mess up all kinds of physical laws. You could change history, you could be your own grandfather. You could do anything. You could—

  You could go back in time and stop something from happening. You could change a course of events so it had a different outcome.

  If your lover died, if the only person you’d ever loved died right in front of you, you could go back in time and make sure she lived instead.

  You could bring the dead back to life.

  “Do you see what this means, Lanoe?”

  “I … I think I do,” he said. “We can change things, Valk. We can change things. If we stop the Blue-Blue-White now, nothing they did will have happened. Nothing.”

  “What? No, Lanoe, we can’t even think about doing that. We can’t change anything. It’d be too dangerous. No, what I meant was—this means I was right all along. I wasn’t broken. I’m not broken. I can still be of use to you.”

  Lanoe heard the urgency in Valk’s voice, the pleading, but he was too lost in thought, in planning, to soothe the AI now. “You’ve already helped me,” he said, the best he could manage. “We can change things.”

  “Lanoe, seriously, that’s a bad idea. Maybe we can do something. I don’t know—I doubt it. We need to sit down, all of us, and figure out what this means,” Valk said. “How it affects our mission and what we need to do now.”

  “Sure,” Lanoe said. “Sure, we’ll do that.”

  He cut the link. He needed to be alone with his thoughts now.

  Alone with the ghost.

  “Zhang,” he said. His voice was thick with potential emotion. He cleared his throat, tried again. “Zhang. It’s … it’s possible. Maybe. Maybe I can—”

  His head swam and he turned around again, this time to face the hatch of his cabin. There was something going on there. He’d heard something.

  Someone was pounding on his hatch. He realized with a start that they’d been doing it for a while, that he’d heard it without hearing it. He felt a strange rush of guilt, as if he’d been caught abandoning his post. He pushed over to the hatch and hit the release before he’d even figured out who it was.

  “Maggs,” he said. “What the devil are you doing here?”

  “Oh, you know, the same as always,” the bastard said. He shoved his way into the cabin and closed the hatch behind him. Lanoe was too surprised to stop him. “Saving your life.”

  Candless came around a corner and saw a hand flying toward her face, fingers stretched out like claws. She yanked herself backward, her heart pounding in her chest—only to feel like a fool a moment later as she realized she’d been startled by a dead body. It floated past her down the hall, bumping off the walls. She got a new shock when she realized it was the yeoman, the poor officer whom she’d made an example of when she first took control of the carrier.

  Had she remained loyal until the very end? Had she been murdered by the Centrocor contingent? It was hard to know. There were outbreaks of fighting all over the ship, and on the small video display on Candless’s wrist it was hard to tell who belonged to which side. Loyalists and mutineers looked exactly alike—though somehow they were able to tell each other apart well enough to murder each other.

  Candless was alone and very afraid. She couldn’t get hold of Ehta—for all she knew, the marine major was dead. She had just a few resources she could still count on. Most important was that she still had access to the ship’s systems. Her rank let her tap into any camera feed in the ship. As she moved through the corridors she could just about know what was waiting for her behind every hatch.

  Of course, the body of the dead yeoman proved those feeds didn’t see everything. Candless had believed this corridor would be completely empty.

  She could tell it wouldn’t be for long. She could hear shouts and the occasional gurgling scream coming from its far end. A band of fighters was headed her way. They might be coming to rescue her. They might be coming to tear her to pieces. She couldn’t take the risk.

  She ducked through another hatch, this one leading to the storage areas of the carrier. She took a moment to seal the hatch behind her—another perk of rank, she could issue an emergency lockdown. Unfortunately, from her wrist minder she could do it for only one hatch at a time. If she could reach the bridge, she could lock every hatch in the ship. That would, at the very least, slow the mutineers down, as they would have to use cutting instruments or dismantlers to make their way from compartment to compartment.

  The bridge was still very far away, though. And she knew she would never make it alone.

  She tried to remember the layout of the ship. The storage area—the quartermaster’s office. Yes. The carrier’s arsenal was there, too. Most likely the place would have been emptied out—Centrocor’s marines would have armed themselves as soon as the mutiny began. Perhaps, though, they’d left behind at least a rifle, or some more ammunition for Candless’s sidearm. Maybe the quartermaster would be a loyalist.

  It was something. It was a step forward.

  Candless hurried through the low storage rooms, hiding inside a compartment full of food stocks when she thought she heard someone out in the corridor. When she reached the quartermaster’s office she found it deserted, a single display up and running above the console. It showed a list of the ship’s personnel, and someone had gone through it, highlighting most of the names in either red or blue. Candless found her own name in blue, so she assumed that the red names were known mutineers. The loyalty status of the vast majority of the names had yet to be determined.

  “Ma’am?” someone said.

  Candless whirled around, her pistol up and pointed into a dark corner of the compartment. Someone was back there, hiding behind a precarious stack of crates.

  “Who’s there?” Candless demanded.

  “Just me, ma’am.” A pair of empty hands appeared from behind the crates. The quartermaster slowly poked her scarred face out. She looked terrified.

  Candless let herself breathe for a moment. She lowered her weapon, though she didn’t put it away. “Come out of there. Are you hurt?”

  “I’m … not sure. Could you—could you help me?”

  “Help you? How? What’s wrong?”

  “I think I might have been shot,” the woman said.

  Candless couldn’t see any blood, but if the quartermaster needed medical attention she had to help. She kicked away from the workstation and headed toward the crates. She never got there.

  Two men burst out from a storage locker, heavy rifles cradled in their arms. One of them tossed his away and grabbed Candless across her chest, pinning her. She fought and kicked, but in the absence of gravity it was impossible to get any leverage. The man holding her put one arm around her neck and started putting pressure on her windpipe.

  Candless’s vision started to shrink down to a narrow tunnel. She could hear her heart thudding in her chest, could feel herself slipping away—

  “Don’t kill her! Not yet,” the quartermaster shouted. She emerged—unhurt, of course—from her hiding place, waving her hands. “The bridge controls are locked, and we need her to break the encryption. Then we can kill her, okay? Somebody call Maggs. Tell him we have her.”

  Some of the pressure came off of Candless’s throat. Her vision cleared and she rolled her eyes wildly, trying to see if there was some clever way out of this
.

  If there was, she couldn’t see it. The quartermaster came over and fastened a strip of plastic around Candless’s wrists. She pulled the strip tight—too tight. Candless could feel her hands losing their circulation. The quartermaster moved to put another strip around her ankles. Candless kicked her in the neck, sending her flying.

  One of the men smashed his rifle butt across Candless’s cheek. Her vision exploded with sparks and she cried out in pain.

  The quartermaster tied her ankles together. Someone shoved a piece of cloth into her mouth.

  No, she thought. No. No, this can’t be happening.

  “If she gives you any more trouble, start cutting her fingers off. That should take the fight out of her,” the quartermaster said.

  Candless’s eyes went wide.

  The compartment’s hatch opened, and she saw a dark shape hovering there. Her captors looked up in surprise and terror, but then an expression of pure relief crossed the quartermaster’s ruined face. “Captain,” she said. “It’s good to see you, sir.”

  Captain? Was she talking to Candless? But then, why—

  Oh.

  Shulkin came into the room, his face brighter and more animated than Candless had ever seen it before. A sheen of sweat made his brow and cheeks glow, and his eyes were on fire. He was breathing heavily, his chest moving up and down rapidly. He had a heavy particle rifle in one hand and a combat knife in the other.

  “We have her, sir, all bundled up for you. You came so fast—I’m sorry we haven’t had chance to interrogate her yet,” the quartermaster said. “When we called M. Maggs we assumed it would take longer before someone came to get her.”

  Shulkin came closer. He was smiling. Not even the brutal baring of fangs, not the shark smile Candless might have expected. He looked genuinely happy.

  “Uh, ma’am?” One of the two men holding Candless said.

  “What?” the quartermaster asked.

  “We, uh, we haven’t had a chance to call M. Maggs yet,” the man confided.

  “What? Then—”

  The quartermaster didn’t get a chance to finish her thought. As Shulkin came still closer, Candless didn’t so much see the blood all over him as smell it.

  He moved with incredible speed. The combat knife flew out of his hand as if he was casually tossing it away. Somehow it ended up embedded in the quartermaster’s neck, opening one of her jugular veins. Particle fire erupted from Shulkin’s rifle before the men could react. A beam passed within centimeters of Candless’s ear and she tried to shriek, only to nearly choke on the rag in her mouth. She felt something hot and wet pelt the back of her hair and splatter her neck. She turned to look and saw that the man behind her no longer had a head.

  The second one at least got a chance to move. He roared and came at Shulkin like a bull, knocking the rifle out of Shulkin’s hands. The old captain laughed as the mutineer shoved him backward until they collided with a bulkhead with a meaty thud. The mutineer tried to punch him in the jaw.

  Shulkin made no attempt to block it. He took the hit square on the boniest part of his face, his head snapping back, his mouth closing with a click of teeth smashing together. He didn’t grunt in pain or react to the blow at all. He was far too busy to defend himself—busy with jamming his thumbs into the man’s eye sockets.

  The mutineer screamed in agony. Shulkin kicked him away. Then he lunged toward the quartermaster’s body and pulled his knife free, blood jetting out of the wound. He turned and grabbed the surviving mutineer by the back of his ring collar. With one easy, precise motion he slit the man’s throat.

  He shoved the corpse away from himself, the man’s blood trailing out behind him to hang in the air like a red campaign banner fluttering from a flagpole.

  For a moment after that, Shulkin just hung there in midair, his limbs slack, his face contorted by an enormous grin.

  Then he spun around and came toward Candless. He cut the ties around her wrists and ankles. She pulled the rag out of her mouth on her own. Her hands throbbed with pain as the blood rushed back toward her fingertips.

  “You—you saved me,” she said. All she could think was that this was the man she’d once shot in the leg to get him to clear her bridge. She made a point of not reminding him of that moment.

  “My ship,” he said. “My ship.”

  “They thought you were one of them,” Candless said. “A loyal Centrocor employee.” It made sense. Who stood to gain more from a mutiny than the captain who had been suborned? The man who had been in charge, before Lanoe came along. Yet clearly Shulkin didn’t see it that way.

  “I would have signed up with the devil’s own poly if it meant getting another command,” he said. “I was never a Centrocor man. I always belonged to the Navy. The Navy forgot that, not me.”

  Lanoe’s hands balled into fists. What Valk had told him, the mind-shattering revelation, was all but forgotten as an older, much more primal thought welled up inside him. The knowledge of just how badly he wanted to kill Auster Maggs. “Explain yourself,” he told Maggs.

  Maggs looked genuinely hurt. Well, the bastard could act, Lanoe had known that almost since he’d first met him. “If our positions were reversed, if you’d had to walk in my regulation boots, you might have done all the things I did.” He raised his hands for peace. “Never mind. I know you’ll never see that. I don’t think you can.”

  “You still haven’t told me—”

  “I don’t have time for lengthy explanations full of nuance. I’ll get right to it.”

  For once, Lanoe thought.

  “I have some information you need. Without it, you’ll die. In exchange, I want something you have. Simple, yes? Very simple. I need you to send me home.”

  Lanoe realized he’d been holding a breath in his chest. His whole body was tense, ready to pounce on the traitor. Now he let that breath out, slowly. Tried to relax, to at least hold himself back until he’d heard more details. “When we’re finished with our mission here, when the Blue-Blue-White have been punished, Rain-on-Stones will open a wormhole that will take us back. Not before.”

  “You can stop playing that tune,” Maggs said. “I know the truth. I heard it with my very own ears, from our dear major of the marines.”

  “She told you—what, exactly?” Lanoe asked.

  “That Rain-on-Stones can’t open said wormhole. That it simply can’t be done.” Maggs raised his eyebrows. His eyes searched Lanoe’s face, as if looking for a denial.

  The time for lies was over, apparently. If Ehta had chosen to tell everyone, there wasn’t much Lanoe could do to put the cat back in the bag. He shrugged.

  Maggs nodded, just once. His sneering smile faded, but only a bit. “Came as bit of a shock, I assure you. Then I remembered something.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re not a fool. Lanoe, you and I have had our differences, but I’ve always respected your intellect. I know for a fact you would never have come here without a way home. If it isn’t the chorister who’ll provide that, well, there must be some other way. You must have had some reason to keep it secret—never mind, I won’t even ask. It doesn’t matter to me. I need to go home, and I need to go now.”

  “Why are you in such a hurry?”

  Maggs turned his face away. “It’s none of your business. But I suppose—if it speeds things along, well. M. Bullam has had a bit of a medical emergency. She desperately needs help. Proper help, in a proper hospital. We need to get her there as soon as possible, and you’re the only one who knows how.”

  Lanoe narrowed his eyes. “Interesting. You have a heart after all.”

  “I always did. You just never let me show it,” Maggs told him.

  “All right. I’ll tell you what I have. You first, though. Tell me this piece of information that’s going to save my life.”

  Maggs gave him a long, shrewd look. Clearly he wanted Lanoe to divulge his secret first, but just as clearly, he was desperate.

  “Mutiny,” Maggs said. “There’s a mutin
y happening, even now. There’s a horde of people coming for your head. And even if you somehow managed to fight them all off, Candless and Ehta have joined forces against you. They’re planning to relieve you from duty, just as soon as they regain command of this ship.”

  “What? That’s—that’s impossible,” Lanoe said.

  “Is it? You’ve managed to alienate everyone, Lanoe. Every single person under your command. I was just the first of your faithful retainers to turn on you. You’ve made a very nasty bed, and they want you to lie in it. However—and here, you’ll see just what a friend you have in Auster Maggs—I can help. I have the cutter warmed up and ready to go. It’s right outside airlock sixteen, not a hundred meters away from this cabin. I’ve made sure the mutineers are well clear of the route you’ll need to take to get there.”

  “You did all that? For me?”

  “In exchange for what I need, yes. You can take the cutter wherever you like. You’ve lost your fleet, Commander. You can still save your life.”

  Lanoe started to push past him, toward the hatch. If this was true, if it was all as Maggs had said—

  “Not so fast,” Maggs said. “You promised me a secret in return.”

  “Right.” Lanoe nodded. He reached out and grabbed a nylon loop mounted on the wall, to give himself leverage. Then he spun around and slammed his fist right into Maggs’s abdomen. The air exploded from the traitor’s lungs and he doubled up. Before he could recover, Lanoe grabbed his head and slammed his face against the bulkhead.

  “There is no way back,” he said.

  Maggs could barely breathe, couldn’t speak. He could still look up at Lanoe from surprised and terrified eyes.

  “When we came here, from the city of the Choir—I asked them for a wormhole. I asked them to send us somewhere, anywhere, to get away. It was the only way to save my ship and my crew. I had no idea they were sending us here,” Lanoe explained. “I didn’t expect it. When I saw where we’d come to, I was glad. I knew they’d sent me where I needed to be. I was sorry for you, for everyone else—none of you asked for this, and that was a tragedy. But I understood. There are always casualties in war, and sometimes you lose friends. Sometimes, you have to make sacrifices.”