Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  He grabbed Maggs by the collar ring and shoved him across the cabin, toward the far wall.

  “There is no way back,” he said again. “We came here to do a job, and that’s all that matters.”

  Then he hit the release for his hatch and kicked his way out into the corridor.

  Airlock sixteen wasn’t far. He knew the route. Things had reached a point of no return. If even Candless had turned on him, his time commanding the fleet was done. So be it.

  He still had Plan C. And if Valk was right, if they really had traveled back in time—Plan C could change everything.

  The bridge was a lost cause. On Candless’s wrist display, she could see the mutineers running amok in there. One of them smashed a control console in thwarted rage, hitting it over and over again with a long wrench. They had the carrier’s pilot up against one wall, and as far as she could tell they were using him for target practice—he was already long past feeling the particle beams they blasted into his chest and limbs. “The two of us are never going to get in there,” she told Shulkin.

  “We could die trying,” he suggested.

  She studied his face. He seemed to think that was a rational suggestion. As if it were more important that they keep fighting than that they actually accomplish anything.

  Candless supposed she shouldn’t have expected anything different. “I’d like to try something more practical. Ehta’s marines are over on the cruiser—they’ve been working as gun crews this whole time, but they’re competent enough at this kind of fighting, too.”

  “I remember,” Shulkin said. “I remember them taking my bridge.”

  Candless bit her lip. She had no idea how far she could trust this new ally. She hoped very much that she wouldn’t have to test him to the limit. “If we can just get them over here, they can stop this mutiny,” she said.

  “By killing everyone,” Shulkin said. He nodded in approval.

  “One way or another,” Candless said. She was not so naïve as to think that the marines would simply round up the mutineers and march them to the brig. Not now—the rebellion had gone too far. She would do what she could to keep the death toll low, however. “I’d like to believe that if they just see a show of force—if they know they can’t win—Centrocor’s people will stand down. The problem is there’s currently no good way to get our marines over here. I’ll need to get to the troop transport, which is docked in the flight deck. I can fly over to the cruiser and bring them back.”

  “Very good,” Shulkin said. “Let’s go.”

  Just like that.

  Of course, it couldn’t be simple. The two of them were holed up in a disused section of bunks near the engines. Bunks that belonged to pilots who had died during battles with the Blue-Blue-White. There was a long corridor between them and any entrance to the flight deck, a corridor that Candless’s wrist display showed her as being full of heavily armed people.

  She was certain they were not loyalists. What she’d seen on her display made her think there weren’t very many people left who would help her. Moreover, she was a veteran of too many battles to think that two people, no matter how well trained, no matter how vicious and bloody-minded, could fight their way through a crowd.

  There was another way. Shulkin didn’t like it. He wanted to fight. Candless tried to reassure him. “When I bring the marines back, you can join them for the mopping up.”

  It seemed to mollify him a little.

  The two of them hurried back through the engine section of the carrier—it was, thankfully, deserted—and out through the maintenance airlock by the thrusters. The same lock Lanoe had used when he boarded the carrier. Candless intended to move across the outer hull of the carrier, all the way up to the front of the ship. From there they could climb inside the flight deck, hopefully unseen and unopposed.

  As they picked their way carefully around the massive thruster cones, still glowing with heat even though they’d been shut down for hours, Candless tried to put through call after call, trying to raise Ehta, trying to reach Paniet, even once trying to get hold of Lanoe. She still intended to relieve him of duty, but only after she’d restored some level of order to the carrier.

  None of her calls were answered. Each one, in turn, returned an error message telling her that the people she’d tried to reach were blocking incoming transmissions. She didn’t know whether that meant they were simply busy surviving the mutiny or if they were already dead.

  Chances were it was just her and Shulkin. Hellfire, she thought. Even if she won—how was she going to command a ship with no crew?

  And what did she even hope to accomplish now? She could end Lanoe’s pointless war against the Blue-Blue-White. But then what? There was no way to open a wormhole home. Was she going to die here, anyway, so far from anything she knew—not because of murderous aliens, but because eventually they would starve to death?

  She couldn’t let herself think about that. She moved quickly, jumping from handhold to handhold as she came around the mammoth curve of the carrier’s hull. Eventually they reached the side of the cylindrical hull and she reached down and switched on the adhesive pads on the bottom of her boots. There was no up and down in space, but when she stood on the hull, looking forward toward the open end of the flight deck, she felt like an insect standing on the trunk of a massive tree.

  The dark hull curved away from her to either side, ran straight as far ahead as she could see. A terrain broken into thousands of sections of armor plates, carbon fiber cladding electroset over scandium alloy. Ahead of her, maybe seventy-five meters away, one of the carrier’s running lights blinked a dull green. It looked like a pool of radiance, an oasis of light in a dark desert.

  She shuffled forward, one step at a time, making sure to keep at least one foot always on the hull. Place her left foot, lift the right. Place the right, lift the left. It was an exhausting way to walk, and soon her legs were so tired they felt like hot bars of lead. Her wrists chafed against the inside of her suit where they’d been tied with the plastic strip. She could hear nothing but her own breathing and Shulkin grunting along behind her.

  The whole time all she could think was that if a single mutineer poked his head out of an airlock, a maintenance hatch, so much as looked out a window—they were dead. They were exposed out there. Sitting ducks.

  It felt like hours before she saw what she was looking for, up ahead. One of the three cupolas that protruded from the open maw of the flight deck. The thick carbonglas glinted in the starlight. She allowed herself to breathe a sigh of relief. She started to turn, to look back at Shulkin, to just make sure he was still there. He hadn’t said a word during the whole ascent.

  Just before she turned her head, though, she could have sworn she saw something. A flicker of motion.

  It was most likely nothing, she promised herself. It was almost certainly—

  Damnation. She’d seen it again. Just a hint of motion, behind the transparent panels of the cupola. She used her wrist display to get a magnified view, but saw nothing—no silhouettes, no dark figures crouching there.

  Which just made it worse.

  Someone was in there. Someone had seen them, and ducked out of view to try to hide from them.

  “Shulkin,” she said. “I think we may be in trouble.”

  “Define trouble,” he said.

  She didn’t need to. Dark shapes flickered around the open end of the flight deck. People in suits came rushing over the edge, some taking a second to adjust the pads on their boots, some just flying toward her using their suit jets.

  All of them were armed.

  Lanoe touched the cutter’s control stick, banking to come around the side of the cruiser.

  Maggs had told him to flee. To run away before the mutineers or his own officers could catch up with him. Maybe the bastard thought he was just going to fly off into the sunset—fly until he ran out of fuel, until he died out there in the void.

  He couldn’t realize that he’d simply given Lanoe the justificati
on to do a terrible thing. By taking away all of Lanoe’s options, Maggs had pushed him toward what he’d always known was inevitable. To finish what he’d started.

  And, by so doing, make everything okay again.

  Okay.

  What he had in mind wasn’t simple. The devil knew it wouldn’t be easy. But it was possible. And that meant it had to be done.

  It was a terrible thing he considered. It was a crime, he knew that. He understood that it was the wrong thing to do. But to bring Zhang back, to make her live again. All he had to do was keep his promise of revenge.

  He frowned as he approached the cruiser’s vehicle bay. He had no idea what he would find inside. A horde of mutineers clamoring for his blood? Ehta’s marines, lined up in perfect formation, ready to beat him senseless and throw him in the brig?

  Yet as he got closer he saw that the vehicle bay was empty. No ships at all in there. That didn’t make sense. There should be—

  He brought the cutter in. Made contact with a docking berth, its skeletal arms folding around the cutter’s landing gear. Holding it down. He opened the hatch and slid out, his sidearm in his hand.

  There was no one there to challenge him.

  He moved through the cruiser quickly, not knowing how much time he had. Every time he opened a hatch or moved into a new corridor he braced himself for shouts, for questions, for particle beams to come sizzling past his face. Instead—

  Silence. Emptiness. The cruiser was deserted.

  When he reached the brig he found it just as abandoned as the rest of the ship. The hatch to Rain-on-Stones’s cell was inert, its display blank. He half expected that when he touched the display it would set off an alarm. That this was all an elaborate trap.

  If he was honest with himself, he’d hoped that would happen.

  It didn’t.

  The hatch opened and inside the two of them looked up at the same time, their movements as synchronized as their thoughts. Rain-on-Stones stared at him with wet silver eyes, like ball bearings soaked in mercury. Ginger’s look just bore through him, so full of anger he could barely stand to make eye contact.

  He forced himself. He looked right into her eyes and stood up to the hatred there. If he was going to do this, if he was going to use her like this, he could at least be honest about it.

  “Get her up and moving,” he said. “The two of you are coming with me.”

  “Where are we going?” Ginger demanded. “What’s this all about?”

  “We’re going to save somebody’s life,” he said. “And kill a hell of a lot of aliens.”

  Shulkin let out a noise that might have been a roar, a maniacal laugh, or a scream of rage. It was so loud it turned into a distorted wail that echoed around inside Candless’s helmet. He rushed forward, barely managing to keep his feet on the hull as he poured rifle fire into the oncoming horde.

  Candless tried to cover him as best she could, though she had to be careful not to shoot him in the back. The mutineers flooded forward, barely keeping their heads down. She saw one coming at her from on high, jets blazing from his ankles and elbows. Through the helmet Candless could see a female face writhing with hatred. The woman had a knife held over her head and clearly she meant to crash into Candless and stab a hole in her suit.

  Candless let out her own scream of terror and fired straight up, her bullets cutting tiny holes through the front of the mutineer’s suit. The woman’s hand flew open and the knife spun off into nothingness as she crashed into a hull plate right next to Candless. As the woman started to get back up, she kicked her away, then fired three more shots through her helmet.

  Was the woman dead? Was she done? Candless couldn’t even tell. She dodged to one side just in case and ran forward after Shulkin. Even as a line of mutineers shot out of an airlock fifty meters away from her, emerging like bullets from a gun.

  How many of them were there? How many could there be? It felt like dozens of them, maybe scores, were rushing toward her, and her suppressing fire barely slowed them down. She spared a glance for Shulkin but couldn’t find him—he was lost in a knot of mutineers, their arms flashing up and down as they stabbed at him with knives. Particle beams and kinetic projectiles streaked past her and she dropped to the hull plates, trying to make herself as small a target as possible.

  Then someone grabbed her by the shoulders and flipped her over. A mutineer had caught up with her, a man with some kind of tool in his hand—a vibrasaw, she thought. Oh, hellfire, what would one of those do to a human body? She looked up into a maddened face, taking in the wide-open mouth, the staring eyes. It took her a second but she realized she recognized the man.

  It was Uhl. The pilot who had saved her during the battle with the dreadnought.

  “It’s me,” she tried to say, but the vibrasaw was already coming down, swinging through the space between them. She squirmed away and it bit hard into the flowglas of her helmet and she screamed again.

  “I’m sorry!” he shouted, and she could see in his face that he didn’t want this. Even as he reared back for another blow. “I’m sorry!” The blade of the saw shimmered so fast it was just a bright blur, the metal changing shape thousands of times a second. She tried to evade it a second time but he was too fast for her. The vibrasaw’s teeth bit deep into the shoulder of her suit. She could feel the layers of material there part and tear and she let out a cry of pure agony as the blade sank into her flesh.

  “I’m sorry,” Uhl sobbed, as he pressed the saw deeper into her arm.

  “So am I,” she wept, and drew her pistol and fired a single round right into his forehead.

  He flew backward, launched from the hull by the momentum of her bullet. The saw flickered and twisted in his lifeless hands as he slowly receded into space.

  Candless bit her lip and grabbed at her shoulder. Her suit was already repairing itself. Hot foam poured down her arm to plug the leak, and though it stung wickedly where it touched her wounded flesh, she knew it would help stop the bleeding as well. She tried to make a fist and found that she still had control of her fingers, even if her entire arm was burning with agony.

  She climbed to her feet, holstering her pistol and bringing her rifle around in case any other mutineers were nearby. She couldn’t find any of them at first—then she turned and saw they were all piling on Shulkin, trying to knock him down. He’d lost his rifle and she could see the long parallel scorch marks of particle fire all over his suit, but his face was lit up like a lamp as he laid into his attackers with a knife in either hand, cackling as he tore open a mutineer’s suit, shouting in glee as he kicked one of them off into space.

  One of them got an arm around Shulkin’s helmet and tried to pull him backward, off his feet. Candless fired a dozen shots into the mutineer’s side and back and he fell away, his body bouncing off the armored hull. Shulkin spun around and jabbed one of his knives deep into the guts of a mutineer with a welding torch. The man looked surprised, but he had already started to swing his weapon. Superhot plasma gouted from the end of the torch and Candless barely had time to scream “No!” as it burned a hole right through Shulkin’s midsection, a fountain of fire emerging from his back.

  “Ha!” Shulkin barked. “Ha! Ha!” He looked around him, as if wondering who would be the most satisfying to kill next. Mutineers edged away from him, as if they couldn’t believe he was still standing, still fighting.

  “Ha,” he said, but there was no force in it this time. It came out like a wheeze. Foam spilled out of the front and back of his suit as its damage control system tried to keep his air from escaping, but it just looked like he’d been disemboweled.

  “Ha,” he puffed out. His face was gray and his eyes were dark.

  He never fell. The carrier was too small to generate sufficient gravity to bring him down. He slumped forward a little, his muscles curling up, and one of his knives floated out of a dead hand. Then the mutineers piled on top of him, perhaps just trying to make sure he really was dead, and Candless couldn’t see him anymore.


  “You bastards!” she screamed, lifting her rifle. “You bastards!” She opened fire, hosing them down with particle blasts. “You bastards!”

  She hit some of them. Not enough. Mostly she just drew attention to herself. Suddenly they were all coming for her, all running toward her at once, a wave of them that would crest over her and smash her to the hull, smash her to pulp—

  Candless ran. She didn’t think about where she was going. She didn’t think about how she would survive this. She didn’t think at all—she just ran, her body reaching down through millions of years of evolution, through layers of instincts she’d never needed before, and she ran, her legs pumping like triphammers as she dashed down the carrier’s hull, away from the mob, away from death. A particle beam went right through her helmet, missing her cheek by millimeters. A bullet smacked into one of the life support packages mounted on her back and she nearly went sprawling forward.

  She never stopped running. Her feet slapped against the carbon fiber, her breath pulsing in and out of her lungs, and they were right behind her, they were just moments from catching her, they were—

  Something big went over her head, very fast. She felt a rumbling vibration through the hull, waves of it rolling up her calf muscles and making her knees shake. She threw herself forward, threw herself down with her arms over her head as the vibration came again and again and again.

  When she dared to look she turned and saw a line of mutineers right behind her, swaying gently as their boots held them to the hull. Their helmets were gone, shattered and thick with blood. She couldn’t see their heads.

  And then—

  And then it started raining marines.