Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  “A fellow named Hollander,” Paniet said, as he rode with Ehta back to the carrier. “A neddy, like me. He had me fooled right from the start, I’m sorry to say. I’m pretty sure he was spying for Centrocor even when we first met. He’d been on the crew of one of the destroyers, you see, but I thought engineers couldn’t possibly be devious. It’s just not in our makeup, is it, ducks?”

  “Anybody can be a bastard, if they’ve got a reason,” Ehta said.

  “I think he wanted to expose M. Valk to the Centrocor contingent, or something. I was foolish enough to let him come onboard the cruiser with me. Oh, I’m sure I’m in for it when we get back. I’ve been so stupid!”

  “I don’t understand,” Ehta said. “This guy took you out to the dreadnought?”

  “No, of course not, love, do try to pay attention. Lanoe had asked me to investigate that hulk. See what I could learn of Blue-Blue-White technology. It was terribly spooky, but for a boy like me, well, how could I resist? Every time I see a machine I want to take it apart and see how it runs. So I went. But I asked Hollander to come with me, for company. And so I wouldn’t be alone in there.” Paniet sighed and rolled his eyes. “I thought it might be … well. A nice bonding moment. Instead it was all just one huge mistake. He cornered me in there. He had a pistol and he brandished it at me. Positively threatened me with it. I thought he was going to kill me, honestly, but his intentions were the exact opposite.”

  Ehta frowned. “He wanted to … help you? With a pistol?”

  “It’ll come clear in a moment, I swear it. So he told me there was a mutiny planned. A bunch of Centrocor people were going to rise up and seize the ships, and he knew that all the Navy officers were going to be, well, you know.” Paniet drew a finger across his collar ring. It took Ehta a second to realize he was miming cutting his throat. “It turned out that while, yes, he was a devious spy, and a real cad, he still had a heart. He’d started to like me after all, no matter how it compromised his secret mission. So he shot me. Yes, really! Except it turned out it wasn’t a pistol, it was a neural stunner. When I woke up, I found that he’d disabled some of my suit’s systems. He was rather clever about it—spy, perhaps, evildoer, yes, but he was also one hell of an engineer. He drained all the fuel out of my suit jets, and cross-welded all the antennas in my communications rig. I couldn’t call you lot to tell you what was coming, and I couldn’t fly back to the cruiser to warn you, either.”

  “So you … wrote ‘MUTINY’ on the dreadnought.”

  “To warn you, yes. And I’m guessing it worked. Right, dearie? It did? You were able to put down this nascent plot before it even got started. Of course you did, because you and Candless are very clever. So that’s that. You can thank me anytime you like for saving the day.”

  Paniet’s chipper tone was belied by his face. Ehta could see the doubt gnawing at him. The fear.

  She hated having to be the one to tell him he was right.

  “No,” she said. “We didn’t get the message in time.” She gave him the broad strokes of what happened with the mutiny. She kept the bloodier details out of it.

  His crestfallen look made her turn away. “I see,” he said. “I … see. Let me ask just one question, then.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Ehta said.

  “Hollander,” Paniet asked her. “Is he … I mean, I’m sure you had to, I don’t know, rough him up a bit. But you’ll have him in the brig or something. I want to recommend clemency. He did, after all, try to save me. I’m sure he would have come back for me, if the mutiny was successful. He would have protected me, he would have—”

  He stopped abruptly, because Ehta was scrolling through a list on her wrist display. A list of names in red and blue, with far too many of them crossed out.

  When she found the one she wanted, she cursed softly to herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him.

  Paniet looked away. She could see tears starting to pool in the corners of his eyes, so she looked away.

  Eventually he reached over and patted her knee. “You did what you had to,” he said, but very softly, and with very little emotion.

  When they docked with the carrier, she took him straight to the bridge. Candless had asked to see him as soon as possible. “Captain-Engineer,” the teacher said, rushing over to grab his hands when he pushed through the hatch. “By the devil’s own handmaidens, we didn’t think—that is to say, we thought you were—”

  “I’m healthy as a well-fed marine,” he told her. “I—oh. That—that stain on the wall, there, that’s—”

  “Don’t,” Candless said. “Don’t look.”

  Paniet nodded. He swallowed thickly and looked away from the bulkhead. Ehta moved out of his way so he could see who was there, and who wasn’t. No one was sitting at the navigator’s position. The pilot had a bandage wrapped around her head. Shulkin’s seat was empty.

  Valk was there, though. Looking almost human. He had his helmet up and tuned to an opaque black, of course, but he looked like Ehta remembered him, from back when she thought he was still the Blue Devil.

  Paniet rushed over to him and dragged the AI into a bear hug. “Oh, old friend, it’s good to see you,” he said.

  “You too,” Valk replied. He looked like he didn’t know what to do with his hands, though. Maybe he’d forgotten how humans showed affection for each other.

  “I’m sorry to break up the reunion,” Candless said. “I asked Major Ehta to bring you here for a reason, Captain-Engineer.”

  “You did?” Paniet asked.

  “M. Valk has discovered something … troublesome,” Candless said. “Something that, frankly, I’m having trouble understanding. The mathematics are a bit dense, but the conclusions are simple enough. He says they’re irrefutable. One of the tasks I’d like you to undertake is to check his work.” She handed him a minder. Its display was densely figured with equations and mathematical symbols. Just looking at it made Ehta’s head spin. Paniet started running his finger across the numbers as soon as it was handed to him.

  “It’s sound,” Valk said.

  “I’m sure, love, but it’s always worthwhile having a second pair of eyes on something complex,” Paniet said.

  “I don’t have eyes,” Valk said.

  “Ah. Right. Wait just a mo—here, this figure, that would suggest—”

  “Yes,” Valk said.

  “That we’ve traveled through time. Half a billion years.”

  “Yes.”

  “Impossible,” Paniet replied.

  “No,” Valk said.

  “It should be,” Paniet said. “In a reasonable world. Yes, yes, I know—we don’t live in one of those. I suppose … I mean …”

  Candless cleared her throat. Noisily enough that everyone on the bridge looked up at her. “Can you confirm M. Valk’s conclusions?” she asked.

  Paniet blinked rapidly. He looked, to Ehta, about equal parts fascinated, curious, amazed—and scared to the point of soiling himself.

  “It looks good,” he said. “Oh, goodness. Oh, goodness, darlings, this means—”

  Candless stopped him with a nasty look. She was good at that, Ehta had to admit. Best nasty looks in the service. “There’s another thing I require,” she said.

  “Yes? I’m all ears,” Paniet told her.

  “You’ll notice Commander Lanoe isn’t here.”

  “I assumed he would be on the cruiser,” Paniet told her. “Somebody has to fly it.”

  “I made a copy of myself,” Valk said.

  The very thought seemed to make Candless’s skin crawl. Which, of course, made Ehta want to grin from ear to ear. She suppressed it.

  “Commander Lanoe has been relieved of duty,” Candless said. Before Paniet could respond, she held up one hand. “In absentia. He absconded with the cutter—and with Ginger and Rain-on-Stones.”

  Paniet’s mouth opened wide. Then he shut it again, carefully. “What’s he going to do with them?”

  “Something he calls Plan C,” Candless told hi
m. “I don’t know the details, but Valk tells me he means to change history. I can guess why. He wants to bring a woman named Bettina Zhang back from the dead.”

  “Oh. Goodness,” Paniet said.

  Candless nodded. “The thing is, Valk tells me that if he tries to do that, there will be negative consequences.”

  Paniet laughed out loud. He looked from one of them to the other, as if they should understand implicitly why this was so funny.

  Ehta liked Paniet. She liked him a lot. That didn’t mean she didn’t want to hit him sometimes.

  Paniet’s face eventually fell, as he realized no one else was laughing.

  “There’s a great deal we don’t know about time travel, because of course we’ve never done it before, have we? But yes. Yes, dear heart,” he said finally. “Negative consequences. You could say that. Time travel would be dangerous. So very, very dangerous. Have you tried warning him? Telling him so?”

  “That’s the problem. The cutter is designed to be stealthy. We have no way of tracking it. He’s somewhere in the system. I assume he’s most likely somewhere near the disk, but beyond that …he could be anywhere. I need to send him a message.”

  Paniet nodded. “Ah, I see. You want me to rig up some kind of radio transceiver capable of reaching him wherever he is. A way to talk to the entire system at once, so you’re sure he hears it.”

  “Exactly. Can it be done?”

  “Yes, of course,” Paniet told her. “I can start on it immediately, if you like. Oh, but, dearest, there is one tiny smidge of a problem there. Barely worth considering, I suppose, but—”

  “Tell me,” Candless said.

  “Once you send this message, well. We’re talking about a very high-power signal. It will be heard literally everywhere, including in the disk. The Blue-Blue-White will have no idea what you’re saying, of course, but they’ll know exactly where we are, as long as you’re on the air.”

  Candless inhaled sharply. “They’ll be able to triangulate our position.”

  “Precisely.”

  She turned to look at Ehta. Ehta was so surprised that Candless would turn to her for advice that all she could do was shrug.

  “He needs to know,” Valk said. He tapped the minder. “Before he makes a terrible mistake. Before he drags us all down with him.”

  Candless closed her eyes. Then she nodded, just once.

  “Do it,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  You’re insane,” Ginger said.

  Maybe, Lanoe thought. It was a distinct possibility. There were a lot of kinds of insanity, though.

  “You honestly think this is something I would do? To commit genocide, just because—what? Because you’re ordering me to do it?”

  “No,” he said. He leaned back in his seat and scratched at his short hair. “No. It’s not an order. Maybe that would have worked on you once. Back when I first met you, when you were just a cadet. Or when I fought beside you, when Centrocor first attacked us. But no. Not now. You’ve come a long way since then. You’ve changed, a lot.”

  “I—I chose this,” she said.

  Clearly she understood what he meant. Maybe she suspected where he was going with this. “Did you? You volunteered, yeah. You volunteered to have an antenna put in your head so you could talk to the Choir.” Though at the time she’d been up on charges. She’d been in a bad place, and it was the only way for her to get out. “You didn’t know what that was going to mean, though. You didn’t know, back then, what was going to happen.”

  Ginger shook her head. “I didn’t know you would kidnap us.” Meaning both her and Rain-on-Stones. “Drag us all this way.”

  “No. And you didn’t know you would be tied to just one chorister, unable to harmonize. Stuck in her head as she went insane. You didn’t know that would happen, when you volunteered.”

  “I’ve tried to make the best of it,” Ginger said. “I’ve tried to help her, to keep us both … stable.” She shrugged. “It hasn’t been easy,” she admitted.

  “Exactly. It’s been unbearable, hasn’t it? Excruciating. You’ve had to cope with her pain this whole time. You’ve had to feel how cut off she is, handle all that anguish. Ehta tried to help you. She tried to kill Rain-on-Stones, to free you.”

  “Because I asked her to. And then you threatened to kill her.”

  “I had to maintain order in my fleet,” Lanoe rushed out, before realizing that it would sound like the empty rationalization it was. “Never mind. That’s not important. I’m going to offer you something, in exchange for opening this wormhole.”

  “Lanoe, no, I—”

  “I’ll free you from her. From Rain-on-Stones. All you have to do is this one thing.”

  “No,” she said. “No, you can’t—I won’t let you just kill her!”

  “That’s not what I said, and it’s not what I meant. I won’t hurt her. I’ll just separate the two of you. Move you someplace where you can’t hear her thoughts.”

  “What? But then she—she would be all alone.” She shivered as if she were freezing. She understood he was serious.

  “You, too,” he said. “You’d be free.”

  “No,” she said. “No, I couldn’t.” She was shaking. Trembling so hard he thought she might have a seizure.

  “Sure you could. You just have to say yes.”

  “No—I. No!” she shouted, and smashed at her temples with her fists. “No, no, no!” she shrieked. “No!”

  He leaned his head back and pressed it against the headrest of his seat. He knew perfectly well that half her reaction was coming from Rain-on-Stones. That Ginger, the real Ginger, was still in there, thinking it over carefully.

  He hadn’t heard her final answer, not yet.

  “Do you remember the night we spent on that troop ship, right after the fighting ended at the Belt of Styx?” Zhang asked. She was sitting in the seat next to him, hands on her knees. Strapped in and wearing a suit, as if she was really there.

  It wasn’t just her voice this time. He could see her. She was right there.

  She rolled her head to the side lazily, smiling at him. “The ship was full of marines and it stank, not just bodies but that horrible oil they used to use on their fighting suits, you remember, yeah? It was like synthetic lard or something, and they said it kept the enemy from grabbing them. And the women slicked their hair with it.”

  Lanoe nodded. “We ate fried dough in the engineering section, because it was the only cool place on the ship, but they had their machine shop going, printing out replacement parts for a tank, and we couldn’t hear each other talk.”

  Her smile widened. “You waited until the grinders were going full blast. My helmet kept coming up automatically to try to protect my ears. You thought I wouldn’t actually hear you when you asked me to marry you.”

  “You did? You heard that?” Lanoe said, laughing.

  Her smile faded, just a little. “I wish I’d said yes,” she said. “All those times you proposed. I could have said yes, at least once. And then—”

  “Zhang never said yes,” Lanoe said.

  “And then we wouldn’t have had to meet again at Niraya, and I wouldn’t be—”

  “Dead.”

  “ … right.” Zhang nodded, looking very serious. She turned her head to face forward. “I get it. But things can change now. I can come back.”

  “You’re dead,” he repeated. It was all he could say—he’d hit some kind of wall, some kind of psychological barrier. He couldn’t think about the future. Only what had been, and what should have been.

  “I know. But I don’t have to be.”

  “You’re dead,” he whispered.

  Her face blurred. Changed. She grew freckles. A scar on one temple where the antenna went in.

  Ginger was staring at him with her blue eyes.

  “Who are you talking to?” she asked, her face twisted with disgust.

  “No one,” he said. “A memory.”

  “We’re getting close now,” Lanoe
said. Ahead of them, right in the middle of their view, the red dwarf had swollen to fill a third of the sky. They were coming in almost directly above the star’s north pole, so the disk filled the rest of their view, the red clouds boiling in tension as if they knew what was coming. The narrow band of black between the star and the disk was filled with distant stars.

  It was a view, a landscape—for lack of a better term—beyond human scale, so it was beyond human meaning. All just hydrogen, the simplest thing in existence, but hydrogen in profundity. Hydrogen as transcendence, as immanence.

  The human eye makes distant things small, because the human brain is small, and cannot contain the sky. What they were doing was crime on a cosmic scale, but because they were human beings, they couldn’t comprehend the size of it.

  Lanoe laughed to himself. The rot his brain fed him sometimes … there was work to be done.

  He didn’t know how close they would have to get. He figured Ginger would tell him. When she agreed to his plan.

  “It’s your choice,” he told her. “You can do what I ask, and be free. Otherwise—we’re here for good. There’s no way back. You can spend what’s left of your life with the alien, locked up in a cell together. Feeling each other’s pain.”

  Ginger wouldn’t look at him. She kept her face turned to the side, as if the light hurt her eyes. As if she wanted to be anywhere else, anywhere in the universe but next to him. He didn’t blame her.

  There was still some part of him that felt sorry for her. That wished he could relent and give her what she truly wanted. Her innocence back.

  That was impossible, of course. Even if you could change history, you couldn’t change who people were. You couldn’t fix them. Better to stamp out that feeling part of himself. Better to be what everyone thought he was. The fighter pilot, the Ace of Aces. The statue made of brass.

  “It’s your choice,” he said.

  Lanoe had worked as the personal pilot of a planetary governor once, a very powerful man. He had told Lanoe that the secret to negotiation was to take the other fellow’s options away. Leave him with nothing, no direction to jump except the one you want. And then tell him to choose.