Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  “What did I say about this not being easy, just a second ago?” Lanoe asked.

  Paniet shook his head. “No, I got that. What I’m wondering is how it’ll look to them. What they’ll see. From their perspective, the alien invaders are going to attack one of their most important installations—then run away without actually breaking anything that can’t be replaced. If you were in charge of their defenses, Commander, wouldn’t that raise a red flag or two? Or fifteen?”

  Valk laughed.

  Ehta shot the AI a quizzical look.

  “It’s a joke,” Valk explained. “The Blue-Blue-White use a base-fifteen numbering system. So instead of a dozen red flags, they would raise fifteen.”

  Ehta frowned.

  “It’s funny,” Valk protested. “I thought it was funny.”

  Paniet waved a hand through the display. “The point is, it’s going to look suspicious. They’ll suspect that we’ve sabotaged the queenship somehow. I imagine they’ll check its computers. What happens then?”

  “I can hide myself pretty well,” Valk said. “That’s one of the nice things about being a self-aware computer program. If they scan the queenship’s memory I can just make sure I’m not in the place they’re looking.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Paniet said. “Or we’ll have wasted a great deal of time and put ourselves in danger for nothing.”

  “At least we’ll know right away if it works or not,” Lanoe pointed out. “If it does, we’ll see a wormhole throat open in the sky.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Candless asked.

  “Do you see any point in worrying about that?” Lanoe asked her. “If it doesn’t, we’re all dead. Just like we were before we came up with this plan.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The new gun crews boarded the cruiser annoyed and unhappy. They were the last of the Centrocor contingent—those members of the carrier’s crew who had remained loyal during the mutiny, or at least failed to take up arms in the revolt. They grumbled about being pressed into a service they weren’t trained for. It was unavoidable—Ehta’s marines were needed down on the shepherd moon. Replacements had to be found, as the guns were designed to be operated by human hands. Somebody had to shoot the guns, and this batch were the only ones available.

  “Welcome aboard,” Valk said, a disembodied voice sounding from speakers in the vehicle bay. “I’ve designed some instructional videos to help you learn your new tasks. You should proceed directly to the gun decks and get settled in. We’ll be maneuvering in just a few minutes and you’ll want to be strapped down—we’ll be subjected to several g’s of acceleration for the duration of the burn. I hope you’ll enjoy your new posts.”

  Kilometers away, Valk climbed onboard the troop transport. He would be flying the vehicle in. Ehta’s marines were already strapping themselves in or stowing their heavy weaponry behind panels in the transport’s bulkheads. Ehta grabbed his arm before he could head up to the transport’s tiny cockpit.

  “Hey, big guy,” she said. “For luck.”

  Before he could react she shoved her face up against his helmet and kissed the black flowglas there. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him into a tight hug. The marines whooped and laughed, a couple of them making rude comments that Valk had to pretend not to hear. He didn’t understand. Didn’t Ehta know he was far past any kind of sexual feelings?

  “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling away from her. “We need to get going—maybe we can talk about this later.”

  As he hurried up the ladder to the cockpit, he could see Ehta slapping hands with some of her people. Well, at least they were in a good mood.

  Not so very far away, more copies of Valk powered up the last four BR.9s from the cruiser’s original complement. The cataphracts had been moved over to the carrier so that all the small craft could be launched from the same position. The copies ran through preflight checklists, checked weapons loadouts, tested their comms.

  Their bodies burned with phantom pain. The sooner this was over, the better, as far as they were concerned. If they didn’t make it back, well, that would just be optimal.

  The copies sent their ready signals to the carrier’s bridge, one by one.

  Time to get started.

  Lanoe grabbed a handhold on the wall of the carrier’s flight deck as gravity pulled him down toward what was suddenly a floor. The second the engines came online, he knew, the Blue-Blue-White would have their position and would move to intercept. Valk and the carrier’s pilot had poured every ounce of power they could get into their vehicles’ engines—the faster they could get to the shepherd moon, the less resistance they would meet when they arrived.

  It would be a short flight. And then—well, Lanoe had never really suffered from nerves. Right before a battle, no matter how bad the odds, he always felt a certain calm come over him. Resolve, but also detachment, an almost dreamlike state. It was never truly real until the shooting started.

  Candless, on the other hand, was shaking. She sat down hard on the floor and clutched at whatever she could find to hold on to.

  Lanoe peered upward, at the docking berths in their ranks above him. Most of them were empty now. They’d lost all but a few of the Yk.64s that had come with the carrier. Bullam’s yacht was gone—with Maggs at the helm. For the first time since he’d met the bastard, Lanoe didn’t wish him ill. He honestly hoped the two of them were still alive out there, somewhere. Alive and safe.

  He turned and looked at Candless. “I want to tell you something,” he said.

  “Is now the perfect time?” she asked, her head between her knees.

  “It’s the only time. I want you to know—you were right. When you decided to relieve me from duty. That was a good call, at the time.”

  “I’m tempted to try it again now,” she said. She looked up suddenly, a surprised look on her face. “Lanoe,” she said, “what you just said—that sounded almost like an apology.”

  Lanoe sighed. “I let a lot of people die because I thought I knew best,” he said. This wasn’t easy. Lanoe had always made it a policy to never look back, to not question the things he did or the reasons he did them. Moving forward, taking action, was what counted. If he was going to fight by Candless’s side, though, he needed to clear the air. “All those Centrocor pilots—they weren’t prepared for this fight. How could they be? And I pushed them, thinking maybe if my expectations were high enough they would start showing some real talent. They died because I overestimated them.”

  Candless sniffed in derision. “Hardly,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “They died because you were so obsessed you refused to accept reality. You were delusional, Lanoe. You were unfit for command. It wasn’t a decision I made, to relieve you. It was absolute necessity. You gave me no choice at all.”

  Maybe he deserved that. His actions had been dubious, he could see that now. He’d made some very bad mistakes.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for what I did. I’m especially sorry for what happened to Bury—”

  “Damn you,” Candless spat. “Don’t you even say his name, you bastard.”

  Candless didn’t talk like that. Lanoe reeled as if he’d been slapped.

  He raised a hand that weighed three times what it should, three times what it would have weighed on Earth. The effort was exhausting, but he needed to make the gesture. To explain to her, to help her see why he’d done what he did.

  He opened his mouth to speak.

  “Spare me,” she said, before he could get a word out.

  Grunting a little under the hard acceleration, she rose to her feet, then moved to a ladder that ran along the wall of the flight deck. Her BR.9 was up there, and clearly she intended to get into its cockpit before he could say anything else.

  He stood there for a while, looking up at the fighters perched above him. The ones Valk was inhabiting. The ones they’d left in reserve, even though they had no pilots left to fly them. All of Centrocor’s pilots had
picked the wrong side in the mutiny, every last one. After the way he’d treated them during the battle with the interceptors, they’d chosen to try to kill Navy personnel rather than fight at Lanoe’s side again.

  Aleister Lanoe never got lonely. What a foolish thought.

  Still, as he stood there at the bottom of the flight deck, he suddenly felt very much alone.

  Valk eased the transport out of the flight deck, fighters rocketing past him. It was fine—he was controlling most of them, or at least copies of his program were controlling them. There was no risk of a collision. Candless and Lanoe gave him a wide berth as he slipped out the front of the carrier and into space.

  The shepherd moon was less than an hour away, even for the lumbering transport. They were coming in at a low angle, just above the atmosphere of the disk. Thin as it was this far out, the fighters could still make better time flying through hard vacuum.

  Valk had thought he’d evolved past human emotions like wonder and awe, but he hadn’t factored in a view like this. The disk stretched out forever, a vast and flat plain of shimmering light. The red and black clouds mere ripples in an infinity of color, a maelstrom of constant movement with the red dwarf at its center. The star sat out there like a king on a throne, or like a god in a shrine.

  The moon, their destination, was much closer and looked enormous even from this distance, its cagework-covered surface reticulated and complex in the dim light. It cleared a broad swath through the disk, a ribbon of night cut through the cosmic whirlpool. It pushed an enormous hazy bow wave ahead of itself, a permanent roiling thunderhead of white that dripped streamers of vapor like battle standards, fluttering and braiding behind the moon as it passed by.

  Valk couldn’t remember how many moons, how many planets he’d visited, both in his current form and as Tannis Valk, the human pilot who’d come before him. He’d surfed through the rings of gas giants before, but nothing on this scale. Nothing so big it made him feel this tiny, this insignificant. It couldn’t help but make him worry that this wouldn’t work, that his plan had been an audacious folly.

  He had to force himself to not turn back. He looked to his left and right and spotted fighters all around him, guarding him, and he took a little courage from that. He touched the transport’s controls, very lightly, and swooped down toward the moon.

  The Blue-Blue-White were expecting him. They must have detected the carrier as it came in for its close approach. The first lasers licked at the sky, sweeping back and forth as they searched for him, spearing straight up from the moon.

  Lanoe kept his throttle wide open and tapped his control stick back and forth, his Z.XIX swinging around wildly as he dodged the searchbeams. At that speed they couldn’t get a fix on him, though they kept trying. He checked on Candless and the Valks flying the BR.9s, saw they were just barely staying ahead of the lasers. It looked like it was up to him and his advanced fighter to clear the way.

  “All seven dreadnoughts are inbound now, as well as the interceptors,” the fighter told him. “They’re moving quite rapidly. Would you like a tactical display?”

  He swung around to dodge a searchbeam and dove toward the surface of the moon. Lances of coherent light flashed past him on every side. The cagework that overlaid the moon’s surface rushed toward him, the white pylons growing distinct, shadows on their tops turning into features. Where the hell was the laser emplacement? Ehta’s intelligence showed it—there—

  Yes—he could see it now, a cluster of searchlights mounted on top of one of the pylons. It saw him, too, and a beam lit up his canopy. He ducked down, just his body acting by reflex, as the beam narrowed, and suddenly a line of light as straight as a razor’s edge cut through his flowglas canopy. Air rushed past him, leaking out of the breach, but the flowglas healed itself almost instantly.

  Valk dodged as best he could, but the troop transport had never been made for evasive maneuvers. The searchbeams were getting closer, getting far too close for comfort. One grazed the transport’s hull, then swung back to touch him again, tracking with him as he tried to swing back and forth.

  “Hey, take it easy!” one of the marines in the passenger compartment shouted, as he tried to shake the beam. It was no use, though—it was on him now, locked on, and already it was narrowing, growing more coherent. In a moment it would intensify and collimate until it burned right through his hull, until it cut the transport to pieces—

  —except, a hundred kilometers away, one of his other selves, one of the copies inhabiting a cataphract, felt it, too, and moved to intercept, boosting upward on a pillar of fire, accelerating at a rate that would have turned any human pilot into a thin red paste across the back of the cockpit. Even as the beam that had found the transport shrank down until its cross section was no wider than a coin, the Valk in the BR.9 twisted upward in a tight corkscrew, just narrowly avoiding three more beams that had tried to catch it, using up every bit of power he could send to his thrusters, even as engine degradation lights flickered on where no one could see them, chimes sounded where there were no ears to hear them. Even as the searchbeam narrowed further and turned a brilliant ruby red, the BR.9 forced itself onward and there—there—

  The BR.9 took the full brunt of the laser, the beam cutting right through its fairings, its armor, its cockpit. Molten slag cascaded across the empty pilot’s seat and seared its way through the heat shielding behind the cockpit.

  “Thanks, I guess,” Valk said, the original Valk in the transport.

  The copy of himself started to respond, but just then the laser cut through the BR.9’s engine housing. It sheared through the ranks of field emitters holding the fusion torus together and the reactor breached, superhot plasma exploding outward at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

  Down in the passenger section of the transport, the marines must have seen the flash of light through the narrow viewports. He heard them shouting, heard a few of them scream.

  “Nothing to worry about, friends,” he told them. “Just a near miss.”

  Lanoe saw the BR.9 disintegrate, up ahead of him, and cursed under his breath.

  It was Candless who called the AI out, however. “M. Valk,” she said, over the general band, “you will refrain from these suicidal maneuvers in future! We don’t have enough BR.9s to be profligate with them. Am I understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Valk said, though he sounded like a child trying to explain he couldn’t finish his homework because it was boring. Lanoe shook his head. Distractions, so many distractions. When he was so close to the laser emplacement. So close to clearing their way down.

  A virtual Aldis sight bobbed around his canopy. He had a disruptor ready to go, the moment he got a firing solution on the emplacement. Even with the Philoctetes targeting algorithm, though, even with all his skill, he could never quite get a lock because he was too busy swinging from side to side, cutting tight corners with rotary turns as he dodged the beams.

  It had been a lot easier the last time he’d done this. Then, he’d had the cover of the clouds. Then, he’d had Batygin and his destroyer to act as a shield. Now it came down to nothing but fancy flying and desperation.

  “That last beam cut off the end of our upper starboard airfoil,” the fighter’s voice told him.

  Lanoe hadn’t even felt it. He wanted to look sideways, to inspect the damage, but he had no time. Three new beams were converging on his position and he had to twist away, zooming up over the moon’s surface as they nearly hit his thruster cones.

  “I can’t get a lock,” Candless said over the general band. “Moving to—to engage, but—there are too many of them!”

  If Lanoe was having this much trouble, with his advanced fighter, he could only guess how bad her situation must be.

  He couldn’t afford to think about that, though. He twisted around in a flat spin and then dropped his nose to dive straight toward the laser emplacement. The virtual Aldis sight drifted across the middle of his vision and he swiped it away—it wasn’t helping. H
e reached over to his weapons board and set the disruptor to launch as soon as he pulled the trigger, and not to wait for a firing solution.

  A searchbeam caught the nose of his fighter, filling his canopy with blinding light. His helmet opaqued to block it out, but that meant he could barely see what he was aiming at, could barely see the emplacement at all—

  Now, he thought, shoot now, but he forced himself to take another second, a second during which the searchbeam narrowed and narrowed, until it was a red dot shining directly into his eyes, but—

  There. Now.

  He squeezed the trigger. Then threw his stick over to the side, even as the laser collimated and punched a hole through his canopy, through the back of his seat. If it hit his engine shielding—but he couldn’t look back, couldn’t check his damage board, couldn’t do anything but watch as—

  The disruptor started exploding long before it reached the emplacement. The plume of debris it gave off scattered the beam, sending rays of red light shooting off in every direction. The missile plunged into the cagework around the emplacement, a full meter off from its target, and for a moment Lanoe thought he’d missed, thought he’d thrown away his best chance.

  Then orange light and a mushroom cloud of dust shot up from the ruptured pylon, shards of coral pinwheeling away from the emplacement. He couldn’t even see the searchlight shapes of the laser weapons, couldn’t tell if he’d destroyed them or not, but for the moment, at least, for a few seconds the lasers stopped firing. He held his breath, certain they would start up again as soon as the dust settled.

  But the laser didn’t fire. He could see the searchlights now, their lenses thick with dust. They weren’t moving, weren’t firing.

  “Yes!” he shouted, and pounded on his console with his fist.