Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  “One emplacement down,” Lanoe called.

  “The second one’s giving me trouble,” Candless replied. The second emplacement was on the far side of the construction site, over on the horizon and almost below the curve of the moon. Valk was still well within its range. He called up a telescope view from the carrier and saw Candless flitting around it like a gnat, trying over and over to get close enough to knock it out, constantly being forced away as flurries of coherent light shot upward toward her fighter.

  “I need support over here,” she called. “Valks—come help me!”

  The copies streamed away from the transport, twisting toward her along random trajectories. As for the original, Valk had his hands full just staying airborne. He wished he could have controlled the transport directly—it would have sped up his reaction time to simply issue commands straight to the vehicle’s computer. He wasn’t sure it would have really helped, though. If he maneuvered too hard, if he twisted away from the laser beams too abruptly, he ran the risk of harming his passengers.

  That wouldn’t do. He was going to need them when he got down to the ground.

  As it was, they kept shouting and screaming as he zigged and zagged, trying to stay out of the path of the deadly beams. Without his copies to protect him it was a futile attempt.

  “Hang in there,” he told the marines, and threw his stick forward to dive toward the moon’s surface. Maybe if he could get under the lasers, below an elevation where they could fire safely—

  A beam tore through the rear of the transport without warning, slicing through one of his thruster cones like a hot knife. Chimes sounded and red lights filled the cockpit, bathing Valk’s suit in the color of blood. He felt something tear loose at the back of the transport, felt the whole vehicle shake and start to tear itself apart. The ship rolled over on its side, and he had to fight to stabilize, to keep from falling out of the sky.

  “Valk!” Lanoe shouted. He could see the transport spinning on its long axis, see a plume of smoke a kilometer long leaking from its engines. He threw his stick over to the side and let his inertial sink pin him down in his seat as he maneuvered hard to close the distance, to reach the transport. Even though he knew it was probably already too late.

  As he closed the distance, he saw large shapes moving up behind the transport, shapes he at first mistook for clouds. Closer still and he saw what they really were, and he swore softly to himself.

  Airfighters. The moon’s contingent of airfighters had scrambled on their position. The raid had been scheduled for a time when most of them were on the far side of the moon, but clearly they must have responded to the attack faster than he’d expected. Three of them were bearing down on the transport already, their giant wings catching the light as they banked in the moon’s thin atmosphere. They dwarfed the bulbous transport, like sharks chasing a sunfish.

  “Give me some telemetry on those things,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” the fighter said, and brought up a subdisplay across the bottom of his canopy.

  The airfighters’ weapons were already hot, ready to fire.

  “They’ll tear the transport to pieces,” Candless called. “They’ll burn it to a cinder.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Lanoe said. He threw his stick forward and punched open his throttle. Reaching over to his weapons board, he readied a disruptor, and put two more on standby.

  Below Valk the cagework surface twisted and blurred past. Above him lasers swept across the sky, looking for his copies, ignoring him for the moment. Did they think he was finished? Did they think he was going to crash?

  Were they right?

  It took him a second to realize the actual reason why the lasers were ignoring him. To notice the three giant airfighters swooping in behind him. Ah. That was going to be a problem, he thought.

  Though, frankly, at that point they were just overkill. The transport was doing a perfectly fine job of shaking apart all on its own.

  “I’m in trouble,” he said, calling Lanoe and Candless. “I’ve been hit.”

  “I saw it happen. Looks like they caught your aft section, your engines. What’s your status?” Lanoe demanded.

  Flight data and sensor inputs reeled through Valk’s electronic mind, data forming graphs that all pointed to the same nasty conclusion. “I’m going down,” he said.

  “I’m on my way to support you,” Lanoe told him. “When you say going down—”

  “I mean I can’t hold my altitude,” Valk said.

  “You’re still ten kilometers from the construction site,” Lanoe said. “How close can you get?”

  “That depends if we want to be alive when we get there.”

  “Understood,” Lanoe said. “I’ll cover you. Just—be safe. We’re all counting on you.”

  Valk knew they were. He took a moment to check a camera view of the inside of the transport’s passenger compartment. He could see the marines in there weren’t even screaming anymore. Most of them had blacked out from g stress. The ones who were still awake looked disoriented, confused, pale and terrified. Ehta’s eyes were rolling up in their sockets, and there was blood streaming from her nose.

  Valk remembered the night, right before the battle for Niraya, when he and Ehta had shared something … special. Something intimate. He’d still thought he was human, back then. He’d thought he was a terribly burned shell of a human body locked inside a suit with a helmet he could never, ever lower. He couldn’t bear the thought of anyone seeing him like that. He’d assumed that any chance he had of human contact was over. That no one would ever want to touch him again.

  Ehta had let him keep his helmet up. She hadn’t cared what was underneath. She’d shown him what he could do with what he still had. She’d let him touch her, let him be with her, in a way that had felt impossible right up until it happened. For just a little time they’d just been two people, sharing their fear, pushing it away so they could connect.

  What they’d had that night wasn’t love, not by any classical definition. It was warmth, though, and compassion, and sympathy. In the whole time Valk had masqueraded as a human being, it was the best he’d ever felt.

  He was going to keep Ehta alive. He was going to save her—no matter what. He wrestled with the control stick of the transport. Stabbed at virtual keyboards, his free hand moving faster than any human hand could. He activated fire and damage control safeguards, then hit a key that flooded the passenger compartment with emergency restraining foam. The marines disappeared under great billowing clouds of the grayish stuff, their helmets raising automatically so they didn’t drown in it.

  A display popped up in front of him, showing a column of numbers that were going down far faster than he liked. The numbers represented his altitude, in meters, and very soon now they would shrink to zero.

  “Anyone who can hear me,” he said, his voice muffled by the foam in the passenger compartment, “now would be a good time to brace for impact.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Ehta’s head hurt.

  Her first thought was that she must have a hangover. It was a pretty good bet that anytime she woke up in pain, not knowing where she was, it was a hangover. Her second thought was that she was glad she’d squirreled away some hydration tabs.

  Her third thought was that she’d been buried alive. She could see nothing through her helmet but darkness and could feel weight pressing down on her from above. She panicked for a second, flailing her arms and legs. Surprisingly that had a positive effect—the crash foam all around her, having done its job, liquefied and sluiced away as she moved. She saw a boot sticking out of the foam, right in front of her, and dug toward it, dug up the side of someone’s leg.

  All her scrabbling around was having an effect. More and more of the foam drained away and the pile of bodies in the wreckage started to settle to the floor. Ehta found an arm and grabbed it, squeezing the hand hard until the arm jerked away from her. She recognized that hand from the missing fingers. “Gutierrez,” she said, �
�you alive? Then get moving! Everybody, move, get up, get up!”

  The marines groaned and swore but they obeyed her command, slowly struggling through the remaining foam as they got to their feet. “Binah, Gutierrez,” she said, “do a head count, see who’s hurt. I’m going to recce our situation. Keep these people moving—nobody sits down until I order them to.”

  She fought her way over to the transport’s bulkhead, slipping in the residue of the foam. She found the ladder that led up to the cockpit, and reached for a rung—then got a shock when she saw the cockpit wasn’t there anymore. The top half of the transport was gone, torn away in the crash, and the ladder led up to nothing but reddish-black sky.

  Valk, she thought. No. No—Valk! She scrambled up the ladder. The shepherd moon only had about five percent of Earth’s gravity, so she got to the top in a hurry, nearly flying out of the broken shaft.

  At the top a sullen breeze blew, howling as it streamed across her helmet. She looked around, trying to get some sense of where they were. From the ground level, though, the moon was a bewildering chaos of shapes and forms. She had no referents to explain what she was seeing, and it took her a while to piece it together.

  A white coral pylon crossed the sky above her, a kilometer across and riddled with tiny openings. Around her on every side were stacks of soft, billowing gas bags, veined with hoses and cables. She had no idea of their purpose, or if it was even safe to be near them.

  She didn’t care. Ehta clambered up on top of the smashed transport, searching for any sign of the cockpit. If it had broken off in one piece, if Valk was still inside it, maybe hurt but mostly intact—

  A trail of debris, pieces of the transport, headed away from her, strewn out in one direction. Twisted and scorched as it was, the debris at least looked like something human beings had created. She hurried along the trail, bouncing off one gas bag after another. None of the debris was burning—there wasn’t any oxygen on the moon to sustain a fire—but some of it was glowing red-hot. One jagged spar had punctured a gas bag, and she was buffeted by an incredible wind as she got close, knocked backward off her feet. She maneuvered around the upwelling gas as carefully as she could, then rushed forward because she saw what was left of the cockpit.

  Not much. Just a couple of torn-up pieces of fuselage and part of the pilot’s seat, stuffing leaking from its headrest and flitting away on the breeze like chaff. “Oh, no,” she said aloud. “Valk! Valk!”

  “Over here,” he replied. He lifted one arm and gave her a feeble wave. It was about all he could do. He was trapped under a pile of debris and broken alien machinery. She could just see the top of his black helmet.

  She started grabbing the debris and throwing it away, freeing him piece by piece. The hot wreckage burned her fingers, even through her gloves, but she didn’t care. Eventually she’d exposed enough of his upper body that she could get her arms around him, and she pulled him out of the pile. Part of his suit got stuck on a jagged shard of metal and his left arm came off in one piece. Ehta grunted in horror, but once the arm came loose he came out of the debris pile all at once and they both went sprawling.

  “Your arm,” she said. “Your arm—it—”

  “I don’t have an arm,” he said. “I had a sleeve and now I don’t. It doesn’t matter.”

  She stared at the ragged hole in the side of his suit where his arm had been. Sealant foam oozed across the layers of torn cloth, hardening even as she watched. It looked like he’d grown a clump of mushrooms where his arm had been.

  “It’s fine,” he said, and she realized she was still staring.

  “Ma’am?” Gutierrez said.

  Ehta craned her head around and saw her marines right behind her, a loose column of them having followed her from the transport’s final resting place. “Ma’am,” Gutierrez said, “Geddy didn’t make it. Mestlez can’t see out of one eye. Otherwise … I guess we’re okay.”

  Ehta nodded. She got up and helped Valk rise to his feet. She turned in a circle, looking around her, as if maybe she would see something that made sense. As if she might find some landmark that would tell her what to do next.

  She heard a noise like the sky being torn apart and looked straight up, past the pylon that arched overhead. An airfighter shot by, like a giant manta ray gliding over the bottom of the ocean. An instant later Lanoe’s Z.XIX streaked after it, his PBW cannons blazing away.

  “The transport’s gone,” Gutierrez said. “It’s totaled. Ma’am—we’re stuck here. There’s no way back. There’s no way to get back to the carrier.”

  Gutierrez’s face was hidden by her silvered helmet, but Ehta could hear panic building in the woman’s voice.

  “What are we going to do?” someone else asked.

  Ehta wouldn’t have minded panicking herself, just a little. She would have loved to have just screamed and grabbed her head and let it all out. Majors weren’t supposed to act that way. “We’re going to fulfill our mission requirements,” she said. “Nothing’s changed.”

  “Okay,” Gutierrez said. “Okay, uh—okay, ma’am. But how?”

  It was a fine question.

  The laser emplacement had stopped shooting. Candless circled around it three times, expecting that it was a trick, that it would start firing at her again at any moment. When it failed to do so she swooped in low, buzzing the searchlights, daring them to shoot.

  They did not.

  It took her a second to realize why. She brought up a tactical board and cursed when she saw what it had to show her. Airfighters. The big drones were converging on the construction site—clearly they knew it was being targeted. That was a problem—a big one. They had counted on the element of surprise, of hitting the Blue-Blue-White seemingly at random. If their enemies knew what their objective was, they could concentrate their defense around it.

  In the meantime, Candless decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. She assumed the laser emplacement had shut down because the Blue-Blue-White didn’t want to risk shooting their own airfighters out of the sky. She could take advantage of the momentary reprieve. Coming in low, she placed a disruptor right in the middle of the searchlights, smashing them to bits.

  Then she had to climb hard and twist away—one of the airfighters was already on her. She pulled back on her stick and maneuvered to come around in a tight bank, circling to get a lock on the airfighter. It banked around more slowly, trying to do the same. There were four more of the things inbound, headed straight for her. If she didn’t take this one down soon, she was going to have real trouble. “Valks,” she called, “I need support—close to intercept!”

  “On our way,” one of them called back. She craned her head around, looking for them, but saw nothing. She pulled up a tactical board and found them on the far side of the construction site. Lanoe was over there, too, flying low over the location where the troop transport went down.

  “Lanoe—do you see any sign of survivors?” Candless hadn’t heard from Valk or Ehta since they reported they were going to crash. If they were dead—if Valk was destroyed—then this mission was over. It would be pointless to continue.

  If that was the case, she had no idea what they would do next. Maybe it would be better to just die here, in battle—

  “They’re okay,” Lanoe called back. Candless let out a pent-up breath. “A little banged up. The main problem is they’re stuck about eight kilometers from the queenship. Ehta reports she’ll head there on foot.”

  “That’ll take too long,” Candless pointed out. “We had a tight window for this operation. If they take more than an hour getting there, we’ll have seven dreadnoughts coming down on our heads. Not to mention those interceptors.”

  “Then we’ll fight them with everything we’ve got,” Lanoe replied. “This is our only chance. If we retreat now they’ll boost security on this site. Lock it down so tight we’ll never be able to get close again.”

  Candless could find no fault in his logic. She wished very much that she could.

 
“There’s one other problem, though,” she pointed out. “If the transport is down, they have no way to get back.”

  “I know,” Lanoe told her.

  “They’re all going to die down there. We’re going to lose every one of them.”

  “We do what we can,” Lanoe said.

  Candless would have had more words with him—if she hadn’t been so busy at the moment.

  The airfighter was fifty meters across, not even counting its long, curved wings. She looped up high over it and tried to get behind it, tried to get right behind the trail of fire its thruster painted across the sky. For all its size, the drone ship could move, though—it was already accelerating as it followed her up into her loop. She rolled away at the top of her arc, even as it started firing at her, long plumes of superhot plasma stretching forward from gun barrels recessed into its wings.

  Candless banked around to try to get away from that fire.

  This was going to take some tricky flying.

  It was slow going, maneuvering over the gas bags. There was no good footing, no way to move forward with any kind of speed. You had to place each foot carefully, bracing it on the most solid things you could find, then sort of lunge forward and hope you found another foothold. The tangle of hoses around each of the massive sacs could snag your feet and even break your ankle if you weren’t careful. Yi had tried jumping on the gas bags like a trampoline, and actually made some good progress, bounding twenty meters forward at a time—until she came down on the wrong end of a bag and nearly brained herself against a metal support beam. After that Ehta had forbidden anyone from trying to bounce their way out.

  Three hundred grueling meters on, they came to a stack of gas bags so tall that they brushed the side of the pylon that bisected the sky. Ehta pulled Valk aside. “We can make a lot better time if we get up there. If we get on top of it, it’s a straight shot right to the construction site.”