Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  The AI tilted his head back to get a better look. “Quicker, sure—but we’ll be exposed up there. The airfighters could pick us off.”

  “Lanoe and Candless can keep them off our back,” Ehta said. “Hopefully. Come on,” she said. “I’ll help you climb.”

  Not that he needed much help. The low gravity made it easy and Valk proved surprisingly nimble, even with only arm to grab on to handholds. They pulled themselves up, using the more rigid hoses and the metal support skeletons like ledges. Valk made as good time as Ehta did. “I’m used to working with no body at all, sometimes,” he said.

  “I suppose it also helps you aren’t carrying ten guns,” Ehta said, shifting her steadygun on her back so it didn’t swing around as much. In the low gravity it felt as light as a feather, but it still had the same mass as ever, and when it swung back and forth like a pendulum it threatened to pull her off the narrow perches.

  Together they scrambled up the last of the gas bags, then started climbing the side of the pylon. The going was easier there—though the ascent was nearly vertical, the porous coral of the pylon presented endless hand- and footholds. Ehta glanced down and saw her squad climbing up after her, their silver helmets reflecting the dusky light.

  Ehta pulled herself up onto the top of the pylon. It ran straight in either direction, a perfect white road reaching to either horizon. She helped her marines up to the top, then got them marching forward. A thin haze like a fog or maybe—given their altitude—a layer of low-lying cloud wisped across the top. In the distance she thought she could see structures rising from the coral, but from where she stood they looked like nothing more than bumps in the otherwise smooth surface.

  It was eerily silent up there. Their boots made a constant crunching sound as they marched, but otherwise there was no sound at all. If the fighters were engaged in pitched battles they were off over the horizon, presumably drawing the airfighters away to give Ehta and her people a chance. She intended to make as much use of it as she could. Once she was relatively certain that no tanks or waves of Blue-Blue-White infantry were coming for them, she had her people move out at double time, guns slapping against their backs. Valk had no trouble keeping up. After all, he had no human muscles to get sore or tired.

  For almost ten minutes they jogged along in silence, Ehta listening to the rhythmic breathing of her people and nothing else. Then Valk saw something up ahead. He grabbed Ehta’s arm and told her to hold up. “There’s something up ahead. A—a pit, or something.”

  Ehta nodded and threw a hand signal. Her people slowed to a careful walk and unlimbered their weapons. As they got closer, Ehta started to see what Valk had pointed out—a shadow lying across the top of the pylon, a shadow that quickly resolved itself into a hole smashed through the coral. Its edges were ragged and natural-looking, though Ehta had no real idea what was natural here or not. A slope of broken coral led down into the depression.

  She stopped her people and moved forward to investigate. It looked like a cave burrowed into the pylon. “Mestlez,” she called, “you’re up.”

  The marine cursed but he ran forward, his particle rifle clutched in both hands. He moved carefully down the slope of coral shards, planting each foot and testing his weight before he moved to the next one. Soon he’d disappeared from view. “It goes down about ten meters,” he said. “My lights aren’t showing anything but—”

  Ehta frowned. She waited a second, then called, “Mestlez? What do you see? Give me some info here.”

  Instead of replying, Mestlez screamed.

  A dark wave frothed up out of the hole, a boiling mass of dark skin and wet eyes. Ehta grabbed for her steadygun but marines behind her were already shooting, pouring ammunition into the cloud.

  As it swarmed toward her Ehta realized it was made up of countless small bodies—small here meaning less than a meter across. She made out wings and eyes that stared at her, eyes the size of her fist, and then they were on her, flapping all around her, slapping her helmet a million times a second with their leathery wings.

  She heard guns going off all around her, marines screaming. “Hold your fire!” she shouted, in part because it didn’t seem to be doing any good, in part because—“They’re just bats! Stop shooting! You’re wasting ammunition!”

  The swarm of bats evaporated as quickly as it had come, individual animals fluttering off in every direction, clearly terrified and just trying to get away. Before they could all escape, Valk calmly reached up into the cloud and grabbed one of them out of the air. He turned to face the marines, the bat snapping and jerking in his grip.

  Ehta looked around and saw half her people prone on the ground. The rest, like herself, were crouched down, hands up to protect their faces.

  Only Valk was still fully upright. “Hmm,” he said. “Remind you of anything?”

  Ehta came closer to examine the bat, then lurched back when it flapped at her. It was—a bat. Not like any bat she’d ever seen before, of course, but she couldn’t think of a better word for it. It had three wings and one enormous bulbous eye. Its body behind the eye was so thin it looked skeletal. She could clearly make out a tripartite rib cage and a round pelvis that supported a single taloned foot.

  “It reminds me,” Valk said, “of the scout ships we fought at Niraya.” He let the thing go and it flapped away in a frenzy of leathery wings. “We know so little about this place. I guess we’ll never really get a chance to learn more.”

  “I’m kind of okay with that,” Ehta said.

  Mestlez poked his silver helmet up out of the hole. It was smeared with straw-colored muck. Presumably bat droppings. Otherwise, he was unharmed.

  They kept moving.

  Two jets of plasma lanced out from the airfighter’s wings, but Candless twisted away in a corkscrewing dive before they could touch her. She was slightly more maneuverable in her BR.9 than the giant aircraft, but she knew she couldn’t play this game forever—eventually she would make a wrong move, or the drone would just get lucky and score a hit. That plasma was hot enough to cook her alive if it hit her dead on.

  The tip of the airfighter’s wing cut across Candless’s view. She poured PBW fire into the massive ship, feeling like a wasp trying to sting a condor. She saw her shots connect, saw tiny sparks appear along the wing, but knew she was having little effect. With her free hand she readied a disruptor.

  Candless pulled a snap turn that made her whole fighter vibrate. A damage control light came on, but it was only yellow—a warning, not an alert. The shepherd moon’s atmosphere was just thick enough that she needed to worry about air resistance, and that limited the number of fancy tricks she could pull. Through her canopy she saw the airfighter turning, its wings held at an angle as it banked around, trying to get her in its sights. She couldn’t let that happen. She killed her throttle, then intentionally stalled on her airfoils so she dropped like a stone for a moment. She goosed her thrusters and came up under the massive wing, its shadow darkening her cockpit. A virtual Aldis sight swung right into the middle of her view and flashed to indicate her targeting system had a lock.

  She pulled the trigger. The disruptor launched with a thud she felt through her seat, then sprang forward on its tiny thruster. It tore through the glass canopy of the airfighter, leaving a hole less than half a meter across. She couldn’t see it start to explode, but she felt it as a massive wave of air pressure buffeted her cataphract and knocked it over on its side.

  The airfighter’s canopy burst open, shards of glass spinning through the air and smoke pouring out of a crack in its wing. Candless had to burn hard to get out from under it as it fell toward the cagework below, rotating slowly as the low gravity of the moon pulled it inexorably down.

  She didn’t waste time cheering over her success. There were four more of those things coming for her—and forty more where they’d come from. Her job was far from over.

  She nudged her stick to one side and banked over the construction site. The queenship lay directly below her, a gray p
ebble in the middle of a vast network of lacy pylons. She saw a dark speck on the horizon, black against the red clouds. It grew steadily larger, but by then she knew it was one of the Valks. She could look into the BR.9’s cockpit and see that it was empty.

  “Lanoe sent me to support you,” the pilotless machine said. “He thought you could use some help.”

  Candless wondered how things had grown so perverse that she would be glad to have a heavily armed AI as her wingman. “Did he, now. How very gallant of him. I’m doing just fine, as a matter of—”

  “Because,” the machine went on, “he’s needed elsewhere. So we—my fellow copies and yourself—are going to have to take on the airfighters ourselves.”

  Candless stopped in mid-tirade. “He—what? Where? Where, exactly, is he needed more than here?”

  “The dreadnoughts and the interceptors are about to arrive. The cruiser and the carrier are moving to engage them, but they need cataphract support or they’ll be chewed to bits.” The Valk had no body with which to shrug, but she could hear the resignation in its voice. Well, the copies were suicidal, after all. Or would be if their programming would allow it. “Commander Lanoe is going to provide that support. Our job remains to take on the airfighters as best we can. To give my original a chance,” the Valk said.

  “Yes,” Candless said. “Yes, I suppose it does.” She fought to keep the fear out of her voice, despite the fact that she felt like a river of icy water had just poured down her spine. “Shall we pick our first target?”

  The ground shook and then a dull roar and a shock wave of compressed air washed over them. All around Ehta, marines went sprawling onto the white coral. She barely managed to keep her own footing. “What was that?” someone asked, sounding terrified. Ehta didn’t have an answer, so she didn’t bother replying.

  “Come on,” she shouted. “We have to keep moving!” She helped Binah up, grabbing his arm and yanking him to his feet. “You can take a nap when we’re back on the cruiser, you bastard!”

  “We’re not going back,” he muttered.

  “Care to repeat that?” she demanded.

  He was a marine. A good marine. “No, ma’am,” he said.

  Ehta hadn’t forgotten that they were stranded down here. As she urged her people forward, she was keenly aware that this had turned into a suicide mission. Nothing new for the PBMs, she thought. The Admiralty and the polys she’d fought for had always considered marines to be a renewable resource, and they’d squandered marine lives in every battle she’d fought. There were dozens of times she’d walked into hell with a squad behind her, certain she was marching to her doom.

  This felt different, though. This wasn’t some pointless war fought to see which poly was tougher, nor was it some peacekeeping mission on a hellhole planet full of dead-eyed colonists. This was an alien moon where the scale of everything was so enormous it made her feel insignificant, made all her actions seem pointless. It didn’t help that she was fighting for Lanoe, a man she’d once revered as a kind of demigod. A man who’d turned out to have feet of clay. A man who’d turned out to be a crazy bastard after all.

  Just like every other officer she’d known, she supposed.

  She ran on ahead a bit, then turned to face her people, marching backward. “Listen up,” she said. “I know none of you asked for this. I know none of you want to die here, so far from home. I wish I could tell you everything’s going to be okay. Obviously, I can’t.”

  She couldn’t see their eyes. She couldn’t even read their body language in their heavy armored suits. She had to just hope they were listening, really listening.

  “We came down here knowing there was a chance we would die here. We’re the damned marines, after all. Stick with me. I will keep us alive as best I can. If there’s a way out of here, I’ll find it. But first and foremost—we’re going to do what we came to do. We’re going to get Valk here to that queenship, and we are going to save the thrice-damned human race. Yeah? Let me hear you say it!”

  “Ma’am, yes, ma’am,” they shouted, in unison.

  If some of them only sounded half-convinced, she supposed she would take what she could get.

  They hurried forward. Only about two kilometers lay between them and the construction site. They’d covered a fair amount of that distance when they started to see low domes rising from the pylon in front of them. The first of these were barely a meter high and two meters wide, like pimples on the coral. Farther on they grew larger and more numerous, swollen bumps that stood out from the pylon, growing more numerous until they covered the entire surface of the pylon. Some of them had been broken open, by the looks of the jagged holes in their sides, and Ehta couldn’t help but think of eggshells. The shells of eggs that had hatched.

  A lot of the domes were still perfectly intact.

  Ehta led her people into what increasingly felt like hilly terrain, as the domes grew so large she couldn’t see over them—then larger still, until she couldn’t see around them, either.

  She nearly jumped out of her skin when she caught a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye. It had come from one of the broken domes, just a quick glimpse of something that was gone before she could make out any details. She signaled to her people to stop, then moved to investigate, a pistol in her hand.

  Behind her something skittered across the coral. She swiveled around just in time to see a boneless limb, pale and shiny, disappear into a crack in one of the bigger domes.

  “Ready weapons,” she said.

  Valk came up to stand next to her. She waved him back, but he only moved behind her elbow. She shook her head and brought her steadygun around. She touched a key on its receiver, then set it gently on the ground. The weapon automatically extended three legs to brace itself. Keeping her torso behind the bulk of the gun, she drew her pistol and pointed it forward.

  “The construction site is just past these domes,” Valk pointed out. “If I were going to set up static defenses around one of my most valuable assets—”

  “Yeah,” Ehta said. “Yeah.” She picked one of the smaller domes. Adjusted the selector switch on her pistol for explosive rounds and took aim. Squeezed the trigger.

  Her round cut through the coral of the dome with little resistance. Light and smoke streamed out of a crack in its top. She heard a cry—not a mechanical noise, but the sound a living creature might make. The sound was high and piercing and rhythmic, less a scream than a chant of pain.

  “Ma’am,” Gutierrez said, from behind her. “Ma’am, the ground is vibrating.”

  “Yeah,” Ehta said. “I feel it, too. Marines—get ready. When you see movement, fire at will.”

  Ahead of them, deep in the forest of domes, something cracked and spat out chips of broken coral. There was a horrible rumbling that seemed to come from all around them, and then an amorphous orange shape squelched its way out of one of the bigger domes, burst forth with its tentacles shaking in the air. An adult Blue-Blue-White, twenty-five meters across, the lights inside its body strobing with rage.

  Without further warning, a dozen more of the domes split open, vomiting forth an endless stream of black-and-white legs, clusters of legs with no heads, no bodies, just legs joined together like limber starfish. The things were wet and skinny, their size impossible to judge as they slithered to their pointed feet and came rushing toward the marines, running like hounds, all of them loosing that terrible war chant, screaming as they ran straight at Ehta.

  And then the shooting started.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The sky was full of ships.

  On the bridge of the carrier, Paniet—who guessed he was in charge, as much as anybody—called for more sensor sweeps, more imagery. As if that might change what he was seeing.

  Seven dreadnoughts inbound. One so close he could count the number of control blisters sticking out of its sides. The other six weren’t far behind.

  Flitting about them like pilot fish around a school of sharks were more than a hundred interce
ptors.

  Very soon now one of those dreadnoughts would be close enough to attack the cruiser. It would be a showdown between its plasma ball cannons and the cruiser’s coilguns. If the cruiser lost that fight, there would be nothing to stand between the dreadnoughts and the carrier—and then it would all be over.

  Paniet would give them as much of a fight as he could. The carrier had a few guns mounted on its hull. Heavy-duty particle beam cannons, which could theoretically take those interceptors to pieces. Their range was minimal, though—they were there to fight off attacking cataphracts, not alien warships. By the time the carrier’s guns could engage, the interceptors would already be close enough to use their microwave weapons. Paniet had seen what those did to the electronics on a cataphract—not to mention the pilots—and he was not looking forward to having them knock out the carrier’s systems in the middle of a pitched battle.

  Their only hope, then, was the tiny speck, just a single pixel, that danced around his display. The lone cataphract out there, fighting to hold back the tide.

  “Lanoe,” Paniet said, “I know you have a reputation for winning fights like this. Where the odds are against you, and all seems lost. Yes?”

  “I’ve heard people say that, sure,” Lanoe told him.

  “You and I are both grown-ups. We know what legends are for, don’t we, love? They’re for soothing little children when they have bad dreams.”

  “In my experience,” Lanoe said, “ … yeah.”

  “Any word from Valk and the ground team?” Paniet asked.

  “I’ve been a little busy,” Lanoe replied. Well, Paniet could hear the PBWs blazing in the background when he spoke. “I’ll check in when I get a chance.”

  Down on the ground, the guns were blazing and Ehta was trying desperately to hold things together.

  The marines had drilled long and hard for a fight like this. They knew what to do. Even if panic was freezing their brains, their arms knew to lift their rifles and shoot, reach for grenades, cover each other. In theory, at least, the twenty of them should act like a well-oiled machine.