Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  She fought back the urge to turn and hit it with a disruptor. No need for that now.

  The fight against the Blue-Blue-White was over. Lanoe had told her so.

  She headed back to the carrier as fast as her BR.9 would take her. The big ship had turned around to point at deep space and its engines were already burning hot. It was a little tricky matching velocities so she could get inside the flight deck and dock her ship, but Candless was an old professional at that sort of thing.

  Two minutes later she was on the bridge, sitting in a chair and nursing a squeeze tube of water.

  Everyone was there—almost. Ehta hung back against a bulkhead, watching everyone with cautious eyes, as if she were waiting for the next bit of bad news. Paniet had his gloves off and was chewing his fingernails.

  Lanoe was sitting in the captain’s chair. Studying a display that never changed. A view of space directly ahead of them, of empty space.

  “It had better show up soon,” he said.

  Candless didn’t need to ask what he meant. The wormhole Valk had promised them, of course. Either it would open right in front of them, in the next few minutes, or—

  Well. There were still six dreadnoughts and dozens of interceptors on their tail. No one had bothered to tell the Blue-Blue-White that the alien invasion of their disk was all over now.

  “There—what’s that?” Lanoe asked, but Candless could see enough of his display to know it was nothing. Just a momentary flicker of light as a comet passed in front of a star or something. If a wormhole had opened up, they would all know it.

  “What if the Blue-Blue-White do a deep scan of the queenship’s files? What if they find Valk hiding in there?” Paniet asked.

  “They won’t,” Ehta told him.

  “What if there was a transcription error, and the program he uploaded is corrupted? What if it doesn’t work?”

  “It’ll work,” Ehta said.

  She didn’t sound terribly convinced. More like she just wanted him to be quiet.

  Candless looked over at Giles, the Centrocor IO. “How long until the enemy fleet catches up with us?” she asked.

  “Seven minutes,” Giles responded, without having to check his display. Clearly he’d been keeping close track of their pursuers.

  Candless approved.

  “What are you smiling about?” Ehta demanded.

  “I am not currently engaged in a dogfight with one of those damned airfighters,” Candless said. “For me, that’s good enough.”

  Hmm. Swearing. She had always avoided it in the past, thinking it inelegant. That was, of course, before Lanoe dragged her into this disaster of a mission. She thought she might take up the occasional profanity from now on.

  However long “now on” might last.

  “Someone get a bottle. Whiskey, if we have it,” Lanoe said. He leaned back in his chair. Looked away from his display. “We can at least toast our success. Even if we die here, we achieved something meaningful.”

  No one rushed to do his bidding.

  “Six minutes,” Giles said.

  Candless nodded.

  “What if …” Paniet started to ask. He apparently found his own hypothetical too depressing to actually voice aloud.

  “If anyone could pull this off, it’s Valk,” Lanoe said. “I know I gave him a hard time—damn it, I treated him pretty shabbily. But he was one of the best pilots I ever met, and he had a heart like—”

  “Like what?” Valk asked.

  Candless spun around to look at the bridge’s hatch. Valk was standing there.

  At least, there was a suit standing there, and its helmet was up and tuned to an opaque black. The suit was appreciably shorter than Valk had ever been. The voice sounded correct, though.

  “Valk?” Ehta asked. “Buddy—I don’t—”

  “You stayed behind,” Lanoe said. “You stayed behind on the moon. And all your copies are dead.”

  Valk came into the room and let the hatch close behind him. “You sent me on a dangerous mission into heavily defended enemy territory,” he said. “Did you think I wouldn’t make a backup?”

  Ehta rushed over to hug him. Candless watched dispassionately, unsure how to feel. She had been somewhat pleased when Lanoe told her that Valk was staying behind. She had always advocated against the AI’s continued existence.

  That being said—he was a comrade. A sibling in arms. She’d lost so many of those, finding out one of them was still alive was … comforting.

  “Five minutes,” Giles said.

  He was about to say “four,” when Lanoe’s display lit up with a wash of pure white light.

  Everyone grew very quiet. The flash receded, and in its place they could clearly see a sphere of distorted space, like a glass prism, hanging directly in front of their current trajectory. They didn’t need to so much as steer and they would pass right through it.

  A wormhole throat. A passage to another part of the galaxy. Presumably, a way home.

  “You did it,” Ehta said, holding Valk close. “You did it, you bastard.”

  “I said I was going to, didn’t I?” Valk asked. “Why would I have said that if I didn’t think it could be done?”

  Lanoe moved to the pilot’s station, ejecting a former Centrocor employee from her chair. “Let’s go home,” he said, and opened the carrier’s throttle wide.

  Maggs was down in the yacht’s cargo hold, checking their supplies of comestibles. He reckoned they might be all right for a month or thereabouts, as long as they didn’t get sick of eating canapés every day. Bullam’s provisioner had made sure she was well stocked in case a spontaneous cocktail party ever broke out on the yacht.

  Couldn’t stand those dainty things, myself, his father said. A real man craves a slab of meat and a flagon of—

  “Maggs!” Bullam shouted, from up on the deck.

  He pushed his way up the ladder and out into the dome. Bullam was right where he’d left her, strapped down on her couch. Her drones bobbed around her like bubbles in a glass of beer, tending to her with almost touching concern. She had not so much as lifted her head. Yet when she spoke, her voice was less thick, less hesitant than it had been before. Perhaps she was getting better.

  “There was a flash of light,” she said. She lifted one hand, perhaps intending to point at the stars. She dropped it again almost immediately. The drones’ treatments did leave her terribly weak.

  “I’m sure it was nothing, dear,” Maggs said, but he called up a display and studied the sensor logs.

  There. A most definite flash. A burst, you might say.

  Ever seen the like, Pater? he asked.

  Not in my time, no, the old man replied.

  Perhaps it was simply Lanoe dying in some dreadful explosion. The thought made Maggs smile. Yet when he checked the metadata it looked like the flash had been far more intense—and evanescent—than the explosion of a spacecraft ought to be. Well, there were plenty of strange things here in this system so far from civilization. Still …

  Maggs saw something else in the logs, then. Something that, if he squinted at it just right, looked like a—

  No. No, Lanoe—you bastard, you lied! he thought.

  His father did not have a comment.

  “Hold on,” he told Bullam. “We’re going to accelerate pretty hard for a moment.” He called up the ship’s controls and got them moving, burning hard enough to degrade the yacht’s engines. If this was what he thought it was, well—he needed to know.

  It took some rather clever flying, and burned through most of their fuel, but he crossed half the system in less time than it takes to tell about it. Thankfully the yacht had a robust inertial sink.

  Yet when he arrived, it was to find their destination well guarded. More Blue-Blue-White ships than he’d ever seen in one place hovered around what was most definitely a wormhole throat. Dreadnoughts and interceptors in thick profusion.

  He glanced back at Bullam. “I’m going to take care of you,” he promised her. “I’ll make sur
e you come through this all right.”

  It was a lie, and he knew it. He imagined she must know it, too.

  Still. He gave it his best shot, as a Maggs always did.

  Grabbing the yacht’s control stick, calling up an engine board to see what he had to work with, Maggs plotted a trajectory that would take the little unarmed, defenseless yacht right through the thickest of the enemy line. If he was fast enough, if he was bold enough, then maybe, just maybe—

  Ahead of him, fifteen interceptors started warming up their weapon rings. Plasma balls were already coalescing on the dreadnoughts’ hulls.

  They couldn’t make it—he knew they couldn’t possibly make it.

  Even a scoundrel’s luck could only take him so far.

  The carrier had no trouble with the passage. The wormhole was generously wide and relatively straight, and it only took them about an hour to pass through ten thousand light-years of space and five hundred million years of time.

  The hour started very tense. As the wormhole swallowed them up, spears of ghostlight stabbing out at them from the tunnel walls, Paniet opened dozens of displays, trying to understand some of the data he was receiving. “Good news and weird news,” he said, once he was sure he had it right. “Good news first. None of the Blue-Blue-White ships have followed us through.”

  Valk nodded, moving his whole torso back and forth. “That makes sense, actually. They have no concept of wormholes, or any idea how they work. What they saw was a big flash of light, and then we disappeared into a hole in the sky. They probably think we blew ourselves up or something.”

  “I don’t claim to understand how they think. I’m just glad we’re safe. And we are. Safe, I mean. That’s the weird news.”

  “Oh?” Valk asked.

  “This wormhole isn’t shrinking,” the engineer said. He pursed his lips and pointed at a datastream on his display. “Its size is holding steady at seven hundred and four meters in diameter.”

  “It’s stable,” Valk said.

  “Right. It’s stable. Wormholes are supposed to collapse, almost instantly. This one isn’t. The Choir were supposed to have lost the ability to do that.”

  “Not anymore, I guess,” Valk said.

  Paniet let out a long, deep breath and studied the opaque black helmet. “That’s a good sign. Right, love? It’s a good sign. Tell me something. When your original went into the queenship—were you in contact with him?”

  “Yes,” Valk said. Sounding like he didn’t want to answer any follow-up questions.

  Paniet needed to know, though. “When he merged with the queenship,” he said, thinking of how best to ask this. “Was he—”

  “Stable?” Valk asked.

  Paniet smiled.

  “He came to a kind of accommodation with himself,” Valk said. “An understanding about what he was, and what he was always going to be, from now on. A way to live that didn’t include being human at all.” Valk shrugged, lifting his arms and letting them drop again. “It’s an accommodation I haven’t made for myself yet.”

  “That doesn’t really answer my question,” Paniet pointed out. “Do you think he’ll actually do everything you promised he would do? If he doesn’t consider himself human anymore, will he even want to fix things?”

  “I imagine,” Valk said, “that when we get to the other end of this wormhole, we’ll find out.”

  The other throat of the wormhole opened into busy space.

  Into a sky full of ships.

  Lanoe watched a planet turn below them, bright dots streaking across its surface, high above its clouds. A green and brown and blue planet, with continents he recognized. He did not recognize the lights on its night side, or the dark spots on its landmasses that were cities. Active, living cities. “That’s the homeworld of the Choir,” he said. “Valk says we’re in our own time again. The same time we left. Though it might be different. A lot different.”

  “Regardless, I’ll take it,” Candless replied.

  The two of them were in one of the carrier’s cupolas, one with carbonglas that was still mostly intact. A good place to watch the sky.

  The sky that was full of ships. Lanoe was trained to recognize the silhouette of every ship humanity had ever built. He didn’t recognize any of these, except one. The biggest of the ships on view—a Blue-Blue-White queenship. This one was a slightly different color than the other two he’d seen. It was a copy of a copy of a copy of the one Valk had ensouled. A distant cousin of the one Lanoe had blown up when he fought for Niraya.

  The other ships, the smaller ships, darted and flitted around it like gnats. It made no attempt to attack them.

  Some of those smaller ships made sense, when he looked at them through a magnified view on a display. Some of them had obvious thrusters and even airfoils, though they were often in the wrong place. Other ships looked like nothing he’d ever seen before. There was one that looked like a molten blob of wax, that changed shape constantly as it orbited the planet. There was one that was just a mass of scaffolding, with things that might have been living creatures clutching to its pipework with taloned feet. There were some that were just swarms of small machines flying together as a cloud, and some that were enormous balls of glass full of colorful smoke, through which vague shapes could be seen moving, through which inhuman eyes could occasionally be seen to peer outward.

  Humans hadn’t built those ships. Neither had the Choir, nor the Blue-Blue-White.

  “It worked,” Lanoe said.

  “I suppose it did.” Candless rose from her seat and kicked toward the cupola’s hatch. “I’m going to check on Ginger. I imagine she’ll have plenty to tell us, once she’s made contact with the Choir. I’ll work up a full report.”

  Lanoe frowned. He considered staying silent, but stopped her just before she could leave. “Candless,” he said. “Hold on. There’s something I need to say to you. You didn’t want to accept my apology. For what happened to Bury, I mean. Tell me what I can do. Tell me how I can make it up to you.”

  She looked down her nose at him. “Make it up to me? What a stupid notion. You can’t, and you never will. You want to know what I would like best from you, Lanoe?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “When we leave here, when we get back to human space, I want you to never contact me again, as long as either of us lives. Do you think you can manage that?”

  “I …” Lanoe hung his head. “Sure,” he said.

  “She’s nervous. Worried,” Ginger said. The girl couldn’t stop fidgeting. Candless reached over and tried to hold her hand, but Ginger couldn’t even manage that. “Rain-on-Stones has experienced things, felt things no chorister should ever have to feel.”

  The three of them—the two women and the alien—were onboard the cutter, headed down to the planet’s surface. They had contacted the Choir and asked how they should proceed, and were told to bring the long-lost chorister home.

  “They know what we did, where we went,” Ginger said. “Valk told them. The Valk in the queenship, I mean. Some of them don’t actually believe it.” She tilted her head to one side. “A lot of them.” She shrugged. “They remember history differently. The Blue-Blue-White never invaded this planet, never tried to wipe them out. When Valk arrived they could barely understand what he was talking about. But they opened the wormhole he asked them to open, the one we just came through. It wasn’t hard, for them. In this place, this …”

  “Timeline?” Candless suggested.

  “Yes,” Ginger said. “In this timeline they open wormholes all the time. They never lost the technology. This place is a lot different from the world Rain-on-Stones grew up in.”

  One of the chorister’s insectile arms flopped over the back of Candless’s seat. She barely managed not to squeak in terror and disgust.

  “This can’t end well for her,” Ginger said. “When she tries to reintegrate with the Choir’s harmony, they’ll reject her. Her memories are completely different from theirs. She knows a different history. And
worse—she’s … kind of crazy. The Choir don’t handle mental illness very well. They can’t, do you see? They share everything. Every one of them will have to go through what she went through, feel what she felt. They’ll shame her. They’ll shame her for being different … for being …”

  Candless glanced over at Ginger. The girl’s face had gone stark white. Her eyes were enormous. “Ginger? What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “There are … so many of them,” Ginger said. “The last time we were here, there were only about three thousand choristers left. Now—the harmony is so much bigger. So much richer. I can’t explain. I can’t! There are so many choristers, there must be … oh, hellfire, there are millions of them.”

  “You can hear them? Already?”

  Ginger didn’t need to answer. In the back of the cutter, Rain-on-Stones went into a frenzy of motion, her limbs drumming on the hull. Candless didn’t know what to do.

  “Put us down,” Ginger said. “Put us down!”

  “I don’t understand,” Candless said. “Are you asking me to—”

  “Put us down—there,” Ginger said, and pointed through the cutter’s seemingly invisible skin. She had indicated a round open spot on the ground, right in the middle of one of the Choir’s cities.

  As Candless brought the spacecraft in for a landing, she saw that it was a kind of amphitheater, a bowl-shaped depression surrounded by row after row of terraced seats. Choristers filled the arena to capacity.

  She set down carefully, not wanting to catch any of the aliens in her thruster exhaust. Ginger barely waited for the landing gear to make contact before she opened the cutter’s hatch and spilled out, dragging Rain-on-Stones along with her.

  Candless followed with a little more dignity. By the time she got out, the girl and the mentally ill chorister were standing in the center of the amphitheater, and the rest of the Choir had come down to meet them, pressing close, all of them appearing to want to touch the newcomers at once. Candless nearly retreated to the cutter as claws brushed her suit, clinked against her helmet. There were so many of them, so close—and Candless had never come to feel comfortable around aliens of any kind.