Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  Captain Keira Jenkins of the Alliance leads a team of simulant soldiers in a joint military action, but when the mission goes down in flames, an injured and humiliated Jenkins is offered one last chance at redemption: a mission deep into contagion-infested enemy territory.

  She has one last chance, and so does mankind.

  I collapsed into the cot, panting hard as I tried to catch my breath. A sheen of hot, musky sweat—already cooling—had formed across my skin.

  “Third time’s a charm, eh?” Riggs said. He spoke Standard with an accented twang, being of Tau Ceti III, a descendant of North American colonists who had generations back claimed the planet as their own.

  “You’re getting better at it, is all I’ll say.”

  Riggs tried to hug me from behind as though we were actual lovers. His body was warm and muscled, but I shrugged him off.

  “Are things ever going to change between us?” he asked, a sigh on his lips. “Are we always going to stay like this?”

  “Like what? This is letting off steam before a drop. There’s no point dressing this up: we’re just soldiers doing what needs to be done.”

  “I know, and I’m grateful for it.” He grinned at me boyishly. “You sounded pretty grateful, too.”

  “Watch yourself. Things can change fast.”

  “How do you handle this?” Riggs asked. “The waiting. It feels worse than the mission.”

  “It’s your first combat operation,” I said. “You’re bound to feel a little nervous.”

  “Do you remember your first mission?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but only just. It was a long time ago.”

  He paused, as though thinking that through, then asked, “Does it get easier?”

  “The hours before the drop are always the worst,” I said. “It’s best just not to think about it.”

  The waiting was well recognized as the worst part of any mission. I didn’t want to go into it with Riggs, but believe me when I say that I’ve tried almost every technique in the book.

  It basically boils down to two options.

  Option One: find a dark corner somewhere and sit it out. Even the smaller strikeships that the Alliance relies upon have private areas, away from prying eyes, away from the rest of your squad or the ship’s crew. If you’re determined, you’ll find somewhere private enough and quiet enough to sit it out alone. But few troopers I’ve known take this approach, because it rarely works. The Gaia lovers seem to prefer this method, but then again they’re often fond of introspection, and that isn’t me. Option One leads to anxiety, depression, and mental breakdown. There aren’t many soldiers who want to fill the hours before death—even if it is only simulated—with soul-searching. Time slows to a trickle. Psychological time dilation, or something like it. There’s no drug that can touch that anxiety.

  Riggs was a Gaia Cultist, for his sins, but I didn’t think that explaining Option One was going to help him. No, Riggs wasn’t an Option One sort of guy.

  Option Two: find something to fill the time. Exactly what you do is your choice; pretty much anything that’ll take your mind off the job will suffice. This is what most troopers do. My personal preference—and I accept that it isn’t for everyone—is hard physical labor. Anything that really gets the blood flowing is rigorous enough to shut down the neural pathways.

  Which leads to my current circumstances. An old friend once taught me that the best exercise in the universe is the exercise you get between the sheets. So, in the hours before we made the drop to Daktar Outpost, I screwed Corporal Daneb Riggs’s brains out. Not literally, you understand, because we were in our own bodies. I’m screwed up, or so the psychtechs tell me, but I’m not that twisted.

  “Where’d you get that?” Riggs asked me, probing the flesh of my left flank. His voice was still dopey as a result of postcoital hormones. “The scar, I mean.”

  I lay on my back, beside Riggs, and looked down at the white welt to the left of my stomach. Although the flesh-graft had taken well enough, the injury was still obvious: unless I paid for skintech for a patch, it always would be. There seemed little point in bothering with cosmetics while I was still a line trooper. Well-healed scars lined my stomach and chest, nothing to complain about, but reminders nonetheless. My body was a road map of my military service.

  “Never you mind,” I said. “It happened a long time ago.” I pushed Riggs’s hand away, irritated. “And I thought I made it clear that there would be no talking afterward. That term of the arrangement is nonnegotiable.”

  Riggs got like this after a session. He got chatty, and he got annoying. His job here was done and I was already feeling detachment from him.

  I untangled myself from the bedsheets that were pooled at the foot of the cot. The cabin was private but also tiny, and it stank of sweat and sex. Almost as soon as the act was over, I started to feel jumpy again, felt my eyes unconsciously darting to my wrist-comp. I pulled on a tank top and walked to the viewport in the bulkhead.

  The cabin’s port was open, displaying an anonymous sector of deep space. Another sector in what had once been known as the Quarantine Zone: that vast ranch of deep space that was the divide between us and the Krell Empire. A holo-display above the port read “1:57:03 UNTIL DROP.” Less than two hours until we reached the assault point. Right now, the UAS Bainbridge was slowing down—its enormous sublight engines ensuring that when we reached the appointed location, we would be traveling at just the right velocity. The starship’s inertial damper field meant that I would never be able to physically feel the deceleration, but the mental weight was another matter.

  “Get dressed,” I said matter-of-factly. “We’ve got work to do.”

  I pulled on the rest of my duty fatigues, pressed down the various holo-tabs on my uniform tunic. The identifier there read “210.” Those numbers made me a long-termer of the Simulant Operations Program—sufferer of an effective two hundred and ten simulated deaths.

  “I want you down on the prep deck, overseeing the simulant loading,” I said, dropping into command mode.

  “The Jackals are primed and ready to drop,” Riggs said. “The lifer is marking the suits, and I ordered Private Feng to check on the ammunition loads—”

  “Feng’s no good at that,” I said. “You know that he can’t be trusted.”

  “‘Trusted’?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” I corrected.

  Riggs detected the change in my voice; he’d be an idiot not to. While he wasn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the box, neither was he a fool.

  I watched as he put on his uniform. Riggs was tall and well built, his chest a wall of muscle, neck almost as wide as my waist. Hair dark and short, nicely messy in a way that skirted the edge of acceptable military regulation. The tattoo of a winged planet on his left biceps indicated that he was a former Off-World Marine aviator, while the blue-and-green globe on his right marked him as a paid-up Gaia Cultist. The dataports on his chest, shoulders, and neck stood out against his tanned skin, the flesh around them still raised. He looked new, and he looked young. Riggs hadn’t yet been spat out by the war machine.

  I felt a wave of regret crash over me. What was I doing? I knew that it was wrong. Why hadn’t I learned my lesson the first time? I’d shit on my own doorstep before, but a dirty dog doesn’t learn from her mistakes.

  “So we’re being deployed against the Black Spiral?” he asked, velcroing his tunic in place. The holo-identifier on his chest flashed “10,” and sickeningly enough, Riggs was the most experienced trooper on my team. “That’s the scuttlebutt.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “That’s likely.” I knew very little about the next operation, because that was how Captain Heinrich—the Bainbridge’s senior officer—liked to keep things. “It’s need to know.”

  “And you don’t need to know,” Riggs said, nodding to himself. “Heinrich is such an asshole.”

  “Talk like that’ll get you reprimanded, Corporal.” I snapped my wrist-computer into place, the vambra
ce closing around my left wrist. “Same arrangement as before. Don’t let the rest of the team know.”

  Riggs grinned. “So long as you don’t either—”

  The cabin lights dipped. Something clunked inside the ship. At about the same time, my wrist-comp chimed with an incoming priority communication: an officers-only alert.

  “EARLY DROP,” the wrist-comp said.

  The wrist-comp’s small screen activated, and a head-and-shoulders image appeared there. A young woman with auburn hair pulled back from a heavily freckled face. Early twenties. With anxiety-filled eyes, she leaned close into the camera at her end of the connection. Sergeant Zoe Campbell, more commonly known as Zero.

  “Lieutenant, ma’am,” she babbled. “Do you copy?”

  “I copy,” I said.

  “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for the last thirty minutes, but your communicator was off. I tried your cube, but that was set to private. I guess that I could’ve sent someone down there, but I know how you get before a drop and—”

  “Whoa, whoa. Calm down, Zero. What’s happening?”

  Zero was the squad’s handler. She was already in the Sim Ops bay, and the image behind her showed a bank of operational simulator tanks, assorted science officers tending them. It looked like the op was well under way rather than just commencing.

  “Is Heinrich calling a briefing?” I asked, hustling Riggs to finish getting dressed. I needed him gone from the room, pronto.

  Zero shook her head. “Captain Heinrich says there isn’t time. He’s distributed a mission plan instead. I really should’ve sent someone down to you fetch you …”

  “Never mind about that now,” I said. Talking over her was often the only way to deal with Zero’s constant state of anxiety. “What’s happening? Why the early drop?”

  Zero grimaced. “Captain Heinrich has authorized immediate military action on Daktar Outpost.”

  At that moment, a nasal siren sounded throughout the Bainbridge’s decks. Somewhere in the bowels of the ship, the engines were cutting, the gravity field fluctuating just a little to compensate.

  The ship’s AI began a looped message: “This is a general alert. All operators must immediately report to the Simulant Operations Center. This is a general alert …”

  I could already hear boots on deck around me, as the sixty qualified operators made haste to the Science Deck. My dataports—those biomechanical connections that would allow me to make transition into my simulant—were beginning to throb.

  “You’d better get down here and skin up,” Zero said, nodding at the simulator behind her. “Don’t want to be late.” Added: “Again …”

  “I’m on it,” I said, planting my feet in my boots. “Hold the fort.”

  Zero started to say something else, but before she could question me any further I terminated the communication.

  “Game time, Corporal,” I said to Riggs. “Look alive.”

  Dressed now, Riggs nodded and made for the hatch. We had this down to a T: if we left my quarters separately, it minimized the prospect of anyone realizing what was happening between us.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said. “You do know that, right?”

  “You know that was the last time,” I said firmly.

  “You said that last time …”

  “Well, this time I mean it, kemosabe.”

  Riggs nodded, but that idiot grin remained plastered across his face. “See you down there, Jenkins,” he said.

  Here we go again, I thought. New team. New threat. Same shit.

  if you enjoyed

  FORBIDDEN SUNS

  look out for

  THE OUTER EARTH TRILOGY

  by

  Rob Boffard

  In space, every second counts.

  Outer Earth is a massive space station that orbits three hundred miles above the Earth, holding the last of humanity. It’s broken, rusted, and falling apart. The world below is dead. Wrecked by climate change and nuclear war, and now we have to live with the consequences: a new home that’s dirty, overcrowded, and inescapable.

  The population reaches one million. Double what it was designed to hold. Food is short, crime is rampant, and the ecosystem nears the breaking point.

  What’s more, there’s a madman hiding on the station who is about to unleash chaos. And when he does, there’ll be nowhere left to run.

  Seven years ago

  The ship is breaking up around them.

  The hull is twisting and creaking, like it’s trying to tear away from the heat of reentry. The outer panels are snapping off, hurtling past the cockpit viewports, black blurs against a dull orange glow.

  The ship’s second-in-command, Singh, is tearing at her seat straps, as if getting loose will be enough to save her. She’s yelling at the captain, seated beside her, but he pays her no attention. The flight deck below them is a sea of flashing red, the crew spinning in their chairs, hunting for something, anything they can use.

  They have checklists for these situations. But there’s no checklist for when a ship, plunging belly-down through Earth’s atmosphere to maximise the drag, gets flipped over by an explosion deep in the guts of the engine, sending it first into a spin and then into a screaming nosedive. Now it’s spearing through the atmosphere, the friction tearing it to pieces.

  The captain doesn’t raise his voice. “We have to eject the rear module,” he says.

  Singh’s eyes go wide. “Captain—”

  He ignores her, reaching up to touch the communicator in his ear. “Officer Yamamoto,” he says, speaking as clearly as he can. “Cut the rear module loose.”

  Koji Yamamoto stares up at him. His eyes are huge, his mouth slightly open. He’s the youngest crew member, barely eighteen. The captain has to say his name again before he turns and hammers on the touch-screens.

  The loudest bang of all shudders through the ship as its entire rear third explodes away. Now the ship and its crew are tumbling end over end, the movement forcing them back in their seats. The captain’s stomach feels like it’s broken free of its moorings. He waits for the tumbling to stop, for the ship to right itself. Three seconds. Five.

  He sees his wife’s face, his daughter’s. No, don’t think about them. Think about the ship.

  “Guidance systems are gone,” McCallister shouts, her voice distorting over the comms. “The core’s down. I got nothing.”

  “Command’s heard our Mayday,” Dominguez says. “They—”

  McCallister’s straps snap. She’s hurled out of her chair, thudding off the control panel, leaving a dark red spatter of blood across a screen. Yamamoto reaches for her, forgetting that he’s still strapped in. Singh is screaming.

  “Dominguez,” says the captain. “Patch me through.”

  Dominguez tears his eyes away from the injured McCallister. A second later, his hands are flying across the controls. A burst of static sounds in the captain’s comms unit, followed by two quick beeps.

  He doesn’t bother with radio protocol. “Ship is on a collision path. We’re going to try to crash-land. If we—”

  “John.”

  Foster doesn’t have to identify himself. His voice is etched into the captain’s memory from dozens of flight briefings and planning sessions and quiet conversations in the pilots’ bar.

  The captain doesn’t know if the rest of flight command are listening in, and he doesn’t care. “Marshall,” he says. “I think I can bring the ship down. We’ll activate our emergency beacon; sit tight until you can get to us.”

  “I’m sorry, John. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  There’s another bang, and then a roar, as if the ship is caught in the jaws of an enormous beast. The captain turns to look at Singh, but she’s gone. So is the side of the ship. There’s nothing but a jagged gash, the edges a mess of torn metal and sputtering wires. The awful orange glow is coming in, its fingers reaching for him, and he can feel the heat baking his skin.

/>   “Marshall, listen to me,” the captain says, but Marshall is gone too. The captain can see the sky beyond the ship, beyond the flames. It’s blue, clearer than he could have ever imagined. It fades to black where it reaches the upper atmosphere, and the space beyond that is pinpricked with stars.

  One of those stars is Outer Earth.

  Maybe I can find it, the captain thinks, if I look hard enough. He can feel the anger, the disbelief at Marshall’s words, but he refuses to let it take hold. He tells himself that Outer Earth will send help. They have to. He tries to picture the faces of his family, tries to hold them uppermost in his mind, but the roaring and the heat are everywhere and he can’t—

  1

  Riley

  My name is Riley Hale, and when I run, the world disappears.

  Feet pounding. Heart thudding. Steel plates thundering under my feet as I run, high up on Level 6, keeping a good momentum as I move through the darkened corridors. I focus on the next step, on the in-out, push-pull of my breathing. Stride, land, cushion, spring, repeat. The station is a tight warren of crawl-spaces and vents around me, every surface metal etched with ancient graffiti.

  “She’s over there!”

  The shout comes from behind me, down the other end of the corridor. The skittering footsteps that follow it echo off the walls. I thought I’d lost these idiots back at the sector border – now I have to outrun them all over again. I got lost in the rhythm of running – always dangerous when someone’s trying to jack your cargo. I refuse to waste a breath on cursing, but one of my exhales turns into a growl of frustration.

  The Lieren might not be as fast as I am, but they obviously don’t give up.