Lichens. He understood the principles of terraforming, and he knew that lichens were used on planets that could just barely support multicellular life. They needed very little water to survive, and they gave off a surprising amount of oxygen. If you could grow enough of them on a planet like Niraya, they would eventually give you a breathable atmosphere.
The lichens came in a dozen different muted colors and a hundred different shapes, from simple black spots on the ground to feathery masses like green dust bunnies gathering in the cracks of the slickrock. Roan was very careful not to step on any of them—they must be very delicate.
Thom did his best to do the same. He watched his feet and tried to match her stride. His respirator hissed and snored against his face but very quietly and the only loud sound was the crunch of his boots on the dusty rock, the repetitive thuds of his clumsy footfalls. He fell into a careful sort of rhythm of walking and so it was jarring when Roan grasped his arm to make him stop.
The mesa had snuck up on them when he wasn’t looking. Now it was right before them, a wall of stone thirty meters high that ran off in either direction for what seemed like forever. It presented a craggy face to the sun that hung motionless in the sky behind him.
Every square centimeter of that wall was covered in lichens. Huge, concentric rings of them, dozens of meters wide, black and purple and a frosty pale green. Where the rings touched they joined together in trefoils and looping curves, some of them forming broad patterns bigger than the ground car behind them, bigger than he could take in. They had a slightly furry texture that rippled in the tenuous breeze, until the whole wall shimmered and coruscated with trapped light.
It was…beautiful. So incredibly beautiful.
“I come here,” she said, “when I can’t find peace anyplace else. I think about how this happened, about how long it took for the lichens to colonize this wall. Season after season of growing and then quieting down during the long nights, then growing again when the sun came back.” She sat down with her legs folded and he joined her, sitting close enough that their knees touched.
He nodded, his eyes never leaving the shimmering spectacle before him.
“What do you see?” Roan said, whispering, as if even a raised voice here could harm this precarious ecology.
“Raindrops,” he said. “Raindrops falling on the surface of a pond.”
A funny little smile crossed her face, never quite settling down. “It doesn’t rain here,” she said. “I’ve never seen rain.”
A strand of her hair fell down across her nose and the top of her mask. He felt a very strong urge to reach over and brush it away, but he didn’t. She left it there for a long minute, then reached up and moved it back into place herself.
“When I first met you,” she said, “I thought you were just some useless pretty boy from some decadent world. A social parasite.”
He laughed, though he knew she was serious. And not entirely incorrect. His life so far had been a privileged one. Compared to the lives people lived on Niraya, his had been an uninterrupted pageant of luxury.
“When Lanoe asked you to be his goodwill ambassador, I thought he was just making busywork for you. But you took the job seriously. When you spoke to the Gnostics, when you tried to do that video interview…I saw something new in you, Thom. I could see you really wanted to save Niraya, while everybody else—the pilots, the elders—they’d already given up. You hadn’t even seen this,” she said, gesturing at the shimmering lichens. “You didn’t know this place could be beautiful. You wanted to help anyway. Thom, you can’t give up now.”
He looked down at his hands. “Everything I do goes wrong. I’ve managed to piss off everybody. Even Elder McRae.”
If she was shocked by his obscenity, she didn’t show it.
“You know how this planet got settled,” she told him. “About the original elders, and how they wanted to choose a life for themselves. A spiritual life. That’s a good story. It’s an old one, though. There are a lot of people who didn’t choose this place. They were born here, and had no place else to go.”
“People like you,” he said.
“People like me, yes. For most of us this is the only planet we’ve ever known. The only place where we know how to live. Even if we could leave, if there were some way to escape what’s coming, where would we go?”
Thom shifted uncomfortably, because he wasn’t sure what she was really asking. “Roan, I can’t leave now, either. I owe Lanoe too much.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t think you would. I just…If I only have a couple of days left to live, I want to know we’ll keep working, keep fighting, because if we just stop, if we just sit here and wait for the end, I know I’ll go crazy with fear.”
For a while she was silent. Thom listened to their respirators hiss and kept his own thoughts to himself. He wanted to reassure her, to tell her Lanoe would save them, but he knew it would just sound like an empty promise now.
Eventually she spoke again, maybe just to fill up the silence.
“I was born in one of the canyons, about a hundred kilometers from here,” she said, finally. “My father wasn’t cruel, but he was very religious. He belonged to a fundamentalist sect that held that God created man, but woman was kind of an afterthought. There was no point in educating me because I would never be smart enough to be useful. The most I could hope for, he believed, was to marry a farmer and make babies. Preferably male babies.”
She turned to look at him, maybe to see if she’d shocked him. He didn’t know what to say—it sounded horrible.
“I ran away from home when I was twelve. I went to Walden Crater because I thought that everything was bigger there, brighter and better and you didn’t have to wear a respirator every morning when you went out to feed the emus.” She laughed a little, amused by her own distant naiveté. “I found out pretty quick I wasn’t made for town life. I had no skills, I didn’t even know how to read or use a minder. The only real option I had was to join one of the churches. They’ll take anybody. I thought the Transcendentalists were appealing because they never seemed to get angry or sad.” She shrugged. “It was that or the Gospel of the Falling Star, and they…Well, that wasn’t my path.”
Thom nodded. “I got a request from them to attend something they called a Darkness Mass. I have no idea what that means, but it sounded kind of sketchy.”
“You’ve got good instincts. They do their rituals…naked,” she said, whispering the last word. He laughed and, surprisingly, she did, too. “They call it ‘going skyclad.’ They dance in a big circle, around a fire. That’s what they consider religion.” She shrugged. “They think it makes them free. Everybody wants to be free. In the Retreat, the elders talk all the time about choosing your own path. About making your own decisions. But it’s a lot of nonsense, Thom. We don’t get a lot of choices in life. Not really. That’s what makes them so precious.”
“Is that why we’re here? To talk about choices? You want me to choose to keep fighting, right?”
“I brought you out here because I want you to help me make a choice,” she said. “A big one. I need to decide whether I want to stay with the faith, or leave it forever.”
“That sounds pretty drastic.”
“Yeah,” she said, with a sigh. “I don’t know what I would do without the Retreat. It’s been my home for almost half my life. It’s been my calling, and my refuge. The elders have been very good to me—they taught me so many things.”
“You’ve worked really hard for them,” he said. “Paying back that debt.”
She looked at him for a while, just watched his eyes. “The Retreat talks a lot about personal responsibility and being centered. But they’ve changed, I think. Gotten hidebound. You asked me awhile back whether I thought people had a right to know about the invasion fleet, and I put you off.”
“Your faith wouldn’t let you answer the way I wanted you to,” Thom said.
Roan nodded. Then shook her head. “I didn’t want to answer at
all. Because it meant making a hard choice. The answer, of course, is yes. People have a right to know what’s going to happen to them. Of course they do. But saying that makes me question so many other things.”
“Roan—”
“I’m beginning to think it isn’t the faith that deserves my loyalty. I think it’s Niraya itself I believe in.”
“You sound like you’re trying to talk yourself out of something. Or into something. I can’t tell,” he said. “Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on here?” he asked.
“Okay. Do you remember, before, when Elder McRae followed you out of her office, when she asked you to not tell anyone about the fleet advancing on Niraya?”
“I do.”
Roan took a deep breath. “She left her personal minder sitting on her desk. While she wasn’t looking, I cloned its memory to my own minder. I copied everything.”
“Wait—you did what?”
“One of the files I copied was the video. The video of the lander attack. The one you think everybody should see.”
“Oh,” he said.
“I can let everyone on Niraya see that file. Tell them the truth. Of course, if I do, it means the end of my time with the faith. They’ll kick me out of the Retreat and they’ll never let me back in.” She took a deep breath that made her respirator cloud up. “I’m going to do it, Thom. I’m going to do it anyway. It’s the right thing to do.”
The look in her eyes was anything but certain. Had she brought him out here to ask for his advice? Or did she want him to talk her out of this?
He tried to think it through rationally, calmly, like a Transcendentalist would. “You’ll lose everything. You shouldn’t have to be the one to do this. It should fall on somebody else.”
She frowned. “I wish it could, Thom. But we have so little time left. It seems pretty likely,” she said, “that everybody on this planet is going to die soon. I need to do this now or not at all.”
“If you show everyone that video, maybe they’ll just panic,” he said.
“But that’ll be their choice. They’ll get to determine how they want to spend their last days for themselves. Yes,” she said, nodding to herself. “I have to do this, Thom.”
“Then…” He stopped, unsure what to say next. “Then,” he tried again. “Then I want to help. I want to do this with you.”
She nodded. All her training, all her discipline couldn’t hide the look of gratitude in her eyes. She climbed to her feet, careful not to step on any lichens. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“Where? How do we start?”
“Back to the car, first. After that…we’ll figure it out.” She started walking and he got up and followed her, careful to only step where she did. Careful not to hurt her planet.
Knowing full well that what he was about to do might make it tear itself apart.
Maggs and Valk unrolled a giant Mylar tent across the sodden rock of the moon. In the low gravity it was easy to prop it up, to make a shelter from the rain. A shelter big enough to cover one of the half-constructed landers, as well as Proserpina and her equipment. A silver roof that billowed in the poison wind and made a sound like a thousand snare drums pattering away as the rain struck its top side.
As soon as the shelter was erected she moved in quickly to perform something rather like an autopsy. Maggs stood back and watched, fetching her tools as she requested them.
It was insufferably boring, of course. He could only watch her cut the skin away from the tangles of wires for so long before his mind began to drift. He watched her instead, his delightful engineer. Watched the way her body moved as she tugged at the metal braids, as she bent over to dig inside its mechanical entrails.
She put her foot up on one of its legs and leaned deep inside its carcass with a pair of pliers. She got hold of some hidden component, then pulled hard to get it loose. It fought her: She had to apply more and more leverage.
When it finally came loose, it did so all at once and in the low gravity she flew backward, launching herself off the ground.
Maggs jumped after her, getting his arms around her and bringing them both thudding back to the soil in a heap of limbs, with her on top. She struggled around until she was almost facing him, then held up her prize—a little bauble of brass and silicon, nearly crushed between the jaws of her pliers.
As she moved across him, trying to get back to her feet, Maggs pulled her closer until she laughed. “In such a hurry to get off of me?” he asked.
She shook her head inside her helmet. “I need to get this in a millimeter-wave scanner,” she said.
“You need to take a break. You’ve been working for hours now.”
She struggled away from him and he let her go. “Later, maybe.” She gave him a longing look. “Okay, definitely. But later.” She hurried off to a pile of cases that held her tools and her computers. She didn’t even offer him a hand to help him get back up.
Though hardly given to intensive self-examination, Maggs knew he was a vain man. He possessed no pretensions otherwise—false modesty in his esteem being a quality more loathsome than the breath of vipers.
So he took some offense that his charms weren’t enough to penetrate her defenses. Still. He needed her, for his latest scheme. She was, not to put too fine a point on it, the linchpin holding everything together.
A war’s not won the day it breaks out, his father’s voice said inside his head.
Patience, in other words. For now he would bide his time. He went back to watching her work, as she bent over some arcane bit of computer equipment, watching numbers crawl across a screen. Eventually, they stopped. And then she nodded to herself. Clearly she’d found something. She called Lanoe over and he came running, bouncing high over the wreckage and the rubble of the facility.
“How’s it coming along?” the old bastard asked.
“Slowly,” Proserpina said. “But I’ve got something now. You asked me to take this thing apart and see what I could tell you about its brain.”
“Sure,” Lanoe said.
“It doesn’t have one.”
“I don’t understand.”
She nodded and took the bauble out of the millimeter enwidgetizer or whatever the instrument was called. “It doesn’t have any kind of central processor. Its logic elements are spread throughout the body, more like a nervous system than a central brain. There are animals back on Earth that operate like that—really primitive stuff, starfish and sea cucumbers and things like that.”
“Have you ever seen a drone with that kind of hardware before?” Lanoe asked.
“Not one made by a human being. Look, here,” she said, and brought up a display. It showed a simplified view of a lander, a cluster of legs joined together at one end. Glowing lines spread through each leg in a pattern like veins or the branches of a tree. “This shows the electronic components inside the thing. Like the nerves in your arms, they ramify outward until they reach the skin. You’ve seen how the things don’t have anything like eyes.”
“I thought maybe the cameras were just hidden,” Lanoe said. “Or microscopic.”
“No,” Proserpina said. “These landers are blind. They operate almost entirely by sense of touch. The entire skin seems to be one big haptic sensor, and it’s very sensitive. They’re deaf and blind but if they touch something as smooth as glass it probably feels like sandpaper, because they can detect incredibly fine textures.”
Lanoe frowned. “When I was flying over this crater they definitely knew I was there. They didn’t have to touch me to react to my presence.”
“No, because there’s another kind of sensor in that skin. One it took me a long time to identify, because I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m still not sure how it actually works. It picks up coronal discharges from objects composed of carbon and water.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Lanoe said.
Proserpina held the bauble up to the light and turned it slowly so it glittered. “I’ll give you the short v
ersion. It’s a life detector. Somehow it picks up the presence of living things anywhere nearby. Even if they’re hidden behind a wall, or inside a fighter, or whatever.”
“Neat trick,” Lanoe said.
“Tell me about it. This thing—it confounds me. It’s so simple, so basic in design, and yet it has that sensor onboard. Something I don’t think humans could invent if we tried, it’s so advanced. Which leads me to my next point.”
“Go ahead.”
She turned the bauble over and over in her gloved hands. “I tried taking a look at its programming. No luck there—it’s not any kind of code I’ve ever seen. Well, I expected that. But it doesn’t even read right. It doesn’t even think in binary; instead it’s like base fifteen or something crazy like that…Sorry, I know, too technical, and it doesn’t really matter. What does is this. I can’t read this drone’s code, but I can the shape of the programming, the file sizes, stuff like that. And what I found is crazy. Just a few lines control the whole thing—just a single, dirt-simple program. I can make an educated guess what that program is.”
Maggs suddenly found himself paying attention. Was it possible that he even cared? Unlikely, but he wanted very much to hear what she said next.
“Walk around in circles,” she said. “Look for anything living. If you find something living, stab it until it isn’t living anymore. Repeat.”
When they arrived at the ground control station, Ensign Ehta squinted at the two of them. Thom had the idea she’d been asleep when they arrived, napping in her chair. The minder in front of her displayed the gray shapes of the enemy fleet, just as he’d seen them before. “Something up?” she asked them.
Thom opened his mouth to speak but Roan beat him to it.
“The elder wants to know if there are any updates on the fleet.”
Ehta nodded and rubbed at her face. “Well,” she said, “I’ve been tracking that big line ship headed toward Aruna. It’s definitely sticking to its course. Lanoe and them are going to have a nasty fight on their hands.”
Forsaken Skies Page 28
