Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  No, this wasn’t fun at all. Especially with all the red lights flashing at him.

  Every one of his boards showed significant damage. His engines were battered and bruised and their output had dropped to half of optimum. His supplies of ammunition were running dangerously low—he had but two disruptors left to his name, and even his PBWs were running short. Life support was critical and even communications had seen better days. He wasn’t sure if his call for help had been received or if it had even gone out.

  One more bad hit, one more damaged system, would do for him, and he knew it.

  In his head his father’s voice kept up a nonstop stream of advice.

  Keep your nose up, Maggsy—keep turning, think in three dimensions. Keep your mind on your six, but not so much you forget to look forward. Don’t just spray them down with your beamers; pick your shots. You can afford to lose your airfoils, so turn into those blows you can’t avoid, let your wings take the brunt.

  All very good advice, he was sure. None of which was new to him. Maggs had learned to fly and fight long before he’d set foot inside a cockpit. At his father’s knee he’d absorbed all this advice a hundred times over, as Dear Old Dad regaled Maggs enfant with tales of epic dogfights and desperate encounters at the rim of some far-off system, all from the comfort of an armchair at the Admiralty. Maggs had, not unlike a sponge, absorbed every word, memorized every stratagem, every tactic.

  In fact, once he’d reached his majority and entered the Naval ranks himself, the hardest part of his education had been unlearning half of what his father had taught him—figuring out which bits of advice were still valuable and which had been made antiquated by advances in technology, or which he’d misinterpreted from lack of practical experience.

  Still, father’s legacy had kept him alive. Heeding that paternal advice brought him his Blue Star and made him a bit of a hero, hadn’t it?

  Do remember to pivot, and keep your trajectory clear, the voice in his head told him. Don’t forget the rotary, the best trick you’ve got. A snap turn’s better than a vector field, when you’re down in the slot.

  Though perhaps the best piece of advice of all had been this: A hero is a fellow that learned on day one how to duck, and on day two when to do it. Courage and resourcefulness ill behoove a dead man.

  Two interceptors were closing on him, their guns already belching out impactors. They didn’t seem to care when their fellow scouts ran right into their lanes of fire—they were happy to blow away their own scouts, if it meant getting a shot off at a human pilot. Maggs eyed his ammunition board, saw his last two disruptors showing green lights all across their status displays. They were ready to fire. Once they were gone, though, he’d have none left.

  He checked the interceptors again, plotting their trajectories. They were set to converge on a spot a few kilometers in front of him, though of course the bigger enemy ships were smart enough not to actually collide with each other. They would correct at the last moment and just miss one another and then they would bank around, double back on him where they would have a good view of his tail.

  The thing about this enemy, though, unlike every human foe Maggs had ever faced down, was its predictability. The alien drones were fast and they could appear to be clever but only because they were running some algorithm, some deep-seated program. If you could guess that program’s next move, you could play the enemy ships against each other. It just took a bit of gray matter, a little application—

  There.

  Maggs twisted around and brought his nose up until he was burning away from the interceptors. The big, spiky ships poured on their own fuel until they were arcing up to meet him—they wouldn’t let him get away so easily.

  Too bad an entire cloud of scouts was already swooping down toward him. Too bad for the interceptors, anyway.

  The scouts tried to bank out of the way but they weren’t quite fast enough. The interceptors tried to jink but they had to fight their own momentum, and they would never be as nimble as Maggs and his BR.9. Some of the scouts managed to get away. Others plowed right into the interceptors like insects smacking into the windshield of a ground car. Their spindly bodies folded and twisted as they struck home, their fuel tanks igniting silently in the void.

  One of the interceptors broke in half under the weight of multiple collisions, its thrusters sending it rolling off into darkness.

  The other interceptor was damaged but kept after Maggs, listing a bit but still blazing away with its heavy guns. Impactors flashed past Maggs’s canopy like fat shadows, coming fast and thick. One creased his left-side fairing and it burst in a shower of sparks, adding a new red light to his damage control board.

  Maggs stood on his throttle a moment longer, then yanked it back to zero as he shoved his stick over to the side. His BR.9 rolled hard to the left and the interceptor flashed past him until he could see the glow of its thrusters.

  The interceptors were too big and too heavily armored to be killed by PBW fire—under normal conditions. There was no armor inside their thruster nozzles, though. Maggs brought up a virtual Aldis sight and let his computer find the perfect firing solution, let his finger hover over his trigger, waiting…waiting…now.

  His particle beam lanced straight through the interceptor’s engines, carving the bastard like a roasted goose. There wasn’t much to see—all the damage was internal—but the interceptor’s guns stopped firing. A moment later its thrusters cut out as well.

  Maggs would have preferred to see the thing explode in the dark, but he would take the kill he could get.

  He looked around for the next target, the next dogfight. With his free hand he reached for his comms board again. Zhang wasn’t responding—maybe she was dead. He refused to believe he’d outlived the famous Aleister Lanoe, though.

  “Commander,” he called, “do we have an actual plan, here? Or do we just keep fighting till we die? I’m just working on my social calendar, you see.”

  Bravado was another thing he’d learned from Dear Old Dad. It was so much more decorous than screaming in terror.

  Green pearls queued up in the edge of Lanoe’s vision, calls coming in from Zhang and Maggs that he didn’t have time to answer.

  He needed every ounce of concentration he could get, at that particular moment.

  Scouts and interceptors kept launching from the sides of the destroyer, which had shrunk to nearly a third of its original mass. Lanoe watched it like a hawk, waiting to see any sign of the line ship underneath all those ancillary craft, especially keeping an eye out for anything resembling a crew section.

  He wasn’t just biding his time while he watched, however. The emerging scouts and interceptors paid him no attention except to swoop out of his way as they hurried toward the cloud of their fellows beyond, out where Zhang and Maggs were. The enemy didn’t spare a shot for Lanoe, as if he were some neutral third party they didn’t have to worry about.

  He made them pay for that mistake. As soon as they were clear of the destroyer—sometimes even as they emerged—he tore them apart, racking up kill after kill after kill. He imagined Maggs would find it all terribly unsporting.

  Lanoe didn’t give a damn.

  Some glitch in the enemy’s programming, some misplaced variable in its algorithm, had given him a chance to take out a vast number of ships before they could attack his squadmates. He would thin the herd as much as he could, until the enemy realized its mistake and came for him.

  If that happened, of course, he wouldn’t stand a chance. He was in far too close. In a moment a hundred scouts would be on him and they would turn his FA.2 into a cloud of vaporized metal before he even started to evade.

  He flew a tight course around and around the destroyer, looping down under its belly then up over its top decks then back around for another pass. This must be what an apex predator felt like, he thought—the lions of the plains of Africa, killer whales in the polar oceans must have felt like this before humans came along and beat them at their own game. To p
ick one’s targets secure in the knowledge of one’s own inviolability. It was almost boring.

  The green pearls kept spinning. He let one call through, then the other. Listened more to the tones of his squadmates’ voices than the actual content of their words. Zhang was in trouble, he could tell—she put a brave face on it but there was an edge of fear there, a certain clipped bite in her voice that he knew all too well.

  He still didn’t know how to really read Maggs, but he was certain the swindler was in bad shape, too. He’d given them a mission far above and beyond what two fighter pilots should be expected to accomplish and he knew it. Desperately he wanted to turn away from the destroyer, burn back toward the cloud and come to their aid—but he knew he was far more useful to them where he was. Every scout and interceptor he took down here was one less they would have to fight. The work he was doing was the only chance they had.

  Ahead of him two interceptors jumped into space at the same time, huge and dark and lumpy. He’d used up his disruptors long before then but he’d figured out the trick of taking the big ships down with just PBWs, found all the sensitive spots in their thick hide of armor. The thrusters were good, but hard to get at. Far better to rake fire across their sensor pods. The hard part was finding them, as they were nestled deep between two ranks of guns on the interceptors’ flanks. Once you blinded them, though, the interceptors would just fly off in a straight line, headed for nowhere, unable to find targets to shoot at. Like the machines they were, they had no idea what to do when their programming broke down, and thus they did nothing.

  Scouts, of course, were a lot easier. One good shot and they broke in pieces. Lanoe made a point of taking careful aim, but only so he wouldn’t waste ammunition.

  Meanwhile, below him, the destroyer grew leaner and leaner as its cargo of drone ships launched toward oblivion. And still no sign of what Lanoe desperately wanted to find.

  NO CAVITIES DETECTED, his computer kept telling him. MILLIMETER-WAVE ANALYSIS: NO RESULT. MAGNETIC RESONANCE ANALYSIS: NO RESULT.

  If one of the aliens were inside that thing, Derrow’s hypothetical programmer, they were buried deep.

  Boards flashed at him. Red pearls spun in the corners of his vision. Alarms blared.

  Maggs couldn’t pay attention to any of them. All he could see was the divot in his canopy.

  He’d flown right into a kinetic impactor, straight into a headlong collision with a chunk of metal the size of his fist. He must have caught it at a slight angle, because it hadn’t just torn through the canopy, his body, the seat behind him—instead it had bounced off, ricocheting out into the void. The impact had been powerful enough, however, to leave a finger-long dent in the carbonglas of the canopy.

  Carbonglas was nigh-on indestructible. It could be crushed under hundreds of tons of weight, subjected to temperatures higher than the surface of a star, and not even get scratched. Even particle beams could do little more than mar its shiny surface.

  The impactor could have cleaved right through it like a hot knife through a ripe tomato. The fact that it hadn’t—the fact that Maggs was still alive—came down to pure, incorruptible luck.

  Another hit on that same location—even a near miss—would crack the transparent material, he knew. The canopy would shatter. Shards of jagged ultrahard material might come scything for his face. Or it might just explode outward, leaving him relatively unharmed—but also completely exposed to the void. And enemy fire.

  When you stare Death in the proverbial eye socket, his father’s voice told him, that’s the moment you see how empty it is.

  He’d never really understood that lesson until now. Maggs realized, with a start, that he’d never really been afraid of dying before.

  It wasn’t an experience he could recommend. He heard a weird, low throbbing alarm from somewhere nearby, though it was nothing like the alert tones his boards normally used. It was enough to make him look at his displays, which was enough to break the hypnotic spell of the divot.

  When he couldn’t find the source of the thumping, he blinked away the last of the cobwebs because he realized what it was. That was the sound of his own heart thundering in his chest.

  He fought for control of himself. Found the steel that laced his blood, the steel his father had given him. Wheeled around just as three scouts came tearing through space at him and, with one rapierlike blast of particle fire, cut all three of them to pieces. He needed to pay attention.

  If he died out here—if he died anywhere, frankly—certain debts would go unpaid. That was unacceptable.

  For a good minute he did nothing but kill. Like an alchemist he transmuted this new fear into pure, cold, high-toned rage and fought like a maniac, scouts falling before him so fast he thought perhaps he could win this battle single-handed if he could keep it up. Yet something cold and thick had clotted inside his heart and it started to drag him down. Adrenaline curdled in his veins and he felt like he wanted to weep.

  That was when he saw the trap. When he realized just how clever the alien drone ships could be, if you gave them half a chance.

  The scouts he’d been cutting down must have been a screen, a ruse thrown at him so he wouldn’t notice the real menace creeping up from behind. He caught sight of the attack on one of his displays, then spun around on his axis so he could get a good look at the hounds that pursued him.

  There, through his canopy (don’t look at the divot, don’t look at it), were three interceptors, bearing down on him at high speed from the heart of the cloud. Already they had begun to unleash their storm of projectiles, impactors coming at him in a nonstop torrent of solid metal.

  His weapons board showed him the two disruptors he had left.

  One too few.

  He could take down two of them, then wheel about, bank hard, loop back, and catch the other one from behind—assuming he somehow, miraculously, avoided all those impactors. Assuming there were no scouts anywhere nearby waiting to swoop in and catch him split-arsing all over the local volume. A bad plan is better than none at all, Dear Old Dad told him, and he tapped a virtual keyboard to try to get a firing solution, while working out the maneuvers in his head.

  Then one of the interceptors exploded in a cloud of debris. And another.

  A firing solution came up. He blasted the third, then wheeled around to look for scouts, to try to get some idea of what happened.

  “Remember that time you saved my ass? We’re even,” Zhang called, on an open channel.

  He found himself laughing, fear pumping endorphins all through his body and for a moment he felt good again, invincible.

  Then he saw Zhang’s fighter and felt the ice water of trepidation splash against the back of his neck. The whole flank of her BR.9 was a jagged mess of broken components and torn-open panels. He could see one of her secondary thrusters flap back and forth, connected now only by a thin, frayed cable. The red tentacles that writhed across her fairings were obscured by scorch marks and craters left behind by impactor strikes.

  “You look like ten varieties of hell,” he told her.

  “Yeah, well, your canopy’s about to fall off,” she responded. Weakly, he thought. She sounded very tired. Well, her body might be twenty but her brain was much, much older. And if he were being fair, he wasn’t exactly fresh himself. The inside of his suit stank of fear sweat and bad breath.

  “We’ve both seen better days. How damaged are you?” he asked.

  “In about ten minutes I’m going to look like a Fleet Day goose. How’s your ammo supply?”

  “I have one disruptor left, and maybe two thousand shots in my PBWs. Fuel?”

  “I’d be lucky to get back to Aruna.” Zhang was quiet for a moment. “Maggs, if we don’t make it—”

  “Should we die here,” he said, cutting her off, “anything we say won’t matter. If we live, anything we say will be embarrassing later.”

  “Fair enough,” she said. “Oh, hellfire. Look at that.”

  Maggs could see it just fine.

&nb
sp; He’d spent most of the battle at the periphery of the enemy ranks, scoring hits along the edges while she burned through the heart of the opposition. The two of them had put up a valiant effort, indeed—Maggs’s displays showed him an enormous field of debris, hundreds of dead enemy ships reduced to scrap metal in a slowly expanding cloud. Yet in the midst of all that chaos at least a hundred drone ships remained active. They showed up on his display as pinpoints of light, a visual representation of the heat of their thrusters.

  The display switched over to a vector analysis—a breakdown of how those ships were moving, how fast and in what direction. They were all burning blue. In other words, they were all headed straight for Maggs and Zhang.

  “No point in cursing, really,” Maggs said. “Shall we make a good show of this?”

  “Yeah,” Zhang told him. “Go out in a blaze of glory. Can’t wait.”

  Maggs’s hands flew over his boards, readying his BR.9 for what was going to be some of the hardest fighting he’d ever experienced. The fighter complained with red lights and warning chimes but he ignored them. No point in conserving resources or playing safe now.

  In his mind he rehearsed his next moves. Dive straight into the cloud at all available speed. Punch through the far side, swing around, dive through again. Repeat as possible. Do as much damage as he could while Zhang hung back, hunting targets of opportunity. Maybe, just maybe, give Lanoe a chance to accomplish something here.

  Or at the very least give him a story to tell back at the Admiralty, about how Auster Maggs died well.

  “Ready to run,” he told Zhang.

  “Good luck,” she said.

  He leaned forward on his stick, opening his throttle until his engines screamed. Dove straight into the maw of a hundred enemy ships.

  And then—the miracle occurred.

  Another layer of scouts and interceptors had peeled off the destroyer, and still there was no sign of any crew compartments, any centralized command structure. Lanoe was starting to accept the inevitable conclusion: that the destroyer was just a drone, like every other enemy ship they’d encountered.