Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  “You will be allowed to remain here until such time as it is safe for you to leave,” the elder said. She took a deep breath and looked down at her minder. She began paging through the other business of the day. Elder Ving reported that they had enough food stored inside the Retreat’s walls to last for another three weeks. More than long enough, surely. Elder Ghent informed her that classes for his aspirants had been moved to the dome so as to keep everyone away from the Retreat’s windows. Just in case anyone threw a rock at them, or the like.

  “I’m…Elder?” Roan asked. “I don’t understand. Is that all?”

  Elder McRae didn’t look up from her minder. “Did you have something else to say?” she asked.

  “I just thought…I mean, I was expecting something more in the way of punishment,” the girl said. “I thought you might…I don’t know.”

  “Flog you in the public square? Lock you in a pillory? That kind of thing doesn’t belong in the Transcendentalist faith,” the elder said. “As I thought you would know. You didn’t strike me as being that ignorant of our beliefs.” Regardless of how seriously the girl had violated them. Better not say that out loud, the elder thought.

  “I just thought…”

  The elder’s minder chimed and a new display came up, showing a view of the sky over the Retreat. A large aircraft was approaching, flying very low. After a moment the view focused on the craft and she saw it was the tender, the same vehicle on which she’d returned to Niraya from the Hexus.

  A message came in from the tender, one the elder found very hard to believe. Surely the pilots couldn’t be so reckless?

  She rolled up the minder and left her office, Roan following unbidden behind her. Elder McRae climbed three flights of stairs until she came out onto a narrow balcony on the roof of the Retreat. Before her she saw the wild profusion of shingles and tarpaper and flagstones that covered the top of the huge building. Others were out there as well, mostly elders, though a few aspirants stuck their heads out of skylights and the tops of stairwells.

  The tender came in at a terrifying rate of speed, though Elder McRae imagined it was flying as slow as its pilot dared. As it crossed the top of the Retreat its nose suddenly reared up and for a split second it stood on its thrusters, all but hovering there. It was clear even to one as untutored in aerodynamics as the elder that the craft could not stay like that for long, not without stalling out and crashing into the rooftops.

  It didn’t have to. A hatch on its side opened and three human figures leapt out, and then the tender bucked up into the air and shot away, its wind nearly bowling Elder McRae over. In a moment it was gone, far away from the Retreat.

  The three suited figures fell through the air without making any attempt to slow their descent. Two smashed down onto a distant balcony, rolling with the impact. The third hit a terra-cotta roof and burst right through the tiles, its weight and momentum too much for the fragile ceramic.

  That roof was on top of Elder Ving’s office, Elder McRae knew. She hurried back inside, then down a corridor until she reached Elder Ving’s door. She could hear a commotion inside and she threw the door open without knocking.

  Elder Ving was unhurt, even smiling in joy as she studied the ruin of her desk. A person in a space suit was struggling to stand up, but they kept slipping on broken pieces of roof tile. Elder McRae peered through a helmet obscured by red dust.

  “Lieutenant Maggs,” she said. “Are you hurt?”

  “My pride has seen better days,” the pilot said. “My inertial sink took care of the rest.” He finally got to his feet and bowed to Elder Ving. “My most sincere apologies,” he said. “I couldn’t resist the urge to make a dramatic entrance.”

  “First things first,” Lanoe said. “We need to get you out of here.”

  They had gathered in Elder McRae’s office—Lanoe, Maggs, and Derrow, along with half a dozen of the Retreat’s senior elders—to watch the display and wonder just how things had gotten so bad. On the display they could see the people of Niraya weren’t going anywhere. Some of them had set up tents outside the Retreat, including makeshift kitchens and even latrine facilities. Most of them were just standing out there, watching the Retreat’s windows, perhaps hoping someone would poke their head out long enough to get it knocked off.

  “That’s not necessary,” Elder McRae said.

  Lanoe stared at the old woman. “You do realize that half the people out there would put a bullet in you right now if they could? That the other half would probably just shout questions at you until you went deaf?”

  “The doors downstairs are secure,” she told him. “There have been a few attempts to break in, but nothing serious. There’s been very little violence, all things considered. A few Centrocor employees have been attacked, though there were no serious injuries.”

  Derrow scrabbled to pull a minder out of her pocket. “I need to contact my people. Make sure they’re okay,” she said.

  Lanoe dismissed her with a nod. She stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

  “There’s a funny thing about crowds,” Lanoe told the elder. “You can’t predict how they’re going to act. Maybe they’re just demonstrating peacefully today—give it twenty-four hours and you could have a mutiny on your hands. Lieutenant Maggs and I brought sidearms with us. We can get you out of here, one way or another.”

  An old man who Lanoe had been told was Elder Ghent gasped at the thought. “You can’t be considering firing on the crowd.”

  “Just over their heads,” Lanoe said. “It’ll make ’em disperse. Then we get you over to the ground control station. I had Zhang and Valk head over there to get Ehta and Thom—they’ll be ready to fly as soon as we arrive. It’ll be a squeeze, but we can get all of you elders on the tender and get you into orbit, where you’ll be safe.”

  Elder McRae sat down in her chair. “Unnecessary, as I said.”

  Lanoe wanted to grab her by the arm and haul her to safety. He fought to keep his cool. Why couldn’t Zhang be here? She’d know what to say. Or maybe Maggs might have some thoughts. He turned and looked at the pilot but Maggs just shrugged.

  “You seem to think we’re prisoners here,” Elder McRae said. “That we would have left already given the chance. You’re incorrect. One of our four basic principles, our eternal truths, is self-reliance. That includes preparing for all contingencies.”

  “What are you getting at?” Lanoe asked.

  “There’s a flare shelter at the bottom of the Retreat, under the dome. When we constructed it, we included an escape tunnel in case this building was damaged in a natural catastrophe. The tunnel runs out to a house in town—one whose owners probably don’t even know what’s in their basement. We could leave anytime we liked. We choose to stay.”

  Lanoe looked at the other elders, standing in a semicircle by the windows. Their faces were just as impassive as Elder McRae’s.

  “This is our place,” Elder Ving said. “Now, especially. Someone must stand for order on Niraya. Our path is clear.”

  Lanoe sighed. Damned zealots. Well, he’d tried to rescue them. If they wanted to die here that was their business.

  He turned next toward Roan. “When I got back here, I had a message waiting for me, from Thom,” he told her.

  At least she had the decency to react, a little. She tried to hide it but he could see by the sudden light in her eyes that she desperately wanted to know what the kid had said.

  “He tells me this whole thing, this damned broadcast, was his idea. That he coerced you into helping him turn this planet upside down. He says he exploited your feelings for him and he hopes you won’t be punished.”

  “He…said that?” Roan asked. “He’s just trying to protect me. If anything, it’s the other way around. I coerced him.”

  Lanoe nodded. About what he’d expected. “Elder McRae, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “I imagine so,” the old woman said. “They did this together.”

  Roan’s mouth o
pened but she was too disciplined to say anything.

  Lanoe took a step toward her. “I could shoot you both for treason,” he said.

  He expected her to break down in fear but she barely winced. Instead she stood up as tall as she could—still about six inches short of Lanoe’s height—and set her mouth in a hard line. “I wasn’t aware that Niraya was under military authority,” she said. “Then there’s the fact you have no official jurisdiction here at all, since your mission isn’t sanctioned by the Navy.”

  Maggs laughed. “She’s got you there,” he said.

  Lanoe didn’t bother glaring at his pilot. He was too busy trying to stare Roan down. “Sure,” he said, finally. “Okay. You do have me there, kid. Now—how about you use that powerful brain of yours and tell me what we’re supposed to do next? Huh? How do we get that crowd to disperse so we can get back to the business of saving all your asses?”

  “You don’t,” Roan said.

  Lanoe said nothing. Give her some more rope, he thought. See if she ties a noose.

  “The people out there were confused and frightened and angry before. They knew they were in danger but they didn’t understand what that meant—they had some rough idea they were being invaded, but no concept of what was going to happen. Well, now they’re not confused anymore.”

  “Which just left more room for the frightened and angry part,” Lanoe said.

  Roan nodded. “Perfectly rational responses to what’s happening, don’t you think? They know they’re going to die. All Thom and I did was to give them a chance to make their own choice about how they’re going to spend their last days.”

  Lanoe stepped back. Then he looked around at the elders. “That’s how it is, huh?” he asked.

  None of them dared reply.

  He nodded at them. “You think we’re going to lose. You think you’re doomed, so none of this matters.” He rested one hand on Elder McRae’s desk. Suddenly he was leaning on it. He forced himself to stand up straight. “Well, just maybe we’re going to prove you wrong.”

  “Perhaps,” Elder McRae said. “Anything is possible.”

  There was more talking. Such was the nature of human existence—a thing could not happen but it would be endlessly discussed. Even when there was so little to say.

  Elder McRae listened patiently as the Commander told her of the desperate fight out past the moon Aruna. She heard his report on swarmships and drone fighters and how M. Valk had saved them. Of what a terrible and alien thing they had fought.

  It did little to improve her estimate of the pilots’ chances.

  When Commander Lanoe ran out of words, he started asking for suggestions. It almost seemed like he expected her to give him orders. She found she couldn’t fulfill that need, so she simply asked him to do his best.

  When she had first met him, at the Hexus, she had possessed a fragile kind of hope, a sort of half belief simply because he seemed so competent, so knowledgeable in the ways of war. There had seemed, then, to be plenty of time—and anyway, it might have turned out that the enemy fleet wanted something they could part with, some tribute or ransom that they would gladly have paid.

  It was clear now, in these last days, that all such hopes had been pointless. That there had never been a chance.

  Eventually he left her office—storming off to consult with Lieutenant Maggs and the engineer, Derrow. The other elders went with him. Roan had slipped away at some point, presumably to return to her own room, where she could contemplate what she’d done.

  Quiet and a false peace filled her office and for a while she simply sat at her desk, her minder rolled up securely so she didn’t even have to see the crowd outside. She sat and tried to breathe and tried, simply, to be. She meditated on the Four Eternals, worked through the catechisms of self-reliance and self-understanding. Attempted to clear her mind of all nonessential thoughts.

  It proved difficult.

  Impossible, actually. She couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t focus with so many clouded and angry people all around her, even if she couldn’t see them directly. She needed to escape her office, the place where she considered worldly business all day long. She rose from her chair and went out into the hall, then passed down a side corridor until she was deep within the mass of the Retreat, until she could feel its bulk around her, sheltering her. A windowless meditation room lay there at the heart of the building and she stepped inside, closing the door silently behind her. The room was kept dim and some aspirant, keeping to their duties despite what was going on, had lit incense to fill the room with its calming scent.

  It was only after she sat down on a woven mat, crossing her old and aching legs underneath her, that she realized she was not alone in the little room.

  Elder Ghent sat against the far wall, his eyes closed. Ghent was the oldest and most infirm of her fellow elders and she thought perhaps he had fallen asleep. She tried to focus on herself, on her own being, pretending he wasn’t there.

  Then he spoke, and she nearly jumped in surprise.

  “How did we come to this?” he asked, in a very soft voice.

  “What do you mean?” she asked him.

  He was silent for some time, perhaps collecting words. In the quiet room they seemed out of place. Yet when he spoke again he did not falter.

  “Those who built the Retreat, those who settled Niraya, came here to get away from worldly things. To escape the temptations and empty stimulations of the wider universe. They came here to study and to practice their disciplines, and only that.”

  “It seems that one can keep the universe at bay only for so long,” she replied.

  He did not move. He did not nod or even open his eyes. Yet she could tell he was lucid and quite present. “It didn’t take an invading fleet to make that plain,” he said.

  Ghent was a teacher. He was in charge of leading the aspirants in their studies and helping them find their way. Years of that task had given him a roundabout way of speaking—a Socratic method of asking questions instead of simply giving answers. She wished he would just get to the point.

  “We,” he said, “never meant to rule. To govern. Did we? And yet here we are. Choosing a path for others, not just for ourselves.”

  “You mean the people outside,” she said. She permitted herself the tiniest, least audible of sighs. “We never asked to lead them. They simply followed.”

  “As humans will. And we acted—as leaders will. We held information back from them. Hoarded secrets.”

  “We agreed, all of us, to withhold the video,” Elder McRae insisted.

  “I do not claim to be innocent in this. I thought, as you did, that it was the right thing to do. There is no point in pondering what might have been different. Yet I wonder now—what is the way forward? They know they will die. Now they know how it will happen. What is our responsibility to them in their final days? Do we try to teach them acceptance? Give them peace?”

  “I doubt they’re in the mood to listen to sermons now,” she said.

  “Is there time to teach them by example? I think not.”

  She closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of the incense. “I came here today—to this room, I mean—to escape such thoughts.”

  “That’s too bad,” he told her. “I don’t think you can.”

  Her eyes snapped open. She felt anger rise up inside her like a snake lifting from its coils. That was not an appropriate way for one elder to speak to another.

  Which, of course, was the point.

  “Whether you asked for this responsibility or not—it is yours,” he told her. “I will support you as I can. So will the others, I’m certain. You must choose for all of us, however. Please choose well.”

  She rose from her mat, wanting to storm out of there. To tell him exactly what she thought of his elliptical demand. Instead she collected herself and bowed in his direction. “Thank you for your counsel,” she told him.

  Then she opened the door and stepped out of the dim room, back into the hall.

&nb
sp; It seemed there was nowhere left for her to go.

  “I refuse to give up,” Lanoe said. “I refuse to just accept defeat. Even if every damned religious nut on this planet thinks we’re doomed.”

  “An admirable position,” Maggs replied. The smarmy little bastard had a smile on his face. Lanoe supposed that was the upside of not being in charge. You didn’t have to take the blame when things went wrong.

  Lanoe brought a gloved fist down on a little wooden table, not quite hard enough to smash it to pieces. Even though he wanted to. Damn it all. If Zhang was there—

  Funny how fast things could change. When he’d first seen Zhang in her new body he’d wanted nothing but to keep away from her. He’d felt so awkward just talking to her again. Now he desperately missed her. She, he knew, would never give up. Not when she could still fight.

  “We need to start planning the next phase of this war,” he told Maggs. “Derrow—you’re a big part of that. We’ve showed we can beat one of their swarmships but that’s not going to be enough. I need ground-based guns. That’s the only way we can punch through the fleet and get at the programmer on the big ship.”

  “Assuming,” Derrow said, carefully, “there is a programmer there.”

  He turned to face her and he could almost feel the anger radiating off his face. He could definitely see her wince. “Let me guess. You’ve got doubts now, too.”

  “Well…not so much doubts, just…Commander,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “You asked me for ideas on how to fight this enemy and I did my best. I think there probably is a programmer somewhere in that fleet, someone who isn’t just a drone. But I don’t know it for a fact.”

  “Nothing in war is ever clear or certain,” he told her. “You go into battle with your best estimate of the enemy. Often you’re proven wrong, and then you have to scramble to keep up. Now what about those guns? How fast can you build them?”