Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  She’d never thought she would actually get to meet the man. Much less find out that the legend was true. She was very glad he was on her side.

  “Hang in there,” she told him. “If it gets too bad, take a white pearl.”

  “Thank you, but no,” Valk said. “After my accident they gave me this suit. It includes painkillers that are a lot stronger than what you’re used to—which is why I’ve never taken them.”

  “Never?” Zhang asked. If it hadn’t been for the white pearl in her own suit, after her own accident, she would never have made it until she was rescued. She would have killed herself with her sidearm. She’d taken the white pearl plenty of times since then. She took it whenever she had a bad headache.

  “If I take it once, I won’t stop,” he told her. “They swore up and down the stuff isn’t habit forming. I figure there’s more than one way to get addicted to something. Anyway, I need to be sharp for this battle. I can’t risk getting all fuzzy.”

  The painkillers in Zhang’s suit had never touched her skills as a pilot, but she supposed maybe it was true, that his were different. To each their own, she supposed.

  To take his mind off the rough ride, she asked, “So—when I came over to the ground control station after last night’s party, I couldn’t help noticing that somebody put Ehta to bed. Without her suit on.”

  “I figured she’d be more comfortable that way,” he replied, his voice carefully neutral.

  “Uh-huh,” Zhang said. “She and I used to be squaddies. I know she never had a problem sleeping in a suit, even under gravity. She was a marine, too—they never take their suits off except for one thing. You and she didn’t…I mean, not that I’d judge you, but…”

  “An officer never tells,” Valk called back.

  “You know, I’ve heard that expression before, a couple hundred times,” Zhang said, smiling even though the acceleration made her face ache every time she moved her mouth. “I’ve never heard anybody use it when they could have just said no.”

  Valk laughed. “Maybe this is the first time, then. Am I going to hear about what you got up to with Lanoe? All the juicy details?”

  “Fair point,” Zhang said, suddenly embarrassed. Certainly that story wasn’t for sharing. “I was just glad, that’s all I meant by it. If you and she found a little comfort. I didn’t mean any offense.”

  “None taken,” Valk said. “Listen, how about some music? I find it helps take my mind off the discomfort.”

  “Sure,” Zhang said.

  He switched on some terrible old-fashioned stuff, grungy and with a bass line so deep it just sounded like distortion in the speakers. Most likely recorded in the low-rent sound studios of Mars—it lacked the technical precision of Earth music. Before another minute had passed he started singing.

  “Brand new threads / gonna hit the town / girls to the side / when the boys…get down!”

  Zhang couldn’t help herself. She laughed uproariously.

  Valk might be superhumanly tough and a hell of a pilot. He still had the worst singing voice she’d ever heard.

  They’d been forbidden to bring any personal possessions, but someone had smuggled a tiny drum machine onboard the shuttle, and the engineers passed the time singing very old songs. It was a way to pass the time during the long, cramped flight.

  The woman who had squeezed Elder McRae’s hand so hard seemed almost apologetic when she joined in. “Probably not the kind of music you’re used to,” she said, in a break between songs.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” the elder replied, with a warm smile. “I wasn’t born into the Faith. I grew up on Jehannum, as a matter of fact.”

  “Really? I would never have guessed it. I have an aunt who lives there. I doubt you’d know her, though.”

  “I imagine you’re right. I left there very long ago. There was a time, though, when I knew the words to all of these songs. I used to love music.” She proved it by joining in on the next number. Some of the engineers cheered and clapped and smiled at her, which was nice.

  Still, it was a very long journey, and the music couldn’t stop her from thinking about how much her joints had started to ache, or how hungry she was getting. The latter need, at least, was seen to halfway to Aruna. Someone at the back of the shuttle opened a box of protein bars and handed them forward. It took the edge off the emptiness in the elder’s stomach.

  “Now this,” she admitted, as she licked the foil wrapper for every last morsel of the largely tasteless food, “is something I’m not used to. I’m going to miss fresh food while we’re away.”

  “I wish they’d let us bring minders, so we could just watch videos,” her neighbor said. “I’ve always hated spaceflight. I guess you probably know that—I hope I didn’t hurt your hand, before.”

  “Yours is not the first hand I’ve held in a stressful moment,” the elder replied. “I’m Elder McRae, by the way.”

  “I, uh, I know,” the engineer replied, with a sheepish grin. “I’m Wallach. Yuna Wallach.”

  “Well, M. Wallach, if we can’t have videos, we’ll have to find other ways to pass the time.” They’d already gone through all the songs she knew, but perhaps she had something else to offer. The elder couldn’t stand up—she was forbidden to release herself from her safety straps during the flight—but she could raise her voice. “Would anyone be interested,” she asked, “in some spiritual guidance? Perhaps a sermon?”

  Accustomed as she was to speaking with others of her faith she was a little surprised by the silence that was the first reply.

  Then one of the engineers, on the far side of the shuttle, asked, “Are you trying to convert us?”

  That even elicited a few laughs.

  The elder mused that she had perhaps forgotten that the majority of people in the shuttle were Centrocor employees. They lived on Niraya, true, but not because they’d come there, like her, looking for a spiritual path away from the cosmopolitanism of other worlds.

  She began to consider how to withdraw her offer without losing her dignity, when someone else spoke up.

  “I’m, uh, I’m kind of scared,” a young man near the cockpit said. That got a few laughs as well, though they sounded more sympathetic this time. “I wouldn’t mind hearing something. You know. Something kind of hopeful.”

  “I’m afraid,” the elder said, “that in our faith we don’t believe in raising false hopes. I can’t offer you any promises. I can’t tell you this will turn out just fine, or that we will for certain prevail against the enemy.”

  “Maybe we don’t need to hear what you have to say, then,” the engineer with the Centrocor logo shaved into his head, the one strapped to the extra fuel tank, said.

  What he didn’t seem to realize was that the sermon had already begun. “I can,” she went on, as if there had been no interruption, “talk about what human beings can achieve, when they set their minds to something. About the incredible potential each of us possesses. There have been many times in human history when all seemed lost. Throughout every age people just like us have found themselves with their backs against the proverbial wall, with no clear path ahead of them. Think of the original Martian colonists, when their main water tank rusted through just a month into their mission.”

  “That’s what you get for using the wrong paint on a planet half made out of oxides,” one of the engineers called out.

  The elder smiled and let the laughter die down before she continued. “They faced immediate and certain death. They did not surrender, though. They dug for ice beneath the soil and they found it. They found more water than they would ever need. Think, if you will, of the explorers who arrived at Tau Ceti, only to find hellish worlds where they could not even land. Including the planet we now call Hades. A planet that, once it was terraformed, became one of the jewels of humanity’s expansion among the stars.” Inspiration struck her, as it often did once she began to preach. So far her examples had all been of great engineers, as she had intended. But there was one story that might reso
nate even more with this crowd. “Think of the miners on the asteroids of Appolyon—”

  The engineers cheered and lifted their hands in the air.

  She smiled. She had them now. “When Wilscon decided their production quotas were not sustainable, when a hundred years’ worth of work was going to be thrown away because a column of numbers didn’t add up, the miners there had never known another life. They were to be discarded, disbanded—they could not live in an asteroid belt without constant resupply. They could not afford to move somewhere else and start anew. So a group of poor, largely uneducated miners instead invented a…M. Wallach, what was it they invented?” she asked.

  The woman looked surprised to be asked. “A continuous injection smelter,” she said. “The same kind we use on Niraya.”

  The elder nodded. “A new kind of smelter, a device that could increase their yields tenfold. Instead of being shut down and abandoned, those mines became incredibly profitable.”

  With any other crowd it would hardly be the most stirring example of her point, but the engineers in the shuttle grew excited and loud as they shouted back and forth comments she couldn’t understand about colloidal sieves and mesoscale electrostatics, debating the genius of the Appolyon miners’ innovation. She let them debate for a long while before she cleared her throat to get their attention once more.

  Then she looked across the shuttle, between two rows of passengers, and caught the eye of the man who had first asked her to speak. She nodded at him. “You see? Humanity cannot work miracles. Miracles are impossible. What we can do, when faced with impossible odds, is build a solution. We find the possible way, where once it seemed no such thing existed.”

  The reaction was immediate and enthusiastic. Some applauded, some cheered. Some just looked down and smiled. She’d reached them.

  “Did you just come up with all that now?” M. Wallach asked.

  “I extemporized it, yes,” the elder said, softly now, as her sermon was complete. “I’ve had a great deal of practice. Now, rather than boring all these good people with more speeches,” she said, raising her voice again, “how about another song?”

  The engineers launched into a very old tune from Earth about a miner and his lost love named Clementine. Half the words made no sense to the elder, but she liked the cadence of it. Before the song was half-finished, however, it stopped suddenly because the shuttle lurched and they were all thrown against their straps. For a moment the elder worried something terrible had happened, that perhaps they were under attack.

  Then she felt weightless, and she understood. The shuttle had simply stopped accelerating. She floated in her straps and felt the aches in her knees and back start to recede.

  She looked forward, but could see nothing through the cockpit windows except darkness. Not even stars. Yet she understood what the sudden weightlessness meant. They must be getting close to their destination.

  Zhang and Valk arrived at Aruna well ahead of the tender and the shuttles. Garuda, the ice giant planet, grew to fill most of her forward view. To Zhang’s cybernetic eyes it was just a big round shape with no surface features at all—because she couldn’t see color, she couldn’t tell if it was banded and spotted with storms like Jupiter or just hazy and pale like Uranus. A shame—she’d always found gas giant planets pretty.

  Aruna, the moon, showed much more detail. She could make out its craters and rilles and scarps, the jagged terrain of the tiny world. She could even tell that the weather seemed to have improved since her last visit. Only a few curving wisps of cloud obscured the factory crater.

  Her sensors picked up a number of objects orbiting the moon, even though they were still too small to see. She found mostly what she’d expected. When they’d left Aruna they’d put a number of microdrones in orbit, just to keep an eye on the place.

  There was one object in orbit, however, that shouldn’t be there. A metallic object about six meters across, almost perfectly spherical. “You picking this up?” she asked Valk, sending him the object’s particulars in case he’d missed it. “Does it look familiar to you?”

  “Yep,” Valk said.

  “I’d say that looks exactly like one of the enemy’s orbiters.” The spacecraft that carried their landers. The enemy must have sent it in to scout the moon. Presumably so that a larger force could come retake Aruna if the coast was clear.

  “I’ve seen them before,” Valk said. “You want me to move in and blast it?”

  “Not yet,” Zhang told him. “I’m not picking up anything else—no interceptors, none of those little scouts. The orbiters we’ve seen so far weren’t armed. I’m guessing this is just a reconnaissance ship. Maybe we should let it get a good look at us—Lanoe’s plan hinges on them coming out this way to fight us, so let’s give them a reason to do just that. Approach within a hundred kilometers and see what it does.”

  “You got it, boss,” Valk said. She watched him pull away from her, his BR.9 banking around in a very long, shallow curve toward Aruna’s north pole. She followed him a little more cautiously, using just tiny bursts of her maneuvering jets to send her ship into an orbit around Aruna.

  The orbiter didn’t move or open fire as Valk got closer. If it had even seen them it made no sign. It could be in communication with the enemy fleet by way of comms laser but there was no way to know.

  “This one’s different from the others,” Valk called. “Close up I can see it’s got a bunch of sensors mounted on its outer skin. Millimeter-wave scans show it’s mostly hollow inside—I don’t think it’s carrying a lander. I’m at three hundred kilometers now and it hasn’t changed course. Still closing.”

  Zhang kept an eye on the volume of space around the moon, expecting an ambush of enemy fighter craft at any moment. None of her scans showed anything out of the ordinary, but you never knew. Maybe the aliens had some kind of stealth technology that could hide a whole wing of ships from her sensors. Maybe they were down on the moon, camouflaged by all the wreckage and debris.

  “Two hundred kilometers, still closing,” Valk called. “It’s leaking electromagnetic radiation.”

  “You think that’s the signature of some kind of weapon?” Zhang asked.

  “Negative. I think it’s got a radio onboard. A really strong radio. Weird. If it uses that radio to contact the fleet, why hasn’t it transmitted yet? If we—”

  His voice disappeared in a welter of static, a high-pitched squealing wave of white noise that deafened her until her systems automatically turned the volume down.

  Her fingers danced across her comms board until she’d figured out what she’d just heard. That squeal had come from the orbiter, from the radio unit Valk had found. The orbiter had dumped a huge amount of energy into the radio, sending out a signal so strong it would propagate throughout the entire system. A warning to the fleet, most likely—she could guess that the message would be “enemy sighted.”

  Good enough. She hit her thrusters to send her over toward the orbiter, to get a good look for herself before they blew the damned thing up. It turned out she needn’t have bothered. The energy behind that radio blast had been more than the orbiter could take—the thing was fried, its outer shell half-molten with the heat of the transmission. Its sensors looked like they’d burned from the inside out.

  Valk hung in space about eighty kilometers from the thing, not moving. For a second she thought maybe the radio pulse wasn’t a communication at all, but some kind of weapon—maybe a microwave burst that could have cooked Valk alive inside his suit.

  “Big guy,” she said, “say something. Let me know you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine,” he called back. “My ears hurt a little. Damn. Did you hear that?”

  “Everybody in the system heard it,” she said, just relieved he was okay.

  “Then can you tell me what it meant?”

  Zhang shrugged inside her suit. “Who the hell knows? It just sounded like white noise to me. Probably some kind of machine code only its fellow drones would understand.”
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  “Then you didn’t…Zhang, you didn’t hear it speak?” Valk asked.

  She had been about to blast the orbiter to slag. Her hand hovered over her weapons board.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, cautiously.

  “You didn’t hear words?” Valk asked her. “You didn’t hear it talking about a false-mind?”

  Landings, Elder McRae was told, were almost as dangerous as launches.

  She held M. Wallach’s hand again as the shuttle shook and tossed in the thick air of Aruna, its wings vibrating with the heat of atmospheric entry. It wasn’t nearly as frightening as the launch had been, nor did it last nearly as long.

  Once the shuttle had touched down and stopped shaking, they all released themselves from their safety straps and almost trampled each other getting out through the shuttle’s narrow hatch, all of them eager to at least stretch their legs—and certainly to see the place where they would be working for the next few days.

  A whole new world.

  Elder McRae stumbled out onto a surface of wind-blasted rock and looked up at a dark purple sky and for the first time wondered if she had made a bad mistake. She could hear her breath in her ears, see it turn to fog on the inside of her helmet. The suit’s life support pack chugged and wheezed in the small of her back and heating elements came on across her stomach and her thighs, hot enough she worried they might burn her.

  She had to move out of the way as engineers poured out of the shuttle. Her first step nearly sent her flying—the gravity here was only a fraction of Niraya’s.

  M. Wallach grabbed her arm and steadied her. Through the engineer’s helmet she could see that Wallach was as dumbfounded as she, that at least she wasn’t the only one confused by this new place.