Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  He wished he could join in. It would be good to get in a whoop or two of his own. There was only one problem—he saw what the others must have missed.

  The aliens weren’t stupid. As soon as the first swarmship was destroyed, they’d already begun to react. The remaining swarmships seemed to bubble and grow as they deployed their scouts and interceptors as fast as they could, sending out small craft in a hundred directions, all of them burning hard to get away from the debris of their wrecked brethren.

  The guns on Aruna would be useless against the smaller ships—they were too maneuverable, too small in cross section for proper targeting. Once they deployed, they were Lanoe’s problem.

  “Did we—” Thom sounded like he was trying to catch his breath. “Did we just start the battle?”

  “Started an hour ago, kid,” Valk told him. “You must’ve blinked and missed it.” He understood what Thom must be feeling, though. In every battle Valk had ever fought it was the same way. A whole lot of maneuvering and not engaging and getting into just the right position. When the shooting actually started, you were usually too busy planning your next trajectory to notice.

  You could win or lose a battle in those first few seconds when one side didn’t realize the fighting had started in earnest. This time it looked like they had the drop on the aliens. The swarmships were deploying as fast as they could, but that just meant they suddenly had ten times as many ships in the same small volume of space. The interceptors and scouts scattered without taking up anything like formations, simply trying to get away from the incoming projectiles. As more and more ships deployed behind them they clumped up in thick clouds of metal, sometimes colliding with each other. Meanwhile whole sections of the volume were left empty and undefended.

  Valk swooped down on a lone interceptor that had strayed too far from the chaos. He couldn’t take it out with a disruptor—orders were orders, he had to save those for the queenship—but he raked its nose with PBW fire and made it turn to face him. Its guns heated up and it burned to close with him but he pulled a tight loop over its top and got around behind it, the glow of its thrusters bright in his canopy. It tried to turn its guns to target him but they weren’t designed to take on a threat from behind. Before it could open fire he put a salvo across its thruster cones, shredding them like tissue paper. Maybe he couldn’t kill the thing with PBWs alone, but if he could keep it from maneuvering it was effectively out of the battle.

  He burned away from the crippled enemy, looking for his next target. A whole squadron of scouts showed on his display and he rushed to meet them. They’d deployed from their swarmship in poor order and were trying desperately to construct a formation but they kept getting in each other’s way. They didn’t even seem to see him as he approached, and he started computing a fire pattern in his head when he noticed what lay beyond them.

  Nothing.

  Past the clot of small ships, there was nothing but empty space between Valk and the queenship. He had a clear run at the thing.

  “Stick to me and watch my six,” Lanoe told Thom. “Just keep them off me as best you can.” The two of them were deep in a disorganized cloud of ships, scouts, and interceptors so thick he could barely see any stars between them. He cut apart a scout in front of him, then craned his neck back to see two interceptors collide above his canopy, debris from the resultant explosion pattering off his vector field. “Keep shooting, even if you can’t get kills—don’t give them a chance to regroup.”

  “You’ve got scouts on your…your ten,” Thom said. “Lanoe—look out!”

  A projectile from Aruna came streaking past, so close its space-bending wake pulled Lanoe forward against his restraints. The metal sphere tore through a pair of scouts before rocketing past the queenship and out into the void.

  Lanoe ignored it—if one of those rounds hit him it would happen so fast he wouldn’t have time to know he was dead. He rolled over on his side as a scout breathed fire across his airfoils, then he twisted around and dove for a thick knot of enemy ships below him. Thom mirrored his maneuvers flawlessly, the kid’s PBWs stitching a line of tiny craters across the skin of an interceptor.

  Dead ahead, through his canopy Lanoe could see a swarmship deploying, a boiling cloud of drones desperately trying to launch before they were destroyed. Another shot from the guns tore through that cloud, lighting it up from the inside with flashes of red and bursts of lightning. Most of the alien ships came away intact, but he could see the scars on their hulls from a thousand small collisions, places where debris had torn loose gun mounts or dug deep into armor.

  “Zhang, report,” he said.

  “Heavy resistance on my flank,” she said. He could hear collision alarms warbling in her cockpit. “I can’t keep ’em corralled for long. Lanoe—this chaos is working to our advantage right now, but if they get a chance to draw up proper formations—”

  “Understood,” he told her. The only chance they had was to keep the enemy dancing. The aliens outnumbered them a hundred to one—if they got organized, if they came at the human pilots with proper tactics, this battle would be over in minutes.

  They needed a decisive strike now, while the enemy was still off balance. He twisted his head around, looking for the queenship. He almost missed it, hidden behind a welter of scouts and interceptors and the slagged remains of a dead swarmship. There must be a hundred drones between him and the queen.

  Lanoe had never believed in false modesty. He knew his own capacities—and he knew he could punch through that mess. The aliens were too disorganized to stop him if he moved fast enough. He would take some hits, and there was no guarantee he would survive the run, but he could do it. He could cut his way through and drop every one of his disruptors down the queenship’s maw. He could do it.

  There was only one problem—Thom couldn’t.

  If he dragged the kid along with him on his suicide mission, Thom would be dead before they got halfway there. The kid just didn’t have the skills to dodge enemy fire. Yet if Lanoe left Thom behind, if he went for the glory himself, he’d be abandoning Thom in the middle of the thickest action. Either way he would be signing the kid’s death warrant.

  He gritted his teeth. Reminded himself he was the commander. That he had made decisions like that before, and never hesitated.

  Then a green pearl started spinning in the corner of his vision. He flicked his eyes across it to open a channel.

  “I’ve got a clear run,” Valk told him. “I can hit that thing right now.”

  Lanoe felt a cold wash of relief run down his spine.

  “Do it,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Every time the guns fired, Roan felt like a zipper was being ripped open in her head. She kept trying to clamp her hands over her ears, forgetting that she had her helmet up. She tried just to stay on her feet and avoid touching anything metallic. Snakes of crackling static electricity writhed across the cables and junction boxes that crowded the ground of the base camp as power flowed from the tender’s fusion reactor into the eight skeletal towers that pointed at the distant enemy.

  The projectiles tore apart the sky as they launched from their barrels at half the speed of light. Blue lightning traced their path as they ionized the atmosphere of Aruna, lingering in the upper air long after they were gone. The light left afterimages floating in her vision.

  “Number six, you’re running hot,” Engineer Derrow called. She stood up in her rover and pointed at the gun. “Stand down for repair.” The energies surging through the guns were enough to melt vital components, enough to tear them to pieces if they weren’t constantly maintained. Crews of engineers worked endlessly, stripping out fused superconductor loops and checking circuits to make sure they didn’t misfire.

  Other crews carried the heavy projectiles from the main store and loaded them into the firing chambers, as fast as they could manage. It was bizarre to think that for all the technology that had gone into constructing the guns, they were still loaded by hand. Roan
caught sight of Elder McRae among the loaders, and considered running over to help. Then the guns fired again and her brain quivered inside her skull and she decided instead to duck back inside the tender. Maybe Ensign Ehta needed her.

  In the spacecraft’s wardroom a massive display of the battle flickered in the air. The queenship was a rough sphere at the center of it all, with the swarmships hanging before it at seemingly random angles. Smaller ships were represented by individual pixels. There were so many of them they seemed to coruscate, as if they were shimmering in and out of existence. Enemy craft were picked out in white, while the human pilots were dots of blue, though the battle area was such a chaotic jumble Roan kept losing track of the blue pixels as they disappeared inside clouds of white.

  “Zhang’s in deep,” Ehta said, moving her gloved hand through the display, as if she could wave aside alien drones like gnats. “Lanoe and Thom are holding their own.” She looked pointedly at Roan. “I thought you’d want to know.”

  Roan refused to blush. She had a right to be worried. “Where is he?” she asked.

  “Here.” Ehta pointed at a pair of blue dots right in the middle of the battle. They wove and swung around thick formations of white, matching each other’s maneuvers as if they were tethered together. “He’s alive, okay? So maybe we can get back to work?”

  Not that there was much for them to do. The purpose of the ground control station was to model the battle, keeping track of all the individual ships—their position and speed. With that data the tender’s computers could build up predictions of how the enemy would act, where they would build up formations, and where they would leave weak spots in their strategy. Weak spots Lanoe and his pilots might be able to exploit.

  It was mostly an automated process, though Ehta was keeping a very close watch on the data as it emerged, getting a feel for the battle. Looking for places where the pilots needed to strike, and when they needed to disengage so they didn’t get overrun.

  “Zhang can’t keep this up much longer,” Ehta said, pointing at one flank of the battle area. “Lanoe wants her to keep the enemy contained, but she’s all alone out there. That kind of sheepdogging needs at least two fighters, one to herd and one to cut out strays. If Valk could get over there and help, maybe, but he…”

  The Ensign trailed off as she studied the display.

  “What is it?” Roan asked.

  “Valk. Go for it, you crazy bastard,” Ehta whispered.

  Valk reached over to a virtual panel by his left hand and adjusted a control. Music swelled to fill his cockpit, a loud, driving beat to push every thought out of his head. If this was it, if he was going to die here, at least his death would have a good soundtrack.

  He flipped over on his back to avoid a blast of plasma fire, cutting a scout in half almost without thinking about it. Looped around a bewildered interceptor and burned on past it before it could start shooting at him. Up ahead lay the remains of a dead swarmship, a vast wall of metal curled and bent by destruction. He bobbed over it at the last possible second. A scout had been chasing him at full speed, but it wasn’t as maneuverable as his BR.9 and it plowed into the dead swarmship in a burst of flame.

  Up ahead there was nothing but clear space—and the queenship. It filled up half of his canopy, a landscape of shadow-filled craters and jagged rills. It felt exactly like he was coming in for a landing on a desolate moon.

  His boards showed half a dozen drones curving in to meet him, burning hard to catch him before he could reach his target. None of them would beat him there. He dropped lower and lower toward the surface of the queenship, a virtual altimeter pinned to the corner of his heads-up display. Ten kilometers up. Nine.

  He poured on the speed as if he planned to smash right into the side of the queenship and the numbers blurred. At the last moment, barely fifty meters over the surface, he pulled back hard on his stick and broke out of his dive. The ground below him—he couldn’t think of it any other way—turned to a gray blur as he skimmed over the surface, barely clearing a high ridge.

  He’d forgotten how exhilarating contour-tracing could be. He cut left to avoid a hill, then dropped into the darkness of a crater and raced across its bottom so low he pulled up a plume of dust in his wake.

  All this high-speed maneuvering hurt like hell, of course. The white pearl in the corner of his vision positively throbbed as it begged him to accept its offer of painkillers. He almost laughed as he dismissed the pearl. He’d spent seventeen years grunting his way through the pain. He wasn’t about to start drugging himself up now.

  He eased back on his stick and shot up out of the crater, over its lip and across a wide expanse of smooth rock beyond. His boards chimed and flashed red lights at him. At first he ignored them, assuming they were just ground avoidance alarms. A display opened automatically, though, and showed him what the BR.9 had been trying to tell him. He had company.

  Coming up from behind him three scouts flew in close formation, bearing down on him fast as hell. Gaining on him, in fact—he had to keep his speed down to avoid flying right into the terrain, but they didn’t seem to care what they hit if it meant they could catch him before he reached the queenship’s maw.

  He couldn’t turn around and face them. Flying backward here was just too risky. He was going to have to shake them the old-fashioned way.

  “That tall son of a gun is making a run at it,” Ehta said, her face lit up with joy. “If he can pull it off, we actually stand a chance. Quick, kid—get over to the sensor console and give me everything we have on the queenship.”

  Roan worked the controls and the display changed, zooming in on the queenship until it filled the wardroom with white light. Ensign Ehta called out commands and Roan trained the sensors on the giant maw. Visual light imagery gave them very little data—it was almost perfectly dark inside the opening—but the tender’s sensor package could see in far more wavelengths than the human eye. As it scanned the queenship with various instruments the display gained detail.

  Just inside the maw titanic gantries ringed the opening, cluttered with moving objects that looked like the worker drones they’d found on Aruna—clusters of legs that ended in clawlike hands. They hurried to and fro at unguessable tasks.

  Beyond the gantries lay open space. The queenship was hollow inside, though not empty. Structures stuck out of the inner skin—countless spires pointing inward toward the center of the ship. At a perfectly spherical core of some kind.

  “Trace its power flows,” Ehta said. Roan studied the controls, looking for a way to do that, but she must have taken too long. Ehta shoved her out of the way and did it herself. The white shapes in the display tinged with orange as the sensors analyzed how power moved through the structures of the queenship. The central core glowed with power, looking exactly like the molten core of a planet. All the huge ship’s power seemed to flow from that central mass.

  Ehta brought up a comms console. “Valk, I’ve got a target for you, if you can get close enough,” she said. “The power plant of that thing is right in the middle. If you can hit it hard enough, maybe you can stop the bastard in its tracks.”

  “Understood,” Valk called back.

  “How you doing up there?” Ehta asked.

  “Busy—gotta go,” Valk said, and the connection broke off.

  Roan watched as a blue dot streaked across the surface of the queenship, followed by three white dots that were steadily gaining on it. The blue dot wasn’t far from the maw—and the giant spikes that stuck up around it like teeth.

  “Can he actually do it?” Roan asked.

  “He’s the damned Blue Devil,” Ehta replied. “Of course he can.” Then she reached over and grabbed Roan’s hand and held it tight.

  Valk flew as low as he dared, just meters from the surface of the queenship. So low he couldn’t help but pull his feet up off the floorboards of his cockpit, as if they might get ripped off by a swell in the terrain. He looked at his sensor display, not at his cockpit as he nudged his stick ba
ck and forth, dodging low hills and scarps that made his collision detectors blare.

  Behind him the scouts were just out of range. If they got within a hundred meters of him they could blast fire all over his thrusters. His cones were already running hot, and the added heat would push them over the edge.

  Time to shake his tail. Up ahead he saw a sort of miniature mountain range, a row of peaks no more than ten meters high, their sides perforated like coral with tiny impact craters. He forced himself not to shout in panic as he aimed for the thin notch between two of the peaks. He would have to fly through them sideways just to keep from scraping off all his airfoils.

  The scouts stuck like glue to his course. As he leaned over on his side they didn’t deviate by a fraction of a degree. He had the briefest, faintest sense of rock closing in on him and then he was through—and behind him, one of the scouts tore into a peak, exploding in a cloud of rock and metal debris.

  Two left.

  He had no idea if they would fall for the same trick twice. They weren’t exactly bright, nor did they have much of a sense of self-preservation. Still—relying on your enemy’s stupidity was a great way to get killed.

  Luckily for Valk he had one more card to play. Dead ahead lay a hill that was little more than a large boulder, a pimple of rock sticking out of the queenship’s surface. No more than eight meters high, something he could easily just jump over with his maneuvering jets. He leaned forward on his stick as if he intended to crash right into it.

  Maybe the scouts weren’t so stupid after all. The two of them split up, one going right, one going left, so they would fly around either side of the hill. The maneuver didn’t slow them down at all.

  Valk let go of his stick, his hands hovering over it like he was afraid to touch it, afraid that he would chicken out at the last moment. The hill came rushing toward him, filling the view through his canopy. The scouts kept creeping closer, ever closer—