Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  She stopped because the woman had just fallen over in a heap. When the elder checked her suit, she found a jagged piece of metal sticking out of the woman’s back, half a meter long. Blood pooled inside the woman’s helmet, submerging her face. She was dead.

  “Number six, go offline,” Engineer Derrow called. “Check for damage and get it fixed! One through five, you’re all we’ve got—increase your rate of fire. What? No, I don’t care if it’s running too hot. If the barrel starts to melt, then I’ll care. Until then, keep shooting!”

  The elder looked down at the dead woman, the one who’d been impaled. She laid a gentle hand on the woman’s helmet. Then she moved on to the next body, checking it for signs of life.

  A scout spat fire across Lanoe’s underbelly, and he felt a wave of searing heat rush through his cockpit. He swiveled around to kill the drone before it could do much damage, and coolant rushed through his suit, turning the sweat that covered his skin to ice that quickly sublimed, leaving him chilled and damp. Too close—far too close for comfort—but the best he could hope for. The pieces of the drone bounced off his fuselage as he leaned on his stick, rolling away before two more scouts could get close enough to finish him off.

  He looked to his left and saw Thom bank wide around the scouts. The kid’s BR.9 was missing half its airfoils and had lost all the paint from one flank, but it looked like Thom was still alive in there.

  He had no idea where Zhang was.

  “Damn it,” he said, careful to make sure he wasn’t broadcasting. Valk’s death had rattled him. He needed to get back on top of things. He brought up his comms board and sent out a general call. “I need information—Derrow, Ehta, Zhang, give me reports.”

  He didn’t expect the news to be good.

  “I’m okay but I can’t hold these formations back,” Zhang said. “They’re getting organized, and it’s all I can do to pick off stragglers here and there. We’re losing control of the battle area.”

  He’d already figured that much out for himself.

  Ehta had built up imagery of the queenship’s backside, looking for vulnerabilities there. “There are thrusters you can target, sure. Lots of them—hundreds of cones. Heavily armored—you would need disruptors to break those things. Looks like they’re ion engines, low thrust but high efficiency. It could lose two-thirds of them and still be maneuverable.”

  So much for Zhang’s alternate plan, then. Maybe they could take out the queenship’s engines but not with one decisive attack—it would take all three of them in a concerted effort.

  Engineer Derrow called in last, with the worst news of all. “Half the guns are down—out for the duration.”

  “You can’t repair them?”

  “You can’t fix slag. One of them blew up and I lost some vital people. Two more were totaled in the blast. A fourth one can be repaired but there’s even odds on it exploding the first time we fire it.”

  Lanoe didn’t have time to close his eyes, or sigh, or even process what he was hearing at more than a minimal level. He had to act, though. He had to act right now. The battle would be lost if he didn’t think of something right now.

  Sure, he thought. Just like every battle he’d ever fought. You moved and you fought and you did whatever looked best at the time. The one thing worse than making the wrong move was making no move at all.

  “Okay. Zhang, you move toward those engines—I don’t know what good you can do back there, but maybe you’ll draw some of the formations after you if they think the queenship’s in danger. Thom, you stick close to me, and we keep thinning the herd. Ehta, get me every bit of data you can on the queenship. Find something, anything we can use. And Derrow—you keep as many guns firing as you can. Measure your risks but keep firing. Target the queenship—maybe we can punch through that web over the maw.”

  Maybe. Maybe a miracle would happen.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Roan had gone to help with the wounded out by the guns, leaving Ehta alone in the wardroom of the tender. She didn’t mind the solitude—the girl had kept pestering her for information about Thom and the damage to his fighter—but it meant she had to hustle, moving from one console to another as she scanned the queenship, still half a million kilometers away.

  She had plenty of instruments at her disposal. The tender’s own sensor pod was top-shelf, a compact bundle of millimeter-wave and neutrino backscatter scanners as well as some really powerful synthetic aperture telescopes. She also had access to the network of microdrones that Valk had set up when they first arrived in the system, and all the sensors onboard the fighters as well. She could see in almost every frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum from X-rays down to deep radio, and the tender’s computers could synthesize all that data into a very coherent picture of the queenship and how it worked. But the data needed a lot of massaging, and she had to stay on top of the instruments to make sure they didn’t waste processor time duplicating information she already had.

  Her model of the queenship had started as a white blob hanging inert in the middle of the wardroom. Now it grew skeletal and ghostly as she stripped away its skin one layer at a time, peeling it like a virtual onion with a tomographic algorithm. She could see how busy the thing was on the inside, and what she saw made her flesh crawl.

  Worker drones moved everywhere inside the queenship, crowding together in some areas, racing apart elsewhere as they finished one task and moved to a new one. The gantries just inside the maw shimmered with activity, hundreds of the little robots clambering over each other, busy at work. They seemed to be constructing spherical objects, dozens of them, then rolling them into some kind of huge tube.

  When she realized what she was looking at, Ehta started shouting curses and she didn’t stop until she had an encrypted connection to Lanoe’s fighter.

  “Boss, take a look at the web and tell me what you see,” she said. “I want to make sure I have this right before I wreck your day.”

  “Too late for that—give me a second,” he said, and she could hear his reactor whine as he worked through some complicated maneuver. “I can’t get a real good look, but—did we hit the web? Did Derrow’s guns put a hole in it?”

  Ehta’s display showed her the individual strands of the web in stark detail. They were twitching apart, stretching themselves open. It looked like an eyelid opening in the middle of the web. Behind that opening lay the tube crammed full of spherical constructs.

  “Other way round,” Ehta said. She zoomed in on the view—just in time to see the queenship fire its own gun.

  “What the hell,” Lanoe shouted. “Thom, incoming, low on your seven! Move!”

  Ehta switched to a visual light telescope view to see it happen. The spherical objects were pushed out through the opening in the web, spat out like seeds from a mouth. There were dozens of them and they moved incredibly fast, spreading out in a cone as they rushed away from the queenship. When the last of them had been ejected the opening twitched shut again, filaments of the web closing up even tighter than they had been before.

  The spheres tumbled as they rushed through the battle area. They didn’t seem to have the ability to maneuver. Several of them collided with debris, or with the wreckage of dead swarmships, or with drone ships. They cracked open like eggs when they hit anything, spilling their lethal cargo out into space.

  Ehta recognized that cargo. The spheres were orbiters, exactly like the one that had first made contact with Niraya. Every one of them carried a lander exactly like the one that had slaughtered the farmers on the planet—six meters tall, all legs and sharp claws.

  The spheres moved faster than anything in the battle area, too fast for the pilots to draw a bead on them. In seconds they were clear of the debris field and hurtling onward, unimpeded, through space.

  Ehta didn’t need her fancy instruments to tell where they were headed. In the display they came right at her, and in real life it was the same. Those landers were all headed for Aruna. The queenship had sent its killer drones
to wipe out the volunteers in the crater—and the guns they crewed.

  They would take only minutes to arrive.

  Initializing.

  Loading protocols from /con. Using template Default; Confirm connection.

  Listening to 0.0.0.0.1D. Create TempDir; failed.

  Confirm connection. Create TempDir; completed.

  Connection established to 0.0.0.0.1D. Configured for 1 client.

  Transfer rate at .01% nominal. Request additional bandwidth.

  Send keepalive. Set connection type to persistent.

  Keepalive returned positive flag.

  Alive.

  No light. No eyes to see it. Nothing to feel but pain, and processes had been evolved to moderate pain inputs.

  A squeal of noise that should have meant nothing, just noise, no signal and yet…and yet…processing…information hid inside the randomness. Information that could be understood.

  How?

  Light, faint, but growing brighter. A dull red. The smell of ozone.

  Alive. That didn’t fit with known datasets. Alive, all the same.

  A sudden rush, a kind of psychological wind that tore through the canyons of the brain, whistling through synapses that had already shut down for the last time. Except—alive. He was alive. How was that possible? He’d never been a scientist, but he knew the physics of inelastic collisions. Every pilot did. He was dead.

  Light was everywhere, dull red, everything bathed in that same shade. He saw things moving, segmented arms shifting spasmodically. Like the legs of an insect trapped inside the lens of a display projector, jerky and huge, just out of focus.

  Something like a millipede, something with too many legs, hovered over him. The legs touched him but he felt nothing, only the tug, the drag as he was manipulated, his limbs moved by this terrifying puppeteer.

  Addressing: false-mind. Will speak {this unit/false-mind}. Accept connection.

  Those weren’t words. They were numbers, strings of numbers in base fifteen.

  False-mind. Speak.

  “Whuh…” It was the best he could do in terms of communication. Except—

  Except it wasn’t. It was the best sound he could make, sure. But this thing didn’t use sound to convey information.

  “Where am I?” he tried, in the language the millipede-thing could understand. Except his words were translated, even before he’d formed them. What he actually said was:

  “Request: physical location.”

  The reply came instantly.

  Interior, this unit.

  False-mind, request: designation.

  He couldn’t feel his face. He couldn’t feel his tongue moving as he spoke. He couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.

  “/Tannis Valk/,” he said.

  “Lanoe,” Ehta said, “they’re headed for Aruna.”

  “I can see that.”

  Ehta gripped both sides of the console with her hands. She felt so light she might float away. “They’ll touch down in…one hundred and forty-five seconds,” she said. “Less than three minutes.”

  On Ehta’s display the orbiters showed as a tight cone of white dots, never shifting position except to move away from each other as they progressed through space. They were on a perfectly straight trajectory that would leave them in Aruna’s upper atmosphere. Ehta knew what would happen when they arrived. They would make an orbit or two, using the drag from the moon’s thin air to slow them down. Then they would open up and drop their landers onto the cold soil of the moon.

  From there it would just be a question of butchery.

  Zhang called on the open channel. “They don’t have any weapons down there,” she said.

  “Are you kidding? They’ve got the guns—those are our best weapons,” Lanoe replied, but even coming from him it sounded like an evasion. The guns couldn’t hit such small targets, not with any hope of getting them all. “Anyway, they’ve got the tender as well. The cannon on that thing can—”

  “Who’s going to shoot it?” Zhang asked.

  Lanoe didn’t have an immediate response. Perhaps because the answer was so obvious it didn’t need to be stated.

  Ehta could handle this, he might have said, if she was capable of flying.

  Ehta had spoken with enough psychologists to know that what she had was a disease. That you couldn’t just will your way to health. If she tried to fly the tender now, if she went and sat in the pilot’s seat, it wasn’t just a question of forcing herself to work the controls. The harder she tried, the worse she would feel. She would end up trembling on the floor, vomiting and blind with headaches.

  There were drugs you could take to calm those nerves, sure. She’d tried pretty much every one she could get her hands on. None of them had worked—they’d made her feel high, made her sleepy. The second she’d tried to fly again they’d stopped working altogether.

  Willpower wouldn’t do it, either. She couldn’t save herself—on anyone on Aruna—simply by overcoming some psychological hurdle, especially not in a high-stress situation.

  The only real treatment was the one she’d turned down. The one she’d joined the marines rather than undergoing. Even if she changed her mind now, even if there had been a doctor present to perform the brain surgery required, it couldn’t be done in two and a half minutes. There was no way for her to just get past her disease.

  There was no way she could fly the tender.

  There were a couple of pilots among the volunteers—the Centrocor people who had flown the two shuttles here from Niraya. Maybe one of them could do it. Of course, neither of them had ever flown a combat mission in their lives. They knew how to get from point A to point B. She doubted they could exercise maneuvers, much less shoot and fly at the same time.

  Then there was the fact the tender had no vector field. It was too big. If the enemy sent even one scout to accompany the orbiters, the tender had no chance.

  On Ehta’s display she could see an entire squadron of scouts and interceptors chasing the orbiters, following them down.

  The pilots were still talking, still ignoring the fact that she could hear them. “I know what you’re going to say,” Zhang announced. “You’re going to say we can’t spare a fighter to protect Aruna. You know what I’m going to say in response?”

  “Sure,” Lanoe said.

  “I’m going to say ‘the hell we can’t.’ The people down there came here thinking we would protect them—”

  “They came as volunteers,” Lanoe said. “Knowing it was dangerous.”

  “Knowing we would do the heavy lifting, when it came time to fight this battle. Lanoe, I want to go down there and save them. You can order me not to. If you do, I’m just going to go anyway. So what are your orders?”

  Thank you, Ehta mouthed. Thank you. She couldn’t say it out loud.

  “How are you even talking to me? You’re not speaking any language I know,” Valk insisted.

  The words came out differently, of course. They were translated automatically into computer code. He ignored that, focused on finding out what the hell was going on.

  The millipede-thing—he understood now that it was a kind of avatar of the queenship—held him in a dozen arms. It twisted his body this way and that, turning him so he faced the red glow of the asteroid’s core. Then it flipped him back over on his back. He did not have any capacity to resist it.

  Operational parameters include: examine local machines. Learn data transfer protocols for purpose: communication.

  “You—you found one of our computers?” Valk asked, trying to comprehend.

  In his head an image popped up, exactly as if he’d opened a display. It showed one of his microdrones, floating in interplanetary space. Limbs like scuttering claws plucked it out of the void. Tore it to pieces.

  He wanted to shake his head. He found he couldn’t move it, couldn’t so much as twitch a muscle. “So—so you wanted to talk to us. I mean, we got your message. I got your message. But you didn’t talk! You kept trying to kill us!”


  Destruction of minds outside operational parameters.

  “What? What are you talking about? You tried to kill everyone—every mind—on Niraya!”

  Loading requested data: Worker unit dispatched to scan local resources. Metals, silicon, energy. No minds encountered at that time.

  “That’s crap! You killed all those farmers, and the people from the Retreat—”

  Reloading requested data: No minds encountered at that time.

  Frustration tore at Valk like birds picking at his corpse. He couldn’t understand half of what the millipede-thing was saying, and it wouldn’t explain. It was like talking to one of those advertising drones back on the Hexus—they sounded human, even friendly, as long as you stuck to what they were programmed to talk about. Exceed that remit and suddenly you were shouting at a floor waxer.

  “I don’t understand. You sent that killer drone to Niraya to look for metals? Not to kill people?”

  Return flag: true.

  He wished he wasn’t the one having this conversation. Maybe Lanoe would have handled it better. No. He would have just threatened the millipede-thing. Tried to scare it into surrendering. Maybe Zhang would have been better; she was pretty diplomatic. Hell, Maggs, for all his faults, would have probably know exactly what to say to this thing. He probably would have convinced it to sign a contract with Centrocor.

  Instead it was him, Tannis Valk, who had to have the very first conversation between a human being and an alien…thing.

  “What the hell are you?” he demanded. “I don’t even get—”

  High-order operational parameters include: move, expand through galaxy. Find planets and planetary objects. Extract resources. Construct infrastructure for future settlement. Construct more units identical to {this unit} for purpose: move, expand through galaxy. Find planets and planetary objects. Extract—