“Sure,” Lanoe said.
“I’ve got about thirty seconds until…well.” She couldn’t keep her voice from wavering, a little.
Lanoe squeezed his control stick until he felt like his fingers might break.
“I need to know something,” she said. “This planet, Garuda. I’m going to be spending a lot of time there from now on.” She laughed. Good old Zhang. As long as she was laughing he didn’t need to scream. “What color is it?”
“What?”
“What color is this planet? My eyes don’t see color. But I want to know.”
He had to think about it for a second. He hadn’t paid it much attention. “It’s…blue. Blue with purple bands. There’s a big storm near the equator that’s kind of, I don’t know, indigo.”
“It sounds beautiful,” she told him. “Nice.”
“Sure.”
“Tell Thom something for me. Tell him I was impressed—I’ve never seen a raw recruit pick up our business so fast. He’s a hell of a pilot. And when they write about this war, make sure they remember what Valk did. They’ll try to minimize his role since he was Establishment, but don’t let them.”
“I will,” he told her.
“Okay. Not much time now. I’ve been thinking about something lately,” she told him. “Well, in the last two minutes or so. Something about us. About something I always meant to get around to saying.”
“Zhang—”
“All the years I’ve known you and I never actually said it out loud. I thought it a million times but it never felt right, saying it, not for us, not for how we were together. None of that matters now. I love you, Lanoe. Always did.”
“I love you, too,” he told her.
“Say again?”
“Damn—is my signal breaking up?”
“Nope,” she said. “I just wanted to hear it one more time.”
“I love you, too, Bettina Zhang. I always will.”
“Sure,” she said, a gentle tease.
And that was just like her. Good old Zhang.
Leave on a joke.
“Marry me,” he whispered, but there was no response.
On his display the blue dot winked out. Nothing remained but an unbroken field of white. Then white dots started to appear at the top of the screen. Following the blue, on exactly the same course. One after another.
The damned drones were chasing her, just like she’d wanted. One by one they hit the atmosphere and burst into flame. He switched to visual light imagery and pulled up a view of Garuda. Watched tiny firefly lights flare and then die out across its banded sky.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Lanoe?”
Lights flickered on his boards. An alarm chimed from somewhere. Not so loud that he had to think about it.
Through his canopy he saw them. The drones, lined up in elaborate formations. Scouts and interceptors, closing on his position. Ready to box him in. To kill him.
“Lanoe?” Thom’s voice. He could ignore that, too.
Beyond the formations, the queenship. Implacable and huge. Just a tiny hole in its face, a crater the guns had made. Not big enough. Not big enough for a proper run.
That ship—that thing—had taken Zhang from him. Taken away the woman he loved. He’d wasted so much of his life not being with her. Not talking to her, not touching her skin. Not breathing in the smell of her. Not even thinking about her, because that had hurt too much. Then, for just a little span of time, she’d come back. And he’d just wasted more time being hung up over the fact she wore a different body.
Why had he been such a fool?
“Lanoe, come in, please.”
One quiet night in a bunk. They’d had one soft night and then they’d gone back to war. Because war was what they did best. Better than being lovers. Better than being human, maybe.
They should have tried harder.
When she told him to go away, all those years ago, he should have said no.
He closed his eyes.
“Lanoe, I need to know what to do.”
The aliens had taken Valk from him, too. That didn’t hurt quite so much. But it meant something. Lanoe and Valk had never really had a chance to become true friends. Becoming comrades happened a lot faster, when you fought side by side.
It didn’t matter what he’d seen when Valk took his helmet down. It didn’t matter that there was no man inside that space suit. Valk had been more human than half the people Lanoe had ever met.
“Lanoe. I know it’s hard, losing her, but…”
Thom. They were going to kill Thom. It was just a matter of time before the alien drones overwhelmed the kid. He’d done a remarkable job so far but Thom was no immortal warrior. He was going to die. Lanoe genuinely liked the kid. He had gone out of his way to save him, just so Thom could come here and get killed.
Just like Ehta, down on the moon.
Ehta, whose life he’d saved in the ring of some damned planet, Ehta who had fought by his side, who’d been one of his squaddies once upon a time. Ehta who came when he called even though she must have died inside to think of flying again, even though she was afraid. That counted.
Elder McRae, who had spent two weeks in a cargo container just to go ask for help from a world that was only ever going to shrug and turn away.
Engineer Derrow, who came to Niraya for a job, and then found out she was going to die because she picked the wrong planet.
Roan. Roan who threw her calling, her whole life away just to get him the guns he needed. The guns that punched that tiny little hole in the queenship.
They were going to die one by one and he was going to have to listen to their last words, and mourn them for just a little space of time, before he was killed himself.
He’d seen good people die before. So many times. He had fought for so many years, in so many wars. He had fought for Earth, and for the Navy, and for polys he didn’t believe in. He’d fought because he was a warrior, because he didn’t know what else to do.
For the first time in centuries he’d found a fight he could care about. That meant something. That counted. Was it worth it, to die here, for that?
Yes.
Was dying enough? Was sacrifice all that mattered, in the end?
No.
“No,” he said out loud.
“Lanoe? I don’t understand,” Thom said. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“No,” he said. To himself. It wasn’t enough. “But it’s a start.”
“Lanoe—”
“I’m going in,” he said.
“Lanoe? You mean—you’re going to try to fly inside that thing? But the hole the guns made—it’s too small. You’ll never get your fighter through there.”
“If not, it won’t be for lack of trying. Thom—cover me. You understand what this means? You understand there’s no turning back?”
He could hear Thom swallow. The kid understood.
“Yes,” he said.
Good.
Ehta stepped out of the tender and down onto the soil of Aruna. The dirt crunched and squeaked under her boots. She had weight here, she had mass. She had to keep reminding herself of that fact. Her head felt like it had come loose, like it was just tethered to her neck by the thinnest of strings. She was breathing still and her heart was beating but she might have been a ghost, looking down on all of this from above.
Roan jumped down beside her. Together they walked the short distance to where the guns were still pounding away, every round they shot like a wind that would blow Ehta’s soul away, send it cartwheeling away over the craters and ridges.
Engineer Derrow and Elder McRae were bent over a console, their hands moving in elaborate, private gestures. They looked busy. She really didn’t want to interrupt them.
“There’s no more time,” Roan said.
The girl could be a real pain in the ass. Ehta liked her for that, most of the time, the way Roan refused to bow before age or rank or anything else. Right now she just wanted to strangle the little twerp.
Which, Ehta knew, was a sign the girl was right. This had to be done.
The engineer looked up when Ehta came close. “Something happened just now,” she said. “I don’t claim to understand, but—a bunch of the drones just flew right into the planet.” She pointed upward. Garuda filled a quarter of the sky, its purple light leaving highlights on her shoulders and the side of her helmet.
“That was Zhang,” Ehta said. She felt like she was belching out the words, pulling them from somewhere deep in her gut. “She’s gone now.”
“Gone? As in…?”
Ehta nodded.
“I’m—I’m sorry, I know she was a friend of yours,” Derrow said, one hand on her helmet as if she wanted to press it to her forehead. “But I have to know. Did she get all those orbiters, or…are we…”
She didn’t finish the thought. Maybe because she didn’t want to say it out loud. Maybe just because she saw the answer in Ehta’s face.
A bubble of acid popped inside Ehta’s stomach. She thought she might vomit inside her helmet. That was never good. It would take weeks to get rid of the smell, at the very least.
Lucky for her she’d be dead within the hour, she guessed.
“What about the guns?”
It was the elder who spoke. The old woman’s face looked ridiculous behind the carbonglas of her helmet. Nobody like her should ever wear a space suit—it just didn’t look right.
“Can’t they shoot down the orbiters? We have all of this firepower, right here.”
The engineer lifted her arms. Let them fall again. “We’ll try. They’re not designed for that kind of work, though. They’re meant to shoot at much larger targets. Better chance of getting a hit that way. But…we’ll try.”
They turned away, back to their console. As if Ehta weren’t even there anymore.
The thing she’d dreaded, the thing she absolutely could not handle, just hadn’t happened.
No one had asked her to save them. Nobody had even considered the idea that she might just magically get over her disability and learn to fly again. To just not be nervy anymore.
She turned to go. To head back to the tender, where she could be alone, maybe. Where she could just wait this out. Where—
She saw the PBW cannon mounted on the side of the tender.
Then she turned around and looked behind the engineer. The absurd little rover sat there, a thing made of hollow pipes and overinflated tires. A roll bar stuck up above the driver’s seat, with a little dish antenna clamped to it like it was wearing a flower in its hair.
On a planet, the idea that had just come to her would be laughable. The weight of the cannon would just be too much. But on a little moon like this…
“I’m on it,” she said, and she was right back in her body again. Awake, aware, alert. Here. “I’m on it,” she said again. “I just need a little help.”
A lot of eyes turned to look at her. It was Roan who spoke first.
“What does that mean? Exactly?”
Engineer Derrow shook her head. “Never mind that. What do you need?”
“A good mechanic.” She didn’t wait for an answer. She knew that Derrow had those to spare. She walked over to the rover, put her hands on the roll bar. Pulled backward, hard, testing its strength.
“What are you going to do?” Roan demanded.
“I may not be a pilot anymore,” she told the girl. It felt like the bar would hold. “But I’m still one hell of a marine.”
Zhang had pulled a full squad of enemy drones down into the hell of Garuda’s atmosphere with her. Some eighty-odd ships remained, gathered in three thick formations. Arcs of steel like bands of armor across the face of the queenship. The early part of the battle had been especially hard on the enemy’s scouts, which meant that a full third of the alien fleet was made of interceptors. All but immune to PBW fire.
They did not intend to let Lanoe through. They had computer-generated attack strategies and more than enough firepower to take down an FA.2 and a BR.9.
Lanoe’s only trump card was that he didn’t plan on flying away from this. He didn’t need to bother figuring out how he would survive his run.
“Scouts on your four,” Thom called. “Interceptors at eleven high!”
Lanoe saw them.
He twisted around a line of scouts that flew in such perfect formation they might have been wired together. Jinked to his left as they started firing, plumes of bright plasma streaming across his canopy. Sweat burst from his forehead and rolled down into his eyebrows, but he just blinked it away.
The interceptors on top of him started firing long before he was inside their effective range. They shot with precision for once, careful not to hit the scouts or each other. Kinetic impactors rained down around him and he feathered his stick to dodge those he could, taking those he couldn’t as deflecting shots that rattled his vector field and filled his view with sparks. His airfoils were gone almost instantly but he didn’t need them out here in the vacuum. One shot struck his canopy, denting the carbonglas, but he didn’t even flinch.
Behind him Thom cut the scouts up like he was slicing a cake. The kid had learned to shoot, there was no denying it. Lanoe had forgotten to tell him what Zhang had said, her encouraging words, but there was no time now.
“Stay below me for this bit,” he called. He didn’t bother checking his displays to make sure Thom complied. Three more interceptors were coming up from down there, splitting off their formation to try to catch the human pilots unaware. They failed at that task, but their impactors were harder to dodge when Lanoe couldn’t see them coming. One hit the FA.2’s undercarriage, a nearly direct hit, but not near enough. The fighter jumped under Lanoe, his seat hitting him hard against the backs of his legs, but his positioning jets compensated automatically and put him back on course.
More scouts, a wall of them dead ahead. He opened up with both barrels, not bothering to aim at all, just punching his way through. Debris from a scout that wasn’t quite dead smacked across his fuselage, its eyeball cannon still trying to track him, to aim, but he was gone before it could fire.
Two of the massive formations, nearly thirty drones each, were already moving, tightening their screen, blocking him from his approach to the queenship. He rolled over on his side then dove as if he were breaking off his run. Fire from Thom’s PBWs raked across the space where he’d been, catching a scout that had tried to sneak up on him. Its cannon was hot and it exploded in a vast bloom of fire that blocked Lanoe’s view of the moving formations. That was fine—he didn’t need to see what they were doing. He could maneuver a lot faster than those interceptors.
He dove for the better part of a kilometer, then yanked back hard on his stick. His maneuvering jets pulsed with flame as they twisted him around, his view rolling this way, then that, and then his main thrusters caught and he rocketed upward, right between the two massive formations. Both of them opened fire the second he started his climb but he just corkscrewed past, letting them fire broadsides right into each other. Maybe they scratched each other’s paint jobs—he knew better than to expect them to wipe each other out in the crossfire.
He rushed past a new line of scouts like a gauntlet of blowtorches, fire washing over him, but he was moving fast enough that it did nothing but start red lights flashing on his damage control board and moisten his armpits. His engine was running hot but he disengaged the automatic temperature controls. Flooding the reactor with coolant now would just slow him down.
“Interceptors,” Thom called, but Lanoe had already seen them.
Seven of the big beasts, flying in a ring formation between him and the web that covered the queenship’s maw. Spaced perfectly so that they could avoid shooting each other but still leave no gap he might fly through.
Well, he had an answer for that. He loaded his disruptors, all of them, and let them go in a broad fan, the FA.2 shaking every time one of them launched.
He didn’t need them where he was going.
The rover had been designed fo
r one simple thing: to let Engineer Derrow move around the gun camp at a pace slightly faster than her legs could carry her. It was built of lightweight modular components and a single storage battery that had half run down by the time Ehta got to it.
The engineers did their best.
They stripped out the old battery and mounted four fresh ones in its place, holding them onto the frame with nylon straps. When they started up the little engine it roared but all of the rover’s bolts shivered and started shaking themselves loose. They welded those down as best they could and moved on. They tore the little dish antenna off the roll bar and tossed it away, then reinforced the bar with an additional length of pipe, using spot welds to let it carry some real weight.
They unbolted the PBW cannon from the side of the tender. Like all Naval technology it was designed to attach to any available hardpoint. The roll bar almost qualified. They clamped it on tight, then strung power cables from its leads to the batteries. The cannon had not been designed to be triggered by hand. Ehta brought a heavy rifle from the tender’s stores and they cut its grip off, then ran command lines from the cannon’s electronics to the trigger. It would work.
They bolted nylon straps to the rover’s back end, so Ehta could wedge herself in back there and hopefully not fall off.
They overhauled the rover’s steering, its suspension, its brakes. It was going to be ridiculously top-heavy, there was no getting around that. The PBW cannon weighed more than the rover did. In Aruna’s low gravity, though, it could function. As long as it didn’t corner too hard.
When it was ready to go the engine thrummed with power. Ehta fired off a quick burst of the cannon and a high-density particle beam shot off into space, making all the engineers duck their heads.
“If I had time, I could put armor plating on there,” Derrow said, all but wringing her hands in concern. “You’re going to be pretty exposed.”
“If we had time we could build a squad of tanks,” Ehta told her. “We don’t.”
It was Roan’s turn to object. “How are you supposed to drive and shoot at the same time?” she asked.
Forsaken Skies Page 53
