Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  He dragged himself over to the hole. It was going to be a tight fit. His suit might tear on the jagged edges.

  He’d come this far, though. He wouldn’t stop now, not after what the bastards had done to Zhang. He wriggled his head and shoulders into the hole, then pushed hard to get through, into the perfect blackness beyond.

  Into the queenship.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  One by one the landers came galloping after the rover. Ehta took a half a second to check her wrist display and see the data Engineer Derrow had sent her.

  Hot damn. It was working. Every single one of the landers was headed in their direction. Not normally something to celebrate. But if even one of the landers had turned around and headed toward the crater where the volunteers were, it would have been a catastrophe. They had no weapons to defend themselves. They could have huddled inside the tender but it would have just been a matter of time before a lander could tear through its armored walls.

  It looked like that wasn’t going to happen—at least as long as Ehta and Roan kept moving and shooting.

  Ehta sliced through the front legs of a lander and it stumbled—only to be overrun by the landers behind it, trampled as they clambered over its twitching body. She got a lucky shot on another one, her particle beam lancing right through its legs so it fell over, inert, shaking the ground with its impact even in Aruna’s low gravity.

  There were still more than a dozen of them back there. But this was working, she was having an effect, thinning their numbers and—

  Roan just had time to say “Wh—” before a pillar of flame came down right beside them, a lander touching down only meters away. Ehta hugged the cannon as the girl threw her wheel over to one side and cornered, hard, trying to get away from the impact site. Roan knew the rover’s tolerances by now and she didn’t cut her turn too hard, but she didn’t account for the shock wave of the impact.

  The sky and the ground tried to switch places as the rover went up on two wheels. If it tipped over the two of them could probably right it—but that would take precious seconds, and the herd of landers would be on them before they could get moving again.

  Ehta gripped the cannon’s hot barrel with one hand, then threw herself over the side of the rover, dangling over its edge between its two spinning wheels. The rover started to right itself and Roan turned the wheel this way, then that, until it fell back to the ground with a crunch. Ehta’s ankle hit a rock and she felt her foot twist around inside her boot. Sharp pain lanced up her calf.

  “You okay?” Roan asked, as she accelerated away from the impact site.

  “Fine, keep going!” Ehta shouted, dragging herself back up onto the back of the rover. “They’re almost on us!”

  “I’m doing what I can,” Roan said, but then Ehta felt the rover fishtail underneath her as Roan stamped on the brakes and swung the wheel at the same time. “Damn damn d—”

  In her desperation to get the rover back on all four wheels, Roan must have ignored what was right in front of her.

  “Hold on!” she cried, as the rover went pitching over the rim of a tiny crater.

  No gravity under his feet. No air inside, no warmth, nothing you would find on a human ship. No lights.

  Lanoe could hear himself breathing, the same thing you heard when you were floating in the void, very far from anything else. His eyes adjusted slowly to the gloom. In the distance, very faint, he could see a smudge of red.

  He switched on his suit lamps, adjusted his helmet’s filters for low-light amplification.

  He didn’t know what he’d expected to see, really. Not decks full of aliens bent over consoles, calling out orders. Not a giant thing made out of legs sitting at the center of it all, meditating on war. Something more than this, though.

  Before him the inside of the queenship was almost all empty space, cold, useless darkness. Metal catwalks spiraled inward, stretching toward the red glow. Curved constructions of long girders braced by triangular supports. They looked almost like something humans would build, but they were off—they didn’t run straight, not anywhere, but always curved in long sinuous coils, and the supports were spaced farther apart from each other than seemed proper. Here and there on those skeletal frames crouched big pieces of machinery that shook and twitched and pushed out the round shapes of orbiters. Factories, building war machines. Nearer the center larger structures hung motionless and unsupported. Impossible to guess what those were—their forms were covered in scaffolding that hid their intent.

  Here and there on the catwalks, things moved. Workers—bundles of legs, some of which ended in tentacular hands. There weren’t nearly as many of them as he’d expected. They picked their way along the girders carefully, as if they were trying to walk in a place that had no floor, no down of any kind.

  Around the maw, just inside the web, the catwalks grew together to form a thick ring. A sort of staging area, maybe. He saw the thick body of an interceptor embedded in the mass of girders as if it had crashed there and was slowly being absorbed by the metalwork. Then he noticed it had no thrusters, no guns, just cavities where such things should be and his perception shifted and he thought that no, the drone ship hadn’t crashed there—more like it was growing, the girders around it like stems holding a piece of complicated fruit. Workers scuttled over the interceptor’s surface, welding pieces of the war machine into place. Even as he noticed them, though, they stopped moving. Lifted themselves up on their many legs. They didn’t have eyes, or any visible sensory organs, but he knew, he was certain that they had just become aware of his presence.

  They didn’t need to waste any time deliberating among themselves, or checking with superiors. As one, with fluid motions, they came streaming toward him across the catwalks, multi-fingered hands raised before them.

  They made no sound at all. They didn’t need to. He understood just fine what they wanted—to tear him to pieces.

  Lanoe reached down to his hip and found his sidearm, the one he’d nearly killed Maggs with, back in the basement of the Retreat. It had maybe a dozen rounds left in its clip. There were at least twenty workers coming for him, moving so fast they would be on him in seconds.

  He really, really wished he’d had time to come up with a better plan.

  The cannon went spinning out of Ehta’s hands. She needed them to grab the roll bar, to hold on. The rover tilted underneath her and she felt weightless, that horrible, water-in-the-gut feeling of zero gravity, and she heard Roan scream.

  She ducked down as low as she could. There was no chance of using her weight to balance the rover this time. Its wheels spun in Aruna’s poison air. Stars and clouds twisted overhead and they were falling, bouncing in the low gravity, bouncing and falling and clattering down the steep slope.

  She heard something creak, some pipe in the rover’s chassis failing under stress. Heard it snap with a sudden, final sound, and then a wheel came up and smashed into the side of her helmet—the flowglas held but her neck was wrenched sideways. She felt the rover dig in hard as it struck loose soil but still it was falling, spinning around now so all she could see was white, powdery dirt and then she was facedown in it, half-buried.

  “Ehta!” Roan called. “Ehta! Are you alive back there?” There was something wrong with Roan’s voice. Or maybe Ehta’s ears were ringing, or—or her brain was still reeling from the crash, or—

  She pushed herself up with her hands. Looked around.

  “Ehta?”

  “I’m okay,” she called back. “I think.” Her neck felt weird and her left arm throbbed with pain. Broken, maybe, but when she got to her feet her suit just tightened from her elbow to her wrist and she could move the arm just fine.

  She looked around and saw they’d fallen all the way down into the crater. The dirt at the bottom was soft and shifted under her feet, like she was walking on sifted flour. In the low gravity she didn’t quite sink into it.

  The rover was a total loss. It had been designed to be lightweight and to break down in
to small, easily portable sections. It was a twisted pile of junk now. One of the batteries had cracked open and lithium slurry was draining into the loose soil. Incredibly toxic, but it wouldn’t eat through their suits, so she decided not to care.

  “I don’t think we’re driving out of here,” she told Roan. Roan, who—

  Roan.

  Where the hell was Roan?

  She ran around to the front side of the wreckage. Not that it was easy to tell which side of the wreckage was the front. The steering wheel had snapped off completely and lay a meter or so away. She found a boot sticking out from underneath the tangled pipes. She grabbed at the chassis and lifted it, her injured arm barely complaining. And there the girl was.

  Flat on her back, staring upward with vacant eyes. Impaled on a piece of broken pipe.

  “Are you okay?” Roan asked.

  “Oh, hellfire,” Ehta said, kneeling down next to the girl. “Roan—Roan, honey, you’re hurt. Don’t try to move.”

  “Okay.”

  Ehta searched through the wreckage, hoping to find a first aid kit. There wasn’t one, and it wouldn’t have helped anyway. She went back and saw that Roan was breathing, still. There was very little blood—the thing that impaled her had penetrated her suit and her body with very little resistance.

  Ehta had no idea what to do. She’d never been trained as a field medic. Pilots typically either died in space instantaneously, or were able to fly themselves home. Marines typically just died where they fell.

  “Is Thom okay?” Roan asked.

  “What? I—I don’t know,” Ehta told the girl. Did Roan think they were back in the tender, monitoring the sensors? “No, wait, never mind. I just checked and he’s fine. He’s just fine.”

  “Okay,” Roan said. “Watch out.”

  Ehta spun around, unsure what she was going to see. It didn’t surprise her in the least, though.

  All around the rim of the little crater, the landers had gathered. Standing above her like a fence of claws, blocking out her view of the sky.

  One of them put a tentative leg down into the crater, testing the steep wall, preparing to clamber down toward the two humans.

  Lanoe lifted his pistol and lined up a shot. The worker was no more than five meters away. The projectile dug through one of the thing’s hands, blasting off a couple of fingers, but that didn’t even slow the drone down.

  Others came up behind it. They clambered over each other, grabbed each other’s limbs to throw themselves forward, toward him. Lanoe cursed. If he didn’t move they would be on him in seconds.

  He looked up—toward the center of the queenship, toward the red glow. Then he braced himself as best he could with no gravity to support him and kicked hard, tossing himself off the gantry and out into empty space. He started to tumble almost instantly but there was nothing he could do. His suit’s propellant tanks were empty and he was at the mercy of physics.

  Behind him one of the workers tried to do what he had done. It had a lot more legs to kick with and it came at him fast, its dozens of limbs spinning outward until it looked more like a sea anemone than a spider.

  If he didn’t act fast it would catch up to him. Pull him to pieces in midflight. He lifted his pistol and steadied it with both hands. Fired three quick shots. Two missed. The third one barely chipped at the cladding on the worker’s leg—but it sent the bastard spinning off in a slightly different direction. For a second he was safe.

  Then his back struck something very hard and unyielding and he started bouncing away, all the air in his lungs exploding out of his mouth and misting the inside of his helmet. He twisted himself around and reached out with one hand, desperately trying to get hold of whatever was behind him, whatever it was he’d hit.

  It was another of the long spiral catwalks, a helix pointing at the red smear at the center of the queenship. He held on even as momentum tried to yank him free. Bounced around like a ball on a string until he could get one leg around a girder, bracing himself.

  Back near the maw more of the workers launched themselves toward him, dandelion seeds of wicked limbs drifting through the open space. He lifted his pistol but it was useless—there was no way he could shoot all of them, and even if he did he doubted he’d be lucky enough to push them away like he had the first one.

  No, they would catch him eventually. Especially since his lamps showed him movement all around him now, plenty more workers on various catwalks speeding toward him.

  He had to keep moving. Had to reach the core before they could kill him.

  He slapped his pistol back on his hip and grabbed the catwalk with both hands. Pulled himself along, inward, toward the core. The bombs bounced against his chest like medals on an admiral. At least he still had those.

  He moved as fast as he could, pushing himself from one handhold to the next, kicking with his legs and flying free when he was sure he would find something to catch. He followed the curve of the catwalk, twisting along with it. In zero gravity there was no up and down and he knew he was in real danger of getting disoriented, of ending up crawling in the wrong direction.

  He reached out and grabbed a support stanchion, yanked himself around and over a girder to try to get a better look at his destination, to see if he was at least making progress. Reached for another stanchion—and stopped dead still.

  A worker perched on the catwalk, almost right on top of him. One of its multi-fingered hands reached for his face.

  Lanoe grabbed for his pistol, knowing there was no time to bring it up, knowing he would never get a shot off. That hand would close around his helmet at any moment, close and crush it until it shattered—

  Except when he looked back up at the thing, its arm was still centimeters away from him. It moved with a sudden jerk, a millimeter closer, then stopped.

  One of its legs was descending toward the girder, maybe looking to improve its grip there. He watched it move with glacial slowness, in little fits and starts.

  “Lanoe?” someone called.

  He was too shocked to answer, at first.

  “Lanoe?”

  “Valk?” he called back. “Valk? You’re still alive?”

  “Heh. I wouldn’t say that. Exactly.”

  The lander put another leg down inside the crater.

  Drew it back.

  “They’re having trouble—they can’t get good footing,” Ehta said. Maybe just to herself. She didn’t know if Roan could hear her. She didn’t know if the girl was still alive. “Hell’s bells. I kind of wish they would just jump down here. Make it quick.” She was close to sobbing. She’d really thought they had a chance. She’d thought she could make up for her inability to fly, somehow. She’d thought—

  “No,” Roan said.

  Her voice was very faint. Ehta could hear her just fine.

  “We have to stay alive,” the girl told her. “The landers…”

  Ehta rushed over to kneel next to the girl. Roan’s face had turned white as a sheet, the blood having drained even from her lips. Her eyes looked like they were drying out. “The landers sense life. If we die…”

  “They’ll move on,” Ehta finished. “They’ll head for the next living thing they can find.” Which meant the volunteers over at the gun camp. “But Roan—they’ll figure it out in a minute. They’ll find some way down here, and then—”

  Well, she didn’t have to make it easy on them.

  She hurried around to the back of the broken rover. The cannon’s barrel was dug into the soft ground but it didn’t look bent. It was still hooked up to the three intact batteries.

  It was too big, too heavy for Ehta to lift, even on Aruna. She could never just pick it up and use it like a rifle—the thing was a vehicular weapon, meant to be mounted to the side of a spacecraft. Still. Maybe. Maybe just.

  She hauled down on its stock, worried the pistol grip might break off at its jury-rigged weld point. The barrel resisted her, buried as it was in the dirt. It came loose with a jerk that sent her sprawling.

&nb
sp; Up on the lip of the crater, one of the landers had three feet down inside the steep wall. Two of its claws pushed hard into the rock there, anchoring themselves. It was making progress.

  Ehta grabbed the end of the cannon and twisted it around. It clanked against the roll bar—it couldn’t quite traverse far enough for her to get a shot at the adventurous lander. She cried out in dismay. Then she did what she had to do. She found the cotter pin that held the cannon in its mounting and yanked it free.

  The cannon came down on top of her, heavy enough to make her gasp. She wrestled it around until the barrel pointed almost straight up. Pulled the trigger and prayed the cannon hadn’t been damaged in the crash, that it wasn’t about to explode in a million pieces.

  She had no control, no real ability to aim with any kind of accuracy. She kept the trigger held down, spraying particle beams across the whole lip of the crater. A lander’s leg and then two more came loose, severed by her wild fire. They tumbled down the slope toward her, still twitching.

  “Is Thom okay?” Roan asked.

  “He’s doing great!” Ehta screamed, as she kept blazing away at the shadows up above her.

  Lanoe pulled himself along the catwalk, hand over hand. Behind him the workers followed, plodding along so slowly they were no threat.

  “How did you—I mean, how are you—”

  “I was a false-mind,” Valk told him. “An artificial intelligence tricked into thinking it was something else. The queenship made me true.”

  Lanoe didn’t even try to understand what any of that meant.

  “You knew what I was. Didn’t you? When I lowered my helmet for you, back on Niraya. You saw what I was.”

  Lanoe shook his head. “I didn’t know what I saw. I guess maybe—it was one thing I thought, that maybe you were…a…”