Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  “Give me something to shoot at, at least,” Valk called.

  “Don’t worry,” Lanoe replied. “You’ll get another chance.”

  In the pilot’s cockpit at the front of the recon scout, Lanoe worked his boards with one hand while the other stayed tightly wrapped around his control yoke. On a secondary display he saw a three-dimensional view of the four militia fighters with their projected courses streaming out before them like ribbons of glass. The four of them were cruising along well behind and above him, lined up in a textbook formation. They had him boxed in, at a distance where they never came close enough to get a good, clear shot at him. It was a solid play—they were keeping their distance because they knew time was on their side. They could afford to pepper him with long-distance shots, knowing they only needed one lucky hit to finish him off.

  He couldn’t outrun them. If he tried to fall back, to let them get ahead of him, they could just close the distance and then they could carve him up or just shove him into the wall of the wormhole, and that would be that.

  Militia pilots weren’t, as a rule, all that talented. Many were cadets who washed out of the Navy and found the only job they could get was flying for a poly. Others were recruited from the civilian population, given ten hours in a flight simulator, and sent out to do their best. This batch, though, were clearly a cut above—smart, adaptable. Patient.

  He very much wished he knew who had sent them. And why they wanted him dead so badly.

  If he was getting out of this trap, he was going to have to get reckless. “Valk,” he called, “I know you like to be miserly with your ammunition.” Valk had earned his wings during the Establishment Crisis. Back then resources had been scarce and every shot had to count. Valk never liked to squeeze off a shot that he didn’t know would be a direct hit. “Right now, I need you to get downright profligate. When I pull this next trick, you hold down your trigger and don’t stop until your gun overheats, okay?”

  “Wait,” Valk said. “What are you about to do?”

  Lanoe didn’t waste time answering. He punched in a sequence of burns on his thruster board, then yanked his stick straight back and simultaneously kicked open the throttle.

  The Z.VII had been built for long-distance patrols. It carried an impressive package of sensors and a very energy-efficient fusion engine. All that extra equipment made it bulky and slow to respond to commands, though. It had never been designed for close-in fighting, and definitely not for stunt flying. The complicated maneuver Lanoe executed just then ran the risk of tying its frame in knots. He could hear its spars groan as the ship twisted around nearly a hundred and eighty degrees on its long axis. It took more strain when the dozens of jets and miniature thrusters built into its nose and sides all fired in a complex rhythm. If Lanoe was unlucky, they might have torn themselves right out of their mountings.

  It turned out—as it usually did—that he was lucky, instead. Everything held together. It just looked like he’d lost all control and sent his ship into a wild, uncontrolled vertical spin.

  The Z.VII tumbled up and backward, right into the path of the pursuing militia fighters. They were fair pilots, Lanoe had to give them that, and they reacted instantly, breaking formation to make room and avoid a full-on collision. Fair pilots, but not great. One of them sideswiped a second in a great shower of sparks as their vector fields fought to shove each other away. A third pilot started to bank, to try to get a shot in as Lanoe’s ship went cartwheeling past. It would have been an easy hit, and it would have cleaved right through the Z.VII’s vector field and cut the recon scout in half.

  If Valk hadn’t already started shooting. He’d done as asked, releasing a wild spray of PBW fire that lit up the canopy of the BR.9. The militia pilot inside probably didn’t have time to scream. The shot tore the BR.9 to pieces, and the three remaining militia pilots had to scatter further to avoid the superheated debris.

  Lanoe pulled the recon scout out of its tumble and leveled out, skating along just a few dozen meters from the wall of the tunnel. They weren’t out of the woods yet. He opened his throttle as far as it would go and burned for speed, headed in exactly the wrong direction.

  2

  Valk rotated his observer’s blister around a hundred and eighty degrees. Behind them, through the haze around their thrusters, he could see the remaining BR.9s banking hard, regrouping to chase after them.

  “You know the Admiralty’s the other way, right?” he asked.

  “They’re not going to let us get to the Admiralty. Not today,” Lanoe answered.

  Valk switched off the intercom so Lanoe wouldn’t hear him cursing. He tried focusing on the pursuit, tried lining up a long, impossible shot on one of the pursuing fighters, but there was no point. He switched the intercom back on. “Lanoe, you promised me. You said we would go to the Admiralty and download all this stuff in my head. And then you would let me—”

  “I didn’t forget,” Lanoe replied.

  There was no point in arguing. Valk could see perfectly well how things were stacked up against them. He’d just thought they were close—so close. “Ignore that last comment,” he said. “What’s the new plan?”

  “Get out of this in one piece. If we can. Listen, we’ve bought ourselves about fifteen seconds’ worth of a head start. There’s no way we can outrun them. So I need you to keep them off balance—lay down suppressing fire as soon as they get close, keep them from forming up again. I don’t expect you to actually kill these bastards. Just make it difficult for them to kill us. Got it?”

  “Yep,” Valk said. He brought up his weapons board. There was still plenty of ammo in his cannon. He checked his other displays and nodded to himself. “Mind if I get a little creative? I might have a few surprises for them.”

  “Whatever you can do, do it,” Lanoe told him.

  Valk tapped a few virtual keys. This might be interesting, he thought. If they could stay alive long enough to see it.

  The wormhole rolled out before Lanoe, its walls snaking back and forth, spitting out ghostly fire. He brought a display up into his main view, showing a camera feed from directly behind them. The BR.9 pilots hadn’t expected his crazy maneuver and it was taking them a little time to get themselves turned around.

  Not much time. One of them pulled a perfect half loop, a maneuver that was a lot harder to do in vacuum than inside an atmosphere. The other two banked and rolled, slower but safer. Behind them light flashed again and again, sudden and bright as lightning, as debris from the downed ship touched the walls. Those little annihilations would give off a lot of gamma rays, but it was too much to hope that any of the remaining pilots would be fried.

  The ship that pulled the half loop burned hard in pursuit, enough so that Lanoe could see the ion trail of its wake, as if the BR.9 were standing on a pillar of fire. Valk put a couple of pointless PBW shots across its nose and its airfoils but it didn’t even bother rolling to evade.

  The BR.9’s powerful engines ate up the distance. Any second now the militia pilot would be close enough to get a perfect bead on Lanoe’s main thruster—a perfect kill shot, and then it would all be over. Lanoe considered a couple of different tricky maneuvers, just to make it harder for him to get that shot, but any deviation from their course right now would slow the Z.VII down, and he would still have the other two pursuers to worry about. They weren’t far behind.

  “Valk,” he called, “if you’ve got something—”

  “Close your eyes,” Valk said.

  “I’m a little busy flying this crate,” Lanoe pointed out.

  Valk reached for his sensor board. His finger hovered over a virtual key.

  “Hellfire, Lanoe—close your damned eyes.”

  He stabbed the key.

  The Z.VII came with a whole suite of advanced sensors and communication gear. Included in that package were several hundred microdrones—basically satellites no bigger than Valk’s thumb. Each of them contained a camera, an antenna, and a tiny thruster. There wasn’t room for anyth
ing else. In normal conditions these would be released one at a time as the recon scout made a long patrol across a battlefield, stringing them out like a trail of breadcrumbs. They were designed to work together to create a distributed communications and imaging network, providing a comprehensive picture of a massive volume of space.

  Valk released all of them all at once. They burst out of panels recessed into the Z.VII’s hull, flaring away on their tiny thrusters, headed in every possible direction, a whole cloud of them zipping away and behind like chaff. They would ruin the pursuing BR.9’s ability to get a clear lock on the Z.VII’s thrusters, but it would only take a fraction of a second for the pursuer’s computer to compensate. That wasn’t what Valk was after.

  Nor did he hope they would hit the BR.9. They would make lousy projectiles—too slow and too small to do any damage, and anyway the BR.9’s vector field would just shunt them away.

  No, Valk had fired off all his microdrones for another reason. He had disengaged their standard programming, specifically the collision avoidance algorithms. One by one, then in great numbers, they shot away from the Z.VII on perfectly flat trajectories that had them smash right into the walls of the wormhole.

  They were annihilated instantly, torn apart and converted into pure energy. Hundreds of impacts all in the space of a half second, each one giving off as much light and radiation as a nuclear blast.

  “Hellfire!” Lanoe shouted, which was apt whether he’d meant it to be or not. “Valk—I can see that right through my eyelids! What did you just do?”

  The pilot of the BR.9 hadn’t been warned ahead of time to close his eyes. He was also directly behind the burst of light, whereas Lanoe was ahead of it, looking away from it.

  Valk had flown a BR.9 before. He knew that it was a very good machine, and that it was designed to protect its pilot from all kinds of hazards. A microsecond after the flare-up, its canopy would polarize until it was one hundred percent opaque, blocking out every bit of that horrible light.

  It was an open question whether the pilot was permanently blinded before that could happen. An academic question—with the canopy opaqued, there was no way he could see anyway. For about nine-tenths of a second, he was flying blind.

  Plenty of time for Valk to line up a good, solid shot, even at a distance. Of course Valk had been facing the light blast, but unlike Lanoe or the pilot of the BR.9, he didn’t need his eyes for what came next. He reached out into the raw code of the Z.VII’s sensors, synthesized the ones and zeroes into a perfect firing solution. He didn’t need to be able to see his hand to pull the trigger.

  PBW fire hit the BR.9 dead on, cutting right through its vector field. The fighter broke into pieces, airfoils and weapons and thrusters all tumbling away from each other as the particle beam cut them apart like a scalpel.

  “Got another one,” Valk said.

  “As soon as I can see through all the spots in my eyes,” Lanoe told him, “I’d love to know what just happened. It was a great trick.”

  “Yeah,” Valk said. “Too bad I can only do it once.”

  Lanoe blinked and squinted and shook his head to clear the tears out of his eyes. The tunnel ahead of them was as crooked as a dog’s leg and he was taking it at top speed. If he wasn’t careful he’d brush the walls and finish the assassin’s work for them.

  Not that they needed much help. The remaining two fighters were catching up with them, fast. They’d been lucky so far—well, Lanoe had been lucky enough to have Valk crewing the guns for him—but the law of averages was running after them just as fast as their enemies. The two BR.9s were firing indiscriminately, wasting ammo on long-range shots that had very little chance of hitting the Z.VII as it wove through the corridors of the maze. One of those rounds could hit at any moment.

  “There was a side passage, a little ways back,” Lanoe said. “Remember?”

  “No,” Valk said.

  Lanoe laughed. “Yeah, well, it’s there. No idea where it leads but if we can get out into open space we can at least maneuver a little more. I’m going to make a hard turn in a second here. It might hurt a little.”

  “I’ll survive,” Valk told him.

  Lanoe nodded. Well, the big guy was probably right about that. He could take a lot more g forces than Lanoe could, after all.

  Still, this was not going to be fun.

  Most people thought of the wormhole network as a kind of superhighway system, a grid of streets that connected all the stars in human space. Pilots knew better. The system had all the untidy chaos of the root structure of a massive tree, or maybe the burrow of a digging animal—wormholes crossed each other at junctions, split off into dead ends and long loops that doubled back on themselves. Making it worse, there was no real map of the entire system, because it changed over time—only the widest and most heavily-traveled routes stayed constant for long, and even those twisted and knotted themselves up when nobody was looking.

  You passed junctions and new tunnels all the time. Pilots had learned not to go exploring, in case they found themselves in a wormhole that went nowhere, or, worse, one that narrowed down until it was too tight a squeeze for even small ships like the Z.VII.

  Of course, sometimes you just had to take a chance.

  The two BR.9s were almost on them. Valk laid down salvo after salvo of suppressing fire, but the assassins had velocity to spare—they swung and jinked back and forth as they came on, refusing to let themselves be decent targets. Lanoe studied the tunnel ahead, looking for the side passage he vaguely remembered. If it was farther down the tunnel than he thought—

  No. There it was. The ghostly vapor that steamed from the walls grew thicker, almost opaque up ahead. The sign of a junction. Lanoe pulled up his engine board and scrolled through a menu to the gyroscopic control settings. He had to confirm twice that he was really sure he wanted to disengage the rotary compensator.

  He was sure.

  “Hang on!” he said, and stabbed the virtual key.

  The recon scout twisted ninety degrees to the right in the space of a few milliseconds. The fuselage groaned under the stress as its engine tried to rip its way off its own mountings. There was a good reason you had to confirm twice to pull this stunt—there was a very real chance it would tear your ship in half.

  The effect on a squishy human body could have been much worse. Lanoe’s inertial sink slammed him down as if he were being hammered into his seat. He couldn’t breathe. The blood in his body stopped moving and for a split second he went into cardiac arrest. Even his vision blurred to nothing as his eyeballs were flattened inside his head.

  Then the compensators snapped back on as alarm chimes blared in Lanoe’s ears and his heart thudded in his chest as it started beating again. He made a horrible choking gasping noise as his lungs reinflated. The recon scout compensated for the time it took him to physically recover. His positioning thrusters burned hard to keep the scout from fishtailing into a bootlegger’s turn.

  Up ahead of him, through his canopy, he could see the side passage. It wasn’t very long. He goosed his main thruster and sent the Z.VII rocketing down the tunnel, barely worrying about twists and turns.

  “Valk, you okay back there?” he called.

  There was no answer.

  Right behind him the two BR.9s copied his turn perfectly. They didn’t so much as skid as they twisted around to follow him.

  Bastards.

  He would have to worry about Valk later. For the moment, all he could do was fly fast. Something he was very good at.

  Up ahead the tunnel ended in a lens of pure spacetime. It looked like a glass globe, through which he could only see darkness. A wormhole throat—one of the exits from the maze. Lanoe had no idea what lay beyond. It could be a star with nice planets to hide behind, it could be some forgotten corner of deep space, light-years from anything. It could open out into the event horizon of a black hole.

  Lanoe would take his chances. He punched through the lens—it offered no resistance—and into bluish-white l
ight. His eyes adjusted and he saw stars, stars everywhere—speckles of white on a black background.

  Real, normal space. The kind that made up most of the universe. The void.

  For a fighter pilot like Lanoe, flying free through open space was the closest he ever felt to being home.

  He wasn’t safe, though. Right behind him, the two BR.9s shot out of the throat side by side, their weapons still glowing in the infrared. They converged on him, a classic pincer maneuver, and then—

  They stopped. For a second they just hung there behind his shoulders, ready to blast him to smithereens. Then they twisted around and shot back through the throat. Back into wormspace.

  A second later Lanoe realized why. A green pearl appeared in the corner of his vision, his suit telling him he had an incoming call.

  “Reconnaissance scout, please identify. This is a Naval installation and off-limits to unauthorized personnel. Repeat, reconnaissance scout, please identify. This is…”

  Some of those twinkling lights all around him weren’t stars after all. His displays showed him magnified, light-enhanced views of cruisers, carriers, a couple of big habitats. Hundreds of cataphract class fighters, and all of them painted with the three-headed eagle of the Navy. Clearly, whoever the assassins had been, they had no interest in tangling with that much firepower.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so happy to see his own people.

  introducing

  If you enjoyed

  FORSAKEN SKIES,

  look out for

  ARTEFACT

  The Lazarus War: Book 1

  by Jamie Sawyer

  Mankind has spread to the stars, only to become locked in warfare with an insidious alien race. All that stands against the alien menace are the soldiers of the Simulant Operation Programme, an elite military team remotely operating avatars in the most dangerous theaters of war.