Lanoe nodded. “That might be good.” Finding an enemy ship in deep space was one of the hardest parts of space combat. The distances involved tended to be enormous, and even the most barren system provided plenty of rocks to hide behind. “At that distance, Centrocor won’t be able to see us. They know we’re here, somewhere, but it’ll be like searching for a needle in a swimming pool full of ink. That gives us some time.”
“Some,” Candless said. “Almost assuredly not as much as we’d like.”
She was right. Centrocor had no mission here except to find and destroy them. They could put all their resources into that one goal. And once they caught sight of the cruiser, they would resume their attack without hesitation. There was more room to maneuver out here than they’d had inside the bubble, but the odds weren’t much better. If it came down to a pitched battle, the cruiser would lose.
“We can hedge our bets, a little. Valk, switch off the engines. They’ve taken some damage, so they’re probably blazing like signal beacons in the infrared. Turn off all of our exterior lights, too. Paniet, I want you to put some insulating foil over that missing hatch in the vehicle bay.” There was no way to make the cruiser invisible, but they could make it as hard to find as possible. “Candless—get down there and run diagnostics on all our fighters.”
“We lost several in the last battle,” she pointed out. “You and Bury both brought your BR.9s back fit for nothing but the scrapyard.”
Lanoe nodded. He remembered. “See how many of them can be repaired, then.” It was going to come down to a fight, eventually, of that he was sure. But he intended to make it a short one. He had far more important work to do.
Chapter Three
The cruiser’s telescopes moved from one object to another, each rock in the system getting a few seconds of observation time. The data thus recorded was fed directly to Valk, the candidates spooling through his consciousness. He didn’t see the objects except as numbers: diameter, average orbital distance, albedo, spectroscopic profile. Each object in the system had to be evaluated, cataloged, rejected. “Object number 6020,” he said. “Four hundred and fifty-one kilometers across its major axis. Twenty-one AU from the star. Albedo point seven one, indicating an icy but dynamic surface. Spectral lines indicate no atmosphere. No satellites.”
“Uh-huh,” Paniet replied. “Dearie, do you know I could be working on actually repairing this ship just now? Oh, how I would adore to be tracing circuits and welding bulkheads just now. Compared to this snipe hunt.”
“Lanoe needs a planet,” Valk said. “Let’s move on. Object number 6021. Five hundred and twelve kilometers across its major axis. Twenty-one AU. Albedo point zero four, indicates a carbon/silicate hybrid composition, which is backed up by spectral lines. No atmosphere. One satellite, listed as 6021-a, one point six kilometers across major—”
“Enough,” Paniet said. “Enough. I’m headed back to the engines. If I can get a patch on the damaged shielding down there, it’ll make us harder to track.”
“That’s fine,” Valk said. “We don’t need to be in the same place to keep running down the planetary candidates.”
“Valk, my friend,” Paniet said. “Look at me a moment.”
Valk hadn’t even been aware that his visual sensors were switched off. He brought them back online and trained them on Paniet. Anyone else would have noticed no change in him—he was still motionless in the seat by the ship’s controls. Somehow, though, Paniet must have sensed it. “How did you know I wasn’t looking at you?” he asked.
“How did I know you were sitting there blind as a bat? Because you didn’t have any displays active.”
Valk looked around and saw it was true. Normally he kept at least one visual display going—a view of what was directly ahead of the cruiser. He maintained that display for the sake of anyone who happened to be standing nearby. He must have shut it down by reflex, to save power. He switched it back on now, even though there was nothing to be seen but the multitude of crowded stars.
“I … I don’t need a display to fly this crate,” he said. Trying to make it sound like a joke.
“I know you don’t,” Paniet said. The engineer sighed. “There are a lot of things you don’t need anymore, hmm?”
Valk had no ability to look ashamed or embarrassed. He had no face, and his body language was limited by what he could do with his arms in his bulky suit. “You’re suggesting that maybe I don’t need the human crew of this ship.”
There had been a time when he thought he was a human being. Tannis Valk, the Blue Devil, the hero pilot of the Establishment. The legend was that Tannis had been flying a routine patrol in an FA.6 one day when he was ambushed by an enemy destroyer. He was struck by an antivehicle round that turned his cockpit into a hell of fire. Even as his skin crisped and his muscles burned, Tannis had continued to fight, getting two more confirmed kills before he flew back to his base. Afterward he’d become a legend—the pilot so tough he refused to die. Though he had suffered third-degree burns over his entire body, he could still fight on for the great cause. In public, after that day, he’d only ever appeared in his suit with his helmet up and tuned to an opaque black. Supposedly to spare anyone from having to see what was left of his face.
The real reason was that the suit—and the helmet—was completely empty. Tannis Valk had died instantly when the fireball tore through his ship. The FA.6 had been smart enough to get the two kills and fly home on its own. The Establishment had a bad need for heroes, though. At the time it was fighting the combined fleets of Earth and the polys, and it was losing. So Tannis’s consciousness had been scanned from the charred ruin of his skull. Downloaded into a computer and made to think and see again. Not as a man, but as an artificial intelligence.
Creating an AI capable of independent thought and action was a serious crime. Giving such a being access to weapons—like, say, a cataphract-class fighter—was one of the worst crimes imaginable. The last time an AI had been armed, half the human race had died as a result. It was just assumed that any artificial intelligence would eventually turn on its creators and try to wipe them out.
The Establishment had been desperate enough to try it anyway. They had thought that if they told Valk he was still alive, still human, they could keep him on their side. Their plan had been to dismantle him and quietly erase his programming just as soon as they won the war. The problem was that they lost.
Valk had been left thinking he was a human being until shortly after he met Lanoe. When he’d discovered the truth, it had nearly driven him insane. He was only now starting to come to terms with what he really was. What he had always been.
“You’re afraid that I’m going to go rogue and kill you all,” Valk said.
“I’ll admit it’s a worry,” Paniet told him. “But not a significant one. I’ve worked with you long enough to know how loyal you are to Lanoe. I don’t think you would ever betray him.”
Valk was surprised to find how much relief he felt, hearing that. He knew there were others in the crew who didn’t trust him at all.
“Don’t forget,” Paniet went on, “I know computers better than anyone else here—except you. I know how computers think. I’m much more worried that you’ll just shut down on us. That you’ll get stuck on some impossible problem. Something that a human being could just shrug and put aside—but instead you’ll be unable to let it go, and so you’ll devote more and more processing power to it until you stop communicating with us altogether.”
“What, like calculating pi to the last digit or something?”
“Or, say, pointlessly cataloging every chunk of matter in this system, looking for a planet that isn’t there,” Paniet said.
“No. That can’t be right. Lanoe said the Choir wouldn’t have sent us here for no reason. There has to be something.”
“We would have seen it by now,” Paniet replied. “We’ve run so many sensor sweeps—a big planet couldn’t hide from us, not like this.”
“Most of our scans hav
e been in the visual portion of the spectrum,” Valk pointed out. “If the planet was exceptionally dark, say, with an albedo below point zero one—”
“Ahem,” Paniet said. “You think I hadn’t considered that? But to have an albedo that low, the planet would have to be made of nothing but carbon nanotubes. We’re looking for a gas giant with a hydrogen atmosphere.”
“We don’t know what we’re looking for. It might not even be a planet.”
“I suppose that’s true, but—”
“I want to start running a series of transit photometry scans. If an exceptionally dark object passed in front of the star, we would see a dip in its light output,” Valk said. “Anyway. You don’t need to worry about me climbing up my own posterior and disappearing. I have a safeguard built in to prevent that.”
“You do?” Paniet asked. Valk thought he sounded skeptical.
“Yes. Pain.”
“I’m not sure I understand how that tracks.”
Valk couldn’t sigh, or snort in derision, or laugh. You needed lungs for those things. He could simulate them just fine, create sound files he could play when he needed to express an emotion. It didn’t feel the same, though. “I hurt. Just all over. Back when I believed I was a human, I thought it was pain from my injuries. Now I know better—it was something like phantom limb syndrome, except everywhere at once. I call it phantom body syndrome. My simulated brain expects to get constant signals from my nonexistent nerves, and when that input doesn’t show up, it assumes something is very wrong. So it tries to tell me that—by making me hurt.”
“Is it … bad?” Paniet asked.
“Excruciating,” Valk told him. “Worse when I move around, because I’m more aware of the fact that my joints aren’t there.”
“The devil you say,” Paniet swore. “I—I didn’t know.”
“It’s fine. I’ve lived with that pain for, well, the entire time I’ve existed. I know how to ride it out.”
“Couldn’t you just turn it off?” Paniet asked him.
“Of course. Easiest thing in the world—I just need to edit a one and make it a zero. But I won’t.”
“Why in Earth’s name not?”
Valk couldn’t smile. He had no mouth. “Because it’s the last part of me that still feels human,” he said. “You’re worried I’m going to turn into a pure computer and stop thinking like a human being. That won’t happen, you see? Because if I started down that road, the pain would bring me back. It would remind me of what I used to be.”
The emotion that crossed Paniet’s face then was difficult to parse. Valk chose to ignore it.
“Candidate number 6022,” he said. “Thirty-seven kilometers along its major axis …”
Four.
Numbers were easy. Especially the number four. He saw it in his head, rotating in empty space. Four four four four. The number was always there.
There were words, too, thoughts spooling through his head, what felt like whole sentences, memories of things said, things other people had said. When he tried to catch them, though, they turned to nonsense, melted in his hands. Turned into a ringing sound, the ringing sound, the ringing noise that filled his head and turned him inside out and—
And—
“Gah,” he said.
A word. A real word, in the oldest language. In baby talk. In the primal cry.
“Gah.”
It made sense. It was the first word that had made sense to him in a long time. It meant something.
It meant “get this thing off of me.” Except not quite. The word was missing something. Oh, right. It was emphatic. It needed an exclamation mark.
Get this thing off of me!
“Gah!” he said, thrashing against the mass on his face, against the intruder in his throat, inside of him—
“Hold on,” someone told him. A woman, and then he felt soft hands on his face, on his chest, and then a hundred-meter-long snake came slithering out of him, biting and tearing at his insides as it came, and he tried to scream but the woman shushed him and he couldn’t resist, couldn’t resist that oldest and first maternal command, and then he gagged and spat up the last of the snake, its twisting tail, and saw it was a length of plastic tubing no more than twenty centimeters long.
There was blood on it. Blood and spit.
That thing had been inside him. He was—he was hurt, he’d been—
“Wah,” he said, more baby talk, but now he was conscious enough, aware enough to feel shame. He was better than this, he was a Hellion, and that meant something, it meant he was tough, tough enough for real words—
“Wat!” he cried.
And because it was almost a word, because it almost made sense, he was rewarded. The woman pressed a squeeze tube of water to his mouth and he sucked at it, just like an infant sucking at a bottle—
No, damn it. He was an adult, a man, but—but the water in the tube was so perfect, so cool and soothing and clean. He sucked and sucked until it was taken away.
“Muh,” he said.
“In a minute. You don’t want to overdo it yet. Shh.”
The soft hand stroked his forehead. Eased away the tension there, the taut agony of straining muscles, of a pounding headache, and it felt so, so good.
“Ginj,” he whispered.
Which was not just a real word, but an actual name. Ginger. It had to be her—the only woman who’d ever shown him any kindness or understanding since he left his mother’s home back on Hel. The only friend he had in the world—
“No,” the woman said. “It’s Lieutenant Candless.”
Bury opened his eyes. Stared at her.
His old instructor, from flight school. Now his superior officer, the second in command of his ship. Bury stared at her with wide, terrified eyes. She’d been hard on him, so hard back in school, always pushing him, needling him, insulting him. She’d treated him like a child, like a petulant brat. He’d hated her, hated her like poison even when he’d respected her, even when he’d felt—when he felt—
“Off,” he said. “Get off!”
Her hands, those hands that a moment before had felt so comforting, pulled back. He couldn’t stand to have her touch him like that, it was just wrong, so wrong. He reached out and grabbed the side of the bed, hauled at it with both hands until he swung around.
“Bury, no—don’t move, you can’t move yet, you’re still—”
He ignored her. He needed to get away, needed to … to … Oh, by all the chapels in hell, he’d thought she was Ginger, he’d let her touch him like that, let her—
“Get away from me!” he howled, and tried to put his feet down, tried to put his bare feet on what he expected to be a cold, hard floor, except he wasn’t prepared for the fact that there was no gravity and he launched himself out of the bed, launched himself up into one corner of the room, behind the segmented arms of a medical drone. Grabbed on to anything he could and curled himself into a corner, staring down at her.
At her maddening, prim face. At her severe and demanding and unbearably smug face. Oh, by hell, by bloody, bloody hell, he’d thought she was Ginger, thought—
“Get out of here!” he screamed at her. “Get out!”
“Oh,” Valk said. “It looks like Bury’s woken up. That’s some good news.”
Lanoe scowled at him. “Sure,” he said. “Is that why you called me down here?”
Valk knew that Lanoe could come across as callous sometimes, but that the commander truly cared about his crew. He was just distracted by everything else that was going on.
It looked like Paniet didn’t understand that. The engineer visibly flinched. “When I got dropped on my head and went into a little coma, were you this angry about it?” he asked.
“Sorry,” Lanoe told him. He let out a long sigh of impatience. “Yeah, it’s good. I’m glad Bury’s going to be okay. Just—tell me what you wanted to say.”
Valk brought up a display and spooled through page after page of dense text. “We’ve cataloged eighty-six thousan
d seven hundred and ninety-one objects in this system. There may be a few we’ve missed, but they’re likely to be very small.”
“You counted eighty thousand rocks here?” Lanoe interrupted.
“Every star system is just littered with bits and pieces left over from its formation,” Paniet said. “Even a small one like this. Comets and asteroids, dwarf planets and scattered disk objects and meteoroids in vast profusion. Eighty thousand is probably just scratching the surface. The asteroid belt around Earth’s sun contains millions of objects more than half a kilometer across, and the Oort cloud out past the orbit of Neptune probably has trillions. No one has ever bothered to count them all. Such a thing might not even be possible.”
Lanoe shook his head. “I’m aware of how crowded the solar system is. What surprised me is that you scanned eighty thousand rocks and none of them were planet-sized. Because I’m assuming if you had found a planet you would have led with that.”
Paniet rolled his eyes. “Oh, indeed. And no, we didn’t find any planets. But it’s possible our survey wasn’t completely in vain. We did find one candidate mass that intrigued us. M. Valk, if you please?”
Valk brought up a new display. This one showed a light-enhanced view of the object they called 82312, an icy mass about three hundred kilometers in diameter. Its surface was mostly flat, a skin of sheer ice broken only by very deep craters. Paniet had said it looked like a hollow skull, if one were feeling poetic. When Valk looked at it, it just looked like a big chunk of frozen rock.
“Okay,” Lanoe said. “Now’s the part where you tell me why I should care about this thing.”
“Look at the metadata in the corner of the display,” Valk said. A list of numbers was printed there, showing 82312’s orbital parameters, its surface gravity, its hypothesized composition, its rotational period and values for its perturbation and precession—
“Just tell me, Paniet,” Lanoe said.
“It’s exactly what it looks like, a big chunk of dirty ice, but contain your disappointment. It’s only a few million kilometers away from our present position. We could hide the cruiser behind it so that Centrocor could never find us. If we’re feeling cheeky, we could even harvest an enormous quantity of deuterium and tritium from its ice.”
Forbidden Suns Page 4
