Suns Eclipsed

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “Sang,” Bellona said sharply, as they all stepped onto the plate beside the weapons.

  Sang was frowning, peering down at his feet. Then he looked up overhead. “There’s a problem.”

  “Just one?” Fontana asked dryly, hitching his ghostmaker.

  “Connie is…panicked.” Sang winced. “More than that.”

  “Forget Connie,” Khalil said. “We’ll cuddle her later. Get the lift moving, Sang. You’re connected. We are not.”

  Sang kept his head up. The plate moved with a soft sigh and lifted away from the floor. There was a clank of machinery beneath it. The plate rose swiftly and smoothly.

  Overhead the doors cracked open and slide apart. Moonless sky and stars appeared.

  “Where is the pickup ship?” Thecla demanded, rounding on Sang suspiciously.

  “That’s the problem,” Sang said. “No one is there.”

  As he spoke, alarms sounded in the warehouse. Dozens of them. Lights flashed. Hero turned to look over at the south end of the warehouse, where the doors to the barracks corridor were located. A dozen or more guards ran through them, ghostmakers in hand.

  They hadn’t been spotted yet, but they soon would be and they were completely exposed on the platform.

  “Down,” Bellona said, crouching down low. Apparently, she thought the same.

  Everyone ducked down, hugging the pallet and crates.

  Someone shouted. A ghostmaker bolt streaked over them, searing the air itself. Then another. They both came nowhere near anyone. The angle was too tight. It wouldn’t have been if they’d still been standing.

  “Sang, where is the damn ship?” Bellona demanded.

  “Gone,” Sang said quietly, still looking up at the stars. “Only Connie remains. She is afraid. The military ships are moving. The alarm has gone up. The Titus is gone.”

  “They’re panicking over a conveyor leaving?” Khalil asked, frowning.

  Fontana swore. “It was a cruiser. Arany’s people destroyed it,” he said heavily. “Then they fucked off. No wonder the alarm went up.”

  Thecla scowled. “They left us here?”

  “How are we going to get back to the Alyard?” Aideen asked, her voice rising. Fontana touched her arm, to calm her.

  “There’s Connie,” Sang said with the same remote voice. He seemed to be oblivious to the bolts crackling over them and streaking against the edge of the platform with crackles and sparks.

  “Tell her to get down here at once,” Bellona said.

  “She’s already half-way down,” Sang said. “As soon as the others opened fire upon the Titus, she began her descent.” He pointed. “There.”

  The platform was almost level with the roof landing pad now. The guards below were cut off, although there would be more pouring onto the roof any moment. Yet Hero couldn’t help looking up into the sky where Sang was pointing. There was a streak of white there, like a slow-moving shooting star.

  “That’s her?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Sang confirmed.

  Everyone holding a ghostmaker had fanned out around the pallet, protecting it, looking for the first sight of more guards.

  “That’s too fast,” Bellona said. “She’ll burn up.”

  “She is controlling the descent,” Sang said calmly.

  “Barely,” Fontana decided. “Heads up!” He fired off a bolt, which lit up the night air. There were few lights up here as no ship was expected. The bolt illuminated five guards in their purple uniforms. The guards ducked and rolled, splitting up and taking cover behind the environmental units.

  “Idiots,” Fontana said and re-aimed. The bolt went through the unit. The guard standing behind staggered to his feet and dropped.

  “Fontana!” Aideen said sharply.

  He got to his feet, staying hunched over and ran around the pallet to the other side, where everyone else was crouched, including Hero.

  Hero looked up. The shooting star had become a distinct object now. Connie was hurtling down at them. From the little Hero knew of the AI, she was probably running to symbolically hide behind them. Helping them would not occur to the foolish ship. Connie’s trajectory and rate of descent made Hero wonder if she was doing any thinking at all. It looked like a lethal drop.

  At the last minute, the ship reversed engines.

  The roar was deafening. Everyone winced. Aideen clapped her hands over her ears and screamed. Her scream was lost beneath the thunderous, beating noise. The eddies from the reversed engines beat at them. Even the guards lost interest in the pursuit and dived back into their hole.

  With the engines throbbing, Connie hovered over them and lowered the cargo ramp.

  Fontana, Khalil and Hayes got behind the floating pallet and pushed, straining to get it moving. The antigravs kept it in the air, only all that weight had to be overcome to create horizontal movement. Normal cargo ships would winch the pallet into the hold. Connie wasn’t a normal cargo ship. The ship that should have been here did have a winch.

  Vang pushed in between Khalil and Fontana, looking short and stumpy. He shoved at the pallet, the tendons in his neck standing out and his face turning red.

  The pallet slid forward, then tilted to ride up the ramp.

  “Everyone!” Bellona shouted.

  They all got behind the pallet, searched for handholds and pushed. The pallet glided up the ramp a bit at a time, then was finally over the lip.

  “Close up, Connie!” Sang shouted.

  The ramp lifted up, closing. At the same time, the luxury yacht rose from the landing pad and surged forward.

  Everyone grabbed the crates, holding on.

  As the ramp closed, the buffeting wind from their passage lessened, then stopped. The ramp sealed with a hiss.

  “A bit rough, Connie,” Thecla said.

  “I’m so glad you’re back!” Connie said, her young-sounding voice coming through the ship-wide speakers. “I was so frightened! They were burning ships!”

  “I know,” Bellona said soothingly. “Take us back to the Alyard, Connie. You’ll have to dodge the sentry ships and mines. Tell the Alyard we’re coming and to have the doors open.”

  “I have,” Connie said, sounding calmer. “Three cruisers ahead. Their cannons are primed.”

  “Coming!” Khalil said, putting down the ghostmaker. He took off at a run, heading for the bridge.

  Aideen paced in a tight little circle, her arms around her middle, whispering in a tight, soft voice.

  “Fontana.” Bellona nodded at her.

  He moved over to Aideen and spoke quietly.

  “Sang,” Bellona said. “Bridge, please. We’re going to have to blast our way out of here. Retha, would you mind running gun control?”

  Retha nodded. Even with the clumsy self-defense weapons Connie had, he was still the best marksman among them.

  Bellona, Sang and Retha headed for the bridge. As she passed Hero, Bellona snapped, “Hero, get some clothes on!”

  “You’re welcome!” Hero called after her.

  Chapter Three

  Cerce City, Cerce Prime, Cerce

  By the time the Alyard dropped into normal space over Cerce, with Connie and the stash of ghostmakers and mines in its otherwise empty cargo holds, most of the remnants of Arany’s fleet had already returned and departed again. Perhaps they did have genuinely urgent business elsewhere, as the governor elegantly explained.

  “They’re ducking Bellona,” Fontana said dryly. “Cowards.”

  “It wasn’t cowardly, taking on four cruisers and actually destroying one,” Thecla pointed out, her tone just as dry. “None of their ships are advanced models. They’re all old and held together by wishful thinking. Even Eriuman vessels out-gun them.”

  “Taking out any vessel and alerting them to our presence on the planet was not part of the plan,” Khalil said. “Of course she is upset with them.”

  “Probably just as well they buggered off,” Fontana said. “There’s not enough ghostmakers to share, anyway.”

&nb
sp; There was one ship that still lingered. The Yoxall’s captain, Natasa Garza, agreed to meet in the Governor’s building in Cerce City.

  Bellona asked Khalil and Sang to go with her, plus Fontana, who had once been a free-stater and looked normal, while Thecla and Hayes with their biobot implants, tended to unsettle the free-staters. She would have preferred to have a nominal Karassian among them, only Vang made anyone uneasy if they weren’t used to him, while too many people bothered Aideen. Retha was a free-stater, but was as enclosed and challenged as the other two.

  Connie dropped them down to the surface, chattering all the way about her friends on the Alyard. Sang had only recently released the AIs on the ship after vetting them one by one and adjusting their leashes. He let Connie interface with them and she was thrilled to have the company, even the dubious company of Karassians, who often puzzled her with their responses, for she did not fully understand the difference between artificial intelligence that was smart enough to learn and sentient computers, who were self-aware.

  They landed on the roof of the Governor’s village building and were shown to the drop shaft that lowered them down through the crop fields at the top level, the garden below and the markets beneath. The shopping mall level was busy. Heads still turned to look at them as they drifted downward. Shoppers whispered and murmured to each other. Bellona had been recognized.

  The apartment blocks were separated by parks and gardens. One complete floor was a giant pool, dotted with tiny islands and floating docks, where swimmers could rest when they wanted. Divers at the deep end peered through the transparent walls at them as they descended. One of them waved. Bellona didn’t wave back.

  The governor’s administration took up two whole floors of the vertical village, the lower one opening out onto the rest of the city. The sub-floors housed food processing levels, manufacturing and industries, with their environmental wastes absorbed and reprocessed by scrubbers and filters at the very bottom of the building.

  As the transparent walls of the village absorbed sunlight and generated energy, the building was completely self-sufficient and had minimal impact upon the urban landscape.

  They stepped out of the drop shaft on the second floor and the guide took them to the Governor’s office, threading though administration rooms and hushed waiting areas.

  Governor Alberda greeted them personally, in the antechamber outside his office. “I heard you raided the Eriuman supply depot on Criselda,” he said, with a warm smile. He was a robust man with a full head of gray hair and a full beard to match. His eyes twinkled. They were a nice dark brown, the eyes of a much younger man.

  “The raid was not without its problems. Did the person who told you about it mention that?” Bellona asked.

  “Captain Garza is in my office,” Alberda said. “She barely escaped the venture. Shall we go in and discuss it?”

  Bellona’s gaze was caught by the view through the walls behind Alberda. It was late afternoon and the white sun was almost touching the horizon. It was a mild, crisp day here. She moved toward the window.

  The first time Governor Alberda had invited Bellona to call on him, he had toured her through the village, pointing out its features like any proud parent. She had found this view from the window of his office more distracting. Cerce City, like most of Cerce itself and any of the free states she had so far visited, were completely unlike settled, sedate Cardenas and the Eriuman worlds.

  There were no roads anywhere on Cerce. The city, which had begun life as a village, had not stepped outside the original footprint of the village. Instead, they had built upward, creating vertical villages that were self-sufficient, adjoined by parks, paths and numerous waterways featuring the black, still waters of Cerce. Flitters and the tiny little personal pods the Cercians called dragonflies were the only form of private transport. Everyone else walked, or if they needed to arrive more quickly, used the link pods—light rails lifted a foot above the grass, with two- or four-man pods attached to the links that anyone could step into anywhere along the routes.

  The still, glittering canals and pools ran through a green landscape that looked almost untouched. Towers rose above them, some of them dripping with greenery, too. Almost buried among the bushes and tall grasses were individual buildings. Most of them were municipal in purpose. Toward the outskirts lay the single-family dwellings that made up the original village. They were being gradually replaced by vertical villages.

  It was a peaceful scene that reminded Bellona, as it had the first time, that appearances were often deceiving. Cerce City was the principal city of Cerce. Cerce itself was a leader among equals. Most of the free states followed Cerce’s lead. That made Governor Lin Alberda more than a simple governor. He held sway over the free states.

  And now he was hosting Natasa Garza and her remnant captains.

  Alberda stood politely to one side and Bellona gave him a stiff smile. “The view is spectacular.”

  “Far more interesting than the vast wastes of space, I’m sure,” Alberda said, just as politely. He stepped back and waved her toward his office.

  Natasa Garza was on her feet, waiting for them in the cavernous room. She was a petite woman who crackled energy. She kept her red-blonde hair in a short, precise cap. Her tall spacers’ boots were strapped, matching the double strapped holster on her thigh that normally held her one-handed ghostmaker.

  She had an air of competence and contained impatience that rarely shifted. Bellona found her to be a hard but realistic decision maker. She had been Ben Arany’s right hand man for a decade. It had been sheer luck she had been dirtside elsewhere when Arany and his people had been destroyed by the Karassian city killer device on Shavistran.

  Since then, Natasa had poured her considerable energy into rounding up the few surviving ships and crews, trying to build a second fleet to replace Arany’s. The destruction of Shavistran, though, had removed the bravest and smartest captains in three fury-filled minutes. Natasa was fighting the odds.

  She was still a good person to have onside. Her fleet was small and ailing, yet it was more than Bellona could currently call her own. Bellona nodded at her.

  Natasa threw out her hand. “You didn’t say the Eriumans would hunt us down!”

  Bellona paused from selecting a seat among the many comfortable ones arranged around the low table. “Good afternoon, Natasa,” she said mildly.

  “Natasa,” Khalil said in acknowledgement.

  Natasa nodded at him. “Khalil Ready.”

  There were three other people already seated and waiting. Two of them Bellona remembered from previous meetings. The men were both from Natasa’s own ship, the Yoxall. They wore the typical spacers uniform—leather jacket, high boots, short hair and holsters for weapons, all of them currently empty. Nothing about their features hinted at their home worlds. The third person was a woman with long legs neatly crossed, golden hair severely fastened to the back of her head and lovely, rare, blue eyes. An ugly, thick red scar ran over the corner of her eye, drawing it down and marring her prettiness. She stared at Bellona, even when Bellona met her gaze. She did not look happy. None of Natasa’s people did.

  Alberda guided everyone to a chair each, his hand on shoulders and backs. He was a smooth host. Soon, everyone was seated. Alberda didn’t prolong the matter by offering refreshments. He pressed his hands together. “I offer you the neutrality of my office to discuss this matter. There seems to be a difference of opinion.”

  “If you call running off and abandoning us on the surface of Criselda with a cache of stolen weapons on us as merely one’s opinion, then yes,” Bellona said. “We differ by a large degree.”

  “You said we wouldn’t be spotted,” Natasa said hotly.

  “You weren’t spotted,” Sang said. “Not until you opened fire upon the Titus. What did you think they would do? Wave at you?”

  Natasa scowled. “Our mission has always been the preservation of free space. Eriuman cruisers and destroyers are counter to that mission. You really
think I would give up the opportunity to take one out, when it was sitting right there in front of me?”

  “The raid on Criselda was not your mission,” Bellona shot back.

  Natasa drew in a breath that made her nostrils flare. “I don’t take orders from you.”

  “You agreed to help with the raid. You didn’t help.”

  The two men sitting behind Natasa stirred. The one with no chin and large teeth spoke up. “Does that mean you won’t give us our share of the ghostmakers?”

  Bellona hesitated, caution flooding her. “I can spare five of each.”

  “Five?” Natasa repeated. “Out of five hundred? What are you going to do with four hundred and ninety-five ghostmakers? There’s maybe a dozen of your Ledanians. I have a dozen ships and they all have crews.” Her mouth curled down. “I was warned not to trust you. I should have listened.”

  Khalil leaned forward. “Who told you not to trust her?” he asked, his tone quiet and reasonable. “Karassians? Eriumans?”

  “I did,” said the blue-eyed woman. Her voice was a pleasant contralto.

  “Who are you?” Bellona demanded.

  Natasa waved her hand impatiently. “Isabelle Lykke.”

  “A name means nothing,” Sang said.

  Lykke smiled. There was no warmth in it. “I am from Alkeides.” Her gaze came back to Bellona. “You’ve heard of the system. I know you have.”

  Bellona frowned. “I’ve heard the name.”

  Sang pressed his slender fingers against her forearm. It was a silent warning. “The Homogeny annexed Alkeides, two standards ago.”

  “It’s called Felis now,” Lykke said. Her blue eyes, so wonderfully different from the browns and blacks most humans had, glittered like hard jewels. “Thanks to you.”

  Bellona’s guts tightened. “Me?”

  “She means Xenia,” Khalil said.

  “Xenia was a Karassian construct,” Sang said, his voice almost strident. “She was artificially imposed upon Bellona’s memories. The Karassians are who you need to thank, Isabelle Lykke. Bellona had nothing to do with your worlds’ misfortunes.”

  Lykke’s gaze didn’t shift away from Bellona. Bellona reconsidered the scar on her face. Its origins were obvious, now. “It was very bad for you and yours, then,” she said.