Forsaken Skies (10 page)

She turned and stared at Lanoe with a bleak expression. “We do have video of that,” she said.

Roan had not seen the video before. Almost nobody on Niraya had seen it—the elders had decided not to share it publicly, for fear of starting a panic. It didn't take long for Roan to see why that was a concern.

The file the elder brought up was grainy and the color balance was off, an automatic recording from a camera mounted on the dashboard of a ground vehicle. At first it showed nothing but the inside of the vehicle's sealed cabin, just a shot of two grizzled men in heavy quilted jackets. One of them looked a little like Roan's father. They were talking but the audio quality was too low to make out what they said.

One of them tapped a key on the dashboard and the camera switched to a forward view. Roan saw two more vehicles rumbling up ahead, big utilitarian half-tracks that fishtailed and swerved as they raced across an unending landscape of slickrock and scrubby yellow vegetation. They kicked up a lot of dust as they dove into a high-walled canyon, a defile full of the haze you got in the low-lying areas where the atmosphere was thick enough to breathe.

As the vehicles headed down into the canyon Roan saw the first of the dead animals, a smear of reddish gore on the side of a narrow track. One of the men shouted something and the camera automatically panned to record the body, but the vehicle was moving so quickly it was only on-screen for a second.

The view jumped and smeared as the vehicles roared down into the canyon, hurtling around a tight curve and then braking hard as they approached their destination. For a while Roan could make no sense of the video but then it wobbled back to something approaching clarity, though the dust was still very thick.

There was more red—more blood, a fan of it sprayed across a canyon wall. The camera swiveled around to focus on the bodies of more animals. They looked like emus. Big flightless birds were the preferred meat animals on Niraya, since they could thrive in low-oxygen environments. Roan had seen plenty of emus and ostriches in her life, but few of these animals were intact enough to resemble anything but butchered meat.

Then Roan noticed that one of them had hands. Human hands.

She fought back a wave of nausea.

The men in the trucks were all shouting now. Some had jumped out of their vehicles. She saw the tubes of respirators flopping from their collars, saw their heavy boots. They could be anyone she knew back on Niraya. Two of them headed down into the canyon with long rifles in their hands while a third gestured at the camera, shouting for one of his people to make sure it was recording. Roan could see his face quite clearly. There was dust in the fine wrinkles around his mouth and his hair was the color of new iron.

“Elder Mosaddeq,” she said, unable to control her voice.

In the video, he grabbed one of the men by the arm and shoved him forward, deeper into the canyon. He didn't want to seem to go. There was a noise that Roan thought at first must be an artifact of the recording. With a shudder she realized it was the sound of someone screaming in agony.

The dust that obscured the view wouldn't settle. The view of the canyon ahead showed nothing, just dark shapes moving fast. The camera was smart enough to know it wasn't recording anything useful so it switched back to focusing on Mosaddeq's face. Roan wished it would look elsewhere. Mosaddeq looked terrified, and she knew he had good reason.

Roan looked up at the people in the casino. Elder McRae had turned away from the view—she'd seen it before. Lanoe sat forward with his forearms resting on his thighs, only his eyes moving as he took everything in. Valk sat nearby, fidgeting, his hands clenching and unclenching in his lap. Maggs was wholly absorbed by the view in the display. He had the decency to look appalled.

In the video, Mosaddeq began to speak.

“All dead,” he said, “all of them. Tell—tell Elder Young, tell—”

The camera jumped back to the dust in the canyon. There were fewer shapes moving in there now, in fact it might just be one big one.

“—made contact at seventeen forty-nine local time, I think. Our weapons had no effect. Repeat, weapons had no effect. Garner and Ionescu are dead. We're going to try the explosives, just give me—”

The camera focused on the dust of the canyon but this time there was something to see. The lander had emerged from the murk and shown itself clearly for the first time.

It stood nearly six meters tall, towering over the vehicles. It looked like a cluster of long segmented legs with nothing resembling a head or body, just dozens of limbs that ended in sharp points. It was smeared with blood everywhere. One of the legs dragged behind it and Roan gasped when she saw it was still impaled on the body of one of the men from the trucks.

Mosaddeq didn't run. His training as an elder would keep him there, Roan knew, where he might do some good. It would keep him even from saving his own life, if there was still something he could achieve. He kept shouting orders, though Roan couldn't see anybody else in the camera view.

“Get those explosives up here! The blasting gel—get those tubes up here! Tell Elder Young—tell her we couldn't—we tried, weapons had no effect, we couldn't get—what? I can't hear you, say that again. I can't—”

The camera focused on him as his last words turned into a gurgling scream. One of the lander's legs was visible, emerging from a red hole in Elder Mosaddeq's stomach. He tried to grab the leg, maybe to try to damage it with his bare hands, maybe just because he was falling and he wanted something to hold on to.

Roan thought the camera had gone out of focus, but then water splashed on her hand and she realized she was weeping. She fought to control herself—the elder's sacrifice deserved better—but the tears kept coming.

The lander walked over his corpse, its shadow passing over his face. It didn't even slow down, just kept moving. Roan could hear every pattering crunch of its footsteps as it trod the dusty rock of the canyon floor. The camera followed it for a while, providing a good view of the thing walking away.

The camera's computer must have recognized that the action was over. That there was nothing more to see. Its facial recognition software took over, and the view snapped back to Mosaddeq's face, lying in the dust, the eyes turning to lifeless glass.

Eventually Elder McRae reached over and switched off the video.

Lanoe felt for the people he'd just watched die, but in an abstract kind of way. He'd been a warrior far too long, he thought. He knew he should be more moved, more horrified. All he could think of, though, was how to kill that damned thing. Bullets didn't harm it. He hadn't heard any explosions in the video. Did they try explosives on the thing or not? Maybe—

But Elder McRae was talking. He snapped himself out of his thoughts so he could listen to her, because she had more data for him.

“The lander moved immediately to the next livestock station and repeated what you saw there,” the old woman said. “It left nothing alive. It worked its way through six more stations before it was stopped.”

Lanoe grunted. “The rifles in that video—they had no effect.”

“No,” the old woman said. “Nor did the explosives—blasting supplies from our mining operations. As I said, Niraya is a place of peace. We're far from the wars, and there are no predators on our world. We have few weapons, and nothing particularly advanced.”

“But you did kill it, eventually,” Valk said.

Lanoe shook his head. Weren't they listening? “She didn't say they killed it. She said it was stopped.”

The old woman nodded. “It was headed directly for Walden Crater, the place where the vast majority of our people live. Before it could arrive, it had to pass by one of our fusion plants, and we made a very difficult decision. The temperature inside the reactor averaged about a million degrees. We…dropped containment.”

She tapped at her keyboard again and a new video popped up to hover in the air over the faro table. The camera view showed a stretch of canyon land where nothing moved—it could have been a still image except for a high streamer of cloud ribboning by overhead. The lander wasn't visible—the video must have been taken from a significant height, perhaps from orbit.

Without warning, brilliant scintillating light filled the image, bright enough to make Lanoe wince and look away. When he looked back the landscape had changed. Rivers of molten rock twisted across a blasted plain, the entire view shimmering under a red sky.

“There were…environmental consequences,” the old woman said. “We may have set our terraforming efforts back by a few years.”

Roan piped in from the other side of the room, in a small voice. “You can't pump that much heat into an atmosphere—even one as thin as ours—without causing storms. Our weather patterns are going to be unpredictable for a generation.”

The old woman looked down at her keyboard. “It had to be done.”

“I'm just saying it's going to cause problems,” Roan insisted.

“It had to be done.” The elder stared the girl down. Eventually she turned away and went to sit down in a corner.

“What about the orbiter?” Lanoe asked, maybe to clear the air.

“The orbiter?”

The old pilot arced his hand through the air as if she were asking what an orbiter was. “The vehicle that originally entered your space. It dropped its payload—this lander—but you said that part of it remained outside the atmosphere.”

The old woman nodded. “Yes. Yes.” It looked like she needed a second to gather her thoughts. “The orbiter was…just a shell. We sent up one of our shuttles to investigate it but they found little to report on. An empty pod, with very primitive thruster elements mounted on its exterior surface. There were no life support facilities because there was no pilot. No significant computers onboard. Clearly it was designed simply to bring the lander to us. Furthermore there was no indication where the vehicle came from or who sent it. The only thing we found inside was a communications laser.”

“To control the lander, maybe?” Valk suggested. “That thing looked like a drone to me. Maybe it was taking its orders from the orbiter.”

“The laser wasn't pointed at the ground,” the old woman said. “It was pointed outward, toward space. That's how we discovered that our nightmare wasn't over.”

Roan rubbed at her face with her hands. She still had trouble believing that it wasn't going to stop. She'd put so much hope in Lieutenant Maggs, in his promises. None of it had been real. No help was coming.

Niraya was doomed.

The elder was still talking, though Roan barely listened. “The communications laser was pointed at an empty patch of space. No planets in that direction, not even any stars for hundreds of light-years. When we reached the orbiter it was active, sending a coherent signal. Frankly, our people were too terrified of the thing to even switch it off, at first. They didn't know if the orbiter was booby-trapped. They did eventually cut power to the laser, but not before it sent its message.”