Forsaken Skies (18 page)

A welcoming ceremony.
How quaint,
she thought, if a little pathetic. The turnout, for one thing, was almost insulting. She didn't let those thoughts linger, though, instead scolding herself when she remembered how little these people had. They'd clearly done their best.

Then she noticed a long table on the other side of the stage, laden with bowls and platters, all of them heaped with steaming food.

Free grub,
she thought, which to a warrior like her always covered a multitude of sins.

“I don't understand,” Roan said. “Where is everyone? This place should be packed. Don't they understand how important it is that you're here?”

“Maybe they'll show up later,” Zhang said. “I mean, we just got here ourselves. It'll take time for them to know there's something to see here.”

“No, they should already have arrived! Everyone on the planet knew about this ceremony, well in advance,” Roan replied. “We sent a message from the tender as soon as we left the wormhole throat, to say we were on our way.”

“You did
what
?” Zhang demanded.

It looked like Lanoe had heard it, too, as he chose that moment to stomp over toward them, murder in his eyes.

Valk was on his ninety-fourth game of Centrocor Challenge when the microdrones started pinging him.

It was a dumb little game where you tried to match colored hexagons before they tessellated across a rotating spheroid. There was nothing much to it but he found he couldn't stop playing—there was always at least one more match, and if you got six in a ring the game made a soothing chime sound. At first, when the ping came in, he thought he'd unlocked some kind of secret combo.

A new display opened near his right hand, though, and he grunted and looked over to see what was happening. His game kept running without him and the hexagons completely covered the spheroid. The game screen flashed and asked him if he wanted to reset the spheroid for only six virtual diamonds.

He wasn't about to spend real money on virtual gems. He dismissed the game panel and brought the new display over in front of him. The microdrones wouldn't achieve their best configuration for days yet, but already they had mapped the local volume of space and were sending him imagery. The display showed a simplified map of the system, out to about ten astronomical units.

Niraya wasn't the only planet circling the red dwarf. There were three others, all ice giants well outside the habitable zone. Valk was supposed to see if any of them would be useful from a strategic perspective. One of them looked promising—if you drew a straight line between Niraya and the encroaching enemy fleet, the outermost of the big planets was only a few degrees of arc off of that line. The planet might make a good place to stage an ambush.

Otherwise most of the system was just empty space. A thin belt ringed the star, out at about two AU, but nothing there could properly be called an asteroid. Just dust and ice, mostly objects no larger than Valk's fist. More of a hazard to navigation than anything useful.

The microdrones had turned up a few comets and big rocks on long elliptical orbits—at best, places to set down in an emergency. None of them were in great positions.

The most interesting thing on the display, however, was almost too small to see. Valk magnified the view again and again until he had a useful image, and even then it was just sixteen bright dots that flickered with reflected starlight. The dots were moving fast, though—really fast, two and a half thousand kilometers per second. That was nearly one percent of the speed of light. Nothing natural moved that quickly.

The dots were spread out across a staggered line, as well. They looked almost like they were flying in formation.

Valk checked their trajectory and took a deep breath. Yep. Just as he'd expected. They were headed straight for Niraya.

It looked like the fleet had sent advance scouts after all. He punched for a new burn to intercept, a six-minute burn that would bring him close to matching their velocity. The adjustments he'd made to the fighter's inertial sink worked perfectly—this time there was no pain at all as the fighter's engine roared and pushed him hard back into his seat.

L
anoe fought for control over his emotions. He very much wanted to explode, just then. It was perhaps not the best possible time.

“It is not commonly accepted conduct,” he said, in a deep, growling voice, “to broadcast troop movements in a time of war.”

He had to hand it to the elder. The old woman didn't wince. “I'm not a soldier. I'm not aware of such things.”

“The enemy is, in all likelihood, monitoring every communication that gets transmitted in clear, anywhere on this planet,” Lanoe went on. “If I were them, I know I would. From now on anything you say about us—anything—needs to be encrypted. Better yet, don't transmit at all.”

“That will limit my ability to—”

“We had—perhaps we had—some element of surprise before,” Lanoe went on, ignoring her. “The enemy didn't know we were coming. They didn't know this planet had any space-based defense. Now, thanks to your little slipup, they know the Navy has gotten involved. Can you see how that compromises our mission?”

“Yes, of course I can. I understand what I did wrong, Commander. I think we can move on to other matters, now. Perhaps, for instance, we can go in and greet the people whose lives you have agreed to protect.”

Lanoe looked over at the banner strung over the stage. It read
WELCOME HEROES
, which irritated him. They hadn't done anything heroic yet. He grew even more angry when he saw the mostly empty seats in front of the stage. He started to form a response to the elder's suggestion—something that would blister the elder's ear—but he knew he needed to get this over with. He stomped across the concrete floor of the dome, not particularly caring if anyone followed. When he reached the stage there was a polite smattering of applause, and then the band stopped playing.

Up on the stage he stared down at the Nirayans, a group of people in dress as varied as the décor of the building looming above them. Some wore the simple tunics and leggings of the Transcendentalists. Others wore Centrocor uniforms or work clothes—coveralls and chunky boots. A delegation of three people were dressed in elaborate robes and wore high furred hats of a type he'd never seen before. The eyes of this last three looked glassy and confused, as if they were on drugs.

All of them stared at him like an exhibit in a zoo.

Great,
he thought.
The adoring public
. It wasn't the first time in his career he'd been called on to address a group of civilians, but he'd never gotten used to doing it. He supposed he should say something.

“Thank you for coming,” he told them. There was no microphone to speak into, but the weird acoustics of the dome made his voice echo. “I'm Commander Aleister Lanoe. I represent the Navy. My pilots and I are, uh. Well. We're going to do our best on your behalf. We have been thoroughly briefed on the local situation and we have every, um. Sure. Every confidence that we can bring this crisis to a speedy and…safe resolution.”

He looked down into a few dozen pairs of very wide eyes. It was hard to think with them staring at him like that. Hard to know what to say.

“I guess…I guess, well. Okay. Any questions?”

Everyone started talking at once, shouting out so many different things he couldn't make sense of any of them. A tall woman in a Centrocor uniform jumped to her feet and bellowed loudly enough to be heard above the din. “I want to be evacuated immediately,” she insisted.

“Sorry?” Lanoe asked, completely lost.

“I'm a Centrocor employee. The poly has a responsibility to people like me. I've worked for the mining concern here twenty years, and there isn't a single black mark on my record! I want to be relocated to the Hexus or some other safe poly installation immediately, and that goes for my entire staff as well.”

“I don't know if…” Lanoe said, trying to think of a polite way to tell the woman to sit the hell back down and shut up. “How many staff do you have?”

“I have thirty-four hundred people working in seventeen mines. They'll need to be relocated at least for the duration, so you're going to have to find billets for them; they'll need food allowances and per diem expenses for each day we have to be away, not to mention indemnity for the lost time and productivity.”

Lanoe gave her a tight smile. What she wanted was impossible, of course. They could maybe pack twenty people in the tender, if they were all friends. Even if they made daily trips back and forth to the Hexus it was never going to happen in time. He started to open his mouth to say as much, but then someone behind him cleared their throat in a particular way. Not particularly loud, just…authoritatively. Lanoe swung around and saw Maggs standing there.

“Excuse me, everyone,” he said. “I,” and he placed one hand, fingers splayed, across the cryptab on his chest, “am Lieutenant Auster Maggs.”

The tangle of voices quieted down almost instantly. Every eye present focused on Maggs as he smiled and nodded at various people in the audience as if he already knew them personally. He came back around to the tall woman, the mining administrator, and his smile grew an extra notch wide.

“We'll get to your people in just a moment,” he told her, with a sly wink. Lanoe was surprised to see the tall woman's mouth twitch in the suggestion of a smile. “First, though—friends, seekers, you look troubled.”

He stepped down off the stage and walked over to the people in the robes and furred hats. They stared at him like a tiny bird staring into the eyes of a cobra. “We,” the shortest of them said—his hat was especially tall—“have been chosen by lot to represent the Church of the Ancient Word.”

“I could tell you were a holy man,” Maggs said. “Tell me, Father, what's your name?”

“Oh, well—I'm not—we prefer not to use titles like ‘father' or even individual names,” the representative of the church said. “The greatest enemy of spiritual development is the ego, after all.”

“I've tried so hard for so long to come to an accommodation with mine,” Maggs said, with an apologetic simper. “Tell me. What brought you here today?”

“We—well, that is, the church, as a, a communal, that is to say, a nonhierarchical body—”

Maggs nodded in sympathy.

“We resolve that we oppose violence in all forms. We understand that the defense of the planet may involve some—some—some danger. But we've come to petition you to try not to…to…”

“Please,” Maggs said, resting a hand on the man's shoulder. “I'm listening.”

“We'd like you not to kill anyone. If that would be. That is. Possible.”

Maggs closed his eyes and bowed his head as if he were praying with the man. “We're Navy pilots. We do deal in aggression, it's true. But we're not butchers. I promise you, we'll keep the bloodshed to an absolute minimum.”

The church man looked up at Maggs the way a teenager might look up from the first row of a concert hall at a pop star.

“Now,” Maggs said, “I know everyone here today had a very good reason to come. You all have pressing concerns and believe me, we know how important this situation is, how it affects each one of you. I give you my personal promise that we'll hear you all out, on an individual basis.” He started to climb back up on the stage, but before he got there he turned back and aimed a big smile right at the mining administrator. “Especially with you,” he said.

Lanoe was too far away to see if the woman blushed or not, but she definitely looked away with an embarrassed smile.

“First things come first, though,” Maggs said. He gestured broadly at the table with all its platters and dishes, as if he'd made all the food with his own two hands. “And first—we eat!”

The people in the chairs, the ones who'd been so full of questions and demands before, laughed in unison. Then they got up and started to form an orderly line in front of the food table.

Zhang went over there as well. While Lanoe watched from the stage, she started talking to the people in the line, smiling and shaking hands and laughing at jokes. Just like that—as easy as that—the welcoming ceremony was over. At least the part where Lanoe had to give a speech.

He would admit to himself he was distinctly relieved. He stepped over to Maggs to find out what had just happened. “Where did you learn how to do that?” he asked.

“My sainted father was in the Admiralty,” he explained. “He was constantly at some public relations work, you know—pressing the flesh, scratching backs. He taught me a very important lesson.”

“What's that?”

“When dealing with a crowd,” Maggs said, “you separate them into two groups. Those who are insane and those who are simply indignant. You put the latter bunch aside—give 'em time, he always said, and their jets will cool down. Anger goes away, but crazy never does. So you deal with the madmen first.”

“Hellfire,” Lanoe said. “I knew we brought you for a reason.”

Valk wasn't sure what to do.

His microdrones showed him the enemy ships in high resolution. Sixteen of them. Fifteen had spherical segmented metal hulls with just the pits of maneuvering jets showing on their surfaces. They matched exactly the imagery he'd seen of the orbiter that first attacked Niraya. He had no doubt that inside of each of them was a killer drone made of nothing but legs ending in sharp claws.

The sixteenth craft was different, elongated, its surface complicated by pipes and cables and studded with spikes that had to be the barrels of weapons. Some kind of defensive escort for the orbiters, clearly, but the configuration made no sense to Valk. The enemy interceptor had no airfoils and it was three times the size of his BR.9. Too big to have a vector field onboard, far too small to function like a Navy destroyer. It wasn't like any kind of ship he'd fought before.

Normally the role of a deep picket was to observe and report. Valk filed all the imagery he had and shot it off toward Niraya, earmarked straight for Lanoe. His job should have been over at that point—he should have veered off and headed back to base, so a full patrol could come out and take care of this threat.

The speed of light was a problem, though. Valk was ten light-minutes out from Niraya. If he asked for Lanoe's orders it would take at least twice that long to get a reply—his signal had to travel all the way to the planet, then Lanoe's response had to travel all the way back. As fast as the orbiters were moving, twenty minutes was far too long to wait. If those orbiters reached Niraya before Lanoe could scramble a patrol, they would drop their landers—and people would die.

The obvious answer was for Valk to take the initiative and kill these things himself. It wasn't a great option. His tactical position was lousy—he was alone and he had no cover to speak of.

He would just have to fall back on the oldest trick in the book.

He leaned on the BR.9's stick and swung around until his back was to the red dwarf. Maybe the orbiters and their escort wouldn't see him as he came screaming out of the sun. He armed his PBWs and readied the cannon that launched his disruptors and antivehicle rounds. He cranked the sound system until an extended drum solo drowned out every nonviolent thought in his head.

His weapons panel flashed an amber light at him and he looked down to see he had a firing solution on three of the orbiters, even though he was still fifteen thousand kilometers away from them. Bless Navy optimism, he thought—at that range, even PBW fire would take five seconds to reach the orbiters. More than enough time for them to dodge. He held off for three more seconds—counting them down against the beat of the music—then squeezed the trigger built into his control stick.

His twin PBWs fired simultaneously. Beams of protons lanced forth, the BR.9 spitting fire in two flat streams, even as Valk hurled himself straight at the line of enemy ships. Two seconds to impact and he watched the targeted orbiters, knowing they would move, knowing he'd wasted his opening shot. One second to impact and they—they didn't move. They weren't evading.

Had his trick really worked? Could they not see him approaching against the disk of the sun?

Zero seconds to impact.

His cannon fire ripped through the hull of one orbiter, then the other two a microsecond later. Metal boiled and vaporized in the dark, as the orbiters were reduced to debris and slag.

He wasted no time congratulating himself. He cut all thrust, then punched for maneuvering jets to swing himself around until he was flying backward, the line of orbiters receding in his forward view.

Amber lights on his weapons panel. New firing solutions available. He let fly another volley of particle beams from close range, watched the orbiters sizzle and pop. As easy as cracking eggs with a hammer.

And still the orbiters didn't respond. They didn't turn off from their course, didn't veer away from him. They were holding steady on their established trajectory, still screaming down toward Niraya at a thousand kilometers a second.