Forsaken Skies (24 page)

The giant pilot stood up straight, having heard his name. “Actually, I'd be happy to—”

“He's going to rest, because I ordered him to,” Lanoe said, never looking away from Zhang's metal eyes. “As for him,” he said, pointing one gloved finger right at Maggs, “he's got work to do planetside.”

“Do I?” Maggs asked, quite surprised.

“I saw the way you and that engineer were together,” Lanoe said. “I'd call that a positive rapport. I want you to get her on our side. If we're out a pilot, we need to make up the shortfall somehow. Get the engineer to agree to build some ground-based weapons for us. Understood?”

“Oh, aye, aye, Commander,” Maggs said.

Lanoe gave him a curt nod. Then he tapped the key at his throat that raised his helmet. “Besides,” he said to Zhang, “you and I are supposed to have a talk. Well, we've got hours of flying time to log, so this should give us a chance.”

He stormed over to his FA.2 and strapped himself in. Within seconds he had lifted off the ground and was receding into the upper atmosphere.

Zhang stood where she was for a moment longer, her head bowed, but her shoulders still high. Then she let them fall. Nothing more, but on a body like that such gestures spoke volumes. She went to her BR.9 and readied it for takeoff.

“Maggs,” she called, before she left. “Nobody's going to begrudge you a little fun. But don't do anything that's going to come back and bite us later.”

How deeply insulting,
Maggs thought to himself.

What he said was, “I shall be the soul of propriety.”

Zhang didn't bother to comment. Before he could say anything else she was up, up, and away.

Once they were gone he turned to see if Valk had any comments—people so often did, nosy bastards. But the giant had climbed inside his own cockpit. “I'll rest better in orbit,” he said. “If anybody asks where I am—”

“They can simply do a search for your cryptab,” Maggs said. “I'll be busy with other matters.”

Valk didn't even bother to perform that gruesome bow he used in place of a nod. As quick as the others had gone, he took off for space.

Which left Maggs the only fighter pilot
mens sana
on the planet.

That had possibilities.

He considered—and not briefly—jumping in his fighter and just lighting out for the wormhole throat. He could be away before anyone noticed, away from this rotten planet and this suicidal mission.

He told himself that he would not do so, because he was a man of honor and he'd been given orders to carry out. The real reason—which his father's voice was perfectly happy to remind him of—was that he knew Lanoe would just come haring after him to bring him back.

Anyway. Carrying out his orders didn't need to be such an onerous task. It had its own compensations, in fact.

He took a minder from his pocket and unrolled it across the fairing of his BR.9. The local directory was quaintly small and it didn't take long to find Mining Administrator Derrow's address. He pinged her and she answered almost immediately. On the screen he saw a view of her from just below chin level, which allowed him unfettered visual access to the interiors of her nostrils. He gave himself credit for not letting his smile falter one bit.

“Something I can help you with, Lieutenant?” she asked, once they'd exchanged the usual pleasantries.

“I certainly hope so,” he told her. “All my fellow pilots are away at the moment. It's just me down at the spaceport, which means I'm in terrible danger.”

“Oh?” Her eyes widened and he could tell he had her attention.

“Yes,” he said. “The danger of eating dinner alone.”

Lanoe didn't say a word for the first hour of their patrol.

He'd burned hard to get away from Niraya, and Zhang had to strain her engines just to catch up. Once they'd matched acceleration she took up a station-keeping formation with him, never getting closer than ten kilometers to his FA.2. She could just make him out as a fast-moving dot on her left.

Out there in the void, there wasn't much else for her to look at, though. Her cybernetic eyes couldn't make out the stars. Far away as they were, they were just points of light in a backdrop of darkness—and her borrowed brain didn't really understand either of those concepts. To her space wasn't black. It just wasn't there.

Their course took them on a long, curving path out toward the distant enemy fleet, though she knew Lanoe would turn back long before they got that far. He was worried that they might see more incursions like the one Valk had found—more landers, more interceptors. So far the network of microdrones had found nothing, but years of war had taught both Lanoe and Zhang not to put all their faith in imagery and intelligence.

Lanoe kept his engine burning long after they'd left Niraya well behind. The two of them passed through the belt of dust Valk had told them about. Zhang saw nothing, really—the rocks that made up the belt were too small and too far apart for that. One grain of dust did smack into her vector field in a sudden burst of heat but it happened so fast she didn't even bother responding to the warning on her console.

It was enough to get Lanoe talking. “You okay?” he called.

“Just a bug on my windshield,” she said.

“Sure. How does it feel, being out here?”

“Flying a patrol, you mean? Lanoe, I never stopped. I've trained more cadets than you ever had in your squadron. Part of that was just this kind of work. War games, anyway. This feels fine. It feels like I'm right where I belong.”

“In that—your new body, I mean.”

“I'm
fine,
” she said. “I should be asking you all this. You're the one who retired.”

She knew it was the wrong thing to say as soon as it was out of her mouth, but once you sent a message by comms laser, you couldn't exactly call it back. When he didn't respond for a full minute, she pinged him just to make sure he hadn't cut off their signal link.

“You said we were going to talk. I get that it's a chore for you,” she told him. “It's not like we have much else to do right now, though.”

“Sure,” he said.

She waited for him to say more. A fool's errand, of course. He was going to make her start. “There's a lot of ground to cover. It's been a bunch of years.”

“Yeah.”

“But I'm guessing the big problem is my new body. You aren't used to me looking like this. I get it. The last time you saw me, I didn't have any legs. But it's still me in here. My memories, my training, my feelings—none of that has changed.”

“I get that.”

“Do you?” she asked. She touched her stick and banked over a little until she was closing the distance between them. “The way you look at me—okay. This body is young. It's very young. But I didn't choose it. I was on a list and this was the first body that came available.”

“How does that even work? This girl, the one with no optic nerves. She's in your old body now, right? The one I remember. Is she going to live like that for the rest of her life?”

“It's a temporary swap,” Zhang told him. “Just until one of us decides we want to switch back. I talk to her occasionally and she tells me there are still plenty of things she wants to see. She loves having eyes for the first time. Just like I love having legs again. So far we're both happy with how it worked out.”

“What if you die out here?” he asked.

“That's a risk you accept when you go on the list.”

She could imagine him shaking his head. Trying to grapple with it all.

Maybe she needed to give him some space.

“If you can't get past this, then maybe somebody else needs to be your second in command,” she said.

“Come on—”

“Not that there's a lot to choose from. Maggs is definitely not right for the job. You and Valk seem to get along, though.”

“He's not a people person,” Lanoe pointed out.

“I've noticed that.”

“And,” he said, as if he were admitting something deeply disagreeable, “you're still a pretty good wingman. Back in the elder's office, when I started talking to her like a problem cadet—you reeled me back in. Just like you used to.”

“Somebody had to,” she suggested. “Okay, I'll keep the job, since you asked so nicely. But we were more than just squaddies, before. We can't just ignore that.”

A collision detection warning sounded inside her cockpit. She ignored it—but Lanoe must have heard it as well.

“You're slipping left,” he told her. “You need to correct your course.”

“No, I don't.” She tapped the throttle and then hit her maneuvering jets to swing herself around on her long axis. When it was done she was only a few meters from Lanoe's fighter. Flying upside down, from his perspective, and just above him. She drifted a tiny bit forward until their canopies were almost touching, and she could look straight up and into his cockpit.

She saw him through four layers of glass—two canopies, two helmets. Her lidar eyes were almost up to the task. The image of him she received was washed out, a little indistinct. He looked like a ghost down there. Maybe like what a memory would look like if you put it under a microscope.

But then he looked up at her and their eyes met.

“I'm still the woman you proposed to,” she said.

“Which means you're still the woman who said no,” he answered.

The sun hadn't moved a millimeter in the damned sky.

Maggs kept glancing up at it, daring it to move while he wasn't looking. Still it hung there more or less exactly just about overhead.

He pulled up a display on his wrist and pinged the local time server. “Bloody bones,” he said. The sun wasn't going to set for another three weeks. The night would be twice that long.

He made a mental note not to be here when it fell.

“Did you say something?” Derrow asked, from the kitchen.

He let the curtains fall back over the window—now he knew why they were so heavy—and stepped through the archway that separated the two halves of her apartment. She was stirring a pot of noodles, glancing back at him over her shoulder.

Getting a home-cooked meal out of her had been a bit of a coup. There were restaurants on Niraya, of course, though none that Maggs would have eaten in on a bet. He'd made a big show of laying his cards on the table, telling her that he was under orders from his CO to talk business tonight, that they ought to head somewhere with a bit of privacy. She'd seen right through his tale, of course—just as he'd meant her to. But here they were.

“How do you know when it's time to go to bed?” he asked.

She looked the tiniest bit shocked. “Is that a riddle?”

He pointed upward, through the roof. In the general direction of the sun.

He was pleased to find it didn't take her long to get it. “Oh, you mean with how long the days are? We've developed a simple but efficient system for ordering our daily schedules. A real triumph of local engineering.”

“Oh?”

She gave him a sly smile. Then she tapped her kitchen counter, calling up a display there that showed local time. “It's called a clock,” she said.

He laughed and leaned up against the wall. It had been a pleasant surprise to find that Derrow thought this planet nearly as uninspiring as he did himself. She had a rather nice laugh, too.

“There's beer in the fridge,” she told him. “Imported, I promise.”

“That must be expensive,” he said. He bent over the refrigerator and found the promised bottles, and behind them—
aha
—a glass jug full of vodka. At least, someone had written the word
VODKA
on the bottle in black grease pencil. “Hate to waste the good stuff. How about we stick to this?” He held the jug up at an angle and raised an eyebrow at her.

“You sure?” she asked. “That's local. We have a still out at the refinery we made out of surplus equipment. Don't tell Centrocor.”