Forbidden Suns Read online

  It was over in the space of a few seconds. It left Bullam’s head ringing like a bell and blood dripping from her nose. She grabbed a brocaded handkerchief from a pocket of her suit and pressed it—hard—against her face. “Captain,” she called. “Captain Shulkin!”

  Smoke drifted across the bridge. The only light came from a single display that looked like a jigsaw puzzle—some of its emitters must have been smashed. In the fitful light, she saw Shulkin floating in the middle of the bridge, holding on to his chair with the long, skeletal fingers of one hand.

  He was smiling.

  “Well done,” he said, a throaty whisper.

  Then he flipped around to face the navigator. “Take us closer to the cruiser,” he said.

  “Captain, sir,” the IO said. Blood slicked the left arm of the man’s suit. “We need to do some damage control, we need to make sure we haven’t lost—”

  “The battle,” Shulkin insisted, “isn’t over yet. Move us closer. Tell the Batygin brothers to engage with everything they have.”

  Bullam rubbed her neck with one hand—she was relatively sure it wasn’t broken—and tapped anxiously at her wrist minder. It brought up a new display, showing her the city below. Fighters banked and soared over its spires, individual ships now caught up in lethal dogfights. She saw one of the enemy BR.9s break into pieces, debris twisting and streaming away from it even as inertia carried it down into the city streets. Debris from collisions and explosions and general destruction was cascading onto the dark stone towers, a dangerous rain of burnt titanium and shredded carbon fiber.

  A single BR.9 flashed across her view, momentarily filling the entire display. She backed up frame by frame until she could see the pilot’s face. Sharp features, hair pulled back in a severe bun, prim, pursed lips. Maggs had said this Candless was a teacher. She’d come very close to killing every human being on the carrier.

  The damage done, Candless was streaking away, swinging back and forth to avoid Centrocor fire. She was breaking free of the fight, headed back toward the cruiser. Not to defend it, Bullam thought. No.

  “They’re retreating,” she said.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Shulkin told her. “Where could they go? There’s only one exit from this cavern, and we’re blocking their way.”

  Bullam shook her head. “That attack—it wasn’t meant to kill us. Just tie us up with damage control. She was playing for time.”

  “Time for what?” Shulkin demanded.

  They didn’t have to wait long to get an answer.

  Bullam was probably the only one on the bridge who was looking at the city, not at the battle still raging all around them. She was the first to notice when the searchlights down there began to pivot around until they were all facing the same direction. A surge of white plasma poured out of them, beam after beam twisting around toward a common target. Though she couldn’t see what they were pointing at—they seemed to be converging on thin air.

  “What are they doing?” she demanded, not really expecting an answer. Nor did she receive one. None of the bridge crew were even paying attention to her. Valk’s drone ships were tearing away at one of the destroyers, targeting its many guns, scoring its hull with burst after burst of concentrated PBW fire. Candless was halfway back to the cruiser already, where Lanoe was still defending his ship against all comers.

  “There’s something … happening,” she said. “Damn you, Shulkin! Look at this!”

  The captain finally twisted around in his seat to look at her. She held up her wrist minder so he could see the display.

  The beams from the city were coalescing into a cloud of radiance, a sort of nebulous, formless glob of plasma.

  “You there! Traitor!” Shulkin called.

  Maggs looked deeply hurt, but he refrained from saying anything in his own defense. The charge was, after all, irrefutable. “How may I assist?”

  “You were with Lanoe before we got here. What the devil is he doing? What are those beams? Some kind of weapon?”

  “I’m afraid I wasn’t privy to his negotiations with the people of the city,” Maggs said. “I haven’t the faintest. Many apologies.”

  Shulkin’s face was fleshless and pale at the best of times. At that moment he looked like nothing more than a skull with lips. “IO! Give me data on that weapon!”

  “Sir, it’s … a series of collimated plasma beams, and, well … yes,” the poor information officer said. “I suppose it could be used as a … as a weapon, but—”

  “Stop stammering and tell me what I need to know,” Shulkin said. “Or I will replace you with someone who can.”

  The navigator and pilot looked away. They knew perfectly well what Shulkin meant. He’d shot the previous navigator for hesitation in following an order. There was no question he would do the same thing again.

  “The beams are hot enough to cut through armor plate, yes, sir,” the IO said. “I’m getting some anomalous readings from them, though—the plasma seems to have negative mass.”

  “Negative? Negative mass?”

  “It’s not as impossible as it sounds, sir. It’s called exotic matter, and hypothetically you could use it to create a—”

  On the display, the beams wove together into a ring of coruscating light. It flared bright enough that Bullam started to look away—but then the ring collapsed inward, into itself, and seemed to pop out of existence as quickly as it had appeared.

  “—to create a wormhole throat,” the IO finished, in a near whisper.

  Where the ring had been, where the beams had crossed, there was nothing now except a strange spherical distortion in the air, as if a globe of perfect glass hung there.

  Every single one of them knew what that meant. A wormhole throat. A passageway through the belly of the universe. It could go anywhere—literally anywhere.

  And it was right where the cruiser needed it to be.

  “They’re going to escape,” Bullam said, hardly believing it. “They’re going to get away from us—again.”

  BR.9s started streaming into the cruiser’s open vehicle bay, one by one. Static guns mounted on the hull of the Hoplite blazed away at those few Sixty-Fours that were still in range, still trying to get close enough to the cruiser to launch disruptors.

  “Their engines are warming up,” the IO called out. “They’re going to move.”

  “Of course they are,” Shulkin said. He sat down in his chair and pulled a strap across his waist. Then he steepled his fingers together before his face.

  “Batygins,” he called.

  “A bit busy right now.”

  “A bit busy right now,” the twins replied.

  “I don’t care,” Shulkin said, though his voice was oddly soft. “Maneuver on your own time. Right now I need you to pour every ounce of fire you can into that cruiser. I want every missile, every flak gun firing. If this is our only chance, we will kill Aleister Lanoe. Am I understood?”

  The brothers didn’t even take the time to respond. Their guns opened fire almost instantly, heavy PBW salvos lancing across the sky, missiles firing in quick succession out of their pods. A few shots even found their target, burning long streaks down the engine modules of the Hoplite. Missiles locked on and flared with light as they accelerated toward the cruiser’s thrusters. Anything in the way of that torrent of destruction would have been vaporized.

  But it was too late. Even Bullam—who had no training in space combat—could see that. The cruiser’s nose was already disappearing into the new wormhole throat, even as a final BR.9 raced for safety inside its vehicle bay. Lanoe’s ship vanished into thin air, a little at a time. On the display it looked like it was moving with glacial slowness, like it had all the time in the world. But it kept disappearing, bit by bit.

  “Keep firing!” Shulkin said.

  A missile hit home—but only one. It burst against a thick plate of armor on the cruiser’s side, light and debris spreading outward in a deadly cloud. But the Hoplite was half-gone now, its coilguns blinking out of e
xistence one by one. The vehicle bay disappeared, and then the thrusters were all that remained, just a dull glow of heat and ionized gas, and then, finally, even that was gone.

  The missiles lost their lock and could no longer home in on their targets. Rudderless, they twisted off, away from the wormhole throat, losing speed as they twirled pointlessly in the air. A few blasts of heavy PBW fire followed the cruiser through the throat, but it was impossible to see if they hit anything.

  Eventually the destroyers stopped firing. What was the point?

  Shulkin lifted his hands to his face, covering his eyes.

  Bullam held her breath. She knew that something was coming. The captain was insane. Neurologically impaired. Back when he’d still been with the Navy, he’d developed a suicidal mania brought on by extreme combat stress. The Navy had fixed him, as best they could, with extensive brain surgery. They’d left him nearly catatonic, able to do nothing but fight.

  Cheated of his prey now, how would he react? Would he pull out a pistol and blow his own brains out? Or maybe he would shoot everyone else first.

  “Maggs,” Bullam whispered. “Maggs, get ready to run if—”

  “Send the recall,” Shulkin said.

  “Sir?” the IO asked.

  “Send the recall order. I want every fighter back here, in our vehicle bay. I want the destroyers lined up and ready to maneuver. Have all crew aboard this ship report to stations, or to their bunks if they have no immediate duties.”

  “Yes, sir,” the IO said.

  Then Shulkin started to scrape at his eye sockets. Digging his nails deep into the skin around his eyelids. Rubbing at his brows with the balls of his thumbs.

  “Captain?” Bullam asked. “Are you …?”

  “Navigator,” Shulkin said. “Give me a course that takes us through that wormhole as fast as possible.”

  “Wait,” Bullam said.

  “If the civilian observer wishes to comment on my orders, she can do so in writing at some future time,” Shulkin said. “Navigator?”

  “Course entered, sir.”

  “Pilot,” Shulkin said. “Take us—”

  “No,” Bullam said. “No! That won’t be necessary. Our mission was to find out what Lanoe was up to. To find these allies he was looking for, and, well, here we are.” She opened a display to show the city below them. “We’ve done it, Captain. We’ve reached our objective and we no longer need to capture Lanoe, we can—”

  “Ignore her,” Shulkin said. “If anyone on this bridge so much as looks at her, they will be disciplined. This is my ship. Pilot, take us through that wormhole.”

  “Sir, I’m sorry to interrupt,” the IO said, “but there’s something you should know. That wormhole isn’t stable.” On his display a schematic of the wormhole appeared. It dwindled even as Bullam watched, the throat tightening down to nothing. “It’s shrinking. If we get caught in there when it collapses, we’ll be annihilated. Every one of us will die. And we, uh … we won’t be able to … kill Lanoe.”

  “Noted,” Shulkin said. He scratched along the side of his nose as if he were trying to peel off a mask. “Pilot,” he said, “I believe I gave you an order. If Lanoe thinks he can make it through, so can we. And I will not allow him to get away from me. This battle is not over until I say it is!”

  No one on the bridge said a word. None of them moved, except the pilot. And she only stirred far enough to get the ship moving.

  Gravity pushed them all down into their seats as the carrier surged forward, toward the wormhole throat.

  Chapter Two

  Too many stars.

  Aleister Lanoe stood on the surface of his cruiser, his boots adhering to the armor plates and keeping him from just drifting off into nothingness. He folded his arms behind him, tilted his head back, and tried to take it all in.

  Too many stars here. The sky was packed with them. Paved with light.

  They’d come ten thousand light-years in the space of an hour. Ten thousand light-years closer to the center of the galaxy.

  In the spiral arm where Earth lay, in the tiny zone of worlds colonized and inhabited by human beings, stars were far apart. So distant from one another they looked like white dots on black velvet. As you traveled inward, though, toward the center, the stars grew thicker, more closely packed. Valk had told him the stars here were on average less than a light-year apart.

  Arcing across Lanoe’s view was the Milky Way itself. Whereas before he’d always known it as a vague pale streak across the sky, here it was a solid blur of light, a band of fierce energy that was hard to look at.

  He felt exposed. Pinned down by all that hard light, like every star was an eye watching him, studying him. He knew that was just the anthropic fallacy at work. The ludicrous idea that in a universe as big as this one, as mind-freezingly gigantic, anything a human being could ever do would make one whit of difference. That in the scale of stars and globular clusters and galaxies, of deep time, the entire human race could make so much as one tiny dent in the attention of the cosmos. Nonsense, of course.

  Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling.

  Dead ahead lay a single orangish-white sun, a K-type red dwarf. From here, fifty astronomical units away, it looked like just another of the great multitude of stars. This one, though, was what he’d come for.

  This star belonged to the Blue-Blue-White. The bastards who had wiped out almost all life in the galaxy. The bastards who had killed Zhang—the only human being Lanoe had ever truly loved.

  Lanoe had moved heaven and earth to get this close. To get his chance at revenge.

  Just a little farther now. They would arrive soon enough.

  For now, he walked across the hull of his ship, feeling it vibrate beneath the soles of his feet. The powerful engines were burning, pushing them closer. He saw the ship’s scars. He saw the missing sections of hull plating, saw the scorched and burnt-out components. Already the ship and its crew had suffered. What lay ahead was going to test their limits. He hoped they would be strong enough.

  As he came to the missing hatch over the vehicle bay, he stopped and looked up at the busy sky. Knowing what he would face once he stepped back inside, into air and warmth and human companionship.

  He spent one last moment enduring the cyclopean gaze of the orange star dead ahead. And then he nodded in acknowledgment.

  That’s right, you bastards, he thought. I’m coming for you.

  In the cruiser’s tiny sick bay, Marjoram Candless considered her failures.

  Bury hadn’t regained consciousness. He lay strapped into a bed, the long arms of a medical drone tending to his injuries. He was one of her former students, brought along on this mission without any idea of what he was getting into. He had been born on the planet Hel, a very dry place, and like all the people of that world he was hairless and his skin had been infused with polymers to trap his sweat so it could be recycled. It made his skin shiny and smooth, as if he were just an infant.

  If he knew she was thinking that, he would have flown into a rage. He would have insisted he was a man, an adult. Well. He’d proven his right to that, she supposed.

  In the last battle with Centrocor his fighter had been nearly obliterated by an enemy missile. He’d barely made it back to the cruiser, even with her help. His shiny face was scarred now, burned in patches. The medical drone scrubbed at the injured flesh, rebuilding what it could, fusing together wounds that were too grievous to be erased.

  He looked so very pale.

  Candless checked the sensors that listed out his pulse, his respiration, his blood oxygen levels. He had stabilized but he was far from whole. Candless had been monitoring his condition quite closely, and she knew he was improving, but very slowly. She didn’t know how long it would be before he regained consciousness. Even then he would need extensive therapy if he was going to return to his duties.

  She touched his cold hand. She refrained from squeezing it—he needed to sleep. She closed her eyes. Candless had never been a religious woma
n, and she did not pray now, but she visualized him healing, getting better. She had a responsibility to him, one she had failed to carry out. A responsibility to keep him safe.

  “I expect you to make a full recovery, young man,” she told him, whispering. “I will accept nothing less. I intend to bring you home in the same shape I found you.”

  Sometimes it helped, saying things like that aloud. Sometimes, if she said them in just the right tone, with just enough authority, she thought they actually sounded believable.

  Lanoe moved quietly through the ship. There was no one he particularly wanted to talk to at that moment. He passed through the vehicle bay and then into the axial corridor that ran the length of the ship, from the ruined bridge down to the engineering section.

  A starship under acceleration is not like a yacht sailing on a placid ocean. Gravity pulls in the opposite direction of thrust, so the engines of the cruiser were down and everything else was up. The axial corridor ran through all the crew spaces of the Hoplite, a hundred meters and more. When the ship was moving it was essentially a very, very long ladder. Lanoe had to climb through the gun decks, where a dozen side passages branched off from the main corridor. As he hauled himself past, he heard raised voices, and he stopped for a moment to listen.

  “We didn’t sign up for this!”

  “Where the hell are we?”

  “When are we going home?”

  Lanoe spent most of his time on the ship in the company of its officers: Candless, his executive officer; Paniet, his chief engineer; Valk, his … everything else. The enlisted men and women onboard never came into his orbit. There were twenty marines and three engineers aboard and he’d barely managed to memorize their names.

  A good commander should be constantly aware of how his people are doing, at least so that he knows how close they are to open mutiny. Lanoe had never been a very good commander—his skills lay in other areas. He could hear the anger and the desperate confusion in their voices, though, and he knew he ought to at least hear them out.