A Night Without Stars (14 page)

Ry Evine finally got to experience real free fall, not just the twenty-second interludes delivered by the divedown-upchuck flights. When he confirmed the Liberty's systems were all fully operational, he took his helmet off, loosened the acceleration couch's straps, and looked out of the larger port that had been covered by the shroud. The crescent of the planet glowed brightly below. Ry flicked the safety guards off the Reaction Control System (RCS) joystick, confirmed the system readiness, and tipped the joystick slightly. The Liberty began to roll, responding just like it did in the training simulations. With the third stage still attached it was sluggish, but he turned it so the port on his right was aligned on Bienvenido, all the while checking the spherical flight director attitude indicator as he stabilized the spaceship.

Now he could look down directly. An astonishing amount of glaring white cloud was smeared across the planet. The Eastath Ocean was a deep enticing blue, and so smooth; some astronauts claimed they could see individual waves. The Liberty approached Fanrith's western coast, and Ry grinned at the coastal outline—silly thought, that it was just like all the maps. He was surprised by how brown the land appeared; this section of Fanrith had plenty of tropical vegetation. He caught sight of rivers, silver veins slicing across the land. At least they were surrounded by the darker hues of vegetation. Farther east was the central desert. He touched two gloved fingers to his forehead in a respectful salute. So many Air Defense Force crews had died defending Bienvenido that day the Prime invaded—thirty-nine planes just from the Portlynn squadron he'd served with during his Air Force duty.

A light on the communications section of the console turned from amber to green as the spaceship came in range of the tracking station on the west coast of the Aflar Peninsula.

“Do you copy, Liberty two-six-seven-three?” Anala asked.

“Roger that, flight com, communications link operational. Good to hear you again.”

“Stand by for course tracking data.”

Radar stations across Lamaran locked on to the spaceship as it orbited, checking course and velocity with meticulous precision—data that he fed into the tiny onboard guidance computator. He had completed a full orbit, passing over Cape Ingmar again, when flight com gave him a go for the apogee kick burn. He checked the Liberty's orientation, correcting its attitude with a series of RCS burns. Then when he was stable and aligned, the guidance computator took over. Numbers blurred in its display row of seven nixi tubes, counting him down. The ullage rockets fired first—small solid rocket engines around the base of the third stage, pushing the liquid fuel to the bottom of the tanks where the turbopumps could suck it in. Then the main rocket took over, firing for 135 seconds, thrusting the Liberty up away from Bienvenido.

The third stage shut down and separated. Ry fired the service module engines, moving the Liberty away from its spent third stage.

Flight com confirmed his course track was good. Liberty 2,673 was in a highly elliptical orbit, on its way up to the Ring, fifty thousand kilometers above Bienvenido.

It took a long time to take his pressure suit off, banging elbows and knees against the capsule's equipment and console as he struggled, but eventually he stowed it in the locker. And he finally had a few moments to himself.

Everyone called it free fall, but to Ry it was
flying,
pure and simple. He didn't even feel nauseous. Instead, he felt unshackled, as if space were where he'd been born to live. And through the main port, beautiful Bienvenido was visibly growing smaller as the Liberty rose farther and farther away on an elliptical orbit that would peak at the Ring.

Flight com asked for updates on systems. With a sigh he strapped himself loosely into the acceleration couch and began to run through another checklist. He had to establish a thermal roll, setting the Liberty rotating around its long axis, so that the heat from the sun was evenly distributed. The sextant was used to confirm the position of the other planets and fed into the guidance computator to check his position. Then he sighted the crosshairs on Tree 3,788-D. Flight time to bomb release was verified at seventeen hours, nineteen minutes.

Food had no taste; veteran astronauts had warned him about that. Fluid was pooling in his head as if he had a cold. His fingers swelled up until they resembled sausages. Systems whirred and buzzed loudly. Thick sunbeams stabbed through the ports, moving across the cabin like bizarre clock hands as the Liberty continued its stately thermal roll. Ry didn't care. Out there beyond the port, Bienvenido dominated space. And the other planets glimmered excitingly. The blue jewel of Aqueous, the closest world to Bienvenido, sharing the same orbit but trailing by seventeen million kilometers. Weird Trüb—sliding along its orbit fourteen million kilometers closer to the G1 star, its elegant necklace of twelve moonlets glinting against the infinite black. Valatare, the cool shining rose-colored giant in its outer orbit. And hated Ursell, whose murky atmosphere was now more than a thousand kilometers thick; its tenuous upper layers toyed with the sunlight to crown it with an oddly beautiful haze that extended for hundreds of kilometers farther still.

Ry spent every spare second staring at the planets, tying to visualize the day Bienvenido would finally be free of the Trees and their vile Faller spawn. A future without fear of aliens, where human spacecraft would fly across the gulf between worlds, and astronauts would land on those exotic planets. He allowed himself to believe he might live to live in those times. Slvasta, in his historic speech after the Prime invasion was defeated, had declared that they could rid Bienvenido of Trees within three human lifetimes. Most people could live past two hundred years, and there were only 3,223 Trees left in the Ring. If they could increase their launch rate to fifteen a year, the Ring would be gone and the skies open before Ry passed his two hundredth birthday. It was a pleasant daydream to carry him along to apogee. But the factories were going flat-out to meet current Silver Sword and Liberty delivery schedules, and the current defense budget was a huge economic strain on the whole world.

Three hours from apogee, when Liberty 2,673 would reach the top of its elliptical orbit, flight com told him to start activating the bomb carrier missile.

Ry pulled his head back from the sextant. “Roger that, flight com. I'll pull the manual out.” The sextant folded back neatly into its storage position. He'd been examining Tree 3,788-D with the device on full magnification. Trees were usually about eleven kilometers long, with little variance. Slender spires of crystal with a tip at one end always pointing planetward, while the other flared out into a broad bulb more than a kilometer wide. Their surface was made from deep folds and wrinkles in the crystal that hosted slow blooms of moiré light slithering along their length in random surges.

Laura Brandt said Captain Cornelius's ship had estimated up to thirty thousand trees in the Forest that hung above Bienvenido back in the Void. Nigel Sheldon had destroyed about twenty-four thousand when he set off the quantumbuster in the center of the Forest—collateral damage to the distortion applied to the fabric of the Void. After the Great Transition, the surviving Trees had dispersed into the Ring, using what Laura said was some kind of gravity manipulation propulsion, like that of the Skylords, left behind in the Void. Some of them had taken longer than others. The newly formed Space Vigilance Office had cataloged their movements, then started to observe them closely with telescopes and Bienvenido's newly built radars. They kept a file on every Tree, classifying them into two distinct types: S for standard, and D for damaged.

First-flight astronauts were always assigned to D Trees, as they were usually easier targets. Tree 3,788-D was short, barely nine kilometers long, indicating that a good two kilometers had broken off during the quantumbuster blast. Broad sections of it were permanently dark. The Space Vigilance Office had only recorded it releasing seventy-eight Faller eggs in 250 years. Well below average.

According to the sextant observations, it wasn't moving.
Not yet, anyway,
Ry corrected himself. That made the mission so much easier. Trees inevitably moved when the missiles got close.

Ry unlocked the console's missile section and took the thick manual from its recess. He didn't really need to; every page was perfectly clear in his memory. But the microphones in the command module were picking up every sound, and transmitting it continually to mission control where tape recorders faithfully documented each cough, knock, and fart he made. If there was no sound of the manual's pages being turned, someone might get suspicious about just how good his memory was—and why. Which was a high level of paranoia, he acknowledged wryly, but with the PSR you could never be sure. And he certainly wasn't going to take the risk. So the manual was opened with a soft rustling sound, and he started down the checklist.

Prepping the missile took ninety minutes—powering up its systems and loading the inertial guidance system with the data from the command module guidance computator. The missile itself rode above the command module: a cylinder with the same two-and-a-half-meter diameter as the rest of the Liberty. At the front was a radar dish, then the electrical instrument section. Below that was the actual warhead: a fission bomb with a yield of three hundred kilotons, the largest practical size Bienvenido's bomb factories could make. Propulsion was dual stage, with a hypergolic fuel rocket for launching it from the command module, and a clustered solid rocket motor stack for final high-velocity delivery. Total mass was two point two tons.

“Missile systems at preflight stage five, and holding steady,” Ry reported an hour from apogee. The Liberty was close enough now that he could make out the shape of Tree 3,788-D without any magnification. Even the dark areas were visible, slim fissures amid the bright entrancing shimmer.

“Good to hear that, Ry,” Anala replied.

It was probably imagination, but her voice seemed fainter—maybe just the static crackle that came with such a long-distance radio beam.

“Taking final radar reading of target,” he said. A muted mechanical clanking reverberated through the command module's frame as the radar dish scanned around. Nixi numbers shifted and settled, sending a warm orange glow across his face as he floated over to that section of the console. “Navigation data locked and transferred. Flight profile confirmed. Requesting final missile sequence initiation.”

“You have a green light for missile fuel tank pressurization, Liberty two-six-seven-three.”

Ry went back to the port, where he could see the Tree—noticeably larger now. Radar gave him a separation distance of 327 kilometers. He flicked three switches on the missile console, moving them to mid-position. “Commencing propellant tank pressurization.”

“SVO reports Tree movement,” Anala said. “One percent gee.”

Ry pulled himself over to the port and swung the sextant out of its recess. Two readings a minute apart, centering the crosshairs on the bulbous end of 3,788-D. The coordinates were different. Sure enough, Tree 3,788-D was on the move, accelerating at just under 1 percent of Bienvenido gravity.

He grinned savagely through the port. “You can run,” he told Tree 3,788-D. “But you can't hide.”

Most Trees moved when a Liberty spacecraft approached. That was the thing Ry found most amazing about them. Something so
huge
being able to move. The Silver Sword had burned 275 tons of propellant in order to lift a six-and-a-half-ton Liberty into space. Tree 3,788-D was
nine kilometers
long, and it was accelerating. A small acceleration, true, but he couldn't even visualize the energy level necessary for such a motor. And some Trees accelerated at up to 5 percent gee. Seventeen Liberty astronauts had burned all the fuel in the service module so they could still intercept their fleeing target, completely altering the spacecraft's orbit and thus throwing away their chance of a successful reentry. Only one of them—Matej—had ever made it back.

The next twenty minutes were spent calculating the catch-up burn that would change the Liberty's course to give the missile its highest strike probability. Ry fed the figures flight com gave him into the guidance computator, and fired the service module's main rocket for sixteen seconds.

The missile's guidance data had to be reloaded to take the new course into account. Then it was time; the Tree was only seventy-five kilometers away. He entered the bomb arm code on the missile console's red keyboard, and confirmed three green lights. A final check of missile systems and he turned the launch key. The Liberty shuddered as the missile detached. Ry saw sparkling gas flowing past the ports and used the joystick to turn the Liberty, aligning it for the retro burn. He caught sight of the missile through the port, its exhaust flaring wide from the small rocket nozzle at its base, accelerating toward the Tree. Radar confirmed its course was steady.

Ry fired the service module rocket again, retro burning to build distance between him and the impending blast, and putting him back onto his original reentry trajectory. It was a busy time, requiring two further short burns.

“Course correction verified,” Anala told him after the second one. “Good burn, Liberty two-six-seven-three.”

“Thank you, flight com. Appreciate that.”

“Flight control wants you to put Liberty into shield one orientation.”

“Roger. Beginning RCS maneuver for shield one.”

He reached for the joystick. Basically, shield one was positioning the Liberty so the back of the service module was pointing directly at the Tree; that way, when the atom bomb went off, the bulk of the spaceship would be between him and the blast, shielding him from the brutal gamma ray pulse. He canceled the thermal roll and began to turn the Liberty.

The missile panel buzzed a warning. Ry scanned it quickly, not quite understanding. That particular warning sound was for attitude correction. The numbers in the nixi tubes were slowly changing, as if he were updating the missile's guidance computator.