A Night Without Stars (15 page)

“Flight com, I have a problem,” Ry said. He started flicking switches, trying to cancel the error. The numbers kept on changing.

“Say again, please?” Anala asked.

“There's a malfunction in the missile guidance system. Course vectors are changing.” He growled in frustration as the numbers locked. Nothing he was doing was making any difference.

“Wait, please. Missile command is analyzing your telemetry.”

“They're going to have to hurry,” Ry muttered. He tried to reload the original vector, but it wasn't registering. An amber light came on at the side of the missile control panel. “No, no, no. Don't do that!” The light turned green, indicating that the missile's tiny RCS nozzles were belching out cold gas, changing its attitude in accordance with the new data. “Uracus!”

“Liberty two-six-seven-three, telemetry is showing you transmitting a new course to the missile.”

“Negative! I'm not! It's changing. Oh, crud.” Another light turned amber, the missile's engine was preparing to fire. “It's going to course-correct. Flight control, do I abort? Do I abort?” His thumb hovered above the red key.

“Liberty two-six-seven-three, cancel your update to the missile.”

“I haven't updated! It's malfu— Crud!” Ry stared helplessly at the console as the light changed to green. The missile was fifty kilometers from the Tree, and the engine burned for three seconds. He read the new numbers again, and instantly worked out the course that would take the missile on. Procedure always had the strike aimed at the base of the bulbous end, the biggest target; but this new trajectory would take it to the midpoint. So it wasn't going to miss. “It's still aimed at the Tree,” he said numbly.

“Major Evine, what's happening?”

Ry recognized the new voice in his headphones: Colonel Matej. That was a severe break with protocol.

“Something changed the missile's course,” Ry said, hating how inadequate that sounded.

“Did you change the missile course, Liberty two-six-seven-three?”

“No, I did not.” Ry took a breath and made an effort to calm down. His medical telemetry would be showing them his quickened heartbeat and respiration—rising temperature, too. “There's some kind of malfunction. I'm going to attempt to regain control of the missile.”

His fingers flew over the missile panel, flicking switches in a sequence he knew should work, wiping the computator's memory ready for a clean reload.

“What are you doing?” Colonel Matej asked.

“Clearing the false data from the missile. I can reload the correct course.”

“Negative. Missile desk has confirmed the new track. It
is
still on course for the Tree.” There was a short pause. “But how did you know that?”

Ry grimaced, furious with himself. It took the big electrical computator sitting in the basement of the Cape Ingmar flight control building to work out orbital vectors. No normal human brain could perform that kind of calculation. “I guessed the burn wasn't long enough to divert it,” he said.
Come on Matej, you know an astronaut could make that guess.

“Okay. Consensus down here is to let it run. If the kill burn doesn't initiate as programmed, we'll consider a data reload.”

“Roger that.” Ry stopped trying to correct the anomaly, and looked at the missile countdown clock. They were seven minutes away from the kill burn, when the solid rocket cluster would ignite and send the missile streaking in toward the Tree. “Can I have an update on Tree thirty-seven-eighty-eight-D, please, flight com?”

It took a moment, but Anala's voice returned to his headphones. “SVO is saying the Tree acceleration is holding constant. Its course is stable. Missile will not require a further update.”

He nearly said it hadn't had an update, that something very strange was happening. The new data had to come from somewhere, and flight control had an override channel for the Liberty's computator in case anything happened to an astronaut; they could continue the missile launch by remote.
But why would anyone change the impact point?
He just couldn't understand that. Unless—
Fallers!

They would be the only beneficiaries from a sabotaged Liberty mission. But the missile is still going to hit the Tree. So it can't be them. Who then?

“Ry, are you all right?” Anala asked.

He realized his heart must have jumped at the thought.
If they can change the missile course from the ground, what else could they change? But the flight center team gets blood checked almost as often as astronauts.
“I'm fine,” he said, eyes tracking across every readout on the console, trying to spot any anomaly, but everything seemed to be functioning normally. The Liberty's battery power was lower than he would have liked at 62 percent, but still well inside mission parameters. His eyes were fixed on the missile countdown display as the numbers wound down.

“The doctors would like to remind you to pull the viewport blinds down,” Anala said.

“Roger that, flight com.” He reached out and pulled the silver blinds across each of the command module's ports. It was to protect his eyes from the explosion. “Strapping in, and locking down guidance data.” The electromagnetic pulse from an atom bomb explosion was fierce, and had knocked out circuits and instruments in the early Liberty craft until Demitri and his team came up with methods of hardening the electrical components on board. But even then, the protection wasn't always 100 percent effective. Ry began copying the readouts onto a pad—not that he needed to, but the technicians who recovered the capsule might notice the absence. If the computator did get knocked out, he could reload it quickly enough.

“Stand by, one minute,” he said. His gaze was fixed on the missile panel. If anything happened now, there'd be no chance of correcting it. The numbers flicked downward. On ten seconds, a green light indicated separation of the missile's hypergolic rocket engine module. Then, right on time, the green light for the solid rocket ignition lit up.

Ry let out a soft breath of release. He watched the radar, seeing the missile's velocity build as the solid rocket cluster accelerated it at seven gees. The distance from the tree shrank rapidly.

“Looking good,” Anala said.

Twenty seconds.

All his console readouts were stable. “Switching on external cameras,” he announced. Footage of the Ring Trees exploding in nuclear fury always played well in the newsreels.

Ten seconds. The solid rockets were spent. Missile acceleration dropped to zero. The radar return was perfect; the nixi numbers measuring distance to the Tree merged together as they wound down to zero.

His earphones emitted a loud hissing, then went silent. Tiny cracks of intense light shone around the edge of the port blinds. Needles in the dials connected to the hull radiation instruments flipped over to maximum. Lights dipped from the EMP. He held his breath, scanning the console. There were two amber lights. One for an RCS tank pressure valve, which didn't matter; the valve was triple redundant. And a second for a radar servo; again, the backup could cope. A red light glowed for the omnidirectional radio antenna receiver. He switched the backup set on immediately. His earphones started hissing again.

“Clean detonation,” Anala called through the static. “Visible down here.”

“Good to hear, flight com. Tell everyone to go ahead and start their Treefall parties. Systems nominal up here.” He checked the flight director attitude indicator and fired the RCS.

“It looks like you're maneuvering, Liberty two-six-seven-three,” Anala said, and there was a note of strain in her voice evident even through the static.

“That's confirmed, flight com: maneuvering. I want to see,” he said simply.

He stabilized the Liberty side-on to the Tree, and put on dark sunglasses before opening a blind.

There it was, a perfect sphere of dazzling white plasma; Bienvenido's latest and very temporary secondary sun. It expanded fast, dimming as it went. A slender flare extended out from the northern surface. Ry frowned at it. Then the tip began to curve over. “What the crud…?” The tenuous line across the infinite blackness began to dwindle. “I can see something,” Ry gasped. He snatched the camera from its locker and tugged at the lens cap with comic ineptitude.

“What is your visual, Liberty two-six-seven-three?”

“Something's moving.” The explosion's plasma shell was shading down to a purple-blue, becoming translucent as its luminosity faded. The tenuous trail of ions had almost vanished. He managed to click off three fast shots. “Something came out of the plasma shell.”

“Repeat, please.”

“There's something out there.” He peered through the camera's viewfinder, trying to focus the lens properly. The tip of the dying streak was meandering aimlessly as it dissipated.

“SVO will begin tracking the debris constellation when the plasma shell scatters. There's too much ionization interference right now.”

“That wasn't debris, flight com. The trail the object left in the plasma shell curved. Whatever made it was changing course. It was under acceleration. It's a spaceship of some kind.”

There was a long pause. “Liberty two-six-seven-three, please confirm you said there is an alien spacecraft in the Ring.”

Ry didn't like the way all emotion had vanished from Anala's voice. In his mind he could see the flight control center, all the dozens of technicians sitting at their desks, looking around at Anala with nervous astonishment, none of them saying a word.

“Affirmative, flight com. I don't think I'm alone out here.”

“Can you see the anomaly now?”

Ry pressed his face against the cool glass of the port, twisting around to scan as much of the empty panorama as he could. There were definitely some chunks of Tree visible out there now that the plasma shell had dissolved, faint-glowing splinters tumbling slowly across the blackness. One segment must have been a kilometer long—presumably the end of the spire. But all of them formed a central cluster, expanding slowly.
At least I did kill 3,788-D
.

“Negative.” Now he began to doubt himself—up until he replayed his own memory. With his eyes closed, the tenuous strand of glowing ions was pushed out of the seething shell, energetic gases stretched along by some invisible force.
Something created that wake, something accelerating. Something that could survive a three-hundred-kiloton atomic bomb. But what?

He glided back into the acceleration couch. “Flight com, I'm activating the radar. It might find something.”

“Roger that, Liberty two-six-seven-three. Nice thinking.”

Ry watched the tiny circular scope for several minutes. The cluster of Tree remnants showed as a faint fuzz at the radar's extreme range. There was nothing else—and certainly nothing close or accelerating.

“All right, Ry,” Anala said. “We've alerted SVO; their radars will scan for it. If there's a Prime ship hiding up there, they'll find it.”

He blinked in surprise at the near-heresy.
There are no Prime, not anymore. Mother Laura sacrificed herself to destroy them and save us. Besides, the Prime ships had a vast exhaust plume.

His training took over and he strapped himself in, barely realizing what he was doing. The more he thought about it, the less he understood what any kind of spaceship would be doing so close to the Tree. Research? Attack? But he was damn sure that it was the cause of the missile going awry. Nothing else could have done it.

So where did you come from? Which planet? Is there going to be another invasion?

Despite his urgency to find the intruder, Liberty continued its constant demands on his attention. He had to restart the thermal roll. Systems needed to be reset. Readings taken. Updates entered. Flight control's astrogation team wanted Liberty to perform a course-correction burn.

Two hours after the strike, the Liberty's orbit took it out of Bienvenido's umbra. Sunlight shone into the command module as the spacecraft slipped back into the full glare of the G1 star. Ry always wondered why Laura Brandt had bothered classifying the star at all; it wasn't like they had anything to compare it with. Apart from the planets, the sky above Bienvenido was completely empty.

Of course he'd seen pictures of the smudges the SVO and university observatories had photographed—galaxies: so far away that even Commonwealth starships would take decades to reach the closest. Invisible to the naked eye. Bienvenido was alone forever. The Void had made sure of that, banishing its woebegone exiles beyond any hope of return.

Something glinted amid the eternal black out there on the other side of the viewport—a tiny point of light far above the planet's distant crescent. Not a Tree. The Liberty wasn't oriented to let him see the Ring.

Ry unclipped his couch straps and slid over to the port. Sunlight was shining on
something.
An object in space. Distance undetermined. He grabbed the camera again and clicked off a few pictures before the thermal roll carried it out of view.

“Liberty two-six-seven-three, telemetry is showing you canceling the thermal roll. Do you have a problem?”

“It's here,” he said, inanely using a near-whisper. “It's with me. I can see it.”

“What is there? What are you seeing, Liberty two-six-seven-three?”

“I have visual contact. The alien…It's following me down.” Ry watched the flight attitude indicator, and stabilized the Liberty's attitude. When he looked out the viewport he found the gray glimmer where he'd seen it before.

His fingers moved over the console as if he were playing some complex piano music, flicking switches and clicking knobs around, always knowing what to do. Turning the radar toward the alien. The round scope lit up with a slight phosphorescent sheen. There was nothing there. He glanced out of the viewport, seeing the faint glimmer point. It wasn't bright, not like the refraction you got off the crystal substance Trees were made from, but certainly not dark like a Faller egg. There was still nothing on the radar. “Crud!”