A Night Without Stars (37 page)

Ry Evine watched the crowds ebb and flow along the street below his wide sash window. As soon as he'd arrived in Opole, he'd rented a one-bedroom flat above a clothing store on Broadstreet, almost directly opposite the imposing gray stone monolith that was the PSR office. As far as sheer chutzpah went, he doubted it could be beaten. Watching the people who would be on the alert for him, separated by sixty meters of road, two tramlines—and, on the second day of his vigil, a throng of angry protesters.

Their chanting and singing had been persistent and inventive. He'd never known there were so many songs about freedom, and what had happened to Slvasta's balls. The banners they waved were direct, too. Demands for the release of prisoners, insults, lewd caricatures…

In a strange way he found it rather pleasing that so many people were prepared to stand up to the PSR. His incredibly sheltered life in the Astronaut Regiment had fostered the assumption that the PSR's power was unchallenged, that they were somehow invincible, infallible. His interview with Stonal had certainly reinforced that view; even the Astronaut Regiment was subject to PSR authority.

It had taken his mad trip to Opole to make him realize just how much of his life had been governed by fear. First twenty-six years concealing his own precious secret from them, and now defying their deceit. That first day's train journey he'd sat hunched up on his seat, silent and numb, waiting to be caught.

But it seemed the PSR weren't so fearsomely efficient as he'd been led to believe. After all, they'd need to be told he'd gone missing—and who was going to do that? Certainly not General Delores, nor Anala. All government organizations were heavy with bureaucracy, even the Astronaut Regiment. And with everyone jittery about the PSR's strong interest in Liberty flight 2,673, his absence from events and training sessions would not be remarked on; nobody wanted to ask questions about things they shouldn't be asking. With luck, it might take a week before his absence was officially noticed.

By the time the Opole express pulled into Gifhorn for refueling, he'd been gone for nearly two days. With that much time to think, he'd realized his initial flight from Cape Ingmar had been far too impulsive, and he was actually woefully unprepared. Anathema to an astronaut. To confuse his tracks a little, he booked into a hotel using his own name, and had his first shower in way too long. He never went back to the hotel, but the registration form would be forwarded to the local PSR office as a matter of routine. When the alert was finally raised, they would waste a great deal of time following that false lead.

After the hotel, he visited three banks and wrote himself a check for cash at each one. Only one cashier—at the County Agricultural Bank—recognized him (which he had mixed feelings about). She asked for an autograph for her son, which he obliged, then put his finger to his lips. “I'm here on a break,” he told her quietly, “before the whole Treefall triumph tour kicks off next week. They always give us a few days to ourselves after a flight.”

“I understand, comrade,” she whispered back, delighted to be his confidante.

The checks gave him enough cash to see him through a few weeks, if he was careful; maybe even a month. If he hadn't found any trace of the alien spaceship by then, he knew it was all over anyway.

In the bank, he committed his first theft. A man in his mid-thirties with a full beard was getting irate with the next cashier, something about payments on a tractor-trailer. A whole array of papers were spread out across the counter to prove his point. Ry walked past him, fussing with his jacket—and deftly lifted the man's ID papers from the counter as the argument over finance grew even more heated. A fast confident conjuring motion as if he'd been practicing for years.
Maybe I missed my calling.

Back at the city's train station he opened the papers and studied them. His victim was Tarial, from some small rural town Ry had never even heard of. The small black-and-white photo on the ID might be a problem, but Ry hadn't shaved for four days now, so his stubble should give him a reasonable chance of passing a cursory inspection. It wasn't going to get any better.

The ticket clerk never even looked at the proffered ID when he bought a ticket for the Bautzen express. Forty-two minutes later his train was pulling out of the station at the beginning of a journey that traveled the first thousand kilometers overnight to Opole, before starting on its final twelve-hundred-kilometer leg south to Bautzen.

They were still 120 kilometers north of Opole as dawn broke, shining its fresh rosy light into the carriage. The guard switched on the tannoy and announced that Opole had enacted a nest alert, and that all passengers would be inspected by the PSR before they were allowed to leave the station.

It was an anxious fifteen minutes in the queue that wound along the platform at the side of the express before he reached the barrier. A very bored and tired junior PSR officer took a fast look at his ID papers, barely glanced at his heavily stubbled face, and waved him on past the armed guards.

Opole had come as something of a revelation to Ry. Cape Ingmar and Port Jamenk were completely devoid of Eliters. Here in a much older city, where the Eliter community was large and well established, their pings and links were thick in the air. Ry had never sent out a ping in his life. The closest he'd ever come to embracing his heritage was accepting basic management routines from the general communication bands, which allowed him to organize his memory in a more orderly fashion. After that, he'd closed himself off to all electromagnetic communication.

Once he was in Opole, practical considerations overcame his lifelong refusal to involve himself with the Eliter community. He still wasn't going to link with anyone, but he did search through the general communication bands for upgrades to the routines he already had. To his delight, he discovered a whole section given over to the free distribution of files containing education bundles and upgrades for secondary thought routines. Intriguingly, every file's identity icon had the visual image of the legendary Warrior Angel. She was still a huge idol for the Eliters.

With some of those new routines operating in his macrocellular clusters, he began to filter the news and gossip that were flung about so gleefully by the city's maligned and abused underdogs.

The first thing he learned was that none of them believed the nest alert was actually about a nest. There had been a regiment deployment among the Sansone foothills the previous week, but oddly no corresponding Fall warning had been issued.

That's my alien spacecraft landing, it has to be.

The main focus of the nest alert was an Eliter called Florian, who according to the few Opole residents who remembered him was a harmless nonentity. Florian had been a forest warden in a valley where the regiment had been deployed. Speculation as to whether he had now Fallen reached a fever. Some pointed out there was no evidence; they were countered by others who suggested the PSR simply wouldn't mount an operation of this scale for anything other than a nest.

Florian's the key, then,
Ry decided.
He must have encountered the alien spaceship. It must have given him something—information or a piece of technology the PSR are desperate to recover, to make sure nothing on Bienvenido changes.

News leaked that it was Captain Chaing himself who'd been appointed to lead the hunt. Chaing: the one who'd recently faced down a whole nest of Fallers at Xander Manor. So the threat was real and serious. Then it came out that Florian was Lurji's younger brother. Okay, so maybe he hasn't Fallen, but he's certainly pissed off someone high up in government. Typical of that family; no thought as to how the rest of us will suffer. To Uracus with that defeatism; go, Florian.

At the time that argument broke out, Ry had just moved into his rented flat on Broadstreet and was settling down to watch the PSR. The general band was alive with stories about a car chase in the city. Visual files showed some kind of ancient, battered saloon moving at dangerous speed along narrow streets, being chased by sheriff patrol cars. It ended in a spectacular pileup.

Nothing much happened after that. But early the next morning, joint PSR and sheriff teams started to systematically arrest Florian's old friends, hauling them from their homes without any valid charge or even a warrant. Then Florian's mother was arrested. Almost immediately a crowd appeared in Broadstreet below Ry's flat, their chants growing louder. Within an hour, their numbers had expanded dramatically. Traffic was blocked. Even the trams had to slow to a crawl. The sheriffs hung back, unwilling to intervene and make it worse. It was perfect for Ry; their presence put him next to the heart of Eliters' gossip about the whole nest alert. And they didn't hold back what they were broadcasting across the general band.

Sometime around midday, Castillito was released to a huge outbreak of cheering as she emerged from the front entrance. After that, the crowd thinned out considerably.

Fresh gossip had it that the PSR was shifting their attention to gang members, specifically Billop's crews. Ry sat patiently by his window, meticulously organizing and indexing all the information accumulating in his storage lacuna, noting who was wanted, and their position and relevance. Watching, waiting.

It was evening, with an erubescent twilight claiming Broadstreet, when the man came down the short steps out of the PSR office. He hunched his shoulders as if frightened by the hard core of protesters who were still stubbornly clustered on the opposite side of the road and immediately slunk off along the pavement away from the big domineering building.

Ry was interested; that was certainly no PSR officer coming out at the end of his shift; the furtive behavior simply didn't match. His eyes strained against the dim illumination, filter and magnification routines sharpening the image. Then a couple of men got out of a van parked farther along Broadstreet. The man stopped and looked around at them. Ry finally got a reasonable look at his face. His new visual recognition routines kicked in, zipping through files and general band streams to find a match. Perrick: one of Billop's senior lieutenants, arrested earlier for questioning.

The two men from the van now stood on either side of Perrick, who was severely discomforted. Ry could see that in his body language.

Crudding Uracus, they're snatching him! In the middle of the street, outside the PSR headquarters!

It was so incongruous, so
wrong,
that Ry knew it was important. Without thinking, he ran out of the flat and down the rear stairs to the alley at the back. Renting the tuk-tuk had taken more than half of his cash, but as soon as he climbed into it at Opole station, he'd known it was the perfect way to get around the city unnoticed. They were everywhere all the time, yet completely unseen.

The little three-wheeled vehicle trundled out of the alley spluttering oily smoke as all its kind did. Nobody paid him any attention at all. He was just in time to see the van doors shut. He turned toward it as it pulled out from the curb.

A street map of Opole was another gift from the general band. He tracked his own position as the van drove steadily out of the city center and headed north toward the river Crisp. After twenty minutes they turned into Midville Avenue, which ran parallel to the old Hawley Docks along the waterfront. Back in the Void days, those docks had been a source of great wealth for the district's merchants, who had spent their money lavishly along Midville Avenue, creating an extravagant mix of high-rise tenements, plush homes, fancy offices, and commercial properties. After the Great Transition, the nature of trade and commerce changed drastically as the economic equality laws were brought in, and Hawley Docks was designated part of the state rationalization plan. Fewer ships used them, wealth and jobs drained away to the city's central docks, and the neighborhood declined in every sense.

Ry stared up at the once-elegant façades as he followed the van. Judging by the number of windows that were lit, nearly half of the tenement flats were unoccupied. Several of the commercial buildings were boarded up; offices had heavy iron bars over their grimy windows, doors protected by equally sturdy metal gates. The huge old walwallow trees that lined the avenue hadn't been pruned in decades, allowing their thick boughs to spread over the street to create an intermittent roof of furry ginger leaves. Trunks and roots were now so thick they were lifting the pavement slabs and cobbles, making the ride bumpy.

The van pulled up outside a five-story townhouse of dark-red brick. Ry rode past, taking in as much as he could. The upper levels of the townhouse were invisible behind the walwallow, while the big bay windows on the ground floor shone with light. There was a discreet scarlet-and-violet neon sign curving over the broad door:
CAMERON'S
. A couple of beefy men in smart black suits stood outside.

The van doors opened, and Perrick was escorted to a narrow set of iron stairs at the corner of the house that led down into a narrow sunken courtyard running along the side of the building. Then Ry had to stop looking back before it became obvious.

He studied the street map in his exovision and turned off down Yenkoy Street, seventy meters farther along from the club on the other side. Half of the alleys and service lanes behind Midville Avenue were so narrow and decrepit they didn't even feature on his street map. Weeds and creepers were colonizing every wall and mound of refuse, producing a decaying arena for bussalores and feral cats to fight over. The tuk-tuk puttered along the confined maze of dank passages until Ry was behind one of the larger tenements. He wheeled the tuk-tuk into one of its many deserted outbuildings and made his way cautiously to the rear door.

A third-floor tenement had no door; the rooms inside looked like a domestic battlefield of broken furniture and moldy carpets. Something smelled really bad, and Ry had no desire to investigate the source. The lounge was down a short corridor, which shielded it from any view from the tenement's central stairwell. Several panes in the tall window were empty. He peered up over the rim and had a perfect view of Cameron's. Even better, he could see right down the iron stairs that led to the sunken courtyard. The van that had delivered Perrick was gone.