A Night Without Stars (5 page)

“Did we do it?” Slvasta asked in trepidation.

“I think so,” she said. Her enhanced retinas scanned the area where the ships had been, unable to detect anything but the billowing ion haze.

“Thank you.”

She nodded acknowledgment. He'd actually meant it.

“Do we open the gateway back to Fanrith and bring
them
back?”

“No. Kysandra said they would find their own way home.”

“I see.”

“So how do we know if they've been successful?” Yannrith asked.

Always the suspicious one,
Laura thought. “You need to send the forward scouts into the landing zone to confirm the ships were destroyed. But Kysandra will have done the job. Trust me.”
I haven't told you half of the things biononics are capable of.

“All right.” Slvasta turned to one of the regimental colonels. “Send the scouts in.”

“Sir.” The colonel picked up a telephone and started talking into it.

“Time to finish this,” Laura said. “Let's get the floaters in here.”

“Yes, ma'am,” the weapons master acknowledged.

Slvasta and Javier exchanged a glance.

“Are you sure about this?” the political adviser asked.

“I've never been more sure of anything,” Laura told him solemnly. “If we don't eliminate Ursell, the Prime will just keep on coming. Once they confirm how vulnerable Bienvenido is, it won't be sixteen ships they send next, it'll be sixteen thousand.”

“I thought you said Ursell was ruined?” Slvasta said.

“It is.”

“So surely the ships we've just defeated are all they can send?”

“No,” Laura told him firmly. “What they've sent is just what they could put together in a hurry. The Prime that are left back on Ursell will expend whatever is left of their resources to transfer themselves here. They know they can survive and expand again on Bienvenido.”

“But the Fallers—” Javier began.

“What? They'll save us?” she asked scornfully. “Even they can't stand against the Prime. No, this is something that must be done.”

“All right. Just…be careful,” Slvasta said.

“I always am.”

They continued to look through the gateway as the bombs' devastation slowly cleared, the devil's light draining from the sky above Tothland. The firestorms raged below them, pumping dense smoke into the tormented air. Then the next two trolleys were being wheeled into the crypt by the same technicians who'd delivered the atom bombs.

The floaters were another part of
Vermillion
's cargo that had lain undisturbed since the landing. Like the gateways, floaters also generated wormholes, but they were intended to support the new colony's burgeoning manufacturing industry rather than provide transport. Slightly smaller than the CST BC5800d2s, they were designed to be dropped into a gas giant's atmosphere, where their force fields would expand, acting as a buoyancy system so their altitude could be selected with a good level of accuracy. That was necessary in a gas giant, where the atmospheric density meant the chemical composition was enormously varied, from almost pure hydrogen at the uppermost levels to complex hydrocarbons at the bottom. When the floater reached the required strata, its wormhole would open directly into a refinery, and a near-infinite supply of hydrocarbons would rush in, ready for conversion into whatever products the burgeoning colony needed.

The first time she saw them still in their protective transit shells, she'd thought she could use them to assist Bienvenido's petrochemical era, providing combustion engine fuel without the need for oil wells and shale mines. Then she'd hesitated, wondering if she could skip that entire stage by going directly to fusion and high-density batteries—and cut out decades of pollution. It was a good problem to have, taking her mind off the Faller threat and Slvasta's despicable regime.

The weapons technicians had to turn the floaters sideways to get them through the crypt's arched doorway. They were cylinders four meters in diameter, and two deep, with a concave center on one side. The casing was a gray metalloceramic mottled with turquoise blemishes, as if it were a living carapace. They'd been relatively easy to restore, with less component degradation than the gateways. She supposed that was due to the tough environment they were designed to work in.

Her u-shadow established a link to both of them, and interrogated their smartnets to run a final systems check. Like the CST BC5800d2, they were powered by a direct mass energy converter that could be fed by the superpressurized atmosphere they were immersed in. Exovision displays showed her they were fully functional.

She stared at them as the trolleys came to rest. She'd done good work, aided by information from the ANAdroids.
So no reason to delay, then.
Bollocks.

“All right then,” she announced. “Let's do this.”

“And there's no other way?” Javier asked.

“No.”

“You would kill an entire world?”

“Sonny, it's us or them.”
Again.

Slvasta held up a hand and gave Javier a sharp glance. “Laura knows what must be done. Without her…” He smiled ruefully. “It's just the risk. Please allow me to send some marines through with you.”

“They wouldn't be any help,” she said. “But thanks anyway.” Her u-shadow sent a new series of instructions into the CST BC5800d2.

The terminus shifted again. Exovision displays showed her the gateway's increased power consumption as the wormhole extended its range by eighty million kilometers. This time, the terminus judder was more pronounced.

A wan heliotrope light shone through the gateway, but there was nothing to see, just a haze. The terminus had opened deep inside Valatare's atmosphere. Laura studied her exovision displays as 3-D graphics fluctuated, with amber caution graphics streaming in. The force field was being subjected to a huge pressure. “Odd,” she muttered.

“Something wrong?” Slvasta asked. There was an edge to his voice, not anger for once, but fear.

“Not specifically.” Her u-shadow sent a fresh batch of instructions to the gateway, and the terminus shifted. She monitored the pressure against the gateway's force field, which was reducing rapidly. Then the haze cleared. The terminus had risen out of a cloud layer. It was as if they were looking out across an infinite cyan sky, roofed by another unbroken cloud sheet tens of kilometers above them. Mammoth hurricane-whorls chased through the gulf at colossal speed. Phenomenal lightning bolts snapped between them, rivaling solar flares in power.

Valatare was the sole gas giant orbiting this lost sun, ten million kilometers farther out than Bienvenido. At ninety-seven thousand kilometers in diameter, it was considerably smaller than Jupiter, but still massive. Whenever it was in conjunction, it created storms and tides the likes of which Bienvenido had never known before.

Laura frowned at the readings she was getting from the gateway—not the force field, but the wormhole itself. “That's not right.”

“What is it?” Slvasta asked. “Are there more aliens?”

“It's not that,” she assured him and everyone else in the crypt. Aliens were now Bienvenido's ultimate nightmare. They had a justifiable collective paranoia of monsters swooping down on their planet, she acknowledged.

In truth, she'd been worried by what might be lurking in Valatare's atmosphere. The theory she and the ANAdroids had come up with was that the Void used this lonely star as a place to banish the planet of any species who defied it in some way. A theory confirmed by the Vatni, who claimed to have seen Ursell emerge from nowhere more than a thousand years ago.

The Vatni themselves, though amenable to strategic deals with humans, were stubborn in the extreme, refusing to have their nature consumed by whatever malevolent intelligence lay at the heart of the Void. Ursell was a semi-habitable wasteland, ruined by a nuclear war. So typical of the Prime, whose existence was one of constant belligerence. Macule was in an even worse state than Ursell; whatever species used to live there must have wiped themselves out in a ferocious nuclear exchange millennia ago. Odd Trüb was a featureless barren planet with a thin atmosphere and a dozen tiny moons—the only ones in the system. She never had the time to work out its enigmatic presence. Asdil, orbiting much farther out than Valatare, was completely frigid under its nitrogen-methane atmosphere. Laura didn't know what kind of alien that could support; the Commonwealth had never found any cryolife, and there were no electromagnetic signals or thermal emissions indicating any kind of civilization. The same went for Fjernt, which was visually encouraging, with water oceans and 20 percent landmass, but the atmosphere was nitrogen and carbon dioxide; there was no free oxygen. Because it was unscathed by any conflict, Laura liked to think its aliens had found their way back to wherever they'd come from.
And if they can do it…

But from what she'd experienced so far, this isolated star system was turning out to be utterly lethal for humans.

“Then what's the problem?” Javier asked.

“It's the gravity.”

“The what?”

“Valatare's gravity. It's wrong somehow. The gradient is steeper than it should be this close; that's what threw the terminus emergence point off. The pressure is all wrong, as well. It might be the density—that blue color is from methane—but there's not enough to…This is weird.”

“Does that affect your plan?”

“No.” She locked the terminus coordinates and looked over her shoulder at the technicians clustered around the first floater. A final activation signal from her u-shadow—confirmed by the floater's smartnet—and she told them: “Go.”

They pushed hard, but the floater weighed a lot more than the atom bombs. It trundled slowly over the floor toward the gateway. Javier went over and added his considerable strength, soon followed by Yannrith, and then Slvasta. Several Air Force officers joined them until it resembled a rugby scrum piled up against the floater's dark casing. The machine began to pick up speed.

“Careful,” she warned as the leading edge slipped through the force field. The bulk of it went through, and Valatare's gravity took over, pulling sharply. Everyone let go and lurched back. The floater fell through and dropped away fast.

Laura stood close to the gateway so her link to the floater's smartnet would be maintained. Secondary routines in her macrocellular clusters monitored the telemetry, seeing a force field expand out around the tumbling cylinder, increasing its buoyancy. The rate it dropped began to slow, then stopped twenty kilometers below the terminus—a dark speck buffeted by the winds. “Okay, that's good. External pressure at the floater is thirty-three times Earth standard. That should do it.”

She suddenly realized that it was
now.
The inevitable moment had just crept up, which was maybe for the best. Laura knew she wasn't the bravest person; her first encounter with Fallers had shown her that. But she'd accepted her fate then, so once again—“Bring the second floater up, please,” she said.

“Can you really do this?” Andricea asked. “Destroy a whole world?”

“Believe it,” Laura said. She activated her biononic force field function. A thin layer of air shimmered around her, rippling like a heat haze before stabilizing. Her u-shadow delivered a new coordinate for the wormhole terminus.

It opened a hundred kilometers above Ursell. Laura looked down across an expanse of filthy clouds. Even the stratosphere above was clotted with particles, staining it a benign sulfurous yellow. The quick mapping run they'd performed weeks earlier had given them a rough outline of continents and seas, so the terminus should be above land—a region devoid of radio emissions and without any large ruins.

She told the gateway to lower the terminus. It slipped down through the clouds, kilometer after kilometer of dank gray vapor. Exovision displays showed her the radiation level rising as the terminus approached the ground. Then it was abruptly dropping through the base of the cloud. The ground was five hundred meters away—a wasteland of flinty stone cluttered with boulders. There was no vegetation, only ribbons of dark lichen clinging to fissures in the rock. Turgid rain drizzled down, giving every surface a dull oil-rainbow gleam.

Under Laura's direction, the terminus rotated to the vertical then turned 360 degrees, allowing her to study the entire area. “Looks clear,” she said.

“How long will you need?” Slvasta asked.

“Not long. A few minutes, maybe,” Laura said. She looked at the team standing behind the final trolley. “Stand by.”

“Do you have to go through?”

“Yes,” she said firmly, and walked through the gateway onto Ursell. The light level was almost as bleak as it had been back in the crypt. Drizzle spluttered against her force field, dripping onto the sodden ground. Exovision displays showed her the atmospheric composition, the toxins and contaminants. All easily filtered by the force field. She turned full circle. There were hills in the distance, with tiny scarlet lights scattered along a deep valley. Her fieldscan function couldn't detect any electromagnetic signals, though there was a spray of radiation coming from the valley, and also some strong magnetic fields. Having the Prime this close was still a worry, though. “Come on,” she muttered. “Get it through.”

On the other side of the gateway, men pushed hard against the trolley. The floater began to trundle along the crypt's stone floor.

Something moved. Laura's secondary routines caught it—a flicker above the valley with the red lights. She turned and faced it, her enriched retinas scanning frantically. Infrared was difficult; the cool rain wrecked the image. Light amplification routines cut in.

Flying machines. Small, blunt hemispheres, maybe twenty meters across, eight deep. Stubby fin-wings. Strong magnetic field. Ducted fans tilted to power them forward. Heading straight for her.