A Night Without Stars (52 page)

“Corilla,” Chaing said patiently.

She looked up. “Paid for from all the illegal deals the commune makes with local merchants, if you're interested.”

“Not in the slightest. How would you like to get out of here?”

“What I'd like would be for you two to eat crud and die.”

“You're angry with me.”

“Wow, nothing escapes the mighty PSR, does it?”

“I didn't send you here.”

“The PSR did. Whose uniform are you wearing?”

“I can get you out,” he repeated levelly.

Corilla pulled a fat oval-shaped bottle of dirantio out of the lowest drawer. “Gotcha!”

“I need your help.”

She finally looked right at him, her face animated with naked fury. “I helped you before. Now see where I am. Where I'm going to be for the rest of my life if I'm crudding lucky. This is the future I so
dreamed
of when I went to university.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Yeah, it just oozes from you.”

“Do you want to leave or not?” Jenifa snapped.

Corilla glared at her for a moment before flipping the bottle neatly so she was holding it by the neck. “Hey, bitch, how bad do you think I could rip your face up before your cripple boyfriend limps to the rescue?”

Jenifa pushed away from the door, hands becoming fists.

“Enough,” Chaing said. “I get it; you're pissed. Third and last time I ask: Do you want me to get you out of here?”

Corilla inhaled deeply. “To where?”

“Port Chana.”

“You're crudding kidding me!”

“No.”

“Why there?” Corilla asked suspiciously.

“You heard there was a new nest alert?”

“Yeah, we get news even here. And the nonexistent Warrior Angel brought that alert to a very public end at Hawley Docks, didn't she? Good job someone is genuinely helping the people of this world.”

“She and the people she helped escape have probably gone to Port Chana. I need to find them. I thought you'd like to help.”

“Help you do what?”

“Find the Warrior Angel. You'll be an informant, same as before. Tell us what's in all those messages the Port Chana Eliters are sending to each other.”

“You want me to betray the Warrior Angel to the PSR? Could my life get any better?”

“It's not her I'm interested in, it's the people she's protecting. The Fallers want them badly, and there's no telling what lengths they'll go to.”

“What people?”

“A man called Florian; we think he's developed some kind of weapon. The Fallers are reacting badly. Very badly.”

“You mean they're going to launch their Apocalypse?”

“I have no idea how they'll react. But—” He tapped the splints on the side of his leg. “They're serious enough to take on the Warrior Angel in broad daylight. We have to try and calm the situation. And to do that, I have to locate Florian and determine exactly what he's up to.”

“Right,” she said uncertainly.

“I have the authority to reinstate you at Opole University. But of course, there has to be a university left for you to return to…”

“Ha! Some choice, then.”

“I guess so.”

She held up the bottle. “I get to keep this.”

“Deal. Go and pack. You've got ten minutes before we drive out of here.”

Corilla sauntered past Jenifa, giving her a smug victory smile as she passed.

“Seriously?” Jenifa asked as the door shut behind Corilla. “She'll be broadcasting everything she knows about us to the radicals the second we arrive in Port Chana.”

“I sincerely hope so,” Chaing said, holding his crutch firmly, ready to lift himself from the chair.

“You expect her to betray you?”

“I'd be disappointed if she didn't. I want the Warrior Angel to know who's hunting her.”

“You want to meet her
again
?”

“Correct.”

“Why, Chaing? Look what happened to you last time.”

Chaing shoved down hard on the crutch, levering himself upright. “Next time it will be different. I know it's coming.”

Supper, served by the ANAdroids, was braised beef short ribs with portobello mushrooms, dusted in shallots and smoked folal cheese with a red wine jus, and served with buttered korril rice and steamed vegetables picked that afternoon from the farmhouse's garden.

Paula ate about half of her plate, enormously relieved that the impulse to completely stuff herself with whatever food she could grab had finally subsided. She did manage all of her raspberry crème brûlée, though.

The formal meal seemed oddly momentous, which she supposed was a realistic appraisal. What they were proposing was essentially going to usher in the end of an era.

While the ANAdroids were clearing away she followed Kysandra outside, back to the telescope. A gentle breeze was blowing in off the sea, playing soft discordant notes as it eddied up the tall cliff.

“I'm sorry about before,” Kysandra said sheepishly. “I was being unhelpful.”

Paula stared out across the estuary, where Port Chana glowed with a bright twinkling haze against the darkness. “You've spent two and a half centuries defending this world, then I come along and advise you to change everything. You're entitled to an emotional reaction.”

“Quite.” Kysandra took a sip of her dessert wine and peered into the telescope's eyepiece. “Although it was going to change anyway.”

“I'd like to ask you a favor.”

“What's that?”

“Florian. Let him down gently.”

Kysandra stood up and gave her a surprised glance. “You're concerned about Florian's love life? Why? Do you…”

“No. My feelings toward him are purely maternal.”

“That's—weird. He's just spent a fortnight being your father.”

“Welcome to Commonwealth aging issues.”

“Crud.”

“He's a good man. He stood up for me against incredible odds.”

“Then he deserves some happiness, surely.”

“He certainly does. I don't want him hurt, that's all. His emotional involvement is a lot higher than yours. You're his first true love.”

“He is rather sweet. And he might well be my last love. It's funny, how they all genuinely think you're going to save us.”

“And you don't?”

Kysandra shrugged and went back to the eyepiece. “Maybe if you'd turned up even fifty years ago, we might have had time. But you know as well as I do that we don't have the resources to achieve anything now. When the Fallers come, they will come in their millions. Tens of millions probably.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“Oh, no, I'm clean out of ideas. I made my mistakes a long time ago. Now I'll live with them. And die with them, I expect. But if you make a deal with Prime Minister Adolphus, it will just confirm the Fallers' fears.”

“Damned if I do, damned if I don't.”

“Is that a quote?”

“It is. I just don't know where from.”

“That's quite comforting, that you admit you don't know everything.” Kysandra lifted her head. “Do you want to see?”

“Certainly.” Paula walked over to the telescope and put her eye to the lens. It was centered on a faint swirl of light. “A galaxy?”

“The Commonwealth galaxy,” Kysandra confirmed. “Your home. I look at it every night it's in the sky. I get a silly degree of comfort knowing there are humans living there, that they'll carry on living even after we're wiped out. And…Sometimes I imagine him, looking up into the night from that planet he owns. I believe he's there, searching for Bienvenido, wondering where we are.”

“Him?”

“Nigel. Am I being stupid?”

“You're being human. That's never stupid.”

“Is he looking for us?”

“I can't answer that.”

“Yeah. I know. Don't want to dash my hopes.”

Paula straightened up and looked into the blank, black sky where the telescope was pointing. There was nothing there, nothing at all. “Twenty-three million light-years.”

“So the ANAdroids say.”

She looked toward the east, where the bright point of Ursell had risen. With her retinas on enhanced focus, she could actually see the solar-energized haze shimmering around its unnaturally thick atmosphere. “Laura certainly wasn't doing things by halves, was she?”

“Fireyear Day is an annual celebration,” Kysandra said. “It's a grand carnival in all the towns and cities.”

“Laura came up with a simple, swift solution. Using floaters like that was inspired.” Paula searched across the sky, seeing blue Aqueous, the gray-white glimmer that was Trüb, then almost directly overhead the pale-pink gleam that was Valatare. “And none of the other planets have native species we can ask for help?”

“No. At least, not that Laura could find while the wormhole was active, and the Space Vigilance Office hasn't picked up any signals since. They keep a good watch, too.”

“I could probably break the wormhole's codelock. I have routines that weren't even around when it was built.”

“What good would that do?”

“We could evacuate some people to Aqueous. Children and some guardians.”

“The island areas are small. You could only take a few thousand at best.”

“And Macule is a radioactive desert?”

Kysandra nodded and drank some more wine. “Yes. The ANAdroids call it nuclear winter. They had the really big dumb war—the one Earth managed to avoid.”

“We're all here because we were too belligerent or stubborn for the Void to tame.” Paula fixed Aqueous with a pensive stare. “We could send boats through the wormhole to Aqueous. They could anchor together, form a floating city. If we give every Eliter that goes with them Commonwealth technology files, they might be able to bootstrap their way up to a spacefaring civilization. Once they're in space they could build starships. Trouble is, most solar systems have asteroids and comets that can be mined. This has nothing.”

“Trüb has twelve tiny moons,” Kysandra said. “If your spaceships get there, they could mine them.”

Paula's secondary routines called up all the information the ANAdroids had on Trüb. “That's a strange one,” she murmured. Trüb was completely featureless. It had no mountains or basins; no oceans or even polar caps. Just a uniform gray wasteland—presumably of dust or sand, but even with a low-pressure argon–carbon dioxide atmosphere, there were no storms. And the twelve moons…It wasn't impossible for a planet Trüb's size to have twelve natural moons like that, but it was highly unlikely. “There is no ecosystem at all; no life. So if nothing lives on it, what's it doing here?”

“I have no idea.”

She began to review the other planets. Asdil: a solid world larger than Bienvenido, orbiting 740 million kilometers out from the sun, with a thick, cold nitrogen-methane atmosphere clotted with many cloud layers, denying any glimpse of the surface. Radio-silent.

Fjernt: forever in conjunction with Bienvenido on the other side of the sun. Another solid world, but with no free oxygen in its nitrogen–carbon dioxide atmosphere. Laura Brandt hadn't detected any radio transmissions on her brief exploration mission. Which was the only thing Paula cared about. The cellular biochemistry of a species was irrelevant; she wanted a technological civilization, someone who could help. If there were any sentients living on the worlds Bienvenido shared this lonely sun with, they weren't developed enough to come to their aid. All she was really doing was confirming what Laura Brandt had discovered when she drew up her plan to fight the Prime.

“Why do you need asteroids to mine?” Kysandra asked.

“Actually, we don't. If we can build ingrav and regrav systems, we could start mining the other planets directly and not have to come back here.” Paula sighed. “I'm not an industrialist. And it's all purely theoretical right now.”

“The floaters were intended for mining, weren't they?”

“Yes.”

“The two Laura used to kill Ursell are still working.”

“We'd have to get to them to change their operation. I wonder—the package that brought me must have some kind of ingrav. Using it might have to be part of the deal I offer Adolphus.”

Kysandra smiled drily. “Old times, getting Commonwealth spaceships back into space. But it would have to be careful orbiting Valatare; Laura said the gravity was wrong.”

“She said what?”

“Valatare's gravity is wrong.”

“Wrong how?”

“I think…The gradient was too steep.”

“How can—? When did she find this out?”

“When she opened the wormhole.” Kysandra grinned. “Actually, you can see for yourself if you want.”

“How?”

“One of the ‘technicians' helping Laura develop the atom bombs was Valeri. He was there in the crypt the day we defeated the Prime. Slvasta and his cronies didn't know what he was, so he was able to go on and work with the Manhattan Project. He offered some subtle guidance to build bigger bombs until they got the yield up to three hundred kilotons. Those are the ones the Liberty flights take up to the Ring to kill the Trees.”

Paula couldn't help the small twitch of her lips at Laura using the name
Manhattan Project.
“So you were behind the bombs and the Silver Sword?”

“This is my world, Paula. I'll defend it to the end.”

“I know. I do admire what you've done.” Her u-shadow opened a link to Valeri. “Could you show me your memory of Laura opening the wormhole to Valatare, please?”

The farmhouse's terrace rippled away, replaced by the crypt below the palace. A tense, tired Laura Brandt stood in front of the wormhole.

“Well?” Kysandra asked eventually.

Paula had to grip the telescope hard for balance; she thought her knees might give way. Her personality might be over a thousand years old, but her brand-new teenage body was still remarkably susceptible to emotional surges. “The baddest of them all,” she whispered.