A Night Without Stars (57 page)

As always, Stonal managed to maintain a neutral expression in the face of raw political greed. “Yes, sir.”

“Society will change once we're rid of the Fallers; everybody knows and accepts that. I just never thought it would be an issue for my premiership. But if we can control the factors that bring change—”

The doors behind Adolphus swung open, and five palace guard officers ran in.

“Sir,” the chief protection officer called breathlessly, “you must come with us. We're initiating a full security lockdown.”

“What's happening?” Adolphus said. Several telephones on his desk had started to ring, their red lights flashing.

“Is it the space machine?” Stonal snapped.

The chief gave him an annoyed look. “No. Prime Minister, we have to get you to the palace secure bunker right away.”

“The bunker?” Adolphus blurted. “Why?”

“We're under attack, sir.”

The taxi took Chaing directly from the café to Empale Street. By the time he got there, there were only nineteen minutes left until Jenifa was due to try to scout around on board the
Gothora III.
There should be time for him to make the phone call and get to the harbor in time. But not reach the top of the lighthouse.
She can handle herself.

With only a mild sensation of guilt, he checked the external safeguards to make sure no one had sneaked into the secure house.
Has the Warrior Angel actually been inside? She could probably walk straight through without tripping them.
The safeguards were intact, so he unlocked the door and went in.

He dialed the number and waited for the two-tone connection whistle, then dialed the numbers of the scramble code. The phone's blue light came on.

“This is Captain Chaing. Please connect me to Director Stonal. Top priority.”

“Captain Chaing, this is the section seven communications office, duty officer. Director Stonal is out of contact.”

“Then find him. I have to talk to him.”

“Chaing, I am officially informing you the Joint Regimental Council command have issued a code red one alert.”

“A…A code red one?”
Not possible.

“Yes. Confirm that now, please.”

“I—Yes, I confirm I've received code status.”

“Report to your combat duty positing, immediately. The code is currently being issued to all PSR offices.”

The phone went dead and Chaing stared at the handset in mortification. Code red one:
nuclear attack.

Stonal stood on the rim of the crater and looked down into what he imagined the rancid heart of Uracus must look like. The atomic bomb had blown a massive hole in the ground, centered where the reactor and bomb factory had been. Devastation around the edge had been bad enough—diabolical pressure waves hammering through the earth to throw up steep meandering ridges, then its raging fireball melting the surface sand and soil to a layer of glassy lava that crunched and shattered under his boots as he walked unsteadily across it. But inside…

The bomb had detonated almost nine hours ago now. Even through the thick insulation of his radiation suit, Stonal could still feel the heat of the explosion. His helmet's lead-glass visor tinted the outside world a mundane gray, but the bottom of the crater was still casting a subdued carmine radiance it was so hot. It even seemed as though the very bottom of the crater where the ground shimmered erratically might still be molten, but he was too far away to be certain.

Gazing across the seething desolation, he felt something akin to vertigo. It didn't have anything to do with height; this hit was pure fear-based. The Geiger counter clipped to the suit's belt was wailing painfully.

“Well, crud!” he exclaimed.

It had been more than a decade since he'd last been here—some security inspection. Now he was struggling to match the landscape with his memory. The low hills on the horizon were unchanged, but the rest of it…Distant forests that had once washed the foothill slopes like teal seas were now smoldering black tracts. Scrubland and lakes—all gone, devoured by this newborn radioactive wasteland. He remembered that trip here: driving up to the triple razor-wire fence, with Dobermans loose in the runs between the wire, and watchtowers every five hundred meters—constantly staffed no matter the time of day or weather. And there, sheltered inside the fences and minefields, the twin concrete domes of the breeder reactors, surrounded by squat bunkers where the Liberty mission bombs were painstakingly assembled. All gone. Reduced to vapor and ash that was now drifting out of the dark grumbling clouds that stretched as far as Portlynn three hundred kilometers south.

“What happened?” he asked the suited figure next to him. “Could the reactor have blown?”

“No, sir,” replied McDonnal, the Portlynn PSR station chief. “Reactors don't explode. Even the most catastrophic failure would only result in a meltdown. Not this. This was a three-hundred-kiloton atomic explosion. One of ours. And the detonation was deliberate. There are too many safeguards built in for it to be accidental.”

“They got in,” Stonal said.

“Yes, sir. They've been trying for two hundred years.”

“That doesn't excuse this lapse.”

“We'll never know exactly what happened here.”

Stonal raised an eyebrow as he glanced across the crater again. “You think?”

“My people would have fought them to the end. They must have brought overwhelming numbers. There's nowhere on Bienvenido more heavily guarded.”

Three more places actually,
Stonal mentally corrected.
The other two bomb factories, and Cape Ingmar.
“There's one person who could blast her way past an entire regiment if she wanted to.”

“The Warrior Angel?” McDonnal asked. “Even if she's real, why would she want to do this?”

Because this is the only weapon we have that she fears, and the politicians have begun talking about Overload.
“I've no idea. So let's just concentrate on this being a Faller raid.”

“We have a report of a convoy heading out about an hour before the blast.” McDonnal pointed toward the southwest. “Some farmers saw trucks driving away.”

“What sort of trucks?”

“The report said they were standard Nuclear Regiment vehicles.”

“Which means nothing. Was there a convoy scheduled?”

Even through the radiation suit's heavy cloth, McDonnal's shrug was visible. “The only people who know that were in the facility.”

“Uracus. Get on to the Nuclear Directorate. Immediately. They will know if that was a genuine scheduled convoy. No nuclear materials move anywhere on this planet without their authorization. And I also need to know how many bombs were stockpiled here.” It wasn't common knowledge, but the Portlynn facility also assembled the lower-yield, twenty-kiloton bombs designated for Operation Reclaim. The ones that would be used directly against Fallers if they did take over Lamaran.

“Yes, sir.”

They walked back over the ruined land to the Nuclear Regiment troop carrier that was waiting at the end of the thick black strip of gritty charcoal that had once been the road. This carrier was hermetically sealed and carried its own air supply to maintain a positive pressure inside, allowing it to operate in radiation zones. One of the technicians had plugged it into a surviving sweep-coms box at the side of the broken road.

Stonal went through the decontamination airlock, taking his time for the wash and flush cycles to clean the suit. This wasn't the kind of procedure you rushed. Once inside, he ordered the driver out of the cab, and closed the door before calling Adolphus, who was still in the emergency bunker under the palace.

“So what's happened?” the prime minister demanded.

“Worst-case scenario: A Faller nest stole some of our nukes.”

“Crudding Uracus. How many have they got?”

“I don't know. The Nuclear Directorate can tell us how many were stockpiled here. I'll have that information within the hour. There was some kind of convoy seen driving away just before the explosion. It doesn't look good.”

“What will they use them against?”

“Certainly the capital. I suggest we activate our nest alert isolation procedures. That's a good cover. Just don't allow any vehicle to approach closer than thirty kilometers—and that includes trains. We should also set up roadblocks outside the other bomb facilities, and Cape Ingmar.”

“I'll authorize that immediately.”

“Thank you. I'll get a team of agents from Portlynn's PSR office to start hunting for the convoy vehicles immediately—in fact, I'll just get all of them on it. Recovering the bombs has to be our top priority. I'll need Air Force cooperation.”

“You have it. But what do we do about the panic? It's getting bad in Varlan. Everyone knows a nuke went off.”

“No, they don't. They know there was an incident at a nuclear facility, that's all. Nobody can get within a hundred kilometers of the explosion; there are no photos, no eyewitnesses. Your press statement should be that a reactor failed and leaked, and that the scientists are getting it back under control. It's a terrible tragedy, but we're on top of it.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“I'll come straight back to the capital to coordinate the search.”

“Do you think we should move to Byarn now?”

“It's not that bad, sir. Not yet.”

Chaing left his crutches on the folding canvas chair as he took a walk around the lighthouse's big lens pillar. As much as he willed his damaged leg to be normal, putting weight on it was still enormously painful. One circuit limping around was enough, so he sat back down, cross that the exertion had made him perspire.

Outside, the weather was mirroring his mood. A strengthening wind was bringing dark clouds in from the Polas Sea to slide across the land. It was still a couple of hours until sunset, but the dwindling light hastened the evening forward. Breakers were surging all the way out to the horizon, as if Bienvenido were heading into conjunction with Valatare.

From his vantage point he could see Port Chana's entire fishing fleet sailing back into the harbor, which was quickly running out of mooring buoys. Many of them were riding high in the water, having abandoned any notion of completing their catches as the storm approached.

The boats were a complication he could do without. They were forming quite a bottleneck as they slowed just outside the long curving harbor wall to wait their turn to enter. The landing craft
Lanara
was anchored at the mouth of the Honorato Estuary with a full complement of marines on board under Major Danny. They were ready to intercept the
Gothora III
at Chaing's command. What until that afternoon would have been a fast charge forward was now going to be altogether more complicated.

The advancing storm was a problem Chaing hadn't planned for, though he was quietly pleased it was blowing in from the south. Nobody really believed the prime minister's official statement that the Portlynn facility had suffered a reactor leak, not an explosion. Whatever had actually happened, the atmosphere was full of radioactive particles—invisible, deadly—and that frightened people. Had the wind been blowing in from the north, he didn't like to think of Port Chana's reaction. A nighttime curfew had been running for the two days since the red one code was issued, but that was about the only material impact the Fallers' daring raid had on the city. Psychologically, it had been a lot worse, as Corilla had gleefully explained while she reported on conversations dominating the general band. The Eliters knew almost as much as Chaing did, and were happily spreading the rumor that the explosion was simply to cover the theft of more atom bombs. That it signaled the start of the Faller Apocalypse, and that Adolphus was preparing to run to Byarn and abandon everyone.

Their propaganda made Chaing very angry, in no small way because half of it was actually true. It didn't help that basic foods were getting harder to find, and prices were shooting up despite government prohibitions on such blatant profiteering. People were stockpiling. Absenteeism was hitting government services and public transport.

Through all the city's disruption and worry, Captain Fajie's observation team had stoically maintained their watch over the Faller nest in the harbor, who in turn never faltered as they spied on the
Gothora III.

“They're getting ready to depart,” Jenifa reported. She lowered the big binoculars as Chaing bent down to look through the camera's viewfinder. Sure enough, the
Gothora
's crew were on deck in bright-yellow sou'westers, untying the hawsers that secured the ship.

“In this weather?” Chaing demanded. The ship wasn't scheduled to depart until tomorrow.

“I know, but this is good cover. The
Lanara
will have trouble tracking them in the storm.”

“Crud. We need to keep
Gothora
under observation; neither of them is on board yet.”

“So do you think
Gothora
will rendezvous with them out to sea?”

“Possibly.”

“She has to get on board somehow. I had a good look around their cabins. The only people on there right now are the crew.”

Chaing had been mildly suspicious about how easily Jenifa's mission had gone, but kept quiet about it. “If the Warrior Angel didn't want you to see her, then you wouldn't. And Giu alone knows what capabilities Paula has.”

“Who is Paula?”

“The Commonwealth girl.”

“I thought her name was Essie. That's what we were told.”

Chaing kept his eye to the viewfinder, hoping his stillness wasn't betraying him. Fat chance; she was PSR-trained in interrogation. She knew all the body's tells.
Especially mine.
Stupid. Stupid!

“Chaing? Why did you call her Paula?”

Nothing for it; he would have to confess. He looked directly at her, seeing the mass of suspicion churning in her thoughts. And her hand was slipping into her jacket—but not to her holster.
That's a comfort response. So what is she reaching for?
“Because she told me.”

“
Who
told you?”

“The Warrior Angel.”

“You are crudding joking! You spoke to her? When?”

“A couple of days ago, just before we got the red one code.”

Jenifa sagged as if she'd absorbed a physical blow. “And you didn't tell me?” she raged.

“I have a section seven mission here, Corporal. You're not cleared for it.”

“Screw you!”

“It was only for a minute. Stop panicking.”

“You met her,” Jenifa grunted as if repetition would make it more acceptable. “Talked to her. What did she say? And don't give me any section seven classified crud. This is
me.
”

“She asked me to arrange it so she could talk to Stonal.”

“Why?”

“She wants to make some kind of deal.”

“A deal?”

“I know. Wild, huh? But Stonal actually wants to talk to her, too—so maybe not so crazy after all. This is politics at the master-class level.”

“What did Stonal say?”

“I haven't been able to contact him. His office says he's traveling.”

“Do you think he's been…?”

“Taken out? It had occurred to me. What better way to start the Apocalypse than eliminating our top officials, especially PSR ones?”

“But the second in command would just replace him.”

“Yes, which is why I've been holding on. His office says he'll be back to talk to me this evening Varlan time. Another four hours.”

“But…” She gestured at the
Gothora III.
“They're leaving now.”

“I know.”

“She's on that crudding ship, isn't she? I missed her.”

“No, she was talking to me just before your infiltration mission.”

“How soon before?”

“A few minutes.”

“So…she was up here?”

“No. I was in a café to meet Captain Fajie.”

Her hand came down on the sniper rifle, knuckles whitening as her fingers closed on the stock. “Were you up here covering me or not?”

“You got off without any trouble, didn't you?”

“You crudding bastard!”

“Contact with the Warrior Angel is our number one priority.”

“How did she know how to find you? Wait! Does she know we're watching the
Gothora
?”