A Night Without Stars (6 page)

“Bollocks,” she grunted. She twisted around. The floater was almost at the gateway. “Move it!” she yelled. Nobody seemed to hear her. Her u-shadow transmitted a crude analog radio signal. “Hurry! They're coming. Push!”

The signal must have gotten through, roaring out of the tannoys. The scrum pushing the trolley strained hard. Slvasta and half a dozen officers added their strength once again. The front of the floater emerged through the gateway.

A maser beam struck Laura. Her force field stiffened for an instant, flaring green. Amber warnings zipped across her exovision. Rain flash-vaporized around her, cloaking her in a seething steam squall.

“Double bollocks.” The beam was strong, but her force field could withstand it relatively easily.
From this distance.
Another beam struck her. The fliers were still seven kilometers away. She faced them, frowning with determination, bringing her arms up like some pre-Commonwealth priest-queen. Her biononic field function sent out a disruptor pulse. Ionization made the wet air flare purple-white as if a lightning bolt had just discharged. She fired again. Again.

Alien fliers tumbled out of the sky. The remaining fliers broke formation fast, shooting up away from the valley, accelerating into the dank camouflage of the rain and cloud base.

Behind her, the trolley carrying the floater cleared the rim of the gateway. It tilted down slightly and its small wheels dug into the wet ground. The team pushing it strained with all their might, but Laura could see it wasn't going to budge.

“Oh, triple bollocks.”

Her u-shadow linked her to the CST BC5800d2's smartcore, and the terminus shot upward thirty meters. The floater fell out, smashing onto the ground five meters away from her and crushing the trolley. She looked up to see Slvasta and Javier standing at the edge of the terminus, staring down anxiously. She gave them a quick wave, hoping to reassure them. Another maser blast hit her. Her field function scan backtracked it easily. The flier was hovering in the cloud two kilometers above. She hit it with a disruptor pulse.

Her u-shadow established a link to the floater's smartnet. Its force field strengthened.

Pity there's no way of using it to kill the individual fliers,
she thought. When she glanced back at the valley, she could see another flock of fliers shooting up into the clouds. These looked even bigger.

Laura activated the floater's wormhole, feeding in a coordinate that should see its terminus opening above Valatare. Somewhere from above, the fliers opened up a salvo of electronic warfare pulses. They were crude but still managed to degrade her link with the floater. Smoking debris from the flier she'd destroyed began to hail down around her. Her scan pinpointed the sources of the electronic warfare pulses, and she responded with more disruptor fire.

Then the floater's wormhole opened: a sapphire haze streaked with white strands. Exovision displays showed her the terminus at the far end reaching for Valatare.

Eight fliers dropped from the base of the clouds. They were more than a kilometer away and coming down fast. Another cohort dropped down on her other side. They were all emitting strong electronic warfare distortion pulses, trying to fuzz whatever sensors she had. It was good, but not good enough to deflect Commonwealth systems. She blew the first group apart, its glaring fireball swelling out. The surging red light showed her
things
scampering over the drab wilderness.

Four stumpy legs, a fat pear-shaped body wearing some kind of black-glitter armor, with sensor stalks sprouting from the crown like whip antennae weighed down with electronic modules on their tips. No mistaking them:
Prime motiles.
The memory was ingrained into the human psyche after a war that had brought the Commonwealth to the brink of extinction.

No wonder the Void shat them out.

Laura blew up another flier. Prime motiles were scuttling out of all the other hemispheres that had landed. With the jerky way they moved, zigzagging from boulder to boulder, it was like watching a charge of giant crustaceans. There was only silence around her, except for swift coded radio bursts. She emitted a powerful jamming signal and watched with satisfaction as they all stopped moving for several seconds. The Prime weren't a hive mind, but the motiles certainly qualified as a herd, functioning best while under direct control from the immotiles—who were the herd brains as well as the egg layers.

The smartnet on the floater above her reported it had established a real-time link to the Valatare floater through the wormhole. Her u-shadow was in direct control of both of them.

Now for the tricky part.
Laura directed the Ursell floater's terminus toward the Valatare floater, at the same time reconfiguring the Valatare floater's mechanism. She wanted to turn it into a stable anchor for the Ursell floater's wormhole rather than generate its own.

The motiles started to move again. Her fieldscan function detected small objects flying toward her on ballistic trajectories. The scan identified a small quantity of uranium inside each of them. “Holy fuck!” Her secondary routines took over, running in parallel, identifying the mini-nukes arching through the air, and slammed out over a dozen disruptor pulses in less than two seconds.

More than twenty maser beams stabbed down, hitting the floater. Its force fields resisted easily. She couldn't waste time targeting the fliers overhead, but this all-out saturation attack was going to overwhelm her pretty quickly.

Her exovision was showing her the wormhole terminus easing slowly to the Valatare floater. The engagement procedure was working, helping to reel it in. Just a couple more minutes, and the gateway to the crypt and safety was a simple jump away…

But she had to be here, had to maintain a direct link with the floaters so her u-shadow could manage the incredibly complicated procedure. More mini-nukes came streaking toward her. Her routines knocked each of them out.

A dazzling flash erupted five kilometers away. Her force field turned opaque to cope with the monstrous gamma pulse. Data flowed across her exovision: The yield was about four kilotons.
Survivable.

She watched the mushroom cloud ascending, finding its grotesque seething shape oddly elegant, as if seeing a legend reborn. The ground around her was suddenly steaming. Then the blast wave reached her, a rolling eruption of sand and small stones hurtling across the wasteland. She flung herself down. Her force field strained into a dull rouge as it fought the pressure slam. The screaming storm began to tip the floater up. She ordered it to expand its force field, and watched it take off, dwindling away into the sky, flipping around and around in the violent air. Her link remained intact.

Laura rolled over, seeing the BC5800d2's terminus still hovering thirty meters above the ground, with long fronds of dust and vapor flashing across it. She couldn't risk its force field being overloaded by Prime weapons. The radiation and pressure surge would kill everyone in the crypt—and probably smash half the palace to pieces, too.

With a sense of bitter inevitability, she knew what she'd have to do next.

Slvasta was there, pressed up against the force field, watching aghast. Her u-shadow transmitted an analog signal again.

“For crud's sake, Slvasta, pardon Bethaneve!” she sent. “This is a big bad universe, you've seen that for yourself now, so you can't go through it jumping at shadows. You have got to dial down your paranoia. Grow up, think logically, plan ahead. You have to defeat the Fallers, kill the bastard Trees. Build the atom bombs and get them up there into the Ring—any way you can. With the Trees gone, there'll be no limits to what your world can achieve. Do it!”

She saw him shouting at her, saw the anger and fright on his face. Her u-shadow linked to the BC5800d2, shutting down the wormhole and codelocking its smartcore. The terminus shrank to nothing then winked out in a purple ember of Cherenkov radiation. Her fieldscan function caught five more mini-nukes in flight. Secondary targeting routines zapped them.

At last, the Valatare floater's smartnet reported it had anchored the wormhole from Ursell. The connection between the two planets was open and stable.

All right. Now we're getting somewhere!

Over two hundred Prime motiles were advancing on her from all directions. More fliers were ascending from the valley. Twenty-five accelerated after the floater as it spun lazily through the air, gradually rising—four hundred meters high already.

Another mini-nuke detonated on the ground three kilometers away. Then a third went off.

Laura sent another batch of instructions into the linked floaters. The final procedure had to be enacted. Then the first of the new blast waves struck her, sending her rolling helplessly across the sharp rocks until she crashed into a boulder.

Pinned there by the wailing superheated wind, with her force field fizzing aquamarine, she stared upward. The blasts had torn the clouds from most of the sky, allowing her to see the floater and its shimmering force field bubble. The explosions were swatting it about brutally, sending it skipping higher and higher. Her u-shadow initiated the final sequence, and the wormhole's diameter began to expand. She watched a plume of the gas giant's hydrogen atmosphere come squirting out. Thin at first, then gradually getting wider, but still the colossal pressure was maintained. Her mouth split open in a smile. It was acting like a rocket exhaust, accelerating the floater upward. And the wormhole diameter continued to expand—a hundred meters wide now. Then bigger. The flow of gas was fierce and undiminished, backed by the incredible pressure of the gas giant's atmosphere. And the fringes of the massive gas plume were bursting into stark blue flame as the hydrogen finally mixed with Ursell's oxygen, creating a fire halo.

Another mini-nuke detonated. The closest yet. Laura left the ground, spinning over and over in the glowing air before crashing down painfully. Her exovision medical readouts blinked up a series of amber warnings. Biononics shut down nerve paths, closing off the pain.

The immotiles must be using the motiles as carriers,
she thought, sending them crawling along ridges and depressions to infiltrate her defensive perimeter, sacrificing them. Which was what the Primes did; individual motiles were valueless.

The wormhole was two hundred meters wide now, its roar rivaling the awesome soundwall of the nukes. Laura ran a systems diagnostic on the two floaters. Everything was functioning very smoothly, all components within tolerance, gas feeding easily into the mass energy converter.

Four hundred meters wide, and the sky above her was a single layer of elegant indigo flame.

“It will never stop,” she broadcast to the Primes in their own neurological code. And started to laugh. It wasn't quite true, of course, Valatare's atmosphere wasn't infinite, but there was more than enough to crush and burn the Primes a thousand times over.

Her link to the Ursell floater was still working, which surprised her. She suspected the local immotile clusters were analyzing what was happening, trying to decide what action to take. Demoting her priority status.

She started downloading her personal memory store into the floater's smartnet for safekeeping.

Which has to be the universe's most desperate roll of the dice.

The floater was seven kilometers in altitude, and its wormhole 680 meters in diameter—and still widening. After analyzing the component loading factors, she'd settled on halting the expansion at five kilometers in diameter. The floaters should be able to maintain that indefinitely.

The Primes launched a barrage of mini-nukes up at the catastrophic incursion.

“Pissing in the wind, boys,” Laura called out with manic cheerfulness as she deactivated her force field.

Ten mini-nukes exploded simultaneously above her—

Captain Chaing, of the People's Security Regiment, saw
her
in the crowd not twenty meters in front of him, and froze in shock. It was a joyful noisy crowd spread out along Broadstreet—thousands of people determined to enjoy the night's festivities. Today was Fireyear Day: a public holiday for the whole world to celebrate the time when, 257 years ago, Ursell's entire atmosphere burned and dear Mother Laura sacrificed herself to save Bienvenido. That was an event worth celebrating, and Opole's residents were certainly going for it.

Chaing was new to the city; the PSR—People's Security Regiment—had only reassigned him from Portlynn two months ago. He'd thought it a drab provincial town, and spent those grim months wondering if he'd somehow pissed off his superiors and been sent here as punishment. But today all that had changed. First there was the procession of big colorful floats through the city center; then as dusk came bands claimed the street junctions, playing loud and fast music, and unlicensed stalls miraculously appeared to serve the excited people some truly throat-killing liquors. Half the city had turned out in bizarre and wondrous costumes, singing and dancing along the streets. The grand civic firework display was about to start.

It was a perfect time for any clandestine activity, which was why he'd arranged to meet the undercover agent in the Nenad Café on LowerGate Lane. His route took him along Broadstreet, and there she was, his own personal ghost. But in the flesh. He stood there numbly as the merry singing people swirled around him, watching her. She was side-on to him, face heavily shadowed under her wide-brimmed hat, with her Titian hair braided into a neat tail that fell down her back. But he knew that profile; he could recognize her anywhere. Just to confirm it, she wore her brown leather coat, the one that came down to her ankles. And now she was walking away from him. That jolted him into action. He hurried after her.

Will I finally see her smile?

Chaing had seen her just once before, three decades ago, but that vision had haunted him ever since. He couldn't stop it. Right from the start he'd been cursed with an excellent memory. And out of all the moments that made up his life, her face was the most vivid recollection…

He'd been five years old, playing in the filthy alley behind their tenement block, when he tripped to sprawl across a mound of earth that turned out to be a bussalore nest. He'd screamed in terror as the vile rodents emerged from the dislodged dirt, squeaking and spitting.

Tiny stars of many colors sparkled behind his eyes, merging to form the picture of a beautiful lady with red hair. And abruptly a voice told him:
Stand up, darling. Bussalores are intimidated by anything larger than themselves.

Chaing scrambled to his feet and stared down at the nasty lean
things
slithering around his ankles. They regarded him for a moment, their noses twitching and sharp little teeth bared, before slinking away through a hole in the wall.

He was still standing in the same spot, trembling in shock, when his mother came hurrying out of the tenement a minute later.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “You did the right thing standing up. Bussalores are horrible things, but they're basically cowards.”

“Was that you?” he asked incredulously. “Did you tell me what to do?”

His mother smiled nervously. “It's your clever memory again, darling. I've told you several times what to do if you see a nest of bussalores.”

She had never said anything of the sort. He knew that. He would have remembered.

“But there was a lady,” he said with a five-year-old's insistence. “She was very pretty.”

His mother pointedly looked both ways along the alley. It was empty. “Nobody here, darling. You must have imagined her.”

“I didn't,” he persisted, upset that his mother wouldn't believe him.

She gave him a worried glance. His mother always looked harried or tired.

“There is a legend,” his mother said slowly. “If I tell you about it, will you promise me not to repeat it, not to anyone, not even Daddy?”

“I promise,” he said solemnly.

“People say that there is a Warrior Angel who watches over this world. She protects us from the Fallers, among other things.”

“But I thought the regiments and the Liberty astronauts guard Bienvenido.”

“They do, darling, and they're magnificent. But sometimes we need a little extra help.” She put her hands on his shoulders and gave him a grave look. “Now, this is the important part: The government doesn't really approve of the Warrior Angel, because she's not one of them. And they get angry with her because she doesn't always do what they say. So that's why we don't tell them if we see her. And we don't tell Daddy, either, because we don't want to worry him, do we? This is our super secret, you and me, and we'll keep it forever, all right?”

Chaing didn't like the idea of upsetting Daddy—Daddy who had a short temper and never hesitated to use his belt to beat Chaing when he did something wrong. And he seemed to do a lot of things wrong, no matter how hard he tried not to. “Yes,” he agreed solemnly. “She's our secret.”

His mother died three years later—on a night when his father came home drunk again, and started hitting her. That night she was standing at the top of the stairs when the vicious punches began to land. She fell, breaking her neck before she'd tumbled halfway down.

A court took less than a day to find his father guilty of murder, and sentence him to life in the Pidrui Mines.

Chaing was placed in an orphanage. By then, like all children on Bienvenido, he knew not to give away any secrets about himself; not his memory, not his vision of the Warrior Angel, nothing that might be regarded as suspect. On Bienvenido, suspicion was always followed by accusation—and soon after that the arrival of PSR officers.

Every child brought up by the state went on to be employed by the state; there was no question, no choice. You took the tests and waited for your assessment results when the career officer told you how the rest of your life would be spent. Chaing's IQ was measured as slightly above average (never high enough to be suspect), and his two-year compulsory regimental service was admirable, so he was sent to the PSR officer cadet training college. At which point, he realized just how lucky he'd been to escape his new employer's attention.

Not that he was a filthy Eliter. But some distant ancestor must have made a bad marriage choice that, by luck or chance—or more likely subterfuge—had escaped the PSR's comprehensive files.

So he'd inherited a good memory through no fault of his own. But that just meant he could be a more effective PSR officer and devote his life to tracking down Faller nests, saving citizens as he was sworn to do.

And as for the Warrior Angel, his mother was right: She was just a legend. One the Eliters incorporated into their criminal propaganda. Which was why he was always on the lookout for her.

Except…his recall was flawless. He really had seen her as a vision, wearing a long brown leather coat that moved with the ease of silk, her red hair falling over her shoulders as if she had a halo of fire, while his memory held her lips forever poised on the verge of a smile. And that vision troubled him. Badly.

A lesser man might call it
obsession.

Chaing started to push through the partying crowd, heedless of the annoyed looks as he knocked shoulders. The ghost girl was ten meters away now, slipping through clusters of laughing people with the greatest of ease. As he closed on her, his initial astonishment gave way to anger. She'd left him alone for thirty crudding years, until he'd practically convinced himself all she'd ever been was a child's stress-induced fantasy. Now here she was again. And given he was now a captain in the PSR, she could end him.

A group of women dressed in cloaks of yellow feathers and exorbitantly high gold-and-emerald headdresses came along the road, all of them linking hands as they high-stepped along. They shrieked at him with drunken delight as he tried to push through them. He snarled and ducked around; taking time to remonstrate, to pull out his PSR badge, would have taken even longer. He looked around frantically, seeing a plait of red hair swaying behind some youths clustered furtively around what looked like a bong of narnik. Chaing was almost running now, and she was right ahead of him. Close enough to—

“Hey, you!” He reached out and closed his hand on her shoulder. His heart thudded at making physical contact.
She's real.

Then she turned and he saw her face. It wasn't the vision, not as he knew her. The light and confusion of the bustling merry crowds had fooled him. This woman was approaching middle age, with rounded cheeks and a small mouth, her eyes painted in gold mascara. Her features creased up in annoyance. “Whaddya want?” she demanded, and her accent was pure Rakwesh Province.

“Who are you?” he gasped. He could have sworn it was her.

She laughed. “I'm the Warrior Angel, and so's me friend.” She draped her arm over the shoulder of another girl and tugged her close. The ebony-skinned friend was also wearing a brown coat; tufts of black hair protruded from below her skewed wig of red hair.

Chaing snatched his hand away as if it were burning.

“Whazzamatter?” the woman asked.

“You're not her” was all Chaing could manage to say.

The second girl was giving him a sly appraising look. “For you, fella, I could be.”

He frowned. “Why are you doing this? This is a festival. A celebration. It is not appropriate to dress as the Warrior Angel. She's just a reactionary legend. A criminal.”

“Screw you, dickhead,” the first woman snapped. “We like the Warrior Angel. She's done more for this shitty world than any regiment ponce. What're yooz anyhow? A party git?”

“Bet he is,” sneered her friend. “Bet his important daddy got him off proper regimental service, too. Didn't he, party boy? Nice little office job in a supply depot instead, was it?”

Chaing backed off, knowing his cheeks would be coloring. “It's not right, that's all. You shouldn't celebrate her.”

The woman gave him an obscene finger gesture.

Chaing turned away, embarrassed and annoyed—mostly with himself. People were supposed to respect the PSR, to show proper deference. But then he'd hardly behaved like a PSR officer. The first firework burst overhead, crowning the cloudless black sky with topaz and ruby scintillations. And there, on the other side of the wide thoroughfare,
she
was standing amid a bunch of revelers who were dressed in outsized silver astronaut pressure suits, staring right back at him. Real this time. This was the face he knew from his vision, stippled by the weird multicolored light of the fireworks.

His jaw dropped in amazement. Then a rowdy band of regiment troops jostled their way along the middle of the road, jeering and shouting among themselves. He craned his neck, desperate to keep sight of her, but there were only the carnival astronauts who were singing a badly out-of-tune rendition of “Treefall Blues.” There was no sign of the ghost girl.

“Crudding Uracus!” One stupid mistaken glimpse and now he was seeing phantoms on every corner. He took a breath and stomped off along Broadstreet, heading for the bulky Filbert Exchange two hundred meters away. Baysdale Road lay down the side of the covered market, and the crowd was considerably thinner here; he turned down it as more and more fireworks smothered the sky above in sizzling lightbursts. Baysdale Road led him into the Gates district, the original heart of the city, more than three square kilometers built without any order or conformity. Two of the ancient founding families had clashed here, which was why the streets were all at angles to one another, as neither would adopt the other's grid. The buildings were slim and high, made from brick and stucco with wooden strapwork, and topped by steep-pitched tile roofs. They weren't particularly vertical anymore, with some façades leaning alarmingly over the cobbled streets, as if their neighbors were squeezing them out of alignment.

The Fireyear celebrations here were mainly alcohol-based. Many ground floors in the buildings that made up the Gates were small state-licensed enterprises where families followed the same crafts as their forebears for more than two thousand years. Plenty of them revolved around brewing and distilling. Open windows showed him that the small pubs were teeming. Lively modern music was flowing out of the bigger clubs.

Even though he'd memorized the city layout, it took him a while to find LowerGate Lane amid the muddle of the Gates. It turned out to be uncomfortably narrow; if he extended both arms, his fingertips brushed the walls on both sides. You couldn't even drive a tuk-tuk along it, let alone a modern van. He wasn't entirely surprised to find that the city council had clearly given up the idea of providing electrical streetlights here. The only illumination came from open windows and the occasional oil lamp hanging outside a doorway. It was like stepping back into pre-Transition times.

The Nenad Café was a student haunt, its alarmingly uneven ceiling ten centimeters too low for comfort. One wall was shelving for a “free library” with a good selection of leather-bound books donated by alumni from Opole University, which bordered the southern end of the Gates. He looked around the tables with their painted chessboards. At thirty-five, he was the oldest patron by a good ten years. Fortunately his family genes kept him relatively youthful. With his full head of hair, as-yet-unwrinkled pale-olive skin, and trim figure, he liked to think he could pass for mid-twenties.

Once his eyes adjusted to the candlelight inside, he saw a short girl who didn't even look twenty sitting by herself, reading an unlicensed news sheet, a mug of chocolate half drunk on the table. Her legs were folded up yoga-style on the worn chair. Chaing just knew he could never manage to bend his limbs like that, and he prided himself on keeping in good shape. She wore a dark-blue corduroy jacket over a black waitress blouse, the uniform finished off with a short black skirt. Her oval face had hazel eyes that seemed far too large for someone so dainty, and her wavy raven hair was held back by a velvet band.