A Night Without Stars (67 page)

“How many?” Paula asked in a subdued voice.

“Must be over a hundred,” Ry said. “And they're still coming.” As the ge-eagle swooped along the coastline, he saw another two of the great gray-white shapes surge up out of the water onto a broad chunk of floating ice.

“The Fallers must have taken over Lukarticar some time ago,” Paula said.

“They're going to come here, aren't they?” Ry said, hoping there wasn't too much anxiety in his voice. His whole life had been spent on the front line combating the Faller menace, but an army of Faller-seibears charging the
Viscount…

“They are a good choice to carry the atomic bombs,” Paula said. “Their size will give them considerable endurance, and they're quite fast.”

“The
Sziu
might not make it ashore,” Paula said. “What's Danny doing?”

“Being cautious,” Kysandra admitted.

Ry immediately switched links to the three ge-eagles flying watch around the
Pericato.
There was considerable activity on deck. Marines were appearing with Gatling guns that they were mounting on tripods.

“Nice,” Florian said. “They'll be able to take out the seibears in the water, so whatever the Fallers were planning isn't going to work.”

“Let's just see how this plays out,” Paula said. “Demitri, how's the wormhole generator coming?”

Ry looked down the length of HGT54b to where the ANAdroids were clustered around one of the generators. Almost all of the casing had been removed, exposing the tightly packed internal systems. He was used to the infernal complexity of a Liberty module, but this was an order of magnitude above. Instruments that were little more than hairs were worming out of the ANAdroids' modules, infiltrating every fissure. Fergus and Valeri were perfectly still, absorbing the data being fed to them.

“Fifteen percent of the elements we've investigated so far are invalid,” Demitri reported. “We're going to have to disassemble and rebuild.” He nodded at Marek, who was carefully removing the casing from a second wormhole generator. “Fortunately, we have a lot of spare parts.”

“How long?” Paula asked.

“A day, possibly. Hopefully no more.”

“But…the
Sziu,
” Florian stammered.

“The
Pericato
is almost in range,” Kysandra said. “They'll be able to launch in another five minutes.”

Ry reviewed the latest speed and distance figures the ge-eagle data was producing. She was right. The
Pericato
would be in range of the
Sziu
while the ship was still over a kilometer from the shore.

“They don't have to score a direct hit, surely,” Ry said, almost in prayer. “It's an atom bomb, for Giu's sake. They just have to detonate close.” The
Sziu
still had smoke wheezing out of the superstructure, and its speed had decreased further. It was having to alter course constantly now that it was so close to the coast to avoid the ice floes bobbing idly in the sea.

“Anything within a kilometer should do,” Paula said. “Major Danny knows that.”

Ry switched back to the ge-eagles over the
Pericato.
The ship was closing fast on the seibear pack. One of the Gatling guns opened up, stitching a small line of white bullet plumes through the undulating sea close to the lead seibear.

“What was that?” Paula demanded.

Ry couldn't answer; he was watching the pack dive cleanly below the surface en masse. Within seconds, all of them were invisible, plunging deeper and deeper into the icy water. “Where are they going?” he marveled.

“The ge-eagles picked up a signal in our link band,” Paula said. “It came from the seibears. Have they acquired Advancer macrocellular clusters?”

“Roxwolf said breeder Fallers could pass any victim's traits on,” Florian said in dismay. “As long as they'd eggsumed an Eliter, they'd have the pattern of the clusters.”

The remaining drone reported a radio signal broadcasting from the
Pericato.
“Where did they go?” Major Danny asked. “We lost sight of them.”

“I'm not sure,” Kysandra replied. “They just dived deep.”

“What's down there?” Danny asked. “Should we change course?”

Ry watched Kysandra and Paula exchange a glance. Paula gave a minute shake of her head.

“No,” Kysandra said. “It is imperative you stop the
Sziu.
”

“Understood.”

“Can the seibears get through a metal hull?” Florian said.

“Cold makes the hull a lot more brittle than usual,” Paula said. “But even so—”

They all saw it at once. The
Pericato
juddered. And as soon as it settled, it began to curve around.

“We're hit,” Danny's voice shouted in near-panic. “Something under us. The rudder's gone!”

The ship continued to turn.

“Did it breach the hull?” Kysandra asked.

“No. We've lost steering. And—oh, Giu!” The ship lurched again.

A ge-eagle swooped low and Ry spread out every sensor read across his exovision.
Something
was moving under the
Pericato.
Large dark shadows flitted about, clumped together tightly, and there was a weird gray-blue stain spreading out from the stern.

“They're under you,” Kysandra said. “Danny, they're under the ship!”

“That's Faller blood in the water,” Paula said.

“We're losing speed,” Danny said. “Something's striking the propellers. Our engine is struggling. The gears are overloading.”

“Kamikaze,” Paula hissed.

“What?” Ry asked.

“They're suiciding. The Faller-seibears are deliberately swimming into the propellers. It'll kill them, but it's wrecking the engines. Danny, you have to stop. They can only ruin your engines if the propellers are turning.”

Even as she said it, Ry saw the marines were firing their Gatling guns into the water all around, hitting nothing.

“Stop firing,” Kysandra ordered. “You're wasting your ammunition.”

“If you have any grenades, drop them into the water at the stern of the ships,” Paula told him. “They'll act like mini-depth-charges.”

“Like what?” Danny asked.

“Just do it!”

“How far away are they?” Florian asked nervously.

“Eighteen kilometers,” Ry told him. “The
Sziu
is three kilometers from shore.”

“Danny, launch a missile,” Kysandra said. “You're not going to get closer. This is your best chance. The blast should be enough.”

“…distance…take me…launch codes…” Danny's voice was interspersed with the sound of the Gatling guns.

“Save your ammunition!” Kysandra implored.

“Oh, crud,” Ry groaned. A seibear had risen up out of the water at the stern of the
Pericato.
It gripped a metal rail running down the hull and held itself in place. Another jumped on its back and in a moment was standing on its shoulders. Then the third came up, using the first two like a ladder, allowing it to move with incredible speed for something so bulky.

Marines swung their Gatling guns around and opened fire, the heavy-caliber rounds ripping the beast apart as it shoved its way on board. But another followed it. And two more emerged from the water under the port prow, forming another ladder.

The Gatlings fired again and again.

“Danny, fire the missiles,” Kysandra yelled. “Fire them!”

Even though it had slowed considerably, the
Sziu
was pulling away. It was less than two kilometers from the shore.
Pericato
was eighteen kilometers behind and dead in the water.

“…what I can…Arm them now…defend my command…” Danny said.

Ry saw a marine race down the steps at the side of the superstructure. It could have been Danny; he wasn't sure. More seibears were coming up over the gunnels. The Gatling guns were firing constantly and the deck was slick with blue blood and gobbets of Faller flesh. He watched the desperate human figure duck a seibear as it was torn apart by bullets, then slip on the gore just as he reached the flimsy canvas shelter.

One of the Gatling guns fell silent. Two injured seibears had reached it at the same time. The marines operating it were ripped apart in seconds, their broken bodies flung at their terrified comrades.

A second Gatling gun ran out of ammunition, its barrel spinning wildly as a seibear sped toward it. Marines tried to stop it with carbines. Ry grimaced and hurriedly switched to another sensor feed. A grenade went off on the starboard side, slaughtering humans and Faller-seibears alike.

The marines on the prow made a strategic withdrawal into the base of the superstructure and five Faller-seibears hurried after them, tearing the metal hatch from its mountings. But they were too big to fit through. A fusillade of gunfire slammed out of the companionway inside, and the one reaching in to claw whatever fragile flesh it could find staggered backward, sticky turquoise blood streaming down its fur.

Two seibears arrived at the canvas shelter. It was pulled apart and flung over the gunwale. Danny and a missile technician were exposed, crouched over one of the launch consoles. Ry witnessed Danny's fist slamming down on a big red button an instant before a seibear claw sliced through his throat. An arterial fountain of scarlet blood shot into the air for several seconds.

One of the Aseri missiles fired. Thick yellow smoke illuminated by an incandescent flame plume streaked out across the center of the
Pericato,
obscuring the massacre.

The Aseri flashed upward out of the bedlam, a dark-gray tube with a spiked nosecone. It scored a dense stream of glowing smoke through the clear polar air behind it, racing faster and faster. The noxious exhaust began to billow wide in its wake.

At two kilometers of altitude, the solid fuel was exhausted. The missile was traveling at supersonic speed. It split in half, the forward section carrying on in a neat parabola, guided by slender fins around its base. Behind it, the spent engine casing tumbled wildly end over end, beginning the long fall back to the water.

Ry's u-shadow immediately acquired the feed from the ge-eagles above the
Sziu.
The ship was less than two kilometers from shore now, and making reasonable speed as it trailed wisps of smoke from the bottom of the superstructure. Seibears began launching themselves from the ice floes, sliding gracefully through the sea toward it. Several of them had established links to Fallers on the
Sziu.

“Thirty seconds,” Paula said.

The Aseri warhead was traveling too fast for the ge-eagles to obtain a decent visual lock, but their other, more sophisticated senses tracked it hurtling down out of the sky. It struck the sea three kilometers aft of the
Sziu,
and detonated.

Every link from the ge-eagles at the coast and around the
Pericato
dropped out simultaneously. The drone switched to links from the ge-eagles farther inland.

An awed Ry watched the mushroom cloud rise—a dome of vapor as bright as any sun. Around it, the sea dipped for a moment before rushing back in, collapsing the crater. A column of dazzling white vapor surged up, then the blast's wavefront streaked out horizontally, shredding the choppy surface into a foamy miasma. Ry held his breath as it struck the
Sziu.
The ship rocked about violently. Fallers and equipment were torn off the deck. Paint was already smoldering across the hull, bubbling and crisping to black. The bodies flung into the air ignited, burning to charcoal in less than a second before disintegrating. Then he could see no more as the vast storm of superheated steam roaring out from the explosion crashed across the abused ship and carried on toward the shore. Seibears on the ice floes were hurling themselves into the water.

“Will that protect them?” he asked.

“I don't think so,” Paula replied. “Look.”

The boiling surface of the steam whirlwind was distorting, bulging up in a giant ripple, as if some leviathan from the deeps was rushing out from the detonation point.

“What is that?” Florian murmured in awed alarm.

“Tsunami.”

They sent five of the surviving ge-eagles back toward the
Sziu.
The semi-organic birds took twenty minutes to fly through the hurricane-force winds howling out from the epicenter of the detonation. The whole area was still shrouded in hot churning cloud bands, though the core was starting to clear. Sensors probed through the thinning vapor. The fringes of the clouds were cooling rapidly now as the wind abated, turning to rain that had chilled to sleet by the time it reached the snowfield.

Along with dozens of ice floes, the
Sziu
had been driven onto the rocky shore. It lay there on its side across the shelf of a black pebble beach, its hull broken open from the impact. Waves lapped through the twisted fissures, flooding the engine room. Faller bodies were strewn across the deck, blackened lumps of meat slicked by the new drizzle of sleet. There was nothing left alive in the ship.

The ge-eagles dropped closer to the ground, scanning the weirdly disfigured snowscape. The radiation flash had evaporated and melted the surface layer of snow, swiftly followed by the fiery blast wave that had flattened any loosely piled slope or tough serac, slamming shut the jagged crevices. For a brief minute the surface had been awash with bubbling water, runnels carving a multitude of new channels. Then the deep polar temperature began to reassert itself, sucking away the temporary heat. The water refroze, producing a vast expanse of glazed ice flats that stretched from the shoreline more than two kilometers inland. There were strange lumps cloaked in grainy ice scattered across it at random—dead Faller-seibears, their fur singed and burnt away, ribbons of congealed blue blood spreading out from the corpses as if they'd sent out roots.

Sensors picked up movement on the edges of the ice crust. Forty-seven seibears were running south, spreading out across the mist-shrouded snowfield. Radiation points were coming from seven places.