A Night Without Stars (68 page)

“Uracus curse them,” Florian grunted. “They have the bombs.”

“If they can keep that pace up, we have about ten hours before they reach us,” Paula said.

Marek turned from the wormhole generator he was dismantling. “Looks like we're on, then.”

Marek's bioconstruct brain had no natural emotions, nothing that came from floods of hormones and neurochemical reactions. For a little over 250 years he'd used appropriate response algorithms to mimic human reactions: shock, disgust, sorrow, kindness, affection. Two hundred and fifty years of incorporating those effects into every situation. In doing so, they had ceased to become secondary routines as they merged into his primary thoughts. He rather enjoyed the notion that he was becoming more human—not simply knowing what a human should be feeling. His batch brothers—Demitri especially—weren't convinced. The ANAdroids didn't feel pleasure or pain, just tactile information from their nervous systems, so they saw the quirky development as evidence of his gradual decline, along with his vocal glitch.

Now, though, they had to admit he might have been right. He was scared by the approaching seibears and nukes, and that was a sensation he couldn't shield from them; it was flooding across their shared gaiafield connection.

But it had to be done. The approaching Faller-seibears had to be tackled. And logically he, with his glitches and slightly wobbly coordination, was the most expendable of them all.

He made his way out of HGT54b to the surface along with the four humans, leaving his batch brothers working on the wormhole. The sky had an unbroken cover of high thin clouds, which defused the sunlight to a uniform glare. A gentle wind was blowing from the west, suffused with tiny ice crystals that pattered against his e-m suit. Overhead, the
Discovery
bobbed about, pulling at its anchor cables. The rope ladder flapped about beneath it. A grim-looking Florian caught hold and steadied it.

Paula reached for it, ready to start climbing.

“No,” Kysandra said. “You have to stay here.”

Paula hesitated, and Marek was intrigued by that. From what he'd seen over the last few weeks, and reviewing his much older original Nigel memories, Paula did not suffer from doubt—not any kind. She was the most confident and determined person in the Commonwealth.

“There's seven atomic bombs heading this way, and only five of us,” Paula said. “You need me.”

“Without you, there is no plan. None of us will be able to break the Valatare barrier.”

“Neither will I,” Paula countered. “The ANAdroids don't have imagination, but there's enough of Nigel in there that when they're given a problem they'll know what equipment to manufacture. It's going to be down to them.”

“And if something unforeseen happens? Something that needs a very human mind to analyze? No. One of us has to remain alive. And that's you. If we can't free the Raiel, you're the one who can evacuate survivors to Aqueous. You. Not me, and not these two boys. We're the ground troops. Let us do our job, and buy the ANAdroids enough time.”

“My combat experience…” Paula began.

“This is the whole world at stake here, Paula. I can't save it. But I can help you save it.”

Paula took a breath and nodded reluctantly. “Very well.” She let go of the rope ladder.

“Good choice,” Marek said, and grabbed the ice-speckled ladder himself. He started to climb up.

“Same goes for you,” Kysandra told Ry and Florian. “There's not much you can do.”

“Oh, please,” Ry said. “There are seven atom bombs heading this way. Every one we eliminate increases our odds of getting a wormhole working.”

“I'm coming,” Florian said. “No arguing.”

Marek reached the gondola. The plyplastic door opened for him. He slung his pack in and sat down in the front seat. His u-shadow linked to the
Discovery
's smartnet and began the preflight activation sequence.

As the other three took their seats, he began pumping helium back into the gas cells. When he looked through the big curving windscreen in front of him, he could see Paula releasing the anchors. Once she'd retracted the malmetal spikes, the cables wound back into the blimp's nose. The
Discovery
rose quickly, its fans spinning up to hold them steady. Then Marek directed the smartnet to take them north.

“They're still spreading the bombs wide,” Paula said through the link.

A display from the ge-eagles showed how the Faller-seibears were moving. More than a hundred of the massive creatures were ranged in a ragged east–west line, heading south at about twenty kilometers an hour. They even saw that three of the giant humanoid-Fallers had survived the explosion and were riding on the seibears. They were wrapped in what looked like several layers of blankets, and carried their pump-action bazookas. The turbulent air from the bomb blast was dying away, and the low-level clouds breaking up, which allowed the ge-eagles to detect still more seibears joining the main pack.

Marek ordered a couple of ge-eagles to glide in closer, from the south. He directed one to the cluster of five seibears gathered around a bomb. Two of the seibears were also carrying the bazooka weapons. Another had something that resembled a small artillery gun; relative size made it a rifle for the creature.

“Crud,” Kysandra grumbled.

“Your force fields will withstand those weapons,” Paula said. “For all their size, they are just chemical-based.”

“Paula's right,” Florian said a shade too eagerly. “Your integral force field deflected the bazooka strike back in Opole easily enough.”

“So it did,” Kysandra said drily.

“And our maser rifles have a much longer range. We can sniper a whole group and destroy their bomb before they know what's happening.”

“Nice theory,” Kysandra said.

As the
Discovery
headed north, they watched as the seibears continued to spread out. Each bomb had a guard of about fifteen seibears, with three or four clustered protectively around the one carrying the warhead. The others took up a perimeter formation, with some scouting up to three kilometers ahead.

“That's not going to make it easy,” Kysandra said.

The
Discovery
was flying northeast now. They'd decided to form a picket line in response to the continually widening pattern the advancing seibears were adopting.

“Looks like they're going to try and surround the
Viscount,
” Paula suggested when the seibears were stretched out over a front twenty kilometers wide and still expanding. “Come at us from all directions at once. It's a reasonable tactic.”

“Yeah, and it'll be tough to intercept every warhead,” Kysandra agreed.

She was first out of the
Discovery,
forty kilometers north of the
Viscount,
where the snow and ice had built into rugged mounds with slabs of ice sticking through, making the going difficult.

It was farther from
Viscount
than Florian would have liked. But because the plan to intercept the seibears meant
Discovery
probably wouldn't be around to collect them all again afterward, they had to be practical about the distance they could travel back by themselves. They also had to have a safe distance to protect the
Viscount
in case the Fallers managed to detonate one of the bombs during the interception. The others all seemed satisfied with the forty-kilometer limit.

Florian stared at Kysandra through the window as the
Discovery
started to fly west, a tiny gray figure trudging purposefully up the steep incline, casting a long shadow across the snow as the low sun sank ever closer to the horizon. Four ge-eagles spiraled above her, and two more were heading in from the south to help watch for the approaching seibears. Leaving her behind was triggering all kinds of feelings. Shamefully, the strongest one was fright. Mostly for himself.
I'm next
.

As soon as Anala passed over the south pole, she knew something was wrong. She'd been hoping she'd be in time to see the
Pericato
launch its Aseri missiles; all the calculations showed it would get within range as she was approaching. Instead she saw the atmospheric anomaly—a big swirling cloud mass eclipsing the coast, roughly circular in shape and rising so much higher than any natural formation. Winds were tearing its edges apart, flinging out long tattered streamers.

She clung to the handholds beside the port, staring numbly at the chaos raging ahead and below. “Ry? Do you copy, Ry?”

“I'm here.”

“Thank crud. What's happened? Did Danny fire the missiles?”

“He got one away. Anala, the
Pericato
was overrun by Faller-seibears. No survivors. We think it sank afterward.”

“No survivors?” she whispered.

“No. Please tell flight com they carried out their duties to the very end.”

“Did they get the
Sziu
?” She was practically shouting now, demanding reassurance.

“Negative. The
Sziu
was flung ashore. The Fallers have recovered the bombs.”

“Oh, great crudding Uracus! Where are they? Where are the bombs?”

“The Fallers are bringing them to us.”

“Giu! What are you doing? Can you get away?”

“The
Viscount
is too valuable to abandon.”

“Ry, no!”

“We're going to stop them.”

“How can you do that?”

“Head-to-head. Don't worry; we have the Warrior Angel and her weapons.”

“You can't go out there, Ry. You can't!”

“I'm sworn to protect Bienvenido. And even if I wasn't a regiment officer, I'd still be doing this. Paula has a plan. She can save us all if she just has the chance.”

“No. Please—”

“I'll be fine. Tell flight com what's happened. You can reenter and splash down now. Thank you for what you did.”

“Ry?”

“See you on the other side of the sky, Anala.”

The farther the seibears ventured into Lukarticar's interior, the more punishing the frigid landscape became. Snow slopes rose higher, ice outcrops were harder and sharper, the crevices deeper and narrower—sometimes covered with a slim treacherous bridge of compacted snow, concealing them from sight. The Faller-seibears never knew they were there until their own weight collapsed them, sending them tumbling onto the terrible ice blades underneath.

Even losing several of their number didn't bother them. They continued to advance inexorably as the sun fell below the horizon, plunging the continent into acute darkness. Night didn't slow them, either. They must have been equipped with eyesight comparable to a human Advancer.

Once the pack was fifty kilometers inland, no more came to join them, leaving their numbers at just over a hundred. They were spread out across a front thirty-five kilometers long, with the flanks beginning to move ahead of the center.

It was a long wait. Florian had been dropped off after Kysandra, nine kilometers to the west of her, with Ry a farther eleven beyond him. After that it was just Marek on board. The ANAdroid had spent his time rigging one of the maser rifles inside the gondola before jumping out.

Five ge-eagles were assigned to Florian. He kept them circling overhead, two of them barely a hundred meters above the snow so nothing was left to chance. He didn't want a Faller sneaking up on him unexpectedly from the south.

Discovery
had dropped him in a zone that had snowdrifts cresting up to thirty meters. The valleys between them were scattered with ice outcrops protruding out of the crisp snow—from irregular lumps the size of boulders up to giant ridges that could've been costal cliffs, they were so tall and jagged. Florian was also extremely wary about crevices, using a multisensor pack built into his e-m suit to sweep ahead, watching for the treacherous frail roofs that had so far claimed four Faller-seibears.

He found a good position on top of a snow ridge, which gave him a clear line of sight for a good five kilometers. Behind him, the downslope was clean—no ice, no hidden fissures—and the valley floor beyond was relatively clear. Once he'd struck, he could make a fast escape.

So he pushed the snow into shape like a kid building castles on the beach and lay in the grooves he'd scooped out, wiggling to get comfortable. As always, the miraculous e-m suit kept him a cozy warm; its fabric had now flowed over all the skin on his face, forming a full mask with a transparent band over his eyes. He was perfectly protected from the cold. And with his force field skeleton already active at low level, he was protected from any physical impact or energy blast.

He settled down for the long wait. Not that he could see much; the night out on the exposed snowfield was as deep as it had been in the dead starship. But he had all his amplified sensors, as well as those of the ge-eagles.

The seibear pack's location was constantly being updated by the ge-eagles tracking it from above. During daylight, they'd flown inside the thin bands of cloud ribbing the sky. Now, with the long night engulfing Lukarticar, they'd dropped down to a kilometer above the massive creatures and continued to gather excellent imagery. They remained invisible even at that altitude, though Paula and the ANAdroids suspected the Fallers could see them with infrared sight—if they had any.

If they did, they must be able to make out the
Discovery.
Marek had been remote-piloting it ever since he abandoned it. The blimp had flown a wide circular course, initially heading southwest, then curving around the seibears' western flank and approaching them from behind. Marek was steering it for the group in the center of the line. As it caught up with the cantering seibears, so Marek increased its speed, redlining the fans.

The group of seibears guarding the bomb began to close up when
Discovery
was four kilometers behind them. Then two of them peeled off and headed back toward it.

“Now we get to see what kind of firepower they have,” Marek said.

When the seibears were still two kilometers away, he reduced
Discovery
's altitude to eight hundred meters and opened a meter-wide hole in the transparent plyplastic of the front windscreen. The maser rifle fired, pulsing twice in under a second. The two seibears dropped down dead.

“That was easy,” Paula said.

Discovery
slid forward. One of the ge-eagles showed a seibear carrying one of the giant rifles, leveling the weapon at the airship. It began to fire repeatedly, the muzzle plumes temporarily overloading the enhanced infrared image. More data slipped across Florian's exovision. Whatever the huge gun was, it had enough range to hit the
Discovery.
The blimp was juddering badly from each hit. Eight gas cells reported losing pressure. Then one of the rounds hit a fan.
Discovery
's smartnet was reporting critical damage.

Through the glare of the muzzle fire, the ge-eagles could just make out the seibears dispersing, scurrying for cover behind thick jumbles of ice outcrops. Two of them hunkered down deep in a fissure, lying on top of the bulky crate that contained the bomb.

Another round hit the gondola, and the link vanished. A ge-eagle tracked the
Discovery
sinking out of the night sky, its envelope deflating as it went, until it was just a mass of flaccid fabric twirling around and around. It hit the snowfield with a gentle bump. The wind blew it along slowly to the northeast until it caught on a snag of ice.

“They all stopped,” Paula said. “There was quite a bit of link traffic between the bomb groups.”

“Can the drone jam it?” Kysandra asked.

“Yes. Their traffic architecture is very crude; my countermeasures routine can easily tailor specific blockers. I'll bring the drone up and close down their communications. If they can't coordinate and don't know what's happening to one another, it should help.”

Jamming the seibear links certainly had an effect. The groups that had all halted simultaneously suddenly didn't seem to know what to do next. Two of them—the ones Florian and Marek were provisionally assigned to intercept—started off again at once. This time, they redeployed their sentries so there were always a couple trailing by several kilometers, alert for any more attacks from the rear.

During the long wait, Florian tried temporarily deactivating his enhanced senses and exovision, certain his excellent natural vision would be able to make out a couple of meters of the snowfield around him; after all, he'd done a lot of nighttime work back in Albina Valley. But this was different. This was a total absence of light. He held his hand up in front of his face, and some primeval part of his brain couldn't accept that the hand was invisible. It scared him badly, and secondary routines hurriedly brought back his enriched vision.

Uracus, the Fallers must be able to see in infrared.
There was no other explanation for them knowing the
Discovery
was closing on them, not in this darkness.

The longer he watched the seibears advancing, the more isolated he began to feel. He wanted them to come within range so this would all be over, yet some shameful part wanted to flee, to hide from the monsters in the all-engulfing darkness.

He concentrated on tracking the group bringing the bomb he was supposed to take out. Treat the whole thing as a mental exercise, he told himself, which should allow him to take his mind off the physical reality of his situation.

After half an hour, it was obvious his group were on a track that would take them east of his current position, so he got up and started walking again. The plyplastic skis were in his backpack along with the harness, a spare power cell, and his food—everything he'd need to get back to the
Viscount
afterward. But despite the memory skill implant, he still wasn't confident enough to start skiing.

An hour later he was atop a hundred-meter ice cliff with the wind whistling up the hard surface to buffet him. Right along the top, the snow was sculpted in strange curving shapes that twisted upward two or three times his own height, like clashing waves solidified in mid-impact. The cavities and hollows provided perfect cover. If the seibear group kept to their current track, they would have to pass along the bottom of the cliff. He could stay hidden inside a snow cleft, shielding his infrared emission until the ge-eagles showed him they were all within range.

He spent another ten minutes scouting along the edge until he found the perfect place—one with a low gully leading away from the cliff that he could retreat along if things went bad. With that settled, he went inside one of the short cavities and began another wait.

Marek watched through the ge-eagles as the seibear group trotted over the rough snow toward him. He'd taken cover halfway up a vast rock crag that was only partially cloaked in snow. The snowfield that splayed out from its base was a broken wilderness of shattered ice boulders and dangerous crevices.

“Our optimal strike time will be seventeen minutes—mark,” Paula told everyone over the general link. “You should all be able to open fire within eight minutes of one another. Ry, you're going to be the last.”

“I can move forward,” Ry said.

“No. Their scouts might see you. Let's keep this as simple as possible. Once the attack has started, I'll use the drone as a kinetic weapon and take out the bomb to the east of Marek. That'll leave the two bombs on the flanks.”

It was good logic, Marek agreed. The flank bombs were now the farthest from the
Viscount,
so they would take the longest to reach the starship. That gave him and Kysandra a reasonable chance of intercepting them while Ry and Florian retreated to
Viscount.
His old Nigel personality approved. The boys had no experience in combat. Equipping them with maser rifles and molecular severance cannons for sniper duty was as close as they could get to guaranteed success, whereas he and Kysandra had a much better chance of taking out the remaining nukes.

His retinas spotted the scouts four minutes later, when they were still two kilometers away. The main group of five seibears clustered around the nuke was another two and a half kilometers behind them. One of the scouts was going to pass within four hundred meters of him.

Marek stopped breathing. The warm breath wafting through the polar air might just be a giveaway. His body had enough oxygen reserves to last for an easy half an hour.

The scout lumbered onward, never breaking stride, its big head turning from side to side with mechanical regularity—and every three turns it would check the sky, too. Marek was impressed. Faller biology allowed the enormous seibear body to perform at the peak of biochemical limits. That kind of power and efficiency was a match for his own.

“I'm red—ready,” Marek announced when the bomb was only fifteen hundred meters away. The scouts had passed by on both sides without slowing; even so, a ge-eagle was marking them. The remaining outriders formed a loose circle around the primary group.

“Me, too,” Kysandra announced.

“Another three minutes,” Florian said.

“The scouts of my group are passing me now,” Ry said. “It's taking longer than I expected. The terrain here is rough.”

“Marek, Kysandra, initiate now,” Paula said. “I'm launching the drone.”

Marek spun around the rock that was concealing him. The maser rifle's target image filled his exovision, shunting the ge-eagle links to peripheral mode. He fired at the seibear carrying the atom bomb and saw all its muscles go limp, sending the big body sprawling onto the ground, plowing up shards of ice. To his dismay the dead seibear tilted as it came to rest, putting the mass of its body between Marek and the crate with the bomb.

“That's not good,” Marek murmured. He'd taken out the carrier first to immobilize the bomb, allowing him to shoot it with the molecular severance cannon—an unhurried accurate shot at a stationary target. Now the bomb would be protected by the vast bulk of the creature's flesh.