A Night Without Stars (70 page)

He blinked in fascination at the slow-motion cascade.
It's like black beer.

But it continued to flow around the curving force field wall until the bulk of snow chilled it to slush and it began refreezing. Directly above his head, there was a small cavity.

Now we're getting somewhere.

With a giddy laugh, he fired the maser rifle again, slowly spiraling the beam around. Outside the force field, the quantity of vigorous bubbling liquid reached epic proportions. A deluge of boiling water flowed around and down to drain into the snow around the base, where it slowly refroze. His u-shadow ordered the force field apex to extend, and it slid up ten centimeters before reaching solid snow again.

“Right you bastard,” Florian declared grimly. He changed the angle of the maser, and fired again.

Twenty-two minutes later, a patch of dark appeared above the boiling water.

Sky! Crudding sky!

The force field shrank back until it was a flexible layer above his e-m suit. He clawed his way out of the hole and lay on his back, staring up into the strange sky. The wind was ferocious, sending clouds streaking past. But above them, borealis storms raged through the tenuous upper atmosphere as the radiation impact from the explosion slowly dissipated across the ionosphere. Ghostly green and crimson waves, already covering half of Lukarticar, spun and slithered around one another, casting ephemeral-colored shadows across the diseased simmering snowfield.

Florian smiled up at the astonishing display in blissful gratitude. Fighting his way out of that mess certainly deserved some cosmic recognition. It didn't come finer than this.

His u-shadow sent out a link ping.

“Florian?” Kysandra sent. “You're alive!”

“Yeah. Little trouble for a moment there. But I'm okay now.”

Communications icons appeared in his exovision. Eighteen ge-eagles were active and in the air. Flying in the fast winds was difficult, draining their power reserves, but they could stay airborne for another couple of days.

“Hey, Ry, you made it,” Florian exclaimed, studying the communications icons.

“Of course.”

“I had a mountain fall on me,” Florian said proudly.

“Rock or snow?”

“Snow.”

“Ha, you had it easy.”

Florian chuckled as he studied the communications display. “Why aren't we linking with the
Viscount
?”

“I don't know,” Kysandra said. “But that was a monster bomb blast. I'm assuming the shock wave collapsed the tunnel down to HGT54b.”

“Yeah.” Florian nodded slowly, trying to convince himself. “That'll be it.”
If it collapsed the tunnel, what did it do to the
Viscount
's structure?

“Are you mobile?” she asked.

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Good. Grab yourself a pair of ge-eagles and get going. We'll see you back at the
Viscount.
”

Uracus, no peace for the wicked.
“Okay. I'm on it.”

“And Florian?”

“Yes?”

“Watch out for Faller-seibears. If we can survive, they sure as Uracus can.”

Ironically, the journey back to the
Viscount
was always the part Florian had worried the most about. Now—less so.

He took his time activating the skis, watching the bulbs of plyplastic expand into two-meter-long strips. As they did that, he struggled into the harness. The wind made it difficult, constantly pummeling him with loose ice chips. In the end he had to reconfigure the force field into a sphere again—which the wind shoved about ferociously. By the time he was ready, two ge-eagles had arrived, with a third on its way.

Florian hitched the huge semi-organic birds to the harness. When they were secure, he hunched down on the skis, giving himself a low center of gravity and reducing wind resistance, and prayed his skill implant memory was up to the task. The ge-eagles took off, and began towing him.

He was fifty kilometers from the
Viscount.
When they'd planned how to get back, no one had figured for the winds. Paula had estimated the ge-eagles could pull them along at about thirty to thirty-five kilometers an hour, but the severe aftermath of what the Liberty bomb had inflicted on the local atmosphere was producing winds that whipped around seemingly at random. Their direction was constantly in flux, as was their speed. Florian even experienced interludes when they dropped away completely, but there weren't many of them.

After the first ten kilometers, when his leg muscles were starting to hurt badly from the constant crouching, the temperature began to plummet again, allowing the fervent clouds to condense. Snow began to fall, only to be whipped into a brutal high-velocity deluge by the winds. Florian had to stiffen the force field to deflect their impact. Visibility shrank to a few meters. He was reliant on the sensor images the ge-eagles were producing to avoid the smaller snags and fissures. The ge-eagles themselves steered him away from larger obstacles. All he had to do was hang on and keep his balance.

The roar of the icequake reverberated like boulders cascading down a rocky mountainside. Inside the cramped confines of HGT54b, it was deafening, but Paula ignored it. She was too busy hanging on to the grid as the compartment shook. Hairline cracks appeared in the pressure bulkheads. Gridwork segments snapped, allowing several heavy cargo packs to shift alarmingly. The three ANAdroids formed a protective picket around the wormhole generator they were working on, gripping onto one another like an acrobat team. Their force fields expanded and merged.

It seemed to go on for a long time. Finally, when the noise abated and the compartment stilled, Paula released her hold on the grid. She wasn't sure, but the angle seemed to have shifted, becoming more acute.

“That was fifty kilometers away,” Demitri said. “If they detonate another one closer, we're dead.”

“I would have expected the ice to absorb more of the compression wave,” Valeri said.

“It probably pulverized the ice in its wake,” Fergus said. “Another explosion might produce a reduced seismic force.”

“Let's try not to find out,” Valeri said. “Did any of them survive that?”

“Marek certainly didn't,” Demitri said. “He was only two hundred meters from the epicenter. The force field suit was not built to withstand a direct three-hundred-kiloton blast.”

“I'm sorry,” Paula said.

“Don't be. We are machines.”

“Maybe. But I have to concede you're doing a pretty good imitation of human.”

“Marek would appreciate that sentiment. He was confident he was becoming human.”

Paula nodded. Exovision displays showed her not a lot. All external links were down. She ordered the plyplastic door to open. When it did, it revealed a wall of compacted snow. “Damn, the tunnel has collapsed.”

“Kysandra at least may be alive,” Valeri said. “She has an integral force field, and was far enough away.”

Paula eyed the wormhole generator. It was half dissembled. Replacement components, cannibalized from two others, had been laid out neatly around it. Now they were scattered everywhere; she could see several sticking out of the water pooling at the bottom of HGT54b. “Worst-case scenario, both flank bombs survived. We have three hours until the seibears arrive.”

“Best-case scenario, actually,” Demitri corrected. “If they come ten kilometers closer and detonate, the icequake will finish us.”

“But they don't know that,” Paula told him, “so let's work on the assumption that we have three hours.” She pointed at the wormhole. “It has to be operational by then.”

“Understood.”

Something prevented her from asking them if that was feasible. The collapsed tunnel was a problem, though. A molecular disruptor pulse was out of the question down here. There was nowhere for the superheated gas blast to escape. She poked at the snow, which wasn't too hard-packed. Several handfuls came out when she scooped at it. She picked up her maser rifle and reduced the power to 5 percent before firing it at the snow just above the bottom rim of the door.

It melted immediately. Several liters of hot water soaked into the snow below, gradually refreezing. She fired again, melting more. After twenty minutes she'd succeeded in melting out a cavity big enough to stand up in. The humidity in the air was becoming tropical.

Standing on the creaking ice of the cavity base, she altered the rifle output again, reducing the beam width to a centimeter and shunting the power up to 50 percent. Then she aimed it vertically upward and fired. A small jet of steam rushed downward. Without her force field, she would have been scalded; as it was, it played across her face, spoiling her view. A fieldscan function allowed her to keep her aim straight.

The maser took nineteen minutes to bore a five-centimeter hole up to the surface. With an open route for the steam to vent, she closed the plyplastic door and increased the beam width, then started to widen the hole.

After an hour and a half, the hectic winds were starting to subside—not that it made the going any easier. True, the ski skill implant memories meant Florian had only lost his balance a couple of times, but he knew he was going to be hooked up to the farmhouse medical capsule for a week to treat his leg muscles. He was having to stop every twenty minutes just to spend a minute to stretch and recover. He didn't dare allow himself any longer.

In those ninety minutes, the ge-eagles had managed to pull him thirty-five kilometers. More ge-eagles had survived the blast wave to rise from their ground shelter and link in. They now had twenty-two, of which nine were on tow duty. Kysandra deployed eight as link relays, giving her five to search for the bomb the east-flank seibears had been carrying.

They finally located it through the gunk clogging the turbulent atmosphere, homing in on the spray of its signature radiation. Eleven Faller-seibears were still alive, and carrying the bomb toward the
Viscount
at their usual prodigious pace.

That was the second piece of bad news. The ge-eagle at the end of the link was flying repeated sweeps over the
Viscount
's location, and there was no sign of Paula and the ANAdroids. No tunnel entrance. No activity. It could detect the huge starship still buried below the ice, but that was all.

As Florian set off again, the ge-eagle sensed a thin plume of steam spurting up out of the ground. He actually cheered. The image from the ge-eagle played front and center of his exovision, banishing the discomfort of the journey.

All three of them watched the feed as the ge-eagles towed them toward it, seeing the steam increase until it was a full-scale fountain. Then it ended, and infrared revealed a glowing hole in the snow. The ge-eagle glided overhead.

“Hello,” Paula said.

“What happened?” Kysandra asked.

“An icequake broke the tunnel, but everything else is fine. What happened to you?”

“One bomb survived. It's twenty-eight kilometers out from
Viscount
and closing. Do you want me to intercept?”

“No, we can't risk another detonation. Our timetable has become perfectly defined: We either activate the wormhole generator or this venture is over—probably along with our lives.”

“Understood,” Kysandra said. “I'm about seventeen minutes out.”

Florian gritted his teeth when he thought about how much longer he'd be spending on the skis. He couldn't help but thinking of that oh-so-long night spent in the Sandy-J with Lukan chattering away in the driver's seat as the dark countryside flashed past. At the time he'd been twisted up with worry. Now he knew just how easy that night had been.

The ge-eagles powered on indomitably through the night, their wide wings illuminated with the freakish swirls of the celestial ghostlight bombarding the ionosphere. It portrayed their movements in juddery snapshots, as if they were clockwork-mechanical instead of the smooth perfect-future technology of the Commonwealth. The temperature was still dropping from the heat peak provoked by the bomb flash, the gentle snow sharpening to ice flakes, making him thankful for his force field as they assailed him.

“How long?” he asked.

“How long for what?” Paula said.

“Until the wormhole generator is operational?”

“We're hoping to power up in an hour,” Demitri replied.

Florian gritted his teeth. An hour was about how long it was going to take him to reach the
Viscount.
“Understood. I'll be there for that.”

“Ry?” Paula asked. “How's your progress?”

“With you in forty minutes.”

“Good.”

Paula stood behind the ANAdroids, watching patiently as they slotted components into place. They were moving with methodical precision, as if this were a complex ballet they'd rehearsed a thousand times. She said nothing, not wanting to interrupt. If they had doubts, they would share them—after all, the actual Nigel would—but they'd given her a timetable. Only some unexpected event would change that now.

Her low-level fieldscan revealed someone slithering down the newly melted tunnel. The plyplastic door opened, and Kysandra stepped into HGT54b, glancing around at the dislodged cargo.

“Crud! You got knocked about, didn't you?”

“The wormhole generator didn't suffer any damage,” Paula replied. “That's all that matters.”

The hood of Kysandra's e-m suit retracted. “Sure.” She ran her gloved hand back through her long hair. “So what are you going to take with us?”

“Everything in HGT54b. Once we get everything working again, it will provide us with a decent manufacturing base.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Even if a machine doesn't work, it'll be a good source of spare parts until we begin manufacturing new systems.”

“Of course. So is the wormhole going to be accurate enough to drop us outside the farmhouse?”