A Night Without Stars (78 page)

“Intervention is us; so other Zones running out of resources and coming over the border would be the other event?” Kysandra said.

“Yes. Resource wars can't happen often here. As long as the Zones have energy, they can recycle most of their metal. Uranium may be their limiting factor, even with breeder reactors.”

“Why, though?” Florian asked. “What's the point? This world is dead.”

“Not quite,” Paula said. “The idea is to wait until the radioactivity dies down to a point where biological life is sustainable again.”

“The Zones must have banks of genetic material,” Demitri said. “The Kromals will live again. Hopefully next time, they will have learned from history and embark on a more peaceful society.”

“Unlikely,” Paula said. “They were expelled from the Void, then they wiped themselves out in a planetwide nuclear exchange. That doesn't speak peaceful rationality to me.”

“And you want to trade with them?” Kysandra asked skeptically. She glanced through the big hexagonal window again. Unit26 had stopped its prowling and was now turning slowly to face the domes. She didn't want to think what would happen if it tried to roll forward. The tracks on each corner were massive, capable of crushing the composite dome panels with ease. And the force field was off…

“Yes,” Paula replied. “They can supply us with material we would otherwise have to waste time tracking down and bringing back here. All that costs to us is some technical information, which we will limit.”

“And help them back to the Commonwealth galaxy,” Ry said. “If they're as bad as we suspect, do we want them as neighbors?”

Paula grinned. “Bienvenido humans were also expelled from the Void. And trust me, back in the galaxy we deal with aliens a lot worse than the Kromal.”

“I suppose…” But he didn't sound convinced.

“In any case, we have no real choice,” Paula said, indicating the Units and their puppies outside. “They're here, it is their world, and we have to deal with them. And I'd rather have them as allies than enemies.”

“All right then,” Kysandra said. It was just like arguing with Nigel all over again. You knew you were always going to lose; the only interest was in exactly how.

Paula stood up. Her suit flowed over her, expanding a transparent bubble around her head. Kysandra and the others followed her out of the dome's airlock.

Three of the puppies raced over to them, hauling their dusty cables along. Unit26 stopped its ponderous turn and tracked them with several sensor mechanisms. Kysandra's exovision showed her maser pulses just a little too powerful for comfort, as if their suits were being tested.

“We'd like to begin our alliance,” Paula told Unit976. “As a gesture of goodwill, this file contains the blueprint of a small fusion reactor that could be used to replace your current fission piles. I provide it without asking anything in return.” Her u-shadow sent over a file.

“We respect your commitment to honesty,” Unit976 replied.

“Then we should begin our trade. Do you have records of Valatare? I would like to examine them.”

“We do.”

“I also have a list of materials we require.”

Interim Prime Minister Terese was still holding meetings in the grandiose cabinet room at the center of the palace. She'd appointed several loyal supporters to key posts, shunting Adolphus's people aside. She'd done deals with senior party members, and awarded civil service directorates to supporters. Her position was now as politically secure as it could be, but retreating to the palace bunker might still be seen as a sign of weakness. Her biggest concession to personal security was to use the regimental communications center, which was on the second floor in the palace's state wing, when dealing with martial law and the reservist buildup.

That would have to change, Stonal thought as he was shown into the cabinet room. He was mildly pleased to see that Davorky, the master general of the regiments, was also waiting for him, sitting in the chair next to the prime minister. The old general played the capital politics game well—you couldn't rise to his post without that ability—but he also boasted a distinguished record leading troops against Faller eggs and nests, and constantly promoted the case for increased regimental funding to the dismay of the state Treasury. All of which made him popular with the regiments. Technically, he was Stonal's commanding officer, but that wasn't a test of strength Stonal ever wanted to enter into. The two of them respected each other's particular fields of expertise, and left it at that. It was simple realism.

“Director Stonal,” Terese said in welcome. “My chief of staff said you had some very urgent information for me.”

“Yes, Prime Minister,” he agreed as he sat in the chair opposite to hers, glancing pointedly at her two young aides and mentally reviewing their files. They had top-level security clearance, but still…

“Please proceed,” Terese said.

“I've just been briefed by my agent, Captain Chaing.”

“I remember the name,” Davorky said. “Wasn't he tracking the Commonwealth girl in Opole?”

“Yes. And now he's just captured Roxwolf, a mutant Faller who ran the gangs in Opole.”

“A mut…You mean a breeder?”

“A failed breeder, apparently; he's some kind of physical crossover. Chaing is escorting him here to Varlan. I'm sure the Faller Institute will have a wonderful time analyzing him, but that's not the point. Roxwolf is offering information on the nests and the Apocalypse.”

“In exchange for what?” Terese asked quickly.

Stonal kept his face expressionless.
Politicians, they can smell a deal a kilometer off.
“He wants to live.”

“Tell him he can. Once we have what we want, then the institute can take over, as you said.”

“That might be difficult. He wants Paula's protection.”

“She's dead, along with the crudding Warrior Angel.”

“We left the possibility open-ended. He has been remarkably cooperative given the circumstances.”

“Good. So what did he tell us?”

Stonal took several minutes explaining Roxwolf's claim about the Trees flying down to low orbit. How the Fallers neither wanted nor needed human structures—a point he admitted he'd never considered. None of them had, not even in the bleakest planning scenario.

“The Trees can do that?” Terese asked. She was perfectly still, though her hands were holding on to the edge of the table as if she feared she was about to keel over.

“They often take flight to a higher orbit when a Liberty approaches them,” Davorky said. “Their acceleration is small, but constant. You can check with General Delores if you want, but I can't see any reason to prevent them from moving into a low orbit instead.”

“Crudding Uracus,” Terese muttered under her breath. She looked at Davorky. “What do we do?”

It took Stonal a long moment to answer. “To defend us from an attack like that? Nothing.”

“Crud.” Terese looked from him to Davorky, clearly waiting for the master general to disagree and offer her a lifeline.

“It's starting to look like evacuation of essential personnel to Byarn should go ahead,” Stonal said, hating himself for it. Byarn was the ultimate admission of defeat. “That would be my recommendation. The majority of facilities there are underground.”

“So we are going to be using Operation Reclaim, then?” Terese said. “I never thought it would actually…I thought the regiments might prevail.” She blinked against the moisture in her eyes. “Are we absolutely certain Paula and the Warrior Angel are dead?”

“The Fallers used two nuclear bombs in the location we believe the
Viscount
was buried. Major Em Yulei was unable to regain contact with their party after that. The conclusion is straightforward. They had personal force fields, but Mother Laura showed us they cannot withstand a nuclear explosion.”

“Right then,” Terese said through a tightened throat before regaining her poise. “Start the evacuation,” she told Davorky.

Florian had been impressed and more than a little intimidated by the Macule Units. They were big machines (especially 26), built with one aim—to survive. And not just incursions from neighboring Zones, but time, too. They were also alive in a weird way, like the space machine that had brought Paula to him. But without Joey's humor, he realized.

Once Paula had agreed to the basic terms, Zone47's Units had begun delivering raw material from whatever stores they had deep underground, attaching open trailers to the back of themselves and hauling back metal ingots, boxes of minerals, and tanks of hydrocarbon fluids.

That was when Florian realized the massive difference between Macule technology and the science of the Commonwealth. The refineries and synthesizers from
Viscount
devoured the materials they were fed, and began to churn out finished products at an astonishing rate in the central assembly dome. That was when his second reevaluation began. He'd been impressed by the composite panels used to build the domes, and the quad-karts had seemed a miracle of engineering. But now satellites the size of his fist were being completed every ten minutes, and their complex solid-state components were immeasurably superior to the axle motors and magnetic bearings of the quad-karts.

He was more impressed by the quantum analysis engine the ANAdroids were building. They called it Nigel2—an innocuous cylinder a meter and a half high that contained processing power an order of magnitude above their own bioconstruct brains. “We're going to need it to evaluate Valatare,” Valeri explained. “It'll even determine what kind of sensors we have to build to increase its understanding.”

“You mean it'll be alive?” Florian asked.

“Are we?” Valeri replied equitably.

Florian blushed. “Well…yes.” He couldn't think of the ANAdroids as anything other than perfectly human, not after all they'd been through together.

“Then so will it be.” The ANAdroid winked at him. “My thought routines will form the base personality.”

“You mean you're going to put your mind into it?”

“Yes and no. My base personality is Nigel Sheldon. That's what will be loaded in, along with the
Skylady
's files. All the irrelevant memories I've accumulated since I was activated will be stripped out of the copy. It will be Nigel's primary mentality, but able to utilize the engine's full capacity.”

“Right.”

“Nigel is a physics genius,” Paula explained. “I need that original ability of his to analyze Valatare for me.”

Florian gave Valeri a curious look. “But I thought you couldn't innovate?”

“We can't. Well, we can't make direct intuitive leaps, anyway. But this much processing power will allow a metaheuristic search for a solution, using brute-force calculation, examining every variable from every direction until you have a valid answer.”

Florian gazed at Paula. “I thought we were using the satellites to find the armada warships?”

“Not quite; they'll provide data on the nature of Valatare's internal structure. If I'm right, and there's a barrier below the cloud layer, we'll need Nigel2 to analyze its composition and work out how to get through it. This isn't going to be easy, Florian.”

“Yeah. I'm getting that now.”

Unit976 rumbled past outside, delivering another trailer load of minerals.

“Do you have the Valatare files?” Paula asked it.

Florian had noticed how keen she was to update their own astronomy files, but getting information out of the Macule Units was a lot more difficult than getting material. The Zones and Units clearly didn't have anything like a communications net; their data was safeguarded in whatever underground citadel they existed to protect, presumably alongside that most precious Kromal genetic bank. So the information had to be downloaded from the central database and into a Unit's memory, then finally transmitted to Paula.

The Units had handed over three batches of astronomical observations so far, which had given them very little fresh data on the other planets. Paula speculated that Zone47's observations had declined substantially from the initial steadfast watch for other worlds to appear around this sun. They certainly had very little data on Bienvenido. Even information on Ursell's atmospheric destruction was minimal.

“I bring them,” Unit976 replied. “Your data on quantum junction processors will be most useful.”

Florian didn't ask how they'd use the new processors. So far they'd seen very little evidence of weapons, but the Units clearly existed to defend their territory. He didn't like to think they were giving Zone47 technology that would shift the relative balance this ruined world had achieved. When he'd mentioned that, Paula had told him that when they were successful the Units would be leaving Macule behind, so it really didn't matter.

“Thank you,” Paula said to Unit976.

“I am transmitting the information now.”

Florian shifted the incoming astronomy data to a peripheral display in his exovision. Unlike Ry, he simply couldn't get worked up about sharper pictures of the other planets, nor the minute changes they had undergone over the course of millennia.

Paula, on the other hand, was practically obsessed. “Is this the best resolution you have?” she asked of the Valatare data.

“It is,” Unit976 replied.

“What are you looking for?” Florian asked.

“I want to know if Valatare's atmosphere has decreased since the Macule started their observations. That would be evidence that the mass is being consumed. These images don't tell me a thing.”

“They go back twenty-five thousand years, if I'm reading the text right,” Florian said.

“But the scale isn't precise,” Paula replied. “The Macule observations aren't accurate enough for what I need.”

“They seem pretty clear to me,” Florian said, reviewing the ever-swirling pattern of dull-pink and white cloud bands. “I bet these telescopes could even show you Trüb's old colors.”

Paula turned slowly to stare at him. That stare was very disconcerting, as if she somehow possessed Void-era telepathy that could examine his soul. His cheeks flushed. “What?” he mumbled.

“What colors?” Paula asked, deceptively lightly.

“Mooray told me about it,” he said defensively.

“And who is Mooray?”

“My friend. A Vatni. He was with me when you landed.”

“So what does he know about Trüb?”

“They have amazing eyes, the Vatni; they never used telescopes to watch the planets. He told me Trüb used to be covered with colored shapes—and its moons, too. It was the most remarkable sight in the night sky, he said. Then the Primes flew there to invade and the colors all turned to gray—like it is today.”

“The moons,” Paula said without blinking. “Of course. Damn, I'm slow!”

“Did aliens make those colors?” Florian asked.

“They didn't make them. They
were
the colors.” She smiled happily at the ANAdroids, who were all motionless, looking at her. “I think Trüb is a Planter world.”

“The parallels are favorable,” Demitri acknowledged.

“Who the crud are Planters?” Florian asked.

“We never met them,” Demitri said, “but we did encounter the gigalife they left behind.”

“The Sheldon Dynasty isolated the world they found the gigalife on,” Paula said sharply, “and researched its molecular structures for their own advantage.”

“An advantage that resulted in us providing the human race with biononics,” Demitri countered.

“I don't get it,” Florian said. “What is a gigalife?”

“Enormous quasi-biological structures,” Demitri said. “A combination of pure biological components supported on engineered molecular skeletons. There were trees the size of mountains. And more important, the planet had spaceflower moons—small asteroid rocks in low orbit that had colorful petals tens of kilometers in diameter—”

“That's what Mooray said!” Florian exclaimed. “Trüb's moons were bigger back then, because they had petals like a flower.”

“Well, that settles that,” Paula said.

“We concur,” Demitri said.

“But you said you never met the Planters?” Florian queried.

“We didn't,” Demitri said, “but it sounds as if the whole of Trüb was covered in gigalife; the world we found in our galaxy only had isolated examples, plus the moons. We even considered it could be a work of art by a hugely advanced species. It took us a long time, but we eventually retro-engineered some of the molecular engineering principles—the ones that gave us biononics.”

“Trüb is different,” Paula said. “If the Void expels only the stubborn life-forms that will not accept subjugation, then it's reasonable to assume the Planters themselves were on that planet.”

“And the Prime killed them,” Florian said.

“I find that hard to believe. Planters, whatever their nature, are a very advanced species.”

“But everything is dead, like this world.”

“Trüb is strange in that it is a uniform surface without any features. Yes, the color went, but…” She paused and sighed. “They might have reacted to the Prime invasion like a hedgehog curling up into a ball so its spikes stand up, but I don't have enough information. If the Planters do exist, they would make phenomenal allies. They might even be able to help with Valatare.”

“You want to open the wormhole to Trüb now?” Kysandra asked, sounding tetchy.

“Not immediately. We have a course of action, and we should focus on that. However, we can build a Trüb contact into our schedule. The possibility of the Planters helping us is too important to ignore. They may even prove as useful as Valatare.”

Florian could see how disgruntled Kysandra was by the prospect of another change in their plans and grinned at her. For himself, he was rather excited by Paula's optimism, the effortless way she accumulated and interpreted facts. And now they had another potential alien species that might help them. “Cool, huh?” he said quietly as he went over to her.

Kysandra took a while to answer. “I know this all seems exciting, but it's all talk, Florian. We don't actually
know
anything.”

“But we will,” he insisted. “We nearly have enough satellites to drop into Valatare orbit. And the atmospheric drones are ready.”

“Ah, your optimism.” She kissed him—a rather distracted kiss, he thought. “At least we'll be able to retreat to Aqueous if everything goes to crud.”

“It won't!”

“You weren't around when Nigel launched the
Skylady.
He was utterly convinced he was going to destroy the Void. I believed him.”

“I don't think Paula's like Nigel.”

“No.” She smiled wryly. “She's not.”

Three hours later, they had enough satellites to begin examining Valatare. The ANAdroids set up a launch rail in front of the wormhole generator to fling the satellites through.

“Open the wormhole, please,” Paula said, standing at the far end of the rail to face the big circular gateway mechanism.

“Initiating,” Demitri said. His eyes closed as his u-shadow interfaced with the gateway's smartnet.

Within a minute, the wan indigo radiance of Cherenkov radiation was shining across the machine's surface.

“Valatare contact,” Demitri said, and his lips twitched. “Laura was right: The gravity gradient is odd. I'm going to open the terminus a thousand kilometers above the ionosphere. Matching coordinate to orbital velocity. Here we go—”

The Cherenkov glow drained backward fast, replaced by a darker rouge light shining into the dome. Paula nodded in satisfaction as she looked down on the vast ammonia cloud bands and their small placid curlicue edgings, a vertigo-inducing distance below.

“Terminus holding steady,” Demitri said. “Minimal jitter. We can launch.” He changed the orientation, and the horizon slid into view.

“Send them through,” Paula told Valeri.

The first satellite zipped along the rail and shot straight through the force field. It was lost from view in seconds. Demitri shifted the terminus three thousand kilometers, and they launched another satellite.

An hour after they started, they'd established a necklace of the satellites in a fifty-five-degree inclination orbit, giving them a reasonable coverage of the planet. The little globes established a full link network among one another and sent their combined results back to the terminus. Paula watched the sensor data start to build in her exovision.

“That's weird,” Fergus said. “There's no planetary magnetic field.”

Paula's grin was radiant. “No, only real planets have magnetic fields.”

Florian couldn't help the grin spreading over his face. “So you were right?” He flicked his gaze toward Kysandra. The whole notion of something the size of Valatare being artificial—
made
by the Void—was incredible.

“So far,” Paula muttered. “There,” she said abruptly as the sensors picked up a magnetic and gravitational vortex drifting through the gas giant's atmosphere fifteen degrees north of the equator. “That has to be the floater.”

“Got it,” Demitri said. He shifted the wormhole terminus, positioning it five hundred kilometers directly above the floater that Laura Brandt had dropped into Valatare's clouds 250 years ago.

Paula told her u-shadow to open a link to the floater's smartnet. Laura had probably left it codelocked, but she was reasonably confident her routines could hack into the main processors.

The link request ping was accepted by the floater. “Hello,” it responded. “Who are you?”

Paula gave Demitri a startled look. She hadn't been expecting the smartnet to be running an autonomous sentience. “This is Paula Myo. I'm from the Commonwealth. I need to assume control over your functions.”