A Night Without Stars (8 page)

Five hundred meters from the long stone arch bridge across the Crisp, the Devora Fruit Nursery van started signaling then turned off onto a slip road. Lurvri followed it, receiving a series of sharp blasts from the truck he swerved in front of.

They drove for another fifteen minutes along Fontaine Avenue, which ran parallel to the river, heading out of town. At first it led through an industrial district of big factories and long warehouses, even passing the fenced-off Opole Rocketry Plant where they manufactured vernier rocket engines for Silver Swords. It was a residential area next—acres of flat ground where the old buildings had been demolished, allowing the city council to build citizen tenement blocks. They were depressing concrete-and-brick cubes, fifteen stories tall, marked by narrow balconies that wrapped around the whole structure. A dozen had already been built, with scaffolding for another five rising out of the dusty, rubble-strewn ground, but now abandoned and swamped by vegetation. Trees struggled to survive in the regimented parkland laid out between the aloof buildings.

As they entered the outskirts of Opole the houses grew larger. Walls began to line the road to shelter them from curious eyes, with gateways opening onto long driveways; none had gates anymore. This was where the pre-Transition aristocrats and merchants used to live. Some families had managed to hang on to their ancestral homes providing they weren't too ostentatious, but the larger ones were deemed inappropriate for a single family and nationalized. They'd been divided up into apartments. Chaing caught glimpses of allotment strips covering the extensive gardens that surrounded the old houses.

“They're turning off,” Lurvri warned as they drove along Plamondon Avenue.

Up ahead, the Devora Fruit Nursery van was turning through a gateway.

“Keep going,” Chaing instructed.

They passed the entrance, which showed them a big old stone lodge. It looked dilapidated, with wisteria and roses swamping the walls and covering a good fraction of the roof. Windows, too, had been overgrown. The grounds were a wilderness of vines and lawns turned to meadow. A slate plaque on the stone gatepost read:
XANDER MANOR.

“Okay, pull in to the next house,” Chaing said.

Lurvri turned up the next driveway. The villa facing them was small enough for the original family to retain ownership. A couple of children peered out of the sagging porch as the van pulled up in front of it.

“Right,” Chaing announced as he got out of the van. “Let's find out what in Uracus is going on here.”

The seven-story Opole PSR office was poised between an old bank and the County Guilds headquarters at the northern end of Broadstreet. It had an impressive stone façade that had blackened with city grime over the decades. Chaing considered that to be the most pleasant aspect of it. The windows were slim horizontal slits, protected by iron bars; and while the front was stone, everything else was built from a drab gray-brown brick. Floors, internal walls, arching ceilings, all of it, as if it were a building comprising only cellars. Those thick solid walls soaked up sound, leaving it oddly quiet as you walked along the corridors with their caged electrical bulbs. That aspect was an architectural triumph considering the interrogations that went on in some of the specially equipped basement rooms.

However, Director Yaki's office on the seventh floor defied the general bleakness. The furniture was old-aristocrat style, with comfy leather wingback chairs and a huge carved miroak desk that dated back centuries. Even her windows seemed to be wider than the others in the building.

Chaing stood in front of the desk, trying not to let himself be intimidated. Director Yaki herself was a tall woman, with her once-blond hair now a lush silver-gray and swept back from her forehead. The dark-pink scar on her face went from her right ear to the corner of her eye, then down to the mouth—a legacy of hand-to-hand combat with a Faller, so Lurvri had told Chaing, which she wore with more pride than any medal. When he'd arrived at Opole, Chaing had hoped her front-line experience would make her sympathetic to field operations. A hope that was rapidly dying.

“So a brothel owner moves his whores around?” Yaki said tonelessly. “That's not PSR business.”

“Noriah isn't a whore. She's a waitress.”

“She's a waitress that they're pressuring to be a whore. So? It's not unique, sadly.”

“But this whole setup, it's wrong.”

“Wrong how?”

“I talked to the Geale family—they live in the house next door to Xander Manor. They told me it's owned by the Elsdon family, who were woolen mill owners pre-Transition. Slvasta's citizen-equity law changed all that. The state took possession of the mill and left them as managers. It didn't exactly incentivize the next generation, and most of them left. By the time the third generation came along, only the youngest daughter, Elyse, was interested in wool. She ran the old mill for a hundred and twenty years, until the Opole city council finally knocked it down twenty-eight years ago. The whole place was falling apart, and the looms were completely obsolescent. Elyse was heartbroken. She became a classic recluse; she's barely left Xander Manor since. The Geales used to see her walking about on the grounds occasionally, but that's all. She's a hundred and ninety-seven now—if she's still alive.” Which he had his doubts about. Officially, the average life expectancy for Bienvenido was 165. Some lived longer, of course, though they tended to be Eliters. The Elsdon family wasn't on the PSR list of Eliter families.

Yaki nodded slowly. “Infiltration?”

“Yes, I'm sure of it. Three years ago, the Elsdon family started to come back. Two supposed cousins, in their twenties, turned up to help look after the old matriarch and keep Xander Manor's title in the family. Or that's what they told the Geales.”

“Have the Geales seen Elyse in the last three years?”

“No, they have not. It's a classic nest setup.”

“Uracus! All right, Lieutenant, what's your play?”

“We followed Caden back to the Cannes Club. Noriah wasn't in the van. So either Caden is being naïve and thinks he's supplying young girls to the cousins for sex, or he's a Faller himself.”

“Nobody in that business is that naïve,” Yaki said. “Especially if the girls are never seen again.”

“That's my thought as well, Director.”

“Do you want to use the assault squad on Xander Manor?”

“Eventually, yes. But we need to know how big this is, how many there are in the nest. I want a proper team watching Caden, and another on Xander Manor. The Geales seemed to think one of the cousins, Valentin Murin, goes to Opole University.” The one word he wasn't going to mention in the director's office was
Apocalypse
—which was just Eliter propaganda. Proponents of the Apocalypse theory claimed the government and PSR were actually useless at their job, and that Faller nests were expanding across Bienvenido, ready for the final genocidal assault. Every time the PSR uncovered a long-established nest, Chaing found himself disloyally wondering just how true it was.

“Crud! Are they snatching students as well?” Yaki asked.

“I don't know, but the university would make a good source of bodies. Kids drop out all the time and never tell their parents. The dean's office is supposed to monitor anyone leaving, just like all institutions, but I don't know how vigilant they're being.”

“Same as the rest of Bienvenido,” Yaki said bitterly. “They never think it's going to happen to them, and when it does they shout loud enough to be heard in the Ring, swearing it isn't their fault.”

“Typical.”

Yaki smiled, stretching her scar to a darker pink. “I'll assign you two watcher teams. You'll have them by midmorning tomorrow.”

“Thank you. Caden is my priority. The first team can follow him and report directly to Lurvri.”

“A duty that entails spending all night in a club. We shouldn't have any shortage of volunteers.”

“Yes. When the rest are allocated to me, they can watch Xander Manor. The Geales will cooperate.”

“Which team are you going to run?”

“The one watching Caden. But if you don't mind, I'd like to command it from here. I've got Lurvri and two of my team down in the basement, going through the Rolodexes to track down this Elsdon family, see if there actually are any cousins. And I want to talk to one of Major Gorlan's informants at the university, see if anyone there knows anything. When we send in the assault squad, they need to know how many and who the targets are.”

“What about Noriah?”

“I'm sorry. She's been in Xander Manor for four hours now. They've either eaten her or she's been eggsumed.”

Yaki gave him a sorrowful look and swung her chair around until it was facing the window. She had an excellent view along Broadstreet down to Ghalby Park, where tall weeping wanno trees encircled the central lake. “Tough call.”

“Yes. But we have to look at the overall picture here.” It was the delicate way of saying it. If a nest had infiltrated Opole three years ago, that was a serious lapse of vigilance—one that was going to reflect badly on the PSR office when it came out. Especially its director.

“All right,” she said. “Keep me informed.”

Chaing took a tram around the Gates district to Opole University. The campus sprawled across several acres in the middle of the city, a village in itself comprising enormous ornate stone colleges accumulated over a millennium and a half, with turrets and halls and libraries and lecture theaters and residencies donated by alumni keen to show off their wealth and charity. The grounds themselves resembled an exclusive parkland, with avenues of trees, and ponds, and statues.

Walking through it, Chaing thought how different it was from the rest of Opole. Here there was a sense of optimism, of looking to the future; even the colors and noises were enhanced somehow. It was the students, of course, all of them seeming ridiculously young to his jaded gaze. They either smiled or looked intent as they milled around, inevitably laden with books and folders, or carrying elaborate shoulder bags. Groups sat on steps having earnest conversations, while others gathered around people reading out loud. Several impromptu ball games were under way, never lasting long before the players were chased off by fierce college wardens in their scarlet-and-black uniforms.

Chaing headed for Mckie College. At five hundred years old, the stone edifice was relatively new compared with the other buildings. There was a large paved area at the foot of one gable wall, below the central library's massive stained-glass window. Holat trees were planted around it, the long crimson-and-amber leaves spreading from their overhanging boughs creating a pleasant dapple over the wooden tables and benches set out on the slabs. Tea and coffee and cakes were served from a small wooden hut, invisible under a froth of climbing roses.

He spotted Corilla straightaway. She was supposed to wait at the outdoor café for thirty minutes every day, and sure enough there she was by herself at one of the long tables, wearing a cheap baggy green sweater, with a hole in one elbow, scuffed black boots, and purple tights. Her jet-black hair was gathered into a side clump that sprouted blue and red feathers. The informant was supposed to be wearing a hat with a red ribbon in it so a PSR control officer could identify her. None of the other girls in the café even had a hat. So it must be her.

“I can recommend Pinborough,” he said as he sat next to her. “She's one of the best novelists Bienvenido ever produced.”

Corilla looked up from her biology textbook, and flashed him a sullen expression—instantly reminding him of Jenifa's greeting.
What is it about covert meetings that makes everyone so grumpy?

“Everyone says
Basement
is her best,” she recited.

“Pleased to meet you, Corilla. I'm Chaing. You'll be reporting to me for now.”

“Where's Gorlan?”

“Moved on to greater things.”

“On this planet?”

He couldn't reprimand Corilla; she was a reluctant PSR informant, not an officer. Major Gorlan, from the Eliter-monitoring division, had offered her a deal when she applied to study physics at the university. Guaranteed admission in return for divulging any radical activity on campus. As an Eliter, she would never normally get into a university, especially not to study physics.

“Probably not,” Chaing admitted.

“Well, you've wasted your time today, Officer Chaing. Nothing to report.”

“Good. And it's just Chaing. Don't risk blowing your cover with casual statements.”

She put her textbook down on the table. “I don't get you people. Where does the paranoia come from? I mean, everyone complains about government. It's only natural. Don't tell me you think the People's Congress is doing a good job?”

He sighed. Eliters were always philosophers, and mostly angry ones at that; she was a genuine walking, talking cliché. “The Air Force clears Fallers from the sky, the regiments sweep them from the land, we pick up any nests that get through, and the Liberty astronauts are eliminating the Trees. I'd call that crudding good, wouldn't you?”

“That happens because we have to fight the Fallers. The only alternative is death. But I didn't mean them.”

“I know what you meant. But that strikes me as a very simplistic view.”

Corilla scowled and waved her hand dismissively. “You prosper from the status quo, but the irony is your own actions are ridding us of Fallers. When they're gone, people will look around with new eyes. They won't like what they see. Mother Laura knew that.”

“I'm sure she did. But in the meantime I have a world to protect.”

“Well, still nothing to report. Sir. Nobody planning to overthrow the People's Congress. Nobody plotting to sabotage the railways or blow up bridges, or cut off the city water supply.”