A Night Without Stars (84 page)

Kysandra's integral force field protected her from the furious chaos. She sent disruptor pulses cleaving into the lead troop carriers. They detonated into fatal shrapnel clouds that shredded the big Fallers. Their fuel tanks blew up, vivid energetic fireballs that engulfed the tall wirthwal trees lining the boulevard.

The second rank of troop carriers crunched over the flaming debris, and kept on coming. Behind them, the huge beast-Fallers started to spread out, disappearing into the alleys between the buildings.

“Crud,” Florian muttered. He dropped to one knee and fired his molecular severance cannon, chopping the hurrying Fallers apart. Very heavy-caliber projectiles pummeled his force field, knocking him back five meters.

Kysandra chuckled at his outburst of profanities. “Were you expecting the Apocalypse to be easy?” A bazooka round slammed into her force field. It wasn't fully rooted in the ground, allowing the blast to send her staggering backward. She retaliated with another blast of disruptor pulses.

“No,” Florian replied. “They're trying to outflank us.”

“Yes. You and Ry will have to take out the big brutes on each side. I'll keep going for the main group.”

“The kids must be under Joey's force field by now,” Ry said. “All we have to do is sit tight.”

“There are a lot of people in the palace that aren't under the force field, as well as the rest of Varlan's population. Right now, we're what the Fallers are concentrating on. While they're fighting us, they're not killing anyone else.”

“Oh, great Giu! Okay.”

Paula waited while Demitri enacted the gateway's location inversion, and watched as the circular machine extruded itself out of the wormhole to stand on Trüb's copper-and-emerald surface.

“What state is it in?” she asked.

“There's a degree of component degradation,” he said, “but it will do what we need.”

“Okay, let's bring the other floater here.”

Demitri redirected the BC5800d2's terminus coordinate to Ursell and pinged the floater. The response showed them it was drifting eighty kilometers above the surface, being pushed along at twenty-five kilometers an hour by one of the turbulent storms. He manipulated the terminus again, moving it closer and closer to the floater as it twirled about erratically in the conflicting winds.

Once again Paula was impressed by his control. It took less than ten minutes until the terminus had closed within twenty meters of the floater, and they established a link to the duplicate Laura personality in its smartnet. Demitri connected the wormhole to it, and brought it back to Trüb.

The three devices rested close together on the hard purple surface. Demitri stood in front of the BC5800d2 that had come from the palace. Fergus had the newly arrived floater, while Valeri linked to the gateway they'd brought from the
Viscount.

“Are you ready?” Paula asked the Planter.

“We are.”

Her heartbeat started to increase, which she couldn't entirely blame on teenage hormones. “Demitri, let's have some power, please.”

Exovision graphics showed her the BC5800d2 opening a terminus 128 million kilometers away, just above the star's corona. The terminus at the other end of its wormhole opened fifty million kilometers directly above the star's north pole. Demitri increased the internal length to twenty kilometers, and modified the exotic matter's internal structure to pull power directly from the plasma flow. “The induction efficiency is poor,” he murmured, “but we have an unlimited supply of plasma, so it really doesn't matter.”

The terminus above the corona began to move down into the seething ionic storms thrown off by the prominences. Long powerful streamers curved around to streak into the dark throat.

Paula steeled herself, supremely conscious of how close she was standing to the wormhole generator—not that she'd ever know if there was a confinement breach. It would all be over too fast for human nerves to react, even nerves as enriched as hers.

Superhot plasma from the corona began to roar down the wormhole before venting into space like a god's own firework rocket. Density, heat, and velocity increased as the terminus penetrated the chromosphere. The power level generated by the induction effect along the wormhole was phenomenal.

Fergus used the floater's wormhole to form a channel between the energy generated by the BC5800d2's wormhole and the connection between Trüb and the barrier generator.

“Is it enough?” Paula asked the Planter.

“Not yet.”

“Down we go, then,” Demitri said evenly.

The BC5800d2's terminus sank deeper into the star's interior; plasma at incredible temperature poured out through the wormhole, its velocity approaching half light speed.

“We are patterning the energy to override the generator's warp effect,” the Planter said.

Paula was sure she somehow picked up a resonance of excitement from the enigmatic alien. She walked over to the arch of outlandish Planter substance that was protruding through the gateway and onto the barrier surface. There was a small gap between it and the edge of the wormhole, revealing the midnight-black crescent of the generator. Close enough to touch, had it not been shielded by the gateway's force field.

“You're going to have to be quick,” Demitri said. “There are instabilities building in the exotic matter. The wormhole won't hold for long.”

“Applying now,” the Planter said.

Paula held her breath.

Abruptly, the blackness was gone. Paula could see a tangled knot of translucent energy bands, loops kilometers across, gyrating around and through one another as they glowed with the telltale violet of Cherenkov radiation. As she watched, stains of darkness sluiced through them, contaminating the intricate formation deeper and deeper until every band was shading down to obscurity. The negative energy they were composed from dissipated in a last burst of gamma radiation and exotic neutrinos.

The barrier collapsed.

Freed from the harsh pull of its artificial gravity, Valatare's colossal gas envelope exploded both outward and inward. Vast surges of cooling hydrocarbon vapor slashed past the floater, which held steady amid the moon-sized hurricanes.

The fake gas giant was now the center of an expanding cloudstorm that would continue to grow over the weeks until it was thin enough for the solar wind to blow it out across the intergalactic night. Paula watched the start of the process, as the hot lower layers surged into the gulf exposed by the barrier disappearing. Nothing was visible through the ever-shifting ocher haze. Titanic energy swirls tried to equalize, flinging off oceanic-sized lightning discharges.

The Planter withdrew from the wormhole, allowing Paula to stand directly in the center of the gateway. Her u-shadow transmitted the message she'd composed what seemed an age ago now, sitting in Kysandra's dining room the night she'd realized what Valatare was.

She waited with growing desperation, seeing only vast swirls of the drab gases rushing past her tiny window.
I am not wrong. It has to be them. It has to be.
Her hands clenched into fists so tight her nails were digging into her palms.

An answering signal came out of the billowing ionized mist. Then shapes began to emerge, serene and massive. Thousands of them.

Paula smiled beatifically at the glorious Raiel warships as they headed toward her.

Kysandra watched the Fallers abandon their troop carriers, finally realizing they were easy targets. Several of them were sneaking forward through the smoke, dodging between trees and statues in the neat gardens that moated the government offices. She used disruptor pulses to take out the corners and core of the People's Transport Ministry. The entire nine-floor building tumbled down in a slow-motion cascade of stone and concrete and tortured girders. The Fallers creeping furtively along its sides ran frantically into the open road. Kysandra tugged her maser rifle off her shoulder as targeting graphics locked on, her secondary routines designating them for the rifle. It saved power; her biononics didn't have unlimited reserves, and there were still more than two thousand Fallers closing on the palace.

She started jogging toward the Ministry of Agriculture. Sure enough, Fallers began to follow, which made her grin savagely; it was like a magnet drawing iron filings along. Huge swells of black smoke churned along the length of Bryan-Anthony Boulevard, forming a roiling ceiling above her. A sleet of incendiary bullets slammed into the Ministry of Agriculture. Fires bloomed behind shattered windows.

Kysandra's secondary neural routines brought up light amplification imagery to compensate for the growing darkness. She ducked around the side of the building, where the smoke wasn't so dense. The light kept dimming.

“Uh, Kysandra, what is that?” Florian asked.

An icy phantom ran slowly along Kysandra's spine. She stopped jogging and looked up.

“Skylords,” Ry said. “The Skylords have returned.”

“That's not a Skylord,” Kysandra said solemnly.

She remembered the Skylords from her childhood. Exquisitely alien crystalline mountains, shimmering in refracted sunlight, that floated nimbly through the sky as they collected the souls of humans beginning their journey to the welcoming heart of the Void. This dark
thing
descending on Varlan was so much larger—orders of magnitude greater than the city itself. Its umbra had already engulfed the surrounding countryside, pushing the sunlight away to a slender fringe clinging to the horizon. Clouds broke apart on its base, and a fierce wind began to blow across the rooftops as it displaced a monstrous amount of air.

It was all Kysandra could do to stay standing. The most primitive animal instinct she possessed was shouting at her to bow down, to run, to scream hysterically—

The only thing she could hear now was the crackling of the flames. Even the Fallers had stopped shooting. Like her they were silent and still, staring up blankly at their fate.

Paula stood beside Yathal in his command chamber as the
Golakkoth
lowered itself into Bienvenido's atmosphere. The titanic warship moved with a sedate grace, ensuring that the air it deposed didn't howl away in wayward hurricanes as it slid down toward Varlan.

“There are many conflicts under way in the city,” the Raiel captain said. “Which one involves your friends?”

Paula was using the warship's phenomenal sensor suite to observe the city. She had to block most of it; the sheer quantity of information contained within a complete sweep could probably fry a human brain. The warrior Raiel, however, seemed quite capable of total engagement.

She moved her perception focus directly underneath the warship; there was a confrontation on a long road stretching out from the palace. Pinprick graphics bloomed emerald, revealing energy weapon discharges. The answering deluge of more primitive chemical weapons were designated a dull yellow. Her perception spiraled in on Kysandra and Florian and Ry. They'd stopped shooting to gape up in awe. “That's them,” she said. “You've shocked everyone into stopping, but we need to end this, now.”

“Of course,” Yathal said. “The other ships are almost in position.”

Outside
Golakkoth
's sensor image, Paula was aware of four other Raiel warships lowering themselves out of the sky above Lamaran. Their T-fields were already reaching out.

She shifted her focus again, zooming into the palace, identifying the overstretched force field covering a courtyard, then diving deeper, her augmented sight flowing through walls, seeing the crypt where the wormhole had spent so many centuries waiting—now home to bodies and the badly wounded. A deep bunker filled with frightened, defiant regiment officers organizing Varlan's last stand. Cellars where the big building's ordinary staff cowered awaiting the Apocalypse.

“It's over,” she whispered, surprised how the omnipotent viewpoint made her feel so benign. “We've got you. You're safe.”

The
Golakkoth
's sensors classified humans and Fallers, tagging them. Within seconds, she was looking at every sentient entity in Varlan no matter where they were.

“Lift the humans out,” she said.

“The Faller species is undesirable,” Yathal said. “We removed them from our galaxy. We can do the same here for you.”

Paula canceled the warship's perception and turned to face the warrior Raiel. He was different again from any she'd encountered in the Commonwealth galaxy, larger and with wings that evolution had long discarded in the Raiel of her time. For a moment that worried her, but Raiel nature was an absolute, of that she was sure. “I ask you not to. They will be perfectly harmless if we simply leave them behind. This world…it is as much a prison for humans as Valatare was for you. There is nothing here for us. We have to leave, now.”

A soft sigh escaped from the Raiel's thick lips. “Very well, Paula Myo. We acknowledge our debt to you.”

“Thank you.”

Kysandra's u-shadow reported a link opening. “Paula?” she asked in amazement.

“Yes.”

“You did it?” There had been so many years spent holding things together, fighting this wretched eternal rearguard battle, that somewhere along the line she'd stopped thinking it could ever end, that they might actually win. True belief had been extinguished that day Nigel had left her.

Inside she felt a hysterical laugh gestating—nothing could be more real than a multibillion-ton alien spacecraft hovering over your head.

“Yes, this is the
Golakkoth,
a Raiel warship.”

“So you were right, then?”

“Yes, I was right.”

“Thank you.”

“It's what I do. It's what I am.”

“Are the Raiel going to destroy the Fallers?”

“No. There's no need. And I did promise the Planters.”

“But…”