‘You do this? You help us?’
‘Of course. I promised Laura Brandt. Bienvenido needs protecting if we’re ever going to grow into a society that can contact the Commonwealth. Sadly, your PSR isn’t doing the best job defending us right now. You can help rectify that, Chaing. You can bring back some of the drive and determination the PSR has lost. You’re a great officer, I’m sure, so climb the promotion ladder to where you have real influence and power. Help sweep away the dumb politics and prejudices that hinder the fight against Fallers.’
‘Eliter sedition.’
She gave him a disappointed glance. ‘That’s a shame. I thought you were smarter than that. Look around you, Chaing. This world is decaying; human birth rates are in decline. The Fallers are expanding, and they’re organizing to an alarming degree. You have to stop them. The Liberty programme alone can’t save us, not now the Fallers are breeding down here. They’re growing more dangerous, and the government is in denial about the apocalypse. You know it’s all true. That ogre-thing nearly ate you tonight.’
‘So breeder Fallers are real?’ he murmured in defeat.
‘Oh yes. Breeder Fallers don’t have to copy the indigenous species like the eggs do; they can designate their offspring’s physiology just like the old neuts and mods we had back in the Void. Don’t your superiors tell you anything?’
‘That’s just—’ In his head, Chaing could hear Corilla saying whose propaganda? ‘We were told their existence was an Eliter lie,’ he said, hating himself for being so weak.
‘You might want to think about why you were told that.’
He looked up fearfully at her. ‘I can’t say these things.’
‘No, but you can believe them. Right?’
‘I . . .’
‘Okay,’ she said sorrowfully. ‘Do what you have to, Chaing. But a word of advice. Some special political officers from Varlan will be debriefing you. Tell them I was here; don’t hold that part back. Then agree to everything they order you to do. That way, they’ll probably let you live.’
He watched the Warrior Angel turn away. Her disconcerting aurora shrank to nothing as she walked out through the blast hole, leaving him in pitch blackness. Somewhere in the distance, sirens were shrieking.
2
As custom dictated, the morning before his launch, pilot Major Ry Evine walked alone up the steep grassy slope to pay his respects to the grey stone statue of Comrade Demitri – the father of the Astronaut Regiment, chief designer of the Silver Sword rocket and Liberty spacecraft, and people’s hero first class. The statue stood atop Arnice’s Peak, a modest hillock that formed the tip of the promontory where Port Jamenk stretched along the steep inclines above the shoreline. Yigulls soared overhead as he walked, squealing loudly, their blue and white wings spread wide so they could ride the strong winds from the sea with minimal effort.
Ry reached the plinth of granite slabs that circled the statue, and took his cap off so he could perform the required solemn solitary deliberation, head bowed before Demitri, deep in thought and thanks. Even though the footpaths to the crown had been closed yesterday evening by the town authorities, he knew he wasn’t really alone – there would be watchers from the People’s Security Regiment. The PSR was always watching, always suspicious, always judging. Even him, with his prestigious family ancestry – a direct relation to Slvasta himself, no less. There was no aristocracy on Bienvenido any more, but he was about as close to the old concept as it was possible to be these days. It meant they’d watched him for all of his twenty-nine years, protectively at first, then with increasing interest as his flight drew near. He no longer cared; it was just another price to pay for being an astronaut, for being able to slip the surly bonds of Bienvenido, and dance defiantly among the shining enemy. Comrade Demitri himself had spoken that phrase the year he died, selflessly saving others from the horrific fuel-dump explosion.
He raised his head, and for once actually gave the statue a good look. The stone was old, over two hundred years now. Host to a cloak of dark lichen blooms, those slightly melancholic features – familiar from countless photos and coins – were badly weather-worn, while quallgull droppings adorned the head and shoulders. It was hardly the most noble of memorials, but he suspected that Comrade Demitri wouldn’t have minded; he was supposedly a humble man, as the truly great always are.
‘I won’t fail you,’ Ry promised softly. Then he put his cap back on and saluted before turning smartly and striding back down the path.
It was only a couple of hours after dawn, but the air was already muggy, making him sweat in his full dress uniform. Port Jamenk was thirty-five kilometres south of the equator on Lamaran’s eastern coast. Built by the state, its core was a clutter of stone cottages bridging the saddle of land behind Arnice’s Peak. Walls of thick granite blocks were painted white to help ward off the tropical heat, inset with broad shuttered arches to allow the air to flow, and they had roofs of red clay tiles crusted in sun-scorched yellow and green lichen. The cobbled roads were awkwardly narrow, roofed by vines and creepers that tangled around drainpipes and overhead power cables. They followed the inclines in zigzags and sharp curves, in contrast to the precise grids favoured by most of Bienvenido’s post-Transition towns. But then Port Jamenk was an exception, born out of desperate necessity, its construction decreed by Prime Minister Slvasta himself, two hundred and fifty years ago. It housed the state engineers and regiment personnel who built and operated Cape Ingmar, Bienvenido’s solitary rocket port. At first little more than dormitory barracks at the end of the new Eastern Equatorial railway line, it had grown over the centuries as the civilian population had expanded, their licensed enterprises slowly improving the comfort of the rocket port’s workforce.
Ry looked across the jumble of rooftops as the severe sun burnt off the wisps of morning mist. Beyond the town, meadowland stretched back along the promontory, where broad fields contained flocks of goats and llamas and ostriches. Further west, where the promontory merged into the mainland, ramshackle banana and breadfruit plantations covered acres and acres of rumpled ground. They were about the only terrestrial crops that would grow in the poor flinty soil.
Beaches stretched along the bottom of the promontory’s low cliffs, narrow strips of muddy grey sand where the water lapped gently – except for those times when Valatare was in conjunction. Then Bienvenido was subject to tides and hurricanes that the moonless planet had never known back in the Void.
A long curving stone harbour with a lighthouse on the far end had been built to protect the deep-water anchorage from those wild times. It had been built for the recovery fleet. Slvasta had commissioned nine big vessels capable of steaming across the Eastath Ocean in any weather so they could reach the splashdown sites, hauling the Liberty command modules out of the water and giving the victorious returning astronaut a well-deserved hero’s welcome.
Today, there were only five ships. The oldest had been built seventy-eight years ago, and along with two other senior ships, it was anchored in the middle of the harbour, slowly rusting away. The three of them were mothballed, their fittings and cold engines constantly raided for spares by engineers to support the two operational ships.
General Delores, who commanded the Astronaut Regiment, assured her pilot corps that two was more than enough. These days, the return flight trajectory was known before launch, and re-entry was far more precise; there would always be a ship on station to pick them up. But talk around the astronaut mess was that five hours wasn’t outside the norm, with some flights in the last decade waiting three days before a ship arrived.
Ry arrived at the fence at the bottom of Arnice’s Peak. Pilot Major Anala Em Yulei was waiting by the gate, wearing her white Astronaut Regiment dress uniform, chestnut hair tucked neatly into her cap. Her thin face was composed into a neutral expression, which her delicate features transformed to fierce disapproval. People who didn’t know her often assumed she wore a permanent scowl. When she did smile, Ry always had to smile in tandem, becau
se it was such a burst of cheeriness.
They’d known each other for years. Ry had left the cooperative farm in Cham county at eighteen to take a general engineering degree at Varlan University. From there he entered the Air Defence Force flight officer school where Anala was in the class above.
She was from a Gretz family, who before the revolution used to hold vast estates specializing in spice crops. That had all been nationalized by the state right after the Great Transition, but they got to keep the ancestral home and some farmland around it. She’d told him the big ancient building had been divided up into apartments where about fifteen branches of the family now lived. Despite all the institutional discrimination against her family legacy, they still had a strong tradition of regimental service. Anala joined up as soon as she finished her aeronautics degree.
After flight school they were posted to different squadrons – she back to Gretz, and he to Portlynn. Two years flying the new four-engine IA-509s on missions against Faller eggs had seen him notch up seven confirmed egg kills as testament to his piloting skill, before he applied to the Astronaut Academy – like every single pilot in the Air Defence Force always did.
Anala arrived at the academy as part of the same intake. Her small frame was always going to act in her favour, for the Astronaut Regiment didn’t accept anyone over one metre seventy-five, and certainly nobody who weighed in above eighty kilos. Those were the limits for the command module. In his case some political pressure must have been brought to bear by Democratic Unity, who would have recognized the advantage from having someone related to Slvasta qualify as an astronaut.
They’d spent the next six years together in training, learning orbital mechanics, rocket systems engineering, electronics, atomic bomb design, physics, mathematics, astrogation, the entire layout of the Liberty spaceship modules, and the nuclear missile operational margins – so much knowledge was crammed into his head that, even with his phenomenal memory, he suspected his brain must be leaking most of it away again. Then there was the physical side of it: horrible survival training exercises on land and at sea, punishing recurring medical evaluations, endless fitness workouts, the divedown-upchuck flights in a modified transport plane to familiarize them all with freefall, and the endless flight simulations – most utterly boring, and the remainder so terrifyingly realistic he’d thought more than once that he wouldn’t get out alive.
All that they’d gone through together, enduring all the indignity and the strain and worry, the constant paranoid observation by the PSR for loyalty to the Democratic Unity party. And all of it endured because there, at the end, lay the greatest prize in the world: spaceflight. Taking the fight against the Fallers up to the Tree Ring. Six years of solid friendship, then last night they’d slept together.
Astronauts got laid a lot. On a world as devoid of glamour as Bienvenido, astronauts were more famous than even the prime minister. Schoolkids collected playing cards of them, the newspapers and cinema reels idolized them, and the whole planet kept the Liberty tally against the Trees. They were all straight icons, they were all gay icons – people just wanted them any way they could get them, in fantasies or in the flesh. The astronaut office had a whole building in Port Jamenk where two floors of clerks did nothing else but deal with the fan mail from across the planet.
So six years of laughing together, travelling together, attending parties, shared duties, covering each other’s backs against the training inspectors, total companionship, and then—
‘I want to offer you a deal,’ Anala had said in the middle of a dance at his Commencing Countdown party yesterday evening. They were swirling around gently as the band played old dance tunes. Ry had been hoping for some of the newer faster songs that were becoming fashionable in the cities, but this was Port Jamenk, after all. ‘I’ll sleep with you tonight if you sleep with me on my countdown night.’
It was a given for an astronaut to have someone (or more than one) sharing their bed the night before a launch. Officially eighty-nine per cent of missions returned – though if you actually did the maths, it was more like eighty per cent. Then there were the three per cent of rockets that didn’t make it off the launch pad. And statistics about radiation damage to astronauts’ bodies were never available outside of fearful whispers.
So nobody – not even the PSR – was going to object to astronauts spending their last night having plenty of sex.
Ry had enjoyed that particular benefit of his status during the tedious and numbing publicity and propaganda tours that the Astronaut Corps were sent on – speaking at factories, universities, town halls, Party rallies, and regiment headquarters right across the continent. Anala, he knew, wasn’t as promiscuous, though she hadn’t exactly been celibate.
‘I . . . Me? Why?’ he stammered in surprise.
‘I’m going to want some human contact that night, same as everyone. I just don’t want it to be some oaf I picked simply because he’s got a hot body and a narnik bong.’
‘You can choose anybody. You know that.’
‘So can you.’ She glanced pointedly round the hall, where there were a lot of amazingly pretty girls in very small dresses waiting impatiently round the dance floor. ‘Most of these babes haven’t even got a Port Jamenk permit; Giu alone knows how they got past security at the station.’
He grinned. Port Jamenk was a closed area, only open to state-approved residents and visitors. ‘I guess our species can be just as determined as the Fallers.’
‘Yeah. So?’
Ry didn’t even have to think about it. ‘I’d like that,’ he said quietly.
She nuzzled up close. ‘We don’t have to have the sex, not if you don’t want. I know a lot of astronauts are too tense, or drunk, or tired to actu—’
He kissed her. ‘Oh, yes, we do.’
Anala opened the gate in the fence and saluted. Ry grinned back at her. When he woke up that morning there’d been a moment when he worried that they’d be self-conscious around each other, that too much had changed. But actually being with a friend – someone who understood – on countdown night had been perfect. It didn’t hurt that six years of intense physical training had made them as fit as marathon athletes, either.
‘Respects paid, major?’ she asked in a formal voice.
Ry glanced at the escort group around her. Three astronaut trainees from their own squad, two medical technicians, five reporters, two newsfilm camera operators, and Colonel Eades, a three-flight veteran. An experienced astronaut always mentored a rookie on their first flight.
‘Indeed.’ He looked back up at the grey statue. ‘I think our father Demitri is smiling upon this launch.’
The group walked through Port Jamenk’s convoluted streets to the town’s small railway station. Bunting from the Fireyear celebration was still strung over the main street. There were few people about, though some had made the effort to gather along the route to quietly wish him luck. Fishermen on the way to their state-licensed boats stopped and applauded. When he looked out across the harbour, both the recovery ships were steaming away towards the horizon. He didn’t say anything, but knew all the astronauts were thinking the same thing. At least they both made it out of the harbour.
The train in the station had a single passenger carriage – the same one that took Comrade Reshard, Bienvenido’s first astronaut, on his momentous journey to the launch pad for the Liberty 1 flight. It had been refurbished many times so that it remained operational. Astronauts could be a conservative, superstitious bunch.
In the carriage it was just Ry, Anala, Colonel Eades and the medical techs. Ry sat down in Reshard’s chair and took his uniform jacket off. The techs immediately wrapped a rubber cuff round his arm and took his blood pressure. A thermometer was stuck in his mouth. He was given a small bottle and told to give them a sample as soon as he could.
‘I trust you didn’t overdo it last night,’ the colonel said.
‘No, sir.’
Anala was staring solidly out of the window as the steam e
ngine let out a whistle, and the pistons started to pump. The train pulled away from the platform.
‘Good man. Glad you haven’t forgotten your duty. Bienvenido comes before any personal indulgence. There’ll be plenty of time for that when you come back. Giu, I remember my triumph parades. If you thought the girls were enthusiastic last night, you ain’t seen nothing yet.’ He slapped Ry’s leg.
Ry gave Eades an embarrassed smile.
The train rattled along the track to Cape Ingmar, a raised stone-walled embankment that ran parallel to the coast a couple of kilometres inland. Outside, the ground was mainly jugobush swamp that had an ever-shifting boundary with the sea as gritty silt and vigorous fronds constantly pushed outwards, only to be washed back again. There were no settlements here; this land was too difficult to ever tame and farm. Nor were there any fishing villages. The swamp covered river inlets and possible harbours.
The only sign of life was a village of Vatni huts – long cylinders woven from dried jugobush branches, looking like some kind of exposed tunnel network. The aliens from Aqueous had slowly spread their family enclaves along Lamaran’s coastlines since their arrival two and a half centuries ago, during the brief time Laura Brandt had opened a wormhole to their world. Some people muttered about their expanding population being as bad as a Faller incursion. Ry knew that was stupid paranoia. They were semi-aquatic; they didn’t covet land. Besides, it was Slvasta himself who had negotiated the deal, allowing them new settlements on Bienvenido in exchange for protection. They had become invaluable in guarding the coastal waters from Marine-Fallers. Eggs Fell constantly into Bienvenido’s oceans, where they eggsumed larger, more aggressive species of fish. Crewing a trawler, and even some of the smaller commercial boats, was a hazardous profession. Since the Vatni arrived and began patrolling along the coast, that risk had reduced considerably.
To the west, the imposing Salalsav mountains rose out of the horizon, snow sparkling on their upper slopes. The high range shielded the Desert of Bone from the clouds coming in off the ocean. Not even the post-Transition conjunction storms could break through their guard. Rain hadn’t fallen on that desert for thousands of years.