A Night Without Stars

  ‘Negative.’ Now he began to doubt himself – up until he replayed his own memory. With his eyes closed, the tenuous strand of glowing ions was pushed out of the seething shell, energetic gases stretched along by some invisible force. Something created that wake, something accelerating. Something that could survive a three-hundred-kiloton atomic bomb. But what?

  He glided back into the acceleration couch. ‘Flight com, I’m activating the radar. It might find something.’

  ‘Roger that, Liberty two-six-seven-three. Nice thinking.’

  Ry watched the tiny circular scope for several minutes. The cluster of Tree remnants showed as a faint fuzz at the radar’s extreme range. There was nothing else – and certainly nothing close or accelerating.

  ‘All right, Ry,’ Anala said. ‘We’ve alerted SVO; their radars will scan for it. If there’s a Prime ship hiding up there, they’ll find it.’

  He blinked in surprise at the almost-heresy. There are no Prime, not any more. Mother Laura sacrificed herself to destroy them and save us. Besides, the Prime ships had a vast exhaust plume.

  His training took over, and he strapped himself in, barely realizing what he was doing. The more he thought about it, the less he understood what any kind of spaceship would be doing so close to the Tree. Research? Attack? But he was damn sure that it was the cause of the missile going awry. Nothing else could have done it.

  So where did you come from? Which planet? Is there going to be another invasion?

  Despite his urgency to find the intruder, Liberty continued its constant demands on his attention. He had to restart the thermal roll. Systems needed resetting. Readings taken. Updates entered. Flight control’s astrogation team wanted Liberty to perform a course-correction burn.

  Two hours after the strike, the Liberty’s orbit took it out of Bienvenido’s umbra. Sunlight shone into the command module as the spacecraft slipped back into the full glare of the G1 star. Ry always wondered why Laura Brandt had bothered classifying the star at all; it wasn’t like they had anything to compare it to. Apart from the planets, the sky above Bienvenido was completely empty.

  Of course he’d seen pictures of the smudges the SVO and university observatories had photographed. Galaxies: so far away that even Commonwealth starships would take decades to reach the closest. Invisible to the naked eye. Bienvenido was alone forever. The Void had made sure of that, banishing its woebegone exiles beyond any hope of return.

  Something glinted amid the eternal black out there on the other side of the viewport – a tiny point of light far above the planet’s distant crescent. Not a Tree. The Liberty wasn’t oriented to let him see the Ring.

  Ry unclipped his couch straps and slid over to the port. Sunlight was shining on something. An object in space. Distance undetermined. He grabbed the camera again and clicked off a few pictures before the thermal roll carried it out of view.

  ‘Liberty two-six-seven-three, telemetry is showing you cancelling the thermal roll. Do you have a problem?’

  ‘It’s here,’ he said, inanely using a near-whisper. ‘It’s with me. I can see it.’

  ‘What is there? What are you seeing, Liberty two-six-seven-three?’

  ‘I have visual contact. The alien . . . it’s following me down.’ Ry watched the flight attitude indicator, and stabilized the Liberty’s attitude. When he looked out of the viewport he found the grey glimmer where he’d seen it before.

  His fingers moved over the console as if he was playing some complex piano music, flicking switches and clicking knobs round, always knowing what to do. Turning the radar towards the alien. The round scope lit up with a slight phosphorescent sheen. There was nothing there. He glanced out of the viewport, seeing the faint glimmer point. It wasn’t bright, not like the refraction you got off the crystal substance Trees were made from, but certainly not dark like a Faller egg. There was still nothing on the radar. ‘Crud!’

  ‘Ry, we’re not getting any reports of anything near you from SVO.’

  ‘Roger that; it’s immune to radar.’ Ry pushed himself back to the port. Far away and big, or close and small? He brought the camera back up, and took more shots. The rangefinder wasn’t helping. He pulled the sextant out of its recess and lined up the crosshairs. Read the figures. Checked the guidance computator display.

  ‘Can you describe it?’ Anala asked. ‘Is it a Faller egg?’

  ‘Negative. It’s a solid material that’s reflecting sunlight. I’m assuming that means it’s relatively small and close by. If it was big, the SVO observatories would spot it. Giu, they can see a Faller egg, and they’re dark.’

  ‘Is it accelerating?’

  ‘Taking a reading now.’ He lined up the sextant crosshairs again, and read the figures. Compared them to the glowing numbers of the guidance computator. ‘I think it might be. A very small acceleration. This is right on the error margin.’ Even with his eyes, he couldn’t see any kind of exhaust plume. Trees don’t have rocket exhausts.

  ‘Roger. We’ll ask SVO to attempt visual observation of the anomaly.’

  ‘Thank you, flight com.’ Another sextant reading, and the figures were slightly different again. It is under power – which means something is controlling it.

  He took a deep breath, considering his options if it moved closer. What if it attacks me? Now that he had fired the nuclear missile, Liberty boasted a single pistol, and that was in the emergency-landing survival pack. His gaze darted to the base of the console where it was stowed, and he grunted in exasperation at how desperate that was. A Liberty spacecraft was expendable, he’d always known that; he just hadn’t faced up to that situation ever becoming real.

  He stayed by the viewport, determined not to let the enigmatic glint of light out of his sight. It was drifting slowly towards the base of the port. Ry checked it through the sextant again. Difficult now – it was definitely dimmer.

  ‘Ry, the Prerov observatory has visual acquisition of the Liberty,’ Anala said. ‘They’re using their main telescope.’

  Ry knew from her tone it wasn’t good news. ‘Glad to hear that, flight com.’

  ‘They report empty skies. There are no Faller eggs around you.’

  ‘It is not a Faller egg,’ he said firmly. ‘It is a vehicle, under acceleration.’

  ‘Stand by, Liberty two-six-seven-three.’

  He knew what that meant. Flight control had become worried he was cracking up. Medical ‘incidents’ were another rumour spoken about in hushed tones around the astronaut quarters – the unique stress of spaceflight with its cabin claustrophobia and simultaneous exposure to the infinite nothing of intergalactic space. It didn’t happen often, but even the best pilots had been known to get quirky out here, all alone.

  ‘Ry, engineering believes the object you’re seeing may be a part of your third stage,’ Anala was saying. ‘Possibly a section of the inter-stage fairing. That would account for the similar orbit.’

  ‘Roger that, flight com. Could be.’ He almost laughed with contempt at the amount of crud they were expecting him to swallow. After separation, the third stage would carry on along a similar elliptical orbit, true. But the third stage automatically vented the gas left in all its tanks, to avoid any later rupture producing a fragment cascade which might endanger a Liberty mission, and that venting alone would diverge their orbital tracks. And his continuing correction burns would add further distance and velocity difference. It would be impossible for any part of the third stage to run parallel with his own course by this time in the mission.

  Ry grimaced and turned his attention back outside. The alien was still there, but very faint. ‘Flight com, the intruder is definitely darker now. Liberty is moving away from it.’ He swung the sextant round, centred the crosshairs, and took another reading. It turned out to be the last. Less than a minute later, the speck had vanished.

  Routine and training reclaimed him for the rest of the flight.

  There was the seventeen-second mid-course-correction burn. He needed to eat. He needed to sle
ep; flight com said the doctors were insisting on that.

  For fifteen uneventful hours the Liberty spaceship glided along its elliptical orbit, back down towards perigee, two hundred and fifteen kilometres above Bienvenido.

  After he woke from a troubled three-hour doze, Ry started working through the atmosphere re-entry checklist. Now he was approaching the planet, SVO’s radars were tracking him with greater precision. It was a critical time. The command module had to hit the ionosphere at the perfect angle. Too steep and it would burn up, too shallow and it would skip across the tenuous gas and pick up an unstoppable tumble.

  Ry laboriously entered new data into the guidance computator. Everything checked out for his final course-correction burn. It lasted nine seconds, and flight com confirmed its accuracy.

  ‘We need to start the checklist for command module separation,’ Anala said.

  Ry was staring out of the viewport, half-expecting to see the alien ship out there, a black splinter silhouetted by Bienvenido’s glaring blue and white panorama. ‘Roger that, flight com. I’m opening the manual now.’

  He had to switch the command module power over to its own internal batteries. They could keep the spacecraft’s instruments and life support running for ninety minutes. Ry was back in the pressure suit for the descent.

  The command module separated from the service module while the Liberty was three hundred kilometres above Nilsson Sound. Seven minutes later, Ry experienced the first effects of gravity reclaiming the spaceship when crumbs and scraps of food packets, a lost pen, all drifted gently down out of the air to settle on the rear bulkhead around him. Static built up in his headphones.

  ‘See you on the other side of the sky,’ Anala said encouragingly just before contact was lost.

  Gravity was increasing now. The sky outside the ports began to glow a faint orange, swiftly rising to a brighter cherry red. Then the sound started – a low moan building fast to a full hurricane roar. Ry could see solar-bright streamers flaring for kilometres along the plummeting command module’s wake, clogging the air with the dazzling embers burning off its blunt heat-shield base. Inside of a minute, gravity reached one gee, then continued to climb. The whole command module started shaking, far worse than it did during launch. In front of him, the console was a blue-grey blur as he fought to inhale, gulping down air in short frantic bursts. After forty hours in freefall, the six-gee force which re-entry exerted on his body was excruciating.

  Finally the deceleration force began to ease off, and the brilliance of the tormented air died away. Blue sky was visible above as the command module sank through the lower atmosphere at terminal velocity. There was a terrific bang, and a yellow flash streaked across the port.

  ‘Drogue chute deployed,’ Ry managed to croak, not even knowing if he had regained radio communication.

  Another giant impulse crushed him painfully down into the acceleration couch. He saw the three bright orange main chutes opening across the sky, clumped together like a bunch of flowers.

  ‘Welcome home, Liberty two-six-seven-three,’ Anala said solemnly. ‘Recovery fleet reports they have a visual on your chutes.’

  Ry scanned the console. His altitude was five hundred metres. Gravity was back to normal. He braced himself as the altimeter wound down to zero. The command module thudded down into the water – which, after the trauma of re-entry, seemed quite mild. Spray sloshed over the viewports, and the floatation ring inflated out from the top of the command module. He began to bob about in the ocean swell. In his earphones, he could hear the flight control staff cheering.

  ‘Great Giu,’ he groaned, and started to laugh. ‘I made it. I actually crudding made it!’

  3

  The small, well-equipped clinic was on the second floor of the Opole PSR office. As well as the five treatment bays, it had a bathroom with a shower. Chaing stood under the thick stream of hot water for a long time, despite the acute pain from his damaged wrist, washing the carnage off his skin. Soap took care of the physical contamination. As for the mental pollution – well, that was a whole different thing.

  The trauma of losing Lurvri, the butchery, those were events he could come to terms with eventually. That was an honourable part of the fight against the Fallers. But the Warrior Angel . . .

  I am completely compromised. Everything she told me, my heritage, it leaves me exposed. She did that deliberately.

  The nurse bandaged his discoloured, swelling wrist, and told him he would have to get an X-ray. It was probably broken. He would need a cast for a couple of months.

  She offered him some painkillers. Chaing almost refused, but that would be churlish. And possibly out of character. I can’t risk that.

  He swallowed the pills and dressed in a set of spare clothes someone had brought from his locker. That was when he realized his PSR badge was missing, removed along with his ruined clothes.

  Two mildly embarrassed guards were waiting for him, as he knew they would be. He knew them – he knew everybody in the office – but said nothing as they led him down into the basement. It was indignation he felt, rather than anger or fear, when they put him in one of the interrogation cells. Humiliatingly, it was a cell for interrogating renegades and reactionaries: three metres by three, the universal bricks painted a dull grey-green. Table in the middle, and a plain wooden chair on each side, facing each other.

  At least it wasn’t one of the cells down on level five. The ones with benches where the suspect was strapped down. Where instruments and injections were used to extract truths.

  Not yet, anyway.

  He’d completely lost track of time when the door finally swung open again. The man who came in was well over a century old, wearing a perfectly tailored charcoal-grey suit, a white shirt, and a slim dark-red tie. Chaing didn’t know him; he wasn’t from the Opole office. But he was definitely PSR. He possessed the air of cold authority Chaing always strove to project.

  He settled himself in the chair opposite Chaing and adjusted his steel-rimmed spectacles. A thick cardboard folder was placed on the table.

  Chaing looked at the label. His name was printed on it. If there is any hint of an Eliter ancestor in there, I’m dead.

  ‘Captain Chaing.’

  ‘Yes. And you are?’

  ‘Stonal. I am the director of Section Seven. And I’ve flown in from Varlan specifically to talk to you.’

  Chaing nodded. ‘Of course you have.’ Everyone knew about Section Seven, the PSR’s internal security office. But . . . The director himself?

  ‘Given you are a fellow PSR officer, you understand how this interview will proceed? I don’t have to go through the whole threats-and-promises routine, do I?’

  ‘No. You don’t have to do that.’

  ‘Good. I’m not interested in the nest, nor their plans to sabotage the rocketry plant. I don’t care about Lurvri, though I’m saddened that the regiment lost a good officer. Nor am I bothered by Comrade Deneriov.’

  ‘So what does interest you?’

  Stonal pursed his lips in a grudging approval. ‘Right now? Only one thing. So tell me . . . What was she like?’

  Chaing didn’t hesitate. ‘Very frightening. Her weapons were powerful. Those Fallers, she just . . . shredded them.’

  ‘Did you see her weapons?’

  Chaing cocked his head to one side, trying to recall the slaughter. Not easy, even for his recall – he’d spent the last couple of hours suppressing the horror. ‘Actually, no, now I think about it. The air wobbled, like a heat shimmer, and there was a flash. But her hands were empty; there was no hardware.’

  ‘Her timing was perfect, from your point of view. Did she say how she knew about the nest?’

  ‘She said the Eliters had intercepted some encrypted signals, so they knew there was a nest in Opole. They’d been watching for it.’

  ‘They? She’d been working with radicals?’

  ‘She said she’d been in Opole for a few days, helping local Eliters track down the signals.’

&nb
sp; ‘What else did she say?’

  ‘One thing I found interesting: that she’d promised Mother Laura she would protect Bienvenido.’

  ‘I’m told that’s true.’

  Which almost threw Chaing. He shot Stonal a suspicious glare. ‘How could it be true? She looks about twenty. The legends say she was alive back then, so she must be the last person alive to see Bienvenido undergo the Great Transition.’

  ‘Kysandra was born in the Void. Nigel gave her some form of Commonwealth medicine which allows her to stay young – apparently.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Indeed. And she chooses to keep that medicine for herself, as she does a lot of things. Uniqueness helps consolidate her quasi-mythical status among the Eliters and other reactionaries.’

  ‘But she is helping us.’

  ‘When it suits her, yes.’

  ‘Then why the secrecy? If she has Commonwealth technology, why not let her aid us openly?’

  ‘That’s simple: Nigel Sheldon. Kysandra was his . . . companion. Prime Minister Slvasta, quite rightly, did not trust her. She had assisted the revolution not to right injustice, but purely as a subterfuge enabling Nigel to steal the Captain’s old quantumbuster. Then she collaborated with Slvasta’s own wife to secretly influence the new People’s Congress. She cannot be trusted. We still do not understand what Nigel’s ultimate aim was. In the Void we were at least the equals of the Fallers. Looking back, we may even have had a slight advantage due to the mental powers the Void gave us. Here, in the infinite dark, we are barely holding our own. In the Void, our souls were taken into the loving embrace of the Heart: we had immortality. Out here, when we die, it is forever. This is not liberation, as Nigel and the Warrior Angel claim. This is one short step from damnation.’

  ‘She killed those Fallers. She saved me.’

  ‘If we Fall, she Falls with us. For all her weapons and her technology, she is alone. She cannot hold off an entire planet of Fallers.’

  Chaing let out a long breath. ‘All right. We can’t eliminate her, and she won’t cooperate with us. So, now what?’