A Night Without Stars

  ‘Crud.’

  ‘So asking PSR Eliter division techs to monitor transmissions is a dead end.’

  But not Eliters, he thought. They could scan for them. Except Stonal sent Corilla away. Stupid move. ‘All right. I’ll need a new team to hunt for nests. I’d like Corporal Jenifa assigned as my partner to replace Lurvri.’

  ‘Are you sure about that? It’s generally not a good idea to have someone you’re screwing working under you. Emotional attachment can lead to hesitation, among other problems.’

  Crud, how did she know that? ‘I wasn’t emotionally attached to Lurvri, and that didn’t help him.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You can have Jenifa. Your call.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  *

  Early-morning light was just starting to shine round the red and blue curtains when Chaing woke up. It revealed Jenifa lying beside him. She was under the bedclothes this time, and naked – like him. He looked at her for a while, enjoying the memory of last night. His wrist still ached from that, so he moved his arm trying to ease it.

  She woke at the motion, disorientated at first as she glanced round his bedroom, then she saw him watching her and grinned. ‘Morning.’

  He kissed her, using it to huddle up closer. ‘Morning to you.’

  ‘You’re very eager . . .’ A curious frown, and her hand was snaking down his stomach to find how stiff he was. She giggled. ‘Men in the morning. It’s like a crudding alarm clock.’

  He nibbled her ear and moved down to her throat, which made her squeak.

  ‘Tickles,’ she protested. Then she shoved the bedclothes away and slung a leg over his hips, rising up to straddle him. Instead of taking him inside herself, she began to toy with him. He groaned in frustration. The wan beams of light stippled her skin, bestowing her robust figure with a rich gold hue. Anticipation became unbearable.

  ‘Please,’ he moaned.

  Smirking, she leant forwards so her mouth was a centimetre from his ear, a hot whisper telling him the wicked things he’d have to do before she’d let him inside her.

  The phone on the bedside cabinet started ringing.

  ‘No crudding way!’ Chaing cried.

  Jenifa nearly fell off the bed, she was laughing so hard.

  He glared at the phone, but of course it was no good. He wouldn’t be getting a phone call at home and at this time unless it was extremely important. ‘Yes?’ he snapped into the handset.

  ‘Am I interrupting something?’ Stonal’s voice asked.

  Once again Chaing wondered if his flat was being bugged. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘We have a problem. You’ll be helping me control a regiment operation.’

  ‘Er . . . Yes, of course. What regiment operation?’

  ‘I’m conducting a search of the countryside not far from Opole. A car will pick you up in ten minutes. There’ll be a helicopter for you at the Air Defence Force aerodrome.’

  ‘I’ll be ready, sir.’

  6

  They reversed Ry’s furtive arrival – a procedure he would have laughed at if it hadn’t been so ridiculous. The same escort took him back out of the anonymous PSR office block and into the car, which retraced its route to the hangar with the seaplane. He got in, and one of the aircraft crew handed him the crumpled flight suit he’d worn during the mission. Nobody said anything as he changed back into it, making sure his mission badge was prominent on his chest. Then they all sat and waited.

  Sure enough, base personnel started to appear in the hangar soon after – colleagues from the Astronaut Corps, flight controllers, Cape workers, a regiment band, reporters and the newsreel camera crews. Finally the radio operator looked up and said: ‘They’re ready for you, sir.’

  The band was playing when he stuck his head out of the seaplane door. A grand cheer went up; flashbulbs went off. Ry raised an arm to wave. At the foot of the airstairs, General Delores saluted. He walked down and saluted her back. A ten-year-old girl in a pretty red and green dress gave him a bunch of flowers and smiled up shyly. He looked round the hangar at the enthusiastic faces, returning their smiles. Then stopped. Anala was standing two rows back from the front, giving him a mocking slow handclap, an icily contemptuous expression on her face.

  Ry didn’t get back to his private quarters until after midnight. There had been the official press interviews, carefully monitored and guided by the Astronaut Corps political officers; then the formal splashdown banquet in the mess hall. Followed by a less formal, but still traditional, session in the Astronaut Corps bar, drinking the same shots of Dirantio Comrade Demitri had downed after the first successful Silver Arrow launch – during which no one, absolutely no one, had mentioned anything about any part of the mission having difficulties. Nothing about the delay after he arrived, and the welcome-home ceremony in the hangar. A whole evening of talk which said nothing. It was quite remarkable, really.

  He took his dress uniform off and got into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt – another change of clothes; he’d lost track of how many there’d been today – and gave the bed a longing look. Yet he knew he wouldn’t be sleeping any time soon.

  And there it was: a discreet knock on the door. Just before he opened it, he wondered if he’d got this wrong and it would be another armed escort, and the last anyone would know or see of Pilot Major Ry Evine would be the newsreel films of his splashdown banquet. But it was Anala, looking rather sexy in her tailored dress uniform with the top three buttons on her white blouse undone.

  Ry gestured her in with an exaggerated motion, realizing he’d had quite a lot of Dirantio shots. Then he put his finger to his lips, and gave his quarters an embellished glance round.

  She responded with an exasperated scowl, but nodded in understanding. ‘Good to see you.’

  ‘And you.’ He started to kiss her, then discovered it wasn’t being returned. ‘Oh,’ he grunted.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, more sympathetically. ‘I think you need a proper sleep. You can tell me all about it in the morning.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ Ry looked round for the bed—

  *

  He woke up with that uncomfortable fading ache which told him he’d slept through a hangover. Anala was moving round in the little galley kitchen which all the astronaut quarters had. All she wore was the white blouse, which barely came down over her hips. It was a fantastic sight to wake up to.

  She brought a mug of coffee over to the bed. ‘I thought you might need this.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m not too bad actually.’

  ‘Lucky you. Astronauts and parties! No wonder none of us ever worry about making it to old age; alcohol poisoning is going to get us long before a faulty capsule.’

  ‘Right.’ He was looking at the bed with its rumpled sheets, wondering if she’d spent the night beside him. Perhaps she’d like to spend the morning on the mattress as well? Then he remembered the welcome in the hangar, and decided not to push his luck. Besides . . .

  ‘Drink your coffee,’ she told him, ‘and we’ll walk to the canteen for breakfast.’

  Something in her voice . . . ‘Okay.’

  All of Cape Ingmar’s accommodation blocks were on the north side, well away from the engineering hangars and rocket-assembly facilities. Concrete paths between the military-style buildings were lined with shrubs that struggled to produce any flowers in the sandy soil. When they stepped out of the astronaut quarters, a warm wind was blowing in off the sea. Humidity hadn’t yet reached its usual hostile peak. Ry took some deep breaths, finally starting to feel the tension slacken off as he inhaled the fresh air.

  ‘So are we safe to talk out here?’ Anala asked.

  ‘If we’re not, we might as well pack for the Pidrui mines right now and save them the trouble of a show trial.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’d even get that,’ she said. ‘All of Cape Ingmar was in lockdown while the political officers talked to you.’

  ‘Officer – not officers. Just one. He didn’t give me his name, but he
had to be from Section Seven.’

  ‘Figures. So what the crud happened up there?’

  ‘There was something. I saw it. Some kind of craft. I think it was hiding behind Tree 3,788-D.’

  ‘Really? Not debris from the Tree?’

  ‘It was a spacecraft.’ He closed his eyes, his perfect memory bringing back the image of the bomb’s plasma shell, the slim contrail spiking out from it, the tip curving round. ‘I saw it manoeuvre. But there wasn’t any rocket exhaust. It was alien, Anala, and it was heading down to Bienvenido. And those bastards from Section Seven don’t give a crud. All they’re worried about is suppressing the knowledge.’

  ‘They won’t suppress this. Not at the highest levels. They can’t ignore this.’

  ‘They’ve got the photos I took. There’s no evidence. If I say anything, they’ll tell everyone I tried to sabotage the missile.’

  ‘Yeah, and how did that happen?’

  ‘It must have been the alien. Anything with that level of technology could interfere with our communications.’

  ‘The only aliens I know that can fly without a reaction drive are the Skylords. Do you think they’re coming back? The Church of the Return would love that.’

  ‘No, the Skylords were as big as mountains. This thing was small, probably about the same size as the Liberty capsule.’

  ‘Not an egg. Not a Skylord. Not a Prime. What, then?’

  ‘The only species other than the Skylords that don’t need rockets to fly through space is us: humans.’

  Alana gave him a shocked look. ‘The Commonwealth?’

  ‘That’s the only possibility left.’

  ‘It can’t be them.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they’d . . . show themselves?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Ry’s hand went automatically to his mission badge, fingertips stroking its small hard curves. ‘What I swore to do when I joined this regiment: to protect Bienvenido from aliens. All aliens. Not just the Fallers.’

  ‘Same as everyone else on this planet, then.’

  ‘I have to know, Anala. I have got to find out what I saw up there.’

  She stood still and brushed at the hair the wind was blowing across her face, revealing a troubled expression on her sharp features. ‘I know you. That’s trouble coming.’

  ‘Whatever it takes. I don’t care. They don’t frighten me. They can stop me if they catch me, but they can’t intimidate me into silence.’

  ‘Fine words. Slvasta would be proud.’

  Ry saw the old political officer’s face, emotionless and calculating in the interview room, waiting for the correct answers. ‘I doubt it.’

  She grinned cheerfully. ‘So what have you got in mind?’

  ‘I need ten minutes with the flight centre’s computator. When are you due an orbital mechanics training session?’

  Teaching room 3-B was one of several identical rooms in the astronavigation department. A small window provided a view out over the shallow dunes along the neck of Cape Ingmar’s plateau. Ry had spent weeks of his life in this very room, sitting at one of the three wooden tables, trying to keep interested as the instructor droned on behind the lectern. The big blackboard was covered in curving vectors, like giant arrows stabbing out from a small chalk representation of Bienvenido, each with a series of equations running along them.

  He ignored that and walked over to the chunky teleprinter standing beside the lectern. The machine resembled an oversized typewriter, with a near-inexhaustible supply of paper that kept spooling out of the top. Its printer head was a small electrically powered globe that bobbed about like some badly neurotic creature.

  Anala pulled the blind down over the glass pane in the door. ‘You’re going to have to hurry.’

  ‘I know.’ It was six in the evening, and the trainee astronauts were taking a break, which meant the department was almost deserted. Still, it was a risk.

  Ry bent down to switch the teleprinter on. The button was on the side of the metal pedestal. He flicked it across. Nothing happened. ‘There’s a lock,’ he said in surprise. In all the years he’d been using teleprinters at the Cape, he’d never had to actually switch one on. The machines were always up and running when the teachers began their training sessions.

  ‘What do you mean, a lock?’ Alana asked.

  ‘It’s locked. You need a key to switch it on. Crudding Uracus!’

  She hurried over to check for herself. ‘Damn. Okay, let’s go.’

  ‘Go?’

  ‘Get out of here.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Ry, think! You’re only going to have one chance. We can’t afford time to try and hotwire this. Now let’s go. We’ll work out how to get a key for you – after we’re out.’

  ‘Right,’ he hissed through clenched teeth.

  The door opened. General Delores walked in.

  Shock and guilt froze Ry’s legs. This is it; crash and burn. ‘General,’ he began. ‘This is my idea, not Anala’s.’

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ the general snapped. ‘One day after Stonal interviewed you, and you’re breaking into restricted facilities.’

  ‘Stonal?’ Ry blurted inanely.

  ‘The Section Seven director with a very long sharp stick up his arse. The man who controls every PSR officer and informant in the Cape. And that’s a lot of informants.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The general narrowed her eyes. ‘What do you want with a teleprinter?’

  ‘I’m going to use the computator to work out a course vector.’

  ‘The intruder’s?’

  She knows! She knows it’s real! ‘Yes.’

  ‘Here.’ General Delores held up a fat cylindrical key. ‘Be quick. Even I can be held to account by the PSR.’

  Ry’s throat was contracting from the burst of relief and gratitude. Just knowing he wasn’t alone against the PSR was—

  ‘Get on with it!’

  He took the key and switched on the teleprinter. There were a number of programmes available on the computator. He typed in the activation sequence for the navigation vector plot, and waited until the manic jerky ball printed READY.

  Two columns: one with the fixed coordinates, the second with the sextant reading. Ry started typing out the fifteen-digit coordinates for both. He’d managed seven readings before the intruder had disappeared from sight, and each time he’d meticulously checked the Liberty capsule’s own location on the console display.

  Anala blinked and peered forwards to read the printout paper when she realized what he was doing. ‘You remember all those coordinates?’

  Ry nodded silently. They would know what that meant, what he was. His other heritage. As if that matters now.

  He finished typing the numbers, and entered COMPUTE.

  The ball hopped up and down for a few seconds, then started to whirr noisily again as it printed out numbers for latitude and longitude. Ry tore the paper off the teleprinter. It wouldn’t be exact, he knew that; there were too many variables. But he had the rough area where it would have landed – which was all he needed.

  ‘Now what?’ General Delores asked as she shut down the teleprinter and retrieved her key.

  ‘This is where it was heading,’ Ry said, holding up the paper. ‘So it’s where I go.’

  ‘I can’t cover for you,’ she warned him.

  ‘I know. Thank you, general.’

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ Anala said.

  ‘No, you’re not. I won’t be coming back. This has finished my career here. But the Liberty programme needs good astronauts. That’s you, Anala. You’ve earned your flight. Don’t throw that away. I don’t know what this thing is, but we still have to kill the Trees.’

  ‘Ry . . .’

  ‘I’ll get word back to you. I’ll tell you what I find. Somehow. I promise.’

  *

  An hour later, Ry was on the train out of Cape Ingmar, a non-stop
journey which took a day to curve around the edge of the Desert of Bone before heading south to terminate at Portlynn. At the big station there, he bought a single ticket for the express to Opole.

  BOOK THREE

  Running From a Fall

  1

  It rained for most of the day in the Albina valley, as it did for the majority of days on the northern fringes of the Sansone mountains. Florian was used to the microclimate of the foothills. Seven years he’d spent as the valley’s forest warden, looking after the trees that grew up the broad slopes, maintaining the firebreak lanes, watching out for roxwolf packs. So he’d learned that for eight months each year, chaotic southern winds would push the clouds through the high snow-capped peaks before sending them slithering over the foothills where they coated the forested slopes in a persistent drizzle. Then the summer months arrived, and the sea winds died down. That was when a more intermittent rain came in from the north, carried by the warm air from the heart of the continent.

  He’d known the rain would end by mid-afternoon, recognizing the weather pattern as soon as he rose that morning. So after breakfast he stayed close to the little lodge with its shaggy thatch roof and shifted stodgy clumps of dalfrond from the big pile to the metal trailer ready to take to the trenches that afternoon. It was the Vatni who brought the stuff to him, dredging the dark-green water weed from the lake at the bottom of the valley where they had a village. Teal, his springer spaniel, trotted along behind him, curved bushy tail wagging about and soaking up its usual quantity of mud.

  Once the trailer was full, he backed the four-wheel-drive SMI (Siegen Motor Industry) Openland truck up to it and hitched the two together. The trailer’s left tyre looked slightly flat again. It’d been three weeks since he filed a report of the slow puncture with the county office of the forest warden service. Jackso, the warden two valleys to the west, had loaned him a compressor, which now sat in the lean-to shed on the side of the lodge. He unwound the air hose and screwed it onto the tyre’s valve. The compressor’s electric motor started with a vigorous whirring sound, and the tyre inflated.