A Night Without Stars

  ‘I’d be disappointed if she didn’t. I want the Warrior Angel to know who’s hunting her.’

  ‘You want to meet her again?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Why, Chaing? Look what happened last time.’

  Chaing shoved down hard on the crutch, levering himself upright. ‘Next time will be different. I know it’s coming.’

  *

  Supper, served by the ANAdroids, was braised beef short ribs with portobello mushrooms, dusted in shallots and smoked folal cheese with a red wine jus, and served with buttered korril rice and steamed vegetables picked that afternoon from the farmhouse’s garden.

  Paula ate about half of her plate, enormously relieved that the impulse to completely stuff herself with whatever food she could grab had finally subsided. She did manage all of her raspberry crème brûlée, though.

  The formal meal seemed oddly momentous, which she supposed was a realistic appraisal. What they were proposing was essentially going to usher in the end of an era.

  While the ANAdroids were clearing away she followed Kysandra outside, back to the telescope. A gentle breeze was blowing in off the sea, playing soft discordant notes as it eddied up the tall cliff.

  ‘I’m sorry about before,’ Kysandra said sheepishly. ‘I was being unhelpful.’

  Paula stared out across the estuary, where Port Chana glowed with a bright twinkling haze against the darkness. ‘You’ve spent two and a half centuries defending this world, then I come along and advise you to change everything. You’re entitled to an emotional reaction.’

  ‘Quite.’ Kysandra took a sip of her dessert wine and peered into the telescope’s eyepiece. ‘Although it was going to change anyway.’

  ‘I’d like to ask you a favour.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Florian. Let him down gently.’

  Kysandra stood up and gave her a surprised glance. ‘You’re concerned about Florian’s love life? Why? Do you . . .’

  ‘No. My feelings towards him are purely maternal.’

  ‘That’s – weird. He’s just spent a fortnight being your father.’

  ‘Welcome to Commonwealth ageing issues.’

  ‘Crud.’

  ‘He’s a good man. He stood up for me against incredible odds.’

  ‘Then he deserves some happiness, surely.’

  ‘He certainly does. I don’t want him hurt, that’s all. His emotional involvement is a lot higher than yours. You’re his first true love.’

  ‘He is rather sweet. And he might well be my last love. It’s funny, how they all genuinely think you’re going to save us.’

  ‘And you don’t?’

  Kysandra shrugged and went back to the eyepiece. ‘Maybe if you’d turned up even fifty years ago, we might have had time. But you know as well as I do that we don’t have the resources to achieve anything now. When the Fallers come, they will come in their millions. Tens of millions, probably.’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  ‘Oh no, I’m clean out of ideas. I made my mistakes a long time ago. Now I’ll live with them. And die with them, I expect. But if you make a deal with Prime Minister Adolphus, it will just confirm the Fallers’ fears.’

  ‘Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.’

  ‘Is that a quote?’

  ‘It is. I just don’t know where from.’

  ‘That’s quite comforting, that you admit you don’t know everything.’ Kysandra lifted her head. ‘Do you want to see?’

  ‘Certainly.’ Paula walked over to the telescope, and put her eye to the lens. It was centred on a faint swirl of light. ‘A galaxy?’

  ‘The Commonwealth galaxy,’ Kysandra confirmed. ‘Your home. I look at it every night it’s in the sky. I get a silly degree of comfort knowing there are humans living there, that they’ll carry on living even after we’re wiped out. And . . . Sometimes I imagine him, looking up into the night from that planet he owns. I believe he’s there, searching for Bienvenido, wondering where we are.’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Nigel. Am I being stupid?’

  ‘You’re being human. That’s never stupid.’

  ‘Is he looking for us?’

  ‘I can’t answer that.’

  ‘Yeah. I know. Don’t want to dash my hopes.’

  Paula straightened up and looked into the blank, black sky where the telescope was pointing. There was nothing there, nothing at all. ‘Twenty-three million lightyears.’

  ‘So the ANAdroids say.’

  She looked towards the east, where the bright point of Ursell had risen. With her retinas on enhanced focus, she could actually see the solar-energized haze shimmering around its unnaturally thick atmosphere. ‘Laura certainly wasn’t doing things by halves, was she?’

  ‘Fireyear Day is an annual celebration,’ Kysandra said. ‘It’s a grand carnival in all the towns and cities.’

  ‘Laura came up with a simple swift solution. Using floaters like that was inspired.’ Paula searched across the sky, seeing blue Aqueous, the grey-white glimmer that was Trüb, then almost directly overhead the pale pink gleam that was Valatare. ‘And none of the other planets have native species we can ask for help?’

  ‘No. At least, not that Laura could find while the wormhole was active, and the Space Vigilance Office hasn’t picked up any signals since. They keep a good watch, too.’

  ‘I could probably break the wormhole’s codelock. I have routines that weren’t even around when it was built.’

  ‘What good would that do?’

  ‘We could evacuate some people to Aqueous. Children and some guardians.’

  ‘The island areas are small. You could only take a few thousand at best.’

  ‘And Macule is a radioactive desert?’

  Kysandra nodded and drank some more wine. ‘Yes. The ANAdroids call it nuclear winter. They had the really big dumb war – the one Earth managed to avoid.’

  ‘We’re all here because we were too belligerent or stubborn for the Void to tame.’ Paula fixed Aqueous with a pensive stare. ‘We could send boats through the wormhole to Aqueous. They could anchor together, form a floating city. If we give every Eliter that goes with them Commonwealth technology files, they might be able to bootstrap their way up to a spacefaring civilization. Once they’re in space they could build starships. Trouble is, most solar systems have asteroids and comets that can be mined. This has nothing.’

  ‘Trüb has twelve tiny moons,’ Kysandra said. ‘If your spaceships get there, they could mine them.’

  Paula’s secondary routines called up all the information the ANAdroids had on Trüb. ‘That’s a strange one,’ she murmured. Trüb was completely featureless, it had no mountains or basins; no oceans nor even polar caps. Just a uniform grey wasteland – presumably of dust or sand, but even with a low-pressure argon–carbon dioxide atmosphere, there were no storms. And the twelve moons . . . It wasn’t impossible for a planet Trüb’s size to have twelve natural moons like that – but highly unlikely. ‘There is no ecosystem at all; no life. So if nothing lives on it, what’s it doing here?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  She began to review the other planets. Asdil: a solid world larger than Bienvenido, orbiting seven hundred and forty seven million kilometres out from the sun, with a thick, cold nitrogen–methane atmosphere clotted with many cloud layers, denying any glimpse of the surface. Radio silent.

  Fjernt: forever in conjunction with Bienvenido on the other side of the sun. Another solid world, but with no free oxygen in its nitrogen–carbon dioxide atmosphere. Laura Brandt hadn’t detected any radio transmissions on her brief exploration mission. Which was the only thing Paula cared about. The cellular biochemistry of a species was irrelevant; she wanted a technological civilization, someone who could help. If there were any sentients living on the worlds Bienvenido shared this lonely sun with, they weren’t developed enough to come to their aid. All she was really doing was confirming what Laura Brandt had discovered when she drew up her plan t
o fight the Prime.

  ‘Why do you need asteroids to mine?’ Kysandra asked.

  ‘Actually, we don’t. If we can build ingrav and regrav systems, we could start mining the other planets directly and not have to come back here.’ Paula sighed. ‘I’m not an industrialist. And it’s all purely theoretical right now.’

  ‘The floaters were intended for mining, weren’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The two Laura used to kill Ursell are still working.’

  ‘We’d have to get to them to change their operation. I wonder – the package that brought me must have some kind of ingrav. Using it might have to be part of the deal I offer Adolphus.’

  Kysandra smiled dryly. ‘Old times, getting Commonwealth spaceships back into space. But it would have to be careful orbiting Valatare; Laura said the gravity was wrong.’

  ‘She said what?’

  ‘Valatare’s gravity is wrong.’

  ‘Wrong how?’

  ‘I think . . . the gradient was too steep.’

  ‘How can—? When did she find this out?’

  ‘When she opened the wormhole.’ Kysandra grinned. ‘Actually, you can see for yourself if you want.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘One of the “technicians” helping Laura develop the atom bombs was Valeri. He was there in the crypt the day we defeated the Prime. Slvasta and his cronies didn’t know what he was, so he was able to go on and work with the Manhattan Project. He offered some subtle guidance to build bigger bombs until they got the yield up to three hundred kilotons. Those are the ones the Liberty flights take up to the Ring to kill the Trees.’

  Paula couldn’t help the small twitch of her lips at Laura using the name Manhattan Project. ‘So you were behind the bombs and the Silver Sword?’

  ‘This is my world, Paula. I’ll defend it to the end.’

  ‘I know. I do admire what you’ve done.’ Her u-shadow opened a link to Valeri. ‘Could you show me your memory of Laura opening the wormhole to Valatare, please?’

  The farmhouse’s terrace rippled away, replaced by the crypt below the palace. A tense, tired Laura Brandt stood in front of the wormhole.

  ‘Well?’ Kysandra asked eventually.

  Paula had to grip the telescope hard for balance; she thought her knees might give way. Her personality might be over a thousand years old, but her brand-new teenage body was still remarkably susceptible to emotional surges. ‘The baddest of them all,’ she whispered.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Every planet here is home to a belligerent, untameable species. The Void saw all of us as a danger. But some are a lot more dangerous than others.’

  ‘Oh crudding bollocks, are you saying Valatare is worse than the Fallers?’

  ‘No, not if I’m right.’ She couldn’t keep the smile from her face. For the first time she actually began to feel hopeful. ‘I just have a theory, that’s all. But it changes everything. Come on.’ She hurried back towards the farmhouse. Her u-shadow called Florian and Ry, telling them to come to the dining room.

  ‘What are we doing?’ Kysandra asked.

  ‘We need a new plan. Because, let’s face it, just asking the government for help is fairly pathetic.’

  Fergus and Valeri followed Florian and Ry into the dining room.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Florian asked, looking intently at Paula’s face.

  Paula made an effort to rein back her exhilaration. She sat down and took a moment as the others reclaimed their chairs. ‘Two things. Firstly, an emergency survival option. If the Fallers do launch their mass attack against humans, we need to evacuate as many people as possible.’

  ‘Evacuate?’ Florian asked. ‘You mean, to Byarn?’

  ‘No, I mean to Aqueous.’

  ‘How are we going to get there?’ Ry asked.

  ‘I may be able to open the wormhole in the palace vaults. If I can, we send boats through for people to live on. We’ll take mostly children with some adult guardians. They’ll need to be Eliters, and we provide them with all the files we have. We also send through all the equipment from here. My hope is that a colony nucleus can elevate themselves up to a level that can at the very least build an ultradrive starship, one capable of making it back to the Commonwealth with a message. It’s not a great plan, but it does save Bienvenido’s humans from complete extinction.’

  ‘I can imagine the price Adolphus will demand for giving you access to the wormhole,’ Kysandra mused.

  ‘If he comes with us, then so be it. He will not be in charge when we get there. That is something he will have to accept.’

  ‘You’ll be admitting to the government that the situation is hopeless,’ Ry said bitterly. ‘That even you can’t stop the Fallers.’

  ‘Not quite. I’m hoping all Aqueous will ever be is a contingency. We need to open the wormhole to Valatare.’

  ‘Valatare? What the crud is on Valatare?’

  ‘The theory behind this star existing is that the Void banished all the planets here because the species living on them inside the Void were either a threat or refused to submit to the Heart. Right?’

  Kysandra nodded. ‘We’re here because of the quantumbuster. The Vatni are as obstinate as Uracus, they always refused to be guided by the Skylords. The Prime – well, we all know about them. And whoever used to be on Macule were clearly hugely antagonistic – they blew themselves up once they regained their industrial technology base.’

  ‘Trüb and Asdil we’re not clear about,’ Paula said, ticking them off on her fingers. ‘But they don’t seem to have any active aliens. Same goes for Fjernt, which is unscathed.’

  ‘Laura assumed the Fjernt species managed to build starships and went home,’ Kysandra said.

  ‘Reasonable,’ Paula said. ‘Because you’d have done that if it wasn’t for the Fallers. Which leaves us with Valatare. As far as I’m aware, the Commonwealth never found a native sentient species in any gas giant. There are various microbes in the atmosphere of some of them, but a sentient evolving there – it’s not impossible, but it’s very unlikely. And Valatare’s gravity is wrong, which implies it’s artificial.’

  ‘Artificial?’ Ry barked. ‘A whole planet?’

  ‘Not a planet,’ Paula said. ‘A prison.’

  There was silence in the dining room. She looked round at all of them, resisting the impulse to smile at their surprised expressions. ‘There is one other species that we know is extremely hostile to the Void: the Raiel. So hostile, they’ve kept a million-year vigil to prevent other aliens being ensnared by the Void. So enraged that the Void’s expansion could one day consume the entire galaxy they sent an armada of their greatest warships through the barrier to destroy it.’

  ‘The armada was defeated,’ Demitri said.

  Paula cocked her head to one side and smiled at him. ‘Exactly. And where does the Void send its beaten enemies?’

  ‘Oh crudding Uracus,’ Kysandra whispered. ‘You think they’re in Valatare?’

  ‘The Void beat them, yes, but the Raiel warships are formidable. I know, I’ve been on one. So it sent them here, but the distance back to our galaxy is nothing to the Raiel – a moderately inconvenient few decades of flight, if that. So to be sure they never posed a threat again, the Void imprisoned them. That’s what I believe Valatare to be. Underneath the atmosphere there’s some kind of barrier holding them in.’

  ‘The gravity gradient,’ Fergus said quickly. ‘It’s like a miniature Void barrier.’

  ‘It probably works on the same principle,’ Demitri said. ‘It’s just the scale which is different. The Void consumes stars to power itself; Valatare consumes the hydrocarbon atmosphere.’

  ‘Good,’ Paula said. The ANAdroids couldn’t come up with ideas of their own, but set them a problem and they’d use logic and a process of elimination to force-compute a solution.

  ‘Will they still be alive after a million years?’ Florian asked apprehensively.

  ‘I suspect they won’t be a day older,’ Paula said. ‘A
major component of the Void’s internal spacetime was the variable temporal flow. Humans were living on Bienvenido for three thousand years, yet out in the galaxy only two hundred years went by. The Void wouldn’t want the Raiel to be active inside their prison, not with the resources available to those warships. They’d probably manage to find a way to break out. I may be wrong . . .’

  ‘But you’re not, are you?’ Kysandra said softly. ‘There’s a file on you in the smartcore Nigel left behind.’

  ‘Checking up on me?’ Paula enquired.

  Kysandra smiled thinly. ‘Very thoroughly.’

  ‘Would the Raiel help us?’ Ry asked.

  ‘They will help us,’ Paula assured him. ‘Even if it wasn’t us breaking them out, they’d help. That’s what they’re like. Besides, they owe me a few favours.’

  Kysandra poured herself the last of the dessert wine. ‘I’ll bet they do,’ she mumbled.

  ‘So how do we do it?’ Florian asked eagerly. ‘How do we jailbreak the armada?’

  ‘With difficulty,’ Paula said. ‘Are we absolutely sure there’s no more Commonwealth technology left? Valeri, your memory showed me nothing apart from the wormhole under the palace. What else did the Captains hang on to? Is there anything else left of Vermillion’s cargo?’

  ‘Effectively nothing,’ Valeri said. ‘The wormhole Laura Brandt reactivated is still there, but codelocked. All the others were cannibalized to repair it and the two floaters. There are no synthesizers or extruders left.’

  ‘Nigel cleared all the quantumbusters out of the armoury,’ Kysandra said. ‘I helped him do it. The medical modules the Captains hung on to broke down two and a half thousand years ago. All that’s left now are some components which the Section Seven advanced science division is scratching its head over. I have an asset in that department, who has supplied us with an inventory, but if you’re looking for something to bootstrap our manufacturing base up to Commonwealth levels, it’s not in the palace.’

  ‘Three colony starships came to Bienvenido,’ Paula said calmly. ‘Vermillion landed to found Varlan. What happened to the other two?’

  ‘The Verdant splashed down in the Gulf of St Ives, seventeen kilometres off what is now New Angeles,’ Fergus said. ‘They salvaged what they could, which wasn’t much; it took them months just to build wooden-hulled boats back then. That was more than thirty-two hundred years ago. There’s nothing left of it now.’