A Night Without Stars

  ‘Your own personal telephone line to me,’ the Warrior Angel said as she peeled the rectangle off. ‘To activate, press your thumb on the knuckle of your index finger. ‘I’ll get to you as soon as I can.’

  He held his hand up in alarm, trying to see the green lines. ‘What is that? What have you done?’ I’m not an Eliter, I told you that.’

  ‘Chill down, captain. It’s just a monofunction OCtattoo.’

  ‘I don’t know what that is.’

  ‘Organic circuitry tattoo. It’s like having a little radio in your flesh.’

  ‘Crud.’

  ‘Get Stonal to agree to talk. It’s important.’ And with that, she was gone, striding down the line of tables to be swallowed up by the mid-afternoon glare outside.

  *

  Hot, intense sunlight was streaming in through the big windows of the state office like the start of some kind of invasion. Stonal walked through the thick beams, trying not to squint each time. Overhead, the fan blades were a blur as they tried to stir some freshness into the stifling air.

  Adolphus was waiting behind the desk, his suit jacket draped over the back of his chair and his shirt collar undone. There was no sign of Terese.

  ‘I appreciate you seeing me on short notice,’ Stonal said.

  ‘It’d be a fool who doesn’t listen to his security chief,’ Adolphus grunted, and waved him into a chair. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve just come from the advanced science division. They’ve made progress with the machine, sir.’

  ‘Really? That’s not something I expected to hear. Those crudding Commonwealth relics are adept at keeping their secrets.’

  ‘Yes. But up until now, we haven’t had one that’s alive.’

  The prime minister’s bushy eyebrows shot up. ‘Alive?’

  ‘It claims not, but it is sentient. I have talked to it.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Firstly, the Commonwealth woman is called Paula; she’s some kind of diplomat. Nigel brought her along in case he needed a skilled envoy to negotiate with whatever government he found in the Void.’

  ‘Pity he didn’t use her.’

  ‘Quite. However, the machine believes she will help Bienvenido, without prejudice.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘She’ll treat everyone equally, including the Eliters.’

  Adolphus scowled. ‘Oh will she, now?’

  ‘Equality is the goal of Commonwealth society. We’ve always known that.’

  ‘Very worthy. Someone should tell the Eliters. So how big a danger is this machine?’

  ‘In itself, not at all. How we use it, however, is a different matter. It describes itself as a life-support pod with a built-in medical system, which was part of Nigel’s mission, and it also claims to be storing the memories of Joey Stein.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’

  ‘No, sir. From what we know of Commonwealth technology, it may well be possible.’

  ‘A medical system? Like the Captains used to have?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it certainly kept Paula in suspension for two hundred and fifty years as an infant. But it contains a huge amount of knowledge about Commonwealth technology. It even knows how to build starships, it says.’

  ‘I don’t want starships. I just want something that’ll kill the crudding Fallers.’

  ‘It can give us that, too,’ Stonal said. ‘That’s why I came to you. It’s offered to teach our advanced science division people how to build Faller detectors. That would give us a phenomenal advantage. If our regiment troops can identify Fallers at a distance, we can wipe them out once and for all.’

  ‘What does it want in return?’ Adolphus asked suspiciously.

  ‘It wants to survive long enough to see us contact the Commonwealth. That way, Joey Stein can be brought back to life.’

  ‘Can we build enough of these detectors in time, do you think?’

  ‘We’d need thousands, and we don’t know what time we have left,’ Stonal answered equitably. ‘And by releasing Commonwealth technology, we will be instigating change. That is inevitable.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Adolphus leaned back, staring at the ceiling with unfocused eyes. ‘But Paula is going to bring change anyway. And if an innovation like this were to work, we would be Bienvenido’s saviours, not her.’

  As always, Stonal managed to maintain a neutral expression in the face of raw political greed. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Society will change once we’re rid of the Fallers; everybody knows and accepts that. I just never thought it would be an issue for my premiership. But if we can control the factors that bring change—’

  The doors behind Adolphus swung open, and five Palace Guard officers ran in.

  ‘Sir,’ the chief protection officer called breathlessly, ‘you must come with us. We’re initiating a full security lockdown.’

  ‘What’s happening?’ Adolphus said. Several telephones on his desk had started to ring, their red lights flashing.

  ‘Is it the space machine?’ Stonal snapped.

  The chief gave him an annoyed look. ‘No. Prime minister, we have to get you to the palace secure bunker right away.’

  ‘The bunker?’ Adolphus blurted. ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re under attack, sir.’

  *

  The taxi took Chaing directly from the cafe to Empale Street. By the time he got there, there were only nineteen minutes left until Jenifa was due to try and scout round on board the Gothora III. There should be time for him to make the phone call and get to the harbour in time. But not reach the top of the lighthouse. She can handle herself.

  With only a mild sensation of guilt, he checked the external safeguards to make sure no one had sneaked into the safe house. Has the Warrior Angel actually been inside? She could probably walk straight through without tripping them. The safeguards were intact, so he unlocked the door and went in.

  He dialled the number and waited for the two-tone connection whistle, then dialled the numbers of the scramble code. The phone’s blue light came on.

  ‘This is Captain Chaing. Please connect me to Director Stonal. Top priority.’

  ‘Captain Chaing, this is the Section Seven communications office, duty officer. Director Stonal is out of contact.’

  ‘Then find him. I have to talk to him.’

  ‘Chaing, I am officially informing you the Joint Regimental Council command have issued a code red one alert.’

  ‘A . . . A code red one?’ Not possible.

  ‘Yes. Confirm that now, please.’

  ‘I— Yes, I confirm I’ve received code status.’

  ‘Report to your combat duty posting, immediately. The code is currently being issued to all PSR offices.’

  The phone went dead and Chaing stared at the handset in mortification. Code red one: nuclear attack.

  BOOK SIX

  Going Nuclear

  1

  Stonal stood on the rim of the crater and looked down into what he imagined the rancid heart of Uracus must look like. The atomic bomb had blown a massive hole in the ground, centred where the reactor and bomb factory had been. Devastation around the edge had been bad enough – diabolical pressure waves hammering through the earth to throw up steep meandering ridges, then its raging fireball melting the surface sand and soil to a layer of glassy lava that crunched and shattered under his boots as he walked unsteadily across it. But inside . . .

  The bomb had detonated almost nine hours ago now. Even through the thick insulation of his radiation suit, Stonal could still feel the heat of the explosion. His helmet’s lead-glass visor tinted the outside world a mundane grey, but the bottom of the crater was still casting a subdued carmine radiance, it was so hot. It even seemed as though the very bottom of the crater where the ground shimmered erratically might still be molten, but he was too far away to be certain.

  Gazing across the seething desolation, he felt something akin to vertigo. It didn’t have anything to do with height; this hit was pure
fear-based. The Geiger counter clipped to the suit’s belt was wailing painfully.

  ‘Well, crud!’ he exclaimed.

  It had been over a decade since he’d last been here – some security inspection. Now he was struggling to match the landscape with his memory. The low hills on the horizon were unchanged, but the rest of it . . . Distant forests which had once washed the foothill slopes like teal seas were now smouldering black tracts. Scrubland and lakes – all gone, devoured by this newborn radioactive wasteland. He remembered that trip here: driving up to the triple razor-wire fence, with Dobermanns loose in the runs between the wire, and watchtowers every five hundred metres – constantly manned no matter the time of day or weather. And there, sheltered inside the fences and minefields, the twin concrete domes of the breeder reactors, surrounded by squat bunkers where the Liberty mission bombs were painstakingly assembled. All gone. Reduced to vapour and ash that was now drifting out of the dark grumbling clouds that stretched as far as Portlynn three hundred kilometres south.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked the suited figure next to him. ‘Could the reactor have blown?’

  ‘No, sir,’ replied McDonnal, the Portlynn PSR station chief. ‘Reactors don’t explode. Even the most catastrophic failure would only result in a meltdown. Not this. This was a three-hundred-kiloton atomic explosion. One of ours. And the detonation was deliberate. There are too many safeguards built in for it to be accidental.’

  ‘They got in,’ Stonal said.

  ‘Yes, sir. They’ve been trying for two hundred years.’

  ‘That doesn’t excuse this lapse.’

  ‘We’ll never know exactly what happened here.’

  Stonal raised an eyebrow as he glanced across the crater again. ‘You think?’

  ‘My people would have fought them to the end. They must have brought overwhelming numbers. There’s nowhere on Bienvenido more heavily guarded.’

  Three more places, actually, Stonal mentally corrected. The other two bomb factories, and Cape Ingmar. ‘There’s one person who could blast her way past an entire regiment if she wanted to.’

  ‘The Warrior Angel?’ McDonnal asked. ‘Even if she’s real, why would she want to do this?’

  Because this is the only weapon we have that she fears, and the politicians have begun talking about Overload. ‘I’ve no idea. So let’s just concentrate on this being a Faller raid.’

  ‘We have a report of a convoy heading out about an hour before the blast.’ McDonnal pointed towards the south-west. ‘Some farmers saw lorries driving away.’

  ‘What sort of lorries?’

  ‘The report said they were standard Nuclear Regiment lorries.’

  ‘Which means nothing. Was there a convoy scheduled?’

  Even through the radiation suit’s heavy cloth, McDonnal’s shrug was visible. ‘The only people who know that were in the facility.’

  ‘Uracus. Get on to the Nuclear Directorate. Immediately. They will know if that was a genuine scheduled convoy. No nuclear materials move anywhere on this planet without their authorization. And I also need to know how many bombs were stockpiled here.’ It wasn’t common knowledge, but the Portlynn facility also assembled the lower-yield, twenty-kiloton bombs designated for Operation Reclaim. The ones that would be used directly against Fallers if they did take over Lamaran.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  They walked back over the ruined land to the Nuclear Regiment troop carrier that was waiting at the end of the thick black strip of gritty charcoal that had once been the road. This carrier was hermetically sealed and carried its own air supply to maintain a positive pressure inside, allowing it to operate in radiation zones. One of the technicians had plugged it into a surviving sweep-coms box at the side of the broken road.

  Stonal went through the decontamination airlock, taking his time for the wash and flush cycles to clean the suit. This wasn’t the kind of procedure you rushed. Once inside, he ordered the driver out of the cab, and closed the door before calling Adolphus, who was still in the emergency bunker under the palace.

  ‘So what’s happened?’ the prime minister demanded.

  ‘Worse-case scenario: a Faller nest stole some of our nukes.’

  ‘Crudding Uracus. How many have they got?’

  ‘I don’t know. The Nuclear Directorate can tell us how many were stockpiled here. I’ll have that information within the hour. There was some kind of convoy seen driving away just before the explosion. It doesn’t look good.’

  ‘What will they use them against?’

  ‘Certainly the capital. I suggest we activate our nest-alert isolation procedures. That’s a good cover. Just don’t allow any vehicle to approach closer than thirty kilometres – and that includes trains. We should also set up roadblocks outside the other bomb facilities, and Cape Ingmar.’

  ‘I’ll authorize that immediately.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll get a team of agents from Portlynn’s PSR office to start hunting for the convoy lorries immediately – in fact, I’ll just get all of them on it. Recovering the bombs has to be our top priority. I’ll need Air Force cooperation.’

  ‘You have it. But what do we do about the panic? It’s getting bad in Varlan. Everyone knows a nuke went off.’

  ‘No, they don’t. They know there was an incident at a nuclear facility, that’s all. Nobody can get within a hundred kilometres of the explosion; there are no photos, no eyewitnesses. Your press statement should be that a reactor failed and leaked, and that the scientists are getting it back under control. It’s a terrible tragedy, but we’re on top of it.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

  ‘I’ll come straight back to the capital to coordinate the search.’

  ‘Do you think we should move to Byarn now?’

  ‘It’s not that bad, sir. Not yet.’

  *

  Chaing left his crutch on the folding canvas chair as he took a walk round the lighthouse’s big lens pillar. As much as he willed his damaged leg to be normal, putting weight on it was still enormously painful. One circuit limping round was enough, so he sat back down, cross that the exertion had made him perspire.

  Outside, the weather was mirroring his mood. A strengthening wind was bringing dark clouds in from the Polas Sea to slide across the land. It was still a couple of hours until sunset, but the dwindling light hastened the evening forwards. Breakers were surging all the way out to the horizon, as if Bienvenido was heading into conjunction with Valatare.

  From his vantage point he could see Port Chana’s entire fishing fleet sailing back into the harbour, which was quickly running out of mooring buoys. Many of them were riding high in the water, having abandoned any notion of completing their catches as the storm approached.

  The boats were a complication he could do without. They were forming quite a bottleneck as they slowed just outside the long curving harbour wall to wait their turn to enter. The landing craft Lanara was anchored at the mouth of the Honorato estuary with a full complement of Marines on board under Major Danny. They were ready to intercept the Gothora III at Chaing’s command. What until that afternoon would have been a fast charge forwards was now going to be altogether more complicated.

  The advancing storm was a problem Chaing hadn’t planned for, though he was quietly pleased it was blowing in from the south. Nobody really believed the prime minister’s official statement that the Portlynn facility had suffered a reactor leak, not an explosion. Whatever had actually happened, the atmosphere was full of radio-active particles – invisible, deadly – and that frightened people. Had the wind been blowing in from the north, he didn’t like to think of Port Chana’s reaction. A night-time curfew had been running for the two days since the red one code was issued, but that was about the only material impact the Fallers’ daring raid had on the city. Psychologically, it had been a lot worse, as Corilla had gleefully explained while she reported on conversations dominating the general band. The Eliters knew almost as much as Chaing did, and were happily spreading the rumour
that the explosion was simply to cover the theft of more atom bombs, that it signalled the start of the Faller Apocalypse, and that Adolphus was preparing to run to Byarn and abandon everyone.

  Their propaganda made Chaing very angry, in no small way because half of it was actually true. It didn’t help that basic foods were getting harder to find, and prices were shooting up despite government prohibitions on such blatant profiteering. People were stockpiling. Absenteeism was hitting government services and public transport.

  Through all the city’s disruption and worry, Captain Fajie’s observation team had stoically maintained their watch over the Faller nest in the harbour, who in turn never faltered as they spied on the Gothora III.

  ‘They’re getting ready to depart,’ Jenifa reported. She lowered the big binoculars as Chaing bent down to look through the camera’s viewfinder. Sure enough, the Gothora III’s crew were on deck in bright yellow sou’westers, untying the hawsers that secured the ship.

  ‘In this weather?’ Chaing demanded. The ship wasn’t scheduled to depart until tomorrow.

  ‘I know, but this is good cover. The Lanara will have trouble tracking them in the storm.’

  ‘Crud. We need to keep Gothora under observation; neither of them are on board yet.’

  ‘So do you think Gothora will rendezvous with them out at sea?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘She has to get on board somehow. I had a good look round their cabins. The only people on there right now are the crew.’

  Chaing had been mildly suspicious about how easily Jenifa’s mission had gone, but kept quiet about it. ‘If the Warrior Angel didn’t want you to see her, then you wouldn’t. And Giu alone knows what capabilities Paula has.’

  ‘Who is Paula?’

  ‘The Commonwealth girl.’

  ‘I thought her name was Essie. That’s what we were told.’

  Chaing kept his eye to the viewfinder, hoping his stillness wasn’t betraying him. Fat chance; she was PSR trained in interrogation. She knew all the body’s tells. Especially mine. Stupid. Stupid!