A Night Without Stars

  She had never said anything of the sort. He knew that. He would have remembered.

  ‘But there was a lady,’ he said with a five-year-old’s insistence. ‘She was very pretty.’

  His mother pointedly looked both ways along the alley. It was empty. ‘Nobody here, darling. You must have imagined her.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he persisted, upset that Mummy wouldn’t believe him.

  She gave him a worried glance. His mother always looked harried or tired. He wished it wasn’t so.

  ‘There is a legend,’ his mother said slowly. ‘If I tell you about it, will you promise me not to repeat it, not to anyone, not even Daddy?’

  ‘I promise,’ he said solemnly.

  ‘People say that there is a Warrior Angel who watches over this world. She protects us from the Fallers, among other things.’

  ‘But I thought the regiments and the Liberty astronauts guard Bienvenido.’

  ‘They do, darling, and they’re magnificent. But sometimes we need a little extra help.’ She put her hands on his shoulders and gave him a grave look. ‘Now this is the important part: the government doesn’t really approve of the Warrior Angel, because she’s not one of them. And they get angry with her because she doesn’t always do what they say. So that’s why we don’t tell them if we see her. And we don’t tell Daddy, either, because we don’t want to worry him, do we? This is our super secret, you and me, and we’ll keep it forever, all right?’

  Chaing didn’t like the idea of upsetting Daddy – who had a short temper and never hesitated to use his belt to beat Chaing when he did something wrong. He seemed to do a lot of things wrong no matter how hard he tried not to. ‘Yes,’ he agreed solemnly. ‘She’s our secret.’

  His mother died three years later. One night his father came home drunk again, and started hitting her. This night she was standing at the top of the stairs when the vicious punches began to land. She fell, breaking her neck before she’d tumbled halfway down.

  A court took less than a day to find his father guilty of murder, and sentence him to life in the Pidrui mines.

  Chaing was placed in an orphanage. By then, like all children on Bienvenido, he knew not to give away any secrets about himself – not his memory, not his vision of the Warrior Angel, nothing that might be regarded as suspect. On Bienvenido, suspicion was always followed by accusation – and soon after that the arrival of PSR officers.

  Every child brought up by the state went on to be employed by the state; there was no question, no choice. You took the tests and waited for your assessment results when the career officer told you how the rest of your life would be spent. Chaing’s IQ was measured as slightly above average (never high enough to be suspect), and his two-year compulsory regimental service was admirable, so he was sent to the PSR officer cadet training college – at which point he realized just how lucky he’d been escaping his new employer’s attention.

  Not that he was a filthy Eliter. But some distant ancestor must have made a bad marriage choice – which, by luck or chance, or more likely subterfuge, had escaped the PSR’s comprehensive files.

  So he’d inherited a good memory through no fault of his own. That just meant he could be a more effective PSR officer, and devote his life to tracking down Faller nests, saving citizens as he was sworn to do.

  And as for the Warrior Angel: his mother was right. She was just a legend, one the Eliters incorporated into their criminal propaganda. Which was why he was always on the lookout for her.

  Except . . . his recall was flawless. He really had seen her as a vision, wearing a long brown leather coat that moved with the ease of silk, her red hair falling over her shoulders as if she had a halo of fire. His memory held her lips forever poised on the verge of a smile. And that vision troubled him. Badly.

  A lesser man might call it obsession.

  Chaing started to push through the partying crowd, heedless of the annoyed looks as he knocked shoulders. The ghost girl was ten metres away now, slipping through clusters of laughing people with the greatest of ease. As he closed on her, his initial astonishment gave way to anger. She’d left him alone for thirty crudding years, until he’d practically convinced himself all she’d ever been was a child’s stress-induced fantasy. Now here she was again – and, given he was now a captain in the PSR, she could end him.

  A group of women dressed in cloaks of yellow feathers, and exorbitantly high gold and emerald headdresses, came along the road, all of them linking hands as they highstepped along. They shrieked at him with drunken delight as he tried to push through them. He snarled and ducked round; taking time to remonstrate, to pull out his PSR badge, would have taken even longer. He looked round frantically, seeing a plait of red hair swaying about behind some youths clustered furtively round what looked like a bong of narnik. Chaing was almost running now, and she was right ahead of him. Close enough to—

  ‘Hey, you!’ he reached out and closed his hand on her shoulder. His heart thudded at making physical contact. She’s real.

  Then she turned and he saw her face. It wasn’t the vision, not as he knew her. The light and confusion of the bustling merry crowds had fooled him. This woman was approaching middle age, with rounded cheeks and a small mouth, her eyes painted in gold mascara. Her features creased up in annoyance. ‘Whaddya want?’ she demanded, and her accent was pure Rakwesh Province.

  ‘Who are you?’ he gasped. He could have sworn it had been her.

  She laughed. ‘I’m the Warrior Angel, and so’s me friend.’ She draped her arm over the shoulder of another girl, and tugged her close. The ebony-skinned friend was also wearing a brown coat; tufts of black hair protruded from below her skewed wig of red hair.

  Chaing snatched his hand away as if it was burning.

  ‘Wazzamatter?’ the woman asked.

  ‘You’re not her,’ was all Chaing could manage to say.

  The second girl was giving him a sly appraising look. ‘For you, fella, I could be.’

  He frowned. ‘Why are you doing this? This is a festival. A celebration. It is not appropriate to dress as the Warrior Angel. She’s just a reactionary legend. A criminal.’

  ‘Screw you, dickhead,’ the first woman snapped. ‘We like the Warrior Angel. She’s done more for this shitty world than any regiment ponce. What’re yuooz anyhow? A Party git?’

  ‘Bet he is,’ sneered her friend. ‘Bet his important daddy got him off proper regimental service, too. Didn’t he, Party boy? Nice little office job in a supply depot instead, was it?’

  Chaing backed off, knowing his cheeks would be colouring. ‘It’s not right, that’s all. You shouldn’t celebrate her.’

  The woman gave him an obscene finger gesture.

  Chaing turned away, embarrassed and annoyed – mostly with himself. People were supposed to respect the PSR, to show proper deference. But then he’d hardly behaved like a PSR officer. The first fireworks burst overhead, crowning the cloudless black sky with topaz and ruby scintillations. And there, on the other side of the wide thoroughfare, she was standing amid a bunch of revellers who were dressed in outsize silver astronaut pressure suits, staring right back at him – real this time. This was the face he knew from his vision, stippled by the weird multicoloured light of the fireworks.

  His jaw dropped in amazement. Then a rowdy band of regiment troops jostled their way along the middle of the road, jeering and shouting among themselves. He craned his neck, desperate to keep sight of her, but there were only the carnival astronauts who were singing a badly out-of-tune rendition of ‘Treefall Blues’. There was no sign of the ghost girl.

  ‘Crudding Uracus!’ One stupid mistaken glimpse and now he was seeing phantoms on every corner. He took a breath, and stomped off along Broadstreet, heading for the bulky Filbert Exchange two hundred metres away. Baysdale Road lay down the side of the covered market, and the crowd was considerably thinner here; he turned down it as more and more fireworks smothered the sky above in sizzling lightbursts. Baysdale Road led him into the G
ates district, the original heart of the city, over three square kilometres built without any order or conformity. Two of the ancient founding families had clashed here, which is why the streets were all at angles to each other, as neither would adopt the other’s grid. The buildings were slim and high, made from brick and stucco with wooden strapwork, and topped by steep-pitched tile roofs. They weren’t particularly vertical any more, with some facades leaning alarmingly over the cobbled streets, as if their neighbours were squeezing them out of alignment.

  The Fireyear celebrations here were mainly alcohol-based. Many ground floors in the buildings that made up the Gates were small state-licensed enterprises where families had followed the same crafts as their forebears for over two thousand years. Plenty of them revolved around brewing and distilling. Open windows showed him that the small pubs were teeming. Lively modern music was flowing out of the bigger clubs.

  Even though he’d memorized the city layout, it took him a while to find LowerGate Lane amid the muddle of the Gates. It turned out to be uncomfortably narrow; if he extended both arms, his fingertips brushed the walls on both sides. You couldn’t even drive a tuk-tuk along it, let alone a modern van. He wasn’t entirely surprised to find the city council had clearly given up the idea of providing electrical streetlights here. The only illumination came from open windows and the occasional oil lamp hanging outside a doorway. It was like stepping back into pre-Transition times.

  The Nenad Cafe was a student haunt, its alarmingly uneven ceiling ten centimetres too low for comfort. One wall was shelving for a ‘free library’ with a good selection of leather-bound books donated by alumni from the Opole University, which bordered the southern end of the Gates. He looked round the tables with their painted chessboards. At thirty-five, he was the oldest patron by a good ten years. Fortunately his family genes kept him relatively youthful. With his full head of hair, as yet unwrinkled pale-olive skin, and a trim figure, he liked to think he could pass for mid-twenties.

  Once his eyes adjusted to the candlelight inside, he saw a short girl who didn’t even look twenty sitting by herself, reading an unlicensed news-sheet, a mug of chocolate half-drunk on the table. Her legs were folded up yoga-style on the worn chair. Chaing just knew he could never manage to bend his limbs like that, and he prided himself in keeping in good shape. She wore a dark-blue corduroy jacket over a black waitress blouse, a uniform finished off with a short black skirt. Her oval face had hazel eyes that seemed far too large for someone so dainty, and her wavy raven hair was held back by a velvet band.

  He hesitated. It was definitely Corporal Jenifa; he recognized her from her file photograph. But she looked a lot younger than her twenty-two years. Which is probably the reason she was chosen for this mission.

  The sullen expression marring her features was also off-putting.

  He eased himself into the seat opposite. ‘Anything interesting in the news?’ That was the identifying phrase.

  She slapped the sheet onto the table, and regarded him in annoyance. ‘Yes, I’m Jenifa.’

  Which wasn’t the kind of greeting he expected. ‘Chaing.’

  ‘Of course you are. Who else would you be?’

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  She rocked forwards, putting her face close to his. ‘This is Fireyear Day, right?’

  Chaing returned her gaze levelly. He wanted to issue an instant reprimand, yet undercover agents had to be given a certain amount of leeway. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Plenty of people about . . .’ she paused as a couple of students squeezed past the table, ‘so no one is going to notice or care about two strangers talking in a cafe. Not tonight.’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘Brilliant. Your idea?’

  ‘Yes, actually. I wanted to meet you. The information you’ve provided has been helpful.’

  She grunted dismissively. ‘The information that I gathered from my job, waitressing at the Cannes Club. Waitressing! Nothing suspicious about me taking time off on the busiest night of the year, then. Right?’

  ‘Oh.’ Chaing didn’t know what else to say. It had seemed clever when he’d had the instruction placed in her drop box.

  ‘Forget it,’ Jenifa said, abruptly dismissive. ‘I’m here now, and I’ve got something for you. It’s about the other girls. We may have been right about the gangs here.’

  ‘Good.’ Chaing was suddenly very interested. His predecessor had brought Jenifa in to infiltrate a probable trafficking operation. The PSR didn’t usually bother chasing streetwalkers; that was the job of the local sheriffs. But inevitably when humans were treated like cattle, there was the chance that they’d wind up being shipped off to a Faller nest. Fallers who took human form ate human flesh. According to the Faller Research Institute manual, it was mainly to do with body chemistry. Fallers mimicked humans in such a way that the nutrient requirements of their human-shaped bodies required the proteins and vitamins contained within real human flesh. It was instinct at an individual and species level. Fallers had evolved themselves to conquer worlds by supplanting the dominant sentient species – and what better way to speed up the process than by literally consuming your opposition?

  ‘The manager at the Cannes, he asks a lot of questions,’ Jenifa said. ‘Stuff like where a girl comes from, her family. Basically, if anyone’s going to notice them missing.’

  ‘I would have thought that was pretty standard.’

  ‘Yeah, but this is more. Once a girl goes to work in the rooms upstairs, she belongs to the house. She’s meat to them. All they’re interested in is that she keeps herself clean and attracts enough customers.’

  ‘Right.’ He nodded. There was a big Opole county regiment camp on the edge of the city. Everyone on Bienvenido was conscripted into the regiments for two years on their eighteenth birthday. It was one of Slvasta’s laws, designed to make people understand the reality of the Faller threat. But with the Air Defence Force planes successfully killing eggs in the sky, and the paratroops following them immediately into the area, there was less call for the regiments to sweep the land as there had been in Slvasta’s time, which left the teenagers kicking their heels in the camps undergoing basic training. And with so many teenagers away from home for the first time, and with the regiment basic pay in their pocket, the town’s clubs and bars and brothels received a large never-ending income stream.

  ‘If the answer comes back that no one cares, they work for a few weeks and then get passed on to another house,’ Jenifa told him. ‘I’ve seen it three or four times now.’

  ‘Are these other houses in Opole?’

  ‘That’s the thing. Girls working the pubs and clubs and houses move around a lot, but we all share lodgings – three or four to a room, sometimes. Some of these ones that don’t have connections, nobody ever hears from them again. They certainly don’t come back to their lodgings.’

  ‘Okay. The manager who keeps asking these questions, what’s his name?’

  ‘Roscoe Caden.’ Her clenched hand slid over the table. ‘I managed to get a few shots of him for you.’

  Chaing took the little cylinder of film from her. He looked at the corduroy jacket again: it was PSR issue, bulky to disguise the lump of the camera mechanism sewn in just behind the long broad collar. All the buttons were shiny black so as not to draw attention to the fact that the top button was actually a lens. The right-hand pocket contained the end of the shutter-release cable, allowing the wearer to take a photo without anyone seeing. ‘If Caden is just managing girls at a club, he’s not the top man. Do you know who he takes orders from?’

  ‘Not really. But the name that keeps coming up is Roxwolf.’

  ‘Roxwolf?’ Chaing said scornfully. He knew the animals had been hunted out of the district over a millennium ago. They were nasty beasts, running in packs that would gang up on just about anything in the wild.

  ‘Whatever. That’s the name he goes by. He’s Opole’s biggest gang boss, by all accounts – has interests in every underground activity.’

>   ‘And where do I find him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nobody does.’

  ‘So how do they all get their instructions?’

  ‘No idea. Could be Eliters linking privately.’

  ‘Possible,’ he mused. That ability to communicate unheard and unknown was one of the reasons the PSR mistrusted Eliters so badly. Somehow he couldn’t imagine Eliters helping Fallers. But her comment was typical of PSR officers in the radical monitoring division, so he let it slide. ‘Anything else?’

  She gave him a cynical grin. ‘You’re hard to please.’

  ‘I do my best.’

  ‘There’s a new girl in the Cannes, Noriah. Just a waitress for now, but she’s a runaway like I’m supposed to be. Caden has started his getting-friendly routine with her. Normally he worms his way in, then puts the pressure on to force new girls upstairs if they’re pretty enough. Noriah ran from her co-op farm. She fits the nobody-cares profile. Might be worth putting her under observation.’

  ‘Right. Where’s she staying?’ He tried to think which officers he could request to watch Noriah. There were enough resources at the PSR office – once you’d gone through the paperwork to liberate them from their desks. Just the thought of that made him weary.

  ‘The Mother Laura Hostel on Old Milton Street, same as me.’

  ‘Is Caden showing an interest in you?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I can handle myself.’

  I’m sure you can. ‘What does Noriah look like?’

  ‘Develop the film. You’ll see.’

  ‘Thank you. This is good work.’

  ‘Be sure to write that on my report.’ She got up and shrugged the jacket round her shoulders before walking out.

  Chaing put the reel of film in an inside pocket on his own jacket, and zipped it up. If he took it back to the PSR office now, he could get it developed and printed inside an hour.

  *

  They came for Noriah two days later. Chaing was still setting up the surveillance operation. All he’d got after filling in a mound of forms was three extra officers in addition to Lieutenant Lurvri, his junior partner. It was ridiculous! You couldn’t mount total coverage on someone with just five people.