A Night Without Stars

  But it continued to flow around the curving force-field wall until the bulk of snow chilled it to slush and it began re-freezing. Directly above his head, there was a small cavity.

  Now we’re getting somewhere.

  With a giddy laugh, he fired the maser rifle again, slowly spiralling the beam around. Outside the force field, the quantity of vigorous bubbling liquid reached epic proportions. A deluge of boiling water flowed round and down to drain into the snow around the base where it slowly refroze. His u-shadow ordered the force-field apex to extend, and it slid up ten centimetres before reaching solid snow again.

  ‘Right, you bastard,’ Florian declared grimly. He changed the angle of the maser, and fired again.

  Twenty-two minutes later, a patch of dark appeared above the boiling water.

  Sky! Crudding sky!

  The force field shrank back until it was a flexible layer above his e-m suit. He clawed his way out of the hole and lay on his back, staring up into the strange sky. The wind was ferocious, sending clouds streaking past. But above them, borealis storms raged through the tenuous upper atmosphere as the radiation impact from the explosion slowly dissipated across the ionosphere. Ghostly green and crimson waves, already covering half of Lukarticar, spun and slithered around each other, casting ephemeral coloured shadows across the diseased shimmering snowfield.

  Florian smiled up at the astonishing display in blissful gratitude. Fighting his way out of that mess certainly deserved some cosmic recognition. It didn’t come finer than this.

  His u-shadow sent out a link ping.

  ‘Florian?’ Kysandra sent. ‘You’re alive!’

  ‘Yeah. Little trouble for a moment there. But I’m okay now.’

  Communication icons appeared in his exovision. Eighteen ge-eagles were active and in the air. Flying in the fast winds was difficult, draining their power reserves, but they could stay airborne for another couple of days.

  ‘Hey, Ry, you made it,’ Florian exclaimed, studying the communication icons.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I had a mountain fall on me,’ Florian said proudly.

  ‘Rock or snow?’

  ‘Snow.’

  ‘Ha, you had it easy.’

  Florian chuckled as he studied the communication display. ‘Why aren’t we linking with the Viscount?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kysandra said. ‘But that was a monster bomb blast. I’m assuming the shockwave collapsed the tunnel down to HGT54b.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Florian nodded slowly, trying to convince himself. ‘That’ll be it.’ If it collapsed the tunnel, what did it do to the Viscount’s structure?

  ‘Are you mobile?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Good. Grab yourself a pair of ge-eagles and get going. We’ll see you back at the Viscount.’

  Uracus, no peace for the wicked. ‘Okay. I’m on it.’

  ‘And Florian?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Watch out for Faller-seibears. If we can survive, they sure as Uracus can.’

  *

  Ironically, the journey back to the Viscount was always the part Florian had worried the most about. Now, less so.

  He took his time activating the skis, watching the bulbs of plyplastic expand into two-metre-long strips. As they did that, he struggled into the harness. The wind made it difficult, constantly pummelling him with loose ice chips. In the end he had to reconfigure the force field into a sphere again – which the wind shoved about ferociously. By the time he was ready, two ge-eagles had arrived, with a third on its way.

  Florian hitched the huge semiorganic birds to the harness. When they were secure, he hunched down on the skis, giving himself a low centre of gravity and reducing wind resistance, and prayed his skill implant memory was up to the task. The ge-eagles took off, and began towing him.

  He was fifty kilometres from the Viscount. When they’d planned how to get back, no one had figured for the winds. Paula had estimated the ge-eagles could pull them along at about thirty to thirty-five kilometres an hour, but the severe aftermath which the Liberty bomb had inflicted on the local atmosphere was producing winds that whipped round seemingly at random. Their direction was constantly in flux, as was their speed. Florian even experienced interludes when they dropped away completely, but there weren’t many of them.

  After the first ten kilometres, when his leg muscles were starting to hurt badly from the constant crouching, the temperature began to plummet again, allowing the fervent clouds to condense. Snow began to fall, only to be whipped into a brutal high-velocity deluge by the winds. Florian had to stiffen the force field to deflect their impact. Visibility shrank to a few metres. He was reliant on the sensor images the ge-eagles were producing to avoid the smaller snags and fissures. The ge-eagles themselves steered him away from larger obstacles. All he had to do was hang on and keep his balance.

  *

  The roar of the icequake reverberated like boulders cascading down a rocky mountainside. Inside the cramped confines of HGT54b, it was deafening, but Paula ignored it. She was too busy hanging on to the grid as the compartment shook. Hairline cracks appeared in the pressure bulkheads. Gridwork segments snapped, allowing several heavy cargo packs to shift alarmingly. The three ANAdroids formed a protective picket around the wormhole generator they were working on, gripping on to each other like an acrobat team. Their force fields expanded and merged.

  It seemed to go on for a long time. Finally, when the noise abated and the compartment stilled, Paula released her hold on the grid. She wasn’t sure, but the angle seemed to have shifted, becoming more acute.

  ‘That was fifty kilometres away,’ Demitri said. ‘If they detonate another one closer, we’re dead.’

  ‘I would have expected the ice to absorb more of the compression wave,’ Valeri said.

  ‘It probably pulverized the ice in its wake,’ Fergus said. ‘Another explosion might produce a reduced seismic force.’

  ‘Let’s try not to find out,’ Valeri said. ‘Did any of them survive that?’

  ‘Marek certainly didn’t,’ Demitri said. ‘He was only two hundred metres from the epicentre. The force-field suit was not built to withstand a direct three-hundred-kiloton blast.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Paula said.

  ‘Don’t be. We are machines.’

  ‘Maybe. But I have to concede you’re doing a pretty good imitation of human.’

  ‘Marek would appreciate that sentiment. He was confident he was becoming human.’

  Paula nodded. Exovision displays showed her not a lot. All external links were down. She ordered the plyplastic door to open. When it did, it revealed a wall of compacted snow. ‘Damn, the tunnel has collapsed.’

  ‘Kysandra at least may be alive,’ Valeri said. ‘She has an integral force field, and was far enough away.’

  Paula eyed the wormhole generator. It was half disassembled. Replacement components, cannibalized from two others, had been laid out neatly around it. Now they were scattered everywhere; she could see several sticking out of the water pooling at the bottom of HGT54b. ‘Worst-case scenario, both flank bombs survived. We have three hours until the seibears arrive.’

  ‘Best-case scenario, actually,’ Demitri corrected. ‘If they come ten kilometres closer and detonate, the icequake will finish us.’

  ‘But they don’t know that,’ Paula told him, ‘so let’s work on the assumption that we have three hours.’ She pointed at the wormhole. ‘It has to be operational by then.’

  ‘Understood.’

  Something prevented her from asking them if that was feasible. The collapsed tunnel was a problem, though. A molecular disrupter pulse was out of the question down here. There was nowhere for the superheated gas blast to escape. She poked at the snow, which wasn’t too hard packed. Several handfuls came out when she scooped at it. She picked up her maser rifle and reduced the power to five per cent before firing it at the snow just above the bottom rim of the door.

  It melted imm
ediately. Several litres of hot water soaked into the snow below, gradually refreezing. She fired again, melting more. After twenty minutes she’d succeeded in melting out a cavity big enough to stand up in. The humidity in the air was becoming tropical.

  Standing on the creaking ice of the cavity base, she altered the rifle output again, reducing the beam width to a centimetre and shunting the power up to fifty per cent. Then she aimed it vertically upwards and fired. A small jet of steam rushed downwards. Without her force field, she would have been scalded; as it was, it played across her face, spoiling her view. A field function scan allowed her to keep her aim straight.

  The maser took nineteen minutes to bore a five-centimetre hole up to the surface. With an open route for the steam to vent, she closed the plyplastic door, and increased the beam width, then started to widen the hole.

  *

  After an hour and a half, the hectic winds were starting to subside – not that it made the going any easier. True, the ski skill implant memories meant Florian had only lost his balance a couple of times, but he just knew he was going to be hooked up to the farmhouse medical capsule for a week to treat his leg muscles. He was having to stop every twenty minutes just to spend a minute to stretch and recover. He didn’t dare allow himself any longer.

  In those ninety minutes, the ge-eagles had managed to pull him thirty-five kilometres. More ge-eagles had survived the blast wave to rise from their ground shelter and link in. They now had twenty-two, of which nine were on tow duty. Kysandra deployed eight as link relays, giving her five to search for the bomb the eastflank seibears had been carrying.

  They finally located it through the gunk clogging the turbulent atmosphere, homing in on the spray of its signature radiation. Eleven Faller-seibears were still alive, and carrying the bomb towards the Viscount at their usual prodigious pace.

  That was the second piece of bad news. The ge-eagle at the end of the link was flying repeated sweeps over the Viscount’s location, and there was no sign of Paula and the ANAdroids. No tunnel entrance. No activity. It could detect the huge starship still buried below the ice, but that was all.

  As Florian set off again, the ge-eagle sensed a thin plume of steam spurting up out of the ground. He actually cheered. The image from the ge-eagle played front and centre of his exovision, banishing the discomfort of the journey.

  All three of them watched the feed as the ge-eagles towed them towards it, seeing the steam increase until it was a full-scale fountain. Then it ended, and infra-red revealed a glowing hole in the snow. The ge-eagle glided overhead.

  ‘Hello,’ Paula said.

  ‘What happened?’ Kysandra asked.

  ‘An icequake broke the tunnel, but everything else is fine. What happened to you?’

  ‘One bomb survived. It’s twenty-eight kilometres out from Viscount and closing. Do you want me to intercept?’

  ‘No, we can’t risk another detonation. Our timetable has become perfectly defined; we either activate the wormhole generator or this venture is over – probably along with our lives.’

  ‘Understood,’ Kysandra said. ‘I’m about seventeen minutes out.’

  Florian gritted his teeth when he thought about how much longer he’d be spending on the skis. He couldn’t help but think of that oh-so-long night spent in the Sandy-J with Lukan chattering away in the driver’s seat as the dark countryside flashed past. At the time he’d been twisted up with worry. Now he knew just how easy that night had been.

  The ge-eagles powered on indomitably through the night, their wide wings illuminated with the freakish swirls of the celestial ghost light bombarding the ionosphere. It portrayed their movements in juddery snapshots, as if they were clockwork-mechanical instead of the smooth perfect-future technology of the Commonwealth. The temperature was still dropping from the heat peak provoked by the bomb flash, the gentle snow sharpening to ice flakes, making him thankful for his force field as they assailed him.

  ‘How long?’ he asked.

  ‘How long for what?’ Paula said.

  ‘Until the wormhole generator is operational?’

  ‘We’re hoping to power up in an hour,’ Demitri replied.

  Florian gritted his teeth. An hour was about how long it was going to take him to reach the Viscount. ‘Understood. I’ll be there for that.’

  ‘Ry?’ Paula asked. ‘How’s your progress?’

  ‘With you in forty minutes.’

  ‘Good.’

  *

  Paula stood behind the ANAdroids, watching patiently as they slotted components into place. They were moving with methodical precision, as if this was a complex ballet they’d rehearsed a thousand times. She said nothing, not wanting to interrupt. If they had doubts, they would share them – after all, the actual Nigel would – but they’d given her a timetable. Only some unexpected event would change that now.

  Her low-level field scan revealed someone slithering down the newly melted tunnel. The plyplastic door opened, and Kysandra stepped into HGT54b, glancing round at the dislodged cargo.

  ‘Crud! You got knocked about, didn’t you?’

  ‘The wormhole generator didn’t suffer any damage,’ Paula replied. ‘That’s all that matters.’

  The hood of Kysandra’s e-m suit retracted. ‘Sure.’ She ran her gloved hand back through her long hair. ‘So what are you going to take with us?’

  ‘Everything in HGT54b. Once we get everything working again, it will provide us with a decent manufacturing base.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Even if a machine doesn’t work, it’ll be a good source of spare parts until we begin manufacturing new systems.’

  ‘Of course. So is the wormhole going to be accurate enough to drop us outside the farmhouse?’

  ‘We’re not going to the farmhouse,’ Paula said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I have been considering options. We not only need to buy time, we also need to safeguard Port Chana. Neither of those things will happen if we go back to the farmhouse.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Our original plan didn’t account for the Fallers acquiring nukes. Now we know they have them and are more than willing to use them, we have to circumvent them.’

  ‘By not going home?’

  ‘Exactly. They have clearly infiltrated government to at least the same degree as your friends have. I saw Roxwolf’s connections, and that was a rejected Faller in an outlying city. So we can’t risk opening negotiations with Adolphus, because they’ll find out. If they even have a hint of where we might be, they’ll detonate a bomb there. And everyone knows Port Chana is the centre of Eliter resistance to the government. They will blow it off the face of the planet.’

  Kysandra gave her an unenthusiastic nod. ‘Okay, so we don’t go to the farmhouse. Where then?’

  ‘A place where we can activate all the Commonwealth machines without panicking the Fallers into launching their apocalypse. A place where we will never be spotted, even by accident.’

  ‘So?’ Kysandra demanded. ‘Where?’

  ‘Macule.’

  ‘You’ve got to be crudding kidding me! Macule is a radioactive desert.’

  ‘Not relevant. Commonwealth technology can protect us from a little radiation. And as soon as we’re up and running, we can feed local minerals into the refineries to build the sensor satellites that’ll analyse the Valatare barrier. That’s not possible on Aqueous, which is the only H-congruous world. All its minerals are at the bottom of the ocean.’

  ‘Giu! You’re really not kidding, are you?’

  ‘That’s not my strongest trait, no.’

  Kysandra glanced down the tilted compartment at the ANAdroids. ‘I suppose you lot agree?’

  ‘It’s logical,’ Demitri said without turning round. ‘Paula knows what she’s doing.’

  Kysandra’s arms went up in surrender. ‘Bollocks: Macule it is.’

  *

  Ry arrived next. He grinned in delight when Kysandra explained Paula’s change of plan
. ‘My Astronaut Corps friends are going to be so envious. I will be the first of us to set foot on another world.’

  ‘First of many if this works,’ Paula said.

  They tracked Florian’s progress as the ANAdroids finished reassembling the wormhole generator. He was still eleven minutes out when Demitri announced: ‘Ready to power up.’

  ‘Do we wait for him?’ Ry enquired.

  ‘No,’ Paula said.

  They all gripped the gridwork and stared down at the big circular machine. Paula knew her nerves couldn’t be written off entirely as teenage hormones. So much depended on this – two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old biological machines using someone else’s memories to repair machines over three millennia old. The fate of a world. Nobody had ever thrown the dice so high in human history.

  Well . . . maybe Ozzie.

  That conjured up a secretive smile as Demitri initiated the power-up sequence.

  Everyone held their breath. The wormhole generator emitted the tiniest humming noise.

  ‘Mass converter on line and functional,’ Demitri said. ‘We have power.’

  Paula was struck by just how much like Nigel he sounded. She hadn’t noticed before.

  ‘Bringing the gateway up to full activation readiness.’

  Paula’s nerves were overtaken by excitement. She’d gone through tens of thousands of wormholes in her enormous previous lifetime – so many it was utterly mundane. This, though . . . This reminded her of just how extraordinary the whole concept was. Warping the very fabric of the universe for human convenience.

  ‘Force field on,’ Valeri said. ‘We are shielded.’

  In front of her, the blank circular face of the wormhole generator began to flicker with hazy turquoise phantasms, slivers that hovered on the edge of existence.

  ‘Initiating space–time compression,’ Demitri announced.

  The phantom streaks merged together, forming a circle of elusive indigo radiance. It was impossible for the human eye to focus on the phenomenon; the light was shifting, extending back into infinity at the same time as it remained in place.

  ‘Is that it?’ an awed Kysandra asked. ‘A wormhole?’

  ‘No. What you’re seeing is Cherenkov radiation,’ Fergus said. ‘The start of a wormhole. This is a wormhole.’