A Night Without Stars (12 page)

Streetlights on this road were few and far between. As before, his eyes adapted quickly to the darkness. Going through the gateway was out of the question, so he slung his jacket over the top of the unkempt nettlethorn hedge and scrambled over, cursing as the big spikes scratched his arms and legs.

Pistol held ready, safety catch off, he scurried across the wide unmown lawn to the big house beyond. Slim lines of light showed him windows that weren't entirely covered by curtains. Using them as a guide, he worked out the shape of the house. There was one oddity, a light in some kind of annex. He crept toward it and realized this was the stable block where the family's coach and horses would've been kept pre-Transition.

Chaing slowed his approach, always alert for the
thing
from Frikal Alley lurking somewhere in the gloomy grounds. The front of the stables boasted three big double doors. Light was spilling out from the one closest to the main house, which wasn't fully closed like the others. There was gravel under his boot soles now, but cushioned by moss and weeds so his feet were silent as he crept forward.

His heart was hammering away fast in his chest. He could feel the adrenaline surge in his blood, chilling him, making it difficult to hold the pistol steady.

“Get a grip,” he whispered harshly, ashamed by how scared he was.
I should have waited for backup.

Without warning tiny colorful stars were sparkling across his vision, yet strangely not interfering with what he saw. The breath caught in his mouth as he remembered exactly when he'd seen this phenomenon before. And—as before—the stars swarmed into a picture of
her
: the Warrior Angel. Exactly the same picture his five-year-old self had seen.

“Where are you?” a voice asked. It was a silent voice, speaking into his head.

Chaing spun around, his pistol trying to cover the whole world. There was nobody there, of course.

“Crudding Uracus!” he cursed under his ragged breath.
It's the pressure, it must be. Lurvri's life is on the line here.
He took a moment to quell his anger and fear. The phantom image of the Warrior Angel faded, and he walked unhesitatingly toward the stable.

There were no voices, no sign of movement in the fan of pale light that shone out across the mossy gravel. Chaing swiveled around the opening, presenting the smallest profile as he'd been trained—and his heart thudded, shock locking his muscles. The stable was a big open space, with a stone slab floor and empty wooden stalls at the back, illuminated by a single bare bulb hanging from a flex. And right in the middle was a Faller egg. He'd never seen one before; all the countryside sweeps he'd taken part in as a regimental conscript had been uneventful, and the times he'd encountered nests as a PSR officer, there had never been eggs involved.

Now he stood facing one, and it was exactly as the descriptions and photographs depicted it. A sphere three meters in diameter with a hard crinkled skin the color of charcoal. It was eggsuming comrade Deneriov.

Rule one in the Faller Institute manual was
never ever
touch the shell of a Faller egg. It responded to the slightest physical contact at a molecular level; skin stuck and adhered in an unbreakable bond. From that moment on, you had to be cut free. If your friends were quick enough then you only lost a finger, or hand, or in the worst case an entire limb. For as soon as the adhesion process was triggered, the shell became permeable around the contact point, and began to drag the entire body inside.

Deneriov's naked body was too far gone for any rescue. He was being eggsumed sideways, so an arm, a leg, and half of his torso were already inside. His head, too, was sinking below the shell, leaving just one eye and the corner of his mouth outside as the shell slowly drew in more and more, a millimeter at a time. There was no expression on his remaining features, and his free limbs were hanging limply.

The parts of his body inside the egg were being broken down by the alien cells that made up the yolk. Once he was completely inside, those same cells that were consuming him would come together in a perfect replica of the life-form they'd ensnared. But the only thing it shared with its original victim was form; its thoughts were pure Faller. And those thoughts were bent toward one thing—conquering whatever planet they had come to and making it their own.

Chaing didn't know how long he stared at the terrible scene. It was too late even to perform a mercy slaying. The yolk cells were already infiltrating Deneriov's brain, penetrating individual neurons. His memories were being extracted, drained away. He wasn't Deneriov anymore. To shoot what was left of him would be to alert the nest.

There's only one egg, so where's Lurvri?

He slipped out of the barn and headed for the house. The front door was too obvious, so he tried one of the ground floor's sash windows. It opened a few centimeters, and he strained harder, forcing it on upward. Eventually it was wide enough for him to squeeze through.

The room inside was very dark, with a door outlined by thin cracks of light coming from the hallway beyond. He could see the shapes of furniture—big chairs and sofas, a low table—and guessed at a lounge.

He paused by the door, but there was only silence. Pistol held ready, he turned the handle gingerly and opened it a fraction to peer out. The hallway was dilapidated, with faded wallpaper molding away, and dirt crowning every surface. The carpet was now a strip of furry gray grime, filling the air with a musty smell. And something more. He sniffed, not quite recognizing the scent.

Chaing opened the lounge door and walked slowly along the hall, pistol held rigidly out in front. One of the doors five meters ahead was open, with odd muffled sounds coming from within. He reached the doorframe and knelt down to press his eye to the gap between the hinges. The instant lasted an eternity.

He knew the naked, dismembered corpse lying on the long dining table was Lurvri, because the vile beast from Frikal Alley chewing on his head hadn't yet bitten off every distinguishing feature. Caden was also in the room, along with another four Fallers, all of them feasting on chunks of limb.

No thought. No plan. Only pure rage.

Chaing burst into the room, shooting wildly. Two bullets caught the beast, punching it across the dining room. Blue blood squirted out of its gaping wounds. Then he swung the gun around, firing at Caden. A bullet caught his neck, blowing off a big chunk of flesh, sending blue blood splattering everywhere. The other Fallers roared in fury, jumping aside. Chaing tracked them, going for the nearest, his finger relentlessly pumping the trigger.

Then something slammed into his back with agonizing force, sending him flying. He thudded into a chair and tumbled to the floor. For a terrible second, he thought he'd been shot. But when he twisted his head around, he saw a huge humanoid shape lumbering forward from where it had been hidden behind the door. Blue-gray skin was stretched over impossibly bulging muscles. Its profile was the only remotely human thing about it. The head was clearly related to the beast, and it had six fat pincer claws on the end of each arm.

Chaing rolled desperately, trying to bring his pistol around. A foot stomped down on his wrist. Something snapped, and he screamed. He couldn't feel his fingers behind the hot pain.

“Mine,” the hulking humanoid creature grunted. It reached down, pincers flexing wide. The tips resembled horns.

Chaing wailed helplessly.

An explosion blew out half a wall, plunging the room into darkness as debris shattered the lights. Then the dreadful scene was lit by an electric-blue glare, as if every air molecule were fluorescing.

The Warrior Angel strode out of legend and in through the smoldering hole, surrounded by her own violet aurora. And she was just as she'd appeared in his vision. Silky Titian hair hanging down over her shoulders. Her sweet twenty-year-old face heavily freckled, wide-brimmed hat at a jaunty tilt. Long dark-brown leather coat flowing like a captured liquid.

Great Giu. She is real.

She raised her arm as if it were a weapon and the air in front of her warped, emitting a dull
whoomp.
A purple-white flash smothered the room. And the giant Faller disintegrated, great globes of gore splatting outward.

The Warrior Angel's splendorous blaze lashed out again. Then again. And again. Faller bodies ruptured violently, flinging steaming gobbets wide to coat the whole room in slick carrion.

Chaing was curled up in a fetal ball, trembling in shock. Finally, the awesome flares ended.

“Chaing?”

He tensed even tighter.

“Chaing, it's over. They're dead. The Fallers are dead. You're safe now.”

The words made no sense.
I can never be safe, not in this world, not anymore.

“Would you like a sedative? It'll help you cope.”

He risked looking up. The whole room glistened blue. Blood and tattered gore coated every surface. His shirt and trousers were saturated in warm, viscous Faller blood, as was his hair, his face. He held up dripping hands, staring at them numbly, then threw up.

“Easy there,” the Warrior Angel said. “I know it's a shock, but you'll be okay.”

“What are you?” he managed to snivel.

“You know what I am, Chaing. You're the PSR.”

“Why do you haunt me?”

“Haunt you? Don't flatter yourself, Captain. I never even knew you existed before this week. As far as I know, tonight's the first time you linked to the general band.”

“I don't understand.”

“Okay, let's get blunt here. You have a Commonwealth Advancer heritage, Chaing. You're an Eliter.”

“No. No, I can't be!”

“Not fully, no. Genetic drift means your macrocellular clusters aren't integrated properly with your neural structure. But they're still there, in your head. Panic or fear put your brain into overload for a moment there, and your clusters went active. Briefly.” She smiled, and it was enchanting. “Lucky for you, huh? It allowed me to pinpoint your exact location.”

“You knew about the nest?”

“I knew there was one around here. Local Eliters have been detecting their encrypted communication for a while. I've been in Opole for a few days, helping to track them down.”

“Why?”

“To protect the Liberty program. There's a factory in town producing vernier rocket engines for the Silver Sword. I couldn't risk the nest damaging it.”

“You do this? You help us?”

“Of course. I promised Laura Brandt. Bienvenido needs protecting if we're ever going to grow into a society that can contact the Commonwealth. Sadly, your PSR isn't doing the best job defending us right now. You can help rectify that, Chaing. You can bring back some of the drive and determination the PSR has lost. You're a great officer, so climb the promotion ladder to where you have real influence and power. Help sweep away the dumb politics and prejudices that hinder the fight against Fallers.”

“Eliter sedition.”

She gave him a disappointed glance. “That's a shame. I thought you were smarter than that. Look around you, Chaing. This world is decaying; human birthrates are in decline. The Fallers are expanding, and they're organizing to an alarming degree. You have to stop them. The Liberty program alone can't save us, not now that the Fallers are breeding down here. They're growing more dangerous, and the government is in denial about the Apocalypse. You know it's all true. That ogre-thing nearly ate you tonight.”

“So breeder Fallers are real?” he murmured in defeat.

“Oh, yes. Breeder Fallers don't have to copy the indigenous species like the eggs do; they can designate their offspring's physiology just like the old neuts and mods we had back in the Void. Don't your superiors tell you anything?”

“That's just—” In his head, Chaing could hear Corilla saying,
Whose propaganda?
“We were told their existence was an Eliter lie,” he said, hating himself for being so weak.

“You might want to think about why you were told that.”

He looked up fearfully at her. “I can't say these things.”

“No, but you can believe them. Right?”

“I…”

“Okay,” she said sorrowfully. “Do what you have to, Chaing. But a word of advice. Some special political officers from Varlan will be debriefing you. Tell them I was here; don't hold that part back. Then agree to everything they order you to do. That way, they'll probably let you live.”

He watched the Warrior Angel turn away. Her disconcerting aurora shrank to nothing as she walked out through the blast hole, leaving him in pitch blackness. Somewhere in the distance, sirens were shrieking.

As custom dictated, the morning before his launch, Pilot Major Ry Evine walked alone up the steep grassy slope to pay his respects to the gray stone statue of comrade Demitri—the father of the Astronaut Regiment, chief designer of the Silver Sword rocket and Liberty spacecraft, and people's hero first class. The statue stood atop Arnice's Peak—a modest hillock that formed the tip of the promontory where Port Jamenk stretched along the steep inclines above the shoreline. Yigulls soared overhead as he walked, squealing loudly, their blue-and-white wings spread wide so they could ride the strong winds from the sea with minimal effort.

Ry reached the plinth of granite slabs that circled the statue, and took his cap off so he could perform the required solemn solitary deliberation, head bowed before Demitri, deep in thought and thanks. Even though the footpaths to the crown had been closed yesterday evening by the town authorities, he knew he wasn't really alone; there would be watchers from the People's Security Regiment. The PSR was always watching, always suspicious, always judging. Even him, with his prestigious family ancestry: a direct relation to Slvasta himself, no less. There was no aristocracy on Bienvenido anymore, but he was about as close to the old concept as it was possible to be these days. It meant they'd watched him for all of his twenty-nine years, protectively at first, then with increasing interest as his flight drew near. He no longer cared; it was just another price to pay for being an astronaut, for being able
to slip the surly bonds of Bienvenido, and dance defiantly among the shining enemy.
Comrade Demitri himself had spoken that phrase the year he died, selflessly saving others from the horrific fuel dump explosion.

He raised his head and for once actually gave the statue a good look. The stone was old, more than two hundred years now. Host to a cloak of dark lichen blooms, those slightly melancholic features—familiar from countless photos and coins—were badly weatherworn, while yigull droppings adorned the head and shoulders. It was hardly the most noble of memorials, but he suspected that comrade Demitri wouldn't have minded; he was supposedly a humble man, as the truly great always are.

“I won't fail you,” Ry promised softly. Then he put his cap back on and saluted before turning smartly and striding back down the path.

It was only a couple of hours after dawn, but the air was already muggy, making him sweat in his full dress uniform. Port Jamenk was thirty-five kilometers south of the equator on Lamaran's eastern coast. Built by the state, its core was a clutter of stone cottages bridging the saddle of land behind Arnice's Peak. Walls of thick granite blocks were painted white to help ward off the tropical heat, inset with broad shuttered arches to allow the air to flow, and had roofs of red clay tiles crusted in sun-scorched yellow and green lichen. The cobbled roads were awkwardly narrow, roofed by vines and creepers that tangled around drainpipes and overhead power cables. They followed the inclines in zigzags and sharp curves, in contrast with the precise grids favored by most of Bienvenido's post-Transition towns. But then Port Jamenk was an exception, born out of desperate necessity, its construction decreed by Prime Minister Slvasta himself, 250 years ago. It housed the state engineers and regiment personnel who built and operated Cape Ingmar, Bienvenido's solitary rocket port. At first little more than dormitory barracks at the end of the new Eastern Equatorial Railway Line, it had grown over the centuries as the civilian population had expanded, their licensed enterprises slowly improving the comfort of the rocket port's workforce.

Ry looked across the jumble of rooftops as the severe sun burned off the wisps of morning mist. Beyond the town, meadowland stretched back along the promontory, where broad fields contained flocks of goats and llamas and ostriches. Farther west, where the promontory merged into the mainland, ramshackle banana and breadfruit plantations covered acres and acres of rumpled ground. They were about the only terrestrial crops that would grow in the poor flinty soil.

Beaches stretched along the bottom of the promontory's low cliffs, narrow strips of muddy gray sand where the water lapped gently—except for those times when Valatare was in conjunction. Then Bienvenido was subject to tides and hurricanes that the moonless planet had never known back in the Void.

A long curving stone harbor with a lighthouse on the far end protected the deepwater anchorage from those wild times. It had been built for the recovery fleet. Slvasta had commissioned nine big vessels capable of steaming across the Eastath Ocean in any weather so they could reach the splashdown sites, hauling the Liberty command modules out of the water and giving the victorious returning astronaut a well-deserved hero's welcome.

Today there were only five ships. The oldest had been built seventy-eight years ago, and along with two other senior ships, it was anchored in the middle of the harbor, slowly rusting away. The three of them were mothballed, their fittings and cold engines constantly raided for spares by engineers to support the two operational ships.

General Delores, who commanded the Astronaut Regiment, assured her pilot corps that two was more than enough. These days, the return flight trajectory was known before launch, and reentry was far more precise; there would always be a ship on station to pick them up. But talk around the astronaut mess was that five hours wasn't outside the norm, with some flights in the last decade waiting three days before a ship arrived.

Ry arrived at the fence at the bottom of Arnice's Peak. Pilot Major Anala Em Yulei was waiting by the gate, wearing her white Astronaut Regiment dress uniform, chestnut hair tucked neatly into her cap. Her thin face was composed into a neutral expression, which her delicate features transformed to fierce disapproval. People who didn't know her often assumed she wore a permanent scowl. When she did smile, Ry always had to smile in tandem, because it was such a burst of cheeriness.

They'd known each other for years. Ry had left the cooperative farm in Cham County at eighteen to take a general engineering degree at Varlan University. From there he entered the Air Defense Force flight officer school where Anala was in the class above.

She was from a Gretz family who before the revolution used to hold vast estates specializing in spice crops. That had all been nationalized by the state right after the Great Transition, but they got to keep the ancestral home and some farmland around it. She'd told him the big ancient building had been divided up into apartments where about fifteen branches of the family now lived. Despite all the institutional discrimination against her family legacy, they still had a strong tradition of regimental service. Anala joined up as soon as she finished her aeronautics degree.

After flight school they were posted to different squadrons—her back to Gretz, and him to Portlynn. Two years flying the new four-engine IA-509s on missions against Faller eggs had seen him notch up seven confirmed egg kills as testament to his piloting skill, before he applied to the astronaut academy—like every single pilot in the Air Defense Force always did.

Anala arrived at the academy as part of the same intake. Her small frame was always going to act in her favor, for the Astronaut Regiment didn't accept anyone over one meter seventy-five, and certainly nobody who weighed in above eighty kilos. Those were the limits for the command module. In his case, some political pressure must have been brought to bear by Democratic Unity officials, who would have recognized the advantage of having someone related to Slvasta qualify as an astronaut.

They'd spent the next six years together in training, learning orbital mechanics, rocket systems engineering, electronics, atomic bomb design, physics, mathematics, astrogation, the entire layout of the Liberty spaceship modules, and the nuclear missile operational margins—so much knowledge was crammed into his head that, even with his phenomenal memory, he suspected his brain must be leaking most of it away again. Then there was the physical side of it: horrible survival training exercises on land and at sea, punishing recurring medical evaluations, endless fitness workouts, the divedown-upchuck flights in a modified transport plane to familiarize them all with free fall, and the endless flight simulations—most utterly boring, and the remainder so terrifyingly realistic he'd thought more than once that he wouldn't get out alive.

All that they'd gone through together, enduring all the indignity and the strain and worry, the constant paranoid observation by the PSR for loyalty to the Democratic Unity party. And all of it endured because there, at the end, lay the greatest prize in the world:
spaceflight.
Taking the fight against the Fallers up to the Tree Ring. Six years of solid friendship, then last night they'd slept together.

Astronauts got laid
a lot.
On a world as devoid of glamour as Bienvenido, astronauts were more famous than even the prime minister. Schoolkids collected playing cards of them, the newspapers and cinema reels idolized them, and the whole planet kept the Liberty tally against the Trees. They were all straight icons, they were all gay icons; people just wanted them any way they could get them, in fantasies or in the flesh. The astronaut office had a whole building in Port Jamenk where two floors of clerks did nothing else but deal with the fan mail from across the planet.

So six years of laughing together, traveling together, attending parties, shared duties, covering each other's backs against the training inspectors, total companionship, and then—

“I want to offer you a deal,” Anala had said in the middle of a dance at his Commencing Countdown party yesterday evening. They were swirling around gently as the band played old dance tunes. Ry had been hoping for some of the newer faster songs that were becoming fashionable in the cities, but this was Port Jamenk, after all. “I'll sleep with you tonight if you sleep with me on
my
countdown night.”

It was a given for an astronaut to have someone (or more than one) sharing their bed the night before a launch. Officially, eighty-nine percent of missions returned—though if you actually did the math, it was more like 80 percent. Then there were the 3 percent of rockets that didn't make it off the launch pad. And statistics about radiation damage to astronauts' bodies were never available outside of fearful whispers.

So nobody—not even the PSR—was going to object to astronauts spending their last night having plenty of sex.

Ry had enjoyed that particular benefit of his status during the tedious and numbing publicity and propaganda tours that the astronaut corps were sent on—speaking to factory workers, universities, town halls, party rallies, and regiment headquarters right across the continent. Anala, he knew, wasn't as promiscuous, though she hadn't exactly been celibate.

“I…Me? Why?” he stammered in surprise.

“I'm going to want some human contact that night. Same as everyone. I just don't want it to be some oaf I picked simply because he's got a hot body and a narnik bong.”

“You can choose anybody. You know that.”

“So can you.” She glanced pointedly around the hall, where there were a lot of amazingly pretty girls in very small dresses waiting impatiently around the dance floor. “Most of these babes haven't even got a Port Jamenk permit; Giu alone knows how they got past security at the station.”

He grinned. Port Jamenk was a closed area, only open to state-approved residents and visitors. “I guess our species can be just as determined as the Fallers.”

“Yeah. So?”

Ry didn't even have to think about it. “I'd like that,” he said quietly.

She nuzzled up close. “We don't have to have the sex, not if you don't want. I know a lot of astronauts are too tense, or drunk, or tired to actu—”

He kissed her. “Oh, yes, we do.”

Anala now opened the gate in the fence and saluted. Ry grinned back at her. When he woke up that morning, there'd been a moment when he worried that they'd be self-conscious around each other; that too much had changed. But actually being with a friend—someone who understood—on countdown night had been perfect. It didn't hurt that six years of intense physical training had made them as fit as marathon athletes, either.

“Respects paid, Major?” she asked in a formal voice.

Ry glanced at the escort group around her. Three astronaut trainees from their own squad, two medical technicians, five reporters, two newsfilm camera operators, and Colonel Eades, a three-flight veteran. An experienced astronaut always mentored a rookie on their first flight.

“Indeed.” He looked back up at the gray statue. “I think our father Demitri is smiling upon this launch.”

The group walked through Port Jamenk's convoluted streets to the town's small railway station. Bunting from the Fireyear celebration was still strung over the main street. There were few people about, though some had made the effort to gather along the route to quietly wish him luck. Fishermen on the way to their state-licensed boats stopped and applauded. When he looked out across the harbor, both the recovery ships were steaming away toward the horizon. He didn't say anything, but knew all the astronauts were thinking the same thing.
At least they both made it out of the harbor.

The train in the station had a single passenger carriage—the same one that took comrade Reshard, Bienvenido's first astronaut, on his momentous journey to the launch pad for the Liberty 1 flight. Refurbished many times, but still operational. Astronauts could be a conservative, superstitious bunch.

In the carriage it was just Ry, Anala, Colonel Eades, and the medical techs. Ry sat down in Reshard's chair and took his uniform jacket off. The techs immediately wrapped a rubber cuff around his arm and took his blood pressure. A thermometer was stuck in his mouth. He was given a small bottle and told to give them a sample as soon as he could.

“I trust you didn't overdo it last night,” the colonel said.