A Night Without Stars (21 page)

They'd almost made it to the bank of the stream when Florian's communications routine flashed a spectral green icon of a general ping request across his vision. He started at the unexpected connection.

“Is something wrong, friend?” Mooray asked.

Florian held up a hand for silence. The signal was gaining strength. His auditory nerves plagued him with a distorted whistle that quickly calmed and began to stutter before becoming coherent.

“Urgent request for assistance. Urgent request for assistance. If you are receiving this, please respond. Urgent request for assistance. Urgent—”

The message carried on with methodical insistence.
An Eliter!
Florian let out a small groan of dismay. Some hothead radical on the run had ended up in the valley, one step ahead of the sheriffs or PSR officers. But scanning the larch tree avenue in infrared he couldn't see any kind of vehicle, not even a bicycle.
I don't need this.

“Is there a problem?” Mooray asked in a fast clatter of tusks.

“I hope not.” Slumping his shoulders, Florian ordered his communications routine to open a link. “Nobody here can help you. You need to keep moving.”

The signal strength multiplied by an order of magnitude. Florian hadn't known anyone could transmit at such strength. “Not an option, I'm afraid. I'm locking on to your position. That's good—nice and remote. I can make that easily. Hang on, I'm decelerating.”

“What?” Spoken aloud as well as transmitted along the link.

“Three minutes out. You'll hear me real soon. Don't be afraid.”

Which was completely the wrong thing to say. And still there was nothing visible between the larch trees.

Mooray's tusks clattered wildly. Teal barked.

“Look, look,” Mooray was saying. His heavy body was rocking about in agitation, flippers extended rigidly. Pointing up into the air.

With blood thudding in his ears, Florian slowly looked up into the sky, dreading what he would see, telling himself there could be nothing.
Please.
“Oh, great crudding Giu!” he moaned.

Something blazing with heat was moving across the northern sky, curving around.
Fast, so fast!
Lining up on the Naxian Valley as if the wide-open slopes were some kind of welcome embrace.

“Go away!” Florian pleaded. He knew he was watching the end of his life zooming toward him. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. He whimpered in dismay. The urge to wrap himself in a pleasant faraway mindscape until the
thing
was gone was almost overwhelming.

“Way too late for that, pal. I've been waiting for a long time now. And anyway, my systems ain't what they used to be.”

Then
it
was dipping down, and slowing. Getting bigger. But actually, it wasn't that big. Florian had been expecting something the size of an IA-509. What he saw now was a cylinder with slightly bulbous ends, which his optical analysis routines were classifying at three meters long, and two wide. The incredibly hot air surrounding it was not moving, which was impossible. He could see the turbulence in the sky behind it, a long line of warm twisting air.

“What is that?” Mooray asked. “A new type of Faller?”

“No,” Florian told his friend. “I don't know what it is. But it's trouble.”

The cylinder passed fifty meters overhead, descending rapidly now. And somehow it wasn't as hot. Its halo of fiery air was dissipating, a spherical ripple gushing away.

Florian felt it, a gust of heat as if someone had opened an oven right in front of him. Teal barked in dismay, jumping about. Then thunder rolled into the valley—a weird crackling boom from the north that went on and on. And Florian just knew that had to be the cylinder's wake, ripping through the sky.

The whole county's going to know it's here!

Teal was howling with fright now as the thunder echoed off the valley walls. Sheep were charging across their pastures. Infrared vision showed him flocks of panicked birds rising from the trees they'd been sleeping in.

“Down and safe. Well, sort of. Get yourself over here, my new friend. I have something for you.”

“What?” Florian replied automatically as he tried to soothe Teal.

“As of now, the most precious thing on the planet. Come on, get your arse over here.”

Florian looked at Mooray and pulled out the flute. “The thing that Fell from the sky: It wants us.”

“How do you know this?”

“It's speaking to me, the way my kind speak, over distances.”

“What is it?”

“I don't know.”

“Then we will adventure this night. Hunt more than stupid land meat. Hunt the knowing, friend Florian. This is good.”

The cylinder had landed about eight hundred meters away, at the edge of a spinney of silver birch that crowned a small rise. Florian hurried toward it, torn between wanting to know what the cylinder was and simple fear of the unknown. Teal bounded along beside him, while Mooray struggled to keep up.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Joey…Well, I used to be. I'm not anymore.”

“I don't understand. What are you now?”

“Good question. Technically, this is an independent life support system.”

“Life support…? You mean you're in a spaceship, like a Liberty capsule?”

“Not so much in it, as: it. I'm resident in the smartnet nowadays.”

“What?”

“I'm the electronics.”

“You're the machine itself? I'm talking to an electrical machine?”

“Yeah, that's it. You are.”

“Then what is your function?”

“Okay, that's the complicated part. You'll see in a minute when you get here.”

Florian saw the lights in the farmhouse come on. They would have been woken by the thunder of the cylinder's flight. But the Ealton family weren't Eliters; they wouldn't be able to see the cylinder's radiant heat and know something had come from the sky. He still had some safe time.

“You said you required assistance?” Florian inquired.

“Yeah. I was trying to reach a big concentration of Advancers. I scanned from orbit and picked up their link chatter; there's an area near the coast with a lot of them there. I figured they'd be my best bet.”

“What are Advancers?”

“Crap. You have forgotten a lot. Advancers are people like you, with functioning macrocellular clusters.”

“We call ourselves Eliters. Bethaneve founded our movement during the revolution, but it became so much more. Now the label is used by the government to denigrate us. But we use it with pride.”

“Ah. I wondered about that. I've picked up some radio over the centuries, but it's been intermittent. I'm not really configured for shortwave; I had to improvise. Eliters got mentioned, but never in a good way.”

“Centuries? You have been orbiting for centuries?”

“Not through choice. I got stuck. Long story, and irrelevant tonight.”

“Joey, where are you from?” Florian asked in trepidation. There was one answer he wanted to hear above everything.

“Again: complicated. But originally I'm from the Commonwealth.”

“You've found us!” he yelled joyfully.

“No. Sorry, pal, I've been here all along, and I'm completely alone. But that should end soon.”

“How?”

“Look, I'm not sure how long we've got, so let's just cut short the—Holy shit! What is that with you?”

Florian glanced sideways at Mooray, uncertain how to respond. “This is Mooray, my friend of the water.”

“It's an alien? A sentient one?”

“Yes.”

“I didn't know there were more aliens on Bienvenido.”

“The Vatni come from Aqueous. They came across through the wormhole Mother Laura opened.”

“Sonofabitch! I've missed so fucking much. Bastard Tree. Nuking was too good for it. Is Laura Brandt still alive?”

“Mother Laura sacrificed herself to defeat the Prime.”

“Sweet Jesus! The Prime are here? The
Prime
? This is a fucking nightmare!”

“The Prime were exterminated. Mother Laura killed their world. She flooded it with the atmosphere from Valatare.”

“Valatare? That's got to be the gas giant, right?”

“Yes.”

“Flooded…? So she left you working wormholes?”

“No. The wormhole closed behind her. We think she did it to protect us.”

“Oh, that stupid smart woman. I always thought she was the best.”

Florian had arrived at the bottom of the slope. He looked up at the pale slim trees on top; several of them had been knocked down when the cylinder landed. There was a short gash in the ground as it tore through the lingrass to end up with one blunt end embedded in the steaming mound of peaty soil it had plowed up. Once again, his enhanced vision revealed a strange layer of air cloaking the thing's skin.

“Joey, do you know Mother Laura?” he asked in bewilderment.

“Yes, I knew her. Long time ago, now.”

“But—”

“Look, I know you've got a bazillion questions, but we're kind of short on time. From what I did manage to catch from your radio, Bienvenido has some kind of totalitarian government, right?”

“Depends how you look at it.”

“Should have asked before. What's your name?”

“Florian.”

“Okay, Florian. My sensors are showing you're a young man. So you're full of ideals, right?”

“Not really.”

“Dump the modesty; this is extremely important. Is your government totalitarian? Think carefully about your answer, please. I need you to be completely honest with me, okay? No pressure, but the fate of every human on Bienvenido may depend on it. There are some big decisions that have to be made in the next minute, and this net isn't really wired for that. I need my choices to be as simple as possible.”

Florian stared at the cylindrical space machine that used to know Mother Laura.
Dear Giu, how do I answer? I should just walk away, let someone else deal with this.
But of course he couldn't.
A friend of Mother Laura!
“The government can be quite oppressive, yes.”

“Shit! Okay. Right. Thanks, Florian. Do you live around here?”

“In the next valley.”

“So I'm not going to ask what you're doing here at this time of night.”

Too late, Florian realized the crossbow was still hanging from its shoulder strap. He shifted in embarrassment. Was the space machine judging him? It felt like it.

“Now listen,” Joey said. “This is the way these things always play. The government is going to come looking for me. And looking hard. I managed to deflect their radars; that's easy enough. But there was nothing I could do about the hypersonic boom. They'll figure that out soon enough. I'm already picking up some pretty paranoid communications, and I'm guessing those are search planes they're launching from that city to the north. Then there was that astronaut who saw me, clever bugger. They'll know what they're looking for.”

“What astronaut?” Florian was angry with himself for not understanding what was going on, but even more upset with the space machine for not explaining anything properly.

“The one in the Liberty spaceship—and how you wound up building Soyuz copies is a story I'm really going to enjoy hearing some day! Irrelevant; sorry. But this is how it is: I can't fly again. My ingrav units took a pounding in the quantumbuster blast, and didn't get any better while I was tussling with that motherfucking Tree.”

“You've been fighting the Trees?”

“Sort of. This life support system used to be part of Nigel's ship—”

“Nigel!”

“Yes.”

“You knew Nigel as well?”

“Briefly. Focus, please. The life support package was damaged by the quantumbuster Nigel detonated. The Trees don't have force fields, so chunks had snapped off, and the surface was heated to plasticity, jetting vapor like a comet.”

“A what?”

“Ah, yes, you don't get them here, do you? Think: chunk of ice and rock that starts to boil when it gets near a star. They shoot out huge vapor tails—Never mind. Point is, the Tree surface was molten. When I hit, I was embedded deep. Ever since then the bastard Tree has been trying to engulf me. It was a slow process, and I fought back by manipulating my force field. Neither of us could ever get the upper hand. Then along came your Liberty mission.”

“Two hundred and fifty years fighting a Tree! That is a truly heroic battle, Joey.”

“Yeah, whatever. Let's concentrate on the now, shall we? I have something for you, Florian. Something I need you to keep out of harm's way for a month. There is nothing more vital in the universe right now. Capish?”

“What?” Florian hated the way he'd been reduced to repeating that one word over and over, like he was too dumb to say anything else.

“This gift has to be kept out of government hands. They'll be…unpleasant. Can you do that? Or if not you, can you find someone who can?”

“I…I suppose. Yes.”

“Thank you. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”

“You have a heart?”

“Used to. Come up here now, please.”

Florian walked slowly up the incline toward the space machine. He urgently wanted to be holding the crossbow ready, but that was plain ridiculous. His enhanced vision showed him how smooth the space machine's skin was. There was no way of knowing what it was made from, except he didn't think it was metal.

“Do you know what it is yet?” Mooray asked from just behind him.

Florian raised the flute once more. “I think it came from the place where humans lived before the Void.”

“Is it a good thing?”

“Giu, I hope so.”

A circular hole appeared in the center of the space machine, expanding rapidly and silently until it was a meter wide. Florian watched it in fascination; it was as if that section of the shell had turned to liquid.