Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  "What kinds of ideas do you have?"

  "Painting freighters to look like warships and leading the enemy around by the nose. Packing mile-wide rocks with explosives and then setting them off right in the attacker's path. That sort of thing."

  "How many ships can you bring?"

  "Well, that depends entirely on how many other Belters decide you're worth backing, now don't it?"

  "I can't convince them on my own," Rada said. "I get the impression they all think I betrayed them."

  "Because you did."

  "I'm not going to argue with you. What I did was necessary for our survival."

  He stared, waiting for more, then nodded. "That might be the only attitude that will convince them."

  "I'm not convincing them. You Dashers are so stubborn and contrarian I'd get more of you to flip by arguing that you shouldn't join us. I need you to talk to them for me."

  "You and I hardly know each other. Big favor to ask."

  "Then just think what I'll owe you once we've kicked the Lurkers out of the System. Will you help me or not?"

  Mat-Nalin made a face like he might spit. Then he actually did. "When you abandoned the Belt, you showed you didn't care whether my kind lived or died. In normal times, if you told me to sweet talk my people into helping you, I'd tell you to go fuck your own engines. But these ain't normal times. These are the times that makes scoundrels and hypocrites of us all."

  "Thank you, Mat-Nalin."

  "I'm saying I'll talk to them. Can't promise they'll listen."

  "You have to make them. All our lives depend on it."

  The corner of his mouth lifted again. "If our lives depend on the whole Belt agreeing to something, I expect our next conversation will be held in hell. Good luck, Commander Pence."

  Rada was mildly surprised to find herself giving him a quick and impromptu salute. She closed the comm line and switched over to Winters.

  "In case you weren't listening in," she said, "Mat-Nalin's about to start recruiting the Belt for us."

  "We're still waiting to hear back from Earth," Winters said. "Assuming that one of them can send us a fleet, it would be nice for us to be able to tell them where our target is."

  "Then let's do our best to find some Lurkers. And our double best not to get murdered by them in the process."

  They made way for the region of space clockwise from the first attacks, where the rumors of alien activity had been heaviest. Two drones led the way at all times. When their fuel ran low, they returned for collection and refueling as two others boosted forward to take their place.

  Rada split her attention between watching the feeds from the drones and keeping tabs on the activity across the Belt. A number of ships were launching from or returning to the hundreds of small-to-medium stations and habitats strung across the gigantic ring of asteroids, but it was neither organized nor nearly large enough to make for a proper evacuation or resistance.

  Her comm booped at her, startling her.

  "We just got word from Earth." Winters couldn't conceal his grin and made no attempt to try. "They're sending everything they have left. They'll be here in four days."

  6

  They huddled in the dark, the hold vibrating around them. The dark felt unnecessary, considering the engine propelling them through the stratosphere was about a million times brighter than the light needed to illuminate the hold, but that was Dark Solutions paranoia for you.

  "One minute to drop," the pilot announced.

  "I can't believe we're doing this for the second time in three days," Webber said.

  "This ain't at all like the last time."

  "Really? Because it seems to me like we're about to jump out from so high up you can't even breathe, then spend the next few minutes hoping we're not vaporized by missiles as we drop into enemy territory."

  "Yeah," MacAdams said, "but this time you have your own parachute."

  Webber shut down his suit's comm so no one could hear what he said next.

  "Ten seconds to drop," the pilot said.

  The door opened. The pilot counted down. Webber swore to himself and stepped out. Earth was really, really far beneath him. Really dark, too. Even if he had known the geography of the far side of the Pacific, the tiny sprinkle of city lights that were still in action would have thrown him off anyway.

  It had been decided that the submarine was more likely to be detected and treated as suspicious than a random plane cruising through the upper atmosphere on its way toward mainland Grasia. Hence the jump.

  At the moment, they were free-falling through what was "atmosphere" in name only and there wasn't any wind or noise at all. Webber felt compelled to break the silence, but that would involve using the suits' comm systems, which probably couldn't be detected from so far away, but would still run counter to the whole idea of coming in completely dark so that no one could see them and think about shooting them.

  So he just fell. The planet got bigger beneath them. After a while, their suits started flapping around a little. They signaled to each other and deployed the flaps from their shoulders and arms, turning themselves into flying squirrel people. The plane hadn't been flying directly over the island of Tandana, because again, DS was so paranoid that after they kissed their wives goodbye in the morning they checked their mouths for surveillance bugs, obliging Webber and MacAdams to bank toward the black lump in the middle of the moon-reflecting sea.

  Webber spent most of the descent hoping they weren't about to have a missile fired at them. He spent the last part of the descent hoping he wasn't about to be eaten by a shark. They came down in the ocean, landing with a good splash and shooting underwater before paddling their way to the surface.

  There wasn't much wind and the waves were pretty calm, but a nasty offshore current made it feel like they weren't getting any closer to Tandana at all. But the suits had had retractable fins set into them and before long they were riding the swells into shore and then slogging up onto the sand.

  Crabs sidled in the moonlight. The sand was white, sprinkled with knobs of coral and bits of broken shell. The air smelled like salt and humidity. They retracted their fins and hurried across the open ground to the wall of palms lining the shore.

  MacAdams hunkered down behind a ringed trunk and checked his pistol even though the holster was waterproof. Webber opened his device. He didn't have a net connection—and couldn't have used it even if he did; if there was an espionage installation of some kind on the island, they might be able to pick up the signal—but he could use its passive sensors. Which were currently telling him there was nothing to sense.

  "Nada," he said.

  MacAdams undid his suit's hood and stared into the jungle ahead of them. "We'll go inland. Look for clearings, roads, an airstrip, lights. If we see anything man-made, we get down and don't move. If they went to the trouble of putting a secret spy base on a nowhere island in the middle of the Pacific, they won't have any problems perforating our skulls with bullets."

  "They'd never do that. They'll want to know what we're doing here. They'll torture us first, then shoot us."

  MacAdams drew his gun and advanced through the palms in a crouch. The night air was warm and damp and the jungle smelled like greenery and standing water. A ton of bugs were chirping at each other and now and then a bird or a monkey unleashed a godawful shriek.

  There was plenty of space between the palms and it made for easy walking. The instant the ground shifted from sand to red dirt, the trees and shrubs and vines got so thick a rat would have trouble squeezing through. MacAdams cursed and walked parallel to the growth. A hundred yards later, he disappeared into the trees.

  He'd found a game trail worn into the rusty dirt, barely wide enough for them to walk along single-file. Low branches grabbed at the shins of Webber's suit. Spiderwebs gleamed in the moonlight, but even though MacAdams had his mask down, he walked through them like they weren't there, which Webber found really annoying for reasons he couldn't really explain.

  T
he trail got muddy, slowing them further. The smell of moldering fruit hung in the air. They stopped several times an hour to drink water and take a look around. Webber didn't see any signs of inhabitation, but between the canopy and the growth, he could have walked right past an active football stadium without knowing it was there.

  MacAdams put his pistol away to better push aside the brush. Webber did the same. Boots squicking in the mud, squinting to make sure each step had sound footing, he found himself forgetting for minutes at a time why they were even there.

  The trail forked. MacAdams stood there a minute, then chose the path heading toward a hill. They were soon hiking up a ridge, the jungle thinning around them into a forest of tall trees. Whenever the brush cleared enough to give them a view of the slope to their right, MacAdams hunkered down and gazed into the night.

  "Not seeing much," he muttered.

  Webber ducked under a perfectly round spiderweb. "Maybe they're one of those groups of real eco-friendly spies. We should start looking for tree forts. Or squirrels driving around in tiny surveillance vans."

  MacAdams made a noise and got back on his way. Once they were about five hundred feet above sea level, the ground leveled out. A peak loomed miles in the distance. MacAdams trudged toward it. From way up in the sky, the island had looked like a tiny little speck, but in truth it was larger than most stations, and none of it was designed to make it easy for humans to get around on.

  Leaves rustled ahead. MacAdams dropped like he'd been shot, ensconcing himself behind a gigantic yucca plant. Webber crouched beside him. A dark shape slipped out onto the path and stopped, eyes glowing green, its rope-thick tail lowered behind it.

  Webber almost choked. "Is that a tiger?"

  "That is exactly a tiger." MacAdams kept his pistol steady. It was a decent enough caliber to take down a person no sweat, but a five hundred pound tiger would probably take its sting as proof that it was right to eat them. "Hold still. Like your life depends on it."

  The tiger gazed at them, appraising them in a way that made Webber's hair stand up. Every sensation became so intense he would have sworn he could feel the individual air molecules passing over his tongue.

  The tiger swung its great shaggy head to the side, stepped forward, and vanished into the forest as thoroughly as a Lurker ship into the void.

  Dawn was coming up and by mutual agreement they decided the tiger was a sign that they'd done enough jungle-traipsing for the time being. They found a tree with a bunch of thick outspread limbs like a welcoming octopus. They slung their hammocks behind the cover of the leaves. MacAdams took first watch, which Webber thought was a sacrifice until the big man shoved him awake three hours later and Webber discovered that he now had to stand watch while he was tired and cranky.

  They got up for good early in the afternoon, but MacAdams didn't like the idea of tramping around while it was light out. After the tiger, Webber didn't like the idea of tramping around while it was dark out, but he knew that was a losing argument. As the day drew on, MacAdams crept from the camp to make for the edge of the mesa and get a look at the lay of the land before night fell.

  He returned in almost perfect silence. "Don't see anything."

  "What if there isn't anything?"

  "Then an uninhabited island seems like the best place for us to avoid getting bombed."

  "But not to avoid getting tigered."

  "Three or four miles ahead, there's a ridge that looks climbable. It'll take us up to the top of that little mountain. Should give us a view of the entire western half of the island."

  They set out at twilight. The sky turned purple, coaxing out the stars. At breaks in the canopy, Webber checked for the lights of ships or the flash of fighting, but the skies looked at peace.

  Clouds came in from nowhere and it did some raining. That made the mud worse and drummed on the leaves so hard they couldn't hear any potential nearby conspiring, but Webber thought it might also discourage large predatory cats, so he ruled it a wash.

  Two hours later, they started up another ridge. The mud stopped sucking at his boots, but it was still slick underfoot and he fell every few minutes. The larger trees went away, replaced by shorter trees with smooth, piebald orange bark. These were the perfect size for gripping, and the abundance of handholds let them make good time up the slope.

  They reached the top, toeing to the edge of the cliff for a look to the east. This was a span of small hills and flatland leading to another small mountain range on the far side of the island.

  "See anything?" Webber murmured.

  "Yeah," MacAdams said. "More island."

  "We don't actually know that the goons from Cannel's office are here, do we? They could have been coming out here, then getting on a boat to confuse their trail. Or they just faked their GPS readings altogether in case their devices were captured."

  "Yeah."

  Webber stood there a few seconds longer, feeling stupid. "Well, let's go check out the rest of it."

  He turned around and walked north along the cliff, which was almost sheer yet was coated in vines and grass despite this. The air was several degrees cooler than it had been below and it felt good after the sweat of the hike. He couldn't see much of the way forward, what with it being close to midnight in a forest, but it looked like there was more mountaintop ahead than he'd expected.

  The cliff curved to the left. He moved down a short decline. The trees thickened around him, but even though there was still a path forward, he came to a stop, momentarily troubled. Wind blew up around his legs, rippling his suit. When nothing leaped out of the foliage to attack him, he walked forward.

  The ground unzipped beneath his feet. He yelled out and fell. Something snagged his arm: MacAdams' right hand, bearing down hard enough to grind sparks between the bones of his forearm.

  His legs dangled down into nothing. He tried really, really hard not to yell or scream and succeeded in limiting himself to a frightened squeak. He grabbed out for the net of vines but just shredded through them. He grabbed again. They stretched under his weight but held strong.

  MacAdams was down on his belly, hanging onto Webber with one hand and anchoring himself to one of the orange trunks with the other hand. He wriggled away from the edge, pulling Webber up with him. Webber got his chest up over the cliff and rolled onto his back.

  "What's the matter with you?" MacAdams said. "Didn't your mother ever tell you not to fall off cliffs?"

  "It's not my fault!"

  "Then whose was it? The invisible man who shoved you over the edge?"

  Webber's heart was bouncing around his chest, but he'd caught his breath enough to sit up, walk on his knees to where he'd fallen, and paw through the foliage there.

  "See this? It's grown so thick it looks like solid land, you jerk. But there's nothing underneath it."

  MacAdams gave him a contemptuous look, then he cocked his head, gazing out across the growth. "If there ain't no ground, what are the trees growing on?"

  "How should I know? This crazy jungle could probably grow in the storms on Jupiter. Some of the plants don't even feel like real…" He trailed off, then reached out for a tangle of vines next to where he'd fallen. No matter how hard he tugged, they wouldn't break. He drew his knife, cut one loose, and examined the end. "This one isn't bleeding. Or sapping. Or whatever plants are supposed to do when you cut them. I don't think these are real plants."

  MacAdams had a wild look in his eye. They both had some basic survival equipment with them, including a pair of grapplers. MacAdams secured his to the arms of his suit. Webber caught on, doing the same. They secured themselves to a prow of rock, then lowered themselves down the cliff where Webber had fallen through.

  MacAdams had to stop twice to cut his way through the plants. About twenty feet down, he came to a halt. Webber stopped beside him.

  Unsteady wind swirled up from below. It was almost totally black, but he could feel the cavernous space beneath him, an empty yawning mouth. Webber pulled the hood of his mas
k up and activated its low-light vision.

  He was hanging on the side of a canyon a half mile wide, three hundred feet deep, and at least a mile long. Above him, a mat of plants blocked out the sky. For the most part, this was only semi-solid, but an obvious grid ran through it, holding it up.

  Far below him, there were no plants at all. Instead, hundreds of fighter jets sat on a tarmac that stretched from one wall of the canyon to the other.

  There were a few lights below, but it was a strange gray illumination that died before it reached a hundred feet up the cliffs. Prefabricated buildings sat in three groups with some larger structures near the back of the canyon. Three people walked among the field of jets, but otherwise, it was completely silent.

  Webber turned on his video recorder, zooming and scanning everything below. After a few minutes, MacAdams tapped him on the shoulder and jerked his thumb upward. Webber nodded and they reeled themselves up the grapplers' lines. They crested the cliff and hunkered down behind the boulder they'd attached themselves to.

  "I think," Webber said, "that we found it."

  "They've got enough fighters to fill out a good-sized army. What the hell's it doing out here in the middle of nowhere?"

  "They built a scaffold and covered it in plants to hide it. Maybe they wanted to keep it safe from the Lurkers."

  "Or hide it from their human enemies. Are these guys working with Carriana and the UDL? Or against them?"

  Their devices still didn't have net service, but DS had loaded them up with a database of different subjects that might be used to identify whatever there found on Tandana—including one of all popular vehicles both civilian and military. They ran a comparison of their video to the database. No direct matches.

  "What now?" Webber said. "Should we go down and ask them whether they're good guys or bad guys? And if they are bad guys, just who exactly their shadowy outfit is working for?"