Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Two options. Either we ring up DS and see if they've got a more sophisticated way to ID these designs, or I go down to plant a tracking bug on one of them and we see where it goes."

  "We can't contact DS without risking being detected. And you can't go down there to plant a bug."

  "If you were concerned for my safety, you should have stopped me from ever setting foot on the Fourth Down."

  "I didn't want you there. I thought you were going to cut into my share of the loot." Webber grinned, then got serious. "You can't go plant the bug because I'm the one that's going to go down and do it."

  "Like hell you are. Not with your condition."

  "My 'condition'? My legs have held up this far, haven't they? Now shut up and cover me. I'm going down."

  He turned and walked back toward the cliff. Sensing that the only way to stop him was through physical restraint, MacAdams grunted and followed. Webber switched his suit over to its ultra-black setting, grappled himself to the boulder, and slid down the side of the cliff.

  The couple-three security guards or maintenance people were still milling among the planes. Webber detached one of his grapplers, reeled it in, and fired it thirty feet horizontally toward the far end of the tarmac. He was carrying his baffler and he was darker than a shadow, but swinging across the bare rock, he felt pantslessly exposed.

  Didn't matter, really. He'd used his injury to shame MacAdams into letting him go down, but the truth was his injury was the reason he wanted to take the risk himself. He'd been out of the mix for too long. He needed to know that he could still get things done.

  And if it turned out to be a suicide mission, better for the cause to lose him than MacAdams.

  He lost a few feet of elevation with every grapple, but was still a hundred feet up when he reached the outer row of jets. He took a long look around to make sure nobody was patrolling that far out, then slowly lowered himself to the paved ground.

  The jets waited in tidy rows, somewhat bulbous noses attached to slim bodies, their back thirds rigged with enough wings and fins to pass for old-timey frigates. Webber got the tracker from his kit, a thumbnail-sized rectangle. It was the same shade of gray as the inside of his pack, but a moment after he'd palmed it, it switched to the blackest it could manage, trying to match the color of his glove.

  The nearest plane was sixty feet from the canyon wall. Webber gave it another few seconds, then got up and just walked toward it, keeping his steps light enough that he could barely hear them over the rustle of the trees sticking from the canyon ceiling.

  He came to a stop next to its main wing, which stood a little over his head. He'd never stuck a tracer to a fighter jet before: was the wing fine, or would it get ripped up by the wind or scorched by a missile launch? All at once, his indecision felt so profound that his mind locked up altogether. But this just freed his body to act. It marched him over to one of the landing gear, which he pressed the tracer to. He gave it a rub, gluing it in place.

  He kneeled, surveying the pavement between himself and the cliff face. Nada. He stepped forward.

  A footstep scraped from the rear of the jet. Webber froze, then darted back beneath the fuselage. Instead of his gun, which was quiet but not quiet enough for the deadly silence of the night, he drew his knife, hiding it under the blackness of his sleeve.

  A man in camouflage walked from behind the plane, a rifle slung over his chest. He glanced over at the jet, eyes seeming to be sucked in toward Webber, then continued on—before rocking to a stop and swinging his head back toward the shadows.

  The soldier wrinkled his brow, taking a step forward. He was staring right at Webber but the suit was so dark the man couldn't tell what he was looking at, just that something maybe was wrong. He took another step, ducking his head as he neared the wing.

  Webber sweated into the glove of his knife hand. He'd killed people before, but they'd all been shitheads or it had been in the middle of battle where killing was not just accepted but approved of. But for all he knew, this fellow was a hero, or probably just some average guy doing his job.

  Webber was going to have to kill him. That was simply the position he'd put himself in. Once upon a time, he would have tried to justify it, or even blame the soldier for it, but he'd seen too much to pretend anymore. He tensed his knife arm and his legs beneath him. Two more steps.

  A tiger roared from somewhere up on the cliffs, a thunderous yowl; the hair stood up across Webber's skin and he had to clamp down on his bladder to stop himself from spraying down his suit. Caught up in the same ancient instinct, the guard spun around, head craned toward the heights.

  Webber took four long, quiet steps beneath the jet. Under the far wing, he got down and lay flat. The soldier turned from the cliffs and stooped, scanning the shadows where Webber had been before, then shook his head, straightened, and walked away.

  Webber slunk off past the planes, then beelined for the cliffs. The grapplers made some hissing and smacking noises when you used them and he gave the soldier a minute to get further away before heading up. Once he was hanging under the vegetation, he cut sideways toward the hole through it and wriggled out onto the plateau.

  "Got it," Webber said. "But one of their guards was right on top of me. He would have made me for sure, but then that tiger roared and distracted him. Imagine that, getting saved by a tiger. Think it's my spirit animal?"

  MacAdams waggled his device. "That tiger was me, you dolt."

  "Oh. Then maybe you're my spirit animal."

  "I don't think we're going to learn much more from up here. Except what the inside of their jail cells look like after they catch us snooping around. I say we send what we've got to our people and see what they make of it."

  Webber bit his thumbnail. They didn't have an open connection to Dark Solutions, but the submarine team had given them a transmitter for situations just like this. Except, of course, it wasn't that simple.

  "Think we'll be able to send something out without the hidden military base picking up on it?"

  MacAdams shrugged. "Don't know."

  "Because unless the local wild boars are known amateur satellite transmission enthusiasts, I have to think these guys will come do something about an unauthorized signal. Something involving bombs."

  "We'll go down to the coast. Put some mountains between us and them to reduce detection. If we want to get real tricky, we can plant a device in a tree and have it send remotely while we hunker down under the biggest rock we can find."

  They observed the tarmac for another fifteen minutes just to make sure everything was as quiet as it looked, then headed back down the same trail they'd taken to the top of the plateau. For some reason walking downhill was tougher on Webber's legs than climbing up, and by the time they got to the lower plateau, his hips and knees were aching. The braces were now doing almost all of the work and that meant he was damaging himself, but he didn't complain the way he once would have. Complaining was a luxury of easy times.

  It had been after midnight when they'd left the mountain top and they were still a good two miles of jungle from the north shore by the time the eastern sky started to go gray. MacAdams did some grumbling but allowed that it was time to make camp. They ate from their ration packs and slept. When they woke in the afternoon, rather than waiting for nightfall, MacAdams decided to press on toward the coast.

  Low clouds streamed in from the sea, dumping buckets onto the jungle, stirring up the smells of wet leaves and rusty clay. Things got sloggy again. After living most of his life on stations where there was no weather, Webber found it extremely annoying and a little frightening that physical hardship could literally fall out of the sky.

  The trees opened before them; they stood on a low cliff overlooking a long slope to the bright blue sea. A stream ran to their right, descending in a whole bunch of short waterfalls. After a quick survey of the land, MacAdams shinnied up a towering tree, reached a fat branch festooned with purple blossoms, and crawled out on it, securing his device in one of i
ts many forks.

  He climbed down and they continued downhill, trying to keep the tree in line of sight at all times. Later in the afternoon, with the rain coming and going in inconsistent squalls, they stood on a lump of gnarled black rock, the surf thwacking into the coast twenty feet below.

  MacAdams motioned for Webber's device, then spent some time twiddling with it, rain dripping from his beetled brows as he looked back and forth from his device screen to the faraway tree that they were almost but not entirely certain was the same one he'd propped his device in.

  "Signal's on its way," he declared, passing the device back to Webber. "Suppose there's any caves for us to cower inside?"

  They headed west along a trail trampled through the shrubs, hunting for shelter from the rain and any inbound bombs. Webber pointed out an overhang next to a ten-foot waterfall. The footing was mossy and wet, but once they were inside the alcove, it was a welcome relief from the rain.

  Webber was just starting to think about taking a nap when the skree of an engine carried through the damp air. MacAdams pointed, but Webber's eyes had already jumped to the motion of a jet flying out to sea to the east, skimming over the wind-tossed waves. A second jet emerged behind it.

  Webber shifted. "Are we about to get vaporized?"

  "Don't know."

  "Well, if we are about to get vaporized, it's been fun. Except I have to say we deserved to go out doing something more glorious. Like punching one Lurker after another until the pile of Lurker bodies growing under our feet got so high it pushed us past the atmosphere and we suffocated."

  MacAdams snorted. He drew his pistol and gave it a quick check, then rested it on his thigh. This was completely ridiculous—the only thing that could save them now was if a Swimmer walked out of the wall with a teleportation device—but then again, wasn't it better to go out shooting? Webber drew his own pistol and waited for the plane to turn around and make its pass.

  Except it didn't. It just kept on flying, fading into the gray curtain of rain. A third jet launched, a fourth appearing seconds behind it.

  Webber tapped his trigger finger on the barrel of the pistol. "Why aren't they turning around? Did they forget their island was back over this way?"

  "You can unclench your sphincter. They ain't coming for us."

  "Er, they're not?"

  "I don't know where they're going." MacAdams stood with a crackle of joints. "But I know what they're doing. They're flying off to war."

  7

  Four days until they had their fleet.

  It wouldn't be much. Just eighty ships. Less than a quarter of what the Lurkers were still flying with. But they had no intention of winning outright. All they had to do was kill the two remaining carriers before they were wiped out.

  Four days until arrival. That meant they had four days to try to spook the Lurkers away from destroying any more stations—and to talk the Belters into joining them.

  Rada spent the first eight of those one hundred-odd hours glued to her screens and the net. When the message came in from Mat-Nalin, she couldn't have said whether she was awake or asleep.

  "I tell you, I've had more arguments today than in the last twenty years of marriage." Mat-Nalin grinned, weatherbeaten face crinkling top to bottom. "At least it's given me the chance to yell at some people I been meaning to yell at for a long time. Anyway, here's your progress report. So far, I've managed to scare up about thirty ships. Expect that's a lot less than you were wanting. But only a few are refusing to help. Most are saying they just don't have anything left—that they already sent everything to the combined fleets, or that the ones they held in reserve just up and vanished."

  The message ended. Usually when you had enough light-speed lag between you that real-time conversation wasn't possible, the protocol was to discuss more topics than were strictly necessary and let the other person determine what was worth responding to.

  This time, Rada kept it to the point. "Do you trust them that they're telling you the truth?"

  His reply came in a few minutes later. "Commander Pence, I don't trust 'em when they're wishing me good morning. They're sitting on more ships. I can smell it in their voices. They just don't want you to have them."

  She replied, "For now, keep talking to new people rather than concentrating on the holdouts. I'm attaching some evacuation plans my partners have come up with. If the stations don't have any military ships, they can still put their non-combat vessels to good use. We're happy to help coordinate with them. I know a lot of you will want to stay put—that you'd rather die in the place that's always been your home—but the Lurkers are here to destroy our population. Part of beating them is to thwart their objectives. We need to remove your populations from harm's way."

  She sent the Needle. Mat-Nalin didn't reply. She was glad. That meant he was out doing his job.

  Asteroids began to appear on screen. They had entered the Belt proper. Rada had already believed in her duty on an ideological and intellectual level, but a heaviness like quicksilver ran down her veins: there was nowhere else in the System like the Belt, with so many different microcommunities scattered across the thousands of asteroids big enough to stick a habitat inside. It had to be saved.

  "Contact," Winters said at the same instant her tactical buzzed with the same warning.

  The feed was coming in from the drones: scores of ships, a few hundred at a glance, which was strange because you shouldn't need to count for yourself, tactical usually did that automatically—which meant the Lurkers' stealth was still functioning to some degree, even with the drones relatively close.

  "They're not supposed to be this close," Winters said. "They were supposed to be headed clockwise."

  "Turn fast," Rada said. "Right now. Before they decide to follow the drones' engine sigs back to us."

  Orders came through from their command ship, the Pegasus, directing them to break left, accelerating at a rate that would maximize their velocity while minimizing the signs left behind by their engines. The feed from the drones went black: the Lurkers had put the hammer down on all communications.

  The Pegasus dropped another pair of drones to watch behind them—and try to lead any pursuit astray. Needles flew from Rada and Winters' ships as they transmitted the sighting of the fleet, along with its numbers and bearing, across the Belt and the wider System.

  Then there was nothing left to do but run and hope.

  The two drones under comm lockdown had preset orders to withdraw from any such area as quickly as possible. A minute later, a signal came in from one of the drones: it had escaped the field, but its partner had been destroyed, and it was under chase. The DS fleet didn't respond to it, not even with a Needle. Another minute, and the two Lurker fighters assigned to the drone blew it apart.

  The drones they'd sent back to trail them still had a glimpse of the two Lurkers. The fighters swung about, fading into the void as their stealth did its work.

  "Think they're actually heading on?" Winters sent, voice-only to reduce their profile. "Or is this another ruse?"

  "I don't know. But it's pretty goddamn obvious they're not afraid of six ships. If they're not coming after us, it's because they've got something more important to do."

  They launched four more drones, sending them after the Lurkers, then put out a call for assistance from any nearby stations that could help with surveillance. Every station in the vicinity had already gone dark and made no response, but video and intel started streaming in from dozens of sources—mostly old-model mining survey drones, military surplus, and some the Belters had build themselves.

  Anything that got too close got pegged with a missile—which itself was interesting, as apparently missiles were lower-resource to expend than a laser blast—and others had to peel off regularly to go back for fuel.

  Communicating automatically, the drones spread out from each other, surrounding the fleet in a (very) loose swarm. At that range, they were too far away to see any of the ships, but it still provided them with a very s
ound approximation of the enemy position. And if the Lurkers changed course, they would eventually come within range of one of the individual drones within the cloud, allowing the others to adjust.

  Within two minutes, two things became apparent. The Lurkers weren't chasing after the DS ships. Because they were headed for a pair of habitats instead.

  "Balden and Rosemary stations," Rada sent. "The Lurkers have been found. They are headed directly toward you both and could arrive at Balden within forty minutes and Rosemary just minutes after that. You are under imminent threat. We recommend you evacuate immediately. We recommend you use a puffball pattern. We'll do everything we can to aid the survivors."

  Once she'd sent her message, Winters appeared on her comm. "Given our experiences so far, I'm not sure they'll listen to you even in the face of a coming fleet."

  "We should have thought of this. We could have had Mat-Nalin prerecord an evacuation notice."

  "If it would have been a good idea then, it's still a good idea now."

  She composed a Needle to Mat-Nalin. The DS fleet had turned about to follow the Lurkers from a relatively safe distance, yet despite being closer to the Lurkers than to Rosemary and Balden, their optics could make out the stations but could find no visible trace of the aliens. A tingle ran across Rada's back.

  Her comm lit up, making her jump. Toman flicked onto her screen.

  "Rada. I understand the situation in the Belt. I've spent days in talks with LOTR and my advisors and there are no good answers here. If we leave the Lurkers to their business, they'll kill millions. If we break cover and come for them, they'll destroy us. At present, we're in a terrible bind.

  "Our recommendation is that rather than engaging directly, you should do your best to run the Lurkers around the Belt, buying as much time as possible for us to study them, analyze them for weaknesses, and formulate strategies to exploit them. Furthermore, Dark Solutions is still working on their mirror shielding. While it's a long shot in the short-term, if we're able to produce that technology, it will change everything. The longer we can avoid a direct conflict, the better our chance to achieve it."