Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Yeah."

  "Not really, no. Do you?"

  "It's getting to the point where I'm starting to wonder."

  People were sleeping on stoops, sitting on the sidewalks doing nothing, arguing listlessly. Others gathered in dispirited crowds outside shops and bars, blocked from entry by large men with weapons.

  Most major Earth cities looked like they were cranked out by the same factory, but Khent wasn't big enough to suffer that fate. The single houses were made of anywhere from one to eight round structures like a contiguous collection of yurts, with high conical roofs to keep off the snow. The apartment blocks had turrets on the corners, the windows round, protected with thick shutters.

  And the windows of every ground-floor structure were now boarded up with planks and nails.

  The air was thick with wood smoke. Locker-raised as he was, MacAdams had almost never smelled burning wood before and it was like one nostril thought it smelled like poison while the other nostril thought it smelled like standing watch over your tribe in the darkness of the night. The streets rapped with the sound of axes: people were chopping down houses for the boards and hauling off the lumber for kindling.

  The defector was going by the name of Rohan. He had been staying at the White Fox, a local inn. MacAdams plotted a route on his device and carried on.

  There was no vehicle traffic in the streets. In fact, there were almost no parked cars either. The only ones that remained had been stripped down for parts, their plastic and aluminum carcasses left to the snows.

  With no vehicles to get run down by, the refugees were making full use of the streets. Most were walking around aimlessly, heads tilted down under thick hoods, breath curling from their mouths. Others just stood there in knots, staring resentfully at the armed men guarding the shops. A few were using broken boards to carve shelters from the deep snow drifted on the side streets.

  MacAdams knew at a glance that there wasn't much food. More refugees were arriving by the minute and the city was already swollen to two or three times its original size. Wouldn't be long until the riots began. Maybe less than a day.

  He hoofed it a mile and a half downtown, watching Webber from the corner of his eye to make sure his braces were holding out in the snow. Webber's eyes looked a little pinched but nothing too bad.

  The White Fox was a six-story building with a bar on the street level and lodging above. A turret rose from each corner. The upper floors were painted white with green shutters, but the ground floor was a black and white mural of foxes, deer, wild horses, scrub pines, and snowy hills.

  MacAdams approached it from the south side of the street. Passing the alley between it and the neighboring building, he made his face go blank. He took Webber's elbow and strode past the White Fox's doorway without so much as a glance through the windows.

  Webber pursed his lips. "Uh, that was our spot."

  "No it wasn't."

  "Oh right, we want one of all those other White Foxes in town."

  MacAdams waited until they were well past the corner of the building. "He ain't here."

  "How do you know that? Did DS give you the X-ray vision upgrade package?"

  "No, but the spooks watching the place might have something like that."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Fresh tire tracks leading around the back. And look up there—but do not make it obvious."

  Webber lifted his eyes to the building across the street, where three windows on the upper floor had been blacked out. "You think the Fox is being watched?"

  "Only cars I've seen here have been military or appropriated by the military. Betting they've got one parked behind the Fox. And people inside, waiting for Rohan to show up so they can grab him and stuff him in the trunk."

  Engines thundered overhead. MacAdams glanced up in time to catch four more jets speeding north, keeping well ahead of the racket put out by their engines.

  "How sure of this are you?" Webber said once it was quiet enough to be heard again.

  "Rohan's a state defector. Whatever he's got, it's big enough for DS to get itself involved in. New Mongolian security must have been tipped off to his plans."

  "So if he's not there, how do we find him? Put up the Rohan Signal?"

  "That ain't the worst idea ever."

  "Yes it is! It's maybe the actual worst idea! We don't have his device address. If we put out a public signal for him, security will wait for us to meet up with him, then arrest us all."

  "So we put out a signal that will only mean anything to him."

  "Like what? 'Hey local traitor, your ride is here, or at least it would be if a violent mob hadn't stolen it from us'?"

  "I was thinking something a little more subtle. Like 'DS is here.' Or SD, if you want to get really paranoid. Drop it on the public net and see what happens."

  "I think what's going to happen is we're going to sit around posting nonsense until our balls freeze hard enough to play pool with. But I don't have a better idea, so let's try yours."

  They found a relatively quiet street. Access to the wider net was extremely limited, but Khent still had a local net. It was cluttered with thousands of messages from refugees looking for family, food, medical treatment, and transport away from the war zone—along with less wholesome things like drugs and weapons—and while there was a chance MacAdams' message would get lost in the blizzard, that also meant it was more likely to pass without notice by local authorities.

  Just in case it wasn't, they left the side street as soon as the message went out. MacAdams thought about finding a room somewhere for about three seconds before concluding a) that would only leave a transactional trail for the cops and b) there wouldn't be any open rooms anyway.

  So they wandered for a while, killing time while keeping an eye out for anywhere that wasn't crowded with cold, dingy people. On three different occasions, they walked past groups of men beating each other in the streets. There were no police or soldiers to be seen.

  Thousands of people were sleeping against the bases of walls, wadded up under blankets and cardboard. It wasn't until MacAdams saw a man with a frozen beard and blank eyes staring up at the gray sky that he understood not all of them were sleeping.

  His device pinged. He'd gotten a one-word response to his message: "Yes?"

  He wrote back, "Who are you?"

  "A rider. One who's lost his horse and has no way home."

  "The hell?" Webber muttered out loud.

  "It's him," MacAdams said. "The Rohan are a people from the Book of Good Acts. Horse-lords."

  He bent over his device and asked for a meet. The person on the other end, who MacAdams was almost but not certain was their guy, told them to meet at a park three-quarters of a mile away. They headed on over. The park was spread across the northern side of a hill and as they neared it the black deltas of New Mongolian jets curved in from the east.

  This time, they were met by a wing of fighters coming out of the north. MacAdams swung up his device and zoomed in. What he saw made him choke on his own spit.

  "Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" Webber said.

  MacAdams nodded and thwacked his chest.

  Webber tapped his device, pulling up files. "The jets from Sveylan are an exact match for the ones we saw on Tandana."

  "Was Sveylan the one who sent the spies to Cannel's office? Hunting for information it could use to attack the other members of the UDL?"

  "The UDL sold out the whole planet to the Lurkers. Is it any surprise some people wanted to kick the UDL's collective heads down the street?"

  MacAdams scratched his beard. "Does that make Sveylan the good guys?"

  The two sides had already closed enough to launch missiles at each other. MacAdams hadn't seen much atmospheric combat before and he watched with a critical eye as the enemy jets veered away from the incoming missiles, dumping counters and flares.

  Three of the Sveylani fighters broke course, straightening out on the now-distant New Mongolians. Thin red beams connected the no
ses of the Sveylanis to the tails of their enemies. The Mongolian fighters crumpled apart in orange blossoms.

  Webber lowered his device to take in the scene with his bare eyes. "Those lasers were lasers."

  "I only know one group that has lasers strong enough for atmospheric combat."

  "What if that's why those jets aren't a match for any known military?"

  "Because they were designed by Lurkers?"

  Webber had gone pale. "They're down here, aren't they? And they're working with humans. The Sveylanis. But why the hell would they attack the UDL rather than keep working with them?"

  "Don't know. Maybe it's revenge. Maybe they blame the UDL for ambushing them in orbit."

  A man stepped out from the edge of the park. His mid-length black hair was combed in a neat part on the left side of his scalp. He was on the short side and even though he was wearing a puffy jacket MacAdams could tell he had never lifted anything heavier than a gallon of milk.

  Still, the hard look on his face was not the kind MacAdams liked to see in the wild.

  The man stopped across from them, right hand hanging near the pocket of his jacket. "Daniel Silva?"

  MacAdams relaxed his hand, which had been close to his own pocket. "Yeah, that's our bossman. Hear you've lost your steed."

  "And I'm about to lose my patience with this sneaking around and coded foolishness."

  "It's almost over. How do we know you're who you say you are?"

  "If I am who I say I am, then you must understand that you must prove yourself to me first."

  "I'm Mazzy Webber." Webber tugged his hood down from his head and mouth. "I've put my life on the line for the System more times than you've looked over your shoulder today. If you think I'm working for the Tubes, or any government that's helping them, then you're even dumber than my friend looks."

  Rohan leaned forward, inspecting Webber's face. "I've seen you on the news." He looked up at MacAdams. "Which makes it a simple matter to identify the ambulatory boulder you commonly travel with. I don't know whether to be honored or worried."

  "Figure that out after we're out of here. Which we can do as soon as you prove who you are."

  "I'm the one you know as Rohan. But anyone can claim to be Rohan, so I'll tell you something that only the real Rohan would know: the Lurkers made landfall weeks ago. They've been working in secret ever since. And they're much further along than you know."

  "Further along on what?"

  Rohan shook his head simply. "You don't get to know that yet. Not until I have been safely removed from those seeking to kill me."

  "Happy to oblige," MacAdams said. "But we ran into a setback. We don't have a car."

  "You don't have a car? I also don't have a car. So in what way do I need your help when I can provide myself with the exact same not-having-a-car service as you can give me?"

  "Because we're rude enough to be able to find a replacement. Once we're out of the city, we've got a ship waiting to take you as far away from here as you want."

  "Or you can try to get out on your own," Webber said. "And get captured and tortured by your government while the rest of Earth gets destroyed because it doesn't have the information you could have saved it with."

  Rohan examined them, their faces and their posture, then nodded. "All right then. Impress me. Where is our new car?"

  MacAdams tugged his hood back over his head. "Don't think we're going to find a car here. Even if we did, the military would take it from us and thank us for the find."

  Webber folded his arms. "Then what's the plan? Bikes with skis instead of tires? Or maybe we can find a discount pogo stick outlet."

  "Skis are Plan C. But before we lower ourselves to getting out of here on our own legs like a bunch of barbarians, we'll take some inspiration from our new friend and try to find some horses."

  Rohan's right eyebrow twitched upward. "Khent is a tourist town. People come here to pay money to experience New Mongolian traditions—including crossing the wastes and old trade routes on horseback. Why didn't I think of this?"

  "Because nobody we know has ever used a horse to get anywhere in their entire lives." MacAdams hitched his pack up his shoulders. "We need to start thinking like the people who made it through the Panhandler. Everything's a tool now."

  A look at the city maps DS had installed on their devices showed a riding district on the northwest edge of town. They struck that way, avoiding the refugee-clogged avenues in favor of smaller streets with boarded-up apartments and shops.

  It was early afternoon, but with the sun smothered in a thick mat of clouds, it might as well have been dusk. Snow began to fall as they reached the first of the stables, which had twenty-foot outer wooden walls enclosing a bailey of stables, supply buildings, and a small walking ground.

  The place reeked of horses, but the stables were empty. The horses' feed was gone, too. MacAdams had the feeling it was currently being boiled in sidewalk stewpots around the city. He hoped the same wasn't true about the animals.

  The stable after that had a few goats in it, but the horses were AWOL there, too. The third stable was as empty as the first. The fourth was boarded up, but as MacAdams was contemplating whether to bust in, an animal snorted from behind the outer walls.

  "They're watching us." Webber nodded to the windows of the four-story tower-like structure built over the wide double doors to the enclosure. "Think we can convince them to let us take a few steeds out for a test ride?"

  "I think they'll have orders to shoot anyone who lays a hand on their walls." MacAdams pretended to examine something on his device as he recorded footage of the enclosure. "Easy enough to grapple inside. But there's no way to prep three horses and get them out of there without alerting the guards. We'll have to take them out. We'll wait until night, then go in."

  They turned around and wandered south, closer to the center of town. It had started to snow and they took shelter on an empty stoop. MacAdams' device still didn't have real net access, but it did have a condensed offline library on it, and he watched every video he could on how to saddle, ride, and tend to a horse.

  In the middle of the afternoon, another wing of fighters screamed in from the southeast. The cityscape blocked off their view so they climbed a fire escape to the top of the apartment block and watched as the New Mongolian forces confronted and were rapidly destroyed by an opposing squad of the laser-toting fighters they'd seen parked at Tandana.

  Webber poked at Rohan for answers about what was going on, but Rohan just stared off into the distance. As the three of them started to climb down the fire escape, screams opened up to the south, followed by the hum of oversized truck engines.

  MacAdams moved to the southeast corner of the roof. He had a clear view for a mile down the street. More than enough to see a caravan of brick-camo trucks and APCs, along with a small fleet of conscripted civilian cars, headed to the west. Along with hundreds of soldiers, every vehicle was filled with people in noticeably better dress and shape than the refugees crowding around the procession.

  "They are heading toward the western highway," Rohan declared flatly. "They're deserting the city."

  MacAdams had a bad feeling even before a southbound jet drove across the gray sky, engine sizzling behind it as it crossed high over Khent.

  Webber zoomed in with his device. "That's a Sveylan fighter."

  "They're coming for the city. We have to get out of here right now."

  "You want to make a run for the horses?"

  MacAdams jogged toward the fire escape. "No time. We take one of those cars or we get bombed."

  They descended the icy metal stairs faster than was safe. Displaced people were running down the street toward the caravan. As a truck in rust-colored camouflage crossed the intersection a quarter mile ahead, a bottle spun through the air. It landed just in front of the truck and burst into flame.

  The truck veered to the right, skidding and stalling in the snow. A mob of refugees rushed it. A top-mounted spin gun pivoted to face them.
Without issuing a single warning or threat, the gun opened up, eight barrels alternating shots in a high-pitched Eee. The crowd was sprayed backward in red mist and tumbling chunks.

  Webber's mouth fell open. "Are you sure we want to try to steal a car from those guys?"

  "New plan," MacAdams said. "We go for the horses."

  They turned around and ran as hard as they could toward the stables. Behind them, thousands of people screamed and wailed, the sound becoming the cacophony of hell every time a spin gun opened up with another flood of lead. The nightmare of noise slowly drifted westward.

  The refugees were all flowing the same way, as if someone had pulled a drain stopper from the desperate city. Made the going a lot easier. They were back at the stable within minutes.

  The front doors of the enclosure were wide open, snow twirling into the courtyard beyond. No time to spare. MacAdams crossed the open space in a crouch. No bullets came. The proprietors were gone and he was certain they had taken the horses with them, but five of the animals remained in their stalls, nostrils steaming.

  Two were already saddled up, as if the owners had meant to take them but changed their minds at the last second. MacAdams and Webber wrestled a saddle onto the third. The animal was sweating and scared and MacAdams was surprised when they finished up without either of them eating a kick.

  They mounted up. It felt good, even better than gripping the controls of a warbird during a dogfight or breeching the hull of an enemy vessel, like a birthright humans had given up in favor of something distant and cold. He didn't know what the hell he was doing, but the horse was trained to carry tourists around all day, including children and the elderly, and it trotted out the gates with hardly any direction at all.

  They were close to the northern edge of the city. The horses seemed to want to head that way, presumably because that's where they took their customers out on the trail. MacAdams let them take the lead.

  The hard-packed snow muffled the clop of the animals' hooves. After three blocks, two men with grungy faces threw themselves out from behind the skeleton of a car, barring the way. One brandished a long knife while the other held out a broken glass bottle.