Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  The maintenance man tossed the rag aside and turned back to the craft. Webber led them to the door to the left of the platform that had brought them down to the caverns. MacAdams glanced back to confirm none of the maintenance crew was watching, then got the severed hand from his left pocket and held it up to the pad. The status dot turned blue. Webber opened the door.

  MacAdams had been hoping for a stairwell—you couldn't shut down a stairwell—and got one. Technically, he got two: the stairs were divided in half, with the set on the right looking like your human-standard concrete steps, while the set on the left looked like the inside of a nautilus shell, where each step, rather than being flat, was a curved upward incline leading to the next tread.

  Webber crinkled his forehead. "How the hell do the Lurkers use those?"

  "I believe they roll up it like a wheel," Rohan said. "I also believe I don't want to stand around discussing it when they might slaughter us at any moment."

  "Leg cuffs off," MacAdams said. "We need to be ready to run."

  Rohan bent down and tapped his electronic key, releasing the shackles from his ankles. MacAdams tossed them in the box with their other stuff and took the lead up the steps. The scuff of their feet echoed up the stairwell. They passed four landings before seeing their first doorway. MacAdams ignored it and continued up.

  Two flights later, an alarm wailed from above and below. MacAdams and Webber stopped, locking eyes.

  MacAdams gritted his teeth. "They must have found the body."

  "I knew we should have thrown it into one of the machines," Webber said.

  They started climbing again. After another doorless landing, they took the next flight and heard boots clapping from above. Three men in green camo turned the corner, lifting rifles as they saw the men on the stairs below.

  "Mr. Enspach," one of them said. "Are you all right?"

  "Perfectly fine," Webber said sharply. "But I doubt the same can be said for everyone below. What is happening?"

  "There's been an assault. What did you see?"

  "People acting as though they had been confronted with unexpected chaos."

  "Any scuffles? Anyone running away?"

  "If I had seen anything of use, I would tell you about it. I have a job to do. I suggest you do yours as well."

  The man's face went blank in the universal way of the subordinate putting a lock on his emotions as he's being rebuked. "Yes, Mr. Enspach."

  He looked ready to say more, then nodded and jogged down the stairs, the two other soldiers right behind him. Webber gave MacAdams an extremely relieved look and ran on.

  The dual sets of stairs stopped two flights further up, terminating at a doorway. MacAdams took out the severed hand and activated the pad. He stepped through first, emerging from a small, plain building. A square of bright yellow outlined the now-empty platform they'd landed on. Larger buildings were arranged against the back of the canyon.

  When they'd come through, the base had been almost completely dark. Now the runways and parking strips blazed with floodlights. Soldiers and crew were spread between the silent jets, most holding a ready position while others jogged toward the buildings that led underground—and thus toward the three intruders.

  "Uh," Webber said. "That way."

  He spun to his left, heading around the back of the little building housing the stairwell. Some plastic crates were stacked behind it. Storage sheds lined the rock wall, which sloped up steeply to the skein of vegetation roofing them in close to two hundred feet above.

  Webber tipped back his head. "MacAdams, if you'd be so good as to put your grapplers to work?"

  "One problem," MacAdams said. "We don't have any grapplers."

  "Why don't we have grapplers?"

  "Because we don't have any of them."

  "We had them in Khent!"

  "Yeah, and we don't have them now. Enspach must have chucked them out."

  "Why would he do that? Now we have no way out of here!"

  "Yeah, that might have been the reason he chucked them." MacAdams glanced back toward the stairwell building. A lot of boots were currently tromping past it on the other side. He checked his device. "Signal's jammed. We can't reach DS until we get out of here."

  "I know we have to get out of here. That's kind of why I'm mad that we can't."

  "We can try climbing out the other end of the runway. But things will have to get a lot quieter first. Better find somewhere to hunker down."

  "Yes, we could do that," Rohan said. "But if we wish to get out of here, we could take the trail designed to do just that."

  He pointed toward the rocky slope. Took MacAdams a second to see it: a gap, almost hidden by eight-foot cane grass, with Lurker-style steps disappearing up into the foliage. MacAdams made a surprised noise and headed for it. The grass was so thick and the first steps so steep it didn't look like there was anything beyond them, but he found himself on a hard-packed dirt trail angling up the side of the rise.

  Just like in the stairwell, the steps inclined upward, making it feel like they could throw you over the side at any time. The three of them climbed in a low crouch, sometimes dropping to hands and knees, grabbing at the pinky-thick grass sprouting on both sides of the trail. Sometimes the path ran straight to the edge of the cliff, with nothing between them but a long fall to the paved ground below.

  "Get down!" Webber hissed.

  MacAdams pressed himself to the ground. The dirt smelled like old iron. A light cast across them, brighter than a flare. MacAdams had no choice but to look away and press his eyes into the dirt. The light lingered, then flicked away, sliding further across the slope.

  It was a minute before his eyes had stopped being dazzled enough to where he could move on. The base of the canyon fell further away. The soldiers jawed to each other, voices carrying on the wind blowing in from the north shore and across the canyon.

  A craft took off, its hum oscillating between the stone walls. A second followed. The foliage narrowed, scratching at MacAdams' arms as he wriggled through. Then he was out on the top of the plateau, the trees soaring above them, and you'd never have known there was a military installation just below them if not for the hubbub of soldiers searching for a murderous infiltrator.

  They hiked inland, shrinking down into the shrubs whenever the hum of one of the scout craft grew louder. They had to travel a quarter mile before MacAdams' device showed a signal. He pinged DS, requesting an open channel. He didn't know if they had a channel, or if they were still out there in the first place, but as soon as he sat down against a tree, his device pinged.

  Loris' elderly face appeared on his screen. She smiled gnomishly, white hair tucked behind her ears. "Agent. So you are alive after all."

  "So is my partner," MacAdams said. "And our defector."

  "That is welcome news. Where can we find you?"

  "Tandana. Enemy territory." He motioned to the others and they walked onward into the darkness. "And if they pick up our signal, they'll drop a bomb on us before we can get out of here. We have to talk now."

  Loris nodded, hair swinging forward. "Speak."

  "The Lurkers are down here on Earth. They're starting wars between us. They're infiltrating us."

  "Yes, we have already begun to see—"

  "It runs deeper than that. They've got a factory here. First it built itself, and now it's building war birds. They're manufacturing an army here, Loris. If we don't root them out, they'll use our own world's resources to conquer us."

  15

  Admiral Vance had one advantage over the typical encounter: he knew from the very beginning that he and his pilots had no chance to survive. Detached from any notions of caution or reserve, Earth's warriors fought heedlessly, slinging whirlwinds of missiles, diving straight toward the Lurkers as they launched every drone and emptied every magazine they had.

  In the face of this ferocity, the Lurkers fired back with lasers, but it was as if the humans' bravery had earned them the favor of some long-dormant god. Their ship
s often shrugged off the first laser blast and sometimes a second before succumbing to a third or a wave of missiles. Ambushed, outnumbered, and outgunned, it seemed as though Vance would have been lucky to collect five kills before the end. Instead, his people got nearly twenty.

  Then the shooting was done, and the last of the explosions faded, and the camera drones watched in silent automation as the Lurkers withdrew once more into the murk of their stealth.

  There was a lot of chatter over the Belters' comms. Rada forwarded Vance's footage to Toman. Once it was sent, she altered her course to fly by the wreckage of the stations of Obold and Athena, which were only slightly off from her current bearing.

  She told herself she wanted to see the ruins of the habitats on the off chance they'd provide her some new insight into how to fight back, but her subconscious couldn't manage to—or even bother to—conceal the real reason: everyone was about to die, and she felt compelled to witness large-scale mortality up close with her own eyes.

  In preparation for the arrival of Toman's fleet, Winters had been keeping a speed and heading close to hers. He requested permission to rendezvous and come aboard. After ensuring she'd pass by Obold before they converged, Rada granted it.

  She had a good head of steam going and soon had Obold up on her screen. It had once been orange-shaped, right down to its pebbled skin, but the asteroid had been cracked and cratered by the Lurkers' assault. In vacuum, there was nothing for warm matter to pass its energy to besides stray atoms passing by, and the rock still held a slight bit of residual heat, either from the days-old missile strikes or the dying embers of the habitat.

  The bio scans turned up nothing, of course. She hadn't even expected to see an intact dead body, let alone a live one, and was thus surprised when the camera she'd set to hunt for them beeped.

  The picture resolved on eight bodies floating around an icy lump twenty feet across. None of the people were suited. One was curled into a ball, but the others hung there with their arms and legs dangling like they'd drowned. She panned across the lump of matter, then swung back, dread spiking up her spine. A face stared at her from the ice, its mouth hanging open. The entire lump was a wad of bodies stuck together by their own frozen skin.

  She gazed at it until she'd seen what there was to see, then aimed the cameras at Athena Station, which hung silent and cold in the distance.

  Winters approached and docked. He crossed through the airlocks. He unsealed his helmet and seated himself across from her in the small bridge.

  "You warned him." Winters had his helmet in his lap, one hand settled on its crown as if it was a sleeping cat and he was resting at the end of a long day. "At least Vance died in glory."

  "He robbed us all of a major fighting force. Where's the glory in that?"

  "It was only forty ships. We've lost far more than that several times already."

  "At this point, we can't afford to lose anything. Even with his ships, it was going to be a long shot to pry the Lurker fleet away from Earth, let alone to defeat it. Vance handed the planet to them on a platter."

  Winters rolled his lips together. "It's worse than you think, Rada. We've received more news from Earth. The good news is that your friends are alive. The bad news is they've discovered the Lurkers have established an arms factory and it's already manufacturing weapons and jets to use against the planet's nations."

  "The Lurkers have only been in the System a few weeks. How could they have built a factory so fast? Has the UDL been working with them for longer than we knew?"

  "We don't have anything to suggest that. The factory is self-assembling. Basic machines built more complex machines, which in turn created more machines, until they were advanced enough to begin building weapons."

  "They'll retake Earth with their fleet, then consolidate there. They'll build more lasers. More ships. Once their advantage is overwhelming, they'll come for what's left of us."

  "I have been speaking with Lord Stuart, the head of our order. He reached the same conclusion."

  "Did he have any idea how to stop them?"

  "He did not."

  An image of the frozen ball of people flashed across Rada's mind. Her heart skipped a beat. "Wait a second. What if everything they've been doing since we first drove them away from Earth has been a ruse? An attempt to cause chaos, split us up, and then pick us off like they just did to Vance?"

  "I don't think it's that simple. Again, they've had years to prepare for this. That's given them contingencies for everything. Even when faced like a massive setback like our ambush at Earth, they were able to pivot into a new strategy immediately."

  "I'm saying maybe the strategy was to pretend they had a much better strategy. By doing so, they've made us react to endless feints and threats. The most masterful move of all would be if there was no underlying significance to any of it. For it to be nothing more than a wild goose chase."

  Winters lowered his head, then lifted it sharply. "Or they stayed away from Earth to make us think they'd abandoned it."

  "To do what, buy time? For what?" It was Rada's turn to jerk her head about in recognition. "For their factory to get up and running. And then build others like it."

  "Which would have happened right under our noses if not for the work of our organization and your friends."

  "That makes it even more vital for us to break through to Earth. But how do we do it? Especially now that Vance is gone?"

  "Fly at them and hope for a miracle."

  "That's exactly what they want us to do."

  "What else can we do? We've tried everything. Spent every resource we had."

  Rada shrugged her shoulders high. "You guys have had a thousand years to think about this sort of thing. You don't have any other tricks up your sleeves?"

  "First off, it's not 'you guys' anymore, it's 'us guys.' Second, we realized very early on that in almost every case of invasion, we'd be hopelessly outnumbered, outclassed, or most likely both. That limits the scope of what we can reasonably get done. Frankly, without what our institution has already brought to the table, we'd have been conquered weeks ago.

  "In case you've forgotten, we were the ones who discovered the Lurkers would arrive sooner than everyone thought. That discovery is what prevented the immediate capture of the System. Then we put you in position to ambush the aliens at Earth, saving us for a second time, while also killing enough of the Lurkers to make our victory a real possibility.

  "As if that wasn't enough, at the same time we were doing that, we took down the treasonous governmental alliance that was preventing Earth from rallying to its own defense. Now our people are fighting the Lurkers down on Earth at this very moment, attempting to forestall widespread nuclear war and to remove the alien infestation from the surface.

  "By my count, we've already provided no fewer than five opportunities for someone to stand up and strike a killing blow against the enemy. Unfortunately, no one has been able to deliver that blow. We now find ourselves approaching the end. We have no tricks left and there is no realistic hope of beating the Lurkers with our dwindling ships. All that remains are the dark solutions."

  "Such as?"

  "We can take a clue from the enemy and bide our time."

  Rada knit her brow. "How would that help? Every day we delay gives them another day to outproduce us."

  "I mean really bide our time. Our organization maintains a series of secret cryogenic freezing facilities. I know the location to one of them. We can go to it now and freeze ourselves."

  "And cede everything to the Lurkers?"

  "Yes."

  "Forgive me for being less sophisticated about the mysterious art of battle, but how does surrendering the war actually win us the war?"

  "By freezing ourselves, we remove ourselves from the context that created this war." Winters pinched his thumb and forefinger together and drew a line through the air. "Say we awaken in two hundred years—or play it safe and make it four hundred. Every Lurker who's currently trying to kill us will be lo
ng dead. Most likely they will have been gone for many generations. Today's conquest will be as distant to them as the Panhandler is to us.

  "If we reemerge at that point in time, the Lurkers might not be hostile to us. Instead, they might be curious. They may even be guilty about what they've done. We may be given a habitat or moon to settle—and a second chance at existence."

  "How many of us will be frozen? And who gets chosen to survive?"

  "Each facility has space for a hundred people and I know of at least five facilities. The membership of Dark Solutions will fill roughly half of our slots. Other slots will be given to prominent and intelligent figures: people like Toman. It will be easy to fill the remaining beds."

  "And all of the survivors will be chosen by you. By us."

  "How else should they be decided? Through a vote? By whoever can make us the largest financial donation? There is nothing wrong with submitting to a single ruler when that ruler is capable of dispensing justice. The leadership of Dark Solutions is the only reason we have this chance to go on."

  "There's no guarantee this will work. If they're killers at heart, we could wake up a thousand years from now and they'd still slaughter us."

  "You could be right. But out of all the remaining ploys we've come up with, we consider this the most likely to succeed. When we wake, we could even find that the Lurkers are gone altogether. They could have been conquered later on, possibly by the Swimmers, who would then be friendly toward us. Or perhaps they will have been taken over by a neutral party who will accept us as refugees. It's also possible that the Lurkers could have simply destroyed themselves, or left for another world. If we give ourselves time, there are so many possibilities for us to awaken to."

  He spoke these words with a monk's sense of wonder and conviction. At first the prospect had seemed ridiculous: just freeze your troubles away, lie down for a little nap, and before you knew it you'd wake up again with your friends and find that the big scary monsters were all gone.