A Night Without Stars

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Looking at the jagged pinnacles, he thought of his brief time on the edge of the desert. Astronauts underwent two weeks of desert survival training just in case they came down in one. Afterwards, Ry decided he’d prefer a leaking command module adrift in the ocean to that.

  The train whistled again as the raised track began to follow the coastal curve eastwards and start up a shallow incline. Ry and Anala stared out of the window. Cape Ingmar was a sight Ry knew he could never possibly tire of. The Cape itself was an oval of land protruding out from the low swamps, like a plateau that had never managed to rise more than thirty metres up from sea level. But its hundred and ninety square kilometres of scrub wasteland just south of the equator made it the perfect launch site.

  The five assembly buildings occupied the neck of the Cape – massive metal hangars painted white to reflect the heat, with huge electrical air cooler boxes along the walls. A clutter of administration and engineering buildings, equally white with silvered windows, were huddled in their shadow. The flight control centre out in front was a three-storey cylinder of white marble, topped by big radar dishes, and smaller radio aerial towers. The two basement levels were full of electrical computators that would guide his Liberty spacecraft up to the Tree ring, and back again.

  Dominating the eastern side of the rocket port were the eight launch pads: big circles of concrete surrounding the deep blast pits, smothered in iron gantries. Seven of them were currently inactive, the gantry towers lying horizontally on their support columns as they underwent routine maintenance and refurbishment. But the eighth—

  Ry couldn’t help the sigh of satisfaction as he saw the Silver Sword rocket standing proud against the burning azure sky. It stood fifty metres high, including the escape rocket at the top. The four first-stage boosters were matt grey, clustering round the core stage. The third stage was a three-metre-diameter cylinder standing on a simple truss segment above the core, its insulation foam snow white, protecting the cryogenic propellant tanks from the brutal sunlight. (Even then, the rocket was only ever fuelled at night when the air was cooler.) Above that was the silver shroud, its aerodynamic segments encasing the Liberty spacecraft he was going to be riding tomorrow. Perched on top of the shroud was the spindly solid-fuel escape rocket.

  Most of the Silver Sword was obscured by the four gantry towers that had levered up to clamp the fuselage and connect it to dozens of umbilical lines and fuel pipes. Hydraulic access platforms were extended all the way up, and he could see technicians crouched beside inspection hatches, running final tests.

  ‘Now that is something beautiful,’ Ry murmured.

  ‘Certainly is,’ Anala agreed. ‘And it’s all yours.’

  ‘You get the next one.’ Pilot assignments were made fifteen flights in advance, allowing mission-specific training.

  ‘Six weeks,’ she replied wistfully. ‘It’s going to seem like forever.’

  The train pulled up at Cape Ingmar’s solitary passenger platform. General Delores was waiting under the awning, heading the welcome committee of more officers and flight-veteran astronauts, several People’s Congress representatives, more reporters, more photographers, and more newsfilm cameras. Ry put his jacket and cap back on, let Anala straighten them, and gave her a quick kiss when Eades wasn’t looking. ‘I don’t want to wait six weeks,’ he said.

  Her grin was enigmatic, but promising. ‘Me neither. So make sure you come back.’

  ‘Deal.’

  The carriage door opened. Ry stepped out and saluted the general amid the clicking of cameras and loud applause. The general formally presented him his mission badge – a platinum Liberty craft with a C-curve of exhaust wrapping round the planet, number two-six-seven-three.

  With 2,672 Liberty missions already completed over the last two hundred and fifty years, the launch procedure at Cape Ingmar was now utterly rigid. There were no variables, no unknowns, no deviation from the long checklist.

  Once his mission badge was pinned onto his uniform, Pilot Major Ry Evine became a piece of Cape Ingmar’s property, a component to be inserted into the Silver Sword rocket when tests and preparations had been completed satisfactorily. There was the final mission briefing, hourly reports on the Silver Sword status, two hours of preflight medical checks, the formal handover of the bomb codes, and studying of the weather reports for tomorrow morning.

  When dusk fell he went out onto the roof of the flight centre, where a small telescope had been set up. Trees of the Ring glimmered silver-white along their orbit, fifty thousand kilometres above Bienvenido. Laura Brandt had claimed they looked like stars in the Commonwealth galaxy, where they’d all come from originally. He looked through the eyepiece at his target, Tree 3,788-D. It hung just above the western horizon, magnified by the telescope to a small line of sparkling brilliance, with a hint of colour in its radiance.

  ‘I’m coming for you, fucker,’ he promised it.

  He ate his last meal in the astronaut suite on the second floor of the flight centre: fillet steak, sautéed potatoes, grilled tomatoes, tolberry sauce. Chocolate ice cream with cherry sauce for pudding. Half a litre of water – no alcohol this close to the mission. Eades and Anala were his table companions. Talk was all trivia. One last weather report, predicting minimal wind at dawn. Silver Sword progress reports. At six thirty, the third-stage tanks were being chilled ready for fuelling with liquid hydrogen and oxygen. First- and core-stage fuelling was scheduled to commence in eighty minutes.

  Six fifty: he changed into pyjamas and entered the bedroom. Lights out, seven o’clock – authenticated by Colonel Eades, who flicked the switch and shut the door.

  Some veterans told the trainees they couldn’t sleep. Others claimed they were so tired by the preflight procedures and their Commencing Countdown festivities they even asked to go to bed early. Ry lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, convinced he was going to be an awake-all-night guy. There was so much running through his mind, the flight manuals flipping up behind closed eyelids, reviewing everything. Then they faded away to be replaced by Anala – her touch, her warmth, her lithe body writhing energetically against him. He wished there could be an exception about being alone tonight. And if anyone was going to break regulations and sneak in, it would be Anala. But the door remained closed. It was going to be a long night—

  Colonel Eades opened the door and switched the light on at three o’clock precisely.

  ‘Flight control has issued a pilot ingress go,’ he announced.

  Cape Ingmar’s chief medical officer was waiting. Ry extended his hand, and the doctor jabbed his thumb with a needle. A drop of blood welled up.

  ‘Confirmed red,’ the doctor reported officially. ‘Pilot Major Ry Evine is human.’ He smiled. ‘Good luck, major.’

  Fallers had a dark-blue blood. There’d never been an attempt by a nest to hijack a Liberty flight in the two hundred and fifty years of the programme, and General Delores was determined there wouldn’t be one on her watch.

  Breakfast. Yogurt, then bacon, eggs, toast. Orange juice. Colonel Matej, the mission controller – a five-flight veteran and living legend to the Astronaut Corps – came in for his briefing. The fuelling had been completed during the night; all they were doing now was topping up the tanks. Tracking and communication stations around the planet were on line. The recovery ships had reached the splashdown zone, two hundred kilometres east of Cape Ingmar. Weather planes were up, reporting excellent conditions. Two Falls were in progress, neither of which would come close to his projected orbit.

  Down a floor to the suit room. The indignity of the fluid waste disposal tube, its tight rubber cap squeezing his cock, bladder sac strapped to his right thigh. Further indignity of the solid-waste absorber pants – basically an adult nappy. Medical electrodes were stuck to his chest, a thermometer strapped into his armpit. Then they dressed him in a bright-blue one-piece cotton garment. Over that came the silver pressure suit. Tight gloves. Big bowl helmet, clicked into the metal ring round his neck. Thick flexible air tub
es were plugged into the sockets on his chest, leading to a suitcase-sized personal environment module – carried by Colonel Eades as he walked out of the door.

  People were lining the corridor, applauding. Camera flashbulbs going off. Outside doors opening. The transfer van. Drive to the pad. Rocket and gantries illuminated against the dark predawn sky by powerful arc lights. Ride up the gantry in a cage lift. No nerves. Not yet. Just eagerness. And pride.

  Five flight engineers were grinning in welcome. They were used to this. It was nothing special to them, just another spaceflight. Open hatch in the shroud, exposing the smaller circular command module hatch. Ingress: an incredibly difficult gymnastic manoeuvre while wearing the pressure suit, holding the rail and wiggling in horizontally. But then he was snug in the acceleration couch, looking up at a console wall that was all switches and dials and the orange glow of Nixie tube numbers.

  The inside of the command module was a simple hemisphere two and a half metres in diameter at the base, most of which was taken up by the controls, instruments, and various lockers. When the Liberty was in freefall, he would have just over two and a half cubic metres of space to move around it. On the ground it was like wearing a coffin, especially for him: one metre eighty-one tall, and eighty-four kilos. This capsule had to have customized fittings, and not even those could mitigate the way his legs were bent up to accommodate his height.

  The engineers plugged his air tubes into the command module environmental circuit. Colonel Eades reached in and gave his hand a quick, firm shake.

  Ry switched on the com circuit.

  ‘Good morning, Liberty two-six-seven-three,’ Anala’s voice said in his earphones.

  ‘Good morning, flight com,’ Ry replied with a smile. It was comforting to have her as his flight com, and not just because of what had happened between them. Flight com was always the astronaut scheduled for the next flight – the intense shared training over the previous months helped them become familiar with each other, reducing the chance of misunderstanding.

  He scanned the console, checking the lights and dials. ‘Ready to commence pre-launch checklist.’

  ‘Roger that. The flight controller has given a go for hatch closure.’

  A hand slapped his helmet, then the hatch shut.

  Ninety minutes spent confirming instrument data, putting switches in the correct position, watching the Liberty systems stabilize. Dawn light started to shine in through the tiny hatch port behind his head.

  He became the machine he’d been trained to be: a piloting mechanism. Observing and responding correctly as the tanks were pressurized, the umbilicals withdrawn. Gantry retraction. First-stage booster motors’ turbine ignition. Not even when all twenty rocket motors of the boosters and core stage ignited simultaneously did he take a second out from the procedures.

  Liberty mission 2,673 lifted smoothly from the pad as the rocket engines burned four hundred kilograms of liquid oxygen and eleven hundred kilograms of highly refined kerosene every second, delivering a combined thrust of four and a half thousand kilonewtons. Acceleration in the command module reached four gees, shoving Ry down hard into the couch. The instrument console blurred from the vibration and he couldn’t read anything; he just gritted his teeth and concentrated on trying to breathe.

  Booster separation came at a hundred and twenty seconds – a judder that made him yell half in fright, half in delight. Now he started to relax and take in the experience. Thirty seconds later the Liberty shroud split apart, and the segments peeled away from the spaceship amid a vigorous shaking. The guidance computator steered the core’s four small vernier rockets, keeping the trajectory steady, and the Silver Sword continued to power upwards for a further hundred and forty seconds until the core stage was exhausted, and the third stage ignited. The hydrogen-oxygen rocket produced two hundred and fifty kilonewtons and burned for a further two hundred and seventy seconds, putting the Liberty into orbit two hundred and twenty-five kilometres above Bienvenido.

  Ry Evine finally got to experience real freefall, not just the twenty-second interludes delivered by the divedown-upchuck flights. When he confirmed the Liberty’s systems were all fully operational, he took his helmet off and loosened the acceleration couch’s straps and looked out of the larger port that had been covered by the shroud. The crescent of the planet glowed brightly below. Ry flicked the safety guards off the Reaction Control System (RCS) joystick, confirmed the system readiness, and tipped the joystick slightly. The Liberty began to roll, responding just like it did in the training simulations. With the third stage still attached it was sluggish, but he turned it so the port on his right was aligned on Bienvenido, all the while checking the spherical attitude indicator as he stabilized the spaceship.

  Now he could look down directly. An astonishing amount of glaring white cloud was smeared across the planet. The Eastath Ocean was a deep enticing blue, and so smooth; some astronauts claimed they could see individual waves. The Liberty approached Fanrith’s western coast and Ry grinned at the coastal outline – silly thought, that it was just like all the maps. He was surprised by how brown the land appeared; this section of Fanrith had plenty of tropical vegetation. He caught sight of rivers, silver veins slicing across the land. At least they were surrounded by the darker hues of vegetation. Further east was the central desert. He touched two gloved fingers to his forehead in a respectful salute. So many Air Defence Force crews had died defending Bienvenido that day the Prime invaded – thirty-nine planes just from the Portlynn squadron he’d served with during his Air Force duty.

  A light on the communication section of the console turned from amber to green as the spaceship came in range of the tracking station on the west coast of the Aflar Peninsula.

  ‘Do you copy, Liberty two-six-seven-three?’ Anala asked.

  ‘Roger that, flight com, communication link operational. Good to hear you again.’

  ‘Stand by for course tracking data.’

  Radar stations across Lamaran locked on to the spaceship as it orbited, checking course and velocity with meticulous precision – data which he fed into the tiny onboard guidance computator. He had completed a full orbit, passing over Cape Ingmar again, when flight com gave him a go for the apogee kick burn. He checked the Liberty’s orientation, correcting its attitude with a series of RCS burns. Then when he was stable and aligned, the guidance computator took over. Numbers blurred in its display row of seven Nixie tubes, counting him down. The ullage rockets fired first – small solid rocket engines around the base of the third stage, pushing the liquid fuel to the bottom of the tanks where the turbopumps could suck it in. Then the main rocket took over, firing for a hundred and thirty-five seconds, thrusting the Liberty up away from Bienvenido.

  The third stage shut down and separated. Ry fired the service module engines, moving the Liberty away from its spent third stage.

  Flight com confirmed his course track was good. Liberty 2,673 was in a highly elliptical orbit, on its way up to the Ring, fifty thousand kilometres above Bienvenido.

  It took a long time to take his pressure suit off, banging elbows and knees against the capsule’s equipment and console as he struggled, but eventually he stowed it in the locker. And he finally had a few moments to himself.

  Everyone called it freefall, but to Ry it was flying, pure and simple. He didn’t even feel nauseous. Instead, he felt unshackled, as if space was where he’d been born to live. And through the main port, beautiful Bienvenido was visibly growing smaller as the Liberty rose further and further away on an elliptical orbit which would peak at the Ring.

  Flight com asked for updates on systems. With a sigh he strapped himself loosely into the acceleration couch and began to run through another checklist. He had to establish a thermal roll, setting the Liberty rotating around its long axis, so that the heat from the sun was evenly distributed. The sextant was used to confirm the position of the other planets and fed into the guidance computator to check his position. Then he sighted the crosshairs on Tree 3
,788-D. Flight time to bomb release was verified at seventeen hours, nineteen minutes.

  Food had no taste; veteran astronauts had warned him about that. Fluid was pooling in his head as if he had a cold. His fingers swelled up until they resembled sausages. Systems whirred and buzzed loudly. Thick sunbeams stabbed through the ports, moving across the cabin like bizarre clock hands as the Liberty continued its stately thermal roll. Ry didn’t care. Out there beyond the port, Bienvenido dominated space. And the other planets glimmered excitingly. The blue jewel of Aqueous, the closest world to Bienvenido, sharing the same orbit but trailing by seventeen million kilometres. Weird Trüb, sliding along its orbit fourteen million kilometres closer to the G1 star, its elegant necklace of twelve moonlets glinting against the infinite black. Valatare, the cool, shining rose-coloured giant in its outer orbit. And hated Ursell, whose murky atmosphere was now over a thousand kilometres thick; its tenuous upper layers toyed with the sunlight to crown it with an oddly beautiful haze that extended for hundreds of kilometres further still.

  Ry spent every spare second staring at the planets, tying to visualize the day Bienvenido would finally be free of the Trees and their vile Faller spawn. A future without fear of aliens, where spacecraft would fly across the gulf between worlds, and astronauts would land on those exotic planets. He allowed himself to believe he might live to exist in those times. Slvasta, in his historic speech after the Prime invasion was defeated, had declared that they could rid Bienvenido of Trees within three human lifetimes. Most people could live past two hundred years, and there were only three thousand two hundred and twenty-three Trees left in the Ring. If they could increase their launch rate to fifteen or twenty a year, the Ring would be gone and the skies open before Ry passed his two-hundredth birthday. It was a pleasant daydream to carry him along to apogee. But the factories were going flat out to meet current Silver Sword and Liberty delivery schedules, and the current defence budget was a huge economic strain on the whole world.