A Night Without Stars

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘I was being hunted by Slvasta’s people and Laura Brandt seemed to be turning things around, so I just waited while things settled down. Then the Prime came: that was an utter crudding disaster. After Laura sacrificed herself, we didn’t have many options, so we decided to push Laura’s plans forwards. They made a lot of sense back then. Laura had already taught them to build atom bombs. Demitri went undercover and showed them how to build their space rockets. The Liberty flights worked. We thought it was just a matter of time – and biononics eliminate time as a problem for me. So we sat back and waited for the Trees to be wiped out. The thinking went that once the Fallers are gone, society won’t be on this permanent war footing. Humans will be able to start progressing again, just like they always do when they’re not constantly living under a threat. Bienvenido would evolve into a real democratic society. And when that happened, we’d be here with the seeds of advanced technology. We’d go back into space, and build starships again. That was always Laura’s goal, to make contact with the Commonwealth.’

  ‘Why don’t you just release the technology now?’

  ‘Even if I released it universally, the Eliters are the only ones who can utilize it effectively, at least to begin with. The general population would have to undergo gene therapy, or receive OC-tattoos, to interface with Commonwealth technology. And those concepts would trigger every PSR paranoia going. Society as a whole has to change, to liberalize. Plus, Commonwealth-level technology can be badly abused. The Captains showed that, and they only had a residual number of functioning systems.’ She let out a long sigh. ‘In any case, I was wrong to take this course, and it’s too late for me to correct now. Liberty missions are irrelevant; the Fallers are too well established. They have nests everywhere. We think they’re already dominant across the rest of the planet.’

  ‘The Faller Apocalypse,’ he said gloomily. ‘How could we have let that happen?’

  ‘My mistake.’

  ‘No! You can’t blame yourself for everything.’

  ‘You’re so sweet. And actually I don’t. The Captains and Slvasta have a huge responsibility with their Lamaran isolationist policy. I just didn’t make the effort to try and break that convention. I’ve done the best I can, Florian, I really have. But it’s not good enough, and I don’t know enough to try anything else. That damn revolution haunts me every crudding day. We never had a plan for what happened afterwards, because Nigel was so ridiculously confident the Void would be destroyed and the Commonwealth would come zooming in to help. But that didn’t happen. We were left hanging on by our fingertips. That’s the world I really grew up in. Biononics gives me a lot of power, but I do not know how to change the path of a whole society; I don’t have that experience – ironic, considering I’m over two hundred and fifty years old.’

  ‘And that’s where Paula comes in?’

  ‘All I know is: Paula was the fallback. Plan B. The ANAdroids told me she and Nigel prepared the package in case his mission failed and a different approach was needed. Not that he even began the mission he entered the Void to do.’

  Florian rolled onto his side and frowned at her. ‘What was his mission, then?’

  ‘There was another planet in the Void, Querencia, which was settled by the ships that accompanied the Vermillion. They managed to get some sort of message out to the Commonwealth – though it turned into a religion or something. Anyway, Nigel came looking for Querencia. Nobody in the Commonwealth knew we existed.’

  ‘So they’ll never look for us?’

  ‘I thought they would,’ she said forlornly. ‘I thought that for over a century, which is another reason I failed to change anything here. It’s complicated, but the Nigel who came here was only a copy. The real Nigel is still out there somewhere in the Commonwealth. He wouldn’t give up on us, I know he wouldn’t. But we’re so achingly far from the Commonwealth galaxy, and he must have thought Uracus destroyed us rather than simply expelling us. So we’re on our own.’ She gave him a sad smile. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Hey.’ He cupped her cheeks. ‘Everything you’ve done is magnificent. Really. Think of the lives you’ve saved, the Fallers you’ve eliminated. Bienvenido practically worships you for that – the real Bienvenido, not the government bollocks. I did when I was growing up.’

  ‘Thank you, Florian.’

  They kissed. She liked the way he kissed – fearful and excited at the same time, so anxious to please.

  ‘And when Paula’s old enough she’ll give us a different perspective,’ he said, all eager with reassurance. ‘You’ll see. Maybe we can build a starship and fly to the Commonwealth galaxy.’

  ‘Now you’re starting to sound like Ry.’ Who had spent the whole submarine trip talking about Commonwealth starships – so much so, she’d almost regretted letting him access her files on them.

  ‘We’ll find an answer,’ he insisted. ‘Humans can do anything if they have enough determination. And knowledge. Knowledge is the key to everything.’

  Which is what I really want from him. All that beautiful youthful optimism. ‘Well, we’ll know soon enough.’ She rubbed her nose softly against his and returned his hands to her breasts. ‘And in the meantime, we’ll start with the first of those positions I mentioned . . .’

  *

  At one o’clock in the morning, Opole General Hospital was quiet. Ward lights were out, night-shift staff sat in their offices chatting softly, janitors mopped corridors with the listless movements of everybody working while the rest of the city slept.

  The receptionist barely glanced up when Jenifa came through the main entrance. Despite the balmy night, she wore her full-length uniform coat, buttoned up to the top, and long black boots. Her cap completed the appearance of an aloof PSR officer. ‘Comrade,’ she said coldly to the startled receptionist, and carried on up the central stairs.

  The private wards for Party members and senior government officials took up their own wing on the second floor. Two sheriffs were sitting on chairs on either side of the double doors. She waved them down when they started to rise and salute her. ‘No one else is to come in until I leave,’ she told them. Pointed at their logbook. ‘I am not here. Understood?’

  They nodded silently. She went through the doors into the long corridor. Chaing’s room was the third door along. She locked it behind her as she went in.

  A soft night light glowed on the wall, bathing the room in a warm yellow glow. There was a single metal-framed bed under the window with a thick mattress. Chaing was asleep on it. An IV bag hung from the frame, feeding a painkiller into his arm. Jenifa gazed down at him for a long moment. A bandage held a fat gauze dressing against his eye, and his face had a few light grazes. Despite that he looked very peaceful, she thought.

  She moved the call button out of his reach, then folded the sheet and blanket down until they made a tidy roll below his feet. He was dressed in a green, short-sleeved hospital gown that came down to his knees. There was another new cast on his arm. His left leg was heavily bandaged from thigh to ankle, with sturdy wooden splints bound on to hold it rigid.

  Chaing stirred slightly as the weight of the blanket was lifted. Jenifa took a syringe from her coat pocket and slipped its needle into the rubber IV tube, just above his arm. She didn’t know his exact body weight and he had a sharp mind, so she’d measured out a maximum dose of sodium pentothal. The second syringe contained a liquid form of granddad’s delight – which wasn’t easy to come by, but her time working the Cannes Club meant she knew who to go to. That was a maximum dose as well. Her tongue slowly moistened her lips as she watched the plunger go down. ‘Do you like that, captain?’ she whispered.

  The empty syringes went back into her coat pocket. Carefully, so she didn’t wake him too soon, she gripped the hem of his hospital gown, and worked it up until his torso was completely exposed.

  Chaing let out a low moan. Not of pain. The sodium pentothal would be reaching his brain now, disorientating him.

  Jenifa climbed onto the bed, and stood there with h
er boots on either side of his hips. ‘Oh captain. Wake up, captain.’

  It took a little while, but Chaing began to regain consciousness. Sighing again, shoulders moving.

  ‘Look at me,’ she commanded. ‘Look up, captain.’

  His unbandaged eye fluttered open. She could see how dazed he was, but aware of her at some level.

  ‘Can you see me?’

  ‘What?’ he mumbled.

  ‘Look at me.’ She undid the coat buttons, working from the top down. Her own heart was pounding with exhilaration now. ‘I’m here for you, captain. Here for you any way you want.’

  Chaing was definitely focusing on her through his drug stupor as the coat fell open. With an impish grin she loomed over him, and pulled the coat apart to show off her naked body underneath.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she cooed as she watched his cock stiffen. ‘You’re going to take your reward, aren’t you, captain?’

  Fever sweat started to ooze across his brow as she knelt down. Her hand curled round his iron-hard erection, impressed with just how well granddad’s delight worked.

  ‘What?’ he groaned.

  Jenifa joyfully impaled herself on him. ‘Oh, that is so good,’ she sighed. Her weight was pressing him down, pinning him to the bed. The dominance was a spike of pure pleasure direct into her brain.

  ‘Jenifa,’ he grunted. Tears were leaking from his eye. ‘Lovely Jenifa.’

  ‘Yes, it’s me, it’s Jenifa. And I want you to screw me. I always want you to screw me.’

  ‘Giu yes.’

  ‘I’m your reward, captain. This is what you get for a mission accomplished.’ She began to move up and down, trying to concentrate through the blaze of physical delight. ‘You found Florian. We all saw him, and the girl. You did so well.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘And better than that, you outsmarted Castillito, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes! Crudding yes.’

  ‘She threatened you, didn’t she? That’s so insulting for a PSR officer, so shameful. Especially one as fantastic as you. But she got what she deserved. She’s in exile now, she can never come back. You made that happen. You!’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I did that. That’ll teach the bitch.’

  Jenifa felt sweat trickling down her skin as she rode him faster and faster. ‘Tell me. Celebrate your victory over Castillito. It’ll be our secret. Tell me, tell me so I can never confess it to anyone. What did she know about you?’

  ‘She told Castillito!’ He yelled vehemently. ‘She betrayed me.’

  ‘Who, captain? Who betrayed you?’

  ‘The Warrior Angel.’

  Ecstasy claimed her, and she cried out in glory. When her body and mind finally calmed, she saw Chaing had lost consciousness beneath her. She smiled victoriously, and bent forwards to whisper in his ear. ‘I am the strongest. I am the best.’

  *

  The black Zikker was parked on the other side of Roturan Road from the General Hospital’s entrance, its engine running with a low purr. Jenifa walked over the street and climbed in the back.

  ‘So?’ Yaki asked. ‘How did that go?’

  Jenifa looked through the darkened side window as the limousine pulled away, watching the big old grey-stone hospital disappear behind them. ‘You need to eliminate him. He’s been compromised. The Eliters can manipulate him.’

  ‘Really? How?’

  ‘The Warrior Angel knows some secret about him.’

  ‘Interesting. What secret?’

  Jenifa pouted. ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘You need to improve your interrogation technique, my dear.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my technique, thank you. Castillito knows whatever the Warrior Angel discovered about him. That’s the hold the Eliters have on him.’

  ‘But you don’t know what it is the Warrior Angel has on him.’

  ‘I can go back and ask.’

  ‘Any more sodium pentothal tonight and you’ll fry his brain.’

  ‘So? He’s a traitor.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Yaki settled back into the thick leather cushioning. ‘And yet he ran a very effective hunt for Florian.’

  ‘We didn’t catch him, though, did we?’

  ‘You were just a few metres away on the docks.’

  ‘And then the Warrior Angel appeared. Convenient, that. She must have tracked Chaing. Or more likely he told her where we were.’

  ‘Maybe. But there’s something odd about this. He’s not a double agent, not in the traditional sense.’

  ‘He’s compromised!’

  ‘Did you ever see him put in less than a hundred-per-cent effort? Did he ever come over as less than genuine?’

  Jenifa gritted her teeth. ‘No.’

  ‘He even threw you under the proverbial tram so he could stay on the operation. Now that’s dedication.’

  ‘Thank you for that reminder.’

  Yaki paused, closing her eyes for a moment. ‘We can use this. Stonal rushed into recruiting him for Section Seven after Xander Manor. If Chaing is truly compromised, that calls Stonal’s judgement into question.’

  ‘Is this good enough to take out Stonal?’ Jenifa asked.

  ‘I know people in Varlan. If questions are asked in the right places, he’ll be damaged. Nobody wants a damaged director of Section Seven.’

  ‘Crudding Uracus! You’re really going to do this, aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s for the good of Bienvenido. This world needs strong people in charge. But before we can even think of that, we need to know what the Warrior Angel has on Chaing.’

  ‘I can do that,’ she said eagerly.

  ‘No. At least, not the way you’re thinking. I want to keep Chaing in play. He’ll write off one night like tonight to painkiller nightmares, but any more and he’ll grow suspicious. So . . . I know the director of the PSR Portlynn office; I’ll have Chaing’s old case files forwarded to us. Go through them; find his vulnerability.’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  *

  Stonal walked the long length of the prime minister’s study, taking care not to appear any different to all the other times he’d had a meeting here – poised, slightly contemptuous of politicians. It was difficult, which it shouldn’t have been; not for him. This time he was bringing bad news, which in itself was unusual, but the magnitude of the failure took this to a whole new level. When he’d been younger, growing up in Kassel before Slvasta took him in, there had been an earthquake. A minor one, but even now he could still remember his fear and confusion as the uncanny noise roared through the house. There was nowhere to go to shut it out, nowhere safe. It was exactly the same noise he imagined Bienvenido’s last two and a half centuries of stability would make if it started to fracture. And there it was resonating inside his head, a possibility now.

  Adolphus and Terese were sitting in their usual places. Instead of the routine farce of him going through paperwork and her waiting impatiently, they were both watching him approach. He understood that look: he’d relinquished his status as ally, become a potential opponent. Given the files he had on both of them, that arrogance was almost amusing.

  He stopped in front of Adolphus’s desk, and nodded politely. ‘Prime minister. Deputy.’

  ‘What the crud happened?’ Adolphus demanded.

  ‘My officer had Florian and the Commonwealth girl contained. He was actually taking them into custody when the Warrior Angel appeared. There was nothing anybody could do.’

  ‘I understand there were Fallers present,’ Terese said.

  ‘Yes. They were impersonating sheriffs. They used a bazooka to shoot the Warrior Angel. It was spectacularly ineffective.’

  ‘That’s it?’ Adolphus said, incredulously. ‘She’s gone? We’re just supposed to accept that?’

  ‘Hardly gone. I suspect we’ll be hearing from her in the near future.’

  ‘No. Oh, no. That is not acceptable, on any level.’

  Stonal sat himself down, ignoring the prime minister’s aggravated stare. ‘We lost, Ad
olphus. It’s that simple.’

  ‘Lost? This wasn’t a crudding vote in the Congress. What’s she going to do to Bienvenido?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea. But I can’t imagine it will be wholly beneficial to the government.’

  ‘Then we have to stop her,’ Adolphus growled out. ‘You have to stop her.’

  ‘Me? She’s under the Warrior Angel’s protection now.’

  ‘Operation Overload,’ Terese said quietly.

  Stonal turned to glance at the deputy, surprised she would suggest it. Both politicians were more desperate than he’d realized. ‘I see’

  ‘You must have some idea where the Warrior Angel hides out,’ Adolphus said. ‘Section Seven has had crudding centuries!’

  ‘It’s most likely Port Chana, or somewhere in that area. However, that might be a double bluff. We’d need to be extremely certain about her exact location before we even think of detonating a three-hundred-kiloton atomic bomb on the planet. And she may well be living in Port Chana itself. The civilian casualties would be enormous.’

  ‘But we know an atomic explosion will break a Commonwealth force field,’ Adolphus insisted. ‘That’s how the Primes killed Mother Laura.’

  ‘My father saw her being overrun by them, yes,’ he answered carefully. ‘But it has to go off close to the Warrior Angel, very close.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ Terese said.

  ‘Okay what?’ Stonal asked.

  ‘Proceed with Operation Overload,’ Adolphus said. ‘Find them; eliminate them.’

  ‘Operation Overload was drawn up as a last resort in case the Warrior Angel tried to overthrow the government.’

  ‘And now this Commonwealth girl is here, that’s become a whole lot more likely.’

  ‘Has it? How so? If the Warrior Angel had established the kind of revolutionary cell network necessary to overthrow the government, she would have used it by now. She’s not a political creature; all she has is the tacit support of Eliters. And we watch them closely. There is not going to be a revolution just because this girl has arrived.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I told you I don’t believe that the girl is the vanguard of the Commonwealth’s arrival. It is most likely she is a refugee.’