A Night Without Stars

by Peter F. Hamilton

  An hour later he was atop a hundred-metre ice cliff with the wind whistling up the hard surface to buffet him. Right along the top, the snow was sculpted in strange curving shapes that twisted upwards two or three times his own height, like clashing waves solidified in mid-impact. The cavities and hollows provided perfect cover. If the seibear group kept to their current track, they would have to pass along the bottom of the cliff. He could stay hidden inside a snow cleft, shielding his infra-red emission until the ge-eagles showed him they were all within range.

  He spent another ten minutes scouting along the edge until he found the perfect place – one with a low gully leading away from the cliff which he could retreat along if things went bad. With that settled, he went inside one of the short cavities and began another wait.

  *

  Marek watched through the ge-eagles as the seibear group trotted over the rough snow towards him. He’d taken cover halfway up a vast rock crag that was only partially cloaked in snow. The snowfield that splayed out from its base was a broken wilderness of shattered ice boulders and dangerous crevices.

  ‘Our optimum strike time will be seventeen minutes – mark,’ Paula told everyone over the general link. ‘You should all be able to open fire within eight minutes of each other. Ry, you’re going to be the last.’

  ‘I can move forward,’ Ry said.

  ‘No. Their scouts might see you. Let’s keep this as simple as possible. Once the attack has started, I’ll use the drone as a kinetic weapon and take out the bomb to the east of Marek. That’ll leave the two bombs on the flanks.’

  It was good logic, Marek agreed. The flank bombs were now the furthest from the Viscount, so they would take the longest to reach the starship. That gave him and Kysandra a reasonable chance of intercepting them while Ry and Florian retreated to Viscount. His old Nigel personality approved. The boys had no experience in combat. Equipping them with maser rifles and molecular severance cannons for sniper duty was as close as they could get to guaranteed success, whereas he and Kysandra had a much better chance of taking out the remaining nukes.

  His retinas spotted the scouts four minutes later, when they were still two kilometres away. The main group of five seibears clustered round the nuke was another two and a half kilometres behind them. One of the scouts was going to pass within four hundred metres of him.

  Marek stopped breathing. The warm breath wafting through the polar air might just be a give-away. His body had enough oxygen reserves to last for an easy half an hour.

  The scout lumbered onwards, never breaking stride, its big head turning from side to side with mechanical regularity – and every three turns it would check the sky, too. Marek was impressed. Faller biology allowed the enormous seibear body to perform at the peak of biochemical limits. That kind of power and efficiency was a match for his own.

  ‘I’m red – ready,’ Marek announced when the bomb was only fifteen hundred metres away. The scouts had passed by on both sides without slowing – even so, a ge-eagle was marking them. The remaining outriders formed a loose circle round the primary group.

  ‘Me, too,’ Kysandra announced.

  ‘Another three minutes,’ Florian said.

  ‘The scouts of my group are passing me now,’ Ry said. ‘It’s taking longer than I expected. The terrain here is rough.’

  ‘Marek, Kysandra, initiate now,’ Paula said. ‘I’m launching the drone.’

  Marek spun round the rock that was concealing him. The maser rifle’s target image filled his exovision, shunting the ge-eagle links to peripheral mode. He fired at the seibear carrying the atom bomb, and saw all its muscles go limp, sending the big body sprawling onto the ground, ploughing up shards of ice. To his dismay the dead seibear tilted as it came to rest, putting the mass of its body between Marek and the crate with the bomb.

  ‘That’s not good,’ Marek murmured. He’d taken out the carrier first to immobilize the bomb, allowing him to shoot it with the molecular severance cannon – an unhurried accurate shot at a stationary target. Now the bomb would be protected by the vast bulk of the creature’s flesh.

  ‘Trouble?’ Demitri asked.

  ‘Only for them.’ Marek shot another seibear, one being ridden by a giant humanoid-Faller. The two of them went tumbling into the ice barbs.

  Another three fast shots and he finished off the primary group. The ge-eagles showed him the humanoid-Faller jumping up from behind a clutter of rocks. The bazooka fired and the Faller was immediately pumping the mechanism, firing again. Marek got off a shot – too quick for a decent aim, and anyway the Faller was diving for cover. He did the same thing just as the first bazooka round slammed into rock fifteen metres away. It couldn’t harm him, not with his force-field skeleton, but the blast did punch him backwards. The force field flickered a spectral turquoise as debris slammed into it. Marek stayed down.

  The second bazooka exploded, further away than the first. Through the ge-eagle’s feed, he saw the giant Faller pick up the bomb crate and start running at impressive speed. All seven seibear outriders were now charging towards the crag.

  ‘Having some trouble there?’ Demitri asked.

  Marek ignored his brother’s taunt, stood up and took careful aim at the fleeing humanoid. Only it vanished from the target feed. Genuine incomprehension flashed through his thoughts – a puzzlement reflected in the minds of his batch brothers. At any other time, that would have been really quite satisfying.

  He sent the closest ge-eagle diving down to the Faller’s last position and began jogging towards it. A seibear scout cleared the side of the crag, sprinting at a phenomenal sixty kilometres an hour. Marek spun and fired the maser rifle, completing the spin and running forwards again in less than a second. The seibear collapsed, its momentum sending its mighty body careering onwards for another twenty metres.

  An image from the ge-eagle leapt into his exovision as it streaked over the jagged expanse of rock and ice. It had found the giant humanoid-Faller. ‘The Faller’s faller – fallen,’ Marek said. ‘Down a crevasse.’

  The ge-eagle circled tightly. It showed a slim fissure bridged with a layer of ice, which had shattered the instant the giant had stepped onto it. His infra-red signature was a bright glow, fifteen metres down, wedged between the narrowing rock faces. Warm trickles of fluid ran down the fissure walls. The crate, leaking radiation, was a couple of metres from him.

  ‘That’s not good,’ Marek said. He started to speed up.

  ‘Don’t you fall down,’ Valeri warned.

  ‘I no – know.’ Marek directed another ge-eagle round, sending it skimming along the route he was taking, scanning the ground ahead for any snags or hidden fractures.

  ‘Got mine,’ Kysandra announced. ‘Masered the bomb. It’s dead. Clearing up now.’

  Two more seibear scouts raced into range. Marek slowed and shot both of them. One was carrying a pump-action bazooka. The beam must have hit the magazine. It exploded, flooding the area with garish orange light. Flames leapt upwards for several seconds, plunging the abysmal terrain into sharp relief. Shadows swung round as the fireball rushed upwards, then dimmed and vanished. Marek sprinted onwards.

  ‘Engaging now,’ Florian said. ‘They’re almost directly beneath me. Oh yeah! Got the bomb carrier!’

  ‘Well done,’ Kysandra said. ‘Just stay calm and shoot the bomb next, then pick the survivors off.’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  ‘I’m sending the drone down now,’ Paula said.

  Marek was halfway to the crevice with the Faller giant, his concentration divided between making sure every footfall landed on secure ground and the image relayed from the ge-eagle. ‘Uh oh. It moved. I thunk it’s still alive.’

  ‘Can you get to it?’ Demitri asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In time?’

  Marek didn’t answer. The giant Faller was wiggling about energetically now, trying to get free of the rock’s grip. A large amount of its blood was running down the fissure. Every motion sent anoth
er gout squirting out of the wound where the rock had punctured its waist. ‘It’ll kill kill itself doing that.’

  ‘It has no choice,’ Fergus said. ‘If it gets to the bomb . . .’

  A flash of light zipped across the eastern horizon, as white and fast as distant lightning.

  ‘Drone strike confirmed,’ Paula said. ‘On target. Ge-eagles reporting radioactive debris in the air. The bomb was vaporized.’

  Marek was four hundred metres from the crevasse now. He had to slow to take out another seibear. That left six closing in.

  Down in the crevice, the giant Faller wrenched itself free of the impaling rock and flopped sideways. Its fist smashed the hefty crate open.

  Marek sprinted. The ge-eagle had mapped out a safe track. His bioconstruct brain kept him aligned perfectly. He hit fifty kilometres an hour, zinging with exhilaration and fear, bringing the maser rifle round, ready to hurdle the crevasse and shoot straight down. Beam switched to full power, wide angle.

  The Faller tore shards of wood aside and reached for the control panel underneath.

  ‘Fucking fuck it,’ Marek snarled.

  *

  Florian was shooting the eleventh seibear of his target group when the nuke went off. Marek was about thirty kilometres to the west, but the light was so intense it felt like ten metres. Fortunately he hadn’t been looking directly west.

  Crudding Uracus!

  The transparent strip over his eyes had a cut-out level, automatically preventing dangerous light levels from reaching the retina. Even so, all he could see was a white glare; it even overwhelmed the exovision icons. He shut his eyelids fast. The only difference that made was turning the light from white to a pale pink. He slapped a hand across his head, and finally the glare reduced.

  His skeleton suit was reporting a huge radiation surge. The force field had been pushed close to its limit blocking the initial gamma flash, but it was holding.

  Feeds from most of the ge-eagles had dropped out. His own multisensor module was reporting a huge electromagnetic pulse. The relay back to the Viscount was intact, running through five ge-eagles.

  ‘That was not an Operation Reclaim bomb,’ Paula said. ‘That was a full Liberty bomb, around the three-hundred-kiloton mark. You all need to shield yourself from the blast wave. Move! I’m bringing the ge-eagles down. We’ll relink as soon as it’s safe.’

  The light level was reducing slightly. Florian looked down at the dazzle-white snowfield below the cliff, his targeting graphics picking out the surviving seibears. He was sure two of them had been blinded by the flash; they seemed to be stumbling. The others were standing still, taken completely by surprise. Then he realized the glare haze shimmering off the snow was actually fluorescing fog. For as far as he could see, snow was boiling, throwing off a blanket layer of seething mist that was expanding upwards rapidly.

  He turned and ran through the gully that was his ready escape route. Two ge-eagles plunged down out of the clear pearl-white sky, one racing on ahead, surveying the meandering passage, the other keeping pace three metres above his head.

  ‘You have control,’ Paula said. Then her link dropped out.

  ‘Kysandra?’ Florian sent.

  ‘Here, babe,’ Kysandra said. ‘I hope you’re doing what you’re told, and getting ready for the blast. It’ll hit you in about a minute.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s difficult. I’m in this gully.’

  ‘Crud! Get out of it! You’ll be crushed!’

  ‘Trying.’ Now he was out of direct line of sight, the glare was almost tolerable. But steam was roaring overhead between the lips of the snow walls and churning down into the gully. It was hard to keep traction, and the dense steam was interfering with most sensors.

  Florian slipped and scrambled round uselessly on the steam-slicked ice trying to regain his footing. Then stopped, realizing it was much better to go with it. He held his body rigid, and began to pick up speed. He slid down the slope like the world’s smallest bobsleigh, totally dependent on the force field to protect him if there was any rock sticking up through the melting ice.

  ‘Ry?’ he asked.

  ‘Present and correct.’

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Alive, and working to carry on with that.’

  ‘See you later?’

  ‘Deal.’

  ‘Hey, did you get your bomb?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Florian’s laugh had the taint of hysteria. He was going alarmingly fast now, and water was starting to sluice along with him. Corners sent him slithering up the walls before gravity pulled him down.

  Abruptly he shot out of the gully and began spinning round. There was nothing to see. The steam was too dense and turbulent, its own jets and micro-currents strong enough to buffet him.

  Then the blast hit and the ground slammed up into him. He cartwheeled through the cloud. Steaming lumps of snow flew round him and then he was down again, hitting hard. The force field tightened round him, cushioning the blow. Exovision graphics told him the force field was also deflecting the sound waves that were ripping the snow apart. As he kept skidding along, the crazy slushy ground vibrated under him like an abused trampoline.

  The steam layer was suddenly ripped away by the shockwave. He almost wished it hadn’t been. The twisting spires of wind-fashioned snow were disintegrating, breaking apart into a tide of looser snow that was starting to flow like a viscous liquid. It churned around him, pummelling the force field. Overhead, the incredible atomic light was burning down to incandescent red-gold, filling the heaving air with dusky oil-rainbows as it fluoresced the hail of water particles.

  ‘Avalanche!’ Florian screamed. He had no idea who he was trying to warn.

  The mush he was caught on began to move faster and faster, spitting out chunks that arched through the air in every direction. It started to build up around him, sliding over his frantic scrabbling limbs.

  Think!

  There were waves forming in the mush cascade now, building into horrifying crescents. About to collapse downwards in lethal torrents.

  He ordered the force field to expand. It left him in the middle of an invisible bubble that elevated him up from the unstable flood. But still the waves built around him, growing in violence as the blast energy poured into them, sending them writhing at contrasting angles and differing speeds. They smashed together, whirled apart, peaked, fell away. He was slammed about violently, utterly helpless, a football kicked by elemental gods.

  Then the biggest wave of all rose up, darkening his world. The force-field bubble rotated him upside down. He looked up past his feet and saw the wave break in a strangely elegant fantail of solid scarlet spume that crashed down upon him.

  *

  Florian didn’t think he lost consciousness entirely, but there was certainly a long moment of utter disorientation. The mush kept shoving him along, though the motion soon became sluggish and stopped.

  He hung suspended inside the force-field bubble, body inclined at a seventy-degree angle, head down. True consciousness was the realization that he was dangerously nauseous. His u-shadow ordered the skeleton suit to release him from suspension, but to maintain the perimeter.

  Squatting on the floor, he fumbled through his backpack, and pulled out a torch. That wasn’t as reassuring as he wanted. He was at the bottom of a perfect sphere three metres in diameter, completely buried in snow. No way of telling how deep.

  But those avalanche waves were high. Seven, eight metres at least. And more has flowed over since.

  He used his u-shadow to expand the force field. It grew by about twenty centimetres, then stopped. The pressure the snow exerted was now equal to the energy it took to maintain the force field. It wasn’t going to get any bigger, so it definitely wasn’t going to expand until it burst through the surface.

  ‘Crud.’

  Florian had thought the dose of claustrophobia he’d suffered in the starship was bad. This threatened to be infinitely worse.

  His heart started doing its
flutter thing, and he sucked down air in fast, shallow gulps.

  Oh, just crudding great!

  Then he stopped panicking about being confined because an oxygen warning flipped up in his exovision. Not only was the oxygen level of the air shrinking, the carbon dioxide was rising.

  ‘No! No, no, no!’

  He used his secondary routines to calm his breathing. His u-shadow ran a fast analysis. With the e-m suit filters operating at maximum efficiency, he had enough air left for approximately thirty minutes. That helped the secondary routines pacify his racing heartbeat a little.

  He stared upwards, furious with the universe for doing this to him. ‘I just survived a crudding atom bomb,’ he yelled. Stopped. Calmed again. Wasting oxygen. ‘Come on. Think, Uracus damn you. You’re supposed to be smart, a true nerd. Science your way out of this.’

  He glanced up again at the stubborn snow pressing down against the force field. ‘Ah.’ The u-shadow changed the force field’s shape, turning it to a teardrop, with a very pointed apex. It drove upwards a good twenty centimetres.

  ‘Crud!’

  He shone the torch into his backpack. Nothing in there he could punch upwards with. The maser rifle and molecular severance cannon were still with him, hanging on their shoulder straps. He really didn’t fancy trying the molecular severance cannon on the ice, not at zero range.

  He put the rifle muzzle up into the small apex, and his u-shadow reformatted the force field to allow the slim tube through. With the rifle muzzle pressed directly into the snow, he fired a half-power burst. The tube rammed itself back down, and a shower of boiling water squirted through the gap in the force field before it managed to close. The e-m suit deflected the scalding heat easily.

  ‘Crudding bollocks!’

  Okay, reformat the force field to let the maser energy through, but no physical gap this time.

  Once the u-shadow complied, he fired through the weakened zone. The snow above him turned to water, which began to seep down the curve of the sphere. There were bubbles fizzing away inside it.

  He blinked in fascination at the slow-motion cascade. It’s like black beer.