The tailor on JermanGate had taken an impressive eighteen hours to produce the new uniform. Jenifa had picked it up the morning Chaing was released from hospital. The jacket sleeve folded neatly to be pinned at the side, while the front could be buttoned over the sling that held his arm. Instead of a seam on his left trouser leg, there were buttons he could do up after he’d slipped them on, covering the bandages and splits. Even the shirts were customized, with the right sleeve missing, and a larger-than-usual shoulder hole.
Despite the ease of wearing it, Chaing was sweating when he got to the top of the third-floor stairs. He had to use a crutch on his left side and it was exhausting work; he often found his left arm shaking from the strain. But he’d flat-out refused to accept the wheelchair the hospital offered. It would make him look too much like a failure.
In his mind, he’d prepared the scene that would greet him in the operations room. A week from the firefight outside Cameron’s would see several of the metal desks sitting empty, their investigators either killed or still in hospital. But there’d be a full complement of secretaries; typewriters clattering away, gossipy voices talking down the telephones. Clerks would be moving silently among them like swans across a lake, gathering and distributing files. The pin boards would have new photos, and ribbons stretching between them forming a thick unsymmetrical web.
He stood in front of the door and used the crutch to push it open, a smile lifting his face, ready to greet his team. Instead, there were two janitors inside, stacking chairs on a trolley. Half of the desks had already been taken away; the remainder were empty. All the boards were clear.
“Where’s it gone?” he asked numbly.
“Oh, hello, Captain,” one of the janitors said. “Welcome back, sir. Nice to see you on your feet.”
“Where’s the operation gone?”
“Sir?”
“My crudding operation! Where’s it gone?”
“Chaing.”
He turned to find Gorlan standing behind him. “What’s going on?”
“Director Yaki would like a word.”
Chaing wasn’t sure he could make it up to the seventh floor. He had to stop a couple of times on the stairs to take a breath. Gorlan didn’t say anything, just waited patiently for him to recover. He could feel how damp his shirt was from perspiration when he finally arrived at Yaki’s office.
She looked up from behind her antique miroak desk and frowned when she saw the state he was in. “For Giu’s sake,” she muttered.
Chaing sank down onto one of the chairs, ashamed to find his vision tunneling. A glass of water and crushed ice was put into his hand. He drank it gratefully.
Gorlan gave him a disdainful look as she left.
“So I don’t need to ask if you’re fit for duty,” Yaki grumbled.
“I wasn’t going to do any fieldwork,” he countered. “I was going to sit behind my desk. In my operations room!”
“Great Giu, Chaing. It’s over. You were there, for crud’s sake. You saw the Warrior Angel take the pair of them.”
“Someone alerted her. The Eliter radicals. Castillito’s associates. They might not know where she’s taken them, but it’s a start.”
“They vanished,” Yaki said. “Thirty-seven sheriffs and Corporal Jenifa searched wharf three within seconds of the bazooka explosion. There was nothing, no sign of them. This is beyond us.”
“It can’t be,” he implored, fearful he would lose it in front of her. “Florian was there in front of me, and so was the girl. I had them!”
“And she took them from you.”
“Uracus be damned!”
“There were Fallers there, Chaing. Masquerading as sheriffs—the balls of it! Another nest in Opole that we knew nothing about. Some of Roxwolf’s gangsters were Fallers. How did that ever happen? And how did Roxwolf know so much about what was going on? I need answers to all of this, because Varlan is asking me some very pointed questions. You can get those answers for me. Finding that new nest is my top priority now; in fact it’s my only priority.”
He almost nodded, almost gave in to her. “I want to talk to Stonal.”
“I see.” Her eyebrows rose up at his insubordination. She pulled the black phone across her desk and dialed. Once the connection was made, she dialed the scrambler code and the blue light came on. She flicked the toggle switch for the speakerphone.
“Director Yaki,” Stonal’s voice crackled out of the speaker.
“I have Captain Chaing with me,” Yaki said. “He insisted on talking to you.”
“Really? Hello, Captain.”
Chaing wasn’t sure, but there may have been a hint of amusement in Stonal’s tone. “Sir, I’d like your permission to carry on hunting Florian and the girl.”
“Do you have any reason to think they’re still in Opole?”
“No, sir. They’ll be in Port Chana.”
“What in Giu’s name makes you say that?”
“Major Evine said Florian and the girl had been forced into Roxwolf’s headquarters. Forced. That implies they’d been kidnapped. Then they escaped Roxwolf, and the Warrior Angel was there to snatch them to safety. The fact that she was in Opole implies they were about to be moved, presumably along the underground railway. That always takes wanted Eliters to Port Chana.”
“Well, it certainly takes a lot of them there. But you can’t know for certain that’s where Florian and the girl are.”
“It’s our best lead.”
“Florian’s brother left Opole ten years ago. He’s never been found, and he’s only one of hundreds.”
“You have to let me try, sir.”
“The Port Chana office is already looking for him.”
“She nearly talked to me,” Chaing said in desperation.
“Who?”
“The Warrior Angel. On Hawley Docks. I asked her what was happening. She was going to answer me, I swear she was, then the crudding Fallers fired their bazooka.”
“So you think she’ll…what? Take pity on you if you show up, and surrender?”
“Not surrender, no. But…I’ve faced her twice now, and I’m still alive.”
“Pick up the handset.”
“Sir?”
“Pick up the handset. I want to talk to you in private.”
Chaing gave Yaki a guilty look and lumbered up out of his chair. She watched him with an impassive expression, but her scar was a hot red jag against her cheek.
“Here, sir,” he said with the handset pressed to his face.
“We’re in a difficult situation politically. This Commonwealth girl, we don’t know what she’s capable of. Unofficially, the government is willing to negotiate with her. That’s why I’m going to let you go to Port Chana. You’re bait. That is your only value.”
“Yes, sir!” He smiled like a buffoon.
“Make yourself known down there, see if the Warrior Angel gets in touch with you. If she does, the message you will deliver is very simple: We want to talk. That is all you will do.”
“I understand.”
“There’s another thing. I don’t trust the Port Chana PSR office.”
“Sir?”
“Port Chana is the last stop on the underground railroad; you’re quite right about that. But the office there is singularly useless in apprehending radical Eliters, and has been for some time. I have to ask why.”
“Oh.” He glanced at Yaki, wanting to ask a whole load of questions about that. “Got it.”
“I’ll clear it for you to run an independent operation there; the local director will provide all the services you require. But take some of your own people, keep them inconspicuous, and run the real search in parallel from our safe house.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good luck, Captain.”
It was two fifteen in the morning. The phone rang.
Anala sat upright in bed, focusing hard. All astronauts got used to interrupted sleep; it was part of the training. Glitches can happen at any time.
She picked up the phone. “Yes?”
“This is Sergeant Rebara.”
“Uh, yes?” She clearly wasn’t as alert as she thought; the only Sergeant Rebara she could think of was the drillmaster at the Air Defense Force flight officer school, who specialized in making cadets’ lives a total misery.
“I have the results of your last training exercise in teaching room three-B.”
Now Anala was very awake. The voice…It was him. She came so close to yelling: Ry? Instead she got a grip like a good astronaut. “Yes?” she said cautiously. “What was the result?”
“The landing coordinates you worked out were correct, and a full recovery was enacted. Well done.”
“Great Giu,” she whispered. Her gaze went directly to the three-day-old Varlan Times newspaper on the table, with its headline: OPOLE NEST DESTROYED.
“I’ll call you when your next training session is allocated.” The phone went dead in her hand.
Paula’s last memory was of the elegant lake house on the Sheldon estate on Augusta. She’d been staying there with Nigel and Vallar, a Raiel; the three of them were preparing Nigel’s covert mission into the Void. The plan was a simple one. Humans in the Void had found Makkathran, an ancient Raiel warship that had somehow survived their vanquished invasion a million years earlier. Now the Raiel were desperate for the knowledge Makkathran had acquired during its million-year purgatory. Nigel had agreed to go inside the Void and attempt contact with Makkathran. Paula had been concerned he wasn’t right for the mission. There were humans living in Makkathran, a primitive society with a very rigid class structure, where people possessed strong mental powers and weren’t afraid to use them. An interloper would need to be subtle, infiltrating them slowly and quietly.
That so wasn’t Nigel—in her opinion.
So, with acute reluctance, she’d suggested the backup. If Nigel failed, she would carry on with the mission. But it had to be an extreme last resort, she insisted…and Nigel and Vallar had agreed. Because Nigel considered it so unlikely he would fail, and she personally disapproved of going multiple, she wasn’t going to grow an adult clone of herself like he was doing. Instead, there would be an embryo and an external memory lacuna. So she’d gone into the estate’s clinic for a secure memory download—
The growth phase from infant to child was a vague period of laughter and tears and deep affection for her father, the one person who was constantly there for her. And pain. Pain that plagued her relentlessly, integral to a body that was being forced to grow far too quickly. She knew frights, too, from some of the people who lurched into her life, only for Daddy to fend them off.
Then finally she’d integrated her memory and become herself again—to find she wasn’t in Makkathran, that Nigel had never made it to Querencia. Her home galaxy was millions of light-years away, and for some reason the package smartcore had taken 250 years to activate her.
So: She and Nigel drinking a pleasant vintage burgundy on the lake house terrace that evening just before she’d gone for the download, chatting away in such a civilized fashion about times past and possible options—then cut to a nonhuman monster threatening to eat her before trying to blow her brains out in its underground lair. As disorienting events went, she was now the all-time universe champion.
The semi-organic synthesizers in the extensive underground (why are people on Bienvenido obsessed with putting their secret bases underground; don’t they understand how that limits their escape routes?) chambers carved into the rock below the farmhouse had produced a decent gray suit for her. The cut was weirdly old-fashioned, which Fergus (who names an ANAdroid Fergus?) assured her would go unremarked in any of Bienvenido’s towns. She looked at herself in the bedroom’s full-length mirror. It had been a long time since she had rejuvenated herself all the way down to eighteen. Despite rejuve being commonplace, Commonwealth society still placed their trust in more distinguished elderly figures, so the most clinics had ever taken her back to was her mid-twenties. Then biononics had come along and she maintained her appearance at a constant thirty.
Now that the forced maturation was complete, she wasn’t about to dive right in and use biononics to adjust and tweak her physiology. Nature could take its proper course for the next twenty-two years. If Bienvenido lasts that long.
Her ebony hair had been cut by Fergus. He’d actually done a reasonable job. It was still too short for her usual style, so he’d trimmed where necessary, and crimped tightly. The result looked a bit shaggy-wild, but was perfectly in keeping with her teenage features. The suit, too, was reassuringly comfortable. She felt she was finally coming to terms with her new body and circumstances.
It was seven o’clock in the evening when she made her way downstairs. She paused at the second-floor landing window. Kysandra was on the small lawn outside, looking through a long telescope. That starless night sky was something that Paula still wasn’t acclimated to; it alarmed her at some instinctive animal level.
The ANAdroids were all waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. “Now, that is the Paula we remember,” Valeri said.
She raised an eyebrow at the African-black artificial man. It was understandable that Kysandra had used the ANAdroids as a social support mechanism, accepting them as people, but there was no way she could ever think of them as human. However, she was the outsider here. As always. Her lips lifted in a tiny wry smile at the true familiar. “Thank you,” she said. “Would you like to call Kysandra in? We should get started.”
“Give her this moment,” Demitri said. “She’ll be in shortly.”
“Of course.” Paula went into the dining room.
Ry Evine was already there, along with Florian. She hadn’t seen much of them in the four days they’d been at the farmhouse, preferring to stay quietly in her room with the occasional trips down to the medical capsule when her joints were at their worst. Most of that time she’d spent assimilating the memories the ANAdroids had prepared for her, detailing a comprehensive breakdown of Bienvenido’s history, along with information on the Fallers.
Florian got to his feet, a nervous smile on his face. His arms came up, but he clearly didn’t know what to do next—hug, kiss, shake hands…Paula saved him, giving him a swift hug and a quick kiss that could almost be classed as paternal. He was dressed in a simple dark-orange shirt and navy-blue trousers; she nearly missed the colorful shirts and extravagant, furry kaftan he’d worn in Letroy and the mod-stable. But he looked a lot smarter now, and quite respectable. Ironically, now that he’d cleaned up and shaved and had some decent sleep, he actually seemed to have lost several years while she went the other way. “How are you?” she asked.
“Uh, fine.”
Paula quashed her grin; it was clearly going to take him a while to get over the experience of being a father for ten days. She just hoped he wouldn’t carry on feeling all protective of her.
Ry Evine was a lot easier. They shook hands briskly. He was easy to categorize—the epitome of alpha-class human. She’d met so many just like him back in the Commonwealth, the Forward Crews from CST’s exploratory division, and latterly survey starship personnel. They all exuded that same self-confidence, coupled with wanderlust enchantment. Focused dreamers, all of them. She just hoped he wouldn’t open with another barrage of questions about Commonwealth spaceflight. It seemed to be about his only topic of conversation.
“Thank you for helping out,” she said as she took a seat at the dining room’s big polished walnut table.
“Pleasure,” Ry said as he sat to her right. “Though I’m not sure I’ll be much use.”
“We’re going to need as many viewpoints as we can get.”
“Good to know,” Kysandra said as she came in. She was wearing a leaf-green summer dress, with her Titian hair falling loosely down her back. Her beautiful face was heavily freckled, making her smile even more prominent.
Paula caught Florian’s response to this girlish vision as she ran her hand lightly across his shoulders before sitting next to him—opposite Paula and Ry. Florian was clearly a man besotted, and—if she was any judge—hopelessly out of his depth. She wondered if she should warn him, repaying the kindness and devotion he’d shown her. But he won’t thank me, let alone believe me.
“I think we’s reed—red—ready,” Marek said, sitting at the head of the table. Demitri and Fergus sat on either side of their batch brother.
“So what do we do?” Paula said.
“That’s why you’re here,” Kysandra said. “You tell us.”
A tad defensive, Paula thought. “It’s not why I’m here at all. I am as unprepared for this as it’s possible to be, frankly.”
“But you must have some idea what we can do?”
“I can offer advice based on the situation as I see it. As I understand it, our primary worry is now the reaction of the Faller nests to my arrival. Certainly that was Roxwolf’s concern.”
“Are you sure the Commonwealth won’t help us?” Ry asked.
“Very sure. When Nigel and I put our mission together, no one in the Commonwealth knew Bienvenido existed. And even if Nigel and the Raiel released the knowledge, they have no way of knowing where we are now.”
“If they knew, would they help?” Florian asked.
“They would help,” Paula said solemnly. “They would do whatever it takes to rescue us.”
“So we have to get a message to them,” Ry said. “Somehow.”
“We’ve examined this,” Kysandra said. “We can’t build a starship, not with the facilities we have. And even if Democratic Unity agreed we could and helped, we’re still twenty-three million light-years from the Commonwealth galaxy. An ultradrive would take almost fifty years to reach them. And then there’s an equal return time. Whatever we do do, we have to do it ourselves.”
“That’s what will be scaring the Fallers,” Demitri said. “They will assume you have brought weapons or knowledge that will allow us to wipe them out.”
“Which I have, of course,” Paula said. “But building sophisticated weapons on a scale that will eliminate them will take time.”
“We don’t have time,” Kysandra said.
“Sensors,” Florian said. “That’s what we need, not weapons.”
“What sort of sensors?” Paula asked.
“Ones that can pick out Fallers. We don’t need new weapons; our carbines and Gatling guns can kill a Faller very effectively. What we need are verifiable targets.”
“Nice idea,” Paula said, mildly impressed with the way he’d analyzed the situation.
“Forget sensors,” Ry said. “People need biononics.”
“Also a valid solution, but there’s an even bigger problem introducing them. Biononic organelles do replicate in tandem with cellular mitosis, so the new cell also contains one. Which is fine for embryos; when the child reaches maturity they are embedded and ready to begin full functionality. However, to implant them into an adult requires time.”
“It took three years for our medical module to enrich my cells with them,” Kysandra said. “Admittedly I had to stagger the treatment sessions, we were so busy. But at best it would take eighteen months per adult.”
“And for those without functioning Advancer traits, it would take even longer,” Paula said. “The biononics would have to be manipulated to create a neural interface within the brain. I remember the upheaval it caused in the Commonwealth when the Sheldon Dynasty released the technology. There was a fundamental schism that to some degree still exists. In this case, I expect it will increase the divide between natural humans and Eliters. Besides, it doesn’t solve the time-critical problem.”
“Plus, we don’t have anything like the resources for that,” Kysandra said. “All we’ve got is a single medical module and three functioning semi-organic synthesizers—though functioning is pushing it for one of them. We can release the knowledge of how to build anything, but the actual construction process requires an industrial base that simply does not exist on Bienvenido.”
“Some kind of political agreement will have to be made,” Paula said. “The government must understand how severe the Faller threat is.”
“They do. That’s why they fortified Byarn,” Kysandra said. “It’s their refuge from which they’ll reclaim Bienvenido. Uracus, they even call it Operation Reclaim.”
“Nuking this continent won’t reclaim it,” Paula said, recalling the files the ANAdroids had prepared for her. “Surely they know that?”
“Operation Reclaim uses low-yield bombs. The thinking goes that the land will take a century or so to recover, and after that they’ll spread out from Byarn to repopulate the planet.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Yes,” Demitri said. “But like everything on the planet, it all goes back to Slvasta. The government has always known Fallers are prevalent on the other landmasses. His idea was that after the last Tree was blown up, the Air Force would use low-yield bombs on the islands and continents to wipe out the nests. And when the radiation decayed to safe levels, we could claim them for ourselves, and occupy the whole planet.”
“Didn’t he understand what Macule was?” Paula asked in annoyance. “That planet is a perfect example of why you don’t use nukes—period. Never mind for some ethnic-cleansing program.”
“You don’t quite appreciate how much Slvasta feared the Fallers,” Kysandra said with a regretful sigh. “He wasn’t rational on the subject. To him, widespread nuclear bombing was a risk worth taking if it resulted in eliminating Fallers from Bienvenido. This is how the government still thinks.”
“Then I should probably talk to them,” Paula said. “Come to an agreement over us accelerating the planet’s technology base.”
“Good luck with that,” Kysandra muttered.
“Politicians will always talk.”
“Democratic Unity are crudding fanatics; the only thing they hate and fear more than Fallers is the Commonwealth. Nigel’s legacy here is toxic like you wouldn’t believe.”
“I have some experience in this field,” Paula told her, “and we have the entire knowledge of the human race to trade with. There will be something they want, at the most basic level they need to survive. That is ultimately the hope I can offer them.”
“But we have no time,” Kysandra said heatedly. “If we’re going to defend this planet, we need all these advanced manufacturing facilities yesterday. It took Nigel years to build the solid rocket boosters to get Skylady back into space. And you’re not Nigel.”
“Kysandra—” Florian said uneasily.
“No, I’m right. The whole reason Paula is here is because she’s not Nigel.”
“Correct,” Paula said. “So we have to find a different solution. At the extreme, we might consider offering the Fallers an evacuation deal.”
“What do you mean?” Ry asked.
“They hold off any further attempts to take over Bienvenido while we build ark starships.”
“Crudding Uracus,” Florian exclaimed, “there’s millions of humans! How long would that take?”
“A century, probably,” Paula said.
“The Fallers aren’t going to agree to that. You heard Roxwolf. All we are to them is a mealtime on the road to their civilization dominating the planet.”
“Florian is possibly correct,” Valeri said. “Such an arrangement does not fit with Faller psychology.”
“I’m outlining options,” Paula said, unperturbed. “Do you have any line of communication to Democratic Unity?”
“No.”
“Then I need to open one.”
Kysandra nodded reluctantly. “I know someone who has direct access to the head of section seven, and in turn he has the confidence of the prime minister. We’ve just heard he’s coming to Port Chana. I’ll ask him.”
It was a two-hour drive southwest from Opole. The Adleton collective farm was nestled in the saddle of a low valley, the first of eight farms stretching along its thirty-two-kilometer length. The valley floor was mathematically flat, potato fields alternating with sugar beets and broad beans. Up on the slopes, pines and bluewoods covered the rumpled ground all the way up to the stony crests, above which huge mantahawks soared on the thermals, their kitewings keeping them aloft for days at a time as they soundlessly stalked their prey below.
The farm compound was a big square area surrounded by a high wooden fence in bad repair. Twenty single-story log cabins formed a neat row on one side, where the families and farmworkers slept. Larger communal buildings formed another side, while opposite them were the barns and silos.
The ground was muddy, churned up by tractors and hooves. Chaing’s crutch kept slipping about in the stuff, slowing his walk from the car to the administration building, where Shanagu, the farm manager, had his office.
Shanagu—a middle-aged man who spent most of his time behind a desk rather than working outside in the fields—greeted them with the same cautious enthusiasm that everyone affected when the PSR came knocking. Chaing and Jenifa warded off all his offers of drink and food.
“We’re here to see Corilla,” Chaing said when he was sitting in a leather wingback chair. It must have been a prosperous collective, he thought; Shanagu’s office had expensive furnishings and a heavy gold-and-blue rug on the floorboards—a décor that to Chaing spoke of a pre-Transition aristocrat’s hunting lodge.
“I see,” Shanagu said guardedly.
“Problem?” Jenifa asked. She was wearing her PSR uniform, jacket and trousers perfectly pressed, peaked cap holding her short hair out of view, which made her look beguilingly young. That youthfulness—combined with her unsmiling, clearly humorless persona as she stood rigid-backed beside Chaing’s chair—was guaranteed to make the most innocent citizen feel guilty about something.
“No more than usual for her kind,” Shanagu said.
“Her kind?”
“Eliters.” Shanagu went for the conciliatory angle. “Look, we’re not a prison; we just do some correctional work for the county justice office.”
“I wasn’t aware Corilla had been sentenced,” Chaing said.
“She’s not a justice office case. It’s like this: Nearly a third of our comrade workers have been assigned here by the department of labor—the usual layabouts and hotheads. It’s our duty to the state to install a sense of worthiness, show them their place in society, make them understand they are valuable. Eliters are always such a pain. They consider themselves better than everyone else—the arrogant cruds. She’s just the same, young and condescending; thinks she’s an intellectual and shouldn’t be working with her hands. But good honest physical labor will make her come around in the end, you’ll see. We have a good record here handling recidivists.”
“I’m sure you do,” Chaing said. “If you could call her in now, please? And we’ll need to talk to her alone.”
“Is she in trouble?”
“If she is, it’s happened since she arrived here,” Jenifa said curtly.
It took twenty painfully long minutes before Corilla arrived. Chaing almost laughed as she stomped into the office. The feathers had vanished from her black hair, which was now gathered into a practical braid. She wore dungarees that were smeared in mud and grime; knee-high boots were thick with muck that wasn’t 100 percent mud. Shanagu tried to keep his face composed as she trod the dirt into his fancy rug.
“You two,” she grunted, her hostile gaze sweeping from Jenifa to Chaing, lingering on his straight leg and crutch. “What happened to you?”
“The Warrior Angel happened.”
“Is that a slogan? I thought your people said she doesn’t exist.”
“Thank you,” Chaing said to Shanagu. “We’ll take it from here.”
Jenifa closed the door behind him and stood in front of it, arms folded over her chest.
Corilla ignored the belligerent stare she was being given and sat herself down in Shanagu’s chair. She started opening the desk drawers. “He keeps the good booze in here somewhere, I know he does.”
“Corilla,” Chaing said patiently.
She looked up. “Paid for from all the illegal deals the commune makes with local merchants, if you’re interested.”
“Not in the slightest. How would you like to get out of here?”
“What I’d like would be for you two to eat crud and die.”
“You’re angry with me.”
“Wow, nothing escapes the mighty PSR, does it?”
“I didn’t send you here.”
“The PSR did. Whose uniform are you wearing?”
“I can get you out,” he repeated levelly.
Corilla pulled a fat oval-shaped bottle of dirantio out of the lowest drawer. “Gotcha!”
“I need your help.”
She finally looked right at him, her face animated with naked fury. “I helped you before. Now see where I am. Where I’m going to be for the rest of my life if I’m crudding lucky. This is the future I so dreamed of when I went to university.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, it just oozes from you.”
“Do you want to leave or not?” Jenifa snapped.
Corilla glared at her for a moment before flipping the bottle neatly so she was holding it by the neck. “Hey, bitch, how bad do you think I could rip your face up before your cripple boyfriend limps to the rescue?”
Jenifa pushed away from the door, hands becoming fists.
“Enough,” Chaing said. “I get it; you’re pissed. Third and last time I ask: Do you want me to get you out of here?”
Corilla inhaled deeply. “To where?”
“Port Chana.”
“You’re crudding kidding me!”
“No.”
“Why there?” Corilla asked suspiciously.
“You heard there was a new nest alert?”
“Yeah, we get news even here. And the nonexistent Warrior Angel brought that alert to a very public end at Hawley Docks, didn’t she? Good job someone is genuinely helping the people of this world.”
“She and the people she helped escape have probably gone to Port Chana. I need to find them. I thought you’d like to help.”
“Help you do what?”
“Find the Warrior Angel. You’ll be an informant, same as before. Tell us what’s in all those messages the Port Chana Eliters are sending to each other.”
“You want me to betray the Warrior Angel to the PSR? Could my life get any better?”
“It’s not her I’m interested in, it’s the people she’s protecting. The Fallers want them badly, and there’s no telling what lengths they’ll go to.”
“What people?”
“A man called Florian; we think he’s developed some kind of weapon. The Fallers are reacting badly. Very badly.”
“You mean they’re going to launch their Apocalypse?”
“I have no idea how they’ll react. But—” He tapped the splints on the side of his leg. “They’re serious enough to take on the Warrior Angel in broad daylight. We have to try and calm the situation. And to do that, I have to locate Florian and determine exactly what he’s up to.”
“Right,” she said uncertainly.
“I have the authority to reinstate you at Opole University. But of course, there has to be a university left for you to return to…”
“Ha! Some choice, then.”
“I guess so.”
She held up the bottle. “I get to keep this.”
“Deal. Go and pack. You’ve got ten minutes before we drive out of here.”
Corilla sauntered past Jenifa, giving her a smug victory smile as she passed.
“Seriously?” Jenifa asked as the door shut behind Corilla. “She’ll be broadcasting everything she knows about us to the radicals the second we arrive in Port Chana.”
“I sincerely hope so,” Chaing said, holding his crutch firmly, ready to lift himself from the chair.
“You expect her to betray you?”
“I’d be disappointed if she didn’t. I want the Warrior Angel to know who’s hunting her.”
“You want to meet her again?”
“Correct.”
“Why, Chaing? Look what happened to you last time.”
Chaing shoved down hard on the crutch, levering himself upright. “Next time it will be different. I know it’s coming.”
Supper, served by the ANAdroids, was braised beef short ribs with portobello mushrooms, dusted in shallots and smoked folal cheese with a red wine jus, and served with buttered korril rice and steamed vegetables picked that afternoon from the farmhouse’s garden.
Paula ate about half of her plate, enormously relieved that the impulse to completely stuff herself with whatever food she could grab had finally subsided. She did manage all of her raspberry crème brûlée, though.
The formal meal seemed oddly momentous, which she supposed was a realistic appraisal. What they were proposing was essentially going to usher in the end of an era.
While the ANAdroids were clearing away she followed Kysandra outside, back to the telescope. A gentle breeze was blowing in off the sea, playing soft discordant notes as it eddied up the tall cliff.
“I’m sorry about before,” Kysandra said sheepishly. “I was being unhelpful.”
Paula stared out across the estuary, where Port Chana glowed with a bright twinkling haze against the darkness. “You’ve spent two and a half centuries defending this world, then I come along and advise you to change everything. You’re entitled to an emotional reaction.”
“Quite.” Kysandra took a sip of her dessert wine and peered into the telescope’s eyepiece. “Although it was going to change anyway.”
“I’d like to ask you a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Florian. Let him down gently.”
Kysandra stood up and gave her a surprised glance. “You’re concerned about Florian’s love life? Why? Do you…”
“No. My feelings toward him are purely maternal.”
“That’s—weird. He’s just spent a fortnight being your father.”
“Welcome to Commonwealth aging issues.”
“Crud.”
“He’s a good man. He stood up for me against incredible odds.”
“Then he deserves some happiness, surely.”
“He certainly does. I don’t want him hurt, that’s all. His emotional involvement is a lot higher than yours. You’re his first true love.”
“He is rather sweet. And he might well be my last love. It’s funny, how they all genuinely think you’re going to save us.”
“And you don’t?”
Kysandra shrugged and went back to the eyepiece. “Maybe if you’d turned up even fifty years ago, we might have had time. But you know as well as I do that we don’t have the resources to achieve anything now. When the Fallers come, they will come in their millions. Tens of millions probably.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“Oh, no, I’m clean out of ideas. I made my mistakes a long time ago. Now I’ll live with them. And die with them, I expect. But if you make a deal with Prime Minister Adolphus, it will just confirm the Fallers’ fears.”
“Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.”
“Is that a quote?”
“It is. I just don’t know where from.”
“That’s quite comforting, that you admit you don’t know everything.” Kysandra lifted her head. “Do you want to see?”
“Certainly.” Paula walked over to the telescope and put her eye to the lens. It was centered on a faint swirl of light. “A galaxy?”
“The Commonwealth galaxy,” Kysandra confirmed. “Your home. I look at it every night it’s in the sky. I get a silly degree of comfort knowing there are humans living there, that they’ll carry on living even after we’re wiped out. And…Sometimes I imagine him, looking up into the night from that planet he owns. I believe he’s there, searching for Bienvenido, wondering where we are.”
“Him?”
“Nigel. Am I being stupid?”
“You’re being human. That’s never stupid.”
“Is he looking for us?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Yeah. I know. Don’t want to dash my hopes.”
Paula straightened up and looked into the blank, black sky where the telescope was pointing. There was nothing there, nothing at all. “Twenty-three million light-years.”
“So the ANAdroids say.”
She looked toward the east, where the bright point of Ursell had risen. With her retinas on enhanced focus, she could actually see the solar-energized haze shimmering around its unnaturally thick atmosphere. “Laura certainly wasn’t doing things by halves, was she?”
“Fireyear Day is an annual celebration,” Kysandra said. “It’s a grand carnival in all the towns and cities.”
“Laura came up with a simple, swift solution. Using floaters like that was inspired.” Paula searched across the sky, seeing blue Aqueous, the gray-white glimmer that was Trüb, then almost directly overhead the pale-pink gleam that was Valatare. “And none of the other planets have native species we can ask for help?”
“No. At least, not that Laura could find while the wormhole was active, and the Space Vigilance Office hasn’t picked up any signals since. They keep a good watch, too.”
“I could probably break the wormhole’s codelock. I have routines that weren’t even around when it was built.”
“What good would that do?”
“We could evacuate some people to Aqueous. Children and some guardians.”
“The island areas are small. You could only take a few thousand at best.”
“And Macule is a radioactive desert?”
Kysandra nodded and drank some more wine. “Yes. The ANAdroids call it nuclear winter. They had the really big dumb war—the one Earth managed to avoid.”
“We’re all here because we were too belligerent or stubborn for the Void to tame.” Paula fixed Aqueous with a pensive stare. “We could send boats through the wormhole to Aqueous. They could anchor together, form a floating city. If we give every Eliter that goes with them Commonwealth technology files, they might be able to bootstrap their way up to a spacefaring civilization. Once they’re in space they could build starships. Trouble is, most solar systems have asteroids and comets that can be mined. This has nothing.”
“Trüb has twelve tiny moons,” Kysandra said. “If your spaceships get there, they could mine them.”
Paula’s secondary routines called up all the information the ANAdroids had on Trüb. “That’s a strange one,” she murmured. Trüb was completely featureless. It had no mountains or basins; no oceans or even polar caps. Just a uniform gray wasteland—presumably of dust or sand, but even with a low-pressure argon–carbon dioxide atmosphere, there were no storms. And the twelve moons…It wasn’t impossible for a planet Trüb’s size to have twelve natural moons like that, but it was highly unlikely. “There is no ecosystem at all; no life. So if nothing lives on it, what’s it doing here?”
“I have no idea.”
She began to review the other planets. Asdil: a solid world larger than Bienvenido, orbiting 740 million kilometers out from the sun, with a thick, cold nitrogen-methane atmosphere clotted with many cloud layers, denying any glimpse of the surface. Radio-silent.
Fjernt: forever in conjunction with Bienvenido on the other side of the sun. Another solid world, but with no free oxygen in its nitrogen–carbon dioxide atmosphere. Laura Brandt hadn’t detected any radio transmissions on her brief exploration mission. Which was the only thing Paula cared about. The cellular biochemistry of a species was irrelevant; she wanted a technological civilization, someone who could help. If there were any sentients living on the worlds Bienvenido shared this lonely sun with, they weren’t developed enough to come to their aid. All she was really doing was confirming what Laura Brandt had discovered when she drew up her plan to fight the Prime.
“Why do you need asteroids to mine?” Kysandra asked.
“Actually, we don’t. If we can build ingrav and regrav systems, we could start mining the other planets directly and not have to come back here.” Paula sighed. “I’m not an industrialist. And it’s all purely theoretical right now.”
“The floaters were intended for mining, weren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“The two Laura used to kill Ursell are still working.”
“We’d have to get to them to change their operation. I wonder—the package that brought me must have some kind of ingrav. Using it might have to be part of the deal I offer Adolphus.”
Kysandra smiled drily. “Old times, getting Commonwealth spaceships back into space. But it would have to be careful orbiting Valatare; Laura said the gravity was wrong.”
“She said what?”
“Valatare’s gravity is wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
“I think…The gradient was too steep.”
“How can—? When did she find this out?”
“When she opened the wormhole.” Kysandra grinned. “Actually, you can see for yourself if you want.”
“How?”
“One of the ‘technicians’ helping Laura develop the atom bombs was Valeri. He was there in the crypt the day we defeated the Prime. Slvasta and his cronies didn’t know what he was, so he was able to go on and work with the Manhattan Project. He offered some subtle guidance to build bigger bombs until they got the yield up to three hundred kilotons. Those are the ones the Liberty flights take up to the Ring to kill the Trees.”
Paula couldn’t help the small twitch of her lips at Laura using the name Manhattan Project. “So you were behind the bombs and the Silver Sword?”
“This is my world, Paula. I’ll defend it to the end.”
“I know. I do admire what you’ve done.” Her u-shadow opened a link to Valeri. “Could you show me your memory of Laura opening the wormhole to Valatare, please?”
The farmhouse’s terrace rippled away, replaced by the crypt below the palace. A tense, tired Laura Brandt stood in front of the wormhole.
“Well?” Kysandra asked eventually.
Paula had to grip the telescope hard for balance; she thought her knees might give way. Her personality might be over a thousand years old, but her brand-new teenage body was still remarkably susceptible to emotional surges. “The baddest of them all,” she whispered.
“Excuse me?”
“Every planet here is home to a belligerent, untamable species. The Void saw all of us as a danger. But some are a lot more dangerous than others.”
“Oh, crudding bollocks, are you saying Valatare is worse than the Fallers?”
“No, not if I’m right.” She couldn’t keep the smile from her face. For the first time she actually began to feel hopeful. “I just have a theory, that’s all. But it changes everything. Come on.” She hurried back toward the farmhouse. Her u-shadow called Florian and Ry, telling them to come to the dining room.
“What are we doing?” Kysandra asked.
“We need a new plan. Because, let’s face it, just asking the government for help is fairly pathetic.”
Fergus and Valeri followed Florian and Ry into the dining room.
“What’s happened?” Florian asked, looking intently at Paula’s face.
Paula made an effort to rein back her exhilaration. She sat down and took a moment as the others reclaimed their chairs. “Two things. First, an emergency survival option. If the Fallers do launch their mass attack against humans, we need to evacuate as many people as possible.”
“Evacuate?” Florian asked. “You mean, to Byarn?”
“No, I mean to Aqueous.”
“How are we going to get there?” Ry asked.
“I may be able to open the wormhole in the palace vaults. If I can, we send boats through for people to live on. We’ll take mostly children with some adult guardians. They’ll need to be Eliters, and we provide them with all the files we have. We also send through all the equipment from here. My hope is that a colony nucleus can elevate themselves up to a level that can at the very least build an ultradrive starship, one capable of making it back to the Commonwealth with a message. It’s not a great plan, but it does save Bienvenido’s humans from complete extinction.”
“I can imagine the price Adolphus will demand for giving you access to the wormhole,” Kysandra mused.
“If he comes with us, then so be it. He will not be in charge when we get there. That is something he will have to accept.”
“You’ll be admitting to the government that the situation is hopeless,” Ry said bitterly. “That even you can’t stop the Fallers.”
“Not quite. I’m hoping all Aqueous will ever be is a contingency. We need to open the wormhole to Valatare.”
“Valatare? What the crud is on Valatare?”
“The theory behind this star existing is that the Void banished all the planets here because the species living on them inside the Void were either a threat or refused to submit to the Heart. Right?”
Kysandra nodded. “We’re here because of the quantumbuster. The Vatni are as obstinate as Uracus; they always refused to be guided by the Skylords. The Prime—well, we all know about them. And whoever was on Macule, they were clearly hugely antagonistic; they blew themselves up once they regained their industrial technology base.”
“Trüb and Asdil we’re not clear about,” Paula said ticking them off on her fingers, “but they don’t seem to have any active aliens. Same goes for Fjernt, which is unscathed.”
“Laura assumed the Fjernt species managed to build starships and went home,” Kysandra said.
“Reasonable,” Paula said. “Because you’d have done that if it weren’t for the Fallers. Which leaves us with Valatare. As far as I’m aware, the Commonwealth never found a native sentient species in any gas giant. There are various microbes in the atmosphere of some of them, but a sentient evolving there—it’s not impossible, but it’s very unlikely. And Valatare’s gravity is wrong, which implies it’s artificial.”
“Artificial?” Ry barked. “A whole planet?”
“Not a planet,” Paula said. “A prison.”
There was silence in the dining room. She looked around at all of them, resisting the impulse to smile at their surprised expressions. “There is one other species that we know is extremely hostile to the Void: the Raiel. So hostile they’ve kept a million-year vigil to prevent other aliens being ensnared by the Void. And so enraged that the Void’s expansion could one day consume the entire galaxy that they sent an armada of their greatest warships through the barrier to destroy it.”
“The armada was defeated,” Demitri said.
Paula cocked her head to one side and smiled at him. “Exactly. And where does the Void send its beaten enemies?”
“Oh, crudding Uracus,” Kysandra whispered. “You think they’re in Valatare?”
“The Void beat them, yes, but the Raiel warships are formidable. I know; I’ve been on one. Yes, it sent them here, but the distance back to our galaxy is nothing to the Raiel—a moderately inconvenient few decades of flight, if that. So to be sure they never posed a threat again, the Void imprisoned them. That’s what I believe Valatare to be. Underneath the atmosphere, there’s some kind of barrier, holding them in.”
“The gravity gradient,” Fergus said quickly. “It’s like a miniature Void barrier.”
“It probably works on the same principle,” Demitri said. “It’s just the scale that is different. The Void consumes stars to power itself; Valatare consumes the hydrocarbon atmosphere.”
“Good,” Paula said. The ANAdroids couldn’t come up with ideas of their own, but set them a problem and they’d use logic and a process of elimination to force-compute a solution.
“Will they still be alive after a million years?” Florian asked apprehensively.
“I suspect they won’t be a day older,” Paula said. “A major component of the Void’s internal spacetime was the variable temporal flow. Humans were living on Bienvenido for three thousand years, yet out in the galaxy only two hundred years went by. The Void wouldn’t want the Raiel to be active inside their prison, not with the resources available to those warships. They’d probably manage to find a way to break out. I may be wrong…”
“But you’re not, are you?” Kysandra said softly. “There’s a file on you in the smartcore Nigel left behind.”
“Checking up on me?” Paula inquired.
Kysandra smiled thinly. “Very thoroughly.”
“Would the Raiel help us?” Ry asked.
“They will help us,” Paula assured him. “Even if it wasn’t us breaking them out, they’d help. That’s what they’re like. Besides, they owe me a few favors.”
Kysandra poured herself the last of the dessert wine. “I’ll bet they do,” she mumbled.
“So how do we do it?” Florian asked eagerly. “How do we jailbreak the armada?”
“With difficulty,” Paula said. “Are we absolutely sure there’s no more Commonwealth technology left? Valeri, your memory showed me nothing apart from the wormhole under the palace. What else did the Captains hang on to? Is there anything else left of Vermillion’s cargo?”
“Effectively nothing,” Valeri said. “The wormhole Laura Brandt reactivated is still there, but codelocked. All the others were cannibalized to repair it and the two floaters. There are no synthesizers or extruders left.”
“Nigel cleared all the quantumbusters out of the armory,” Kysandra said. “I helped him do it. The medical modules the Captains hung on to broke down twenty-five hundred years ago. All that’s left now are some components the section seven advanced science division is scratching its head over. I have an asset in that department, who has supplied us with an inventory, but if you’re looking for something to bootstrap our manufacturing base up to Commonwealth levels, it’s not in the palace.”
“Three colony starships came to Bienvenido,” Paula said calmly. “Vermillion landed to found Varlan. What happened to the other two?”
“The Verdant splashed down in the Gulf of St. Ives, seventeen kilometers off what is now New Angeles,” Fergus said. “They salvaged what they could, which wasn’t much; it took them months just to build wooden-hulled boats back then. That was more than thirty-two hundred years ago. There’s nothing left of it now.”
“And the Viscount?”
“Nobody knows.”
Paula checked the faces at the table, startled at how they all seemed perfectly content with that statement. “The starships the Brandts built for this colony attempt were a kilometer and a half long. How can they not know what happened to one?”
“According to the Landing Chronicles, they never found it,” Ry said. “Their auxiliary flying craft carried on working for up to a fortnight after they arrived, so they managed to gather everyone together at the Vermillion’s landing site. Once that was done, they made some overflights of the islands, but there was no sign of it.”
Paula rested her elbows on the table and tented her fingers. “If Viscount had left orbit for another star, they would have seen it go. I take it there have been expeditions to all the landmasses on Bienvenido?”
“Yes,” Fergus confirmed. “In the first couple of centuries the Geographical Association sent expeditions to every landmass on the planet. They never found a crash site.”
“It has always been assumed Viscount came down in water,” Valeri said. “Presumably the Eastath Ocean; it is the largest.”
“No tsunami? And nothing ever washed ashore?” Paula asked. “Ever? If it broke up on impact there would have been thousands of tons of debris that floated. If it didn’t break up, the crew would have had time to escape.”
“So where is it?” Florian asked.
“There’s only two places it can be,” Paula said. “One of the polar continents.”
Fergus and Valeri looked at each other, then at Kysandra.
“Logical,” Fergus conceded.
“Which pole, though?” an intrigued Ry asked.
An image taken from the Captain’s Cartography Institute slid up into Paula’s exovision. “The southern polar continent, Lukarticar, is the larger. It also has an unmapped interior, so those ancient expeditions probably only charted the coastal areas. That makes it the more likely.”
“Lukarticar is unmapped because it’s big and desolate,” Kysandra said. “If the Viscount did come down there over three thousand years ago, it’ll be underneath at least fifty meters of snow and ice by now. How are we going to find it? This is needle-in-a-haystack territory.”
“Your semi-organic synthesizers can still produce ge-eagles,” Paula said. “Fabricate a new batch with upgraded sensors and communications and take them to Lukarticar. They’ll find it.”
“That’s quite an expedition,” Kysandra said with a sly smile growing on her lips. “Too big for the sub. We’ll need a proper ship. And I just happen to know an obliging captain.”