A Threat Among the Stars

by Mark Henwick

  She lets my shirt go and tries to struggle upright.

  “Just get me up,” she says.

  Talan is frowning, but I don’t see any other options. In the short term, either the wounded Hartzak or the surviving mercenaries might come back. Or the Hartzak’s roars might have attracted other Hartzak. In the longer term, one of the mercenaries might have made a radio call, or someone monitoring this area might have noticed plasma discharges. We have to retrieve the evidence from the Auzitegi and then get out of Berriaren, quickly.

  And we need to take her with us.

  We lift Kat. Her legs buckle, but she catches herself and straightens up, swaying between us, eyes narrowed in concentration.

  She takes a few steps and she’s working hard at trying not to limp. Her clothes are tattered and her boots are nearly destroyed. From the look of her, she should be in a hospital bed, but we can’t take any of that into account. With her, we’re now committed to taking the exposed route because it’s shorter, but we’ll be moving slowly—the worst of both options.

  We set off across the plaza. There’s a boulevard at the north side that looks as if it’s heading in the right direction.

  We’ve gone barely twenty steps when I hear a moan over to our left.

  It’s the dying mercenary that the Hartzak bit and threw aside. I’m amazed he’s lasted this long; there’s a race to end his life between the poison from the bite and the abdominal bleeding from his wounds.

  Kat stops.

  “There’s nothing we can do for him, Kat,” I say. “The Hartzak bit him.”

  “I know.”

  She ignores my restraining hand and stumbles over to kneel beside the mercenary.

  He’s landed awkwardly on his side, and probably broken his collarbone, though that’s the least of his worries. His face is pressed against the dirt, twisted with pain. He looks at her with his eyes wide. I guess he’s aware enough that he’s expecting her to kill him.

  I feel ill. He’s little more than a boy.

  Kat turns him onto his back gently, to make him more comfortable. His breathing is labored. She loosens his military jacket. There’s a gleam of metal at his throat—an old-style dog tag. The skin beneath is a blur of cheap tattoos, matching the stylized eagles on his cheeks.

  “I can’t save you,” Kat says. Her voice is scratchy. He blinks.

  She speaks slowly and gives him a drink from her canteen. “The Hartzak, the big bear...”

  “Bite is poison,” he says, between pants. “Know.”

  He squints at her. “Girl,” he says, his voice puzzled. “Just girl.”

  She shrugs and lifts the tag from his chest. “Should we send this to someone? Your company?”

  “Not soldier like army. Merc. Company not care. Syndacia not care.”

  I bite my lip. We need to be going, but instead I kneel on the other side and take his hand. It’s hot. He’s burning up.

  “There must be someone who should be told,” Kat says. “Family? Friends?”

  The boy’s brow creases in a frown.

  “Family dead,” he hisses. His body is beginning to shake. “Is hard winter ’05. No food. Spring come, no family.” Tears gather in the corners of his eyes. “Dead all. Bad time. Bad spring... earth stay hard. Mech come make hole, bury. Bury all.”

  “What about friends?”

  “Gone. Not know where. Home bad place. All go.”

  Talan is scanning the entries to the plaza, looking worried. I can feel it too. We’re very exposed here. We need to be gone.

  Still, she drops down to one knee next to us and asks the mercenary: “What about a team somewhere? You played sports? Someone will remember you.”

  His face clears a little.

  “Yes. The boys,” he says, haltingly. “West stand. Kulita stadium. Ice hockey. Good games. Good time. Northern cup. ’06. Won.” His body stops shaking. His gaze focuses on something beyond us, and he smiles. His breath fades as he whispers a chant: Ku-li-ta Ku-li-ta.

  “I will make sure the boys in the Kulita stadium west stand know,” Kat says, wiping tears from her cheeks. “The Goddess take you in her arms and bear you away, my brother, for we are all her children.”

  A heavy silence returns to the plaza.

  I put my hand on her shoulder.

  “You did well, Kat, but he’s not listening anymore,” I say quietly. “And we have to go.”

  She nods, takes the tag from around his neck. I pull her to her feet and start her toward the northern boulevard as the sun disappears into a sea of red clouds and the shadows of Berriaren swell around us.

  Behind us, a grim-faced but pragmatic Talan strips the dead mercenaries of everything we might be able to use. I hope there are some medicines in their packs, because Kat’s skin is almost as hot as the dead boy’s was.

  Chapter 26

  Zara

  It’s midnight. Talan is looking after Kat and keeping a watch. I’m on a rope, mostly naked, fourteen meters down a well in the courtyard of the Auzitegi, with a flashlight tied to the side of my head. It’s absolutely freezing. The lower half of my body is already under water, and the problem is, I really need to be fifteen meters down the well.

  The water table in spring is much higher than it is in late summer.

  It’s not a problem for the evidence, so much as a problem for me. There are four data modules stored in two sealed, waterproof boxes which I hid behind the wall of the well.

  These modules are the most important part of the evidence. There’s also a cubic meter of original paperwork and recordings that my grandfather collected, all of which is hidden in plain sight, in the research rooms of the Belardia Library in Iruña. But all of that they can say is faked. These data modules cannot be. They form part of the government’s verified systems. Their own computer systems in Iruña will provide the unique key that will unlock their destruction.

  If I deliver all four and get them accepted by the Enquiry.

  The real and immediate danger is that the boxes will not float if I drop them.

  The well is about one hundred meters deep, according to the old designs. They might as well be on one of the moons if they slip through my hands. That’s becoming all too likely, because in addition to the fact I can’t see what I’m doing with my hands, which are a meter below the surface of the water, my fingers have also gone completely numb.

  The stone in the wall has to be carefully removed. The boxes are held in a space just big enough for them. If I take the wrong stone out, the boxes would quickly be at the bottom of the well.

  The stone I’ve been working on for twenty minutes slides out. I try to hold it, but it’s slippery with mosses. I can’t grip. My heart’s in my mouth as it slides away. I feel it nudge my frozen feet on the way down.

  My hands are desperately trying to block the hole.

  After a minute, I can breathe again. Nothing else has come out.

  I think I’ve removed the right stone. The fact that it has mosses on every side means it’s probably one of the stones I took out when I hid the boxes. I should be able to reach in and retrieve them without moving any more stones.

  First, I need the feeling in my hands back.

  Talan has rigged a ratchet system for the rope holding me. Slowly and painfully, I drag myself back up to the lip of the well and clamber out.

  We don’t have a fire or anything cheerful like that. I want to get dressed again. I want to curl up and go to sleep. I make do with stamping my feet in a circle around the courtyard to get the blood flowing again.

  When my feet and hands start to hurt, I walk quietly to the front of the building.

  Kat’s still fast asleep.

  She’d rambled as we walked, talking unintelligibly about people called Benat and Ohana, and how the Resistance were all ghosts, and how she’d been speaking to Xabat Abarran Aguirre himself, just back in the plaza. She collapsed as soon as we got to the building, and slept through Talan’s cleaning and tending to her blisters and skin infections. Sleep
is probably the best thing for her.

  Talan’s standing, hidden in the doorway, looking out over the Plaza Nagusia, which is silver in the light of the twin moons. The cool breeze brings the screeches of night-hunting creatures from the ruined city.

  “Nearly there,” I say. “Just need to be able to feel my fingers for the next bit.”

  She smiles, but it’s a tight, distracted smile. “All quiet here. Apart from the animals.”

  There’s something she’s not saying. There has been since the incident with the Hartzak.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She tilts her head toward Kat without speaking.

  “What are you saying? You’re not suggesting we leave her, Talan!”

  She sighs. “She’s probably got as good a chance if she hides here as she does if she comes with us. If she even can. I’ve treated her as much as I can, Zara, but there’s nothing for that fever, and she’s exhausted.”

  “We could wait a couple of days. Give her time to recover.”

  “And it might get better. Or it might get worse. In the meantime, the mercenaries will come looking again.”

  I shake my head. I can’t leave Kat here.

  “Look,” she says. “One of the dead mercenaries had a seeker. I destroyed it, but the thing is, they’ll have her bio-signature in their systems. They’re specifically hunting her, and they’ll bring more mercenaries and more seekers. They don’t know about us yet. They might guess. They might have enough data on you to program a seeker. We don’t know. What we do know, is if we take your cousin with us, we’ll be leaving a trail they will follow. We have enough of a mountain to climb.”

  “Talan...”

  “This isn’t what I want to do, Zara.” We’re keeping it very quiet. Her voice is shaking. “Not at all. But I took an oath to keep you alive. I believe keeping you alive is important for the whole of Newyan, for Kernow, and maybe even for the whole of humanity. Taking Kat with us...” She lowers her head. “Taking her makes it more likely we’ll fail.”

  “I can’t leave her here, any more than I could have left you here, if you’d been injured.”

  Her face is ghostly in the darkness.

  After an age, I make out a short nod.

  I know I haven’t really won the argument. And I know Talan is a wonderful, warm and loving person. But she’s also one of those people who can put everything... almost everything... aside, and take a decision on hard logic. She scares me sometimes.

  In the meantime, she brings up practical issues.

  “We’ll need to visit a clinic or hospital,” she says.

  We both know we can’t take a chance that a doctor or nurse, innocently or deliberately, will alert the authorities when three desperate-looking women emerge out of the foothills without identification. By ‘visit’ she means we break in and steal medicines.

  “Cabezón’s the closest city,” I say. “But some of the villages in the foothills might have clinics. Won’t be as much security there.”

  “You were thinking Cabezón was the best place to head for anyway, weren’t you?”

  I shrug. “It has roads and railways and an airport. If we’re going to steal something to get us to Iruña, that’s probably the best place to try.”

  She snorts quietly. “How far did you say it was?”

  “About 160 kilometers.”

  Even as I say it, I’m thinking that’s a long way in the Sierra Arija and though the foothills. I’m still amazed Kat was able to reach here.

  “With a sick person... at least a week,” Talan says. “As long as we’re blessed with enormous luck.”

  We’re silent then, both probably wondering what that infection is going to do to Kat in the course of a week on that trail.

  But there is no other way I’m prepared to contemplate. And we just have to take one step at a time.

  There are villages in the foothills on the way to Cabezón. We’ll find a clinic and raid its medicine store. Then we need to get to the city. In addition to being a good place to find a way to get to Iruña, Cabezón is big enough for us to hide while we communicate with Hwa. We’ll need an update on the legal situation with the Commission of Enquiry, and we’ll need to find out how much time we have to present our evidence. Hopefully we can stretch it out to another month.

  One step at a time. And the first step is still waiting for me halfway down a freezing cold well.

  My feet don’t really feel warm again yet, but my hands are okay.

  “Back to work,” I mutter.

  Over the side of the well and down. Once in the water again, I quickly feel inside the hole in the wall. The boxes are there, in a cavity just below where I removed the stone. They’re slippery. I expected that, so I’ve made a little bag out of string which I carefully slide in around the boxes. The boxes nudge the stones, and I can feel them shifting, threatening to fall out. It seems to take an age, partly because I have to stop several times to blow on my fingers and warm them.

  Halfway through, the solar battery in the flashlight dies.

  I continue entirely by touch until finally, I have the boxes in the string and the string securely tied to my rope.

  I pull on the rope threaded through the ratchet. Up I go. Another step made on the journey. I can start thinking about the way to Iruña now.

  A pebble pings against the wall of the well and falls past me to the water below.

  My heart misses a beat.

  Talan’s sibilant hiss follows the pebble: “Stay inside.”

  Twisting on the rope, I look upwards. I can’t really see anything: a tunnel of blackness and a circle of lighter sky that is the mouth. The twin moons are setting and there are stars visible in the sky.

  My ears strain.

  There’s a noise I can just make out. A noise that doesn’t belong above the ruins of abandoned Berriaren.

  Chapter 27

  Hwa

  Hwa steels herself to remain polite.

  “But Ministro Sánchez, the proposed Commissioners are two days away from actually arriving in Iruña. The Accords are most clear about the rules for initiating an Enquiry.”

  “Indeed, Delegate Hwa. And yet...”

  Even in the air-conditioned offices of Newyan’s Bureau of Justice, the minister is sweating. He’s working on remaining polite too. Hwa believes he’s treading a fine line between powerful voices making difficult and contradictory demands of him.

  She’s surprised he kept this appointment.

  The Hajnal’s standing operating procedure is to take control of vital parts of the government. The Bureau of Justice would have been one of the first. She knows it must be run by the Hajnal. But does that mean Sánchez is committed to the Hajnal? Or is he being threatened? Bribed? Coerced?

  Regardless, he’s allowed the meeting to go ahead. That must mean he wants something.

  “And yet?” she prompts him.

  “Captain Taha is an accredited Commissioner, of this there can be no question. We have been officially informed of this by the Terran Council. So, his pronouncement has the authority of the Terran Council and he has expressly commenced the Enquiry, within the Newyan system, citing the whole Newyan system.” Sánchez clears his throat and begins to speak more quickly as if to prevent there being any counter argument. “The Accords were written when even the Inner Worlds tended to be entirely planetary. Of course, now that it is generally accepted that our jurisdiction extends throughout the planetary system to within double the distance encompassing all genuinely orbital bodies, one might reasonably interpret—”

  “One might,” Hwa interrupts him. “However, one expects and even demands laws to be interpreted in court, or by governing bodies assigned that task, not by an incoming Commissioner who has not even spoken to the system’s authorities.”

  The fact that the Newyan government seems to be willing to cooperate by immediately accepting the establishment of a Commission of Enquiry makes Hwa suspect even more that they’ve done some kind of secret deal with Taha—to e
nsure there’s a long Enquiry where nothing is found and nothing is done.

  If the Hajnal had worked out what Hwa’s case really is—a Trojan horse for presenting evidence on the Hajnal conspiracy to the Commission of Enquiry—then Sánchez wouldn’t have agreed to meet.

  So there must be a way past this. All she has to do is find the right button to press.

  The alternative...

  The vision forces itself on her.

  Cold. It’s been cold across the whole of Newyan since the kinetic bombs landed on Iruña. The planet is a grey, freezing desert and even the snow is the color of ash. Humanity has split up into those that are inside fortified buildings, with enough fuel and hydroponics, and those that are outside, and are going to die.

  That is the Dowr’s vision of the type of war that would erupt if the Hajnal are not stopped now. Hwa knows she personally would not survive even that long, but it’s likely Zara would see something very like that. She might well be faced with the choice of shooting people outside the fort so that those inside can survive.

  The vision feels very real. As if it’s somehow invaded this office. The cold clutches at her heart.

  She shivers.

  “This is unacceptable, Ministro Sánchez,” she says. “If the case I’m bringing against Newyan for the attack by the customs ship Duhalde is not registered and running before the Terran Commission of Enquiry stops all cases, then Xian will not trade with Newyan.”

  “Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, Delegate Hwa, but Xian has ceased all trading already, following the proclamation by Captain Desud.”

  “Xian has suspended trading, pending our enquiry into the circumstances of a ‘pirate’ ship within your claimed jurisdiction which attacked and destroyed the courier ship I arrived in. A suspension which will continue for as long as there is no Xian-led case to determine whether it is safe to trade with this system or not. That includes pirates and the actions of the Duhalde. You may be assured that the Commissioners will not resolve this to Xian’s satisfaction within a timescale which your markets will understand.”