A Threat Among the Stars

by Mark Henwick

  “How do you know?” Yion says.

  “We’re wasting our time,” Natalia snaps. “We can’t believe anything she says.”

  “Get me out of the city, to the road up to the sierras, just past the checkpoint, and I’ll change your mind,” I say. “Kat is waiting there for me.”

  Silence.

  Yion believes me. Natalia is still clinging onto the idea of a Resistance.

  “Why do you need us?” Yion says.

  “Because the Nightwatch took my ID when I came in, this morning.” I look across at the old clock tower on the other side of the plaza. “I can’t get back out through a checkpoint. To make it even better, in another hour they’re going to be looking for me.”

  “Why not hide here? Why not get Kattalin inside the city? Why is it so important to get out?”

  “Because I have to get to Iruña.”

  I haven’t explained what we have in the backpacks and all the detail about why it will make the difference when I present the data to the Enquiry.

  Predictably, that’s where Natalia goes next. “What’s it you’re going to do? What’s so important about being in Iruña?”

  “It’s vital that it’s kept secret,” I reply. “If they find out about it, they may be able to stop me. If I get to Iruña, there’s a chance—”

  “We wouldn’t betray—”

  Yion puts a hand on her arm. “We can’t guarantee anything, Natalia.”

  “We could if we took the city back!”

  “You’d take it with hundreds of deaths, and you wouldn’t even keep it until next summer. What other weapons would you have apart from hunting rifles and whatever you can take from the police?”

  Natalia rights her chair and sits back down, glaring furiously at the tabletop.

  “We can’t sit here and do nothing,” Yion says.

  “No. I’m not asking you to.” I take a deep breath. “I’ll leave you some specialist apps that break through the isolation software that the Hajnal have implemented. You’ll be able to talk to me and some friends of mine. They may be able to offer information and advice. They’ll work to put you in touch with other cities, so you can co-ordinate what you do.”

  If I fail.

  I don’t say that, but if that happens, then maybe a coordinated rebellion across the whole of Newyan will overwhelm the ability of the Hajnal to respond.

  But the cost in lives...

  I can’t think about that.

  I get out my pad and start preparing a transfer.

  “Is that it?” Natalia asks.

  “No,” I say. “I’d like you to find out what the police are doing with the people they’re collecting in trucks. I’d also like evidence of the way the police are behaving sent to my friend in Iruña—video and photographic evidence. If we have enough of that, and it’s as bad as I think it is, it’s possible the Enquiry will decide to impose martial law with Terran Marines whether I get through or not.”

  Natalia opens her mouth to object about the Terrans.

  “Which would you prefer?” I snap at her. “The Nightwatch or Terran marines?”

  She shuts up.

  I link up with Yion’s pad and transfer Hwa’s apps and the sites I use to communicate with her.

  I send her a hasty message telling her to expect news from the friends I’ve met here and then slip the pad back down my pants.

  Yion is staring wide-eyed at the comms routes Hwa’s tools have opened for him.

  “I have to go,” I interrupt him. “I have to get away. If you can’t help, you can’t, but I don’t want a showdown with the Nightwatch in the Plaza Mayor.”

  Yion leaps up. “We’ll get you out. Come on.”

  He leads us out of the library, past the security guard—who studiously ignores us—through the big glass doors and into the plaza.

  It’s getting near lunchtime. The Cabezón I knew before would have had people thronging the streets, out to pick up snacks from the shops and stalls. Today, it’s nearly empty. The people who are out are hurrying. They don’t look around. Everyone has their head down.

  Yion takes my arm and pulls me toward a small street, away from the police.

  We’re no more than half a dozen paces down the street when a shadow looms behind us. Yion gasps and I feel him go tense beside me.

  “We’ll just keep walking nice and calmly, like we’re a group of friends, or this knife will be twisting inside your liver.”

  Chapter 41

  Zara

  “Talan! He’s a friend.”

  “Hmm.” She doesn’t sound convinced, but she slips the knife back into a sheath inside her jacket. “He shouldn’t have been grabbing you like that, then.”

  “He knows where we’re going and we’re in a hurry. We were going to find you.”

  There’s movement in the plaza behind us.

  “Come on, let’s keep walking.”

  While Talan had been saving me from Yion, a pale but determined-looking Kat was making sure Natalia didn’t get away. Natalia is glaring daggers, so as we walk I make hasty introductions.

  “You’re Kattalin?” Natalia’s mouth falls open. “Kattalin Aguirre, of Company Bravo?”

  Kat bites her lip, and bends her head to hide the tears.

  “Walk!” Yion says, looking over his shoulder. “Quickly!”

  Behind us, trucks pull into the Plaza Mayor and policemen pour out of them.

  Yion’s commspad bleeps at him as he ushers us into another road, out of the line of sight from the plaza. He pulls it out and checks a message.

  “Shit. Natalia, ahead! Check the next plaza is clear,” he says.

  As she sprints forward, he urges us into a trot.

  “They’ve started a major operation. The police are rounding up anyone without ID. There’s a safe house down here. Five minutes away. We can hide you there while this goes on.”

  We don’t argue, and, once Natalia confirms the police have not yet reached the next plaza, we run across it and down the next street, and the next.

  Yion slows us down.

  “Walk now,” he says, unconsciously echoing Talan. “Calmly, like a group of friends.”

  We amble down the quiet street, trying to talk and laugh while Natalia moves ahead to unlock the door of an unremarkable town house.

  It’s basic inside, like student accommodation, but it gets us off the streets.

  It’s lunchtime, and I can feel Yion instinctively wants to offer us something to eat, but there’s no food in the house. Frowning, Talan retrieves some of the dried food the Rangers gave us and we share it out.

  A truck goes past outside, and even though we’re safe inside, none of us speak until the noise of the engine has faded down the street.

  Natalia and Kat go to the kitchen to make us tea. It seems Yion has a dwindling supply of Harantza from his old estates.

  It must hurt, every time he drinks it.

  I speak to cover the pain I can see in his eyes. “How did you get in?” I ask Talan.

  “Bribery.” She shrugs. “I saw what happened to you, so I decided we had to get in. We walked all the way around to the next checkpoint. Wasn’t the same group guarding it. They didn’t seem bothered that people didn’t have ID.”

  “And now they’re starting to round those people up.”

  Yion nods. “On my list to find out about, once we get you out.” He scratches his head. “How do you expect to get to Iruña? You can’t steal a truck; there are checkpoints on the roads as well.”

  I balance the risk of telling him and decide it’s safe enough.

  “Aircraft,” I say. “We’ll have to get out to the airfield and steal one.”

  He shakes his head.

  “It’s the mercenaries’ headquarters. It’s surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers with sensors. You won’t get within two hundred meters.”

  “Well, we have a week to get to Iruña. If we can’t get an aircraft, then we’ll have to steal an off-road truck and find some way around the check
points.” The Rangers’ vehicle would do the job, but we can’t go back to fetch it.

  “You’ll never manage it.” Yion waves his hand. “You’re visible for miles on these roads. They’ll put up an aircraft, and an hour after you stole the truck, they’d have found you.”

  “Borrow a truck?” I look hopefully at him.

  “Still have the problem with checkpoints. Your idea you can just drive around them won’t work.”

  “Have you got maps? We could work out the pinch points—”

  “I’m not going to encourage you to get yourself killed.”

  Our voices are rising. They cut off, mainly from embarrassment at ourselves, when Natalia walks back in with a tray. Kat brings a small wooden crate which she places upside down in the middle of the floor, and Natalia puts the tray down on it.

  Kat kneels by the tray and bows her head. Natalia copies her, though I’d lay good odds she has no idea what Kat’s doing.

  It’s the tea ritual, in a dilapidated house that seems to be part of some nascent rebellion in Cabezón while police are arresting people outside for not having documentation that the government hasn’t been organized enough to give them.

  Regardless, the ritual is always performed in silence.

  I slide off the grungy sofa and kneel on the opposite side of the tray. Yion, well-brought-up young man that he is, abandons our argument to join me. Talan, who has no idea about tea rituals either, takes our cue and kneels between us.

  Part of the ritual is to clear the mind. That includes clearing it of conflicts and anxieties.

  I close my eyes and breathe deeply.

  From the tiny sounds, I can hear Kat warm the leaves in the pot and then discard the water.

  That wonderful, delicate scent of Harantza fills the air. It brings such vivid memories of happier times and places.

  I smile, listening to Kat testing the aroma, then filling the pot while we remain kneeling, each bound up in our own thoughts, only linked by the scent of the tea.

  Kat pours. I open my eyes as she hands Yion a chipped mug as if it were the finest porcelain. She’s made him the honored guest, which makes me smile crookedly. We are his guests and dependent on him at the moment.

  Yion savors the fumes rising from the tea and takes a small sip.

  “Excellent,” he says.

  Kat pours us each a mug and we take our seats to savor the drink.

  The ritual is over, but none of us really wants to break the silence.

  Eventually, to my surprise, it’s Kat who does.

  “There’s another way to get to Iruña,” she says.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Are you sure about this?” I whisper five hours later.

  Kat nods, even though she’s visibly shaking.

  Time is running out. There’s a nighttime curfew in Cabezón; it starts in twenty-five minutes. Yion and Natalia have to get back to their safe house. We have to succeed here or go back with them and try something else tomorrow.

  There are people still unloading this supply train, not forty paces from us, on the other side. Groups of police stand around and watch them. We’re crouched by the last railroad car, the boxcar that is intended to carry the mail.

  There’s no mail allowed at the moment, but regulations are regulations. They say there has to be a boxcar at the end of the train for the mail, so there is.

  Kat tells us that Commander Benat had devised a system for getting people and supplies around the country using these boxcars. His second-in-command had actually recruited Kat and others down in Valdivia, and they had come up to Cabezón this way, via some railway junction called Xorio near Iruña.

  That’s where we’re heading, if we can get in. The journey will take a couple of days to Xorio, and then, if there’s no train heading into Iruña, we’ll have to walk another day or so.

  It all sounds good to me, but there’s a difference between Kat seeing someone else do it, and being able to do it herself. The railcars are connected electronically with a signal cable next to the mechanical couplings, and she’s using a screwdriver, a wire clip, a small square of conductive foil and a piece of duct tape to fool the alarm system.

  The sound of doors crashing closed has been coming from the other side of the train for a few minutes now. A distant bell sounds. At the far end of the train, I see a mechanical signal change the position of its red-painted arms. I hear the clack of the movement and a green light comes on above it.

  “Out of time. Got to move now,” Yion whispers.

  “Nearly there,” Kat hisses.

  The distant electric engine starts to spool up as the driver takes it through its test sequence. I’ve travelled by train before, but I’ve no idea how long it takes after testing before the train starts moving.

  “Kat...”

  “Got it!” she says.

  She’s broken the connector casing and worked the clip down into the unit, grounding the door seal signals against the casing with the foil. The tape holds it in position.

  “Open the door!”

  There’s no platform this side, so Talan has to lift Yion up to reach the boxcar door lock. He has a rusted old screwdriver with a wide, flat blade. As Kat promised, it fits in the simple lock. Yion twists. At that moment the train moves forward with a clank and a jerk.

  Yion drops the screwdriver, nearly overbalancing Talan as he grabs for it.

  Natalia scrabbles to retrieve it.

  With a squeal, the train stops. The driver is testing the brakes.

  Yion takes the screwdriver Natalia is holding up, slams it back in the lock and twists.

  “Open. Let me down!”

  Talan drops him back on his feet and they both heave on the sliding door.

  With a squeal that the whole station must be able to hear, the door slides open just enough.

  “Go!” I hit Yion on his shoulder.

  Talan picks Kat up and throws her inside.

  Yion grabs my hand briefly, his eyes wide, then he and Natalia are sprinting away into the gloom.

  Talan throws me in after Kat and hauls herself up, wriggling to get her backpack in.

  Inside, Kat and I push against the door to close it.

  The whole train shudders and begins to shunt forward like some enormous segmented worm. There’s banging and rattling. Shouts close by which make my heart rate spike. Whistles. A mournful howl from the engine.

  And then we’re moving, gathering speed, leaving Cabezón and disappearing into the vast night of the central high plains.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Seems too easy,” Talan whispers.

  I snort quietly and turn down the little solar lamp that is the only light we dare have on.

  We’re three hours out of Cabezón and Kat is asleep. Talan’s going to take first watch, but despite the lullaby of clacking and the gentle rocking, I’m slow in closing my eyes. Partly, it’s because Talan’s right. This does seem too easy, and if things do go wrong, we’ll be in the middle of nowhere and our options will be limited.

  Somewhere, a few hours ahead of us, there’s the small town of Orbaiz. It’ll have a comms server at the station which might be turned on. If it is, I’ll have to risk communicating with Hwa to find out what’s going on. The train is empty and there’s no reason to stop for loading or unloading, but Kat says the drivers will either replace their engine’s massive batteries for fully charged ones or change engines entirely.

  “You think this really is the last supply train?” I ask.

  “That’s what they said.”

  While we were breaking into the boxcar, we could hear discussions on the other side of the train. I have no way to estimate how much food the train delivered, but there’s clearly a huge crisis in the whole of Newyan. The Rangers hadn’t been exaggerating.

  “There must be something that’s being organized,” I say. “Hwa will know more. I’ll check the message I picked up when it’s light tomorrow.”

  Talan grunts. “It’s difficult being ou
t of the news loop.” There’s a scuff of empty mailbags as she shifts her position on them.

  Kat twitches, mumbling something.

  Her temperature seems okay, and I hope that means the infections are being eradicated, but she doesn’t sleep easy.

  I pull her closer, the way Talan used to do for me when I had terrible nightmares in the first weeks at Cardu.

  Still asleep, Kat’s fist closes on my shirt and grips it hard.

  “Not going anywhere, little cousin,” I murmur.

  “She’s tough,” Talan says. I can tell she’s smiling.

  “Natalia certainly thinks so,” I reply. “Advanced case of hero worship there.”

  Talan snorts in the dark. “Almost as bad as Kat has for you.”

  Me? I try not to laugh.

  We fall silent then, and with Kat’s body curled against mine, I eventually slip away into dreams. I dream of Bleyd and Rhoswyn and Alexis. We’re all together, arm in arm, walking along the seafront in Stormhaven. A storm is gathering. Waves rush against the sea wall, and I can feel the salt spray on my cheeks.

  Behind us, in the town, the mummers in their tall, conical masks sway through the streets to the sound of flutes and pipes. They dance and sing. Their songs say that the world has turned, the cycle has ended and the Dreamers have woken. And the voice in the deep speaks again.

  Chapter 42

  Sánchez

  Ministro Sánchez erupts, gasping, from his nightmare of blindness, suffocation and falling, to find his security chief shaking him.

  “What? What is it?” A fear, halfway between the fading nightmare and the dread of being woken like this, in the dead of night, clutches at his heart.

  “It’s Ministro Berges,” the man answers. “She’s downstairs, in your study. It’s urgent.”

  His stomach spasms. Not what he wants to hear.

  His valet is there, holding a gown for him. Hardly suitable attire for a departmental meeting, but this is hardly a suitable time for one either.

  He has no choice. He pulls himself out of bed and shrugs into the gown under the gaze of his security chief. The man’s face has become increasingly closed and distant over the last few weeks. Sánchez believes he answers first to the woman downstairs, the chilling head of Security, rather than to him.