Night Without Stars (Chronicle of the Fallers Book 2)

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘Everyone ready?’ Demitri asked.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Kysandra said.

  Exovision schematics showed Florian the Discovery compressing helium from its gas cells, storing it in small onboard tanks. The propulsion fans whined loudly, holding the blimp stable as it sank towards the ground. Lights came on around the base of the gondola, shining down on the glittering snow.

  ‘Twenty metres,’ Demitri announced. ‘Picking up some microburst winds. Get us anchored, please.’

  The gondola door expanded, and ice particles swirled in. Florian watched Marek and Valeri slide down the rope ladder. He switched to the gondola fuselage sensors. Valeri stood still under the tail, running a full field function scan, alert for any nearby hostiles. Marek collected the cables that had unwound from the nose; both of them ended in field anchors – small globes of malmetal. He shoved one down into the crusty snow. Eight separate pinions shot out, curving down and round through the hard-packed subsurface ice like fast-growing roots, holding the cable fast. Marek walked thirty metres and applied the second cable’s anchor.

  ‘Secure,’ he reported.

  Florian felt the fans slowly spin down.

  ‘It’s holding,’ Demitri said. ‘Well inside stress parameters.’

  Fergus was next down the rope ladder. Florian ordered the e-m suit’s hood to cover his face. It flowed over his cheeks and chin like a dry liquid to protect him. He followed Ry down through the pool of light underneath the gondola. And – amazingly – the e-m suit did regulate his body temperature at a steady thirty-seven degrees. Air temperature was registering as minus forty-two.

  ‘Damn,’ Ry sent across the general link. ‘I wish our space suits were this good.’

  Florian looked round. There was the base of the gondola glaring above him, glittery dense snow under his feet – and nothing else. Beyond the illuminated patch, the polar night was absolute; they were too far south for any backscatter illumination from the Tree Ring. He couldn’t even see a ge-eagle, though twenty of them circled overhead.

  Paula and Fergus walked out of the light and vanished. Visual enhancement and infra-red cut in, allowing him to follow them as they moved off.

  ‘Heads up,’ Demitri announced. He dropped the first equipment case out of the gondola. Florian and the others spent the next ten minutes picking up and stacking the cargo he threw down to them.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Valeri said. ‘The drones are picking up a new radio signal.’

  Florian couldn’t help it – his stomach muscles tensed up, and he started searching round for seibears.

  ‘Where?’ Kysandra asked smoothly.

  ‘Above us,’ Valeri said. ‘One hundred and seventy eight kilometres, to be exact. There’s a Liberty capsule in polar orbit.’

  ‘No way,’ Ry muttered.

  And now Florian was tilting his head back, searching through the haze of wind-borne ice particles. His u-shadow pulled the exact coordinates from the drone, and bracketed the tiny grey dot as it slid low across the western horizon.

  ‘They’re looking for us,’ Kysandra said. ‘They must be pretty desperate to use a Liberty.’

  ‘You’d be surprised how much you can see from low orbit,’ Valeri said. ‘At one time in the twenty-first century, there were hundreds of spy satellites orbiting Earth, every nation busy watching their enemies.’

  Florian glanced at the gondola and its intense white lights. ‘Will they be able to see us? We are kind of bright.’

  ‘Let’s not risk it,’ Kysandra said. ‘Demitri, kill the lights until the capsule’s over the horizon.’

  The lights went off. Florian had to turn up his infra-red reception.

  ‘The pilot is talking,’ Valeri said. ‘She must be in range of a ship somewhere.’

  ‘We’ll get the drones looking for it,’ Kysandra said.

  ‘She?’ Ry asked. ‘Can I hear the broadcast, please?’

  Florian listened. It was a female voice amid plenty of static which his u-shadow worked to filter out, giving him a clipped conversation, typical of military types – rather, half a conversation. The drone over the Straits of Tyree couldn’t pick up the ship’s answering transmissions.

  ‘It’s Anala!’ Ry exclaimed. ‘I know her. She was next on the flight list. They must have changed her mission because of us. Giu, she’ll be pissed off about that.’

  ‘Going behind the horizon,’ Valeri said as Anala’s voice collapsed into a distortion hash then fell silent.

  ‘Okay, lights back on,’ Kysandra said. ‘We’ll have to go dark and silent every time she’s overhead. Load the orbit parameter into your u-shadows, everyone, please.’

  The gondola lights returned, and Demitri threw down the next case.

  ‘Ry, would she be an ally?’ Kysandra asked.

  ‘She’s a good officer,’ Ry said.

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘We’re ready,’ Paula said. ‘Florian, Ry, activate your force fields, please.’

  Florian did as he was told. Back when they were planning this, nobody could quite work out what would happen when a disrupter pulse struck ice. Explosion? Vapour jet? Geyser of boiling water?

  Five hundred metres away, a mellow purple-white haze flared out, forcing the surrounding snowscape into sharp focus. He could see two figures silhouetted against the aurora. Then a wide circle of snow burst upwards atop a furious blast of steam, as if a rocket motor had just ignited. Static seethed through the smog, sending weird twisters of light flickering along the plume. Lightning forks skewered out, discharging into the snowfield. Three of them lashed the Discovery’s envelope and Florian flinched, ducking instinctively as they crackled overhead.

  Then the purple radiance faded away. A few more static waves rippled through the dispersing cloud, and darkness swept back in.

  ‘That cut down about eight metres,’ Paula said, ‘but it was a low-power pulse. Second one now.’

  Purple light flashed across the snowfield again.

  For the whole flight, Paula and the ANAdroids had been studying the scans being relayed to them from the ge-eagles. They’d decided to aim for the middle of the colony starship, just behind the point where it had bent on impact. Viscount had a simple enough design, consisting of a long spindle to which various modules and compartments were attached, allowing for multiple redundancy and easy manufacture. The front – which was mainly force-field generators, regrav units and the ultradrive systems – had taken a lot of damage when it came down. From the scans, it seemed like the majority of cylindrical cargo modules that were clumped round the rear section had survived – if not still attached to the starship’s primary axis, then strewn around the landing zone before the snow and ice engulfed them.

  It took Paula three hours to tunnel down to the Viscount’s hull. Twice she had to stop for ten minutes while the Liberty flew overhead. Then there was another hour of more delicate disrupter pulses clearing a route through the clustered modules to an airlock.

  Valeri and Fergus opened a maintenance hatch next to the airlock, and spent a quarter of an hour trying to reactivate the malmetal.

  ‘No good,’ Fergus said eventually. ‘Three thousand years in the ice has screwed it completely.’

  Paula turned her disrupter pulse to the lowest power level and punched cleanly through the airlock instead.

  They followed her in, shining wide-angle torches that filled the interior with a uniform white light. Every surface was covered in a carpet of fine ice granules, creating a shimmering disorderly chamber of opalescent rainbows. Florian found it bad enough trying to keep his balance as he walked along the sloping corridor. The chromatic dazzle made it worse, and visual clues didn’t help. The corridor was clearly a radial one, extending out from the starship’s central spindle. When in flight, gravity was always oriented towards the aft end; that meant he was walking along one of the walls.

  The Viscount was dead. He accepted that at some deep instinctive level. Beneath the victorious layer of ice, the starship’s structure s
eemed almost pristine, suspended perfectly in its frigid tomb, waiting only for the kiss of warmth to awaken. But the extreme cold hadn’t preserved it. The long millennia of exposure to nothing but sub-zero temperature and darkness had permeated every molecule, bringing only extinction.

  ‘I’m concerned about cold fatigue,’ Valeri said. ‘My scan is showing diminished molecular integrity in the structure all around. The starship is fragile, so please tread lightly.’

  Florian stopped mid-step, but everyone else carried on, so he shrugged and followed, just taking extra care now to make each footfall a light one.

  They came to the end of the corridor. Three malmetal doors glimmered softly beneath their ice cloaks, opening onto the transit tubes which ran through the ship. The ANAdroids ignored them and went to work on a small hatch beside them. When the cover was removed, it exposed a neat array of slim cables and pipes worming into various plastic boxes.

  Fergus began to plug modules into the exposed electronics. Florian tried not to flinch every time sparks shot out of the ancient cables. Small wisps of smoke began to curl upwards. Several times, lights around the malmetal doors flickered a pale green-white before fading away again. He wasn’t sure, but one time he thought the malmetal itself twitched. Grains of ice drifted gently down to the floor. With that first hint that the starship might not be completely dead, he kept looking round to see if Fergus could animate anything else.

  ‘Got it,’ Fergus announced. ‘The wiring in here is so much powdered crud, but I’m shunting power into a nexus. It’s frying some processors, but a couple are tough enough to withstand the surge if I bring the voltage up slowly. Ah, here we go.’

  ‘What’s he trying to do?’ Florian asked Paula quietly.

  ‘Power up a local node. The Viscount has a distributed network, so unless there was a catastrophic data loss when it came down, the node should be able to tell us exactly where we are.’

  ‘Where we are?’

  ‘In the ship. Once we know that, we know the location of every cargo compartment in relation to us. And we have the Viscount’s complete manifest.’

  ‘Ah. Right.’

  ‘There’s considerable damage to the micronet,’ Fergus said, ‘but there are valid caches. I’m initiating the boot-up in safe-base; the software should be able to work round the damage.’

  Florian started to worry. If pushing a few millivolts through a processor blew most of it, what hope did they ever have of reactivating a Neumann synthesizer or a wormhole generator?

  ‘Got it,’ Fergus said.

  A three-dimensional image of the Viscount opened up in Florian’s exovision. Their location amid the terrific complexity of shadowy lines was indicated by a purple star.

  ‘Okay,’ Paula said. ‘That gives us HGT54b as the most convenient.’

  The cylindrical cargo compartment she nominated glowed lime-green in Florian’s exovision. He sighed. They’d have to tunnel further through the ice to reach it.

  It took another seventy minutes (with one pause to let the Liberty fly past), which he spent back up on the surface again. Every couple of minutes, the tunnel entrance would belch out a thick jet of steam which melted yet more of the wall. When he ventured back down, the tunnel wall was impossibly slick, like a glossy diamond. Demitri had to use a molecular severance rifle to break up the surface and give them some traction; otherwise they would have slid down the entire length.

  The new excavation branched from the airlock where they’d entered the Viscount, curving round parallel to the hull then angling down. It ended in the silver-grey wall of cargo compartment HGT54b. Heat and seething steam had already shredded the surface of its protective foam. Valeri and Demitri started applying power-blades to the remaining insulation, shaving off long strips that crumbled apart as they fell to the floor. Before long, they came to the metalloceramic bulkhead itself.

  ‘Fragile from cold fatigue, of course,’ Valeri said. He inserted his blade carefully and cut a neat circle about a metre and a half wide. He and Demitri gingerly eased it out.

  Somehow the blackness inside the cargo compartment was even more profound than it had been in the starship. Demitri climbed in. The other ANAdroids started handing him equipment packs.

  ‘You are probably safer sleeping in there,’ Marek said. ‘I will stind – stand watch on the surface in case any seibears show up, Faller or otherwise.’

  Florian gazed at the intimidatingly black hole again. He hadn’t even realized how late it was until the ANAdroid mentioned sleep. ‘In there?’ He wasn’t sure why, but the cargo compartment was stirring a mild claustrophobia, making breathing more of an effort than usual.

  ‘Yes,’ Paula said. ‘I don’t want us split up.’

  ‘All right.’

  Once he clambered inside, the forty-degree angle the whole starship was resting at became obvious. There wasn’t much room, which didn’t help Florian’s feeling of confinement; the cylinder was divided up by sheets of reinforced carbon grid-mesh, forming smaller subcompartments that held the cargo in place. A hexagonal-cross-section corridor ran down the centre, allowing full access. Movement was difficult, the steep angle turning everything into a half climb.

  HGT54b was carrying industrial production systems and four wormhole generators. Several of the heavier neumanetic synthesizers had broken free on impact and smashed into their neighbours in a disastrous domino effect, but that still left over forty manufacturing systems intact. They were all covered in thick protective membranes, themselves layered in ice – but not as thickly here as directly inside the starship.

  Paula and Demitri were clambering along the central access corridor, shining their torches into subcompartments, seeking visual confirmation to their field function scans.

  ‘The wormhole generators are all intact,’ Paula called out.

  The ANAdroids started setting up heaters – simple metal cylinders a metre long and half as wide. One end was an intake grille, while the opposite end had long plyplastic strings dangling like particularly feeble tentacles.

  Ry handed out meal packs. He and Florian sat on a broken metallurgical extruder while their self-grilling wrappers cooked ham and cheese toasties, and watched the ANAdroids clambering along the corridor, stretching the plyplastic strings along and feeding them into subcompartments. Once a string was in place, it expanded out into a hollow duct and stiffened into place.

  The heater fans started up with a mild hum. Warm air gusted out of the ducts.

  ‘It should take about ten hours of this heat soak to get the ambient temperature back up to zero,’ Demitri said. ‘That should help with the reactivation. I don’t want to rush it.’

  ‘Why won’t the wormhole generator work in the cold?’ Ry asked.

  ‘It was designed to operate in temperatures a lot lower than this,’ Valeri said, ‘but cold along with the time it’s been down here . . . We don’t want to take any chances. You saw what happened to the electronics in the ship. Our chances will be improved if we can get some heat in here first. Plus, it makes it easier to make repairs.’

  Florian glanced about the dark cramped space and worried what warmth would do to the frozen machinery, how expansion would shift things. He glanced at a couple of synthesizers that had crunched into each other; they weighed several tonnes each. The notion that more of them might be dislodged while he was sleeping added to his claustrophobia, and he gave up on the toastie.

  Trying to sleep now would be useless, but he was tired, so he unrolled his plyplastic mattress on top of a biochemical refiner, and lay down, wondering if he should compose a new mindscape file that might divert his anxiety—

  *

  Florian woke up when drops of cold water dripped onto his nose. All the ice in HGT54b had melted, leaving the resultant droplets clinging to every surface like persistent morning dew. He hadn’t noticed the air getting hotter thanks to his e-m suit, which had maintained a constant body temperature while he slept, but now water was running across every piece of cargo, slicking thei
r protective membranes as it formed slow runnels. The black grids dividing up the compartment were drizzling a light mist. Water was pooling at the bottom of the corridor. And for the first time since leaving the gondola, Florian could smell something: a curious bad-air scent similar to the musk of a waltan fungus.

  Overnight, the ANAdroids had rigged the inside of the compartment with lights. They’d also stripped the protective membrane off two of the wormhole generators and cleared some space around the big circular machines. The slim metal cases they’d brought with them were open, showing off an impressive collection of intricate tools and electronic gadgets. Sensor pads had been applied to the generator casings.

  ‘More – morning,’ Marek said cheerfully.

  Florian checked his time display, surprised he’d slept for more than seven hours. ‘Where is everyone?’ he asked. Only Marek, Fergus, and Valeri were left, gathered round the wormhole generators like devoted acolytes.

  ‘On the sir – surface,’ Marek told him. ‘There’s a breakfast pik – pik – pack if you want one.’

  ‘Maybe later. How are you doing with the wormhole generators?’

  ‘Warming nicely now. The pre – pro – protective membranes had cold-welded to them. Tick took some scraping to got get off. We should be able to start initializang zing in a couple of hours. Their systems seem to be mainly intact.’

  ‘Mainly?’

  ‘Yes. We knew they wouldn’t be perfectly prefect – perfect.’

  Florian glanced round the cargo compartment again. Secondary routines flashed up turquoise identifier icons across the machines cocooned inside their glistening membranes. The potential locked away in this one space was phenomenal. Some of the synthesizers were even capable of full replication, building duplicates of themselves. If you coupled this single small trove of Commonwealth technology with all the knowledge Joey had given him, Bienvenido really would be building hyperdrive starships within twenty years. And this was only one small section of the Viscount’s cargo.