A Night Without Stars

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Troopers opened the lorry doors. Faustina peered eagerly into the gloomy interior. ‘Up you go,’ she told one of her assistants.

  A big forklift truck rolled up to the tailgate, the long prongs sliding slowly inside. The assistant inside waved directions to the driver.

  ‘Director Stonal,’ she said. ‘This is all very exciting.’

  ‘I thought you’d enjoy it,’ he said.

  ‘And it’s been inert since it landed?’

  ‘Completely. Apart from the protection layer, of course.’

  ‘Yes, that sounds like a Commonwealth force field. So it is still active. There’s a functioning power generator inside, and also a computator of some kind which governs its systems.’

  ‘Well, yes. We think it might have brought someone to Bienvenido.’

  ‘Really. Who?’

  Stonal almost smiled at the offhand question. Faustina hadn’t even looked round as she asked. She was only truly interested in science. People, politics, they couldn’t hold her attention like machines and electrical circuits. It made her ideal for her job. He had personally approved her appointment sixty years ago, bringing her over from the Varlan University mathematics department. She had an exceptional mind, but on campus she would never have risen further than a tenured professorship. He didn’t need someone who could play the academic advancement game, or who had Party contacts – just someone who was focused on the job.

  The advanced research department wasn’t huge, but in those sixty years under her leadership it had produced a steady trickle of results. And he had no worries anything she discovered would leak to the Eliters. The world outside her domain simply didn’t register with her.

  ‘A child, we think,’ he said. ‘One of my people is tracking her.’

  That, at least, got her attention. ‘A child? Isn’t that an odd thing for the Commonwealth to send to Bienvenido?’

  ‘Very.’

  The forklift truck started to move away from the tailgate. Stonal watched Faustina suck on her lower lip in anticipation. The space machine slowly emerged. In the glaring electrical lights, its sleek fuselage shone with a pearly sheen. Back in Naxian valley, the regiment engineers had built a sturdy wooden frame around the cylinder, allowing the crane to hoist it up. The forklift’s prongs had slipped under the planks, but the weight of the contraption was almost enough to topple the truck. A big flatbed trolley was hurriedly shoved into place, and the crate lowered onto it.

  ‘Superb,’ Faustina said. She beckoned one of her assistants over. The man was carrying several electrical boxes with silver aerials sticking out like strange insect antennae. ‘It’s not broadcasting in any spectrum,’ she said, studying the dials on the boxes. ‘And it flew supersonically, too, the Air Force said?’

  ‘So they said, yes,’ Stonal agreed. ‘They tracked the sound it made.’

  ‘Interesting. It’s not very aerodynamic, is it? Those bulbous ends might make atmospheric entry easier than a blunt surface, but I can’t believe that’s their purpose. There isn’t an aero-surface of any kind. What was the size of the impact crater?’

  ‘There wasn’t really a crater, more a scar in the earth. It slid along, like an airplane landing badly.’ He held up a briefcase. ‘I have photographs of the landing site, measurements the engineers took. Anything we could think of, really.’ He glanced at the technician who was now waving a Geiger counter around the cylinder. ‘We checked that, too. No radioactivity.’

  ‘Interesting. Space is full of radiation, solar-wind particles, high-energy electromagnetic waves from the sun. Any surface exposed to such a bombardment should have residual traces. Liberty capsules certainly do.’

  ‘The force field protected it from radiation?’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’ She finally turned to face him. ‘So what do you want my department to analyse?’

  ‘All of it.’

  ‘Really. Not asking for much, are you?’

  Stonal gave a modest shrug. There were few who would dare talk to him like that, which was why he respected the science chief. ‘I need to know what it’s capable of.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  A small tractor was coupled to the trolley, and began to tow it into a tunnel at the back of the stable. Stonal and Faustina walked behind it. After twenty metres the tractor turned off down a side corridor, which soon became a ramp spiralling down.

  The lower level of cellars had vaulted ceilings just as high as the palace’s state rooms above. Stonal always felt slightly uneasy down here. In part because of all the dungeons he’d been in, supervising increased interrogations. But this subterranean area of the palace was where the Captains had stored the Commonwealth machines that survived the landing – the core of the old order. And then there was the wormhole generator.

  The tractor rolled slowly into the big brick-walled crypt where Faustina did so much of her work. It was the site of Mother Laura’s triumph and sacrifice. Stonal had seen the old black and white photographs of the day Bienvenido defeated the Prime, with the Fanrith map table surrounded by junior officers, their poles moving squadron models to intercept spaceships; trestle tables of telephones and radio equipment. Armed guards stood by the doors, trolleys with Bienvenido’s first crude atom bombs in a line before the eerie open wormhole. Slvasta himself had been there (he was the one who showed Stonal the super-classified photos), and his friends and fellow heroes were all present and correct – Javier, Yannrith, Andricea. A pivotal moment in history.

  Today the crypt was very different. The wormhole still stood at the far end, unmoved since Mother Laura had shut it down. But not inert; its force field still encased it, like a layer of clear crystal stronger than the toughest steel, preventing any kind of analysis. The trestle tables had long gone, replaced by lab benches covered in strange chunks of machinery, analysis instruments, and chemical arrays. Half of the science division’s investigatory power was devoted to analysing chunks of Tree that were either held in metal clamps or hanging inside tanks full of liquid. They were splinters that had come whirling out of Treefall explosions to crash onto Bienvenido. Stonal always thought they looked like tarnished quartz, though Faustina assured him they were far more complex than that. They’d discovered channels of different molecules running through them, like seams in ore. Some conducted electricity, although most didn’t.

  ‘It’s not the same as the Commonwealth’s solid-state circuits,’ Faustina had explained once. ‘They have different properties. One day we’ll understand them. Once we have more refined instruments.’

  Stonal had made no comment. Section Seven’s advanced science division had a lot of leeway when it came to researching and utilizing new technology, but he had to impose limits. Unrestricted technology had too much potential to impact on Bienvenido society, betraying all they had achieved for themselves. It was everything Slvasta had warned them of. To this day, Democratic Unity’s core policy was to keep Bienvenido society stable, which meant very little industrial or technological development was licensed.

  To remind him of the danger, right in the centre of the vault, a new section of clean white flooring had been laid half a metre above the old stones – a perfect circle that always made him think of a club’s dance floor. Sitting on it was the exopod which had brought Mother Laura safely to Bienvenido. It was a spherical space capsule only slightly larger than a Liberty command module, but oh so different in terms of capability. Nearly half of the fuselage had been gingerly removed to lie carefully on the floor, each bit in a precise relationship to the others, like mechanical orange segments peeled from their technological core. Some sections were original access panels, while other parts had been carefully cut away. The sophisticated machinery and electrical systems underneath had also been dismantled and extracted, forming a second jigsaw ring around the exopod. Each piece had a printed label, with an index and a brief description of the function it performed (where known).

  The tractor left the space machine’s flatbed trolley next to the exopod floor, an
d trundled out of the crypt. Both large doors swung shut behind it with a loud thud; the bolts were thrown.

  Faustina gave her new prize a thoughtful look for a while, then picked up a large screwdriver from one of the benches. She bent down to examine the wooden frame it was resting on, wincing as her joints protested.

  ‘About a centimetre and a half clearance,’ she muttered. One of her assistants started writing on a clipboard. ‘See the gap?’ she asked Stonal.

  He bent down beside her. There was a clear gap between the space machine’s surface and the wood, as if it was floating. Faustina poked the gap with the tip of the screwdriver. The slim edge was unable to get through.

  ‘Invisible glass or solid air,’ she muttered, climbing up again. ‘Take your pick.’

  He glanced over at the imposing wormhole generator. ‘Same as that, then?’

  ‘Yes. And the wormhole force field has remained functional for two and a half centuries. The Commonwealth build their machines to last.’

  ‘So what’s your first step?’

  ‘You tell me what you want me to do. How much damage do you want to risk? We know the wormhole force field is strong enough to resist an atomic explosion – from a distance. Slvasta himself witnessed that, when the Prime were detonating them all around Mother Laura.’

  ‘So there’s no way we can break through to find out what that thing is?’

  ‘Everything has a breaking point, director,’ she said archly.

  It surprised Stonal. He’d never heard her say anything remotely ambiguous before. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘A nuclear explosion up close might do the trick.’ She grinned at his disapproving frown. ‘But instead of a uniform blitz of energy, we can concentrate our assault on a tiny area, perhaps a centimetre across. We need to puncture it, not vaporize it. This is not something we’ve ever attempted with the wormhole.’

  ‘Of course not. No Section Seven director is going to be responsible for the wormhole’s destruction – it was Mother Laura’s last gift to us. My dear father assumed she left it active as a warning not to meddle with the other planets again. What sort of assault were you thinking of?’

  ‘We’ll start with a simple electrical discharge and monitor the effects, if any. Next, a thermal lance, perhaps. Personally, I would like to use the maser beam we developed. That can emit a great deal of energy on a small area.’

  ‘I remember,’ he said.

  The maser projector had been impressive, derived from one of the exopod’s sensor instruments; but he and the security cabinet had vetoed making it available to the regiments. It required too much power to be truly portable, and the Gatling guns could smash a Faller egg apart for a fraction of the cost. There was also the problem of what else masers could be adapted to once factories became accustomed to producing them. Spinoffs, Faustina called such unpredictable consequences.

  ‘I can probably get you permission to use the maser again,’ Stonal told her.

  ‘Thank you, director,’ she said. ‘I’ll need to modify the weapon when we remove it from storage. We did some theoretical work on increasing its power rating.’

  ‘I’m sure you did. I will speak to the prime minister about it right away.’

  ‘In the meantime, we’ll see what we can do with passive scans,’ Faustina said. ‘Now we know how to activate most of the exopod’s sensors, it might be able to reveal some of the space machine’s secrets to us. How’s that for irony?’

  ‘Ironic indeed,’ Stonal agreed. Again he had that little feeling of unease. She was talking about machines they knew practically nothing about other than how to switch them on. ‘I don’t need to tell you to be careful, I’m sure.’

  ‘Hmm?’ Faustina was staring at the smooth surface of the Commonwealth machine, practically oblivious to him. ‘No, no, we’ll be very careful,’ she said absently.

  Stonal made his way back upstairs through the maze of service corridors and grand cloisters until he reached the second floor of the palace’s state wing. After the revolution, there had been a big debate among Democratic Unity over razing the whole place to the ground. Practicality won out, pitched as sentiment. Tens of thousands of workers have spent three millennia crafting the most impressive building on Bienvenido; smashing it down would be insulting their memory and achievement.

  A senior aide ushered him directly into the prime minister’s study, walking him through the antechamber full of officials and politicians who started to glare at his privileged progress until they recognized the slightly stooped figure in the grey suit. The study was always too bright for Stonal’s taste, with tall arched windows letting in a flood of sunlight which glared off the white marble floor and walls. He had to squint as he walked the length of the ballroom-sized chamber. Overhead, big eight-blade fans turned slowly as their electrical motors whirred, stirring the warm air.

  All the glitz and finery of the Captains’ era had been stripped out of the palace during the revolution, with every one of the family’s possessions redistributed to Varlan’s poorer citizens in an inspired public-relations exercise. So the plinths in the alcoves where the busts of past Captains used to sit now held Faller skulls aloft, and the paintings on the wall depicted crowd scenes from the revolution itself, along with squadrons of aeroplanes shooting at Falling eggs, and hydroelectric dams in various stages of construction.

  Prime Minister Adolphus sat at a broad desk at the far end, surrounded by a cluttered nest of bookcases and cheap metal filing cabinets. It always made Stonal think of a boy living in an adult room, trying to comfort himself with familiar furniture from his own bedroom.

  Adolphus pushed aside the pile of files he was reading, and stood up. At seventy-nine he already had the posture of a hundred-and-fifty-year-old, and he’d only held the office of prime minister for seven years. When the People’s Congress voted his affirmation, he’d clawed his way up from the local Adice party to county senator and then into the cabinet itself at sixty-two – quite an achievement, given the average age of the cabinet was ninety-eight. But he was a good public speaker, popular with the Party’s grass roots, had a strong regional powerbase in the north, and knew how to make deals and alliances, abandoning old allies with a ruthlessness which even impressed Stonal.

  A glad-handed voter being given his smile would be inspired, confident he was the right man to lead their world – whereas Stonal could see the deep worry it shielded. Even the prime minister’s rich ebony colour had shaded paler over the last couple of years. His aides whispered to the right ears that the stress of his high workload, tirelessly advocating for the people, was affecting his health; they begged him to slow down, of course, but he selflessly refused to reduce the burden he was humbled by. Stonal, who had read his private medical reports, knew what a load of crud that was.

  Terese, the deputy prime minister, was sitting patiently in front of the desk, wrapped in a colourful toga-like robe edged in gold thread. At a hundred and twelve, she was a more experienced politician than Adolphus, but hadn’t quite got the votes necessary to claim the prize when the last prime minister stepped down. The deal for supporting Adolphus gave her the chairmanship of the Joint Regimental Council as well as being the treasury’s chief officer.

  Stonal approved of that. Their power-split in the cabinet was almost equal, meaning their continual battle for supremacy limited both of them.

  ‘So?’ Adolphus asked as Stonal settled in one of the plain chairs beside Terese.

  ‘The machine isn’t doing anything. I’ve turned it over to the advanced science division to see what they can find out. But we do know it had a Commonwealth citizen on board.’

  ‘Giufucking bastards! Are they coming for us?’

  ‘No. Not directly, anyhow. It was a girl, a child.’

  ‘What?’ a startled Terese asked. ‘What’s the point in sending a child?’

  ‘One of my officers is pursuing her. He’s just reported from Letroy where an Eliter radical had taken her for safety. She might be young, but she is growin
g at an unnatural rate. Apparently she will be an adult within a month.’

  ‘Crud! Then what?’

  Stonal took off his glasses and pinched the top of his nose as he looked at her. ‘Best-case scenario, it’s Laura Brandt all over again. She’s all alone and has Commonwealth knowledge, but has to work through us.’

  ‘And the worst case?’ Adolphus demanded.

  ‘She’s some kind of scout, a prelude to their true arrival. The end of our entire society, a culture over three thousand years in the making.’

  ‘After so long, though! Why now?’

  ‘I don’t believe she came from the Commonwealth. Not directly anyway.’

  ‘How do you conclude that?’

  ‘Liberty flight 2,673. Something strange happened up there at the moment of Treefall; we still don’t understand what. But that’s when the Commonwealth machine appeared. It was photographed by the astronaut, Ry Evine.’

  Terese frowned. ‘He’s from Slvasta’s family, I remember. One of your relatives?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes. Interestingly, he’s also gone missing. Our last verified sighting is at a bank in Gifhorn. He may be trying to contact the machine.’

  ‘So he was in on this? He’s a Commonwealth agent?’

  Stonal sighed as he put his glasses back on; politicians did see conspiracy everywhere. ‘No, I believe the machine has been there all along.’

  ‘You mean since the Vermillion?’

  ‘Unlikely, but certainly since the Great Transition. Perhaps the Liberty missile’s atomic explosion knocked it out of orbit.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Adolphus said. ‘If this girl is still a child, how could it have been there for two hundred and fifty years?’