A Night Without Stars Read Online Free Page A

of explosions on the surface had been visible across interplanetary space.
    Standing in this very crypt she and the observation team looked down on a planet swathed in a thick layer of dingy gray clouds. It wasn’t really H-congruent anymore, though it must have been centuries ago. Through the occasional gaps in the swaddling vapor they’d glimpsed a desolate landscape of brown semi-desert littered with wrecked towns. Background radiation was high—the inevitable result of nuclear weapons being detonated all over the planet. And the radio picked up a constant high-frequency
click click click
signal amid the heavy static. Something was still alive down there. They’d transmitted a message toward the source—a standard welcome sequence, devised by ancient Commonwealth alien contact specialists, and stored deep in her lacuna. And they got an answer back—a linguistic code also stored in her lacuna. A lot of red symbols had erupted across her exovision that day, for it was a species the Commonwealth knew well.
    The Prime: the living embodiment of ruthlessness, with a single evolutionary imperative—to constantly expand. To the Prime, all other life-forms were a threat to be exterminated.
    Just as they were about to be exterminated now, if Laura’s desperate plan failed.
    “Ah, bollocks,” Laura muttered under her breath. “Here we go.” She went to stand alone in front of the wormhole. Her u-shadow sent a code to the ancient machine’s smartcore and schematics opened across her exovision, giving her a status review of the wormhole’s systems. It was entirely self-contained, powered by a direct mass energy converter. There had been plenty of component decay in the three thousand years it had lain here undisturbed, but by cannibalizing the other four BC5800d2s she’d gotten this one operational again—even if it was a bit quirky.
    She ran through the exovision displays, checking there weren’t too many amber warnings. Satisfied, she loaded in coordinates.
    “Stand by,” she told everyone.
    The four-meter circle of Cherenkov radiation was abruptly contaminated by serpent shadows. Then the haze cleared. The wormhole terminus was poised two thousand kilometers above the Fanrith continent, looking directly down. Laura’s exovision displays showed her that the terminus was juddering, which always happened to an open-ended wormhole; it needed to be anchored to be completely stable. But the movement was minimal, a few centimeters at worst. Looking through the opening she had an excellent view out over the landmass lying twelve hundred kilometers west of Lamaran, Bienvenido’s major continent. Roughly oblong in shape, it straddled the equator, with a desert dominating a third of the interior. Dawn had reached its eastern coastline, shading the ground a pale ocher, fringed in the dark green of native vegetation. Thin clouds scudded slowly across it.
    Laura was very aware of the awed silence behind her. “Observers,” she called. “Front and center, please.”
    Five young officers with perfect eyesight hurried forward. The vista was slightly fuzzed by the wormhole’s integral force field holding back the vacuum, but despite that, nine points of light were visible, descending slowly into the atmosphere. The exhaust was a high-temperature hydrocarbon that was extremely radioactive. Laura thought it might be some kind of nuclear gas core rocket.
    They’d tracked the Prime spaceships for six weeks, ever since they launched from Ursell. The ships massed about two thousand tons. Not huge then, but big enough to carry a significant threat. The Ursell Primes’ technology certainly wasn’t up to Commonwealth levels, and they didn’t have force fields—which meant Bienvenido’s more primitive forces stood a chance against them. A small one.
    “They’re well below orbital velocity now,” she said, checking the vector reading from the terminus. “The descent trajectory is effectively vertical. Mark them.”
    The