Read A Night Without Stars for Free Online Page B

won’t be sixteen ships they send next, it’ll be sixteen thousand.”
    “I thought you said Ursell was ruined?” Slvasta said.
    “It is.”
    “So surely the ships we’ve just defeated are all they can send?”
    “No,” Laura told him firmly. “What they’ve sent is just what they could put together in a hurry. The Prime that are left back on Ursell will expend whatever is left of their resources to transfer themselves here. They know they can survive and expand again on Bienvenido.”
    “But the Fallers—” Javier began.
    “What? They’ll save us?” she asked scornfully. “Even they can’t stand against the Prime. No, this is something that must be done.”
    “All right. Just…be careful,” Slvasta said.
    “I always am.”
    They continued to look through the gateway as the bombs’ devastation slowly cleared, the devil’s light draining from the sky above Tothland. The firestorms raged below them, pumping dense smoke into the tormented air. Then the next two trolleys were being wheeled into the crypt by the same technicians who’d delivered the atom bombs.
    The floaters were another part of
Vermillion
’s cargo that had lain undisturbed since the landing. Like the gateways, floaters also generated wormholes, but they were intended to support the new colony’s burgeoning manufacturing industry rather than provide transport. Slightly smaller than the CST BC5800d2s, they were designed to be dropped into a gas giant’s atmosphere, where their force fields would expand, acting as a buoyancy system so their altitude could be selected with a good level of accuracy. That was necessary in a gas giant, where the atmospheric density meant the chemical composition was enormously varied, from almost pure hydrogen at the uppermost levels to complex hydrocarbons at the bottom. When the floater reached the required strata, its wormhole would open directly into a refinery, and a near-infinite supply of hydrocarbons would rush in, ready for conversion into whatever products the burgeoning colony needed.
    The first time she saw them still in their protective transit shells, she’d thought she could use them to assist Bienvenido’s petrochemical era, providing combustion engine fuel without the need for oil wells and shale mines. Then she’d hesitated, wondering if she could skip that entire stage by going directly to fusion and high-density batteries—and cut out decades of pollution. It was a good problem to have, taking her mind off the Faller threat and Slvasta’s despicable regime.
    The weapons technicians had to turn the floaters sideways to get them through the crypt’s arched doorway. They were cylinders four meters in diameter, and two deep, with a concave center on one side. The casing was a gray metalloceramic mottled with turquoise blemishes, as if it were a living carapace. They’d been relatively easy to restore, with less component degradation than the gateways. She supposed that was due to the tough environment they were designed to work in.
    Her u-shadow established a link to both of them, and interrogated their smartnets to run a final systems check. Like the CST BC5800d2, they were powered by a direct mass energy converter that could be fed by the superpressurized atmosphere they were immersed in. Exovision displays showed her they were fully functional.
    She stared at them as the trolleys came to rest. She’d done good work, aided by information from the ANAdroids.
So no reason to delay, then.
Bollocks.
    “All right then,” she announced. “Let’s do this.”
    “And there’s no other way?” Javier asked.
    “No.”
    “You would kill an entire world?”
    “Sonny, it’s us or them.”
Again.
    Slvasta held up a hand and gave Javier a sharp glance. “Laura knows what must be done. Without her…” He smiled ruefully. “It’s just the risk. Please allow me to send some marines through with you.”
    “They wouldn’t be any help,” she said. “But thanks anyway.” Her u-shadow