A Shroud of Night and Tears (Beyond the Wall Book 3) Read online

  As he looked at her, knowing what was coming, a small part of him reflected on how he had come to be aboard this ship, The Flame of Tartarus, facing the uncertainty of another unknown tunnel. Back on his home planet of Gerasa, Gant had cared little for the complexities of the Core and the Republic, and his only desire had been to abscond into the mountains to climb and fly.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  He had been a wilful child, he could see that now, and as a young man he had broken the Republic’s laws more than once to feed his dependency. A thief and a liar who had stared up at the sky, desperate to leave behind the harsh life he had been born into, if only for a while—and who would take from others to do it. What had two decades in Kolyma done to change that?

  Around him the crew were now well into the process of going through pre-breach procedures. Scanner arrays, impossibly complex tetrabit minds, monitored and recorded data obtained from the breach itself, then displayed the results for even more complex human minds to parse and collate. The furore faded into a blur of white noise around him, and the familiar rituals washed over him like the swirling wind on a mountain summit.

  ‘Time to breach is seven minutes.’

  Gant caught only an echo of Fahad’s thickly accented words; in truth he barely heard the Samarkandian. He found he couldn’t bring himself to take his gaze from Papin. Do you know how many drops this is for us? he thought. I tried to count a while ago, but I couldn’t remember. Why can’t I remember?

  ‘Time to breach, seven minutes.’ It was the captain’s voice now—a selfish, arrogant man named Isaacs. ‘Mr Sawyer, is your drone prepped and in the drop-bay?’ The same symphony that Gant had heard played out a thousand times. The first time, the second, this last—all of them just the same. Their lust for the freedom of the open balanced against their fear of the unknown; the terrible risk every drop carried. We’re so insignificant and small—an insect beneath an elephant’s great foot. But here we can fly—anything is better than being locked in a cage. At least, I used to think that. Do I still?

  ‘Yes, sir. Drone is prepped and standing by.’

  Sawyer was a fair enough man, Gant reckoned. The drone pilot would often visit Gant in his cell, sharing whatever moonshine rotgut he had picked up before the trip, talking about their home planets, so far away now. Sawyer was easy enough to talk to—he treated Gant and Papin as human beings rather than criminals.

  But that’s what we are, Gant thought darkly. Criminals. A danger to humanity. That’s why we’re here.

  Sawyer had once admitted that he himself had been lucky not to get caught—that he could just as easily have been sitting in a cell right next to Gant. He didn’t say for what, and Gant had never asked. In truth, he had never cared. Sawyer didn’t really know him, and he didn’t know what Gant had done. And it didn’t matter. It might as easily have been stealing apples as committing some more serious breach of the Concessions.

  That was the dividing line between them, Gant supposed. He’d been caught.

  ‘Mr. Sawyer, you ready to tell us what she can see?’ Isaacs again, performing that same dance.

  ‘I am, sir.’

  ‘Very good. Where are our sparrows?’

  Sparrows. Gant detested Isaacs’s fatuous attempt to trivialise the risks he and Papin took, but he knew the captain of the Tartarus didn’t care much for their safety. And why should he? Gant thought. Apart from the inconvenience of needing to get a fresh drop-team from Kolyma, the loss of the captain’s ‘sparrows’ would have no effect on his objectives.

  ‘We’re here,’ Gant murmured. He turned away from his partner to see Isaacs glance at him and nod.

  ‘Strap in, everyone. Weapons free.’

  ‘Weapons free, aye.’

  ‘You think we’ll ever get used to this part?’ Gant said.

  Papin’s eyes remained fixed on the screen. ‘I doubt it,’ she said.

  ‘Why do we do this?’ Gant asked. ‘Why do we search? Take the risk? We never know what’s on the other side, so why go there? Don’t we have enough territory?’

  ‘You really care?’ she said, her tone thick with more than her usual bitterness. ‘They don’t know what’s there, what’s down on those planets, so they send us. That’s all that matters. Asking why doesn’t help us any.’

  She was always like this before a breach. Each member of the crew took the edge off the uncertainty in their own way. Papin’s was to turn to aggression. Mostly because aggression, the child of her bitterness and anger, was what lay inside her.

  He had never asked why she was sent to Kolyma—some people you just didn’t ask—and she never told. But there had always been that anger in her. He hadn’t known her before the Black Dragon runs, because she’d been interred on a different Kolyma Hand then. And they hadn’t liked each other much when they were partnered up on the Tartarus, either—not much of a foundation for a drop-team. Yet the risk they faced on the mountain was too high to not work together, and an eventual, almost grudging, respect had led to something approaching fondness.

  Or at least, as much fondness as Papin was capable of. Like so many of those in Kolmya, she was closed off, quiet. Her rage simmered beneath the surface, barely controlled. But when she focused that aggression on the rock and ice during a climb, she was an awesome sight. It was only in here, caged and prowling, that all that emotion pressed down, transformed her into something else entirely.

  ‘You and I,’ Gant said. ‘They need us.’

  She snorted and looked back at the screen. ‘We’re just bait for whatever’s down there.’

  ‘I tell myself it’s because we see more than the drones.’

  ‘You always were an optimist.’

  ‘It makes me the better climber.’

  Papin snorted again, but allowed herself a thin smile. ‘They use us because we’re expendable, Gant. You of all people should know that by now. We’re cheaper to replace than a shuttle and all the technology inside it.’

  Gant didn’t respond. Am I expendable? he thought. Of course I am. Human beings are cheap. I know that’s why they use us. But that’s not why I’m here. Anything is preferable to a Kolyma hulk. I chose to be here, Ines.

  Gant had agreed to join the drop-teams nearly a decade before. He had been seduced by their offer back then: freedom from his cell on Kolyma 714, The Hand of Retribution, in return for his apparently important skills. Black Dragon runs were intended to explore uncharted tunnels and the systems beyond them, and the drop-teams aboard deep-space Black Dragon hunters were there by invitation only.

  When the drop-teams called on Gant, he’d been young, and Kolyma had been hard. He had been coping with the nightmare by working as a rigger. His natural childhood proclivity to climb anything and everything had given him something to use as currency in the misery of the pits, so wherever the mining teams were headed, he would scout ahead on foot, scaling sheer rock and ice, seeking fault lines for the drills to exploit. It was the closest thing to freedom he’d known since the day the Caesteri came and dragged him away.

  Apparently, his skills had not gone unnoticed.

  Now he watched the breach unfold in front of them. He fought the urge to look away, pretended he didn’t wish he was back in his bunk in the darkness, away from the violent storm of colour that seethed ahead of the ship. Each tunnel was a different beast—the raw energy and savagery of the lightning, the formation of the swirling colours—but with every push into the unknown, the fear was the same. Why must we look for these places when we have no idea what lies in wait for us beyond them? Wondering every time: is this the last?

  The ship began to pitch and shudder as the lightning at the fringes of the breach eddied around it. Gant looked down at his hands, the knuckles white as he gripped the armrests of his seat. I chose to be here, he thought darkly. Chose to be dropped into the unknown. Anything to be out of my cell and out there.

  Within that illusion of freedom.

  C H A P T E R 2

  FROME, USUALLY so com
posed and laconic, was breathless. His words tumbled out in a stuttered mess. ‘Sir, you should see this.’ He gnawed his lip, blinking continuously, and Gant watched him search Isaacs’s face for a reaction. ‘Sensor data indicates three gas giants, each with more than four orbital moons, and a number of smaller planets, some also with their own moons. One of the smaller planets might qualify.’ He jabbed his finger at the screen, then turned back to Isaacs. ‘It’s the right distance from a regular G-class star. It’s within the habitable zone.’

  The bridge fell abruptly quiet, the only sounds the background hum of the drives and the symphony of machines performing their myriad functions. The crew all knew well enough what Frome’s discovery might mean. The same question hovered, unasked, on everyone’s lips: Had they found one? A terrestrial? Had they struck gold? Every one of them studied the captain, waiting to hear his orders.

  ‘Take us in,’ the captain said. ‘Keep weapons free and sensors running.’

  ‘Weapons free, aye.’

  ‘Nothing on sensors yet, sir,’ Frome said. ‘System’s clean.’

  Gant detected some uncertainty in Frome’s voice, but whether he was unsure of the accuracy of the readings he had taken, or concerned that there should be nothing at all on his scanners, Gant couldn’t tell.

  ‘I want to know the moment you pick up even the faintest signal, Mr Frome.’

  ‘Understood, sir,’ Frome said. Then more quietly, almost to himself, he added, ‘Yes, the faintest signal.’

  ‘Get your drone ready, Mr Sawyer. We’ll launch from the upper atmosphere.’

  Sawyer nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  A warning klaxon blared, and Frome shouted almost in tandem with it: ‘Solar flare heading our way, shit we’ve gotta move—’ His fingers danced furiously across his panel as his eyes darted from one to display to another, gathering information.

  ‘Give me a course, Mr Frome,’ the captain said.

  ‘Checking now,’ Frome said, the edge to his voice tight now. ‘Suggest… wait… full ahead port, three-one-seven. Now, right now!’

  ‘Three-one-seven laid in.’

  The Tartarus lurched as its manoeuvring thrusters fired, and Gant felt a punch of pressure in his back. A brilliant flash of white pulsed across the screens at the front of the bridge, flooding the room with an almost incandescent white light—enough so that Gant was forced to shield his eyes. Vibrations kicked through the hull and the ship rocked. Manuals and headsets flew from their perches and crashed onto the hollow aluminium floor.

  ‘Report!’ Isaacs shouted. ‘CMEs?’

  ‘Coronal Mass Ejections on two of the flares,’ Frome shouted.

  ‘How much solar wind?’

  ‘Maybe too much, but the atmosphere and the magnetic field of the planet still seem densely layered. Charged particles seem to be mostly dispersed, but it’s possible some radiation is getting through.’

  ‘Why the hell didn’t we get any warning, Mr Frome?’

  ‘It came too suddenly, sir. The star is kicking them out like comets. Two more since that one. It’s the first set since we arrived, but there’s no way of knowing when more might come or from what damn direction.’

  ‘Find a way, Mr Frome. I’m not going to sit here hoping those things keep missing us.’

  ‘Aye, sir.’ Frome tapped furiously at his console, searching the trajectories of the previous solar flares as another surged past in a blinding flash of white. The Flame of Tartarus waited, almost tentatively. The bridge was quiet.

  ‘There may be a black spot,’ Frome said eventually. ‘Within a geostationary orbit of the terrestrial. It should be enough.’

  ‘Do it now,’ Isaacs said.

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  Frome moved the Tartarus into a geosynchronous orbit around the equator of the terrestrial. Isaacs waited there for an hour, to be sure the position would in fact shield the ship from the pulsing solar flares, before he gave the order for Sawyer to launch his drone.

  Gant stared at the feeds from the drone’s cameras as it dropped through the upper layers of atmosphere, down through the ionosphere, and into the clean air below. In addition to the visual feeds, there were other displays that Gant only vaguely understood: atmospheric data, climatic conditions, the composition of the air. A never-ending cycle of numbers and values, constantly updating as the drone hauled in data through the mass of sensors strewn across its fuselage.

  Sawyer stood in front of the screens, his hands inside the webbed gauntlets of woven tetrabit, polymer, and canvas that crawled from his fingers to his forearms. Through them he controlled the drone. Every movement of his hands was mirrored instantly by the machine, every dive and turn capturing new images that were then fed through the cameras. At his command, it swooped down towards the cloud base and punched through.

  Abruptly, the footage became intermittent. It flickered and hissed as though the feed was being disturbed or interrupted. Through the haze of interference, Gant could make out only the vague shadow of the landscape below the clouds. The jagged outline of mountain massifs, vast swaths of what might have been forest or jungle. There was nothing more certain than that. The drone just couldn’t see enough.

  Gant’s chest kicked because he knew what was coming.

  ‘Sir, there’s a hell of a lot of interference from those solar flares,’ Frome complained from his console. ‘There’s too much residual radiation and charge from the solar wind getting through the atmosphere, bouncing off terra firma, and then being caught beneath the cloud base. The increased ionisation is interfering with the drone’s sensor array.’

  ‘Are you getting anything at all?’ Isaacs asked.

  ‘Some, but not much that’s useable. Most of the readings are control values showing the rest to be unreliable. The good news? The atmosphere’s breathable. That’s for sure. Although it’s hot as hell down on the ground—I’m getting enough readings that stack up to be able to say that.’ He turned to Gant. ‘Hot, but survivable.’

  Around the bridge, Gant could feel the nervous, almost whispered, optimism increase. A terrestrial was a rare and precious thing. Some teams searched for years before finding one; others never found one at all. Isaacs had found three in his time on Black Dragon runs. Gant wondered whether that was more luck than judgment, but regardless, Isaacs had become something of a legend among the exploratory crews. And now this. If the atmosphere of this place was breathable—if terraforming teams could work the planet in months rather than decades—this planet would be home to a new colony within a few years. And the crew would get one hell of a payday.

  ‘Okay, let’s get some images and start working out where the most viable landing spots are. Then we send in our sparrows.’

  Gant glanced at Papin. ‘Time to suit up.’

  As she nodded and unbuckled herself from her seat, Gant saw something in her face that he hadn’t seen there before. Unlike the others, Papin conveyed no sense of optimism, but that didn’t surprise him—it was her way. They were both afraid before jumps, and they had accepted that fear a long time ago. But now he saw something else, something unusual. It wasn’t fear, but something deeper.

  Why has she been so quiet on this trip? he thought. There’s nothing different about it. Yet each time they had spoken in recent days, she had been even more closed off than usual. Sometimes she didn’t even make it up to eat, and he had returned to his cell wondering what it was that was troubling her.

  He shook his head and unbuckled himself. Focus on your own job, he told himself. Let Ines do hers.

  They had chosen to jump from a shuttle a little over thirty kilometres up, in the lower layers of the planet’s atmosphere. Gant and Papin set the distance to allow themselves the maximum time in freefall before deploying their wingsuits. Miniature hydrogen thrusters positioned on their legs would give them additional flight time, keeping them in the air longer and allowing them to cover greater distances and survey the surface in more detail. Then, finally, when they had seen enough, they would deploy their ch
utes and land.

  ‘We’ll find you a place to set down.’ Gant turned to Fahad. ‘You need landing beacons?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ Fahad said, nodding. He glanced at Sawyer, then back at the maps. ‘The charged particles and photons in the solar wind might end up screwing with the shuttle’s telemetry systems. I could do with a second point of reference. Beacons would be good.’

  ‘Okay,’ Gant said. He and Papin headed down to the ready room.

  Gant had already packed his chute, unpacked it, and then re-packed it. Another blind superstition, he observed as he pulled on his pack, but it was too late to change his method now. Too many years flying and climbing to reshape old habits. For too long he’d trusted his preparations, and maybe also to luck, and been rewarded. No, now wasn’t the time to change any damn thing. He tightened the straps on the pack and tucked them away.

  The blast door to their ready room was old and creaked every time it opened. It was a sound he had grown used to, and, as with most things, Gant drew comfort from its familiarity. Yet when it opened this time, he turned to see Isaacs standing there, waiting.

  ‘You two ready to go?’ the captain said.

  Gant was surprised to see him there. The man rarely came down to the drop floor, and he had certainly never asked them if they were ready. He just expected it of them. His being there at all made Gant nervous. What do you want? he thought. You’re sure as hell not down here just to check if we’re okay. As if you give a shit.