A Night Without Stars (7 page)

He hesitated. It was definitely Corporal Jenifa; he recognized her from her file photograph. But she looked a lot younger than her twenty-two years.
Which is probably the reason she was chosen for this mission.
The sullen expression marring her features was also off-putting.

He eased himself into the seat opposite. “Anything interesting in the news?” That was the identifying phrase.

She slapped the sheet onto the table and regarded him in annoyance. “Yes, I'm Jenifa.”

Which wasn't the kind of greeting he expected. “Chaing.”

“Of course you are. Who else would you be?”

“Is something wrong?”

She rocked forward, putting her face close to his. “This is Fireyear Day, right?”

Chaing returned her gaze levelly. He wanted to issue an instant reprimand, yet undercover agents had to be given a certain amount of leeway. “Yes.”

“Plenty of people about—” She paused as a couple of students squeezed past the table. “—so no one is going to notice or care about two strangers talking in a café. Not tonight.”

“Well, no.”

“Brilliant. Your idea?”

“Yes, actually. I wanted to meet you. The information you've provided has been helpful.”

She grunted dismissively. “The information that I gathered from my job, waitressing at the Cannes Club. Waitressing! Nothing suspicious about me taking time off on the busiest night of the year, then. Right?”

“Oh.” Chaing didn't know what else to say. It had seemed clever when he'd had the instruction placed in her drop box.

“Forget it,” Jenifa said, abruptly dismissive. “I'm here now, and I've got something for you. It's about the other girls. We may have been right about the gangs here.”

“Good.” Chaing was suddenly very interested. His predecessor had brought in Jenifa to infiltrate a probable trafficking operation. The PSR didn't usually bother chasing streetwalkers; that was the job of the local sheriffs. But inevitably when humans were treated like cattle, there was the chance that they'd wind up being shipped off to a Faller nest. Fallers who took human form ate human flesh. According to the Faller Research Institute manual, it was mainly to do with body chemistry. Fallers mimicked humans in such a way that the nutrient requirements of their human-shaped bodies required the proteins and vitamins contained within real human flesh. It was instinct at an individual and species level. Fallers had evolved themselves to conquer worlds by supplanting the dominant sentient species—and what better way to speed up the process than literally consuming your opposition?

“The manager at the Cannes, he asks a lot of questions,” Jenifa said. “Stuff like where a girl comes from, her family. Basically, if anyone's going to notice them missing.”

“I would have thought that was pretty standard.”

“Yeah, but this is more. Once a girl goes to work in the rooms upstairs, she belongs to the house. She's meat to them. All they're interested in is that she keeps herself clean and attracts enough customers.”

“Right.” He nodded. There was a big Opole country regiment camp on the edge of the city. Everyone on Bienvenido was conscripted into the regiments for two years on their eighteenth birthday. It was one of Slvasta's laws, designed to make people understand the reality of the Faller threat. But with the Air Defense Force planes successfully killing eggs in the sky, and the paratroops following them immediately into the area, there was less call for the regiments to sweep the land than there had been in Slvasta's time. Which left the teenagers kicking their heels in the camps undergoing basic training. And with so many teenagers away from home for the first time, with the regimental basic pay in their pockets, the town's clubs and bars and brothels received a large never-ending income stream.

“If the answer comes back that no one cares, they work for a few weeks and then get passed on to another house,” Jenifa told him. “I've seen it three or four times now.”

“Are these other houses in Opole?”

“That's the thing. Girls working the pubs and clubs and houses move around a lot, but we all share lodgings, three or four to a room sometimes. Some of the ones that don't have connections, nobody ever hears from them again. They certainly don't come back to their lodgings.”

“Okay. The manager who keeps asking these questions, what's his name?”

“Roscoe Caden.” Her clenched hand slid over the table. “I managed to get a few shots of him for you.”

Chaing took the little cylinder of film from her. He looked at the corduroy jacket again; it was PSR-issue, bulky to disguise the lump of the camera mechanism sewn in just behind the long, broad collar. All the buttons were shiny black so as not to draw attention to the fact that the top button was actually a lens. The right-hand pocket contained the end of the shutter release cable, allowing the wearer to take a photo without anyone seeing. “If Caden is just managing girls at a club, he's not the top man. Do you know who he takes orders from?”

“Not really. But the name that keeps coming up is Roxwolf.”

“Roxwolf? They were hunted out of this part of Lamaran over a millennium ago. Nasty beasts; their packs will gang up on just about anything in the wild. I think you still get them in the east.”

“Whatever. That's the name he goes by. He's Opole's biggest gang boss, by all accounts; has interests in every underground activity.”

“And where do I find him?”

“I don't know. Nobody does.”

“So how do they all get their instructions?”

“No idea. Could be Eliters with their links; they can do private ones.”

“Possible,” he mused. That ability to communicate unheard and unknown was one of the reasons the PSR mistrusted Eliters so badly. Somehow he couldn't imagine Eliters helping Fallers. But her comment was typical of PSR officers in the radical-monitoring division, so he let it slide. “Anything else?”

She gave him a cynical grin. “You're hard to please.”

“I do my best.”

“There's a new girl in the Cannes, Noriah. Just a waitress for now, but she's a runaway like I'm supposed to be. Caden has started his getting-friendly routine with her. Normally he worms his way in, then puts the pressure on to force new girls upstairs if they're pretty enough. Noriah ran from her co-op farm. She fits the nobody-cares profile. Might be worth putting her under observation.”

“Right. Where's she staying?” He tried to think which officers he could request to watch Noriah. There were enough resources at the PSR office—once you'd gone through the paperwork to liberate them from their desks. Just the thought of that made him weary.

“The Mother Laura Hostel on Old Milton Street, same as me.”

“Is Caden showing an interest in you?”

“Don't worry about that. I can handle myself.”

I'm sure you can.
“What does Noriah look like?”

“Develop the film. You'll see.”

“Thank you. This is good work.”

“Be sure to write that on my report.” She got up and shrugged the jacket around her shoulders before walking out.

Chaing put the reel of film in an inside pocket on his own jacket and zipped it up. If he took it back to the PSR office now he could get it developed and printed inside an hour.

They came for Noriah two days later. Chaing was still setting up the surveillance operation. All he'd gotten after filling in a mound of forms was three extra officers in addition to Lieutenant Lurvri, his junior partner. It was ridiculous! You couldn't mount total coverage on someone with just five people.

“Then find me useful intelligence, and I'll give you a bigger team,” Director Yaki had said simply when he'd gone up to her office to complain.

So he and Lurvri had spent the morning setting up a field office over a hardware shop in Old Milton Street that was opposite the Mother Laura Hostel. The family who held the shop's state enterprise license cleared some space in their storeroom for the PSR officers, who sat on fold-up chairs by the grimy window, watching the hostel's entrance.

Noriah's photo was pinned up on the window frame, next to the camera with a long telephoto lens they'd aimed at the hostel's door. She was a slight girl who claimed she was fifteen, though Chaing had his doubts she was that old. Her thin face was almost lost in the center of a massive frizzy ball of ebony hair.

According to Jenifa, her routine was a simple one. Noriah slept at the hostel until midday, then took a tram into town, sometimes with another girl from work; a couple of times it had been Jenifa. She had lunch at a cheap café, then took a look around stores before going back to the hostel to change for work. Another tram to the Gates, and she'd be in the Cannes Club by six. Her shift finished at four in the morning, when she took a tram back to Old Milton Street.

“Not much of a life, is it?” Lurvri said as they lugged their equipment cases up the stairs to the storeroom. “What the hell did her parents do to her that she'd want this instead of the farm?”

Chaing shrugged. “It's boring on a co-op farm. Kids want action and excitement. Always have.”

“I'd never let any of mine sink to this.”

Chaing suppressed any idea of commenting on Lurvri's parenting skills, or even on his relationships in general. Lurvri was an Opole local, fifty-seven years old, tall with wiry limbs and a bald head—shaved meticulously twice a day. He was now on this third marriage, and had to support five children from the first two. His current wife had just given birth to their second, a boy. To be stuck at lieutenant at his age marked him as a by-the-book time server. Chaing had no problem with that; Lurvri wasn't particularly dynamic in his role, but he knew the city, knew everyone in the PSR office. He could even push things through its Uracus-begat bureaucracy. Best of all he was never going to question Chaing's decisions or complain.

Just before midday a van drew up outside the squat brick edifice of the Mother Laura Hostel, its diesel engine growling. For a private individual to own a van on Bienvenido they needed to have a licensed enterprise that legitimately required one—something that involved hauling around a large quantity of goods. Even then, getting a purchase authorization from the county transport office was difficult, and normally involved an envelope stuffed with cash changing hands.

Chaing read the side of the van. “Devora Fruit Nursery. Odd, there's no greengrocer on this street.”

“Never heard of them,” Lurvri said, writing it down in his notebook. “I'll check it out.”

“Well, well, look who it's delivered,” Chaing said happily. The passenger door opened and Roscoe Caden got out. He was a sturdy man, wearing a brown jacket, his curly graying hair kept in place by a black leather cap. He looked both ways along Old Milton Street and went into the hostel.

“Let's go,” Chaing said, and snatched up the camera.

It was Lurvri who'd found them their transport in the PSR's garage. A small van similar to the one Caden was using, but older, a drab gray body with rusting edges. The city's water utility logo was painted on the doors. Chaing was more than satisfied; there were always dozens of them scuttling around the city's roads.

Lurvri drove; he knew the streets a lot better than Chaing. He had to adjust the choke as he kept turning the ignition key. The engine fired at the fifth go, then something made a terrible grinding sound.

“Crudding clutch,” Lurvri grunted, and pumped the pedal twice before shoving the gear stick forward. The van crawled out of the alley and paused at the junction with Old Milton Street. They didn't have to wait long. Caden emerged from the hostel, his hand clamped around Noriah's arm. She didn't look scared; more like defeated, Chaing thought.

Caden opened the doors on the rear of the van and got inside with Noriah. The doors were closed, and the Devora Fruit Nursery van drove off.

After another fight with the clutch, Lurvri started after them. The first few hundred meters were difficult. Apart from cyclists and a couple of tuk-tuks loaded up with boxes, there was no traffic on Old Milton Street. Then they were out into the wider, busier streets of the city center, and more vans were driving, along with trucks and a river of tuk-tuks caught up in their eternal fist-shaking battle with cyclists, both of whom knew the right-of-way was theirs and theirs alone. Trams rattled along the center of the wider streets, sparks flashing from their spindly pantographs overhead.

Lurvri kept back about fifty meters, surging forward or dropping back depending on how many vehicles got between them.

Chaing searched the dashboard. “Do we have a radio? We could do with some backup.”

“You're kidding, right? The transport manager got this van from the impound park. The sheriffs nabbed the utility guys using it to carry narnik wads around the city. It's not an official PSR vehicle.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Better for us. The gangs know all the official vans and cars in Opole, even the unmarked ones. They also monitor the sheriff radio bands.”

Chaing wanted to dispute that but held his tongue. If Noriah was being taken to a nest, then it was likely Caden was a Faller. Having the PSR assault squad on call would be comforting.

“I don't think they know we're following,” Lurvri said. “He's not trying any maneuvers.”

They were heading north along Dunton Road, a dual carriageway lined with ulcca trees that would take them to the Yokon Bridge over the river Crisp. There were fewer bicycles here, and a lot more commercial vehicles—larger trucks hauling freight in and out of the warehouse district. The Devora Fruit Nursery van slotted in behind an empty coal truck, and Lurvri stayed in the outer lane, keeping its taillights in sight. Dunton Road curved around to run parallel with the railway tracks. Chaing could see the big marshaling yard up ahead, merging into the docks whose tall iron cranes stood guard over the wharves that extended for more than three kilometers along the river.