C. S. Friedman - Coldfire 2 - When True Night Falls

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[04 feb 2002-scanned, proofed and released for #bookz]

[Version 2.0]

[Corrected and formatted by braven]

C. S. Friedman

When True Night Falls

For Michael Whelan, whose beautiful art brings

dreams to life.

The author would like to thank Todd Drunagel for

saving chapter two from computer oblivion, and Mark

Sunderlin for rescuing her from computer hell several

times. (Sometimes a world without technology can be very

appealing!) And very special thanks to Daniel Barr, for

costuming above and beyond the call of duty.

Prologue

I Can't Believe we're doing this.

Colony Commander Leonid Case lay full length upon

the damp Ernan soil, his hands clenched into fists before

him. This whole plan was insane, he thought. His furtive

departure from the settlement, his midnight stalk through

these alien woods, and now hiding in this gully like some

forest-born predator, alert for the scent of prey . . . in fact,

the only thing crazier than the way he was acting was the

situation that had brought him here in the first place. And

the man responsible for it.

Damn Ian! Damn his delusions! Didn't the settlement

have enough problems here without his adding to them?

Wasn't it enough that people were dying here - dying! - in

ways that defied all human science? Did Ian have to add to

that nightmare?

The blackness of despair churned coldly in Case's gut,

and panic stirred in its wake. He couldn't let it get to him.

He was responsible for this fledgling colony, which meant

that the others depended on him - on his advice, his

judgment, and most of all on his personal stability. He

couldn't afford to let despair overwhelm him, any more

than he could allow himself to openly vent his fury over his

chief botanist's behavior. But sometimes it seemed almost

more than he could handle. God knows he had signed on

for better and for worse, well aware of all the tragedies that

might befall a newborn colony . . . but no one had prepared

him for this.

Thirty-six dead now. Thirty-six of his people. And not

just dead: gruesomely dead, fearsomely dead, dead in ways

that defied human acceptance. He remembered the feel of

Sally Chang's frozen flesh in his hands, so brittle that when

he tried to lift her body it shattered into jagged bits, like

glass. And Wayne Reinhart's corpse, which was little more

than a jellylike package of skin and blood and pulped

organs by the time they found it. And Faren Whitehawk . . .

that was the most frightening one of all, he thought. Not

because it was the most repellent; Faren's corpse was

whole, the flesh still pliant, the expression almost peaceful.

But all the blood was gone from the body, impossibly

drawn out through two puncture wounds in the neck. Or so

the settlement's doctors had informed him. Christ in

heaven! Looking down at those marks - ragged and

reddened, crusted black about the edges with dried blood

and worse - he knew that what they were facing here was

nothing Earth could have prepared them for. Monsters

drawn from Earth's tradition, their own human nightmares

garbed in solid flesh and pitted against them . . . how did

you fight such a thing? Where did you even start? When

Carrie Sands was killed three nights later by some winged

creature that had accosted her while she slept, he wasn't

surprised to hear her bunkmate describe it as a creature

straight out of East Indian mythology. Something that fed

on nightmares, he recalled. Only this time it got carried

away, and fed on flesh as well.

Jesus Christ. Where was it going to end?

Thirty-six dead. That was out of the three thousand and

some odd colonists who had survived the coldsleep journey

to this place, to stand under the light of an alien sun and

commit themselves body and soul to building a new world.

His world. Now they were all at risk. And dammit, the

seedship should have foreseen this! It was supposed to

survey each planet in question until there was no doubt,

absolutely no doubt, that the colonists would thrive there. If

not, it was programmed to move on to the next available

system. In theory it was a foolproof procedure, designed to

protect Earth's explorers from the thousand and one

predictable hazards of extraterrestrial colonization. Like

rival predators. Incompatible protein structures. Climatic

instability.

The key word there was predictable.

Case looked up at the starless night sky - so black, so

empty, so utterly alien - and found himself shivering. What

did a Terran seedship do when it had surveyed a thousand

systems - perhaps tens of thousands - and still it had found

no hospitable world for its charges? Would there come a

time when its microchips would begin to wear, when its

own mechanical senility would force it to make one less

than ideal choice? Or was all this the fault of the

programmers, who had never foreseen that a ship might

wander so far, for so long, without success? Go outward,

they had directed it, survey each planet you come across,

and if it does not suit your purpose, then refuel and go

outward farther still. He thought of Erna's midnight sky, so

eerie in its utter starlessness. What was a program like that

supposed to do when it ran out of options? When the next

move would take it beyond the borders of the galaxy, into

regions so utterly desolate that it might drift forever

without finding another sun, another source of fuel? Was it

supposed to leap blindly into that void, its circuits

undisturbed by the prospect of eternal solitude? Or would it

instead survey its last available option again and again,

time after time, until at last its circuits had managed

whatever convolution of logic was required to determine

that the last choice was indeed acceptable, by the terms of

its desperation? So that there, tens of thousands of light-

years from Earth, separated by a multimillenial gap in

communication, the four thousand colonists might be

awakened at last.

We'll never know, Commander Case thought grimly. The

bulk of the seedship was high above them now, circling the

tormented planet like an errant moon. They had brought all

the data down with them, each nanosecond's record of the

ninety-year survey - and he had studied it so often that

sometimes it seemed he knew each byte of it by heart. To

what end? Even if he could find some hint of danger in the

seedship's study, what good would it do them now? They

couldn't go back. They couldn't get help. This far out in the

galaxy they couldn't even get advice from home. The

seedship's programmers were long since dead, as was the

culture that had nurtured them. Communication with Earth

would mean waiting more than forty thousand years for an

answer - and that was if Earth was there to respond, and if it

would bother. What had the mother planet become, in the

millennia it had taken this seedship to find a home? The

temporal gulf was almost too vast, too awesome to

contemplate. And it didn't really matter, Case told himself

grimly. The act that they were alone here, absolutely and

forever, was all that counted. As far as this colony was

concerned, there was no Earth.

He shifted uncomfortably in his mossy trench, all too

aware of the darkness that was gathering around him. It

was a thick darkness, cold and ominous, as unlike the

darknesses of Earth as this new sun's cold light was unlike

the warm splendor of Sol. For a moment homesickness

filled him, made doubly powerful by the fact that home as

he knew it no longer existed. The colonists had made their

commitment to Eden only to find that it had a serpent's

soul, but there was no escaping it now. Not with the figures

for coldsleep mortality in excess of 86% for second

immersion.

He heard a rustling beside him and stiffened; his left

hand moved for his weapon, even as he imagined all the

sorts of winged nightmares that might even now be

descending on him. But it was only Lise, come to join him.

He nodded a greeting and scrunched to one side, making

room for her to crawl forward. There was barely room for

both of them in the shallow gully.

Lise Perez, M.D. Thank God for her. She had saved his

life a few nights back, under circumstances he shuddered to

recall. She had almost saved Tom Bennet when that thing

got past the eastern fence and launched itself into the mess

cabin, and in any case she had prevented it from grabbing

anyone else, until a cook finally brought it down by

severing head from body with a meat cleaver. She was a

competent officer, always collected, she had a nose for

trouble - and she had been keeping tabs on Ian Casca for

nearly a month now. God bless her for it.

"How long?" he whispered.

She looked at her watch. "Half an hour." And glanced

up at him. "He'll be here before that," she assured him.

If anyone else had brought him out here - if anyone else

had even suggested that he should come out here, making

himself the perfect target for every nightmare beast in this

planet's ghastly repertoire - laughter would have been the

kindest of his responses. But Lise had suggested it and he

trusted her judgment, sometimes more than his own. And

Ian had to be dealt with. There was no way around that.

Case should have jailed the man when this all started, but

he had chosen to assign him to therapy instead, and now he

was paying the price for that decision.

"Listen," she whispered. "Here he comes."

He nodded, noting that though her jacket and pants were

dark enough for cover her pale skin glowed like a beacon in

the moonlight. They should have thought of that. Rubbed

her down with charcoal, or lampblack, or . . . something.

Made her dark, like him, so that they could creep through

the night unseen. Too late for that now, he thought. He

cursed himself for carelessness and motioned for her to

keep low, so that the weeds might obscure her face.

True night was about to fail. Less than half an hour now.

Case told himself that the term was a mere technicality, that

even on Earth heavy cloudcover might obscure the stars

and moon, leaving a man in total darkness - but he knew

that there was more to it than that. He had tasted its true

power once in the field, by turning off his lantern so that

the darkness was free to envelop him - a darkness so

absolute, so utterly boundless, that all the shadows of Earth

paled by comparison. The mere memory of it made his skin

crawl. By now the whole camp would be alight with

beacons, bright floods fighting to drive back the shadows of

the triple night. As if mere light would help. As if mere

walls could keep the serpent out of Eden, or prevent it from

reading their secret thoughts, from turning their fears and

even their desires against them.

As he listened for the sound of Ian's approach, he

remembered the night it had come for him, the serpent

incarnate in an angel's form. Remembered how all his fear

and his skepticism and even his innate caution were

banished from his soul in an instant, as though they had

never existed. Because what had stepped out from the

shadows was his son - his son!- as young and as healthy as

he had been ten years ago, before the accident that took him

from Case's life. And in that moment there was no fear in

the Commander's heart, no suspicion, not even a moment's

doubt. Love filled him with such force that he trembled,

and tears poured down his cheeks. He whispered his son's

name, and the figure moved toward him. He reached out his

hand, and the creature touched him - it touched him! - and

it was warm, and alive, and he knew it by touch and scent

and a thousand other signs. Christ in heaven, his son was

alive again! He opened his arms wide and gathered the boy

up, buried his face in his hair (and the smell was familiar,

even that was right) and cried, let all the pain pour out in a

tsunami of raw emotion, an endless tide of grief and love

and loss . . .

And she had saved him. Lise. She had come, and she

had seen, and she had understood at once. And acted.

Somehow she'd killed the unnatural thing, or driven it off,

and she'd dragged Case to MedOps. Barely in time. Later,

when he had regained the wherewithal to communicate, he

asked her what she had seen. And she answered, steadily, It

was devouring you. From the inside out. That's what all

these creatures do, one way or another. They feed on us.

In the distance now he could hear the low rumble of a

tram approaching, its solar collectors vibrating as it

bumped over the uneven turf. Ian. It had to be him. The

trams had proven to be dangerously unreliable - two had

exploded while being started up, and three more simply

would not work - but Ian was one of the few who seemed

capable of making them run, and they gave him no

surprises. Likewise the man's weapons functioned

perfectly, while others jammed and backfired, and as for

his lab equipment . . . the botanist lived a charmed life,

without question. But at what price?

In his mind's eye Case could see the grisly stockpile that

Lise had discovered one night, after following Ian from

camp. Small mammals, a few birds, a single lizard . . . all

beheaded or dismembered or both, and hidden beneath a

thornbush at edge of the forest. When Case had confronted

Ian about them the botanist had made no attempt to

dissemble or even defend himself, but had said simply,

There's power in the blood. Power in sacrifice. Don't you

see? That's how this planet works. Sacrifice is power, Leo.

Sacrifice is power.

The tram was coming into sight now, and it was possible

to make out the form of a man behind its controls.

Lamplight glinted on red hair, wind-tossed: Ian Casca's

trademark. In the back of the tram was something bundled

in a blanket, that might or might not be alive. Case felt a

chill course through him as he gauged the size of the

trapped animal, and he thought, Might be human. Might be.

He couldn't see Lise's expression, but it was a good bet she

was thinking the same thing.

The blood is the life, the Old Testament proclaimed.

Lise had shown him that passage in Casca's own Bible,

underscored by two red lines on a dog-eared page. He

wondered if Ian had made those marks before or after this

horror began.

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[04feb2002-scanned,proofedandreleasedfor#bookz][Version2.0][Correctedandformattedbybraven]C.S.FriedmanWhenTrueNightFallsForMichaelWhelan,whosebeautifulartbringsdreamstolife.TheauthorwouldliketothankToddDrunagelforsavingchaptertwofromcomputeroblivion,andMarkSunderlinforrescuingherfromcomputerhellseve...

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