Free A Night Without Stars by Peter F. Hamilton

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