‘You mean we don’t have guns inside the complex big enough to take them out?’
‘No. But the Security Directorate does have the necessary firepower, especially given the age of the Alamo Avenger force field generator design. However, you will have to wait until they arrive. Their Anshun deployment should start in twenty-five minutes.’
Wilson took another look at the display screen. He and Anna had set up their command post in a crew office which had several network systems and arrays installed, though precious little else. The walls and flooring were still raw structural panels, ducting ran across the ceiling like a pair of dull-silver serpents twined in a mating position. So far, three console screens were set up to show crude representations of the starship’s internal status, while the remaining two were being fed images from the cameras around the assembly platform. There hadn’t been a repeat of the explosion in the assessment room beyond the gateway, but that wasn’t what he worried about seeing now.
‘Are they under the perimeter yet?’ he asked the SI.
‘Most definitely. The volume of earth they are ejecting behind them has not decreased. Our best estimate already puts them one hundred and eighty metres inside the force field. They will probably surface soon.’
‘How long till they reach the gateway?’ Anna asked. Her OCtattoos had sunk into quiescence. She was looking directly at the screen which showed the camera image covering the gateway from inside the assembly platform.
‘The shortest time is six minutes,’ the SI said. ‘To derive that, we are assuming they will continue underground until they are underneath the complex buildings before surfacing. That tactic means they will not have to expend any energy breaking through the building wall force fields.’
‘Okay, let me have it straight: can the Alamo Avengers break through the gateway force field?’
‘If their original specifications have not been downgraded, our estimate is that it will take at most two shots from a particle lance to break through the gateway force field’s cohesion.’
‘Son of a bitch.’ Wilson growled it through clenched teeth. He kept telling himself that it wasn’t even dying in this body which frightened him – there was enough bandwidth in the satellite link to download his memory into a secure store right up until the last instant. No, it was being unable to defend the project from some bunch of half-assed anarchist terrorist freaks. The project didn’t deserve this; they were trying to achieve something noble and right with the starship. No piece-of-shit trendy-cause rebel outside the political process had the right to screw with that. Not to mention the time and money and – goddamn it! – lives which had been poured into its construction.
‘I can probably route some additional power from the ship to the platform’s force field generator,’ Anna said. Platinum spirals were rotating slowly round her eyes as she studied a network schematic within her virtual visual. ‘One of the niling d-sinks is partially charged. That should give us enough power to last for hours. I think I can route it through the superconductor cabling. We just have to reprogram the umbilical junctions to reverse the flow.’
‘Can you help us with that?’ Wilson asked the SI.
‘From our analysis of your resources, your power output is actually capable of exceeding the force field generator’s designated input,’ the SI said. ‘However, the generator was never designed to withstand the kind of stress inflicted from a particle lance. One Alamo Avenger could break through relatively quickly. Two in combination will require less than ten seconds.’
‘Fuck it!’ Wilson raged. ‘You have to close the gateway for us. They cannot be allowed to destroy this starship.’ He wanted to add: it’s not fair, the Second Chance deserves her shot at history, she shouldn’t die like this, not stillbirthed.
‘The fireshields erected around the gateway network are proving exceptionally resolute,’ the SI said. ‘We have so far broken three. The fourth utilizes one-hundred-and-sixty-dimension geometry encryption. It will take us several minutes to crack it.’
‘We don’t have several minutes!’
‘Our calculations are not in error.’
Wilson twisted his body to look at Anna. She was floating in front of the console, gazing at the screen which displayed the ship schematic. Her hands pressed tight against the console i-spot; gold glyptics chased slow strange patterns across the stretched skin of her forearms.
‘Is there any kind of weapon installed?’ he asked desperately.
Her virtual hands were pulling data out of the array as if by brute physical force. ‘No, sir. Nothing.’
‘Goddamnit!’ He punched at the nearest surface with his free hand, sending his body into a nasty twist, which strained the hand he was holding himself in place with.
‘Any sign of them breaking surface yet?’ He was just going to have to leave it all to the SI, and pray it could break the fireshield in time.
‘No,’ the SI said.
‘Okay. Will you please set up a store to receive the memories of everyone onboard. If you can’t close down the gateway, they’ll have to be transferred to the clinic which performs the re-life procedures.’
‘We will do that, of course. But there is now a new problem.’
Anna gave Wilson an anguished look. He could see how hard it was for her to keep going, the effort it required to stay resolute. Executive management was hardly training for this kind of situation. He would have to consider that carefully later – once they survived this. In the meantime there wasn’t much he could say to help. ‘What now?’ he asked levelly.
‘Anshun civil flight control is tracking two unauthorized spaceplane launches from an island close to the equator.’
‘What kind of launch?’
‘Unknown. But they appear to be accelerating into a retrograde orbit.’
It took Wilson a second to work out the implication. ‘They’re heading for us,’ he murmured.
‘It would appear so, yes.’
‘How long?’
‘If their acceleration remains constant, eight minutes.’
‘Have you got any idea of their size?’
‘From their radar return, they appear to be medium-lift spaceplanes. If so, they will mass around one two hundred and fifty tonnes each, unloaded.’
Wilson didn’t even try to do the math in his head. Two hundred and fifty tonnes impacting at a combined speed of twice orbital velocity . . . ‘They don’t even need to carry a warhead,’ he said. And it didn’t matter any more if the gateway was switched off or not. If the Alamo Avengers didn’t get them, then kinetics would.
Somebody somewhere really hates us, Wilson thought. Why, though? What’s the point, we will get to the Dyson Pair eventually. I’ll re-life, and by Christ I’ll fly this ship yet.
And with that the muscles in his arms locked in shock. ‘Anna! We pressure-tested the fuel tanks two weeks ago. I remember the schedule.’
‘Yes,’ she said cautiously.
‘Is there any fluid left in the tank?’
*
The concrete floor in cosmic radiation test laboratory 7D quaked slightly. Equipment juddered along benches and desks. A soft roaring sound was just audible, its volume increasing in tandem with the ferocity of the quakes. Cracks began to appear across the floor, with little splinters of concrete flaking off to jump and spin across the now unstable surface. Ceiling-mounted cameras scanned back and forth. But the only illumination in the laboratory was a pale amber emergency lighting which had come on after the complex generators had been sabotaged. It provided a poor resolution.
Seconds later, the floor disintegrated, with vast chunks of concrete whirling upwards, their molten edges throwing off glowing droplets. Beneath the torn rift a dazzling jade-white light poured upwards to blind the cameras. Small tendrils of energy followed an instant later, scratching and clawing at every neutral surface, vaporizing metal and obliterating plastic and glass.
Then the light went out. An Alamo Avenger heaved itself up and out into the flame-shrouded r
uin of the laboratory. Its head swung round to focus on its goal, casually demolishing a wall and several support pillars. Chunks of masonry and the shattered floor of the upstairs laboratory crashed down, only to slither and bounce off the armoured monster’s force field. The six legs shifted round, turning the body until it was lined up behind the head, pointing directly towards the gateway. It moved forward, slowly at first, smashing through another internal wall. Gradually it built up speed, crashing through the building as if it were nothing more than dense strands of air.
As it charged through the constructionbot maintenance centre, the floor ruptured underneath its feet. Slightly off balance, it lumbered onwards for a few metres, then stopped and twisted its head round to see if there was any threat. Impenetrable jets of dust gushed up from the new rip in the ground. Then a second Alamo Avenger pushed and forced its way out of the tunnel. The first waited until it was level, then they began their final charge towards the assessment building and the gateway.
*
The café was utterly silent as Alessandra Baron’s overawed voice announced the rise of the spaceplanes. Adam realized he was licking his upper lip in anticipation, and hurriedly stopped. The images shifted from the smouldering land around the complex force field dome to a clean graphic of the assembly platform’s orbit around the planet. In conjunction with Baron’s now sombre voice they illustrated the impending destruction. Figures in the corner of the screen counted down. They almost matched the timer in Adam’s virtual visual.
Second Chance had at most another four minutes. He took a quick look around the rapt faces of the other customers, seeing horror and fascination in equal amounts. For once he didn’t feel any guilt at what he’d done. There were no innocents in the assembly platform, no children devoid of memorycells. Not this time. This time it would be right.
Someone working for Baron’s show managed to access the microsat geosurvey observation swarm around Anshun. Thousands of tiny solid state sensors along the equatorial orbit shifted their alignment from the minerals buried far below to one specific speck of light. The assembly platform swam into focus at the centre of the screen, a giant blue-grey sphere of malmetal soaring above the clouds. Its featureless symmetry gave it a strangely organic appearance, Adam felt.
Dark lines appeared on the surface, illustrating long petal-like shapes. Adam blinked, leaning forward. They hadn’t been there a second before, he was sure. Then long, slim fantails of snow-white gas were shooting out from the spherical surface as the dark lines split open. Sunlight poured into the assembly platform, erasing the weak glow of emergency lighting; the starship’s incomplete superstructure gleamed silver-white at the centre of an expanding cloud of vapor.
‘No way,’ Adam groaned. His timer read a hundred and fifty seconds until impact.
Two plasma rockets ignited, wiping out the image in a white nova of super-energized particles. Both exhaust plumes blasted straight through the shell of folded malmetal, sending twin spears of light stabbing over a hundred kilometres down towards the planetary surface. Some of the plasma plume rebounded off the surviving structure, billowing backwards around the starship and its swathe of girders. Insulation blankets and cables lashed around as they dissolved back into their component atoms, while support girders melted away into pliable strings that stretched like hot cheese as the starship started to move away from the gateway. Component cargo pods ignited, shooting out from the stellar inferno like lurid orange comets, trailing a fluorescent haze behind them as their contents blazed.
The Second Chance began to accelerate away. Her huge body wavered at first as the programs and pilot – was it Kime himself? Adam wondered – analysed the nonsymmetric mass distribution along the fuselage. As soon as they’d mastered that, the rockets were vectored to compensate, and the starship held steady as she built velocity, heading straight up from the planet. Behind her, there was a last violent contortion amid the seething molten wreckage as the force field protecting the gateway finally ruptured. Atmospheric gas spewed out into the void, bringing with it a host of fragments from the ruined assessment room. The jet’s vigour was reduced for a few seconds as something pushed its way along the wormhole. Then like a cork from a bottle, a small force field globe burst through; it glimmered amid the debris storm as it was propelled onward by the aggressive blast of air from the gateway behind. The dark, heavy object within the sparkling bubble spun helplessly round and round as it soared away through space. Behind it, the gush of atmosphere was reduced once again. A second golden orb came through, tumbling off into the void after the first.
By now the Second Chance was twenty-five kilometres away, a dazzling elongated star ascending towards the bright constellations. The first spaceplane leapt into view. Its tremendous closing velocity meant that there was only the briefest glimpse on the screen – a streamlined silver-grey delta shape – before it slammed into the cooling ruins of the assembly platform. The explosion that erupted was indistinguishable from a small nuclear blast. As the sphere of incandescent atoms began to darken, it suddenly renewed itself as the second spaceplane pierced its heart.
A hundred kilometres above, the Second Chance was still accelerating out towards the stars.
11
Hoshe had thought that the flood of data would slow down after the first couple of days. Now, a week on from his initial request, he knew better. For shadowy creatures who lived outside society’s boundaries, there was an awful lot of information stored on the so-called big-time crime syndicates. On Oaktier, there were three main such organizations recognized by the police: the Johasie Family, an old-fashioned mafia-style network of related hoodlums, but with enough brains and lawyers to disconnect the bosses from all the activities of their street-level soldiers; Foral Ltd, a company whose board seemed to have diversified down into crime, both financial and street; and Area 37, the smartest and most elusive, whose murky empire was bolstered by legitimate businesses and, apparently, political connections. They were based in Darklake City, and for that reason alone Hoshe favoured them as the most likely suspects to murder Shaheef and Cotal. It was simple geography. Neither of the lovers had travelled outside Darklake for weeks before they disappeared. If they had accidentally stumbled on something which required their removal, then it was Area 37 who probably had the kind of resources and connections to make it happen. That just left him with a likely activity.
Just what could two innocent civilians walk into that required a response of that magnitude?
The official files on organized crime syndicates Hoshe had retrieved from the Attorney in Chief’s office contained all the previous investigations, plus the alarmingly unsuccessful court cases they resulted in. Of those, reports filed by undercover operatives and informants were the most useful. The Attorney’s office knew the major and minor players, and had a general idea of what they were up to most of the time; it was just proving it legally which was the perennial problem.
Proven or not, the files covering suspected events forty years ago were of little use. There simply weren’t any killing sprees, or violent clashes with rivals, or even big heists. It was just a steady drip feed of money from clubs, gambling, chemical and digital narcotics, prostitution, bank scams, and dubious development contracts.
Following the official files, he started to access the media’s collective knowledge of Area 37. It was more gossipy, although some of the investigative reporters certainly seemed to know their subject. But again, there was no mention of a serious crime back then. When he searched through standard police reports for that year, and the five subsequent ones, there was no outstanding major crime that had happened or had required years of preparation.
Halfway through the morning, he’d stopped work to watch the incredible assault on the starship. But then so had most of the Commonwealth. Even the Chief Investigator had sat back to stare at the images playing on her desktop screen. Once the Second Chance had reached safety the weight of waiting data had slowly drawn him back to his task, although colleagues fr
om around the metropolitan police headquarters building kept dropping in to ask him if he’d seen it and what he thought. They seemed more interested in hearing Paula’s opinion, even though she never gave one. By late afternoon, he was once more completely immersed in the dreary details of the criminal underworld. The constant input from both virtual visual displays and reading the screens on his desk was giving him headaches. When he reached for his coffee mug, he found only the cold dregs of the last batch.
‘Get some more,’ he muttered.
Paula didn’t even look up from her screen as he went to the door. They’d been given an office on the fifth floor, a pleasant enough room with a broad window and furniture which wasn’t too old. The desktop arrays were all top-range equipment, with screens and portals to match. The coffee maker, however, was down the corridor.
‘Wait,’ Paula said as he was almost through the door. ‘Secure call coming in.’
It was Qatux. They put it on the large wall-mounted portal, and Hoshe sat down just as the big alien’s image came up. Hoshe frowned his concern at the Raiel’s appearance, Qatux could barely hold his head up to look at the camera. Shivers ran along his body and tentacle limbs, as if he was coughing silently.
‘I have lived her life,’ Qatux whispered. ‘How you humans survive so much experience is something I shall never understand. To do so much and react to it all in the way you do is as much a curse as a blessing. You never take time to digest and appreciate what happens to you.’
‘It’s what we are,’ Paula told him. ‘And how are you? Did the memories cause you any trouble?’
‘It was difficult. I had not expected it to be so. I see now, and I see then. I am Tara more than I have been any human before. That frightens me as much as it delights. I have never been frightened before.’
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